Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)
by
Douglas R. Dechow
Published 2 Jul 2015
So I’ll talk about philosophy and filmmaking—and media in general—before I talk about computers. 17.3 Philosophy of Intertwingularity Let me begin at the philosophy end. Let’s talk about intertwingularity. This book, like the conference, is called Intertwingled. It’s a word that expresses a philosophical position about cross-connection. I said in Computer Lib [2, 6], “Everything is deeply intertwingled.” I meant that all subjects and issues are intertwined and intermingled. But intertwingled subjects are not what computers usually represent. From the beginning, people have set computers up to be hierarchical. Hierarchy is not in the nature of the computer. It is in the nature of the people who set computers up.
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In addition, several of the authors discuss what it is like to collaborate directly with Nelson. The penultimate section, Hypertext & Ted Nelson-influenced Research, wrestles with Nelson’s influence and legacy. The fourth and final section of Intertwingled, appropriately enough entitled The Last Word, is comprised of a single contribution from Ted Nelson himself. In it, he tells the reader—just as he did at the Intertwingled conference—that he’s spent the day listening to his obituaries. He says, “I feel very lucky to have eavesdropped on these thoughtful pre-mortems.” Nothing could be further from the truth. We believe that the world—particularly the technology world—is better off for having Ted alive and kicking at the boundaries of the possible.
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Struppa Orange, CA February 7, 2015 Contents Part I Artistic Contributions 1 The Computer Age Ed Subitzky 2 Odes to Ted Nelson Ben Shneiderman Part II Peer Histories 3 The Two-Eyed Man Alan Kay 4 Ted Nelson’s Xanadu Ken Knowlton 5 Hanging Out with Ted Nelson Brewster Kahle 6 Riffing on Ted Nelson—Hypermind Peter Schmideg and Laurie Spiegel 7 Intertwingled Inspiration Andrew Pam 8 An Advanced Book for Beginners Dick Heiser Part III Hypertext and Ted Nelson-Influenced Research 9 The Importance of Ted’s Vision Belinda Barnet 10 Data, Metadata, and Ted Christine L. Borgman 11 Making Links: Everything Really Is Deeply Intertwingled Wendy Hall 12 Ted Nelson Frode Hegland 13 History Debugged Daniel Rosenberg 14 We Can and Must Understand Computers NOW Noah Wardrip-Fruin 15 The Future of Transclusion Robert M.
Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything
by
Peter Morville
Published 14 May 2014
Intertwingled by Peter Morville Intertwingled Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville © 2014 Peter Morville All Rights Reserved Advance Praise for Intertwingled “Intertwingled is a meditation on the connectedness of everything. From language and ontology to culture and strategy, Peter takes us on a journey that reveals how a simple change in what we take for granted can send ripples that reach far beyond our awareness.” Irene Au, Operating Partner, Khosla Ventures “A delightful, surprisingly practical book: an insider’s guide to the best in design, culture, and complex systems.”
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Instead of burying guilt and fear in little boxes, we must admit black swans and externalities into our model of the system, because information changes everything. If we allow ourselves to be aware of connectedness, to see everything is intertwingled, and to act on the reality of interbeing, then we will hopefully change what we want, and that is the path we must travel. You finished the book. Congratulations! If you enjoyed Intertwingled, please write a short review. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MOR4B0W/ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22931460-intertwingled Your feedback can help others to discover the book. Thank you! Peter Morville About the Author Peter Morville is a widely respected pioneer of the fields of information architecture and user experience.
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Kathy Sierra, author, Badass: Making Users Awesome Contents Preface Organization of This Book Acknowledgments Chapter 1, Nature Information in Systems Systems Thinking Intervention Literacy Chapter 2, Categories Organizing for Users Making Frameworks Re-Framing Tranquility or Insight Chapter 3, Connections Links Loops Forks Reflection Chapter 4, Culture Cultural Fit Mapping Culture Subcultures Ways of Knowing Design Ethnography Levers of Change Chapter 5, Limits Organizational Strategy Daylighting Understanding Limits Interbeing About the Author Notes Landmarks Chapter 1 Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 Preface “People keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.” – Theodor Holm Nelson In 1974, Theodor H. Nelson wrote and self-published a book with two covers. The first, Computer Lib, is an introduction to computers that notes “any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.” The flip side, Dream Machines, is an invitation to the future of media and cognition that states “everything is deeply intertwingled.” This prescient codex served as a bible to many pioneers of the personal computer and the Internet. In 1994, I started my career as an information architect.
Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext
by
Belinda Barnet
Published 14 Jul 2013
Current tools cannot represent the tangle of the real world and its burgeoning mass of information; we need an alternative paradigm. The computer world could be so much better. Like Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart (a close friend), Nelson also has a theory about the inheritance and transmission of human knowledge. The knowledge that we pass on to each other is itself a vast, intertwingled (a term Nelson coined) network, an accumulation of different disciplines and fields of knowledge, ‘a corpus of all fields’ (Nelson 1965, 145). This corpus is constantly shifting and changing; like biological life, it is evolving. It is a ‘bundle of relationships subject to all kinds of twists, inversions, involutions and rearrangement: these changes are frequent but unpredictable’ (Nelson 1965, 145).
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Unlike Nelson and Engelbart, Bolter and Joyce were not ridiculed; on the contrary, they both felt embraced by computing science, which set a precedent for future work in the area. In fact, according to Joyce, ‘What has gone unremarked is Storyspace’s contribution to a dialogue, if not across the two cultures then at least across the engineering and literary communities’ (Joyce 2011a). CONCLUSION Everything is deeply intertwingled. I have always loved that particular Nelsonism (and there are many to choose from); it has stuck with me for twenty years. In this book we have looked at several early, pre-Web attempts to represent intertwingularity, to represent the deep connections that criss-cross and interpenetrate human knowledge.
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Imagine if we could separate the linking structure from the content, and that content could consequently be reused in a million different contexts. Imagine if there were no artificial distinctions between readers and writers. Imagine if we could capture the deeply tangled structure of knowledge itself, but make it better, make it permanent. ‘EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no ‘subjects’ at all; there is only all knowledge, since the crossconnections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly’ (Nelson 1987). notes Preface 1 Although Nelson believes one of the Xanadu prototypes breaks this rule: ‘The tumbleraddressing system of xu88 was precisely for accommodating billions of users’ (Nelson 2012).
Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by
David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011
Knowledge now lives in the messy web that has grown around it, the way life lives not in our neurons, bones, blood and marrow but in their connection. Finally, if books taught us that knowledge is a long walk from A to Z, the networking of knowledge may be teaching us that the world itself is more like a shapeless, intertwingled, unmasterable web than like a well-reasoned argument. 7 Too Much Science IN JUNE 2010, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition ran a story typical of the sort of science news that the media like to cover: A study found that if mice drink lots of coffee, they’re less likely to suffer from little tiny cases of Alzheimer’s.1 Excellent!
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Carolina Celebration Sparks New Civil War,” McClatchy.com, December 19, 2010, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/12/19/105532/150-years-later-s-carolina-celebration.html. 33 Ted Nelson coined the term “intertwingularity” in Computer Lib: Dream Machines (1974). Frank Hecker read my use of the word in Everything Is Miscellaneous and tracked down the exact source of Nelson’s phrase “Everything is deeply intertwingled,” which is harder than it seems because of the nonstandard ways in which Nelson published his work. See details at http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/2007/06/09/untwingling-nelsons-intertwingularity-quote/. 34 See WolframAlpha’s Frequently Asked Questions at http://www.wolframalpha.com/faqs.html.
Possiplex
by
Ted Nelson
Published 2 Jan 2010
Cover pic: The author as he wishes to be remembered: clever, determined, defiant. (ID photo from Hacker conference, ca. 1998) There is too much to say and it goes in all directions. My religion is human creativity and human freedom. Everything is possible, nothing is easy. I mistook a clear view for a short distance. Everything is deeply intertwingled. TN TN TN TN TN Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for? Robert Browning AFORETHOUGHT I am writing my history because they say that history is written by the winners, and I still intend to win. This book is coming out just fifty years after I had my main ideas in the computer field.
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This is not that. This is far more urgent, a story about attitudes and designs—what I knew and thought about and designed and why, as I stumbled and clawed and thought my way through the developing computer world of these last fifty years.* * Here’s how the book evolved: the languorous version, deeply intertwingled with thousands of interconnections of the world and my life, was going to be called World Enough (as in the poem by Andrew Marvell). But that got too big, and with its hundreds of threads and criss-crossing connection, would be impossible to follow unless it could be a proper hypertext, which is still impossible in today’s software world, and impossible to write without a decent text system.
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by
Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013
“I think it might be useful for understanding what’s going on.” As of today, Jerry has over 173,000 thoughts in his brain file, and 315,000 links between them, all created manually.23 And he is finally emerging from his public reclusiveness to share what he learned with the rest of us. His chief insight, as he puts it, is that “everything is deeply intertwingled.” He no longer thinks of any thought or idea in isolation, but in context. Jerry describes himself as a pattern finder and lateral thinker. Everything matters only insofar as its relationship to everything else. Surprisingly, offloading his memory to the computer in this fashion has not damaged his recall, but improved it.
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For Michalski, the “self” is defined by connections. TheBrain isn’t about him, but about everyone else he has met. It is not limited to a single path, but instead suggests an infinity of possible pathways through data. The patterns are out there, constantly evolving and becoming increasingly “intertwingled.” It’s all potential energy. Maintaining this state—this readiness-is-all openness—isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to create context without time. MyLifeBits, on the other hand, approaches memory as the storage of a personal narrative over time. It is not really stored potential energy as much as a record of spent kinetic energy.
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by
Scott Rosenberg
Published 2 Jan 2006
(Nelson views today’s Web as a bastardization of his more complex vision.) Nelson also coined the word intertwingularity as a label for the kind of complexity that informational silos ignore: “People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t,” he said. “Everything is deeply intertwingled.” For all the contempt heaped upon them, however, silos—discrete containers that hold a particular set of similar items in one and only one place—have stubbornly persisted. The graphical interface of modern computing, the GUI, had evolved around physical-world metaphors—desktops, files, and folders.
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Constantine, Constantine on Peopleware (Prentice Hall, 1995), pp. 123–24. “Keeping up with what’s available”: Ward Cunningham, quoted by Jon Udell in his InfoWorld blog at http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/05/21.htm #a1006. “People keep pretending they can”: These lines by Ted Nelson are widely distributed on the Net, and the word intertwingle appears frequently in Nelson’s writing, but the original source of the full quotation is obscure. One source cited is p. 45 of the first (1974) edition of his book Computer Lib/Dream Machines. There are two discussions of the quote’s origins at http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/3260.htm and http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?