Mark Bernstein (publisher)

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Mark Bernstein is one of the first publishers of hypertext fiction in the United States. [1] He is the founder and chief scientist of Eastgate Systems, a software and literary publishing company that has maintained and developed the hypertext authoring software Storyspace since 1990, and that launched the hypertextual note-taking software Tinderbox in 2002. Bernstein has also made significant contributions to the critical discourse on hypertext with dozens of peer-reviewed publications. [2]

Contents

Life and education

Bernstein graduated from Swathmore college and earned a PhD in Chemistry from Harvard. Bernstein relates that he became interested in the potential for computer work while he was working in laser chemistry, which required computing powers. [3]

Hypertext publisher

Bernstein founded Eastgate Systems in 1982 as a software publishing company. [4] In 1990, Eastgate became the first commercial publisher of hypertext fictions when the company published Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story. The same year Bernstein licensed the hypertext authoring software Storyspace, which became the leading platform for hypertext fictions in the early 1990s. [1] Bernstein has continued to maintain Storyspace since 1990. [5] Bernstein also established the literary journal Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (EQRH), [4] which was "fundamental in the establishment of creative practices in the context of electronic literature." [6]

By 1993 a The New York Times article by novelist Robert Coover described Bernstein as Eastgate Systems' "chief scientist, reader, theorist, pitchman and indefatigable enthusiast". [1] In the following decades, scholars have described Bernstein as a "hypertext pioneer", [7] pioneer of "serious hypertext" [8] [4] and an "electronic publishing pioneer". [9] Many of the hypertext fictions Bernstein published are now in library collections. [10] Some of the most notable include the aforementioned afternoon, a story , Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden , and M.D. Coverley's Califia. [11]

Scholarly contributions

Bernstein has published dozens of scholarly articles, including 66 publications in the ACM Digital Library between 1988 and 2025. [12] He has been particularly active in the ACM SIGWEB community, serving on the Program Committee of several ACM Hypertext Conferences and as program co-chair in 1996 and 1997. [13] He has also been a chair on the Web Sci conference. [14]

In addition to traditional peer-reviewed publications, Bernstein has also authored non-fiction in hypertext format. With Eric Sweeney, Mark Bernstein wrote an early non-fiction hypertext, The Election of 1912: A Hypertext Study of the Progressive Era (1988), [15] which David Farkas termed a "pioneering hypertext history." [16] The Electronic Literature Lab created a live traversal of this work in 2020. As M. Pisarski described the work as a game where the reader plays Theodore Roosevelt and must defeat other candidates. "The Election of 1912 combines non-linear narrative with a robust simulation mode set within a historical background." [17] J. Yellowlees Douglas explains that Mark Bernstein’s and Erin Sweeney’s Work, The Election of 1912 has 169 nodes with information on people, issues, and contexts for this simulation of the election. However, rereading nodes seems to present much more information because “the information in each node appears in dramatically different contexts, depending on the users that the actor in the simulation finds for it.” [18]

Selected works

Bernstein has 66 publications in the ACM Digital Library. [12] Some of his most cited publications are:

Selected keynotes and invited talks

Awards

References

  1. 1 2 3 Coover, Robert (1993-08-29). "Hyperfiction; And Hypertext Is Only the Beginning. Watch Out!". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2025-06-08.
  2. ↑ Barnet, Belinda (2013-07-15). Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext. Anthem Press. p. 132. ISBN   978-0-85728-060-2.
  3. ↑ Hunter, Lawrie (September 2005). "No reason not to link: An interview with Mark Bernstein". Information Design Journal & Document Design. 13 (3): 229–237. doi:10.1075/idjdd.13.3.08hun.
  4. 1 2 3 Ensslin, Astrid (2022). Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.
  5. ↑ Barnet, Belinda (2012-10-26). "Machine Enhanced (Re)minding: the Development of Storyspace". Digital Humanities Quarterly. 006 (2). ISSN   1938-4122.
  6. ↑ Martin, Alexandra L. (2023-09-10). "Digital Histories: A review of Astrid Ensslin's Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature". Electronic Book Review . doi:10.7273/TJF0-DC38.
  7. ↑ Liestøl, Gunnar; Morrison, Andrew; Rasmussen, Terje (2004-09-17). Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovations in Digital Domains. MIT Press. p. 404. ISBN   978-0-262-62192-2.
  8. ↑ Jones, Robert Swydon (1989-01-30). Corporate Users Remain Sceptical about Hypercard. InfoWorld Media Group, Inc. p. 8.
  9. ↑ Greenberg, Susan L. (2018-09-03). A Poetics of Editing. Springer. ISBN   978-3-319-92246-1.
  10. ↑ Post, Colin; Hof-Mahoney, Kassidy (2024-10-03). "Eastgate Census: Tracking Legacy Literary Software Titles in Libraries, Archives, and Special Collections". Journal of Archival Organization. 21 (1–4): 28–54. doi:10.1080/15332748.2024.2407269. ISSN   1533-2748.
  11. ↑ Ciccoricco, David (2012). "Digital Fiction: Networked Narratives". In Bray, Joe; Gibbons, Alison; McHale, Brian (eds.). The Routledge companion to experimental literature. Routledge companions. Abingdon, Oxon New York: Routledge. p. 472. ISBN   978-0-415-57000-8.
  12. 1 2 ACM Digital Library. "Author profile: Mark Bernstein". Author DO Series. doi:10.1145/contrib-81100134465/abs (inactive 8 June 2025). Retrieved 2025-06-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of June 2025 (link)
  13. ↑ Atzenbeck, Claus (2008-06-01). "Interview with Mark Bernstein". ACM SIGWEB Newsletter. 2008 (Summer): 4:1–4:5. doi:10.1145/1377501.1377505. ISSN   1931-1745.
  14. ↑ "Program Committee Members – WebSci24" . Retrieved 2024-03-25.
  15. ↑ "Mark Bernstein". www.eastgate.com. Retrieved 2024-03-25.
  16. ↑ Farkas, D.K. (September 1992). "Applying Hypertext Concepts to Print". Conference Record on Crossing Frontiers. pp. 157–162. doi:10.1109/IPCC.1992.673010. ISBN   0-7803-0788-7.
  17. ↑ "The Election of 1912 - Mark Bernstein, Erin Sweeney < Techsty < 2020". techsty.art.pl. Retrieved 2025-06-08.
  18. ↑ Douglas, J. Yellowlees (2000). The end of books or books without end ? reading interactive narratives. Ann Arbor (Mich.: University of Michigan press. p. 47). ISBN   978-0-472-11114-5.
  19. ↑ Bernstein, Mark (1988). "The bookmark and the compass: orientation tools for hypertext users". ACM SIGOIS Bulletin. 9 (4): 34–45. doi:10.1145/51640.51645. ISSN   0894-0819 – via ACM Digital Library.
  20. ↑ Bernstein, Mark (1998). "Patterns of hypertext". Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia : Links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems - Hypertext '98. ACM Press. pp. 21–29. doi:10.1145/276627.276630. ISBN   978-0-89791-972-2.
  21. ↑ Bernstein, Mark (2001-09-10). "Card shark and thespis: Exotic tools for hypertext narrative". Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia. Hypertext '01. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 41–50. doi:10.1145/504216.504233. ISBN   978-1-58113-420-9.
  22. ↑ Hobson, Marvin E. (2011). "Mark Bernstein and Diane Greco, Reading Hypertext". Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures (8): 1. doi: 10.20415/hyp/008.r01 . ISSN   1555-9351.
  23. ↑ Dicks, Bella; Mason, Bruce; Coffey, Amanda; Atkinson, Paul (2005). Qualitative Research and Hypermedia. London: SAGE Publications, Ltd. doi:10.4135/9781849209649.n3. ISBN   978-0-7619-6098-0. In his keynote speech to the Hypertext 1989 Conference, Norman Meyrowitz posed the rhetorical question,' Hypertext — does it reduce cholesterol too?' (1991: 287). Ten years later, Mark Bernstein's keynote speech to the Hypertext 1999 conference, posed the (non-rhetorical) question 'Where are the hypertexts?' These questions, framing the decade that saw the emergence of a global hypertext communications system (the World Wide Web) and the development of affordable, high-powered multimedia personal computers, seem to substantiate the perception that claims about hypertext tend to be full of 'hype' but lacking in actual texts.
  24. ↑ "BlogTalk 2.0". 2004.blogtalk.net. Retrieved 2024-03-25.
  25. ↑ Riehle, Dirk (2006). WikiSym '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Wikis. ACM Digital Library. Association for Computing Machinery, ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web. New York, NY: ACM. doi:10.1145/1149453. ISBN   978-1-59593-413-0.
  26. ↑ "ICIDS 2020 Bournemouth - the 13th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling". icids2020.bournemouth.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 2025-04-25. Retrieved 2025-06-08.
  27. ↑ "ACM SigWeb - Awards". SigWeb. Retrieved 2025-04-17.


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