Doc Mara (of SurfnPoetry)has some great comments (via email) on the earlier post on how hypertext history has largely overlooked Paul Otlet's contributions, as well as some questions about comments being turned off on Datacloud (more about which follows his note).
Hey Johndan,
Why no comments feature on your blog? Just wanted to let you know I mentioned Otlet in an article I have floating around. "As We May Think" was published about 10 years after Bush started working on the essay, so Bush may have dreamed up the memex first. Bush and Otlet were kicking the idea around at about the same time. Bush gets the cred, while Otlet and others did lots of the work (except in a few sources--and Alex Wright is hardly the first guy to notice this).
WHY Bush gets the cred (Lessig calling Bush "father of hypertext" etc.) and Otlet shows up on academic blogs as "the guy nobody remembers" is the subject of my essay. I probably give a crap answer, but I think its the discussion we should be having.
Thanks for the post and put me down for a "datacloud should have comments" vote. Of course, there is no democracy on the datacloud, right?
Andrew
All of which are good points. Our writings of history tend to valorize individual geniuses, unfortunately, and once one hero (like Vannevar Bush) gains prominence, everyone else falls away. But maybe there's room for Otlet (and others) as the history of hypertext continues to be (re)written.
And about the comment feature on Datacloud: Datacloud never gets a huge number of comments, partly because I'm usually just pointing to other things I guess. At some point over the last few months, comment spambots began hitting the weblog really hard. And although I was able to set up tight enough filters and blacklists to keep most of the comments from ever getting to the public face of Datacloud, the filters and blacklists are Perl scripts that run as the comments.cgi was launched. The filters and blacklists did what they were intended to do, but the fact that the cgi's needed to be launched to do their work was creating some pretty heavy loads on Clarkson's web server (to the point that I was getting periodic visits from the IT support staff)--not just a few hits, but tens of thousands of hits a day. I'm hoping that our move to linux next fall will let me run the weblog on MySQL rather than the current BerkeleyDB to speed things up, but in the interim, I've had to leave the comments turned off....
Posted by johndanseven at September 25, 2005 12:03 PM