canonical | commentary | quotation | reference | external |
I do not propose to say much about this issue here, [the rhetoric of electonic texts] because the other issues are still more problematic. However, it is important to recognize that printed text is not the same as electronic text. Although very similar to print, it is another of the 'new media' subsumed under the heading multimedia and scholars will need to become adept at understanding and exploiting the differences between electronic and printed text. Among the most obvious of these are things like font choice and page layout. For example, there has been considerable discussion about how much text should be dispalyed on a computer screen at any one time; and the tendency for electronic texts to be laid out in 'landscape' can be a significant problem for scholars wishing to create electronic access to archives of print documents that are, as general rule, laid out in 'portrait'. More generally, the problem is simply that electronic text has only been around for about 40 years and only really controllable for 15 or 20, while print has been with us for 500 years. There simply hasn't been time enough to develop the same level of expertise or accepted conventions for electronic text. As in many electronic texts, the electronic versions of this article use colour to indicate various things; but, as yet, these do not constitute a generally accpeted strategy like the use of quotation marks, italic or the Harvard referencing system.
5.2 The rhetoric of hypertext
Hypertext, however, is clearly a radical departure from printed text. The ability to move seamlessly from one point in a document to another or to a point in another document clearly has enormous potential for scholarly study. At the very least it can provide 'fancy footnoting' by allowing direct access to the complete bibliographical citation and thus obviating the need for the reader to rurn to the end of the article or the bottom of the page. Still more usefully, of course, hypertext can, in principle, not only provide the citation but also direct acces tot he document cited; and, if that document were itself a similarly annotated hypertext, to other documents included within a chain or network of related information. Such a body of documents can be more or less structured, but freedom of movement within such a corpus is clearly one of the virtues of hypertext. (Ingraham, n.p.)
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Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information