Understanding Changes in Hypertext design

A comparative analysis of two related Websites

Like writing itself, hypertext is constantly changing; the rules that govern effective hypertext design continue to evolve over time. The hypertexts that first appeared on the Internet in scholarly circles during the mid-1990s were different from the hypertext of the late 1990s or the New Media writing of the early 21^st century.

This exercise encourages you to think about the rhetoric of hypertext design by evaluating these changes. You will be looking at hypertexts published in an online scholary journal called Kairos. As its homepage states, “Kairos is a refereed online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy.” Aimed at audience of writing instructors, Kairos’s articles have long represented the vanguard of scholarly electronic writing. For this exercise, you should work in groups of three to four students, and you should look at two different articles from Kairos from issues spaced at least 2 years apart. Evaluate the difference in the form of the article that you encounter as a reader. How has the visual rhetoric of web publication changed? Have these arguments become more linear? Less linear? What changes do you see in the rules governing web design, navigation, and user interface? Is one argument more easy to follow than another? Is this due to a conceptual difference (i.e. the actual ideas behind the argument) or a structural difference (i.e. the way the ideas are presented electronically to the reader)?

Once you have come to some conclusions about your two articles, discuss your observations with the class at large, displaying the different articles if possible. Based on this discussion, work together as a class to develop criteria for writing for the web for today’s hypertext readers.

Link: Kairos http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/current/index.html