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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
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In recent hypertext theory several uses of cinema have been made. The most impressive work in this field is the collaboration between Sawhney, Balcom and Smith in their hypervideo project, where hypertext is reorientated towards an interactive video project.

Mancini's recent work, which strongly identifies a relation between cinema and hypertext, also offers a rich set of future research possibilities. Mancini also identifies the significance of Metz's syntagmatic categories as a point of critical entry, as she seeks various cinematic modes of argumentation for use in hypertext.

In addition, there have been various combinations of hypertext and video, though this work is more concerned with the technical application of hypertext technologies to video parsing, annotation, or cataloguing, and so concentrates on highly contextually bound, instrumental applications. What could be characterised as a cinematic desire to animate the relation between parts is also evident in some recent hypertext.

However, what is significant (with the notable exception of Mancini), is the extent to which much of this work adopts a classical paradigm as the model for cinematic narrative and its point of applicability to hypertext. Detailing this here is beyond the scope of the current work, but the general view appears to have been to accept as canonical the Hollywood studio form of cinematic narrative as the only 'transparent' way to narrate audiovisually. The major intent of this essay is not to critique the transparency of classical cinema, but to demonstrate that this transparency is a stylistic practice and not a grammar, that hypertext is already cinematic, and that hypertext's emphasis on link clarity misreads the contextual nature of cinematic and hypertextual syntagmatic series.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
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