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Hypermedia
"The linking of separate media elements to one another to create a trail of personal association." Memex In his 1945 essay "As We May Think," scientist Vannevar Bush envisioned "the Memex," a device that worked with the human inclination to think in terms of associations. The Memex indexed and stored information so that the user's mode of association and creative expression would be integrated into the machine. Hypertext Visionary philosopher Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" in 1967. He was inspired by Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think" and Samuel Coleridge's poem Xanadu. Both works caused him to critically consider how technology could enhance human memory. His creative work into tools that would change the way we read and write led to the development of non-linear writing. The reader would not be constrained by the structure of the author, but would be allowed to freely roam the text. In his book Literary Machines, he describes his concept of Xanadu or the global hypertext network, where all published information would be freely available to everyone. World-Wide Web While working for the European Research Consortium, CERN, in the late 1980's, British-born physicist and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, a hypertext system that allowed information sharing among researchers on the global Internet. Researchers installed a web browser that could read and link HTML-formatted documents in an open and dynamic environment. Berners-Lee was well aware its explosive potential in the mainstream to globally link information and hypermedia. Intertextualities Literary
theorist George Landow from Brown University explored hypermedia's
creative and academic possibilities with writers and scholars.
In his writings, he explains how hypertext creates "intertextualities"
by altering text into "textual units," such as paragraphs,
sentences and fragments. These units are then systematized in
such a way that the reader is given the flexibility to explore
the text in a non-hierarchical, borderless fashion.
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