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1. What Hypertext Is

   Over the past couple decades, as the term "hypertext" has gained a certain popular currency, a question has been raised repeatedly: "What is hypertext?" Our most respected scholars offer a range of different, at times incompatible, answers. This paper argues that our best response to this situation is to adopt the approach taken with other terms that are central to intellectual communities (such as "natural selection," "communism," and "psychoanalysis"), a historical approach. In the case of "hypertext" the term began with Theodor Holm ("Ted") Nelson, and in this paper two of his early publications of "hypertext" are used to determine its initial meaning: the 1965 "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" and the 1970 "No More Teachers' Dirty Looks." It is concluded that hypertext began as a term for forms of hypermedia (human-authored media that "branch or perform on request") that operate textually. This runs counter to definitions of hypertext in the literary community that focus solely on the link. It also runs counter to definitions in the research community that privilege tools for knowledge work over media.

   Scott Rettberg - 25.05.2012 - 14:15

2. Remediating Stretchtext

   Seventeen years have passed since Coover's inspiring call to defy the tyranny of the line through hypertext, "where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text." The profound influence of that clarion shaped the development of electronic literature and attracted the scorn of critics — Sven Birkerts, Laura Miller, Michiko Kakutani – who villified hypertext in defense of the line. Overlooked in the controversy is the embarrassing fact that, even today, we know remarkably little about inventing, implanting, and cultivating the narrative line in its organic richness. We know sequence and rhizome well, but the contours of recursus, timeshift, and renewal remain, for most writers, an arcane craft.

   How may we render a satisfactory account of complex events, fictitious or historical? We want hypertext narrative to do things we cannot achieve in print, and though we may occasionally use links or actemes to introduce variation in presentation or in story, it is now clear that hypertext will most frequently prove useful in changing (or adapting) plot.

   Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 15:04

3. Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate

   This is the paper where Ted Nelson first coined the word hypertext. What follows is the abstract he wrote for the paper:

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 27.06.2013 - 12:49