for - Indyweb dev - Think machine - Vannevar Bush Memex influence - AI based

for - Indyweb dev - Indranet dev - Vannevar Bush - memex - Douglas Engelbart - Mother of all demonstrations - Ted Nelson - Project Xanadu - transclusion

In the margins on November 8th, 2023 by Jeremy Keith https://adactio.com/journal/20608

Jacobs, Alan. “The Garden and the Stream.” Digital magazine. The New Atlantis (blog), May 4, 2018. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/text-patterns/the-garden-and-stream.

Alan Jacobs argues that the Memex is not a tool to publish with and is thus fundamentally different from the World Wide Web.

Did Vannevar Bush suggest the Memex for writing or potentially publishing? [Open question to check] Would it have been presumed to have been for publishing if he suggests that it was for annotating, changing, linking and summarizing? Aren't these actions tantamount to publishing, even if they're just for oneself?

Wouldn't academics have built the one functionality in as a precursor to the other?

• for: history - hyperlink, history - Vannevar Bush, history - Ted Nelson, history - Doug Engelbart

• for: memex, Vannevar Bush, Indyweb, Ted Nelson

The 1929 desk in this image isn't too far from a physical instantiation of Vannevar Bush's Memex which didn't appear until 1939 (1945 published).

• https://tinyletter.com/nikhilthota/letters/s02-e05-on-booling-knowledge-management-tooling
• https://nikhilthota.com/projects/memex/

se asimila el memex con el manejo y disposicion del cerebro e incluso el memex fue concebido como herramienta para estudiar el propio celebro.

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.

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.

Profile of Ted Nelson

• The explorations of a system that could
• record our learning trail in life
  • personal individual synthesis
  • new knowledge gained by social learning:
    • from direct, synchronous, real-time interaction with another live other human being
    • from indirect, asynchronous, non-real-time interaction with cultural artefacts produced by another
• Bush famously named cc this the "memex"

https://shawngraham.github.io/hist1900/#the-big-idea

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Kathleen Fitzpatrick</span> in Spending today tinkering with a combi… (<time class='dt-published'>12/18/2022 00:02:04</time>)</cite></small>

https://xememex.com/

Appears to be a TiddlyWiki farm, possibly for collaborative work?

Page recommended by @wfinck. Seems @karlicoss is the author. This project seems similar to what I've been trying to do with Hypothes.is, Obsidian, Anki, Zotero, and PowerToys Run but goes beyond the scope of my endeavors to just quickly access whatever resource comes to mind (without creating duplicates). The things that Promnesia adds beyond my PKM stack is the following: - prioritize new info - keeping track of which device things were read and how long

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220810205211/https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/gpt-3

Blogged a few first associations at https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/08/communicating-with-gpt-3/ . Prompt design for narrative research may be a useful experience here. 'Interviewing' GPT-3 a Luhmann-style conversation with a system? Can we ditch our notes for GPT-3? GPT-3 as interface to the internet. Fascinatiing essay, need to explore.

I know that a few people have been using the Webmention and the Semantic Linkbacks plugins for WordPress together to show the backlinks in the "comments" section of their posts/pages. Perhaps this may work for your purposes?

A recent example I've seen someone put together on WordPress that does something similar (though not using Slippy) is https://cyberzettel.com/.

In a similar vein, though not with WordPress, Kevin Marks mocked up a UI for an incoming/outgoing links in the mode of a Memex that also leverages Webmentions for part of the functionality: https://www.kevinmarks.com/memex.html.

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

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://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"?

Explicit example of someone using a zettelkasten to develop ideas and create content for distribution online and within social media.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vgtyuf/mastery_requires_theory_application_of_theory_is/

The studies quoted here are in the mid 80s and early 90s before the rise of better and easier UI methods or more powerful search. I'd have to call this conclusion into question.

There's also a big difference in what people know, what people prefer, and what knowledgeable people can do most quickly.

Cross reference this with Dan Russell's research at Google that indicates that very few people know how to use ctrl-f to find or search for things in documents. - https://hyp.is/7a532uxjEeyYfTOctQHvTw/www.youtube.com/channel/UCh6KFtW4a4Ozr81GI1cxaBQ

Relate it to the idea of associative (memory) trails (Memex), songlines, and method of loci in remembering where things are -- our brains are designed to navigate using memory

1. Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstra ß e, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1928/1981), 98 – 140, at 103.

Does Walter Benjamin prefigure the idea of card indexes conversing with themselves in a communicative method similar to that of Vannevar Bush's Memex?

This definitely sounds like the sort of digital garden inter-communication afforded by the Anagora as suggested by @Flancian.

In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.

Given this and the easy portability of index cards, should we instead of recommending notebooks, laptops, or systems like Cornell notes, recommend students take notes directly on their note cards and revise them from there? The physicality of the medium may also have other benefits in terms of touch, smell, use of colors on them, etc. for memory and easy regular use. They could also be used physically for spaced repetition relatively quickly.

Teachers using their index cards of notes physically in class or in discussions has the benefit of modeling the sort of note taking behaviors we might ask of our students. Imagine a classroom that has access to a teacher's public notes (electronic perhaps) which could be searched and cross linked by the students in real-time. This would also allow students to go beyond the immediate topic at hand, but see how that topic may dovetail with the teachers' other research work and interests. This also gives greater meaning to introductory coursework to allow students to see how it underpins other related and advanced intellectual endeavors and invites the student into those spaces as well. This sort of practice could bring to bear the full weight of the literacy space which we center in Western culture, for compare this with the primarily oral interactions that most teachers have with students. It's only in a small subset of suggested or required readings that students can use for leveraging the knowledge of their teachers while all the remainder of the interactions focus on conversation with the instructor and questions that they might put to them. With access to a teacher's card index, they would have so much more as they might also query that separately without making demands of time and attention to their professors. Even if answers aren't immediately forthcoming from the file, then there might at least be bibliographic entries that could be useful.

I recently had the experience of asking a colleague for some basic references about the history and culture of the ancient Near East. Knowing that he had some significant expertise in the space, it would have been easier to query his proverbial card index for the lived experience and references than to bother him with the burden of doing work to pull them up.

What sorts of digital systems could help to center these practices? Hypothes.is quickly comes to mind, though many teachers and even students will prefer to keep their notes private and not public where they're searchable.

Another potential pathway here are systems like FedWiki or anagora.org which provide shared and interlinked note spaces. Have any educators attempted to use these for coursework? The closest I've seen recently are public groups using shared Roam Research or Obsidian-based collections for book clubs.

Summary tk

Modern note taking has seen a reversion to pre-Renaissance practices in which they're much more temporary tools. Relatively few students take notes with an aim for reusing them past their immediate classroom settings or current term of study.

The revitalization of the idea of the zettelkasten in the late 2010s seems to be helping to reverse this idea. However, there aren't enough online versions of these sorts of notes which allow them to be used with other publics or even to be used and shared with other collaborators. There are some growing spaces seen in the social media note taking space like the anagora.org or the digital gardens space where this seems to have some potential to take off. There's also a small community on Hypothes.is which seems to be practicing this as well, though direct links between various collections of notes is not commonplace.

How does one equitably and logically build a communally shared knowledge base for a for-profit space?

How might a communal zettelkasten work? A solid index for creating links between pieces is incredibly important here, but who does this work? How is it valued?

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

This is a dreadful definition of the neologism genex. Had it been used previously in other locations so as to be common even within a small community? Is this the first use?

It obviously didn't catch on at the time.

Si bien fueron los planos o la descripción del mecanismo se resalta la importancia que tiene este para las bases de datos actuales y la forma en como se crean anotaciones en el mismo, permitiendo a todo quien la use ser el autor.

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

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.

Cory Doctorow calls his blog and its archives his "outboard brain".

Cory Doctorow's commonplace makes it easier to search, quote, and reuse in his process of synthesis.

https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/interlinking-wikis

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?

https://divyahansg.com/docs/memex

Google Ngram Viewer for "commonplace book",florilegium,memex,"note taking"

The credo of the writer Walter Benjamin speaks for this:

And today, as the current scientific method of production teaches, the book is an outdated mediation between two different card index systems. Because everything essential is to be found in the slip box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar who studies it assimilates it in his own card index.

Here's an early instantiation of thoughts being put down into data which can be copied from one card to the next as a means of creation.

A similar idea was held in the commonplace book tradition, in general, but this feels much more specific in the lead up to the idea of the Memex.

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.

Whether or not digital gardens should follow any standards is an interesting question.

What features/functionality should a digital garden have? Is there a canonical list yet?

I wish more supported Webmention to enable the Memex dream...

There are a few of us using Webmention for this. Similarly there are some running open wikis or experiments like Flancian's agora.

He's got a nice conceptualization here of a networked version of commonplace books for search and creation for one's own commonplace book.

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

A fascinating quote in the history of the commonplace book on it's way to becoming the Memex.

Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/promnesia/

Promnesia is a browser extension for Chrome/Firefox (including Firefox for Android!) which serves as a web surfing copilot, enhancing your browsing history and web exploration experience.

TLDR: it lets you explore your browsing history in context: where you encountered it, in chat, on Twitter, on Reddit, or just in one of the text files on your computer. This is unlike most modern browsers, where you can only see when you visited the link.

I've been doing something a bit like this manually and it looks a lot like the sort of UI examples I've been collecting at https://boffosocko.com/2019/06/29/social-reading-user-interface-for-discovery/

I wonder something related, but even broader, "How do we get everyone to work in public?"

tab/link management tools

.

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

A browser extension for archiving web pages locally.

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?

It's these deep learning breakthroughs that now make a lot of these memex and semantic web technologies accesssible. This is a note I also referenced in the SWTs whitepaper for Cortex. Great to see Moritz and RemNote picking up on this change as well.

I look it and say, it's just another version of the commonplace book!

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.

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?