(2021-04-25) Ohno You Can Kind Of Break The History Of Hypertext Into Three Lineages With Different Lenses

John Ohno: you can kind of break the history of hypertext into three lineages, with different lenses:
the engineer (Douglas Engelbart’s lineage)
the scholar (Ted Nelson’s lineage) and, starting in the 80s, and
the publisher (which ate the other two)

Ted & Doug were very concerned with hypertext as an evolving thing — with creating hypertext iteratively, and using the affordances of hypertext as a tool for thought. (tools for thought)

This is how the social dimension was expected to play in some of these systems. For Doug, NLS/Augment was this collaboration platform for tight-knit engineering teams. For Ted, Xanadu was a natural extension of the republic of letters, making visible the invisible threads of scholarly history.

Thing is, collaborative hypertext systems weren’t super interesting on small home computers, which had poor networking support & not much storage.

This is where we start to see the third lineage

let you export your generated hypertext and ship it with a “light” version of the software with no editing. This is pretty natural. If you can’t collaborate on hypertext because it’s nearly impossible to coordinate or merge changes (because you’re sending floppies through the mail or something) why not treat hypertext stacks as finished products — like books? (hypercard flashback)

This is the stuff that the hypertext literature people (and the cybertext people, etc) ended up analyzing. And, if you’re forced by the software into being a consumer of some hypertext — your only choices being which links to click — then the value propositions are overblown (as claimed in the book Cybertext).

We didn’t really have collaborative hypertext on the web again until the advent of the wiki.

Wikis swallowed the markup pill and the mutability pill and therefore can’t do what real hypertext does.

the ramifications of getting rid of a focus on collaboration led to design decisions that made other core features of hypertext hard or even impossible to implement, even when collaboration was reintroduced.

I’ve talked a lot about the publishing model because it’s what I hate most, but let’s compare Ted & Doug’s models too.

Ted’s model is expected to be global

So, things like “see everybody who ever linked to something” actually isn’t socially viable. “See everything that links here” isn’t either. It’s hard to make technically viable too. You’d need a centralized database

Actually, federation was on the table from very early. But basically you’d want to constrain who you saw.

you want sets of links that you think will add to your experience

Meanwhile, NLS is for small teams (two pizza team) who know each other and are working together. Like jira. So, you can see everything, but also, if you let the team get too big you end up with coordination problems & it gets fucked up like your average jira.

I find the scholarly lineage most interesting not just because of my own workflow but because it fairly naturally extends back in time. Transpointing windows is a very complete and natural extension of marginal notes — so natural that it took a lot of work to get right! Hypertext really is “text, but more so” along Walter Ong’s orality-literacy spectrum. The things we associate with text in literate cultures — density and complexity, permanence, and (with the codex) psychotechnologies for making use of random access — are all extended here.

“Web surfing” was coined by analogy to “channel surfing” specifically because of the disjointedness of jump links. Just as your short term memory often loses data when you walk through a door, the change of context when you click a link makes it hard to connect the two ends. In other words, this is an ENDNOTE EMULATOR, and a bad one. Transpointing windows, on the other hand, expand marginal notes kaleidoscopically, with every document a potential marginal note to every other.