In the mid 80's K. Eric Drexler wrote a paper on the userfulness of a form of Hypertext on the creation, dissemination and critiquing of knowledge. It's getting old at this point, but is still well worth a read. One problem is that even the online version doesn't have up-to-date links to it's references. I found a couple of them and have listed them here.
- Drexler's Original Article
- Ref 4: A Survey of Hypertext, by Jeffrey Conklin, April 1985 (updated 1987)
- Ref 8
- Ref 12: [Bush45] Bush, V.: As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945: 101-108. Reprinted in Adele Goldberg (editor), A History of Personal Workstations, ACM Press, New York, 237-247. 1988.
Other hypertext documents
Notes
Conklins document is a bit annoying in that he didn't apply any of the concepts he was talking about to the document itself (or whoever did the html conversion). So there's no way to link to headings or any points inside the document. And there's no table of contents which would have made scanning the document easier (as suggested by most speed reading systems). I'm currently on section 6: Some Design and Implementation Issues.