Building Visual Knowledge in a ‘Cinematic Hypertext’ authoring environment

One of the main issues in hypertext is what we would like to call “discourse shaping”. The possibility of providing or recognising discourse coherence in the interactive medium has a lot to do with the possibility that authoring environments offer to shape the hypertext discourse. The answer of spatial hypertext to this problem is ‘visual’ shape [11,12]. Its peculiarity and strength is that it allows the user to express relations between objects in a visual dimension, where shape is more immediately perceivable and can express in an implicit form what might be difficult to explicitly define. From painting, to photography, to cinema, all visual media have this peculiarity, due to the nature of their significant. Among them, the cinematic medium is the closest to hypertext and the analogy between cinema and hypertext in general1 has been pointed out in more than one occasion [3,7,8]. In particular, though, cinematic language has a lot to do with spatial hypertext and would have contributions to make to its development, as a medium that creates discourse coherence through dynamic visual shape.