News Story

New KMi Book on Hypertext

Chris Valentine, Friday 01 April 2005 | Annotate

Clara Mancini's "Cinematic Hypertext: Investigating A New Paradigm" has just been launched by IOS Press (see link below). The book is based on Clara's PhD thesis, completed at KMi over a year ago and supervised by Simon Buckingham Shum and Marc Eisenstadt. Addressing the problem of coherence in non-linear scholarly discourse, "Cinematic Hypertext" investigates a new paradigm for framing the medium and its characteristics: film. Gathering ideas from technology, psycholinguistics, visual design, narratology and film theory, the book offers elements of reflection for media theorists and coherence relations scholars, with analyses of cinematic rhetorics, film clips, hypertexts, and hypertext systems, grounded in an underlying theory of Cognitive Coherence Relations. It also offers design principles and guidelines for experimental system developers, with experimenal evidence of their empirical validity. "Cinematic Hypertext" proposes a novel way of thinking about hypertext which complements existing hypertext paradigms, inviting the reader to design hypertexts capable of communicating through a visual language inspired by the power of cinema.