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| Trastram Shandy in
Hypertext by David R.Hammontree "Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversa-tion : As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; -- so no author, who under-stands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all : The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. For my own part, I am eternally pay-ing him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own." (Book2, Chapter 11)
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Welcome Much like the photograph record revolutionized the way we listen to music, the computer may revolutionize the way which we read literature. Antonio Vivaldi composed his music to be performed in front of a modest to large gathering of people, yet today one can listen to his created melodies due to digital or analogue recordings. Sterne was trapped within the context of print when writing Tristram Shandy, yet the novel today finds success also in Hypertext format. "Tristram Shandy could in fact be represented as a structure in the computer's writing space, in which each chapter was a topic and in which chapters or runs of chapters were linked according to their several motifs. The reader could then examine the effect of Sterne's digressions by taking alternative routes through the text. The result would be a critical demonstration of the power of association to organize across the linear dimension imposed by the paged book. The network could serve as a critical tool for understanding the novel in a new way" (Bolter 134). So, here is a piece of the Web that I've dedicated to the 18th Century hypertext that is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Here you will find some basic concepts and ideas behind hypertext with Tristram Shandy as a backdrop. Given the sudden and ever-changing emergence of new technologies, people are changing their once preconceived notions of how to read text. No longer does one have to flip through the pages of a book in order to read a novel. How we feel, write, read, and think has always been defined by the medium of print - but this may change. Nowadays, hypertext is no longer a vague concept but, much like music went from sheet to recording, we find hypertext yet another tangible, viewable form of remediation. Here is my humble introduction.
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