The Origin Concept of Linking our Knowledge-(The Beginning of Hypertext Idea)

(source: my thesis- improving learning ability through hypertext system)

The initial concept of modern hypertext was published in July 1945 by Vannevar Bush in his article entitled “As We May Think”. Bush [1945] yielded his creative idea by thinking of how people that live in his era or in the future could inherit the previous or existing knowledge by using a growing technology since man could not remember all the knowledge that they have produced. He proposed a famous system, which is called the memory extended (memex), to handle the uneasiness of using a huge number of information that difficult to be trailed by any scientists in a discipline. Thus, his memex was used to store human knowledge and organize them in a consulted mechanized device, which ran in a flexible way so that the memory inside the device could be quickly extracted and extended in the future. Although his idea has never gotten constructed, his concept has never been outdated and still always fresh until now since the knowledge always be transferred and explored over the time.

After Bush’s article, Ted Nelson formulated the authentic word of hypertext in his system called Xanadu. He proposed the system to be a literary place to put information on line and can be linked to every user [Nielsen, 1995 p38]. By ‘hypertext’ Nelson elucidated:

I mean non-sequential writing – text that branches and allows choices to the
reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a
series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different
pathways [Nelson, 1960, cited in Landow, 1992).

His important concept of hypertext is non-sequential or non-linear, which allows readers/users access to non-linear information. Non-sequential means that “there is no single order that determines the sequence in which the text is to be read” [Nielsen, 1995 p1]. This suggests that the texts, images and other forms of information, that connected by links are arranged to make a set up of a multi-order of relationships among those nodes of information. The multi-order of connected information, then, becomes the most distinctive feature of hypertext to give users freedom to explore banks of information [McAleese, 1989]. Users can manage a set of dynamic links in attaining multi-sequential information of the hypertext system. They are permitted to browse and navigate by using the links generated by the author of the system.

References:

[Bush, 1945] Bush, V, 1945, Atlantic Monthly, July, pp. 101-108. Available on-line at: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

[Landow, 1992] Landow, G., 1992, Hypertext: The Convergence of Technology and Contemporary Critical Theory , Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

[Nielsen, 1995] Nielsen, J., 1995, Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond, Academic Press, Boston.

[McAleese, 1989] McAleese, R., 1989, Navigation and Browsing. In R. McAleese (Ed.), Hypertext: Theory into practice, pp. 6-44, Norwood, NJ: ABLEX.