This brief primer points to some of the main terms in hypertext discourse and raises questions about how they are used. Page references in brackets are to Ilana Snyder, Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth (NY: New York University Press, 1997), where helpful (if often uncritical) discussion of the terms will be found.
AGENCY. The attribution of agency (intentions, motives, acts) to text, which is thus able to be "duplicitous," to "betray" (41), or to be "promiscuous" (53). This is particularly common in accounts of hypertext, which may appear to possess animate powers in the eyes of some authors. Do we write text, or does text write us? Or is this an example of "technological determinism"? (reference to Grusin, 122)
ASSOCIATION. The suggestibility of the mind: how one idea evokes another. This principle is embodied in the precursor of the hypertext, Bush's memex. (23) Is this how the mind works? Does hypertext reflect the way we think? (25)
AUTHOR. In hypertext the role of author is said to diminish or disappear. When text is interlinked and dispersed, the author as centre of authority no longer exists; electronic textuality means loss of authorial power and control. (64-5) So what do readers pursue? The experience of intertextuality, or the work of a particular author? And if an author, everything written by the author, from philosophy to laundry lists? (64)
BOOK. Consists of a single, unchanging, linear sequence of text, representing the final choices of an author. (17) As such it is said to foster the illusion of truth and completeness. (61) How far does linear ordering determine the process of reading? In what kinds of text?
DISORIENTATION. With some hypertexts it may be easy to become "lost in hyperspace"; designers must be attentive to the needs of the reader, providing navigational aids. (34) Or is the experience of dislocation central to the new world of hypertext as some authors, such as Moulthrop, seem to claim?
CANON. The canon is said to be especially the result of the printed book, which has helped to promote and keep unchanged a privileged group of literary texts. (75) If the canon is undone by hypertext, which permits intertextual allusion, dispersal, and networking between texts, what is it that we are actually reading? And what happens to our taste for narrative?
COMMUNITIES. Hypertext, with its flexibility and readiness to incorporate new materials, provides a basis for creating communities that cut across traditional boundaries. It facilitates communication between different schools, or the sharing of educational materials at widely dispersed sites. (105) It also helps the emergence of special interest groups that meet only online.
CONVENTIONS. Just as the printed book depends on particular conventions, so hypertext also requires rules of interaction. In both you have to learn the rules of the game in order to participate. (74) Does this make illusory the rhetoric of liberation?
DISCIPLINES. Hypertext in education is likely to help dissolve traditional boundaries between disciplines: students will become more aware of connections across subjects. (104) At the same time, being authentically interdisciplinary is also difficult. Will hypertext promote only superficial or inappropriate use of materials?
DISPERSAL. In hypertext the nodes take on a life of their own, existing more as fragments or atoms than parts of a whole; they are able to disperse themselves more freely into other texts. (53) How far is the greater autonomy of the node compatible with its dispersal, its intertextuality?
ESSAY. The traditional academic essay may evolve into something quite different, no longer dependent on a consecutive argument. A hypertext assignment might involve parallel arguments, non-linear rhetorics, the use of graphics, etc. (112-4) Does this new essay verge on the tabloid sheet, a temporary, adventitious, collage of materials, or could it unlock new intellectual insight? Can collage be "discursive"? (114)
EXPLORATORY AND CONSTRUCTIVE. Joyce contrasts the hypertext that is consulted (the reader can locate information, recover or change pathways chosen) with hypertext that can be changed by the reader in the process of reading (creating new links, adding texts, etc.). (30-31) Where can you find constructive hypertext? What if you produce a web site of your own?
FICTION. In hypertext fiction allusion, digression, and openness are favoured over the causal, linear directions of plot. (89) By discarding the forward impetus of plot (when it does), what elements of narrative does hypertext fiction abandon or add? And if the trance-like or absorbed state of fiction reading is prevented, the "lure" of narrative (95) disabled, what are the compensations? What gains in awareness, in particular? Or is the electronic medium too "alien" to our familiar reading patterns? (citing Douglas, 93)
HIERARCHY. Abolished in hypertext, where there is said to be no "main" text with its satellite footnotes. No node in hypertext is central. (59) Thus hypertext is said to shift the balance of power away from author to reader, from singleness to plurality of discourse.
HYPERTEXT. Sections of text and other elements online, linked by electronic pathways. Since the reader may choose which links to follow the reader becomes in part a writer of the hypertext. (ix-x) The linear model of reading is said to be replaced by the network or multi-sequential model. But what do readers of hypertext do?
INFORMATION. A hypertext presentation of a novel might include a map of the city in which it is set, accounts of historical events or people mentioned, pictures, critical commentaries, earlier versions of the novel, film treatments, links to the author's other novels. (56) In what sense is all this additional material "information"? Why do examples of what hypertext is good for often propose the scholarly article with its footnotes turned into hypertext links? (58)
LEARNING. Hypertext systems in education are said to offer students greater opportunity for designing their own learning, e.g., by requiring choice of pathways, or participation through the contribution of texts of their own. Authority is transferred to the student from the teacher. (103) Students can learn in a sequence of their own devising. (105). Examples of such learning also show that other pedagogical practices besides the use of hypertext may be required, especially where the electronic medium is used to promote collaboration or group projects.
LINEARITY. No text can be without some minimal linearity, if only because a sentence (in English) is read from left to right. But the larger scale linearity of the printed book disappears in hypertext. (46) Does a hypertext reader then engage in successive acts of linear reading? When is hypertext non-linear?
LINKS. "Hypertext is essentially a network of links between words, ideas and sources that has neither a centre nor an end." (18) If any document can be linked to any other, following the links is always to digress. So if there is no centre, then there can only be digression? What actually changes when we follow a link?
LITERARY TEXTS. Works of literature were once seen as "autonomous wholes"; now they are said to be constituted by their participation in the intertextual culture which alone gives them meaning. The printed book encourages the first view; hypertext the second. (55) How far pre-electronic literary texts can be accommodated to hypertext is debatable: perhaps hypertext promotes study rather than reading, information rather than experience. If all literature were available in a giant hypertext what benefits would follow? (109)
LUDIC READING. The playful skipping from text to text suggested by the postmodern view of text as a play of signs. This is in contrast to the serious, introspective, hermeneutic mode of reading that seeks a single understanding. (42) Hypertext is said to literalize the tenets of the postmodern view; deconstruction occurs before our eyes on the computer screen (43-4). Or we can play with, alter, create, from an existing classic text. (73)
METAPHORS. Computing operations are familiarized through pre-computer metaphors: "file," "desktop," etc. (6) So what it would be like to inhabit the computer world beyond such backward-looking metaphors? Is there such a space?
MIMESIS. The old view of literature as true to life or nature (mimesis) cannot be sustained in such an unstable medium as hypertext. (71) Does this relate to the claim that how the mind works is better represented by the associationist properties of hypertext? Or is the mind not a part of nature?
PUBLISHING. In reading and writing hypertext (on the internet), we can all become publishers, destabilizing the old hierarchy of control over print traditionally exercised by printers and publishers. (77) What notion of publishing sustains this view? You may place your writing on the internet, but do you have access to a budget for marketing and distribution? If you build it, will they come? (Be sure to put a counter on your site.)
PRESENCE. In a hypertext the author's presence is said to be felt more directly than when reading printed text. (67-8) Is this virtual author a replay of the implied author of Wayne Booth? How does this view of hypertext radically reconceptualize the authorship role?
READER. Through hypertext, the reader becomes in part a writer, able to choose pathways, create links, intervene with new text. (62) The act of reading has apparently become a more conscious, active one; no longer just a passenger in the boat, the reader's hand is on the tiller. What need is there for a map, or a sense of direction?
READING. Reading has been seen as linear and dependent on the stable, enduring properties of the printed book. Yet reading has also been seen as constructive, creating textual meaning in the act of reading. (68-9) So what is fixed about the text in a book, compared with a hypertext, if reading is a constructive process? Alternatively, is the constructive nature of reading comparable across print and hypertext? (71) Is the reader really more active in hypertext? (72)
TECHNOLOGIES FOR WRITING. From papyrus roll and vellum manuscript, to the printing press, to the computer. (1) How far does a change in technology change what can be written and how it is read? (5) What difference does the cursor, or the screen window make to writing/reading? (7) If a sequence of texts is placed in a different medium does its meaning differ? And who had (or now has) access to the dominant medium of writing as producer or reader?
TERRITORY. The printed book, because it cannot be prised apart, reordered, or connected in a network, imposes closure on the space of writing: it territorializes it. (52) Thus hypertext can be seen as deterritorializing, dismantling authority. Or is the hypertext the territory of its author in just another, but more subtle, form?
TEXTUALITY. The two contested models of text: one involves margin, centre, linearity, hierarchy, the other multilinearity, nodes, links, networks (39-40). Discourse theorists (e.g., Kintsch) have well established accounts of the former, based on what readers do with printed texts; the latter is still a largely unknown domain, a supposition about reading and writing. Do Iser, Fish, or Barthes actually lend support to the hypertext model? (40)
VIRTUAL TEXT. Computer-based text is said to be virtual, a transient electronic copy of a sequence of electronic signals; such text is a simulation; it cannot be touched or entered. (3-4) Does this remove the writer or reader from the text in an endless "deferral"? Is there an "original" text from which it is derived?
WEB. A common metaphor for hypertext and, now, the internet. Or is it a maze? or a labyrinth? (37) Does it have a centre (with lurking minotaur?). In what ways can one thing be connected to another? Is everything so connectable?
WRITING. Learning to write in the hypertext medium involves new forms of rhetoric -- managing the location of text in boxes onscreen, how to manage links between blocks of text, etc. It may involve unlearning a part of the rhetoric of traditional paper-based writing. (107-8)
WRITING SPACE. The computer screen and electronic memory is said to provide a new spatial environment for writing; we write with spaces or within a topography (3, 36). Does screen or memory space have an impact on the rhetoric, or grammar of writing? What does it change?
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Document created August 9th 1999