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Why Hypertext?
"We are surrounded by reference materials, but without the ability to use them, they are just another source of anxiety. I think of them as Buddhas, sitting on my shelf with all that information and a knowing smile."
Richard Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety. 1989]
Open any computer magazine and you will find an endless stream of articles about how hypertext or hypermedia technology can change your life. Is this just today's fad or is there something of substance behind all the hype? We would not be editing this book if we did not feel that the latter was true. We are confident that the promise behind hypertext is too fundamental to disappear quickly.
"You can't have everything; where would you put it?"
Steven Wright
The capacity of the storage devices we use in the computer and consumer electronic fields is getting so large that the time-worn methods of searching for information are beginning to break down. Character searches, pull-down menus, indices and tables of contents just don't cut it when you are dealing with 550 megabytes of data on a CD-ROM, or the gigabytes that stream from other optical and digital storage devices.
"The more shoes you have in the closet, the harder it is to find a pair."
Emily Berk
A related problem is that the amount of information being generated is growing even faster than the technology used to store it. For example, each time a new jet leaves its birthplace at Boeing, four tractor trailers full of paper documentation go with it. In this sort of situation the problem is no longer finding information or even building a place to store the information, but rather filtering out useful from irrelevant or redundant information.
Another impetus for improved information access technologies such as hypertext is the move toward multimedia (mixing of text, pictures, sound, data, and video). We can make documents much richer by adding sound and moving pictures, but multimedia data poses entirely new information management challenges; different from the ones we've seen so far. Hypertext can provide useful tools and conventions for managing and retrieving information from huge multimedia databases.
There are certain applications where hypertext offers obvious advantages over paper documents. In general, hypertext is a potential solution to problems that involve voluminous, densely cross-referenced databases that must be searched by many different people attempting to retrieve highly divergent types of information.
As can be seen in Appendix A, the Case Studies section of this book, the type of data to be searched is almost irrelevant – it is the structure of the data that determines whether hypertext will be a productive approach. For example, some conventional paper documents such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference works, are usually used nonsequentially by readers. So it's no surprise that Grolier's Encyclopedia is already available on CD-ROM, and can be accessed through HyperCard as a hypertext.
Large technical manuals intended to provide quick solutions to very specific problems are also prime candidates for hypertext. For example, suppose your B-1 bomber springs a leak 40,000 feet over Albania. There is no way you want to pull out your 10,000-page repair manual and try to diagnose the problem. Instead, you boot your computer and search the hypertext repair manual sitting on a single optical disk for solutions.
Computers do a good job of storing, retrieving and presenting vast quantities of data. The human mind is far more facile at filtering data to access information appropriate for the job at hand than are computers.
Hypertext builds upon the relative strengths of the human mind and the digital computer: the computer holds the data and presents it to the human, the human chooses which way to go by pointing at each juncture. It is an intuitive approach in which the ability to link associated text matches the brain's natural tendency to think associatively. So, for example, the smell of crayons reminds you of Miss Hyperlove, your first grade teacher, whose intoxicating scent made it easier to remember how to spell "intoxicating".
Hypertext seems simple, obvious even. You put some text, a few graphics, sounds, and motion videos perhaps, on a computer. Someone, we'll call this person the "author," annotates these "documents" by linking concepts that relate to each other together. Someone else, call this person the "reader," calls up this "hyperdocument" and follows the links.
When first you think about hypertext, the concept is trivial, but look again; it's really very complex. Well-designed hyperdocuments are magical. They allow readers to explore collections of ideas nonsequentially, by stepping back and getting an overview, zooming in for details, learning by association, experiencing the sound and images of the real thing on video, and reading or playing the same data at their own rate-repeatedly if necessary.
Hypertext may be digital technology's unique and definitive form, but achieving this vision is difficult. Well-designed hypertexts are hard to engineer. In order to build successful hyperdocuments, you must discard old ways of organizing information. This requires an intimate understanding of hypertext as a new medium. We must try things out and see how readers like them. We must learn in order to teach. Hypertext authors (be they called multimedia producers, hypertext authors, or on-line documentation specialists) should have a good theoretical grounding into what works and what does not. Providing that sort of intellectual grounding is what this book is all about.
About the Authors
Joseph Devlin and Emily Berk
Joe Devlin and Emily Berk are co-editors of this handbook. They are also the
co-principals of Armadillo Associates, a multimedia consulting and development
firm.