Hypertext and Association

Contemporary debates concerning hypertext theory often question the place of the written word in visual media. Contrary to this, I argue that hypertext is first and foremost a visual, graphical medium. It is a way of spatialising ideas into discrete units which might be grasped by the mind and efficiently retrieved along lines of connections: association. This technique has a long history. There is a strange continuity in metaphor between early associationist models of memory, classical Greek systems of place-memory loci, sixteenth and seventeenth century philosophies of memory retrieval and the history of hypertext. I argue that hypertext belongs to this lineage.