Sarah Allen's Weblog

historical perspective on links and trails

In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext,” Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar's workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3x5 index cards. -- Forgotten Forefather: Paul Otlet by Alex Wright

I have long been inspired by the vision of Vannevar Bush in his 1945 article, As We May Think. In learning more of the great thinkers and inventors of the time, I have realized that these ideas were not unique; however, it may have been the first time such applications of technology were expressed in the popular press. Bush's writing was and still is accessible, printed originally in the Atlantic Monthly and later in Life Magazine with illustrations.

Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, And Vannevar Bush's Memex [via danah boyd] details the invention of microfilm devices of the 1930s and 40s for information indexing, search and retrieval. Although Buckland provides wonderful quotations from writings both before and after the publication of "As We May Think" that anticipate today's world wide web, I disagree with his dismissal of human trails as effective indexing.

Alex Wright writes of Paul Otlet's vision for "links" establishing the relationship between documents: "...he simply believed that documents could best be understood as three-dimensional, with the third dimension being their social context: their relationship to place, time, language, other readers, writers and topics. Otlet believed in the possibility of empirical truth, or what he called “facticity”—a property that emerged over time, through the ongoing collaboration between readers and writers. In Otlet's world, each user would leave an imprint, a trail, which would then become part of the explicit history of each document." (Forgotten Forefather)

I have seen reflections of these ideas in the blog-o-sphere. A whimsical name for something with profound implications. We writers of blogs create trails throuh the web. A single web log entry, such as this one, provides a short trail of a few links and some commentary. It may be added to over time with comments from other authors or "trackbacks". One blog provides trails through the web that demonstrate the interests and experience of the writer. Tools are emerging to follow the thread of conversation on a particular topic across multiple web logs.

This social experiment lacks the academic rigor of microfilm. It is surprisingly resilient depite the transient and limited nature of the medium. I often pine for the fine-grained addressability of Doug Englebart's open hyperdocument system; however, the format of a web log with relatively short entries and "permalinks" addresses this limitation to some extent. The evolution of the web is one more step along a well-worn path.