Montage

In Montage, several distinct writing spaces appear simultaneously, reinforcing each other while retaining their separate identities. Montage is most frequently effected through superimposed windows which establish connections across the boundaries of explicit nodes and links. Montage is prominent in the pedagogical hypertexts of George P. Landow [47, 51], each of which commences with a montage offering multiple points of departure [49]. Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl [37] also uses windowed montage with intriguing effect. Christiane Paul's Unreal City [65] breaks the frame of the screen, using montage between the screen and a conventional paper book, held in the viewer's hand. An iconic representation of the printed page mediates the montage, thus freeing screen real-estate.

Figure 2. A montage from Patchwork Girl [37] as it appears in Writing At The Edge [50]

Montage is a fact of life in the design of museums and art galleries, where disparate visual works are collected in a limited space. Thoughtful architecture and clever arrangement may minimize the disruptive effects of montage, while juxtaposition may suggest new insights. Some art-historical hypertexts attempt to recreate the architectural montage of real or virtual museum spaces; often, as in the masterful Musée d'Orsay: Visite Virtuelle, the subject of such a hypertext becomes the museum itself rather than its collections [15].

Trellis [72] is extensively -- perhaps primarily -- concerned with describing and managing montage.

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