J. Blustein's Hypertext

What is The Hypertext Community?

A part of Hypertext Materials

What is, or rather who are, the hypertext community? I think of the community as the collection of people who are passionate about some aspect of hypertext. I think that every regular attendee of the ACM's annual Hypertext conference must be a member or else why do they bother to attend more than once? At the 1998 conference, John Leggett described the attendees as belonging to three groups: writers, designers/architects of new hypermedia systems, and theoreticians. Some people belong to more than one of those groups. But we are all passionate about hypertext.

Of course there are members of the hypertext community who do not attend that conference, and some who don't attend any conferences. But we are all passionate about something related to hypertext: for some it is what it enables, for others it is a fascination with structure, for others it is an understanding of data processing in the mind, for some it is a different perspective on an other field of discourse. (I don't fully understand it myself, but I've been told many times that hypertext is just film studies in a different form*), for others it is something else.

Who is in the Hypertext Community?

Obviously, there is no single list of members of the community, but you could see:

• the homepage list in the hypertext literary theory section of dmoz and
• Who's Who list at the WeblogKitchen

to find some people who fit the description above.

See also:

• Website Sitemap
• Definitions of Hypertext
• Major Hypertext Resources
• Notable Hypertext Websites