Computer Lib/Dream Machines - Nelson
- Nelson establishes his computer prescience by proclaiming that early computers would/had "destabilized the existing computer order, that brought about a conception of the computer as a personal device." Notably advocating for a conscience of user interface when designing computers and how they operate, fitting quite well with Krug's focus on usability.
- I find the notion of stretchtext to be somewhat fascinating. The example given is somewhat benign, just adding in deadwood and making the simple sentence more dense, but no more significant. However, I can certainly see the potential in this kind of hypertext. Summaries of novels or chapters/sections of textbooks could be expanded to a large set of critically analytic dialogue surrounding and including the initial text, this could be reduced to the initial source material, then to summary, then to basic vocabulary/definitions. This would also be a very tedious web of interconnected texts to design, especially if they had to run together perfectly, as in the example. Seeing alternative versions of the same information, as in islands, might be a possible solution/alternative to Nelson's model.
- I get a sense that if the hypertext connections of the internet were designed as stretchtexts, we would have a completely different culture of users on the web. Rapid clicking from article to article, link after link, might be replaced with longer focus on pages/information, instead cycling through amounts of information on single topics. Information gathering would be about quality control, rather than quantity.
- Nelson again agrees with Krug in not making the user think. He sees hypertextual interfaces as tools for thinking. That though their designs be complex (just look at those diagrams!) their use should be self-evident, or be able to be interacted with seamlessly, so the actual function of the program does not distract from the thinking the program helps achieve. In this way hypertexts become a means unto an end, rather than an end unto themselves, as they seem to be now in our scroll-addicted culture.
Hypertext Gardens - Bernstein
- Again, as with Nelson, Drucker, and Marshall as we have seen before, Bernstein sees hypertext as a viable medium of literature, an a superior one to the current model of disinterested, disconnected internet site hopping - information gathering. Hypertexts, like DAK0TA in some ways, puts the designer back into control in regards to the amount of information that is framed at one time, thus creating a different expectation for how time/focus will be utilized when reading. The use of multiple links and multiple smaller embedded texts, defers the users attention by hiding a large portion of the entire text that the user can potentially find hidden in the web of links and nodes. Thus hypertexts perhaps have a certain game-like quality that makes the user a participant in how the text is formed for themselves (in reference to Gardens, the user has a plethora of options from the beginning that will determine how the experience/information is shaped, based solely on user choice.)
- As I come through the first screens, I am reminded of Nelson's idea of stretch text. Each term that is linked is expounded upon in the following text connected to it. In other words, it follows Krug's expectations of evidental conventions. Once the user understands the convention of texts linked within texts, the expectation is that the individual terms of a text will be expounded upon by clicking the link, thus stretching the meaning of the original text to encompass a more specific range of information.
- Understanding increases as the hypertext is interacted with, as I would imagine multiple viewings would double that understanding, as untaken paths and alternatives were explored, creating a better sense of clarity. In this way, hypertexts, perhaps as a rule, have more return value than the simple digital or physical text.
- As I am writing this, I find that I have a hard time keeping to a set terminology. Are we readers or users in a hypertext? I suppose we are both, which makes the hypertext a true hyprid of the media, thus creating its own individual conventions while also relying on the conventions of interactions with the digital, and some of the basic conventions of print, as Drucker might see here.
- When I first started reading this I was already pondering the Navigation Problem. I believe I talked about this when we were looking at Marshall, that with a physical medium there is a very tangible sense of position that does affect reading performance and understanding, if ever so slightly. With some digital media, especially this hypertext, there is a sense of infinitude, aimlessness, or disorientation, that I know for myself made me want to click rapidly through the links just to find the end so I could go back to the beginning more confidently. However, this may be a result of my inundation with more scannable texts.
- Although an argument might be made that hypertexts are very scannable. They often contain smaller pieces of visually manageable information, with salient links that inform the user how to navigate and what to do on the 'site'.
- Bernstein sort of skirts the Navigation issue by simply saying it doesn't exist as a real problem, and is more theoretical. That users were traversing these types of spaces with little disorientation, or little more than one might in a dense work of prose in a traditional medium. This is perhaps a page out of Krug or Nelson's book, relying on well-crafted design elements to speak for themselves and guide users based on intuition and convention, rather than having to rely on overt-flashy-nonsense.
- This however might risk making somebody think.
- "Links are new opportunities for expression", a very McLuhanesque type statement.
- Directly opposes Krug's notion of needing to permanently navigate or center users on a homepage. In terms of Krug's metaphor, the 'shopper' is more than likely, if they find themselves returning to the front of the store to reassess whether they have found what they needed, to just leave, not because of frustration over whether they achieved their goal, as Krug suggests, but simply because the open door of the store suggests the promise of other stores, suggests that they have made a full circle, when maybe they only visited an aisle or two before finding themselves back at the 'beginning'.
- Also in direct opposition to Krug, Krug suggests these conventions are immediately evident and run on semi-universal laws, while Bernstein points out that the use and combination of conventional tools on a webpage creates a very distinct message, one that has pervaded internet culture and made information virtually dispensable
- Last summer my wife and I visited America's Last Romantic Style Public Gardens in Charleston, and it is by those memories that I get a true sense of what Bernstein is getting at when he speaks about a well-planned system that incorporates the tame and the wild, structured and unkempt, familiar and unfamiliar, repetition and discontinuity, something that expands on the users preformed knowledge and perhaps contains surprises, "delights" as he calls them, along the way. Building knowledge becomes less about 'the mission', catching whatever salient information pops up first, but about the learning process, the journey, taking what you will along the way, leaving with a larger wealth of knowledge for not approaching the task with a constraint on the expected amount to be retrieved.
Literary Machines - Nelson
- Again, stretchtext, this time painted as a continuous or flexible hypertext, and again very reminiscent of some of the ideas of revision and text that infinitely expands upon itself.
- In terms of reader vs user, Nelson at least sees the designer of these 'thinkertoy' hypertexts as editors of written material, thus cultivating a reading experience, rather than programmers designing a functional machine, as Krug might see it.
"Now that we have all these wonderful devices, it should be the goal of society to put them in the service of truth and learning. And this is the way I propose. Not through obscure forms of "information retrieval;" not through newly oppressive forms of "computer- assisted instruction;" and not through a purported science of "artifical intelligence" that will create new personalisms to irk us. All these obstructive oddities, I think, have developed as separate ideals because of the grand preposterosity of Professionalism that has created a world-wide cult of mutual incomprehensibility and disconnected special goals. Now we need to get everybody together again. We want to go back to the roots of our civilization--the ability, which we once had, for everybody who could read to be able to read everything. We must once again become a community of common access to a shared heritage."
- The quote to the right perfectly encapsulates many of the underlying reasons for creating this type of hypertext culture. Interconnectedness, interdependence, interdepartmental knowledge, and an unhinging from the reliance on the machine to think for the user. The machine becomes a tool, a medium, and is acknowledged as such by this specific type of usage.
- Everything is "interwingled", all hierarchies are arbitrary constructions, thus part of the "magic" of hypertexts is the exploration of surprising connections and hierarchies hitherto unexplored or utilized.
- Explores the limits of paper compared to emerging tech involving some kind of file sharing/editing system called the Engelbert system. We can see this as the predecessor of the thought behind GoogleDocs and other cooperative/collaborative file editing softwares. The ability to view multiple linked files at once reminds me first of the old book wheel we looked at, and secondly of the regular internet browser convention of "tabs" or "windows", which, to me, offer a very similar, if temporary, system of connected previously unconnected material, and viewing them in tandem.
- Hypertext is multi-directional, non-sequential writing...this however is something hard to achieve. Take Gardens for instance. There we have an illusion of multidirectionality and non-sequentialness, in that the user chooses which links to take at any given time, can return to previous sections and take new paths etc. However, the structure for that hypertext is limited, or has bounds, forcing the user either in loops, causing them to turn back at the "outer edge", or siphoning choices for a certain, predictable, controllable, outcome...Which makes sense when you think of a hypertext as a whole piece of writing, in that you can't have a text so multidirectional or non-sequential that the meaning is obscured by a sense of disconnection or abstractness. In this way I see some limitations, and perhaps some hindrances to Nelson's view of hypertexts here. In this case, Nelson might see the Internet as an example of the infinite, boundlessness he seems to be advocating for, but one that does not have the type of interconnected, well-cross-sectioned or well-managed structure that he sees as beneficial.
- If Nelson was hoping for an "explorable informalized whole", then today's internet landscape might just be what he was hoping for. Although I doubt he was hoping for a digital world in which image and video make a vast majority of content and meaning, with text relegated to the far corner as a necessary evil when you can't say it with a snap, GIF, or emoji...
The New Media Sphere - Vandendorpe
- Another history of the invention of printed text as a natural progression from verbal/aural readings to internalized private reading. The progression seems to chart an idea of social self-hood or autonomy, gaining knowledge about benefiting the self, and all the more beneficial for the breadth of material encountered, rather than the depth.
- The "rigidity of the screen" is an interesting concept I have never taken into account before. I'm not entirely sure this is the main reason people have been put off from "grazing" on the web rather than "browsing" or "hunting". Is the literal flexibility of the physical material of a book/paper what makes reading a book preferable?
- Vandendorpe presents hypertext to us as the opposite of what Nelson saw it potentially doing, even though he cites him here. Vandendorpe tells us that books were read as whole entities, whereas hypertext structures fracture the reading experience, causing the reader/user to jump from thought to thought, idea to idea, without a sense of destination for completion. Nelson might say this was the developing of further ideas, experiencing something unexpected. However, Vandendorpes presentation might be nearer to the truth of how hypertext as a tool is utilized in the digital reading world today. (You like this article/video/news so far? Well click on over here for something else on our website that may or may not be related!).
- Interesting little aside about the physical limitations of reading. As it is a process of rapid, jerking movement text needs to be adjusted with attention of margins, line length, spacing, font size etc. Similar to the points Marshall makes, there is a balancing act between the logical, design motivated factors that attribute to a texts usability, and the visual elements that make something readable and desirable.
""Printing tended to magnify the distance between the author and the reader, as the author became a monumental figure, the reader only a visitor in the author's cathedral"
- I find Vandendorpe's final conclusions interesting, that digital, hypertext writing is seen as antagonistic to the status of author in reference to audience, that in effect, it will either bring them closer together, rending the curtain if you will, or will render them virtually inseparable, as all text will be 'interwingled' and thus a collaborative effort, as Vandendorpe points out is already a fast growing trend on the digital sphere by 2006, and is all the more so now.
