Corpora: ILASH seminar - Ted Nelson

From: Ekaterini Pastra (e.pastra@dcs.shef.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Nov 05 2001 - 17:00:51 MET

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    Dear all,

    The Institute for Language, Speech and Hearing celebrates its 2001
    Annual Day
    with a talk by Professor Ted Nelson. Everybody is welcome to attend this
    event.
    More information and a poster of the event can be found at:
    http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/Seminars/index.html

    Prof. Ted Nelson
    Friday, 07 December 2001
    11:00a.m.
    Room G22, Regent Court,
    Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield
    211 Portobello Street, Sheffield.

    "Ideas, the Final Frontier
    -- Computers Beyond Hierarchy and the Web beyond HTML -- "

    "Most uses of computers simulate either hierarchy, paper, or both
    (Acrobat
    and the Web). Hierarchy is notably unsuited to most human thought,
    creativity, and ongoing changes of projects; paper is a form of
    confinement
    to which we have adapted for two millennia, though the ideas have tried
    to
    escape for a thousand years-- through footnotes, annotations,
    parallelisms,
    and creative layout.
        If we dare to challenge these traditions, the alternatives still
    need
    structuring for implementation. The issue is the optimal representation
    of
    ideas-- what relations among discrete structures can best replace
    hierarchical directories, and what generalizations of electronic
    document
    will allow profuse bi-directional connections, track content flow from
    version to version, allow publishing of annotations and ongoing parallel

    documents, and permit large-scale quotation of copyrighted material?
    (All are vital for a true electronic literature.)
        The alternatives Ted proposes are simple, straightforward, and
    deeply
    different from the prevailing paradigms.

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Ted Nelson is a Project Professor at Keio University in Fujisawa, Japan.

    "From October 1960, Ted firmly predicted the era of
     personal computing and mass marketed software
     as a direct extrapolation of early CRT based computers,
     (such as the PDP-1 of that year); the universal migration
     of work to computer screens; interactive media based on
     personal computers, generalizing writing and movies
     as we already knew them; and populist world-wide
     uncontrollable anarchic hypertext based also on personal
     computers, both as distributed small servers and as
     mass market clients.
         He did not make these predictions diplomatically,
     so that many who heard him were enraged at the time
     and do not like to remember or acknowledge now that
     he said all these things that early. (Indeed, very little
     that he said was actually comprehended.)
         In his software designs he has always urged breaking away
     from the paper model, rather than imitating paper--
     but since the Xerox PARC interfaces were popularized
     in 1984 as the Macintosh, computers have been made
     to imitate paper. This is rather like the way that trained
     animals are made to imitate people, because it makes
     people feel comfortable, unthreatened and smug.
         Ted has always had a complete general design for a
     complete general alternative world of software, based on
     parallel documents, deep interconnection, side-by-side
     intercomparison and swooping high performance,
     massive rearrangement with origins showing, and new
     forms of copyright permission and micropayment.
     The details of this vision and design have continually
     changed, but the ideas have stayed the same. These
     designs have been generally considered ignorant, silly,
     bizarre, too radical, unimaginable, impossible, deranged,
     delirious, insane and crazed.
     Until now."

    Best,
    Katerina Pastra
    --------------------------------------------------------------
    Katerina Pastra
    Research Assistant - ILASH Research Co-ordinator
    Natural Language Processing Group
    Department of Computer Science
    University of Sheffield
    Tel. +44 114 2221945
    Fax +44 114 2221810
    http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~katerina



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