more on The Pursuit of Knowledge, from Genesis to Google

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Frode Hegland <frode () liquidinformation org>
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 18:44:52 +0000
To: <dave () farber net>
Cc: <ip () v2 listbox com>
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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