Traveling in "Knowiedge-Land”
although this is ten years before my first experience with a browser, it seems that the idea of moving through knowledge space is already set . . . and parenthetically its also a dozen years before i first see Muriel Cooper's concept of moving through a three-dimensional data space . . . no wonder it had such a powerful impact on me.
With a body of knowledge that is sa much larger and so much more comple: and difficult to Grasp, people need to be marter.”" They are going to have to absorb larger amounts of gore abstract information, over wider areas. They must be able to maneuver more efficiently and effectively in “knowl edge-Land."
this tracks all the way through to the arguments for social reading
How has the domain of knowledge changed over time
more materialism
by the ability to transmit learning, “outside the body,”
primacy of learning
changing social needs of each age.
more indication of materialist perspective
trying to understand haw the rale of an encyclopaedia might change a= society itself changes,
can't imagine these words from a straight "business consultant" point of view . . .
anv discus on of how to use electronic media needs such a framework af the result is going to have any redeeming and Long- army Social value.
second reference to "social value" -- and none to economics
Because of this, we suggest that two or three years into the project we create something like the Atari Institute for the Art and Science of Knowledge
the top-down nature of the effort being proposed is such a clear indication that we had one foot very firmly planted in the hierarchical structures of the print era; the distributed efforts of the browser-based internet were yet to come.
We can't just take text from books, movie footage from over here and some photos from over there and transport them as is into the IE. A thoroughly interactive learning environment such as the IE will require a fresh approach
i'm wondering if readers can point to examples of breakthrough efforts in pedagogy over the past 40 years. i fear not, but would love to be proven wrong.
WB confusion
WB refers here to World Book, not Warner Bros
Tying the packaging of the microcomputer and videodisc products together should create even greater benefits at retail, including enhanced scope, variety, and retail presence. We can protect our own hardware business by giving the Atari versions a six-month head start in the marketplace.
without evaluating the viability of these marketing ideas, it's important to see that we were grounded in the commercial world.
development of this particular line of software must be driven by Corporate Research.
i'm pretty sure the idea of having a research group drive a line of product development was unusual for its time. i'm sure there are other examples but the first one that comes to mind for me is Dave Liddle's Interval Research (owned by Paul Allen) which consciously merged research and development.
We envision stand-alone versions of each product that will run on a variety of target microcomputers, as well as a version of each to run on the online encyclopedia network.
this seems awfully vague . . . in retrospect not sure of the extent to which we grasped the inherent difficulties of pulling this off in a way that would be BOTH commercially viable and a really useful experimental test bed.
Second, is that Atari/EB can still establish strong connections to several major institutions -- the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- whose holdings constitute a resource rich beyond dreams, just waiting for the proper medium to exploit them.
there are lots of already indentified reasons why Atari failed to do this, but it's a bit harder to understand why basically no one has undertaken a major effort to create super high quality interactive video . . . or perhaps i've been away too long and don't know of important new initiatives. if you know of some, please say something.
With each program we will. be exploring better ways to use visual images to communicate. Games will be an integral part of many of the programs as we strive to tear down the walls between education and entertainment.
IF Atari had embraced videodiscs in the early 80s (and not gone out of business) -- two impossible IFs -- i don't see any reason why this wouldn't have been a practical plan. after all it's exactly what Criterion did . . . learning the territory and establishing its brand in the videodisc era and positioning itself perfectly for the DVD and streaming eras to come.
The question of how to ship the bits to the consumer boils down to cable or telephone.
interestingly we didn't imagine "wireless" at this point, but by the Atari drawings, you can see little antennas on the terminals meaning that we assumed wireless connection.
Ideally the system would be designed to work best with an Atari computer, but would be accessible to anyone with a microcomputer -- Apple, IBM, or even a high~quality Videotex terminal.
opposed to hardware silos from the beginning
Within three years we could have on the market. an online system combining the full-text feature of NEXIS with a fairly powerful interface, permitting the novice user to wander in the database with considerable ease. Our basic standard is that it shouldn't be any harder to find anything than with print versions, and usually, it should be easier. Referral to related subjects should be much better than the existing print version. Not only will it be easier to go from Aardvark to Zebra, but the system can be programmed to point out connections.
this still reads like a sensible and doable plan
When word get out that Atari is working on this project under Alan Kay, everyone doing interesting work in related areas will seek to contribute their work to the effort, bringing Atari a bounty of ideas and talent.
this reads right to me.
From the very beginning our strategy calls for two parallel lines of work:
Something that i will probably write multiple times . . . Alan Kay was regarded as a blue-sky guy who didn't worry about practicality or fitting within the constraints of corporate profit/loss. my sense is that this was unfair. Alan told Atari's leadership that although their basic PC was quite good compared to the Apple 2, their product pipeline was basically empty, so Alan proposed going to Japan and finding tech that could be licensed for a five-year run while Alan and his crew developed the next big thing. this idea was turned down. in fact Alan and i once tried to think of one initiative that had been greenlighted and we came up short.
‘The first is basic research in varous fields that relate to the IE -- artificial intelligence,
the need for a ton of basic research is why was so important that this effort was being mounted out of a research group
5% of those homes subscribed to the IE for $10 per month, that would generate revenues of $540 million per year. The $10 figure is analogous to the phone companies' basic charge. For $10 the. user gets unlimited usage of the basic system; interconnect charges to other databases result in add-on charges similar to long distance charges with with the phone company.
obviously, we never imagined an advertising-based revenue model . . . what's missing from the advertising model though is the revenues that we presumed were necessary to create a media rich and AI savvy database.
The system is so expensive to develop and requires a monumental effort by such a talented group of people that more than two parallel efforts would be inconceivable.
we completely missed the potential of crowd-sourcing, not surprising given that without a browser etc. people hadn't really started uploading information to be searched . . .
Everyone, whether they be a child wondering how birds fly, or an executive trying to understand the intrinsic relationship between interest rates and oil prices, will turn to their intelligent encyclopedia “several times a day. It will become an indispensable feature of daily life.
can't say we didn't see what was coming, although we didn't know how to get there; remember we didn't even have a browser in 1982.
drawings on the following pages
have no idea what drawings are being referred to. i'm pretty sure the Atari Drawings would have come later since it was a while before Brenda Laurel who worked on the drawing scenarios came to work with the encyclopedia project.
Capable of including audio and video of the highest quality, the intelligent encyclopedia presents information and knowledge in the form best suited to the particular subject matter. Text, photos, full-motion video, and sound can each be used to best advantage.
We're starting to see this emerging especially on YouTube . . . if audio/video might be helpful in teaching something, there's a decent chance someone has posted a video . . . for example searching for a video on the third law of thermodynamics yields dozens of hits. Two big differences between what we were contemplating and what's happened is that we never imagined the crowd-sourcing of video . . . it was just way too expensive to think of ordinary people making videos . . . which also means we never imagined that each subject would have competing videos. and we were presuming a powerful AI layer capable of tailoring answers to the needs of the individual user.)
Who hit more home runs, Mickey Mantle or Willy Mays?"
BTW, Google today returned this answer in .8 seconds "Mickey had more power, but Willie hit more home runs because he played longer and took fewer pitches.
To make use of the information, there needs to. be a transformation in the learning process. With a body of knowledge that. is so much more complex and difficult to grasp, people need to be "smarter." They must absorb larger amounts of more abstract information over wider areas.
"information and knowledge service" sounds like early Google but when you add the focus on learning itself, it's quite a bit more,
Before information can really become a commodity on a mass : consumer level, there are two. problems which have to be solved
Although it doesn't say so explicitly, this formulation and the ideas put forth in this doc seem to presume people will pay directly for access to information . . . the way it's turned out though, a LOT of the information we "search for everyday" is free in terms of money as we exchange info about ourselves in exchange.
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February 1983 is about the time of the ET disaster which marked the end of many Atari initiatives, such that the Encyclopedia Project at Atari was soon to be doomed.
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the reference to "tapes" suggests that EB and Atari had gotten to the point where EB was considering giving Atari an electronic copy to be used for research purposes. characteristically, however, van doren admits that the bean counters and lawyers were nowhere nearly as enthusiastic as he was.
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Peggy Goldman, the daughter of one of my parents' closest friends was a Hollywood Comedy Writer (TV). She wrote up this idea after I'd explained to her what I was up to, probably 1981. Essentially it's a cooking show with the addition of accessible recipes on still frames. While only the most minimal interactivity, this would have been a step forward at the time since pre-internet there was no way to combine still photos with motion video.
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I sent this proposal recently to a photographer friend in his early 40s and this is what he wrote in response:
Wow! Did you ever go forward / get funding with this project? I really can't imagine a better introduction and tutorial series for learning photography when you were proposing this! The entire arc of the tutorial was great: introducing the technical aspects of photography, then raising the idea of learning how to see and think photographically, then featuring several acclaimed photographers' work with the laserdisc's visual quality at the time was a great idea.
I think that would have been an excellent at-home learning option for people at the time. You ask about today's state of the art, and from what I've seen, it's still the model y'all were pointing at. What has changed, of course, is the ease of producing the content, and therefore being much more inclusive of different modes and styles, the presentation mechanisms, and the interactivity options available, but I don't think the training structure has advanced from the basic form you articulated here.
And I think that's a real testament to your and Arthur's vision for this project.
Photography also means something much wider scope today than it did before. I think KelbyOne.com is probably the top site for training in this wide scope sense, but I also think they’re just a supercharged version of your vision here (but again, with today's enhanced technologies and vastly expanded production/distribution/interactivity options).
When I reading through the project it made me think about when I was learning photography. and how it was very different than most people I know from my age and olders, who came of age either before or just at the beginning of the internet and its vast content options. I think the excellent model you and Arthur had developed was a great way of presenting this material, but I’m not sure it would have found me at the time. And I think that points to something interesting in how not only passions get formed and molded, but how one learns can directly impact what one learns… especially within particular technical infrastructures, political economies, and theory productions. I think I told you this before, but I developed my love of photography only after my love for cinema and cinematography. I never took an in-depth photography course in person, and then I finally started to study it, it was through the New York Institute of Photography's at-home course that was all done through the mail! Remember all those learning by mail options for things? 😊
I got these booklets in the mail, mostly printed in b&W, where they went through the technical side of things, but it was still mostly reading and following instructions in the booklets. The printed materials' production quality had all the problems you identified in your proposal about the difficulties in high-quality photographic rendering. And those production issues meant that certain styles of photography would be better presented than others. For example, most B&W works came through better colorwork. In reading the booklets, I was often drawn to the B&W work because it was better represented, but also it reminded me of my favorite B&W cinematographers like Toland, Nykvist, and Alton.
I completed the assignments by mailing my prints to the school, and my assigned mentor would then send me cassette tapes of his review of my work. From my first assignment, and nearly every one of his reviews after it, would have something like, "Joe, your images have this really stark, severe tonal quality to them. They almost feel like film noir to me." Or: "Your compositions and framing feels widescreen sometimes, or like your weighing your frames really different than a lot of other students."
So here was this voice on a tape of a person I never met, who knew nothing about me, whom I never had a conversation with, referencing how he noticed cinematography influenced and informed my own photographic seeing in a way that seemed to surprise him. And this influence is something that likely wouldn’t be a part of a traditional photography pedagogy. (This could also mean I’m just a hack who merely regurgitates his limited influences, but I’ll stick with my deeper point 😊. HAHA. )
I bring this up because I think the model you were proposing was excellent in traditional photography pedagogy. And that model, especially at the time you were proposing it, would have been informed not only by the technical infrastructure and the political economy of the time in how you could present and distribute it, but in the thinking and theorizing of what photography itself was an artform, and what should be a part of the discussion in teaching it.
This is not remotely a criticism! I think this project was awesome. But I think it’s interesting in thinking how these projects are necessarily shaped by the times in which they’re being considered..
What do you think about the project now? In reading it through, what do you think you would change now?
Linda Miller
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Bob Stein, a pioneering digital innovator, wrote recently that “people often ask me to expound on the ‘future of the book.’ ” Since Mr. Stein is founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book, one might think he would expect and even welcome this. He does not. “Frankly,” he wrote, “I can’t stand the question.”
the full quote is from an op ed piece i wrote for Corriere della Serra: "As someone who made the leap from print to electronic publishing over thirty years ago people often ask me to expound on the “future of the book.” Frankly, I can’t stand the question, especially when asked simplistically. For starters it needs more specificity. Are we talking 2 years, 10 years or 100 years? And what does the questioner mean by “book” anyway? Are they asking about the evolution of the physical object or its role in the social fabric?"
and the full text is here (in english): http://futureofthebook.org/blog/2013/03/18/the_future_of_the_book_is_the/
This personal journey gives meaning to the macro text: the Biennial and its exhibitions, site-specific projects, performances, film program and lectures.
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