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Intertwingled : the work and influence of Ted Nelson
Dechow D., Struppa D., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2015. 150 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319169-24-8)
Date Reviewed: Apr 29 2016

Over 40 years ago (1974), the computing world got a glimpse of the future with the publication of a very peculiar book--really two books in one, bound back-to-back with each side showing its front cover. It was author Ted Nelson’s Computer lib/Dream machines [1] that proclaimed his now familiar mantra:

EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no “subjects” at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.

During the 1960s, Nelson began designing a computer world he called Xanadu, in which widely related information on all levels and formats was intertwingled through a system of multi-linking he called hypertext. Many of the ideas he described were later embedded at the start of the Internet.

In 1995, Wired’s Gary Wolf profiled Nelson [2]. He describes a man whose ideas ran way ahead of their execution. The ideas embedded in Nelson’s Xanadu project were the springboard for “most of the essential components of today’s [web and] hypertext [document production] systems.”

The Economist article “The Babbage of the web” [3] describes Nelson’s Xanadu as directly inspiring HyperCard, Apple’s pioneering hypermedia software; by the time Tim Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web in 1990, “the idea of hypertext was [current].”

To celebrate Ted Nelson’s achievements at the 50-year anniversary of Computer lib/Dream machines, California’s Chapman University hosted a conference, INTERTWINGLED, The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (April 24, 2014), paying tribute to Nelson’s many contributions to accessing and connecting information on a semantic level. Computing world colleagues and others working in knowledge access spoke at the conference and presented papers. These were gathered for subsequent publication in the book reviewed here (not to be confused with information architect Peter Morville’s book [4]). Speakers and writers included:

Alan Kay (Turing Award winner “for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming language”). Kay presented a celebration video that chronicled the 1960s as a time of a prodigious way of thinking: naming Xerox PARC’s Smalltalk contribution to linked information, Sketchpad, Logo and Turtle graphics, the Arpanet, and the innovative work by Nelson and Englebart. He concludes: despite these efforts, “many of Ted’s and Doug’s ideas have been missed. ... So, why bother having visions? ... To me, the visionaries are the most important people we have because it is only by comparing their ideas with our normal ideas that we can gauge how we are doing.”.

Belinda Barnet (Lecturer in Media at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne; author [5]). Barnet lets us know that in 1965, text was not considered to be data, just something to be manipulated with typewriters. She argues “the idea of a universal digital publishing system, an ‘open hypermedia’ system, originated with Nelson ... the most important vision in the history of computing.” She concludes with: “The web is just one implementation of hypertext. ... Xanadu still has much to offer us ... as a guiding vision.”

Christine Borgman (Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA; author [6]). “Ted has tackled--head on--some of the thorniest known problems of information organization.” Continuing, Borgman notes that “Ted has a large following in the library world because he dared to reimagine the library,” commenting on how Nelson “moved quickly into the most complex theoretical territory, asking questions that still challenge hypertext designers today. For instance, if you change a document, what happens to all the links that go in and out? Can you edit a document but preserve its links? What happens when you follow a link to a paragraph that has been erased?” Nelson discovered that in order to represent metadata organizational relationships between documents in hypertext relationships, multi-directional links are needed. Technical compromises regarding multi-directional linking were made early in computing history, hampering the ability to implement hypertext on a large scale. This constraint continues to this day.

Wendy Hall (Professor of Computer Science and Dean of the Faculty of Physical Science and Engineering at the University of Southampton, UK; former president of the Association for Computing Machinery; multimedia and hypermedia researcher). Hall discussed a very early British hypermedia system, Microcosm, “very prescient of the work being done today in the semantic web and big data.” There are problems with automatically making a link on a work without knowing its precise semantic meaning. In Xanadu, links are two-way connections whose “links never break, even if the text they adhere to is moved or altered.” (Nelson was a visiting professor at Southampton.)

Daniel Rosenberg (Professor of History at the University of Oregon; author [7]). Emphasizing the need to study older information systems, Rosenberg compares the knowledge access schema used by the 1751-1772 Encyclopedists to Nelson’s knowledge organization methods, and his empathy with the Encyclopedist methodologies. The task the Encyclopedists faced was how to organize the newer, vaster amounts of information for easier access. Their encyclopedia covered 28 volumes, 72,000 articles, and 3,000 plates. They innovated new means of access by changing from the traditional organization by subject to an alphabetical format, and used cross-referencing by keyword (hypertext) coupled with direct navigation to the keyworded sources.

Other speakers included Ben Shneiderman, Ken Knowlton, Peter Schmideg, Laurie Spiegel, and Robert M. Akseyn, who discussed Translusion, a concept for Xanadu in which one copy of a document source would exist, to be included in a new document only when someone called it up [3]. Henry Lowood compiled a thorough bibliography of Ted Nelson’s body of work.

Ted Nelson, thanking all for the gift of the event, identified his inspirations in the computer field as the APL computer programming language, the PDP-8 computer, Sutherlands Sketchpad, Ken Knowlton’s L6 language, Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams, and Sinden’s film Force, mass, and motion [8]. “Their designers had all found simple constructs that generated all the results they wanted. ... I see the purpose of computers as giving us new and better worlds, not simulating the old. Trying to find the magical, minimal structure is the highest goal.” Nelson concludes, “people now call me a ‘computer scientist.’ ... For most of my life, I have thought of myself as a philosopher and filmmaker.” ... “I believe my constructs still hold great promise. I believe this would be a much better world if I had succeeded, but I ain’t dead yet!”

You can try Xanadu yourself with Open Xanadu [9], which recently had its first release in a limited sample form. It is a simple document, which users navigate with the spacebar and arrow keys. At one point, Xanadu had the potential to beat Tim Berners-Lee to the invention of the World Wide Web. But the project carried on slipping, and the web got there first.

More reviews about this item: Amazon, Goodreads

Reviewer:  Bernice Glenn Review #: CR144368 (1607-0488)
1) Nelson, T. H. Computer lib/Dream machines. Self-published, 1974.
2) Wolf, G. The curse of Xanadu. Wired 3, 6(1995), 158–202.http://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/.
3) The Babbage of the web. The Economist, Dec. 7, 2000, http://www.economist.com/node/442985.
4) Morville, P. Intertwingled: information changes everything. Semantic Studios, Ann Arbor, MI, 2014.
5) Barnet, B. Memory machines: the evolution of hypertext. Anthem Press, London, UK, 2013.
6) Borgman, C. Scholarship in the digital age. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007.
7) Rosenberg, D.; Grafton, A. Cartographies of time. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, NY, 2010.
8) Sinden, F. Force, mass, and motion. The Bell System, Warren, NJ, 1968, http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2012/8/20/AT&T-Archives-Force-Mass-Motion.
9) OpenXanadu, http://xanadu.com/xanademos/MoeJusteOrigins.html.
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