serial consign

There has been a bit of a lull in my posting over the past few weeks as I recently began a teaching position at the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University in Hamilton, just southwest of Toronto. I'm teaching a course entitled Interactive Digital Culture, providing a survey of new media paradigms and theoretical positions to a group of undergrad software engineers enrolled in the program's game development stream. This is a great opportunity for me to consolidate a sprawling body of research I've been working on over the last several years, and I also expect the pile of texts I'm digging through to drive the content here at Serial Consign over the coming months. With this course, I am tracing the roots of "new media" and tapping into the lineage of technological research and development, both overt (Xerox Parc, The Media Lab, WWII cryptography) and more obtuse (Modernist literature, the history of the document, the process of archiving). In setting up this research project, a few images have really jumped out as benchmarks in thinking about media. I'd like to take this opportunity to share them, and make a few observations.

In July 1945, as the dust was still settling after the Second World War, the engineer Vannevar Bush published an essay entitled As We May Think in Atlantic Monthly. The article hypothesized the machine pictured above, which would revolutionize the way we think about information. Bush called this machine the memex, and this exercise in speculation anticipated hypertext, the idea of personal computing and the Graphical User Interface (GUI). The memex capitalized on magnetic tape as a super storage medium capable of archiving vast amounts of information. The system, which could be loaded with thematized collections of texts, could be operated by a user through multiple screens that facilitated navigating and annotating this body of information. Bush, on how the device might be used for a specific research project:

...the owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item; he ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own either linking it into the main trail or joining it, by a side trail, to a particular item. When it becomes evident to him that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the superiority of the Turkish bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through text books on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of interest through the maze of materials available to him.

The memex facilitated the creation of vectors between texts, as well as alternative means of navigating written space. The device helped gestate the idea that the computer could be a tool for personal research, above and beyond facilitating commercial and academic data analysis (where the bulk of computing power was focused over the next four decades).

There is no shortage of evidence foreshadowing hypertext in Modernist writing (a personal favourite of which is Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project) and in experiments with montage in early cinema. Despite these cues which anticipated new non-linear modes of organizing information and narratives, I am still amazed by the confidence and clarity of Bush's memex as a design proposition.

The second image that has made a sizable impression on me is this 1973 map of ARPANET, the military/academic network that preceded the Internet. Considering the connectivity we now take for granted, it is amazing to consider the idea of the network (as an abstract entity) as only having a few dozen nodes. One of the driving forces in information visualization has been the struggle to represent the complexity of computer networks. Looking back at this simple network (which can be mapped quite clearly on a traditional map) and comparing it to some incredibly rich maps of the Internet from the last several years makes it quite clear how quickly information visualization has had to develop in order to represent networks.

I'm going to be doing some of my own research into early Internet and network visualizations in hopes to better understand the underpinnings of contemporary infosthetics. Please stay tuned for this material in the coming weeks.