I thoroughly enjoyed reading Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think,” and found it a nice opening reading for this course, as Bush’s imagined future mode of knowledge work feels very “digital” even while writing the piece in a pre-digital paradigm. Reading about Bush’s imagined Memex machine, as it creates these “associative trails” which thinkers can return to later, feels like a mode of performing research that we have still not reached. I felt myself longing to create the kinds of linkages that Bush describes as I work through multiple texts at a time for my own research. One could draw parallels between how Bush treats reading and moving between texts on the Memex to how one might move through online databases today, or even landing in “Wikipedia holes” of fascinating associative chains of connection. Regardless, I can’t think of any contemporary methods that exist to store associative chains like this in a format that would make links between texts useful for later research.

I’m interested in exploring Bush’s project in Digital Humanities terms, and specifically in relation to the forms of “data” as were described by Christof Schöch. In what way might associative chains be considered data, particularly “smart” data? Are there data analysis projects in the humanities that specifically focus on intertextual linkages? Would these associations need to be gathered manually, like the (quite literal) manual linking that Bush imagines on the Memex, or are there forms of analysis that could automatically find references between texts? Certainly texts like Wikipedia that contain hyperlinks could be analyzed for association with relative ease. Could one perform this kind of analysis on visual media?