Reaching Out of the Paperdigm
Thursday, November 10, 2011
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm, Young Research Library – Main Conference Room 11360
UCLA Information Studies Colloquium Lecture
Presented by Theodor Holm Nelson, PhD; Project Xanadu and The Internet Archive.
The computer world pretends to be finished, but never will be. In fact, it simulates the past: computers for secretaries, as designed by Xerox in the 1970s, have become our working world. Today’s “computer documents” (.doc and .pdf) simulate paper and the fancy printing of long ago. The Web added trivial one-way jumps, allowing pogo-stick travel between pages. But what of deeper connection? We need deep, live documents of a very different kind for the interactive screen, as foreseen by Bush and Engelbart and others–for annotation and detailed discussion and scholarship, for organizing and decision-making, for lawmaking and litigation, and for entirely new forms of writing. Such profusely connected, living documents are still possible, but require a wholly different infrastructure. We will show some of these alternatives.
Free and open to the public.
Sounds like an interesting lecture!