Rethinking
The Academy:Rethinking
The Academy:The phrase, hypertextual media, is a melding of two seemingly separate terms.
Hypertext is text - as we understand text in its simplest sense, as words - that is arranged by lexia or nodes and connected by links; hypermedia has the same sort of arrangement and connections, but involves sounds, video, animated illustrations, live audio connections to radio stations, and other types of information than simply plain text.
Other than this, there is no real theoretical distinction between the two; it is the connectivity that is of interest to hypertext theoreticians, not the material that is itself under connection. For the purposes of this dissertation, the category "hypertext" includes the narrower category, "hypermedia."
This distinction is wide-spread and quite common, but is probably best credited to George Landow (4; the entry for hypermedia in the index to Landow's Hypertext reads simply "see hypertext" [238] which is the very next entry in the index).
Last Modified: August 2, 1996
Copyright © 1996 by Keith Dorwick
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