Node vs. Episode:

There has been much discussion over what to call the destination spots of links. Do we call them “spaces,” (as is used with Storyspace) “documents,” “pages” (as is commonly used on the Web), “cards” (as was used with Hypercard), “nodes” or one of a variety of other names? (For a fuller discussion of the different terms used, see Jim Whitehead’s “As We Do Write: Hyper-Terms for Hypertext” [125] .)

In Writing Space, Jay Bolter used the term “episode” for these spaces. He writes, “episodes may be paragraphs of prose or poetry, they may include bit-mapped graphics as well, and they may be of any length. Their length will establish the rhythm of the story—how long the reader remains a conventional reader before he or she is called on to participate in the selection of the next episode” [74, p. 122] . This term has not really caught on in the way that Bolter used it, and Jim Rosenberg later re-purposed the term [109].

For Rosenberg, the term “episode” refers to “whatever group of actemes cohere in the reader’s mind as a tangible entity” [109, p. 23] . If we understand an acteme as the lowest level of activity within a hypertext, then an episode involves the act of developing a reading by first piecing together fragments from the process of reading the hypertext itself. Thus, rather than defining episodes as physical (coded/written) parts of the hypertext structure, Rosenberg uses the term to refer to units constructed by readers as part of the act of reading. Throughout our text, we have used episode in this same way.

Yet, this still leaves what to call the physical space itself. What do we call the part of the hypertext that exists between the links and presents content? For this text, we have used the term “node” as the most neutral term because it is commonly used and does not refer to any one particular hypertext system.