Towards Cinematic Hypertext : A theoretical and Empirical Investigation

Hypertext’s non-linearity has critical implications for scholarly discourse and argumentation, where it is commonly considered important to control the reader’s exposure to the line of reasoning in order to communicate complex ideas and maximise rhetorical impact. Hypertext’s non-linearity has been seen to threaten authors ’ control over discourse order and the coherence of their argumentative discourse. Existing hypertext paradigms offer different solutions to the problem of preserving user-defined navigation whilst maintaining coherence: pagebased hypertext relies on the expressiveness of linear associative writing; semantic hypertext relies on the expressiveness of link taxonomies; spatial hypertext relies on the expressiveness of hypertext’s visual features. This research combines elements of these with new theoretical insights, to investigate a fourth paradigm referred to as Cinematic Hypertext. The problem of maintaining coherence is framed as the problem of representing