The Memex

[davidar]

The memex (a portmanteau of "memory" and "index") is the name of the hypothetical proto-hypertext system that Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." The memex would provide an "enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory". The concept of the memex influenced the development of early hypertext systems (eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web) and personal knowledge base software.

In "As We May Think", Bush describes a memex as an electromechanical device enabling individuals to develop and read a large self-contained research library, create and follow associative trails of links and personal annotations, and recall these trails at any time to share them with other researchers. This device would closely mimic the associative processes of the human mind, but it would be gifted with permanent recollection. As Bush writes, "Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race".

--- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex

I've had a few discussions with people about using IPFS as a "personal library", but can't find much in the way of public discussion about it, hence this issue.

In particular, users would be provided with a ":pushpin: Pin It" button (a la pinterest) that would pin a document to a user's local ipfs node, along with providing some system for synchronising pins across all of a user's devices. There could also be shared collections that are synchronised between multiple users, etc.

The 📌 button could be embedded directly into webpages, be added to the browser toolbar, added as an entry to the contextual menus of file browsers, etc. Ideally it would also show the (estimated) number of ipfs nodes seeding the content, much like GitHub stars (but better, because in addition to showing support for content, you're also helping to host and distribute it ;).

We could also integrate it with other systems, eg. @hypothesis for annotations (ipfs-inactive/archives#34), @mediachain for media resolution, etc.

CC: @jbenet @edsilv @aeschylus @JesseWeinstein @mekarpeles

[mekarpeles]

i.e. torrent-ifying arbitrary pieces of content? Where "arbitrary" might be informed by the Open Annotations specification? (Ignore the technical incorrectness of the claim and consider only the analogy in its accessibility to the layperson)

[davidar]

@mekarpeles Anything that can be added to IPFS, yes :)

[edsilv]

along with providing some system for synchronising pins across all of a user's devices

Would something like https://onename.com work for identity?

[edsilv]

It might be good to be able to create "associative trails" as per Bush's original vision too. Linking items together to form narratives. Bush's trails seem to be linear-only, but I've been thinking about ways to create non-linear narratives using IPLD:

https://github.com/idocframework/specs

[mekarpeles]

Bush's "associative trails" are one of my ultimate goals (in life) to support. Books are essentially associative trails... but they are too rigid in their creation and presentation to benefit from the rapid-paced, technology-augmented evolutionary / recapitulation processes "Wikipedia" style crowd-sourced platforms enable.

One area where this could be applicable is in my embarrassingly idea-stage concept for http://dissertate.org -- a wiki for quickly, collaboratively publishing directed sequences of themed academic papers towards a goal. Think coursera's "tracks" but imagine that these tracks can branch arbitrarily. Thus (Randy Pausch style "head-fake") we're really talking about step towards creating a dependency knowledge graph. The goal is saving researchers time by being able to search sequences of papers (the result of tens of hours of an expert reading papers, filtering the relevant and high quality works, and pruning/publishing a "shortest path" to knowledge.

e.g. if I am reading one of Andrew Ng's papers on CNNs for voice recognition, that same paper may occur in a sequence of "how to tune a CNNs".

arbital.com, metacademy, khan academy, and other services have similarly acknlowledge this philosophy in their design and interface choices, but it's challenging to build momentum on such fronts, as (even if we can get past the technical requirements), it requires (the right) curators / scholars to participate + seed value and expertise. And presently there isn't a whole lot of incentive for this -- academics have the option to get paid and receive sole recognition for monopolizing the paper format and silo'ing + publishing their ideas and insights. Such a format also allows them to remain more focused and avoid the distracting element of others changing/interrupting their work. This suggests that a successful mode might need to be more like git in its interface, to enable collaborators to also maintain personal / separate branches / trains of thought... without preventing pull only-access / cross-pollination of ideas. Needless to say, now, in this theoretical landscape of adoption, we have a tangled mess of tangential features complicating adoption.

My thought on such things is, it's less about the technology and mechanism (pinning, etc) and more about the content: the ability to focus on a valuable domain and get buy-in from scholarly experts who can seed the right value. e.g. the phenomenon where 50% of all edits on Wikipedia (circa 2006) done by 524 people (.7% of users) http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia. Also reflected by the "90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities" (inverted pyramid) https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality.

@aeschylus are attempting a project (books.archivelab.org for greco-roman classics) to start with (a) content + data, (b) a community of experts, and (c) minimal interfaces (with minimal technological investment) to enable contributions. The emphasis is on exploring the best ways to organize ~100 greek classics (which version/translation of a book). Once we have enough overlapping sequence of books, we can enable some sort of "Choose Your Own Adventure" (For those who remember the Goosebumps series where you could switch between story lines/trees: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61T0AHDQ33L._AC_UL320_SR218,320_.jpg).

The long term goal is to enable people to create directed sequences not only out of books, but out of parts of books (cc: @edsilv) using the Internet Archive's collection of millions of IIIF backed books.

I'd look forward to experimenting with this "pin" feature on such a collection, given the community, schema, and data is ready for it.

[edsilv]

@mekarpeles It sounds like we have similar ideas but are coming at the problem from different directions. I think if there were a simple standardised way to create decentralised n-linked lists that refer to one or more IPFS objects with additional metadata we can achieve these linear and non-linear "trails". I'd really appreciate it if you could have a read of my 'IDF' (bad name I know...) proposal and let me know your thoughts. I wrote it after going to the i-docs conference in Bristol this year. The idea of interoperable narratives occurred to me while watching a panel discussion between two i-doc authoring tool vendors with different data models. "Where's the IIIF for interactive documentaries?" The documentary makers I spoke to seemed to like the idea, but if we can make it as generic as possible I'm sure it would have a wide variety of applications.

[aeschylus]

Some more context: https://books.google.com/books/about/From_Memex_to_Hypertext.html?id=oZNQAAAAMAAJ

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
(1945)

[edsilv]

This thread may also be of interest to @trentmc. We chatted briefly at the DWeb Summit about this 'IDF' idea and how the author properties could make use of the ongoing work of the COALA IP group: http://coala.global/working-groups/

[davidar]

I knew I'd forgotten something: https://read-write-web.org/

[jbenet]

As i read every comment here, my reactions are:

[jbenet]

I think we have all been greatly inspired and want to build the various pieces of the memex. I (naturally) think IPFS is perfectly suited for this, particularly for establishing the public record. But it's going to take a lot more too-- lots of UX tooling / applications on top. we can do it!

Btw, i'm reminded of https://WebRecorder.io

[jarmitage]

Randomly dropping in out of nowhere to say I love that this is getting discussed

This thread may also be of interest to @trentmc ... author properties could make use [of] COALA IP work: http://coala.global/working-groups/

Thanks for the ping, Ed -- definitely interested :)

Correct, you might be able to leverage the COALA IP protocol here to save much effort. About the protocol: it starts with LCC, a protocol designed to generalize rights expression & attribution across different media verticals such as DDEX (widely used in music) or PLUS (widely used in photos). COALA IP protocol is an opinionated implementation of LCC: it uses JSON-LD & IPLD for base data structure, schema.org for identifier naming, and Interledger protocol to connect across networks (IPFS, IPDB, more). It's been an effort by the COALA IP working group, with much input from the broader community.

I've attached a couple slide decks that provide an intro. Short = 5 min intro, long = all the details. Please let me know if you have more Q's.

COALA IP - short.pdf
COALA IP - long pdf.pdf

[edsilv]

@ascribe0

invent as little as possible, reuse well-considered building blocks

Would be a sensible mantra to adopt for a Memex project too I think.

I've been looking at the Web Annotation Data Model.

It looks like we could potentially model bookmarks and trails with this. The creator properties could use COALA IP: Party I think?

"creator": "fs:/ipfs/QmParty"

(We'd need to adhere to using IRIs as per the spec).

Combining JSON-LD with IPFS has some snags:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LsQCB2aznlFduE549AfIYR6Tbm95t2VmrjEiFnOhqVM/edit?usp=sharing

I noticed in your example JSON objects you aren't using an id property.

Maybe we could also use a COALA IP: Right hash/IRI for these too:

https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/CR-annotation-model-20160705/#rights-information

[aeschylus]

I highly recommend reading Ed's docs on the OA specs. Pretty much every memex feature can be modelled in a reasonable (meaning non-semantic-web-fascist) way by OA (except for dereferencable IRI/URIs).