HyperPo: The Next Generation

HyperPo: The Next Generation

Stéfan
Sinclair
Department of French Queen's University
4ss42@qsilver.queensu.ca

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

"Only, perhaps, when hypertext or something like it begins to open
our eyes to startling truths about some body of text, truths that were
totally imperceptible before, may we expect a significant attempt of
synthesis or any substantial shift toward the computer as a major tool
of humanistic study."
(Raben, p. 349)

Since the sophistication and wider implementation of Graphical User Interfaces
(GUI) in the early 1990's, the prodigious diffusion of Hypertext has conduced a
dizzying array of experiments and applications, guides and theories. Granted,
many important foundations date back to prior years, decades centuries and even
millennia - at least as far back as Vannever Bush's description of his Memex
machine (1945) and Ted Nelson's 1965 coining of the word "hypertext" - but the
more recent profusion of hypertextual technology has allowed a great pooling of
resources that has combined the creative and innovative forces of many people
from diverse disciplines. It's of no surprise, then, that hypertext has seen
itself successfully woven into the fabric of objectives as disparate as
pedagogy, retail and literary writing. Literary criticism, however, is one
discipline where the hypertextual paradigm has been almost absent (TACTweb is a
rare notable exception). This is all the more surprising, I think, since
literary criticism stands to benefit substantially from certain possibilities
offered by hypertext. Time and again colleagues have commented on the
regrettable chasm that continues to exist, methodologically, between the text to
be analysed and the data produced to help analyse it (retrospectives on
computing in the humanities such as those by Raben and Potter invariably invoke
this impediment). This paper will present the latest version of HyperPo (Hypertexte potentiel), a Web-based application intended, among other
things, to bridge the gap between text and data by fully exploiting the
hypertext paradigm (HyperPo is available at ).
It needs to be asserted from the outset that HyperPo is as much a tool for text
exploration as a program for text analysis (a fundamental characteristic
enshrined in its full name "HyperPo: Text Analysis and Exploration Software").
In fact, HyperPo strives to blur the distinction between exploration and
analysis with two related strategies: (1) the superimposition of text and data
through typographical schemes (2) the tight integration of text and data through
hypertextual links. The act of reading the text and the acts of producing and
analysing data are all collapsed into a flexible exploratory and experimental
activity that assumes the modalities desired by the particular
reader/user/researcher (these distinctions are of course also blurred).
In essence, HyperPo is an extensible text reading program. The first-time user
can have HyperPo display an electronic text with little or no supplementary
information (in a format that would seem comforting and familiar), and
progressively add types of textual information deemed potentially interesting or
useful. I see this incremental approach to computer-assisted literary criticism
as a crucial step if it is to gain wider acceptance. No longer must the
traditional literary critic make a daunting leap of faith away from her text and
towards a new world of quantitative analytical tools; she can stroll around on
relatively familiar ground and, in time, explore and claim new territories as
she sees fit. Although HyperPo's user-friendliness doesn't come at the expense
of utility and power, it should be conceded that all of its text analysis
functions (frequency, distribution, cooccurrence, KWIC lists, etc.) are
available from other programs. What is novel, and epistemologically significant
(in ways that will be defined and elaborated), is the possibility of dynamically
generating text and data intertwined in a rich web of associated
information.
Given that HyperPo is freely available as a web-based program -- which, among
other advantages, eliminates the need for the user to install and update
software other than a browser -- I will forego a detailed description of the
software in favour of a brief account of its major features and a somewhat
hypothetical presentation of it in action with an excerpt of Georges Perec's
La Disparition. (My work on the play between
literary game and violence in La Disparition will be a
secondary preoccupation in this context. Although I heed the warnings of
colleagues to not concentrate on the tools of criticism at the expense of proper
literary scholarship, I think that HyperPo represents a sufficiently significant
shift in methodology that the process of hypertextually
driven exploration merits full consideration and elaboration. See my ACH-ALLC'97
summary for an apologia of Oulipian texts in my corpus).
As one would expect, the absence of the letter 'e' in Perec's lipogrammatical
novel La Disparition severely limits the use of the
primary feminine morphological marker in nouns and adjectives of French. This in
turn further limits an already deleted vocabulary, encouraging recourse to
foreign and unusual words («la Star» and «la Squaw»), unorthodox paraphrases («pli labial» for une
lèvre) and aberrant syntactical forms («un Roman
Jakobson qui nous dirait son structural avis» -- the strange
anteposition of the adjectif masks how Perec avoids more common forms such as
«structuralisme» or «structuraliste»). In fact, the lipogrammatical constraint
propagates itself through successive textual levels: the graphemic, the
morphemic, the lexical, the syntactical, the textual and the semantic (the
precise meaning and order of these are obviously open to discussion).
By representing parts of speech or repetition information directly in the text
(through a chosen colour scheme), by linking together text based on this
information, by providing the means to generate KWIC, distribution and
coocurence lists, and finally, by linking words to outside resources such as the
Altavista search engine and the ARTFL Frequency database, HyperPo provides the
means of exploring different stylistic strategies present in La
Disparition and indeed in any text. Figure 1 shows a screen shot of
HyperPo where the relative frequency of repeating series of two words are shown
in increasing hues of grey in the text of the top left frame, the list of
repeating series of words in alphabetic order are shown in the top right frame,
the distribution of pouvoir is shown in the bottom
left frame, and other information is indicated in the status bar.

Figure 1

As always, HyperPo is about making readily available a relatively powerful but
easy-to-use tool for text exploration and analysis; one that fully exploits the
hypertextual paradigm. Despite progress, much frustration has resulted in
Humanities Computing from trying to make computers do things that they can't
(yet?) do. HyperPo recognizes the respective strengths of humans and computers
and attempts to maximise the collaboration through hypertext.

References

Vannevar
Bush

As We May Think

Atlantic Monthly

176

101-108
1945

Georges
Perec

La Disparition

Paris
Denoël
1969

Rosanne
G.
Potter

Statistical Analysis of Literature: A Retrospective on
Computers and the Humanities, 1966-1990

Computers and the Humanities

25
6
401-429
December 1991

Joseph
Raben

Humanities Computing 25 Years Later

Computers and the Humanities

25
6
341-350
December 1991

Stéfan
Sinclair

L'HyperPo: Exploration des structures lexicales à
l'aide des formes hypertextuelles

Greg
Lessard

Michael
Levison

ACH-ALLC '97 Conference Abstracts

Kingston, ON
Queen's University Press
1997