Interconnectedness

Hypertextuality

Hypertextuality is a postmodern theory of the inter-connectedness of all literary works and their interpretation.

The prefix 'hyper' is derived from the Greek 'above, beyond or outside'. Hence hypertext has come to describe a text which provides a network of links to other texts that are 'outside, beyond and above itself'.

According to Gerard Genette in Palimpsestes, a book about hypertextuality, "hypotext" refers to the source of the text, as well as to previous editions or versions of it. Hypertext is related to paratext, which includes information that accompanies the text itself (illustrations, preface or introduction).

See also

• Intertextuality
• Paratext

References

1. ^ Genette, Gérard (1997). Palimpsests: literature in the second degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-7029-1. OCLC 36001432.http://books.google.com/books?id=KbYzNp94C9oC. Retrieved 6 April 2009.

see http://www.hypertext.belarus.pomorze.pl/

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Manipulating texts

The ease of cutting, copying, and otherwise manipulating texts permits different forms of hypertextual composition, ones in which the researcher's notes and original data exist in experientially closer proximity to the text than ever before.

According to Michael Heim, as electronic textuality frees writing from the constraints of paper-print technology, "vast amounts of information, including further texts, will be accessible immediately below the electronic surface of a piece of writing. . . .

By connecting a small computer to a phone, a profession will be able to read `books' whose footnotes can be expanded into further `books' which in turn open out onto a vast sea of data bases systemizing all of human cognition". The manipulability of the scholarly text, which derives from the ability of computers to search databases with enormous speed, also permits full-text searches, printed and dynamic concordances, and other kinds of processing that allow scholars in the humanities to ask new kinds of questions.

Moreover, as one writes, "The text in progress becomes interconnected and linked with the entire world of information".

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Link typology

The role of rhetoric in relation to link typologies is not grounded in the individual relations established between a single link (or even a multiheaded link) between two nodes, but is in fact determined much more substantially by the context provided by an autonomous segment developed across several nodes, and more specfically several links.

A distinction needs to be recognised between the quantity of nodes versus the quantity of links simply because a small number of nodes can produce a significant number of autonomous segments by virtue of a high incidence of linking.

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Landow and the quality in hypertext

What is quality in hypertext?

How, in other words, do we judge a hypertext collection of documents (or web) to be successful or unsuccessful, to be good or bad as hypertext? How can we judge if a particular hypertext achieves elegance or just mediocrity? Those questions lead to another: what in particular is good about hypertext?

To answer these questions this paper proposes a number of basic rules, including (1) Individual lexias should have an adequate number of links, (2) Following links should provide a satisfying experience, (3) The pleasure of following links comes from a perception of coherence, (4) such coherence can take the form of analogy, (5) Individual lexias should satisfy readers and yet prompt them to want to follow additional links, (6) The document should exemplify true hypertextuality by providing multiple lines of organization, and (7) hyper-document should fully engage the hypertextual capacities of the particular software environment employed.

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Personal homepages for hypertextual thought

In our program we have Web surfing . Do you have some Websites that you could suggest as interesting to visit during Web surfing and can you also tell us something about the Website on which you work with your students and where material of your students is located.

David Kolb - If we’re thinking about hypertext, the two Websites that come to my mind are actually personal homepages. One is the personal homepage of Stuart Moulthrop who teaches at the University of Baltimore and the other is the homepage of Michael Joyce at Vassar College. Both of those are interesting because they connect to essays or texts written by those people, who are both fine theorists and writers, but also because they have many links from those pages to other hypertext-related Websites.

I think those would be good starting points. As to what I’ve done with my students, I’ve created on the Web a little thing called the Bates Hypertext Archive, which is simply a place to put some student works and a bit of my own which seemed to me to be worth putting on the Web. Most of the material there has been transferred from the program Storyspace, which allows you to construct more complex linkage than is easy to do on the Web. As a result, there is some awkwardness in the Web production of the pages, but by and large it is OK. What you’d find there are three or four "fictions" or short stories written by students and also a link to a site of students in a philosophy of art class - quite a large class. I asked the students to go out onto the Web and find sites related to art - paintings, sculpture, architecture - and write reviews of those sites.

So I have several hundred reviews, typically a paragraph or so, written by these students, purely their own opinion, about these various sites, and there is a link to the site with each review. Some of the reviews are very fine, some of them are not. Some of them are quite insightful. But it was an attempt to allow the students to have a voice and to have a fairly simple way of constructing something, because we were able to post the reviews without too much difficulty and it did not require the students themselves to compose a Web page. That is an example of another thing you could do. Given that you’ll probably have some students who know something about Web construction, one of the best ways to involve students is to have a common project - it allows them to learn from one another. Have them create a Website or a portion of a Website that relates to the material of the class or to some project that the students are working on. You could even let them define it to some extent. One of the things that is on the Website, for instance, is something some students did last spring. They had to break into groups of three or four and decide on a Web project and create it. One group did a project on the worst things they could find on the Web. Another one did a guide to college, things the administration doesn’t want you to know, and so forth.

So you are getting people to create. It doesn’t have to be enormous but they learn a tremendous amount and they learn from one another.

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Hypertext as a metaphor

Do you think there is some possible use of the idea of hypertext, the idea of this kind of linking and putting in relation different scattered pieces of information outside the field of literature, of writing? Do you think hypertext can also be seen as a kind of model or metaphor in other fields?

David Kolb - I think so. If you think about hypertext as linkage which is non-linear and also non-hierarchical - although you can build a hypertext which is hierarchical, you can build a hypertext which is purely linear, the problem is that you cannot keep it that way, it is going to have other links, it is going to move out - if you think about that image of non-linear, non-hierarchical linking, and forms that can be created but which cannot dominate the field of writing because other forms could be created out of the same pieces of text, that idea can be transferred. Here’s an example. Many people complain, especially in American but I think also increasingly in Europe, about suburbs and suburban sprawl. We tend to think that we have a very concentrated historical city core surrounded by a flat area which has houses and factories and malls just kind of scattered about with no order. This lack of order is felt to be somehow inappropriate. But you might try reading the suburbs as a hypertext.

You might say: Do not try to impose on the suburbs the old hierarchical kind of order, look for linkages, see the economic links that go among pieces of the suburbs, see how people make lives, especially in America, by using their car to make links from one activity to another. See how a community is created which is not a community of people who live in the same neighbourhood but a community of people who are linked by car, by telephone, by e-mail. A disconnected, discontinuous community but nonetheless a community.

So this idea of linkage without hierarchy and linkage that has many possible patterns at the same time may be a useful way to think about the kind of physical civilisation which tends to be growing up in a dispersed fashion rather than the concentrated, hierarchical city.

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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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Link everywhere the best as you can

According to Jeff Jarvis, there is a new rule now on the web : Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.

Try this on as a new rule for newspapers.

That’s not how newspapers work now. They try to cover everything because they used to have to be all things to all people in their markets. So they had their own reporters replicate the work of other reporters elsewhere so they could say that they did it under their own bylines as a matter of pride and propriety. It’s the way things were done. They also took wire-service copy and reedited it so they could give their audiences the world. But in the age of the link, this is clearly inefficient and unnecessary. You can link to the stories that someone else did and to the rest of the world. And if you do that, it allows you to reallocate your dwindling resources to what matters, which in most cases should be local coverage.

This changes the dynamic of editorial decisions. Instead of saying, “we should have that” (and replicating what is already out there) you say, “what do we do best?” That is, “what is our unique value?” It means that when you sit down to see a story that others have worked on, you should ask, “can we do it better?” If not, then link. And devote your time to what you can do better.

In the rearchitecture of news, what needs to happen is that people are driven to the best coverage, not the 87th version of the same coverage. This will work for publications and news organizations. It will also work for individuals; this is how a lone reporter’s work (and reputation) can surface. We saw that happening with the Libby trial and Firedoglake’s liveblogging of it. As Jay Rosen said at our NPR confab last week — and I’ve heard this elsewhere — theirs became the best source for keeping up on the trial. Reporters and editors knew it and were using it. So those same reporters and editors should have been sending their readers to the blog as a service: ‘We’re not liveblogging it, but they are. We’ll give you our analysis and reporting later. Enjoy.’ That is where the architecture of news must go because links enable it and economics demand it.

There’s another angle to this: News is not one-size-fits-all. We don’t get all our news from one source anymore. We get bombarded with news all around us. So we all knew that Anna Nicole Smith was dead (or, in Jack Cafferty’s immortal words, still dead). So that means that not every newspaper needs to cover that story in depth.

It certainly means that The New York Times needn’t. So why did the Times devote considerable space and reporting and editing talent to the Anna Nicole story this week? They added nothing more to the story. It’s not what they do best. At the least, if they felt they really needed to cover it, they should have used the AP. Online, they certainly should have just linked to the many, many other sources that are covering it. And then the paper could have used its resources for news that matters and news that they can do uniquely well.

So why did they do it? They didn’t want to be left behind. They perhaps even didn’t want to seem snotting (as if the Anna Nicole story were below them and their readers). But that’s not the issue. Making the best use of their resources and talent it. They need to take advantage of the link.

Newspapers are getting more comfortable with linking out even to competitors. This takes it farther. It says that the best service you can perform for yourself and your readers is to link instead of trying to do everything.

And once you really open yourself up to this, then it also means that you can link to more people gathering more coverage of news: ‘We didn’t cover that school board meeting today, but here’s a link to somebody who recorded it.’ That’s really no different from saying after a big news event, ‘We weren’t there to take pictures, but lots of our readers were and here they are.’
So you do what you do best. And you link to the rest. (Jeff Jarvis)

That is the new architecture of news.

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Relevant hyperlinking

Poor quality hypertext is a usability disaster causing annoyance, confusion, and anxiety. Users expect links, and that the links will be relevant and useful.

A good hyperlink is relevant to the surrounding text and provides enough information for the user to make an informed decision about whether to leave the current page they’re on and follow.

Here’s an example of a useful hyperlink:

1 For excellent examples of finely crafted hypertext
2 look no further than kottke.org,
3 the online home of Jason Kottke.

For excellent examples of finely crafted hypertext
look no further than kottke.org,
the online home of Jason Kottke.

The linked text must have relevance, as it’s the first hint the user will receive as to the nature of the link. The test of good link text is whether it can stand alone on a page, outside of the hypertext of which it’s a part, and still make sense.

Links must also be styled differently to the surrounding text. They can be another color than blue, as long as it’s different to the normal text, and that all the links in the page are the same color, so they’ll be clearly visible.

A title attribute is optional, but should be used independently from providing a context because the tool tip only appears when using the mouse. If the link text is sufficient, it’s unnecessary anyway.

Well-crafted hypertext is simple to read and use, and frankly, simple to create! Are you guilty of crimes against hypertext?

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Links you don't know

Within text, some links highlight a key phrase, others a verb, and many prefer the very literal, "for such-and-such an article go here," with the "here" being the blue, underlined, linking word.

Still others prefer that links live within graphic elements: a picture, a drawing, a logo. Sometimes you don't know where a link is until you roll your mouse over the spot.


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Hypertext Editing System

Ted Nelson coined the words hypertext and hypermedia in 1965 and worked with Andries van Dam on the development of the Hypertext Editing System in 1968 at Brown University.

With its prefix hyper- from the Greek for "beyond, over," hypertext is text on a computer that can take the user to other hypertext information through connections called hyperlinks. The first practical use of hypertext is credited to Douglas Engelbart's "oN-Line System" (NLS), developed at Stanford Research Center in the 1960s. (Engelbart is also co-inventor with Bill English of the computer mouse.)

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Pageranking

To fully understand pagerank and how it can be channeled or sculpted, we need to add one additional concept: pagerank transference.

The idea is that if you have a page with lots of pagerank that points to lots of other pages (let's say 20) each link gets 1/20th the pagerank of the originating page. If the page has a pagerank of 100, each link would get a transferred pagerank "vote" of 100/20, or 5. If that same page had only two outbound links however, then each link would get 100/2 or 50 points.

Clearly, the more outbound links you have on a page, the less benefit each resultant destination page sees as the originating page gains in popularity. This is a bit confusing, but think about it this way: If we have a Web page with 20 outbound links (e.g., links pointing to other pages, either on our own site or another site) and our pagerank jumps from 100 to 200, each of those destination pages gains an additional vote of 5. Not so much. If we only have two outbound links, however, each sees a jump of 50 as our own page gains in pagerank!

The obvious question is whether you can control the flow of pagerank so that you can have outbound links that don't get any votes?

You can. That's what's called the "nofollow" attribute and to see how it works we need to briefly sidetrack and talk about HTML. A hypertext link on a Web page has two elements: the destination URL and the text that's to be shown as clickable. It looks like this:
"a href="http://www.google.com/visit scenic Google.com (surrounded by carets) and ending with a "/a" (also bracketed by carets)

In this instance, "http://www.google.com//" is the target address where you'll be taken if you click on the words "visit scenicGoogle". You already know this if you're learning HTML, I'm sure.
To have a hypertext link not pass along pagerank, the secret is to add the nofollow attribute, actually a value to the "rel" (short for 'relationship') attribute. It ends up looking like this:
(open caret) a href="http://www.google.com//" rel="nofollow(end caret) visit scenic Google.com (start caret) /a (end caret).

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Linkage

A hypertext offers not only intertextual linkages, but can also bring other sources of information to the user's workstation which would formerly have been out of reach: sound, graphics, and even video sequences, can be systematically interwoven with textual materials in such a way that the author's experience in the field, in coming to understand another person, is brought much closer to the user.

The conceptual input is surrounded with a sensory richness that no printed text can provide.

Recognising contextual nature of link

The issue is not one of predetermining what links mean but of recognising the contingent and contextual nature of link use, as readers and writers.

This is common in poststructural approaches to discourse, which no longer place much store in hierarchies determined by formal categories, and is particularly the case in hypertext where it seems reasonably clear that readers find connection by virtue of the link.

It is important that we recognise that hypertextual narration is composed of syntagmatic series, and that this series is determined on the basis of some measure of narrative 'integrity' - whether episodic wholeness, readerly comprehension, temporal or thematic unity, or some other criteria (Rosenberg 1996). This is important because it suggests that the definition and decision of what constitutes a sequence lies as much outside of each constituent part as it does within the content or the connecting of its parts. Hence, if it lies outside, then any ambition to develop or define a typology or classificatory system must always be surrendered in the face of this outside.

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Rules of movement

To aid in the seamlessness of editing a sequence of action together several basic rules of movement, frame entry, and frame exiting, were developed by classical Hollywood cinema.

Where a moving body exits a frame, and the next shot is to show them again, then the following conditions are to be followed:

where a figure has left the frame in shot A, they can be shown already present in shot B.
where a figure remains in shot A, they must enter frame during shot B.

These rules only apply to those shot sequences where a character, or other moving object, is to be shown moving across the sequence produced by the edit, where there is to be a change of shot but no movement across the frame, movement is regularly co-opted to motivate the edit.
Such rules of movement can be seen in Written on the Wind, though it helps if you use the movie controller. Where this is not followed a jump cut results, and while uncommon prior to the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, it, like crossing the line, does not appear to significantly compromise intelligibility.

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

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It is clear that link source plays a fundamental role to the context of any particular pattern.

For example Joyce's cycle could as easily describe the experience of using the Internet Movie Database, as Afternoon: a story, yet clearly in each case the effect of the cycle is radically different. Similarly a tangle could describe Simpson's Memex project, parts of Amerika's Grammatron, or Miles' 1996 Hyperweb, yet each are fundamentally different hypertexts.

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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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Desire to link

There is some expression of force outside of the shot in the cinema's desire to cut the shot into fragments, and that a similar force is present in hypertext and expressed as a desire to link.

This 'force' is always outside of the shot, or the node, or the link. It is sought by the link, the link is an expression of appropriation of the force that writing and the link is a response to, but it is never adequate to this outside. Outsides remain, always, outside. Harpold's work on links and diversions - the manner in which links are always detours around what is sought, is extremely relevant here.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links

A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

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Syntagmatically oriented hypertext

Hypertext writing and systems that emphasise 'usability' (where usability seems to assume ease of use as a positive attribute for any hypertext), place an emphasis on the syntagmatic.

This emphasis on the smooth flow of links into nodes describes a highly linear reading experience. Interestingly, in Bernstein's examples most of the patterns that would probably relate to 'usability' are represented by highly linear images, the sieve for instance. However, the emphasis in the syntagmatically oriented hypertext is not, as might be thought, on simple patterns (any variety of pattern could be formed by the reader) but on linear continuity.

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