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Hypertext
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Hypertext is text, displayed on a computer, with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately follow, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Any of these can be hyperlinks; other means of interaction may also be present, e.g. a bubble with text may appear when the mouse hovers somewhere, a video clip may be started and stopped, or a form may be filled out and submitted.
The most extensive example of hypertext today is the World Wide Web.
prefix hyper- (comes from the Greek prefix "?pe?-" and means "over" or "beyond") signifies the overcoming of the old linear constraints of written text.
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Encyclopedia
Hypertext is text, displayed on a computer, with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately follow, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Any of these can be hyperlinks; other means of interaction may also be present, e.g. a bubble with text may appear when the mouse hovers somewhere, a video clip may be started and stopped, or a form may be filled out and submitted.
The most extensive example of hypertext today is the World Wide Web.
Etymology
The prefix hyper- (comes from the Greek prefix "?pe?-" 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" - four syllables longer, and not expressing the idea that it extends hypertext.
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) and later added to the Internet (developed/tested c.1977).
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, 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 Emanuel Goldberg in 1931. 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).
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.
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 as well as text to anchor hypertext links. It also incorporated other protocols intended to coordinate information across the Internet, such as Gopher.
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.
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:
- FRESS — A 1970s multi-user successor to the Hypertext Editing System.
- Electronic Document System — An early 1980s text and graphic editor for interactive hypertexts such as equipment repair manuals and computer-aided instruction.
- Information Presentation Facility — Used to display online help in IBM operating systems.
- Intermedia — A mid-1980s program for group web-authoring and information sharing.
- Storyspace — A mid-1980s program for hypertext narrative.
- Texinfo — The GNU help system.
- XML with the XLink extension — A newer hypertext markup language that extends and expands capabilities introduced by HTML.
- MediaWiki, the system that powers Wikipedia, and other wiki implementations — Relatively recent programs aiming to compensate for the lack of integrated editors in most Web browsers.
- Adobe's Portable Document Format — A widely used publication format for electronic documents including links.
- Windows Help
- PaperKiller - A document editor specifically designed for hypertext. Started in 1996 as IPer (educational project for ED-Media 1997).
- Amigaguide - released on Amiga Workbench 1990.
Academic conferences
Among the top academic conferences for new research in hypertext is the annual ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia ( ACM SIGWEB Hypertext Conference page). Although not exclusively about hypertext, the World Wide Web series of conferences, organized by , include many papers of interest. There is a on the web with links to all conferences in the series.
Hypertext fiction
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 Cortázar's Rayuela and Milorad Pavic'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..
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.
Critics and theorists
See also
External links
- (whether and how concepts from hypertext research can be used on the Web)
History
Hypertext Conferences
Hypertext Fiction
- (by Sergio Cicconi)
- (for more on hypertext literature)
- (Texts in English and German). Editor Roberto Simanowski.
- (catalog of historically significant Hypertext fiction, nonfiction and poetry)
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