Annotated Readings, 2/25

Wampum as Hypertext (Haas):

● “We are not the ones who forget. We remember. … Our bodies hold everything we are told to forget.”

● “This essay traces a counterstory to Western claims to the origins of hypertext and multimedia by remembering how American Indian communities have employed wampum belts as hypertextual technologies…”

● Wampum - small, short, tubular bead, made from the quahog clam shell

○ White and purple beads

● Wampum belts - used to record important civil affairs (treaties, alliances, wars, etc)

● Memex (Dr Vannevar Bush) - an instrument designed to extend human memory by allowing us to associatively store and retrieve memories through nonlinear trails

○ Allows for associative indexing - tying two items together

○ “Allow for an associative system for indexing, storing, retrieving, and delivering of memories”

○ Was never built

● Xanadu (Ted Nelson) - would “make all published information available to everyone adn to enable anyone to freely recombine any and all documents and add their own textual content”

● Digitalis (latin) - “of or relating to the fingers or toes” OR “coding of information”

○ All writing is digital

● Hypertext (Jay David Bolter) - “layered writing and reading” environment, where “[a]ll the individual pages may be of equal importance in the whole text, which becomes a network of interconnected writings”

○ Nonhierarchical

● In the wampum network

○ Beads serve as nodes to topics

○ Sinew, hemp, tree bark twine, etc serve as links to associated information

● Hypertext (Farkas & Farkas) - “the original term for interactive content”

● “Wampum presents a hypertext visually and aurally via an accompanying oral story.”

● The meaning of wampum belts does not change VS Western hypertexts can change easily

● Wampum belts require a conscious human effort to be remember the encoded message

● Wampum belts somehow prove American Indians as techno-savvy (?)

● “While Western society has determined what it means to be technologically advanced, it does not mean we have to buy into that fiction.” (huh?)