|
Past Visions of Hypertext and Their Influence on Us Today.
In July 1945, Vannevar Bush published the seminal paper ``As We May
Think'' in Atlantic Monthly. In this paper Bush proposed Memex, a
device where information and records could be stored and linked
together through `trails' and `associations' rather than `artificial'
indexing mechanisms. This idea of hypertext (a term coined later by
Ted Nelson), has inspired many devices that seek to link information
and knowledge, such as Engelbart's Online System (NLS), Nelson and Van
Dam's Hypertext Editing System (HES) and Berners-Lee's World Wide Web
(WWW). Indeed, notions of linking data have seeped into the realms of
Science Fiction, with William Gibson's novel Neuromancer popularising
the term `Cyberspace' and describing it as a ``graphic representation
of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human
system''. In this panel session to mark the 65th anniversary of ``As
We May Think'' , we shall explore how these previous hypertext systems
envisaged collecting, storing, associating, and presenting knowledge
to the user. We shall also examine how these systems have influenced
our thinking today and what the future of knowledge capture and
information association will involve.
Moderator:
Darren Lunn (Researcher, The University of Manchester)
Panelists: Mark Bernstein (Chief Scientist, Eastgate Systems, Inc.)
Cathy Marshall (Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research)
James M. Nyce (Associate Professor, Ball State University)
Frank Tompa (Professor, The University of Waterloo)
|
|
 |