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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
academic writing

The literature on hypertext, from Bolter's seminal "Writing Space" to the most recent annual conferences in the hypertext community, has routinely celebrated the possibility of academic writing utilising hypertext. In general this consideration of hypertext as an academic practice has emphasised two related possibilities.

The first is the ability to link, incorporate, annotate, or connect to, those other documents or discursive objects (sounds, images, moving image, text) that one ordinarily refers to in the course of academic writing. That is, rather than footnoting a link of some sort is provided to this other content, or this other content is in some manner able to be incorporated within the existing hypertext work.

This approach, very broadly speaking, does not require any significant changes to academic writing - or reading - as a practice. The major difference this offers, and celebrates, is the ability to dissolve the boundary between the central text and its academic and scholarly contexts and so in this academic paradigm the major problems confronting the writer are ones of access, labour, and skills.

Ironically, this has been the major methodology adopted for academic content online, to date. While this conservativeness is unsurprising in an academic context, it should be remembered that the conceit of the footnote in fact performs a fragmenting and editing or linking function that, while generally concealed under the veneer of rhetorical transparency (academic writing's version of 'realism'), does disrupt and create a thematic form of montage. Indeed, it might be of interest to speculate on the extent to which the footnote, as disruptive and necessary outside, is in fact domesticated by the rigidity of the academic essay as a formal practice - a rigidity that has been preserved into electronic publication.

The second possibility retains the desire to link to what has traditionally had to be regarded as external content in a context that renders the external internal, but it also seeks to reconsider the role and possibilities hypertext offers academic discourse as a writing and reading practice. This work emphasises not only hypertext's ability to include what would otherwise be marginal, but also its potential as a medium for producing other forms of academic writing. This form of academic hypertext remains marginal, minor, and generally undertheorised - notwithstanding recent interest in this field and Moulthrop's continuing efforts, and is as subject to the vagaries of the reader as much hypertext fiction.

While this essay is clearly an experiment in the second possibility, though it should be emphasised it is only one possible methodology for an academic hypertextual writing practice (and one perhaps more suited to the humanities than the sciences), it remains significantly constrained by the presentation medium adopted here (HTTP/HTML) with its generally static and singular screens, and a banal link structure offered by HTML's "HREF" attribute.

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