Internet computing iconoclast Theodor “Ted” Nelson, Ph.D., will have his life’s work honored at Chapman University on April 24, in honor of the 40
th
anniversary of the publication of his book
Computer Lib
. In a conference called “
Intertwingled
,” Nelson’s more than 50 years of influence in the world of personal and academic computing will be celebrated in talks by a dozen of today’s leaders in technology and creativity. The event is open to the public.
It is not well known that Nelson invented movie editing by computer and realistic computer graphics, for which he filed early patent applications. Among Nelson’s more notorious contributions throughout the advancement of the computer age are coining the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia” among others, authoring several books such as
Computer Lib, Literary Machines
,
Geeks Bearing Gifts
and
Possiplex
, and he has spent more than 50 years working on his vision of a connected document world called Xanadu. Nelson was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Chapman University during fall 2013, when he taught an Honors course entitled “Cinema of the Mind.”
“Ted is a very unique individual—he formulated his ideas before the world was ready to understand them, but that has not deterred him from continuing to believe in a different future for the world of computing,” said Daniele Struppa, Chancellor, Chapman University. “Irreverent, and yet tender, he is the modern/high tech version of Don Quixote, and I say this with the greatest admiration for the immortal creation of Cervantes,” continued Struppa.
Participants in the conference include notables in the tech world, including Turing Award winner (equivalent to a Nobel Prize in Computer Science) Alan Kay, creator of the Smalltalk programming language – the inspiration for today’s windowing based systems; and who is best known for coining the phrase, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Also participating is Dame Wendy Hall, former president of the Association for Computing Machinery and one of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research in multimedia, hypermedia and digital libraries.
“The book being celebrated,
Computer Lib,
made the outrageous claim in 1974 that personal computing, computer graphics, interaction and hypertext would fuse into an oncoming wave that would revolutionize the world—absurd, most people thought,” said Nelson.“ After 40 years of
Computer Lib
being very right, here we are in a soup of resulting super-problems. Now they’re listening to me again,” Nelson continued.
The son of show business parents – his mother was an Oscar winning actress and his father an Emmy winning director – Nelson initially was a filmmaker, actor, and author of a rock musical and numerous plays and periodicals. As early as 1960, he envisioned a world in which all media—documents, films, etc.—would be connected and interacting with one another on a vast system of computers. Nelson coined the term
intertwingled
to express the philosophical complexity of the world and the difficulty of representing it.
Dr. Ted Nelson’s book
Computer Lib
had a considerable influence on the personal computing world in its infancy. Nelson’s effect on the development of hypertext systems has led the Association for Computing Machinery’s Hypertext Conference to awarding the “Ted Nelson Newcomer Award” annually. More about Ted Nelson’s work can be found at
http://hyperland.com
Other speakers at
Intertwingled
include:
Jaron Lanier
Christine Borgman
Ken Knowlton
Mirco Mannuci
Belinda Barnet
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Intertwingled
takes place April 24, at Chapman University, in Argyros Forum. More information can be found at
www.chapman.edu/intertwingled
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