Hypertext story - 2023

When the Web worked at its best….

This is a short story is about how we have seen new technologies and adapted them but very often by dumbing them down into something the equivalent of what we have already, and then integrated them into our environments.

I offer a simple example.

In the late 1980’s, a young man had the task of making it possible for two groups of people, trying to collaborate across an ocean and thus huge time differences, to share their work. One group slept while the other worked but it was obvious that this would work best if they worked on a single set of documents rather than have them going back and forth. Tim showed how he could open a section of his computer to outsiders without giving access to everything he had so both groups could work on the things stored in a single place. He was living in the time of hypertext when computers had made it possible to have text that was not just text, but also executable. He programmed in to the computer the hypertext facility. He developed a simple language for telling the computer what to do with the text (HyperText Markup Language).

The missionaries in the early days in Arnhem Land had recorded First Peoples telling their stories. They wrote texts from the recordings and they drew illustrations. In writing the texts, they somewhat cleaned up the works – eliminating unnecessary sounds. Finally, they made stencils and thus copies of the books with a Gestetner device – sometimes missing bits of the images when they did not fit neatly on the page.

Given computers, we offered to help by developing digital versions of the books so they could be distributed cheaply and widely. We had access to the books but also the tapes and some linguists. We knew about Tim’s work and so naturally we used hypertext. We made all the words in the stories ‘live’ or executable. We made it so that if the user clicked on a word, they were asked what they wanted done – a dictionary entry? A thesaurus entry? To hear the word pronounced? To see where else the word appeared, … We had decided to make sure the images were copied completely and we added back the prefixes and suffixes that we could hear on the tapes but were not in the missionaries’ books. The additional text made the words much more meaningful for the reader because they did such things as locate the action, indicate who was involved and in what capacity, and more. These are things that do not operate in the English language in the same way but are very important in the complex Indigenous languages of Australia.

Today, HTML lies behind a lot of the documents displayed on the (now) World Wide Web but the only thing that happens when the odd active word or other symbol is clicked is a single something set by the author of the document.