The "information explosion" may seem like an acutely modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation—or even the first species—to wrestle with the problem of information overload. Long before the advent of computers, human beings were collecting, storing, and organizing information: from Ice Age taxonomies to Sumerian archives, Greek libraries to Dark Age monasteries. Spanning disciplines from evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology to the history of books, libraries, and computer science, Alex Wright weaves an intriguing narrative that connects such seemingly far-flung topics as insect colonies, Stone Age jewelry, medieval monasteries, Renaissance encyclopedias, early computer networks, and the Internet. Finally, he pulls these threads together to reach a surprising conclusion, suggesting that the future of the information age may lie deep in our past.

1. Glut: Mastering Information
Through the Ages
Alex Wright
alex@agwright.com | www.agwright.com

2. Or, how did we get from
to
?

3. Stone Age Information Architecture

4. 4

5. 4
?

6. 58

7. 58

8. 68

9. 68

10. Animals
Birds Mammals Fish
Dogs Cats
Burmese Tabby Siamese
Brown mackerel
domestic
longhair
Unique
beginner
“Life form”
Generic
Specific
Varietal
What a folk taxonomy looks like:
Sheep Cows

11. Hierarchies and Networks

12. The Ice Age Information Explosion

17. The Ice Age Information
Explosion
• Folk taxonomies evolve into mythic systems
• Symbols beget wider social networks
• A “release from social proximity”

18. The Age of Alphabets

19. Bullae
Sumeria, circa 5000 BC

22. Cuneiform
circa 3000 BC

24. The Age of Alphabets
• Counting begets writing
• Birth of the “knowledge bureau”
• Schism between oral and literate cultures

25. The Codex

26. The Library at Alexandria
3rd century BC

27. Roman de Troie
13th Century

28. Adam naming the animals
from The Aberdeen Bestiary, c.1200 AD

29. Canon Table
from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

30. The codex
• The “networked” book
• Random access, pagination and indexing
• Early mass production techniques

31. Gutenberg

32. Gutenberg Press

34. Trinity College Library, Dublin

35. Gutenberg’s impact
• Rise of secular literacy
• Schism between the “book” and the “work”
• Disruption of old institutional hierarchies

36. The Industrial Information Explosion

39. Desk Set
1957

40. The Industrial
Information Economy
• Mass literacy
• Knowledge as product
• New institutional hierarchies emerge

41. The Post-Industrial Web

42. Charles Cutter
“The desks had ... a little key-board
at each, connected by a wire. The
reader had only to find the mark of
his book in the catalog, touch a few
lettered or numbered keys, and [the
book] appeared after an
astonishingly short interval.
Charles Cutter, “The Buffalo Public Library of
1983” (Library Journal, 1883)

43. H.G.Wells
“The whole human memory can be,
and probably in a short time will be,
made accessible to every individual.
[T]his new all-human cerebrum ...
can have at once, the concentration
of a craniate animal and the
diffused vitality of an amoeba...”
H.G. Wells, World Brain, 1938

44. Teilhard de Chardin
“A sort of ‘etherised’ human
consciousness... a single,
organized, unbroken
membrane over the earth” that
will “pave the way for a
revolution.”

45. Paul Otlet
• Creator of Universal Decimal
Classification
• Founder of Mundaneum
• Author of Monde, Traité de
documentation

49. Otlet

60. How the UDC works
• Universal Decimal Classification for top-
down categorization
• Auxiliary Tables to mark relationships
between topics (e.g., “+” “/” “:”)
• Constructing the “social space” of a
document

61. What would Otlet’s
Web have looked like?
• Marriage of top-down classification with
bottom-up categorization
• Constructing the “social space” of a
document
• Gradations of links, e.g.:
• Agree / Disagree / Approve / Disapprove

63. Vote-links
http://microformats.org/wiki/vote-links

64. Vannevar Bush
• Science advisor to FDR
• President of Carnegie
Institution
• Author of “As We May Think”

66. As We May Think
“Thus [the user] goes,
building a trail of many items.
Occasionally he inserts a
comment of his own, either
linking it to the main trail or
joining it by a side trail to a
particular item… Thus he
builds a trail of his interest
through the maze of
materials available to him.”

67. “Wholly new forms of
encyclopedias will appear,
ready-made with a mesh of
associative trails running
through them, ready to be
dropped into the Memex and
there amplified.”
As We May Think

68. What would Bush’s Web
have looked like?
• Two-way links
• Visible trails
• Microfilm!

71. Eugene Garfield
Founder of Science Citation Index
Inventor of citation ranking
Forefather of PageRank

74. What would Garfield’s
Web look like?

76. Doug Engelbart
Former SRI Researcher
Creator of oNLine System (NLS)
Author of “Augmenting Human
Intelligence”

79. Doug Engelbart
• 1968 NLS Demo

80. What would Engelbart’s
Web have looked like?
• Tools for small group collaboration
• Process hierarchies
• Built-in audio/video conferencing

84. Xerox PARC
Founded by Alan Kay and several early
Engelbart collaborators
Mission:“The Architecture of
Information”
Invented the GUI, precursors of the
modern PC

86. TextText

87. Apple Hypercard

88. Ted Nelson
Coined the term “hypertext” (1965)
Author of Literary Machines,
Dream Machines, Computer Lib
Creator of Xanadu

90. • http://www.digibarn.com/collections/books/computer-lib/dm-cover.jpg

92. AndriesVan Dam

95. http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/HARTadj5in.jpg

96. On Hypertext
“I mean non-sequential writing-
text that branches and allows
choices to the reader… a
series of text chunks
connected by links which
offer the reader different
pathways.”

97. Nelson-isms
Transclusion
Docuverse
Stretchtext
Zippered lists
Window sandwiches
Indexing vortexes
Part-pounces
Tumblers
Collateral
hypertext
Humbers
Thinkertoys
Fresh hyperbooks
Anthological
hyperbooks
Grand systems

98. What would Nelson’s
Web have looked like?
• Transclusion
• Two-way linking
• Intellectual property controls

102. I Don’t Buy In
The Web isn’t hypertext, it’s DECORATED DIRECTORIES!
What we have instead is the vacuous victory of
typesetters over authors, and the most trivial form
of hypertext that could have been imagined…
There is an alternative.
Markup must not be embedded. Hierarchies and files
must not be part of the mental structure of
documents. Links must go both ways. All these
fundamental errors of the Web must be repaired. But
the geeks have tried to lock the door behind them to
make nothing else possible.
We fight on. More later.
- Ted Nelson

103. AndriesVan Dam
Early collaborator with Nelson
Created the first working hypertext
systems:
Hypertext Editing System (HES)
File Retrieval and Editing System
(FRESS)
Intermedia

104. Intermedia

106. What would the IRIS
Web have looked like?
Networked applications embedded in the
GUI
Two-way hyperlinks
Closed system

107. Tim Berners-Lee
Former researcher at CERN
Built first version of Enquire in
1980
Released WorldWideWeb in
1989

109. Which brings us to...

110. • Facebook

113. Orality Literacy
Additive Subordinative
Aggregative Analytic
Participatory Objective
Situational Abstract
Source: Ong

118. Conclusions

119. Glut: Mastering Information
Through the Ages
by Alex Wright
http://alexwright.org/glut/

120. Thank you