• Dr. Pratibha Pandey

  Author

Digital Hypertextual Storytelling (DHTS) offers a new way of organizing narratives that can contradict the traditional way of text coherence and progress. Although digital narratives have begun to attract the attention of scholars, the lack of computational linguistics to systematically study the sorts and complexities of structural and linguistic elements of digital narratives has yet to be addressed. This study aims to bridge that evident gap by studying non-linear narratives in hypertextual texts through the application of computational techniques. 15 text-based hypertexts form the corpus for the study and are analyzed based on the traditional methods of NLP with the addition of lexical analysis and narrative path graph modeling. The majority of hypertexts, specifically 73% (equivalently, 11 texts) form multi-branch narratives that include 4 to 7 narrative strands. From an NLP perspective, the text structures exhibit a moderate to high level of complexity at node connections, with a value of 0.48. Low narrative cohesion scores reinforce the hypertext writing theory of fragmentation and a high level of reader participation. All levels of hypertext narratives stress the association of reader participation. The study has analytically supported the transformative potential that hypertext theories can offer to narrative construction by focusing on the reader. The study hopes to add to the complexity of hypertext storytelling through analytic computational linguistics. From the study, new pathways are opened for computational linguistic based theories for digital text narratives, especially hypertext, that have yet to be explored in the field of literary digital humanities.

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