Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 191.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Charles Ess <cmess@lib.drury.edu> (114)
Subject: Re: 16.188 (concept, topic &al.) mapping?
[2] From: Charles Ess <cmess@lib.drury.edu> (11)
Subject: Re: 16.188 (concept, topic &al.) mapping?
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 09:51:14 -0700
From: Charles Ess <cmess@lib.drury.edu>
Subject: Re: 16.188 (concept, topic &al.) mapping?
Willard and colleagues:
At the risk of over-filling your e-mail , I pass on the following notes I
made on Thierry Bardini's excellent book on Douglas Engelbart,
_Bootstrapping_. This makes the historically interesting point that the
very interfaces we now take granted - including the visual display of our
monitors (modeled after WWII radar screens (Engelbart was a radar
technician), the keyboard, the mouse - rest on Engelbart's then-radical
notion that the _body_ of the user must be included in thinking about what
we call the Human-Computer Interface (Engelbart had his - more complex -
version). As well, these interfaces are further tied to an explicit
understanding of the _use_ of the machine as symbol manipulator - one that
humans could use first of all to conceptually map their world -- a mapping
process, finally, that for Engelbart led to hypertext as a distinctive
capacity of the machine that would augment and enhance human intelligence
as concerned with building concept maps in distinctive new ways.
All of which is a very long way of saying and documenting that (a)
Willard's interest in embodiment and concept mapping is (as usual) spot on,
and (b) points to important historical roots in the development of
computing technologies as such. In particular: Engelbart's interest in
embodiment (which led directly to the idea of using the keyboard and the
mouse as input devices) anticipates the important work of Winograd and
Flores (1986) by something like thirty years.
Cheers!
Charles Ess
Interdisciplinary Studies Center
Drury University
Springfield, Missouri 65802 USA
<www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html>
<NOTES>
Bardini sees the emergence of natural-language interface out of the
artificial computer languages (FORTRAN and COBOL) as part of "a slow
process of teaching both the user and the computer how to talk to each other
to find a common language." Moreover,
How that process worked out had significant consequences for the way the
personal computer developed. The most significant consequence was Dougals
Engelbarts / inclusion of the body of the user in the interaction between
computers and their users. (33f.)
Contra the emphasis on the distinctiveness of this technology, Englebarts
conceptualization of the interaction between users and computers is as "a
process of information exchange that is not necessarily unique to humans
using computers. All exchanges take place within a larger framework." (34)
This larger framework (for computers, Engelbart called it "H-LAM/T - Human
using Language, Artifact, Methodology, in which he is Trained"), the
"man-artifact interface"
has existed for centuries, ever since humans began using artifacts and
executing composite processes, exchange across this "interface" occurs when
an explicit-human process is coupled to an explicit-artifact process. Quite
often these coupled processes are designed for just this exchange purpose,
to provide a functional match between other explicit-human and
explicit-artifact processes buried within their respective domains that do
the more significant things. (Engelbart 1962, 21-21)
Engelbart focused on language, influenced by Benjamin Lee Whorf (of the
famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). One example:
A natural language provides its user with a ready-made structure of concepts
that establishes a basic mental structure, and that allows relatively
flexible, general-purpose concept structuring. Our concept of "language" as
one of the basic means for augmenting the human intellect embraces all of
the concept structuring which the human may make use of . The other
important part of our "language" is the way in which concepts are
represented - the symbols and symbol structures. (Engelbart 1962, 35) (36)
Bardini:
Language was thus conceived as operating at two levels: it structures
concepts, but it also structures symbols in order to model and at the same
time to represent "a picture of the world." (36)
With specific reference to Whorf:
The Whorfian hypothesis states that "the world view of a culture is limited
by the structure of the language which this culture uses." But there seems
to be another factor to consider in the evolution of language and human
reasoning ability. We offer the following hypothesis, which is related to
the Whorfian hypothesis: Both the language used by a culture, and the
capability for effective intellectual activity, are directly affected during
the evolution by the means by which individuals control the external
manipulation of symbols (Engelbart 1962, 24) (36)
As Bardini illustrates:
It is not simply the case that language structures our world in a given way,
without our having any influence on the matter. The computerized display of
new symbols should therefore allow us to affect the way we conceptualize our
world. The computer thus could become an open medium that could be used to
"make sense of the world," to map the structure of the world as information
flows in order to manage their increasing complexity. The computer medium
would change intellectual activity radically. It would not just improve its
efficiency, make it faster, more economical, and so on, although it would do
these things, too. The basic means to augment human intellect would lie in
the simultaneous development of computer and user in a way that would
exploit the potential of natural language to reconfigure our concepts and
change our world. (37)
Nice quote from Whorf:
Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are
culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not
only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of
relationships and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of
his consciousness" (Whorf 1956 [1942], 252) (37)
A crucial turn (Bardini)
Engelbart thus decided to focus on the configurations themselves, the
"pattern-system" or "network" ordering the concepts that make up our world,
rather than on the linear expression of those concepts, the way in which
they usually are communicated:
With the view that the symbols one works with are supposed to represent a
mapping of ones associated concepts, and further that ones concepts exist
in a "network" of relationships as opposed to the essentially linear form of
actual printed records, it was decided that the concept-manipulation aids
derivable from real-time computer support could be appreciably enhanced by
structuring conventions that would make explicit (for both the user and the
computer) the various types of network relationships among concepts.
(Engelbart and English 1968, 398).
In this way, according to Bardini
Engelbart proposed to use this pattern system as a way by which computers
could become devices that would allow humans to expand the house of their
consciousness. When one stretches the notion of technology to include the
way humans use language - as Engelbart realized very early, according to his
own account - it becomes clearer how it was the influence of Whorf - and
beyond that, of a nexus of independent thinkers like him - that was central
to the development of the personal computer. --> hypertext (37)
</NOTES>
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Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 09:52:09 -0700
From: Charles Ess <cmess@lib.drury.edu>
Subject: Re: 16.188 (concept, topic &al.) mapping?
Willard:
I've run into some literature on concept-mapping over the past five years -
in part, as part of a collaboration with a colleague in architecture, as
we've exported architectural pedgagogies into humanities teaching. I'm not
sure I have any good bibliography to offer to complement yours - but I just
wanted to make sure: are you familiar with Edward Tufte's several books on
the visualization of information? They are classics in both architecture
and other domains, so far as I can tell, and I'm pretty certain they've
already been mentioned on Humanist one way or another.
If so, grand. If not, let me know and I'll get the more precise details.
Cheers,
Charles Ess
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