WHAT IS AN HYPERTEXT?
Hypertext most often refers to text on a computer that will lead the user to other, related information
on demand. Hypertext represents a relatively recent innovation to user interfaces, which overcomes some of the
limitations of written text. Rather than remaining static like traditional
text, hypertext makes possible a dynamic organization of information through
links and connections (called hyperlinks). Hypertext can be designed
to perform various tasks; for instance when a user "clicks" on it or
"hovers" over it, a bubble with a word definition may appear, a web
page on a related subject may load, a video clip may run, or an application may
open.
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The prefix hyper-
(comes from the Greek prefix "υπερ-" and means "over" or
"beyond") signifies the overcoming of the old linear constraints of
written text. The term "hypertext" is often used where the term hypermedia might seem appropriate. In
1992 Ted Nelson - who coined both terms in
1965 - wrote:
By now the word
"hypertext" has become generally accepted for branching and
responding text, but the corresponding word "hypermedia," meaning
complexes of branching and responding graphics, movies and sound - as well as
text - is much less used. Instead they use the strange term "interactive
multimedia" - four syllables longer, and not expressing the idea that it
extends hypertext. - Nelson, Literary Machines 1992
Hypertext documents can either
be static (prepared and stored in advance) or dynamic (continually changing in
response to user input). Static hypertext can be
used to cross-reference collections of data in documents, software
applications, or books on CDs. A well-constructed system can also incorporate other
user-interface conventions, such as menus and command lines. Hypertext can
develop very complex and dynamic systems of linking and cross-referencing. The
most famous implementation of hypertext is the World Wide Web.
Recorders of information have
long looked for ways to categorize and compile it. Early on, experiments
existed with various methods for arranging layers of annotations around a document. The most
famous example of this is the Talmud. Various other reference works (for example dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.) also developed a
precursor to hypertext, consisting of setting certain words in small capital
letters, indicating that an entry existed for that term within the same
reference work. Sometimes the term would be preceded by a pointing hand dingbat, ☞like this, or an arrow, ➧like this.
Later, several scholars
entered the scene who believed that humanity was drowning in information, causing foolish decisions
and duplicating efforts among scientists. These scholars proposed or developed
proto-hypertext systems predating electronic computer technology. For example,
in the early 20th century, two visionaries attacked the cross-referencing
problem through proposals based on labor-intensive, brute
force methods. Paul Otlet proposed a proto-hypertext
concept based on his monographic principle, in which all documents would be
decomposed down to unique phrases stored on index cards. In the 1930s, H.G. Wells proposed the creation of a World Brain.
Michael
Buckland summarized the very advanced pre-World War II development of microfilm
based on rapid retrieval devices, specifically the microfilm based workstation
proposed by Leonard Townsend in 1938 and the microfilm and
photoelectronic based selector, patented by Emmanuel Goldberg in 1931.[1] Buckland concluded: "The
pre-war information retrieval specialists of continental Europe, the
'documentalists,' largely disregarded by post-war information retrieval
specialists, had ideas that were considerably more advanced than is now
generally realized." But, like the manual index card model, these
microfilm devices provided rapid retrieval based on pre-coded indices and
classification schemes published as part of the microfilm record without
including the link model which distinguishes the modern concept of hypertext
from content or category based information
retrieval.
All major histories of what we now call hypertext
start in 1945, when Vannevar
Bush wrote an article in The
Atlantic Monthly called "As We
May Think," about a futuristic device he called a Memex. He described the device as an
electromechanical desk linked to an extensive archive of microfilms, able to display books, writings, or any document from a library. The Memex would also be able
to create 'trails' of linked and branching sets of pages, combining pages from
the published microfilm library with personal annotations or additions captured
on a microfilm recorder. Bush's vision was based on extensions of 1945
technology - microfilm recording and retrieval in this case. However, the
modern story of hypertext starts with the Memex because "As We May
Think" directly influenced and inspired the two American men generally
credited with the invention of hypertext, Ted Nelson and Douglas
Engelbart.
Ted Nelson coined the words
"hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1965 and worked with Andries
van Dam to develop the Hypertext Editing System in 1968 at Brown University. Engelbart had begun working
on his NLS system in 1962 at Stanford Research Institute, although delays in obtaining funding,
personnel, and equipment meant that its key features were not completed until
1968. In December of that year, Engelbart demonstrated a hypertext interface to
the public for the first time, in what has come to be known as "The
Mother of All Demos".
Funding for NLS slowed after
1974. Influential work in the following decade included NoteCards at Xerox PARC and ZOG at Carnegie
Mellon. ZOG started in 1972 as an artificial
intelligence research project under the supervision of Allen Newell, and pioneered the
"frame" or "card" model of hypertext. ZOG was deployed in
1982 on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson and later commercialized as Knowledge Management System. Two other influential hypertext projects from
the early 1980s were Ben
Shneiderman's The Interactive Encyclopedia System (TIES) at the University of Maryland (1983) and Intermedia at Brown
University (1984).
The first hypermedia
application was the Aspen
Movie Map in 1977. In 1980, Tim
Berners-Lee created ENQUIRE, an early hypertext database
system somewhat like a wiki. The early 1980s also saw a
number of experimental hypertext and hypermedia programs, many of whose
features and terminology were later integrated into
the Web. Guide was the first hypertext
system for personal computers.
In August 1987, Apple Computer released HyperCard for the Macintosh line at the MacWorld convention. Its impact, combined with interest in Peter J. Brown's GUIDE (marketed by
OWL and released earlier that year) and Brown University's Intermedia, led to
broad interest in and enthusiasm for hypertext and new media. The first ACM
Hypertext academic
conference took place in November 1987, in Chapel Hill NC.
Meanwhile Nelson, who had been
working on and advocating his Xanadu system for over two decades,
along with the commercial success of HyperCard, stirred Autodesk to invest in his
revolutionary ideas. The project continued at Autodesk for four years, but no
product was released.
Hypertext and the World Wide Web
In the late 1980s,
Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web to meet the demand for automatic
information-sharing among scientists working in different universities and
institutes all over the world. In 1992, Lynx was born as an early Internet
web browser. Its ability to provide hypertext links within documents that could
reach into documents anywhere on the Internet began the creation of the web on
the Internet.
Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released the first version of
their Mosaic
web browser to supplement the two existing web browsers: one that ran only on NeXTSTEP and one that was only
minimally user-friendly. Because it could display and
link graphics as well as text, Mosaic quickly became the replacement for Lynx.
Mosaic ran in the X
Window System environment, which was then popular in the research community, and offered
usable window-based interactions. It allowed images[2] as well as text to anchor hypertext
links. It also incorporated other protocols intended to coordinate information
across the Internet, such as Gopher.[3]
After the release of web
browsers for both the PC and Macintosh environments, traffic on the
World Wide Web quickly exploded from only 500 known web servers in 1993 to over
10,000 in 1994. Thus, all earlier hypertext systems were overshadowed by the
success of the web, even though it originally lacked many features of those
earlier systems, such as an easy way to edit what you were reading, typed links, backlinks, transclusion, and source
tracking.
In 1995, Ward
Cunningham made the first wiki available, making the web
more hypertextual by adding easy editing, and (within a single wiki) backlinks
and limited source tracking. It also added the innovation of making it possible
to link to pages that did not yet exist. Wiki developers continue to implement
novel features as well as those developed or imagined in the early explorations
of hypertext but not included in the original web.
Besides the already mentioned Project Xanadu, Hypertext Editing System, NLS, HyperCard, and World Wide Web, there are other noteworthy
early implementations of hypertext, with different feature sets:
Among the top academic conferences
for new research in hypertext is the annual ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia ([1] ACM SIGWEB Hypertext Conference page). Although
not exclusively about hypertext, the World Wide Web series of conferences,
organized by IW3C2, include many papers of
interest. There is a list on the web with links to all conferences in the series.
See main article Hypertext fiction
Hypertext writing has
developed its own style of fiction, coinciding with the growth and proliferation
of hypertext development software and the emergence of electronic networks. Two
software programs specifically designed for literary hypertext, Storyspace
and Intermedia became available in the
1990s.
Storyspace 2.0, a professional level hypertext development tool, is available from Eastgate
Systems, which has also published many notable works of electronic
literature, including Michael
Joyce's afternoon,
a story, Shelley
Jackson's Patchwork Girl, Stuart
Moulthrop's Victory
Garden, and Judy
Malloy's its name was Penelope. Other works include Julio Cortazar's Rayuela and Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars.
An advantage of writing a narrative
using hypertext technology is that the meaning of the story can be conveyed
through a sense of spatiality and perspective that is arguably unique to
digitally-networked environments. An author's creative use of nodes, the
self-contained units of meaning in a hypertextual narrative, can play with the
reader's orientation and add meaning to the text.
Critics of hypertext claim
that it inhibits the old, linear, reader experience by creating several
different tracks to read on, and that this in turn contributes to a postmodernist fragmentation of worlds.
However, they do see value in its ability to present several different views on
the same subject in a simple way.[4]. This echoes the arguments of
'medium theorists' like Marshall
McLuhan who look at
the social and psychological impacts of the media. New media can become so
dominant in public culture that they effectively create a "paradigm
shift" (Lelia Green, 2001:15) as people have shifted their perceptions,
understanding of the world and ways of interacting with the world and each
other in relation to new technologies and medias. So hypertext signifies a
change from linear, structured and hierarchical forms of representing and
understanding the world into fractured, decentralized and changeable medias
based on the technological concept of hypertext links.