Untitled - witz cultural

182HYPERTEXT 3.0 draw some general guidelines. Furthermore, since some of these electronified books exist in two or more different hypertext environments, we canobserve the degree to which minor differences in hardware and softwareinfluence hypertextuali zation.First, one has to obtain an accurate digital version ofthe text to be converted.For my earlier books and articles, written before I began to work withcomputing, I used OminPage Professional, software for scanning text andthen interpreting the resultant image into alphabetic characters-an oftentime-consuming process. Since I had written the first version of this book inMicrosoft Word, working with it proved to be fairly easy. Converting the textfor Intermedia required only saving it in a particular format (RTF) and thencreating links within Intermedia. Working in Storyspace proved even easierbecause this system imports Word documents, automatically translatingfootnotes into linked lexias; the one chapter translated in HTML used theStoryspace export function to create a basic linked working text to which Ithen added header and footer icons. The DynaText version required addingSGML tags and manually adding coding for links.In adapting the printed text for all four kinds of hlpertext systems, Ifound I had to make decisions about the appropriate length of lexias. In eachcase, I took chapters already divided into sections and created additional subdivisions.Whereas print technology emphasizes the capacity of language toform a linear stream of text that moves unrelentingly forward, hlpermediaencourages branching and creating multiple routes to the same point. Hypertexhralizinga document therefore involves producing a text composed ofindividual segments joined to others in multiple ways and by multiple routes.Hypermedia encourages conceiving documents in terms of separate briefreading units. Whereas organizingone's data and interpretation for presentationin a print medium necessarily leads to a linear arrangement, hypermedia,which permits linear linking, nonetheless encourages parallel, rather thanlinear, arguments. Such structures necessarily require a more active reader.Since a major source of all these characteristics of hypermedia derives fromthese linked reading units, one has to create hypermedia with that fact inmind. Therefore, when creating webs, conceive the text units as brief passagesin order to take maximum advantage of the linking capacities of hypermedia.Whatever its ultimate effect on scholarly and creative writing, hypermediatoday frequently contains so-called legacy te)ct-texts, like the 1992 version ofHyperturt, originally created for delivery to the reader in the form of a printedbook. Such materials combine the two technologies of writing by attachinglinked documents, which may contain images, to a fixed steam of text. Any-