December 1994
This is a draft prolegomenon for scholarly cyberspaces. My aim is to describe a practical and fertile substrate of commercial, research and supporting information technology which would amplify certain scholarly practices or open new avenues of scholarly work. It is based on, and assumes a practical familiarity with the technologies which are named.[1] Equally importantly, it is based on an understanding of the research and teaching functions of the university.
By scholar, I mean anyone who is engaged with knowledge as a teacher or learner.[2] Interpreting "scholar" in an expansive sense, I include those who are engaged with scientific, humanistic and artistic work, professional scholars as well as those who are provisionally engaged with such activities. Scholarly spaces include not only the physical plant of a university, but also the relationships and techne of the academy. Traditional scholarly spaces comprise the complex of libraries, laboratories, dining halls, common rooms, offices, personal files and paraphernalia together with the associated social relations and practices of intellectual work.
For the purposes of my discussion, I will assume that there is an institutional infrastructure like that of Stanford underlying the work.
Ideas about "scholar's workstations" have circulated in the folklore[3] for decades, but to date, the technological substrate has been less than adequate. Even now, I would say that technology[4] is not sufficiently expressive, robust and transparent to implement everything described below, but I think we can begin to sketch in the elements that would support scholarly spaces. We live in an information landscape criss-crossed by a windy paths, dotted by clusters of cottages and manors. This being a prolegomenon, I aim only to survey the terrain, and suggest a few ways to recognize firmer ground. I also can indicate some of qualities we might wish to have in the ways we design and build information spaces. In light of history, I have no illusions that we can specify and build a cybernetic Utopia any more readily than a material Utopia,[5] but we can at least try to avoid the extremes of social stratification, xenophobic neighborhoods and lifelessly uniform projects. Perhaps the most important part of this note is a call for the academic communities to envision how they might live with these new information environments.
Although this is primarily a discussion of technology, its development and adoption is intertwined with habit and intent. Therefore I will start by reviewing current practices by producers as well as adopters of technology in academic circles and discuss how their practices may evolve. Then I will set out some qualities which a substrate computing environment should have in order to mediate or augment some of these scholarly practices, followed by a sketch of the process by which people and systems can evolve. These are based on ten years of participant-observation and analysis from the perspectives of teacher, researcher and software developer. I will reserve evaluations of specific technologies (languages, software architectures, vendors, etc.) mostly for the final section, which is a peek into the future.[6]
[1] Relevant technical background would include various systems' documentation, e.g. Inside Macintosh, NeXTSTEP Developers Manual, X Windows Programmers Reference, ScriptX Manual, Taligent Developer Environment, etc., plus direct experience as a denizen as well as creator of environments in some of these frameworks.
[2] Throughout our evaluation of technology and practice, it is useful to keep in mind the mnemonic data != information != knowledge. The distinction depends on human interest. Machines manage data; algorithms manage information; humans take interest in knowledge.
[3] BBN; Brown; UCB, etc. Also Vannevar Bush, Dynabook, etc.
[4] Throughout, I'll use "technology" as shorthand for computer technology: applications of computational linguistics, human-computer interface design, communications theory, etc.
[5] Winograd and Flores, in Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, suggest that a wiser approach is to design complex human-computer systems in anticipation of inevitable breakdowns.
[6] In this version, section VI is abbreviated by eliminating detailed technical remarks.
SULAIR Human-Computer Systems Architect / Mathematics and Scientific Visualization