Abstract :
In several disciplines, sketching is used as a fundamental activity in the creation of new ideas. Theodor Holm Nelson, who coined the term hypertext, used sketching to conceptualize the way that hypertext would create dynamic, crosslinkable structures in order to escape the hierarchies of paper documents. Hypertext, as envisioned by Nelson, promised to revolutionize how documents could be viewed and browsed within electronic environments, such as the Internet. Yet, despite the prevalence of hypertext within the Internet, many of the concepts represented in these sketches remain unrealized. This article investigates Nelson´s early conceptual sketches of hypertext, in which he envisioned how it would affect people´s interaction with electronic documents, and also explores the larger role of sketching in technical innovation
