For my multimedia project, I chose to explore Dr. Ted Nelson’s Xanadu. I was at first rather confused about his vision on the initial reading we had on his concept. When I watched the supplemental video of a presentation explaining the system it became so much clearer. This piqued my interest and wanted to learn more about this proposal for an alternate document sourcing, referencing, and linking system.
As mentioned in my Rip.Mix.Feed post, I chose to host this project on Weebly as it allowed to easily embed and edit HTML code. Since this is just a carrier of information, I wasn’t looking to present some type of new multimodal text technology. I wanted a way to efficiently load content.
In order to appreciate Ted Nelson’s vision, one has to experience it and there are a couple of dandy links I wanted to include that were not that easy to track down. In Ted’s bio he mentions that he was diagnosed with ADD at a young age and after taking a computer course in university he saw a way to create an organizational structure that would help him to streamline his divergent thoughts. Finding all of these bits of gold to share took some hunting, so I thought hosting them in a website would provide a convenient way for a viewer to get immersed without the hours of searching through his myriad web pages and YouTube videos. The sheer volume of information that he and others have created on the subject, written text, books, interactive web pages, and videos could have escalated this project quite easily. Pardon me for taking the liberty of focusing on just a small portion of his vision that most interested me and related to this course.
If you visit the web site, Visiting Xanadu, I used Embedly to include live links (I hope they remain that way 😉 ) for a couple of his demos. One interesting find are the five videos he created in May, 2018 as an archive of his concept. Interestingly, all of the resources he has created seem rather disjointed, counter to his vision for Xanadu.
I used Google Sheets to create the practicalities and pitfalls chart to see what this app’s functionality is like when embedding. I had to add to and play with the HTML code for sizing as the Sheets embed code has no aspect ratio built in. Other than that it worked as advertised. Embedly was a cool find as well. It was simple to use and provided a great way to get embed code generated for stuff that doesn’t have a ready to go code.
Link to Visiting Xanadu: https://visitingxanadu.weebly.com
