Online hypertexts that seek to explore and to demonstrate the essence and meaning of hypertext are somewhat of a genre unto themselves. Many (too many?) are available. The worst of them are little more than lists of links that seem to cry out "hey, look what I can do!". It's unclear that someone was really in need of yet another list of this sort, but people are still creating them. The best, however, offer well thought out content in a framework that actually demonstrates the medium well.

Interestingly, the best of these are almost totally textual. They seem to understand that rather than enhance the page, graphics deflect the eye and the brain from the real matter at hand.

Marcel O'Gorman's How to Wread a Hypertext (discussed elsewhere) attempts to examine different reading styles in a hypertext environment. In order to do this he creates an environment of this sort. He doesn't bend over backward to add more and more links, but instead uses them where necessary. This prudence casts a mature aura over his web.

Nelson Hilton's , Hype & Hypertext represents an extreme opposite. Hilton, from the Department of English, University of Georgia hardly lets a word go by without it being linked. (I have to admit that an earlier title of this text was planned as Reading and Writing Hypertext, where I intended to put links on each of the words, including "and" in order to get to the different sections of the text. Realizing that Hilton had already done something very similar, I chose not to.) His text has a frame on the left with a list of about 110 links, all but a handful of them to parts of his text. Actually, in this case text is not really an accurate description, even though the vast majority of the site is textual. The breadth and inter-connectedness of the site demand that it be called a network. It's doubtful that Hilton actually expects anyone to read the entire network, and ultimately, though it's an adventure to roam through it, at some point it becomes obvious that the encyclopedic effort devoted to organizing the whole has succeeded at the cost of the loss of any distinct character that the network might have. The choice of the elements that comprise the whole express a distinct attitude toward the subject, but there is nothing personal about the organization that permits us to get a feeling for what the "author" actually thinks about his subject.
 

Rhetorics of the Web by Doug Brent is the most extensive of the texts under discussion here. Like Hilton, Brent has created a network, and it is an extensive one. It is comprised of Brent's comments on various aspects of the phenomena of reading and writing on the web, and excerpts from numerous authors on the topics being discussed. In his introduction to his network (or at least in one of them) Brent comments that he has provided an index to help the reader navigate the index. However:

Be aware, though, that these clusterings are after-the-fact associations of my own, made necessary by the need for some order in an index and a reluctance to submit to totally random (or perhaps alphabetical) order. Reading the nodes straight through from top to bottom of the index will result in one kind of landscape for the text, but not the only or probably the best, since I have put a lot more work into writing the node-to-node links than into the arrangement of the index. Since most nodes are linked to a number of others, there is a considerable element of the arbitrary in this arrangement.

Almost all of Brent's links are situated at the bottom of the page, rather than interspersed in the text itself (where only references, footnotes, can be found). This is a rather limited use of hypertext, though it doesn't seem to disturb Brent, or the reader. Brent has concentrated at the bottom of each page those links that he thinks are relevant to a continued examination of the topic at hand. One gets the feeling that Brent has purposefully sought to built a network that can actually be used by someone who wants to learn about the topic under discussion.

There is something enticing about Hypertext Notes by Richard Anderson, a feature article of EJournal (Volume 6 Number 3, August 1996). Anderson is truly dealing with notes - short comments on ideas, rather than with well developed and constructed thoughts. Like Hilton's network, the page is divided into frames, but choosing a particular link raises one particular note that is connected to a series of notes that the reader can scroll through. There is structure here, but it seems purposefully amorphous, as though Anderson wants us to become confused. On the opening page of his text he writes:

This is a sort of experiment in what can be done with hypertext. My purpose is to exploit the medium of hypertext in a way that is only rarely done, especially on the web, in order to make some points about a wide variety of aspects of digital text.

I've intentionally avoided explicitly outlining the manner in which this document is written--it's a kind of a puzzle or tapestry which can be put together on several levels, for example what I'm saying and why I'm saying it this way. The work is different every time it's read, and I suppose the meaning varies. In some ways this kind of a document seems unfathomable, maybe because of how we've been trained to read, and trained to think.

Nancy Kaplan's E-Literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print is the most aesthetically pleasing of the experiments being discussed here. It was first posted in January of 1995, and it's last update is from December 1997. Kaplan has a very clear point to make (though not necessarily an opinion which she wants to convince is correct), and she offers the reader different paths to reach it. She even links from her main page to a page entitled Stakes where she makes this final point. (Kaplan argues that both the promoters and the detractors of electronic texts fail to take into account the cultural contexts in which these texts are used.) Kaplan invites the reader to plunge into the text, but doesn't see getting lost as a virtue. He offers simple navigational tools at various stations of her argument that allow the reader either to plunge deeper, or to withdraw and choose another path. On the opening page she let's us know that her network "includes approximately 35 nodes and 180 links". This isn't being boastful, but instead a way of orienting the reader. Ultimately, the aesthetic quality of the text is directly related to Kaplan's desire to be clear and understood. She isn't fearful of hypertextual linking, but she sees it as part of a well-constructed whole.

Any discussion of sites of this sort wouldn't be complete with at least mention of Christine Boese's doctoral dissertation (1998) The Ballad of the Internet Nutball: Chaining Rhetorical Visions from the Margins of the Margins to the Mainstream in the Xenaverse, though I honestly have no idea what might be said about it. Though the graphics on this site are rather limited, everything else strives for hi-tech. Links open in frames and in new windows, and links within those frames and windows refer back to the window of the original link. A special navigation map, in Shockwave, is available, though whether it actually helps the reader find where he or she is, or is going, is open for debate. The dissertation itself apparently seeks to examine:

hypertextual interfaces, as well as the social cultures that form within those interfaces, in an effort to determine if those power structures are actually being undermined, or if more panoptic, dominating, controlling forces will carry the day.

The activist goal of this dissertation is to resist those forces of control and domination, and one way I am trying to resist is through the decentralizing and dialogic potential of hypertext.

I have not gone into nonlinearity completely, and as such, I try to exercise some control over my nodes and links in hopes that the persuasive effect will be reinforced by those structures. My aim is to take a middle position between freedom and control in the hypertextual interface, to strike a balance that will allow a dialogic form of persuasion to happen within more open structures than are traditionally found in dissertations.

In the end, as interesting as it is to read (or in some cases, to try and read) these hypertexts, a questions continually presents itself. Why is it that so many of the sites that seem to truly effectively use hypertext are built primarily as demonstrations of the medium? If it works, why don't people use it, integrate it into their work, accept it as a given? One gets the impression that more people are preaching the virtues of hypertext than are actually making use of it.

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