As WeMay

Think

Vannevar Busch

• Pronounced [van-NEE-var]

• Was involved in / created a ridiculous number of inventions

• Director of the OSRD (Office of Scientific R&D)

• Oversaw part of the Manhattan Project

• Helped found the NSF• + a lot more

Timeline

• This was published right at the beginning of the post WW-II era

• Vannevar went from Civilian Scientist -> Military Scientist -> Civilian Scientists

• Most scientific development that happened was focused on helping the war effort -- now there isn’t a war

• Scientific development during the war was immense. There was a lot of knowledge created.

The “Future” of Scientists

• Scientists will walk around in their labs with cameras on their foreheads

• (and vocoders in hand)

• He “moves about and observes, he photographs and comments.”

• But we still need to go from existing record to new discovery! Sorry Vannevar – still not trending

The Information Problem

• Specialization is “increasingly necessary for progress”

• Develops this problem of “Information Overload” (and is credited for first coining the concept)– Ex: Mendel– Current methods for

reviewing and transmitting are out of date

We can no longer effectively review and make use of scientific records

His Solution: The Memex

• You can store large quantities of multimedia artifacts

• You can make notes, memoranda, etc

• Essential: Associative Indexing

• You form a “trail” of documents/articles when researching

• You can share that trail with friends / collegues

Some Similarities

• We should be able to push off the repeatable task of looking up previous work

• We should interact with computers naturally – ex: through speech

• Humans should be coming up with the advances and not worrying about the calculations

What’s being done about it

• HCI Research: Sensemaking– How do people cognitively process

information and use it. • Organizational Intelligence

– How do businesses (groups) comprehend information relevant to their purpose

• Sensemaking Handoff – passing the results from one person’s cognitive processing on.

• Personal Information Management• Spam Filters!

Discussion Questions

• Have advances in technology reduce the issue of information overload or made it worse? Has our ratio of information quality to total quantity improved? 

• Would the memex actually solve information overload?

• Would you want to read through someone else’s memex trace?

• Is the Web the current form of the memex? Or is it something else entirely?

• Have our methods for transmitting and reviewing research results actually improved at all?