A Note on Hypertext

Since the advent of the Internet's popularity explosion, scholars have begun to look at the written word in entirely new ways. Electronic publication has made purveyors of traditional forms of the written word— librarians, book and magazine publishers, and the like— rather uncomfortable with the threat of replacing all physical written media with their digital counterparts. Despite what the doomsayers may predict, the invention of the printing press did not devalue or send to extinction the practice of creating illuminated manuscripts: in fact, this art form is still alive today, as I myself, as well as the modern scribes that gave me informal advice, are here to prove. If anything, this recent movement toward digital methods of publication will only serve to perpetuate the literary world in both its ancient and modern incarnations.

I believe that the format of the Internet contains inherently the seeds for returning us to an active awareness of the relationship between word and image, sound and space. Where illuminated manuscripts did this in a subtle way, noticeable only to those with long training and unbelievable discipline, the Internet has the potential to bring those relationships to the forefront. Hypertext, for instance, increasingly combines the temporal aspects of the literary and auditory arts, which must necessarily move forward in time along a two-dimensional plane, with the visual and spatial arts, through icons and transitions from one plane to the next. The Web has created a virtually realistic three-dimensional space in which the written word can— dare I say literally?— overcome its ambitions to conquer visual reality, and exist in harmony with its imagistic and auditory counterparts.