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Genesis and Hypertext: Exchanging Scores
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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It is difficult to give a precise definition of hypertext since, in addition to its use as a technical tool, there is the conceptual dimension of a space for organizing memory and mapping connections. People often confuse the hypertext system, which makes it possible, through the digital medium, to link objects of different types, with the products (compositions?) created by means of this technique. Hypertext cannot be limited to either of these aspects. Like ink and paper, it is a medium for composition and expression and should also be seen as such. Whatever its purpose, and even if it involves collecting together pages on the Web in an ad hoc manner, hypertext delineates areas of knowledge and thus helps to produce a dual temporality, one that belongs to documents, the other characterized by instant actualization (which coincides with the eradication of any distance of space or time between the items of information).
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1. What is commonly understood by ‘hypertext' is a system composed of links and anchors that makes it possible to cross-reference units of text in a collection of documents. This gives rise to a dynamic mode of reading that offers the reader the opportunity to choose a succession of links depending on need, a logical train of thought or intuition.
2. See the article in Libération, Wednesday 17 May 2000, Le Web est un grand noeud pap'.
3. A manuscript by Edmond Jabès, the text of which was issued as an unpublished work by Editions Fourbis in 1992 and reissued in its original stage version by Editions Jean-Michel Place in 1995.
4. In this regard the example of the electronic book made of pages with rechargeable ink illustrates this option not to let windows wander around and to compensate for this shortage of space. To a greater extent one can even imagine being able to deploy reading pathways using a virtual architecture.
5. Character mode in fact means that automatic processing of the text is possible, whereas image mode almost runs counter to the abstraction of digital and hypertext unit autonomy insofar as it is not yet possible to encode the elements of an image. One of the problems that remain to be solved, which is still difficult to automate, would be to make each area (spatial boundary, transition, typographic breaks), each word, each formal space correspond precisely to a digitally encoded equivalent, like pentimenti, in order to make the manuscript image interactive.
6. Because of printing constraints colour has not been retained here; in the original program it provides visual clues to the identity of each component and codes the physical characteristics of the pages (recto, verso, formats, etc.).