{"id":11086,"date":"2014-04-25T08:00:54","date_gmt":"2014-04-25T15:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.janaremy.com\/pilgrimsteps\/?p=11086"},"modified":"2014-04-24T21:37:53","modified_gmt":"2014-04-25T04:37:53","slug":"lessons-ted-nelson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.janaremy.com\/pilgrimsteps\/2014\/04\/25\/lessons-ted-nelson\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons from Ted Nelson"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I prepped my syllabus for the “Introduction to Digital Humanities” class that I taught last year, I included Ted Nelson’s article “Complex information processing: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate” because I wanted my students to gain some historical knowledge about how modern-day computer interfaces developed from the ideas of visionary thinkers like Nelson.\u00a0 At the time, I was unaware that Nelson would be a Visiting Fellow <\/a>on our campus or that I would have the luxury of becoming personally acquainted with him.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>

Ted Nelson, who coined the term Hypertext.<\/p><\/div>\n

My students struggled a bit with the Nelson article.\u00a0 Not only was it long, but his ideas didn’t seem to spark much interest.\u00a0 As we discussed his piece together, I pointed out just how revolutionary his thoughts were in 1965, but that seemed to have little impact on their thinking.\u00a0 Moreover, his ideas about hypertext, or links between words and documents seemed so obvious<\/em> to their minds that it was difficult to underscore their significance.\u00a0 So I took a different tactic and we created a list of all of the characteristics of Nelson’s imagined platform: it would be connected and iterative and creative and collaborative.\u00a0 It would “grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world’s knowledge.”<\/p>\n

“Do you know of any platform like that?” I asked.<\/p>\n

The response: Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

When I shared their reply with Ted a few weeks later, he seemed frustrated.\u00a0 And I could see why.\u00a0 Wikipedia, although a valuable resource and an excellent knowledge repository, is not a creative space.\u00a0 Indeed, it tends towards being rather scripted and formulaic, as well as hierarchical in ways that don’t gel with Nelson’s vision.<\/p>\n

My students’ response to my question about Project Xanadu points to the unrealized nature of Nelson’s early vision–we remain locked into ways of digitally writing that replicate paper and although many of us read e-books or use text-based apps of various kinds, they are simply re-presentations of analog modes of creation.\u00a0 But it also points out a far larger problem: that the development of our computer interfaces and software feels like a “given” to most students.\u00a0 They have difficulty imagining that computers could have developed a different way or with an alternate mode of interaction.\u00a0 Which concerns me about how they may imagine their own future–as a series of inevitabilities rather than as dynamic and evolving threads of occurrences on a canvas that they can manipulate and shape to their liking.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I prepped my syllabus for the “Introduction to Digital Humanities” class that I taught last year, I included Ted Nelson’s article “Complex information processing: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate” because I wanted my students to gain some historical knowledge about how modern-day computer interfaces developed from the ideas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,144],"tags":[186,235,234],"class_list":["post-11086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-humanities","category-teaching","tag-chapman","tag-intertwingled","tag-xanadu"],"yoast_head":"\nLessons from Ted Nelson - PilgrimSteps<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.janaremy.com\/pilgrimsteps\/2014\/04\/25\/lessons-ted-nelson\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lessons from Ted Nelson - 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