Hypertext. The electronic labyrinth, New York University Press, New York, 1997.

SNYDER, Ilana -

http://www.cce.ufsc.br/~neitzel/literatura/snyder.html

Origins of hypertext

The creation myth of hypertext is dominated by the rhetoric of founding fathers and pioneers. Although appealing in its patriarchal simplicity, romanticism and elegance, this approach to history has its limitations. Equally problematic is the impulse to explain the history of hypertext technology — indeed of anything — as a neat series of chronological and causally linked events. Histories of hypertext presented in this way may be comforting in their formal familiarity, and apparently illuminating, but they remain merely constructs. Acknowledging these difficulties, I attempt to provide in the following sections an overview of the contributions made by key individuals to the development of hypertext, and to give a sense of the socio-cultural and literary formations which produced them. The decision to begin this chapter with an expanded explanation of hypertext reflects my desire to resist the impulse to represent the development of the technology as a relentlessly linear progression. More importantly, such an approach enables us to understand what early thinkers in the development of hypertext were working toward.

For centuries scribes, scholars, publishers and other makers of books have been inventing devices to increase the speed of information retrieval. ‘Manuscript culture gradually saw the invention of individual pages, chapters, paragraphing, and spaces between words. The technology of the book found enhancement by pagination, indices, and bibliographies’ (Landow, 1992a:19). All of these devices have facilitated reading. Yet although multiple copies of the fixed texts made possible by print technology have had enormous effects on modern conceptions of literature, education and research, they nevertheless make information retrieval difficult because they preserve their information in an unchangeable linear format which is totally different from the dynamic, alterable and multi-sequential format of hypertext.

The problems of linear text prompted some innovators to think of alternative ways of presenting information even before computers themselves became a reality. Commonly recognized antecedents of computerized hypertext include:

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Treatise on Method’ (1849), which outlines the principles for organizing all human knowledge

• Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic Monthly essay, ‘As We May Think’ (1945), which is recognized now as the first serious attempt to lay out the principles and functions of a memory machine (the memex)

• Ted Nelson’s (1978) vision of electronic hypertext, which he named Project Xanadu.

Coleridge, Bush and Nelson were all concerned with the problem of creating a system for providing complete access to the ‘endlessly expansive world of texts’ (Tuman, 1992a:55). The prototype of a hypertext system — NLS (oNLineSystem) — was first designed and built by Douglas Engelbart in 1968 at the Science Research Institute at Stanford University. What Bush and Nelson could only imagine, Engelbart made a reality.

Encyclopaedias

Coleridge intended his ‘Treatise on Method’ to be the introduction to a proposed encyclopaedia called the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (1849). Having an intense dislike of alphabetical systems of ordering knowledge, he was seeking a set of principles that had more meaning than ‘an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters’ (Collison, 1966:231). His ‘Treatise’ accordingly outlines alternative principles for organizing all human knowledge, a problem of increasing interest nowadays, ‘given the huge database capacity of modern computers and .. . the seemingly geometrical increases in information’ (Tuman’ 1992a:53).

While Coleridge’s topical arrangement can be traced back to the Middle Ages, his ideal encyclopaedia is ‘a clear product of the technology of print’ in which the text is laid out in one ideal order’ (Bolter’ 1991:92). The ordering principle favored by Coleridge is to demonstrate how each notion is subordinated ‘to a preconceived universal Idea’ (Coleridge, 1849:22): in other words, to present hierarchies of knowledge. ‘The passion for hierarchy’’ argues Bolter (1991:105),

finds its purest expression in the elaborate table of contents of modern encyclopaedias and other great books in print. The table of contents is both hierarchical and linear: it shows subordination and superordination, and it also shows the reader the order in which he or she will encounter these ideas in reading from the first page to the last.

In a hypertext nothing corresponds to the printed table of contents. Menus can indicate a hierarchy of topics, but the order of pages does not compel readers to move linearly through the structure. Hypertextual relationships are correspondingly multiple and evolving. Bolter (ibid.) goes so far as to suggest that hypertext is a writing technology well suited to the contemporary view that nature is not a hierarchy but ‘a network of interdependent species and systems’.

Encyclopaedias have been the traditional print attempts to cover all knowledge, and it is perhaps not surprising that we now have encyclopaedias in electronic form. The literal precursor was the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: first issued in 1974’ it was both an excellent printed encyclopaedia and ‘a book straining to break free of the limitations of print’ (ibid.:92). It had both a topical and an alphabetical arrangement: the main articles were printed alphabetically in volumes called the Macropaedia, to which separate volumes called the Propaedia provided a vast outline. In effect, the Propaedia ‘turned the encyclopaedia into a hypertext whose parts could be assembled and reassembled by the reader’ (ibid.:92). Because the references were hard to follow in a printed work of thirty volumes, the format was eventually abandoned. An index was added, and by the mid 1980’s the Britannica had become again a conventional encyclopaedia.

Commercially available electronic encyclopaedias such as Grolier’s (1988) are not ‘true electronic books, but rather printed books that have been transferred to the computer’ (ibid.:95). Even though readers can search for topics in a number of ways, they can neither intervene in the structure of the encyclopaedia nor build new structures. Indeed, most of the existing electronic encyclopaedias ‘do not reflect the power or the limitations of the new medium, but rather the conservative character of the publishing industry, which is bound inevitably to the technology of print’ (ibid.:95-7).

Bush’s memex

The earliest conceptual framework for hypertext is generally believed to have been provided by Vannevar Bush, Director of Scientific Research and Development for the Roosevelt administration during World War II. In an essay in 1945, Bush envisioned a memory machine, which he called the memex, to manage the large volume of scientific information available at the time. Whereas Coleridge pointed to the limitations of alphabetic ordering, Bush traced the main problems of information retrieval to inadequate indexing and categorizing systems. He imagined a machine that would transcend the storage and retrieval limitations of print technology by allowing users to gain access to and to search huge amounts of information in order to retrieve and annotate what they considered important. His memex would mechanize a more efficient and more human mode of manipulating information. Like the imagination, it would operate by association, and therefore better accommodate the way the mind works. Memex users would be able to browse through information by creating ‘numerous trails’ (Bush, 1945:104) of their own associative links. Bush describes how records of these memex trails could be stored and retrieved for another purpose at a later date.

He recognized that trails of links would constitute a new form of textuality and a new form of writing. ‘When numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail’, he explains, ‘it is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book’ (ibid.). Bush’s conception of textuality introduced three new elements: associative indexing (or links), trails of such links, and webs of such trails. These elements ‘in turn produce the conception of a flexible, customizable text, one that is open — and perhaps vulnerable — to the demands of each reader’ (Landow, 1992a:17). They also introduce the idea of ‘multiple textuality’ (ibid.). For the memex world, ‘texts’ are not only those individual reading units that make up a work, but also entire works and sets of documents created by the trails, and perhaps even the trails themselves, without accompanying documents.

The memex machine would also allow users to add their own marginal notes and comments. In recognizing the need to record one’s reactions to texts, Bush conceives of reading as an active process that involves writing. His memex enabled the practices of reading and writing to draw closer together than is possible in book technology. However, the principal capacity of the memex was neither retrieval nor annotation but associative indexing, ‘the basic ideas of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another’ (Bush, 1945:103).

Writing in the days before digital computing, Bush conceived of his device as a desk with translucent screens, levers and motors for the rapid searching of microfilm records. A computer is indeed a perfect memex machine, able to handle large amounts of information, to display it on a screen, and to provide the means of creating trails that link relevant bits of information. But it can offer further benefits. For example, word processing enables the text not just to be read, but to be changed or annotated. The computer can search for words and phrases, reach distant sources of information over a network, and combine pictures and sound with text.

Nelson’s vision

Like Coleridge and Bush before him, Ted Nelson was also concerned with how best to structure information so that it may be retrieved easily. Drawing on the speculations of Bush and others, in the early 1970’s Nelson argued that what we need is not an ever expanding collection of books but a system that gives users access to the total world of human knowledge, which he called the ‘docuverse’, and which is ‘not unlike the linked world (as) text of contemporary computer networks’ (Joyce’ 1995b:23). Nelson called his docuverse project ‘Xanadu’: it is a system in which the whole of recorded discourse — all the world’s ‘literature’, defined as ‘an ongoing system of interconnecting documents’ (Nelson’ 1992a:2/9) — would be woven into one enormous matrix. Xanadu represents a design ‘for the universal storage of all interactive media, and indeed, all data; and for a growing network of storage stations which can, in principle, safely preserve much of the human heritage and at the same time make it far more accessible than it could have been before’ (ibid.:0/6). Although Nelson describes Xanadu as an ongoing project, it could be argued that the concept has been realized already in the World Wide Web, a system (currently used in the academies and industry) which allows multiple, simultaneous and synchronous interaction between those who create or gather material and those who use it.

Integral to the Xanadu project is Nelson’s notion of hypertext, the term he coined in the 1960s to refer to ‘non-sequential writing-text that branches and allows choices to the reader, [and is] best read at an interactive screen’ (ibid.:0/2). Nelson’s hypertext encompasses texts that are minimally or maximally non-linear and tightly or loosely structured. In the broadest sense, all texts are hypertexts: even a printed text gives readers and writers one link out of each node (usually a sentence or paragraph)’ namely the option to move linearly to the next section of the text. Nelson thought it important to find the right word for his invention:

Hypertext was an audacious choice: hyper- has a bad odor in some fields and can suggest agitation and pathology, as it does in medicine and psychology. But in other sciences hyper connotes extension and generality, as in the mathematical hyperspace, and this was the connotation I wanted to give the idea. (Nelson, 1992b:49)

Hypertext is Nelson’s alternative to traditional texts which provide readers with only one path (namely the author’s) through a given body of information. His system of organizing materials enables readers to move through it polysequentially in pursuit of their own ends. By offering us multiple pathways and the ability to make our own connections, hypertext more closely reflects the fluid way in which we think. Like Bush, Nelson thinks the mind works by association: with one item in its grasp, it moves instantly to the next, thus forming an intricate web of trails. By representing the ‘unbroken web’ (Drexler, 1986:224) of human knowledge and problems, hypertext allows users to ‘keep ideas hitched together in ways that better represent reality’ (ibid.:222). In hypertext, everything is intertwined and intermingled with everything else; or as Nelson puts it, ‘intertwingled’ (1978:DM2).

Nelson’s vision of hypertext materialized in the form of Engelbart’s NLS (oNLineSystem), later renamed ‘Augment’. In the process of conceiving his system, Engelbart also ‘invented or first put to serious use fundamentals of computer interaction, writing, and networking, including word processing, outlining, windows’ electronic mail, computer conferencing’ collaborative authorship, and — not last — the mouse’ (Joyce, 1995b:22). Hypertext software first became commercially available in the 1980s. Examples of hypertext systems include Brown University’s Intermedia, Xerox Parc’s Notecards, Owl International’s Guide, MIT’s Media Lab applications, and Bolter, Joyce and Smith’s (1990) Storyspace, a vehicle for exploring non-linear narrative. In the late 1980s, when Apple Computer began including its Hypercard with all new Macintosh computers, ‘hypertext achieved an unprecedented ubiquity — or at least its potential did’ (DiPardo and DiPardo, 1990:8).

The Xanadu project continues to develop apart from these other advances in hypertext. It has two main components. A company called the Xanadu Operating Company was given the task of producing what Nelson calls ‘a hypermedia server program’ (Woolley, 1992:159). This was to provide the mechanism for exploring large computerized databases of information, comprising video, music and voice as well as text. The server was also to provide the means of creating new documents by making links between the content of existing ones, so that individual users would be able to establish their own redactions of the database’s contents. ‘These links are the key to the Xanadu concept, since it is through links, through the creation of structures within a vast, shapeless mass of information, that Xanadu creates new meanings and interpretations that would be inaccessible using conventional methods of information storage, (ibid.).

The second component of the Xanadu project is to create a new publishing market by establishing a network of databases. Data contributed by publishers would gradually accumulate into a global information repository. The hypermedia server program would enable users to explore this repository. For every bit of text they linked to, users would pay a royalty to its publisher, even if the particular document they compiled from their session in Xanadu was made up of texts from a variety of different publishers. This royalty-payments system is a key component of Xanadu, since it would ‘create a market, a trade of texts that would encourage more publishers to contribute, which, in turn, would attract more users’ (ibid.:160).

In fact, Nelson’s Xanadu revolutionizes the conventional library which users can only consult or borrow from. In Xanadu, every reader becomes a potential writer, because the system is specifically designed to make it as easy to contribute to a text as to consult one. ‘It creates an open market, a free trade in knowledge, where the success of a text is simply dependent on the number of times it is accessed, which in turn will depend on its relationship with other texts on the system, (ibid.).

The unifying structure of the Xanadu project, explains Nelson, not only maintains the integrity of the original materials it contains but also allows users to quote from and anthologize them in any way they wish. This can be achieved by what Nelson (1992b:54-5) calls ‘transclusion,:

When you cite something, you ordinarily insert a copy of the quoted material from the original, or quoted, document into the new, or quoting, document. In the Xanadu model we use transclusion instead: now you have a hidden pointer in the data structure of the second document, which points to the original and tells the computer-based reading machine where to get it. So the material is not copied from the original; it remains in the documentary space of the original and is brought anew from the original to each reader.

Nelson’s (1992b) commitment to social and cultural change — a political position not uncommon in the passionate rhetoric associated with the development of hypertext — is expressed in his somewhat fanciful articulation of the purpose of Xanadu:

Our objective at the Xanadu project has been not to fulfill the needs of industry, or to make things happen a little faster or more efficiently. Ours has been the only proper objective: to make a new world ... Open hypertext publishing is the manifest destiny of free society. It is fair, it is powerful, and it is coming. (ibid.:56-7)

In formulating the notion of Xanadu, Nelson (ibid.:52) poses a rhetorical question:

Is it mathematically possible to supply billions of readers at screens with the exact paragraph, sentence, fragment, illustration, or footnote, photograph, or piece of movie that each requires, immediately? Even if the number of the stored documents and the number of links between them grow into trillions?

Nelson continues to believe that it can be done:

I have a vision for the year 2020; I like to call it the 20/20 vision. Think of everyone at screens: a billion around the planet. And each person at a screen will be able to extract from a great common pool any fragment of whatever is published, with automatic royalty and no red tape. (ibid.:44)

While it may be argued that Nelson’s docuverse is not feasible because ‘there are insurmountable political and social obstacles to a universal system, (Bolter, 1991:103), his vision remains an important incentive to hypertext development, even though its utopian excesses make it for the time being unachievable.

Borges’s library

The notion of hypertext originates in the imagination not only of scientists but also of literary visionaries. In a story called ‘The Library of Babel’, the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (1970b: 81-2) imagines a library of incomprehensible immensity:

its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twentyodd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): in other words, all that it is given to express, in all languages. Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basillides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

The Library of Babel, comprises ‘an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries’ (ibid.:78), each containing twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, each shelf containing thirty-five books, each book containing 410 pages, each page containing forty lines, each line containing eighty letters. No author’s name or title is inscribed on any of these books; they are simply arbitrary collections of symbols, each one a combination of all the possible combinations of the letters of the alphabet. That is why the library is so vast and contains every possible text.

The narrator describes the crazy and often desperate reactions of the inhabitants as they come to realize the implications of living in a universal library of random typography which exhausts symbolic thought. Every combination of the letters of the alphabet has been realized, and now sits on the shelves waiting for readers. There is nothing left to be written, although much to be discovered; yet discovery is impossible because the nonsense books overwhelm those that are supposed to have meaning. The inhabitants of this world, whom Borges calls ‘librarians’, wander about the cubicles looking for sensible books, but they are helpless before the logic of permutation. Their library, writes Bolter (1991:138), is

The exhaustion of writing also means that time has stopped for these readers. The librarians exist in an eschatological moment in which there is nothing left to wait for, because nothing new can be described.

For Borges, literature is at a dead end, an impasse, because of its commitment to single story-lines, denouements and conclusive endings. The American novelist John Barth has characterized Borges’s work as ‘the literature of exhaustion, (Barth, 1967:29); with Borges, we sense that a print-based literary tradition is breaking down. To renew literature, writers ‘would have to write multiply, in a way that embraced possibilities rather than closed them off, (Bolter, 1991:139). But ‘Borges himself never had available to him an electronic space, in which the text can comprise a network of diverging, converging, and parallel times’ (ibid.). He could not see that the ‘exhaustion’ of literature is merely the effect of a print-bound technology now surpassed by the electronic medium of hypertext.

Although there is no real Library of Babel, its books in some sense exist as part of the global information network. Indeed, it is, perhaps, possible to discover texts that no individual author has so far found, variations on existing texts, alternative endings to familiar scenarios, elucidations, glosses, diversions, a new text that can be discovered by its proximity to an existing one. That, at least, is the hope of the champions of a new sort of literary object: the ‘hypertext,. (Woolley, 1992:153)