Internet Technologies

Ted NelsonAfter all of this, the first keynote of this conference will be delivered by hypertext veteran Ted Nelson. He basically begins by saying the present computer world is appalling - it is based on techie misunderstandings of human life and human thought, hidden behind flash user interfaces. The GUI (or for him PUI - park user interface) presents a cosmology which categorises all computer tasks into paper-based tasks. WYSIWYG, too, remains paper-based, of course - what you see is what you get when you print it out. (Developed, of course, by Xerox - what a surprise.)

We're on to the post-lunch sessions now - and the researchers' working group has been joined by the access working group. There are seven hypothetical usage cases for the archive which they've envisaged, and these will help us work out what the archive would need to be able to do.

Pierre Lévy now takes the discussion to another level; I heard him give a keynote at AoIR 2003 and was very impressed (and sufficiently confused at the scale of his project), so I'm looking forward to this.

Niels Finneman is next, speaking about the archiving of Danish election sites which led on to the question of developing a national Danish Internet archive. They didn't find either the Australian or Swedish models appropriate for their purposes, and so tried to find a middle way.

Alex Halavais is next; he also presented at AoIR last year. He points out that a few years back hyperlinks rarely crossed national borders (other than into the US, I suppose), but this has been reducing over time. Language borders persist, of course, and continue to mean there is little linking across language borders.

Paul Koerbin from the National Library of Australia now speaks on issues of how to select content for an archive of Internet content (and whether selection is even necessary given that there are wholesale archivists like Internet Archive). The NLA has a specific statute which leads its PANDORA project towards archiving selected content, however.

My first day in Britain is spent at the meeting of the researchers' working group for the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). This is within a couple of hours of stepping off the plane from Brisbane - and I can now also claim the privilege of having showered next door to the boardroom of the British Library, which is where we have now convened (the boardroom, not the shower).

We're on to the next keynote (which we've delayed through our question time in the previous panel). Wendy Hui Kyong Chun from Brown Univerity makes a start here. She talks of the tendency to take work at interface value - to fetishise new technology as cool rather than look beyond the interface itself. What conditions, what makes possible an experience of use?

We're on to the next session - with Richard Barbrook from the University of Westminster. His talk is about imaginary futures. The way we conceive of the future is actually an old idea, and some decades old - artificial intelligence is a good example, based as it remains on ideas like Asimov's work or even older concepts. Like communism, the arrival in such futures is always 10-20 years into the future.

Arriving in TallinnISEA has reached Tallinn. I'm blogging this live from the welcome session by the Estonian minister of culture. A fairly creative industries-inflected welcome, actually - obviously the Estonian government realises the value of these industries to its economy. (And I must say it's amazing to see the changes this place has gone through in the last 10-15 years.) Now we're on to Tapio Mäkelä's welcome.