Untitled - witz cultural

170HYPERTEXT 3.0 of such difficulty will become clear when I report that the multiple links thatrequired twenty to thirty minutes to create for an Intermedia or Storyspaceoverview-and less than half that time for Microcosm, using its more sophisticatedgeneralized link-options-can take several days when translatingsuch materials for the Web: one must go through the subset of documentsthat will link to the overview and manually create separate ones for literaryrelations, themes, biographical materials, and so on. Even if one already hasan earlier version of one's materials in another software environment toremind one of possible links, it still takes hours of repetitive work-withresult that authors inevitably tend to avoid as much of it as possible andthereby produce a relatively flattened hypertext.So here's my first two gleamware proposals, the first of which may alreadyexist as a proprietary research tool in some large corporations in *re computerindustry. Imagine combining Macintosh OS 10.43 Spotlight featureor a commercially available search tool, such as On Location, with someC-programming, and a set of templates that would permit one to generatewith minimum expenditure of time and effort a subovewiew entitled, say,"Political Themes in Dickens" simply by calling up a menu and typing "Dickens,""themes," and "politics." An even better version-one that I have spokenabout longingly since the last few years of the Intermedia project-involvesautomatically generated graphic representations of literary and other complexrelations. In this example of gleamware, one would simply choose froma menu a literary relations (or similar) option, and one's authoring (readingl)system would combine a graphics engine, search tools, resulting indices,glossaries, chronologies, and synonym lists to produce automatically thekind of concept maps Paul Kahn created in the early Dickens Web:usingsynonymlists and chronologies, this Relations Map Generator-let's give it aproperly stuffy name-places the chronologically earlier authors or textstoward one end of a chosen axis; earlier ones could appear, for example, at theleft, at the top, or, in a three-dimensional representation, farther away. Authorsor texts that I considered more important-either for reasons of somecultural standard (Shakespeare), relation to the author in question (Hallamto Tennyson, the Brownings to each other), or quantity of available commentarycould be made to appear larger or in brighter colors. You get the idea.Let's take the gleam one step further: if one could produce such documentsquickly enough-something that probably assumed preexistent indicessuchdocuments could exist only dynamically, created each time one followeda link from an overview, and hence always current, always up-to-date.the