Hypertext Essays: An Introduction

Jerz > Writing > Electronic Text An ordinary essay is designed to be read one way — from beginning to end. A hypertext essay can be read in many different ways. The ordinary prose essay has been around for hundreds of years; people have had a long time to discover how to write a good one. …

Hypertext as a Teaching Tool — Brown University Poetry Classroom 1974

This short film documents an early attempt to use hypertext to help students study poetry. A fascinating early collaboration between computer science and the humanities. Similar:Today I didn't save the world, but I did help a student while power-walking at the mall.The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their…

Hypertext as a Teaching Tool — Brown University Poetry Classroom 1974

Similar:Today I didn't save the world, but I did help a student while power-walking at the mall.The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode…

Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story

It’s not that hypertext went on to become less interesting than its literary advocates imagined in those early days. Rather, a whole different set of new forms arose in its place: blogs, social networks, crowd-edited encyclopedias. Readers did end up exploring an idea or news event by following links between small blocks of text; it’s…

The Death of Hypertext?

 “Hypertext.” When I was a college student, I was obsessed with the idea that, some day, we would all be creating and consuming information— not just information, but literature—via portable devices like cell phones, when the hyperlink might become as central to reading and writing as the sentence. Since then, that day has come and gone. There…

Navigation in Hypertext: 10 Writing Tips for Web Authors

Jerz > Writing > E-text We only notice navigation when it doesn’t work. Web authors should follow web design conventions that account for the variety of ways users will try to navigate through their pages. While usability testing is the best way to ensure your site is really operating as you intend it to, this page offers…

Hypertext '08: Session 7: Applications of Hypertext

Chair: Ken Anderson (University of Colorado at Boulder, USA)Enhancing Access to Open Corpus Educational Content: Learning in the Wild (Long Paper) Seamus Lawless, Lucy Hederman and Vincent Wade Lack of relevant and accessible digital content hampers the implementation of e-learning. As these eLearning tools begin to try to offer personalization, the tools require access to…

Hypertext '08: Session 4: Hypertext, Culture, and Communication

Chair: Mark Bernstein (Eastgate Systems, USA) Information Flows and Social Capital in Weblogs: A Case Study in the Brazilian Blogosphere (Long Paper) Raquel Recuero Qualitative study. Perception is that bloggers are just wasting time, but people have strong personal reasons for blogging. Went quickly through the obligatory background slide… I wonder that this audience might…

Hypertext '08: Jon Kleinberg, Link Structures, Information Flow, and Social Process

John Kleinberg This year’s conference emphasizes social linking and its relation to information linking. A striking slide illustrated the tangled interconnections of online friendships, as opposed to the red and blue nodes that characterize political blogs (with some neutral interconnections).  (Blackstorm-Huttenlocher-Kleinberg-Lan 2006) and (Adamic and Glance 2005) Bridging levels of scale; Zacharly 1977 studying a…

Hypertext '08: Social Linking 1: Link Inference

Chair: Ethan Munson (University of Wisconsin) Dynamic Prediction of Communication Flow Using Social Context (Short Paper)Munmun De Choudhury, Hari Sundaram, Ajita John and Doree Seligmann Estimate intent to communicate and the associated delay. Using MySpace, successful prediction of intent to communicate. [This section is a review of related work, so the speaker is going quickly…

Hypertext '08: One-Minute Poster Presentations

I don’t attend many science/technology conferences, so the genre of the one-minute poster presentations is brand new to me.  The genre is akin to the haiku or flash fiction — it’s a research paper bared down to the bones.  Flash scholarship?  60-second-scholarship? About 20 people pre-loaded their slides onto the conference room computer, then lined…

Hypertext '08: Bernardo Huberman, Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web

Today’s keynote: Brughel painting showing the social dynamics of a village festival. Grounded the talk with a presentation of statistics on user-generated content (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), noting that whether those users are interacting with one another is another question. Noted that his research is observational rather than experimental, and that he won’t be able to…

Hypertext '08: Literatronica. Adaptive Digital Narrative :: Juan B. Gutierrez, and Mark C. Marino

Literatronica: Juan: Empower the computer to be part of the literary transaction… mathematical literature. Mathematical literature — not the syntatic approach, using mathematical language to describe a story. Not a semantic approach, using theorems to define stories. Lexicographic Hypertext — basic HTML with nodes connected via links.  We navigate through the network to get from…

Hypertext '08: Chris Crawford — Deikto: An Application of the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Chris Crawford has been working on Storytron for 16 years. The computer gaming industry was not intersted in or able to solve the problem of interactive storytelling. Left the gaming industry to solve that problem on his own. Has been explaining Storytron for 10 years, says that during that time he has “failed miserably.”  About…