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?
Randall Munroe says, “You know, pep rallies weirded me out in high school, and they’ve only gotten creepier in retrospect.”
According to Urban Dictionary, a Mouse Monkey is “A person who repairs computers for a living.” The definition was posted in February ‘09, and has two thumbs up and one thumb down.
Nuh-uh. The Blue Mouse Monkey is a small furry creature whose mission is to beautify the Internet one website at a time. She does not repair computers, neither for a living, nor as a hobby.
A typical mis-typing of ‘does not’ is ‘doe snot’. Google this for some funny sentences, particularly when viewed in their truncated search-results form:
“Garage Door opener doe snot close the door” (It’s a new lubricant. Works great)
“suspend doe snot work when X is running” (I try to suspend doe snot work at every opportunity)
“The PC doe snot boot” (There’s a hose out the back you can use for that)
“Widows Explorer doe snot open” (and when it does, it works like doe snot)
“Windows Media Player doe snot work” (seems to be pretty cervid and gummy up there in Redmond)
“Autumn Doe Snot Return” (It’s inevitable, I’m afraid)
“view doe snot copy” (or if you’d prefer to see the original doe snot…)
“Extreme 2000 doe snot show anything” (Extreme doe snot?)
“For Everone Who Doe Snot Like Me” (Hmm)
“Doe snot wirth the money” (That one’s from a hotel review)
“my subwoofer doe snot make any sound” (that’s because it has exceptional muffling effects)
“thanks - but no this doe snot help” (and neither did the buffalo snot)
“My niece is going to court for DWI and doe snot have a attorney” (Yikes. Just one shot of doe snot will put you over the legal limit)
“A team hat doe snot communicate and talk to each other about what the next move will be is going to lose.” (Mostly because doe snot makes a lousy hat)
“quality doe snot seem to suffer” (the cheap stuff, though, bounces right back!)
“instead just doe snot load the page” (that’s if you have no intention of ever reading it again)
“They only have a peace-keeping force that doe snot compbat terror” (Now why didn’t the UN think of this first?)
“remember that doe snot give you the right to be condescending and cocky” (or snotty)
“to ensure development doe snot” (this is critical for societal progress)
“Anarchy doe snot equal chaos” (Capitalist doe snot is worse, though)
“OH WAIT IT DOE SNOT FIT IN MY IPHONE” (That was the last call she made from that phone)
“As long as Valve doe snot articficially raise the dollar prices for people from Europe I still prefer Steam” (I’m watching the exchange rate and keeping my fingers crossed)
“the little bit of static that may be in the background doe snot” (which is kind of like the background cosmic radiation - it’s everywhere)
Image from Farm Sanctuary
46 million avian consciousnesses get snuffed out for this day. I’m not going to get into a discussion of vegetarianism, or the meat production industry. But the turkeys aren’t happy, and I’m not happy for them.
Besides, it’s like calling your birthday ‘cake day’, or calling Christmas ‘presents day’.
So just stick to “happy thanksgiving”, please, and I’ll wish the same back to you.
Turkey production explained, with reference to pain and suffering removed
Turkey production explained, with references to pain and suffering included
1000 Languages
The Mandarin word for “www” is wanweiwang, a loan translation meaning literally “10,000 connections net”.
- from a review of Peter K. Austin’s new book One Thousand Languages: Living, Endangered, and Lost in The New Scientist.
“We are the Web…We are teaching the machine…The machine is us…We’ll need to rethink a few things: copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves.” — Michael Wesch, Cultural Anthropologist @ Kansas State. Watch his highly informative and entertaining 5-minute video for the whole deal.