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INTRODUCTION: Our level 2 analysis demonstrated that both the Washington Post and Watergate.info offer alternatives to the limited Chronological structure of our initial analysis. But it also showed that these alternatives again become anchored to the Chronological timeline. However, at certain points within the websites, the multilinearity reappears.
TOKEN EFFORTS: One area is the 'key players' section at the Washington Post, previously accessed via the Post's timeline (1). Within many of the short biographies of the Watergate characters, there are links. With some, like Sam Ervin and H. R. Haldeman, the link takes the user to the article archive and an obituary of that individual (2). Other links take the user to articles on contemporary Watergate news, for example a recently released 1972 memo proving Pat Buchanan's implication in Watergate (3). A link in the John Dean bio takes users to a revisionist history website which is being sued by Dean for promoting a conspiracy theory where Dean is the 'mastermind' of Watergate (4). In another section, The Post and Watergate, users can choose to read former publisher Katharine Graham's recollections, or find out more about the movie made about the newspaper's role in Watergate, All the President's Men (5). There are also interviews with editor Ben Bradlee, and links which can be followed to more information about All the President's Men, a broad discussion on "Journalists in the Movies", or links back into the Post retrospective (6). But all these alternative narratives are sparse, and the multilinear links too few, compared to the defining context of the site, first identified in our initial analysis, of a linear chronological history.
HYPERTEXT HISTORY: A far more promising hypertextual history is offered within the individual sections of Watergate.info. Despite having a similar Chronological structure to the Post website, there are multiple narratives which exist within individual sections. For example, the user clicks the link to 'Aftermath of Watergate' towards the bottom of the central page (7). The following links and commentary spiral out in several possible directions (8). There are a series of obituaries for Watergate characters, or a discussion of Oliver Stone's film Nixon, or background information on the White House tapes that indicted Nixon and are still being released. Here we have the various narrative paths we hoped for at the beginning of the analysis. Moreover, they have taken an interesting form. As was acknowledged in the introduction, it would be an enormous task to create a website that both contained all the possible narratives of Watergate, all the recollections of the participants, as well as all the evidence, and then hypertextually link them together. But the author of Watergate.info has found a clever way around this encyclopaedic task. Much of the primary sources, including tape transcripts, court evidence, audio and visual multimedia, as well as personal recollections, already exist in isolated pockets of the internet. What the author has done is to provide a interpretive site, albeit linear and chronological, through which all these resources can be accessed.
MORE THAN A GATEWAY? In a Journal of American History article regarding 'Guidelines on Reviewing Websites', the author describes a Gateway as "a site that provides access to other Web-based materials" (9). In our discussion of Hypertext theory and our initial analysis, Janet Murray attacked much of digital history as being merely additive. Is Watergate.info anything more than an additive gateway? Given this is supposedly the most comprehensive historical site on Watergate on the internet, it is tempting to overstate its achievements. But even the author admits that "the constraint of full-time employment means that the site is necessarily eclectic and incomplete. Readers are simply promised steady and continual growth" (10). Yet perhaps this is also the site's greatest possibility. Although beginning with a Chronological structure, as each new element of Watergate is added to this site, the old linear narrative will become more and more unstable. Already there is a clear focus on more recent interpretations, such as links to 25th Anniversary of Watergate websites, including the Post and its article archive, as well as related events like the Clinton impeachment, and coverage of Nixon's funeral (11). But although Watergate.info provides links between the documents, we are still along way from Landow's hypertextual ideal which depends "on the multisequentiality and the reader choices created not only by attaching multiple links to a single lexia but by attaching them to a single anchor or site within a single lexia" (12)
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: These two websites seem stuck in their
own linear context for Watergate. However, the way Watergate.info seems
to be gradually replacing the limited chronology with multiple narratives
offers some hope for hypertext history. And the Washington Post's
use of 'key players', Deep Throat, and an article search function, as alternate
trajectories for investigation is also promising. But once these components
become written into the site structure, these narratives too become dominant,
and force the user back into well trodden paths. Despite the theorists'
claims of the author being replaced by the reader in hypertext, the
question seems to be how to find a balance between the two, in a structure
of co-authorship, rather than having to choose between limited structures
from a single author, and chaotic multiplicity from many individual readers.
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2 Level 1
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