The Magical Place of Literary Memory

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The Magical Place of Literary Memory 10/07/2009 The Magical Place of Literary Memory The Magical Place of Literary Memory™: Xanadu Belinda Barnet What I thought would be called Xanadu is called the World Wide Web and works differently, but has the same penetration (Nelson, 1999, interview). It was a vision in a dream. A computer filing system which would store and deliver the great body of human literature, in all its historical versions and with all its messy interconnections, acknowledging authorship, ownership, quotation and linkage. Like the web, but much better: no links would ever be broken, no documents would ever be lost, copyright and ownership would be scrupulously preserved. This vision is actually older than the web, and aspects of it are older than personal computing: it belongs to hypertext pioneer Theodore Holm Nelson, who dubbed the project Xanadu in 1967. The name comes from the famous poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan. In his tale of the poem's origin, Coleridge claimed to have woken from a laudanum-laced reverie with 'two or three hundred' lines of poetry in his head. He had noted down but a few lines when he was interrupted by a visitor, and when he returned to his work later he found that the memories had blurred irretrievably. His mythical landscape, this vision of Xanadu, had passed away 'like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast' (Coleridge, cited in Nelson 1987, hereafter DM, p. 142). Like Nelson, Coleridge feared the despotism of the senses and the confusion of senseless memory; he feared memory loss. In an introduction to the poem cited by Nelson (DM), Coleridge writes of his muddled visions: Then all the charm Is broken--all that phantom world so fair, Vanishes and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape the other (Coleridge, cited in DM, p. 142). The first story Nelson told Wired reporter Gary Wolf about Xanadu was also based on a vision of disturbed water. To Nelson, the 'swirling currents under his grandfather's boat represent the chaotic transformation of all relationships and the irrevocable decay associated with the flow of time' (Wolf 1995, p. 12). Xanadu was meant to organise this chaos, to channel this temporal flow, at the same time preserving all the 'true interconnections' which held it together. But unlike Coleridge, Nelson believed (and still does believe) that the 'intertwingled' nature of human thought is its greatest asset. Like the early hypertext pioneers Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart[1], Nelson has a theory about the inheritance and transmission of human knowledge. The knowledge that we pass on to each other as human beings is itself a vast, intertwingled network (DM, p. 156), an accumulation of different disciplines and fields of knowledge, 'a corpus of all fields' (Nelson 1965, p. 145). Most importantly, this 'corpus of all fields' is constantly shifting and changing; like biological life, it is evolving. It is a 'bundle of relationships subject to all kinds of twists, inversions, involutions and rearrangement: these changes are frequent but unpredictable' latrobe.edu.au/…/BBfr18a.html 1/16 10/07/2009 The Magical Place of Literary Memory (Nelson 1965, p. 145). If we wish to gain control of this giant corpus, if we wish to preserve human knowledge, then we need to understand how it works and preserve its structure. We need to maintain the interconnections, the original paths or trails through ideas. This is important because thoughts and minds themselves, of course, do not last ..."Knowledge," then – and indeed most of our civilization and what remains of those previous – is a vasty [sic] cross-tangle of ideas and evidential materials, not a pyramid of truth. So that preserving its structure, and improving its accessibility, is important to us all (DM, p. 157). Xanadu was originally proposed as a vast digital network to house this great corpus of ideas and its interconnections, facilitated by a special linking system. The linking system would be based on 'the fluidity of thought--not just its crystallised and static form, which, like water's, is hard and cold and goes nowhere' (Nelson 1992, 1/13). He wanted this system to stretch around the planet, embracing all our stray ideas, all our stray works of literature and scholarship, all the information that would otherwise be lost to us. Xanadu is a case study in Derrida's will to totality. It would be a mini-universe of words which remember where they have been and where they might yet be: the 'Pleasure Dome of the creative writer' (DM, p. 141). The story of Xanadu is the greatest image of potentiality in the evolution of hypertext[2]. Nelson invented a new vocabulary to describe his vision, much of which has become integrated into contemporary hypermedia theory and practice - for instance, the words 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia'. As he put it in our interview, 'I think I've put more words in the dictionary than Lewis Carroll. Every significant change in an idea means a new term' (1999). Nelson came up with many significant changes, and consequently many new terms (some of which will be explained presently). He also recruited or inspired some of the most visionary programmers and developers in the history of computing, many of whom went on to develop the first hypertext products. His writings and presentations concerning the 'digital repository scheme for worldwide electronic publishing' (Nelson 1992, 3/2) have been plundered by theorists and practitioners the world over. It was Nelson's vision which inspired me to write a Ph.D. on hypertext and the aporia of memory. Media opinion, however, is divided over Nelson: '[b]oon or boondoggle, nobody is quite sure', as The Economist puts it (cited in Nelson 1992, preface). I will be exploring the evolution of the Xanadu design and the ideas behind it in more depth presently. For now, I wish to emphasise this mythical dimension to Xanadu. As a concept, it has been under development for over forty years, and it is only in the last five years that Nelson has released a beta version resembling the vision. Like Bush's Memex, Xanadu has become the stuff of legend within the hypertext community, largely due to the inspired writings of its creator and the lack of a real-world prototype. But unlike Bush's Memex, there have been numerous attempts to create the design exactly as Nelson described it--none of which have realised this colossal vision. Like a spectre of the future, all we have of Xanadu is its erotic simulacrum, its ideals, its ideas--and some tantalising shells of code. To Nelson's dismay, and unfairly, it has consequently been hailed as 'the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing' (Wolf 1995, p. 1). To complicate matters, the code behind Xanadu has been in a state of perpetual rewrite for decades. This technical evanescence, combined with its mythical status, make it a very difficult subject to write about. I have chosen to divide this article into two main parts: the first is the evolution of the idea, which is quite straightforward; the second is an explanation of the Xanadu system itself, its technical design, the criticism of this design, and the attempts to build it. A simple explanation for non-experts of the Xanadu system is long overdue, as anyone who has tried to navigate the white papers will attest. This 'technical' section was written after interviewing Nelson in Japan over a two-day period, and the interesting latrobe.edu.au/…/BBfr18a.html 2/16 10/07/2009 The Magical Place of Literary Memory part of this section is how far it will depart from the first; it is not that Xanadu has failed as vision (it has captured the imagination of a whole generation of developers, for a start), but that the vision has failed to realise itself qua technical artefact. Yet Xanadu refuses to die (its logo is, appropriately enough, The Eternal Flaming X™). Paisley and Butler (cited in Smith 1991, p. 262) have noted that '[s]cientists and technologists are guided by "images of potentiality"-- the untested theories, unanswered questions and unbuilt devices that they view as their agenda for five years, ten years, and longer'. Often accused of handwaving and lucid dreaming, Nelson's Xanadu has nonetheless become inherited vision. Nelson at at Keio University, Japan 1999 (image Belinda Barnet). Ideas and their interconnections: the evolution of the idea People ask me why I carry a stapler. The answer is to attach pieces of paper to each other. Such an archaic concept. Photographers carry cameras, gunfighters carry guns: I CONNECT THINGS! ... the problem with paper is that every sentence wants to break out and slither in some other direction, but the confines of the page forbid us to. So that if the page could sprout wings, or sprout tunnels off to the side, the parenthesis, instead of having to stop after some point, could go on forever (Nelson 1999, interview). Nelson wears a strap across his shoulder with pens, scissors, sticky notes and sticky tape attached to it. He has been wearing it since the mid-1960s. The belt is filled with tools to connect things with, ammunition against a world of paper. Like Bush, Nelson is painfully aware that ideas are easily lost in conventional indexing systems, that they are disconnected from each other, and that 'serious writing or research' demands connecting ideas together (Nelson 1999, interview). Frustrated by the lack of a global, real-world system that might do this for him, and 'outraged' by the confines of paper (Nelson 1998, pp.
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