Rationale

Or: Why?

At the beginning of the semester I posted the following as my plan for a special topic area presentation:

For a special topic, something along these lines: How can machine based tools/information resources be used to augment human brains (for example, to do lists for remembering things you need to do but manage to forget) and what are the issues of classification, representation and accessibility that help or hinder the effective use of such tools? As I get closer and pick up a few things that broad area will probably narrow somewhat.

Given this tumble towards hypertext I decided that my project should be a hypertext system that demonstrates some of the benefits and problems in hypertext systems. I already had warp available from previous experimenting. I realized, initially, that it would provide a good system for the required glossary. After some experimentation I discovered that placing all the content either at the top entries into warp or inside the warp database would provide an effective demonstration of several aspects of hypertext:

• Navigational confusion
• Author and authority confusion
• Unexpected discovery of interrelations between things
• The ability to make copious references and the value such "context generation" provides

[ Top ]

Getting warp to work in the context of the project required some changes:

• A keyword index of the definitions was created with a search interface to find the definitions that include the same terms or to find terms that were somehow associated with the given terms.
• The method by which warp parses text needed to be changed to allow for external linking. Without external linking it was impossible to reliably reference external resources from within any text that had been sent through the warp engine (because it could accidently nest <a href> tags). The parsing process was adjusted so segments of the text can be wrapped in tags to indicate only those segments get sent through the engine.

• The search system does some probabilistic weighting of words in the definitions that can sometimes cause a word that is present in the dataset not to be found. This is a design feature (not a bug) because it is beneficial for the large datasets for which the indexing system was designed [mysql_freetext] but can have some weird effects on smaller datasets (like this one).
• The search index is only of the definitions, not of the words. This means that if you are looking for a definition for a particular word you may not be able to find it if the definition does not include the word. In that situation the glossary word list can be more helpful.
• The word list interface to the words stored in warp--used by the glossary--is cumbersome beyond about 15 words or so.
• Although warp keeps older versions of definitions, no facility is provided to make comparisons between versions. A complete system would allow side by side comparison, display of differences (like the diff command in some operating systems) or both.

[ Top ]

The project as a whole has some problems as well:

• The system is perhaps too good at inducing navigational confusion. Although external references launch new windows, there really isn't enough screen real estate to follow outside references while still maintaining a sense of understanding of the text from which the reference originated. Xanadu and the memex try to address this issue with multi-page displays.
• There's too much to cover. The scope of this project was made intentionally broad to indicate the many issues involved and provide a launching point for further reading. While doing that, however, there is confusion about the goals: is this is a reference, criticism, a demonstration or general exposition? On the other hand, unless the big picture is at least slightly drawn, the impression left is incomplete: hypertext, especially as we see it in day-to-day life, is fairly mundane; enhancing knowledge evolution is not.
• Hypertext, by its very design, throws apart any notion of a linear read of a thesis method, 3.2 paragraph style of writing. It is difficult, to say the least, to ensure that the reader understands and receives the intended message.

So, to sum: The goal of this project is to provide a broad overview of why there is hypertext, who thought about it, what it implies, and its benefits and problems. At the same time it is hoped that it will induce something of a gestalt understanding of the gee-whiz factor that could still be present in discourse related to hypertext and the augmentation of knowledge processing. If I've fallen short it is because in the process of my research I have been pulled off my thread by so many interesting things.

Previous is Howto
This is Rationale
Next is Content