When a Wiki is not a Wiki: Twenty Years of the Victorian Web

From WikiSym 2008

George P. Landow, Brown University

Tuesday, September 9, 8:30-10:00 @ Main Auditorium (A101)

Keynote

Abstract

All the chatter and puffery about Web 2.0 reminds those who have worked several decades in related fields of computing that the World Wide Web is essentially Hypertext 0.5: Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, Douglas Englebart, Andries van Dam, and other pioneering hypertext theorists all emphasized that true hypertext has to have to allow readers to write and link. Fortunately, with the coming of blogs and now wikis, the Web has at last begun to approach the vision of the hypertext pioneers. Therefore, after a brief look at the most useful paradigms for wikis — that is, the best way for readers and writers to think about them — we shall look at The Victorian Web, a site containing more than 38,000 documents and images, some of which date from 1988 — long before the WWW took its present form. The four pre-web versions of the site used both full and partial read-write systems, and as the site took form, its webmaster and editors tried to employ the lessons learned from the earlier hypermedia systems to the WWW. We shall therefore look at how portions of the site have turned out to function much like a proto-wiki — a dynamic hypermedia corpus that contributors continually grow — and what kind of lessons the experience of working with the site has for owners and contributors of wikis.

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George P. Landow, Professor of English and the History of Art at Brown University, has taught at Columbia, the University of Chicago, Brasenose College, Oxford, and Brown Universities. He has been a Fulbright Scholar (1963-1964), twice a Guggenheim Fellow (1973, 1978), and a Fellow of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (1968-1969), and he has received numerous grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been British Academy Visiting Professor at the University of Lancaster, Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, Visiting Professor at the University of Zimbabwe, Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Sao Palo, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, National University of Singapore (NUS). He served as the founding dean of the University Scholars Programme, NUS, 1999-2001.

His books on hypertext and digital culture include Hypermedia and Literary Studies (MIT, 1991), and The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities (MIT, 1993) both of which he edited with Paul Delany, and Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Hopkins UP, 1992), which has appeared in various European and Asian languages and electronically as Hypertext in Hypertext (Hopkins UP, 1994). In 1997, he published a much-expanded, completely revised version as Hypertext 2.0 and Hypertext 2.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization appeared in 2006, He has also edited Hyper/Text/Theory (Hopkins UP, 1994) and published chapters in three dozen books.

His fields of interest — in addition to new media, hypertext theory, and computer literature and art — include nineteenth-century literature, art, and religion. Landow’s books include The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton UP, 1971), Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology and Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Ohio UP, 1979), Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), Ruskin (Oxford UP, 1985), Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Carlyle to Mailer (Cornell UP, 1986).

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Read also his interview to WikSym Blog.