canonical     commentary     quotation     reference     external  


Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
scale

The continuity of scale what always attracted me to hypertext over things like 'multimedia' which always seemed to have the desire to be encyclopedic and enormous. This is no longer the case, though there is little structural difference between writing or building, or linking, a 20 page Web site and a 2000 page web site. (Certainly from the point of view of the reader, and largely technically too, the dominant questions are navigation, and relation of nodes.) This is not the case in print, where there are very different practices and formal requirements for different types of writing. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the term 'hypertext' has been made to do so much work - because there is so much that is common to hypertext.

Interestingly it would appear that the list Metz makes here are important to hypertext in terms of its rhythms, but these are largely not well theorised or understood in hypertext. If a great deal of hypertext's power or authority is produced via its syntagmatic chains then what are we to make of the current fascination with Flash animations which regularly seem to have co-opted our browsers into static and single viewing spaces for content?

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