A reflection of “What Hypertext Is” written by Noah Warden-Fruin. Tumi Jourdan 2180153

The aim of the document is to answer the question “What is hypertext” in its own method.

Noah Warden first covers how communities offer different answers to the question. These communities are the literary and the computer science community. Noah recognises the effect of a community on their definitions of the word and how each of their biased opinions of the definitions are valid. Tangent -The elasticity of words will cause them to evade a singular meaning. Words are borrowed and twisted to fit varying fields and times. The meaning is always valid if enough humans agree on a meaning. The meaning is based in consensus. As to how many must agree for a meaning is formalised is difficult. Words can have different meanings between cultures of billions of people, but also just between two people. This tangent of my own thought leads me to critique the document: merely asking “What is hypertext” is insufficient, and who ever wants to know what the meaning is should also elaborate to which context do they seek the meaning. And the most thorough way to answer such a general question would be to supply all possible meanings of the word, formal and informal.

In attempt to create a better understanding of the word, Noah looks to the origin of it. Noah outlines how Theodor Holm (“Ted”) Nelson first coined the term, along with the other terms; Hyperfilm and Hypermedia. Nelson explains hypermedia as “Hyper-media are branching or performing presentations which respond to user actions, systems of prearranged words and pictures (for example) which may be explored freely or queried in stylized ways.” Using this and hyperlinks Nelson explains hypertexts as “chunk style, hypertexts consist of separate pieces of text connected by links.” And that hypertext is a hypermedia.

From the previous definitions Noah’s work culminates in the form of the definition : “Hypertext is a term coined by Ted Nelson for forms of hypermedia (human-authored media that branch or perform on request) that operate textually. Examples include the link-based ‘discrete hypertext’ (of which the Web is one example) and the level-of-detail-based ‘stretchtext.’”. Considering the path of definition that Noah had made, I consider this accurate. It may not encompass every meaning of the word ‘Hypertext’, but it fulfils the standards he had set for the definition.

What does hypertext mean to me? Well, every definition that can be found is valid in my opinion. A note to Hanli Geyser, or whomever is reading this. I feel like I have gone too far in a peculiar direction and started talking less about what hyper text is and rather the methodology/reasoning that the author utilises to find the conclusion of the piece of work. The reason I found is that the author had already described the term ‘Hypertext’ very well and if I wanted to explain it myself, this whole text could have been just a reference to Noah’s work.