The Gentle Seduction (31 page)

Next Steps in
Hyperinedin Development

Putting all the world's data into an information space would be a huge undertaking—just digitizing it would be an enorrnous task, and beyond that, is the effort of putting in the crosslinks, the hypermedia buttons. Putting the worlds knowledge into hypermedia might become the titanic yet vital project for the information age that the transcontinental railroad's development was for the industrial age. Building information space will give us the same increase in speed and power for information movement that the railioad gave us for material goods.

Several organizations are working toward the building of a global information space, albeit slowly. Apple Computer is probably the leader in the use of hypermedia on personal workstations, having introduced HyperCard, the most-raved-about hypermedia product in history. At its first public presentation, it received a standing ovation from the audience.

Both Apple and Microsoft, the two principal drivers of personal computer technology, have made major commitments to the optical storage devices needed to inexpensively store hypermedia databases. At last year's Comdex, Kodak displayed an optical disk juke box that could store half a
terabyte
of information, enough to store a century of
Scientific Americans
, 400 times over.

The rise of digital information standards, such as Postscript and SGML, will reduce the agonizing costs now incurred by anyone trying to collect large blocks of data from diverse sources. These standards were not designed as data formats for hypermedia information, but their widespread adoption will nonetheless help by creating a smaller set of formats from which conversion will be necessary.

Researchers at IRIS, the Institute for Research for Information and Scholarship at Brown University, have built curriculum materials for English and biology in their own hypermedia system, Intermedia, with more to follow. Key goals include the building of easy-to-use tools for creating information spaces (called webs in Intermedia), and to allow growth of the information spaces without bound (see figure 8).
⁸

Perhaps the most visionary hypermedia undertaking is the Xanadu project, started by Ted Nelson (the same Ted Nelson who coined the term hypermedia in the first place).
⁹
The Xanadu project is developing a hypertext publishing network capable of interlinking millions of documents for thousands of users. Xanadu is also building several examples of front ends, or user interface software, to this information space for personal computers such as the Macintosh, and the IBM PC; their long term plan is to support third-party front end developers.

Xanadu incorporates many significant features beyond the basic hypermedia concept. Xanadu will maintain version control of all the documents in its information space. Links to one version of a document are also present in all other versions (as long as any of the linked data is still present). Thus the reader may trace the evolution of a concept. It also allows the original author to update and correct his work, based on the comments and criticisms others have leveled at his document (and which have been attached to his document by later readers).

The basic links in a Xanadu information space are two-way, i.e., when a link is installed, it puts a button at both ends, allowing the reader to go in either direction (which is considerably different from HyperCard and Guide). Thus when an author inserts backward references to earlier works, the system automatically creates
forward
references. This will fulfill the scholar's greatest fantasy, giving him a bibliography that lists not only material that predates an article, but also a bibliography of all the works created
later
(several years ago,
Analog
published a story about a thiotimoline-operated typewriter. This typewriter could print material from the future, offering a similar forward referencing capability; the idea was hysterically funny because it was so self-evidently impossible. I would have added a reference here to the issue of
Analog
that has the story—but the effort to find it is overwhelming, until we get
Analog
into hypermedia).

Xanadu even has a reasonable answer to the question, "How does the author get paid?" The creators of Xanadu database material (and anyone can be a creator here) will receive royalties based on the number of times their material is accessed; the reader will be charged based on the number of kilobytes of data he reads.

Even the Library of Congress is exploring the application of optical media in its quest for self-improvement. Anyone who has ever attempted to use the Library will appreciate their sense of urgency: the card catalog is not a boxful of index card racks, it is a series of rooms, full of boxes full of index card racks. A subject such as "Advertising" sprawls across half a dozen racks. Stoic is the researcher who selects a handful of books from that mammoth collection, necessarily at random, then waits several hours for retrieval—only to find that these weren't quite the books he had in mind.

As information spaces like the Library of Congress get linked up, new commercial enterprises will arise that blend a bit of the editor's role, the publisher's role, and the reviewer's role. How will the average reader separate the wheat from the chaff? Part of the answer will be that respected reviewers and editors will construct link-sets that point out all the documents that
they
thought were excellent.

Other value-added retailers will build unique, cross- pollinating link sets that highlight the interrelationships between items with no visible connection. Harmonic oscillators from physics have applications in fields from molecular biology to cosmology; a unilateral pull-out of Soviet forces from Europe several years ago, heralded by some news people as an overture of peace, turned out to be a preparatory step for the invasion of Afghanistan a few months later—long after everyone had forgotten the connection.

A link-set spanning just the history of the United States might save us from the great danger to technology that I alluded to earlier: the danger that, as our ability to process paper increases, bureaucrats will increase the amount of paper. One set of buttons that I am personally eager to insert into an American history information space is a set of links connecting governmental regulations with the consequences of those regulations—
all
of those consequences. In the early days of railroads, short-haul passengers felt outrage that the railroads charged almost as much for short local runs as they charged to go the long distance from New York to Chicago. These angry citizens put the railroads under government regulation, and this fixed the problem: the long distance fares were increased.
¹⁰
This might sound like a strange fluke—but the same thing happened when government took regulatory control of the airlines. The future is all too predictable for those who remember the past—for those who have a rich set of interconnections showing the relations between those past events.

Perhaps easily accessible linkages, reiterating these relationships between laws and consequences, would help Americans to understand their vital role as cultural engineers. With such an understanding, our interaction with bureaucracies such as the government could become more rational. We could make institutions more effective—or we could
intentionally
make them less effective, based on a deeper understanding of effective government.

Just this one clear articulation of the relationship between people and institution could pay for the entire effort of building our information space. Who knows where we might go from there?

Authors Note: Needless to say, this document was first drafted in hypermedia, then translated to linear form.

References

^l
Literary Machines
, Theodor Nelson, Project Xanadu, 1987. This book discusses hypertext from the perspective of hypertext's originator, and as such is as close to a bible as one can get in the field. A hypertext version of Literary Machines is now available from Owl International.

²
Guide is a product of Owl International. For further information contact Ed Taylor or Jamie Welch at (800) 344-9737, or write to Owl International, 14218 NE 21st St., Bellevue, WA 98007.

³
Hypercard is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.

⁴
David's Sling
, Marc Stiegler, Baen Books, 1988.

⁵
The Elements of Style
, Strunk and White, MacMillan Publishing Company, 1979.

⁶
Engines of Creation
, K. Eric Drexler, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1986. In addition to being the preeminent book of nanotechnology, this book discusses the possible impact of a Xanadu-style hypermedia system of the nature of debate and decision making.

⁷
Marooned In Real Time
, Vernor Vinge,
Analog
, May- August 1986; Baen Books, copyright 1986. This is, to my knowledge, the first time the term Singularity was used to describe the result of exponential advance in technology.

⁸
"Iris Eyes," Roger Strukhoff, May 1988. Also see "Intermedia: The Concept And Construction Of a Seamless Information Environment," by Yankelovich,
et. al
,
IEEE Computer
, January, 1988. If you have further questions, you may write to IRIS Brown University Box 1946, Providence, RI, 02912.

⁹
"Managing Immense Storage," Theodor Nelson,
Byte Magazine
, January 1988. This article describes the nuts and bolts behind Xanadu. For further information contact the Xanadu Operating Company, P.O. Box 7213, Menlo Park, CA 94026.

¹⁰
Free To Choose
, Milton and Rose Friedman, Avon Books, 1980.