By making space for this generic knowledge, Wendy’s system placed value on the association between documents, rather than on the documents themselves. “If this knowledge is bound too tightly to the documents, then it cannot be applied to new data.” Which is to say: where one instance of a connection might be interesting, multiple instances, expressed laterally, look more like truth. “Links in themselves are a valuable store of knowledge,” Wendy explained. This “generic” linking, in concert with linkbases, created a system that could adapt to its users while presenting them with more opportunities to learn. Microcosm was even able to dig up new links on the fly by running simple text searches on all the material in the system-a prescient design that anticipated the importance of search in navigating information. Links in Microcosm could be tailored to the user’s knowledge level and could point to several places in the linkbase at once. This history has its recurring characters: his field marshal, the leader of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru, and of course, Mahatma Gandhi, whose name is everywhere in the source material. To use one of Wendy’s examples, say I’m browsing the Mountbatten archive using her system, Microcosm, circa 1989.* I’m interested in Mountbatten’s career in India, a two-year period during which he oversaw the country’s transition from colonial rule to independent statehood. This “linkbase” communicated with documents without leaving a mark on any underlying document, making a link in Microcosm a kind of flexible information overlay, rather than a structural change to the material. Where the Web focuses on connecting documents across a network, Wendy Hall was more interested in the nature of those connections, how discrete ideas linked together, and why-what we would today call “metadata.” Rather than embedding links in documents, as the Web embeds links inits pages, Microcosm kept links separated, in a database meant to be regularly updated and maintained. Microcosm’s core innovation was the way it treated links. The following is an excerpt from Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L.
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