Session on perspectives from computer industry founders. Fingers getting tired from typing, but we will carry on. To the notes!
Ted Nelson (Xanadu)
Considers himself the only dissenter in the computer industry. Started Xanadu in 1960. It was easy to create your own computer world in 1960 because no constraints. Worst problem now is the myth of technology. Most of what people consider technology are constructs and conventions.
Talking about lack of marginalia in digital documents. (I find this personally hilarious because Collin and I were talking about this issue on the way to the conference this morning. And we talked about how you can still do marginalia digitally and will hopefully be able to do more when things such as NoteSlate come out.) Nelson is talking about his idea for creating documents that have connections to show marginalia.
Need to represent connections. (Totally agree. Life is about connections because we are social creatures.)
Scholars Building a Personal Archive for Scholarly Use
Ed Feigenbaum (Stanford University)
Talking about SALT: Self Archiving Legacy Toolkit
Self= Probably means Professors Emeriti, especially those with archives worth preserving for scholarly use + DIY with only a little help from professional librarians
Toolkit=webpage formats and software to facilitate DIY
SALT’s JANUS Approach: two faces, looks outward to give access to researchers and students of today and years from now and other face uses Zotero to facilitate the work of scholars doing their archive building and enrichment
The two faces talk to each other on a regular basis. Need to sync between Stanford Digital Repository and Zotero cloud servers.
SALTworks is the name of the experimental system at Stanford. It supports full text search over the entire Feigenbaum digital archive. It contains 15,000 documents. It has users already, even though it is still experimental.
Learnings from a life’s work: The Doug Englebart Archives
Christina Englebart (Doug Engelbart Institute)
About her father’s archives. Doug Engelbart started research lab and created computer software, the computer mouse, and more. Definitely a computer pioneer. Came up with lots of innovations and terminology.
Saved a lot of materials for the archives. Lots of archiving happened in real-time because archiving function was built into their computer programs.
Then, re-archiving by placing the information on the web. First website was created in 1995. Had already gave a lot of documents to Stanford beginning in the 1980s. The material is housed in many different places online: Stanford, Computer History Museum, and the Internet Archive.
Lots of work always to do. Connecting technology to the vision is very important.
Take away: I must be distracted because I’m hungry for lunch as I don’t have an overarching take away from this session. Basically, think about what you are doing and how you might archive it…eventually. Back with more after lunch.