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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
stories

The emphasis on stories seems to regard narration as equivalent to story but it needs to be remembered that nonfiction is also narrative. Web pages pretty much narrate the same way (if joining nodes together is narrating) whether they are fiction or nonfiction, and in many ways the connections made between non fiction works are often more arbitrary than in fiction. For instance a catalogue page listing prices for widgets with a home button is highly functional, but there is no intrinsic signficance or meaning attached to the link as a link in such contexts.

This is very much like documentary film practice where you can pretty much join any shot to any other in ways that are considerably more unmotivated than in fictional cinema. Either the voice over narration, or some other logic, justifies the connection. The same process in a fictional work, whether cinema or hypertext, would be regarded as potentially arbitrary and meaningless.

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