Engelbart’s proposal for “Augmenting Human Intellect” envisioned innovation in personal workstations, organizational management, and social organization in order to tackle society’s most intractable problems. Recent thinking about animal cognition and in the philosophy of the mind leads to intriguing speculation about the experience of augmentation. A large body of literature, seldom cited in this connection, explores the tensions between the Augmented and the Basic remnant.

In his 1994 doctoral dissertation, Andreas Dieberger proposed to visualize hypertexts as cityscapes. Revisiting this concept with the aid of modern processors and displays, we have found that the Information City provides a new perspective on hypertext visualization itself, a practice inspired both by structuralist and by existentialist thought. Where conventional spatial hypertext has tended to focus on proximity, the Information City often foregrounds the implicit semantics of the spaces between buildings.

From 1919 to 1934, the socialist city government of Vienna fostered a remarkable increase in art, public architecture, and scholarship despite desperate economic conditions. Throughout this period, the Vienna Circle, a philosophical discussion group, examined with new rigor the question of what can be known. Their work built the theoretical foundations of computing. Much of this work was carried out in Vienna's distinctive cafes. This was not a quaint idiosyncrasy; the cafes were in the business of amiability. Parallels to the early Web and its precursors are not difficult to find, and the collapse of Red Vienna may parallel the current predicament of the Web.

Hypertext visualizations embed interesting assumptions about the underlying structure of ideas. Few novel approaches to hypertext maps have been presented in recent years. The Gaudí view tessellates the idea plane, exploring an approach to presenting a greater number of notes on the screen, at the cost of restricting the fixity of the visualization: you can move notes, but notes can move themselves.

Hypertext visualizations embed interesting assumptions about the underlying structure of ideas. Few novel approaches to hypertext maps have been presented in recent years. The Gaudi view tessellates the idea plane, exploring an approach to presenting a greater number of notes on the screen, at the cost of restricting the fixity of the visualization: you can move notes, but notes can move themselves.

The early years of hypertext research saw a profusion of strange new hypertext models, formalisms, and systems. The exuberant abundance of this era was overwhelmed by the emergence of the Web and, later, the field’s fascination with social media. Elegies to the freedom of the classical era of hypertext continue to be heard, yet novel systems are rare. This paper proposes a simple architectural twist that embeds web components — which may include hypertext systems — inside a classical hypertext framework. The goal of this work is to enable researchers to implement useful, testable prototype systems very quickly: an exotic hypertext system in an afternoon.

WS.4, the Fourth International Conference on Web Studies, was held in Mexico City, from October 30 to 31, 2023. WS is a multidisciplinary conference organized in cooperation with ACM SIGWEB since 2018. It unites scholars, artists, and professionals who consider the web as their object of inquiry.

The development of hypertext and the World Wide Web is most frequently explained by reference to changes in underlying technologies — Moore's Law giving rise to faster computers, more ample memory, increased bandwidth, inexpensive color displays. That story is true, but it is not complete: hypertext and the Web are also built on a foundation of ideas. Specifically, I believe the Web we know arose from ideas rooted in the disasters of the short twentieth century, 1914–1989. The experience of these disasters differed in the Americas and in Eurasia, and this distinction helps explain many long-standing tensions in research and practice alike.

Category fiction adopts a formal narrative framework to explore topics of mutual interest to readers and writers. Originating as a means of assisting retail booksellers and movie theaters in their work of matching readers and writers, categories like "Mystery", "Western", and "Horror" have shaped modern storytelling. The frameworks that underlie category fiction are often confounded with their conventional surface characteristics. For example, mysteries are not puzzles, but rather interrogate how a damaged world can be understood and, with understanding, repaired. We observe that that framework of Horror is congruent to the affordances of literary hypertext. The technologies and trappings of hypertext itself share the slippery uncanniness and unheimlichkeit of other horror staples: mirrors, twins, rivers, and crossroads. Finally, it is intriguing that the history of hypertext and the World Wide Web itself falls neatly into the framework of horror.

Hypertext and the World Wide Web are built on a complex network of ideas that originate in the military and ecological disasters of the short 20 th Century, 1914--1989, and in a world-spanning intellectual effort to prevent their recurrence. Though that effort now appears to have failed, and though the tragic story of the 20 th Century has not, it seems, concluded, we may learn profit by examining the concepts and ideals on which hypertext was built.

This blue sky paper envisions a novel system which promotes emotional closeness through storytelling. Family members, who may be separated, collaboratively build a spatial hypertext of images and text fragments to express and structure their thoughts and memories. The system observes their reactions as well as their media while they work. Live recommendations prompt users in their thinking and storytelling. Family stories are thus collaboratively adapted to more tightly connect the thoughts and emotions of their loved ones.

PublishersPublishing (publisher) connect readers and writers. The literary economyEconomies with its diverse currencies—cash, attention, academicAcademic tenure—is not an inescapable natural phenomenon, but is continually reshaped by editors, manufacturers, booksellers, and critics. Central aspects of today’s literary economyEconomies would have been unexpected and even astonishing a few decades back, while customs and practices that we take for granted arose from temporary policies adopted almost a century ago. Fashion, talent, and critical success all enter into the story, but so, too, do details of the accounting practices of booksellers and the real-estate expenses of local pharmacies and neighborhood newsstands. This chapter examines how the literary economyEconomies and the practices of the bookBook trade have shaped interactive media through the course of 35 years and considers what aspects of that economyEconomies are now most liable to transformation.