Working definition
a non-linear way of structuring and displaying text with the use of links
What I don’t mean
Boundaries and common misreadings.
Tensions and open questions
Where the definition strains.
Key terms
World Wide Web, Hypertext Markup Language, The Garden of Forking Paths,
cool artefact Nelson imagined hypertext to be much more powerful!, some of what was Xanadu supposed to be like:
- links would be visible from both ends (something like Obsidian backtracking feature)
- they would never break, every piece of information would have a permanent address and would never be deleted (Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine)
- rather than copying and pasting a quote, one would reference it (the quoted passage would stay connected to its source)
- since everything would be linked to where it came from, authorship would be traceable
- keeping the hyperlinks in separate database, as an annotation or in a side view, so one term could be linked to multiple sources
cool Zettelkasten-style note-taking: A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thoughts possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasise connection, not a collection.
cool Andy Matuschak’s digital garden