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From: Stephen Woodruff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 11:00:44 +0100 To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Conversation: Ted Nelson speaking this Monday[Scanned] Subject: Ted Nelson speaking this Monday[Scanned] I thought you might be interested to know that Ted Nelson is speaking in Glasgow University this Monday at 4pm. He is little known outside the computing world, but there he is revered as one of the first great visionaries. (and I dropped the course I was studying to switch to computing science when I read his book...) Would you be kind enough to pass this on to any of the GSA staff who you think might be interested? regards and thanks Stephen Woodruff HATII Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute 11 University Gardens University of Glasgow Scotland/UK G12 8QQ +44 (0) 141 339 8855 www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk ________________________________________________ 2006 Arts and Media Informatics Lecture: TED NELSON on Preserving Deep Civilization 16:00, 22/05/2006 Room 412 (aka Lecture Theatre B) BOYD ORR BUILDING UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Background: HATII is pleased to announce that Ted Nelson will give the 2006 Arts and Media Informatics Lecture. A charismatic prophet, Ted Nelson, invented the twin concepts of hypertext and hypermedia. His visionary ideas gave us hyperlinking, a lesser version of which powers the World Wide Web (WWW) as we know it. This lecture is a unique chance for staff and students to hear one of the legends of the informatics revolution. Abstract: The computer world has all gone wrong. Today's document systems are simulations of paper, designed for secretaries, with no depth or organizing power. Today's hypertext, with crude 1-way embedded links, no easy annotation and no overlapping links, causes documents to be chopped into short pieces and framed with raucous ads. These document formats were designed as paper simulations-- indeed, the simulation of paper unreachable under glass. And all of this takes place under a misguided ideology which imposes hierarchy-- on the data units (traditional since 1945) and more recently on the contents themselves(XML). But preserving the artifacts and documents of civilization is not about imposing paper models or hierarchy. It is about representing exactly whatever is. The world's artifacts and documents must be represented in their full complexity and disorder, not be forced into arbitrary structures. For this we need deeper forms of document, linkage, and representation infrastructure-- which are fortunately still possible. Biographical Sketch: When Ted Nelson started in the computer field in 1960, he called himself a philosopher and a film-maker, and believed that the field needed the ideas that came to him from both philosophy and film-making. Accordingly, from that fall of 1960 he began designing new constructs for a world of personal computing and new constructs for a world of electronic documents, which he christened "hypertext." Others think his visions of personal computing and electronic documents have come true, but Nelson sees these worlds as having gone all wrong. Personal computing should make life easier, and deep hypertext should make easier the processes of writing, annotation, version management, document intercomparison, and content re-use. Nelson believes all these are still possible, and that it is still his duty to make things right. A fuller biographical sketch can be found at: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/visitors.cfm?id=23 http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Prof Seamus Ross x3635 ------ End of Forwarded Message _______________________________________________ Scottish mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/scottish
