UX Australia’s Keynote – Alex Wright, Information Architect nytimes.com

A fly by history of information management. Beginning with how tribal cultures created categorical systems for understanding the world around them, through to the use of symbols, the first written word and the evolution of hypertext, a connected web and just who inspired Google’s pagerank.

“Tim would have launched the web in 1984, if he didn’t crash his hard drive… just goes to show you should back up your work. It took him 5 years to re-write it.”

Interesting tid-bits:

• Folk Taxonomy is not the same as a folksonomy.
  The former is the anthropological study of the classification / naming conventions by cultures for understanding the relationships between things such as animals and plants.  The latter is when people collaboratively tag stuff on computers.
• Jewelery was used as an information system by using symbols to indicate social standing and the wearers relationship to others in the community. The use of this system came about when people began living in larger groups than 5 – 15 or so. This occurred during the time Alex describes as the Ice Age Information Explosion, around 30-40,000 years ago.
• The first forms of handwriting we know of emerged around 5000 BC on Bullae, by the Sumerians. (Now the south of Iraq)
• Charles Cutter wrote an essay in 1883 imagining the library of 1983 called “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983” in which he predicted the library would have desks equiped with keyboards and little bits of wire connecting them to a catalog that would call up and display books for the user to read.
• Paul Otlet was the creator of the universal decimal system. He had imagined a sort of paper internet, where not only would a catalog asist people to find a book, but it revealed the content of the book and its relationship to other books as well as the history of the document’s use, who has read, refereneced etc. His work took place in 1934, much of it was lost to to World War 2. A video on his 1934 vision of an internet is below… truely amazing.

• Check out the memex, a large microfilm desk which is considered one of the conceptual precursors to the web from Vannevar Bush’s essay As We May Think (1945)

Vannevar Bush's Memex

• Eugene Garfield inventor of the Science Citation Index, which is a system for acknowledging the weight of links between various documents in the footnotes. It is considered that his work heavily influenced the founders of google and their page rank system.
• Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse also author of an eassy called Augmenting Human Intelect. In 1968 he delivered a presentation often refered to as “The Mother of All Demos.” This demo was the first to demonstrate the mouse, copy and paste, creation of files, folders, links, video conferencing and email etc.

Some of Alex’s references:

Glut, Alex Wright
- Mastering Information Throughout the Ages
- http://www.alexwright.org/glut/

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff
- What categories reveal about the mind.

Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger
- The Power of the New Digital Disorder
- http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/

Facetag
- Working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool
- http://www.facetag.org/

Some references I found:
Alex speaking at Google Masterclass
- The Web That Wasn’t: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8&NR=1

Wikipedia’s Timeline of Hypertext Technology
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_hypertext_technology