When I talk about the field of hypertext, I am mostly talking about interactive and electronic literature and criticism about that literature. For now, common definitions of hypertext are inclusive enough. Most critics and authors use the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" interchangably, and recognize most interactive uses of text and/or audiovisuals as hypertext. I prefer hypertext to hypermedia because the word hypertext focuses the criticism of these works as texts in a literary tradition, while still includes more than just hypernovels or hyperfiction. I believe there are many perspectives to approach hypertext from, such as the fields of computer science, the visual arts, cinema studies, or electronic games. My perspective includes a consideration of aesthetics important to all of these fields, but I am always primarily reading hypertexts as texts.

I started my study of hypertext knowing very little of the broad picture of hypertext and hypermedia as a field of study or a genre of writing, but I came into it with some print-based biases. I started my investigations into the field with the canon of hypertext, focusing on hyper "novels" or "short stories" because they are extremely prevalent, criticized often, and I think they're also very good literature. You might want to call these hyperfictions, but I think this term has a tendency to separate itself generically from hyperpoetry, and there are elements of poetry in several of the novel-length works I've read. In fact, I view a lot of the hypertext I've read as a marriage of flash fiction, prose-poetry, and user interfaces that are characteristic of the Web.

Most of all, I am using the term hypertext because of the term's general recognition in literary studies as a legitimate medium or genre. Two other excellent alternatives I have seen are ergodic literature (from Espen Aarseth) and interactive narratives (from J. Yellowlees Douglas). Although I have a great familiarity and affinity for the ergodic literature that is usually considered entertainment (games, MUDs, etc.), I am interested in literature that is more human-authored than the texts in Aarseth's study (many of which are generated by computer or by a community of computer users). I am wary of the term interactive narrative because it implies that a narrative must exist in a hypertext, and in order to keep the medium's options as open as possible, I don't want to start off with any assumptions.

Some other biases to keep in mind. There are some great hypertexts that I rarely mention or don't mention at all that are as much a part of the canon as the works I do talk about, but I'm working under space and time constraints. I have tended to veer away from studying anything self-labelled as hyperpoetry (i.e., electronic incarnations/translations of poetry), and I have avoided reading non-fictional hypertext (and its criticism) not directly related to this thesis like David Kolb's Socrates in the Labyrinth and Christiane Paul's Unreal City.