From Text to Hypertext

… and Beyond

From hypertext to Web 2.0

• Watch: Web 2.0 video

Business Model

©2008, Helen C. Barrett, Ph.D http://electronicportfolios.org/learning/index.html.

Contents

• Part One: Non-sequential media defined

• Part Two: Hypertext and hypermedia

• Part Three: Historical development of hypertext and hypermedia

• Part Four: Navigation Designand Information Architecture

• Part Five: The End of The University

Part One: Non-sequential media

Non-sequential Stories and MachinesGarden of Forking Paths (1941) Memex (1945)

Books and Machines

El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan

Labyrinthine Texts

El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan

• Two main characters – The narrator– His friend

• A detective story – Friend tells narrator about a

book written by a Chinese philosopher called ‘Garden of Forking Paths’

– A book that is a labyrinth, the Garden

To cut a short story even shorter• The paths of the labyrinth

converge

• The story ends with the narrator killing his friend…

• The narrator, it turns out, is a spy for the Germans!!

• As his friend predicted, the narrator comes as an enemy; in another story he would come as a friend.

Choose One or Many Forking Paths

The reader meets “diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others.”

“He creates, thereby, ‘several futures,’ several times, which themselves proliferate and fork.” Borges, 1941

• BIMA winners in 2007• A Contemporary Garden

of Forking Paths?

MEMEX MACHINELabyrinthine Machines

Vannevar Bush, formerly a dean of engineering and vice president at M.I.T, chaired the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and became Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development

(OSRD) in WW2

Part Two

Defining hypertext and hypermedia

Hypertext Defined

BA in philosophy in 1960 Masters in sociology at

HarvardEnrols on a computer course

for the humanities

In 1965 defines hypertext as…

“non-sequential writing”(Ted Nelson, 1965)

DefinitionsGygi (1990)

• non-sequential representation of ideas - abolition of the traditional, linear approach

• a complex network of non-linear nodes connected together by links

• facilitates the rapid exploration of large bodies of knowledge

• Link by association rather than indexing

• content is not bound by structure and organisation

See The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information

Luciano Floridi, 2003 p. 248

McLuhanesque (1964)

• A shift from dominant print paradigm

• to electr(on)ic media

• Hot– Sequential– Authority

• Cool– Non-sequential– End of authority

New Paradigm?

Hypertext paradigmNon-linearBorderless Associated links User-NavigationInteractive

Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and BeyondBook by Jakob Nielsen, published by Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (originally

published by AP Professional, Boston, MA), 1995. ISBN 0-12-518408-5 (paperback).

Part Three: Historical Development of Hypertext/media

MEMEX (1945)

‘As We May Think’

• Article published in 1945 by Vannevar Bush

• A device called a MEMEX

• Purpose – to extend human

memory by organising information associatively

– Link to original article

The MEMEX would…

• ‘…externalise the associative processes of the human mind so that access to information was equidistant, in effect equa-linkable, to any and all ideas’ (Levinson, 1998).

As We May Think?

‘…the human mind operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.’

Vannevar Bush

Semantic Network

www.shared-visions.com/.../ mmapx1-l.jpg

Tree of knowledge, branch of knowledge, shaking the tree of knowledge (Newton)

Thinking by Association

‘Impressions and ideas are not psychic atoms isolated from one another. They are all linked together by an inclination to recall one another.”

‘Ideas are naturally associated with one another and form large groups, and these groups in turn are related, to form still larger groups’.See Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature 1737

David Hume’s

law of association of ideas

1711-1776

Rhizomesand the Web

• Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext in 1965

• Ongoing Xanadu project http://xanadu.com/

• Global library • A Docuverse

– Library containing all of humanities literature

• [These consist] of "everything" written about the subject, or vaguely relevant to it, tied together by editors (and NOT by "programmers," dammit), in which you may read in all the directions you wish to pursue. There can be alternate pathways for people who think different ways.

(Nelson in Dream Machines)

• 1968 Douglas Engelbart demonstrates– The GUI– The mouse– Electronic mail– Interactive hypermedia

Growth of the Internet

Tim Berners-Leethe inventor of the WWW

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jev2Um-4_TQ

• Working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory

• In his lunchtime in 1990s

• Web clients and server • defined • URL• HTTP • HTML

The Power of the Web?

<html><head><title>my links page</title></head><body><a href="http://ms1304.blogspot.com/">MS1304 Blog</a></body></html>

The power of a link in the Web is that it can point to any document of any kind in the universe of information (Berners Lee).

Part Four:Navigation Design

and Information Architecture

Websites as organization of complexity

The Link

• Linear Sequence

• Hierarchies

• Balanced Hierarchies

• Semantic Webs

WEB STYLE GUIDE, 2nd editionhttp://www.webstyleguide.com/site/index.html

Summary

Apply to user needs

Part Five: Hypertext Discourses

The Death of the Author

See essay on how networks changer our relation to authority

The End of the University

Sequential Communication

The Shannon-Weaver Model (1948)

public.ansi.org/.../ ptl_docs_publish.gif

Readers Can Become Authors

The author/reader inversion Web 2.0?

Reader Control

‘Necessary to give up conceptual systems

founded upon ideas of centre, margin, hierarchy and linearity and replace them with multilinearity,

nodes, links and networks’

Landow, 1992

George Landow 1992 & 1997 Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology John Hopkins Press

The classroom without walls…

• Hypermedia not a teaching tool, but a learning tool (Duchastel in Landow)

• Facilitates student centred learning

• Student creates own centre

• Chooses own sequence, point of access

The End of the University

• Authority is ‘seriously undermined by the electronic nature of texts’

• ‘Hypertexts’ render ‘the reader the author… disrupting the stability of experts or authorities’ (Poster in Holmes, 1997. p.225) http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/

• Universities are dinosaurs ( Eli Noam, 1995)

The End of the University?

NUS WebsiteNUS YouTube “broadcast”Successes in CanadaThere are numerous Facebook event pagesBBC article: How social media changed protestGuardian: How social media changes protest

From pamphlets to hashtags