Cybertext Forebear:  Ted Nelson
 

     Speculation on the handling of digitally integrated texts has absorbed the work of a growing number of writers over the course of three decades.  In addition to contemporary work by Espen Aarseth and John Cayley, I want to identify another essay as an important foundation to present work.  Theodor Nelson's "Opening Hypertext:  A Personal Memoir," as a summation of his considerations of the first thirty years of hypertext and hypermedia, informs readers on multiple levels.  Nelson—an idealistic believer that "THE PURPOSE OF COMPUTERS IS HUMAN FREEDOM"—continues to perpetuate ideas he has followed in the three decades since he gave these forms their names.  However, this piece is neither a mere embroidery of reminiscences, nor empty nostalgia about his dream to convert people "to the idea of a new literature" (43).  As a world where computers are commonplace is encountered, Nelson maintains, an electronic universe of hypertext is historically inevitable.  A major issue therein becomes, "the conceptual framework, the system of order which will provide a viable structure for people's minds and people's lives" (44).

     The crucial aspects to this documentary universe Nelson saw in 1960 were:

The arrangement of hypertexts and their organizing constructs (conceptual and practical) are points of consideration among people working with computers and literature for over thirty-five years.  Now that our digital systems have the ability to hold and supply millions of documents and interconnections as Nelson dreamed they would, issues regarding their structure and interconnectivity press on.  Other concerns highlighted by Nelson, such as developing tools for intercomparing alternative structures of text and envisioning useful organizational constructions, also remain formidable challenges to persons working with hypertext.  To a large degree, people are still seeking to find ways to make useful cybertext.

     At first, nothing resembled the literature he envisioned, so Nelson embarked on "The Thousand Theories Program," which aspired to illustrate a thousand different viewpoints about the whole realm of human knowledge.  This project, writes Nelson in "Opening Hypertext," "became hypertext," unfolding into four parts:

With the exception of the fourth matter, the machinery (and tools) of Nelson's design have begun to fall into place in recent years.  However, augmentation (to printed literature), rather than subsumption of it, is a more realistic way to describe and envision computerized texts.  Though I will not draw this suggestion out, I do not believe printed and digitized materials to be exclusive forms.  A correspondence, and understanding of the relationship between the two, is in fact integral to the continuum and growth of electronic texts in the present and forseeable future.
 
     Dream Machines (1974)—a book originally bound with another title, Computer Lib, in a much oversized format—is the text where, twenty years before the dawning of the World Wide Web, Nelson's premier articulations regarding hypertext and hypermedia appear. According to a bibliographical footnote in Dream Machines, "The Hypertext," an article by Nelson, appeared as part of the Proceedings of the World Documentation Federation, 1965.  However, it is not until Dream Machines that discussion of the concept is published on a wider scale.  Here Nelson thoroughly divulges the work of his cybernetic predecessors (as well as pugnacious views regarding governmental bureaucracy and the computer industry).  He expands the work of earlier visionaries by introducing Xanadu, his dream, "to give you a screen in your home from which you can see into the world's hypertext libraries.  (The fact that the world doesn't have any hypertext libraries-- yet-- is a minor point)" (56).  From its beginnings, hypertext is proposed as a practical proposition in which computer storage and display mechanisms will allow writers to create multiple, branching and alternative structures in their work.  Believing that, "the structure of ideas are not sequential," Nelson thus defines the form:  "By 'hypertext' I mean non-sequential writing" (44).
 
     At its roots (Nelson's schema), hypertext is encompassed (along with "hyperfilms, branching audio, music," and "branching slide shows"), by a broader conception:  hypermedia.  In Dream Machines, hypermedia is described as a presentational media system which presents pictures (moving or/and static) and sounds (spoken or/and instrumental) controlled on-screen.  An expansion of hypertext, hypermedia is also a branching form.  Comprised of visual, alphabetic, and audio components, hypermedia performs in dimensions printed formats do not allow.
 
     By the late '60s, Nelson realized the problem was not as much the creation of a singular organizing construct, or the individual hyper- unit.  It was more a project of finding multiple conceptions of organization putting, "every contribution on an equitable basis with every other."  Nelson realized, as hypertext theorist Michael Heim recognizes in The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, a Leibnizian concept that, "Through a shared language, many discordant ways of thinking can exist under a single roof" (37).  Referring to methods of textual distribution, Nelson queries, "Paper literature at large is open, though some of its byways are not.  What is to be the electronic equivalent?"  The pressing question for him became: The inception of the WWW—particularly with its sophisticated search engines—does provide a supposition of what such a text-scape might be like, but only partially appeases concerns raised in Nelson's dilemma.  In terms of creating "under different rules," or in creating work using sophisticated cybermediation on the Internet, certain technical limitations exist, as well as a strict code of ethics (made into laws enforced to the maximum degree).  Through graphical interfaces, we are able to uniformly locate resources, and view them on personal computers at home, in libraries, offices, and elsewhere.  However, the extent to which it is a "unified" "literature" lies only in its common coding system.  At present, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the predominant code.  Processes such as JAVA scripting, and programs like Shockwave allow animation and sound); Unix (CGI) scripting enable more technical capabilities for the Web.  Cybertext authors create electronic work with numerous other programs.  It may be naive to envision a single coding language somewhere in the future, though it is possible.  Today, however, the Web is a predominantly disparate, incomplete, and unorganized series of texts.  We are distant from Nelson's ultimate vision of, "a grand open hypertext system that will let anyone explore all the ideas there are in the world, as expounded by those who believe in them and with all the color and vitality that belong to that exposition" (51).
 
     Further elucidating Xanadu in "Opening Hypertext," Nelson redefines "document" as an "information package created by someone at a given time." That is, a document has creator(s), date of creation, and presumably point(s) of view.   He also defines "literature" broadly, as a connected series of documents, believing that individual literatures (i.e. the literature in biomechanical engineering, the literature in sociology, the literature in literary criticism) as galaxies and of all literatures as the universe or, as he prefers to say, the "docuverse" (53).  The problem, then, remains in how to create a unifying and principled basis for, "the interconnection of everything that everyone says, to maintain the integrity of each document, and yet allow everything to be deeply interconnected" (54).  With such intent, Nelson has aimed to build Xanadu with a conceptual framework satisfactory for indefinite growth.  Its unifying structure is known as "transclusion," wherein the integrity of original materials is maintained in a discrete location, yet users of the system are able to access and borrow from these materials as needed.  Through an internal pointing system, texts (be they images, sounds, whatever) are shared through a central source.  In this design, copyright is maintained by the originator, and "the reader buys the copies [used to create other texts] through the automatic reading machine."  These texts can be manipulated by user, but the original remains intact:  "each new version is like a celluloid overlay, varying the documents contents without modifying its original storage" (55).
 
     Nelson's conception of text presupposes borrowing amongst texts.  What is more important, in any case, is that once a document, whether it is a lab report, a poem, a newsmagazine, a letter to the editor of a newspaper—any document—is created, it becomes part of a very large general text, accessible to all users of the Xanadu system.  Texts in their secondary form are layered, recombined, if invisibly so (i.e. seamless), and may be "versioned"—intertextually opened and appended—by anyone else.  This is how, Nelson writes, "we maintain, with utter clarity of origin and convenience, the sources of every fragment:  transcluding all the portions that are still there and making whatever changes the new context requires" (56).  A textuality, as such, echoes a condition that predates the technologically dominant era.  As the Critical Art Ensemble point out in their essay, "Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production:"  "cultural perspectives developed in a manner that more clearly defined texts as individual works in the pre-electronic era.  Cultural fragments appeared in their own right as discrete units, since their influence moved slowly enough to allow the orderly evolution of an argument or an aesthetic" (109).  Our ability to gather texts has shifted.  An age of electronic textuality, marked by rapid speed and incompleteness, is upon us.  How this textual domain is molded and managed is of immense importance to writers seeking an electronic audience.
 
     Laying the foundation for his conclusion to "Opening Hypertext," Nelson reiterates, "Hope for the future lies in the accessibility of open hypermedia publishing."  He sees the workings of digital media as an agency which provides an opportunity to lay plain all cultural facts and possibilities.  His vision has lofty aims.  Referring to Eric Drexler, who argues that a multitude of technological dangers create a situation where there is only a narrow keyhole of survival for the human race and for the planet in the future, Nelson proclaims, "I want to see...what open hypertext publishing can do for the life of the mind, and perhaps for the life of the planet" (57).  Our ability to "intercompare" matters and information on a global scale is a fundamental issue.  He criticizes hypertexts which do not inherently reveal a larger interconnective structure.

    Variant yet related strands of hypertext converged at Hypertext '87, then "the largest meeting ever devoted to hypertext."  Papers from this conference, published by The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1989, are an indicative measure of hypertext as it had been assessed at that point, and as it would be for much of the next decade.  The fruits of "first generation" hypertext are on display in this volume; the seeds of the "second generation" are sown.  Beginning with a "Foreword" by Nelson, "All for One and One for All," which argues for "Everything for Any User," "A Single All-Encompassing Space for All Documents," and "The Possibility  of Uniform Service," the collection panoptically overviews hypertext from archival, compositional, pedagogical, and technical perspectives.   Many of the authors of the essays in this book have since published scholarly collections of their own.  In the process they substantiate a node in the technical-historical progression of cybertext.  Since computer texts are late in coming to a larger body (and variety) of writers, we know the works Nelson and his formal descendants are, technologically-speaking, parts of the original foundation for work being done now.
 
     Despite an ongoing tendency to collapse hypertext and hypermedia into one entity, it is questionable whether or not they are the same.  Complex texts which use images and other effects as conduits, as parts in a design or arrangement in language, are inherently different from text-only documents.  Watching the day's news scroll by on letter display systems, or in the horizontally streaming light bulbs of Times Square is not the same as viewing it on a billboard-sized television across the street.  Images have a different impact when viewed than described in print.  It is not as much a matter of a picture (moving or static) making a viewer any less remote from the transmission (whether destructive or creative), but that its graphic implant (and, potentially, the ability to navigate through an image to further information) contains pre-linguistic (and, in this case, sub-linguistic) information which has the ability to impel design and navigation.  New understandings of the rhetorical strategies and syntax are required when texts are hybridized in this way.  Different types of demands are often (though not always) placed on attention and memory by cybertexts.  George Landow, in HYPERTEXT:  The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, does not distinguish between hypertext and hypermedia:  at the outset he announces he will use the terms interchangeably.  Landow instead emphasizes a focus on the multilinear or multisequential (terms he prefers to "non-linear") characteristics of computerized texts, and how these dynamics reflect themes in contemporary critical theory.  What Landow avoids by this approach is taking responsibility for discussing whatever effects visual imagery have as a method of presentation, organization, and arranging language, how visuality alters the dynamics of text, and so on.  However, in a 1994 presentation (part of a day-long symposium sponsored by Eastgate Systems), Landow declares, "Writing is now visual as well as alphanumeric," arguing that visual elements in writing provide a compelling reason to switch the terminology to describe hypertext composition "from 'writing' to 'authoring.'" (24) Ted Nelson, in a conversation at Hypertext '97, also expressed his point of view that making distinctions between these terms is unnecessary.
 
     In any case, practical manifestations of Nelson's vision of hypermedia now exist in Hypervideo, Virtual Poetry, Holopoetry, and other new appearances of new media poetry as it is introduced by Eduardo Kac in Visible Language 30.2 and elsewhere.  Espen Aarseth, in Cybertext:  Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, has begun the project of making precise distinctions, and broadening textual conventions to include such concepts.  We have cybertext, made up of what has come before, towards considering what present and future iterations of poetic texts (may) hold.

lecture for NJIT students
 

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