Issue #99
by Gary Marchionini (UNC School of Information & Library Science)
For four decades I have taught iSchool courses at multiple universities and collaborated with researchers around the world on various human-information interaction problems. My syllabi and reference lists from these experiences have some common threads, one of which is Douglas Engelbart’s 1962 paper “Augmenting human Intellect: A conceptual framework”.¹ Like others, I found this paper to be profound, prescient, and somewhat complex and I have returned to it regularly. It has inspired me and many of my students over the years. The paper is a hard read in that it is lengthy, mixes theory and engineering, and so many of his imagined tools and processes are now so commonplace (e.g., text editing, online collaboration) that the reader must constantly remember this was written more than 50 years ago in a very different technical and cultural context.
This week, I started the new semester and a seminar on the information exposome and Engelbart’s paper again is included for student consideration and discussion. After the first day of class, I came home from campus physically exhausted from a long day of teaching and a faculty meeting but mentally energized about students and the ideas we will discuss in the months ahead. In my mail, I found the January/February (Vol 32.1) issue of Interactions² [yes, I still get journals in paper form because they afford and demand at least a casual full scan of the latest work in our field]. Over breakfast the following day I was elated to see that the issue gives homage to Engelbart’s paper with a set of articles and a thoughtful editorial introduction by editors Elizabeth Churchill and Mikael Wiberg (“Human Augmentation: A Paradigm Shift for HCI?” DOI:10.1145/3708356). There are articles in the issue on Assistive Augmentation (Tan, Gupta, Rajendran, Maes, & Nanayakkara), Neural Interfaces for Education (Chris Crawford), Human-Data Interaction (Koesten & Gregory), a conversational sketch on memory (Wolfangel), among others articles and interviews in the issue.
Interactions is the CHI community’s magazine for UX practitioners and is a fitting venue for work that springs from the intellectual framework Engelbart gave us half a century ago. Doug Engelbart was an engineer and visionary who eventually was recognized with a Turing Award and many other honors. He is credited with inventing the mouse and presenting the first online system demonstration. His writings are few but his influence on the CHI community has been extraordinary. I was fortunate to talk with him a few times over the years and quibble a bit that his examples seem more like amplification rather than augmentation, a distinction I now see was simply semantics because his framework, inventions, and vision truly have taken us into new capabilities rather than only to faster or more accurate execution of old capabilities.
I am filled with strong competing emotions at this particular slice of space/time because of the passing of 20th Century leaders, the despair and tragedy of war and natural disaster counterposed with the potential of a new year, new classes to lead, and new students to learn with and from. Emotion, personal memory, and hope are somewhat strange bedfellows for information science because they do not yield to metrics or algorithms. I welcome them nonetheless, and go forward with optimism that we will continue to learn, relearn, and augment the ideas and tools of pioneers like Engelbart. Today we continue to grapple with the challenge Doug Engelbart gave us so long ago in the final page of his classic paper:
“After all, we spend great sums for disciplines aimed at understanding and harnessing nuclear power. Why not consider developing a discipline aimed at understanding and harnessing "neural power?" In the long run, the power of the human intellect is really much the more important of the two.”¹
In the mold of Dr. Engelbart, let us develop and apply today’s powerful technologies to harness and understand the power of the human intellect and the power of the human spirit.
1: Engelbart, D. (1962). Augmenting human intellect: A conceptual framework (SRI summary report AFOSR-3223). SRI International. Report prepared for Director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research. https://web.archive.org/web/20110504035147/http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html
2: Interactions Magazine. https://interactions.acm.org/
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