Hypertext
Encyclopedia
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

 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
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

. It is an easy-to-use and flexible format to share information over the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

.

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
Hypermedia
Hypermedia is a computer-based information retrieval system that enables a user to gain or provide access to texts, audio and video recordings, photographs and computer graphics related to a particular subject.Hypermedia is a term created by Ted Nelson....

" might seem appropriate. In 1992, author Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...

 – who coined both terms in 1963 – 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.

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
Application software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...

, 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
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

, first deployed in 1992.

History

In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

 created a hypertext style novel - The Garden of Forking Paths
The Garden of Forking Paths
"The Garden of Forking Paths" is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is the title story in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan , which was republished in its entirety in Ficciones in 1944...

.

In 1945, Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...

 wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...

called "As We May Think
As We May Think
As We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...

", about a futuristic proto-hypertext device he called a Memex
Memex
The memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the hypothetical proto-hypertext system he described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...

.

In 1963, Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...

 coined the terms 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' in a model he developed for creating and using linked content (first published reference 1965). He later worked with Andries van Dam
Andries van Dam
Andries "Andy" van Dam is a Dutch-born American professor of computer science and former Vice-President for Research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hypertext system, HES in the late 1960s. He co-authored Computer Graphics:...

 to develop the Hypertext Editing System
Hypertext Editing System
The Hypertext Editing System, or HES, was an early hypertext research project conducted at Brown University in 1967 by Andries van Dam, Ted Nelson, and several Brown students. HES was a pioneering hypertext system that organized data into two main types: links and branching text...

 in 1967 at Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

. Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...

 independently began working on his NLS
NLS (computer system)
NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute during the 1960s...

 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
The Mother of All Demos
The Mother of All Demos is a name given to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace...

".

The first hypermedia application was the Aspen Movie Map
Aspen Movie Map
The Aspen Movie Map was a revolutionary hypermedia system developed at MIT by a team working with Andrew Lippman in 1978 with funding from ARPA.-Features:...

 in 1977. In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...

 created ENQUIRE
ENQUIRE
ENQUIRE was an early software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web in 1989.It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in several important ways.According to...

, an early hypertext database system somewhat like a wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

. The early 1980s also saw a number of experimental hypertext and hypermedia
Hypermedia
Hypermedia is a computer-based information retrieval system that enables a user to gain or provide access to texts, audio and video recordings, photographs and computer graphics related to a particular subject.Hypermedia is a term created by Ted Nelson....

 programs, many of whose features and terminology were later integrated into the Web. Guide
Guide (hypertext)
Guide was a hypertext system originally developed by Peter J. Brown at the University of Kent in 1982. The original Guide implementation was for Three Rivers PERQ workstations running Unix. The Guide system was also the third hypertext system to be sold commercially, after it was taken over by...

, the first significant hypertext system for personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

s, was developed by Peter J. Brown at UKC
University of Kent
The University of Kent, previously the University of Kent at Canterbury, is a public research university based in Kent, United Kingdom...

 in 1982.

In August 1987, Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...

 released HyperCard
HyperCard
HyperCard is an application program created by Bill Atkinson for Apple Computer, Inc. that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also features HyperTalk, written...

 for the Macintosh line at the MacWorld convention
Macworld Conference & Expo
Produced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld | iWorld is a trade-show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It is held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January...

. Its impact, combined with interest in Peter J. Brown's GUIDE
Guide (hypertext)
Guide was a hypertext system originally developed by Peter J. Brown at the University of Kent in 1982. The original Guide implementation was for Three Rivers PERQ workstations running Unix. The Guide system was also the third hypertext system to be sold commercially, after it was taken over by...

 (marketed by OWL and released earlier that year) and Brown University's Intermedia
Intermedia (hypertext)
Intermedia was the third notable hypertext project to emerge from Brown University, after HES and FRESS . Intermedia was started in 1985 by Norman Meyrowitz, who had been associated with earlier hypertext research at Brown...

, led to broad interest in and enthusiasm for hypertext and new media. The first ACM Hypertext academic conference
Academic conference
An academic conference or symposium is a conference for researchers to present and discuss their work. Together with academic or scientific journals, conferences provide an important channel for exchange of information between researchers.-Overview:Conferences are usually composed of various...

 took place in November 1987, in Chapel Hill NC, where many other applications, including the hypertext literature writing software Storyspace
Storyspace
Storyspace was the first software program specifically developed for creating, editing, and reading hypertext fiction. It was developed in the 1980s by Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce, who presented it to the first international meeting on Hypertext at Chapel Hill in October 1987...

 were also demoed

Meanwhile Nelson, who had been working on and advocating his Xanadu
Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper...

 system for over two decades, along with the commercial success of HyperCard, stirred Autodesk
Autodesk
Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational corporation that focuses on 3D design software for use in the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media and entertainment industries. The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, a coauthor of the first versions of the company's...

 to invest in his revolutionary ideas. The project continued at Autodesk for four years, but no product was released.

In the early 1990s, Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...

, invented the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

 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
Lynx (web browser)
Lynx is a text-based web browser for use on cursor-addressable character cell terminals and is very configurable.-Usage:Browsing in Lynx consists of highlighting the chosen link using cursor keys, or having all links on a page numbered and entering the chosen link's number. Current versions support...

 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.

After the release of web browsers for both the PC
IBM PC compatible
IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...

 and Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

 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 link
Typed link
A typed link in a hypertext system is a link to another document or part of a document that includes information about the character of the link...

s, backlink
Backlink
Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page...

s, transclusion
Transclusion
In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...

, and source tracking
Source tracking
Source tracking pertains to the ability of some hypertext systems to rigorously track the exact source of every document or partial document included in the system; that is, they remember who entered the information, when it was entered, when it was updated and by whom, and so on...

.

Implementations

Besides the already mentioned Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper...

, Hypertext Editing System
Hypertext Editing System
The Hypertext Editing System, or HES, was an early hypertext research project conducted at Brown University in 1967 by Andries van Dam, Ted Nelson, and several Brown students. HES was a pioneering hypertext system that organized data into two main types: links and branching text...

, NLS
NLS (computer system)
NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute during the 1960s...

, HyperCard
HyperCard
HyperCard is an application program created by Bill Atkinson for Apple Computer, Inc. that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also features HyperTalk, written...

, 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
    Hypertext Editing System
    The Hypertext Editing System, or HES, was an early hypertext research project conducted at Brown University in 1967 by Andries van Dam, Ted Nelson, and several Brown students. HES was a pioneering hypertext system that organized data into two main types: links and branching text...

    .
  • Electronic Document System
    Electronic Document System
    The Electronic Document System was an early hypertext system - also known as the Interactive Graphical Documents hypermedia system - focused on creation of interactive documents such as equipment repair manuals or computer-aided instruction texts with embedded links and graphics...

     – An early 1980s text and graphic editor for interactive hypertexts such as equipment repair manuals and computer-aided instruction.
  • Information Presentation Facility
    Information Presentation Facility
    Information Presentation Facility is a system for presenting online help and hypertext on IBM OS/2 systems. IPF also refers to the markup language that is used to create IPF content. The IPF language has its origins in BookMaster and Generalized Markup Language developed by IBM...

     – Used to display online help in IBM
    IBM
    International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

     operating systems.
  • Intermedia
    Intermedia (hypertext)
    Intermedia was the third notable hypertext project to emerge from Brown University, after HES and FRESS . Intermedia was started in 1985 by Norman Meyrowitz, who had been associated with earlier hypertext research at Brown...

     – A mid-1980s program for group web-authoring and information sharing.
  • Storyspace
    Storyspace
    Storyspace was the first software program specifically developed for creating, editing, and reading hypertext fiction. It was developed in the 1980s by Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce, who presented it to the first international meeting on Hypertext at Chapel Hill in October 1987...

     – A mid-1980s program for hypertext narrative.
  • Texinfo
    Texinfo
    Texinfo is a typesetting syntax used for generating documentation in both on-line and printed form with a single source file...

     – The GNU
    GNU
    GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...

     help system.
  • XML
    XML
    Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

     with the XLink
    XLink
    XML Linking Language, or XLink, is an XML markup language and W3C specification that provides methods for creating internal and external links within XML documents, and associating metadata with those links.-The XLink specification:...

     extension – A newer hypertext markup language that extends and expands capabilities introduced by HTML
    HTML
    HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

    .
  • Wiki
    Wiki
    A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

    s – aim to compensate for the lack of integrated editors in most Web browsers. Various wiki software
    Wiki software
    Wiki software is collaborative software that runs a wiki, i.e., a website that allows users to create and collaboratively edit web pages via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers...

     have slightly different conventions for formatting, usually simpler than HTML
    HTML
    HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

    .
  • Adobe's Portable Document Format
    Portable Document Format
    Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....

     – A widely used publication format for electronic documents including links.
  • Windows Help
  • PaperKiller
    PaperKiller
    Paper Killer is a WYSIWYG help authoring tool created by Visual Vision, an Italian software company. The software is used by technical writers to create manuals in various formats....

     - A document editor specifically designed for hypertext. Started in 1996 as IPer
    IPer
    iPer is an educational computer program designed to manage hypertext and hypermedia.The software was invented in 1996 at Politecnico di Torino and abstracts about its original interface design were published for the first time within the papers of the ED-Media '97 World Conference on Educational...

     (educational project for ED-Media
    ED-Media
    ED-Media is a World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia, and Telecommunications promoted yearly by the AACE, the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education : an international, educational and professional not-for profit organization dedicated to the advancement of the...

     1997).
  • Amigaguide
    Amigaguide
    AmigaGuide is a hypertext document file format designed for the Amiga, files are stored in ASCII so it is possible to read and edit a file without the need for special software.Since Workbench 2.1 an Amiga Guide system for O.S...

     - released on Amiga
    Amiga
    The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...

     Workbench
    Workbench (AmigaOS)
    -Overview:Commodore named their Amiga computer's first operating system Workbench 1.0 and continued with the Workbench name until version 3.1, when it was changed to AmigaOS, prompted by Apple renaming their propriety OS from "System" to "MacOS"...

     1990.

Academic conferences

Among the top academic conferences for new research in hypertext is the annual ACM
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

 Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (http://www.sigweb.org/conferences/ht-cover.shtml 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

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
Intermedia (hypertext)
Intermedia was the third notable hypertext project to emerge from Brown University, after HES and FRESS . Intermedia was started in 1985 by Norman Meyrowitz, who had been associated with earlier hypertext research at Brown...

 became available in the 1990s.

Storyspace 2.0, a professional level hypertext development tool, is available from Eastgate Systems
Eastgate Systems
Eastgate Systems is a publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, which publishes hypertexts by established authors with careers in print as well as by talented new authors...

, which has also published many notable works of electronic literature
Electronic literature
Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works of literature that originate within digital environments.-Definitions:N. Katherine Hayles discusses the topic in the online article...

, including Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story
Afternoon, a story
Afternoon, a story is a work of electronic literature written in 1987 by American author Michael Joyce. It was published by Eastgate Systems in 1990 and is known as the first hypertext fiction....

, Shelley Jackson
Shelley Jackson
Shelley Jackson is a writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments, including her groundbreaking work of hyperfiction, Patchwork Girl...

's Patchwork Girl
Patchwork Girl (hypertext)
Patchwork Girl is a work of electronic literature by American author Shelley Jackson. It was written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate Systems in 1995...

, Stuart Moulthrop
Stuart Moulthrop
Stuart Moulthrop is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works Victory Garden , which was on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review in 1993, Reagan Library , and Hegirascope , amongst...

's Victory Garden, and Judy Malloy
Judy Malloy
Judy Malloy is a poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art. Beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction...

's its name was Penelope, Forward Anywhere
Forward Anywhere
Forward Anywhere is a hypertext narrative created by writer Judy Malloy and scientist Cathy Marshall. They started working together in 1993 through the PAIR program at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center...

. Other works include Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...

's Rayuela
Rayuela
Hopscotch is a novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Written in Paris and published in Spanish in 1963 and in English in 1966, the English translation by Gregory Rabassa won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award. Hopscotch is an introspective stream-of-consciousness novel where characters...

and Milorad Pavić
Milorad Pavic (writer)
Milorad Pavić was a Serbian poet, prose writer, translator, and literary historian. He was also a candidate for Nobel Prize in Literature....

's Dictionary of the Khazars
Dictionary of the Khazars
Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel is the first novel by Serbian writer Milorad Pavić, published in 1984. Originally written in Serbian, the novel has been translated into many languages...

. First Italian hypertextual novel by Lorenzo Miglioli, "Ra-Dio", was written using Storyspace.

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.

One of the most successful computer games of all time, Myst
Myst
Myst is a graphic adventure video game designed and directed by the brothers Robyn and Rand Miller. It was developed by Cyan , a Spokane, Washington––based studio, and published and distributed by Brøderbund. The Millers began working on Myst in and released it for the Mac OS computer on September...

, was first written in Hypercard. The game was constructed as a series of Ages, each Age consisting of a separate Hypercard stack. The full stack of the game consists of over 2500 cards. In some ways Myst redefined interactive fiction, using puzzles and exploration as a replacement for hypertextual narrative.

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. 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
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist...

 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

  • Tim Berners-Lee
    Tim Berners-Lee
    Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...

  • Jay David Bolter
    Jay David Bolter
    Jay David Bolter is the Wesley Chair of New Media and a professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Some of his main points of study include the evolution of media, the usage of technology in education, and the role of computers in the...

  • Vannevar Bush
    Vannevar Bush
    Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...

  • Robert Coover
    Robert Coover
    Robert Lowell Coover is an American author and professor in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.-Life and works:...

  • J. Yellowlees Douglas
  • N. Katherine Hayles
    N. Katherine Hayles
    N. Katherine Hayles is a postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. She is professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Literature at Duke University. -Background:Hayles was...

  • Michael Joyce
  • George Landow
    George Landow (professor)
    George Landow is Professor of English and Art History at Brown University. He is one of the leading authorities on Victorian literature, art, and culture, as well as a pioneer in criticism and theory of Electronic literature, hypertext and hypermedia...

  • Lev Manovich
    Lev Manovich
    Lev Manovich is an author of new media books, professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego, U.S. and European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he teaches new media art and theory, software studies, and digital humanities...

  • Stuart Moulthrop
    Stuart Moulthrop
    Stuart Moulthrop is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works Victory Garden , which was on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review in 1993, Reagan Library , and Hegirascope , amongst...

  • Ted Nelson
    Ted Nelson
    Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...

  • Paul Otlet
    Paul Otlet
    Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist; he is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science, a field he called "documentation". Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, one of the most prominent...


See also

  • Timeline of hypertext technology
    Timeline of hypertext technology
    This article presents a timeline of hypertext technology, including "hypermedia" and related human-computer interaction projects and developments from 1945 on...

  • HTML
    HTML
    HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

     (HyperText Markup Language)
  • Hypotext
  • Hyperwords
    Hyperwords
    Hyperwords was a term for interactive text. Whereas hyper-links have the specific meaning of words which are linked to specific destinations, hyperwords refers to all interactive words where the idea is that the reader can issue commands on the text...

  • HTTP
  • Cybertext
    Cybertext
    Cybertext is the organization of text in order to analyze the influence of the medium as an integral part of the literary dynamic, as defined by Espen Aarseth in 1997...


External links



Hypertext Conferences
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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