E-Books and Hypertext

From digitalhumanities

1 Over
2 History
3 Current Web Presence
4 Some Resources

[edit] Over

Think of hypertext as being similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure series[1], only in cyberspace, clicking links instead of turning pages.

[edit] History

Hypertext has several entrances and multiple paths, it is a labyrinth of language mingled with other text, images, and sounds. Like Borges’ Library of Babel[2] [3], with no beginning or end.

The natural evolution of print technology, starting with old scribes laboring over beautiful handwritten scripts, to Gutenberg and his fancy printing press, it’s not shocking, nor new, that hypertext is where we’re at now. Hypertext isn’t really even a radical new idea as some may think, texts have referred to other texts and texts and texts for years, tangles and weaves. It is a continuation of words, and stories, and ideas that travel outside the confines of the average book. In Michel Foucault's work The Archaeology of Knowledge[4], he correctly stated that the “frontiers of a book are never clear-cut…it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: It is a node within a network…(a) network of references. Bits of text linked to other pieces provide modern readers freedom to to roam and pick the path of their choice through texts. Hypertext, non-sequential and non-linear allows language, verbal and non-verbal, images, sounds, and more to mesh into a delightful, though occasionally tangled web, of information like never before, expanding our ideas of the book, and how we learn. Hypertext works the same as the brain, jumping from thought to thought and making connections. Like a choose your adventure story, only more so due to the flood of information and wrong turns in the labyrinth of cyberspace. SEE Landow's Hypertext 3.0 [5]

Mr. Ted Nelson[6]created the term in 1965. It is said Nelson suffered from ADD. [7] Hypertext was defined as "Nonsequential writing - text that branches and allows choice to the reader, best read at an interactive screen." and rightly so.

"(The)notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms." -Ted Nelson