Hypertext structure

Although seven years are somewhat close to eternity in the fast paced World Wide Web, Gerdes’ (1999) book chapter on hypertext from a psychological point of view is still a standard. Gerdes says that a hierarchic hypertext structure is superior vs. linear and fully networked structures.

Today I found a cool applet that displays any given website as a graph. The picture above displays the hierarchy and complexity of parcival.org (the black dot is the root node). How complex are you?

Gerdes, H. (1999). Hypertext. In B. Batinic (Ed.): Internet für Psychologen. Göttingen: Hogrefe.

EDIT: On a second look, after my excitation has calmed down, I realized that I am talking nonsense. The applet visualizes the complexity of a webpage and not of a website. In other words, the applet is not applicable to the findings of Gerdes – but it’s a cool tool to visualize the complexity of a webpage instead.

EDIT: On a third look, I know why I fell for that mistake: Aharef doesn’t know the difference between a webpage and a website. However, since the author is German speaking, it’s easy to do the mistake. In German, the word “Webseite” (= webpage) is very similar to the English word “website”, but the meaning’s different.

EDIT: On a fourth look, I found an applet that visualizes the structure of an entire website. Unfortunately, it’s a perfect example for why “cool looking” isn’t always the same as “clearly understandable”.

The picture above visualizes the complexity of parcival.org as a website and is applicable to Gerdes. Unfortunately, the applet offers no zoom and rotation functions so its information is close to useless.