Prof. Alvarado's lecture discusses hypertext and its history. It covers (1) how Vannevar Bush conceived of the memex to solve the problem of organizing the growing amount of research in a way that modeled how the human mind works through associations, (2) how Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" and envisioned computer systems being "literary machines" that could represent information non-sequentially through links, and (3) how Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web at CERN to connect people and information across networks through hypertext markup language (HTML).

1. Lecture 3: Hypertext
Prof. Alvarado
MDST 3703/7703
4 September 2012

2. Business
• The weekly blogging cycle
– READ, COMMENT, DISCUSS, POST, REPEAT
– Comment by Monday at 5
– Post after class on Thursday (by Friday at 5)
• Grace period this week …

3. Review
• Digital representation
– Anything can be represented by numbers
– Numbers are just characters that can be
manipulated (sorted, counted, repeated, etc.)
– Information is just a series of characters
• Can we/you come up with a system to
represent taste?

4. A CODE FOR TASTE?
BITTER  B: 0..15
SOUR  S: 0..15
SALTY  T: 0..15
A Code for Taste
SWEET  W: 0..15
UMAMI  U: 0..15
* Every taste can be represented
by a five segment number:
B.S.T.W.U
* Yields a system that can
(the tongue map is represent about a million
actually a myth …) flavors (i.e. 165)

5. Taste “files”
Imagine this potato “printed”
by a 3D printer and
composed of 3D “pixels” each
with a taste value. The “ink”
for this printer would be a
mixture of chemicals that can
“print” pure droplets of
salty, savory, sweet, etc., that
get combined in each pixel.
Each element in the source file would be represented by an 8
segment number, 3 for the X,Y,Z position, and 5 for the B,S,T,W,U
taste code

6. Hypertext

7. Liberation
What does hypertext liberate us
from? How?

8. “When reading these articles and
watching the video, it immediately
made think of Quentin Tarantino
movies, The Six Degrees of Kevin
Bacon, and the Choose Your Own
Adventure books I checked out it bulk
as a kid – all have this out-of-order
connectedness, similar to how
hypertext functions, that create a
very satisfying (user) experience.
People don’t naturally seem to think
sequentially – it almost seems like
more of an effort.”

9. “All of these authors see
hypertext as a way to escape the
many limitations of the
analog, terrestrial world by
making text multidimensional and
placing it in a networked
informational system, which
breaks down the barriers of a
linear world.”

10. Liberation from …
• Hierarchy and linear thinking implied by how
books and libraries are organized
• Limits imposed by the material form of texts
that prevent minds from making natural
connections

11. Where does hierarchy come in?
Where do you find it?

12. Hierarchy
Organization of the library Organization of the book

13. Goes back to Aristotle …

14. So, what’s wrong with hierarchy?

15. Hierarchies fail because things
belong in more than one place

16. [Tomato]

17. How does digital text overcome
these problems?
Let’s look at the history …

18. Prehistory
Ritual  Writing  Computers
Lithic Periods 4000 BC 1945
80,000 BC

19. Timeline
1945: Vannevar Bush conceives of the Memex
1965: Ted Nelson coins the word “hypertext” and
proposes “Xanadu”
1967: Andy Van Dam develops first hypertext
system at Brown
1975: ZOG/KMS developed at CMU
1987: Apple introduces HyperCard
1991: WorldWideWeb at CERN becomes first global
hypertext

20. Vannevar Bush
• American, 1899—1974
• Attended
Harvard, MIT, Tufts
• Engineer
• Director of the Office of
Scientific Research and
Development in WWII
• Inventor of memex
concept, precursor to
hypertext

21. What is the problem Bush
addresses in As We May Think?

22. There is a growing mountain of research.
AND
A record if it is to be useful to
science, must be continuously
extended, it must be stored, and above
all it must be consulted.
BUT
Publication has been extended far
beyond our present ability to make real
use of the record.

23. What makes it hard to find
things?
The problem of selection

24. When data are placed in storage, they are
filed alphabetically or numerically, and
information is found (when it is) by tracing it
down from subclass to subclass. It can be in
only one place, unless duplicates are used;
one has to have rules as to which path will
locate it, and the rules are cumbersome.
Having found one item, moreover, one has
to emerge from the system and re-enter on
a new path. . . . The hman mind does not
work that way. It operates by association.

26. How does the
Memex solve the
problem of
selection?

28. It is exactly as though the physical
items had been gathered together
from widely separated sources and
bound together to form a new book. It
is more than this, for any item can be
joined into numerous trails.
READING AS WRITING

29. Key ideas
• Associative indexing
– “Any item may be caused at will to select
immediately and automatically another”
– “This is the essential feature of the memex”
• Trails and Codes
• The idea is to have media model how the
mind (supposedly) works
• Any analogs in contemporary technology?

30. Theodor Hom Nelson
• American, b. 1937
• Attended Swarthmore
College
• Studied sociology at
Harvard University
• Invented term
“hypertext” in 1965
• Conceived of Xanadu

31. “Hypertext is non-sequential
writinng”
From Literary Machines

36. Key Ideas
• Computer “files” simply reproduce the metaphor
of documents and catalogs (hierarchy)
• Computers should be “literary machines”
– From the beginning they have been used and imaging
as machines for representing and manipulating text
• Again, the dream is to have them model the way
the mind works
– Interactive and associative, not static and linear
• Nothing is forgotten, nothing is lost (because
linked)

37. Some definitions
• Hypertext: Non-sequential writing
• Lexia: a unit of text
• Link: a segment of text that interrupts the reading
of one lexia and moves you to another
• Text: a collection of linked lexia
• Hypermedia: A hypertext system involving other
media, such as sounds, images, and videos.
• Latent Hypertext: Hypertext implied in analog
media

38. Types of Hypertext
Axial Hypertext
RHIZOMIC hypertext
AXIAL hypertext

39. Sir Tim Berners-Lee
• English, b. 1955
• Attended Oxford 1976
• Physicist
• A fellow at CERN
• Inventor of the World
Wide Web per se
• Unitarian
• Made a Knight
Commander, Order of the
British Empire (KBE) by
Queen Elizabeth

40. [Angels and Demons]
Dan Brown, Angels & Demons, p. 19

41. “In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information
management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. ‘Vague, but exciting’, were the
words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue.”
(http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html)
[CERN doc]

42. “CERN is a wonderful organisation. It involves
several thousand people …. Although they are
nominally organised into a hierarchical
management structure, this does not
constrain the way peoplesocial org]
[BL quote are will
communicate, and share
information, equipment and software across
groups. … The actual observed working
structure of the organisation is a multiply
connected "web" whose interconnections
evolve with time.”

43. [Berners-Lee’s diagram]

44. Berners-Lee’s was the first system to
link lexia across the network
Hypertext not only linked lexia, but
people – across the planet

45. <a href=“http://www.virginia.edu”>UVA</a>
The link in HTML connects more than
lexia

46. Nelson never liked the Web
• The web remains bound to the metaphor of
the file
• Links point to files (for the most part), not to
true lexia
• Links are also “dumb” – they don’t go in both
directions, and they are not named (as Bush
would have wanted)
• Google has changed this some …