Making links
Sep. 26th, 2006 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nmgSome years ago, back when I was in sixth form and trying to decide what I wanted to study at University, the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary on novel interfaces for computers, which was presented by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker. The documentary presented a future information system in which you could follow links between documents, images and videos, with software "agents" that helped you find things. More than anything else, it was a novel documentary by itself; how better to show what a new information system might be like, than to film the documentary as if it were being presented by that information system.
The memory of this documentary, Hyperland, stayed with me, and was one of the reasons why I decided to read computer science rather than electronics (this book and this book were the other reasons). Moving forward a few years, I first came across the Web in the autumn of 1993, with the release of the Mosaic browser (I can still remember various of my contemporaries, possibly including ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
evildespot and perdita_fysh, telling me that the Web wouldn't come to anything).
The early Web was quite exhilarating, but it still didn't live up to the promise of Hyperland. I graduated and moved to Cambridge. As I got more disillusioned with my employer (a certain large Scandinavian mobile telecoms company that isn't Ericsson), I spent more time reading academic papers on the subject of hypertext and agents. In order to get a better grounding in AI, I studied for my Masters in Edinburgh. After that, I looked around for PhD places, and found that the University of Southampton was the place to go in the UK if you wanted to do research on hypertext.
The rest, as they say, is history.
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Date: 2006-09-26 11:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-26 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-26 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-26 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-27 07:56 am (UTC)But you understand, I did have to try :)
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Date: 2006-09-27 08:23 am (UTC)Heh. I was wondering the other day whether anyone's given serious thought to a stream encoder which favours predominantly pink scenes, mostly static but with repetitive sections, and is particularly good at compressing audio with 70's wah-wah'd guitars...
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Date: 2006-09-26 03:34 pm (UTC)I said that ordinary people would never want to...
I've never been particularly prescient, but that comment was a low point even for me.
~Katie
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Date: 2006-09-26 12:50 pm (UTC)The Golden Age of Television.
Date: 2006-09-26 12:38 pm (UTC)Ridiculously I kept a few. No tv, but a box of tapes, including two of my faviourites, Red Star In Orbit (about Korolev, the Soviet Chief Designer) and Billy, How Did You Do It? concerning Billy Wilder. Both three part investigations. I think it would be safe to say that BBC2 (and later to a degree, early Channel 4) played a better part in my general education than my schooling.
I regret that television-commissioned documentaries - decent films in their own right, just not fiction... - rarely get released as DVD, or made available in some high quality format, beyond the original broadcasts and subsequent repeats. People read non-fiction, but a concomitant amount of non-fiction just doesn't appear available in the corresponding visual media market.
Re: The Golden Age of Television.
Date: 2006-09-26 12:43 pm (UTC)Re: The Golden Age of Television.
Date: 2006-09-26 12:54 pm (UTC)I don't know whether it's a sign of the times that as the audio-visual tech gets cheaper, documentaries become more reliant upon them. I am not worried by the technology used, merely that, as it seemed to become more extensive, the MANNER of documentaries became considerably less refined. To use the media's own label 'dumbed down.' Back when the tv was still sat in the corner I noticed this particularly towards the end, around 2002. Things to do with dinosaurs and the history of the planet. I don't accept that just because they've got better animation they have to be written DOWN to the average Sun-reader. The whole point is to drag them UP to a more appreciative level.
The dumbing-down and dramatization of modern documentaries
Date: 2006-09-26 06:05 pm (UTC)This penchant for the "EXTREEEME!" has a lot to answer for.
Re: The Golden Age of Television.
Date: 2006-09-26 12:55 pm (UTC)A case in point - the production team which made Hyperland made a documentary about virtual reality called Colonising Cyberspace. Michael Hordern narrated, and it had John Perry Barlow (of the EFF), Brenda Laurel, Jaron Lanier, Howard Rheingold and William Gibson as talking heads. Like its predecessor, it used the medium to describe itself (sort of). Intelligent stuff.
Whoa. I've not seen the full version of this.
Date: 2006-09-26 02:38 pm (UTC)Ouch. That would be funny if it weren't so tragic. (Unfortunately, Flash has gone horribly out of sync, so I'll have to wait for the AVI version to download to see the rest.)
Re: Whoa. I've not seen the full version of this.
Date: 2006-09-26 04:39 pm (UTC)TRON-esque visages do not good navigation interfaces make, IMO. The coughing micons interrupting each other at the Multimedia Lab part was bad enough---one of the great things about dumb, blue, underlined text is that it just sits there and shows that further contextual information exists, without trying to grab your attention.
Re: Whoa. I've not seen the full version of this.
Date: 2006-09-26 09:45 pm (UTC)That said, I always liked the coughing micons as a relatively subtle way of getting your attention by using existing human social cues.
Ted Nelson has a great rant about links-as-advertising (the link that demands that you click it) in response to the early ad banners, but that slightly misses the point. If you're in a Xanadu-like open hypertext world, which is effectively what Hyperland is, it's reasonable to expect that you can have several link anchors on the same text fragment. In this situation, it's easier to get the user to choose the desired link from those available, than to intuit the user's context and work out which link they want, so you need to give the user some way of working out which one they want.
Re: Whoa. I've not seen the full version of this.
Date: 2006-09-26 04:40 pm (UTC)That,
Date: 2006-09-26 04:49 pm (UTC)Presented as such, the words "Office Assistant" come to mind, which is probably why I've never considered that clip particularly good.
Re: That,
Date: 2006-09-26 09:34 pm (UTC)The annoying thing about Bob and OAs
Date: 2006-09-27 12:25 am (UTC)...everything except the actual, useful work that agents are supposed to do. Way to grab onto the shallow graphical parts with both hands and miss the core idea, MS. Again.
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Date: 2006-09-26 03:27 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-09-26 03:50 pm (UTC)I'm playing devil's advocate though. We've (thankfully) got past the point where every website replaced <ul> with a series of coloured balls, which is a step forward, but the aesthetics of the web are still largely informed by those of print media. Even with CSS and XSLT, a lot of websites overuse inline images.
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Date: 2006-09-26 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-26 10:42 pm (UTC)I have very vague memories - I'm certain I've seen it before in its entirety, but I've no idea when. I must have been fairly young at the time!
I keep meaning to read GEB, too. *adds to ever-growing list of things to do*
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Date: 2006-09-27 10:05 am (UTC)