Abstract
Contextualization—particularly as exemplified in the history of social and political theory—has been the predominant theme in intellectual historiography for the last quarter of a century. In particular, pragmatists like Quentin Skinner and Richard Rorty have encouraged us to view the text as having as many meanings as there are contexts within which the text might be placed, and the contexts themselves as reflecting the special interests and purposes of the interpreter. Meanwhile, scholars in the humanities have been relatively slow to apply advanced information technologies to the problem of interpreting such texts; but the emergence of more powerful hypertext systems has led writers like George Landow and Jay Bolter to suggest a convergence between this technology and our understanding of the problems of interpretation. Still more recently, work based on cognitive flexibility theory suggests that there are good reasons to believe that people actually can learn and understand certain kinds of texts better through the use of these systems. In sum, there appears to be a convergence between cognitive psychology, interpretive theory, and advanced information technologies.
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