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Past visions of hypertext and their influence on us today

Published: 13 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In July 1945, Vannevar Bush published the seminal paper As We May Think in Atlantic Monthly [2]. In this paper Bush proposed MEMEX, a device where information and records could be stored and linked together through 'trails' and 'associations' rather than 'artificial' indexing mechanisms. This idea is credited with being the inspiration, and precursor, for the modern World Wide Web (WWW) invented by Tim Berners-Lee, but as Harper notes, for most of the article, Bush was not concerned solely with the technical aspects of his MEMEX system. Instead, as with most computer visionaries, he was more concerned with how the computer system and its interfaces could help humanity [3]. We must therefore consider if, as a research field, we are still trying to build MEMEX as Bush envisioned it, or are we more influenced by a vision of information storage and presentation, of which Bush's paper was one of many?

References

[1]
M. Buckland. Emanuel Goldberg and his Knowledge Machine. Libraries Unlimited, 2006. ISBN: 0-313-31332-6.
[2]
V. Bush. As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
[3]
S. Harper. 'As We May Think' at 65. SIGWEB Newsletter, (Spring):1--3, 2010.
[4]
T. H. Nelson. As We Will Think. In J. M. Nyce and P. Kahn, editors, From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine, pages 245--260. Academic Press Professional, Inc., 1991.
[5]
J. Nielsen. Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond. Morgan Kaufmann, 1995. ISBN: 0-12-518408-5.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HT '10: Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
June 2010
328 pages
ISBN:9781450300414
DOI:10.1145/1810617

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 June 2010

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  1. history
  2. hypertext
  3. memex

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HT '10
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HT '10: 21st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia
June 13 - 16, 2010
Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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