index

New kinds of textual connections

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A list of open hypertext systems

Houston buildings next to one another

Many hypertext implementations that are richer in features than the Web make use of link servers, so that different sets of links can be set up on the same base text. Most of these are laboratory demonstration projects, but there are some annotation services that let readers add comments or links to web pages (the results are available only to those who subscribe to the same link servers, and the services have not been successful). While link servers enrich the hypertextual features of texts, they tend to create individualized sets of links, which make it more difficult to change normative textual connections for a community. What they can do is alter the notion of normative textual connections, replacing them with published sets of links, some of which may become accepted and normative.

It is difficult to envision a place-analogue to this process, because physical adjacency and architectural effects are "there" whether or not they are intended. Their effects on my building and my activities are not intentional links, nor are they avoidable. The car wash next door, or the threateningly large office building down the block, cannot be wished away or made invisible by linking around them. On the other hand, physical adjacencies and architectural effects provide possibilities for exploration and new connection in an intermediate zone between invisibility and fully intentional linkage.