canonical | commentary | quotation | reference | external |
In any event, from both these perspectives, hypertext can simply be viewed as an electronically enhanced version of normally scholarly practice. It simply provides a means of locating the reader within that cloud of referentiality that represents the ongoing discourse of any discipline. However, in so doing hypertext also tends to make more visible the 'rhetorical' character of the moves made to provide the reader with a particular perspective on the discourse. Furthermore, to the degree that hypertext (by, for example, incorporating full-text citations) facilitates the reader's independent exploration of the discourse, it also tends tomake more visible the many inter-dependent strands and possibilities of which the discourse is composed and the particular argument is thus revealed as precisely that, a particular argument - on of a number of possible, competing and not necessarily mutually exclusive perspectives upon the problem in hand. As such, hypertext may tend to reveal levels of complexity in the discourse that traditional modes of argument may tend or are specifically designed to obscure; and, perhaps invites us to consider whether there may be alternative approaches to the structure of scholarly argument that may better reveal the full complexity of the discourse. (Ingraham, n.p.)
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Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information