Hypertext

Modified: 2020-02-23


As noted in Kardas & Milford (1996), hyperspaces and hyper texts are described thusly:

HYPERSPACE AND HYPERTEXT

Imagine a structure where every item is just as close as any other item. Or imagine a place where items have no inherent organization, but where they can be organized in any number of ways. Does that sound absurd or impossible? Well, it is neither. In fact, the Internet is such a place, and it is probably the first real example of a hyperspace. Exotic research in such topics as black holes, wormholes, and gravitational waves also involves hyperspace principles. However, we will not look at those complex subjects. Rather, we will restrict our focus to a subset of hyperspace, hypertext.

In a hypertext, a term coined by Nelson (1965), although Bush (1945) was the first to publish a paper on what we would now call hypertext. Hypertext or other materials are encoded in such a way as to make them difficult to represent on paper. Computers make possible the creation of hypertext and other hypermedia.

Hypertext items are hard to put on paper precisely because of the constraints that paper imposes on text items. Namely, text items have to fit on paper, they have to be fixed in place, and they cannot be moved afterwards. Text items are also linear, meaning that the author has provided them in an ordered sequence. Every book ever written, including this one, is bound by those constraints.

Hypertext, in contrast, is both nonlinear and moveable, and it can be easily viewed in more than one sequence and reordered in an infinite number of ways. Further, hypertext, unlike paper-bound text, can be located anywhere in a hyperspace. All that is required is that a hyperlink exist somewhere to take the user to a particular location in that hyperspace. That location may be hyperlinked from many other locations.

Computers make the easy handling of hypertext materials possible. Without computers, we would probably still be at the stage of merely imagining hypertext. However, because of computers and the Internet, not only can we talk about hypertext, we can actually manipulate it. That manipulation is what the Internet is all about and what this text is all about.

We find it just a little ironic that we are discussing hypertext using old-fashioned linear text. However, we do address that irony, in part, by providing you with hypertext additions to the text in the form of computer disks and our own location in hyperspace that contains pointers to many of the Internet resources cited in the text.

Today, of course, nearly everyone is familiar with hypertext and hypermedia. But, most do not realize the profound revolution in publishing that hypermedia wrought.


Diagrams Illustrating Hypertext

FYI: Notice that this courses's pages are similar to the diagram immediately above. The Cognitive Science course page links to specific topic pages. Of course, the course page also links to pages on the internet as well.


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