Transcript Computation as a Medium - Georgia Institute of Technology

Web Inventors - Bush & Berners-Lee
Week 6
LCC 2700: Intro to Computational Media
Fall 2005
Ian Bogost
Vannevar Bush
• Born in 1890
• Taught at MIT and built an analog computer for
differential equations.
• Became Chairman of the National Defense Research
Committee
• Worked on the Manhattan Project, and helped to found
the National Science Foundation
• Disliked the humanities and social sciences, and
consequentially did not have a historical understanding
of his Memex.
“As we may think” (1945)
• Expansion in human
knowledge
• No way to navigate the fruits
of print culture
• Memex machine
– Based on microfiche, not
digital
– Architecture of associated
trails, forged by experts
Bush was a
leader of
military
research during
WWII, and an
architect of the
post-war
militaryindustrialuniversity
research
establishment
Bush’s Proposed
Memex (1945)
Bush’s Trail is a series of links
(this passage is also quoted by Nelson)
When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the
name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard.
Before him are the two items to be joined, projected
onto adjacent viewing positions. ... The user taps a
single key, and these items are permanently joined. …
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view,
the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a
button …. Moreover when numerous items have been
thus joined together to form a trail, they can be
reviewed…exactly as though the physical items had
been…bound together…more than this, for any item can
be joined to numerous trails.
Idea of the Trail, Trail-blazer
• Connected to American culture: exploration of the
frontier a defining experience and myth
• Google’s success based on weighing links, calculating
authority of the pointer
• Participatory nature of the digital medium supports
multiple trail-blazers, criss-crossing, interconnnected
trails
• Network architecture supports multiple routes
• Need for new indexing, segmenting, and linking
structures to fully implement this concept
The Legacy of Bush
Voice Recognition
Head Mounted Camera
My Life’s Bits:
http://research.microsoft.com/
barc/MediaPresence/
MyLifeBits.aspx
Ted Nelson: Hypertext (1965)
• “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing , and the
Indeterminate”
• Wedded V. Bush’s memex to digital technology, calling
for digital associationist encyclopedic information
resource
Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
• Born in England in 1955
• Banned from using Oxford Computer
after being caught hacking
• Built a computer from an old television
and an M6800 processor
• Began working at CERN, the world’s
largest particle physics lab
• Built a prototype of the WWW called
Enquire in 1980
Launching the Web
• First web page created in 1991
• Poster at the ACM Hypertext
conference
• There were already other methods of
sharing information
– Gopher
– BBS
• First web page:
• http://www.w3.org/History/199211
03hypertext/hypertext/WWW/News/9
201.html
Berners-Lee quote:
• “I didn't invent the hypertext link either. The idea of jumping from
one document to another had been thought about lots of people,
including Vanevar Bush in 1945, and by Ted Nelson (who actually
invented the word hypertext). Bush did it before computers really
existed. Ted thought of a system but didn't use the internet. Doug
Engelbart in the 1960's made a great system just like WWW except
that it just ran on one [big] computer, as the internet hadn't been
invented yet. Lots of hypertext systems had been made which just
worked on one computer, and didn't link all the way across the
world.
• I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and
DNS ideas and -- ta-da! -- the World Wide Web.”
What does the World Wide Web consist of?
• Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) are the names that
represents the address of the server
• HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the system used to send
data between the client and the server. It can encompass a wide
range of data types.
• HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the structure of rules that
encompass the data of a web document. This consists of tags such
as:
– <html> to represent the language that is being used
– <a href> an anchor to another document
– <img src>a method of inserting an image into the document
Why did the Web Win?
•
•
•
•
•
There were many different systems available for use
Patent and Royalty free system
Easy to Use
Easy to Create
World Wide Web Consortium
W3C.org
·
·
·
·
·
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Founded in 1994
Jointly administered from Boston, Japan, and France
Has offices all over the world
Creates standards and guidelines to be used by the web
In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most
fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one
another and allow any hardware and software used to access the
Web to work together. W3C refers to this goal as “Web
interoperability.” By publishing open (non-proprietary) standards
for Web languages and protocols, W3C seeks to avoid market
fragmentation and thus Web fragmentation.
Outside corporations develop other software that does not always
follow these guidelines. (ie. Internet Explorer)
From Yesterday to Now
•Pioneers of the web helped to
establish its direction
http://web.archive.org/collection
s/pioneers.html
•528 Million can view Flash
animation content
•136 Million Americans use the
internet – over half own high
speed connections
The Semantic Web
• Intends to give meaning to the
content of the web
• Machine to understand the
information that it is presenting and
make associations and connections
with it
• Uses several different mark up
languages for users to create their
own meta language.
An Example of the Semantic Web
• BY MIGUEL SALMERON At the doctor's office, Lucy instructed
her Semantic Web agent through her handheld Web browser. The
agent promptly retrieved information about Mom's prescribed
treatment from the doctor's agent, looked up several lists of
providers, and checked for the ones in-plan for Mom's insurance
within a 20-mile radius of her home and with a rating of excellent
or very good on trusted rating services. It then began trying to find
a match between available appointment times (supplied by the
agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete's
and Lucy's busy schedules. (The emphasized keywords indicate
terms whose semantics, or meaning, were defined for the agent
through the Semantic Web.)
The Web’s Future
•Is a lack of hierarchy good?
•Will the web become a huge shopping mall or a library?
•What do people want from ubiquitous connections to the web?
•http://www.idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/