Hypothesis Animated Intro, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCkm0lL-6lc.

This was an early animation for Hypothes.is as a tool. It was on one of their early homepages and is (still) a pretty good encapsulation of what they do and who they are as a tool for thought.

Es conocido por el papel político que tuvo en el desarrollo de la bomba atómica y por su idea Memex, por el cual podemos considerarlo el padre del concepto "hipertexto". El Memex fue un proyecto que no se llegó a llevar a cabo; pero más adelante en 1989, fue precursor de la World Wide Web. La verdad el creo una gran herramienta para elaborar conceptos de hipertexto y que hoy en día (aunque se considere cosa del pasado) se siga usando.

There's some interesting comparison to the ideas here and the long term state-of-the-art in information management, particularly in business and library settings which Bush wholly ignores.

Most fascinatingly Bush "coins" memex here, but prior art for the Memindex as a similar product in the office/business productivity space easily goes back to 1906 and was popular to and through at least the early 1950s.

For details on this, see:

https://boffosocko.com/2023/03/09/the-memindex-method-an-early-precursor-of-the-memex-hipster-pda-43-folders-gtd-basb-and-bullet-journal-systems/

Let YOUR MIND GO FREE Do not tax your brain trying to re- member. Get the MEMINDEX HABIT and you can FORGET WITH IMPUNITY. An ideal reminder and handy system for keeping all memoranda where they will appear at the right time. Saves time, money, opportunity. A brain saver. No other device answers its purpose. A Great Help for Busy Men, Used and recommended by Bankers, Man- ufacturers, Salesmen, Lawyers, Doctors, Merchants, Insurance Men, Architects, Ed- ucators, Contractors, Railway Managers Engineers, Ministers, etc., all over the world. Order now and get ready to Begin the New Year Right. Rest of '06 free with each outfit. Express prepaid on receipt of price. Personal checks accepted

Also a valuable card index for desk use. Dated cards from tray are carried in the handy pocket case, 2 to 4 weeks at a time. To-day's card always at the front. No leaves to turn. Helps you to PLAN YOUR WORK WORK YOUR PLAN ACCOMPLISH MORE You need it. Three years' sales show that most all business and professional men need it. GET IT NOW. WILSON MEMINDEX CO. 93 Mills St., Rochester, N. Y.

Interesting that the use of the portmanteau memindex (as memory + index) for a card index being used to supplement one's memory. It can't go unnoticed that the Wilson Memindex Co. was manufacturing and selling these as early as 1906, several decades before Vannevar Bush's use of the word Memex which seems derivative and removes more of the traces of index from the root.

Note the use of card sizes 2 3/4 x 4 1/2" and 3 x 5 1/2" for this system.

• Title
  • As we may Think
• Author
  • Vannevar Bush

traces of your past thoughts feels closely related to Vannevar Bush's associative trails

reply to Ryan Randall and Matt Stine at https://hcommons.social/@ryanrandall/109677171177320098

@mstine@mastodon.sdf.org @ryanrandall It won't go as far back as we may like, but I'm hoping Mark Bernstein's upcoming talk will help to remedy some of the lost knowledge: https://lu.ma/2u5f7ky0

In part I blame Vannevar Bush for erasing so much history in As We May Think (1945).

I quite like the wording of this sentence.

Artykuł przedstawia podłoże rozwoju metod rozpoznawania dokumentów oraz wyszukiwania informacji do 1939 roku, czyli do momentu, w którym Vannevar Bush napisał artykuł „As We May Think”, opublikowane potem w 1945 roku.

Artykuł przekonuje do tego, że pomysł Busha nie był ani tak oryginalny, ani tak rewolucyjny, jak się go przedstawia. Autor przedstawia także stanowiska innych badaczy czy wynalazców, którzy mieli zarzuty względem projektu Memeksu.

Autor skupia się przede wszystkim na osobie Emanuela Goldberga i jego wynalazku wyszukiwarki mikrofilmów. Przedstawia także powody, które spowodowały, że jego wynalazek był pomijany i zapomniany.

Artykuł przedstawia historię idei Memeksu, autorstwa Vannevara Busha. Autor przedstawia także informacje na temat różnych wydań jego tekstu na ten temat.

W tekście znajdują się także informacje na temat maszyny Rapid Selector, autorstwa Ralpha R. Shawa, powstałej na tym, co pisał Emmanuel Goldberg, który z kolei inspirował się pracą Busha.

Historical Hypermedia: An Alternative History of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 and Implications for e-Research. .mp3. Berkeley School of Information Regents’ Lecture. UC Berkeley School of Information, 2010. https://archive.org/details/podcast_uc-berkeley-school-informat_historical-hypermedia-an-alte_1000088371512. archive.org.

https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/2010/historical-hypermedia-alternative-history-semantic-web-and-web-20-and-implications-e.

https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/audio/2010-10-20-vandenheuvel_0.mp3

Interface as Thing - book on Paul Otlet (not released, though he said he was working on it)

• W. Boyd Rayward 1994 expert on Otlet
• Otlet on annotation, visualization, of text
• TBL married internet and hypertext (ideas have sex)
• V. Bush As We May Think - crosslinks between microfilms, not in a computer context
• Ted Nelson 1965, hypermedia

t=540

• Michael Buckland book about machine developed by Emanuel Goldberg antecedent to memex
• Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine: Information, Invention, and Political Forces (New Directions in Information Management) by Michael Buckland (Libraries Unlimited, (March 31, 2006)
• Otlet and Goldsmith were precursors as well

four figures in his research: - Patrick Gattis - biologist, architect, diagrams of knowledge, metaphorical use of architecture; classification - Paul Otlet, Brussels born - Wilhelm Ostwalt - nobel prize in chemistry - Otto Neurath, philosophher, designer of isotype

Paul Otlet

• wrote bibliography on law
• book: Something on Bibliography #wanttoread
• universal decimal classification system
• mundaneum
• Le Corbusier - architect worked with Otlet for building for Mundaneum; See: https://socks-studio.com/2019/05/05/the-shape-of-knowledge-the-mundaneum-by-paul-otlet-and-henri-la-fontaine/

Otlet was interested in both the physical as well as the intangible aspects of the Mundaneum including as an idea, an institution, method, body of work, building, and as a network.<br /> (#t=1020)

Early iPhone diagram?!?

(roughly) armchair to do the things in the web of life (Nelson quote) (get full quote and source for use) (circa 19:30)

compares Otlet to TBL

Michael Buckland 1991 <s>internet of things</s> coinage - did I hear this correctly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things lists different coinages

Turns out it was "information as thing"<br /> See: https://hypothes.is/a/kXIjaBaOEe2MEi8Fav6QsA

sugane brierre and otlet<br /> "everything can be in a document"<br /> importance of evidence

The idea of evidence implies a passiveness. For evidence to be useful then, one has to actively do something with it, use it for comparison or analysis with other facts, knowledge, or evidence for it to become useful.

transformation of sound into writing<br /> movement of pieces at will to create a new combination of facts - combinatorial creativity idea here. (circa 27:30 and again at 29:00)<br /> not just efficiency but improvement and purification of humanity

put things on system cards and put them into new orders<br /> breaking things down into smaller pieces, whether books or index cards....

Otlet doesn't use the word interfaces, but makes these with language and annotations that existed at the time. (32:00)

Otlet created diagrams and images to expand his ideas

Otlet used octagonal index cards to create extra edges to connect them together by topic. This created more complex trees of knowledge beyond the four sides of standard index cards. (diagram referenced, but not contained in the lecture)

Otlet is interested in the "materialization of knowledge": how to transfer idea into an object. (How does this related to mnemonic devices for daily use? How does it relate to broader material culture?)

Otlet inspired by work of Herbert Spencer

space an time are forms of thought, I hold myself that they are forms of things. (get full quote and source) from spencer influence of Plato's forms here?

Otlet visualization of information (38:20)

S. R. Ranganathan may have had these ideas about visualization too

atomization of knowledge; atomist approach 19th century examples:S. R. Ranganathan, Wilson, Otlet, Richardson, (atomic notes are NOT new either...) (39:40)

Otlet creates interfaces to the world - time with cyclic representation - space - moving cube along time and space axes as well as levels of detail - comparison to Ted Nelson and zoomable screens even though Ted Nelson didn't have screens, but simulated them in paper - globes

Katie Berner - semantic web; claims that reporting a scholarly result won't be a paper, but a nugget of information that links to other portions of the network of knowledge.<br /> (so not just one's own system, but the global commons system)

Mention of Open Annotation (Consortium) Collaboration:<br /> - Jane Hunter, University of Australia Brisbane & Queensland<br /> - Tim Cole, University of Urbana Champaign<br /> - Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory annotations of various media<br /> see:<br /> - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311366469_The_Open_Annotation_Collaboration_A_Data_Model_to_Support_Sharing_and_Interoperability_of_Scholarly_Annotations - http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130205/index.html - http://www.openannotation.org/PhaseIII_Team.html

trust must be put into the system for it to work

coloration of the provenance of links goes back to Otlet (~52:00)

Creativity is the friction of the attention space at the moments when the structural blocks are grinding against one another the hardest. —Randall Collins (1998) The sociology of philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (p.76)

https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/statistical.html

https://www.kevinmarks.com/memex.html

I got stuck over the weekend, so I totally missed Kevin Marks' memex demo at IndieWebCamp's Create Day, but it is an interesting little UI experiment.

I'll always maintain that Vannevar Bush really harmed the first few generations of web development by not mentioning the word commonplace book in his conceptualization. Marks heals some of this wound by explicitly tying the idea of memex to that of the zettelkasten however. John Borthwick even mentions the idea of "networked commonplace books". [I suspect a little birdie may have nudged this perspective as catnip to grab my attention—a ruse which is highly effective.]

Some of Kevin's conceptualization reminds me a bit of Jerry Michalski's use of The Brain which provides a specific visual branching of ideas based on the links and their positions on the page: the main idea in the center, parent ideas above it, sibling ideas to the right/left and child ideas below it. I don't think it's got the idea of incoming or outgoing links, but having a visual location on the page for incoming links (my own site has incoming ones at the bottom as comments or responses) can be valuable.

I'm also reminded a bit of Kartik Prabhu's experiments with marginalia and webmention on his website which plays around with these ideas as well as their visual placement on the page in different methods.

MIT MediaLab's Fold site (details) was also an interesting sort of UI experiment in this space.

It also seems a bit reminiscent of Kevin Mark's experiments with hovercards in the past as well, which might be an interesting way to do the outgoing links part.

Next up, I'd love to see larger branching visualizations of these sorts of things across multiple sites... Who will show us those "associative trails"?

Another potential framing for what we're all really doing is building digital versions of Indigenous Australian's songlines across the web. Perhaps this may help realize Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's dream for a "third archive"?

imitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

Some may categorize handbooks on note taking within the productivity space as "self-help" or "self-improvement", but still view it as something that happens outside of ones' self. Doesn't improving one's environment as a means of improving things for oneself count as self-improvement?

Marie Kondo's minimalism techniques are all external to the body, but are wholly geared towards creating internal happiness.

Because your external circumstances are important to your internal mental state, external environment and decoration can be considered self-improvement.

Could note taking be considered exbodied cognition? Vannevar Bush framed the Memex as a means of showing associative trails. (Let's be honest, As We May Think used the word trail far too much.)

How does this relate to orality vs. literacy?

Orality requires the immediate mental work for storage while literacy removes some of the work by making the effort external and potentially giving it additional longevity.

In 1998, Ben Shneiderman acknowledged the influence of Vannevar Bush's vision of the memex on his work on hypertext.

A list of all the questions that Vannevar Bush poses in the piece:

• What are the scientists to do next?
• Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence?
• Is this all fantastic?
• Will there be dry photography?
• What would it cost to print a million copies?
• The preparation of the original copy?
• 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?
• Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?
• 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?
• 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?
• 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?
• Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another?

This so-called link to computer science and prefiguring the internet is a bit too credulous here. Vannevar Bush prefigured the idea in 1945, but one can look back further to Konrad Gessner centuries before to make the same connections.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-hut-where-the-internet-began/277551/

It really kills me that there's so much hero worship of all this, particularly given the information processing power of index card systems at the time. I don't really think it took such a leap to image automating such a system given the technological bent of the time.

Of course actually doing it is another thing, but conceptualizing the idea at the time would have be de rigueur.

Original paper that became The Atlantic article As We May Think (1945).

This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).

Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond

This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.

This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?

His definition of a Memex is simply a mechanized (or what we would now call digitized) commonplace book, which has a long history in the literature of knowledge management.

I'll note here that he's somehow still stuck on the mechanical engineering idea of mechanized. Despite the fact that he was the advisor to Claude Shannon, father of the digital revolution, he is still thinking in terms of mechanical pipes, levers, and fluids. He literally had Shannon building a computer out of pipes and fluid while he was a student at MIT.

I've been seeing some of this in the digital gardening space online. People are actively hosting their annotations, thoughts, and ideas, almost as personal wikis.

Some are using RSS and other feeds as well as Webmention notifications so that these notebooks can communicate with each other in a realization of Vanmevar Bush's dream.

Networked academic samizdat anyone?

Some revisionist history here glorifying Bush and the Memex without any mention of the long historical precedent of the commonplace book.

Not much substantive or new here for me.It is an intriguing question, but it's better to write my own response elsewhere.

But why can't it do both?

Because it's on the same platform, they could allow people to make their notes public and shareable. They could add Webmention support so that one notebook could talk to another!

C'mon people!!? Don't you remember the dream of the Memex?

I can't help but think about Raymond Lull's combinatorial rings which he used as a thinking tool. Or Giordano Bruno's revision of Lull's tools as described in De Umbris Idearum. Given their knowledge of the art of memory stemming from rhetoric in combination with his combinatorial tool, he was essentially sitting on top of an early form of a memex.

I also can't help but think about Kicks Condor's Fraidyc.at reader tool that pulls in wiki content from TiddlyWikis and which have the potential to also make wikis publishing tools as well.

One needs courage to endure looking foolish.

Ironic that adaptation was part of the memex and yet it did not adapt to the emerging field of digital computing.

A personal memex must first and foremost be personal. No cloud based system can claim to be a memex because it loses the personal / private aspect.

How much further would Bush have gone if he had known about graph theory? He is describing a graph database with nodes and edges and a graphical model itself is the key to the memex.

People often get stuck on specific implementation details that are specific to their time, place, and context. Why didn't Bush consider other storage mechanisms?

Learning is an act of creation. To understand something we must create mental and physical constructions. This is a creative process.

This passage in Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" may be the first mention of what we now think of as digital annotation. The passage in the original article is slighly different... you can see it here.

I seem to run across references to this every couple of months. Interestingly it is never in relation to information theory or Claude Shannon references which I somehow what I most closely relate it to.

Great summary.

That dream does live on. Since Vannevar’s 1945 article on the Memex, we’ve been dreaming of such tools. Our current tools are quite far from that dream.

Who is Vannevar Bush? See [Wikipedia article on V. Bush(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush)