abstract

background

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praxis

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multilinearity
visual rhetoric
theory in practice

references

A hypertext is a network of relatively discrete chunks of text called nodes or lexia. The reader enters the hypertext at a particular node. From that point the reader jumps to another node by selecting from a set of links constructed by the author.

The way a reader approaches a hypertext can be quite different from her approach to a print essay. Print essays, like hypertexts, have discrete units of text. The paragraph is perhaps the unit most like the node of a hypertext. But print texts are generally meant to be read from beginning to end in a linear fashion, and this is how the reader typically encounters them. With hypertext, the actual text gets constructed as the reader selects which relationship(s) to explore as she chooses hyperlinks and reads the chunks of text in the nodes she selects. As a result, the meaning the reader makes of the hypertext depends in part on which nodes she visits, and in what order.

With each node standing alone, linked to other nodes by hyperlinks, the relationships between linked nodes can dissolve. The result is a series of associations between chunks of text with potentially little authorial work to explain the relations. "The text appears to fragment, to atomize, into constituent elements (into lexias or blocks of text); and these reading units take on a life of their own as they become more self-contained, because they become less dependent on what comes before or after in a linear succession" (Landow, 1997, p. 64). The centrality of the reader in constructing meaning, together with the relatively self-contained property of the individual node, leads to the conception of hypertexts as nonlinear.

the problem of nonlinearity | constructing multilinearity

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