A linking strategy is the conscious use of hypertextual links in order to attain narrative and lyrical effects.
Landow examines the rhetoric of linking in hypertext documents based on his experience with the Context32: A Web of English Literature system and argues for principles of relational logic in linking.
The Norwegian writer Jan Kjærstads novel Tegn til kjærlighet (Symbols to love -my translation) concerns finding magical signs of language, that leads to the magical power of love. Karen Wagner answers this in her essay, contextualizing Kjærstads novel in the age of the Internet.
More of Wagner's writings on hieroglyphs: http://www.afsnitp.dk/aktuelt/12/hieroglyffernesg.html
Jan Kjærstads seneste roman Tegn til Kærlighed handler om at finde de magiske skrifttegn, som fører til kærlighedens lige så magiske kraftfelt. Bogen går amok i bogstavernes taktile verden og deres religiøse betydningsindhold. Samtidig er romanens sætninger fyldt med ladede detaljer, hvor næsten hvert ord rummer en “linkmulighed”. Karen Wagner trækker i sit essay tråde til Kjærstads egne overvejelser om romanen i internettets tidsalder - og til den netop udkomne danske udgave af Nøgle til de ægyptiske hieroglyffer.
Mer av Wagners skrivning om hieroglyffer: http://www.afsnitp.dk/aktuelt/12/hieroglyffernesg.html
Når teksten ikke virker som en kaotisk myretue, skyldes det, at de mange historier forbinder sig med hinanden via associationer. Ord eller billeder går igen og associerer til andre historier, detaljer, billeder og figurer, og derved skabes et internt linksystem i tekstens vibrerende netværk. Et eksempel er Cecilias yndlingsbogstav Q, som for hende er den energi der frigøres ved en kernereaktion. Men samtidig er Q-energien også en skaberkraft, fordi Q’et ligner en undfangelse: spermatosoen, der netop er trængt ind i ægget.
Cecilia (og romanen) er udstyret med et Janushoved, der både skuer tilbage mod hieroglyffernes forsvundne sproglige Atlantis, men også frem mod nye måder at opleve skriften på, som måtte have et sanseligt fællesskab med oldtidens billedgåder. Jan Kjærstad har selv i sit essay om Litteraturen og Nettet påpeget, at der med computeren er opstået en helt ny billedskrift og et helt nyt rum for skriftkulturen. Der er ganske enkelt sket en flerdimensionel udvidelse af skriftkulturen: "Den elektroniske skrift ligner mere hieroglyffer end alfabetisk skrift. For første gang er tekst, billede og lyd repræsenteret i én og samme skriftbaserede udtryksform."
This article proposes a theoretical framework intended to facilitate descriptions and discussions of texts of works in different media. The main theoretical traditions which have inspired this endeavor are, on the one hand, textual criticism (with scholars such as Fredson Bowers, D. C. Greetham, Jerome J. McGann, D. F. McKenzie, Peter L. Shillingsburg, and G. Thomas Tanselle), and, on the other hand, hypertext theory (represented by theorists like Espen Aarseth, Jay David Bolter, Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Michael Joyce, George P. Landow, and Janet H. Murray). The study aims to combine and develop the perspectives of such theoretical traditions in order to suggest a more consistent and extensive set of concepts for the analysis of how narratives are stored and disseminated. The study examines the structural aspects of texts and works, and deals with storage, presentation and reproduction of works. Moreover, the structure of works and texts, as well as the navigation related to these structures, are discussed. The study also includes an in-depth discussion on links and linking, and a new terminology is suggested for the subject. The most important concepts discussed are work, text, version, variant, storage medium, storage sign, presentation medium, presentation sign, storage capacity, life expectancy, direct text access, indirect text access, copy, edition, impression, issue, monosequential, multisequential, content space and axial structure. Furthermore, the concepts of network structure and lateral structure as well as hypertext, ergodicity, link and linking are examined.
Dene Grigar discusses ways in which hyperlinks are utilized in three-dimensional multimedia performance works that offer a narrative or poetic focus. In the new spaces of three-dimensional performance environments, hyperlinking can be incorporated as a performative element into the work and therefore always makes a purposeful act necessary for the performance to unfold. Grigar argues that hyperlinking may denote a change of scene, the progression of a poem’s instantiation or the evocation of musical notes comprising a composition.
(Source: Beyond the Screen, introduction by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla)
My argument here is that different modalities of textual performance must necessarily lead to the classification of print-precursors as precisely that: precursors and not hypertext per se.
My thesis thus proposes that hypertext must be conceived in terms of performance and that approaching the problem of a difference between the analog and the digital must be done in a mode through which digital textuality can emerge on its own terms.13 To that end, this essay proposes a theory of practice for hypertext by articulating its form and aspect of performance, a performance that functions to separate the digital from the analog.
My task in this article is thus to articulate a mode of understanding hypertext in terms of two components of performance: that of the user and that of the system. The latter suggests the processing done by the computer, which itself performs or is even performative, and the former suggests the performance of the user who operates as a functioning mechanism in the text, an idea whose genealogy includes performance art's situation and inclusion of the viewer within its boundaries, as well as the literary theorizations of the reader in terms of interaction, encounter, agonistic struggle, dialogue, and experience.
Complexity, in my analysis, is not a substitutive metaphor for collage but an inherent part of the system of hypertext itself. In this sense, it speaks to the liminal moment we inhabit between the consideration of hypertext as a genre, in terms of its formal and stylistic properties, and the consideration of new computer and scientific technologies and ideas, both as they are incorporated into electronic writing and as artifacts that themselves have effects and properties, such as autonomous behavior, that are inherent to the system of hypertext.
Different media produce different readers, different reading environments, and different reading practices.