On Fri, 21 May 1999, Lee, Edmund wrote (in part):
> I am concerned about this. To my way of thinking an arguement can *only* be
> linear in form if it is to serve the purpose of an academic thesis. I
> would argue that this purpose is to sustain the cycle from hypothesis/theory
> to observation/ experiment and back to a reviewed hypothesis (or a
> conclusion 'quod erat demonstrandum'). Non linear- or hyper-text certainly
> is useful for facilitationg exploration of a subject, or the effective
> presentation of a large volume of digital material, but to be effective
> there must be a thread running through it that says 'this is the material I
> worked with...this is my arguement...this is my conclusion'.
My experience of writing a (conventional) thesis was not like this. I had
pursued three strands of research, one was definitely theory construction
and another experimental, which cross fertilised as I conducted them, but
I could have written the thesis with them in any order. As it was, there
were a lot of forward and backward references in the thesis which (in
retrospect) would have been served quite well by hypertext. There was
however a definite beginning, defining the topic and a conclusion which
drew the various strands together. I guess it was a mixture of linear and
non-linear argument.
IA strikes a good balance between linear and non-linear forms, with
contents pages and "next page" links, but also the use of hypertext to
cross-reference different parts of an article. Sometimes I use one,
sometimes I use the other. The contents page is useful for both:
somwetimes I want to know if my non-linear exploration of an article has
missed some part of it.
Andrew Millard
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Dr. Andrew Millard [log in to unmask]
Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, Tel: +44 191 374 4757
South Road, Durham. DH1 3LE. United Kingdom. Fax: +44 191 374 3619
http://www.dur.ac.uk/~drk0arm/
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