Draft:Mark Bernstein (publisher)

Mark Bernstein is one of the first publishers of electronic literature in the United States.

As chief scientist and founder at Eastgate Systems, Bernstein designs tools for interlinked, hypertextual writing, such as StorySpace and Tinderbox.

Education and early life
Bernstein graduated from Swathmore College and got his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Harvard in 1983. Bernstein was in college in 1976 when he met Ted Nelson, which sparked his interest in hypertext and non-linear writing.

Hypertext community
Bernstein has been a part of ACM Hypertext Conferences in the Program Committee and as the program co-chair in 1996 and 1997. He has also been a chair on Web Sci.

Tools
Mark Bernstein created and worked on tools to "harness the power of the link." The first system Mark Bernstein created was Hypergate which ran on HyperCard. After seeing Storyspace, first created by Michael Joyce, Jay David Bolter, and John B. Smith, he helped develop the user interface and then programmed this tool for many operating platforms. Michael Joyce wrote afternoon: a story as one of the first works for StorySpace.

After developing StorySpace, Mark Bernstein created Tinderbox.

Critical works
Bernstein's seminal work, Patterns of hypertext, May 1998 for the UK Conference on Hypertext describes structural hypertext patterns used in early Eastgate works such as True North by Stephanie Strickland and Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. He followed this the next year with Structural patterns and hypertext Rhetoric, which explains navigational anxiety and the evolution of literary hypertexts. His work on pattern recognition in hypertext continued with Trends, fashions, patterns, norms, conventions, and hypertext too in 2001.

Bernstein explored hypertext tools such as Card Shark and Thespis (2001), Brown University's Cave (2009).

Editing
Mark Bernstein and Diane Greco edited the anthology, Reading Hypertext (2011), which, as Marvin Hobson explains "could introduce graduate students to the beauty and complexity involved in reading and writing hypertext literature."

Creative works
With Eric Sweeney, Mark Bernstein wrote an early non-fiction hypertext, The Election of 1912.

Lectures and keynotes
Bernstein has been a major keynote speaker at many conferences, including:


 * Where are the Hypertexts? 1999 ACM Hypertext Conference
 * Blog Talk 2.0 in 2004
 * Intimate Information: Organic hypertext structure and incremental formalization for everyone's everyday tasks. 2006
 * 1st International Conference on Web Studies at Toluca, Mexico in 2010
 * The Futures of Digital Studies 2010, the University of Florida
 * Hypertext 2010 in Toronto.
 * ICIDS2020 KEYNOTE BY MARK BERNSTEIN