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Any print editor is very aware of the limited amount of paper in each issue. A journal has its fixed page range, and the editor wishes to fit a certain number of articles into that range. A lot of editing is in fact word counting. In online media, space is virtually unlimited. Storage space is so cheap, and text takes up so little space, that the writer may very well add another page to his or her article without placing too much of a burden on the servers.
Still, the reader's time is also a limited resource. When editors assign a maximum length for articles in their journal, is not just too ensure that each issue may have three or four papers in it, but it is also a reasonable tradeoff between the author's wish to say as much as possible about the immensely interesting topic, and the reader's wish to get through this rather boring stuff before lunch.
Research publishing in hypertext is at its best not when it allows papers to grow too long, but when authors use the space available to include important material that might otherwise be missed. An interesting example is how Roderick Coover included video documentation of European culture in his CD-ROM-publication Cultures in Webs.
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Use of hyperlinks and other computer forms further open possibilities of different, nonlinear ways of structuring arguments, as Kolb (Socrates; Sprawling Places) Miles ("Kinectiture", "Singin'"), Bernstein ("Hypertext Gardens"), and others have shown).
In the early nineties, this was a dominant form of research writing in the journal Kairos and several other Web texts, but has become less common in recent years.
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The first volume of Kairos, for example, contains several articles where the text is broken up into small units, which are tied together with many links. Most seem to be written in a sequence, but the reader is invited to break out of the sequence and find his or her own path among the nodes in the network.
Some writers, like Rue, provide an outline diagram or map of the argument structure, with links to different parts.
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A few experimental writers have even presented research as a organized collection of material that the reader may peruse, and find patterns and order for him- or herself.
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Lev Manovich tries to characterise hypermedia by stating that "[I]n creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database" (226). A database in Manovich' terms is more than what a computer scientist would think of; it is a "cultural form" seems to be any collection "of individual items, with every item possessing the same significane as any other" (218). Manovich gives many of examples of digital literary and visual works of art use a database format, and he has also created works himself together with Andreas Kratky that thematize this "cultural form".
A few scholars have reported on research in a similar manner; presenting a collection of research data the reader may peruse to, presumably, reach the same conclusions as the author. Adrian Miles has created a fully searchable database of all segments in the movie The Searchers that contain a doorframe, thus effectively demonstrating that there not only is a very large number of such shots, but also that they fulfil an important function in the film's narrative.
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