‘Five Decades of Experiments with Hypermedia Systems for the Humanities’

Since 1967, when my students and I, collaborating with Theodor Nelson, built the Hypertext Editing System on an IBM /360 mainframe, I’ve been involved with building a succession of hypermedia systems primarily but not exclusively for the humanities. I will begin this talk with a brief description of the history of this work at Brown, including the NEH-sponsored project to create an on-line scholarly community for a poetry course in 1976, and the ways in which a recent system, Touch Art Gallery, is being used by courses at Brown, the Nobel Foundation and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Then I will shift to the main focus, a live demo of an early version of the latest multi-format hypermedia system my group is building to support information gathering, sense-making (including organizing, annotating, relationship-building through linking, grouping and visualizations), and ultimately presenting multimedia information. We are especially interested in supporting small workgroup collaboration and the use of pen- and touch-computing on tablets and large interactive whiteboards.