IS Colloquium featuring Ted Nelson on Reaching Out of the Paperdigm

11/10/2011:

REACHING OUT OF THE PAPERDIGM

Theodor Holm Nelson PhD
Project Xanadu and The Internet Archive

The computer world pretends to be finished, but never will be. In fact it simulates the past: computers for secretaries, as designed by Xerox in the 1970s, have become our working world. Today's "computer documents" (.doc and .pdf) simulate paper and the fancy printing of long ago. The Web added trivial one-way jumps, allowing pogo-stick travel between pages. But what of deeper connection?

We need deep, live documents of a very different kind for the interactive screen, as foreseen by Bush and Engelbart and others-- for annotation and detailed discussion and scholarship, for organizing and decision-making, for lawmaking and litigation, and for entirely new forms of writing. Such profusely connected, living documents are still possible, but require a wholly different infrastructure. We will show some of these alternatives.

Ted Nelson is an idealistic troublemaker who coined the word 'hypertext' in the sixties, and continues to fight for a completely different computer world.

This IS Colloquium is co-sponsored by the UCLA Library.

Young Research Library Conference Room, 3pm

A reception will follow the colloquium.

Colloquium flyer

For more information, please visit http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/events/colloquia/index.htm.