Project Xanadu and Ted Nelson
Raanan Sarid-Segal
12/2/16
Digital Preservation
Project Xanadu, in production for decades is one of the foundational elements of
computing culture, and both because of its extended production and its thematic concerns
it becomes relevant to archival theory and modern preservation efforts. Project Xanadu
was an early hypertext project, hypertext being a means of linking separate documents in
a computing environments, created in 1960 by Ted Nelson conceive of a theoretical
structure in which vast amounts of data and separate literary sources would be able to
interact and reference one another permanently. It would go on to be an early rival of Tim
Berners-Lee’s own Internet, intended to connect the world in similar but distinct ways,
and represents one of the great pieces of vaporware in history, i.e. a piece of software that
despite long production never gets released for all manner of reasons. The development
and growth of Project Xanadu, continuing to this day, represents a massive project to
create a new way for humanity to interact with the media they interact with, reshape how
people consume materials, and seems forever stymied.
Project Xanadu was conceived of as a machine language, which would allow for
the storage and display of documents, as well as edits to those documents. It would be
built as a series of interlocking documents, where all edits were recorded, and where one
could follow the trail of any edits made to see the original documents. Useful in an
academic sense, it would have maximized the function of citations, building
accountability and transparency into the process.
It was built to create a system of reading and writing which would allow for non-
sequential intake and processing of information. By allowing every document to
constantly link back and forth to its various connecting documents, the reader would be
able to jump from source to source, taking in the information in whatever order felt right
for them.
The theory behind non-sequential intake of information is that it would essentially
democratize the process of learning, making every subject accessible to all, conceivably
from every angle. People would be able to best learn at the pace and in the order they
would learn most easily in. It would also make subjects more transparent. However, the
benefits of linear learning is that it allows the student to form a theoretical baseline upon
which they can base the rest of their learning, a conceptual framework to operate off of.
To illustrate this idea of informational ingest, Ted Nelson published the boom
Computer Lib/Dream Machines in 1974, a book comprised of two books back to back,
with non-sequential chapters, able to be read in any order. It was to serve as a model of
his vision for Project Xanadu. The book covered his beliefs about the possibilities of the
project, his feelings on the future of machinery, and other assorted topics.
As the project progressed throughout the 1970’s, the project would develop a
piece of software that was the first step in its path towards trying to create a system by
which documents could be linked and created in the way envisioned by Nelson. The
project was plagued by financial crises, leading to many halts in progress, but throughout
Nelson refined his vision for what he would call a “docuverse,” a system of interlocking
documents endlessly held accountable by their unbreakable connections to previously
existing documents, with all future iterations linking back to the past infinitely.
By the time the 1980s had come about the project had stalled more than once, but
was continuing along. At the same time, Tim Berners-Lee was working on what would
become the World Wide Web, and though Nelson has denied that Xanadu was an effort
to create the Internet
1
he nonetheless became a rival of Berners-Lee, each attempting to
get their program to market first, each hoping to revolutionize the future of human
technology and thought.
Nelson and his team were, however, less well funded and less technologically
savvy than Berners-Lee, and as a result Xandu went through another shuttering, for lack
of funding. Nelson wasn’t a programmer, and was at the mercy of his better-equipped
employees to bring his ideas to fruition. Coming at a key time in the development of what
would become the Internet, this put Xanadu behind the World Wide Web, consigning it
to a fate of trailing the World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web went on to revolutionize the way businesses,
governments, and private citizens would interact with the world and each other. A key
aspect of this was that the web, as designed, ended up being flexible enough to
accommodate for the changes that “Web 2.0” functions would institute. Media formats
and temporary sites would abound, social media would become embedded in modern
functions of the Internet.
1
Nelson, Theodor. "Xanalogical Structure." Xanalogical Structure. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.
This speaks to the fundamental philosophy of the World Wide Web versus
Nelson’s as to the function of the Internet. Nelson developed his idea of Xanadu, to
generate a massive encyclopedia of data and information, which when the Internet
became the inevitable result of networking computers became a much more complicated
idea.
Nelson’s model for Xanadu was based around a series of unbreakable hypertext
links between every lifted sentence and word. These links were called Transpointing
windows. Theses windows would be made out of embedded information in words that
had been “cut” and “paste” from other documents, a key facet of this model of
interlocking documents. Unlike modern “cutting” in word processing programs, the way
cutting would work in Xanadu would be to create a link back to the previous document,
which would be unbreakable and forever tie the new document to the preexisting one.
Xanadu was delayed for years, in 1995 being called the most famous piece of
vaporware ever proposed, by Wired magazine
2
. Xanadu, by then a joke in the computing
scene, was seen as an impossible dream that would never be made. Ted Nelson had
achieved some measure of fame for his efforts, but little success or respect. Xanadu
continued as a project only for him. In the Wired article in which he was interviewed
about Xanadu, he describes the image that fundamentally inspired his efforts towards
building Xanadu, the idea of immersing his hand in water, seeing the ripples spread out,
and then reforming after his hand left. The information contained in his system would be
forever connected the way a great body of water is, with perpetual new connections and
reconfigurations for each user.
2
Wolf, Gary. "The Curse of Xanadu." Wired. Conde Nast, n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.
This branching, non-linear, perpetually new vision of how information would be
interacted with was the theme of Nelson’s work. He wanted a free, universal repository of
information, accessible from any point, and constantly growing, with articles readable
side by side, as you could flip from source to descendant to separate source.
To some degree his vision was created in Wikipedia, a free and freely editable
web encyclopedia for public use. The underlying concept is similar to Nelson’s vision.
However, Nelson’s objection lies with the underlying structure of the internet, which is
where his interests intersect with the values held by archivists, particularly people
involved in web archiving and working with issues of copyright.
Nelson, finally delivered a working prototype of sorts in 2014, called
OpenXanadu
3
. Having given up competing with the web, which he calls a severely
flawed system that “
world of fragile ever-breaking one-way links, with no recognition of
change or copyright, and no support for multiple versions or principled re-use.
4
”
As any web archivist will know, the issue with broken links plagues the efforts to
preserve webpages, creative and corporate, private and public.
Nelson’s idea would
address this issue, building into his system a means of constant archiving, so that no data
would ever be lost.
In Web archiving, links break for a number of reasons. The site goes down, the
site moves, the entry was deleted, the material was lost, the site was corrupted, or hacked,
or uses outdated plugins and software. The media may be an inaccessible file format. All
of these issues can make even the most comprehensive attempt to preserve both the visual
3
Hern, Alex. "World's Most Delayed Software Released after 54 Years of Development." The Guardian.
Guardian News and Media, 2014. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.
4
Hern, Alex. "World's Most Delayed Software Released after 54 Years of Development." The Guardian.
Guardian News and Media, 2014. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.
makeup of a website and the deeper content that lends it value into near impossible long-
term tasks. For short-term issues, the standard modern methods of sending a program to
crawl the website, archiving each link and level throughout is sufficient. But as time
wears on, most of those links will break.
Nelson’s hypertext model wouldn’t allow for those breakages, because in his
vision each document is inextricably linked to each other related document. There would
be no issue of link rot, and the problems associated with HTML wouldn’t apply.
Xanadu, in theory, is also significantly more secure and stable as a model than the
current web. Xanadu was designed with 17 rules in mind, which would set it apart from
the Internet as it presently exists and would define its secure qualities.
1.
“Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified.
2.
Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.
3.
Every user is uniquely and securely identified.
4.
Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents.
5.
Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data
type.
6.
Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies ("transclusions")
to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.
7.
Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
8.
Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
9.
Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to
ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all
or part of the document.
10.
Every document is uniquely and securely identified.
11.
Every document can have secure access controls.
12.
Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of
where it is physically stored.
13.
Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency
of access from any given location.
14.
Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case
of a disaster.
15.
Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the
storage, retrieval and publishing of documents.
16.
Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction.
17.
The Xanadu client-server communication protocol is an openly published standard.
Third-party software development and integration is encouraged.”
5
Through these rules, Xanadu imagined a world in which the interlocking of
computers provided endless accountability and security, as well as allow for reusable and
creative reworking of the documents as copyright allowed.
Archiving work to preserve the Project Xanadu is still to be done. However, Ted
Nelson has, over the 50+ years since beginning work on this project, kept meticulous
records of his thoughts and feelings throughout, as well as a fair bit of documentation
online as to the aims and makeup of Project Xanadu. In interviews with him, Nelson
reveals himself as a compulsive documenter of his own life, to cope with the distractions
that Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Aphasia can cause.
The Wired article that covered the failure of Xanadu to come to fruition at the
time psychoanalyzed Xanadu and its archival functions, as well as its ability to jump
from subject to subject, as a manifestation of Nelson’s ADD, a way of processing data
that more easily conformed to his manner of thinking. As irresponsible as theorizations
about a person’s mental health conditions may be, what his vision pointed towards does
represent in some ways a new way of thinking about how files and data are structured and
to some degree archives could learn or take some lessons from Nelson’s ideas.
Nelson continues to work to make the dream of Xanadu come to fruition, despite
the near impossibility of this task. His current plan is to generate workable plugins that
5
Atwood, Jeff. "Coding Horror." The Xanadu Dream. N.p., 2009. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.
would allow Xanadu type uses on the modern web. Though the future of this plan is
uncertain, with Nelson’s skill and funds forever uncertain, should they come to fruition
archives would be able to make use of them. The ways in which Xanadu is built to
permanently embed unbreakable links, with the content displayed in parallel on both
sides of the link. This basic concept would revolutionize the process of preserving
content at every step of the process.
Secondly, though at present Xanadu is not built for moving image content, there
does remain a possibility. If built from the ground up, it is theoretically possible to
develop a language that would accommodate A/V files on a Xanadu type system, which
conceivably would build into the system a level of frame depth that archives can rarely
match. The ways in which Xanadu would embed links would make moving image
materials accessible in ways the current Internet can only begin to point at, with
embedded videos being similarly impossible to break off, representing another step
forward in archival efforts.
At the end of the day, Xanadu is a complicated and far-fetched dream of a
committed and aloof man. The possibility that it will generate useful material for the
future of archiving is slim. However, as the project goes on, hope abounds, and though
there are legitimate benefits to the Berners-Lee descended Web as it exists, the future of
Xanadu should be considered; both as a historical curiosity worthy of preserving the
legacy of, and possibly as a means of modeling the future.
Dostları ilə paylaş: |