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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
literary.technical

A traditional formalist approach to discourse has sought specific properties to allow us to distinguish between literary and non literary texts. Jakobson's work on metaphor and metonymy as the paradigmatic and syntagmatic, has been seminal in this approach, and indeed his research was largely based on the question of what formal properties distinguish poetic from non or un-poetic utterances.

Generally speaking, poetic (and literary) discourses are understood to foreground the formal properties of language at the expense of clarity of meaning. This is, from a literary point of view, a peculiar way of characterising what is celebrated as an art, but broadly speaking literary texts are less concerned with transparency (of meaning, sense, even in some cases, of presentation) than with other effects.

However, this division between the 'noisy' and the 'clear' is generally not strongly recognised in poststructural theory (indeed if anything we could characterise poststructuralism as the recognition of how all information systems are in fact noisy!), and it is probably not useful in any attempt to generate typologies of link types.

It appears commonplace in much recent writing on hypertext - and I have in mind as the simplest example the recent rise of "information architecture" as a discipline - that an onus is placed on writers or systems designers to ensure a maximum of link and navigational clarity throughout any hypertext. This is, in terms of the work cited here, an example of the manner in which syntagmatic movement, and its concealment in or by its own obviousness ("home" on a web page takes you home - even the argot needs criticism) is clearly a mode of realism, and has all of realism's attendant ideologies. That brand of information architecture that insists on what I'm describing as link clarity has remarkable parallels to classical narrative cinema's insistance on the 'motivated' edit and its concealment via continuity editing.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
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Journal of Digital Information