hypertext
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Hypertext is text displayed on a
computer or other electronic device with references (
hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the underlying concept defining the structure of the
World Wide Web, making it an easy-to-use and flexible format to share information over the
Internet.
(1)Etymology
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, author
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": this is four syllables longer, and does not express the idea of extending hypertext. {{nowrap|— Nelson, Literary Machines, 1992}}
Types and uses of hypertext
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 , first deployed in 1992.
History
Early precursors to hypertext
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. Other reference works (for example dictionaries, encyclopedias) also developed a precursor to hypertext: the setting of 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 an
index,
☞like this, or an
arrow,
➧like this.
Janet Murray has referenced
Jorge Luis Borges' "
The Garden of Forking Paths" as a precursor to the
hypertext novel and aesthetic.
(2) "The concept Borges described in 'The Garden of Forking Paths'--in several layers of the story, but most directly in the combination book and maze of Ts'ui Pen--is that of a novel that can be read in multiple ways, a hypertext novel. Borges described this in 1941, prior to the invention (or at least the public disclosure) of the electromagnetic digital computer. Not only did he invent the hypertext novel--Borges went on to describe a theory of the universe based upon the structure of such a novel." -
Wardrip-Fruin and
Montfort (3) 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
Emanuel Goldberg in 1931.
(4) 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.
The Memex
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.
The invention of hypertext
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).
Early Hypertext Applications
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, where many other applications, including the hypertext literature writing software
Storyspace were also demoed
(5)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 simple and immediate information-sharing among physicists working at CERN and different universities or 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
(6) as well as text to anchor hypertext links. It also incorporated other protocols intended to coordinate information across the Internet, such as
Gopher.
(7)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.The
Firefox Add-On
Hyperwords which has been developed in cooperation with
Doug Engelbart(8) and Ted Nelson
(9) gives Web surfers the ability to issue many commands on any text on the web, not only pre-written links - a return to what users could do 40 years earlier with
Doug Engelbart's
NLS.
Implementations
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:
Academic conferences
Among the top academic conferences for new research in hypertext is the annual
ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (
weblink 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.
Hypertext fiction
See main article Hypertext fictionHypertext 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, Forward Anywhere. Other works include
Julio Cortázar'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. In some cases, hypertext can be more a problem to get appealing stories than a tool to develop creativity.
(10) However, they do see value in its ability to present several different views on the same subject in a simple way.
(11).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 media. So hypertext signifies a change from linear, structured and hierarchical forms of representing and understanding the world into fractured, decentralized and changeable media based on the technological concept of hypertext links.
Critics and theorists
See also
References
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[WEB,weblink Internet legal definition of Internet, Free Online Law Dictionary, July 15, 2009, West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2, November 25, 2008, ]
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[ "Inventing the Medium" -Janet H. Murray]
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[# ^ Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Nick Montfort, ed (2003). The New Media Reader. (29). The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-23227-8.]
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[Buckland, Michael K. "Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, And Vannevar Bush's Memex", 1992]
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[ Hawisher, Gail E., Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, and Cynthia L. Selfe (1996). Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood NJ, p. 213]
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[WWW-Talk Jan-Mar 1993: Re: proposed new tag: IMG]
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[WWW-Talk Jan-Mar 1993: Support for CSO and gopher type 2]
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[Hyperwords Advisory Board]
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[Hyperwords Advisory Board]
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[Biblumliteraria weblink]
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[The Game of Reading an Electronic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]
