Hypergraphs: Escaping the Surly Bonds of Syntax

Abstract

Claus Huitfeldt responded to one of the many variants of “What is a Text Really:” Finally, and most importantly, I am struck by the lack of imagination in this approach: why on earth should texts by all means be hierarchies? No doubt, there are many hierarchical structures, and no doubt this is important, but there are countless other relations between text elements which are worth while finding and investigating- overlap, substitution, discontinuity, parallel texts, cross-references, etc. “Multi-Dimensional Texts in a One-Dimensional Medium.” Huitfeldt, Claus. 1992. Huitfeldt and Sperberg-McQueen have labored for decades on the imaginative representation of texts in markup. As have many others. Humanities scholars are confronted with a bewildering array of markup languages and techniques, should they not decide to invent their own for representing complex texts. A number of those syntaxes are illustrated here, to lay the groundwork for this heretical suggestion: Humanists should use any consistent method they choose for complex markup. The burden of preparing texts for interchange, should rest on technologists who have input those texts in a hypergraph database. Let scholars be about what scholars do and technologists at aiding them in those tasks, not training them for new ones.