Hypertext at Brown

George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University

Brown University has played a major role in the design and development of both hypertext systems and materials ever since Ted Nelson and Andries van Dam worked together here in the 1960s. Some highlights of hypertext at Brown and Brown-related organizations include

[As time permits, materials will be added on each of these topics.]

• Andries van Dam's HES (Hypertext Editing System), 1967.
• Andries van Dam's FRESS, an pioneering, early hypertext system that ran on an IBM /360, then the university mainframe.
• CHUG, The Brown University Computer Humanities Users Group, with longstanding interests in hypertext, SGML, and digitial texts.
• NEH-funded experiment using FRESS for a hypertext supplement in an undergraduate introduction to poetry
• The Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) (1983-94)
• IRIS Intermedia (1987-92), a UNIX-based networked hypertext system with advanced features used for teaching undergraduate and graduate courses.
  • George P. Landow's courses on literature and literary theory, 1987-1992.
  • Peter Heywood's course on cell biology, 1987-1990.
  • Robert Coover's hypertext fiction workshops, 1989-1992.
• Electronic Book Technologies' DynaText
• The Brown Storyspace Cluster -- a collection of several hundred hypertext and hypermedia webs including informational materials, fiction, and poetry created by Brown faculty, including Robert Arellano, Robert Coover, George Landow, Massimo Riva, and students in their courses between 1992 and the present. [Follow the link above for an introduction to the cluster containing both indices to the individual webs and descriptions of them.]
• World Wide Web versions of materials originally created in Intermedia, Storyspace, and print.
• some course=related websites
  • Cyberspace, Hypertext, and Critical Theory
  • Postcolonial and Postmperial Literature Web
  • The Victorian Web
• The Hypertext Hotel MOO created by Tom Meyer.