The consideration of hypertext structure as consisting of 'whole' syntagmatic series, which in turn become the paradigmatic sets available, has complex implications which require further research.

It would appear that the relation of one node to another, via a link, while significant, gains greater currency when considered from the point of view of a discrete syntagmatic segment (which could, in principle, consist of two nodes). However, such an approach discounts the origin of the link in a manner that is probably untenable - in cinema this is irrelevant as the point of connection is the end of one shot and this is, currently, the only point of connection. Obviously a hypertext provides a point within a node from which connection is possible, and thus for a syntagmatic series to be formed, and so the relation of the link source to its destination also forms a syntagmatic series.

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Linkable items

One canot make connections without having things to connect.

Those linkable items not only must have some qualities that make the writer want to connect them, they also must exist in separation, apart, divided. As Terence Harpold has pointed out, most writers on hypertext concentrate on the link, but all links simultaneously both bridge and maintain separation. This double effect of linking appears in the way it inevitably produces juxtaposition, concatenation, and assemblage. If part of the pleasure of linking arises in the act of joining two different things, then this aesthetic of juxaposition inevitably tends towards catachresis and difference for their own end, for the effect of surprise, and sometimes surprised pleasure, they produce. (Landow 1999, p. 159.)

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Context and connections

An important implication, as Metz notes, is that if it is the development or articulation of autonomous segments that are fundamental to narration in cinema, then the meaning that accrues to these segments is highly contextual and not inherent within the connections themselves.

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Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

Hypertext and cinema

Semiotician Christian Metz developed a syntagmatic schema of the varieties of cinematic sequence.

He described the extent to which these offer a methodology to reconsider our notions of link rhetoric and link typology. With Metz' description, we can see that much of the appropriation of cinema within hypertext is founded on a common misconception of there being an a priori formal cinematic grammar. Cinema relies upon the contextual and pragmatic basis of connection for the production of meaning, and has clear applicability to a posteriori attempts to determine rhetorical structure in hypertext.

The assumption of an isomorphic relation between hypertext and cinema is fundamental to this thesis.

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Enter Hypertextual as a member

One shot Learning

Training nets to model aspects of human intelligence is a fine art.

Success with backpropagation and other connectionist learning methods may depend on quite subtle adjustment of the algorithm and the training set. Training typically involves hundreds of thousands of rounds of weight adjustment. Given the limitations of computers presently available to connectionist researchers, training a net to perform an interesting task may take days or even weeks. Some of the difficulty may be resolved when parallel circuits specifically designed to run neural network models are widely available. But even here, some limitations to connectionist theories of learning will remain to be faced. Humans (and many less intelligent animals) display an ability to learn from single events; for example an animal that eats a food that later causes gastric distress will never try that food again.

Connectionist learning techniques such as backpropagation are far from explaining this kind of ‘one shot’ learning.

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Intellectual abilities

Connectionism is a movement in cognitive science which hopes to explain human intellectual abilities using artificial neural networks (also known as ‘neural networks’ or ‘neural nets’).

Neural networks are simplified models of the brain composed of large numbers of units (the analogs of neurons) together with weights that measure the strength of connections between the units. These weights model the effects of the synapses that link one neuron to another. Experiments on models of this kind have demonstrated an ability to learn such skills as face recognition, reading, and the detection of simple grammatical structure.

Philosophers have become interested in connectionism because it promises to provide an alternative to the classical theory of the mind: the widely held view that the mind is something akin to a digital computer processing a symbolic language. Exactly how and to what extent the connectionist paradigm constitutes a challenge to classicism has been a matter of hot debate in recent years.

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Related ideas

With computer technology, it's easy to direct readers to related ideas.

This computer-based glossary is hypertextual: I can refer you to terms like Alexandrine and Postmodern, and you can go directly there — and once there, you can follow links elsewhere. Text turns into a web of connections, and the reader chooses which connections to follow.
Metabole is a huge collection of hypertext documents, where each page on the solution can refer to any other page of the hypertext.

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