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Importance of  Meta-text

• Your articulation of a framework within which we can evaluate the creative work is important. But we will not read the meta-text until we have done an initial readthrough of the project to encounter the text on its own terms. The meta-text is in and above any introductory materials you may have to provide to orient the reader. (See M.D. Coverley's opening lexias for Califia and Michael Joyce’s opening lexias for Afternoon as examples.)
• Recognizing that hypertext literary constructions are new and experimental, we want to encourage exploration and experimentation; we also want you to ground your decisions and reasoning in the context of existing base genre(s).

• Explain how your text is a native hypertext. What about its construction requires electronic reading? (If it is not a native hypertext, questions for non-native texts follow.)
• How does your text fit in a tradition of print and electronic texts? What are its influences? What are you writing toward? Writing against?
• To what degree does the hypertextual presentation fragment text; does it break text, for instance, across grammatical lines; that is, do we enter and exit text mid-sentence in one or more lexias?
• In the event that there is a high degree of breaking across grammatical, narrative, or thematic lines, to what degree can the reader be expected to reconstruct meaning across these breaks? How do you address the concerns of writer-centeredness?
• How do you reconcile conventions of literary form (traditional poetic form for example) with the depiction/breakage of text across lexias?
• How do you see this construction in light of current practice in the genre you have chosen? How do you situate your decisions in light of other print and electronic texts?

Mapping

• First and foremost, give an account and image of your initial maps;discuss how your mapping changed over time. Are maps of any kind provided for the reader? Why or why not? What is your navigation scheme? To what degree does it provide the reader guidance; to what degree must the reader struggle as part of the reading process; to what degree does it invite exploration and movement?
• Distinguish between the maps you use to construct and manage the writing and revision of the hypertext vs. those maps that are made available to the reader.
• As a point of contrast, consider how your navigation scheme differs from that of a professional/informational site that demands constant and clear orientation to available topics or lexias.
• Using Mark Bernstein's "Patterns of Hypertext" as a reference, provide a clear key to your map explaining the form or forms used in your final draft.

Design

• Does the text follow basic principles of recommended design principles: contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity? (Williams & Tollett, The Non-Designer's Web Handbook)

Feedback / Usability

• What feedback do you have from readers(preferably hypertext-familiar) as to the coherence of your text; are your readers able to construct meaning/maps for themselves? 
• Robert Kendall's "But I Know What I Like" is an excellent discussion of and guide for writers of literary hypertext.   Kendall's discussion of the agency, momentum, closure, and structural integrity provides a set of issues against which you should measure your efforts.

Graphics / Media

• How and why are images used in your text? What is your goal in using such images?  How is your use of image more than the 19th century use of image as "graphic paraphrase"? (Renée Hubert. Surrealism and the Book.)
• How and why are media such as sound, animations, or film used in your text?
• If media effects are based on available software wizards or templates have you considered the speed at which the effects themselves may become cliché? An effect that seems new and exciting in a software package, or a new release of a version, can tire quickly with overuse.
• Must your readers have special software or plugins to view media portions of text?
  

Thanks for Michael Keller for developing these criteria with me during our preparation for a presentation at the Computers and Writing 2000 Conference in Ft. Worth, Texas, earlier this year. --ejc

elizabeth j. cooper
  Office: Hibbs 315
  Hours: M 2-4:30; T 3:30-5:00
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  Phone:828-1331
  Email: ecooper@vcu.edu