¡Descarga History and Characteristics of Literary Hypertext: A Poststructuralist Perspective y más Apuntes en PDF de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (TIC) solo en Docsity! LITERARY HYPERTEXT History of hypertext. A very schematic history of hypertext reveals how intimately related its conception was to the development of the Internet. ● 1945: Vannevar Bush describes “memex” (Atlantic Monthly) ● 1965: Ted Nelson coins the term “hypertext” ● 1985: Peter Brown, University of KEnt, develops first commercially available hypertext - Guide ● 1986-1990: More sophisticated hypertext systems developed ● 1991: Tim Berners-Lee builds IP-based distributed hypertext system at CERN. Develops UDI/URI, HTTP and HTML ● 1993: Mosaic, first graphical WEb browser, released ● 2002: Work begins on Semantic Web Characteristics of hypertext. Structure: ● It is formed by fragments called nodes (or lexias) and elements that serve as an anchor to join nodes, which are the links. ● The nodes can be formed by all kinds of codes: text, images, audio, video, graphics, etc. ● Its structure can vary: axial, arborescent, network, multipath, etc. Axial: Hierarchy is the basis of almost all websites as well as hypertext. Axial hypertexts are orderly and provide ample navigational freedom. Network: Relatively unsystematic and difficult to navigate. Mostly used in works of short stories and fiction. Multipath: Largely linear and to some extent hierarchical but offers alternative pathways hence they are multipath structures. •Hypertexts can be fixed or dynamic structures (nodes can rearrange themselves depending on how it is programmed to behave). •There are closed hypertexts (which do not contain external links) and others may be open to other hypertexts. •There are also different types of nodes depending on the number of links they contain. •They do not have to have a certain beginning or end. Reading conventions. ● Often hypertexts provide the reader with navigation and orientation mechanisms. ● It is the reading experience what gives a certain form to the hypertext. ● There is also a rhetoric of links, which plays with the expectations of the reader. Postructuralism and the theories of hypertext. The emergence of the Internet and hypertext, its basic structure, has probably been one of the most important technological developments of the 20th century, and the nature of this phenomenon has been studied not only from the scientific field, but also from the human sciences, in as much as it directly affects all fields that are based on the study of communication. In this section, we will briefly summarize the main characteristics of poststructuralism and hypertext, to show how critical views and technological manifestations converge, as George Landow has argued, in hypertext. Poststructuralism. For Jacques Derrida, language is not reliable, because it is imbued with ideologies that program us. Language does not reflect the world, it builds it. But the language is always changing and does not have a defined form, so it does not give us points of reference that help us locate ourselves. The signifier that I pronounce refers to concatenations of signifiers in my mind and evokes chains of signifiers in the mind of the person who listens to me. From the poststructuralist perspective, language does not consist of the union between signifier and signified, but only of chains of signifiers. So our mental life is not built on solid, well-defined concepts, but on an elusive current of signifiers in perpetual change. In Derrida's words, what we associate with the idea of "meaning" is no more than the trace, the wake that leaves the play of signifiers in our mind. The meaning is something that is always a little further away, behind the chains of signifiers, the meaning is something always deferred, postponed. We understand meaning as the difference between two signifiers. Language, however, is the basis of everything. It changes to the rhythm of the world’s changes, without a specific center and with a multiplicity of points of view. For Roland Barthes "the death of the author announces the birth of the reader": the literary text is independent of the meaning given by its author, because the author can not limit its meaning, which is open to the interpretation of the reader. He also defends the distinction between "legible" texts and "writable" texts. The first would be the traditional texts that reflect a plausible world and that the reader can understand without too much intellectual effort. The communication is unidirectional, from the author to the reader, but the reader cannot communicate with the author, nor contribute to the text or make alterations in it. Hypertext is, according to George Landow, the materialization of many of the poststructuralists reflections on textuality, by presenting a "writable" text on the part of the reader, who through his choices sews the text and makes it his own. The text is in turn a faithful representation of the fragmentation, the decentering, the multiplicity of textualities and points of view that poststructuralism defends in relation to our use of language. Poststructuralism and hypertext theory. Poststructuralism Hypertext
