Towards Cinematic Hypertext: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation Tech Report kmi-04-6 March 2004 Clara Mancini PhD Thesis: First submission September 2003 Thesis defense November 2003 Final submission February 2004 PHD awarded March 2004 Knowledge Media Institute TOWARDS CINEMATIC HYPERTEXT A THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION Clara Mancini Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Submitted on the 30th of September 2003 ABSTRACT Hypertext’s non-linearity has critical implications for scholarly discourse and argumentation, where it is commonly considered important to control the reader’s exposure to the line of reasoning in order to communicate complex ideas and maximise rhetorical impact. Hypertext’s non-linearity has been seen to threaten authors’ control over discourse order and the coherence of their argumentative discourse. Existing hypertext paradigms offer different solutions to the problem of preserving user-defined navigation whilst maintaining coherence: page- based hypertext relies on the expressiveness of linear associative writing; semantic hypertext relies on the expressiveness of link taxonomies; spatial hypertext relies on the expressiveness of hypertext’s visual features. This research combines elements of these with new theoretical insights, to investigate a fourth paradigm referred to as Cinematic Hypertext. The problem of maintaining coherence is framed as the problem of representing and communicating discourse form in ways inspired by the mechanisms underpinning cinematographic languages for expressing coherently narrative relations. Cinematic hypertext requires the consistent and concurrent use of the hypertext medium’s formal features, grounded in structuring principles, in order to allow the emergence of a local language. For scholarly discourse, it is proposed that relational primitives based on Cognitive Coherence Relations (CCR) can be used as a structuring principle to define hypertext links, while the graphic features of the medium can be used to render these relational primitives. Relations between nodes are animated in principled ways as they are navigated, shaping discourse structure. This dissertation articulates the theoretical basis for cinematic hypertext, proposes a prototype visual language to express a sub-set of CCR, provides experimental evidence that the visual results are meaningful, and specifies requirements for a cinematic hypertext environment. ã Clara Mancini, 2003 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Approaching the conclusion of such a long process, after spending years to find my own path through the world of research, and after having spent long months writing a Ph.D. thesis to bring my personal contribution to a scientific field, I realise how much my individuality as an aspirant researcher owes to the community that has welcomed and nurtured me throughout these years. Among the people of this community, above all I wish to thank my first supervisor Simon Buckingham Shum, who has always encouraged and supported me, guided and stimulated me, believed in my work…and borne with constant patience my tortuous reasonings, my overflowing wordiness, and my English! I am also very grateful to Marc Eisenstadt, my second supervisor, for the precious advice that he has offered me over the years, always helpful and inspiring…and always prompt. I also wish to thank the many people of KMi who, in different ways, have assisted and supported me throughout the years and in the phase of my writing. These are Trevor Collins, Victoria Uren, Paul Mulholland, Peter Whalley, Arthur Stutt and Gary Li: they have given me their time in many occasions, offering me helpful advice and willingly discussing issues of relevance for my work. My gratitude also goes to the people who offered me technical advice and material help, without their support I would still be struggling to physically put my thesis together! These are Anthony Seminara; Damian Dadswell; Lewis McCann and Ben Hawkridge. I would then like to thank all the people in KMi who accepted to take part in my empirical studies, for the precious contribution that they have brought to my work. I do owe a lot to the Hypertext community in general, but in particular to David Kolb, Adrian Miles and Jim Rosenberg, who have always stimulated and inspired me with their work and with very interesting discussions. Special thanks to David Kolb for having reviewed some of my work on hypertext analysis and to Adrian Miles for having reviewed Chapter 4 of this thesis: they both shared with me many useful and helpful comments. From the same community I would also like to thank Elli Mylonas, David Durand and George Landow for their constructive feedback. Fundamental reference point has also been Ted Sanders, who hosted me at the Centre for Language and Communication of Utrecht University and introduced me to his welcoming Psycholinguistic community. He gave me precious advice and kindly accepted to review Chapter 2 of this thesis, getting back to me with many useful and helpful comments. From his community, I also wish to thank Henk Pander Maat and Alfons Maes for their encouragement and supportive advice. Finally, I am grateful to the Knowledge Media Institute and The Open University, for having offered me the opportunity to get back into the research world, within such a supportive environment. And I am grateful to my husband Anthony for his continued personal support…and for his patience: it cannot be easy to live with someone who is completing a Ph.D.! TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Cohesion and coherence in hypertext argumentation: a perspective, 1 1.1. The promise of a new medium, 1 1.2. Argumentative discourse and hypertext, 3 1.3. Order, cohesion and coherence in argumentative hypertext, 7 1.4. Representing coherence: structural paradigms in hypertext systems, 10 1.4.1. “Page-based” hypertext, 10 1.4.2. Semantic hypertext, 12 1.4.3. Spatial hypertext, 15 1.5. Advantages and disadvantages of three different approaches, 17 1.6. Towards a conception of ‘cinematic’ hypertext, 23 1.6.1. Relational primitives, 25 1.6.2. Role-based rendering of nodes, 26 1.6.3. Temporality, 26 1.7. Overview of thesis chapters, 28 2. Hypertext coherence as text coherence, 33 2.1. Coherence and cohesion in text: definitions, 33 2.2. Different approaches to text coherence, 35 2.2.1. Relations as hierarchic connectors, 35 2.2.2. Cohesive devices as evidence for cognitive categories, 39 2.2.3. Coherence relations as basic cognitive primitives, 42 2.2.4. Basic and economic parametrisation of coherence relations, 46 2.3. Coherence relations and hypertext, 50 3. Applying discourse coherence relations to hypertext, 53 3.1. Cognitive coherence relations and hypertext: scholarly links taxonomies, 53 3.2. Cognitive coherence relations and hypertext: a scholarly hypertext example, 64 3.2.1. ‘Hypertext and Suburbs’: the hypertext, 64 3.2.2. Relations between nodes: an example, 70 3.2.3. Relations between paragraphs in a node: an example, 70 3.2.4. Relations between text spans within a paragraph of a node: an example, 71 3.2.5. Analysis’ results and interpretation, 73 3.3. Expressing hypertext coherence relations, 77 4. Hypertext coherence as ‘cinematic’ coherence, 81 4.1. The roots of the connection between hypertext and cinema, 81 4.2. Cinematic language and cinematic coherence, 84 4.3. Cinematic coherence and cinematic cohesion devices, 88 4.3.1. Cinematic rhetorical patterns, 92 4.3.2. Cinematic compositional and transitional norms, 95 4.4. From cinematic coherence to hypertext coherence, 98 5. Applying discourse coherence relations to cinema, 103 5.1. Cognitive coherence relations and their applicability to other media, 103 5.2. Cognitive coherence relations and cinema: la Grande Syntagmatique, 104 5.3. Cognitive coherence relations and cinema: two cinematic sequences, 108 5.3.1. From Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, 108 5.3.2. From Stanley Kubrik’s 2001. A Space Sdyssey, 114 5.3.3. Analogy, subjectivity and pragmatic relations at cinema, 120 5.3.4. Conditionality at cinema, 123 5.4. Cognitive coherence relations and cinema: a conclusion, 125 6. Visual languages to render coherence relations, 127 6.1. Text discourse and visual discourse processing, 127 6.1.1. Parallels between textual and visual processing, 129 6.2. Visual languages and document design, 136 6.2.1. Visual meta-discourse, 136 ii 6.2.2. The language of graphics, 140 6.3. Visual languages and cognitive coherence relations, 142 7. Rendering discourse relations with graphics and animation, 145 7.1. Rendering cognitive coherence relations in hypertext, 145 7.2. Selecting an experimental set of relations, 146 7.3. Designing the selected set of cognitive coherence relations, 149 7.3. Discussion, 163 8. Evaluating ‘cinematic’ discourse relations: an empirical study, 165 8.1. A first empirical study, 165 8.1.1. Motivating the selection of alternative patterns, 165 8.1.2. Experimental materials, 168 8.1.3. Subjects, 169 8.1.4. Experimental procedure, 170 8.1.5. Experimental predictions, 171 8.1.6. Results, 171 8.2. Analysis of the study’s results, 173 8.3. Limitations of the study, 183 9. The form of coherence in hypertext discourse: proposal for a cinematic hypertext, 187 9.1. Step by step towards the idea of cinematic hypertext, 187 9.2. Contributions of this research work, 190 9.3. Continuing the investigation on cinematic hypertext: future work, 192 9.3.1. Theoretical work, 192 9.3.2. Design work and empirical studies, 193 9.4. Towards a cinematic hypertext authoring environment: functional specification, 195 9.5. Cinematic hypertext and argumentative functions: possible applications, 197 iii 9.5.1. Cinematic hypertext for scholars, 198 9.5.2. Cinematic hypertext for students, 199 9.6. Conclusion: learning to dance, 201 References, 203 Appendix 1. CCR analysis of a scholarly hypertext, 215 App.1.1. Analysis of the relations between nodes, 215 App.1.1.1. Mapp of the hypertext, 215 App.1.2.