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Within the domain of hypertext criticism there has been recent interest in the relation of cinema studies, and cinema narratology, to hypertext theory. This has tended to concentrate on questions of narrative motivation and sequence. In addition there has been much recent interest in questions of hypertextual 'duration,' work which does not specifically utilise cinema theory, but could be seen to be concerned with similar questions to cinema, that is questions of narrative in a temporal medium. Such work (for instance Cayley, Leusebrink, and Swigart) retains what could be characterised as a literary emphasis as various literary tropes of duration are explored in relation to their applicability to hypertext narration. However, there is another, unrecognised, expression of 'cinema' in recent hypertext systems design.
This cinematic 'expression' is what I'd characterise as a desire to animate link or nodal relations in hypertext, perhaps best illustrated in Zellweger, Chang and Mackinlay's 1998 paper describing a system of fluid link relations. Here the rendering visible of link destinations is repeatedly characterised in terms that suggest a protocinematic movement. While the domain of applicability is widely divergent, these descriptions are reminiscent of Manovich's writing on animation, digital cinema, and montage, where he suggests that cinema's origins lie in graphic representation, a desire for movement, and models of what could be characterised as local repetition.
While this effort to animate is clearly characterised in terms of usability and link comprehension it can also be understood as the expression of some desire to render movement into the space and time that a link represents, creates, and traverses. To this extent it is analogous to the strategies that the time based visual art of cinema has articulated for expanding the interval between shots, sequences, or episodes.
Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information