I love making connections between things—finding the relationships between the seemingly unrelated.
It's a love that really started when I was an undergraduate student at Hampden-Sydney College. As a freshman, I took a two-semester honors course on the Industrial Revolution. The course was co-taught by three people, two of them specialists in Victorian literature and the third an historian of economics.
As you might expect from such a grouping of professors, we read an eclectic mix: Dickens, Carlyle, Macauley, Mill, Engels, Tennyson, Meredith, Bentham, Ricardo, the Brontës, Malthus ... and a bunch of others that I'm forgetting at the moment. That's where I first learned that Gradgrand and Bounderby were Dickens' take on Mill and Bentham. It's also where I gained a real appreciation for the fact that none of these writers worked in a vacuum.
They were talking to one another.
During my senior year, I got special permission to write a double-length paper that I could submit for both an English and a philosophy course. It looked at the "Eyre affair." (No, not the one by Jasper Fforde, though you should read that one, too.) The one about a rebellion by former slaves in Morant Bay, Jamaica. The colonial governor, Edward John Eyre, suppressed the rebellion with the special kind of brutality reserved for European colonial powers. Over the course of a month, Eyre burned over 1000 homes, killed 500 Black residents and had even more flogged and tortured.
Many years—and a dissertation on Mill's moral and political theory—later, I came back to the topic.
These days, I don't do much in the way of the history of political philosophy. Indeed, I've forgotten more than I remember about the specific arguments I made close to two decades ago. I certainly don't remember much of that honors course any longer.
But I do remember many of the connections between the books we read back then—indeed, I remember far more of the connections than I do the specifics of the books themselves.
That class shaped how I think about the world. It nurtured my ability to find the connections between ideas. That ability would help me later become a scholar. (And, dare I say, it's the driving force behind the work you're reading right now.) Indeed, it's probably why I gravitated to working on the web.
What is the web, if not making the links between texts into literal links between texts.
They're bidirectional by default. When you're exploring connections between ideas, knowing what is linking in is every bit as important as knowing where you're linking out.
Way back in the first half of the 1990s, the philosophy department at Hampden-Sydney College invited John Searle to give a lecture. Searle gave (what I now know is) his standard talk, in which he argues that artificial intelligence is impossible, thanks to the Chinese Room thought experiment.
The information in the marginalia was in some ways even more important than the information in the text.
Maybe an argument can be more than just a series of carefully-sequenced claims that build to a conclusion. Maybe an argument can be a sort of gestalt that emerges from a series of interconnected bits. My brother Josh likens the nonlinear essay to the experience of visiting an art exhibit—there are many possible paths through an exhibit, and the story you will take away turns heavily on which path you choose.
Nonfiction is normally lean-forward reading. When the reader is in control, sequential ordering makes less sense. Lean-forward readers are drawing connections both within the text and between different texts.
My story is neither new nor unique. It’s how I learned to conduct research as an undergraduate; how I wrote seminar papers, a master’s thesis and a dissertation in graduate school; how I wrote scholarly papers as a young academic.
For Nelson, hypertext was a way of fully documenting the connections between ideas—of understanding that all of human knowledge is intertwingled. In many ways, Xanadu was to be a computer network that mimicked Nelson's own brain.
He goes on to point out that studies of researchers have shown that researchers themselves describe the process of synthesizing research findings as "arduous and effortful" and that "the labor of transforming the 'raw data' of unstructured texts into forms amenable for analysis" is the major driver of those difficulties.
Research doesn’t happen one text at a time. It’s a continual act of creating links between ideas.
Perhaps more pertinent, though, is that a linkbase facilitates online research. Research is about finding the links between texts. Being able to literally document those links would be a useful first step.
And yet I’m fascinated by the very postmodern idea that links between texts are more important than the arguments within said texts.