I’m two weeks in on a crash research project to take a new look into an old idea: The Information City. I’m going to try to blog this as it happens. I usually work alone, but for this project I’m honored to be joined by three researchers: Mark Anderson, Silas Hooper, and Kimera Royale; opinions here, however, are just mine.

Today, most large hypertexts maps look like this Tinderbox map.

That’s not too terrible: we’ve made some progress from the original Intermedia tangle.

We still are quite limited in how many notes we can fit on one screen at a time. In contrast to the situation in the 1980s when this Intermedia experiment was attempted, though, we can’t expect improved displays to get us out of our predicament: today’s displays are roughly as good as our eyes, and our eyes aren’t expected to improve very soon.

The main constraint on getting more notes into the Tinderbox map is that Tinderbox notes are identified by name, and all those textual names pose real problems. First, they use lots of pixels! Second, they need horizontal space, and my my experience they always demand more horizontal space than you are likely to have. Third, all those words make the map view something you want to read, which gets in the way of the map view’s inclination to express itself in space. This third idea was the topic of my Mexico City paper on “The Indefinite Idea Plane Artistically Considered”.

A long time back, Andreas Dieberger wrote an intriguing dissertation on The Information City, a way to visualize hypertexts as a cityscape. That was too hard to implement 25 years ago, but I think it’s time for a fresh try.

In this view, Tinderbox notes are buildings. Sometimes, a building might represent one note or several notes; the apartment towers are containers and their upper floors each represent one child note. The current selection in this view is the yellow house near the center of the view, called “Questions”. At the extreme right edge, you can just see a bit of the Release Notes tower whose green second story represents Release C02, which I am using right now.

The point is not that people are good about reasoning in three dimension. We aren’t, and this is a two-dimensional view of a three-dimensional space anyway. By reducing the amount of text, though, we can get lots more notes onto the screen, and we can still keep them organized in a way which (I hope) will make sense and be sustainable through a few hundred notes. (You can read the note by clicking on the corresponding house, of course, and I think we can do a lot with displaying the names of notes on hover or mouseover, perhaps building on Polle Zellweger’s fluid annotations.)

The models are absurdly simple right now. That might be fine: we don’t want to build a city or a palace, we only need the parts that serve us mnemonically, that help us find stuff we need. Just two weeks in: we’ll see how it goes.

The New Yorker recommends a slew of the best books of 2024. I spent more than any hour scanning this, and added far too many books to my booklist.

by Jorge Almazan

Get the book.

A fascinating discussion of features that make Tokyo a unique and livable city. The discussion of yokochō alleyways is particularly interesting. These narrow streets of tiny two-story bars and restaurants grew from a postwar effort to shut down the black market traffic that centered on Tokyo rail stations. Black-market vendors were removed from their haunts and sent off to new-built market stalls, and these grew into entertainment districts that people like and that show up all the time in movies. This is very on-trend: there’s maybe space for five customers at a time, but rents are low and you can cater to very specialized interests. If you squint, you can see the germ of Robuchon’s atelier and David Chang’s noodle bar.

I’m interested because a small group of us are reviving an old idea of the imaginary city as a view of a hypertext.

Photo: Lan Pham

The Winter Festival of Artisanal Software. Tinderbox, DEVONthink, Scrivener, BBEdit, and lots more. Not to be missed.

People sometimes assure us that there's no need to organize notes, that search will always find what you want.

Not long ago, I read the 12th-century travel book of Benjamin of Tudela. This fellow was a Jew from a small town in Catalonia who, for reasons undisclosed, set out to travel the Mediterranean world. He went to Constantinople, and Baghdad, and Alexandria, and everywhere in between. He always asks, “How many Jews are here? Who are the most accomplished? What do they argue about?” (This was why I ended up traveling with Benjamin: I wanted a footnote to demonstrate that Jews like to argue.)

Four manuscripts of this travel book, which was written in Hebrew, survived the Middle Ages. One of them was printed in 1543; there was demand, perhaps because the Expulsion from Spain had occurred only about 50 years before. Three of the manuscripts were titled with variations of “Travels of Benjamin of Tudela”, but one of them, known as the Roman Manuscript, is titled “Ben Knows.”

The title “Ben Knows” is a truly awful search target. There are lots of Bens, and “know” is a very common verb. For all its early modern popularity among sephardic scholars of the diaspora, Ben Knows would be hard to search for if you hadn’t saved it a good place.

“From one angle her determination to work rather than drink or fuck glints like the single-mindedness that one day becomes greatness. From another angle it looks wrong, but even kingfishers don’t always catch the light in the right way.” — Rosalind Brown, Practice

Don’t miss Porcelain War, a documentary about making art while fighting against the Russian invasion. Now at Coolidge Corner, and lots of other places.

Today is the anniversary of the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking.

We recognize that an immense amount of useful information is available digitally, and that tremendous value can be gained by connecting this information. Connected knowledge enables people to create great products, solve important problems and improve themselves.

My paper from Hypertext 2024: A New View.

Hypertext visualizations embed interesting assumptions about the underlying structure of ideas. Few novel approaches to hypertext maps have been presented in recent years. The Gaudí view tessellates the idea plane, exploring an approach to presenting a greater number of notes on the screen, at the cost of restricting the fixity of the visualization: you can move notes, but notes can move themselves.

by Charles King

Get the book.

An interesting examination of the libretto of Messiah and how it relates to Georgian England, with an emphasis on slavery. Messiah started as Charles Jennens’s commonplace book, with headings on hope, suffering, and redemption. Jennens was a Handel superfan and had money, and he worked out a deal with his favorite composer, whom he call “The Prodigious”. I wish the book said more about the music, but you can’t have everything.

Question: King makes a point that the first contralto aria in the Dublin premiere was “He Was Despised”, and that Mrs. Cibber’s exquisite acting (and, I presume, phrasing) more the compensated for the shortcomings of her voice. But don’t you need an alto in Part I for “For who may abide the day of his coming?” and “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion?”

A documentary biopic of Claude Shannon, the originator of information theory. Because Shannon died in 2001, interviews are reenacted, very plausibly, by John Hutton as Shannon, with other actors as Shannon’s wives and the filmmakers. Shannon hated to be bored, and he was bored a lot; he hated to cheat, and he felt that not working when he was at work was cheating. You can see from this sketch (though it doesn’t mention it) how Shannon could have lived in the same apartment building at Lévi-Strauss, at a time when Lévi-Strauss was desperate to learn about computing, without meeting him. Shannon spent an astonishing amount of time making hilarious toys, including a ski lift between the porch of his shore house and the beach, constructed with Marvin Minsky.