Not only associative thinking with hypertext

While hypertext is often claimed to be a tool that especially aids associative thinking, intellectual work involves more than association.

So, questions arise about the usefulness of hypertext tools in the more disciplined aspects of scholarly and argumentative writing. Examining the phases of scholarly writing reveals that different hypertext tools can aid different phases of intellectual work in ways other than associative thinking. Spatial hypertext is relevant at all phases, while page-and-link hypertext is more appropriate to some phases than others.

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-Enter Hypertextopia

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- Jean-Philippe Pastor

Line of argument

Writing and text, as the supplementary representation of speech is supposed to embody the "voice," the deferred presence of the author.

But can it be really ?

The concomitant of "voice," in traditional composition classes, is "point of view." And these, traditionally, are conveyed, or rather, created, by attention to structure: logic, the "line" of argument.

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Enter Hypertextopia -

PHONEREADER Library -

- Jean-Philippe Pastor

Hypertext in philosophy

You have written a hypertext, Socrates in the Labyrinth, in which you discuss this problem of using hypertext in philosophy, in argumentation, and of course this hypertext has arguments within it, so what is your experience of using hypertext in order to arrange and organise an argument?

David Kolb - Actually I tried to do it in various different ways while I was writing the text. Partially that is because I learned as I was going along. Partially it is because deliberate experimentations were made, and I also included some smaller texts which show various forms with the larger ones.

My experience was that it is good to break up the arguments so that it is not all presented in a single block, but that it is not good to break it up too much. If you tried, for instance, in a complete argument to give each step of the argument in one little block of text, it would be too hard for the reader to keep everything in mind.

So what I decided was to give a chunk of argument, maybe half a page or several paragraphs, which were best read together, and then to link that in various directions to comments, background, previous and subsequent arguments, so that there is a certain judgement you need about how it can be best presented.

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Use of hypertext for argumentation

Coming to the second aspect of hypertext you mentioned, the use of hypertext for argumentation. Can you tell us something about this?

David Kob - This is also something which has not been explored but it is of great interest to me. It seems to me that hypertext offers a possibility to present very complex structures of argumentation in ways that might potentially be clearer than you find in a linear book, because you can make the relationships between the parts of the argument by direct linkage of various kinds and you’re not constrained to put the argument piece by piece and hope that the reader remembers on page 50 the important point that was made on page 25. You can in fact link page 25 to page 50 and your reader can go back and forth directly. So there is a possibility that complex formal structures of argument could be more adequately expressed in hypertext. It is also possible that comments and questions and additions to such forms of argument could then be directly attached, in which case you would begin to develop a dialogue which would not simply be in the form of I say this, you say that, I say this, you say that.

But rather your comments would be attached to portions of what I said, and so we might have many streams of dialogue coming off the argument, and gradually a whole network would develop, which might be rather hard to follow because it would have many paths, but that network would include a whole debate about complex argument, counterarguments, and presumably would also include mapping that would tell you what was going on in such a collection.

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-PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Rhetorical argumentation

I define "rhetorical argumentation" as essentially an argument meant to persuade.

I think in many ways all communication is an attempt to persuade: to persuade people to take action, to read the next line of your work, to grant that you have a good point. For this work, I'm interested in the issues raised by arguing on the Web, and how that differs from arguing in print.

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts