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NoteBook > LegacyOfTheMemex
This is a project of re-designing our Writing from Sources course (CW 1102) openly as a memex course: a course where the method is ostensibly centered on the technology. From one angle, this is nothing new. All writing courses center their methodology on a particular technology. Traditional FYC courses center on writing for paper and typewriting (now word processor to paper). The teaching methods (journals, face to face discussions, workshopping) are all centered on moving from handwritten text production to a linear word processed, double-spaced document of 250 words to the page. The points of intervention - where other students or teacher might intercede - is in keeping with the paper model of text production. We have brainstorming sessions (others help us get started); then draft workshops (we create a draft entity solo); then transfer the text to word processed paper for product approval and comment. Students do not learn to write in the abstract: they learn to use the technologies of text production and the rhetorical strategies for distribution on paper. So, if we shift the writing technology from paper to wiki, we change teaching methods, material production, rhetorical strategies, and what can be learned. So this course would enact using wikis / hypertext as a research and development space in FYC. Because wiki space isn't codified like paper or word processing, it doesn't carry the social baggage of "research paper"; and so wiki space is well suited to teaching research. The characteristics of wiki writing and wiki text make it amenable to what we want to teach about writing, and particularly so in CW II. Consider how wiki characteristics suit the characteristics of teaching research 'when research is re-conceived as something more than the research report, and when research is thought of as process rather than format.
Further, wiki writing strategies (ThreadMode? > DocumentMode? > ReFactoring?) are well suited for research work because
As before: What we teach about writing is going to be grounded in the materiality of the medium. The new medium means teaching a new act of process. [note about designing interfaces to suit the kinds of pedagogical tasks learners are being asked to engage in: giving them more than hammers. The omnium project seeks to do this for teaching Design http://www.omnium.edu.au/projects/]. The need for well-tooled interface design is becoming more and more clear as generic IMSs? proliferate. The question is to consider what the wiki interface and capabilities encourages / makes possible, and how to better adapt it if necessary. ie: the wikimedia engine might prove one of the better for teaching writing because it better supports page history and page discussion. By the same token, it's hard to see what kind of learning - except lecture and response - an IMS supports. In being generic, it supports less and less. [the turn is this: an IMS demands that we adapt method to its constraints. the design approach starts with methods and designs to facilitate those methods] [we can see this design-to-practice at work in Bush's design of the memex. I'd like to see it practiced again in incorporating wikis.] The MemexTo start, we look to Bush's description of method on the memex, which is grounded in his sense of academic work - a sense of academic work that hasn't changed all that much. It's the picture of the scholar at her desk, reading and taking notes: something active, not passive quiet reading in an armchair. I'm going to quote extensively from As We May Think because it deserves a close look. (I'm drawing mainly from section 6 and section 7) First, a sketch of the writer's workstation: Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
But it's a desk with a built-in library: In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.
Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed.
There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions. [...]
A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf.
Here's one of the points where we see that Bush is not just designing a personal microfiche reader. He is designing the memex for the kind of work scholars and writers do. Not only can the writer view a book, but she can view more than one book at a time, and annotate them as well: As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.
And here's the heart of the matter, the move from reading to writing that marks academic work: the "essential feature of the memex... the process of tying two items together," creating the link. All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.
When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.
And now Bush gives us an example, a narrative of a scholar at work on a project and how this project unfolds: The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.
And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations, even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the outranged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.
That, in a 1945 nutshell, is hypertext and the seed of the wiki and the weblog. (The essential, significant difference is that while the memex was imagined for individual use, the wiki is designed for collective use.) It all works by the general principle that the technology will determine the process. A couple of drawings (from Abracadabra: Language, Memory, Representation
But I've always imagined the memex as built into a Frank Lloyd Wright desk alternative view designed for The S C Johnson Wax Administrative Building in Racine, Wisconsin. Or maybe this desk is better for a memex knowledge worker.
And a contemporary product of memex-thinking :Wikipedia.
Layout of the Course
Exercises
notesI found a mention setting Ted Nelson's conception of hypertext against V Bush's conception. Nelson's was privileged because of its egalitarianism over Bush's: Bush's vision of the memex posited an expert (re) creating the same old hierarchies and sense of knowledge; the research trails are passed on to other experts who, it seems, may add to them but not literally re-cast or re-write them. Nelson, on the other hand, saw Xanadu as collective of readers-become-writers, more like the utopian sense of WikiPedia?. This is not a software issue so much as a social power issue. However, if we take the historical moment to define hypertext as a text that all may revise, then Xanadu makes an inroad. In hypertext, re-writing becomes significant, volatile. If the original author doesn't re-write, some one else will for her. |
