Part One Reading Guide

These reading guides will help you sharpen your thinking about the readings. Can you answer these questions?



As We May Think by Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945
  • Specialization has what effect on the quantity of information?
  • Can you suggest technologies in our day that Bush anticipates when he describes photography, facsimile transmission and compression of information?
  • To what extent does Bush anticipate databases and indexes with his discussion and examples of "selection."
  • Describe the qualities and actions of a "Memex" machine.


The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future by Tim Berners-Lee, August 1996
  • What is the goal of the Web?
  • Describe the effect of "minimal constraint" on the development of the Web
  • What is "spoofing?"
  • What is an Intranet?


World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia by H.G. Wells, August 1937
  • What is Wells' opinion of the university system in 1937?
  • Describe how the 'whole human memory' could be duplicated and distributed.


A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indetermine by T.H. Nelson. ACM 20th National Conference, 1965. This is an excerpt: pages 84 - 89, 96 - 100.
  • How do personal files relate to file structures used in business and scientific data processing?
  • Describe how the origins of the Evolutionary List File were in handling personal file systems.
  • Why does Nelson characterize the outlining process as "inductive"?
  • Discuss how Nelson requires his system to change both the contents and his arrangement
  • What is the definition of "hypertext"


The Semantic Web: A New Form of Web Content that is Meaningful to Computers will Unleash a Revolution of New Possibilities, by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler & Ora Lassila. The Scientific American, May 17, 2001.
  • Discuss Berners-Lee's claim that "computers have no reliable way to process the semantics".
  • So far the Web seems to have content for human consumption, but how will this change in the future?
  • What is knowledge representation?
  • What is an ontology?


The Semantic Web, universalist ambition and some lessons from librarianship, by Terrence A. Brooks. Information Research, July 2002.
  • Brooks suggests that the Semantic Web could benefit from a standardized container of information - how?
  • Brooks suggests that the Semantic Web could benefit from a formalized construction of information - why?
  • Describe orthography on the Web.


The Exploding Universe of Web Addresses, by Jeffrey Selingo. New York Times, July 17, 2003
  • Who received 70% of the original set of IP addresses?
  • One estimate is that in the future each of us will need 100 IP addresses. Why?
  • IPv6 addresses have how many groups? and what kind of notation?


The Birth of XML: A Personal Recollection , by Jon Bosak. From: http://java.sun.com/xml/birth_of_xml.html
  • What experience with documentation pointed out the inadequacies of HTML to Bosak?
  • What is the parent markup language of XML?