Description and Narrative in Hypervideo

While hypertext was originally conceived as an approach to the management of scientific and technical information, it has been embraced with great enthusiasm by several members of the literary community for the promises it offers towards new approaches to narrative. Experiments with hypertext-based interactive narrative were originally based solely on verbal text but have more recently extended to include digital video artifacts. The most accomplished of these experiments, HyperCafe, provided new insights into the nature of narrative and how it may be presented; but it also offered an opportunity to reconsider other text types. This paper is an investigation of the application of an approach similar to HyperCafe to a descriptive text. We discuss how the approach serves the needs of description and illustrate the discussion with a concrete example. We then conclude by considering the extent to which our experiences with description may be applied to our continuing interest in narrative.