S&T

[0] After the link: A brief (!) history (?) of hypertext (here) [1] Hypertext and history [2] Measuring hypertext [3] Hypertext and Brown University [4] Hypertext and else (database) [5] Living with hypertext

The College Hill Independent forwards the following open-ended hypertext system for no particular anniversary of hypertext at Brown University.

[1a] We cannot think otherwise: Hypertext [2a, 1] is all nothing but trace.

[1b, 1] My computer is, as usual, littered. The 47 tabs and 9 windows index my last 24 hours of work (and non-work). Everything is at once [3b, 4]. I cannot accurately retrace my steps; everything appears flattened before me [4b].

[1b, 2] An incomplete inventory in-progress, in no order:

Window 1: Canvas assignments, Zoom launch, Wikipedia hypertext, archive.org Selected Papers, 1977, open.spotify.com, Vimeo Andy van Dam talk, Google search “Melissa Clark anchovies,” Wikipedia hypertext again Window 2: Gmail, Zoom launch Window 3: Google doc, Canvas discussion, Google drive search, Google doc, Google doc, Google doc, Google slide, Gutenberg.org, Panopto India Song, Canvas Zoom launch, Brown. edu academic calendar, Canvas dashboard, Wordreference.com, when2meet, Google slides, Google Window 4: Frankel, Tammuz Hypertext Draft 2 Window 5: Notes Window 6: Dropbox (Brown)

[1b, 3] Every click forward is also a click backwards [1b, 3]. Within a tab, I might follow the preceding sequence of hyperlinks by pressing the back arrow on the top left of my browser. Unlike when I view my desktop, I experience this regression as extraordinarily disjunctive: I cannot observe a singular sequence but am instead forced to relive each movement. This feature is enabled through memory: the browser remembers me, but I cannot see it remembering me. With each click I give away a privacy I cannot perceive.

[1b, 4] I am reluctant to rely on analogies to print media, as much as they abound in writings on hypertext. But I cannot help but wonder what my work environment might look like if it were physicalized. Hundreds of books (some duplicates) scattered about on an immense desk, each flipped open to a page so that I can move quickly between them.

Hypertext makes possible a kind of delocalized thought that was previously unthinkable but is now impossible to think outside of.

[1c, 1] The twentieth-century pioneers of hypertext (Andy van Dam [3a, 2], Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, etc.) assert that their invention was perhaps never an ‘invention’ at all, inasmuch as it constitutes an elaboration of a storied mode of textual engagement. Marginalia can be found as early as there are texts—we have never not associated. of origin? It is a history of nothing and everything at once. Nothing, in that it is impossible to isolate hypertext as an object of analysis; everything, in that it is inextricable from any given object of analysis. Every history is, to some extent, already a hypertext: a layer of text grafted upon another.

[2a, 1] Quote from Ted Nelson’s Selected Papers (1977):

“(...)’Hypertext’ is a recent coinage. ‘Hyper-’ is used in the mathematical sense of extension and generality (as in ‘hyperspace,’ ‘hypercube’) rather than the medical sense of ‘excessive’ (‘hyperactivity’). There is no implication about size—a hypertext could contain only 500 words or so. ‘Hyper-’ refers to structure and not size.”

Reproduced on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Hypertext) as “Theodor H. Nelson, Brief Words on the Hypertext, 23 January 1967,” last edited on 31 March 2021, at 22:03 (UTC).

[2a, 2] It remains unclear what orientation ‘hypertext’ provokes. Some proponents describe hypertext as if it were a mode, a recognizable form of eccentric overlay; others write of hypertext as a comportment [3a, 1], suggesting that hypertext merely formalizes a reading process [1b, 4].

[2a, 3] “There is no implication about size”... indeed, this lack of implication leaves a hole of ambiguity. The “recent coinage” of the term “hypertext” implies specificity, i.e., it is a particular textual configuration that can only be accessed from a discrete point (e.g. the hyperlink). At the same time, claims that hypertext is omnipresent [1c, 1] treat it as if it might be used to label all textual excesses, and in doing so project it immeasurably outward [4c]. reader’s path, it retains connectivity.

[2b, 2] Hypertext generates connections between hyperlink and hyperlinked, free play and structure, as well as between divergent understandings of hypertext itself [2a, 2]. Hypertext connects the two definitions of style: style as generic reception (a style of writing) and as the production of genre (as in the Latin stilus, a kind of writing implement). Reading-writing: hypertext presents a written pattern at the same time as it enables those reading to inscribe themselves into that pattern.

[2c, 1] Hypertext is often described as nonlinear—a strange claim given the arguably straight line that hypertext draws between two points, e.g., on Wikipedia [2a, 1] between a hyperlink and a page. Nonlinearity only becomes apparent with a shift in scale [4c]. Deviations from more normative, linear narrative are only visible if one zooms out and views the hypertextual system as a whole with all its detours, redirections, and reroutings. Yet it is unclear whether hypertext permits the reader this kind of agency— facing the hyperlink [5a, 1], one is encountered not by multiplicity but by radical singularity [2a, 3].

[2c, 2] We might also locate non-linearity in the activity of hypertextual engagement. Hypertext changes our relation to speed: the speed of research, the speed of writing, the speed of flicking between tabs [1b, 5].

What are extension and generality if not hyperactive? Hyper-, both in the sense of speeding up (as in “hyper”) and in the sense of depth (as in “hyper-focused”); -active as in the activation of the link in the moment of our involvement [5a, 1]. For hypertext does not necessarily accelerate, but can slow us down, force us to work in starts and stops.

helps us to remember [4a], but in doing so exposes a collective failure of memory that must be sutured technologically. Hypertext extends just as it contests—the deeper the hypertext, the more it enables and the more it exceeds us.

[3a, 1] Excerpted from the first page of Charles Landow’s (professor emeritus of English at Brown, developer of the Victorian Web hypertext project) Hypertext 3.0 (2006):

“When designers of computer software examine the pages of Glas or Of Grammatology, they encounter a digitalized, hypertextual Derrida; and when literary theorists examine Literary Machines, they encounter a deconstructionist or poststructuralist Nelson […] Jacques Derrida and Theodor Nelson, Roland Barthes and Andries van Dam. I expect that one name in each pair will be unknown to most of my readers.”

[3a, 2] Duplicate of notes from an interview with Andy van Dam (professor of Computer Science at Brown, led early experiments in hypertext), March 23, 2021, conducted by Tammuz Frankel.

• Met Ted Nelson at 1967 computer conference, had been at Swarthmore together • Ted graduated a year ahead in 1959, got to know decently well • Acted in what may be the first rock musical? • Did standard catching up • Wonderful new graphics display, which was about yea big (shows with hands) [2a, 3] • Uppercase characters, vectors • More than 1000 dollars in 1967 money, 100K today • Huge amount of hardware • Attached to Brown’s mainframe, less powerful than any little microcomputer that you would have in a digital watch • Brown had this system/360 model 50 mainframe, display was hooked up to it • Research projects sponsored by IBM research center in NYC • IBM mainframe, IBM display, 2250 Model 1—a phenomenal thing to have it, very few universities had one of these • Computing almost entirely on punch cards and paper in those days when timesharing was just beginning • Interactive, put up simple vector drawings, a pge of text so that we could manipulate text • Andy explained graphics system to Ted, Ted explained Xanadu vision • Hypertext system • Maybe it would be fun to try and prototype some of the ideas • Ted came to Brown for some weekends […]

[3a, 3] When Andy van Dam and Ted Nelson collaborated on their first iteration of hypertext in 1967, all of Brown University shared a single computer. The system, located at 180 George Street, had only half a megabyte of memory—of which van Dam and Nelson were permitted a quarter (128kb) during pre-assigned slots. Though meager by today’s standards, Brown’s access to such a cutting-edge display system helped position it as a leading institution for computer science research in the 1960s (at the time still under the umbrella of applied mathematics).

From its genesis, hypertext balanced idealistic and pragmatic aims, in part reflective of the somewhat conflicting interests of Nelson and van Dam. Nelson came to Brown after beginning to design another hypertext project, “Project Xanadu,” that was far more expansive, aiming at the creation of an interlinked repository of all human knowledge [4c]. (In 1995, a Wired Magazine article titled “The Curse of Xanadu” commemorated Nelson’s project as a “universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form.”) Van Dam, by contrast, was more invested in getting a working prototype off the ground and using it to produce academic documents.

Van Dam continues to research and develop hypertext at Brown. Nelson has long since disowned his own work at Brown as a mistake, claiming it was overly limited in its scope.

[3b, 1] From the National Endowment for the Humanities public records of approved grants:

GRANTEE: Brown University PI: Dr. Andries van Dam LOCATION: Providence, RI TYPE OF GRANTEE: University SPEC. CHARAC.: Private, enrl. 6,292 FROM 11-1-74 THRU 6-30-76 NOTES: Computer/film DESCRIPTION: To support an experimental program to teach a college-level English poetry course, utilizing a new form of computer based “manuscript”, called a hypertext. A documentary film about the project is being produced. An evaluation is being performed to determine the usefulness of this technique as an aid to humanities education.

[3b, 2] In 1974, Brown English professor Robert Scholes (who later founded Semiotics, the precursor to Modern Culture and Media) approached van Dam with a proposal: a seminar in which English students would read and annotate poems using van Dam’s hypertext software FRESS (the File Retrieval and Editing SyStem, a nod to the Yiddish/German verb for excessive snacking). The semester-long poetry seminar (run during the fall of 1975) was divided into three groups: a group completely on FRESS, a group simulating FRESS on paper (manually cutting and pasting with scissors) [1b, 4], and a control group approaching the course as a regular seminar (with the library as their only resource).

[3b, 3] Watching the documentary that came out of this collaboration (“HYPERTEXT: an Educational Experiment in English and Computer Science at Brown University”) is a deeply disorienting experience [4c]. In certain regards, the Brown of the 1970s is unshakably familiar. Those depicted in the documentary work and converse in libraries and classrooms still in use today (the shelves of the Rockefeller Library figure prominently in the film in order to illustrate ‘print’ materiality). Moreover, FRESS undoubtedly prefigures many familiar contemporary technologies [4a]—word processing systems, online collaborative work environments, and so forth. Nevertheless, the attitudes expressed by the students and teachers interviewed could not feel more alien. On the one hand, there is a level of suspicion surrounding computers that feels at odds with today’s computer-dominated university; on the other hand, there is a degree of optimism surrounding the possibilities of technology that seems misguided in the present.

[3b, 4] Most fascinating is the documentary’s celebration of FRESS as enabling a more collective learning experience. While technically FRESS could support several dozen users at once, there was only one graphics terminal (an IMLAC vector display) with the capacity to display multiple windows, a variety of fonts, and many lines of text. For this reason, many students participating in Scholes’s seminar worked serially [2c, 1], reading and commenting on poems one after the other. Perhaps a better analogue than the now all-too familiar simultaneous work environments of Canvas, Zoom, and Google Drive is the experience of watching the documentary itself: an engagement with a shared space (FRESS, the library, the documentary) in a later time [4b].

[3b, 5] Hypertext and word processing have been naturalized in the academy—every course today might be said to retain some vestige of this early experiment on FRESS. And yet, it is difficult to imagine the same collaborative energy across the humanities and sciences today: just as certain disciplinary boundaries have disappeared, new ones have developed.

[4a] From Vannevar Bush’s July 1945 article in The Atlantic, “As We May Think”:

“Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. [4b] In Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Albert speaks:

“Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely. I remembered too that night which is at the middle of the Thousand and One Nights when Scheherazade (through a magical oversight of the copyist) begins to relate word for word the story of the Thousand and One Nights, establishing the risk of coming once again to the night when she must repeat it, and thus on to infinity. [...] I lingered, naturally, on the sentence: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: ‘the garden of forking paths’ was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘the various futures (not to all)’ suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork”

[4c] From Chapter 11 of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893):

“We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” “Have you used it much?” I enquired. “It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

[5a] Descriptions of hypertext are often limited to the schematic [2c, 1] without accounting for what it means to live with hypertext. Hypertext promises passage (moving towards or away from the text) [1b, 3] and even prosthesis (connecting with the text). But the encounter with the hypertextual is also an encounter with the unknown, as the augmentation of the textual necessitates distance from the text [2c, 3]. The hyperlink is always partially illegible, what lies after (behind, next) the link is obscured in shadows.

[5b, 1] A history of hypertext is impossible [1c, 2] because, even when restricted to 20th-century computer science, it is a history of too much [1a]. Hypertext is inextricable from the development of the World Wide Web, itself infinitely open-ended. But it is also inextricable from—and quickly becomes—the history of books, language, and text.

[5b, 2] Tammuz Frankel, Notes App, April 2, 2021 at 5:33 PM

What is a link without the linked? Like a series of annotations without an annotated feigningly apodeictic / suspended /fleetingly ambiguous

cannot discuss hypertext because absent text Open-ended Yet to be finished (unfinished and yet to be)

TAMMUZ FRANKEL B’22 thinks the internet of the world.