Hypermedia
The terms ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypermedia’ were coined by Theodor Holm Nelson as early as 1965 in a paper that proposed complex structures for digital file-management, bearing a close resemblance to the logic we use to organize and access files on computers today (Nelson 1965). Though ‘hypertext’ became almost synonymous with ‘Internet’ through its Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) used for coding, ‘hypermedia’ remains more elusive. Throughout the 1980s, several software packages were developed to provide inter-medial possibilities, offering “professional and easy-to-use visual software specifically designed for the creation, management, publishing of any type of hyperlinked, electronic documentation” (functionality that is similar to what we would consider customary of websites soon thereafter). Examples are VisualVision’s Hyper Publish, its follow-up PaperKiller (the source of the above quote)
The use of Storyspace for film analysis is exemplified in a discussion written by Australian New Media scholar Adrian Miles (2004)
At this point, keeping in mind the chosen scope and perspective of this book, it is important to note that the hypertext-format
Because of its associative characteristics and linking possibilities, the hypertext could very well serve preliminary, exploratory, or even organizational means when utilized for scholarly purposes. More than anything, it is built to present an associative or connotative curated field of information. As Bass explicates, the main substance of a hypertext “is in essence a tailored archive of primary materials” (Bass 1999, 282). Nevertheless, at least for academic purposes, this would not absolve the need for an author who would need to streamline content, and provide a rounded-out and retrievable argument by utilizing theHypertext seemed to us a medium full of such detours or interconnections between the personal, embodied nature of information and the larger, cultural, context where the narratives of our research have to reside. Our interest in producing a hypertext construction of our work on Arnold Schwarzenegger was sparked by the very idea that hypertext – as broadcast on the Web – is a cultural circumstance made of detours. (Krasniewicz and Blitz 1999, 259)
Practically speaking, software built around hypertext is now obsolete by