In this section you will find papers that I have written throughout my academic and professional career. I will do my best to sort them properly by year and class. All documents are PDF formatted, so you will need Adobe Acrobat to read them.
Academic
Fall 2006: HFS, We Have a Problem: Making Bush’s Memex into a Reality & Leaving the HFS Behind : This paper was written for Hypermedia In Context in Fall 2006. This paper addresses the issues with the current computing filing system, HFS, and gives some ideas on how it can be fixed/updated. [Undergraduate, non-corrected version]
Fall 2007: How Newspapers Became the First Social Networks: Comparing Print and Web Technologies : My previous research has been in mainly new technologies such as blogs, online forums, and social networking systems. These tools create a public sphere both online and in real-life. I believe that these “new” technologies we use are updated versions of older systems. Starting in the 1700s with newspapers, people began to converse about news and recent happenings in coffee shops and pubs. This “public sphere” created interaction and allowed people to become “experts” in whatever subject they were interested. This same phenomenon has occurred with blogs and new social networking sites. I want to find out the history of social networking through the use of newspapers and magazines and how it has evolved over time. What other types of networking systems were used in the past? What causes people to accept a new networking technology? I believe that these questions are very important to the history of modern social networking. [Graduate, non-corrected version]
Spring 2008: Where’s My Memex?: Using Google and Web 2.0-tech to Bring Us Closer to a Truly Associative & Annotatable Internet: Despite the digital technologies that are used today, people are still hindered when researching, linking, finding, and annotating information found on-line. The Internet, as with all computer systems, use a hierarchical filing system (HFS)–a filing system that uses repetitive directories to store information. The human mind does not work using hierarchy; in most cases the brain uses association to link information. What is needed is a more natural associative filing system (AFS); a system that will allow linking of information that is more natural to the human brain. Looking at works/projects from Bush’s Memex, the first documented AFS/annotatable “computer” system, to the more recent MyLifeBits project what will be shown is that: 1) there is a need and has been a desire for a change to an annotatable AFS; 2) some systems have already accomplished simple AFS capabilities; and 3) the technology we have today is capable of making a working AFS. Development of a true AFS in cyberspace would eventually pave the way for a more refined off-line AFS for desktop computer systems that would free computer users from repetitive HFS-trees and allow filing based more on their own thinking. [Graduate, Corrected version]
