Publishing, Interpreting and Negotiating Scholarly Hypertexts: Evolution of an Approach and Toolkit

This paper describes the evolution of our approach to scholarly hypertext publishing, which is developing a social model of document usage that places particular emphasis on supporting the interpretation and negotiation of documents. The first part of the paper describes principles derived from hypertext research that underpin a toolkit called D3E which we use to publish an electronic journal. This provides a Web environment that tightly integrates publications with review discussion. In part two, we argue that forming and contesting perspectives are key processes that should be assisted by scholarly hypertexts. In the context of our e-journal, we analyse the representational requirements for hypertext support, and explore the expressive power of a semiformal document encoding scheme that expresses a publication's conceptual relationship to other documents. We conclude by discussing socio-technical issues that this work raises.