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transliterature: a humanist format for reusable documents and media 
10.25.2005, 3:03 PM
For decades now, hypertext guru Ted Nelson has slipped in and out of public awareness, often left for dead or permanently exiled in Xanadu, only to re-emerge suddenly in a wonderful burst of curmudgeonly dissent. A recent Slashdot thread discusses his latest project, or more accurately, the latest stage in his ongoing quest: transliterature, "a humanist format for re-usable documents and media," or, an alternative to the constricting protocols of the world wide web. What exactly will this new format entail? It's hard to tell. But Nelson's plea is worth heeding:
The tekkies have hijacked literature- with the best intentions, of course!-) - but now the humanists have to get it back. Nearly every form of electronic document- Word, Acrobat, HTML, XML- represents some business or ideological agenda. Many believe Word and Acrobat are out to entrap users; HTML and XML enact a very limited kind of hypertext with great internal complexity. All imitate paper and (internally) hierarchy. I propose a different document agenda: I believe we need new electronic documents which are transparent, public, principled, and freed from the traditions of hierarchy and paper. In that case they can be far more powerful, with deep and rich new interconnections and properties- able to quote dynamically from other documents and buckle sideways to other documents, such as comments or successive versions; able to present third-party links; and much more. Most urgently: if we have different document structures we can build a new copyright realm, where everything can be freely and legally quoted and remixed in any amount without negotiation.
Nelson is always given a nod as the coiner of "hypertext", but his other concepts -- "transclusion", "virtual rearrangement", "clinks," for example -- are largely dismissed, or simply unknown to most people. But elements of his thinking can be observed far and wide in some of the emerging practices -- blogging, wikis, APIs -- of what people are calling "Web 2.0", or, the web as operating system. Over the past few years, the web has transformed from an interlinked series of brochures into a massive hypertext conversation, a platform in which we are increasingly able to weave, quote and track back to other documents. This is at least in the neighborhood of what Nelson is talking about.
Granted, the microeconomy of quotation (transclusion) that Nelson envisions has not yet materialized, but that may only be because he is thinking so far ahead of his time. Staying focused on the present, it's worth taking a look at what is developing with online advertising. Keyword ads, Google's "AdSense", Amazon's web services, and even voluntary donation models like PayPal tip jars -- couldn't you say these are the humble foundations of an online micropayment economy? The explosion of electronic self-publishing has not as yet produced an equivelant commercial rigging, but with blogging now accepted as an important medium, that could soon change.
The next generation of publishing software may include a more robust infrastructure that could support some kind of quotation or cross-referencing economy. Right now, the few blogs that make money do so by encrusting themselves with ads. Advertisers will buy space if the site can demonstrate impressive traffic stats. But doesn't this all sort of skirt around the edge of what makes blogging exciting and influential? What if talented bloggers could earn money when significant portions of their writing were quoted?
You can already quote images, video and sound in the way Nelson dreams of quoting text: by loading it remotely, i.e. from another location on the internet. Of course, there is no microtransaction infrastructure in place. It's much more roughshod than that. You simply pull html from the source site, or embed the file's address in a media player, and plug it in your page. That's how I've transcluded John Ashbery reading his poem "The Tennis Court Oath" (source - ubuweb):
There's still a long way to go, but the points of contact with Nelson's theories are many. For me, it's his humanist philosophy, more than the fuzzy mechanics of his proposed system, that is most inspiring. There's a generosity, an understanding of the interdependency of form and content, that is conspicuously absent in the prevailing tekkie culture. Perhaps the thinker closest of kin to Nelson was Jef Raskin, whose work on the humane interface is founded on many of the same convictions about usability and connectedness. I also find there's a kind of poetry in Nelson's dream of a literary hypertext economy, captured not only in his writings but in his frayed, manic illustrations (transquoted here):
I think he's a kindred spirit of the institute too. Here's Nelson on electronic literature (sadly, not transquoted, just cut-and-paste):
What is literature? Literature is (among other things) the study and design of documents, their structure and connections. Therefore today's electronic documents are literature, electronic literature, and the question is what electronic literature people really need.Electronic literature should belong to all the world, not just be hoarded by a priesthood, and it should do what people need in order to organize and present human ideas with the least difficulty in the richest possible form.
A document is not necessarily a simulation of paper. In the most general sense, a document is a package of ideas created by human minds and addressed to human minds, intended for the furtherance of those ideas and those minds. Human ideas manifest as text, connections, diagrams and more: thus how to store them and present them is a crucial issue for civilization.
The furtherance of the ideas, and the furtherance of the minds that present them and take them in, are the real objectives. And so what is important in documents is the expression, reception and re-use of ideas. Connections, annotations, and most especially re-use-- the traceable flow of content among documents and their versions-- must be our central objectives, not the simulation of paper.
Posted by ben vershbow on October 25, 2005 03:03 PM
tags: ebooks, html, hypertext, internet, literature, ted_nelson, transclusion, transliterature, web, web_2.0, xanadu
Comments
Ted Nelson seems to be addressing a paradox of bionic reading. Sure, silicon neural systems mimic bionic neural systems, but one is self sustaining, encoding its behavior as it goes while the other is hostage to input via physical media. It is a paradox that we convey conceptual works via physical objects, but it is a deep embedded paradox with an advent far back in the hominid series. In fact the input pathway of the hands prompting the mind engendered that neurological asymmetry, or flexible programmability, that distinguishes us. It was done by construing physical objects as symbolic. The best example of this is the 5000 (thousand) year, archeologically confirmed, prehistory of the use of counting tokens. These were finger pinched tokens of clay used for quantifying stored goods. Another is the even longer prehistory of time annotations incised on bone.
The whole syndrome got started hundreds of thousands of years ago in our parallel hominid species. This prototypical act of conveying conceptual intent via physical objects is exemplified by projectile predation in which a hominid pitches a bullet like stone at an unsuspecting target. This accurate, one armed throw carefully calculated and projected, with every intent of stunning the target, is a perfect metaphor for the book projected across time and culture. It also, as I mentioned, explains our own handedness and more significant, programmable neural asymmetry.
I realize this brings up issues not usually considered in discussions of XML or blog carnivals. The bottom line here is that while we can allocate processing routines to silicon neural systems we will not readily understand the transactions or extract implications of results unless they are embodied in a physical format. That format can be a computer medium, but such objects are illegible to us without the use of other objects. The more efficient pathway still involves physical substrates that are directly eye legible such as counting tokens or print-outs or old fashioned paper books. As bionic readers we are just not very modern. In the best scenario we are post-modern. Or, on the dark side we are post human.
Posted by: gary frost at October 25, 2005 08:29 PM
It's not clear to me that transclusion solves any real problem, unless linked to a copyright/micropayment system.
And I'm not sure anyone really cares that much about that. We're going through a huge explosion of amateur creation of free content, which makes it, for now, hard to charge for most kinds of info.
I think that the combination of
- copy-and-paste
- FairUse rules
- mcropayments for buying access to whole documents
are probably GoodEnough.
You should also take a look at the work on PurpleNumbers being done by a number of people.
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/PurpleNumbersPosted by: Bill Seitz at November 3, 2005 09:39 AM
