10/06/2021

Where Does Enhancement End and Citation Begin?

The internet has made this much more difficult

One of the benefits of hypertext in a connected digital environment is the ability to interlink documents. This was part of the hyper-text focused vision of the internet that Tim Berners-Lee was trying to create in the 1990s when he developed the World Wide Web. At the time, there were other prototypes and products that were more robust visions of what hypertext could do, including Apple’s HyperCard product, the Microcosm hypermedia system developed by Wendy Hall and a team at Southampton University and Ben Schneiderman’s HyperTies system. There was a great deal of excitement around these ideas that originated from Ted Nelson’s (unrealized) vision of digital communications that he proposed in the 1960s. 

Initial experiments and products that were built in the late 1980s and 1990s around hypertext philosophies allowed anyone to create a link from a document. Some of those at the time thought HTML and the WWW that developed based on its principles was a step backward in some respects because the links that were created were only unidirectional and other hypertext features such as annotation were not included (among other criticisms).

This means that only a site’s administrators (or eventually those with write-access, in the case of wikis and other “Web 2.0” tools that developed later) could insert a link onto a page. It was the sole responsibility of the author to curate and maintain the content. In fact this curation role — and the principle of the primacy of the author/publisher — created a number of subsequent problems on the Internet that we’re dealing with today, such as link rot, website preservation and retractions.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.