mercurious » Dr.-Vannevar-Bush

MEMEX 2.0

mercurious — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:18:19 +0000

MEMEX TWO POINT OH

It only just dawned on me. These status-tweet-feed conflations I’ve been following and fueling — this is the MEMEX that I’ve been talking about on these pages. Maybe not MEMEX 1.0 — our trails comprise not only encyclopedic knowledge and book knowledge — they also encompass our communication and social context all wrapped up in knowledge. Social networking is contemporary knowledge machined into media trails.

Whatever “social networking” becomes, Twitter today, who knows tomorrow, we can still be sure that Vannevar Bush was one of the first to fantasize about the business of socially mediating knowledge through machines via exchangeable, reconfigurable machine-readable media (i.e. beyond books and paper).

The #IPF09 Internet as a Factory and Playground Conference at The New School, conferred by Trebor Scholz, discusses the notions of value creation in the networked wealth of a distributed and highly creative, productive, efficient human at work. Vannevar Bush has not been mentioned at the sessions I’ve attended, but a new discovery included Constant’s New Babylon project, perhaps the architectural parallel of the Memex.

Interviewed on Dr. Dobb’s

mercurious — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:51:21 +0000

On Teaching Mobile Application Design at Parsons

Dr. Dobb’s Journal, legendary software design publication, published our phone interview on its web portal yesterday on the subject of teaching mobile media design at Parsons Communication Design & Technology. John Dorsey, the editor of Dr. Dobb’s, offered probing questions that got at the nature of the program, the challenges of teaching Flash for application design, and how various tools and platforms can fit together in a technology curriculum at the service of the arts. This is all very interesting when you consider Dr. Dobb’s target audience, clearly hard-core coders and application developers. It’s a good sign when engineer-types are starting to take what’s going on in art and design schools more seriously. These distinctions are very much starting to blur.

» Interview

Memex, The Dawn of Informatics

mercurious — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 18:53:49 +0000

“AS WE MAY THINK” BY DR. VANNEVAR BUSH

Originally published in the Atlantic Monthly→, “As We May Think→” (July, 1945), a member of the Manhattan Project proposes the [tag]Memex[/tag]↔, a sort of microfilm-based knowledge desk. Many consider the Memex to be the pre-digital precursor to the idea of the Web and Internet as we know it today. It may reflect the dawn of the information age.

I am constantly referring to the Memex in my [tag]lectures[/tag]↔ and research as a significant historical precedent to modern informatics, information design, hypertext and interactive media.

A diagram depicting “Computing’s Family Tree”◊ sources the Memex at the root of all modern operating systems. See also Dr. Ivan Sutherland’s [tag]Sketchpad[/tag]↔ for the world’s first interactive computer graphics system.

Lecture: The Origins of Interactive Media

mercurious — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:30:41 +0000

The Origins of Interactive Media.

交互式多媒体的起源

A brief examination of two influential American scientists who pioneered the idea of interactive information systems and graphics. Dr. Vannevar Bush, The Memex↑ and Dr. Ivan Sutherland, Sketchpad↑. Their research accomplishments resonate through every aspect of modern computing. A lecture given on Thursday, June 21, 2007, 13:30, Room B413 at the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University.Sponsored by Information Art & Design in collaboration with Communication Design & Technology, Parsons The New School for Design.