1. Babel to Xanadu: Hypertext
Prof. Alvarado
MDST 3703
24 September 2013

2. Business
• Quiz 1 to be posted Thursday
• Take home, delivered through Collab
• 10 IDs, 5 short answers, 1 essay
• Covers seminar, readings, and studio
• Open book – free to consult course blog and
other internet sources referenced in class
• Googling for answers not allowed

3. Review: Studio Concepts Covered in
Tutorial
• Documents are made of elements—abstract
units of structure
• Elements are represented in XML by means of
tags and attributes
• HTML is written in XML
• DIV and SPAN elements, along with the CLASS
and ID attributes, allow HTML to be more
semantic
• CSS is a language use to add style to XML

4. Review: Seminar
• Text as self-contained entity
• In terms of form, texts are internally ordered
as a hierarchy (OHCO), representable by XML
• In terms of content, Aristotle, Levi-
Strauss, Colby, and Ramsey each take the
story, written as text, as a unit of analysis

5. But are texts really like this?
What is a text?

6. Jorge Luis Borges gives us a
thought experiment

7. Borges provides us with an allegory
“The Library of Babel”
“The Universe (which others call the
Library) …”

10. What does the Library contain?

11. Babel Books!
• A library of identical books organized into rooms
• 410 pages per book
• 40 lines per page
• 80 characters per line
• 25 characters (incl. space, period, and comma)
• So, each book is a very long string:
80 * 40 * 410 = 1,312,000 chars
• No two books are identical

12. Interestingly, the “IBM Card,” a general-purpose punch
card, introduced in 1928, had 80-columns.

13. If all possible combinations are
represented, how many books, then,
does the library contain?

14. Here is what Google’s calculator give us . . .

15. Number of
characters
Number of
positions

17. So, what kind of information is in
the library?
Are the books readable? What is in
them?

18. Everything that can be
represented by text

19. • All books ever written and to be written
• In every language (transliterated)
• Every possible variation
• Every YouTube video, image, etc.
• EVERYTHING THAT CAN BE WRITTEN
DOWN

21. How likely are you to find something
readable in this library?

22. Passages from Babel Books

24. What does the Library of Babel
remind you of?

25. Information Explosion

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

28. Freedom to access more
information?
or
Freedom from the constraints of
hierarchy and linearity?

29. 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

30. 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

31. What is the problem Bush
addresses in “As We May Think”?

32. 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.
There is a growing mountain of research.
Publication has been extended far
beyond our present ability to make real
use of the record.
AND
BUT

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

34. 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.

35. The Memex

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

38. 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

39. 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?

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

41. “Hypertext is non-sequential
writing”
From Literary Machines

46. 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)

47. 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

48. Axial Hypertext
Types of Hypertext
AXIAL hypertext
RHIZOMIC hypertext

49. 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

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

51. “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]

52. [BL quote are social org]
“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 people 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.”

53. [Berners-Lee’s diagram]

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

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

56. 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 …

57. Observations
• Borges, Bush, Nelson, and Berners-Lee each
break the model of the self-contained,
hierarchically ordered text
• A text emerges as a node in a network of lexia
• The distinction between the library and the
book breaks down
• Instead, we have the “docuverse”

58. More Observations
• Bush and Berners-Lee, both of whom tried to
solve real-world problems, grasped the social
nature of the problem
• The social nature of networked digital media
would end up dominating information
technology in the decades following the
invention of the WWW

59. Is hypertext new?

60. The Talmud
1 = Mishna, the first major
transcription of the oral law
2 = Gemara, analytical
discussions
3 = Rashi, glossary
4 = Tosefos, additions
5 = Hananel, comments
6 = Eye of Justice, legal
decisions
8 = Light of the
Bible, references to Biblical
quotations.
9 = Bach's Annotations
10 = Gra's Annotations

61. [Study Bible]

62. [OED]

63. [Guernica]
Picasso’s Guernica, 1937

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

65. Hierarchy
Organization of the library Organization of the book

66. Goes back to Aristotle …

67. So, what’s wrong with hierarchy?

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

69. [Tomato]

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