Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Fri, 6 Nov 1992 09:07:00 CST
From:         SLATIN@UTXVM.BITNET
Subject:      Re: is the end of "the paper" in

Dave Roberts: It makes no more sense to call hypertexts "nonstructured" by
definition than it does to call all paper-based essays "structured" by
definition. As we all know all too well, the mere presence of five visual
markers indicating "new paragraph" is no guarantee of structure.

Nor will it do to describe hypertext as completely reader-determined or
reader-controlled: the author or authors must make many decisions, both about
wht material to include and about the various ways in which that material is
to be linked.  Those decisions then constrain the choices available to
readers, though some systems allow readers to modify the documents they
receive, either by adding new links or by adding new nodes, or both.  Others
allow individual readers to maintain their own "views" of the document, i.e.,
their own pathways through the material.  So while the reader has more
decisions to make than s/he does in conventional printed documents, the author
*also* has more decisions to make; the hypertext is a set of possible
documents, and the one that's actualized by or for a given reader at a given
time is a product of the interaction among author, reader, and the network(s)
of possibility afforded by the hypertext.

And, to answer a later posting by Irv Peckham which I already read this
morning but couldn't respond to because my inbasket was too full (temporality
gets all screwed up here, doesn't it?): No, talking about hypertext isn't just
more elitist theory-spinning with no application for people who have to work
in the real world (as if academia weren't the *(&)(*& real world).  More and
more often, corporations are going to on-line documentation for a variety of
purposes, especially having to do with corporate policies and procedural
manuals; such documents, often huge, comprising the online equivalent of many
thousands of pages, often contain hypertextual links so that users can
navigate through them; software companies often provide hypertextual on-line
help, so that the user can  click on a keyword and go directly to some other
"place" in a large document database for additional or related information;
electronic encyclopedias of the kind commercially available on CD-ROM contain
hypertextual links replacing, or rather *activating* the cross-references
found in traditional print documents; medical records systems use hypertext
capabilities to link patient records with images produced during various
tests, with lab notes, and with other information in the hospital or medical
school "library"; it is conceivable that such links could also be made from
patient records to books or articles containing important collateral
information about patients with similar conditions, etc.; NASA will be using
hypertext in developing the onboard library system for the space station; and,
of course, educators in many fields from English to history to biology to
classics to you name it are using hypertext to develop course materials which
help students understand the complex relationships with which various fields
are concerned.

More and more, the students who graduate from our institutions will be
entering environments, information environments, consisting of complex webs of
information linked to other webs of information; and they will be expected to
negotiate those webs and to construct them.

John Slatin
UT Austin