Hypertext

During a Christmas dinner, someone commented that many texts are too long these days and that it would be nice to have shorter versions available. One could think of large language models (LLMs) as a good solution for this. However, a better conceptual starting point may be the the concept of stretchtext, coined by Ted Nelson back in the 1960s. I wrote about application writing as stretchtext here on this blog back in 2011. Then, I used the example of having to write both a 5-page and a 15-page application for the ERC Starting Grant. Now, I am curious about how we could use the stretchtext concept to improve contemporary reading and learning. ...

I have previously written about why I dislike footnotes. Here, I explain why I dislike numbered citations. Numbered citations Consider this text fragment (from this paper): Here, the numbered citations are not helpful. You need to scroll to the end of the paper to figure out wat they mean. In practice, I only do that when I really want to check the reference. Most of the time, I just ignore the citations. ...

By coincidence, I have had several discussions about footnotes, endnotes, and different types of citation styles recently. Such discussions often end up in “religious” wars, in which researchers from different disciplines argue why “their” system is the best. I often find myself agreeing with none or everyone in such discussions since I work in and between several disciplines (the arts, humanities, technology, psychology, medicine) and publish my work in journals that use different ways of handling citations and notes. ...

I have been working on an ERC Starting Grant application over the last months. Besides the usual conceptual/practical challenges of writing funding applications, this particular application also posed the challenge of writing not only one proposal document, but two: one long (15 pages) and one short (5 pages). I am used to writing research papers and applications where you are dealing with three levels: title abstract content But for the ERC application I had to handle four levels: ...

A great little movie about the internet (html, xml, hypertext, etc.) by Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology from Kansas State University.

I am very visually oriented and often prefer some graphic representation over text. Now, as I am starting to get into the writing face of my dissertation, I am looking for how to better incorporate visuals (and other media) as part of my dissertation. I will probably end up with some more or less traditionally formatted document, although I have been thinking about writing a hypertext document. However, I will probably make it as an electronic document (PDF) with included audio and video, and of course plenty of graphics and images. ...

A few days ago I wrote about Nelson’s ideas on hypermedia, and I was anxious to see how these ideas have been absorbed in the musical world, and how people have been thinking about hypermusic. Surprisingly, I found very little written on the topic, and what I did find does not seem to relate very much to Nelson’s ideas of hypermedia. As mentioned previously, one paper I did find was by composer John Maxwell Hobbs and his descriptions of Web Phases a composition for the Internet. He writes ...

The ideas of nonlinear thinking and writing has developed quickly with the growth of the Internet, but dates back much longer. An encyclopedia or dictionary can for example be considered an example of nonlinear writing, with links and internal references. However, it is quite common to acknowledge the “Garden of forking paths” by Jorge Louis Borges (1941) as the start of modern nonlinear thinking and writing. In this short story he develops a notion of forking time encountering various diverging paths, which again lead to a number of potential futures: ...

Looking for some references to nonlinear writing and hypertext, I ended up on the web page of Project Xanadu started by Ted Nelson in 1960. I read about it many years ago, when the web was still quite young, and it was fascinating to read more about the ideas of true nonlinear writing.