I was intrigued by the fairly broad list of professions here (all the more so because my late father was beginning what eventually became a diplomatic career in 1962). I'm thinking of who we might add today: computer programmers, for one, of course. Also, medical professionals, who aren't explicitly listed here, though their work draws on several of the disciplines listed.

As with the "girls" in "As We May Think," this terminology starts me thinking about actual clerks, the work they did, how it compares to what is described here, and what happened to them when (and if) systems like this eventually eliminated their jobs.

This is an ongoing challenge, and opportunity, in/for interdisciplinary studies. First step is reminding scholars that they are working within a framework that others don't share; next is finding a way to understand each others' perspectives (I don't think translation back and forth is enough). Understanding how disciplinary frameworks shape understanding is also a goal for students, from intro core courses to the junior-level writing-in-and-about-the-disciplines course I teach to senior capstone courses. Ideally, they become familiar with and comfortable in their own disciplinary frameworks without forgetting that they are frameworks.

I was glad to see this topic come up, since the initial description of the architect/computer-clerk pair didn't seem to represent how most architects work, today, or, I suspect, in 1962 (my grandfather was a working architect when this was written, and he did have a drafting table at home, but that was for personal projects. Most of the time, he worked as part of a large group, including for a time for the WPA, designing hospitals and schools. Today, I'm told by someone on the relevant committee that the architects designing the building that will replace our current office/classroom building have some difficulty understanding English professors' desire for quiet, private places to work and meet with their students, since they're accustomed to working in a very different environment)

Interesting image -- the machine is portrayed as actually desiring/needing data, rather than simply being capable of processing it. This feels somewhat true to the growth of Big Data today: once the system/capabilities are in place, the desire to collect data -- perhaps more data than we can really use, at least responsibly/ethically -- seems to grow.

In this case, what happens to the "process of digestion and correction" which follows "the first stage"? In some ways, we do now have something like this: many more records of the early stages of thinking (including these annotations), in addition to or instead of records of the later stages, after an author has done more "digesting" of his/her thoughts, and published them in a more orderly way. There's a lot to be said for this sort of "thinking in the open," but it also adds exponentially to the "record," which Bush is already finding overwhelming in size.

On first reading, this seemed like a very odd transition, from talking about new ways to navigate the ever-proliferating piles/sea of data, to talking about instruments that seem more likely to add to the piles than to organize it. It takes some time for him to come back to how photography can help solve the problem. If this were a student paper, I'd probably be telling him to move his thesis/solution closer to the beginning, so readers don't lose it in the mass of his own accumulated examples of technological progress.

The limits of memory are/is a key theme throughout. As I write below, I'm not sure he always distinguishes as well as he might between "memory" as in retrieving information that one remembers exists, but of which one can't remember the details and "memory" as in remembering that the information exists in the first place.

This is an interesting choice of words, and echoes, though it does not directly repeat, some of his optimism at the beginning. I found myself thinking about Rachel Carson and others who exposed the results of the "better living through chemistry" (and other forms of science) optimism of the post-WWII era.

I found myself checking Bush's age at time of writing when I read this: c. 55. As a fellow middle-aged person, I can sympathize with his desire, but am inclined to point out that the problem is not just finding something that might be useful, but remembering that it exists in the first place (I guess the "trails" might help with that, assuming one remembers one made a trail, or has a way of stumbling across it).

I've been noticing throughout that his attitude toward the existing "record" is essentially conservative/trusting. There's little suggestion that the role of the present generation of researchers might be to question or even overturn it, and no attention to social/cultural forces that might have shaped what it does and doesn't contain.

One major difference between the memex as envisioned here and most web-based systems is that each individual who has a memex (which presumably isn't everyone; they sound expensive) has his (or her?) own memex. To use the trail metaphor, everyone has his own network of trails on his own island, and while it's possible to reproduce a network of trails from someone else's island on one's own island, the two sets of trails don't really connect (nor does there seem to be a chance for serendipitous connections made by people who don't know each other already).

I'm having flashbacks to using microfilm readers (and to the headaches induced by trying to read while scrolling just slowly enough to scan headlines). No question that it was amazing technology in many ways, but the thought of spending most of one's day working in that environment; ugh.

Back the central question/problem (from which we seem to have strayed for quite some time, mostly as the result of his enthusiasm for all the new ways of gathering/manipulating/processing data he sees on the horizon)

And here I think he's going to address the importance of selection (and he does, a bit), but instead he's mostly focusing on the process of bringing in yet more "material," this time from "the existing record."

There's a very important element that I think is assumed here, and that requires considerable mental labor (and some practice with using the tools described): selection. If the notes and photographs are to be useful, they can't be a stream-of-consciousness recording of everything encountered, observed, or thought that day. Otherwise, the "pondering" would take as long as the day itself.

And presumably the process of "talk[ing] comments into the record" involves yet more selection. That's a natural part of the process of research and writing, but one thing I think we've learned as tools of this sort become widely available is that the temptation to record everything is strong (scholars are not immune to the same impulses experienced by students with highlighters), and the result is a postponement of the difficult task of selecting what's important to a later date (or sometimes never).

Another obfuscation-of-labor moment in the passive here? Who does the retyping, and just how much correction, interpretation, etc. is required (cf. what happens when you run OCR: the result is not usually a text clean enough for markup without some fixing by well-educated humans, often located in low(er)-wage countries such as India).

This is interesting. Perhaps a recognition that the "girl" is more mentally present/engaged than she seems? There's some tension between languid and disquieting.#openlearning17