Mdst3703 2013-09-24-hypertext

Babel to Xanadu: Hypertext

Prof. AlvaradoMDST 3703

24 September 2013

Business

• Quiz 1 to be posted Thursday• Take home, delivered through Collab• 10 IDs, 5 short answers, 1 essay• Covers seminar, readings, and studio• Open book – free to consult course blog and

other internet sources referenced in class• Googling for answers not allowed

Review: Studio Concepts Covered in Tutorial

• Documents are made of elements—abstract units of structure

• Elements are represented in XML by means of tags and attributes

• HTML is written in XML• DIV and SPAN elements, along with the CLASS

and ID attributes, allow HTML to be more semantic

• CSS is a language use to add style to XML

Review: Seminar

• Text as self-contained entity• In terms of form, texts are internally ordered

as a hierarchy (OHCO), representable by XML• In terms of content, Aristotle, Levi-Strauss,

Colby, and Ramsey each take the story, written as text, as a unit of analysis

But are texts really like this?

What is a text?

Jorge Luis Borges gives us a thought experiment

Borges provides us with an allegory

“The Library of Babel”

“The Universe (which others call the Library) …”

What does the Library contain?

Babel Books!

• A library of identical books organized into rooms• 410 pages per book• 40 lines per page• 80 characters per line• 25 characters (incl. space, period, and comma)• So, each book is a very long string: 80 * 40 * 410 = 1,312,000 chars

• No two books are identical

Interestingly, the “IBM Card,” a general-purpose punch card, introduced in 1928, had 80-columns.

If all possible combinations are represented, how many books, then, does the library

contain?

Here is what Google’s calculator give us . . .

Number of characters

Number of positions

So, what kind of information is in the library?

Are the books readable? What is in them?

Everything that can be represented by text

• All books ever written and to be written• In every language (transliterated)• Every possible variation• Every YouTube video, image, etc. • EVERYTHING THAT CAN BE WRITTEN

DOWN

How likely are you to find something readable in this library?

Passages from Babel Books

What does the Library of Babel remind you of?

Information Explosion

Liberation

What does hypertext liberate us from? How?

Freedom to access more information?

or

Freedom from the constraints of hierarchy and linearity?

Liberation from …

• Hierarchy and linear thinking implied by how books and libraries are organized

• Limits imposed by the material form of texts that prevent minds from making natural connections

Vannevar Bush

• American, 1899—1974• Attended Harvard, MIT,

Tufts• Engineer• Director of the Office of

Scientific Research and Development in WWII

• Inventor of memex concept, precursor to hypertext

What is the problem Bush addresses in “As We May Think”?

A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

There is a growing mountain of research.

Publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.

AND

BUT

What makes it hard to find things?

The problem of selection

When data are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. . . . The hman mind does not work that way. It operates by association.

The Memex

How does the Memex solve the problem of

selection?

It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.

READING AS WRITING

Key ideas

• Associative indexing– “Any item may be caused at will to select

immediately and automatically another”– “This is the essential feature of the memex”

• Trails and Codes• The idea is to have media model how the

mind (supposedly) works• Any analogs in contemporary technology?

Theodor Hom Nelson

• American, b. 1937• Attended Swarthmore

College• Studied sociology at

Harvard University• Invented term

“hypertext” in 1965• Conceived of Xanadu

“Hypertext is non-sequential writing”

From Literary Machines

Key Ideas

• Computer “files” simply reproduce the metaphor of documents and catalogs (hierarchy)

• Computers should be “literary machines”– From the beginning they have been used and imaging as

machines for representing and manipulating text• Again, the dream is to have them model the way

the mind works– Interactive and associative, not static and linear

• Nothing is forgotten, nothing is lost (because linked)

Some definitions

• Hypertext: Non-sequential writing• Lexia: a unit of text• Link: a segment of text that interrupts the reading

of one lexia and moves you to another • Text: a collection of linked lexia• Hypermedia: A hypertext system involving other

media, such as sounds, images, and videos.• Latent Hypertext: Hypertext implied in analog

media

Axial Hypertext

Types of Hypertext

AXIAL hypertext

RHIZOMIC hypertext

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

• English, b. 1955• Attended Oxford 1976• Physicist• A fellow at CERN• Inventor of the World

Wide Web per se• Unitarian• Made a Knight

Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth

Dan Brown, Angels & Demons, p. 19

[Angels and Demons]

“In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. ‘Vague, but exciting’, were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue.”

(http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html)

[CERN doc]

[BL quote are social org]

“CERN is a wonderful organisation. It involves several thousand people …. Although they are nominally organised into a hierarchical management structure, this does not constrain the way people will communicate, and share information, equipment and software across groups. … The actual observed working structure of the organisation is a multiply connected "web" whose interconnections evolve with time.”

[Berners-Lee’s diagram]

Berners-Lee’s was the first system to link lexia across the network

Hypertext not only linked lexia, but people – across the planet

<a href=“http://www.virginia.edu”>UVA</a>

The link in HTML connects more than lexia

Nelson never liked the Web

• The web remains bound to the metaphor of the file

• Links point to files (for the most part), not to true lexia

• Links are also “dumb” – they don’t go in both directions, and they are not named (as Bush would have wanted)

• Google has changed this some …

Observations

• Borges, Bush, Nelson, and Berners-Lee each break the model of the self-contained, hierarchically ordered text

• A text emerges as a node in a network of lexia• The distinction between the library and the

book breaks down• Instead, we have the “docuverse”

More Observations

• Bush and Berners-Lee, both of whom tried to solve real-world problems, grasped the social nature of the problem

• The social nature of networked digital media would end up dominating information technology in the decades following the invention of the WWW

Is hypertext new?

The Talmud

1 = Mishna, the first major transcription of the oral law2 = Gemara, analytical discussions3 = Rashi, glossary4 = Tosefos, additions5 = Hananel, comments6 = Eye of Justice, legal decisions8 = Light of the Bible, references to Biblical quotations.9 = Bach's Annotations 10 = Gra's Annotations

[Study Bible]

[OED]

[Guernica]

Picasso’s Guernica, 1937

Where does hierarchy come in?

Where do you find it?

Hierarchy

Organization of the library Organization of the book

Goes back to Aristotle …

So, what’s wrong with hierarchy?

Hierarchies fail because things belong in more than one place

[Tomato]

How does digital text overcome these problems?

Let’s look at the history …