Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson is presently a Research Fellow at the Sapporo HyperLab and Hokkaido University. He is a software designer, writer and film-maker who for thirty-five years has been pursuing the vision he had in 1960-- a world of universal digital media with a special logic structure, where all media objects can be quoted freely, seen side-by-side and connected side-by-side (transparallel viewing).

Nelson is best known for coining the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" (1965) and predicting vast anarchic network publishing, but today's World Wide Web is only part of what he has sought to build. In Nelson's proposal for Universal Transmedia, there are two fundamental types of connection: Links, or connections between differing objects, and Transclusions, or connections between things which are THE SAME. Nelson insists that tranclusions are a vital complement to links, the equivalent of being able to put an object in different places at once.

A proper transclusive system will allow any portion of media to be re-used and republished in many places by anyone, and intercompared in all these different contexts. It will also clear up much of the copyright issue. (There are many ways to implement such a logic, and the well-known Xanadu project at Autodesk used only one particular strategy.) Nelson is now at work on a new Project Xanadu in Japan, together with a copyright system that implements universal quotability without red tape.

Nelson and his colleagues of Project Xanadu pioneered in issues of distributed hypermedia, distributed documents and evolving edit systems. It can be argued that HyperCard, World Wide Web, Lotus Notes and much of "multimedia" all derive from this work. Nelson's theories of software center around arbitrary Virtuality, which he divides into conceptual structure and feel. He condemns "metaphors" as presently used, and instead advocates the design of deep new construct logics.