In Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, he describes a very special book. This book (the Primer) is interactive (in more ways than I need go into right now). If the reader wants the Primer to go more in-depth on a particular subject, or to explain what something is, they need only tell the book to do so, and the images and text change. The best way to visualize this is to start with an individual word. Let’s say “syntax” (there’s a reason for that, I’ll get to it, have faith!). The word “syntax” is used in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a paragraph, in the middle of a chapter of this book. If the reader asks “What does ’syntax’ mean?”, the text surrounding the word “syntax” fades away, and an explanation of syntax takes its place. After learning all about syntax, the story continues on. This can occur recursively (so, while reading about what syntax is, the user wants to know what “transformational-generative grammar” is, the explanation of syntax makes way for an explanation of transformational-generative grammar, and so on).
I was perusing Wikipedia’s entry on syntax just now. And I wanted to know more about transformational-generative grammar. The article about syntax had “transformational-generative grammar” as a hyperlink to an article about that subject when it first appears in the text. Much as within the Primer, further explanations of words in that article can explain individual ideas found there.
This sense of immense interactivity and control can be found, I think, only on pages (like the syntax article on Wikipedia) where almost every lexical (as opposed to functional) word is a link to more information about itself.
There have been projects to make most every word on the internet a link. Some websites employ databases that say “hey, if I have a link about this word stored in my database of words, I’ll turn it into a link every time I see it on a page”. Is that the wave of the near-future, or just an idea from the pages of science fiction?
Also, I found the wedding announcement of one of my profs from the early ’90s on NYT.
Posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 8:39 pm. Categories: Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
3 Responses to “A not-so-illustrated primer, transformational-generative grammar, and a wedding announcement”
Gordon Says:
May 3rd, 2006 at 10:31 pm
Dude, clearly you’ve never been to one of those websites where they do that with ads. Annoyus maximus due to clutterus visualis.
Aaron Says:
May 4th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Any tech presents the opportunity for co-option for “evil”
I guess what I’m talking about really works better when one entity has control over all the pages linked to/from (e.g. Wikipedia). I can imagine this, though, as a client-side tech - your browser has a plugin that goes to whatever database you set it to, and replaces words with links according to that database, and that database only. That, of course, isn’t likely, considering website owners could probably make a good chunk of money by running their sites server-side through one of these db’s that includes adverts. An even scarier notion consider is that ISPs could make similar deals and filter all the content served up to their customers…
That being said, I just woke up, so if any of it didn’t make too much sense, that’s why
jardude Says:
June 21st, 2006 at 1:50 pm
I know this is a couple of months late, but you should see thefreedictionary.com’s rip of wikipedia. It has rollover previews of all the links, which saved my ass when I was first being introduced to Theory.
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