HyperScope

On September 4, HyperScope was released by a development team that included Blue Oxen’s Eugene Kim and Doug Engelbart, who had to cancel a trip to IU to speak a couple years back. Engelbart is the inventor of such things as the Mouse, Hypertext, Videoconferencing, and the chording keyboard — all of which were part of a 1968 demonstration by his Augmentation Research Center at Stanford.

HyperScope is a modern implementation of an idea the ARC was working on in the 1960s: an application called NLS/Augment, created by Engelbart (still running and in use today). A paper on the subject, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” was the core of the ARC mission. After reading about collaborative IQ, Doug renewed his interest in the project in the form of Open Hyperdocument System (OHS). The premise — that many different collaborative tools, like email and wikis, could leverage the same tools — is more relevant today with Web 2.0 than when Engelbart proposed OHS in the 1980s. With Kim’s help, HyperScope came into existence as the next step in turning this vision into reality.

All of this was discussed by Kim at WikiSym 2006 in an evening talk, “The Augmented Wiki.” Engelbart was part of the talk through videoconferencing that was, er, technically challenged (OK, it sucked). He talked for the first half of the time slot about how he saw collective knowledge aggregating through tools augmented by computers. Engelbart also acknowledged that, while he and his ARC team are given credit for inventing a great many important devices, “every capability is dependent on lower-level capabilities.” This is a central concept in OHS — to build on existing tools in a way that communal knowledge can be aggregate across systems. OHS is open because of its attempt to be scaleable, evolvable and interoperable across domains. It is hyper in that it attempts to enhance and manuever through knowledge systems, creating new access to information for study and revitalization. The tools are not the solution; it is a community’s search for its collective IQ that will allow us to cope with complex, urban problems. As Kim put it, “Doug’s motivation is to save the world.”

“We don’t need new features,” Kim stated. He pointed to several aspects of contemporary systems that are relevant to Augment technologies. Examples of granual addressability include HTML anchors, blog permalinks, and wiki section editing. Backlinking is present in blog trackbacks, wikis and email (when displayed as forum threads). Ther are also some unique features that are in the Augment way of thinkings, such as a wiki’s ability to “link as you think” and facilitates shared language. Instead of inventing new widgets, Kim wants to identify patterns that already exist in great collaborative tools and make them interoperable.

HyperScope is a “high-performance thought processor that enables you to navigate, view, and link to documents in sophisticated ways.” (You can download the code to try it out.) The application extends other applications to make access to their information more sophisticated. Augment allowed knowledge to be “chunked” into smaller pieces, and that is a key feature of HyperScope. Kim’s own PurpleWiki is littered with small links with cryptic codes to identify important chunks (some might call it microcontent) and make them easily referenced. The purple numbers are “puposely annoying so they won’t be ignored.” HyperScope also leverages the other information contained in an address — document structure — to help with navigation of content.

Upon first installation, I found it a bit confusing and extraneous. However, all I did was work with a demo. The power of HyperScope, I would guess, would be inclusion in wiki and blog engines as a way to reference specific areas of content, regardless of where they live on the master site. I could also see this as a very useful tool in writing long books or reference materials that have a heirarchy — a table of contents — but reside in a dynamic, non-linear medium, like a wiki.