[Scottish] [Fwd: FW: Ted Nelson speaking this Monday[Scanned]]

[Simon Yuill]

------ Forwarded Message

From: Stephen Woodruff <s.woodruff at arts.gla.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 11:00:44 +0100
To: <p.anderson at gsa.ac.uk>, <a.mcallister at gsa.ac.uk>
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/

s.ross at hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk

Prof Seamus Ross

x3635


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