Farradane‟s Relational Indexing and its Relationship to Hyperlinking in Alzheimer‟s Information

Abstract

In an ongoing investigation of the relationship between Jason Farradane’s relational indexing principles and concept combination in Web-based information on Alzheimer’s Disease, the hyperlinks of three consumer health information websites are examined to see how well the linking relationships map to Farradane’s relational operators, as well as to the linking attributes in HTML 5. The links were found to be largely bibliographic in nature, and as such mapped well onto HTML 5. Farradane’s operators were less effective at capturing the individual links; nonetheless, the two dimensions of his relational matrix—association and discrimination—reveal a crucial underlying strategy of the emotionally-charged mediation between complex information and users who are consulting it under severe stress.