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“Always learn from history. Predicting the future is a waste of time.
InfoDesign gem #6,800 ~ “The PenPoint tablet was ahead of its time and too expensive and heavy, but had gestural syntax and personal-productivity benefits that we can still learn from.”
Always go to the source to read the real intensions.
“The topic of this thesis is style sheet languages for structured documents on the web. Due to characteristics of the web – including a screen-centric publishing model, a multitude of output devices, uncertain delivery, strong user preferences, and the possibility for later binding between content and style – the hypothesis is that the web calls for different style sheet languages than does traditional electronic publishing. Style sheet languages that were developed and used prior to the web are analyzed and compared with style sheet proposals for the web between 1993-1996. The dissertation describes the design of a web-centric style sheet language known as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS has several notable features including: cascading, pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements, forward-compatible parsing rules, support for different media types, and a strong emphasis on selectors. Problems in CSS are analyzed, and recommended future research is described.”
(Håkon Wium Lie, 1994-2005)
Alex’ book really works as a catalyst for our giant Paul Otlet.
“But then there’s the story of Paul Otlet. Born long enough ago that he lived in an imperial Belgium, the problems Otlet, a visionary and entrepreneur, hacked away on are the same we deal with today: nationalism, war, and information overload. The solutions Otlet worked for also resonate today, perhaps nowhere more surprisingly than the means by which you’re reading this very article.”
(Ben Richmond a.k.a. a_ben_richmond ~ Motherboard)
Document thinking is still alive and kicking.
“In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference. Rather than copying the included data and storing it in two places, a transclusion embodies modular design, by allowing it to be stored only once (and perhaps corrected and updated if the link type supported that) and viewed in different contexts.”
Great to see this article appear in the publication where it all started, according to US history. Finally, some historical truth being added.
“Historians of technology often cite Bush’s essay as the conceptual forerunner of the Web. And hypertext pioneers like Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee have all acknowledged their debt to Bush’s vision. But for all his lasting influence, Bush was not the first person to imagine something like the Web. (…) For all his remarkable prescience, Bush never predicted anything like the Internet. That credit rightly goes to Otlet.”
(Alex Wright a.k.a. @alexgrantwright ~ The Atlantic)
So pleased with this information graphics from Paula and her team.
“Sharing the dream of Paul Otlet about Mundaneum – a kind of hypermedia system that allowed the management and sharing of all human knowledge in the 30’s. (…) Systems, principles and machines created by Otlet and La Fontaine to organize the huge documents and index cards in the RBU. The creation of a highly flexible language management system for databases: The Universal Decimal Classification (UCD), the first modern faceted classification system, in opposition of Melvil Dewey’s Decimal Classification.”
(Paula Azevedo Macedo a.k.a. @paulamacedo, Seth Pérez, and Larissa Braga)
Honoring our historical roots is what makes us more mature as a relevant domain in world history. Even though is still three decades old, sort of.
“Thirty years ago, as tech titans battled for real estate in the personal computer market, an inconspicuous young artist gave the Macintosh a smile. Susan Kare was the type of kid who always loved art. As a child, she lost herself in drawings, paintings, and crafts; as a young woman, she dove into art history and had grandeur dreams of being a world-renowned fine artist.”
(Zachary Crockett a.k.a. @zzcrockett ~ Priceonomics)
“Twenty-five years ago today, I filed the proposal for what was to become the World Wide Web. My boss dubbed it ‘vague but exciting’. Luckily, he thought enough of the idea to allow me to quietly work on it on the side.”
“This book tries to explain how minds work. How can intelligence emerge from non-intelligence? To answer that, we’ll show that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.”
“Around the time when Austrian sociologist, philosopher, and curator Otto Neurath was building his ISOTYPE visual language, which laid the foundation for pictogram-based infographics, another infographic pioneer was doing something even more ambitious: The German polymath Fritz Kahn – amateur astronomer, medical scientist by training, gynecologist by early occupation, artist by inclination, writer, educator and humanist by calling – was developing innovative visual metaphors for understanding science and the human body, seeking to strip scientific ideas of their alienating complexity and engage a popular audience with those essential tenets of how life works.”
“One of the most common terms of praise for an interface is to say that it is “intuitive” (the word should have been “intuitable” but we will bow to convention). Yet the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature rarely mentions the word, and for good reason. This note attempts to clarify the meaning of “intuitive” for non-HCI specialists.”
(Jef Raskin 1994)
Computing pioneer Doug Engelbart’s inventions transformed computing, but he intended them to transform humans. ~ “(…) Engelbart never sought to own what he contributed to the world’s ability to know. But he was frustrated to the end by the way so many people had adopted, developed, and profited from the digital media he had helped create, while failing to pursue the important tasks he had created them to do.”
(Howard Rheingold a.k.a. @hrheingold ~ MIT Technology Review)
“I see this as a core principle of higher order UX; to use the medium in such a way that the medium facilitates the delivery of the message instead of polluting it. It’s that pollution that brings about unanticipated consequences in what the user experiences. This is just as much a holistic experience problem as well as a nitty-gritty design and interaction problem.”
(Erik Flowers a.k.a. @Erik_UX)
“In a hut like this — and maybe even one of these huts specifically — Engelbart opened up that issue of LIFE and read Bush’s Atlantic article. The ideas in the story plowed new intellectual terrain for Engelbart, and the seeds that he planted and nurtured there over the next twenty years grew, with the help of millions of others, into the Internet you see today.”
“The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system. The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups. Originally aimed at the High Energy Physics community, it has spread to other areas and attracted much interest in user support, resource discovery and collaborative work areas.”
(CERN)
“I couldn’t end a conversation with one of the fathers of computer graphics without asking him where he thought the field might go in the next fifty years. I should have remembered, though: Sutherland had already explained to me that he’s not into the prediction game.”
(Harry McCracken a.k.a. @harrymccracken ~ TIME.com)
“The greatest thing is that this has sort of become a sandbox for the mind. It’s a medium, not just a calculating machine. We now have this thing in front of us, it allows us to paint, to write, to listen to music. It mesmerizes us and steals our lives. I think it is the invention of the last 500 years. And we’re waiting to see what it does next.”
(Jesse Hicks a.k.a. @jessehixxx ~ The Verge)
Interview with computing pioneer Alan Kay ~ “One way to think of all of these organizations is to realize that if they require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed, then the corporate organization and process is a failure. It means no group can come up with a good decision and make it stick just because it is a good idea. All the companies I’ve worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent “agriculture” we could put the world back together and all would prosper.”
(David Greelish ~ Techland)
“During her thirty years at the Bibliothèque Nationale (BN), Suzanne Briet (1894-1989) made important theoretical, organizational, and institutional contributions to the documentation movement in France. This paper attempts to place her documentation work within the context of the far-reaching reform of French libraries, with special attention to the transformation of the BN. Like her colleagues in special libraries, Briet embraced modernity and science. However, because of her strong orientation toward humanistic scholarship, she viewed documentation service and bibliographic orientation as an enhancement rather than a rejection of the scholarly traditions of the national library. This paper will focus on her efforts to integrate the innovative ideas of the documentation movement into the practice of librarianship at the Bibliothèque Nationale.”
“Brussels, Belgium, Europe, 1895: two men shared a dream of ‘indexing and classifying the world’s information’. Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine’s work foreshadowed the network of knowledge that a century later became the Internet with its search engines! Otlet and La Fontaine aimed to preserve peace by assembling knowledge and making it accessible to the entire world. They built an international documentation center called Mundaneum. They invented the modern library Universal Decimal Classification system. La Fontaine won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913. By 1935, their Mundaneum grew to a staggering 16 million cards covering subjects ranging from the history of hunting dogs to finance! World War II and the death of both founders slowed down the project. Although many Mundaneum archives were stored away, some even in the Brussels subway, volunteers kept the dream alive. The French community government of Belgium brought most of the archives to a beautiful Art Deco building in the heart of Mons near Brussels.”
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"Sharing knowledge is better than having it."