Hypertext interactivity: from choice to participation

Much of hypertext narrative relies on links to shape a reader's interaction with the text. But links may be too limited to express ambiguity, imprecision, and entropy, to allow appropriate control and access to information, or to admit new modes of participation short of full collaboration. We use an e-book form to explore the implications of freeform annotation-based interaction with hypertext narrative. Readers' marks on the text can be used to guide navigation, to create a persistent record of a reading, to enable fluid exploration and revisits, or to recombine textual elements as a means of creating a new narrative. In this paper, we describe how such an experimental capability was created with XLibris, a next generation e-book, using Forward Anywhere as the hypernarrative. We work through a scenario of interaction, and discuss the issues the work raises (1).