Text Types in Hypermedia

The discipline of narratology has long recognized the need to classify documents as instances of different text types. We have discovered that classification is as applicable to hypermedia as it is to any other document presentation. In this paper, following the work of Seymour Chatman, we shall consider three such text types: Description, Argument, and Narrative. The goal of a Description document is to describe some object or concept; this is usually achieved by describing component parts and then describing how those parts combine to constitute the entirety. An Argument document, on the other hand, is concerned with establishing some assertion or point of view; and it is based on supporting evidence, as well as possible refutations and justifications for defeating those refutations. Finally, a Narrative document recounts some sequence of events in time, addressing relationships, such as causality and contingency, among those events. We have analyzed these types through case studies that give an example of each as a hypermedia document: the preparation of a recipe (Description), a report of a group meeting (Argument), and recounting one of the versions of the Rashomon story (Narrative). We then argue that this classification provides an organizational framework that facilitates the construction of outlines that serve the writer in preparing the actual content of a document. Such outlines can also benefit the reader's understanding of the content that the writer intended to convey; and, if the writer does not make those outlines available explicitly to the reader, the reader can use knowledge of the document type to construct his own version of those outlines. Finally, we shall briefly review some early work in content-based indexing and search of multimedia documents; and we argue that knowledge of a document's type can be a significant asset in supporting indexing and retrieval that are actually based on content, rather than lower-level features of the media of the document. 1. Review of text types The discipline of narratology has long recognized the need to classify documents as instances of different text types. We have discovered that classification is as applicable to hypermedia as it is to any other document presentation. In this paper, following the work of Seymour Chatman [5], we shall consider three such text types: Description, Argument, and Narrative.