a show of hands

Author description: a show of hands presents the story of the sisters de la Palma as their lives draw them into the Immigration Reform marches of 2006 in Los Angeles. Out of those spontaneous political demonstrations comes a tale of a Mexican American family wrestling with love, loss, and the possibilities of political engagement. a show of hands is an evolution of the long-form hypertext genre that began with Michael Joyce's afternoon: a story. The Literatronica storytelling engine that hosts the story answers several of the "grand challenges" of literary hypertext, namely the prevalence of dead branches on the forking tree and the inability for readers to locate themselves within the content of the story. In contrast, Literatronica adapts around the reader's choices, rearranging the content so the reader will always encounter all of the text in an order optimized for narrative coherence.