Screens, Research and Hypertext

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Networked Structure

I’ll admit that this is the one that really fascinates me. In a network structure nodes are connected by multiple links, potentially overlapping links (see figure 3). There’s no particular starting point, and no ending point. It’s possible to hit every node, though there are multiple paths through the structure, and many of those paths would hit the same node multiple times.

Image showing a network, with multiple notes connected to many other nodes.

You might recognize the network structure as the basic form of the web itself, in which any given page may link to a multitude of other pages — some or all of which may link back. We’ve gotten pretty good at building these kinds of links between articles.

But I think we’ve not yet really thought about what it might mean to create a single publication that comprises a network of linked nodes.

Indeed, I can’t say that I’ve really seen this tried anywhere, though in one of those bits of self-referential meta-ness that good analytic philosophers like me are supposed to disdain, this very thing that you’re reading is one part of an attempt at doing just that