canonical     commentary     quotation     reference     external  


Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
particular

There appears to be an odd inverse relationship between node size and link ratio. Smaller nodes, that is 'chunking' the work, tends to encourage and produce greater link frequency than longer chunks. This is an entirely anecdotal observation, and perhaps describes my own writing practice more than anything else, however there is some sense in which larger chunks tend to generate their own logic and flow and so discourage linking, whereas smaller units require connection via linking and so encourage more points of connection.

I'd also pose as a question the observation that we still have some sense of 'original' work in this model. This retains a sense of authorial intention and some notion of boundary around the original object. This makes very good sense for the context of Trigg's system, however an interesting case for the development of hypertext as a critical writing practice might be to write an entire document using Trigg's link types, a document doesn't recognise single authorship and tries to invest in the use of the link types as a rhetorical system. One suspects that they may rapidly find the link types to be reasonably poor in relation to our ordinary uses of language (including report writing). For instance Trigg has no tag type for irony, which is hardly surprising since to tag something as ironic tends to be self defeating.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by
Journal of Digital Information