Intertwingled

A one-page comic story in honor of Ted Nelson’s career.

Two poems in honor of Ted Nelson’s career.

An edited transcript of a video created for the Intertwingled conference.

Ted Nelson has been a friend and colleague for almost the entire time during which he has struggled with one enormous, astoundingly difficult question: how might information, about everything, be better organized, in particular so as to emphasize the complex relationships among its various parts. He and I have many similarities in attitude and disposition and background, and a few differences in personality that intrigue me; I admire mostly his energy, focus and devotion to his task.

Personal reflections on the life and work of Ted Nelson.

An edited and annotated transcript of a telephone interview of Ted Nelson by Peter Schmideg.

Intertwingularity is the idea that everything is deeply interconnected on multiple levels. I will therefore describe my own background and experiences with Ted Nelson, comment on some issues raised by other contributors, and describe my views on the intertwingularity of modern popular culture.

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary, as Anne Carson puts it in Autobiography of Red [3, p. 46]. For Nelson it has been a long journey, at times a very difficult one, but it has been necessary. Necessary for him personally—as he puts it in Possiplex, “I have no alternative but to go on. Like Shackleton of Antarctica I find myself enmeshed in a harsh duty that was not the original plan… I will fight for it to my last breath” [10, p. 339]. He has survived the journey so far, his ideals held high above the mud. But as the Intertwingled conference has demonstrated, as the people who have spoken here have demonstrated, the journey has also been necessary for the computing world.

My conversations with Ted Nelson began in earnest in 2004 when we shared an office at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). He was working on Xanadu, and I was working on Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet [7]. My work was in conversation with Ted’s since I was a graduate student, having read Computer Lib early on. Ted signed my copy of Literary Machines [25] at a talk in the mid-1990s, thus I was in awe of the man when Bill Dutton put us together as visiting scholars in the OII attic, a wonderful space overlooking the Ashmolean Museum.

Ted, this is for you. I’ve flown in for this event from Hong Kong. If I become incoherent it’s because there’s a 15-h time difference. I’m flying to London tonight because I have to be back for the weekend, so I can’t stay for the dinner, but I wanted to be here for you. I only have 30 min and I’ve got a lot to say, in fact, I’ve got about 30 years of stuff to say. It is a great honor to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me. I really wanted to honor Ted, and support this wonderful event.

I’d like to talk about Ted the man, limits, connections, some pretty broad history, all leading up to why I believe Ted is limitless. I was born in Norway. Land of vikings, socially connected politics. Ancestral home of Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. A land of fjords. For me the picture has changed to a view of the Thames. I now live in London, greatest city in the world, but I won’t go on and on about that.

This chapter situates Ted Nelson’s hypertext theory in the long history of print media. It argues that a peculiar strength of Nelson’s approach to electronic media arises from its sensitivity to the technical and conceptual nuances of print.

This chapter considers three phrases from Theodor Holm “Ted” Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines. The first is the famous line from the Computer Lib cover: “You Can and Must Understand Computers NOW.” Less famous, but equally crucial in our present moment are a second line, “presentation by computer is a branch of show biz and writing, not of psychology, engineering or pedagogy,” and a third, “All Simulation Is Political.” Taken together, these three statements call for a creative and critical literacy of computing broadly, and computational media in particular. Nelson’s call is not only of historical importance, but one that can guide our work and thinking today. This chapter outlines how even noble attempts to address public understanding of computers often fail to consider the important messages of these three statements, with results that could serve precisely the wrong interests. It also gives an example of work influenced by this set of Nelson’s ideas, from a project of the author and collaborators critiquing and expanding the Kodu introductory programming environment. It also argues that we must unite work that follows in Nelson’s footsteps by reading software critically (e.g., “software studies”) with work that aims to broaden the writing of software, if we hope to successfully answer Nelson's clarion call for a public that is computationally engaged, computationally expressive, and understands what is at stake.

One of the many concepts Ted Nelson has contributed to the notion of hypertext is the concept of “transclusion”. Though utilized by the current web in some ways (e.g., images, style sheets, scripts) fully capitalizing on the potential of transclusion to augment human intelligence will likely require shifting from today’s ‘access-intense’ paradigm of web usage, to ‘authoring-intense’ usage. The fundamental premise to be argued in this chapter is that more fully exploiting the power of transclusion offers future web users the potential for significantly-increased personal productivity for the creation of knowledge artifacts of economic value—and thereby opportunity for significantly-greater remuneration.

The goal of this bibliography is to put together a complete picture of Ted Nelson’s body of work as expressed in publication, including selections from ephemeral and non-print media.

Others have presented many perspectives on my life and work, and now I’ll tell how it’s been from the inside. I want you to know the whole story of the ideas I have tried to carry out.