Subject: hypertexts
oconnort@nyu.edu
Date: Sat Mar 01 1997 - 18:40:06 GMT
> A pre-electronic hypertext! I
> think maybe now I see where you are going with this idea (hypertext
> without computers)...
During the last few years, as the notion of hypertext fell into the
mainstream, I always thought the best example of non-techno hypertext
was the Talmud.
There you might have a passage that is annotated and remarked upon
by scholars, whose scholarly remarks would be themselves be interpreted
and remarked upon by scholars, and any of the remarks -- whether on
the original text or the commentaries -- might contain references to
other Talmudic passages.
One can only imagine how this body of religious literature will appear
when it is inevitably entered into an online system with all the
cross-references intact. It is an interesting notion, to start with
material that has already been studied and annotated by generations of
scholars, such that the texts and the commentaries on the texts are so
closely woven together, it is almost unthinkable to consider them as
separate entities or as flat, unrelated texts.
The Oxford English Dictionary (with which I had to do a lot of work this
week) is another example of a mammoth job of a collection of words that
are accompanied by quotations of their earliest known usages, with
references to other related words that appear elsewhere in the
dictionary.
And all of the above done purely by hand, during the course of many
years....
--tim o'connor
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