As We May 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(and is credited for first coining the concept) –Ex: Mendel –Current methods for reviewing and transmitting are out of date We can no longer effectively review and make use of scientific records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?