for - internet - history - Ted Nelson - early pioneer of World Wide Web and hypertext - advocated for visible connections - but failed to materialize

for - Indyweb dev - Indranet dev - Vannevar Bush - memex - Douglas Engelbart - Mother of all demonstrations - Ted Nelson - Project Xanadu - transclusion

Ted Nelson pensó en un sistema de información que incluso incluía la gestión de derechos de autor, pero no fue un desarrollo tecnológico "popular". Por otra parte los esquemas de metadatos bibliográficos, como el formato MARC, incluyen estos campos, exceptuando la firma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac

Ted Nelson felt visible connections between text were the most important part of his Xanadu project.

There are close parallels between these in digital spaces and songlines and related orality based mnemonic techniques.

quote ostensibly from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA

• for: history - hyperlink, history - Vannevar Bush, history - Ted Nelson, history - Doug Engelbart

• for: Ted Nelson, Xanadu, knowledge federation

• for: memex, Vannevar Bush, Indyweb, Ted Nelson

• quote
  • "paper enforces single sequence and there's no room for digression"
• author
  • Ted Nelson
• comment
  • Ted is alluding to the fact that our written text reflects SPOKEN text
  • Since spoken text is phonetic and produced by our vocal cords, and our vocal cords inherently only produce one sound at a time,
    • any written language that is built upon spoken language will reflect the same linear, sequential, temporal structure
  • with the advent of computing, and especially HTML, this becomes an UNNECESSARY LIMITATION

• quote
  • "when I was a teen, it seemed to me that paper was a prison"
• author
  • Ted Nelson

El mundo es un sistema de relaciones en constante cambio. Expresión-conexión: interconexión.

Se limitó el concepto de copiar y pegar a simplemente eso. ¿Porqué la humanidad no tiene herramientas de escritura decentes?

Tener la posibilidad de tener por ejemplo dos fuentes distintas en un mismo lado. De acortar la distancia.

https://www.enderverse.org/notes/indiexanadu.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCLCIw-HSJc

I'm curious if you knew if Nelson, Engelbart or any of their contemporaries had/maintained/used commonplace books or card indexes as precursors of their computing work? That is, those along the lines of those most commonly used by academics, for example as described by Markus Krajewski in Paper Machines (MIT Press, 2011) or even Beatrice Webb's Appendix C on Note Taking in My Apprenticeship (Longmans, 1926) in which she describes a slip (or index card)-based database method of scientific note taking. I've always felt that Vannevar Bush held things back unnecessarily by not mentioning commonplace book traditions in As We May Think.

https://ncase.me/nutshell/

For those interested in the ideas of annotations, inline footnotes, expandable text, additional context, stretch text, hovercards, etc., Nicky Case has recently released a new project called Nutshell (https://ncase.me/nutshell/) which has some fun user interface as well as code with which to play.

Historical Hypermedia: An Alternative History of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 and Implications for e-Research. .mp3. Berkeley School of Information Regents’ Lecture. UC Berkeley School of Information, 2010. https://archive.org/details/podcast_uc-berkeley-school-informat_historical-hypermedia-an-alte_1000088371512. archive.org.

https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/2010/historical-hypermedia-alternative-history-semantic-web-and-web-20-and-implications-e.

https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/audio/2010-10-20-vandenheuvel_0.mp3

Interface as Thing - book on Paul Otlet (not released, though he said he was working on it)

• W. Boyd Rayward 1994 expert on Otlet
• Otlet on annotation, visualization, of text
• TBL married internet and hypertext (ideas have sex)
• V. Bush As We May Think - crosslinks between microfilms, not in a computer context
• Ted Nelson 1965, hypermedia

t=540

• Michael Buckland book about machine developed by Emanuel Goldberg antecedent to memex
• Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine: Information, Invention, and Political Forces (New Directions in Information Management) by Michael Buckland (Libraries Unlimited, (March 31, 2006)
• Otlet and Goldsmith were precursors as well

four figures in his research: - Patrick Gattis - biologist, architect, diagrams of knowledge, metaphorical use of architecture; classification - Paul Otlet, Brussels born - Wilhelm Ostwalt - nobel prize in chemistry - Otto Neurath, philosophher, designer of isotype

Paul Otlet

• wrote bibliography on law
• book: Something on Bibliography #wanttoread
• universal decimal classification system
• mundaneum
• Le Corbusier - architect worked with Otlet for building for Mundaneum; See: https://socks-studio.com/2019/05/05/the-shape-of-knowledge-the-mundaneum-by-paul-otlet-and-henri-la-fontaine/

Otlet was interested in both the physical as well as the intangible aspects of the Mundaneum including as an idea, an institution, method, body of work, building, and as a network.<br /> (#t=1020)

Early iPhone diagram?!?

(roughly) armchair to do the things in the web of life (Nelson quote) (get full quote and source for use) (circa 19:30)

compares Otlet to TBL

Michael Buckland 1991 <s>internet of things</s> coinage - did I hear this correctly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things lists different coinages

Turns out it was "information as thing"<br /> See: https://hypothes.is/a/kXIjaBaOEe2MEi8Fav6QsA

sugane brierre and otlet<br /> "everything can be in a document"<br /> importance of evidence

The idea of evidence implies a passiveness. For evidence to be useful then, one has to actively do something with it, use it for comparison or analysis with other facts, knowledge, or evidence for it to become useful.

transformation of sound into writing<br /> movement of pieces at will to create a new combination of facts - combinatorial creativity idea here. (circa 27:30 and again at 29:00)<br /> not just efficiency but improvement and purification of humanity

put things on system cards and put them into new orders<br /> breaking things down into smaller pieces, whether books or index cards....

Otlet doesn't use the word interfaces, but makes these with language and annotations that existed at the time. (32:00)

Otlet created diagrams and images to expand his ideas

Otlet used octagonal index cards to create extra edges to connect them together by topic. This created more complex trees of knowledge beyond the four sides of standard index cards. (diagram referenced, but not contained in the lecture)

Otlet is interested in the "materialization of knowledge": how to transfer idea into an object. (How does this related to mnemonic devices for daily use? How does it relate to broader material culture?)

Otlet inspired by work of Herbert Spencer

space an time are forms of thought, I hold myself that they are forms of things. (get full quote and source) from spencer influence of Plato's forms here?

Otlet visualization of information (38:20)

S. R. Ranganathan may have had these ideas about visualization too

atomization of knowledge; atomist approach 19th century examples:S. R. Ranganathan, Wilson, Otlet, Richardson, (atomic notes are NOT new either...) (39:40)

Otlet creates interfaces to the world - time with cyclic representation - space - moving cube along time and space axes as well as levels of detail - comparison to Ted Nelson and zoomable screens even though Ted Nelson didn't have screens, but simulated them in paper - globes

Katie Berner - semantic web; claims that reporting a scholarly result won't be a paper, but a nugget of information that links to other portions of the network of knowledge.<br /> (so not just one's own system, but the global commons system)

Mention of Open Annotation (Consortium) Collaboration:<br /> - Jane Hunter, University of Australia Brisbane & Queensland<br /> - Tim Cole, University of Urbana Champaign<br /> - Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory annotations of various media<br /> see:<br /> - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311366469_The_Open_Annotation_Collaboration_A_Data_Model_to_Support_Sharing_and_Interoperability_of_Scholarly_Annotations - http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130205/index.html - http://www.openannotation.org/PhaseIII_Team.html

trust must be put into the system for it to work

coloration of the provenance of links goes back to Otlet (~52:00)

Creativity is the friction of the attention space at the moments when the structural blocks are grinding against one another the hardest. —Randall Collins (1998) The sociology of philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (p.76)

The public Indyweb is eminently designed as a public space for holding deep, continuous, asynchronous conversations with provenance. That is, if the partcipant consents to public conversation, ideas can be publicly tracked. Whoever reads your public ideas can be traced.and this paper trail is immutably stored, allowing anyone to see the evolution of ideas in real time.

In theory, this does away with the need for patents and copyrights, as all ideas are traceable to the contributors and each contribution is also known. This allows for the system to embed crowdsourced microfunding, supporting the best (upvoted) ideas to surface.

Participants in the public Indyweb ecosystem are called Indyviduals and each has their own private data hub called an Indyhub. Since Indyweb is interpersonal computing, each person is the center of their indyweb universe. Through the discoverability built into the Indyweb, anything of immediate salience is surfaced to your private hub. No applications can use your data unless you give exact permission on which data to use and how it shall be used. Each user sets the condition for their data usage. Instead of a user's data stored in silos of servers all over the web as is current practice, any data you generate, in conversation, media or data files is immediately accessible on your own Indyhub.

Indyweb supports symmathesy, the exchange of ideas based on an appropriate epistemological model that reflects how human INTERbeings learn as a dynamic interplay between individual and collective learning. Furthermore, all data that participants choose to share is immutably stored on content addressable web3 storage forever. It is not concentrated on any server but the data is stored on the entire IPFS network:

"IPFS works through content adddressibility. It is a peer-to-peer (p2p) storage network. Content is accessible through peers located anywhere in the world, that might relay information, store it, or do both. IPFS knows how to find what you ask for using its content address rather than its location.

There are three fundamental principles to understanding IPFS:

Unique identification via content addressing Content linking via directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) Content discovery via distributed hash tables (DHTs)" (Source: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/how-ipfs-works/)

The privacy, scalability, discoverability, public immutability and provenance of the public Indyweb makes it ideal for supporting hyperconversations that emerge tomorrows collectively emergent solutions. It is based on the principles of thought augmentation developed by computer industry pioneers such as Doug Englebart and Ted Nelson who many decades earlier in their prescience foresaw the need for computing tools to augment thought and provide the ability to form Network Improvement Communities (NIC) to solve a new generation of complex human challenges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Gordon Brander</span> in "Slouching toward Xanadu: a roundup of block reference mechanisms https://t.co/CxSm0bZjHu" (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2022 17:12:12</time>)</cite></small>

Discussion of some prior art leading up to Google's text fragment links.

Me gusta que algunas de sus ideas, a pesar de no ser tan populares, están dispersas y han persistido en el desarrollo de algunas tecnologías, como la transclusión que es posible hacerla en herramientas como TiddlyWiki

I love that Ted was prescient enough to give this 5 stars.

These "zippered lists" are the first mention of what would later become known as "Xanalogical storage", and ultimately as "transclusions".

So very close in spirit to Xanadu.