By the middle of the XVII century, the need to produce new and unexpected knowledge through the creation of connections between content had emerged. One relevant work to mention is by Secondo Lancellotti (1583–1643): he created an index system in which he would insert “associative cross-references and pointers whenever and wherever possible, enabling the reader to surf through” all these annotations, “replacing reading with a type of early modern hypertext” (Cevolini, 2020).
