Hypertext 2026📢 #HT2026 Workshop Deadline Extended! 📢
We’ve extended the Workshops submission deadline by two weeks!
🗓️ New deadline: March 13
Submit your proposal and join the conversation.
🔗 Details: [https://ht.acm.org/ht2026/](https://ht.acm.org/ht2026/)
The Medley Interlisp ProjectWhat strategies can be employed to describe a problem and converge on an appropriate hypertext representation? This 1987 paper explored such representation issues with NoteCards, the hypermedia system written in Interlisp.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/317426.317445
Waywords Studio𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜’𝗺 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴: "𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝘂𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗴 𝗘𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗲𝘀" 𝗯𝘆 𝗦𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗕𝗶𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘁𝘀 -
Birkerts has plenty of angst over the demise of the paper book, and I don't share his view, I suspect. But let's give him a fair hearing as he laments the shift from static to dynamic text.
#books #bookreviews #bookworm #readreadread #tbr #tbrpile #tbrlist #quotes #reading #thegutenbergelegies #svenbirkerts #reading #internet #criticalreading #hypertext #readingwars #refuseit
Clock’s ticking! ⏳
The deadline for #ACMHT2026 workshop submissions is approaching fast.
📅 Deadline: Feb 27, 2026 (AoE)
📝 Instructions: https://ht.acm.org/ht2026/open-calls/workshops/
Get those proposals in! 🚀 #Hypertext #AcademicTwitter #CallForPapers
Greg Lloyd“Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies Michael Satlow and a team of Israel-based scholars plan to develop advanced AI and natural language processing techniques — adapted for historical Hebrew and Aramaic sources — to analyze more than 130,000 texts spanning 18 centuries.”
#brownuniversity #hypertext #corpus
https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-02-04/jewish-texts-ai-grant-satlow
Large-scale AI analysis to explore how centuries of knowledge passed through Jewish communities
Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, Brown University scholar Michael Satlow will use cutting-edge computational techniques to analyze 18 centuries of traditional Jewish texts.
Matthias MProveHello World!
_with my ACM #sigweb interview on Cultural Computing.
📰 https://mprove.de/script/24/sigweb/index.html
@sigweb #hypertext #culturalcomputing #interfaceculture #openglam #iiif #iiifviewer @IIIF
@chronohh #AlgorithmicPhilosophy #digitalhumanities
(Roughly) Daily“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”*…
Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI purveyor Anthropic, has recently published a long (nearly 20,000 word) essay on the risks of artificial intelligence that he fears: Will AI become autonomous (and if so, to what ends)? Will AI be used for destructive pursposes (e.g., war or terrorism)? Will AI allow one or a small number of “actors” (corporations or states) to seize power? Will AI cause economic disruption (mass unemployment, radically-concentrated wealth, disruption in capital flows)? Will AI indirect effects (on our societies and individual lives) be destabilizing? (Perhaps tellingly, he doesn’t explore the prospect of an economic crash on the back of an AI bubble, should one burst– but that might be considered an “indirect effect,” as AI development would likely continue, but in fewer hands [consolidation] and on the heels of destabilizing financial turbulence.)
The essay is worth reading. At the same time, as Matt Levine suggests, we might wonder why pieces like this come not from AI nay-sayers, but from those rushing to build it…
… in fact there seems to be a surprisingly strong positive correlation between noisily worrying about AI and being good at building AI. Probably the three most famous AI worriers in the world are Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk, who are also the chief executive officers of three of the biggest AI labs; they take time out from their busy schedules of warning about the risks of AI to raise money to build AI faster. And they seem to hire a lot of their best researchers from, you know, worrying-about-AI forums on the internet. You could have different models here too. “Worrying about AI demonstrates the curiosity and epistemic humility and care that make a good AI researcher,” maybe. Or “performatively worrying about AI is actually a perverse form of optimism about the power and imminence of AI, and we want those sorts of optimists.” I don’t know. It’s just a strange little empirical fact about modern workplace culture that I find delightful, though I suppose I’ll regret saying this when the robots enslave us.
Anyway if you run an AI lab and are trying to recruit the best researchers, you might promise them obvious perks like “the smartest colleagues” and “the most access to chips” and “$50 million,” but if you are creative you might promise the less obvious perks like “the most opportunities to raise red flags.” They love that…
– source
In any case, precaution and prudence in the pursuit of AI advances seems wise. But perhaps even more, Tim O’Reilly and Mike Loukides suggest, we’d profit from some disciplined foresight:
The market is betting that AI is an unprecedented technology breakthrough, valuing Sam Altman and Jensen Huang like demigods already astride the world. The slow progress of enterprise AI adoption from pilot to production, however, still suggests at least the possibility of a less earthshaking future. Which is right?
At O’Reilly, we don’t believe in predicting the future. But we do believe you can see signs of the future in the present. Every day, news items land, and if you read them with a kind of soft focus, they slowly add up. Trends are vectors with both a magnitude and a direction, and by watching a series of data points light up those vectors, you can see possible futures taking shape…
For AI in 2026 and beyond, we see two fundamentally different scenarios that have been competing for attention. Nearly every debate about AI, whether about jobs, about investment, about regulation, or about the shape of the economy to come, is really an argument about which of these scenarios is correct…
[Tim and Mike explore an “AGI is an economic singularity” scenario (see also here, here, and Amodei’s essay, linked above), then an “AI is a normal technology” future (see also here); they enumerate signs and indicators to track; then consider 10 “what if” questions in order to explore the implications of the scenarios, honing in one “robust” implications for each– answers that are smart whichever way the future breaks. They conclude…]
The future isn’t something that happens to us; it’s something we create. The most robust strategy of all is to stop asking “What will happen?” and start asking “What future do we want to build?”
As Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Don’t wait for the AI future to happen to you. Do what you can to shape it. Build the future you want to live in…
Read in full– the essay is filled with deep insight. Taking the long view: “What If? AI in 2026 and Beyond,” from @timoreilly.bsky.social and @mikeloukides.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy.
[Image above: source]
* Alan Kay
###
As we pave our own paths, we might send world-changing birthday greetings to a man who personified Alan’s injunction, Doug Engelbart; he was born on this date in 1925. An engineer and inventor who was a computing and internet pioneer, Doug is best remembered for his seminal work on human-computer interface issues, and for “the Mother of All Demos” in 1968, at which he demonstrated for the first time the computer mouse, hypertext, networked computers, and the earliest versions of graphical user interfaces… that’s to say, computing as we know it, and all that computing enables.
https://youtu.be/B6rKUf9DWRI?si=nL09hD5GQD670AQO
#AI #AIRisk #artificalIntelligence #computerMouse #culture #DarioAmodei #DougEngelbart #graphicalUserInterfaces #history #hypertext #MikeLoukides #mouse #networkedComputers #scenarioPlanning #scenarios #Singularity #Technology #TimOReilly
@mrdk @mjd
Thanks! A great reference on the history and evolution of indices, and its relation to sequential printing technology.
The classical structure and organization of the Talmud might be another early example of a “spatial hypertext”—organized by alternative principles of adjacency and context—to reduce page flipping by the scholar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmudical_hermeneutics?wprov=sfti1#
#hypertext #history #talmud
Spatial hypertext: https://cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/37.html
Markus Redeker@mjd “Was the alphabetic index invented before the scroll was superseded by the codex?” — Not really. Plinius' “Natural History“ has an index and he tells in his preface about another work with an index, but that seem to be the only cases. The problem is that with a scroll, you cannot actually use the index, because “leafing” through the pages (or better, “scrolling”?) would be too much effort.
It is also said that the introduction of Christianity was the reason why in later times, codices were much more popular than scrolls. The problem was the Bible: To work as a theologian, you have jump backward and forward between gospel and prophet books, between different gospels, and so on — much too much work if you have scrolls. The Bible was the first hypertext!
For more about indices, see “Index, A History of the” by David Duncan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index,_A_History_of_the).
📢 Hypertext 2026 is officially open! 📢
The website and Call for Papers for #HT2026 are now LIVE.
Join us for the latest in hypertext research, social media dynamics, and beyond.
📍 London
🗓️ September 14-18
📝 Deadlines and details: