Starting in 2002 I had a Salon Blog called, “GoogObits: Obituaries and essays augmented by Google seaches. There is a lot to learn from the dead.“
The idea was that I took the complete text of well-written, interesting obituaries from the New York Times, pasted them into my blog, and annotated the text with links.
Here are some examples from a GoogObit titled, “Lynda Van Devanter, Nurse Who Became Chronicler of Her Wartime Pain, Dies at 55“
Sometimes the links buttressed the text of the obituary, linking to books and other original works mentioned in the obituary, like in this paragraph:
Ms. Van Devanter’s memoir was “Home Before Morning” (Beaufort Books, 1983), which helped inspire the television series “China Beach.” In it, she wrote of her transformation in 1969 from “an all-American girl” and idealistic supporter of the war into an overworked, confused nurse at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, where the gore and horrors of war were constantly before her.
Sometimes the links were instructive in prosaic ways not intended in the original text, like linking “food stamps” to more information at the Social Security office:
“I was on unemployment and food stamps and in therapy,” Ms. Van Devanter said in an interview in 1981. “But I never told my therapist I was in Vietnam. That’s how deeply I buried it.”
Sometimes the links were sideways, using the found text of the obituary to make a completely unrelated point, like linking the word “Misrepresentation” to a page about the Iran-Contra Affair:
The critics, who called themselves Nurses Against Misrepresentation, or Nam, complained that Ms. Van Devanter’s account could leave relatives of dead soldiers believing that their kin had not received the best possible treatment.
This way the original text serves as a platform for other discourse. Civilly.
My overall term for this is “hypertext enjambment”. People don’t do enough of that, I think. Links are mainly boring and straight on the internet. The word “red” links to something red. A link on the phrase “Governor Rockefeller” would never surprise you.
There’s more to be had. All hail hypertext enjambment.