04 DTC 101

Hypertext & Hypermedia

4.1 Networks of Knowledge

The Memex

Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and inventor who, throughout his career, patented many of his own inventions and is known particularly for his work on analog computers, and for his idea of the memex. He began developing the memex in the 1930s, and in 1945 published his very influential essay "As We May Think" about the hypothetical desktop. The memex was an adjustable microfilm viewer with a mechanical method of linking different documents. His ideas lead to the desktop computing revolution, hyperlinks and the World Wide Web.

Xanadu

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Ted Nelson, a pioneer philosopher of information technology, coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in "Computer Lib" in 1965. Nelson also coined the terms transclusion, virtuality (the "seeming" of anything, as opposed to its reality), and intertwingularity (the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge), and teledildonics. He is perhaps best know for Project Xanadu - his vison of a vast network of linked documents and media.

Nelson has said that while some elements of Xanadu are being fulfilled by the World Wide Web (which took inspiration from Xanadu and Nelson's ideas), HTML documents are too much like paper documents and not in a dynamic space where documents speak to each other through hyperinks. In Xanadu, a document that links to another document would register a visible link back to itself from the linked document and therefore be traceable. A quote from another document would visibly link the two documents - the quoted and the quoting. The purpose of Xandu's two-way linking, which in theory solves many of the problems of the World Wide Web, is to track versions and improve rights management. Jaron Lanier explains the difference between the World Wide Web and Nelson's Xanadu:

"A core technical difference between a Nelsonian network and what we have become familiar with online is that [Nelson's] network links were two-way instead of one-way. In a network with two-way links, each node knows what other nodes are linked to it. ... Two-way linking would preserve context. It's a small simple change in how online information should be stored that couldn't have vaster implications for culture and the economy."" -Jaron Lanier (Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. p. 227)

From Links to Knowledge Graphs

Hyperlinks made it possible to move from one document to another through meaningful connections. Today, linked information also includes tags, metadata, search indexes, recommendation systems, and knowledge graphs. A Wikipedia article, for example, is not only a page of writing. It is part of a larger system of references, categories, citations, and links to related topics.

Search engines and AI systems also depend on networks of indexed and related information. They do not simply store isolated documents; they organize information through patterns, associations, references, and relationships. In this sense, contemporary networked knowledge extends ideas first imagined by Bush and Nelson: knowledge is not only a sequence of pages, but a shifting structure of connected ideas.

4.2 The World Wide Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an English engineer and computer scientist best know as being the inventor of Hypertext Markup Language or HTML and consequently the World Wide Web. As a research scientist, he felt the Internet could be a vehicle for sharing data and reports in real time. In 1989, taking ideas from both Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson, he drafted a proposal for Hypertext Markup Language or HTML and later that year made the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and a server. The first webpage shares much of the basic structure of web pages today. And most importantly this page, which has been replicated exactly, works on all browsers. HTML has lasted and will last for a very long time, or else the history of the Web will be lost.

Hypertext Markup Language

Run Code

Tim Berners-Lee is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the development of the Web. He continues to have great concern for the health and future of his creation.

The Open Web and the App Web

The early World Wide Web was built around open standards. Anyone with a text editor could write HTML, publish a page, and link to other pages. Personal websites, blogs, online journals, fan archives, and small community sites all grew from this open structure. The web made publishing possible without needing permission from a broadcaster, publisher, or software company.

Much of contemporary digital life, however, happens inside apps and platforms. Social media feeds, streaming services, mobile apps, and paywalled systems often hide the underlying structure of the web. Instead of creating pages and links, users post inside systems governed by algorithms, interfaces, terms of service, and corporate ownership.

This does not mean the open web has disappeared. It still exists in personal sites, independent publications, open-source projects, archives, and educational resources. But the contemporary web is divided between the open web of linked documents and the app web of enclosed platforms. One of the ongoing questions for digital culture is whether the web can remain open, creative, and public.

4.3 Digital Texts

Hypertext, one of the first forms of expressive digital writing, used the hyperlink to connect nodes or lexia - short fragments of text. Readers navigate hypertext through a spatial map of linked texts, rather than through sequential pages. Hypertext could also link out to other texts, making works of writing materially more intertexual.

Electronic Literature

Electronic Literature is an emergent form of born-digital, experimental writing that has evolved from floppy disks and CD-ROMs to the Web and downloadable immersive games. There are many types of electronic literature that creatively work with the affordances of digital tools and frame certain practices of computer-writing. Hypertext fiction writers think in new nonlinear or multilinear ways of depicting stories and worlds. Interactive fiction authors create textual games that are virtual spaces for readers to navigate. Multimedia fiction authors incorporate animation, moving text, video, and audio into fractured story-worlds. Because many early works were created with now-obsolete technologies such as Adobe Flash, they can no longer be experienced in their original form and have been preserved through emulators, reconstructed websites, and video walkthroughs.

Combinatory and Generative Texts

Digital texts can be written as collections of parts that are selected, rearranged, and recombined. A database, archive, or folder of media can become the material for many possible readings. Procedural poems, bots, interactive fiction, and generative writing systems use rules or prompts to produce new arrangements of language.

AI-assisted writing is part of this longer history of combinatory and generative text. Although current AI systems are more complex than earlier procedural writing systems, they also depend on recombination, prediction, and pattern. They remind us that digital writing is not only writing on a screen, but writing with systems that can store, retrieve, link, transform, and generate language.

4.4 Interactive Narratives

4.5 Unit Exercise: Make a Webpage

1. Download a text editor for your computer: SublimeText is a free one.
2. Open a new file and save it as mypage.html
3. See how html tags enclose content
4. Add a heading using h1 tag
5. Add a p tag
6. Look up more tags to use.
7. Make a link on this site
8. Upload your page to the class server directory

Reflection Questions

1. How do hyperlinks shape a reader's experience?
2. What pathways can users follow through your page?
3. How is a webpage different from a printed page?
4. What media elements help communicate your ideas?
5. What choices does the reader have while navigating your work?

Discussion Questions

1. How does hypertext challenge traditional ideas of authorship?
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of nonlinear reading?
3. Is the contemporary web becoming less open?
4. How do interactive narratives change storytelling?
5. How might AI systems extend ideas first explored by hypertext theorists?

4.6 Glossary

• hypertext: digital text connected through links.
• hypermedia: linked collections of text, images, audio, video, and interaction.
• hyperlink: a clickable connection between digital resources.
• html: hypertext markup language used to create webpages.
• world wide web: a global system of linked documents and media.
• memex: vannevar bush's conceptual machine for associative knowledge trails.
• xanadu: ted nelson's proposed universal hypertext system.
• transclusion: including part of one document inside another while preserving its connection to the source.
• intertwingularity: nelson's term for the interconnected nature of knowledge.
• interactive narrative: a story shaped by user choices or navigation.
• database narrative: a narrative organized through collections and relationships rather than a fixed sequence.
• electronic literature: literary works created specifically for digital environments.

4.7 Bibliography