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
Design
and
Information Architecture
• Part Five: The End of The
University
Part One:
Non-sequential media
Books and Machines
Non-sequential Stories and Machines
Garden of Forking Paths (1941) Memex (1945)
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 MACHINE
Labyrinthine 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
Harvard
Enrols on a computer course
for the humanities
In 1965 defines hypertext
as…
“non-sequential writing”
(Ted Nelson, 1965)
Definitions
Gygi (1990)
• non-sequential representation
of ideas - abolition of the
traditional, linear approach
• a complex network of nonlinear 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
• Hot
– Sequential
– Authority
• to electr(on)ic media
• Cool
– Non-sequential
– End of authority
New Paradigm?
Hypertext paradigm
Non-linear
Borderless
Associated links
User-Navigation
Interactive
Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond
Book 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)
David Hume’s
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
law of association of ideas
1711-1776
Rhizomes
and 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)
Growth of the
Internet
• 1968 Douglas
Engelbart
demonstrates
–
–
–
–
The GUI
The mouse
Electronic mail
Interactive
hypermedia
Tim Berners-Lee
the 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
WEB STYLE GUIDE, 2nd edition
http://www.webstyleguide.com/site/index.html
• Linear Sequence
• Balanced Hierarchies
• Hierarchies
• Semantic Webs
Summary
Apply to user needs
Part Four:
Hypertext Discourses
The Death of the Author
The End of the University
Sequential Communication
The Shannon-Weaver Model (1948)
The author/reader inversion
Web 2.0?
Readers Can Become Authors
public.ansi.org/.../ ptl_docs_publish.gif
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…
• Facilitates student
• Hypermedia not a
centred learning
teaching tool, but a
learning tool (Duchastel in
Landow)
• 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?
Next Assessment
Understanding Users and Interactivity CODE MS1304A
• A practical group project
• DEADLINES: 9th Nov -11 & 7th DEC-11
• The most important factors in our assessment of your
work are (a) how you perform as a group, (b) how
creative your ideas are, (c) you consideration of the
user, and (d) your understanding of interactivity.
Please ensure that all group meetings are recorded.
Component One (due 9th Nov -11 )
• The Written Proposal (350 words max)
•
Being creative and original with ideas is an important work-based skill in the interactive media and
multimedia industries. In this assignment we ask you to come up with an idea for an interactive
commercial or arts based product/project. This may include one of the following:
•
•
•
•
An original website service
A smart phone Application
An interactive piece of public art. A sculpture or screen-based exhibit
A website service associated with another media product. A television programme
for example
An interactive toy
An interactive TV programme
A web-based soap opera or documentary
An art installation
A simple interactive game
An interactive method for advertising another product
•
•
•
•
•
•
The main idea is to think of new ways to connect users to interactive services or products.
Look here for inspiration http://www.btween.co.uk/branding-talent
You are encouraged to discuss possible approaches to the assignment with your seminar tutor
Component One
• What you submit – 350-word proposal
(marks will be awarded for good
communication, creativity, group effort and
attention to spelling and grammar)
Component Two
• Prototype and Portfolio
• DEADLINE 7th DEC-11
In the seminar sessions we will explore various ways of situating the user in the centre of the
design process. In the groups formed for component one you will collect rudimentary
evidence of user testing and submit in a group folder. The folder should adhere to the
following
•
•
Professionally presented and labelled documentation
Contain evidence of pre and post user testing
– Walkthroughs or focus groups
– Paper prototype
– Questionnaires
Seminar Links
• Pitching ideas: examples
– The Detective
–
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHIv8-7oCj0
– Our City Our Music
–
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCvdXVJPA9I
– Night Bridge
–
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8hs4y1i2pU&feature=related
–
http://www.btween.co.uk/branding-talent
– In Groups - discuss
1. How creative is the idea presented
2. How does it consider the user
3. How does it employ interactivity