Though the Bayeux Tapestry is not a digital hypertext, it is most certainly hypertextual. Scholars have long considered the Tapestry to be "intertextual" in the way it references other visual and literary analogues. The Tapestry implicitly connects internal discursive elements through its own interactive nature. In the embroidery, thematic links occur on and across its space it occupies as icon, inscription, gesture, border combine to present multiple but related lines of interpretation. Like a hypertext, the Tapestry does not string these lines together in sequence, but through a linked network of interpretable moments.

My dissertation addresses the previous ways in which the Tapestry has been presented more as text than hypertextual textile. Further, my work identifies new ways in which to assess the nature of the Tapestry's substance, based on the interaction and intra-action of the work's narrative, material and contextual elements.

Chapter 2 explores the visual nature of the Bayeux Tapestry's narrative, and how the expression of its pictorial and inscribed account differs from its literary analogues. This chapter studies the work's aspects of linearity, chronological order, presentational meaning, spatial dimension and monumental nature.

Chapter 3 explores the inscriptions of the Tapestry investigates the work's enculturating relationship between word, deed and gesture. The study of these inscriptions reveals the careful construction of the Tapestry's propagandistic message and the performative nature of its expression. In addition, the tense, grammar and punctuation of the inscriptions link the action of the Tapestry from past to present, and mark how the Tapestry was designed for several levels of literacy and pedagogy.

Chapter 4 studies past, present and future ways of re-presenting the Tapestry. The first half details the previous efforts of antiquarians and scholars to make accessible the Tapestry and its substantial critical apparatus, while the second half reviews the ideas behind my design of a digital edition of the Bayeux Tapestry.

The final chapter of my dissertation is not a chapter in the traditional, "textual" sense of a term. To further the study of the Tapestry, I have created a digital edition of the work, executed as a multi-platform CD-ROM program software.