Hypertext – Links from the past

Introduction

Clickable text is so ubiquitous in everyday life that the concept of ‘linking’ to content is second nature. Hypertext has shaped the way that we think of the organization of information and the way we think of the information itself. Hypertext has been instrumental in the development of the individual nature of the personal computer, and the integration of massive amounts of people.

Definition

Hypertext is “ … text, distributed to a set of discrete sections, with referential links in between.”[ Müller-Prove] The most typical manifestation of hypertext is through World Wide Web, which

typically presents hypertext ‘links’ as underlined, blue text in order to separate it from the rest of the content on a web-page. When a person selects a link, they are re-directed to the information at the ‘target’ of the link.

Hypertext is essentially an expansion on the concept of reference. Precursors of hypertext include: Table of Contents, Footnotes, and Bibliographies. In a Table of Contents, one needs only find the page number associated with the chapter that you are interested in and turn to that page in order to access the content. Footnotes allow the author to refer to items that support their argument without breaking the flow of the document. Bibliographies ‘links’ to other

documents referenced in the creation of a document.

Bush and the Memex

Hypertext was conceived of very early. The ‘backbone of the web’ began in the mind of a man

named Vannevar Bush. Bush was the Director of the Office of Scientific Research and

Development which coordinate scientific research during World War II. In an article entitled “As

We May Think” published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, Bush outlined his ideas for the future of the organization of knowledge:

“A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave oneitem in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.” [Bush]

Bush envisioned the his information device as an item shaped like a desk with screens that the user can read from and some controls, such as a keyboard and sets of buttons and levers. This device would be “… a device in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” [Bush] Bush saw into the future and predicted, to some extent, the personal computer.

Engelbart’s Expansion

The memex was never created. Douglas Engelbart took the concept of Bush’s memex and took

steps toward making it a reality [Simpson]. In his 1962 paper, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual

Framework” Engelbart described a system that allowed a

professional to navigate cross-linked data [Engelbart]. Engelbart’s ideas were somewhat difficult for the rest of the

scientific community to stomach because computers were gigantic number-crunching

machines that

performed relatively simple number-related tasks.

On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart made a bold move.

In a session of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, Engelbart presented was has been described as “The mother of all demos” to an

audience of 1000 computer professionals. In the demo Engelbart presented the Online System (NLS) for the first time. NLS was full of ‘firsts’, including the mouse, hypermedia, computer-aided meetings, and document version control system. [Engelbart, Christina]

Nelson and Project Xanadu

The word ‘hypertext’ was coined by Ted Nelson and was first published in a paper for th

e Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1965 [Nelson 1]. Nelson has also been credited with the first use of the term ‘hypermedia’. While Nelson had also been greatly influenced by

Bush’s “As We May Think” paper, his approach was vastly different from Engelbart’s. Where Engelbart and Bush approached the problem of knowledge organization from a practical, mechanical perspective, Nelson came from a background of philosophy and sociology.

In 1960, Ted Nelson founded Project Xanadu [Xanadu] , which was the first ever hypertext project. In ‘Weaving the Web’, Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti stated [Berners-Lee 1]

“Ted Nelson, a professional visionary, wrote in 1965 of "Literary Machines,"computers that would enable people to write and publish in a new, nonlinear format, which he called hypertext. Hypertext was "nonsequential" text, in which a reader was not constrained to read in any particular order, but could follow links and delve into the original document from a short quotation. Ted described a futuristic project, Xanadu[®], in which all the world's information could be published in hypertext. For example, if you were reading this book in hypertext, you would be able to follow a link from my reference to Xanadu to further details of that project. In Ted's vision, every quotation would have been a link back to its source, allowing original authors to be compensated by a very small amount each time the quotation was read. He had the dream of a utopian society in which all information could be shared among people who communicated as equals.”

Nelson collaborated with Andries van Dam at Brown University in 1987 on the Hypertext Editing System, which was designed to produce printed documents nicely and efficiently on the IBM/360 system, but primarily to explore the hypertext concept. The Hypertext Editing System is described as “a pointer-rich data structure on arbitrary-length pages.”[Van Dam]

Nelson believes that his original ideas for hypertext have yet to be fully implemented. On its home page, the Project Xanadu website boldly states

“Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.

WE FIGHT ON.”[Xanadu]

Hypertext Explosion

Interest in hypertext finally exploded in 1987, due to the earlier release of Apple Computer’s of HyperCard , the release of Peter J. Brown’s GUIDE and Brown University’s Intermedia software. In November 1987, the first Association of Computer Machinery’s hypertext academic conference took place at the University of North Carolina. It was a huge success. According to Jakob Nielson’s 1987 Hypertext Bulletin ,

“When the workshop was originally planned in the fall of 1986, the planners were not sure whether they would be able to get a large enough set of papers and participants. But they had ended up having 500 people compete for the 200 seats at the

workshop.” [Nielsen]

Andries Van Dam presented the keynote address to the crowd about his earlier work in on the 1968 Hypertext Editing System. Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart were among the illustrious speakers at the 1987 Hypertext Conference.

Berners-Lee and the Web

In May of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN proposed the World Wide Web as a solution to the

communication problems of the widely-distributed CERN scientists. In his paper “Information Management: A

Proposal” Berners-Lee proposed a ‘Mesh’ that would solve CERN’s ‘information loss’ problem.

“Meanwhile, several programs have been made exploring these ideas (referring to an earlier discussion of hypertext), both commercially and academically. Most of them use "hot spots" in documents, like icons, or highlighted phrases, as sensitive areas. touching a hot spot with a mouse brings up the relevant information, or expands the text on the screen to include it. Imagine, then, the references in this document, all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse.”[Berners-Lee 2]

In a section entitled “What will the system look like?” Berners-Lee included the following diagram, which demonstrated the centrality of ‘hypertext’ to his idea of the ‘Mesh’.

Paradigm Transformation

Hypertext represented a radical departure from all textuality before its advent. In the time Vannevar Bush, the very idea seemed fanciful, yet inspiring. The exponentially increasing amount of information available after World War II made Bush keenly aware of the necessity of reducing the amount of time to locate information.

In addition to their technical and textual contributions to the concept of hypertext, Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson championed a vital part of Bush’s vision. In “As We May Think” the Memex that was proposed was a personal device in which “… an individual stores all his book, records, and communications”[Bush]. The Memex was a personal device. Engelbart and Nelson focused their research on the communication and record-keeping of individuals.

Hypertext simultaneously breaks language and unites people. The World Wide Web connected scientists initially and now connects the world. Instantaneous access to arcane information is possible by merely “Touching a hot spot with a mouse” in Berners-Lee’s words. Ted Nelson argues that hypertext breaks allows for escape from the tyranny of sequential text. An hypertext user can follow Alice down the rabbit hole and end up immersed in the saga of the origination of photography as a an art form .

Throughout the history of hypertext, you can catch glimpses of the extraordinary sparks of foresight that individuals have had. No one visionary can really claim the credit for what has become the modern concept of hypertext, yet the combined brilliance of its inventors has created something that we do not yet fully grasp.

Sources

Berners-Lee Tim and Fischetti, Mark Weaving the Web. Harper/San Francisco, 1999, p.5.

Berners-Lee, Tim 1989 Information Management: A Proposal. W3 Archive

http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

Bush, Vannevar July 1945 As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/Secondary/Bush.html

Engelbart, Christina 1986 A Lifetime Pursuit. Doug Engelbart Institute http://www.dougengelbart.org/history/engelbart.html

Engelbart, Douglas C. October 1962 AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework. SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223 http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

Müller-Prove, Matthias 2009 Hypertext. Vision and Reality of Hypertext and Graphical User Interfaces http://www.mprove.de/diplom/text/2_hypertext.html

Nelson, Theodor Holm 1965 Complex information processing: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate. ACM Annual Conference/Annual Meeting Proceedings of the 1965 20th national conference

DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/800197.806036

Nielsen, Jakob 1988 Hypertext ’87. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin Volume 19, Issue 4 (April 1988) DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/43950.43953

Simpson, R., Renear, A., Mylonas, E., and van Dam, A. 1996. 50 years after “As we may think”: the Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush symposium. interactions 3, 2 (Mar. 1996), 47-67. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/227181.227187

Van Dam, A. 1988. Hypertext '87: keynote address. Commun. ACM 31, 7 (Jul. 1988), 887-895. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/48511.48519

Wolf, Gary 1993 The Curse of Xanadu. Wired Magazine http://www.wired.com/wired/archive//3.06/xanadu_pr.html

Xanadu Project Project Xanadu http://www.xanadu.com/

Additional Sources

Wikipedia Page - Hypertext

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext

Wikipedia Page - Douglas Engelbart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

Wikipedia Page - Ted Nelson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

Nelson, Ted "Way Out of the Box"

http://ted.hyperland.com/TQdox/zifty.d9-TQframer.html

The Demo - Video of 'The Mother of All Demos'

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

Dalgaard, Rune Hypertext and the Scholarly Archive: Intertexts, Paratexts and Metatexts at Work. ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (august 2001, Aarhus, Denmark). New York: ACM Press: 175-184.

http://imv.au.dk/~runed/pub/dalgaard_acmht01.html

The Meteoric Rise of Online Communities

The Meteoric Rise of Online Communities
Historical Perspective Essay
Liz Foster

In the beginning
From the moment people started connecting computers together, humans have been using them to talk to each other. The genesis of online communities, defined as a group of people who interact in a virtual environment, predates the internet. The first online communities developed among the scientists who invented them, for sharing knowledge within a single virtual space. Pioneers of online communities knew that the old practice of publishing findings across many different books and journals was hampering scientific research. As we know from our readings, as early as 1945 Vannevar Bush dreamed of a device that could read an entire research library and use links and notes created by researchers to build links and associations between documents.

The internet was invented in 1969 (ARPANET), but email was invented four years earlier in 1965. By 1971, email was in use on networks, and in no time, email was the main task that people used networks for. Electronic mailing lists for sending messages to large groups of subscribers appeared in 1975, the first time users were able to complete one-to-many postings. Soon after came Ward Christenson’s Computer Bulletin Board System (CBBS), dreamed up when Mr. Christenson was snowed in during a storm in 1978. Computer bulletin boards worked in a manner very similar to their physical inspiration. Just as in the cork and wood variety, bulletin board users posted messages to the board, but the electronic version had the added ability to associate subsequent message on the same topic with the each other (called threading). By 1979 we had Usenet, the precursor to all those threaded message boards we still see today. Like CBBS, Usenet used a bulletin board model, but unlike CBBS, participants were not limited to one server. Usenet had thousands of topics, organized in a hierarchy of newsgroups, covering all kinds of interests, including “net.auto” for discussions about cars, “net.bugs” for discussions about Unix bug reports, and so on. Newsgroups still exist – our “comm6480” Google Group is living proof.

Things get personal
1979 also saw the arrival on the scene of multiuser dungeons (MUDs), which combined role playing and chat to allow a large number of players to compete against and cooperate with each other in a virtual world. Some claim chat started much earlier, with 1973's Talkomatic for the PLATO time-sharing system. The origins may not be certain, but what is for sure is that in no time users had discovered that if chat was good for business or scientific communication, it was even better for flirting with or insulting people you’ve never met before, and doing it anonymously if you so choose. Perhaps most significantly for the online community, 1979 also saw the arrival of the first emoticon, “-)”, meant to represent “tongue in cheek”.

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lees and Robert Cailliau launched the World Wide Web while working for CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research). Commercial online services for consumers like CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online soon followed, lowering technical barriers and enabling thousands upon thousands of ordinary folk to connect to each other and the entire world. Online communities moved from their geeky beginnings to the mainstream, and with this broader access, fears about the quality and nature of web participation grew. The resulting webmania began what was labeled the “Eternal September”, an expression coined in 1993 that refers to the annual September influx of university students to Usenet, and their ignorance of any sense of netiquette. Some “old-time” Usenet users believed that these new users degraded the standards of discourse and behavior on the wider internet.

The internet became even more personal with the advent of online diaries, or blogs (a contraction of web log), where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Swarthmore student Justin Hall is generally credited with creating the first blog ever, Links.net, in 1994.

Social networks
In the late 1990’s, a new branch of online communication grew out of the old Web-based communities – social networks. If online communities used to be exclusively for the purpose of sharing ideas, thanks to social networks they were now used for sharing your personal life.
Some early internet social networks, such as 1997's SixDegrees.com and 2002's Friendster, fell by the wayside, but they inspired the rash of social networking sites we see now, like Facebook, and LinkedIn, and the hundreds, if not thousands of hopefuls that exist today. With products like Groupsite it is even possible to build your own social networking site and tailor it to your own preferences.

Almost all the pieces were in place to get the entire world connected online, and then something came along that truly tipped connectedness over the edge – the ability to connect via cell phones, making community participation truly mobile. The Internet can now be accessed from almost anywhere, and from numerous devices, as long that there is a wireless network supporting that device's technology. Social networking sites like Twitter tapped into this new mobility. Now the world had constant contact, anytime, all the time. There was nowhere left to hide.

The good, the bad and the ugly
Participation in online communities has risen exponentially. Facebook trebled its membership in the last year, and just last week reached the 300,000,000 member milestone, a number that approaches the entire population of the United States. And that’s just one site.

It is clear that years ago online communities spread beyond the realm of tight-knit, self-regulating professional communication to the world at large. And while so much good has come out of this tsunami of connectedness, our current state encompasses far more than the mutually beneficial sharing of ideas the mediums’ forefathers envisioned. These communities have gone beyond the shiny, brightly lit hallways of universities and laboratories, and allowed all of us to see into the dark, musty, cobweb-streaked corners of society. Control has moved from the hands of “professionals” to, well, everybody, and the results have been unpredictable. As the ability to access these communities spread to people of all ages and citizens of every country, news reports warned of potential dangers to unsuspecting or under-informed participants on a daily basis. Along with the sharing of knowledge hoped for in the utopian dream of these early innovators, we also have online stalkers, predators, and cyber-terrorists.

Less dramatically, there is the fear that the Internet, and online communities in particular, have compromised our privacy. Young people in particular don’t understand the incredible reach of their online lives, and its permanence. Photos and remarks posted online can be more than just a temporary embarrassment; they can lead to devastating personal and professional consequences. In a survey commissioned by CareerBuilder.com, the research firm Harris Interactive found that of 2,667 HR professionals polled, 45% of them use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future. In this poll, it was revealed that 35% of hiring companies passed on an applicant because of some content in their social networking sites: provocative photos (53%), drug or alcohol related content (44%), or negative comments about previous employers, co-workers or clients (35%) were all sited as reasons for not choosing an applicant. Interestingly, more than 10% passed on an applicant because they used emoticons, or text message lingo – “lol”, “omg” and the like. It seems that President Obama was right on the money when he warned students at Wakefield High School (before his National Address to America’s Schoolchildren on September 8, 2009), “Be careful what you post on Facebook. Whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life.”

But it can’t be denied that there is tremendous potential for good in online communities. They can connect people to good causes, and provide quick answers to simple questions. Communities are unbeatable at organizing large groups of people quickly. They tear down geographical barriers, making us aware of the struggles and achievements of people from around the world. Online communities may have untapped potential for fostering tolerance. Ignoring for the moment community members who attach their own photos to their online identities, or donkeys or elephants or flags or objects that could be considered inflammatory or divisive, if you can’t see the person you’re talking to, you may be more open to their ideas.

Some would say the opposite is true, that online communities are by design a barrier to tolerance – because you blog on this site, or belong to this social group, you must think this way. In an article in “Ethics and Information Technology (Parsell, 2008) it was suggested that virtual communities can lead to attitude polarization. Users tend to gravitate toward communities that are composed of people who share our interests, opinions, personalities and yes, even our prejudices, thus providing confirmation and validation for our basest natures.

In “The Computer as a Communication Device”, Licklider and Taylor anticipate a world where “life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity…communication will be more effective and productive, and therefore more enjoyable.” I suppose in the age of online communities, we’ve just hit puberty. Maybe if we can get past this stage of over-sharing and narcissism, bickering and gossip-mongering, we can achieve that dream. Or is it true that, as Craig Kinsley, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Richmond asserts, humans crave contact and human interaction, but interaction over the Internet is without substance.

Sources:
Lake, M., (July 15, 2009) “Timeline: The evolution of online communities”, Computerworld, (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135308/Timeline_The_evolution_of_online_communities).

Preece, J., Maloney-Krichmar, D. and Abras, C. (2003 in press) History of Emergence of Online Communities. In B. Wellman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Community. Berkshire Publishing Group, Sage.

Parsell, M. (2008) Pernicious virtual communities: Identity, polarisation and the Web 2.0. Ethics and Information Technology. Volume 10, Number 1: 41-56.

Hauben, Michael and Hauben, (1996) Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/book/).

Licklider, J. C. R., & Taylor, R. W. (1968, April). The computer as a communication device. Science and Technology.

(Aug. 19, 2009) “Forty-five Percent of Employers Use Social Networking Sites to Research Job Candidates, CareerBuilder Survey Finds” (http://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdetail.aspx).

The Online Strategy of Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign

“Without the Internet, Barack Obama would still be the junior senator from Illinois”, states Colin Delany, in his ebook Lessons for Online Communicators in 2009 and Beyond.

That may be an overstatement, but it was the web-centered approach of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign that not only contributed to his election, but also taught the world about using the web to engage and catalyze audiences. I believe that these techniques will undoubtedly have an impact on future political campaigns and beyond, including the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Communications, and Design.

Delany reports that the Obama campaign’s approach employed “a combination of both new and proven online technologies to organize volunteers, to find new supporters and put them to work, to turn out voters on election day and (of course) to raise unprecedented amounts of money – all contributing to a crucial edge in the primary and general elections.”

Digital Strategy

In 2007, before his candidacy was announced, Obama’s staff hired experts to develop a new media strategy. Two early members were Chris Hughes, a founding member of Facebook who left the company to join the campaign and Joe Rospas, who worked for Blue Slate Digital. Their team’s goal was go beyond using the internet to communicate to an audience. They envisioned supporters connecting with each other, inspiring each other and mobilizing for a cause.

The key to their strategy was My.BarackObama.com, nicknamed MyBo. It was a site where supporters could register, learn about the campaign, contribute, find events, learn how to host events or simply buy a t-shirt.

As described by David Talbot in an article for the Boston Globe, “Newcomers to MyBo found simple intuitive ways to get involved. You could click a button to donate. You could see maps, displaying locations and details about area house parties. You could, of course, organize your own event and download the Obama message du jour. You could establish your own fund-raising efforts and watch the “thermometer” rise as your acquaintances ponied up. And after you surrendered your e-mail address, you would get messages signed by everyone from Michelle Obama to Al Gore, with new exhortations as the primary and general election campaigns progressed”.

Another social media solution guided supporters to more grassroots activities. Talbot describes how the campaign took the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) national voter database and turned “yesterday’s state-by-state spreadsheets into something as easily accessed and manipulated as an iPod song list…Tens of thousands of volunteers -- including many logging onto MyBo, others entering from the DNC site or from computers at local campaign offices -- clicked a button to download small batches of voters' names, a script for querying them about their views and voting plans, and their local polling addresses. Millions of such calls were made during the heated primary battle -- a scale unprecedented because of the previous practical barriers”.

From text messaging to online tools that steered voters to polling locations to YouTube videos, the campaign made online networking central to their methodology.

Context

Making use of the internet as part of a political campaign’s methodology wasn’t new. Back in 1996, Republican nominee Bob Dole called out his website at the end of a national debate, encouraging viewers to visit it. Hundreds of thousands of viewers took him up on his offer and tried to go to his site at the same time, which unfortunately was only able to accommodate 10,000. The lesson learned that day was to be prepared to accommodate national traffic when inviting a national audience to a website.

Early in the 2000 election, John McCain’s campaign was very active online. They held a virtual fundraiser, ran targeted banner ads and enabled supporters to register online. George W. Bush and Al Gore also had websites and communicated via email to supporters, but the role of the internet was a less important part of their campaign strategy.

Howard Dean, presidential hopeful in 2004, took a more focused approach to using the internet during his campaign. Dean’s campaign raised $27 million in Internet donations. He used blogging and online social groups to drive supporters. Both John Kerry and Bush campaigns took note and incorporated these techniques into their strategies.

In late 2006, Facebook decided to allow candidates to create profiles – this was before celebrities and even products could have fan pages. In fact, that was the beginning of what became a career transition for Chris Hughes. Barack Obama wanted a Facebook profile and his staff worked with Hughes to set it up.

Hughes says, in an interview with Fast Company’s Ellen McGirt, “By 2007, we were finally living in a culture where people get what networks are and what technology can do to connect people.”

Still, as McGirt explains, “To understand what the campaign was up against in the early days, it's necessary to excise the memories of Obama speechifying to record-breaking crowds and raking in pots of money, and remember what he was in early 2007: a little-known senator with a scary-sounding name and a thin résumé, who had neither Hillary Clinton's inevitability nor a Rolodex of wealthy supporters.”

Another person who worked on the campaign, Jascha Franklin-Hodge (Blue Slate Digital’s chief technology officer), remembers that from the beginning, the Obama campaign “embraced what it was we were trying to do: show that technology wasn’t just a tool in the arsenal, but a transformative force. They knew that they didn’t have the kind of political machine Clinton was going to come in with. They had to build their own machine, and the way to do this was with the online tools. The campaign understood the power of Internet to get people engaged in the process on a scale never done before.”

Results

What they achieved was impressive.

• Obama’s campaign earned $500 million in online donations from more than 3 million people


• People spent 14 million hours watching campaign-related Obama videos on YouTube, 50 million views in all


• Supporters formed 35,000 groups for themselves defined by things like geographical location and shared pop-culture interests


• Within MyBo, supporters’ own fundraising efforts earned $30 million from 70,000 individuals


• In the final days before the election, thousands of volunteers used MyBo to make more than 3 million calls


• Volunteers planned 200,000 real-world events and posted 400,000 blog entries


• By the end, MyBo users had created over 2 million profiles

Impacts –Lessons learned

People around the world have been reviewing the efforts of the Obama’s campaign, lauding its adept use of social media. Politicians from all parties will be pulling out the best practices to use in future efforts.

However, I believe the lessons learned will impact fields beyond politics and social causes, and I’m not alone.

In Colin Delany’s Lessons for Online Communicators in 2009 and Beyond, he puts forth essential methods used in the campaign that are applicable as much to the corporate world as to the worlds of politics and non-profits. They speak to the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Communications and Design too.

Here are the lessons that stood out the most for me from Delany’s summary:

• “For Obama, Online Communications was Communications, Not Technology - For starters, Obama’s new media department was NOT a part of the campaign’s tech team. Instead, it was an independent branch of the campaign, coequal with communications, field and finance, and was in fact as much a client of the technology folks as, say, the press department was. Contrast this with the arrangement at many other campaigns and advocacy groups [and companies], in which the online communications team is buried in a basement and often excluded from the communications planning process until its final stages, leaving the online element an afterthought with a stunted chance at success.
  


• Online Communications was Integrated across Entire Campaign - Separate and equal, but also integrated: notwithstanding its distinct place in the campaign structure, the Obama new media team worked directly and daily with their colleagues in other departments.
  


• Measure, Cut, then Measure Again - Obama’s campaign tracked the success of every e-mail, text message and Web site visit, capitalizing on the analytics that are inherent in digital communications. Each ad and e-mail was created in multiple versions (e.g., different headers, buttons vs. links, video vs. audio vs. plain text) to test what worked and what did not. The campaign developed more than 7,000 customized e-mails, tailored to individual prospects, and made real-time improvements to its outreach materials. Adjustments were made daily to improve performance and conversion. They rarely seemed to aim for immediate perfection, but instead built tools that were needed and that worked, and then incrementally improved them through testing and experience.”
  

Ravi Sawhney, in a post for Fast Company, described important lessons for design professionals that he took from the Obama campaign strategy. Here he describes what designers can learn from the MyBo web site: “We can learn the value of creating designs that empower and connect. Don’t let the scope and impact of MyBo intimidate you. The empowerment doesn’t have to be as world-changing as the Obama campaign. It can be as simple as a kitchen tool that empowers a parent to make a meal that connects their family around the dinner table. The real benefit to companies is how this empowerment connects consumers to brands. When you successfully create this connection, you’ve set yourself up to benefit from the grassroots campaign known as viral demand. When people love your products, they’re happy to do your PR work for you”.

There were many elements of Obama’s online campaign strategy that resonated with me professionally. My career is focused on usability research and delivering online user experiences that best meet my company’s and our customers’ needs. The same is true of any number of HCI professionals and, of course, is not limited to online efforts or even software development. As we approach our work, we would do well to keep in mind what helped make the Obama campaign successful:

• To know our customers


• To keep the customer integral to design


• To understand the importance of iterative development


• To use testing and analysis throughout the design and development process


• To listen to and empower our customers

The Keyboard---Expert Interface: An Historical Perspective Essay

Few computer components are more recognizable than the keyboard. Though special-purpose setups such as living room media centers are beginning to chip away at was was once nearly perfect ubiquity among computer peripherals, the keyboard remains an indispensable device for nearly every computer user. Considering the vast range of consumer expertise and use durations, this input device is a strikingly odd champion of instruments. The layout originates as an intentional impediment to user efficacy and anyone learning how to use it can attest to the hundreds of hours needed to reach moderate proficiency. This essay traces the origins of this curious state of affairs and examines the side-effects created along the way.

The roots of the modern keyboard lie in development of the typewriter. Though it was a product of numerous inventors' refinement and experimentation, one model managed to be the first commercial success---the 1867 Type-Writer from Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule[1]. The arrangement of letters from the subsequent commercial product closely resembles the modern "QWERTY" key order [1]; this arises from the well-known detail that when the keys were placed in alphabetical order, the letter bars would collide and jam up the machine. Less well-publicized, though, is that a contributing reason to the new order was that early typists used two-finger hunt-and-peck typing style and the new order delayed location of each subsequent key, which allowed more time for the bars to clear each other[2].

The success of the original "typewriter" eventually compelled competitors to adopt the same idiosyncratic key arrangement which deprived consumers of a choice about their key layout[1]. Once the layout gained enough inertia, no other layout could afford the loss of sales to the established base, even if it were demonstrably superior, as was the case with the Dvorak layout.

Eventually, typists discovered the technique touch-typing, which was publicized by early speed-typing contests among touch-typists [2]. This did provide a large speed boost from the twenty words or less per minute that might be a reasonable expectation of a hunt-and-peck typist [2]. However, learning to touch-type on a QWERTY keyboard is a process that commonly runs hundreds of hours (any new typist will readily attest to the protracted education period). The advance provided by touch-typing is merely to allow an alternative to the poor usability base-case; the alternative, however, demands development of a very specific skill over a long period---it does nothing to improve the situation for users who do not wish to invest the considerable time and effort demanded by learning to touch-type. This marks the beginning of a schism in users of QWERTY key arrangements. Those who develop an expertise in the form of touch-typing are able to utilize the device vastly more effectively than those who cannot or do not follow that path. The non-expert (i.e. hunt-and-peck) typists, also reveal their comparatively low skill level immediately when typing, since the movement pattern used is so distinct from that employed by touch typists. This very clear skill hierarchy produces social consequences that are undoubtedly experienced by all present.

As long as QWERTY keyboards were not common, the effects above were easily dismissable---typing might be a useful skill (like double-entry bookkeeping), but advanced skill therein was only demanded in specific, largely administrative, professions. The advent of computers would change all this. Computers often need text input, so designers looked to the fastest easily adapted text entry tool to fill this need.

Typewriters fit the bill [3].

Considering the experts-only domain that largely characterized early computer work both in academia and with hobbyists, an expertise-necessitating input device like a typewriter made sense.

As computers became gradually more widely-used, perhaps there was never a large enough influx of new, unskilled users to warrant the development of a less expert-oriented text input device. Perhaps the difference in learning effort never overcame the increased cost of designing a new test input system. Perhaps adopters mostly switched immediately into use levels that justified a traditional keyboard. Whatever the reason, there were no serious efforts to obsolete the now century-old design.

Then the mouse appeared. First at the Stafford Research Center, but soon shipping with Apple Computer's hot new line of PCs, the mouse was an enormous break with interface tradition [4]. Suddenly, instead of slow-to-master keyboard interactions, the mouse offered a less efficient---but far easier to learn and understand---means for performing computing tasks. As evidenced by the considerable success of the MacIntosh line that sported the novel interface[5], there had indeed been a market for a new input device. A keyboard still tagged along with every mouse, regardless of the popularity of the latter. It might have been supplanted as the favorite interaction channel, but the keyboard still ruled text input, not to mention its utility for expert interactions.

This dichotomy of interactions again cleaved the user groups, one part regarding the graphical interface as a toy [6], the other believing that the command-line amounted to an archaic concession to bygone computers' limitations[6]. Neal Stephenson holds that the precision and complexity afforded by the command-line (a fundamentally keyboard-oriented interface) is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness [6]. By limiting the user with simple graphical metaphors and a very simple control (the mouse), they need muster less intellectual effort to perform a task; conversely, complex or very precise desires may not be possible to express in such a framework [6]. An illustration of these differences would be a Unix server, which rarely would have a mouse since no task thereon would not be fastest, safest, and easiest expressed by strings of text. On the other end of the spectrum lies software such as MacOS, which, were it not for text-entry needs, would quite comfortably disregard the keyboard.

This, therefore, is the most significant effect of the design of the keyboard: keyed input (including typed commands) is largely targeted at experts and power users, mouse/pointer input is target at everyone else and often garners primary attention during the design process. This tradition seems to have indoctrinated users with the idea that hot-keys and shortcuts are inherently harder even if the user is comfortable entering text on a keyboard and that mouse-driven interactions are easier to learn and remember.

Of course, this author vehemently disagrees with the idea the keyboard control is any less easy to learn than mouse control once the user has learned touch-typing. One example of this idea is an experimental interface design discussed at the New Interface Advocate which leverages the unique advantages offered by keyboards.


Citations:

1. "Typewriter" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter, retrieved September 21, 2008
2. "Early Typewriter History" http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/jcb/Dvorak/history.html, retrieved September 21, 2008
3. "Teleprinter" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype, retrieved September 21, 2008
4. "Mouse (computing)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_(computing), retrieved September 22, 2008
5. "Macintosh" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh, retrieved September 22, 2008
6. "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" Neal Stephenson, 1999
   

What is the Legacy of the Memex?

Introduction
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly called "As We May Think." During the war, Bush had been in charge of coordinating the research of six thousand American scientists as they attempted to apply their expertise to the battlefield. However, with the war at a close, Bush clearly crafted the paper for a civilian audience. Bush's main point is that we have accumulated a giant body of research, but we have not figured out how to organized knowledge so that it is immediately accessible.  With the war over, Bush asks, "What are the scientists to do next?" (1). "As We May Think" is Bush's answer to this question. His foresight was remarkable. He essentially sketched out what we now call the personal computer, the internet, Google and Web 2.0 all wrapped up in one, imaginative concept he called the "Memex."  Bush and his Memex influenced many of the luminaries in the fields of computer science and human-computer interaction (HCI), therefore, how can we characterize the impact of the Memex?

What is a Memex?

The Memex was a "sort of mechanized private file and library...a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory" (Bush 4).  What Bush imagined was essentially a modern desktop computer with internet access and a large hard drive. He describes the user building a "trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him" (4).  In fact, he even imagines saved searches, "And his trails do not fade" (4). He describes the idea of Google, "There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record" (12).  The Memex is capable of calling up Web 2.0 and Wikipedia-style collective intelligence technologies: "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the Memex and there amplified" (4).

Influence of The Memex

Bush and the Memex have had a remarkably long and deep influence in the world HCI.  J.C.R. Licklider, one of the most important figures in the history of computing, HCI and the birth of the internet, credited Bush in the introduction to his 1965 book Libraries of the Future for defining the "information problem" (Stefik 23).  Another visionary directly influenced by Bush and the Memex was Doug Engelbart.  Engelbart was a genius far ahead of his time.  He invented the mouse, and he was using computers for video conferencing back in the 1960s ("Internet Pioneers").  In a 1962 letter to Bush, he cites "As We May Think" as a key influence in his own thinking:

Stanford Research Institute

Menlo Park, California

May 24, 1962

Dr. Vannevar Bush
Professor Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Dr. Bush:

I wish permission from you to extract lengthy and definitely acknowledged quotes from your article, "As We May Think," that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945.  These quotes would appear in a report that I am writing for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and I am sending a parallel request to The Atlantic Monthly.

For your information I am enclosing a relatively brief and quite general writeup describing the program that I am trying to develop here at Stanford Research Institute.  The report which I am writing (and for which I am requesting quotation permission from you) is a detailed description of the conceptual structure that I have developed over the years to orient my pursuit of this objective of increasing the individual human's intellectual effectiveness.  It will also contain a number of examples of the way in which new equipment can lead to new methods and improved effectiveness, to illustrate my more general (but non-numerical) framework, and your article is quite the best that I have found in print to offer examples of this.
I might add that this article of yours has probably influenced me quite basically.  I remember finding it and avidly reading it in a Red Cross library on the edge of the jungle on Leyte, one of the Phillipine [sic] Islands, in the Fall of 1945.

Engelbart goes on to say:

I re-discovered your article about three years ago, and was rather startled to realized how much I had aligned my sights along the vector you had described. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the reading of this article sixteen and a half years ago hadn't had a real influence upon the course of my thoughts and actions (Nyce and Kahn 235).

At a 1972 conference on interactive computing, Ted Nelson, the man who created hypertext, gave a talk titled "As We Will Think." Nelson wrote:

In this paper, an effort in counter-discipleship, I hope to remind readers of what Bush did and did not say, and point out what is not yet recognized: that much of what he predicted is possible now; the Memex is here; the 'trails' he spoke of--suitably generalized, and now called hypertexts--may, and should, become the principal publishing form of the future (Nyce and Kahn 245).

Nelson's postion--that hypertext should be the primary publishing format--is provacative, and it is illustrates again the powerful influence of Vannevar Bush.

Should I Record All My Life Bits?

Aside from influencing some of the key players at the dawn of the internet and computing, the Memex continues to inspire creative projects in the 21st century.  One of the most fascinating is the Microsoft funded, MyLifeBits, which describes itself as "a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort" (MyLifeBits).  In a 2007 article, the creators of the project, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, lay out their vision:

Our team at Microsoft Research has begun a quest to digitally chronicle every aspect of a person's life, starting with one of our own lives (Bell's). For the past six years, we have attempted to record all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits--storing everything in a personal digital archive that is both searchable and secure. (MyLifeBits)

In addition, Bell and Gemmell argue that:

Digital memories can do more than simply assist the recollection of past events, conversations and projects. Portable sensors can take readings of things that are not even perceived by humans, such as oxygen levels in the blood or the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Computers can then scan these data to identify patterns: for instance, they might determine which environmental conditions worsen a child's asthma...After six years, Bell has amassed a digital archive of more than 300,000 records, taking up about 150 gigabytes of memory (1).

Is this the "fulfillment" of Bush's vision, as the creators suggest, or is this a misguided corruption?  What are the possible emotional pitfalls of human-life-as-database?  If we are not worried about the impact on ourselves then we should ask what our loved ones will do with all this digital stuff once we are gone.  In short, if the dream of the Memex is embodied in MyLifeBits, shouldn't someone ask whether or not this is a good thing?  The creators of the project begin their article by stating "Human memory can be maddeningly elusive" (1).  They go on to argue that, "digital memories allow one to vividly relive an event with sounds and images, enhancing personal reflection in much the same way that the Internet has aided scientific investigations. Every word one has ever read, whether in an e-mail, an electronic document or on a Web site, can be found again with just a few keystrokes" (1).

The assumption behind this statement is that humans want to remember everything, that somehow letting memories slip away is a problem.  Don't we need to let certain memories fade?  Isn't the fading of memory part of the healing and learning process?  If I can call up every mistake I have ever made in text or video or audio, I am fairly certain I would go mad.  Bush proposed Memex with the goal of organizing knowledge.  MyLifeBits challenges our idea of knowledge, or at least, self-knowledge.  I do realize that I possess a fairly large archive of email, dating back probably ten years now.  And I know that I rarely consult this archive.  However, what if that archive were more fully integrated into my life?  For example, what happens when our personal history records are merged with everyday knowledge searches?  Google has already stated that they hope to integrate historical newspapers with normal searches, so that your results turn up, essentially, everything (Soni).  Desktop searching has improved dramatically as well, with technologies like Apple's Spotlight constantly indexing every file on your computer.  Will we be able to move forward emotionally when our multimedia past is so accessible?  How will grieving family members deal with fifty years of email, text messages and phone conversations.  The dream of the Memex, as embodied in MyLifeBits and supported by a confluence of other technologies (Google, cheap storage, light and powerful digital camcorders, wide access to broadband and so forth) is not just changing our relationship to our present, but it has the potential to dramatically change our relationship with our past.  Was this what Vannevar Bush hoped for, or have we misinterpreted his dream?  Perhaps it is not a question worth asking.  Like tree roots growing around a large rock, the technology will always find a way to build itself, despite any objections or obstacles.  However, it is our responsibility to take responsibility for our inventions.  Computers have evolved from the distant, impersonal room-sized mystery boxes, to the personal computer and now we are on the brink of intimate computing.

Conclusion

Bush's vision of a "new profession of trail blazers" seems to have manifested itself in the form of Google (and other search technologies).  However, if humans are armed with the intimate technologies of the MyLifeBits project then we all become Google. We all become digital trailblazers, marking trails not of the "common record" but of our own record, which could then be integrated with the common record. Bush described a future researcher in his lab, "His hands are free, and he is not anchored" (6).  Technological optimists always seem to dream of a future in which more and better technology will liberate us from tedious work. MyLifeBits, I argue, will not liberate but shackle humans to their own past. MyLifeBits provides clear evidence that Vannevar Bush's Memex has had wide ranging influence in the world of HCI, but whether or not we ultimately benefit from the dream of the Memex is unclear.

Works Cited

Bell, Gordon, and Jim Gemmell. “A Digital Life.” Scientific American Feb 2007. 16 Sep 2008.

Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think." The Atlantic Monthly July 1945.

“Internet Pioneers.” 16 Sep 2008.

“MyLifeBits Project.” 16 Sep 2008.

Nyce, James M., and Paul Kahn. From Memex To Hypertext. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, Inc., 1991.

Soni, P. "Bringing History Online, One Newspaper at a Time." Weblog entry. The Official Google Blog. 9 Sep. 2008. Google, Inc. 9 Sept. 16.

Stefik, Mark, and Cerf, Vinton. Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. 16 Sep 2008.

Interactivity, The Video Game, and Chris Crawford

Historical Perspective Essay ~Matt Rolph

You float unsupported on the edge of darkness. Across the void, your mission objective: the flickering lights of the enemy. As you glide into your attack, their fire leaps out towards you, missing, missing, missing, and then – just as you near the goal – a direct hit. In that final fraction of a second, as an explosion renders around you, you wonder whether this is all there is or whether there can be something more. And then it’s over.

Of course, the space invader, the asteroid, and all the other creatures of their kind, are not made to wonder. They do not reflect on the nature of their existences. Their makers, on the other hand, have the luxury of philosophy. This has been the case since the beginning of computer driven games, an important part of the history of human-computer-interaction, but there have been precious few game makers who have questioned the repetitive aspects of game design, and none who have dared to do so more vocally than Chris Crawford, “dean of American game design.” To consider his complaints, it’s useful to look briefly at the history of computerized games, Crawford’s own career, and weigh some related concepts in HCI.

First, a definition of the computerized game: In the standard ‘video game’, the computer-managed, program-driven game field (sometimes all of it, sometimes a portion of it at any given time, or, in a text based example, a description of it, though we will deal only minimally with text-based games) is represented on graphical display. The player interacts with the game by means of an input device such as a paddle, joystick, mouse, keyboard, or another specialized device.

In 1958, physicist William “Willy” Higinbotham created a tennis-like game, “Tennis for Two”, displayed on an oscilloscope. He was head of the instrumentation division at Brookhaven National Laboratories in New York, and he meant his creation, which he initially put together from spare parts including an analog computer (not the digital computer his team was building for more serious work), to entertain visitors to the facility. It was the first video game, and somewhat resembled the later and more famous Pong. (Anderson, Hunter, “William Higinbotham”)

Willy … [used old part and an analog computer but] did make use of some recently invented transistors as flip-flop switches--a harbinger of things to come … The screen display was a side view of a tennis court … Each player held a prototypical paddle, a small box with a knob and button on it. The knob controlled the angle of the player's return, and the button chose the moment of the hit … Gravity, windspeed, and bounce were all portrayed … The game was simple, but fun to play, and its charm was infectious. [Higinbotham’s friend and colleague Dave] Potter remembers the popularity of the game: ‘The high schoolers liked it best. You couldn't pull them away from it.’ (Anderson)

The next known game was created by MIT student Steve Russell in 1961, who dubbed it “Spacewar”, and set it up on a Digital PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) minicomputer. It somewhat resembled the game we’ve come to know as “Asteroids” (Herman).

From the outset, interaction has meant a simulation of control over the motion of a game element around or into other elements. The computer-processed algorithms handled the relatively simple mathematics of collision or the lack thereof, tracking the coordinates of all elements on the field and triggering events when any given element overlapped or became directly adjacent to another. In other respects, games are different from other computer-aided tasks, as universal usability and the accessibility of task completion are not primary considerations (Lazzaro 680). Games typically offer levels or stages of increasing difficulty intended to result in the pre-conclusion termination of the experience for all but the most dedicated and adept players. This is particularly interesting when viewed through the lens of Lev Vygotsky’s social cognition theory, which suggests a ‘zone of proximal development’, a challenge slightly beyond the established capacities of the learner which, by virtue of that property, creates ideal conditions for independent problem solving, for engagement, and for learning, precisely as these games do. Vygotsky, it’s important to note, defined the ZPD as created by humans: “determined through problem solving under [human] adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (qtd in Berger). The implication is that in presenting a series of ever increasing challenges the video game serves in place of an adult teacher or more capable peer, another reason for adult concern about them, though most complaints focused on the amount of time the games consume and their simulations of violence. In terms of the math, it makes no difference whether the simulated collision involves a representation of a bullet or of a snowflake. The narrative metaphors associated with the games reflected standard themes and shooting was a very popular one. Even for a pacifist, it's hard to miss the appeal of the hyperbole of mythology, the polarization of us/them (or me/them) antagonism, and illusional immediacy of threat elements, all with very simple rules of engagement: fire at will. “Playing games in their discretionary time, gamers mainly play for the emotions the games create … player experience design crafts … cognitive and affective responses in conjunction with user behavior” (Lazzaro 681).

Crawford’s complaints about video game design are more substantive than anti-violence rhetoric. He is, in fact, an avid wargamer and began his programming hobby thinking about how to computerize games like the paper wargame, Blitzkrieg, which he and a friend played in 1966: “… I became an avid wargamer, and from there started thinking of my own designs. When computers became available, I built one and programmed it with a wargame.” (Krupa) Rather, he laments the limited nature of game interactivity and bemoans the repetitive nature of game design.

These days, Chris Crawford is less known for the games he has authored than for his presence in the industry as the pointed voice of reason. He is a reminder, to those who will listen, that maybe, just maybe, there is room for thoughtful and experimental game design in a world where million dollar budgets and months of technological hype, more often than not, result in peculiarly non-interactive titles … (Dadgum)

“In 1979, I got a job at Atari” (Krupa). Crawford was fresh from a job as a community college physics teacher when he started to write games. After initial successes at Atari, he was “promoted to supervise a group that trained programmers about the Atari computers” (Crawford, MobyGames). After Atari collapsed in 1984, Crawford continued his work as a freelance designer and developer, writing for the new Macintosh computer. He also authored 1982’s The Art of Computer Game Design and five other books on the subject (Krotoski) and founded the Journal of Computer Game Design and of the Game Developers Conference (Dadgum). Despite the longevity of his career and the commercial success of some of his titles (Atari 800 titles "SCRAM," "Energy Czar", Avalon Hill's "Legionnaire," "Eastern Front 1941; for the Macintosh, "Balance of Power," "Patton vs. Rommel," and "Patton Strikes Back,") Crawford is better known for controversial statements than for his designs.

In 2006, Chris Crawford was quoted as saying ‘the video game is dead.’ Asked for clarification, he offered “What I meant by that was that the creative life has gone out of the industry. And an industry that has no creative spark to it is just marking time to die” (Murdey).

Before he got to that point, he lamented what he perceived as a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of interactivity and evinced distaste for the central metaphors of the gaming community:

Unfortunately, the term "interactive" has been so overused that it has lost any meaning other than "get rich quick". We see the term applied to television, theater, cinema, drama, fiction, and multimedia, but the uses proposed belie a misunderstanding of the term. Yet, interactivity is the very essence of this "interactive" revolution. It therefore behooves me to launch the new Interactive Entertainment Design with a straightforward explanation of interactivity. … Part of the problem most people have in understanding interactivity lies in the paucity of examples. Interactivity is not like the movies (although some people who don't understand interactivity would like to think so). Interactivity is not like books. It's not like any product or defined medium that we've ever seen before. That's why it's revolutionary.

Take heart. There is one common experience we all share that is truly, fundamentally, interactive: a conversation. If you take some time to consider carefully the nature of conversations, I think that you'll come to a clearer understanding of interactivity. … This process goes back and forth until the participants terminate it. Thus, a conversation is an iterative process in which each participant in turn listens, thinks, and expresses. (Crawford , Fundamentals)

… I wouldn't be carping about the cinematic metaphor if I didn't have a better one to offer. I propose that we use the conversation as our metaphor for game design. I can imagine the howls of outrage at so prosaic a suggestion. How can I suggest replacing a glamorous, ego-stroking metaphor with a dull, drab one? We all know that people pay good money to see a movie; who would ever pay money to have a conversation? What possible entertainment value can a conversation offer? The answer, of course, is that a conversation has no entertainment value, but the reason why conversations have no entertainment value reveals a great deal. You see, a conversation is necessarily a two-person event. The world's greatest conversationalist could not carry on more than one conversation at a time. Thus, a person gifted with great powers of conversation could never parlay that gift into a marketable entertainment experience, because such conversations could not be shared by more than one person at a time. A singer can sing to thousands at once; an actor can play for millions via television or cinema; a storyteller can share her beautiful stories with countless numbers through print. But the hard reality is that a conversationalist entertainer must always have an audience of one, and it's pretty hard to make money with such a tiny audience. So conversation never developed as an entertainment form. But now we have a technology that eliminates the restriction on the audience. Think of a computer game as a "conversation in a can". Through the medium of the computer, the author interacts with the audience, and that interaction is a direct, one-on-one experience. Yet, we can duplicate the floppies on which the potential conversation is stored, thereby allowing the great conversationalist to reach many people. Suddenly, conversation has become an economically viable form of entertainment!

The true value of this metaphor is that it focuses our attention on the interactive nature of our work. A conversation is one of the few interactive experiences that we already know about. We all have a thorough understanding of the requirements of a good conversation. We can apply that understanding to our computer games to improve them. (Crawford, Conversational Metaphor)

Describing interactivity as conversation sets the bar high, requires incredible advances in artificial intelligence or a masterwork of design that effectively predicts the bulk of the possible player responses. An effective example, with or without commercial success, has yet to be realized.

Even of landmark games like The Sims, Crawford offers little praise:

Will Wright spoke with me just as he began working on The Sims, and I urged him to put interpersonal relationships in. He chose not to. … The Sims is a swig of water to a dying man in the desert. It really doesn't offer that much that's interpersonal, but the games industry has been so utterly devoid of it that even the slight whiffs of it you get in The Sims set people on fire. The Sims isn't about people, it's a housekeeping sim. It's consumerism plus housekeeping. It works, it's certainly better than shooting, and that's its success. But interpersonal interaction is not about going to the bathroom. It's much much more. The Sims is ultimately a cold game. The interactions people have, have a really mechanistic feel. (Krotoski)

Crawford also ascribes the lack of success with the female demographic to the lack of social reasoning in games:

[What is the essence of interactivity?] It's the choices, giving people lots of interesting choices. Actually, that's Sid Meier's definition of a good game too. It's just that you have to give choices that are intrinsically interesting, and that's why we have so intrinsically failed to address the female market. They are not interested in choices involving spatial reasoning and guns. Social reasoning is one of the primary entertainment impulses for women. You know, figuring out who likes whom, allies and enemies and that sort of thing. That's a major part of a woman's psychological or emotional life. That's what we should be doing. However it's a lot more complicated. It's easier to measure the trajectory of a bullet, but chasing people's feelings is a much more difficult job. (Krotoski)

Around the time Crawford was not quite exactly saying the video game is dead, there were a variety of innovations in the industry, including the advent of the Wii, hailed as a revolution in interactivity. To Crawford, though, a new controller didn’t represent a major change:

GS: Continuing with the Nintendo theme, do you feel that the Wii in is a step in the right direction as far as innovation? Or do you think it's going to be the same old stuff only with a fancy new controller?

CC: More likely, the latter. I'm not a fortune teller. I don't know what they'll do. But I think that it is reasonable to expect that an industry that hasn't produced any innovation in at least a decade is unlikely to change its spots. (Murdey)

Crawford’s own interactive storytelling project, the “Erazzmatron”, a decade or more in development, to be marketed as Storytron (http://www.storytron.com/), is in its infancy with an uncertain future ahead. Crawford chose the original project name and his domain name, erasmatazz.com, as a tribute to Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, a precursor to Martin Luther who pointed out the flaws of the Roman Catholic Church with intellectual rigor and acumen but did so while remaining a Catholic. If the game design establishment is like a great church, then perhaps Crawford is very like an Erasmus within it: calling for change, encouraging scrutiny of prevailing wisdom, but nevertheless remaining within rather than ‘lighting out for the territories’ (as Huck Finn might) and rejecting video games and their design entirely.

Whether Crawford is prophetic – foretelling the course games are to take, or, at least, one course they might take once the technology catches up with his vision – or whether he is simply a voice crying in the wilderness – an alternative theorist lamenting his once an insider, now an outsider status – he raises some interesting points regarding the nature of innovation in HCI.

GS: So you'd call yourself a pessimist on this front.

CC: Yeah, I think that’s valid. Hey, maybe they'll surprise us. But I've been preaching this sermon for 20 years now…more than that, in fact, and I haven't seen any serious attempt to move in that direction. Indeed, I hear all sorts of arguments as to why “we don't need to change our spots, we’re doing just fine the way we are.” And in fact, and this is a fundamental point, nobody changes unless they're in pain. And the industry is not in pain. So it's going to keep doing the same thing until it hurts. (Murdey)

There is a point at which the preservation of the status quo, the defense of the investment to date and the initial direction, outweighs anything promised by innovation. In theory, a variety of forces act on the developers of a technology to motivate them to innovate and improve upon existing technology; in practice, the industry moves in directions suggested by existing successes and investment in unproven alternatives is less likely. There is a risk that, to preserve the metaphors and prevailing thinking that has brought us this far, American HCI will follow the example of the American automobile industry and continue to sell sport-utility-class vehicles when an innovation – improved fuel efficiency, for example – could create new demand and address problems which, though currently of modest concern, will eventually become critical. When there is pain – a spike in gasoline prices, to continue the metaphor – the public demand for alternative solutions grows, but the pushing off the development of alternative solutions to that point when the cries become audible in the marketplace means that the end users of a technology will be disappointed, as an alternative solution will not be ready to deploy until years after the initial perception of crisis.

The game design industry can continue to improve upon the graphics, but so long as they rely on the same mechanisms of interactivity, whatever the input device, and cling to the same modalities and prevailing metaphors, they risk building essentially the same things over and over again, disappointing the existing gaming community and attracting less than the optimal number of new users. Attempting to standardize the appetites of the marketplace may work for a time, but can it work forever? Will there be something more?

AIGameDev.com. “What if game AI had been solved …” Forum discussion thread. 11 Sep 2008. 14 Sep 2008. http://forums.aigamedev.com/showthread.php?p=4798

Anderson, John. “Who Really Invented The Video Game?” Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games. I: 1, Spring 1983, p. 8. 14 Sep 2008. http://www.atarimagazines.com/cva/v1n1/inventedgames.php

Berger, Arthur Asa. Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomena. Transaction Books, 1993. p. vii. 14 Sep 2008. http://books.google.com/books

Berger, A.E. “Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development.” Encyclopedia of Educational Technology. Bob Hoffman, ed. SDSU Department of Educational Technology, 1994-2008. 13 Sep 2008. http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/vygotsky_zpd/index.htm

Crawford, Chris. Art of Computer Game Design, The. 1982. Washington State University. 14 Sep 2008. http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Coverpage.html

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History of GUI

“User interfaces have to do with people, and computer scientists don't like to work on problems involving people.”
- Stuart Card, interface researcher at Xerox PARC

When did the graphical user interface (GUI) become so engrained within our daily lives and society, and why? Surely to some, it was simply the shape of things to come, during a time when users would come to demand more from computers as they became much more personal devices. The eventual mainstream adaptation of computers, as well as the innovations of a select few, ahead of their time, is the ones who were responsible for the wonderful present day adaptations of their initial vision.

Why were the end-users so critical to this development? Rather simply, as the computer industry continued to expand, so too did its base of users. Soon, professionals from many different backgrounds and walks of life would be using computers to fulfill their individual needs. Thus, with a broader audience, it is only natural that in order to maximize both efficiency, as well as the user experience, the usability of computers needed to expand to beyond that of simple text-line interfaces. Human beings are visual learners, and as such, having a machine that placed more focus on graphical interaction and manipulation, was one small step for users, one giant leap for usability.

Long before anything that resembled what we tend to think of today as a GUI, there were a few innovations that sparked interest in the field, and showed to everyone just how useful and leading edge this technology could be. The first of which is the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), which was utilized by NORAD from the late 1950’s into the 1980’s, as a program, which was used to track Soviet bombers so that they might be intercepted. Developed by both MIT and IBM for the US Air Force, the program lead to significant advances in interactive, online, and real-time computing. The system even utilized modems so that information could be delivered to subsequent bases, as well as pilots, which were ordered to intercept bombers. Users of the SAGE system, we’re able to make adjustments to radar intercept data on their screens using a light pen. Like many advancements of technology in our society, the SAGE project, a government funded program helped to pave the way for interactive, intuitive, and online computing machines.

A very critical element to early GUIs, involved that of computer assisted drawing (CAD), in which a user is assisted by the computer which is capable of performing complex geometric equations to organize objects and data. Ivan Sutherland, the father of Sketchpad (1963), was a true pioneer. His software, which made excellent use of the recently invented light pen, used an x and y coordinate system, which was capable of receiving input, storing it, and displaying it on a CRT, monitor to be displayed. This was not simply an interaction and interface marvel, it was also a computing marvel, as at this time, most computer programs were still run as batch jobs, and not in real-time.

While video conferencing is nothing new to most users today, it stands to reason, that at a particular point and time, it was a brand new and revolutionary feature. The Augmentation of Human Intellect project, conducted by Doug Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute, was an incredible innovation in computing and interaction, the likes of which the world had never seen. Inspired by the memex as described by Vannevar Bush in the mid 1940’s, the Augmentation of Human Intellect project was focused on how young adults learned, and featured new technology such as a mouse driven cursor and multiple display windows used to interact with hypertext. In his summary report, Engelbart describes that comprehension is essential for increased capability, thus a large focus on technology, which is easily understood. Furthermore, by 1968, the On-Line System, which was developed as part of Engelbart’s project, would go on to be capable of video conferencing with other users, capable of connecting users over distances.

Completed in 1973, the Xerox Alto (named for being developed at their Palo Alto Research Center), is the grandfather of modern GUI as we know it. However, the Alto was not originally designed to be a device for “standard desktop use”, however, as software was developed for it, the doors of usability and opportunity began to expand for it. The Alto bolstered a 606*808 tall monochrome bit-mapped video display, a 3-button mouse and a total address space of 64 K 16-bit words, however, using memory bank selection, a total of 256 K was possible.

During its inception, these features were revolutionary, and as such, allowed Xerox to attempt revolutionary things. Its command line program called Alto Executive was capable of loading programs both locally, and across networks with the help of Net Executive. For file manipulation, the Alto had a GUI file manager called Neptune Directory Editor, which allowed the user to use the various buttons on the mouse to manipulate files and directories without the need to type commands into a command line interface. The Alto also had a basic word processing program called Bravo, as well as a paint program called Draw. These programs also made use of the GUI functionality available, further eliminating the need to type archaic commands to accomplish one’s goals. The programming language SmallTalk was also developed at the Palo Alto center for the Alto computer. This high-level programming language allowed Xerox to create an environment that resembles the modern desktop, with draggable windows, pop-ups, and icons.

In 1981, Xerox commercially released the Xerox 8010 (Star), the Star was Xerox’s only real attempt to enter into the personal computing market. Based upon the designs of the Alto, the Star had much of the same functionality as the Alto. More importantly, in the interest of usability, its designers did their best to adhere to four rules regarding their product: seeing and pointing, progressive disclosure, uniformity in all applications, and what you see is what you get. Although Xerox would never become a major competitor in the personal computing wars to follow, they certainly opened the doors for those who would choose to compete.

Perhaps the most important event in modern computing, took place at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), but it was not the development of the Alto computer; it was a visit from Steve Jobs. Then working on the next evolution of computing, using Apple stock, Jobs negotiated with Xerox to bring a small team of Apple developers with him to the PARC to examine some of the research being done at the center. Two new technologies in particular that Jobs and his team were introduced to were the GUI elements of SmallTalk as implemented on the Alto, and Ethernet networking technology. It was said that Jobs was so marveled by the Alto, that he just about ignored everything else he saw at the PARC. Jobs then negotiated to acquire an Alto unit to take back with him to Apple, where his team would use it as an inspiration to change computing.

Released in 1983, the Lisa was, at that time, the pinnacle of personal computing. However, its hefty price tag of nearly ten thousand dollars, lessened its appeal to a larger audience. The Lisa included desktop management very similar to that of today’s Macintosh Finder and Windows Explorer, allowing multiple window instances, and the ability to drag and drop items from one to the next. The Lisa also offered functionality such as a clock, a basic function calculator, and an entire suite of office tools. LisaCalc, which was a spreadsheet program, was widely used by businesses during its time, as it allowed users to enter data, and reuse cells by simply typing over them, unlike traditional spreadsheets having to erase and rewrite figures. There was also, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaList (a database creation program), LisaProject, and LisaWrite. These programs all made use of the latest GUI technology, allowing the user to click to add features and implement functionality at various points. The Lisa also had customizable preferences for the system so that the user could control the startup volume (disk), and adjust speaker, keyboard, mouse, and screen settings; once again, all in an easy to navigate GUI.

Developed concurrently to the Lisa, was Apple’s Macintosh. Released in 1984, with a fantastic marketing campaign, the sales of the Macintosh crushed that of the Lisa. Released at a much more reasonable price tag of less than three thousand dollars, the Macintosh initially experienced great sales, however, this was short lived, and sales quickly began to diminish. One of the major differences between the Mac and the Lisa was the overall look and feel of the OS. While Lisa had fantastic, and revolutionary functionality, it felt much less personal than that of the Mac. The Mac placed a strong emphasis on visual representation, such as displaying an icon for inserted disks upon insertion on the desktop, which users could then click and interact with. A very noticeable difference was also in that of the control panel, which was used to modify user preferences. Unlike the heavily text based preference customization on the Lisa, the Mac control panel was very pictorial in nature. While it may have been intended for this to result in an easier to understand interface, it stands to reason that with a completely pictorial representation, that it is possible that the user might become confused with some of the functionality, wondering what it is that certain icons represent.

Significant changes in usability and functionality came with the introduction of MacOS 1.1 however, which would further improve the experience it provided users. Some of the new functionality included the ability for users to drag the cursor to select multiple objects, which allowed the user to perform an operation on more than one item at a time, adding to efficiency and the user experience. The Finder utility also included a “close all” function, which allowed the users to clear all of the currently open windows, and return to their desktop.

In contrast to Apple, who developed their systems as one piece, hardware and software, Microsoft took a much different approach. Their vision was to deploy their software onto as many machines as possible, which was made possible thanks to the relationship they had with IBM. By the time the Macintosh was released, Microsoft already had a business relationship with IBM, having provided them with MS-DOS. Windows 1.0 was Microsoft’s initial attempt at a GUI OS, however it lacked a lot of the features and functionality found in the Macintosh, such as the ability to have overlapping windows. This crippled the ability to multi-task for the user, as only so much could be done at once. In addition, the OS itself was really just MS-DOS running GUI programs behind the scenes, which further hindered its potential. The overlapping of windows would change in v2.0, in addition to added application support, such as Word and Excel, and was bundled with AT&T computers.

For Microsoft, the major turning point was the release of Windows 3.0, which would go on to become the first version of Windows to become widely adopted. It bolstered several UI improvements, such as being able to drag and drop objects from different folders in different windows, as well as improvements to elements such as the control panel, which included larger buttons, and a much more organized look and feel. It also made use of hypertext in its help files, which allowed users to navigate information much easier than having to scan a document with a large amount of text. Improvements were also made to the paint program, which allowed users to get a much more robust experience. Later in windows 3.1, Microsoft also added the functionality to allow users to remove files relating to specific programs or folders, similar to Add/Remove programs in modern versions of Windows, preventing the user from having to manually delete the desired files. In Windows 3.11, Microsoft Mail, an early email application was added for the Workgroups edition, which looks very similar to Outlook today, as well as Scheduler, a scheduling application very similar in look and feel to Outlook Calendar.

The grueling fight between Microsoft and Apple raged on in the mid 1980’s and into the 1990’s. At several points, Apple attempted to sue Microsoft, on the basis that the look and feel of Apple’s OS, which was copyrighted, was stolen by Microsoft. However, to be fair, much of Apple’s inspiration was, to a certain extent, stolen from the Alto. The competition between these two companies has changed the world we live in today, and even though Apple was once thought to be broken and beaten, it has shown that they will continue to be around for a long time, as their products continue to grow in market share. Amongst users, it is commonly accepted that Apple’s MacOS is a much more enjoyable experience for the user, while Windows dominance is the result of compatibility, and at one point, activities that became the point of an antitrust law suit. Regardless of what anyone thinks of either company, they have both done their part to bring us into the computing world we now live in today, and surely, they could not have done it without the shoulders of whom they stood on.