Screens, Research, and Hypertext
Screens, Research, and Hypertext, an online hypertext-ebook/wiki-ebook by Joe Miller https://screensresearchhypertext.com/
Introduction to the Project
The web has boiled us all alive.
But while the web has completely transformed how we consume information, it has done remarkably little to change how we produce it.
Media organizations lifted article formats from newsprint and reformatted them as HTML. Broadcast media uploaded segments to YouTube
In the sector where I've spent the last two decades—scholarly research—reports, articles and events look exactly like they did when the professors who taught me were themselves learning the field.
That's a missed opportunity.
Hypertext enables entirely new ways of thinking about the world
This work brings together a number of different strands of thinking that I've developed over 20 years of work in and with the research sector, as an academic scholar, journalist and content strategist
There are around 200 pieces of content in total, each linked to multiple others.
You'll be able to explore based on your own interests and to add your own comments throughout. (You'll need a free Hypothesis account for that last bit.)
The project addresses eight broad themes.
- An exploration of nonlinear thinking and nonlinear writing.
- Some navel-gazing about the nature of research and how scholars read.
- Discussions of hypertext theory and the history of hypertext.
- Arguments for creating research content in modular chunks rather than in blobby reports.
- Thoughts about how authoring content and assembling it into larger units are different—if complementary—tasks.
- Examples of different—better?—ways of presenting research content online.
- The role of rhetoric in thinking about content strategy and writing hypertext
- Occasional digressions into philosophy.
There's obviously a lot of overlap between all of these themes. Which is part of the reason for presenting this work as interlinked hypertext rather than, say, a book.
The philosopher in me kind of shudders at the very question. In my world, essays are either narratives or they are arguments (argumentation) (or possibly both). But narratives and arguments have an order.
Maybe an argument can be more than just a series of carefully-sequenced claims that build to a conclusion. Maybe an argument can be a sort of gestalt that emerges from a series of interconnected bits. My brother Josh likens the nonlinear essay to the experience of visiting an art exhibit
Space, Time, Rhetoric and Hypertext
In those early, freewheeling days of hypertext, scholars like George Landow had a tendency to push the decentered metaphor too far, often arguing that arrangement—one of the central canons of rhetoric—is meaningless in hypertext.
But what this analysis misses is that the physical centeredness of traditional print text is (mostly) a proxy for temporal order
Hypertext is a decentering of the spatial metaphor. But its more transformative decentering is temporal.
Arrangement still has a place. But that order lies in the arrangement of links. It's writing as creation and curation
Screens-Research-and-Hypertext
there’s an argument to be made that — for all its ubiquity — the Web is a poor implementation of hypertext. Consider all of the ways that the web largely replicates the world of print.
Some metadata—usually paratext—is arranged in the areas around the main text— in the margins to the left or right of the text, or in the header
The rise of mobile accelerated this trend. Gone are the days of three- or even four-column layouts
Blogging-Chronology-and-the-Misuse-of-Hypertext
Social media took what the blogging revolution started and turned it up to 11. Even the pesky templates went away, replaced with a single form and a feed that looked exactly like everyone else's.
Digital gardening provides a space for ideas to grow.
The digital gardening movement picked up steam with the release of Roam Research
Sadly, websites for research organizations are not built to accommodate digital gardening. They are generally built to house artifacts
There's nothing wrong with generating artifacts. Those are, after all, the things that answer questions about how to make the world better.
But what we often forget is that today's research outputs form the backbone for tomorrow's research processes. You can't very well engage in public learning when so many of the inputs we need are locked away inside documents
our set of digital tools has solved for one problem—documenting research outcomes—in a way that actively hinders the process we need to produce those very outputs. (cf Discourse Graph)
It's a style of public thinking in which ideas are put out in raw form and refined in full view of the world—or at least whatever corner of it is interested in the same things we are. (thinking out loud)
How "blogging without a publish button" is reclaiming the web as it used to be.
Good writers know the rules. Great writers break them.
For many—particularly in the social science disciplines that dominate the think tank space—the final form of the academic essay is the IMRAD report. (Org Writing Practices)
IMRAD stands for Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion, which is the general order in which materials are presented in social and natural science research reports
The upshot of the IMRAD format is that the interesting bits all happen at the end
IMRAD is usefully contrasted with journalism’s “inverted pyramid,” in which the new information is presented at the very front of the article, with details coming later, and context provided at the very end.
*research outputs frustrating to use as new research inputs.
A better framework would store individual concepts as fully addressable pieces of content.*
Documents are a poor way of visualizing the links between texts. Yes, a good report follows a logical sequence. But that sequence is merely one of many possible logical sequences.
The document is a particularly poor way of thinking through possible arrangements of ideas
When you've stored content as ideas, you can easily shuffle those ideas around.
This means having multiple windows at once. Not switching between tabs in a browser, mind you, but interacting with multiple lexia within the same UI context.
Better hyperlinks would have a few defining features.
They're bidirectional by default.
They encode relationships. A link should have types
They're visible. No blind jump links
They overlay the text.
Hyperlinks laid over the text (via a link database) allow for different authors to make different connections
frequently, we want more than just a hyperlink
Often we want to add our own notes (annotation)
HTML does contain a number of link types. A few of them—author, bookmark, help, license, pingback, search, stylesheet, tag—even encode relationships, albeit weak ones in some cases.
But most HTML link types are instructions for machines (canonical, no-follow, prefetch) or for navigation (up, previous, last).
What they don't do (but should!) is encode editorial (read: rhetorical) intent. Those could be as simple as a link type called reference or note. Or they could also be much more complex, with types like methodology or findings.
Mobile-Screens-and-Lean-Back-Reading
Mobile phones aren't made for lean-forward reading....Mobile phone screens are good at accomplishing discrete activities with defined workflows
They're also amazingly good at a certain kind of reading—the lean-back kind, where you're meant to consume content in a linear fashion.
leaning back in the time around intent is not how research is done. Research is a sprawling mess. It needs more real estate than a phone provides.
I hope you're reading this on a desktop. The mobile experience is pretty poor. That was a conscious choice.
Building a site that works just as well on mobile as on desktop is a foundational principle. And yet...I wonder if it's right for the research sector.
mobile traffic to many of the research sites I work with has barely budged. Desktops claim upwards of 75% of all traffic.
A phone screen just isn't a great place for doing research.
The lack of a defined beginning or ending is a hallmark of the radically decentered nature of hypertext.
It's the same thing that makes it possible for me to later add entirely new passages to this work. The slope from hypertext sort-of-book to digital garden is slippery.
So we shouldn't call this the end. But it is an ending.
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