![]() ![]() ![]() This metaphor of book-as-movable text is useful in that it captures how the form of the academic textbook is now entangled with its process, as much as its context. The image derives from German printer Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century innovation for the mass production of books, a mechanical system that used paper, ink and the relatively cheap and reusable display of cubed, metal letters that could be arranged and rearranged into words on a tray ready to be pressed into print. Given the limitations of this conventional metaphor for the digital text, I propose an alternative conception, one that is as archaic in origin as the printed-book metaphor, yet surprisingly robust for describing the customizable texts of today’s Academy: the metaphor of movable text. However, as digital texts have increasingly taken on characteristics of digital systems, the metaphor of the printed book has lost currency. Texts were divided into ‘pages’ that could turn on screen, and e-book repositories were referred to as ‘libraries’. The results reveal under-use of processes available to sustain and improve an organisation’s docuverse and a gap in organisational roles and skill-sets to apply those processes.ĭuring the early adoption of e-books, this unfamiliar digital format was made more palatable through analogy to the printed book. The research also considers collaborative hypertexts in the context of social machines with regard to sustaining organisational knowledge as hypertext content. Using Wikipedia as a context, this thesis investigates whether large collaborative hypertexts show signs of their contributors using deliberate hypertextual structure or are simply connecting ‘pages’ of digital content. ![]() Constantly updated by humans and bots, it is an ever-changing knowledge store. Wikipedia is the world largest public hypertext knowledge base. For a hypertext docuverse that holds changing information, such as a knowledge base, paying heed to its hypertextual structure aids the long-term health and sustainability of the knowledge it contains. Despite subsequent advances in Web technology, some of the older hypertextual capabilities remain unrealised and hypertext/media appears to be treated more as a technology than a medium. Hypertextual in nature, the Web in its earliest form was technically limited and not capable of using the full richness of hypertext at that time. Interestingly, there is no way to represent only on the link structure that is independent of the outline. Finally there is a view that compresses the outline structure into nested boxes all on one level. A third is a chart of the levels of the outline structure shown as a tree of boxes. This map also includes arrows showing any user-created links that are independent of the outline relations. Another is a Newtonian spatial hypertext showing outline subordination as containment on a lower level. One is a familiar outliner window with indentation. Unlike VKB, Tinderbox provides several spatial representations. Tinderbox had learned from VKB to offer more visual attributes for each item, allowing variation in color, size, edges, and color gradients for increased spatial expressiveness. ![]() My investigation of alternate notions of space was stimulated by comparing Tinderbox with VKB. An outline showing spatial indentation of text blocks (OmniOutliner), and an idea map with movable nodes radiating from a central concept (Nova Mind). ![]()
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