Hypertext

What is Hypertext?

According the the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), hypertext is

In classical writtings like books, newspaper articles or novels, the meaning of the information had to be built in linear form. A reader should start with the first lines, follow the next lines, chapters, or other way to structure the text in order to get the logical path and the full message of such text, at least as intended by its writters. The person or the people who wrote the classical text, had to think in its structure, linke a continuous path with subpaths that must start in some well defined point and must finish in anohter well defined one. So, the subjacent abstract models of the text or the classical text is the sequence and the continuity.

On the other hand, the definition of hypertext quoted above tell me a totally different story about written text. The subjacent abstract model of the hypertext is the assotiation and its geometry is a graph of relations. So, the reading experience it is not more necessarily linear, although it must not be excluded by default. A reader may choose to follow a linear path even in the event of finding connections to other associations or relations. Then, the hypertext opens a new way of thinking about the written text. It is a set of discrete relations at first choosen by the authors, but open to the readers and their decisions on how to navigate it.

The idea of hypertext as the text structured by the writer to allow a non-linear reading, implies that the initial hypertext delivered to the readers is just a possibility offered to them. However, the readers are who choose which path the may want to take. By definition, the linear structure is a subset of the hypertexted or non linear one, because a reader may choose it or may choose her own joirney through the text as well.

In this way of thinking, the hyperwriter (a writer of hypertexts), may not exclude entirely the linear path because it is just another path that can be propssed to the reader. At the end, it seems that non-linear paths includes the linear one, and the hypertext resempbles more a possibility than a constraint. On the other hand, the hyperreader (a reader of hypertexts), may understand the hypertext as an free, open way to navigate through information and build some knowledge from it.

Hypertext as Possible Worlds

The way hypertext offers to the readers possible paths is through links to other texts. Accordint to the W3C, a link

It is a reference from one document to another or from different locations in the same document. Ted Nelson coined the word ‘Hypertext’ and the word ‘Hypermedia’ in 1965 as features of a computerized information system. He also used the word ‘link’ to refer the logical connections that came to be associated with the word ‘hyperlink’. He also had the idea of ‘docuverse’, where all data is stored in some place, and there is not deletions of information. All the information is accessible by a link from anywhere else. So, because the navigation in such docuverse would be non-linear as its more probable development, it resembles very well the Web way to organize and share information.

Tim Berners-Lee took the concept of hypertext and applied to solve some specific need at CERN, and the World Wide Web was born. In some point the current W3 is a kind of realization of the idea of the docuverse with the exception for deletion or lost of information. Deleting information is very important for human life, because human life, as hypertext, is not-linear as well, but as different from a docuverse, human life sometimes need to forget information. That is the reasen for the right to be forgotten exists, and Funes the Memorious too.

Hypertext and Processing Information Transformation

As a result of this brief description of the hypertext, I can summarize some key takeaways: hypertext is the idea of organizing writen information in such a way that allows possible paths and a non-linar approach to the act of reading. The classic linear approach, though, is one of the possibilites of the hypertext. Hypertext implies a different form of read and process information: from the line to the graph of information. The graph structure underlying the concept of hypertext shows the incompleteness of information in a text space search. As physical paths, the hypertext may allow some navigators to be lost in the hyperspace or produce hyperlink fatigue. Reading hyper hypertexts can be annoyng because they may not allow to make sense of a complete piece of information like one of the nodes of the network of information. Perhaps the concept of reading has been transformed in the concept of navigating on a network of texts without the hope for completion, only for partial information. Because the hypertext is just a possibility given to the reader, the reader is transformed in some kind of author as well. Except in creative experiments, the links between texts must be organized, linear in some sense at least at the beginning.