Totemic questions in book studies – authoring, reading, publishing – are profoundly altered by the intervention of digital technologies [3, 4, 16, 22]. Approaches like close reading and manuscript curation seek to reconstruct from tangible evidence the intangible infrastructure connecting discrete works and collective practices. Such exercises are enhanced by information technologies, which enable the systematic processing of digital traces and (as in the case of artificial intelligence, for example, or recommender systems) new ways to learn from them. In this view, methods in the humanities and wider digital space cross over in their approach to evidence: tangible traces which suggest wider networks of less tangible human activities and social constructs. Hypertext as method [6] provides a framework for this interaction between methods, helping to map these intangible connections. This paper explores the value of thinking hypertextually in the way we approach tangible and intangible evidence. Seen as a design theory for tools enabling digital practices, hypertext becomes a lens for the interpretation of human relationships and an approach to the intangible relationships investigated in book studies. This contribution expands on and interrogates reflections on web-native genres and publishing circuits [5, 35] through hypertext as a method.

Hypertext offers the capability of linking content across texts in a way that challenges the print codex format. However, we should not assume that this capability is only relevant to modern or digital texts. Hypertext also has numerous applications to medieval manuscripts and incunabula, which often have their own apparatuses in place to enable the reader to navigate between multiple texts and augment their understanding of a core text [6, 7, 9]. In this way, the medieval and early modern page acts as a locus for textual interchange. Translation of these kinds of texts and pages may be considered a manifestation of this system of hypertext in that the translator often internalises this intertextuality through the process of reading and then reinterprets it within their translation [32]. Consequently, translation is by its very nature hypertextual as well as intertextual. Moreover, the translation process in turn can change the nature of the hypertext. This paper presents a case study analysis of Gavin Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid, focusing on how the page design of his source directly impacted his translation method, affecting his word choices and directly contributing to his habit of “double translation” [7]. In effect, Douglas reinterprets a spatial hypertext as a semantic network. This naturally invites the question of how best to represent these hypertextual structures in Douglas’s text and source so that readers can easily explore them without forsaking the context of the text’s original codex format. This paper concludes with some suggestions for how such an interface might look and function [30].

Digital scholarly editors create models for the texts they are working on, but for several decades they have been tied to the document paradigm and their structures tend to be closed systems based on hierarchical content objects [25, 26, 33]. Meanwhile, book historians have claimed that models for digital editions ignore the “granularity” of material book forms which carry meanings of their own [14, 36, 37]. This depth model would suggest that we represent a text with semantic tags (usually in TEI XML) which explicitly name various textual phenomena which are tied to a project’s specific particularities [12]. Despite TEI being “descriptive”, the data model does not express what is significant about the textual phenomena––such as the meaning, the intentions, and the provenance [27]. A pan-relational model of editing that borrows from hypertext principles would mean different publication strategies that focus on the meanings of texts through creative-critical practices [28]. One promising way to accomplish this is to employ the “database paradigm” which organises “atomized” information that can “be interconnected in more complex ways, allowing for a multi-dimensional representation of texts”. Using this approach, the text exists in “a multi-dimensional space of possibilities’. This kind of publishing becomes “intertwingled”, to use Nelson’s term about hypertext, opening up the text to aesthetic experience. What digital publishing can ideally do, then, is to give space to competing and alternative discourses and processes of the same text and to facilitate connections to other aesthetic contexts.

Comics have always been hypertextual. From their origins in newspapers [31] to their present as pillars of multi-billion media franchises, comics have always existed within networks of texts, images, and other media. The rise of hypertext has done more to comics than providing a new distribution infrastructure: it has transformed the primary structure of their language, the page [18]. Hypertext represents the last in a series of transformations of comics media and has the potential of being the most profound. Webcomics creators can now conceive of their works as existing in a digital-first environment that is no longer dependent conceptually upon the legacy of the printed page and of the power structures that enable and condition its production. This paper will analyse the remediation of the webcomics page in three phases: first the early short strips inspired by newspaper cartoons and limited by the bandwidth of the early internet [20], followed by longer digital-born comics serialised online that still resembled printed pages [2], and finally the most significant formal innovation of recent years, comics designed for mobile consumption that read vertically [17]. Using examples from Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus [34] and Linda Šejić’s Blood Stain [38], this contribution will assess how hypertext is critiquing and refashioning [8] the comics medium by transforming its fundamental units of meaning from the panel, the page, and the gutter [21] to the scroll, the comment, and the whitespace [10].

Hypertext as Method HT ’23, September 4–8, 2023, Rome, Italy

necessary for commercial success, and how to ensure that creative people can make a living from them. Early hypertext scholarship recognised the commercial advantage of the book as a tradeable object, its physical stability and defined boundaries helping assert the personhood of the writer. In the convergent spaces of the web, tools for promotion and commercial success are arguably already in place. An interlocking complex of platforms – Twitter, Patreon, YouTube, Twitch – provide the creative individual with the necessary tools to cultivate a bespoke value chain which can support their working life. Value networks that do not scale may still work at the level of the indie content creator, cultivating a small but highly motivated audience. Such approaches assert the creator as the locus of inquiry, with consequences for our approach to text and context, archive, inequality, and marginalisation. This paper explores the consequences of this shift from work to worker, with reference to the marginalised communities which emerged around the interactive narrative writing platform Twine.

The video gaming world, from the perspectives of both producers and players, is among the first to have embraced the innovation engendered by hypertext. From its role in the narrative flow of games, omnipresent since text-based adventures began their evolution towards hypermedia [11], to the uptake of gaming-related bulletin board services and “door games” relying upon it [13], hypertext has found adoption ground among the gamer community as early as the 1980’s. Possibly for that very reason, however, that public has shown symptoms of being refractory to the evolution of the hypermedium. Among these, we note (a) sparse efforts to foster the adoption of Linked Data to describe gaming resources; (b) sporadic game databases powered by Web APIs; and (c) retro-computing communities rediscovering the “minimalistic Web” through the development of novel hypertextual protocols such as Gemini [15]. At the same time, several recent phenomena offer opportunities for being rethought of from a perspective that is both methodological and hypermedia-based. For one thing, the proliferation of computing and gaming museums across the world, and the introduction of software and media preservation projects backed by e.g. The Internet Archive, testify to the acceptance of the video game medium as a cultural object, thus stifling the debate against its standing as an art form. Then, the few Linked Data approaches to gaming such as Diggr [19] and the ongoing LinkedMoby coding project [1], incorporate the cultural dimension in their foundations, e.g. by adopting or aligning their vocabularies to CIDOC-CRM or FRBRoo. Lastly, the phenomenology of the video game and the experience arising from it is being articulated into complex manifestations, such as regional restrictions, live streams, recorded playthroughs and “speedruns”, with or without commentary or annotations, all of which deserve to be captured, catalogued and organised. Owing to the recent calls for reflections on the role of hypertext in gaming [23], this contribution argues that hypertext and hypermedia can effectively be used to turn a recreational resource into a multi-faceted cultural entity: a terminus a quo to research the historical, technical and cognitive underpinnings of a game. The fact that a great deal of lingering semantics of games and gaming are buried under hyperlinked groupings in crowd-sourced catalogues [29] reinforces this urgency. We therefore explore the possibilities offered by cognitive computing to extrapolate structured cultural information from the latent semantics of game databases, by leveraging not only hypertext, but possibly also the affordances offered by game HUDs treated as hypermedia.

The publishing value chain is historically stable(ish), if not always advantageous to individual writers seeking to make a living. Labourintensive structures of distribution and marketing created an asymmetric power relationship between creator and distributor in publishing culture. Web-oriented models of distribution offer a compelling answer to some historical problems of distribution, and the infrastructure provides assurance that works can reach an audience without the material costs of a traditional publisher. Two specific concerns (for creators at least) emerge from this new publishing environment: how best to maintain those networks