| Hypermedia favours an expanded and more complex
object of study, as well as inviting an experimental mode of authoring.
These potentialities are enshrined in two principal advantages that hypermedia
can offer the ethnographer.
|
Hypermedia
allows readers to trace their own paths through chains of links as well
as, potentially, creating their own links. As soon as one introduces multiple
links into a hypertextual document (rather than merely having a linear
sequential link from one ‘page’ to the next), the author can no longer
control how a reader will progress through the environment created, and
which directions s/he will choose to pursue. Associations and lines of
enquiry can thereby emerge in the act of reading that may not be predicted
in advance by the author. Although there is nothing inherent to the provision
of. multiple pathways or trails in EHEs that will push the reader into
constructing pathways of their own, the presentation of interlinking avenues
of enquiry and the facility for switching among them aims to encourage
readers to approach the ethnographic environment as a shifting matrix of
connections rather than a fixed grid of self-contained narratives. However,
the actual usage that readers make of such potential remains a matter for
empirical investigation. |
| It
becomes possible to create all kinds of multiple links between both the
data assembled and the interpretative texts which comment upon these data.
This facility allows the object of study to breach the boundaries of the
research setting itself, since connections can be made with all kinds of
intertextual resonances in mind. Different types of interpretation can
be accommodated, so that both the voices of participants and the author's
commentary can be more creatively integrated. For example, the creation
of ‘paths’ through the hypertext with appropriate labelling, so that the
linkages and ruptures between interpretation, the data presented and the
potential ‘intertexts’ of the ethnography itself can be more explicitly
foregrounded. Whilst these pathways are designed to guide the reader in
the direction of authorial argumentation and/or suggestion, the very accessibility
and 'proximity' of the data texts may open up channels for innovative interpretation
and reinterpretation – both in terms of analysis and representation. |
