The algorithmic discovery of latent connections within a corpus, presenting them as suggestions rather than claims about semantic structure.
Hard and soft links
Where explicit hyperlinks and references are author-curated (hard data), dynamic hyperlinks are inferred (soft). A heatmap layer shows connection density across the corpus — varying intensity signals how many related mentions exist elsewhere. Selecting text surfaces those mentions ranked by similarity.
The implicit network is irreducibly dense — any sufficiently rich corpus contains countless valid relationships. Dynamic hyperlinks acknowledge this by treating discoveries as exploration aids, not as “true” structure. This humility distinguishes them from explicit links, where actors commit to meaningful connections.
Related components
- Reference — explicit, typed entity linking (the hard counterpart)
- Bubble menu — selection-anchored interaction surface
Resources & references
- Inspired by Linus Lee’s Hyperlink Maximalism and the Notation app.
- Rao (2009) The rhetoric of the hyperlink — the reader-side complement to the “irreducibly dense network” claim: each reader’s click-trail produces a unique text from the same hypertext.
Consequences
- latent connections are on the surface as ranked suggestions, which lets the actor follow them without the system having claimed any of them are real structure
- the suggested links are unfamiliar by construction — nobody authored them, so the actor has no prior expectation of where any one leads, and link text alone no longer tells them
- the corpus holds more valid connections than anyone can read, so what the actor sees is whatever survived a ranking and a cutoff — and both are invisible to them
Related patterns
Complements
- Link preview — inferred links benefit from preview since actors have less prior expectation of the destination
- Suggestion — suggested actions and connections
- Annotation — user-created markers (hard) and system-generated insights (soft)
- Deep linking — URL-based addressability
Related
Preceded by
- Data & Information — hard and soft data layering
Enabled by
- Prose — Dynamic hyperlinks are prose-as-affordance: the link text is the prose, and the move from authored phrase to actionable target is itself the prose move.