If V.Bush Could See Us Now…
This will be a reflective post of the reading selections over the “Idea processors and the birth of hypertext” section of Module 4.
For its time, Bush’s (1945) essay was incredibly visionary. I couldn’t believe some of the notions of informational organization, fluidity, and accessibility that he was mentioning that parallel so many of the tools available to us today. Englebart (1962) definitely piggybacks on these Bush’s (1945) notions (not to mention heavily quoting his work) as a way to communicate the need for immediate solutions in a fast-moving, progressive, and increasingly complex world. From screens to instantaneous recall of information to annotation of content to make learning pathways and share them; all of those things have been made possible through social bookmarking tools, social media, web searching, and hyperlinking. Unfortunately, Bush did not live to see these interlinked information systems grow via the World Wide Web. Engelbart, however, did; he passed away only 2 years ago. It makes me wonder what he thought about Google and its many services.
Through these readings, I was inspired to start digging in to using the Diigo Chrome extension, which is another social bookmarking and annotation tool (different than those suggested in this course), that allows me to annotate, to make short notes, and to save and share the my annotated pages within specific groups. I even made a UBCMET group if anyone wants to join in the web annotation party! I’m beginning to tag web-based content according to the course I’m in. This turns our webpage-based course readings into an online social book of their own, essentially! I feel that it definitely aligns with the collaborative way-finding and sharing of content that some of these early information scholars had in mind.
After reading Nelson’s (1999) paper, I couldn’t help but wonder if some of his dreams of a transclusive web were made into a reality. It seemed as if every time that I began to stir on an itching question (“What happens when some edits something? Deletes something?”), I was met with Nelson’s (1999) answer. However, I still had a few critiques on his thinking, the main ones being:
- Does the automatic linkage of articles/documents require an author to constantly be vigilant about checking to see if their source data is relevant? I know that there are many projects where I’ve embedded a Google Doc, for example, which essentially follows the same transclusive protocol: the site with the embedded Doc updates automatically when I update the Doc. However, I don’t always return to the Doc to make sure the data is correct or still contextually relevant to my page, and because I own the Doc, I know nothing changed. But if someone else was constantly changing their materials, and mine was linked to theirs, I would feel the need to constantly be in the know of whether that source material’s integrity still follows the authorship of my own work. Out of context sourcing [post-edit/deletions within external sources] makes for poor sourcing.
- Copyright solutions are an undertaking of themselves. Nelson (1999) is essentially advocating for overall open-source content (much like Wilinsky (2000) did for academic content) as a way to make his overall idea of xanalogical structuring work. Though necessary for his philosophy, this was probably a too-distracting factor and perhaps a major reason it wasn’t adopted in the first place.
Here, I may need to read further to better understand the whys or why nots of lack of adoption, but I just wanted to share my initial thoughts on this section.
References
Bush, V. (1945). “As we may think”. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
Englebart, D. (1962) “A conceptual framework for the augmentation of man’s intellect”. Stanford Research Institute: Menlo Park, CA.
Nelson, T. (1999). “Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: Parallel documents, deep links to content, deep versioning and deep re-use”. Retrieved from http://cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html
OEM Defence (Photographer). (1940-1944, estimated). Vannevar Bush portrait [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vannevar_Bush_portrait.jpg
