Visions of Hypertext
Engelbart (1963) provides a vision of how the “H-LAM/T system–the individual augmented by the language, artifacts, and methodology in which he is trained” can become more effective by using computers as word processors for low level manipulations of text, such as cut-copy-paste, and for higher order organization of “concept packets” to form complex logical arguments. His system would allow linkages between concepts that go beyond simple hyperlinks, and reveal the structure of the argument, containing information about which concepts support others, and how strong the connection is between them. Engelbart (1963), like Bush (1945), wanted a visible trace of the pathways that link the components of a text so that the trails could be retraced and shared with other researchers, and so that the links between items would be informative, beyond Bolter’s (2001)simple grammar of “This element (page) leads to that one.”
Bolter (2001) presents both sides of the argument about the naturalness of hypertext, stating that “supporters of hypertext may even argue that hypertext reflects the nature of the human mind itself—that because we think associatively, not linearly, hypertext allows us to write as we think.” Engelbart (1963) doesn’t make this argument. He reflects on his own work of synthesizing information to prepare a memo, and concludes that an augmentation using a computer would aid in the efficiency, however, he doesn’t argue that this is a natural way of thinking. He says that his natural response to such a task is to produce a disordered, incomplete stream-of-consciousness which is the starting point for his augmentation system, which can be described as an idea-processor – a higher level form of a word processor.
Wright (2007) traces the history of visions of hypertext, including those of Bush (1945), Engelbart (1963), and Nelson (1999), showing how today’s web doesn’t have some of their envisioned features, although there are apps and add-ons that capture some of those features (what Nelson (2007) calls “fringe applications, but nothing general”). An interesting side note to Wright’s video is the last question from the audience, which comes from Vint Cerf, a vice-president at Google, who raises other concerns about the deficiencies of the web. His concerns about the ephemeral nature of the web, about the difficulty in keeping links active for a long period of time, and about “bit rot”, the problem that the software needed to interpret information may not be available, echo some of the concerns raised by O’Donnell (1998) about the instability of texts. Applications which fill in some of the features desired by early visionaries of the web, such as bookmarking websites, are also ephemeral. For example, Delicious lost many of its users’ links (and many of its users) when it relaunched after it was bought by AVOS (Johnson, 2011).
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References:
Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108. Retrieved June 22, 2015, from http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm
Engelbart, D. (1963). “A conceptual framework for the augmentation of man’s intellect.” In Hawerton, P.W. and Weeks, D.C. (Eds), Vistas in information handling, Volume I: The augmentation of man’s intellect by machine. Washington, DC: Spartan Books. Augmentation of human intellect: A conceptual framework. Retrieved June 22, 2015, from http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html
Johnson, B. (September 28, 2011) “Oh, Delicious – Where did it all go so wrong?” GigaOm. Retrieved July 26, 2015: https://gigaom.com/2011/09/28/oh-delicious-where-did-it-all-go-so-wrong/
Nelson, T. (2007, October 8). Transclusion: Fixing Electronic [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9kAW8qeays
Nelson, T. (1999). “Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: Parallel documents, deep links to content, deep versioning and deep re-use.” ACM Computing Surveys 31(4), np. Retrieved June 22, 2015, from http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html
O’Donnell, J.J. (1998). Avatars of the word: From papyrus to cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wright, A. (2007, October 26). The Web the Wasn’t [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8