As We May Think

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As We May Think Methodology

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Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster material and

lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive compounds to allow an
extension of the minicamera idea, are all imminent.
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Let us project this trend

ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future
wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3
millimeters square, later to be
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projected or enlarged, which after all involves

only a factor of 10 beyond present practice.
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The lens is of universal focus,

down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply because it is of
short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the walnut such as we now
have on at least one camera, which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide
range of illumination. There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and
the spring for operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for
all when the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It may well be stereoscopic, and record with two spaced glass eyes, for striking
improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the corner.
The
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• cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within easy
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• reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken. On a pair of
  ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it
  is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it
  is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the
  laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record,
  he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all
  fantastic? The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many
  pictures as would result from its use.
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  Ella's camera and others. Good example of his prediction. What would it look like to do a prediction like this for ourselves. Choose a current piece of technology and follow the logic projection model used by the author to write a short desfription or story about a piece of technology and humans. Step 2 talk about the negotiation of the world in between now and then

It would be a brave man who would predict that such a process will always

remain clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail.
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Variable sentiment. This could be true for some emerging technologies and the iteration process of technological e,regency in general

the graininess

of the film, the excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the
light sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving
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I feel like he is laying out an interesting methodology here for making logical predictions about the future. Starting with the idea of evaluating the future of technological development by
Understanding how each technology functions. What it is what it's made if how ot works methods etc. then understanding its limitations, what is preventing it from being better at what it does (does he miss the strain of what it could be?-maybe make another model with additions). And then evaluates how likely and easily that will be overcome (match with the processing chip doubling equation).

• Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the same
  thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be usable. Even under
  these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of
  the ordinary record on books, and its microfilm replica.
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One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are

free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs
and comments. Time is automatically recorded to tie the two records together.
If he goes into the field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he
ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the
record. His typed record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature,
so that he projects them for examination.
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This is perhaps an example of his predictions are Li,opted because it isolated technological development over time from the role of human interaction engagement and the happenings of the world. There will be so many dialpgic turns between technology and the human world between now and the future investigator one cannot predict such things about the use of technology in the future without taking into account humans effect and being effected by the time and process in between that we must also imagine whether this future investigator works in an office even, for perhaps offices have become co working spaces. A small change certainly and possibly not hugely effecting the outcome of technological development but as we continue to play these things out in combination we will see a number of variables behaving dynamically which make it impossible to accurately predict one without co investigating it's necessary dialpgic partner

Machines (Good for historical to,Elaine placement. Where am I? When am I?)

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Witness the humble typewriter, or the movie camera, or the automobile

Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most

of the essential features of recent keyboard devices,
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Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce

his great arithmetical machine.
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Put these together with the other 'imagined machimes' that have been I,gained and then existed. Imagined into existence. More about the role of imagination in technology

We could use this article to make a Borges style 'encyclopedia of technology past, present, and future'. All the descriptions of the old technology components is rich for detouring with I,ages etc

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The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings.

Such machines will have enormous appetites. One

of them will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed
with simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results
every few minutes. There will always be plenty of things to compute in the
detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.
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Ok, so we have these unbelievable changes coming, machines that will alter our entire view of the world, that are sure ti change everything and leave behind the slow and halted world we know. Except for gender and labor relationships. These will certainly still be the same roomful of girls waiting anxiously for their orders so they can deliver them to the machine. This is an example of the limitation of Bush’s methodology that I am bringing up

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we

should not get far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as
well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics
of probability. The abacus, with its beads strung on parallel wires, led the
Arabs to positional numeration and the concept of zero many centuries before
the rest of the world; and it was a useful tool—so useful that it still
exists.
It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It
will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future.
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Part of the methodology is
what has been
what is
what we know about how that has happened and how we can project that from where we are now to where we’re going. This is ripe to be illustrated with code. Maybe that p5 pen from codepen

The personnel officer of a factory drops a stack of

a few thousand employee cards into a selecting machine, sets a code in
accordance with an established convention, and produces in a short time a list
of all employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish. Even such devices are
much too slow when it comes, for example, to matching a set of fingerprints
with one of five million on file. Selection devices of this sort will soon be
speeded up from their present rate of reviewing data at a few hundred a minute.
By the use of photocells and microfilm they will survey items at the rate of a
thousand a second, and will print out duplicates of those selected.
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The cards may be in miniature, so that they occupy little space. They must move

quickly. They need not be transferred far, but merely into position so that the
photocell and recorder can operate on them. Positional dots can enter the data.
At the end of the month a machine can readily be made to read these and to
print an ordinary bill. With tube selection, in which no mechanical parts are
involved in the switches, little time need be occupied in bringing the correct
card into use—a second should suffice for the entire operation. The whole
record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet if desired,
instead of dots to be observed optically, following the scheme by which Poulsen
long ago put speech on a magnetic wire. This method has the advantage of
simplicity and ease of erasure. By using photography, however one can arrange
to project the record in enlarged form and at a distance by using the process
common in television equipment.
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Does this exist yet? I think it might not really, or it might not be ‘optimized’ yet, whiich if true brings up some interesting questions about humans and voices and machines.

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One might, for example, speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would certainly beat the usual file clerk.

There are many special machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which

predicts the tides.
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Outline of the article and general ideas

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Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. —THE EDITOR

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Pronouns make it almost unreadable. Run it through the script.

The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next?

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Scientists are all brought together for the war, and then it ends and now what? This possible moment of anlternate future (man in the high castle) where the cooperation, systems, and networks that had been developed as part of the war effort could be carried over into a coordinated effort to make information active, accessible, and actionable in bettering the loves of humans and in ensuring the world never again reached the brink of war. This reminds ,e of the choice milk lays out in where do we go from here chaps or community, and my chart of empathy and technology. Also a little bit the hope of reconstruction

It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride, who have

left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive gadgets, who have
had to devise new methods for their unanticipated assignments
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I feel like in some ways now this war TJ,e activity has become the norm for the research and development, the direction, the ethos and pedagogy with which we develop technological tools. We are always at war with Eurasia

A good logic for the critique of the tyoe of rote learning coding production factories and non-profits training humans in ‘machine learning (re-used)’

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Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by a keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed figures by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits for sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for interpreting the result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys down.

Adding is only one operation. To perform arithmetical computation involves also

subtraction, multiplication, and division, and in addition some method for
temporary storage of results, removal from storage for further manipulation,
and recording of final results by printing.
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This thing about a method for storing, and I would add naming the results of interactions. That is making it possible to not make an object (literal, in taht it would be an element, an object your program could target and manipulate). I think it’s incredibly important and a the root of what is so important and powerful about programming for me and maybe it is for programming

there still come more

machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist. Some of them will be
sufficiently bizarre to suit the most fastidious connoisseur of the present
artifacts of civilization.
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#meme

Gosh this is super deep. It’s also how whiteness works. If they can’t beat you they’ll join you and lead you in the wrong direction.

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The scientist, however, is not the only person who manipulates data and examines the world about him by the use of logical processes, although he sometimes preserves this appearance by adopting into the fold anyone who becomes logical, much in the manner in which a British labor leader is elevated to knighthood.
and in this case if they can’t beat you they will call you one of them and…

Whenever logical processes of thought are employed—that is,

whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an
opportunity for the machine.
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There will always be plenty of things to compute in the

detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.
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#meme
Gosh, this is just great, great meme material

The repetitive processes of thought are not confined however, to matters of

arithmetic and statistics. In fact, every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine
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Not anymore! lol

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With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population

The Encyclopoedia

Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of
magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence,
having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled
and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of
course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also
be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the
modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.
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• Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The material for the
  microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent.
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  And now free on the internet

A mathematician

is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not
even a man who can readily perform the transformations of equations by the use
of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of
symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive
judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs.
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#a1
Gender here is rough too

All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as confidently

as he turns over the propelling of his car to the intricate mechanism under the
hood. Only then will mathematics be practically effective in bringing the
growing knowledge of atomistics to the useful solution of the advanced problems
of chemistry, metallurgy, and biology. For this reason there still come more
machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist. Some of them will be
sufficiently bizarre to suit the most fastidious connoisseur of the present
artifacts of civilization
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Types of Selection. Very relevant to coding. Unbelievably useful logic and explanation.

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This process, however, is simple selection: it proceeds by examining in turn every one of a large set of items, and by picking out those which have certain specified characteristics. There is another form of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, then only to a subclass of this given by the second digit, and so on; and thus proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station. It requires a few seconds to make the selection, although the process could be speeded up if increased speed were economically warranted. If necessary, it could be made extremely fast by substituting thermionic-tube switching for mechanical switching, so that the full selection could be made in one one-hundredth of a second. No one would wish to spend the money necessary to make this change in the telephone system, but the general idea is applicable elsewhere.

but also

ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical
progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube.
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Questions and Look Ups

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Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by a keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable. Machines have been made which will read typed figures by photocells and then depress the corresponding keys; these are combinations of photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits for sorting the consequent variations, and relay circuits for interpreting the result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys down.

Look up

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a Voder

• a Vocoder
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• gossamer
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What does this mean?

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Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of mechanization, it is true.

true.>> It is strange that the inventors of universal languages have not

seized upon the idea of producing one which better fitted the technique for
transmitting and recording speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue,
especially in the scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon would become
still less
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• intelligible to the layman.
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profligate

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Great question to always be asking ourselves

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Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence?

What has/does technology provide and what can it. Connect this to the epigraph from benjamins art in the age of mechanical reproduction

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First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his

Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has

provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make
extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the
life of a race rather than that of an individual.
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This is the great promise of technology. But it is greatly stratified when revealed in ots true composition. Still there are the institutionalize barriers to who and where has access to this record and who has what kind of access (maybe read write allegory)

Misc

All this complication is needed because of the clumsy way in which we have

learned to write figures. If we recorded them positionally, simply by the
configuration of a set of dots on a card, the automatic reading mechanism would
become comparatively simple. In fact if the dots are holes, we have the
punched-card machine long ago produced by Hollorith for the purposes of the
census, and now used throughout business. Some types of complex businesses
could hardly operate without these machines.
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There are many special machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which

predicts the tides.
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Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be well to

produce more assurance in its use. The machines for higher analysis have
usually been equation solvers. Ideas are beginning to appear for equation
transformers, which will rearrange the relationship expressed by an equation in
accordance with strict and rather advanced logic. Progress is inhibited by the
exceedingly crude way in which mathematicians express their relationships. They
employ a symbolism which grew like Topsy and has little consistency; a strange
fact in that most logical field.
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A new symbolism, probably positional, must apparently precede the reduction of

mathematical transformations to machine processes. Then, on beyond the strict
logic of the mathematician, lies the application of logic in everyday affairs.
We may some day click off arguments on a machine with the same assurance that
we now enter sales on a cash register. But the machine of logic will not look
like a cash register, even of the streamlined model
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Selection, in this broad sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a cabinetmaker.

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Stylus was a term used this early? I didn't realize that and want to know more

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e can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.

associative

indexing,
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Interacting with the 'record' (map put what the record is/means and what else it has been called, how else it has been invoked

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Methods for transmitting to and reviewing the record

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Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose

• Mendel's concept of the laws of
  genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not
  reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of
  catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant
  attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.
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  This is so real. Such a worry of mine. And such a driving part of my work. What we are missing out on as humans by restricting and what kind of access people have to engage with, produce, and share meaningfully and effectively the cannon of human knowledge as canonized in the digital world

• The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the
  extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has
  been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.
  The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and
  the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily
  important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
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  This could be an epigraph for one of the scenes in my thesis play. i would also like to add to this some of the consequences of such a state. Here the author registers it almost as a nuetral situation in which the only thing lost and at stake is the potential understanding and scientific human development. But as we are seeing in the recent events of the 2016 American presidential election, and hundreds of years of repressive white-supremacy, the stakes for humans engage,ent in knowledge understanding and production, the ability to soft through the enormous a,Lunt of ,easagimf and data has far ,ore real, measurable dire effects. And this is in direct perportion to the points of imtersectionality that one meets such a moment (be)

The repetitive processes of thought are not confined however, to matters of

arithmetic and statistics. In fact, every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine. Not so much has been done along these lines,beyond the bounds of arithmetic, as might be done, primarily because of the economics of the situation. The needs of business and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as production methods were sufficiently advanced.
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And we are stull suffering from this initial wiaing and continued development in line with R and D, Military, and Economic concerns instead of (imagine) if the energy and thought put into the driving forces developing emerging technology was put to optimizing the creative, empathetic, most human wild horizons blah blah

But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into

use. Photocells capable
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I think this is making the false assumption that I'm working against. Which is that somehow technology and its development exist in a vacuu, outside the rest of humans social world, and that a technology introduced to the world will somehow supersede all structures and stratification that came before ot, remaking the world, democratizing it in fact with its new ability to reach more people further and faster. This, we know, is a myth. Technology, like everything is subject to the integration of human life and all that comes with it. Technology, unfettered in its introduction to the world, will not reform it, it will be subsumed by the logic and pre existing conditions of the world it enters.

A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it

must be stored, and above all it must be consulted. Today we make the record
conventionally by writing and photography, followed by printing; but we also
record on film, on wax disks, and on magnetic wires. Even if utterly new
recording procedures do not appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of modification and extension.
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Main building point about consulting and I would add engaging in the cannon

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Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.

And how do we currently 'write to the record.' What has 'the record been' 'what is it becoming', and what will it be

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To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the record? He does so indirectly, by talking to a stenographer or a wax cylinder; but the elements are all present if he wishes to have his talk directly produce a typed record. All he needs to do is to take advantage of existing mechanisms and to alter his language.

The cannon stuff. Main thread

Link: B4297A0C-D08E-41B3-8815-53127DE04683

Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.

and theywill record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution orfor later further manipulation.

Link: A8B19EAF-67A6-4552-ABC2-4204C9738742

Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation.

The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in

the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by
the artificiality of systems of indexing.
Link: D01ABA86-A03A-4D23-82DD-30AE66B181EA

The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in

the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by
the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in
storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found
(when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only
one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path
will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover,
one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.
Link: 388FF1A5-1209-457A-975D-830D333485EF

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one

item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the
association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails
carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course;
trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully
permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of
trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in
nature.
Link: BC9EBDD1-8485-410E-A1CD-97B8AAD89F2A

Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he

certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve,
for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn
from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than
indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and
flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be
possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of
the items resurrected from storage.
Link: 0CDCD541-55B0-4360-AF0C-890DC55B3368

I wonder how connected this will be to my IGL style personal active archive idea that one keeps through school and the rest of their life

Link: 10CB4FF8-F571-4117-BBDA-A92D9821B1C3

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library.

A memex as the living archive. It is possible that my thesis could include making at least a prototype for what this could be

Link: 42E34AB8-1960-4D24-8519-29C360F5A98D

A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It would be cool to see or make an I,age of this imagined machine. Also this note goes in the machines category for the Borges style book as well

Link: A98B27D1-D24B-4149-B632-800D462A1D39

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk

Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion

Link: 8B1FA2F6-B6D9-4BBC-8EB0-F8A9DCA55A7E

Pre cloud imagitation.

Seems like he's describing here a physical internet machine. Which I'm really into. Maybe the memex is the language recreation machine?

Link: 0DC2AF2E-7AF0-466A-8121-4EDED2DA95F3

Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sorts of things. When one is in place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography being employed

This is the essential

feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important
thing.
Link: A22C7F0A-55FC-4128-A7AD-21958CBEBE1C

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code

book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be
joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there
are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of
these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently
joined
Link: 68A2FBBD-C6F3-43D0-98FC-AE67D8BC3120

Imagining a memex. And the importance of being able to connect things as one of the essential powers digital technology allows us. And how the proprietary format has ruined Bushs dream of a shared record with access points

Put this in conversation with the zettelstein

Link: 5451B11F-DC37-4C2E-B71A-EA2F53866A58

Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.

He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his

own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials
available to him.
And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a friend turns
to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations, even of vital interest.
He has an example, in the fact that the outraged Europeans still failed to
adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code
book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through
it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is
an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in
action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for
insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.
Link: 491E7DEB-2F5C-4156-8190-A0D5CABD7B03

I love 'a mesh of associative trails'

Link: 2B521A0C-C33D-418A-BEB1-787F4007227E

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and

decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and
authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents,
with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician,
puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an
earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with
side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The
chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the
chemical literature before him in his
Link: FADB73F1-B51A-4607-93D4-6D14E57F7934

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with

a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time
contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch.
There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task
of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.
The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's
record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were
erected.
Link: F9B737B8-7004-49B7-85A1-72A0F1F587D8

#a1
Making trails through the common record

All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through

one of the senses—the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or
listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may
be established more
Link: 8F20AD52-A848-4CA8-B570-EFECA2AC0CFC

directly

Link: 8CED39B9-2D7D-416C-AEB6-92ADD87B3D80

In the outside world, all forms of intelligence whether of sound or sight, have

been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order
that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of
process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to
proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought,
but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and
immediateness.
Link: BA488CD0-C40E-4009-BF88-36F1D05B9D79

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady

past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.
Link: 643B9EB3-1270-4376-8487-58F89F0D2B1F

He has

built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more
fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely
become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His
excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of
forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand,
with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.
Link: 282D790C-1E15-4D29-957D-7EEA9E72671C

#a1

The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are

teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses
of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly
to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He
may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good.
Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would
seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or
to lose hope as to the outcome.
Link: 8483BFF1-6D84-467C-9DD4-5E952470630D

#a1

So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the record. Thus

far we seem to be worse off than before—for we can enormously extend the
record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This is a much
larger matter than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific
research; it involves the entire process by which man profits by his
inheritance of acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and
here we are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the
account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone
walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one
a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the
current scene.
Link: B0365C03-A6AD-4AE8-A9F6-25302CB01E4C

But even this

new machine will not take the scientist where he needs to go. Relief must be
secured from laborious detailed manipulation of higher mathematics as well, if
the users of it are to free their brains for something more than repetitive
detailed transformations in accordance with established rules.
Link: 159777E8-4069-4117-A7E2-CA2580E56CD3