Hypertext: The Future of Written Discourse
It's actually more the present of discourse than the future. Already, it is more common to find people searching the web for dictionary and/or encyclopedia entries than that turning to their bookshelves to dust off the ol' Encyclopedia Brittanica. If you ask someone the capital of some obscure country, they aren't going to look at an atlas, but they'll probably type " capital" into Google search and have their information in seconds. And now, in a college-level writing class, rather than writing a research paper the old fashion way, we are presenting research using a hypertext site of our own design. This weeks readings were all about the design aspects of those hypertexts and how they change the way we process information.
Cripps had an entire lexia of his site devoted to the discussion of multiliniearity; in a normal written paper, all of the information is presented in a linear fashion because we read left to right, top to bottom. In a hypertext, information is separated into blocks that Cripps calls nodes or lexia (what the average user would probably prefer to call pages =/), and the order in which those nodes can be acessed is partially influenced by the writer but ultimately determined by the reader. Where a writer chooses to use hyperlinks can determine how a hypertext can be read, and the order in which it is read will have a profound effect on how the information is processed.
I obviously agree with everything that Cripps says; in fact I've generally taken all of his points for granted. What is interesting is how much more responsible the concept of multilinearity makes the writer. At first glance, a hypertext research project seems a lot easier because I don't have to think about the transitions between ideas. However, quite to the contrary, not only do I have to develop transitions that go from one idea to the next, but I now feel responsible for developing a single transition that could flow into one of any x threads, where x is a number I decide based on how I choose to hyperlink my site.
In all of my previous experiences with web development, I have been in a business environment, and so I have been designing sites with the intention of allowing a user to access any piece of information that they are looking for very quickly. However, in a hypertext discourse, that is not necessarily the goal. In order to effectively argue a point, I need to be able to not only provide factual information, but tie facts to conclusions without putting too many words on a page. Tough work indeed.
Cripps had an entire lexia of his site devoted to the discussion of multiliniearity; in a normal written paper, all of the information is presented in a linear fashion because we read left to right, top to bottom. In a hypertext, information is separated into blocks that Cripps calls nodes or lexia (what the average user would probably prefer to call pages =/), and the order in which those nodes can be acessed is partially influenced by the writer but ultimately determined by the reader. Where a writer chooses to use hyperlinks can determine how a hypertext can be read, and the order in which it is read will have a profound effect on how the information is processed.
I obviously agree with everything that Cripps says; in fact I've generally taken all of his points for granted. What is interesting is how much more responsible the concept of multilinearity makes the writer. At first glance, a hypertext research project seems a lot easier because I don't have to think about the transitions between ideas. However, quite to the contrary, not only do I have to develop transitions that go from one idea to the next, but I now feel responsible for developing a single transition that could flow into one of any x threads, where x is a number I decide based on how I choose to hyperlink my site.
In all of my previous experiences with web development, I have been in a business environment, and so I have been designing sites with the intention of allowing a user to access any piece of information that they are looking for very quickly. However, in a hypertext discourse, that is not necessarily the goal. In order to effectively argue a point, I need to be able to not only provide factual information, but tie facts to conclusions without putting too many words on a page. Tough work indeed.
posted by Frederick at 9:43 PM
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