We considered how a scholarly article might look in a hyper structure. With that in mind, we took an existing, unpublished article and recreated a hyper version.
The article made the claim that Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, was the first successful attempt to write a book in cubist style. To support that claim, we were forced to include numerous full-color images along with extensive histories and descriptions of the nature of Cubism. A viable article making this claim would really need to be 100 or more pages long.
We reasoned that a reader need not necessarily read the entire article and so adopted a structure based on the nature of long reports written by good technical communicators. They usually recognize that nobody reads the entire report, so they write each segment specifically for the most common readers. For example, the executive summary is largely read by professional people who may or may not be informed on the topic, while the chemical analysis will be largely read by informed professionals.
We applied this structure to our hyper model, writing what might be considered an executive summary (or an extended introduction) with links out to all of the proofs. If someone reading the summary came across a claim that they didn't understand or didn't believe, they could read the extended proof. If they needed more information about that proof, it was available in additional links to histories, citations, and other resources.
Positives
This creates a powerful new academic genre, making it possible to explore combinations of media (e.g., music-literature, art-music, film, etc.)
Negatives
We found no negatives.
Conclusion
We think that this is a powerful academic genre that will eventually be in common use in the future. It is very similar to current practices that have evolve since then for Internet applications.
Publications
1993 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.