Miall -- Hyperread: Design

Engl 417: Hypertext project

Suggestions on design

The segmentation into nodes and their interlinking can be considered as a problem in spatial design. Other than conventionally organized hierarchical web sites, linked groups of nodes don't usually take advantage of spatial pointers to indicate the structure of an argument. Consider the following diagram of a section of a hypertext:

It would be possible to indicate the relationships between the nodes in two ways:

by arrows embedded in the text, where (next to a link) indicates a link to a subordinate point, such as an example illustrating the current sub-argument; whereaspoints to an internal link that is parallel in some way to the present sub-argument; andsignals an associated, incidental node; etc.

by background colour, or some other easily read design feature.

To illustrate how this might work, here is a summary version of material from section 3, "Literary reading," of one of my papers, The Resistance of Reading: Romantic Hypertexts and Pedagogy, layed out in table form. Note that much of the substance of the section is necessarily omitted here:

Main argument: "how are we to understand literary reading that occurs in a hypertext environment? I argue for an alternative view of literary hypertext that will facilitate student learning."

incidental: "it also strikes me that reading poetry is in this respect similar to reading landscape"

internal parallel links: contrast to

the information processing called for by Landow,
the playful, ludic attitude proposed by Bolter

[Note the relevant passages are not linked in the original paper, but would be in a hypertext version of it]

Sub-argument: a Wordsworth passage (from The Prelude, Book VI) that "might be construed as a pre-hypertext example of the jump between lexia; as an account of a pathway that was lost then found, it might seem to be an experience of the multilinear. That it is none of these things will reveal something of what it means to read a literary text . . ."

This claim is developed through two examples of what it means to read (below)

external example link: see David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, "Feeling and the three phases of literary response" (1995)

[link to example online paper, if this existed]

Example 1: "this passage seems to call first for the immersion of the reader in the extended, highly evocative language of the poetry: it is an effortful, constructive activity"

Example 2: "The reader's freedom to pursue interpretive pathways of her own choosing is practically enforced by many literary texts." [note this passage itself includes two examples to illustrate this claim]

Each of the cells in this table would be a separate node, but the use of links with adjacent arrows would indicate the relationship of one node to the next.

It might be helpful to plan out a hypertext project, at least in part, following this kind of structure (the hypertext equivalent of outlining).

return to Hypertext course

Document created October 25th 1999