Text in the computer age

Notes

"As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush (1945)

Bush was director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, overseeing the Manhattan Project, radar, and weapons research. The essay was written at the war's end. Scientists had produced an enormous body of knowledge; the question was what to do with it next. The memex was imagined as a personal tool for an individual researcher, not a public network, not shared. One machine/private library/usr.

Anticipates the information society.

Imagines a device called "memex" based on technologies thought to be near-future advances:

Technology:



"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. .... A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers."






Memex diagram from the 1945 Life magazine article
Figures from the September 10,1945 Life magazine article "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush.




If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard... A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf.

...

[Associative indexing]:
All this is conventional.....
The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

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.
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed.... It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book.


The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.


Diagram illustrating associative indexing: two items on adjacent screens linked into a named trail through a code button and code book; below, a chain of items forms a main trail with an inserted comment, branching into a side trail through elasticity textbooks, tables of constants, and a personal page of analysis
Diagram (not from the 1945 article) illustrating the trail-building process described above.


Several years later, his talk with a friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations, even of vital interest. He has an example.... In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.




Q: what do we have today?
Notes

Ted Nelson

Coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963.
His proposed system, Xanadu, has been in development since 1960 (was never finished).

Literature is a system of interconnected writings.
Citations, quotes, references...etc


They can all be linked. A document can be thought of as a complex web held together by invisible threads and rubber bands

Ted Nelson diagram 1


Think of the process of making editorial changes as retwisting this braid when its parts are rearranged, added or subtracted...

Ted Nelson diagram 2 Ted Nelson diagram 3


...and imagine that a document is a snapshot in time. A document is a collection of fragments that change over time and the present version of the document is a mere collection of the most recent version of that fragment.


the user of this system may scroll in time as well as space, watching the changes in a given passage as the system enacts its successive modifications .

- historical backtracking
- create alternative versions from different collection of fragments (summary, full text version of text. Or different configuration Boeing 747 design)



Ted Nelson diagram 4

the links were not just metaphorical but actual ones that can be traced, then quotes can be truly attributed to the original source.

Design for a storage system:





"HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT -- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management." (Nelson)

Jaron Lanier explains the difference between the World Wide Web and Nelson's vision, and the implications:

"A core technical difference between a Nelsonian network and what we have become familiar with online is that [Nelson's] network links were two-way instead of one-way. In a network with two-way links, each node knows what other nodes are linked to it. ... Two-way linking would preserve context. It's a small simple change in how online information should be stored that couldn't have vaster implications for culture and the economy."

from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

With one-way links, creators are severed from what they make: a page can link to you without your knowledge, quote you without attribution, or disappear without trace. Nelson saw this not as a technical inconvenience but as a structural problem with consequences for authorship, ownership, and culture.

Notes

A lineage

Year Who What / tradeoff
1945 Vannevar Bush — "As We May Think" Associative linking as a personal research tool. One machine, one user, private library. No network.
1963 Ted Nelson — coins "hypertext", begins Xanadu Global system of two-way links, versioning, transclusion, automatic attribution, micropayments. Ideally correct — never shipped.
1989 Tim Berners-Lee — proposes the World Wide Web One-way links, no versioning, no attribution. Built at CERN for sharing documents across institutions. Deliberately simple — make it easy enough that people actually use it.

Each built on the previous but made different tradeoffs. The web won not because it was the best design but because it was the most immediately deployable. Nelson has called it a catastrophic mistake. Berners-Lee later said he regrets the // in URLs — unnecessary characters, ships sailed.

Notes

Comics and Web?

Fracturing of Space & Time

Scott McCloud diagram on panel transitions











Comics panel transition types
Comics panel fracture both time and space (Scott McCloud)

Source: From "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud



HTML

Here. (There link A, link B)
Notes

Transition




moment to moment example

moment to moment

same subject in continuous moment; least amount of time; mere seconds have passed between images
action to action example

action to action

same subject in continuous action; longer time between images than M2M; the middle of an action is skipped, our brain closes the gap
subject to subject example

subject to subject

same scene, different subjects; series of vantage points to get an idea across
scene to scene example

scene to scene

jumps in space and/or time; different or same subjects in different scenes
aspect to aspect example

aspect to aspect

sense of place or atmosphere; used to establish tone/mood; where nothing happens; zoom lens
non-sequitur example

non-sequitur

panels have no apparent relationship to one another

The six types range from least to most imaginative closure required — moment-to-moment asks almost nothing of the reader; non-sequitur demands everything. Aspect-to-aspect is notably more common in manga than in Western comics: it creates a contemplative, non-narrative experience of place and mood rather than advancing plot.

Source: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (1993)
The six transition types range from least to most imaginative closure required: moment-to-moment asks almost nothing; non-sequitur demands everything. McCloud notes that aspect-to-aspect is far more common in manga than in Western comics — it creates a contemplative, non-narrative experience of space and mood rather than plot.

Closure

The space between panels is called the gutter. Nothing is shown there, yet the reader experiences continuity. McCloud calls this closure: the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole.

"Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality."

"In the gutter, the human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea."

The reader is not passive, they are doing cognitive work in every gap.


The gutter in hypertext

When you click a link, you experience something structurally similar to the gutter: one moment you are here, the next you are somewhere else. The browser does not show you the transition — only the before and after. You supply the connection.


The structure of how you connect pages and what you leave in the gap is a design decision. It is also an artistic one.

Diagram mapping three kinds of hyperlinks to comics' gutter transitions: an anchor link within a page is like moment-to-moment closure, a small gap in the same context; a link to a related page is like scene-to-scene closure, a jump the reader infers; a link with no visible context is like a non-sequitur, where the reader must make meaning from nothing. A scale at the bottom shows closure required rising left to right.
Diagram illustrating the three link types above as gutters of increasing width.

Closure is McCloud's central argument: comics are a participatory medium. The reader co-authors the experience. This is directly analogous to hypertext — the author controls what is shown, but the reader controls the order and supplies the connections. This is why hypertext is more than just text with links; the structure of the linking is itself a form of expression. Worth asking students: when you design a hypertext work, what are you leaving in the gutter?

HTML Links

What can be linked to what?

Character ↔ Character
Character ↔ Word
Character ↔ Page
Word      ↔ Page
Word      ↔ Word
Page      ↔ Page
Parts of page ↔ parts of (same) page
Image     ↔ Character / Word / Page
Image     ↔ Image

Audio / sound / video?

Each of these is a different kind of gap — a different kind of gutter. The transition type (McCloud) shapes what the reader experiences between here and there.


Olia Lialina — summer [Rhizome article]
The link list is meant to expand students' sense of what a "link" can be — not just page-to-page, but character-to-character (a letter linking to a sound), image-to-image (clicking an image reveals another), etc. The gutter note connects back to McCloud: the gap between what's linked matters as much as the destination.

Frame/Window

Notes

More possibilities

Notes