Chapter 144 23.4 Hypertext: The End of Authority

These are old questions.Others have mentioned it in different articles before.If the web of knowledge were fully connected, I would be able to attach appropriate historical references to this book at this point, and to extract the historical context for all these musings. Researchers dream of having such a tightly connected network of data and ideas.Science today stands at another threshold of the limits of connectivity; nodes on a distributed scientific network must become more closely interconnected before reaching the limit of their evolutionary capabilities. U.S. Army medical librarians managed to index together medical journals, taking the first step toward a highly connected knowledge network. In 1955, one of the librarians involved in the project, Eugene Garfield, who was interested in machine indexing, developed a computer system to automatically track the provenance of every scientific paper ever published in medicine.He later started a commercial company in his Philadelphia garage—the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)—that could track on a computer all the scientific papers that had been published over a certain period of time.Today ISI is a large company with many employees and supercomputers, and millions of academic papers and bibliographic reference lists are networked and cross-linked.

For example, take an article from my bibliography: Rodney Brooks' 1990 article "Elephants Don't Play Chess."I can log into the ISI system to find this article under its author name, and can quickly read a list of all published scientific papers that have cited "elephant" in the bibliography or footnote, and mine is among them.Assuming that the articles of the scholars and authors who thought "elephant" was good for me might be good for me, I have a way of tracing the influence of these ideas. (However, books are not yet citation indexed, so in fact this example would only make sense if it were not a book but an article. But the principles apply.)

The citation index allows me to track the future spread of my ideas.Again assuming indexed as one article.Every year I can check the ISI citation index and get a list of all the authors who have cited this article in their books.This network will give me access to the opinions of many people—many of which are more pertinent now that I have been quoted—that I might not have otherwise been able to. The citation index feature is currently being used to map "hot" areas of breakthrough scientific research.Highly cited papers can indicate that a research field is developing rapidly.An unintended consequence of this system is that government funders can use the citation index to help them decide which projects to fund.They count the total number of citations to a scholar's work -- adjusted for the "weight" or prestige of the journal in which the paper was published -- to show the scholar's importance.But like any network, citation evaluation fosters the opportunity for a positive feedback loop: the more money goes in, the more papers get published, the more citations accumulate, the more secure the money, and so on.And without funding, there are no papers, and without citations, there is no return for funding, creating a similar negative feedback loop.

We can also think of the citation index as a kind of footnote tracking system.If you think of each bibliography as a footnote to the text, then a citation index leads you to the footnotes and then allows you to find the footnotes of the footnotes.A more succinct description of this system is "hypertext," coined by Ted Nelson in 1974.Essentially, hypertext is a large distributed document.Hypertext documents are fuzzy webs of live links between words, ideas, and sources.Such a document has no center and no end.When reading hypertext, you can traverse between them, you can turn over the main text to see the footnotes, and see the footnotes of the footnotes, and you can peruse the idea of ​​​​an explanation that is as long and as complex as the "main" text.Any one document can link to another document and become part of it.Computer-processed hypertext can contain various side-notes, notes, additions, updates, revisions, refinements, abstracts, misinterpretations from other authors in the text, and to be listed in the article as in a citation index List all references.

The scope of application of this distributed document is agnostic, since it has no boundaries and is often the result of multiple authors.It is a clustered text.But an author alone can edit a simple hypertext document that can be read by others along many different paths, following many different instructions.Therefore, readers of hypertext make their own creations on the network set up by the author, and this creation depends on how readers view and use the materials.So in hypertext, as in other distributed creations, the creator must properly delegate power and reduce control over his creation.

Hypertext documents of various depths have been around for 10 years. In 1988, I participated in the development of the first generation of commercial hypertext products - an electronic version of the magazine called "The Whole Earth Catalog", programmed with Hyper Card on the Macintosh.Even in such a relatively small textual network (10,000 micro-documents; and millions of ways to browse them), I got an idea for this idea of ​​interconnection. On the one hand, hypertext can easily confuse readers.The hypertext network does not control the core of the narrative, and everything in it seems to have no priority, and everything seems to be the same, and this space seems to be a boring and messy area.Locating and finding an item in the network is an important problem.Going back to the early days of books, in the 14th century, books in scriptoria were difficult to locate because they lacked catalogues, indexes or tables of contents.The advantage of the hypertext model over the web over the oral tradition is that the latter can be indexed and cataloged.An index is an alternative way to read printed text, but it is only one of many ways to read hypertext.In a large-scale information library with no physical form—such as the electronic library that may appear in the future—you will easily get clues that are simple but always feel important in your heart, such as wondering how many books you have read in total. Or roughly how many ways to read a book.

Hypertext creates a space of possibilities for itself.As Jay David Burt writes in his brilliant but little-known book, Space to Write: Applied science, especially the applied science of knowledge, shapes our minds.The space of possibility created by each applied science gives opportunities for certain types of thought while preventing others.The blackboard allows users to modify and erase repeatedly, thus promoting free thinking and spontaneous behavior.Writing with a quill on writing paper requires care, grammar, tidiness, and restrained thinking.The printed page collection is a draft that has been revised repeatedly, and proofing, review, and editing are still required.What hypertext inspires is a different way of thinking: short, combined, non-linear, scalable, and collaborative.As the musician Brian Eno wrote of Bolt's work, "[Bolt's theory] is that the way we organize our writing space, the way we organize our thoughts, have to organize their own way."

The ancient intellectual space was a dynamic oral tradition.Through rhetorical grammar, knowledge constitutes poetry and dialogue—easy to interject, question, and deflect.Early writing was just as flexible.A text is an ever-evolving affair, revised by readers and edited by disciples; a forum for negotiation.By the time the manuscript is printed, the author's ideas become established, unchanging, and eternal.The reader's role in shaping the article is gone.A series of unwavering ideas throughout the book give the work its formidable authority—"authority" and "author" stem from the same root.As Burt points out, "When ancient, medieval, and even Renaissance books are presented to modern readers, not only are the words altered, but their texts are transferred to the space of the modern print."

In the past printing era, some authors tried to explore and expand their writing and thinking space, trying to shift from closed linear printed books to hypertext that brought discontinuous experience.What James Joyce wrote and Finnegans Wake are like webs of colliding and referencing ideas that change with each reading.Borges wrote in a traditionally linear style, but he described writing spaces as: books about books, texts with ever-branching plots, books with eerily repeated self-referencing, endlessly arranged texts, preserving various A library of possibilities.Berth commented: "Borges could imagine such a castle in the air, but could not manufacture it... Borges himself never created for himself an effective electronic space, in this textual network, the various eras diverge. , fusion or parallelism.”