Few things are truly new and even the ‘new’ has a history of ‘newness’. Thus finding what is new and applying it to positive and progressive tasks, is far from a walk in the park. A blog is not an end in itself, it is a way of gaining perspective over-time, a cognitive perspective on what is new, what is useful, and how this can progress our knowledge (and make it new). Fundamental to the advancement of knowledge, is moving through knowledge, sharing knowledge, and imparting an alternative perspective to those who don’t look for it and to those who should.

What is new about new media, the Internet, and hypertext? It depends who you ask. In that famous line from 1972, Henry Kissinger asked the Chinese Foreign Minister, Zhou Enlai, for his views on the French Revolution of 1789. He responded, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Blog on, we might learn something.

This virtual exhibition originated with the idea of deconstructing the rarefied and sanctified museum atmosphere, and thus subvert the order and cataloguing of objects which were important to the consolidation of national imaginaires in 1880s Argentina, Brazil and Chile. The Relics and Selves project, then, seeks to take these items out of their cases and the order imposed on them, so that visitors themselves can un-order and re-order them. Using database and Internet technology, we can bring together thousands of images it would be impossible to handle via traditional publication methods (link).

THE KINDS OF FILE structures required if we are to use the computer for personal files and as an adjunct to creativity are wholly different in character from those customary in business and scientific data processing. They need to provide the capacity for intricate and idiosyncratic arrangements, total modifiability, undecided alternatives, and thorough internal documentation. I want to explain how some ideas developed and what they are. The original problem was to specify a computer system for personal information retrieval and documentation, able to do some rather complicated things in clear and simple ways. In this paper I will explain the original problem. Then I will explain why the problem is not simple, and why the solution (a file structure) must yet be very simple. The file structure suggested here is the Evolutionary List File, to be built of zippered lists. A number of uses will be suggested for such a file, to show the breadth of its potential usefulness. Finally, I want to explain the philosophical implications of this approach for information retrieval and data structure in a changing world (link)

Thinking Rock is a free software application for collecting and processing your thoughts following the GTD methodology. It is simple and easy to use – see our demos and manual. A lot of our mental energy is directed towards trying to remember and manage all the things that we want or need to do. Thinking Rock will allow you to clear your mind so that you can become more proactive and concentrate on what is important to you. Thinking Rock allows you to collect your thoughts and process them into actions, projects, information or future possibilities. Actions can be done by you, delegated to someone else or scheduled for a particular date. Projects can be organised with ordered actions and sub-projects. You can review all of your actions, projects and other information quickly and easily to see what you need to do or to choose what you want to do at a particular time (link )

This is to announce the forthcoming events of the
London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship
for 2006-7, a description of which follows. All events
take place at 5.30 pm in Senate House, Malet Street,
unless otherwise noted.

[2 November]
Dr Peter Garrard (Royal Free and University College Medical School,
London), “Textual Pathology”. Room NG15.

As we humans age, physical and functional changes are detectable in all
organs of the body, yet it is the physical structure and performance
characterisitics of the brain that excites more interest than any other.
The reasons for this cognitive bias are diverse, but a major factor is
undoubtedly the devastating and widespread phenomenon of senile
dementia. Alzheimer’s disease is now recognised as a major (though by no
means the only) cause of dementia, and the changes that take place
within the brain are easily recognised when the brain is examined at
post mortem. By destroying the dense network of neuronal connectivity
with which the brain achieves the highest levels of intellectual
activity, Alzheimer’s pathology disrupts the operation of a profoundly
complex system. Moreover, because of the predilection of this pathology
for some lobes of the brain rather than others, characteristic patterns
of abnormal performance are observed in the early stages of the disease.
These include a typical pattern of linguistic difficulty characterised
by a shrinking vocabulary in the presence of apparently normal sentence
structure. Using well-established techniques of digital textual
analysis, Garrard and colleagues were able to demonstrate similar
changes in the late work of Iris Murdoch, who began to exhibit signs of
cognitive failure soon after publication of her final novel, Jackson’s
Dilemma (1995)*.

Arising from the findings of this seminal work are a series of further
questions concerning the relationship between the complex structure of a
text and that of the brain in which it originated. Specifically, whether
ageing is reflected in progressive changes to a higher order structure,
which – just like physical ageing – may follow either a normal or a
pathological trajectory. Similarly, might the presymptomatic phases of
different cerebral pathologies give rise to distinct patterns of textual
change in the same way that Alzheimer’s disease, Pick’s disease, and
vascular dementia are recognisable to the experienced clinician?

Results of an approach to plotting such a trajectory through the final
two decades of Murdoch’s life will be presented, as will similar
analyses using serially sampled bodies of spoken rather than written
language output (a modality that is arguably more sensitive than the
written word).

[6 December]
Professor Ian Lancashire (English, Toronto),
“Cybertextuality by the numbers”. Room NG15

Cybertextuality theorizes that idiosyncratic verbal patterns in
documents such as poems — the repetition and the variation of segments
– are constrained by working-memory (and an equivalent long-term
memory, it may be) capacity; and that the unselfconsciousness that
characterizes the cognitive uttering of such segments gives rise to a
cybernetic phenomenon, an author’s conscious mental feedback to hearing
his own uttered segments. Self-reflection, anecdotes, and certain
observed quantities give some support to this theory. The last include
George Miller’s “magical number” for working-memory capacity (7 ± 2
chunks; since revised by Nelson Cowan to 4 ± 2) and the still uncertain
capacity of the working-memory chunk (perhaps also 3 – 4). Literary text
analysis has neglected John B. Lord’s observation, in 1979, that
Miller’s “magical number” ideally constrains line-length in verse. If
the Miller-Cowan information limit is valid universally in humans, its
numbers have unrealized explanatory power for our literary works and
offer a literary and linguistic measurement that can be detected by what
John Sinclair calls “concordance and collocation.”

[10 January]
Dr John Lavagnino (Centre for Computing in the
Humanities, King’s College London), “Metaphors of
digital and analogue”. Room NG14.

In the early twenty-first century, the view is commonplace that most of
the things around us in everyday life are analogue but the class of
digital things is rapidly growing. In fact, most things are neither:
“digital” and “analogue” are not names for two categories that between
them encompass the world, but refer to two types of system that we
deliberately engineer. Most things aren’t systematized rigorously enough
to be either digital or analogue. But looser or metaphorical uses of the
terms do have their uses: so Nelson Goodman and others have talked about
the digital nature of writing systems, though such systems as actually
used are not limited to digital coding, as writers and readers commonly
extend them by expressive use of handwriting or other visual features.
It is only in this looser sense that the everyday world can be seen as
analogue, and that the categories of the digital and the artificial can
be conflated — a point of view particularly prevalent in recent films.

In today’s world, “digital” is the privileged term: it’s the one that
has an independent definition (since on this view analogue just reduces
to “not digital”), and even if we’re arguing against its dominance and
assert our difference, we assume things are heading that way. This
extends to very learned discourse: in cognitive science, for example,
the view that the brain is actually digital, deep down, is widespread.
In the mid-twentieth century, when the digital-and-analogue pair first
became established in discussion of computing, it was by no means clear
that digital computing would become the dominant form. It was a more
difficult and expensive way to achieve comparable results at first; it
became dominant only because of eventual economies of scale that
analogue computing did not offer. The thinking about digital and
analogue in the world of cybernetics up through the 1970s was influenced
by a sense of the remarkable things done with information by the living
body, not by computers, and it assumed the view of John von Neumann and
others that the brain worked with a combination of analogue and digital
representations. Each had its own distinctive logic, and neither could
be fully replaced by the other. Just as with today’s casual talk of
digital and analogue, these discussions went beyond the engineering
sense of the terms to metaphorical extensions that did not preserve the
features that are actually required for systems to work. But in making
metaphorical extensions of the terms cybernetics was more sophisticated
than we are today.

[8 February]
Professor Peter Shillingsburg (Centre for Textual
Studies, De Montfort), “The Work Implied, the
Work Represented, and the Work Interpreted”. Room ST275, Stewart House.
(Stewart House adjoins Senate House at the rear; see

http://www.london.ac.uk/stewart.html.)

This three-part paper begins by (1) describing what might be the nature
of literary works and texts (the “thing” that might be tranported into the
electronic medium from a material one), (2) examining what is entailed in
representing or re-representing a work in ways that might be more or
less–preferably less–misleading, and (3) embracing the subjectivity of
editing and exposing the chimera of objectivity in scholarly editing
regardless of medium. The purpose is to emphasize the complexity of the
task and suggest a collaborative way to address the idea of electronic
scholarly editing.

[22 March]
Dr Mary Hammond (Literature and Book History,
Open University), “The Reading Experience
Database 1800-1945: New Directions”. Room NG15.

The Reading Experience Database (RED) is ten years old. Currently
holding around 6,000 records of the reading experiences and practices of
British subjects – including perhaps the largest single collection of
experiences from the ‘long’ eighteenth century – it has recently been
awarded a major AHRC grant which will speed up its growth and enable it
to be placed live on the web for the first time. This paper explores the
ways in which electronically-available data on reading drawn from a wide
range of sources might augment studies of literature and the material
book.

[12 April]
Drs Barbara Bordalejo and Peter Robinson
(Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic
Editing, Birmingham), “Electronic editions for everyone”. Room NG14.

Ten years of experience in the actual making and publication of
electronic editions (ranging from the Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition,
through the Canterbury Tales Project publications, the Parliament Rolls
of Medieval England, to Dante’s Monarchia) has given us some sense of
what electronic editions can do and how they can be made. But so far, we
have no clear answers to two crucial questions: who can use these
editions and how can they use them? Traditionally, critical editions
have had a very narrow readership (usually, advanced scholars) and have
been used in rather limited ways (typically, by scholars themselves
making editions). The promise of electronic editions is that they might
reach a far wider range of readers, who might use them for a far wider
range of purposes, in many more contexts. As yet, this promise has not
been achieved. We may ask: is this because of limitations of the
technology to this point; to the time it takes to break down scholarly
conservatism; or are we simply mistaken, in the belief that scholarly
editions in electronic form might actually reach far wider audiences
than their print predecessors? Or do we need a quite different model, of
what a scholarly edition in digital form might be? In the course of this
talk, we will draw upon the example of two digital editions which aim
(in different ways, from different starting points) to be editions “for
everyone”: the Codex Sinaiticus project, and the publications of the
Canterbury Tales Project.

—–

The London Seminar in Digital Text & Scholarship focuses on the ways in
which the digital medium remakes the relationship of readers, writers,
scholars, technical practitioners and designers to the manuscript and
printed book. Its discussions are intended to inform public debate and
policy as well as to stimulate research and provide a broad forum in
which to present its results. Although the forum is primarily for those
working in textual and literary studies, history of the book, humanities
computing and related fields, its mandate is to address and involve an
audience of non-specialists. Wherever possible the issues it raises are
meant to engage all those who are interested in a digital future for the
book.

The primary form of discussion is a yearly series of seminars by leading
scholars and practitioners involved in the making of digital editions
and scholarly textual resources, in reflecting on these productions and
in examining the historical and material culture of written language as
these inform practice. Running through and uniting the seminars is the
single question, “What is to be done?” They are in that sense all meant
to be practical investigations from which guiding theory will emerge,
feed back into a revised practice and so help us to progress.

The Seminar is deeply rooted in the history of textual production and
its scholarship but is preoccupied with the future. It takes as its
starting point Alan Turing’s principle of computing as a scheme for
constructing indefinitely many machines — from which we derive the
practice of constructing indefinitely many varieties of the digital
book. Its question is not how to arrive at the best successors to this
or that existing form or the best configuration of libraries to house
and manage the products, rather how continuously to remake the digital
book and its environment so that they serve “the living condition of the
human mind” (Peirce). The Seminar explores through practical experiment
the changing ways in which this continuous remaking is to be done and
both the challenges it poses and the opportunities it offers to our
institutions.

The Seminar is sponsored by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities,
King=92s College London, and the Institute of English Studies, University
of London. Its convenor is Dr Willard McCarty (KCL).

SOME THOUGHTS ON HYPERTEXT AND HISTORICAL NARRATIVE
Mark Bernstein

At times, hypertext has seemed incompatible with historical
narrative, either because non-sequential writing is at odds with
understanding cause and effect, or because hypertext caters to short
attention spans and immersive, unreflective visual appeal. Since the
future of serious writing so clearly lies in electronic writing
spaces, this incompatibility has inspired alarm, and the most
commonly-cited advantages of new media for the historian — cheap
publication and economical illustration — are not powerful allies in
this contest. Fortunately, the literary qualities of hypertext turn
out to be well adapted to the needs of historical discussion.

Mark Bernstein is chief scientist at Eastgate Systems and designer of
Tinderbox, a personal content management assistant for making,
analyzing, and sharing notes. Since 1982, Eastgate has created
hypertext tools and published original hypertext fiction and
nonfiction. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he received his
doctorate (in Chemistry) from Harvard University.

New media and cultural form: narrative versus database

Ilana Snyder

Monash University

To appear in 2004 in: A. Adams & S. Brindley (eds), Teaching English with ICT. London: Open University Press & McGraw Hill.

Why narrative and database

Stories define how we think, how we play, even how we dream: they represent a basic way of organising human experience. We understand our lives through stories. Barbara Hardy has argued famously that narrative is ‘a primary act of mind transferred to art from life’ (Hardy 1977: 12). The act of the storyteller, the author, the novelist, says Hardy, arises from what we do all the time, in remembering, dreaming, planning.

Narrative is so deeply ingrained as a cultural form that we take for granted the ways in which storytelling engages our interest, curiosity, fear, tensions, expectations, and sense of order:

For we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative. In order really to live, we make up stories about ourselves and others, about the personal as well as the social, past and future. (Hardy 1977: 13)

Indeed, narrative is so familiar that it has become naturalised: we are no longer conscious of its significance for the ways in which we live our lives.

There is an important explanation for why this has come to be: the novel and cinema, with their pervasive influence, have privileged the narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age. However, we are now in the computer age, which, proclaims Lev Manovich (2001), has introduced narrative’s correlate – the computer database. As Manovich explains:

Many new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning or end; in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organise their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other. (Manovich 2001: 218)

So what is a database? Like narrative, it also represents a basic way of organising human experience. A database can be a library, a museum, in fact, any large collection of cultural data. In the age of the Internet, a database is a structured collection of data organised to maximise fast search and retrieval by a computer. It represents a potentially powerful categorisation system as it provides a range of options for sorting and viewing sets of data. Somewhat loosely, but also generatively, Manovich (2001) uses the word as a metaphor to denote how a collection of digital data can be searched, navigated and viewed in a variety of ways (Walton in press). Unlike a narrative, which creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items or events, a database appears to users as a collection of items to view, navigate and search, no matter how it is organised. As a cultural form – a general way used by the culture to represent human experience, the world and human existence in the world – the database represents life as a list of items and does not presume to order the list. This explains why the experience of using such a collection of information is different from reading a story or watching a film. According to Manovich (2001), these two contrasting cultural forms now dominate the landscape of new media.

In this chapter, I examine how narrative and database manifest themselves, interconnect, perhaps compete, in the context of new media, most often conceived as the Internet, websites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMs and DVD, and virtual reality. The focus here, however, is on just two of these manifestations: games and websites. Although in education, and in the social sciences more broadly, the terms ‘information and communication technologies’ (ICTs) or simply ‘new technologies’ are more commonly used, I prefer new media as it accommodates a greater range of technologies. It also informs the notion of a new media revolution – the shift of culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution and communication.

As is often the case when a new technology or a new way of organising and making sense of the world comes along, we have the opportunity to ‘make the familiar strange’: to re-appraise what we think we know about our world and how we do things within it. The birth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, together with the extraordinary speed of its uptake and expanding influence, at least in the developed world, is one such instance. If the database form is becoming increasingly important as a way of organising information and data, perhaps at the expense of narrative, then we need to make sure that we understand the nature of the new form, how it differs from narrative and also, importantly, how the two interrelate. We also need to consider if indeed there has been a cultural shift of the magnitude alleged by Manovich (2001) and, if so, its implications for literacy education.

Integral to my discussion is the belief that providing opportunities for students to deepen and refine their capacity for informed and critical response to the significant cultural forms associated with the use of new media needs to be recognised as an important goal of literacy education. This outcome is more likely to be achieved if teachers understand for themselves the nature of these cultural forms in the context of the use of new media, share, even if imperfectly, the language with which to talk about them and have real opportunities to consider how best to reorganise their classrooms and their approaches to teaching and learning in creative ways when they are used. The questions posed in this chapter about the relationship between narrative and database are critical as they have profound implications for the effective design of curriculum frameworks and teachers’ inservice and preservice programs that take account of new media.

It might appear that the structure of this chapter pits narrative and database against each other, thus creating an artificial opposition, when in reality their relationship is something more complex and nuanced. However, as a self-conscious rhetorical device, discussing them separately serves to highlight the differences between them thereby providing a base upon which greater understanding of their interconnections may be built.

It might also seem that too much attention is given to defining and explaining key concepts. The concepts selected for explanation, however, are integral to understanding the cultural shifts which provide the focus of this chapter. Probably, because of their unfamiliarity, some of these words, such as ‘compositing’ and ‘interface’, may seem ugly, even alienating. Further, as Raymond Williams (1976) points out, there are difficulties in any kind of definition because the meanings of words – such as ‘narrative’ and ‘database’ – are embedded in relationships and in processes of social and historical change. No word ever finally stands on its own; it is always an element in the social process of language.

However, the words and their meanings that receive extended treatment are foundational to a potentially illuminating discussion of literacy in a world increasingly mediated by the use of new electronic technologies. Each word has somehow demanded my consideration because the problems of its meaning seem bound up with the problems I am using it to discuss. Of course, the complex issues surrounding teaching, learning and the use of new media cannot be understood simply by analysing the words used to discuss them. But, at the same time, the issues can’t really be thought through unless we’re conscious of the words as elements of the problems. Thus not only the argument central to this chapter but also the meanings of the key words used to drive it are given attention.

Finally, it could be construed that I have drawn heavily on the work of just one theorist in the area of new media – Lev Manovich – perhaps ignoring other important thinkers. I hope that readers will agree with me that Manovich’s (2001) book, The Language of New Media, raises a number of provocative, most likely unfamiliar, yet highly relevant ideas for literacy educators. Indeed, I have drawn on just one small element of the book when so much more could be usefully employed to inform the teaching of English in an electronic world.

Understanding narrative in the context of new media

Reconceiving narrative theory

In the context of new media, narrative manifested itself initially as electronic adventure games, then interactive fiction, followed soon after by hyperfiction. All these forms continue to exist, indeed, they are all flourishing in their present instantiations. Much has been written about the literary precursors to electronic narrative (see Snyder 1996). Suffice it to say here that since the beginning of modern fiction, authors have attempted to cajole readers out of passivity. Literary precursors of interactive fiction and hyperfiction include not only Tristram Shandy and Ulysses, but also more recent fiction such as Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (1966) and Borges’ Labyrinths (1970). All work strenuously against the medium in which their books are produced. In attacking the convention that a novel is a coherent narrative of events, such texts simultaneously invite and confirm reader-interaction.

Because interactive fiction already existed in print and film (for example, Alain Resnais’ 1993 film version of Alan Ayckbourn’s play, Smoking/No Smoking), the technological challenge for creators of electronic interactive fiction was ‘to find a way of turning imaginary worlds lodged in the writer’s head into virtual worlds lodged in the computer’s memory’ (Woolley 1992: 155). The precedent was Adventure, a computerised version of role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, developed in the 1960s at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Adventure and its descendants continued to evolve through the late 1970s, when interactive text games migrated from academic and corporate mainframes to home computers. There the form was married with popular fiction and role-playing games to produce a second generation of text adventures that retained the problem-solving design of the original Adventure. In the main, these games were not networks of possibilities to be explored but arrangements of obstacles to be overcome in the progress to a determined goal. Later in the 1980s there emerged a third generation of interactive fiction in which the influence of game scenarios has been less noticeable – although, at the same time, the game scenario fictions have continued to thrive. The multiple fictions of the third generation are narrative networks capable of differing significantly on every reading. And with the advent of the Web, such fictions are able to exploit the new freedoms offered in terms of size, complexity and design.

The most effective techniques for achieving a strong story-line in the print medium are linearity, plot, characterisation, textual coherence, resolution and closure. The same techniques can be used in the context of new media, as with movies on DVD and e-books, although their effectiveness can also be diminished in varying degrees. Writers using the new media, however, have played with the electronic medium’s capacity to create open-ended stories with multiple narrative strands and have found alternative strategies and techniques for engaging readers’ attention (Snyder 1996).

In one sense, each reading of an electronic narrative is a linear experience: confronted with one frame after another, readers are still aware of a narrative, however confused it may be. At the same time, the narrative seems to contain more than one voice and to change direction abruptly. Each electronic narrative handles in its own way the tension between the linearity of the reading experience and the multiplicity of electronic narrative.

According to Aristotle (1959), a narrative must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Electronic narratives, however, interrogate not only Aristotelian notions of beginning and end, but also his assumptions about the sequence of parts and the unity of the finished work. Electronic narrative calls into question some of the most basic points about plot and story in the Aristotelian tradition. By apparently dispensing with linear organisation, linearity becomes a quality of readers’ experience within single chunks of text and their experience of following particular paths. Although the experience of linearity does not disappear altogether, narrative chunks do not follow one another in a page-turning, forward direction. In electronic narratives, space is multi-dimensional and theoretically infinite.

Electronic narratives also pose problems for traditional understandings of beginnings and endings. In traditional print narratives, beginnings imply endings and endings require some sort of formal and thematic closure. Literary convention decrees that endings must either satisfy or in some way respond to expectations raised during the reading of the narrative. Electronic narratives have taken a cautious approach to the problem of beginnings by offering readers a block of text labelled with something like ‘start here’, that combines the functions of title page, introduction and opening paragraph, perhaps reflecting the reluctance of some writers to disorient readers at the point of their first contact with the narrative.

By avoiding the corresponding devices for achieving closure, however, such electronic narratives may challenge readers. It is up to readers to decide how, when and why the narrative finishes. Of course, we are not naive about unresolved texts. Print and cinematic narratives provide instances of multiple closure and also a combination of closure linked to new beginnings. The fact that twentieth-century writers and film-makers frequently offer their audiences little in the way of closure indicates that as readers and writers we have long learned to live and read more open-endedly than discussions of narrative form may lead us to believe. However, culturally familiar though we are with the absence or denial of closure, we may still find the consequences disturbing.

Creating electronic narratives

There are several ways of thinking about how writers create electronic narratives. The first is to conceive of it as a hypertext. Hypertext provides a means of arranging information in a non-sequential manner with the computer automating the process of connecting one piece of information to another. Within a hypertext system, individual media objects (sound, photos, film, animation, graphics etc) are wired together by hyperlinking. A hyperlink creates a connection between two elements. Elements connected through hyperlinks can exist on the same computer or on different computers connected on a network such as the Web.

Hypertext users get their own versions of the compete text by selecting pathways through the structure. They can create, manipulate and examine a network of nodes connected by relational links. Hypertext differs from printed text by offering users multiple paths through a body of information: it allows users to make their own connections and to produce their own meanings.

Manovich (2001) explains the processes of creating electronic narratives somewhat differently. For him, creating a narrative work in new media can be understood as ‘the construction of an interface to a database’ (Manovich 2001: 226). The user of the narrative is traversing a database, following links between its records as established by the database’s creator. Using this logic, an interactive narrative can be understood ‘as the sum of multiple trajectories through a database’ (Manovich 2001: 227).

However, Manovich (2001) is also quick to point out that to qualify as a narrative, a cultural object has to satisfy a number of criteria: it should contain both an actor and a narrator; it should have three distinct levels consisting of the text, the story and the fabula; and its content should be a series of connected events caused or experienced by actors (Bal 1985). Thus not all cultural objects are narratives. Just creating trajectories is not enough – the creator also has to control the semantics of the elements and the logic of their connections so that the resulting object will meet the criteria of narrative as outlined above. It also cannot be assumed that by creating their own paths, users construct their own unique narratives.

The computer game that uses 3-D navigable space to visualise any kind of data – molecules, historical records, files in a computer, the Internet as a whole, the semantics of language – qualifies as a narrative. As with many computer games, the human experience of being in the world and the narrative itself are represented as continuous navigation through space.

Understanding the computerised database

From on the screen to behind the screen

When we think about the Web, it is most often in terms of what we see – on the screen. The notion of digital ‘compositing’ represents one way of explaining what we see when we look at the screen: the ‘assembling together [of] a number of elements to create a single seamless object’ (Manovich 2001: 139). As Walton (in press) explains: ‘Like other new media, the Web is meant to be experienced as a seamless visual artefact, even though it is, in fact, assembled from a collection of files. In reality, the Web is only partially composited, with the seams of its construction more visible to users than is the case in many other new media’. But for the purposes of Manovich’s argument it provides a useful way of thinking about what we see when we look at a computer screen.

We also need to know that what we see on the screen – those assemblages of different elements – is mediated by the visual interface. The Web human-computer interface describes the ways in which users interact with a computer. The interface includes physical input and output devices such as the monitor, the keyboard and the mouse. It also includes the metaphors used to conceptualise the organisation of computer data. For example, the Macintosh interface, which uses the metaphor of files and folders arranged on a desktop, has won the day, so to speak, as Microsoft has adopted the same icon-driven interface. As a result, the Macintosh office metaphor has become more or less ubiquitous.

Further, the visual interface includes ways of manipulating data: copy, rename and delete a file; list the contents of a directory; start and stop a program; set the computer’s date and time (Manovich 2001). As more and more forms of culture become digitised, computer interfaces allow more interaction with cultural data: hence Manovich’s notion of cultural interface. And the language of cultural interfaces largely comprises elements of other, already familiar cultural forms such as painting, photography and film.

As well as taking note of what is seen on the screen – the digital compositing and the visual interface – it is also salutary, argues Marion Walton (in press), to consider some of the less visible aspects of the new Web texts. If we look ‘behind the screen’ of visual interfaces, ‘we find the fundamental structures and architectures which underlie and accommodate the visual designs of the Web’. These structures may be less mesmerising than the multimedia assemblages visible on the screen, but they are no less influential in determining what is communicated. For Walton, what goes on behind the screen is just as important as what is visible on it. When we look beyond the computer’s visual surface and consider the assumptions embedded in the Web’s underlying codes and conventions, we recognise that while the Web is a composited visual artefact, it is, using Manovich’s (2001) definition, also a huge, chaotic database.

Database logic

Putting aside for the moment Manovich’s (2001) claim that the database is not only a new cultural form, but also the essence of new media in general, and of the Web in particular, a database represents an abstract process of organising information. There are different types of databases – hierarchical, network, relational and object-oriented – and each uses a different model to organise data. But no matter how they are organised, databases appear to users as collections of items to view, navigate and search in a variety of ways. As such, the Web is structured according to what Manovich (2001: 215) calls ‘database logic’.

The database logic of the Web provides us with ways of modelling the world through classifications and categorisations – perennially powerful ways of organising knowledge, whether in electronic form or not. Walton (in press) points out that although classification and categorisation may not be as immediately engaging as other communicative forms such as narrative, they are enabling systems which structure today’s world in significant ways. As the logic of a classification is usually implicit, identifying that logic and learning to articulate its underlying assumptions represent key skills for the current era. But, at the same time, Walton (in press) reminds us that the database ‘provides users with reduced and simplified models of reality, which tend to homogenise and classify what they represent’.

The database as cultural form

The most familiar examples of the database form in new media are multimedia encyclopedias and other commercial CD-ROMs or DVDs that feature collections of things – recipes and photographs, for example. Multimedia works that have cultural content, such as the CD-ROM virtual tour through a museum collection, favour the database form. Instead of a constructed narrative, the user is presented with a database of texts that can be navigated in a variety of ways. Another example is the CD-ROM devoted to a single cultural figure. Instead of a narrative biography, the user is presented with a database of images, video clips and texts that can be navigated in a variety of ways (Manovich 2001).

Where the form has really developed is in the context of the Internet. A Web page is a sequential list of separate elements: text blocks, images, video clips and links to other pages. It is always possible to add a new element to the list. In this sense, Web pages are collections of separate elements that are never complete: they can always grow. New elements can be added to the end of a list or they can be inserted anywhere in it: ‘All this contributes to the anti-narrative logic of the Web. If new elements are being added over time, the result is a collection, not a story’ (Manovich 2001: 221).

To users, databases appear as collections of items with which they can perform various operations – view, navigate, search. The experience of using such computerised collections of information is quite distinct from reading a novel or watching a film. But just as a literary or cinematic narrative presents a particular model of what a world is like, so too a database presents a particular model of what a particular world is like. In this sense, the database also represents an independent cultural form. It is what Manovich (2001: 219) calls ‘a new symbolic form … a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world’.

Regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as linear narratives, interactive narratives, databases or something else, underneath, on the level of material organisation, they are all databases (Manovich 2001). In new media, the database supports a variety of cultural forms that range from direct translation, that is, the database remains a database, to a form that is closer to a narrative. Overall, databases occupy a significant territory of the new media landscape.

Narrative and database: understanding the dynamics of their relationship

A number of questions posed by Manovich (2001) help to illuminate some key aspects of the dynamics of the relationship between narrative and database. First: Do databases and narratives have the same status in computer culture? Although some media objects follow a database logic in their structure while others do not, in general, ‘creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database’ (Manovich 2001: 226). Manovich gives some examples. In the simplest case, the interface simply provides access to the underlying database. For instance, an image database can be represented as a page of miniature images; clicking on a miniature will retrieve the corresponding record. If a database is too large to display all its records, a search engine can allow the user to search for particular records. But the interface can also translate the underlying database into a very different experience. The example Manovich provides is Jeffrey Shaw’s (1996) interactive installation Legible City, where the user navigates a virtual three-dimensional city composed from letters.

Thus in new media, the database supports a variety of cultural forms that range from direct translation (ie a database remains a database) to a form whose logic is the opposite of the logic of the material form itself – narrative. More precisely, a database can support narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the form itself that would foster the generation of narrative.

In the computer age, the database becomes the centre of the creative process. ‘The new media object consists of one or more interfaces to a database of multimedia material’ (Manovich 2001: 227). He continues:

If understood in this way, the user of a narrative is traversing a database, following links between its records as established by the database’s creator. An interactive narrative … can be understood as the sum of multiple trajectories through a database. (Manovich 2001: 227)

Second: In the context of new media, are these two cultural forms necessarily competing or oppositional? Manovich (2001: 233) says that he likes to think of them as ‘two competing imaginations, two basic creative impulses, two essential responses to the world’. As he points out, the ancient Greeks produced long narratives but they also produced encyclopaedias. The result of this competition to make meaning of the world is the production of hybrid forms. For example, it would be difficult to find an encyclopedia without a trace of narrative and vice versa.

Even if we resist naming it a competition, there exists a complex interplay and exchange between the two forms. For example, when users access a museum database, the objects in themselves are meaningless: they have to be framed in narrative terms to become meaningful. This might be achieved by a Web developer or by the users, who create their own narratives as they choose which links to activate and thus which elements to juxtapose and connect.

Another example is located in new media design which can be reduced to two basic approaches: constructing the right interface to a multimedia database or as defining navigation methods through spatialised representations. The first approach is used in a website where the objective is to provide an interface to data and to give the user efficient access to information. The second is used in most computer games and virtual worlds where the aim is to psychologically immerse the user in an imaginary universe.

In general, these two goals represent the extremes of a continuum. Often, the two goals of information access and psychological engagement compete within the same new media object. A search engine tries to immerse the user in a universe in which the goal is to define, with increasing accuracy, the parameters of the quest. And in a game, there’s a strong information processing dimension. Gathering clues and treasures, updating a mental map of the universe of the game – aligns playing a computer game with other information processing tasks typical of computer culture like searching the Internet, scanning news groups, pulling records from a database, using a spreadsheet, or data mining large data stores (Manovich 2001).

The third question is to do with the history of culture: Does the pre-eminence of the database form represent a break with the past so monumental that the new media will completely replace narrative with database? As Manovich (2001: 229) argues: ‘New media does not radically break with the past; rather, it distributes weight differently between the categories that hold culture together, foregrounding what was in the background, and vice versa’. Radical breaks do not generally involve complete change, but a restructuration.

Taking meaning

We require an education in literature … in order to discover that what we assumed – with the complicity of our teachers – was nature is in fact culture, that what was given is no more than a way of taking. (Howard 1992: vii)

In her now classic article, ‘What no bedtime story means’, Shirley Brice Heath (1982) argues that the culture children learn as they grow up is, in fact, ways of taking meaning from the environment around them. Even though making sense from books and relating their content to knowledge about the real world is only one way of taking meaning, it is often interpreted as ‘natural’ rather than learned. However, taking meaning from books, says Heath, is as much a part of learned behaviour as are ways of eating, sitting, playing games and building houses.

Twenty or so years later, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can apply the same logic, albeit to a different set of circumstances and for a different purpose. Today, just as in the 1980s, the culture young people learn as they grow up is embodied in ways of taking meaning from the environment in which they are immersed. What has changed, however, is the nature of the environment. Young people continue to take meaning from stories printed in books which, of course, represents just one way of taking meaning. But they also have to make sense of screen-based, digital texts, located on the Web, and relate their form and content to knowledge about the real world. This represents another way of taking meaning.

However, as argued in this chapter, the form and content of these screen-based texts are different to their print counterparts: most are not based on the familiar narrative structure that has become both privileged and naturalised in our book-oriented culture. The dominant structure, indeed cultural form, in the context of the Web, is the database. Unlike narrative, it is in no danger of becoming naturalised: strangely, the cultural significance of the database has been largely overlooked.

As book-oriented teachers and their students interact in classrooms, the adults provide their students, through modelling and specific instruction, ways of taking from books, which seem natural in school and in numerous other social and institutional settings. These mainstream ways persist in formal education systems designed to prepare students for participation in settings involving book literacy. But book literacy, with its deep attachment to narrative as a hallowed cultural form, is now just one of the many literacies that students require to participate effectively in post-school settings. In particular, as this chapter has argued, students need opportunities in their classrooms to learn how to take meaning, not just from the most familiar cultural forms, but also from other increasingly significant ones, such as the computerised database.

If the modern age provided people with robust narratives and modest amounts of information, today we have too much information and too few narratives that can make sense of it all. Whether we like it or not, information access has become a central activity of the computer age. Information access is no longer just integral to the world of work; it is also a key category of culture. As such, it demands that we deal with it theoretically, pedagogically and aesthetically.

Note The author thanks Marion Walton, University of Cape Town, for her generative response to an earlier version of this chapter.

References

Aristotle (1959) The Poetics, trans. L.J. Potts, Aristotle on the art of fiction: An English translation of Aristotle’s Poetics with an introductory essay and explanatory notes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bal, M. (1985) Narratology: Introduction to the theory of narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Borges, J. L. (1970) Labyrinths. In D. A. Yates & J. E. Irby (eds), Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Cortazar, J. (1966) Hopscotch, trans. G. Rabassa. London: Collins Harvill.

Hardy, B. (1977) Narrative as a primary act of mind. In M. Meek, A. Warlow & G. Barton (eds), The cool web: The patterns of children’s reading (pp. 12-23). London: The Bodley Head.

Heath, S. H. (1982) What no bedtime story means: narrative skill at home and school. Language and Society 11, 49-76.

Howard, R. (1992) A note on S/Z. Preface to R. Barthes, S/Z, trans. R. Miller (vii-x). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Manovich, L. (2001) The language of new media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Shaw, J. (1996) Legible City. Online. Available HTTP: http://artnetweb.com/guggenheim/mediascape/shaw.html (22 February 2003).

Snyder, I. (1996) Hypertext: The electronic labyrinth. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press & New York: New York University Press.

Walton, M. (in press) Behind the screen: The language of Web design. In I. Snyder & C. Beavis (eds), Doing literacy online: Teaching, learning and playing in an electronic world. New Jersey: Hampton Press.

Williams, R. (1976) Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana Press.

Woolley, B. (1992) Virtual worlds: A journey in hype and hyperreality. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Bioblurb

Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University. Hypertext (Melbourne University Press 1996), Page to Screen (Routledge 1998), Teachers and Technoliteracy, co-authored with Colin Lankshear (Allen & Unwin 2000), and Silicon Literacies (Routledge 2002) explore changes to cultural practices associated with the use of new media.

Youtube doesn’t really do anything new. It it just the ‘delivery boy’ of online video. But how about this innovation? This is similar to what I was trying to do in my own work 5 years ago with milkbar.com.au. It is what you call ‘hypertextual video’ in that it allows the user to embed links within the video and link between and within the video. Pretty nifty huh? In my own work, I used oral history recording and indexed them according to 4 analytical themes. I am not completely sure how this system is going to work, but I can’t wait until it is released next month. (Thanks to Techcrunch for the link)

The keystone feature here is the ability to add tags and comments tied to particular points in a video. Those tags are then searchable, so if I want to find the particular point in one of my videos that I tagged “touchdown,” that’s easy to do. I can also have a conversation with other users regarding a particular moment in a video and choose to embed the video on another site in it’s entirety or only from a particular point I select. While users can link to particular points in a Google Video as of last month, that’s easier and is just the beginning in Viddler

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Drawing of Bush's theoretical Memex machine (Life Magazine, November 19, 1945)

The Atlantic Monthly | July 1945

As We May Think

by Vannevar Bush

…..

As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. -THE EDITOR

his has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next?

For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there can be little indecision, for their war has hardly required them to leave the old paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their war research in their familiar peacetime laboratories. Their objectives remain much the same.

It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride, who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated assignments. They have done their part on the devices that made it possible to turn back the enemy, have worked in combined effort with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themselves the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now, as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy of their best.

1

Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved mental health.

Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers-conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.

The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings, cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human operator and thousands of times as fast-there are plenty of mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific records.

Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.

Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.

Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably. Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile. Electrical contacts have ceased to stick when thoroughly understood. Note the automatic telephone exchange, which has hundreds of thousands of such contacts, and yet is reliable. A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million, tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets-and it works! Its gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

2

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. Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography, followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of modification and extension.

Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera, which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination. There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It may well be stereoscopic, and record with two spaced glass eyes, for striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the corner.

The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken. On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic? The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many pictures as would result from its use.

Will there be dry photography? It is already here in two forms. When Brady made his Civil War pictures, the plate had to be wet at the time of exposure. Now it has to be wet during development instead. In the future perhaps it need not be wetted at all. There have long been films impregnated with diazo dyes which form a picture without development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has been operated. An exposure to ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye, and the picture can then be taken out into the light and examined. The process is now slow, but someone may speed it up, and it has no grain difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy. Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately.

Another process now in use is also slow, and more or less clumsy. For fifty years impregnated papers have been used which turn dark at every point where an electrical contact touches them, by reason of the chemical change thus produced in an iodine compound included in the paper. They have been used to make records, for a pointer moving across them can leave a trail behind. If the electrical potential on the pointer is varied as it moves, the line becomes light or dark in accordance with the potential.

This scheme is now used in facsimile transmission. The pointer draws a set of closely spaced lines across the paper one after another. As it moves, its potential is varied in accordance with a varying current received over wires from a distant station, where these variations are produced by a photocell which is similarly scanning a picture. At every instant the darkness of the line being drawn is made equal to the darkness of the point on the picture being observed by the photocell. Thus, when the whole picture has been covered, a replica appears at the receiving end.

A scene itself can be just as well looked over line by line by the photocell in this way as can a photograph of the scene. This whole apparatus constitutes a camera, with the added feature, which can be dispensed with if desired, of making its picture at a distance. It is slow, and the picture is poor in detail. Still, it does give another process of dry photography, in which the picture is finished as soon as it is taken.

It would be a brave man who would predict that such a process will always remain clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail. Television equipment today transmits sixteen reasonably good pictures a second, and it involves only two essential differences from the process described above. For one, the record is made by a moving beam of electrons rather than a moving pointer, for the reason that an electron beam can sweep across the picture very rapidly indeed. The other difference involves merely the use of a screen which glows momentarily when the electrons hit, rather than a chemically treated paper or film which is permanently altered. This speed is necessary in television, for motion pictures rather than stills are the object.

Use chemically treated film in place of the glowing screen, allow the apparatus to transmit one picture only rather than a succession, and a rapid camera for dry photography results. The treated film needs to be far faster in action than present examples, but it probably could be. More serious is the objection that this scheme would involve putting the film inside a vacuum chamber, for electron beams behave normally only in such a rarefied environment. This difficulty could be avoided by allowing the electron beam to play on one side of a partition, and by pressing the film against the other side, if this partition were such as to allow the electrons to go through perpendicular to its surface, and to prevent them from spreading out sideways. Such partitions, in crude form, could certainly be constructed, and they will hardly hold up the general development.

Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go. The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.

Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.

Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition, costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the cost of materials. The preparation of the original copy? That introduces the next aspect of the subject.

3

To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the record? He does so indirectly, by talking to a stenographer or a wax cylinder; but the elements are all present if he wishes to have his talk directly produce a typed record. All he needs to do is to take advantage of existing mechanisms and to alter his language.

At a recent World Fair a machine called a Voder was shown. A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal chords entered into the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker. In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of this machine, called a Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding keys move. This may be one element of the postulated system.

The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A girl strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what the speaker is supposed to have said. Later this strip is retyped into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible only to the initiated. Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to.

Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of mechanization, it is true. It is strange that the inventors of universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing one which better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue, especially in the scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon would become still less intelligible to the layman.

One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that he projects them for examination.

Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.

Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by a keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed figures by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits for sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for interpreting the result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys down.

All this complication is needed because of the clumsy way in which we have learned to write figures. If we recorded them positionally, simply by the configuration of a set of dots on a card, the automatic reading mechanism would become comparatively simple. In fact if the dots are holes, we have the punched-card machine long ago produced by Hollorith for the purposes of the census, and now used throughout business. Some types of complex businesses could hardly operate without these machines.

Adding is only one operation. To perform arithmetical computation involves also subtraction, multiplication, and division, and in addition some method for temporary storage of results, removal from storage for further manipulation, and recording of final results by printing. Machines for these purposes are now of two types: keyboard machines for accounting and the like, manually controlled for the insertion of data, and usually automatically controlled as far as the sequence of operations is concerned; and punched-card machines in which separate operations are usually delegated to a series of machines, and the cards then transferred bodily from one to another. Both forms are very useful; but as far as complex computations are concerned, both are still in embryo.

Rapid electrical counting appeared soon after the physicists found it desirable to count cosmic rays. For their own purposes the physicists promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment capable of counting electrical impulses at the rate of 100,000 a second. The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.

Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation. Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes. There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.

4

The repetitive processes of thought are not confined however, to matters of arithmetic and statistics. In fact, every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine. Not so much has been done along these lines,beyond the bounds of arithmetic, as might be done, primarily because of the economics of the situation. The needs of business and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as production methods were sufficiently advanced.

With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population. There are, however, machines for solving differential equations-and functional and integral equations, for that matter. There are many special machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which predicts the tides. There will be many more, appearing certainly first in the hands of the scientist and in small numbers.

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world; and it was a useful tool-so useful that it still exists.

It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future. But even this new machine will not take the scientist where he needs to go. Relief must be secured from laborious detailed manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if the users of it are to free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed transformations in accordance with established rules. A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformations of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs.

All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as confidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the intricate mechanism under the hood. Only then will mathematics be practically effective in bringing the growing knowledge of atomistics to the useful solution of the advanced problems of chemistry, metallurgy, and biology. For this reason there still come more machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist. Some of them will be sufficiently bizarre to suit the most fastidious connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization.

5

The scientist, however, is not the only person who manipulates data and examines the world about him by the use of logical processes, although he sometimes preserves this appearance by adopting into the fold anyone who becomes logical, much in the manner in which a British labor leader is elevated to knighthood. Whenever logical processes of thought are employed-that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove-there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine.

Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be well to produce more assurance in its use. The machines for higher analysis have usually been equation solvers. Ideas are beginning to appear for equation transformers, which will rearrange the relationship expressed by an equation in accordance with strict and rather advanced logic. Progress is inhibited by the exceedingly crude way in which mathematicians express their relationships. They employ a symbolism which grew like Topsy and has little consistency; a strange fact in that most logical field.

A new symbolism, probably positional, must apparently precede the reduction of mathematical transformations to machine processes. Then, on beyond the strict logic of the mathematician, lies the application of logic in everyday affairs. We may some day click off arguments on a machine with the same assurance that we now enter sales on a cash register. But the machine of logic will not look like a cash register, even of the streamlined model.

So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the record. Thus far we seem to be worse off than before-for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.

Selection, in this broad sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a cabinetmaker. Yet, in a narrow sense and in other areas, something has already been done mechanically on selection. The personnel officer of a factory drops a stack of a few thousand employee cards into a selecting machine, sets a code in accordance with an established convention, and produces in a short time a list of all employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish. Even such devices are much too slow when it comes, for example, to matching a set of fingerprints with one of five million on file. Selection devices of this sort will soon be speeded up from their present rate of reviewing data at a few hundred a minute. By the use of photocells and microfilm they will survey items at the rate of a thousand a second, and will print out duplicates of those selected.

This process, however, is simple selection: it proceeds by examining in turn every one of a large set of items, and by picking out those which have certain specified characteristics. There is another form of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, then only to a subclass of this given by the second digit, and so on; and thus proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station. It requires a few seconds to make the selection, although the process could be speeded up if increased speed were economically warranted. If necessary, it could be made extremely fast by substituting thermionic-tube switching for mechanical switching, so that the full selection could be made in one one-hundredth of a second. No one would wish to spend the money necessary to make this change in the telephone system, but the general idea is applicable elsewhere.

Take the prosaic problem of the great department store. Every time a charge sale is made, there are a number of things to be done. The inventory needs to be revised, the salesman needs to be given credit for the sale, the general accounts need an entry, and, most important, the customer needs to be charged. A central records device has been developed in which much of this work is done conveniently. The salesman places on a stand the customer's identification card, his own card, and the card taken from the article sold-all punched cards. When he pulls a lever, contacts are made through the holes, machinery at a central point makes the necessary computations and entries, and the proper receipt is printed for the salesman to pass to the customer.

But there may be ten thousand charge customers doing business with the store, and before the full operation can be completed someone has to select the right card and insert it at the central office. Now rapid selection can slide just the proper card into position in an instant or two, and return it afterward. Another difficulty occurs, however. Someone must read a total on the card, so that the machine can add its computed item to it. Conceivably the cards might be of the dry photography type I have described. Existing totals could then be read by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.

The cards may be in miniature, so that they occupy little space. They must move quickly. They need not be transferred far, but merely into position so that the photocell and recorder can operate on them. Positional dots can enter the data. At the end of the month a machine can readily be made to read these and to print an ordinary bill. With tube selection, in which no mechanical parts are involved in the switches, little time need be occupied in bringing the correct card into use-a second should suffice for the entire operation. The whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the scheme by which Poulsen long ago put speech on a magnetic wire. This method has the advantage of simplicity and ease of erasure. By using photography, however one can arrange to project the record in enlarged form and at a distance by using the process common in television equipment.

One can consider rapid selection of this form, and distant projection for other purposes. To be able to key one sheet of a million before an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would certainly beat the usual file clerk.

6

The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort 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 human mind does not work that way. It 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. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

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.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed.

There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.

A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.

7

All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.

Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. 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.

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations, even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the outraged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.

8

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race. It might be striking to outline the instrumentalities of the future more spectacularly, rather than to stick closely to methods and elements now known and undergoing rapid development, as has been done here. Technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube. In order that the picture may not be too commonplace, by reason of sticking to present-day patterns, it may be well to mention one such possibility, not to prophesy but merely to suggest, for prophecy based on extension of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown is only a doubly involved guess.

All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses-the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?

We know that when the eye sees, all the consequent information is transmitted to the brain by means of electrical vibrations in the channel of the optic nerve. This is an exact analogy with the electrical vibrations which occur in the cable of a television set: they convey the picture from the photocells which see it to the radio transmitter from which it is broadcast. We know further that if we can approach that cable with the proper instruments, we do not need to touch it; we can pick up those vibrations by electrical induction and thus discover and reproduce the scene which is being transmitted, just as a telephone wire may be tapped for its message.

The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?

By bone conduction we already introduce sounds: into the nerve channels of the deaf in order that they may hear. Is it not possible that we may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form? With a couple of electrodes on the skull the encephalograph now produces pen-and-ink traces which bear some relation to the electrical phenomena going on in the brain itself. True, the record is unintelligible, except as it points out certain gross misfunctioning of the cerebral mechanism; but who would now place bounds on where such a thing may lead?

In the outside world, all forms of intelligence whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness.

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.

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