Tag: IBIS

Compendium Archive & Network 2021

CONTEXT… Those of you who know my R&D will know that I have a long-standing interest in the role that software can play in human sensemaking around wicked problems, a form of “augmenting human intellect” (Doug Engelbart). A powerful example is structured, visual hypermedia that makes tangible the ways that ideas, data and arguments connect with each other and documents.

This is certainly a story about the evolution of an interactive visual tool for thinking—but far more interestingly, it’s about the co-evolution of software with a set of practices to develop human fluency with the tool. Those practices were (in historical order) Dialogue Mapping, Issue & Argument Mapping, and Knowledge Art.

Here’s how I told this story in 2014, tracing my work back to Engelbart’s vision of personal computing and collective IQ, and here’s a quick overview of key books and papers.

COMPENDIUM… provides extremely flexible hypermedia linking between conceptual objects (e.g. questions, ideas, arguments), data and documents (local/online), through a visual user interface. As a hypertext system for thinking with, connections can be made in multiple ways: spatial proximity and visual linking within a view, plus tagging and transclusions across views (i.e. embedding a node in multiple views). Views can contain each other non-hierarchically (A can contain B which can contain A). Search can be refined by node types and tags. This 2014 RAE Impact Case distills the research –> impact narrative.

It is an open source, desktop Java application with a full SQL database, with XML and SQL import/export, and HTML publishing. In the course of its development, it was interoperable with (at the time state of the art) Jabber (open source instant messaging) XML, and semantic web RDF.

HYPERTEXT HISTORY… Compendium is descended from the pioneering hypermedia system gIBIS (graphical Issue-Based Information System) at MCC Labs led by Jeff Conklin and Michael Begeman, which led to the commercial corporate memory product CM1, renamed Questmap. Compendium was then developed over the course of around 20 years R&D starting in the early 90s at Bell Atlantic labs (White Plains NY) led by Al Selvin and Maarten Sierhuis, continued at NASA Ames Research Centre by Maarten on the Mobile Agents project providing a human-agent science team tool, in collaboration with my team at the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMI) from 1995-2014. The gIBIS/CM1/Questmap/Compendium lineage exemplifies an influential strand of hypertext R&D that preceded the invention of the Web, which like Xerox NoteCards, exemplifies what Frank Halasz called hypertext for idea processing — focusing on visualising and managing the connections between nodes as a form of intellectual work. You can learn a lot more about the intellectual lineage of these ideas in this brief history, another account, on this blog via the compendium tag, and on the memorial archive of Compendium co-inventor, my colleague, PhD student and friend, Al Selvin.

COMPENDIUM INSTITUTE… The Compendium Institute coordinated the international user/developer network, feature requests, code releases, research and training. Software development has been on pause since 2013, and may well not be continued, since much of the world now expects web-based tools (indeed see the great work by DebateGraph, and the KMI team developed quite a few). However, there remains an active user base of people who value the speed and functionality of a Java desktop app which continues to run on current Mac/Win/Linux Java.

I have therefore archived the Compendium Institute website for posterity, since it contains lots of resources:

SOFTWARE… You want the tool! I’m trying to keep links alive, and Java seems to be holding up remarkably since development ended around 2016.

  • If you’re a developer, then you can get the most recent CompendiumNG, from the CompendiumNG (next generation) wiki.
  • I can also offer this Mac installer version of CNG which requires no code knowledge to get running
  • If you’re non-technical on Win/Linux then this version of Compendium comes in an integrated installer:
    • KMi Open University version 2.0beta with advanced experimental features (like Maps supporting video annotation): Downloads page | QuickStart Guide for Mac or Windows *follow the guide*
    • CogNexus Institute also offers download links for a slightly older version

COMMUNITY… Since Yahoo closed down their groups end of last year, I’ve created a new Google Group which you’re warmly invited to join if you want to stay connected with fellow users and some of the original team. Collectively, we will hopefully be able to answer any queries about Compendium’s functionality and design rationale — and who knows, possible futures…

“The Future of Text” hits the streets

Congratulations to Frode Heglund, convenor for 9 years of the widely respected Future of Text Symposium, who has just edited and published The Future of Text book! The book is “a letter to the distant future”, in which an astonishingly diverse group of people share perspectives on where humanity has got to with the symbol systems we use to codify and share ideas — “Text” — and where we might be going. I was honoured to be invited to contribute to this: The Future of Text in Three Moves.

From the book’s introduction:

“I have invited some truly phenomenal people to contribute to this work, and against all odds, they said yes. There are eminent representatives from the worlds of art, typography, science, software development, academia and more. Text writes our history, and text guides our future, but text itself is not often reflected on, let alone written about.”

You can replay videos from the launch event, which was introduced by no less than Vint Cerf who has supported this work from its early days:

Well it’s been a hell of a year, so here’s a book to settle down with over Christmas and New Year, accompanied by your favourite brew, to dip into at random and make some space for reflection. Give it to all your friends and family! The pieces are short (some only a page), and a mind-stretching joy to browse.

I’m old enough to still love the weighty-tome gravitas of the printed volume in the above photo, but of course, most of us will read this digitally. It’s freely available as PDF | EPUB, and the PDF takes on greater interactive qualities when viewed in Frode’s Reader hypertext tool. Here’s his demo of this and the other tools he’s been inventing…

Alert to the challenge of digital preservation (“we’re writing in sand” as Frode memorably states about digital texts) — they’re working on a physical edition with the entire text micro-engraved into plastic and metal for longevity.

Frode kindly invited me to contribute a chapter, which gave me a much appreciated pause for thought on the 30 years I’ve spent using hypertext to create interactive visualisations of dialogue and arguments, and in the last decade or so, learning from my NLP and machine learning colleagues. So, here’s my letter to the future: The Future of Text in Three Moves.

Many congratulations also to Niko Grupen, whose piece From Author to Editor: Our Place Alongside the New Life Cycle of Text (p.148) scooped first prize in the Student Competition! His punishment is to read a signed Visualizing Argumentation e-book cover-to-cover over Christmas 😉

Doug Engelbart (RIP) is the fire driving both Frode and me (his influence on my career) — so for old time’s sake, here’s when Doug and Frode Heglund visited me in 2004 🙂

Al Selvin – Memories & Tributes

Al_Selvin_MemoriesPage

Words can only say a bit of what Al’s loss means, but a version of what I said at his memorial service is on the website.

POSTED TODAY TO THE COMPENDIUM INSTITUTE COMMUNITY FORUM.

Dear Compendium Community and other colleagues,

Al Selvin, one of Compendium’s inventors and leaders, passed away suddenly due to heart failure on 10th Oct while out cycling, enjoying one of the activities he loved most. He was 56. This is a terrible shock for all who knew him, and our thoughts are very much with his wife, children and wider family. Moving tributes to him at his memorial events reflected the deep love and huge esteem in which he was held as a humble, loving, deeply reflective man.

For those of us in the Compendium community, Al was the driving force to refine Compendium as a digital medium. It was the experience of the mapper that particularly fascinated him, since nobody seemed to pay any attention to this particular mix of skills and dispositions. Why did so many people say that it looked like ‘magic’ when he produced a Dialogue/ Issue/ Conversational  Map during a meeting? What was a mapper doing when they were combining this with more formal modelling, all seamlessly integrated with navigating and linking the myriad other documents in that team’s work? This passion produced many research articles, much thinking aloud in his blog, and a PhD, recently distilled as a book. See the links at the top of the page for more.

Without Al, this community would not exist.

Please use this page as a place to share your memories: http://bit.ly/alselvin

We welcome all reflections on Al’s contribution — his writing, talks, videos, or first hand experience working with him. Feel free to include links and photos.

To contribute, please email us with your contribution and we’ll add it in.

We thought we’d let Al start the contributions in his own words, acknowledging how many of you supported him in his PhD.

With our thanks in advance to you, for helping his family and friends, as well as ourselves, to understand and celebrate how many people Al’s life touched.

Feel free to forward this to relevant colleagues.

Maarten Sierhuis & Simon Buckingham Shum

msierhuis and sbuckinghamshum at gmail dot com

 

 

 

Just out: “Creativity and Rationale in Software Design”

All my research and software development on argument visualization, sensemaking and organizational memory derives originally from work on approaches to representing Design Rationale (particularly for human-centred computing) since starting my PhD in the late 80s on the usability and utility of argumentation-based design rationale. The landmark volume published in 1996 was Design Rationale: Concepts, Techniques and Use, edited by Tom Moran and John Carroll. A decade later saw Rationale Management in Software Engineering (Eds. Dutoit, McCall, Mistrik & Paech), this time from a more software engineering perspective, reflecting on a decade’s progress.

Now, following an NSF workshop last year chaired by John Carroll, a special journal issue of Human Technology has just been published, with a specific focus on one of the most interesting tensions in DR: that between explicit, logical Rationale, and Creativity. Since HT is open access, you’ll find the full volume right here…

Carroll, J.M. (2010). (Ed.) Creativity and Rationale in Software Design. Special Issue of Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments, Volume 6, Number 1, pp. 1-149. Available at: www.humantechnology.jyu.fi

This includes an article led by KMi’s Al Selvin, as blogged earlier under the broader heading of Knowledge Art, which nicely illustrates how we are seeing deeper principles emerge from the longitudinal study of the original DR tools, as they spread to new arenas, and a language emerged for the skillsets and practices that make them effective.