Web Inventors

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Web Inventors

• Week 12
• LCC 2700 Intro to Computational Media
• Spring 2005
• David Jimison

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Vannevar Bush

• Born in 1890
• Taught at MIT and built an anolog computer for
  differential equations.
• Became Chairman of the National Defense Research
  Committee
• Worked on the Manhattan Project, and helped to
  found the National Science Foundation
• Disliked the humanities and social sciences, and
  consequentially did not have a historical
  understanding of his Memex.

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As we may think (1945)

• Expansion in human knowledge
• No way to navigate the fruits of print culture
• Memex machine
• Based on microfiche, not digital
• Architecture of associated trails, forged by
  experts

Bush was a leader of military research during
WWII, and an architect of the post-war
military-industrial-university research
establishment
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Bushs Proposed Memex (1945)
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Bushs Trail is a series of links(this passage
is also quoted by Nelson)

• When the user is building a trail, he names it,
  inserts the name in his code book, and taps it
  out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items
  to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing
  positions. ... The user taps a single key, and
  these items are permanently joined.
• Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items
  is in view, the other can be instantly recalled
  merely by tapping a button . Moreover when
  numerous items have been thus joined together to
  form a trail, they can be reviewedexactly as
  though the physical items had beenbound
  togethermore than this, for any item can be
  joined to numerous trails.

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Idea of the Trail, Trail-blazer

• Connected to American culture exploration of the
  frontier a defining experience and myth
• Googles success based on weighing links,
  calculating authority of the pointer
• Participatory nature of the digital medium
  supports multiple trail-blazers, criss-crossing,
  interconnnected trails
• Network architecture supports multiple routes
• Need for new indexing, segmenting, and linking
  structures to fully implement this concept

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The Legacy of Bush
Voice Recognition Head Mounted Camera My Lifes
Bits http//research.microsoft.com/ barc/MediaPre
sence/ MyLifeBits.aspx
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Ted Nelson Hypertext (1965)

• A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing ,
  and the Indeterminate
• Wedded V. Bushs memex to digital technology,
  calling for digital associationist encyclopedic
  information resource
• Coined the term hypertext
• Architecture of Entry, List, Link
• Subversion of hierarchy part of 1960s frame of
  mind
• Systems became overly complex and never
  implemented (Xanadu)

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Nelsons definition of hypertext (1965)

• A body of written or pictorial material
  interconnected in such a complex way that it
  could not conveniently be presented or represened
  on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of
  its contents and their interrelations it may
  contain annotations, additions and footnotes from
  scholars who have examined it.Such a system
  could grow indefinitely, gradually including more
  and more of the worlds written knowledge.
  However its internal file structure would have to
  be built to accept growth, change and complex
  informational arrangements.

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Xanadu

• Nelson began working on non-sequential writing
  while a graduate student at Harvard
• Name references Samuel Coleridges opium induced
  poem Kubla Khan
• Published his ideas in 1974 as Computer Lib/Dream
  Machine
• Formed a group to work on the project, which was
  eventually funded as Autodesk by Xerox Parc
• After the groups collapse, released the Xanadu
  code as a means to overturn software patents
• http//xanadu.com/tech/

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Nelson against the Web

• Nelson dislikes the structure of the world wide
  web
• Xanadu allows for files to contain each other,
  known as transclusion
• Considered information retrieval similar to RSS
  feeds
• Nelsons Xanadu is considered to have been too
  large of a scope, and still does not work.