Trip Report
H Y P E R T E X T ' 9 6
Seventh Annual ACM/SIGLINK Hypertext Conference
Washington, D.C.
March 16-20, 1996
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stuart school of university of
moulthrop communications baltimore
design
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1996 HAS ALREADY
BEEN A REMARKABLE
YEAR FOR HYPERTEXT,
especially that increasingly notorious branch of the
family called the World Wide Web. This promised to
be a remarkable year for the Hypertext conference as
well. More than in any year since the annus
mirabilis of 1987, things seem to be coming
together: "second-generation" hypertext environments
like Microcosm and Hyper-G converging with
HTTP/HTML, Java, open systems, VRML, MOOspace.
Meanwhile Storyspace, lone survivor of the Class of
'87, continues to bring "serious" ideas about
hypertext structure to users on and off the Web.
These developments involve diverse groups of people:
hypertext specialists and digital librarians, system
designers and implementers, sociologists and
rhetoricians, "engineers" and "literati."
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What follows is a sketchy and idiosyncratic account of the '96
conference. I'm writing mainly for absent friends, partly for my
students, and partly for the Web at large. If you're in the last
category, and if you came here looking for a primarily technical report,
my apologies. The non-scientist's side of this conference was unusually
strong and that's where I spent most of my time, though some of the best
offerings (the HyperCafˇ paper, or Rosenberg's "Structure of Hypertext
Activity") were quite strong in both areas.
Here's what it looked like to me...
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"The Web is the weather.
Enjoy it. Talk about it.
When it's bad, build umbrellas."
-- Mark Bernstein
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HIGHLIGHTS
Norbert Streitz (opening keynote), "Ubiquitous Collaboration and Polyphasic
Activities" ** Nick Sawhney, David Balcom, Ian Smith, "HyperCafe:
Narrative and Aesthetic Properties of Hypermedia" ** Jim Rosenberg,
"The Structure of Hypertext Activity" ** John Tolva, "Ut Pictura
Hyperpoesis" ** Robert Kendall, "Hypertextual Dynamics in A Life Set
for Two" ** Diane Greco, "Hypertext with Consequence: Recovering a
Politics of Hypertext" ** Panel:"Visual Metaphor and the Problem of
Complexity in the Design of Web Sites: Techniques for Generating,
Recognizing, and Visualizing Structure" (Joyce, Kolker, Moulthrop,
Schneiderman, Unsworth) ** Susan Leigh Starr (keynote), "'To Classify
is Human: The Politics of Voice in Information Systems" ** Andreas
Dieberger, "Browsing the WWW by Interacting with a Textual Virtual
Environment" ** Panel: "The Process of Discovery: Hypertext and
Scholarship" (Bernstein, Kaplan, Landow, Smith, Mylonas) ** Panel:
"Things Change: Deal With It! Versioning, Cooperating Editing, and
Hypertext" (Cellary, Durand, Haake, Hicks, Vitali, Whitehead)
** Panel: "Future (Hyper)Spaces" (Cramer, Goldberg, Dieberger, Meyer, Marshall)
** Randy Trigg, (closing keynote) "Hypermedia as Integration:
Recollections, Reflections, and Exhortations" ** Debut of Eastgate
WebSquirrel ** First public release of Forward Anywhere by Judy Malloy
and Cathy Marshall ** Winners of the first Douglas Engelbart best
paper award: Sawhney, Balcom, and Smith from Georgia Tech.
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"Precious Eggs And Fantastic Journeys..."
-- Kathryn Cramer
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WELCOME TO WASHINGTON
Well actually Bethesda, nucleus of the "edge city" that's grown up hard by
the naval hospital and the National Institutes of Health. Okay, so it wasn't
Edinburgh or Milan, Seattle or San Antonio.
For this pilgrim it was only fifty miles from home, and while the daily
commute wasn't the nicest way to spend spring break, it was worth the
trouble to see all in one place the two or three dozen people whose
work means the most to me. You know who you are. Besides, this week it
didn't snow. Much.
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"Why are our
information landscapes
so featureless?
Why are they so unpopulated?
Why don't they acknowledge
that the space inside
is continuous
with the space
outside?"
-- Cathy Marshall
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LOVE THEME FROM HYPERTEXT
Docuverse Emerges?... Hypertext More or Less?... Two Cultures That Pass in
the Night?
Even though the first of these was an actual conference slogan, none of the
above really characterizes the event. Every gathering needs its motto,
battle-cry, or Official Theme, but it's hard to find easy labels for
complicated social moments. Randy Trigg's try -- "Integration" -- has a lot
going for it, especially with the old-fashioned, "off-line" spin he subtly
gave the word.
But for me the dominant mood was better captured by another phrase, also
from Randy's keynote: The Decade of the Web.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Superdense hypertext."
-- Tom Meyer
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Though the World Wide Web isn't that much younger than the ACM Hypertext
community, its huge notoriety is quite recent, much more noticeable this
year than at the last international meeting in late 1994. Hypertext '96 was
really our first gathering in the presence of an actually emerging
docuverse: the 30-odd-million items (this week) entangled in the Web.
Just how should a veteran hypertext campaigner take this? With the proud and
quiet glow of long-term vindication? In high and not unjustified Nelsonian
dudgeon? Or with equal doses of enthusiasm and adrenalin? Anyone who heard
Doug Engelbart speak at the Vannevar Bush symposium last fall saw an
inspiring example of that last option. But opinions will differ.
Cathy Marshall and others have noted that the younger Web developers don't
seem to realize the hypertext concept is a half-century old with a
considerable body of research behind it. It's grating to hear them
sneeringly say, "Xanadu never shipped," and dismiss the past on a handwave.
You know you're getting old when the impiety of youth starts to get to you.
But we're not that old really, and the research continues, so what's the
cause for complaint? Maybe the Web is just a boon to science, a grand
experiment. Should we stop worrying and love the Web?
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"Is there a way in which we're now being colonized by Netscape?"
-- Randy Trigg
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WATCH WHAT YOU SAY ABOUT MY MONSTER
This conference featured a number of attempts at rapprochement with the
Docuverse We Never Made: there was a pre-conference tutorial on Web
development; there was a suite of papers concerning technical advances
beyond HTTP/HTML; and there was a panel on "the Problem of Complexity in the
Design of Web Sites." Having been part of this panel, I make no claim to
objectivity, but it seems safe to say that this was where ambivalence about
the Web most powerfully erupted.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You have to look at what information looks like."
-- Kathryn Cramer
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Playing the clear-eyed child, Michael Joyce. Taking the role of allegedly
naked emperor, Ben Schneiderman. In the imperial backcourt: Kolker,
Unsworth, and your narrator. Sure the problems of information design and
mapping are huge, claimed the imperial chorus. But be patient. Give
technology time. Demand the best. Pitch in if you want to make things
better. Meanwhile how about these suits!
And the clear-eyed child said: yer ass. Like television, the Web is a
cascade of empty airwaves, not a fabric of golden threads. It's about
advertisement and self-promotion. It's isolating and onanistic.
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"How do you know
you've spent too much
time programming?
You look into the fridge
at a certain soft drink bottle
and you hear yourself thinking:
Cool! Hi-Res root beer..."
-- Jim Rosenberg
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Its links are pure deferral, pointing nowhere but elsewhere and always back
to what was there before, not along a reciprocal track to what has come
after. The Web is a hierarchy, not a true network -- not a maze of treasures
but a trivial cascade.
We have no structures of understanding, Joyce argued, to help us understand
our most vivid experiences of reading in this docuverse: for finding friends
or allies in the Web; for failing to make that discovery; or for being
recognized by others in this space. Lacking structures, we fail to grasp
what the Web is for, and absent understanding, we fall unreflectively into
marketing. The Web takes on the color of television tuned to an endless
series of dead channels.
Of course this was controversial. Schneiderman answered Joyce with a
strongly worded rebuttal, drawing applause from the audience. He pressed the
heretic for a reform program -- give us the specs for these missing
structures and we'll build them, see if we don't! Not my job, said the
clear-eyed child, you guys are the engineers -- and besides, who says this
is just a technical problem?
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Surfing is dead. We must have spaces with meaning..."
-- Andreas Dieberger
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AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?
There was more, much more, but a complete account would overwhelm the larger
story. Suffice it to say that we learned many things: that we may love the
Web more than we thought -- perhaps beyond measure; that there may yet be
problems of "design" not amenable to silicon solutions; that it's never
easy, either for speaker or audience, to descry the imperial buns.
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"An inversion of the hypertext graph,
turning links into nodes, nodes into links."
-- Kathryn Cramer
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There is much more to hypertext than the Web and its wonderful discontents.
A new emphasis on space has entered the discussion on both sides of the C.P.
Snow line. This is as much practice as theory: see the Georgia Tech
HyperCafˇ project, or for that matter IBM's AQUI, a potentially
revolutionary distributed-link service that could make the complex
topography of the World Wide Web considerably easier to manage and
comprehend.
Aside from space there was also a quiet but insistent emphasis on
"materiality" -- a perspective that denies the "bodiless exultation of
cyberspace" and reminds us of our communities, our bodies, our selves.
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"We need lots of cute little tools...
Small tools are easy."
-- Mark Bernstein
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Diane Greco's paper on "Hypertext with Consequence" was the first
contribution to this conference to raise questions about social and gender
issues in the promotion of information systems; and though it would be easy
(and depressing) to regard this paper as a lone voice lecturing in the
wilderness, Greco's line was taken up several times in the course of things
-- offering in at least one instance a subversive counter-theme for the
conference itself.
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"Tasty, pleasing, like television."
-- Tom Meyer
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IN THE FUTURE THIS WILL ALL MAKE SENSE
Which brings me to the future -- or specifically, the panel on "Future
(Hyper)Spaces" proposed by hypertext prodigy Tom Meyer (Hypertext Hotel,
WAXWeb, and other wonders). Joining Tom were A. Thomas Golderg (cyberspace
designer from NYU), Cathy Marshall (hypertext system creator lately turned
fiction writer), Kathryn Cramer (hypertext author and editor), and Andreas
Dieberger (hypertext and MOOspace explorer from Georgia Tech). If the
previous day's panel had an emperor's-new-clothes theme, this one was more
like The Wizard of Oz re-made for Fractured Fairtytales. No one paid any
attention to the man behind the curtain. They were all trying to crowd into
the booth.
Things we seem to agree on: surfing is dead, the future lies with richer
interactive possibilities; space is important, especially as it becomes
place (as Dieberger put it) -- invested with meaning by the people who
occupy it; we need vision as well as visuals, and hence some sort of
aesthetic around which to wrap a virtual-world view.
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"...a very large game of SimCity..."
-- Tom Meyer
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But here's where we disagree: will this aesthetic be avant-garde?
surrealist? postmodernist? high-modernist? ironic? Is it okay to wear the
colors of "tasty, pleasing" television? (Does anyone see an alternative?)
Should structures for virtual spaces be negotiated or computed? What are we
doing after the Web?
Interesting questions...
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"I showed Victory Garden to my seventeen-year-old.
She said, 'Where are the pictures?'"
-- Unknown
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ISSUES AND EXHORTATIONS FOR HYPERTEXT IN THE WEB DECADE
Alas, when the questions turn really interesting it's usually a sign that
the conference is nearly over. So we move from prospects to reflection, and
thus to Randy Trigg's masterful closing keynote. In the tradition of Frank
Halasz's classic "Seven Issues" papers, both of which began as Hypertext
keynotes, Trigg gave a studious and revealing analysis of the field.
In at least one area, Trigg went his former colleague one better. He laid
out a scientific, technical, and aesthetic agenda for hypertext; but he
added also an explicit social agenda.
Trigg gave his theme as "Integration," a term he defined in several ways,
including, he hinted, one that would emerge as the talk went on. I submit
(though Trigg never said as much directly) that he meant racial integration
-- a subject not much mentioned in this crowd. One of Trigg's examples
broached this issue clearly enough: the case of the Jervay housing project
in Wilmington, N.C., where a group of residents, primarily African-American
women, successfully organized to demand a voice in their community's future
their situation and to gain expertise from the privileged, white community
around them. (See www.wilmington.net/jervay.)
To be sure, Trigg also covered technical kinds of "integration:" integration
of technologies into the workplace; integration of diverse software
functions into advanced systems; integration of observation and theory into
hypertext design.
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"I never say H-T-T-P-colon-slash-slash -- I just say
hoopla!"
-- Maura Hogan
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His talk had as much to say about typed links as urban politics. As I've
already said, this was an important technical and scientific conference,
facts to which this report does not do justice.
For this non-scientist, though, the real theme and virtue of Hypertext '96
was an arriving maturity: hypertext grows up. Hypertext isn't an eccentric
vision, an academic research project, or a literary theory: it's a tool and
affordance being used by millions of people (not all of them white and
affluent) and likely to be used still more widely in the future. By itself
no tool can change the world; but the changes in work and communication that
tool makes possible can be enormously transforming.
STUART MOULTHROP
March 24, 1996
--------------------------------- Quoted ----------------------------------
i. Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems, 3/19/96, during panel on Hypertext
and Discovery. [back ]
ii. Kathryn Cramer, Sunburst Communications, 3/20/96, during panel on
Future (Hyper)Spaces. [back ]
iii. Cathy Marshall, Xerox, 3/20/96, during panel on Future (Hyper)Spaces.
[back ]
iv. Tom Meyer, First Virtual, 3/20/96, during panel on Future
(Hyper)Spaces. [back ]
v. Randy Trigg, Xerox, 3/20/96, Closing Keynote. [back ]
vi. Kathryn Cramer, Sunburst Communications, 3/20/96, during panel on
Future (Hyper)Spaces. [back ]
vii. Jim Rosenberg, poet, 3/19/96, on the way home from dinner. [back ]
viii.Andreas Dieberger, Georgia Tech, 3/20/96, during panel on Future
(Hyper)Spaces. [back ]
ix. Kathryn Cramer, Sunburst Communications, 3/20/96, during panel on
Future (Hyper)Spaces. [back ]
x. Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems, 3/19/96, during panel on Hypertext
and Discovery. [back ]
xi. Tom Meyer, First Virtual, 3/20/96, during panel on Future
(Hyper)Spaces. [back ]
xii. Tom Meyer, First Virtual, 3/20/96, during panel on Future
(Hyper)Spaces. [back ]
xiii.Unidentified speaker in conversation with Mark Bernstein, 3/20/96.
[back ]
xiv. Maura Hogan at dinner, 3/19/96. [back ]