Is this scholarly writing?
A reader of an early version of this essay remarked that
The text, as was intended, was asking me to read it in a way that I don`t normally approach scholarly work. . . . the traditional structure of scholarly papers . . . is designed to short cut the reading experience to get to 'the meat' as quickly as the reader desires. . . . I don`t always want to spend hours cruising to read an academic text. Unlike other forms of reading, there are often time constraints on the reader that have led to . . . the more rigid structures that are commonly used. This essay is a very different type of text that requires a commitment to it that most academic literature does not demand.
This raises a fundamental question. I have been trying to create a kind of hypertext scholarly writing that does indeed demand more time and a different kind of concentration. There is no 'meat' immediately available. The aim is to raise questions and introduce concepts; the effort is not easily summarizable. Is this violating the canons of scholarly research?
What I am trying to create is a hypertext version of a kind of reading that is familiar to those in philosophy and literary studies, but is not the mode of the "research report" more common in scientific and social science writing. Key texts in philosophy -- a chapter of Aristotle, a deceptively simple-looking essay by Quine -- cannot be read for quick summaries. Their arguments are often difficult to discern, and the difficulty is functional in the sense that it opens up new ways of thinking. This will be less true of secondary writing about those key texts, but even there the most influential commentary and analysis will have its own rich texture, rather than quick isolatable conclusions.
There is a different use of hypertext in scholarly writing, to provide links to data and convenient summaries. In the Sprawling Places hypertext this is the role of the linked "pyramid outlines." But I then tried to immerse those outlines in a larger structure that they could not completely control.
The underlying question raised by the reader's comment above, then, is about the kinds of intentions and expectations readers should bring to texts.