Relationally encoded links and the rhetoric of hypertext

More than two years’ work on designing, writing, editing, and linking documents in Context32 [Land86], the first course employing Intermedia developed at Brown University’s IRIS (Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship), has provided valuable experience of hypertext and hypermedia systems. Context32, which contains more than a thousand text and graphic files joined by approximately 1300 links, appears the most ambitious implementation thus far of a full hypertext and hypermedia system intended for multiple users. Members of the development team at IRIS have previously described various aspects of Intermedia’s object-oriented programming [Meyr86], general design EMeyr85, Yank87a, Yank87b1, and educational goals [Land871. This paper presents conclusions about what works best at each end of a hypertext path or linkway and proposes that, like other forms of discourse, hypertext requires systems of conjunctive and other relational devices.