Leo Laport with Ted Nelson

college
actor on stage and tv
wrote plays, magazine, med, book, record

grand father self published. If you want to say something original, you have to publish it yourself

wikipedia is a bening fruad, you don’t edit it, you submit to the hidden editors

had difficulty talking to people who I didn’t think were bright, or conventional

lost 15 years of my life

Steve Wozniak says Computer Lib inspired him
Bill Gates says Computer Lib was on his mind

1972: early word processor competing with the WANG
1988: Autodesk: Roger Gregory was overthrown by the inmates
Roger Gregory is still working on it

Why is non-linear better?
This is the medium I want to write in.
I think that’s how a lot of people’s minds work

History is not linear. It is a cataract of
Parallel pages is a better way of presenting history
Every medium can be overwhelming, but it is important for the recipient to be able to adjust the flow rate

This is called “Open Zanadu”

I’m not good at presenting in person because of my impatience

It is “systems humanists,” that seeks human goals I seek, for which I use technical means

Intertwingular is en example of an intertwining and

Jobs was a psychopath, he understood the user

You can put two books side by side. You can’t do that on a kindle.

on gmail, all sorts of things pop up, as they keep adding things

Aristotle imposed a hierarchy on everything

Hericytes: everything is a river, you’re never in the same one twice

transclusion: inclusion of content, across a document boundary
it appeals to a certain mind that is willing to travel down paths

more interesting than reading a book with footnotes
Ted’s example: history of France done in parallel
Histomap in 1930s: 5ft long, hung on the wall: last 5000 years, parallel view

pioneer in media

what is undone that you want to do? ha ha ha

very few leisure pursuits. Spends time at the screen.

Intertwingled: Morning Session # 2

Within bodies of writing, everywhere, there are linkages we tend not to see.  The individual document, at hand, is what we deal with; we do not see the total linked collection of them all at once.  But thy are there, the documents not present as well as those that are, and the grand cat’s cradle amoung them all.  -Ted Nelson, Literary Machines  (5:30)

This resonates with the Enlightenment thinkers.  The Encyclopedias they produces were intertwingled.

.. In real life, that is to say, On paper. (13:24)

Literature Debugged

Silicon Valley road to riches: Don’t worry, be crappy.  Get users locked in and spread.  The result is privatization.  Companies like Google have to reconstruct backlinks.  This leads to great fortunes and inequality.  -Jaron

Context-free openness (copy without context) leads to the decline of the middle class.  We’re concentrating wealth in people that can process the information, and not those who created it.

1970s: two types of computer types: hippies and military men.  The “draft” created a desire for anonymity.  CB Radio wanted to avoid cops because they wanted to drive faster than 55mph.  We had to preserve provenence and we have a social contract that rewards the people the data is about.

All simulation is political – the politics are in the rules and the data

We all know that being “apolitical” is supporting the status quo.

 

Xanadu: Browser Demo Released!

At a Chapman University Event, Ted Nelson announced the release of Xanadu:

Instructions

Now before you click on the “Read More” link:

  1. Realize that it loads slowly.  Just wait.  It’s just a demo so the performance hasn’t been optimized.
  2. The user interface isn’t always intuitive (it uses keyboard shortcuts)

Background:

  • The main content is visible in the middle and the related content is displayed in parallel on the side
  • The connections between the different sources are displayed with colored lines between the documents
  • To see the related source, click on it with your mouse.  To get back to the prior source, click on it.

About the document:

  • The document, written by Moe Justes, is a compilation of different sources.
  • I haven’t read all the content; but though Ted Nelson has said he himself is an atheist, Juste’s method of intertextually invoking other sources is actually quite biblical.
  • At this point, it probably isn’t easy to duplicate something like this with your own content, but I wonder how biblical criticism could benefit from this form of parallel writing.