Publishing and Hypermedia

Publishing can help us to preserve the results of an oral performance; but in the end the reader is limited to the same linear arrangement of the information that we get from the oral performance. Computer technology can do better than that, because it can help us create a set-up which helps us not only to read the text of a narrative performance but, with the aid of a web of related ideas that define the world behind the tale, enable us to rearrange the sequence of the tale in a way preferable to us. That set-up is the hypertext or the hypermedia. Through it, we enter into a dialogue with the tale in an even more direct way than the live audience of its performance.