|
|
Post by Joselyn McDonald on Mar 19, 2016 23:43:02 GMT
Hi all,
As one of the discussion leaders for this paper I thought I'd forgo the summary of the article, as you've just read it, rather I'd like to focus the responses around a few areas that are potentially relevant to our work in HCI.
Speculation about Technology Advancement
1. Do you think there (generally) there is value in speculation around the progress of technology development?
2. What purpose do you think Bush is serving by detailing his beliefs about various technology developments including the Memex?
3. Do you think the field of HCI participates in this kind of discussion? If, yes, do you think it's productive?
Focus of Technological Advancement
1. Do you think the focus of technological development has moved towards understanding of knowledge, as Vannevar Bush was arguing it should?
2. What do you think is HCI's role is in shaping the direction of technological advancement? OR (for fun/thought experiment) How would you feel if the field took a decidedly militaristic, or purely egalitarian turn?
The Memex
1. 'As We May Think' does somewhat predict many technologies, or systems, that we currently use including hypertext, digital libraries, Wikipedia, the Internet, etc. Do you then believe his dream for these technologies has been realized? Do you think our modern technologies are functioning as the 'pacific instruments' Bush was anticipating?
Cognitive Psychology and Memory Context
1. In accord with our recent discussion of human memory and retrieval, as well as the other assigned articles, what do you think is a potential shortcoming of the Memex's use and human ability?
|
|
|
|
Post by cgleason on Mar 20, 2016 2:54:28 GMT
Hi! I'm another discussion leader on this paper, so I have a few more comments in addition to Joselyn's excellent topics: In response to Do you think there (generally) there is value in speculation around the progress of technology development? Supposedly, this article had a lot of impact on our current computing landscape, as Doug Engelbart read this article and kept it in mind for much of his career. This lead to the mouse, hypertext, and word processor, although it is unclear how much is attributable to Bush's ideas. Bush was not only trying to extrapolate the path of future technologies, but also inform it. I think if he saw the world today he would say he succeeded in his goals. Many ideas have been "predicted" by science fiction far before they were implemented. Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey both use smartphone/tablet like devices far before iPhone/iPad came to prominence. While I am not sure about those two TV Shows/Movies in particular, I imagine a lot of inventions were actually planted in the minds of scientists by science fictions authors and directors. TL;DR: Yeah, speculation is not only predictive, but also generative. Additional discussion questions:
1. For many of us (in HCI), we no longer consume the research in paper publications, thanks to the Internet. - Do you think this has helped scientists more effectively consume new work in their field, or has it only exacerbated the problem originally put forward by Bush?
- Is scientific advancement moving at the correct pace? Is it too fast or too slow?
- Is information retrieval and synthesis in research really a bottleneck, as Bush suggests?
2. Part of the genius of the memex was the ability to easily create and share association indexes among related pieces of content. - Is this feature really a model for how humans categorize and retrieve information, or is Bush too quick to suggest this index as a good model?
- Has this specific feature of the memex been realized either fully or partially? In what ways?
- What is the advantage/disadvantage of sharing these trails?
3. Many of Bush's predictions were very prophetic, yet wildly inaccurate in how they were eventually implemented. For example, we have massive amounts of storage, but not on microfilm.
- How would you rate the accuracy of the predictions in this article? Should Bush get credit for getting the broad brush strokes of technological advancement correct, or was that inevitable?
- For experts making the same predictions about technological advancement today, do you think they will be more or less accurate than this article? Why?
|
|
|
|
Post by stdang on Mar 21, 2016 18:11:14 GMT
I don't think the medium that we consume research is a driving factor in exacerbating the problem of idea and information consumption management as put forth by Bush. However, the ease of storage, duplication, and distribution of electronic media has made the creation and proliferation of sub-communities especially easy. This may have a two-fold effect. Firstly, it allows for researchers to more easily congregate with others who share their interests and for these specialty communities to forge their ideas together in the high intensity inferno of the scrutiny only their peers can bring. However, it also makes it easy for a wide range of communities to emerge, which makes it less likely for the right hand to talk to the left hand. This fracturing of intellectual capital makes it difficult to find analogous ideas and to be truly thorough as good science demands. This latter effect is more akin to the problem as posed by Bush, and while technology has made the problem worse, it is also contributing to easing of the problem. Algorithmic conceptual mapping and mining is a very active area of research from many angles (though I mostly made up the specific term), and success as this field progresses will contribute to managing the large swath of ideas produced by an ever expanding and accelerating academic community. Thus while Bush may have identified a real limitation, it is only a limitation given the resources of the context that he was imagining.
|
|
|
|
Post by nickpdiana on Mar 21, 2016 20:18:55 GMT
Let's not overlook Bush's callout right out of the gate:
"Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial."
So was HCI doomed from the start?! I'm not so sure, but I think the author has identified a real problem: an expanding scientific world results in vast amounts of (potentially useful) information that is rendered inaccessible by both its sheer volume (finding needles in haystacks) and its domain specificity (grappling with terminology and context). And despite all my grinning at Bush's ultimately shortsighted expectations of the future ("In the future perhaps [photography] need not be wetted at all"), the fact remains that this is a problem we've been unable to solve.
Sure we all carry around memexes (memexi?) in our backpacks (or pockets for that matter), but the process of sifting through research is still clumsy and error-prone. Often we're still only looking at copies of physical paper articles "projected" onto these amazing devices. Why can't we do better than that?
|
|
|
|
Post by anhong on Mar 21, 2016 22:50:24 GMT
In Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", he visioned a system in the term of "memex", that can store knowledge, and link them together for people to consult easily. Many technologies are predicted and realized later, including online encyclopedia, Internet, speech recognition, etc. In the first section, he mentioned that the knowledge of science has grown tremendously and the use of them also has improved in many ways. However, we are still managing them in the same way, which is making it harder and harder to be of real and efficient use. Then he envisioned complicated, cheap and dependable machines that can link the knowledge together, thus making it easy to be used. Now we have Wikipedia, we have Google Scholars, we have ACM Digital Libraries, but it seems we are still overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge coming out everyday. For example, there are over 400 CHI papers coming out every year, and even more papers in the domain of HCI are published every year in various conferences and journals. If we are supposed to read all of them, it would take a huge amount of time, which is almost impossible. Finding a way to link the knowledge together, within this field, and across other fields, and helping people better make sense from them and generate insights and new ideas, will be beneficial to all researchers. In this sense, his dream for these technologies has not been fully realized. Even this large amount of information is indexed, they are still not easily retrievable for real use. Identifying how human link information and memory as a whole, and retrieve abstractions from them could be they key to unlock this “big data” problem.
|
|
|
|
Post by mmadaio on Mar 22, 2016 0:09:13 GMT
Steven, I'm not so sure I agree. I think your point about the fracturing of communities being facilitated by ease of distribution/duplication/storage is a good one, but Bush's main issue that the Memex is supposed to address is the issue of retrieval and synthesis of ever-increasing quantities of information. So, even if we can find the right communities to be a part of, we still struggle to read the 400+ annual CHI articles, or synthesize information across the fraction of them that we did read, such that we could retrieve it again when we wanted it, or that we could share with other researchers.
The closest analogue we have to his association trails are hyperlinks, but there's no semantic content embedded in links. I think there's a fundamental tension between standardization and specificity that's been an obstacle to his vision being realized. For instance, if we have a "profession of trailblazers" hired to make links between content, if they create links between bows and elasticity, it's not clear how the kinds of links they established would be generally useful to someone studying bows for their symbolic or ritualistic properties. So, in Wikipedia, we have in the entry on bows a link to both the elasticity of the bowstring as well as links to their use in ritual and myth, without having unique associative trails for each of the uses.
Even with unique associative trails established between items, there is still a retrieval problem of knowing which trails to find in the future, when returning to the research task. Or, worse, if at each time you had to start from the trailhead and traverse the set of associations to arrive at the point you left off at. Perhaps some sort of spatial, map-like visualization of the associative trails could help here, but the edges between nodes would need some sort of semantic encoding to be useful, as discussed previously. I'm fascinated by the idea of sharing my trails with another person, but I wonder how useful that would ultimately be for collaborative research work. If my associations were inherently personal, or formed from hazy, barely translatable, nascent associations, they might be unintelligible to my research colleagues. Besides, any sufficiently elaborated association seems like it would just be equivalent to a lit review or synthesis.
|
|
aato
New Member
Posts: 16 
|
Post by aato on Mar 22, 2016 0:20:09 GMT
I think the context of "As We May Think" is fascinating and tragic. I remember reading this paper on the very first day of the first HCI Research Seminar course I ever took and the professor telling us that Vannevar Bush worked on the Manhattan Project in WWII. He was instrumental in the creation of that project and this paper was published during wartime a month before the bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It makes sense to me that after disillusionment with the destructive and fatal nature of his prior he would write an introspective piece that warns fellow scientists from following a similar path and envisions a future in which these choices and mistakes are avoided through, of course, technological advancement. HCI researchers and practitioners often discuss the prophetic nature of Bush's writing. Although I appreciate his need to make sense of the issues he was grappling with by describing a technology that could support the future he envisioned, I wish he had grappled with the morality of the work he did and spent more time explaining how scientists can negotiate the wartime needs of destructive creation. In the most serious sense possible, his writing and reflection are in need of design thinking.
To Joselyn's point about HCI taking a decidedly militaristic turn, I think that the danger here is that because we are not making technological advances for the sake of destructive use, we are not questioning the work we are doing enough. Bush really gives to help in that direction whatsoever and just urges scientists to develop towards an understanding of knowledge without evaluating what that knowledge will be used for.
|
|
|
|
Post by jseering on Mar 22, 2016 0:22:50 GMT
Per Joselyn's first question- Yes, I think there is lots of value about speculating about the future of technology development. Bush has a mixed view of the future; comments above have talked about some of his concerns with the future state of knowledge and the increased specialization, but he also speaks optimistically about a variety of technological developments. His description of information processing (and his seeming enthusiasm?) is particularly amusing:
"Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes. There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things."
One of the central purposes of science fiction literature and art over the past hundred plus years has been to raise philosophical issues both about the future and the present by using technology as a mirror; the above passage is one particularly good example of this, though it wasn't meant directly as science fiction but rather as an imagined scientific future. In the quote, are the machines an extension of us, or are we, the roomfuls of girls, extensions of them?
EDIT: Yeah, what Alexandra said.
|
|
mkery
New Member
Posts: 22
|
Post by mkery on Mar 22, 2016 1:38:03 GMT
There is a plethora of science fiction and opinion pieces that question where we are going with technology in relation to what makes us human. Ubik, or Black Mirror are decent examples of fiction that take pleasure in painting bleak, warnings for the future. So although Bush’s piece can be troubling in its unquestioning positivity (“a whole roomful of girls armed with simple keyboard punches”?), I think there’s a place for this.
The memex is an interesting concept. One could argue that a relational maze of paths exists well today on the internet, things like Wikipedia. This doesn’t however, truly exist in a continuation of the way Bush proposes it, on a personal computer. We have folders, a file system, but it’s still difficult to ask your computer “what was I doing summer of 2013?” and view all the photos you took and the research you did and the stubs from flight confirmations. Internet presence, Facebook etc, versus the safe vault of your local computer are still pretty separate banks of memory and storage. Relations that are accessible to us are still mostly ones someone has explicitly encoded, like a web link or folders.
|
|
|
|
Post by francesx on Mar 22, 2016 1:48:44 GMT
What this article makes me realize is how hard it is in today's world to create something that no one else has ever created, while combining the existing knowledge out there. Wouldn't it be nice that while you are working on topic X with method Y to achieve a result Z, you could have access to ALL the work out there relevant to X, Y and Z in a form that is easily accessible, manageable and understandable? And on top of it, to have a special collection W of other methods and topics used to achieve other results in other field, that could be applicable to X, Y and Z? I guess PhDs would be easy thing then...
Certainly information has grown, we know more about the world today than we did yesterday. But are we in a better state because of this? All this lack of synthesis, in or outside of our brain would be needed to make full use of such information.
|
|
toby
New Member
Posts: 21 
|
Post by toby on Mar 22, 2016 1:50:26 GMT
I agree with Joseph that there's lots of values about speculating about the future of technology development, and a central purpose of science fiction literature and art is to raise philosophical issues about the future and the present by using technology as a mirror. I think also it not only serves as a mirror, but also a medium that embodies claims, like the design fiction/critical design works we just read in the Design Mini. Like for the idea of memex, which might seem actually pretty real in the era of Dropbox, Google and Facebook, was actually very much a fiction back in 1940s. I don't think such speculation has any noticeable impact on driving the technology development though, as the each individual limiting factors for the "memex" system like the disk space, fast information retrieval, universal connectivity and accessibility etc. are not anything novel but things researchers in the field of computer science always pursuing after.
|
|
|
|
Post by amy on Mar 22, 2016 2:05:16 GMT
Bush is arguing that the scientists that have been devoted to war efforts should instead turn their attention to making knowledge more accessible, and that these technologies will be "pacific instruments." But I'm not convinced that making knowledge more accessible means that you are designing peaceful technology. In fact, a lot of modern "warfare" is related to hacking and data privacy and information security, or making knowledge less accessible. And the internet has made some crimes easier to commit because of increased communication channels and information availability. So no, I don't think our modern technology is functioning as Bush would have hoped.
|
|
k
New Member
Posts: 9
|
Post by k on Mar 22, 2016 2:12:16 GMT
Tagging on Amy's comment, Bush's vision is utopian and leaves questions about whether redirecting the scientific machinery built up an refined during the war years towards other activities can effectively and neutrally be accomplished. Bush's description of the Memex envisions an idealized extension of human thinking. Given the post-war context of the article, I wonder at the lack of reflection on how this vision might be exploited.
|
|
|
|
Post by xiangchen on Mar 22, 2016 2:26:46 GMT
Re: Cognitive Psychology and Memory Context
The first time I read this article was about five years ago and was quite impressed by how Bush got it right in many places about Memex. However, I think what he was wrong about is assuming the making of systems like Memex equals a leap in the consumption of knowledge and information. It is true that we can now summon the world's data literally at our fingertips; yet our ability to consume and interalize it has hardly grown, if not going backwards. Like Simon said, "... a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention" [1]. Carr in his book points out that exposing ourselves to a feast of information constantly weakens our ability to focus on a central task [2]. Perhaps what Bush hadn't foreseen in his vision is humans' inability to keep up with the pace of technology.
References
1. Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. Computers, communication, and the public interest, 37, 40-41.
2. Carr, N. (2011). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. WW Norton & Company.
|
|
Qian
New Member
Posts: 20
|
Post by Qian on Mar 22, 2016 2:28:22 GMT
What Bush was addressing was mainly the role of technology/science in a post-war age. He turns a partly concerned, partly hopeful eye to where scientists will rediscover “objectives worthy of their best” and calls for “a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.” I don't think he assumed "making knowledge more accessible means that you are designing peaceful technology".
It is also amazing that he could foresee "The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record." The memex is realized in some way, but 1) information retrieval and representation remain difficult. 2) we may have mastered obtaining "information" but the generation of insights, knowledge and even wisdom is still untamed with today's technology.
|
|
