Hypertext
Hypertextual
Literature
Literary Theory
Culture

Typology of Hypertext

Andrei Mochola

7 min readFeb 25, 2026

Qui non habet caballum, vadat cum pede (Latin proverb)
Solomon and Marcolf
(and Umberto Eco)

Long before navigation became an unconscious daily habit and before hypertext became an infrastructure of our daily perception, it was first an object of classification.

When the instability of narrative, authorship, and textual hierarchy began to attract theoretical attention, scholars responded in the manner most familiar to them: they attempted to name, divide, and order what appeared resistant to order. If reality itself seemed to dissolve into links, references, and deferred meanings, then at least hypertext — the formal expression of that condition — could be described.

Typologies emerged not as neutral taxonomies but as gestures of intellectual containment. They sought to determine whether hypertext was primarily a literary experiment or a technical structure, whether it belonged to art or documentation, whether it required an author or could function without one. In doing so, they revealed something essential: hypertext was never a single phenomenon. It was already dispersed across encyclopaedias and fiction, footnotes and databases, solitary digital works and networked labyrinths.

The following classification reflects one of the earliest systematic attempts to map this territory. Read today, it reveals less a stable taxonomy than a snapshot of a moment when hypertext was still becoming itself — when its forms could still be counted, even as its logic was beginning to permeate culture at large.

In his study Late Novels of Italo Calvino as Examples of Hypertext, Mikhail Wiesel proposed the following classification of hypertexts.

Artistic and Non-Artistic Hypertexts

The vast majority of hypertexts are not artistic texts. Among printed materials, these include primarily encyclopaedias, dictionaries (especially encyclopaedic dictionaries), business directories and corporate contact databases, and various types of instruction manuals structured according to the principle to perform this operation, see page… For example, operating-system manuals of the 1990s, or early embedded digital help systems (help compilers) — formats that now belong to an earlier media epoch. Similarly, instructions embedded in all kind of tax forms or visa applications.

Hypertexts also include — perhaps most significantly — scholarly works and dissertations, in which the traditional footnote performs the function of a hypertextual link. The bibliography of such works may likewise be regarded as an internal hypertext, as it constitutes a set of references to further scholarly hypertexts.

Isolated and Networked Hypertexts

The best-known artistic and isolated hypertext of that period was distributed in standalone digital format known as a CD-ROM — media that, like many early carriers of hypertext, now appears technologically distant. It was Afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce, available today also on the USB stick. Such formats were limited both by storage capacity and by accessibility to a single reader at a time, leaving aside cases in which hypertexts were hosted on early network servers accessible from multiple workstations.

There also exist networked hypernovels that are accessible simultaneously to a wide readership and capable of linking to other hypernovels, thereby creating a genuine labyrinth. Such is the case, for example, with the previously mentioned Electronic Labyrinth, the whole hypertext library of the Eastgate Systems, the deliberately provocative SixSexScenes — a novella in hypertext by Adrienne GreenHearth (Penelope Trunk), and many others.

Particular attention in this context should be given to the monumental project by Mikhail Epstein entitled The Book of Books, conceived as a collection of ideas for unwritten books, which may be freely used by anyone.

Back in 1998 Epstein explained the genesis of The Book of Books as follows:

The Book of Books is a collection of alternative ideas in the humanities: philosophy, ethics, linguistics, and cultural theory. These ideas are illustrated by fragments of books in which they are first introduced, challenging dominant theories and commonly accepted terminology.
The main impulse that generated such a multitude of “other-thinking” texts in the second half of the twentieth century — particularly in Russia — was that history entered a totalitarian dead end, while at the same time unfolding consistently according to the logic of self-developing concepts, from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Marx… Alternative concepts are needed to divert history from its measured course; interventions of “other thinking,” even “mad thinking,” are required… Thus an entire spectrum of alternative sciences, beliefs, arts, and linguistic models unfolds… An alternative does not imply the elimination of what exists, but merely the possibility of something different. This thinking operates not in the mode of “not” or “against,” but in the mode of “and” and “or.” And also something else, entirely different.
(…) The Book of Books is a kind of dictionary of alternative thinking, a collection of strange, non-traditional, unaccepted or rejected, cursed or mad ideas that, for various reasons, were not realised in the history of science, philosophy, or religion, but may be realised in the future.

Reading & Commentary vs. Reading & Writing

Reading accompanied by commentary is by far the most common mode of hypertextual existence on the internet. Readers are able, if they wish, to express their opinions regarding the texts they have read (as well as images viewed, photographs seen, or works listened to) using commentary functions and similar interactive formats.

Some such spaces become so extensive and internally interwoven that observers of the phenomenon have spoken of a new genre of hypertextual creativity — network literature — which in many cases is stylistically uneven and of limited artistic quality. Early real-time discussion forums and chat systems functioned in a comparable manner.

Get Andrei Mochola’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

Hypertexts based on the reading-writing model can be divided into two principal categories.

Single-Author vs. Collective Projects

A single-author project is realised exclusively by its creator, without external intervention. On the internet, examples include literary websites in which authors present their own works — often unpublished in a paper book form — in the structure of a multi-textual labyrinth.

Collective projects, by contrast, are accessible to all participants. A frequently encountered situation is one in which a single-author project constructs a virtual author — an invented fictional persona possessing, in addition to the characters within the narrative, an autonomous voice (in Bakhtin’s sense).

An example is the previously mentioned SixSexScenes, whose author, Adrienne GreenHearth, is semi-fictional. This narrative strategy is not new from a literary perspective; it is known, for instance, from Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, or Pushkin’s Belkin Tales. Borges’s novella Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote may be understood in a similar way.

The final typological opposition distinguishes axial and dispersive hypertexts.

Axial hypertexts, according to Wiesel, are texts devoid of plot yet resistant — if not entirely — to combinatorial reading. They are most often literary works with a conventionally book-like structure, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, which may be seen as an intermediate link between the Gutenberg book and electronic hypertext.

Dispersive hypertexts, in contrast, lack a clearly defined narrative axis. Dispersive discourse lacks a clearly modelled beginning or end; reading may begin and end at any point without compromising the integrity of the hypertext (The Holy Bible comes to mind).

As this overview suggests, the typology of hypertext is based on several distinct criteria, allowing a single hypertext to belong simultaneously to multiple typological categories. Nevertheless, the classification cannot be regarded as fully satisfactory from a theoretical standpoint due to its internal instability — most notably in the division between artistic and non-artistic hypertexts. But not only.

Toward the Conditions of Reading

Typologies, however refined, do not stabilise their object. They merely trace its contours at a given historical moment.

The classifications outlined above capture hypertext at a stage when its forms still appeared distinguishable: artistic and non-artistic, axial and dispersive, solitary and networked. Yet these distinctions already contain their own instability. Scholarly writing behaves like fiction; fictional narratives construct databases; solitary projects simulate collective authorship; networked texts acquire authorial signatures. The categories begin to overlap even as they are named.

What appears here as a taxonomy may therefore be read as something else: an attempt to register a transformation in the conditions of reading itself.

If hypertext once described a technical structure — an arrangement of nodes and links — it has since become a cognitive habit. Navigation replaces progression. Selection replaces sequence. Commentary merges with authorship. The reader is no longer positioned before a closed work but within a field of connections.

In this sense, the typology of hypertexts is inseparable from a broader cultural logic. The dispersive text anticipates the dispersive subject; the networked hypertext mirrors the networked world. What began as a literary or technological experiment gradually reveals itself as a model of perception.

To examine hypertext, then, is not merely to classify textual forms. It is to approach the shifting architecture of contemporary consciousness — an architecture in which beginnings and endings, authors and readers, originals and references become increasingly provisional.

The question that follows is no longer how hypertexts are structured, but what kind of world makes such structures appear natural.