by Joe Miller
Vannevar Bush was America’s chief scientist during World War II.
He’d been a leading figure in the scientific world leading up to the war. Bush founded the company that became Raytheon (the giant defense contractor) in 1922. He left his startup to serve as dean of the MIT School of Engineering and President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. When the US entered World War II, Bush convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which Bush then headed.
OSRD conducted nearly all the wartime military research and development work. Their work included developing radar and nurturing the early stages of what became the Manhattan Project.
After the war, Bush played a major role in creating the National Science Foundation.
Of all his (many) contributions to science, the one with the most impact may well have been an article titled “As We May Think,” which he published in The Atlantic in 1945.
There Bush proposed a machine that he dubbed memex—a dual-screen microfilm machine that allows its users to create what he called “associative trails” between books, magazines, newspaper articles and even the users’ own notes.
The memex was never built. But the idea inspired an entire generation of computer scientists, such as Ted Nelson, who coined the term “hypertext” in 1965. Nelson defines hypertext as “material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.”
Nelson, in other words, wanted to use computers to create better versions of the footnotes developed by 18th century thinkers.
For Nelson, the entire world is “a system of ever-changing relationships and structures” and he envisioned hypertext as a way of showing the interconnections between texts.
Some interconnections are obvious—a reference, or a direct quotation. Others can be more subtle, like some of the ones between Charles Dickens’ Hard Times and the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, a British philosopher and economist.
See, Thomas Gradgrind—one of the protagonists of Hard Times—is a thinly veiled caricature of James Mill, John Stuart’s father. James Mill was a prominent education reformer who championed universal public education. The elder Mill also had some very specific ideas about the proper way to conduct schools—ideas that he tested on young John Stuart.
It’s a little hard to determine the effects of James Mill’s system on his son, as the younger Mill was a natural prodigy. (A psychologist in 1926 estimated the J.S. Mill would likely have scored between 180 and 190 on an IQ test.) Mill learned Greek at age three and by the ripe age of eight had worked his way through Herodotus and Plato, at which point his father added Latin, algebra and geometry to the curriculum. By age 12, John Stuart helped his father complete an economics textbook.
But much like Hard Times’ Louisa Gradgrand (Thomas’ daughter), John Stuart suffered a mental breakdown in his early 20s. Both Mill and Lousia attributed their breakdown to the rigidity of their education, which emphasized reason at the expense of emotion. Both eventually found solace in the world of art and poetry.
I first encountered Hard Times and Mill’s Autobiography in an interdisciplinary course on the history of the industrial revolution during my freshman year of college. Discovering this link between a famous novelist and a famous philosopher was an early intellectual thrill.
I later learned that drawing links between seemingly disparate texts is the essence of scholarly research.
Scientists connect observations to theory to confirm (or disprove) a hypothesis. Economists link policies to economic outcomes. Literary theorists link Hard Times to Mill’s Autobiography.
Scholarship is about drawing new ideas from the texts that you have read. Or, slightly more poetically: Ideas are found in the empty spaces between texts.
Hyperlinks make those metaphorical links between ideas into something real.
Writer, editor and web expert Mandy Brown argues that “the ability to follow links down and around and through an idea…is…one of the great modes of human thinking.”
The French literary theorist Pierre Bayard agrees. Bayard is the author of a book with the provocative title How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, in which he argues that the act of reading a text is much less important than understanding how the book is connected to all the other books out there.
Finding links between texts is hard work.
Scholars and researchers spend months wading through texts, trying on and discarding drafts of research papers, even abandoning entire avenues of research.
Hyperlinks serve as a kind of shortcut through that work. They allow you to follow an intellectual trail blazed by others. And by choosing which sets of hyperlinks to follow, readers can create their own unique paths through a body of knowledge.
I sometimes think about how envious those 18th century thinkers stuck with nothing more than footnotes for linking ideas would be. …
I try not to think about their disappointment in finding out that we mostly use hypertext to get mad at strangers on Facebook and share pictures of cats.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
