What is Hypertext?


Hypertext is a technology of writing. The concept was coined by Ted Nelson, who defined it in 1965 as “non-sequential writing -- text that branches and allow choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text's pieces connected by links which offer the reader different pathways” (Cited on Landow's Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology).

The best way of understanding hypertext is to think, for a moment, in an academic book or journal. There we will find footnotes or endnotes. The function of those parts of any publication is to provide the source of something that was mentioned or used on the text. It also can be a type of secondary text giving some additional information about what the main text is addressing on that part. When confronted with the sign of a footnote or endnote the reader has two options: ignoring it and continue his reading in the main text or stop reading the main text and move to the secondary text. That multitextuality constitutes the basic experience of hypertext.

As that example shows, ideas like multimedia, multitextuality, intertextuality, and hypertext, are not necessarily dependent on computers. “Medieval manuscripts presented complex space of words, pictures, illustration, and ornamentation — the most complex prior the electronic medium. In medieval books, pictures were often separated from the text and given prominence as full- page miniatures” (Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing, p. 72). There is also a selection of non-linear (which, as we will see later, is one of the core features of hypertext) literary experiments. An extremely interesting example of this non-linear and experimental literary writing before computers is Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, which can be considered as a hyperbook.

“[Hypertext] has nothing to do with computers logically; it has to do with computers pragmatically, just the way large numbers and large bookkepping schemes have nothing to do with computers logically but, rather, pragmatically” (Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, p. 33). Computers are not what created or contributed to the creation of the logic of hypertext, but they provided the most beneficial environment for it. Ted Nelson noticed this when he enroled in a computer course for the humanities and “[f]or his term project he attempted to devise a text-handling system which would allow writers to revise, compare, and undo their work easily” (Keep, Christopher; et al. The Electronic Labyrinth).

Therefore, the arrival and dissemination of computers provided for different technological experiments on that direction. With the creation of the global red Internet, specially the World Wide Web, the use of computer hypertext propelled exponentially. Electronic Hypertext is the main technology of writing in the Internet.

What is (electronic) hypertext? The people from The Electronic Labyrinth defined it as “the presentation of information as a linked network of nodes which readers are free to navigate in a non-linear fashion. It allows for multiple authors, a blurring of the author and reader functions, extended works with diffuse boundaries, and multiple reading paths” (Keep, Christopher; et al. The Electronic Labyrinth). On the other hand a good definition of hypertext can be the one that Roland Barthes gives in “S/Z” about an ideal textuality. “In this ideal text the networks are many and interact, without any one being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the aye can reach, they are indeterminable...; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is one the infinity of language” (p. 5-6).

At this point we can discuss the traits of hypertext that interest us the most. By addressing each of them we will be providing a better idea of what hypertext is and why we consider it as a technology of writing that fits well with the idea of “the network imagination of telecommunications” stated by Clough.

greendot.gif 0.2 K Multimedia

greendot.gif 0.2 K Intertextuality

greendot.gif 0.2 K Paths, Links and Decentring

greendot.gif 0.2 K Hypertext and Post-Structuralism

greendot.gif 0.2 K The Author, the Reader and the Book

greendot.gif 0.2 K No End?


Outline

About the Question of Narrative

Some Remarks About Modernity

Some Remarks About Post-Modernity

Bibliography