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1. Hypertext and Cognition

   The recent evolution of western societies has been characterized by an increasing emphasis on information and communication. As the amount of available information increases, however, the user -- worker, student, citizen -- faces a new problem: selecting and accessing relevant information. More than ever it is crucial to find efficient ways for users to interact with information systems in a way that prevents them from being overwhelmed or simply missing their targets. As a result, hypertext systems have been developed as a means of facilitating the interactions between readers and text. In hypertext, information is organized as a network in which nodes are text chunks (e.g., lists of items, paragraphs, pages) and links are relationships between the nodes (e.g., semantic associations, expansions, definitions, examples -- virtually any kind of relation that can be imagined between two text passages). Unfortunately, the many ways in which these hypertext interfaces can be designed has caused a complexity that extends far beyond the processing abilities of regular users.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 27.06.2013 - 13:01

2. 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.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 28.06.2013 - 21:30

3. Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny

   Bush considered the plight of a researcher deluged with inaccessible information. He proposed the MEMEX, a machine to rapidly access, and allow random links between, pieces of information. Networks and computers have since allowed us to exceed even that far-sighted vision in terms of speed and convenience. However, we have not seen dramatic advances in our ability to solve political problems, to manage large organizations, or to magnify our group intuition.

   We must do more than empower the individual. We must allow people and machines interacting together to behave in new ways as a mass. Now that we can make trails though our information, we must create a substrate in which these trails will grow into an increasingly meaningful whole, rather than a tangled mass. We and our documents are capable of operating together as a large machine but not as a large mind. Groups of all sizes must acquire gifts of intuition, correlation and invention which we associate normally with people rather than machines, before we can rise to Bush's challenge to mankind to "grow in the wisdom of race experience", rather than "perish in conflict".

   (Source: Author's abstract)

   Scott Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 11:00