Check out Wordle, an online toy that lets you generate word clouds from text you input. You can then tweak the colors, fonts, layouts any way you like. This one is made from T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday. (Click to view larger.) It’s cool that ‘word’ is the biggest word. And that ‘blue’ is white, and ‘white’ is ecru.
See the original file at wordle.net.
So what I’m doing now, i.e. creating a blog post, could have been different in a fundamental way, if Ted Nelson had insisted on not letting his model of Hypertext get dumbed down during a project her worked on in 1968?
Okay, here’s some context: Ted Nelson is an American inventor, software designer, usability consultant, systems humanist and visiting Fellow at Oxford. He is best known for coining the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia”, and pursuing a vision of world-wide hypertext from the early 1960s. According to Ted Nelson’s Wikipedia entry, “The main thrust of his work has been to make computers easily accessible to ordinary people. His motto is: A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.” (Wouldn’t that be wonderful?)
According to a page on NewMedia History by Bill Atkinson, Ted Nelson was “one of the most influential figures in computing”, “on a quest to build creative tools that would transform the way we read and write”.
Nelson was particularly concerned with the complex nature of the creative impulse, and he saw the computer as the tool that would make explicit the interdependence of ideas, drawing out connections between literature, art, music and science, since, as he put it, everything is “deeply intertwingled.”
Nelson’s critical breakthrough was to call for a system of non-sequential writing that would allow the reader to aggregate meaning in snippets, in the order of his or her choosing, rather than according to a pre-established structure fixed by the author.
So nearly 50 years ago Ted Nelson envisioned something a lot like what we know as the World Wide Web. On his own site (which is one of the uglier sites on the Web, but that’s not my point) he says,
In 1960 I had a vision of a world-wide system of electronic publishing, anarchic and populist, where anyone could publish anything and anyone could read it. (So far, sounds like the web.)
But what we’ve ended up with is a disappointment to him:
But my approach is about literary depth– including side-by-side intercomparison, annotation, and a unique copyright proposal. I now call this “deep electronic literature” instead of “hypertext,” since people now think hypertext means the web.
In a letter to the editor of New Scientist, 22 July 2006, Ted Nelson wrote:
I coined, you say, the word hypertext in 1963 “while working on ways to make computers more accessible at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island” (17 June, p 60). But in 1963 I was a dolphin photographer in Miami, nowhere near Brown.
I had become inflamed with ideas and designs for non-sequential literature and media in 1960, but no one would back them, then or now. Not until the late sixties did I spend months at Brown, with no official position and at considerable personal expense, to help them build a hypertext system.
That project dumbed down hypertext to one-way, embedded, non-overlapping links. Its broken and deficient model of hypertext became by turns the structure of the NoteCards and HyperCard programs, the World Wide Web, and XML.
At the time I thought of that structure as an interim model, forgetting the old slogan “nothing endures like the temporary”. XML is only the latest, most publicised, and in my view most wrongful system that fits this description. It is opaque to the laypersons who deserve deep command of electronic literature and media. It gratuitously imposes hierarchy and sequence wherever it can, and is very poor at representing overlap, parallel cross-connection, and other vital non-hierarchical media structures that some people do not wish to recognise.
I believe humanity went down the wrong path because of that project at Brown. I greatly regret my part in it, and that I did not fight for deeper constructs. These would facilitate an entire form of literature where links do not break as versions change; where documents may be closely compared side by side and closely annotated; showing the origins of every quotation; and with a copyright system for frictionless, non-negotiated quotation of any amount at any time.
This amazes me. All along I’ve been thinking XML is marvelous. But when Ted Nelson says, “I believe humanity went down the wrong path because of that project at Brown. I greatly regret my part in it…” I have to take notice. And that the World Wide Web is based on a “broken and deficient model of hypertext”, and XML is a “wrongful system.” Wow. Our lives have been momentously changed in the last 15 years by an information system of enormous scope and complexity that most ordinary folks like myself never saw coming — and Ted Nelson says we could have had something even better if he’d just stuck to his guns about how a single academic project got built back in the late 60s?
Website launches seem to come in clusters, and this one’s the start of the late spring/early summer group. Portland author and editor Sarah Cypher needed a flexible site to market herself as a novelist while she approached agents. Built in WordPress with a custom design, the site gives Sarah the ease of maintenance of a blog, with the scalability of a regular site. We got the site up in time for Sarah’s trip to the Backspace Writer’s Conference. Go, Sarah!
The geometry of coral is hyperbolic. Mathematicians long believed it was impossible to construct physical models of hyperbolic space; yet nature had been doing just that for hundreds of millions of years. Coral is not the only natural form with this geometry. Kelps, sponges, sea slugs, nudibranchs, lettuce, kale, and other life forms share this structure. In 1997 a mathematician at Cornell, Dr Taimina, discovered how to make models of hyperbolic space geometry using the art of crochet.
The fine folks at the Institute for Figuring’s crocheted coral reef project is a “woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world.” The exhibit has been traveling for a while, and has some remaining dates in the US this summer.
Created by Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, the institute’s activities include lectures, publications and exhibitions.
The Institute For Figuring is an organization dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts.
The Institute’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring.
See the video Margaret Wertheim on the beautiful math of coral at the 2009 TED conference, in which she talks about the Coral Reef Project, Mathematics, and Womens’ Craft.