Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 310.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Einat Amitay <einat@ics.mq.edu.au> (47)
Subject: Re: 14.0300 recommended readings?
[2] From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance) (48)
Subject: a link or linking?
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 06:17:59 +0100
From: Einat Amitay <einat@ics.mq.edu.au>
Subject: Re: 14.0300 recommended readings?
Hi Willard,
> 1. the effects of hypertextual linking on compositional practice, by
> which I mean, how using hypertextual links changes the way one writes
> and esp how such linking influences or could influence the design of
> scholarly forms, such as the critical essay, edition, commentary etc.
This is a fraction from my own list (this is the subject of my studies so
far):
The first links to view are
http://www.acm.org/pubs/contents/proceedings/series/ht/
(the ACM HyperText conference series)
http://www.eastgate.com/
(the Eastgate hypertext project/source)
Then you might want to look at:
Bernstein M. (1998). Patterns of hypertext. in Proceedings of the ninth ACM
conference on Hypertext and hypermedia: Hypertext98, pp 21-29.
Haas S.W. & Grams E.S. (2000). Readers, authors, and page structure: A
discussion of four questions arising from a content analysis of Web pages.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS), 51, 2,
181-192.
Foltz, P.W. (1996) Comprehension, Coherence and Strategies in Hypertext and
Linear text. In Rouet, J.-F., Levonen, J.J., Dillon, A.P. & Spiro, R.J.
(Eds.) Hypertext and Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Ricardo F.J. (1998). Stalking the paratext: speculations on hypertext links
as a second order text. in Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on
Hypertext and hypermedia: Hypertext98, pp 142-151.
Erickson T. (1996). The World Wide Web as social hypertext. Communications of
the ACM, 39:1:15-17.
Genres and the Web: Is the personal home page the first uniquely digital
genre?
Andrew Dillon and Barbara Gushrowski, draft of a paper published in Journal
of the American Society for Information Science on the genre charatersitcis
of personal home pages.
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/adillon/genre.html
Susana Pajares Tosca. (2000). A pragmatics of links. In Proceedings of
Hypertext 2000, pp. 77 - 84.
http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/proceedings/hypertext/336296/p77-tosca/
My own work about paragraph structure in Web-hypertext (to appear in JASIS
January, 2001) last draft:
http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~einat/publications/jasis.pdf
Good luck - and please return some pointers to your own work about the
subject,
+:o)
einat
--
Einat Amitay
einat@ics.mq.edu.au
http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~einat
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 06:18:30 +0100
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: a link or linking?
Willard,
Couldn't help noticing a subtle move in your posting on hypertextual
linking. A loose paraphrase of your three topic areas:
1. effects of hypertextual linking on compositional practice
2. the design of linking
3. scholarly reference versus the computably conceivable
seems to stress process --- human users interacting with a digital system.
Your final paragraph however slips towards product and perhaps
inadvertantly restricts the scope of the investigation:
> The more one thinks about the hypertextual link, the cruder an
> instrument it appears. How subtle and various by contrast (and of course
> how problematic) are the ways in which one can in print say "see X"!
All of your three topics seems to point to _sets_ of links or some implied
plurality. The move to the singular "hypertextual link" puzzles me. Even
in HTML, the simple anchor element can be quite powerful if one considers
that the links provided by the content producers can lead to
"intermediate" menus with selections, (i.e. a set of links) --- including
to search engines that are capable of providing information about sites
that link to a certain url.
That said some remarks on your three topics from the HTML perpective:
3) the difference between scholarly and non-scholarly electronic texts
might be measured in part by the number of fragment identifiers used to
link spots within a document. Of course this count would be influenced by
distribution of HTML knowledge over time --- with earlier texts not being
so rich in supplying links between footnotes and the body of a text.
2) John Bradley has already pointed to the TEI and indicated that Xlink
and XPointer will allow scholars to link directly to say the fifth
paragraph of a target document without a fragment identifier being in
place in the target document. [The current work around is to have an
"intermediate" menu which provides the url to the document and a keyword
which a Web surfer would invoke for searching once the document is
retrieved. (e.g. point Marx's 1844 manuscipt and supply keyword
"Eigenschaften") There may be a Java applet which automates such a
process.]
1) It may be that compositional practice, the link *smile* between both
hypertextual navigation and the creation of hypertext passes through
basic cut and paste possibilities:
a) where a composer can not cite, a composer points
b) where a composer can not point, a composer paraphrases
c) where a composer can not paraphrase, a composer alludes
Of course this mention of pointing, citing and paraphrases makes me wonder
if the discussion on the nature of commentary in an electronic milieu is
not linked *grin* to your call for a consideration of the nature of the
hypertextual link. And voila, I have fallen for your seductive singular!
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
Member of the Evelyn Letters Project
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~dchamber/evelyn/evtoc.htm
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