The latest version of hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures (Winter ‘07, 04) hit the webstands recently, and in it you’ll find “a little show of hands,” a short story adaptation excerpted from my adaptive hypertext novella “a show of hands.” The story continues focuses on a Mexican-American family in Los Angeles and the forces that pull them into the Immigration Reform march of 2006.

For this issue of Hyperrhiz, editor Helen Burgess has focused on electronic literature, including works from Thom Swiss, Braxton Soderman, Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Jaka Zeleznikar, Michael Peters, and Jeanne Hamming. Notably Strickland and Lawson Jamarillo’s “slippingglimpse” presents a 10-poem meditation, exploring ocean patterns through images, interaction, and text.

“a little show of hands”

This short hypertext features some changes from the original version. It tells the story of Katrina de la Palma, a Mexican-American girl, struggling with her life and new child in Los Angeles. Readers can pursue hypertextual links to explore vignettes in her relationship with Chino, her lover, and with her mother.

Although this version presents merely a portion of the overall novella, readers should be able to get a sense of the adaptive hypertext system that runs “a show of hands” and how it functions to sustain coherence even with fairly radical reader movement through the text.

(More on “a show of hands” here)

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