The Departure from the Linear Text

For millennia, ever since the advent of writing, the mediation of complex knowledge has been restricted to the written transfer of information through linear text. Academic communication primarily uses linear text, even for mathematical and scientific matters.   For around 20 years, the progressive digitisation of academia has enabled the visualisation of complex contexts and their propagation on a massive scale without being bound to linear text.    The externalisation of knowledge and its transfer from one person to another can now also take place with the aid of alternative techniques.  This is virtually tantamount to a revolution in academic communication.  Particularly for libraries, however, this poses an enormous challenge as, for the last 2,000 years, they have been geared towards storing and disseminating academic results almost exclusively as textual forms.