Skip to main content

Building Hypertext Literature Reviews for Qualitative Research

Published onMar 14, 2024
Building Hypertext Literature Reviews for Qualitative Research
·

In the process of executing a comprehensive qualitative research project, one typically must conduct a thorough literature review of the topic. Literature reviews are expansively defined and may embody diverse purposes depending on the research goal. In qualitative projects, literature reviews behave as a structured and systemic critical outline of the state of the scholarly field related to the research topic. An effective literature review should not only work to synthesize the trajectory of a scholarly field and/or topic through time in space (both in its historical evolution and sociopolitical context) but should also position the topic in conversation with the purpose of your research. In their 2019 guide Writing the Literature Review: A Practical Guide, Sara Efrat Efron and Ruth Ravid argue that the objective of the literature review author is to “present a comprehensive, critical, and accurate understanding of the current state of knowledge; compare different research studies and theories; reveal gaps in current literature; and indicate what needs to be done to advance what is already known about the topic of choice” (2).

In this sense, literature reviews can be understood as methodological in that they do something. This something is an active production of connections that ultimately yields the rationale for a specific theoretical framework as well as a justification for the chosen methodological approach to the research project. The theoretical framework is a vital process that should assemble a relational network of the topic that comes to a crux at the core of the research question. Conventional methods for building such an intricate, systemic piece of research can be limiting for authors who desire more interactive, dynamic engagement with their work, and who may have a deep need for novel, digital-born approaches to building literature reviews that can offer an alternative to maladaptive and siloed traditional writing practices.

This paper details my experience preparing for doctoral candidacy by building a digital literature review using the hypertext technology, Twine. The informational database I developed was an invaluable resource during the course of my candidacy exam and throughout my dissertation research. The database stands as an evolving, affective network that houses, not only the texts, theories, and arguments relevant to my research, but the spaces where these entities come into contact with one another. The following sections will outline a pedagogical exploration of building hypertext literature reviews for qualitative research that can be adopted personally or shared with students beginning their doctoral candidacy.

The Candidacy Exam

In my department PhD students seeking candidacy must go through a process called the comprehensive exam. Over the course of six months or so, we spend time reading a list of seventy to one hundred integral texts in our field of study. Texts can include entire books, chapters from books, or scholarly articles. These are texts that shape our dissertation research and essentially become the foundation of our theoretical framework. During the comprehensive exam, our dissertation committee compiles a series of essay questions related to those readings. Over the course of seven days, we write seven short essays, each of which is three to five pages.

The relationship between students and the comprehensive exam is complex—we understand its significance in preparing us to write our dissertation proposals and to set us up for candidacy success. Nonetheless, it is a daunting event. A major stressor in this exam is coming to terms with a system to best prepare notes taken on over seventy texts, and specifically how to make these notes efficient and accessible during the exam week. In preparation for my exam, I spent months reading texts and built a two-hundred page Microsoft Word document of compiled notes. For each text, I summarized its main points into a series of bullet points. I compiled a list of several significant quotes that I believed represented the overarching arguments of the piece. I also included pages of analysis, or contextualization of the text, sometimes written by me or other times a scholarly review. Finally, I wrote a list of keywords that represented that work.

Several months before my comprehensive exam, I began to feel the weight of this inefficient two-hundred page Word document that seemed like a time constraint to navigate at best and completely useless at worst. I began to understand that the problem with this note-taking method was that the connections between my texts were invisible. I could only engage with each work in isolation, and I was essentially missing that bigger-picture conceptualization of the theoretical frameworks that were threading throughout. I knew I was in trouble and that I needed a different, more inventive approach. At the time I was also beginning to develop a proposal for my dissertation project which was exploring how literary hypertext could be used as a tool for women and nonbinary individuals with hyperandrogenism to write therapeutic illness narratives. As I was learning how to use literary hypertext tools to write creative-based narratives, I began to have discoveries about how literary hypertext could be used to make connections between theoretical works. This is when I decided to “translate” my two-hundred page Word document into an interactive hypertext database. This became a self-pedagogical process to develop a novel method for building a large-scale study guide. I spent the next several months constructing connections between texts using hyperlinks and passages.

After successfully completing my comprehensive exam in the Fall of 2019 using my hypertext database, I knew I wanted to expand this project as a tool to write my dissertation. For the next several years, I continued to build this project, adding information from texts that I was engaging with for my dissertation research. With over one hundred critical texts, my hypertext database has now become the bones of the literature review chapter of my dissertation. What I have created is an interactive map that generates links between texts through concepts and ideas. Similar to not just a Wikipedia article, but Wikipedia as a whole, this small-scale database on the topics of my dissertation includes sections on medical humanities, gender theory, disability theory, digital humanities, hypertext theory, and feminist new materialist theory.

Behind the scenes, in the software interface, you can see the database creates the visual of an intricate web or a network in which every line symbolizes a new connection between passages (figure 1). The intricacy of the connections exposes what insight was left out when using a linear, stagnant Word document.

Figure 1. Screenshot of Twine Literature Review Interface

Coming to Twine as a Database Generator through Literary Hypertext

At the start of my graduate studies, I was hired onto the research team for Astrid Ensslin’s “Writing New Bodies: Critical Co-design for 21st Century Digital-born Bibliotherapy” (WNB) funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant. We spent years, through this project, working with young women and nonbinary people as co-designers to inform the creation of a digital fiction body-image therapy application. One of my tasks on this research team was developing and facilitating a series of participant workshops across Canada. The workshops included a variety of activities designed to produce data for our application. We were interested in data that captured insight and perspectives of participants about body-image experiences. One method we used in these workshops was storyboarding participant narratives through Twine. We spent time in the workshop offering a tutorial on the software and invited participants to write and build their own literary hypertext through the platform. This path into exploring literary hypertext planted the seed for Twine as an information management tool.

In the past several decades, literary hypertext has emerged as a significant interdisciplinary topic of scholarship (Aarseth; Bell, Possible Worlds; Bell, “Ontological Boundaries,” Hayles; Ryan). Literary hypertext is a form of nonlinear digital writing that relies on a point-and-click method to access subsequent textual data. In Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions, digital fiction scholar Ensslin argues that literary hypertext tends to follow traditional genre conventions and can typically be categorized as hyperdrama, hyperpoetry or hyperfiction (48). The latter, according to Ensslin, has been the predominant focus among both authors and researchers of electronic literature. Electronic literature is described by Scott Rettberg in his book Electronic Literature as “new forms and genres of writing that explore the specific capabilities of the computer and network—literature that would not be possible without the contemporary digital context” (11). The genre has grown significantly from the 1990s to the present day as the capabilities of technology expand and grow.

The term electronic literature has been contested in the field for decades, with scholars offering alternatives that they believe capture the essence of the described works more accurately. As Rettberg argues, scholar John Cayley put forward “writing in networked and programmable media” whereas others favour terms such as digital literature or narrower adherences such as hypertext, cybertext and e-poetry (11). Nevertheless, electronic literature as a descriptor has prevailed, likely due to its generality and ability to represent newer modes of digital storytelling. Rettberg defines forms of electronic literature in expansive ways including hypertext fiction and poetry, digital art installations, and even narratives generated by AI or conversational characters known as chatterbots (13).

Today, our understanding of electronic literature is refined to include the notion of N. Katherine Hayles’ term born-digital creations. Electronic literature, at its core, is difficult to reproduce or distribute on the printed page because its origins are within the dynamic space of the digital. Works of electronic literature tend to rely on code, digital interactivity, or computer generation to tell a story whereas the confines of print media are typically unable to produce the same results. But more significantly, at the root of electronic literature is a disruption of print conventions. Not only is electronic literature unable to be translated into print, but it also challenges the boundaries of the static medium. For instance, electronic literature’s affinity with the term reader/player to describe the agent who engages with the text speaks to the genre’s resistance to the boundaries of long-standing axioms where a text can be a game, a narrative, a work of art, etc. Some scholars of electronic literature assert that while print media relies on linearity, electronic literature turns to the malleability of the digital to explore multiplicity, interactivity, and rhizomatic structures. These massive claims were intriguing and I began to wonder how hypertext can act as an accessible tool for building literature review databases.

Hypertext Theory

Hypertext is interdisciplinary and the number of definitions of hypertext is vast. This project understands hypertext as digital data, typically text, connected through a user’s physical intervention. Framing hypertext in this way captures the main goals of the literature review as a navigational, interactive, and textual resource. Ensslin argues in her chapter in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory entitled “Hypertext Theory” that hypertext has linguistic ties to notions of rhizomatic network building where the Greek hypér translates to “over” or “beyond” and the Latin term texere means “to weave” (2). According to Ensslin, the characteristics of hypertext are vast. Some forms of the medium utilize the connective digital protocol of the internet, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML,) as well as a physical intervention to trigger travel to the connecting link through clicking, tapping, or voice recognition, among others. Hypertext typically produces a rhizomatic structure where diverging paths can emerge as text segments, referred to as lexias (Ensslin, “Hypertext Theory” 3). As Ensslin argues, a typical lexia has the capacity to house multiple hypertexts and this structure opens expansive space for readers to have unique, nonlinear experiences with data. There is a misguided perception that hypertext is an archaic theory because it was born in, and tends to be representative of, the pioneering processes of the Web 1.0 era. However, hypertext as a method has become the bones of our digital space as we know it and continues to rule the navigational paths of social media websites, medical software, banking applications, and more.

The birth of hypertext theory can be traced to a lecture given at Vassar College in 1965 by information technology scholar, Theodor Nelson. Nelson coined the term hypertext, describing it as “non-sequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways” (Literary Machines 2). In his later work, Nelson nods to a distinction between hypertext as an ontological framework concerned with how “[e]verything is deeply intertwingled” and the practice of hypertext in the digital space (Computer Lib DM45). He saw hypertext as a method that would define the future because it seemingly paralleled the branching ways in which humans form thought processes.

Nelson argued that the boundless, interactive capability of hypertext would begin to infiltrate all structures of knowledge. Laura Okkema argues in “Hearing the Voices of the Deserters: Activist Critical Making in Electronic Literature” that Nelson envisioned hypertext becoming the very foundation of learning where the hierarchies and divisions of disciplines would dissolve because “all those who can read would be able to read everything” (29). For Nelson, a move toward information as hypertext was urgent as he believed the way in which society approached information processing was incongruent with the inherent rhizomatic nature of knowledge—and, in this sense, our progress as a community was diminishing. Ultimately, the scholar set a declaration in motion that argued the impact of hypertext would be profound, radically reshaping not only the boundaries of information technology but the seemingly linear and stagnant processes of human thought.

This bold testament was reiterated in defining scholarly works for decades including Robert Coover’s 1992 article for The New York Times entitled “The End of Books,” Jane Yellowlees Douglas’ 1992 article “What Hypertexts Can Do That Print Narratives Cannot,” and the scholarly work of George P. Landow and David J. Bolter. Collectively, there was a zealous belief that hypertext, which was emerging alongside academia’s take-up of poststructuralism, was a liberatory method of part-avant-garde part-anarchy that challenged not only normative ways of writing but decentralized structuralist pillars of knowledge. Ultimately, hypertext was positioned as transcending a data information organizer to embody a tool for political change.

The transition into the 2000s saw a critical shift from subsequent-wave scholars of hypertext that began to deconstruct the pure liberatory promises of the medium’s past. Scholars such as Ensslin, Pope, Miall and Dobson, and Mangen and van der Weel started to complicate claims that hypertext completely democratized reading and redistributed agency to the reader. Although hypertext can allow for reader choice in what textual path to pursue, these scholars argued that more critical focus needed to be paid to the power of the author in creating the boundaries of the hypertext rhizome. Ensslin and Skains argue that the emancipatory potential of hypertext is present but more muted than previous claims. Ultimately, contemporary hypertext scholars conclude that the medium has transformative capabilities, but these are tied to user-friendly digital practices that forefront co-creation, where the reader of hypertext has an influence on the authoring of the world of the text (Ensslin and Skains 5). This liberatory and collaborative identity of hypertext is continuing to be cultivated through various methods, including technologies for building hypertexts.

Twinery.org

Twinery.org, known as Twine, is one software option for building hypertexts. Twine is free, open-source, and can be accessed by users in their browser, or they have the option to download the desktop application to their computers. Twine allows authors to not only build hypertexts with limited to no programming knowledge, but they can also publish their stories directly to HTML and host them in various online locations for public access. Twine was developed in 2009 by game developer and web designer Chris Klimas and was intended to stand as a tool that intervened in barriers to entry for game developers of marginalized identities.

Stemming from the platform’s culture of free production and distribution and donation-based funding system, Twine has been taken up by diverse communities as a method to facilitate radical, nonnormative and queer art.

Detailed in the popular 2012 manifesto/tutorial Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, author Ana Anthropy details the emergence of the “Twine Revolution” (Harvey). This movement has seen game-creators of subjugated identities, who are typically pushed to the margins of traditional game production, harness Twine as a method of expression. The storytelling engine has established itself in the last decade as a meaningful cultural artifact at the centre of defining moments in the gaming community. For example, game developer Zoë Quinn used Twine to build their award-winning literary hypertext game Depression Quest. Quinn became the centre of the Gamergate scandal that facilitated a sexist online harassment campaign against Quinn. This scandal targeted women and gender-diverse game developers through practices of doxing, rape threats, and abuse. Twine’s identity emerged from this cultural backlash to progressive shifts in game production as a tool of democratization.

Twine for Information Management

My dissertation research centres the illness experience of marginalized women and nonbinary people who generally have limited knowledge of computer programming or coding. Because of Twine’s kinship with radical, nonnormative art production as well as its forefronting accessibility to beginners, it became the clear software choice to utilize in this project. Twine describes itself, on the website, as a tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. Although the engine has been strongly framed in both its cultural and scholarly take-up as a game creation tool, Twine has come to be embraced in interdisciplinary fields. Alongside Twine’s role as a game and storytelling engine, the software has recently been positioned as a praxis method for pedagogy. Multiple, varying disciplines have published on the effectiveness of the Twine technology for building teaching-based and informational protocols, including for creating interactive patient or client case studies (Davis; Kervyn et al.), simulating the patient-physician encounter (Oje et al.), trans-affirming research and pedagogy (Miles and Jenkins), or experiential pandemic learning (Bolintineanu et al.). Despite the reimaging of Twine as a method beyond, through and alongside traditional game design, there is little research on the technology as a tool for database design.

This push for understanding literary hypertext tools as technology for work beyond fiction was budding at the start of the millennium. In 2001, hypertext scholars Mindy McAdams and Stephanie Berger argue that innovative digital writing practices are “not only desirable but also necessary to move journalistic, nonfiction, and even scholarly writing in a direction made possible by hypertext.” The authors suggest that hypertext should be more comprehensively adopted in nonfiction communities because it improves the reading experience of those engaging with the work. Unilinear storytelling becomes saturated in value judgments, according to the scholars. Here, the author becomes the gatekeeper of meaning by choosing the structure of ideas and in “a well-crafted hypertext, readers immediately select what matters most to them” (McAdams and Berger.)

Meaning can be coded in multiple ways but includes the order of ideas, the amount of text devoted to a topic, or the author’s decisions about which ideas to omit. Meaning, for McAdams and Berger, is cultivated through a normative story structure that steers a course through a beginning, middle and ending. In the limitless story space of literary hypertext, there can be multiple paths to both enter and exit the story with a rhizomatic internal structure. In the past two decades, scholars of hypertext have shown that the structure of hypertext literature does not resist every limitation of linear writing, as described by McAdams and Berger. Even with hypertext choice for the reader, literary hypertext is still confined to the structure and boundaries created by the author of the text.

In an exploration of Twine as a mediation between narrative and database, Jon Heggestad argues that the organizational protocol of databases, as a site of struggle between dominant and counter-narratives, is oftentimes erased. Heggestad brings into conversation the perspectives of database logic put forward by digital culture scholar Lev Manovich. Manovich argues that the inherent structure of databases is in opposition to that of narrative. Narrative, according to Manovich situates an order of plot events that follow a cause-and-effect logic (qtd. In Heggestad 4) whereas database logic democratizes information by uprooting assumptions of hierarchy.

Then, Heggestad brings into focus the counterargument of N. Katherine Hayles who suggests that databases and narratives work through one another. For Heggestad, “Databases, organized rhizomatically, provide users with a variety of narratives, rather than one solitary, static story. If narratives help us to organize events, databases can help us to organize narratives” (4). Heggestad goes on to suggest that the layering of narratives through multiplicity rather than hierarchy can respond to an enduring objective of the digital humanities that aims to intervene in traditional processes of canonicity. This objective is concerned with what narratives get told and what stories rise to the surface. In this sense, the storytelling tool of Twine appears perfectly primed for the moment. How does one visualize the contact between opposing schools of thought in scholarship, or represent academics building, challenging, or subverting previously established theories and perspectives? This is the task of the literature review and the hypertext database seems to be one way to tinker with the body of literature as a living, affective network of relations.

Twine Database Structure

Figure 1 shows the interface of the literature review I built in Twine for my dissertation research. Although the intricate number of connections between passages depicts a notion of a chaotic network, the database is actually highly structured and conceptually it can be understood as resembling the layers of an onion. This section will detail a method for building a literature review in the Twine interface. The following section will describe how to use the database once it is completed (although you may choose to build a living project that is periodically updated).

To begin the task of building a literature review, I started with an opening passage that houses only eight parent hypertexts: [[Medical Humanities]], [[Gender, Disability Theory]], [[Digital Humanities]], [[Hypertext & Digital Fictions]], [[Feminist New Materialist Theory]], and [[Methods]]. These hypertext links are the encompassing, top-level disciplines that create the crux of my interdisciplinary research. I call these hyperlinks the Class A level. Class A can be understood as existing on the meta-level or the outermost layer of the database. Class A data is the access point that holds all the inner levels of data. Each subsequent level houses the data for the next level in the chain. Access to each subsequent level is granted through a hypertext.

Beginning in Class A, any hypertext can be selected, or clicked, to enter into a Class B passage. The second class, or Class B passages, house lists of texts that are included in the meta-disciplines. Figure 2 shows, for example, that selecting the Class A hypertext of [[Medical Humanities]] takes the reader to a Class B passage. This second class passage includes a list of relevant scholarly texts related to the discipline of medical humanities.

Figure 2. Screenshot of “Medical Humanities” Passage

When one of the texts is selected, the reader is taken to the Class C level passages. This third passage level houses the most hypertexts and includes individual content passages on over one hundred scholarly texts. Each scholarly text is contained in its own passage. Class C level passages include a summary of the text, written by myself or a scholarly review, several quotes that I identified as representing the critical arguments of the text, key terms that are important to the piece, and sometimes, a list of related texts (typically directly referenced by the text). Within each of these Class C passages, which include notes on individual texts, important key terms are marked as hypertexts.

Selecting any of these terms brings the reader to the Class D level of the database, referred to as themes. Themes can include important scholars' names, theoretical frameworks, or concepts. For example, the database includes around 40 themes including [[Martin Heidegger]], [[Maurice Merleau-Ponty]], [[Cartesian]], [[Bioethics]], [[Principlism]], and [[Casuistry]]. When a theme is selected, a new passage will emerge that includes a definition of the theme, as well as a list of all the texts in the database that the theme is relevant to, and housed as a hypertext within. For example, Figure 3 shows the term [[Normativity]] as a hyperlink. When that hyperlink is selected, a new passage emerges that includes an explanatory quote of normativity written by Stephen Darwall in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as well as a list of other texts in the database that explore the concept of normativity. The database can be navigated fluidly through the Classes without going through the hierarchy. For example, hypertexts found in Class B may lead to a Class C passage, but they can also lead to a Class A, a Class D, or even another Class B passage. This is where the rhizomatic interactivity of Twine emerges.

Reading the Database

The intended function of the database is to illuminate the connections between texts, themes, and disciplines to create the trajectory of a literature review. When reading my database, I can visually map, for example, the theoretical trajectory of the concept of phenomenology in my texts. Through the database I can identify that a significant thread running through the majority of the texts theorizing phenomenology is a distinct rejection of a Cartesian notion of the mind/body split (Frank; Irvine and Spencer; Mintz; Young), however, two distinct counter narratives emerge as an affinity with Spinoza’s notion of a single, infinite, substance (Nancy, “Intruder” and “Rethinking”) or Sartre’s distinction between the medicalized “body for others” and the lived body (Carel; Kottow). This dynamic reading method allows me a way into engaging with my research omnipotently by muting the boundaries between texts, to an extent.

The interface of the database is robust, but it is not useful for the purpose of reading, engaging, or reflecting on the information within the database. The method for reading the database in an effective way comes from understanding the structure of the passages described in the previous section, in conjunction with accessing the database when it is published online in HTML. In the published state, each passage of the database can be selected, or clicked, to reveal its content. Ideally, what the Twine database should do, for the purposes of this specific project, is generate the trajectory of a literature review.

Moving through the various classes of the database and engaging with the data that populates the passages of individual texts should eventually reveal theoretical themes that weave the texts into a web. The Class D layer generates the themes I identified from the information on each text. For example, when looking at figure 4, clicking on the [[Medical Humanities]] hypertext in Class A will reveal a list of related texts (Step 1). From Class B, a chapter from Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing by G. Thomas Couser called “Auto/Biographical, Biomedical, and Ethnographic Ethics” might be selected (Step 2). This Class C passage contains the specific notes and information relating to this text including summaries of the key points, stand-out quotes that I found helpful, and keywords.

Figure 4. Screenshots of “Reading” the Twine Literature Review

Littered throughout the content of this passage are terms that I chose to hypertext because of their significance to this research. Specific terms are made into hypertext such as [[Illness Narratives]] and [[Disability]]. When those terms are selected, or clicked, Class D data is revealed, which is information on these terms. Looking at [[Disability]] specifically (Step 3) shows how this Class D passage links back to previous classes where reference to disability is made (Step 4). The Class C passage on this specific Couser chapter makes reference to the particular scholars Craig Irvine and Rita Charon (Step 5). When that hypertext is selected, or clicked (Step 6), it reveals another Class C passage specific to the chapter by these authors entitled “Deliver Us from Certainty: Training for Narrative Ethics” (Step 7). Finally, at the bottom of the Couser node, there is a reference to another text by Sayantani DasGupta entitled “The Politics of the Pedagogy: Cripping, Queering and Un-homing Health Humanities” which makes direct reference to this Couser chapter. When the DasGupta hypertext (Step 8) is selected, or clicked, the Class C node on this chapter (Step 9) is revealed.

Essentially, the Twine database becomes a cyclical web with no “true” ending to the database. A concept or author can be selected, and the program will repetitively tour the reader around the notes. Working with the Class D themes led me to an understanding of how I should organize my literature review. Explicitly, it consolidated the mass of information on each of my

individual texts and reconfigured this information into a pattern that I could interpret. In this pattern, I began to see a trajectory of a theoretical progression from phenomenology to the discursive/linguistic turn to feminist new materialism. Both the practice of building this interface and reading through it led me to map out the larger theoretical frameworks that are underpinning my work.

Conclusion

Revisiting the work of Efron and Ravid on effective literature reviews situates this work at the entry point of a certain objective—to find a path forward beyond the research for future scholars of the topic. In this sense, I understand my research should navigate through, and pull threads from, an array of theories housed in multiple disciplines, including queer theory, phenomenology, feminist new materialism, disability theory, and poststructuralism. Ultimately, these theories must be situated in a feedback loop, rather than siloed, to most effectively locate the gap in the literature of which this research is filling. As explored through the practice of reading the literature review, a distinct theoretical trajectory emerges. For my research, this looked like a trip through the clashing, competing and generative contact points between theories of phenomenology, poststructuralism, and posthumanism. Understanding this trajectory, built through the hypertext database, reveals a space at the crux of this theoretical trajectory for my research to live.

The hypertext literature review detailed above has become an irreplaceable living resource throughout the course of my dissertation research. In my candidacy exam, this project acted as a dynamic database that I could reference in real-time. Later, during the course of writing my literature review chapter in my dissertation, the Twine became an active methodological practice to conduct research on my disciplines, map connections between ideas, and track theoretical threads. Ultimately, hypertext literature reviews are a novel and important topic that requires a deeper scholarly focus. This method of database design has the potential to bridge emerging gaps in interdisciplinary research, particularly in relation to the digital humanities and scholarship on digital-born methods.

For graduate students and scholars interested in hypertext methods for literature review design, there is immense potential for insight gathered from this critical making to be expanded into uncharted domains including relationships between Twine and other technologies. Future research may consider how informational databases built through hypertext can be supplemented by connections with other technologies or practices in reading or presenting the database. These emerging pockets of research bring into focus the role of not only the author but the reader and learner in relation to the database.

Works Cited

Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. Seven Stories Press 1st ed. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012.

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. JHU Press, 1997.

Bell, Alice. “Ontological Boundaries and Methodological Leaps: The Importance of Possible Worlds Theory for Hypertext Fiction (and Beyond).” New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age, edited by Ruth E. Page and Bronwen Thomas, UNP – Nebraska Paperback, 2011, pp. 63–82.

Bell, Alice. The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Bolintineanu, Alexandra, et al. “‘A Certain Enemy Robbed Me of My Life': Medieval Riddles, Digital Transformations, and Pandemic Pedagogy.” Digital Medievalist, 2022. https://doi.org/10.16995/dm.8177.

Bolter, David Jay. Writing Space. Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Routledge, 2001.

Carel, Havi. “Phenomenological Features of the Body.” Phenomenology of Illness, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 40–64.

Coover, Robert. “The End of Books.” The New York Times, 21 June 1992. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html.

Couser, G. Thomas. “Auto/Biographical, Biomedical, and Ethnographic Ethics.” Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. 14–33.

Darwall, Stephen. “Normativity.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2001, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780415249126-L135-1.

DasGupta, Sayantani. “The Politics of the Pedagogy: Cripping, Queering and Un-homing Health Humanities.” The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine, edited by Rita Charon et al, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 137–154.

Davis, Rebecca G. “Creating Interactive, Branching Pharmacology Case Studies Using Twine.” Nurse Educator, vol. 47, no. 1, 2022, pp. E3-E4. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNE.0000000000001073.

Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. “What Hypertexts Can Do That Print Narratives Cannot.” Reader: Essays in Reader-oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy, vol. 28, 1992, pp. 1–22.

Efron, Sara Efrat, and Ruth Ravid. “Writing the Literature Review: A Practical Guide.” The Guilford Press, 2018.

Ensslin, Astrid. Canonizing Hypertext: Exploration and Constructions. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Ensslin, Astrid. “Hypertext Theory.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, edited by John Frow, Mark Byron, Pelagia Goulimari, Sean Pryor, and Julie Rak, Oxford University Press, 2020.

Ensslin, Astrid, and Lyle Skains. “Hypertext: Storyspace to Twine.” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature, edited by Joseph Tabbi, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, pp. 295–310.

Ensslin Astrid, et al. Writing New Bodies. Project website, 2019, https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/writingnewbodies/home.

Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. 2nd ed., The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Harvey, Alison. “Twine’s Revolution: Democratization, depoliticization, and the queering of game design.” Game, no. 3, 2014.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. MIT Press, 2002.

Heggestad, Jon. “Bandersnatch-ed Pedagogy: Narrative, Database, and Twine.” IDEAH, vol. 2, no. 1, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.21428/f1f23564.bf1d0e27.

Irvine, Craig, and Rita Charon. “Deliver Us from Certainty: Training for Narrative Ethics.” The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine, edited by Rita Charon et al., Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 110–134.

Irvine, Craig, and Danielle Spencer. “Dualism and its Discontents I: Philosophy, Literature, and Medicine.” The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine, edited by Rita Charon et al., Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 63–86.

Kervyn, Nicolas, et al. “Creating and Teaching an Online Business Case Study Using Twine.” International Journal of Technologies in Higher Education, vol. 17, no. 2, 2020, pp. 61–66. https://doi.org/10.18162/ritpu-2020-v17n2-07..

Klimas, Chris. Twine. The Interactive Technology Foundation, 2009, https:/twinery.org/.

Kottow, Miguel. “Some Thoughts on Phenomenology and Medicine.” Medicine Health Care and Philosophy, vol. 20, no. 3, 2017, pp. 405–412. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-017-9763-4.

Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. 3rd ed., John Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Mangen, Anne, and Adriaan van der Weel. “Why Don’t We Read Hypertext Novels?”

Convergence, vol 23, no. 2, 7 July 2016, pp. 166–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515586042.

McAdams, Mindy, and Stephanie Berger. “hypertext.” The Journal of Electronic Publishing, vol. 6, no. 3, March 2001. https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0006.301.

Miall, David S., and Teresa Dobson. “Reading Hypertext and the Experience of Literature.” Journal of Digital Information, vol. 2, no. 1, 2001 https://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/article/view/35.

Miles, Adetty Pérez, and Kevin Jenkins. “(Re)Born Digital—Trans-Affirming Research, Curriculum, and Pedagogy: An Interactive Multimodal Story Using Twine.” Visual Arts Research, vol. 43, no. 1, 2017, pp. 43–49.

Mintz, Susannah B. Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Intruder.” Corpus, edited by John D. Caputo, translated by Richard A. Rand, Fordham University Press, 2008.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Rethinking Corpus.” Carnal Hermeneutics, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, Fordham University Press, 2015, pp. 77–91.

Nelson, Theodor H. Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now/Dream Machines: New Freedoms Through Computer Screens—a Minority Report (1st ed.), Hugo's Book Service, 1974.

Nelson, Theodor H. Literary Machines: The Report on, and of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow's Intellectual Revolution, and Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. Mindful Press, 1993.

Oje, M., Linn, et al. “Twine Open-Source Software as a Tool for Creating Serious Digital Games with Virtual Patient’s–Enhancing Undergraduate and Postgraduate Diabetes Education.” 2nd Visualisation in Science Conference, 3 Dec 2018, Glasgow, UK.

Okkema, Laura. “Hearing the Voices of the Deserters: Activist Critical Making in Electronic Literature.” 2019. University of Central Florida, PhD dissertation.

Pope, James. “A Future for Hypertext Fiction.” Convergence, vol. 12, no. 4, 2006, pp. 447–465. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856506068368.

Quinn, Zoë. Depression Quest. The Quinnspiracy, 14 Feb. 2013, http://www.depressionquest.com/.

Rettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Polity Press, 2019.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Indiana University Press, 1999.

Young, Katharine G. Presence in the Flesh: The Body in Medicine. Harvard University Press, 1997.

Comments
0
comment
No comments here
Why not start the discussion?