Semantik/Pragmatik: `Linguistic Analysis of Hypertext' (Do 10-12, CHANGE: C01-273, Multimedia-Labor)

Course plan and notes

Course Announcement

Hypertext is found in many contexts, the most well known of which are nowadays probably the World Wide Web and Windows online help assistants. But the concept dates from the 1960s, or even earlier, and not all hypertext is electronic. Many kinds of publication have hypertext properties, though these often remain latent. Dictionaries and other reference works, newspapers with tables of contents on the first page, magazines with `continued on page 94' references, your own term papers, with tree-structured Table of Contents, bibliographical references, and references to footnotes -- all these share basic hypertext properties.

Goals: The course goals are practical, but theoretically based. At the end of the term, participants will be expected to be able to do the following kinds of analysis on hypertext documents:

1. distinguish and describe different levels of analysis of hypertext, from presentationi pattern through text structure to information networks, and describe details of the syntax and semantics of hypertext;
2. discuss and characterise different types of `navigation' in hypertexts in terms of linguistically motivated graphs;
3. develop linguistically well-founded functional interpretations of hypertext for specific purposes, based on principles of communication and speech act theory.

Addressees: The course is directed both at `Lehramt SI/SII' and M.A. students in the `Hauptstudium'. A condition of participation (`Teilnahmeschein') is that all students hold oral reports, and participate in a practical analysis project on hypertext which will be evaluated at the end of term.

Preparation: The best place to look for information on hypertext is clearly the World Wide Web; prepare summaries of the following notions for discussion at the beginning of the term: hypertext, navigation, style sheet, `dos and donts' on the Web. And check my Web pages for updates:
http://coral.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/Classes/Summer98/