Origin and nature of hypertext
In reading of Vannevar Bush’s article (As We May Think) and the report by D.D. Engelbart, I found myself asking what triggers such thinking. Bush is encouraging the world’s scientists to turn their destructive wartime research toward developing a better peaceful society whereby intellectual endeavours would be shared with other members of the global science ‘family’.
My world history knowledge may be sketchy but I recall the English speaking countries were under the British Commonwealth of Nations; which I presume shared their expert scholarship among themselves separate from other cultures. The end of war brought changes and a desire for even more changes. Bush’s article is published in July 1945 just as the United Nations Charter was being discussed at a conference (April – June 1945) whose mandate included the ‘fostering [of] social and economic development” and to “promote information cooperation” (October 1945) (un.org). I can’t help but think this drive for openness between nations was instrumental to his writing. And as of 1945 we have UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) commissioned to “foster innovation to meet [higher education] educators and workforce needs “through intercultural dialogue.
Problem-solvers developing emerging technology with its “more radical innovations” responded to Engelbart’s call for “increased capability’ which in turn ‘increased human intellectual effectiveness” of more segments of the world population than just the next generations of Bush’s scientists (Engelbart) . This was made possible through the faster online publication of their scholarship over the internet. Relationships within data were now digitally connected; “high-powered electronic aids” such as hypertext and shared terminology are bringing researchers and their work in far reaching areas of the globe into closer proximity. Not all innovations succeeded as in the Project Xanadu but much was learned about the intricacies of connecting electronic literature and the incorporation of hypermedia.
Jay D. Bolter (2001) mentions on page 49 of typographic designers “breaking the rules. … For both amateurs and professional typographers, digital visual media are suggesting new looks and functions for printed artifacts…Printed books, magazines, and newspapers are changing typographically and visually by incorporating more elaborate graphics, while at the same time prose is attempting to remake itself in order to reflect and rival the cultural power of the image.”
Further down the page, Bolter eludes to exceptions, “domains, such as scholarly monographs and scientific journals, in which the image is still subordinated to the word and controlled by the idea of verbal communication.” If we look at the print publishing world, we can see a shift in direction that reflects this. One example is the Thomson Corporation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_Corporation ).
“Although diagrams are the exception on the printed page, they become the rule in electronic writing, which invites us to read the whole computer screen as a moving, evolving diagram.” (Bolter, 2001 p63). This breaking of the rules makes me wonder if there was a tug of war between the graphic artist and the text writer. In the art world there was also a disregard for rules. In the 1960s artists like Roy Lichtenstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaam!) and other Conceptual artists such as Bruce Nauman (https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/global-culture/identity-body/identity-body-united-states/a/nauman-the-true-artist-helps-the-world-by-revealing-mystic-truths) were also painting with words. What could be considered a visual statement reflecting, a recording of society changes.
Words: 534