Links for faster reading
The World Wide Web was designed from the outset as a hypertext system that would link science reports together. Links would provide fast access to reports, and by building a large network, give access to more material.
First of all, link collections give instant access to vast numbers of individual papers. Links can also give instant access to the parts of a work. We saw earlier that the IMRAD structure was endorsed to enable modular reading. Journals like the British Medical Journal provide "persistent navigation" links (links available in every part of the work) to Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion.
Another way of using links to speed up reading is to make the work condensable, like the present text; linking shorter versions of the argument to the full text.
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One of the very first ideas of hypertext use is to write a text that may be just as long as the reader wishes. Ted Nelson described such a genre, and a possible reader interface in 1967. Stretchtext was Nelson's term for this kind of writing, and several writers have realised this idea in different ways. Stretchtext is a common feature in "adaptive hypertexts", electronic texts that log what the reader has read, and adapts the text so he or she only need to read, for example in large and complex repair manual for an airplane (DeBra, Brusilovsky and Houben). David Kolb uses a similar structure in "Habermas Pyramid," where the same argument is written out in different lengths for the reader to choose from.
Inspired by Nelson and Kolb, I have used Kolb's structure in two online research articles, trying to replicate as much of Nelson's idea of the stretchtext reading interface as possible on the Web (Fagerjord).
In my version, a rather conventional paper is divided into a handful of chapters. Each chapter is summarised by a sentence. When read in sequence, these sentences form the abstract of the article. Each sentence is linked to the chapter it summarises, which at first is shown in a short format, where several paragraphs are invisible to the audience. At places in the chapter, there are button-shaped links. When clicked, each button will insert some of the invisible paragraphs into that place in the text.
In addition, all references to earlier literature are linked to quite long citations from the original source, to provide context for the interested reader -- another idea taken from Nelson. When possible, the quote is in turn linked to an online version of the cited work.
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