Xanadu!

I was most fascinated by Project Xanadu. In short, it is a version of the world wide web that never came to be; but in my opinion it was the better one. Its development was not championed except for by a very few. Perhaps it was misunderstood or poorly advocated; in either case we are certainly worse off for it.
Project Xanadu was the unrealized creation of Theodor Nelson in which in which only one version of each piece of information existed, and links were never broken.

In its current state, the internet has no “top” – it can be entered from any of a million ways (Wesch, 2007). Vannevar Bush, creator of the Memex (memory + index, a proto-hypertext system) noted the issues with indexing: “our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing.” Bush continues, stating that effective indexing would allow us the “privilege of forgetting” the things we don’t immediately need, with some assurance that we’ll be able to find them later if required. Nelson describes his own ingenious invention succinctly: “Xanalogical literary structure offers uniquely integrated methods for version management, side-by-side comparison and visualizable re-use, which lead to a radically beneficial and principled copyright system”. WOW.

Until I read the article in which Nelson reveals his idea to the world I assumed I was alone in my perplexity with having to keep little bread crumb trails for myself of every site that I visited while researching (a task only slightly aided by referencing software and bookmarking sites, which add their own complexity), what I had gleaned from each site, and whether I might possibly be using an exact quote knowing that I would need to cite it later. Imagine this… how valuable would it be to be able to compare document versions side-by-side, so that one would know WHAT HAS CHANGED instead of having to read, understand, make sense of and even make notes on each version? And instead of hyperlinks, we would have had transclusions – better than links because they connect to the original, revealing the true relationship. Transclusions are a fundamental attribute of the internet, and because they cannot be accomplished on paper would have been invaluable. Nelson had already solved all these problems by foreseeing them before they came to pass; the real heartbreak being of course that the mess the internet is today might have been avoided. Project Xanadu, a pristine, glittering organizational structure with a single version of everything. A single version of the truth.

But we didn’t use the internet for that. Instead we have “fragile ever-breaking one-way links, with no recognition of change or copyright, and no support for multiple versions or principled re-use. Fonts and glitz, rather than content connective structure, prevail.” (Nelson, 1999). In most circles these days Nelson is thought a madman, suffering the same fate of every unsuccessful genius. Maybe we should have listened.

References

Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108. Available: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

Englebart, D. (1962). Comments Related to Bush’s Article. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Retrieved from: http://web.archive.org/web/20080331102459/http://www.bootstrap.org:80/augdocs/friedewald030402/augmentinghumanintellect/3examples.html#A.2

Nelson, Theodore. (1999). “Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: Parallel documents, deep links to content, deep versioning and deep re-use.” Available:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.htm

Wesch, M. (2007). Information R/evolution. (Video). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM

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Scholl, F. (2014). Project Xanadu Finally Released After 54 Years. Retrieved from https://techdissected.com/web-and-computing/project-xanadu-finally-released-after-54-years/