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

Comment by reviewer_SorenPold: Both the article in itself and its design in DJMP raise questions about the architecture and materiality of the book and publishing, including academic publishing, through its discussion of artist books and open access. The interesting discussion is of course how ways of publishing, textual formats, ways of writing, editing and reading relate to different kinds of politics, e.g. institutional, economic, ways of ascertaining quality, etc. These are very important questions, both in global politics (e.g. the discussions on ‘fake news’ and its relation to social media), in institutional politics (e.g. the standards and quality assessment of academic publishing) and in art and literature (e.g. whether readers are able and willing to actually read and understand different forms of texts). In general, it is a question of how the text mediates and transforms the reading, how meaning is produced and how/whether it reaches an audience, whether it is productive of e.g. meaning, knowledge and/or action. It is a discussion of the text between mediator and tool.

It is noteworthy how little has happened after several decades of digital publishing and a plethora of death sentences for books and print: Even though some things have changed and are changing e.g. WWW’s ‘non-linear’ and labyrinthine, multi-cursal (Aarseth 1997) hypertext and the collaborative writing tools and platforms like wikis and social media are part of our everyday textual culture, we still have books and journals. Why? Is it because, as Stuart Moulthrop suggested already in 1991, that although hypertext affords new visions about a shared writing space, the responsibility for changes of this magnitude come from a diverse elite (of software developers, literary theorists, legislators, capitalists) who despite their differences remain allegiant to the institutions of intellectual property (the book, the library, the university, the publishing house). In other words, Moulthrop suggests that “it seems equally possible that engagement with interactive media will follow the path of reaction, not revolution.” (Moulthroup 2003 (1991), Andersen and Pold 2014). Is it because of institutional conservatism, because readers are conservative and slowly adapting (as the rather slow development of hypertext seems to suggest), is it a political battle (as the current discussions of the role of digital media, social media versus traditional media might suggest)? And to which extend is it a battle we should go for, if it includes breaking down the kinds of authority that comes with established publication formats and editorial processes (at least the current political climate raises some concerns).

I know that many of these concerns are afterthoughts to an article and a design done before the current situation, and in this sense, they are more reflections that might be relevant for further work. However, the questions remain, whether hypertext and collaborative authoring always leads to more freedom and productive reading/writing? Whether deconstructing the order of the text and its extended argument is always a good thing? We have of course examples of great hypertextual formats that function well as tools and presentation of knowledge, e.g. the encyclopedia, but maybe there are also good reasons to preserve the extended argument of the book and the article? Today it seems simply wrong to assert that "hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice” (Landow 1992) faced with Trump and Wilders’ tweets. Consequently, I think, the argument of the article and its design could relate to the history of hypertext and electronic literature, though the discussion of artist books and open access publishing is also relevant.

The implementation in DJMP is in many ways exemplary and manages to present the article in nice ways, including the posters, the ability to comment and follow keywords. It allows its reader to access and use the text in different ways, and gives the valuable possibility of commenting and reading other people’s comments. In this it also follows paths from hypertext and electronic literature/digital culture, e.g. Electronic Book Review of A Peer Reviewed Journal About_. The design in many ways affords that it can do as it ‘preaches’, and in this way experiments with different ways of publishing academic texts. This is needed and current academia is not open enough to these kinds of experiments, that are, as argued, much more than making open access a homogeneous project – there is a need for an ongoing critical struggle that includes the forms of publishing. This is necessary, also to reach the popular masses on Twitter and Facebook! Currently, it is a problem, that standardizations within academia driven by STEM standards does not invite for such experiments that would in many cases not even be accepted as examples of academic publication. Also, I want to finish emphasizing that my discussion above is mainly stirred by the qualities of the publication, the important questions and reflections it raises.

References

Andersen, C. U. and S. B. Pold (2014). "Post-digital Books and Disruptive Literary Machines: Digital Literature Beyond the Gutenberg and Google Galaxies." Formules 2014(18): 164-183.<br /> Landow, G. P. (1992). Hypertext the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Baltimore, Md, Johns Hopkins University Press.<br /> Moulthroup, S. (2003 (1991)). You Say You Want a Revolution. The New Media Reader. N. W.-F. N. Montfort. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, The MIT Press: 691-704. <br /> Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore, Md., Johns Hopkins University Press.

Even in writing his book, which takes the form of a numbered and indexed card index, he's making explicit links to the similar card index which he made in volume 1 of the book. It's as if he's created his own hypertext of linked material between the two volumes.

Krapp, Peter. “Hypertext Avant La Lettre.” In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas W. Keenan, 1st ed., 432–51. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Samizdat copy available at: https://www.krapp.org/pdf/hypertextavant.pdf.

Great attitude.

A subset of Ted Nelson's envisioned transcopyright system

Profile of Ted Nelson

an elegant little statement

in 2023, I find myself missing the seeming constancy of the old "gang":

• https://www.kickscondor.com/ - inactive since July 2022
• https://philosopher.life - site seems to have gone offline in late December 2022
• https://sphygm.us/ - slowed down in late 2021 and quit updates in January 2022
• https://wiki.waifu.haus/ - seems to be considering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_Marshall_(hypertext_developer)

https://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~cathycmarshall/viki-sidebar.html

Cathy Marshall was an early digital gardener!

I wonder if there's a good way to evolve wiki systems into the OS of the future by adding more sophisticated views and adding the abilities for computation. Seems like a good way to get multiplayer built in from the start. Maybe add the ability to have content addressed items as well.

Clearly this is just historical context. I'm wondering if we still have issues with hypertext authoring. There seems to be a stronger intuition built up of how to separate pages of information. I'm curious if we could/should be doing better.

Informationswissenschaftliche Definition von Hypertext

The compositional approaches mentioned here are those of Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin.

What was Burrough's cut-up-fold-in technique?

Peter Krapp created a list of thinkers including Locke, Leibniz, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Barthes, Michel Leiris, Georges Perec, and Lévi-Strauss who used index cards in his essay Hypertext Avant La Lettre on the precursors of hypertext.

see also: Krapp, P. (2006) ‘Hypertext Avant La Lettre’, in W. H. K. Chun & T. Keenan (eds), New Media, Old Theory: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge: 359-373.

Notice that Krapp was the translator of Paper Machines About Cards & Catalogs, 1548 – 1929 (MIT Press, 2011) by Marcus Krajewski. Which was writing about hypertext and index cards first? Or did they simply influence each other?

No, no, and no. This is an interesting fallout from Ted's fatwa that links be kept "outside the file".

Link this to Henry James Korn's experimental novel/cards in the early 1970s and late 1990s hypertext fiction.

In 1998, Ben Shneiderman acknowledged the influence of Vannevar Bush's vision of the memex on his work on hypertext.

By crosslinking one's notes in a hypertext-like manner one is able to give them many different contexts. This linking and context shifting is a solid method for helping one's ideas to have sex with each other as a means of generating new ideas.

Is there a relationship between this idea of context shifting and modality shifting? Are these just examples of building blocks for tools of thought? Are they sifts on different axes? When might they be though of as the same? Compare and contrast this further.

One's lifetime of notes could be thought of as a hypertext work in progress that is designed to be open-ended.

https://jamesg.blog/2021/11/18/hypertext-coffee-pot

Introducing the HyperText Coffee Pot

El mundo de la informática no es sólo tecnicismo y deslumbramiento. Es una guerra continua por la política y los paradigmas del software. Con ideas todavía radicales, seguimos luchando. Esperamos la reivindicación, la última carcajada, y el reconocimiento como un estándar más: documentos electrónicos con conexiones visibles. /// Comentar con la traducción como un modo de estar completamente de acuerdo con este definición. Muchas veces hemos dicho, no es la tecnologia perse lo que nos mueve, es la apropiación social de esta y las implicaciones que tiene en nuestro habitar politico, social, cultural etc del mundo.

A thought by way of the Nelsonian school of hypertext:

Tim is quoted several times in this piece, which is to say that there is a larger body of content (say a recording of the interview, whether audio or a full transcript) from which this piece is borrowing snippets. Within the WWW worldview, that full record comprises a resource. Within the Nelsonian worldview of visible connections, at every place in the document where Tim is quoted, there should be an edge which the reader can traverse to reveal the unabridged record.

One thing I'd like forward-looking hypertext toolmakers to keep in mind is the ability for the tools to help people answer questions like "What led to legalanthology.ch hosting a copy of this document? Given a URL from one organization, is it possible to look at the graph of internal backlinks (let me focus narrowly on incoming edges originating from the same host)?"

Synapsen, a digital card index by Markus Krajewski

http://www.verzetteln.de/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Goodreads</span> in Markus Krajewski (Author of Paper Machines) | Goodreads (<time class='dt-published'>07/04/2021 00:22:32</time>)</cite></small>

This idea of playing hopscotch#%22Table_of_Instructions%22_and_structure) through a text reminds me of some mathematics texts I've come across where the author draws out a diagram of potential readings and which portions are prerequisites so that professors using the book might pick and choose chapters to skip in their presentations.

Also reminiscent of the Choose Your Own Adventure books from childhood too.

cross reference: [[John Barth]], [[Henry James Korn]] and [[experimental fiction]], and [[hypertext]]

Definition of lexia (or French lexie).

That neither content creators nor browser vendors are particularly concerned with the production and consumption of documents, as such, is precisely the issue. This is evident in the banner that the majority of the work has occurred under over the last 10+ years: they're the Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group.

No one, not even the most well-intentioned (such as the folks at Automattic who are responsible for the blogging software that made Christina's post here possible), see documents when they think of the Web. No, everything is an app—take this page, for example; even the "pages" that WordPress produces are facets of an application. Granted, it's an application meant for reading the written word (and meant for occasionally writing it), but make no mistake, it's an application first, and a "document" only by happenstance (i.e. the absence of any realistic alternative to HTML & co for application delivery).

In fact, HTML makes it very easy (true for the reasons that lead Mark to write that it can be copied and manipulated). It's contemporary authoring systems and the typical author-as-publisher and the choices they make that are what makes this difficult.

The future of rich media lies in striving to be more like dead media (or at least mining it for insights by better understanding it through thoughtful study), rather than the misguided attempts we've been living inside.

(This is something that I've done a 180 on in the last year or so.)

It is exactly that "timid" ("tepid"?) attempt at dynamism that has led to these circumstances.

Zu der im Working Paper angesprochenen "medienintegralen Verknüpfung von Dokumenten und Gegenständen" und deren Bezug auf Hypertextualität: In offen gehaltenen digitalen Publikationen (wie living handbooks) können stetig neue Knoten dazustoßen. Diesen Aspekt könnte man an dieser Stelle auch kurz erwähnen - in der Hypertextforschung häufig unter den Schlagwörtern "Prozessualität" oder "rhizomatisches Schreiben" verhandelt.

Siehe bereits bei Nelson (1993): Literary Machines, Vers. 93.1, S. 2/17.; zusammengefasst auch bei Żebrowska, Ewa (2013): Text – Bild – Hypertext. / Eibl (2004): Hypertext.

In diesem Zusammenhang ebenfalls relevant: Über die Verknüpfung von Knoten hinaus kann die Anreicherung mit Informationen und (Meta-)Daten auch über die Gestaltung der Knoten selbst erfolgen: 1.) Auf der Ebene der Granularität von Knoten: Die in einem Knoten aufgeführten Informationen können in unterschiedlichen Detailgraden eingeblendet werden, oder auch mehr oder weniger (Meta-)Daten integrieren/referenzieren. (s. Iske (2002): Vernetztes Wissen, S. 29). Ted Nelson hat dies bereits unter dem Begriff "stretch text" eingeführt (zusammengefasst bei Eibl, S. 58 f.). 2.) Versionierungen der Knoten ermöglichen ständige Veränderungen an den Knoten und gleichzeitig das Anzeigen dieser verschiedenen Versionen (s. dazu zusammenfassend Krameritsch (2007): Geschichte(n) im Netzwerk, S. 117 f.).

I've explained such a system, and promised Andy Chu an example that I've yet to be able to complete, but it comes down to this:

A website is fundamentally a document repository. One of the first documents that you should store in that repository is one which explains, in detail, the procedures for provisioning the host powering the site and how content gets published. (Even better if it's so detailed that the procedures exhibit a degree of rigor such that a machine can carry them out, rather than requiring manual labor by a human.)

"A multi-dimensional erector set that will go on forever..."

No, unfortunately not forever.

Around 9:15:

"I'm telling you, that I don't know what to do. I'm completely lost."

"Then you need a guide"

[...]

"Why don't we just start at the beginning?"

The frustration of non-linear presentation in a nutshell.

A fascinating way to structure and describe a website.

Storyspace used a scripting language to create what they called "Guard Fields" — boolean logic that will make a link clickable or not based on the pages the reader had already visited up until that point.

What is interesting is that guard fields proved effective at breaking cycles (one of the risks of disorientation in hypertext).

my personal hope is that we can build a more sensible coherent web, that exudes the machines inside of it, by better harkening towards custom elements ("webcomponents"). move the page from being a bunch of machines in javascript, to a bunch of machines in hypertext.

and then build pages that start to expose & let the user play with the dom. start to build experiences that bridge the gap into the machine/page.

and keep going. keep going. build wilder web experiences. build more machines. and keep building battlesuits for the user, out of more componenets, out of more web, to let them wrestle & tangle with & manipulate & experiment & hack on & see & observe & learn about the truthful, honest, direct hypertext that we all navigate.

I am not sure whether the web is seen here as the universal hypermedia system it is.

The reference to Bush shows, that content strategy and the history of hypertext are closely related.

http://www.eastgate.com/garden/

This is in clear opposition to the ideas of Brust and Rothkugel in their 2007's "On Anomalies in Annotation Systems", where they claim that "a new annotation system is doomed to fail if it is based on the pen-and-paper annotation paradigm only".

George Landow refers to these texts linked by hyperlinks as "lexia". This is also the term used by Catherine Marshall in "Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation".

I doubt so, unless emacs and vim are also counted as IDEs. IDEs are useful but they build on tools which can be used independently (editor, compiler, debugger...).

NOTE: This annotation is a contemplation/criticism of a particular style of linking and is no way a reflection of my opinion about the author's work and ideas, which I respect greatly.

I was contemplating why the use of links in this paper bothered me so much, and it led to some interesting questions/thoughts.

(I know many others within the hypertext literature community have written about the many (multivariate) semantic functions of links, but I have admittedly yet to read that research, so I apologize if my extemporaneous thoughts on the subject are banal.)

The destinations of most links in this paper (take the whole Abstract for example) are highly ambiguous. As the reader I experience curiosity, yes, but also a certain amount of anxiety about the constant choices I must make and the impossibility of dispelling the unknown. This is made considerably worse on mobile where there is no "hover" state to reveal the destination url. Even on desktop the urls are all routed through researchgate.net and thus require some additional cognitive effort to parse the final destination. Upon exploring some of these links, we find that the type of destination is also highly diverse/multivariate:

• weaving meaning → presentation notes
• Things → blog post
• Personal Knowledge → blog post
• augmenting their tacit awareness → annotation of conference session
• Knowledge Augmentation → academic paper

Thus even after following these links one is not able to derive any meaningful expectations about where the links might lead. There is a double confusion: the initial ambiguity and the { patternlessness / resistance to learning }. In my experience as the reader, and perhaps I am not the only one, I feel anxious, split, and ultimately mired in the heap of heterogeneous connections that I am being presented with. The nature/style of link usage in this paper works against its basic coherency. They land as distractions. Only through an application of will may I forge ahead to read the paper in its (short) entirety.

Perhaps, you might suggest, I am doing it all wrong; I should read the paper through, and then go back to explore connections. Inline/embedded links still represent an improvement over traditional footnotes as I do not have to navigate back and forth between them. Yes, how am I as the reader to resist the tempting azure, the smooth and confident understroke, of the link? It is like going for a hike and suffering either blind adherence to an arbitrary path, haunted by the mystery of untaken side trails, or the aimlessness of tangential indulgence that leaves you a hundred meters from the trailhead.

Context, it must be acknowledged, is important. If this were a piece of literary fiction, the reader may very well have the expectation that their journey will be filled with mysterious choices; all the better, as the choices were designed with one's reading pleasure in mind! There is nothing but the happy exploration of the branching narrative. Yet, this is an academic paper (at least presented as such), and so the reader expects to learning something, to acquire a deeper understanding of a subject, or at least to broaden one's sensemaking horizons. The constant branches might as well be rocks in the path that the reader is constantly tripping over, knowing the trail must offer some glimpses of natural beauty if only they could focus on the journey.

It all begs the question: Who are the links really for? They represent the author's mental model, the author's priorities. It is like being invited to peruse someone's home: "Yes, yes, feel free to look around, as you will!" The reader will no doubt form their own mental model of the disparate data. Yet the stasis of the document resists the reader's creative impulses; it won't move for them. Text will not rearrange, links will not form. That power was granted to the author. Now, the reader clumsily explores the frozen statue of the author's creation.

Let us not fall into the false choice between staid nonambiguity and scattershot freedom. As we turn our awareness inward, we see the richness of consciousness, of feeling, of the interpretative process, of apprehension as it miraculously unfolds. It is structured, it is emotional, and it is limited only by our imagination. Reaching into the depths of our phenomenology provides the basis for a principled and decidedly human topology of hypertext that points the way to truly augmenting human intelligence.

• node: elementary document, single idea
• links: organize document in non-sequential way
• anchor: location inside the text

etymology of the word ‘hyper’

We could index it in Wikidata as part of WikiCite.

These hyperlinks would be much more friendly to a person using a screen reader.

I am famous for my non-prescient thinking around technology. I too was on BBS's at the time and when I heard about the Hypertext Protocol and the internet, I told my wife that it wasn't going to go any where. I mean why would somebody go through all that trouble when you could just download a hypercard stack from a BBS, edit it, and then re-upload it to the bulletin board?

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

Definition of hypertext.

Hypertext as liberating.

Hypertext as opposite of "the line," the sentencem the novel, linear narrative.

Both the article in itself and its design in DJMP raise questions about the architecture and materiality of the book and publishing, including academic publishing, through its discussion of artist books and open access. The interesting discussion is of course how ways of publishing, textual formats, ways of writing, editing and reading relate to different kinds of politics, e.g. institutional, economic, ways of ascertaining quality, etc. These are very important questions, both in global politics (e.g. the discussions on ‘fake news’ and its relation to social media), in institutional politics (e.g. the standards and quality assessment of academic publishing) and in art and literature (e.g. whether readers are able and willing to actually read and understand different forms of texts). In general, it is a question of how the text mediates and transforms the reading, how meaning is produced and how/whether it reaches an audience, whether it is productive of e.g. meaning, knowledge and/or action. It is a discussion of the text between mediator and tool.

It is noteworthy how little has happened after several decades of digital publishing and a plethora of death sentences for books and print: Even though some things have changed and are changing e.g. WWW’s ‘non-linear’ and labyrinthine, multi-cursal (Aarseth 1997) hypertext and the collaborative writing tools and platforms like wikis and social media are part of our everyday textual culture, we still have books and journals. Why? Is it because, as Stuart Moulthrop suggested already in 1991, that although hypertext affords new visions about a shared writing space, the responsibility for changes of this magnitude come from a diverse elite (of software developers, literary theorists, legislators, capitalists) who despite their differences remain allegiant to the institutions of intellectual property (the book, the library, the university, the publishing house). In other words, Moulthrop suggests that “it seems equally possible that engagement with interactive media will follow the path of reaction, not revolution.” (Moulthroup 2003 (1991), Andersen and Pold 2014). Is it because of institutional conservatism, because readers are conservative and slowly adapting (as the rather slow development of hypertext seems to suggest), is it a political battle (as the current discussions of the role of digital media, social media versus traditional media might suggest)? And to which extend is it a battle we should go for, if it includes breaking down the kinds of authority that comes with established publication formats and editorial processes (at least the current political climate raises some concerns).

I know that many of these concerns are afterthoughts to an article and a design done before the current situation, and in this sense, they are more reflections that might be relevant for further work. However, the questions remain, whether hypertext and collaborative authoring always leads to more freedom and productive reading/writing? Whether deconstructing the order of the text and its extended argument is always a good thing? We have of course examples of great hypertextual formats that function well as tools and presentation of knowledge, e.g. the encyclopedia, but maybe there are also good reasons to preserve the extended argument of the book and the article? Today it seems simply wrong to assert that "hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice” (Landow 1992) faced with Trump and Wilders’ tweets. Consequently, I think, the argument of the article and its design could relate to the history of hypertext and electronic literature, though the discussion of artist books and open access publishing is also relevant.

The implementation in DJMP is in many ways exemplary and manages to present the article in nice ways, including the posters, the ability to comment and follow keywords. It allows its reader to access and use the text in different ways, and gives the valuable possibility of commenting and reading other people’s comments. In this it also follows paths from hypertext and electronic literature/digital culture, e.g. Electronic Book Review of A Peer Reviewed Journal About_. The design in many ways affords that it can do as it ‘preaches’, and in this way experiments with different ways of publishing academic texts. This is needed and current academia is not open enough to these kinds of experiments, that are, as argued, much more than making open access a homogeneous project – there is a need for an ongoing critical struggle that includes the forms of publishing. This is necessary, also to reach the popular masses on Twitter and Facebook! Currently, it is a problem, that standardizations within academia driven by STEM standards does not invite for such experiments that would in many cases not even be accepted as examples of academic publication. Also, I want to finish emphasizing that my discussion above is mainly stirred by the qualities of the publication, the important questions and reflections it raises.

References

Andersen, C. U. and S. B. Pold (2014). "Post-digital Books and Disruptive Literary Machines: Digital Literature Beyond the Gutenberg and Google Galaxies." Formules 2014(18): 164-183.<br> Landow, G. P. (1992). Hypertext the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Baltimore, Md, Johns Hopkins University Press.<br> Moulthroup, S. (2003 (1991)). You Say You Want a Revolution. The New Media Reader. N. W.-F. N. Montfort. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, The MIT Press: 691-704.<br> Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore, Md., Johns Hopkins University Press.

This document is used as an example in this page about using Hypothesis in conjunction with Atom. Very useful.

I'm interested in hypertext (and annotation) before this point, before fully rupturing the narrative, but somehow co-existing with it...

Or about the broader context for reading. Often strikes me that we still take the “book” concept as a given. Texts come in many forms but we’re stuck with this model of packaging texts by length. Much of literary postmodernism had to do with breaking free of those boundaries on our thinking. But eBooks often reproduce the linearity and boundedness of pre-hypertext “books”. Landow’s book was first published in 1991. What happened in the last 25 years?

See Nelson's reply to Tim Berners Lee about crediting him in Weaving the Web.

What a great text to demo epub.js and hypothes.is! Moby-Dick must be the most mind-blowingly allusive and hypertextual writing in the English language!