[IP] more on The Pursuit of Knowledge, from Genesis to Google
Title: more on The Pursuit of Knowledge, from Genesis to Google
------ Forwarded Message
From: Frode Hegland <frode@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 18:44:52 +0000
To: <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on The Pursuit of Knowledge, from Genesis to Google (fwd)
On 6 Jan 2005, David J. Farber wrote: From: Gene Spafford Subject: Re: [IP] The Pursuit of Knowledge, from Genesis to Google:
...Data is not necessarily information. Information does not necessarily lead to knowledge. And knowledge is not always sufficient to discover truth and breed wisdom. Having Google or Alexandria or the Library of Congress contain all
works in a particular form at a particular time is potentially useful, but without critical skills and background any arbitrary reader is likely to find nonsense and believe it fact, read fact and conclude fiction, or simply be left in a state of greater confusion than before...
Gene, Dave,
great post, this is fundamentally important.
The process of dealing with data to grow one's knowledge has many facets to it.
The history of text based knowledge is also the history of the navigation of, and manipulation of, text based knowledge. Please let me highlight a few points as I fear we are not making much progress on this crucial front.
Some say that information and knowledge is 'connections'. I agree.
Seeing those connections and following them therefore becomes crucial in either growing ones knowledge or showing some information to be false.
Libraries helped the user navigate the knowledge - the fact that related information is on a shelf in the same building rather than in another city physically 'linked' the knowledge more tightly.
The printing of books with a clear and consistent typeface aided the legibility and thus information navigation. Pages numbers helped as did indexes.
Reading is of course not simply getting every word in a text into your head. It's also about deciding what's not worth reading, a skill more valuable in our digital age than ever.
Here's the thing. Ted Nelson defined hypertext simply (and elegantly) as "no sequential writing with free user movement". Doug Engelbart developed the first system with interactive text where links were but one way of navigating texts. Other examples included jumping to the glossary definition of a word. (For more on Doug Engelbart's text interaction systems you can have a look at http://www.bootstrap.org or http://www.invisiblerevolution.net )
And what do we have today? The web is a collection of hand-made, one-way links. That's it as far as interactivity is concerned.
Some designers discuss legibility on computer monitors, asking why we have an easier time reading of paper than computer screens (I suggest it's more that you can move a book around while you cannot move a screen around much, even on a laptop but that's a minor point). Legibility is important, but in the same way that computer game designers must take into account the look of their games (the eye-candy) they must also spend considerable effort on the game-play. Otherwise we are talking about moving around in pretty, 3D movies.
I maintain that this is where we are with the web: much effort has been spent on legibility (or eye-candy) but little on interactivity (or game-play). The web is a good looking collection of largely static billboards.
To really leverage the power of our high speed networked computers to augment knowledge workers in dealing with data to grow one's knowledge, we need to really invest in interactivity. Legibility is important, but legibility with interactivity or deep legibility is crucial to help us follow connections, explicit or otherwise.
This is what our tiny, underfunded research project at University College London attempts to address. If you are interested in some potential ways forward, please have a look at our website: http://www.liquidinformation.org
There is a live demo of what hyperwords, as opposed to hypertext, might look like. No it's not dynamic hypertext, it's a way of making all words interactive.
Any and all comments are very much appreciated, we don't have a single answer but we are starting to build a good series of questions as to how we can develop deep legibility and turn web browsers into web readers.
best,
Frode Hegland
Director,
Liquid Information @ UCLIC
www.liquidinformation.org
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