Google Desktop and the d2_memex

Saturday, October 30, 2004

7:35 AM: I’ve added the most wonderful memex tool: Google Desktop! It's ten days since I read David Pogue's rave review (and thanks for the nudge, Bryan). I tried AltaVista’s “Discovery” years ago and loved it, but didn’t bother to install it on my last two laptops. This is the way it should work. Your personal files are searchable from the browser with all of Google's tools. Feels like your desktop is part of the Net, and your memex’s presentation frame, your “home” cyberspace, is a window running alongside everything else in your system.

7:57 AM: What I first googled, with the above: freud d2 transference. I'd been thinking about the funeral I was to attend later in the morning, of a friend who had followed and encouraged my Freud speculations for 20 years.

8:05 AM: Suddenly my image of the memex, cherished all these years, jumped closer, or into better focus. You do all your writing and half your communicating on a device that also holds your full dossier: all your draft papers, student papers, photo albums, music libraries, tax returns, claims for reimbursement, tactless emails, crushing put-downs of colleagues, admissions, self-deceptions, empty promises. The works.

So, the laptop (and now it really has to be a laptop – or one of the hybrid tablets) is for now the memex as physically represented. A physical memex in use by its human architect/client creates a memexed entity, a very primitive cyborg, the avatar of an individual at a memex.

1:56 PM: I found myself wondering how clearly Vannevar Bush foresaw this googled world back in 1945, as he discussed indexing tools for the memex.

Bush's (1945) memex-defining paragraph highlights the indexing problem.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Four paragraphs down Bush gets to indexing the memex:

There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.

A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.

Bush is at first preoccupied with the mechanics of getting around one's memex. He imagines a mixture of conventional indexes with one’s own evolving code book of mnemonic bookmarks and footnotes to all the stored records. His examples emply simple analogue display devices allowing, e.g., variable speed scanning of video records.

The next section, #7, begins with Bush’s admission that his “projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry” is conventional except as “it affords an immediate step to associative learning, … the essential feature of the memex.” Bush can picture the memex’s indexing functions at work.

It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word. Out of view, but also in the code space, is inserted a set of dots for photocell viewing; and on each item these dots by their positions designate the index number of the other item.

Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.

There follows a lovely example (worth imitating at home with Google) of a hobbyist’s interest in the history of the English long bow.

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.

And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a friend …

At the end, Bush offers suggestions about the good the memex will do us, and notes the stakes.

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.

 

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Bush, Vannevar. (1945). As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly. (registration required)

Next up: a D2 example or two.