After the link: S+T
A brief (!) history (?) of hypertext (here) [0] After the link: A brief (!) history (?) of hypertext (here) [1] Hypertext and history [2] Measuring hypertext [3] Hypertext and Brown University [4] Hypertext and else (database) [5] Living with hypertext The College Hill Independent forwards the following open-ended hypertext system for no particular anniversary of hypertext at Brown University. [1a] We cannot think otherwise: Hypertext [2a, 1] is all nothing but trace. [1b, 1] My computer is, as usual, littered. The 47 tabs and 9 windows index my last 24 hours of work (and non-work). Everything is at once [3b, 4]. I cannot accurately retrace my steps; everything appears flattened before me [4b].
TEXT TAMMUZ FRANKEL
DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN
ILLUSTRATION SYLVIA ATWOOD
[1b, 2] An incomplete inventory in-progress, in no order:
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Window 1: Canvas assignments, Zoom launch, Wikipedia hypertext, archive.org Selected Papers, 1977, open.spotify.com, Vimeo Andy van Dam talk, Google search “Melissa Clark anchovies,” Wikipedia hypertext again Window 2: Gmail, Zoom launch Window 3: Google doc, Canvas discussion, Google drive search, Google doc, Google doc, Google doc, Google slide, Gutenberg.org, Panopto India Song, Canvas Zoom launch, Brown. edu academic calendar, Canvas dashboard, Wordreference.com, when2meet, Google slides, Google Window 4: Frankel, Tammuz Hypertext Draft 2 Window 5: Notes Window 6: Dropbox (Brown) [1b, 3] Every click forward is also a click backwards [1b, 3]. Within a tab, I might follow the preceding sequence of hyperlinks by pressing the back arrow on the top left of my browser. Unlike when I view my desktop, I experience this regression as extraordinarily disjunctive: I cannot observe a singular sequence but am instead forced to relive each movement. This feature is enabled through memory: the browser remembers me, but I cannot see it remembering me. With each click I give away a privacy I cannot perceive. [1b, 4] I am reluctant to rely on analogies to print media, as much as they abound in writings on hypertext. But I cannot help but wonder what my work environment might look like if it were physicalized. Hundreds of books (some duplicates) scattered about on an immense desk, each flipped open to a page so that I can move quickly between them. Hypertext makes possible a kind of delocalized thought that was previously unthinkable but is now impossible to think outside of. [1c, 1] The twentieth-century pioneers of hypertext (Andy van Dam [3a, 2], Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, etc.) assert that their invention was perhaps never an ‘invention’ at all, inasmuch as it constitutes an elaboration of a storied mode of textual engagement. Marginalia can be found as early as there are texts—we have never not associated. [1c, 2] What does it mean to write the history of an entity for which there is no first instance, no point
of origin? It is a history of nothing and everything at once. Nothing, in that it is impossible to isolate hypertext as an object of analysis; everything, in that it is inextricable from any given object of analysis. Every history is, to some extent, already a hypertext: a layer of text grafted upon another. [2a, 1] Quote from Ted Nelson’s Selected Papers (1977): “(...)’Hypertext’ is a recent coinage. ‘Hyper-’ is used in the mathematical sense of extension and generality (as in ‘hyperspace,’ ‘hypercube’) rather than the medical sense of ‘excessive’ (‘hyperactivity’). There is no implication about size—a hypertext could contain only 500 words or so. ‘Hyper-’ refers to structure and not size.” Reproduced on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Hypertext) as “Theodor H. Nelson, Brief Words on the Hypertext, 23 January 1967,” last edited on 31 March 2021, at 22:03 (UTC).
[2a, 2] It remains unclear what orientation ‘hypertext’ provokes. Some proponents describe hypertext as if it were a mode, a recognizable form of eccentric overlay; others write of hypertext as a comportment [3a, 1], suggesting that hypertext merely formalizes a reading process [1b, 4]. [2a, 3] “There is no implication about size”... indeed, this lack of implication leaves a hole of ambiguity. The “recent coinage” of the term “hypertext” implies specificity, i.e., it is a particular textual configuration that can only be accessed from a discrete point (e.g. the hyperlink). At the same time, claims that hypertext is omnipresent [1c, 1] treat it as if it might be used to label all textual excesses, and in doing so project it immeasurably outward [4c]. [2b, 1] Hypertext is clingy [1b, 3]: it liberates and latches, scatters and centralizes [4b]. I read hypertext as linked play. Play: the reader’s path as they deviate and differ from the text. Linked: it follows the
reader’s path, it retains connectivity. [2b, 2] Hypertext generates connections between hyperlink and hyperlinked, free play and structure, as well as between divergent understandings of hypertext itself [2a, 2]. Hypertext connects the two definitions of style: style as generic reception (a style of writing) and as the production of genre (as in the Latin stilus, a kind of writing implement). Reading-writing: hypertext presents a written pattern at the same time as it enables those reading to inscribe themselves into that pattern. [2c, 1] Hypertext is often described as nonlinear—a strange claim given the arguably straight line that hypertext draws between two points, e.g., on Wikipedia [2a, 1] between a hyperlink and a page. Nonlinearity only becomes apparent with a shift in scale [4c]. Deviations from more normative, linear narrative are only visible if one zooms out and views the hypertextual system as a whole with all its detours, redirections, and reroutings. Yet it is unclear whether hypertext permits the reader this kind of agency— facing the hyperlink [5a, 1], one is encountered not by multiplicity but by radical singularity [2a, 3]. [2c, 2] We might also locate non-linearity in the activity of hypertextual engagement. Hypertext changes our relation to speed: the speed of research, the speed of writing, the speed of flicking between tabs [1b, 5]. What are extension and generality if not hyperactive? Hyper-, both in the sense of speeding up (as in “hyper”) and in the sense of depth (as in “hyper-focused”); -active as in the activation of the link in the moment of our involvement [5a, 1]. For hypertext does not necessarily accelerate, but can slow us down, force us to work in starts and stops. [2c, 3] Hypertext aids us through the very same principle by which it is at odds with us. Hypertext
