Hypertexts on Hypertext

Qualifications are in order.

A large body of technical literature about hypertext was available in hypertextual form when I first wrote this. To name but the four most interesting examples: the Guide "envelope" version of Nelson's Literary Machines, the ACM Hypertext on Hypertext, Bolter's Storyspace reader version of Writing Space, and the ACM Hypertext Compendium. Each of these projects makes a significant contribution, both in form and content, to our understanding of hypertext and its rhetoric (Akscyn 1991; Bolter 1991; Rous et al. 1989); but in an important sense their contributions are limited.

Each of these works reprocesses material that originally existed in print. Decisions about the organization of the text, the number and kinds of links, and the design of user interfaces were made after initial, linear composition. Despite the addition of hypertext apparatus, their logical and discursive structures remain fundamentally those of print. They are not true hypertexts but cradle-works or incunabula ( McDaid "Breaking Frames"), retrofit projects like scribal redactions of oral poems.


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