Invited Talk>>Intimate Information-Organic Hypertext Structure and Incremental Formalization for Everyone's Everyday Tasks

INTIMATE INFORMATION:

organic hypertext structure and incremental formalization for everyone's everyday tasks

Mark Bernstein

Eastgate Systems Inc.

Much of our most important writing is written to ourselves and to our immediate circle of family, friends, and allies. This intimate or _nobitic_ information includes not merely calendars and grocery lists, but also work for planning our future travels and endeavors, as well as correspondence to our future selves and our progeny. Tinderbox (http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox) is a tool for making, analyzing, and sharing notes -- offers a range of representational tools ranging from conventional links and WikiLinks to prototype inheritance and spatial hypertext; in this talk, I'll explore the surprising extent to which people exploit this complex tool set to help discover and express the structure of everyday ideas.

Of particular interest, I think, is the interplay between the old hypertextual concept of constructive hypertext and the natural growth patterns of wikis. How can a wiki gardener, or a hypertext writer, best create what Michael Joyce termed "a version of what [it is] becoming, a structure for what does not yet exist"?