The Structure of Hypertext Activity

A framework for discussion of hypertext activity is introduced using the concepts acteme, episode, and session. Acteme is a low-level unit such as link-following; episode is a collection of actemes that cohere in the reader's mind; session is the entirety of contiguous activity. Well-known issues in hypertext rhetoric are recast in this framework and generalized to all varieties of acteme. We consider whether the episode is a virtual document, user interface issues pertaining to the episode, multi-episode structure, concurrency issues, and reader-as-writer activity, with a frequent emphasis on hypertext gathering.