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NEW YORK — Allen Renear is the director of Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group and currently serves as the president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. For more than 20 years, he has been involved in promoting technologies such as hypertext and SGML descriptive markup — the basis for the World Wide Web.

Maria Parvel Renear is working on a book on philosophical issues in electronic communication

Renear is one of the leading figures in the field of humanities computing and last year was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, where he lectured on information technology and the humanities. Currently he is working on a book on philosophical issues in electronic communication.

Fox: As a scholar, looking over the vast sweep of human history, wouldn't you say that there is an element of exaggeration to claims that the Internet is a revolutionary historical event, from a social or cultural point of view?

Renear: On the contrary, that's exactly what it is. The new technologies of computing and telecommunications are effecting changes in our lives that are truly comparable, in scale and quality, to the changes produced by the other major innovations in communication technology: alphabetic writing in the ancient world, the printing press in the Renaissance and audio and video communications in the 20th century.

It is still the early days, but if you take a close look at the number of commercial, social and cultural practices that Internet technology is changing, at the depth and nature of those changes, and at the speed at which those changes emerge and propagate... you can see that it really is one of the most important events ever to have occurred in human history. It really will transform our lives.

Fox: And no one saw it coming?

Renear: Oh no, plenty of people saw it coming. And I don't mean just speculations in science fiction and literature.

In 1945, Vannevar Bush [who among other things led the government agencies responsible for the Manhattan Project during WWII and was President Roosevelt's science advisor] wrote an Atlantic Monthly article, 'As We May Think,' that was a fairly accurate and plausible foreshadowing of our emerging world of networked hypertext, suggesting most of the new tools and practices, and even some of the new social roles, that we see today.

Then in the 1960s, this picture was fleshed out and given an updated technical basis in the writings of Douglas Engelbart who had read Bush's article [and who, by the way, invented many of the aspects of modern computing we take for granted: the mouse, windows, word processing, networked collaboration, etc.]; Engelbart described systems for 'augmenting the intellect' of groups of collaborating scientists and other professionals. Also in the 1960s and 1970s J.C.R. Licklider described 'man-machine symbiosis' as well as what we now call 'digital libraries.'

And the legendary hypertext visionary Ted Nelson vividly presented well-developed brilliant accounts of a vast 'intertwingled... docuverse' of information and 'literary machines.' Then Andy van Dam and others [including Nelson] actually built working hypertext systems [HES and FRESS] in the '60s and '70s, which were used in various collaborative communities [ranging from the Apollo spacecraft documentation to teaching poetry]. And in 1978, Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff published The Network Nation. All this still more than a decade before the emergence of the 'Net' as we know it today.

It was with such futures clearly in mind that in the early 1980s the critical technical pieces, such as the SGML text encoding standard, were developed, and new pioneering research hypertext systems [such as Notecards at Xerox PARC and Intermedia at Brown University] took place. So no question about it, by the mid-1980s we knew exactly what was going to happen in the 1990s.

Fox: Really? Exactly?

Renear: OK, I'll back off a little on that. In fact I guess I'd better, because there is a lot about the Net that has turned out very badly, not at all what we hoped for.

Fox: You mean the misinformation, pornography, privacy problems, commercial entertainment, ads?

Renear: Actually, no. I'm not thinking of those things at all. There should never have been any question of the Net turning out differently then it did in those respects. After all, most writing and printing [for comparison] is misinformation anyway, or idle amusement, or tawdry commercial entertainment, and some, a lot actually, is pornography. Certainly almost all video falls into these categories. But that's just life, real human life. Why should the Internet be different? How could it be?

In fact, the significance of the Net is in part precisely that it is such a powerful general communication medium that it can serve as a superior vehicle for the most enduring aspects of human interest: such as sex, gossip, music, politics and shopping. But hey, you're Fox, so I don't have to tell you that, do I?

Not everyone understood this in the '80s, and there was a lot of silly pontificating about the Net being destined to be a kind of high-toned intellectual and scientific conversation. So some of us responded that the movement of the Net culturally 'downward' was inevitable, beyond any resisting, and that at least some of the reaction to this was an inappropriate elitism and confusion about human culture.

But what we didn't realize then was that this confusion would actually delay engagement of the real cultural and intellectual issues presented by digital media.

Fox: But if there was no way to keep the Internet from descending to the common denominator of popular culture — what was it that turned out badly that actually could have come out differently?

Renear: A lot of the engineering went wrong that shouldn't have. And it went wrong in ways that have real consequences, both practical consequences and cultural ones. For instance, consider just these three things: one, the problems with HTML, such as its failure to reflect the all-important distinction between the logical structure of information and its appearance, as well as the limited and fixed element set; two, the impoverished functionality of hypertext links — you can't tell where you are going or why, you can't follow the link back, you can't make links to shared documents or precise places in documents... etc.; and three, the lack of adequate — what software engineers call 'indirection' in the naming schemes. The approach used on the Internet is as if a library catalogue organized books by shelf location, so you had to redo the catalogue every time you moved the books around.

We knew how to do these things in the 1980s. But we didn't. Shame on us. That's why today you have such lousy searching results on the Internet, and why it is so hard to create and manage information, why 'surfing the Web' is still so awkward and inefficient, why it is so hard to provide alternative access for the visually or otherwise disabled, etc. So we are paying a high price — both in loss of current functionality, and because we are now having to correct those mistakes — painfully. This affects Internet businesses and consumers both and the cultural value of the Internet as well as its commercial value.

Fox: Why wasn't it done correctly?

Renear: Because the market got a hold of things a little early and awkwardly, and a lot of unnecessary compromises and bad decisions were made in the rush to simply make things happen, as quickly, and with as little disruption in existing practices, as possible — even when those practices were really outmoded or inappropriate. It's an old story in the history of technology, a combination of clinging to the past and not being able to defer gratification, going for the quick easy win.

" ... you can safely assume that there will be very profound innovations in art and culture. Multimedia, interactive fiction, role playing, games, virtual reality and the like are all going to be pieces of this. And equally important will be new forms of social interaction and communication — virtual communities and such"

There are promising signs though: the industry commitment to XML and other basic W3C standards, for instance. Though one still hears the wisecrack: 'it's not that we need to move the Web into the 21st century, just into the 80s.' Anyway, that's one job for the new millennium, cleaning up the mistakes of the 1990s.

Fox: So who was doing this pioneering work that was neglected?

Renear: Well, the early visionaries were those mentioned above [Bush, Engelbart, Licklider and Nelson]. They had the right ideas. The first hypertext system to run on commercial computers was developed at Brown University in the late 1960s by a team led by Andries van Dam [and including Ted Nelson, who actually coined the word hypertext]. This system, FRESS, pioneered many classic features [which the Net is still far away from implementing]. In the 1980s, important influential work was conducted at Xerox PARC [resulting in the Notecards hypertext system] and at the Institute on Research in Information and Scholarship, again at Brown University, which produced, among other things, the Intermedia hypertext system.

At the same time the SGML community was developing SGML [Standard Generalized Markup Language] and improving our understanding of how to manage text and documents on the computer. So basic concepts and principles, 'best practice' you might say, was well known by the mid-1980s. But although we sermonized and pushed as hard as we could, it just wasn't possible to get everyone on board in time. People were in a hurry and didn't want to make the changes necessary, they had one foot in the future — but one in the past.

Fox: Earlier you said that the Internet was creating truly profound changes in society and culture. How can this be? Isn't this just technology? How does technology have such cultural significance? Aren't human interests and concerns fairly stable through history?

Renear: If the question is: 'Why does this technology have such cultural significance?' then the answer is: because we are talking about technological developments that affect how human beings think, communicate, and experience their world. That is, in fact, the only reason these changes are important. This is not about technology per se; and it's not about commerce either. It's about communication — communication and culture.

Again, compare the huge effects of the previous communication revolutions. The development of writing and the development of printing each made possible new forms of social and political organization, new social practices, new scientific practices and new cultural and artistic forms. Television has also had similar effects. Some people would say these technologies resulted in new forms of thought and experience. [Marshall] McLuhan really got a lot of important things exactly right.

Fox: Thought, communication, and culture... OK, you are the president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. I think I see a connection?

Renear: Absolutely. The field of humanities computing was initially primarily about using information technology to study traditional literature, art, history and the like [and it dates back to the very early 1950s]. But from there it was a natural evolution first to reflect on the nature and significance of these new tools and practices, and then in turn to take the insights from that reflection and apply them to understanding digital culture itself, as well as more traditional forms of culture. In fact, eventually all these distinctions disappear.

The Association for Computers and the Humanities has for many years been the professional organization devoted to using advanced information technology in humanities research and teaching. Its members include leading theorists and practitioners from libraries, museums and computer centers, as well as academic scholars and researchers. Although not many people have heard of it, it has actually had a considerable influence.

Fox: For example?

Renear: One important example is the Text Encoding Initiative, which the ACH co-sponsored with two other scholarly associations. The TEI is an SGML/XML-based standard for representing textual information in a networked computing environment. It was developed over a period of several years by hundreds of scholars from many different countries and disciplines, lead by Michael Sperberg-McQueen, from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Lou Burnard, from Oxford University.

The TEI is specifically, or at least originally, designed for representing texts in the humanities, such as literature, historical documents, linguistic databases and the like. Through sophisticated understanding of how documents actually work, as systems of knowledge representation and communication [an understanding developed by the community of computing humanists over the last 50 years], the TEI encoding scheme makes features of text accessible to computer manipulation and processing, supporting retrieval, analysis, presentation and other sorts of tasks. This will not just be an incremental change, but will probably fundamentally effect our approach to understanding and teaching our history and culture.

You can see good examples of early work at the text centers and humanities computing institutes at the University of Virginia, Oxford University, Bergen University [Norway] and the University of Michigan. Here at Brown there is a particularly important project, the Women Writers Project, which is making available 200 texts written in English by women between 1350 and 1850, many of them otherwise exist only in rare book libraries. Researchers and students from around the world will be able to pose very subtle queries over this entire corpus, asking questions that simply weren't possible to pursue before now. It doesn't take too much imagination to see that this will change teaching and learning.

The TEI encoding scheme is being widely used already and my bet is that during the first decade of the millennium, it will provide the foundation for digital libraries and the framework of teaching, learning and scholarship.

Fox: Does this affect the larger world, outside of libraries and universities?

"We knew how to do these things in the 1980s. But we didn't. Shame on us. That's why today you have such lousy searching results on the Internet, and why it is so hard to create and manage information, why 'surfing the Web' is so still so awkward and inefficient ... '

Renear: The TEI is an SGML/XML-based standard for representing textual information. It is similar to, but much more powerful and flexible than, HTML. Unlike HTML, it is based on some of the deepest and most extensive experience and reflection on documents functional as knowledge representation systems.

Think about this for a minute: could many things be more important to the future of the Net, in general, than that? Or more promising? The TEI is one of the most sophisticated general purpose document encoding systems ever developed, it is ideal for supporting not only scholarship and learning, but, in fact, all of the cool stuff — high-performance hypertext linking, intelligent searching, efficient intuitive navigation and viewing — we all want to do on the Net. There's nothing better than the TEI for this, and when industry begins looking for a really high-performance general purpose XML-based text encoding system — for electronic books or curricular material or technical documentation — I doubt if they'll be able to do better than the TEI.

And it should be no surprise that some of the technologies developed by the TEI, such as advanced hypertext linking techniques, are already influencing the development of new protocols for the World Wide Web. And of course, a number of TEI developers are also prominent in general — Michael Sperberg-McQueen for instance, the TEI editor-in-chief, was also one of the three editors of the W3C's XML standard. And Steve DeRose has been leading the development of new hypertext linking standards for the Web, drawing on TEI achievements. So, strange as it may seem, but when, in the next millennium, you surf the Web, you'll be using techniques developed originally in the early 1990s by a bunch of humanities scholars — specialists in medieval German legends, New Testament Greek, Restoration verse drama, stuff like that.

Fox: It seems a strange combination, technology and the humanities, the Internet and the humanities.

Renear: Not really. For one thing, the problems posed by the humanities are hard, and so the tools and practices used to solve those problems will be powerful and able to be generalized to many other purposes as well. Sperberg-McQueen has used the analogy of the canary in the mine: humanists notice the problems and requirements well before industry — and often create the first real solutions.

	"As we begin this period of convulsive change, very few of our institutions are stepping up to the task of providing the moral and intellectual leadership needed to stimulate reflection and insight into the changes happening around us"

But also remember that the humanities aren't just some abstruse preoccupation of a few academics. The humanities are about human culture, all of it — our stories, our art and music, high fashion, paintings, tatoos, jokes, games, religion, everything. It is about us, who we are. For any historical change — like the emergence of networked computing — to be of significance to us, it has to play out in that field somehow. In fact, in the end, in a sense, nothing else really counts, to us as human beings, except the humanities. And nothing that does count to us as human beings fails to be included, somewhere, in the humanities.

This is exactly what is happening with the Net; it is changing all aspects of our lives precisely because, and only because, it is about human communication and expression — because it is a powerful new technology for communicating and expressing ourselves.

Fox: Will we see new forms of art and culture in the new millennium?

Renear: Yes, although 'new forms' becomes an elusive notion when you consider the variety of existing forms. But you can safely assume that there will be very profound innovations in art and culture. Multimedia, interactive fiction, role playing, games, virtual reality and the like are all going to be pieces of this. And equally important will be new forms of social interaction and communication — virtual communities and such.

Here at Brown, following Bob Scholes' injunction that understanding and creation, historically joined and only recently separated, must be rejoined to meet the cultural challenges facing us, we are involved in both trying to develop these new forms, and, at the same time, to deepen our understanding of them. While computer scientists like Andy van Dam and others have been creating interactive graphics, virtual reality and new hypertext systems, the novelist Bob Coover, has been teaching courses on new forms of electronic fiction, and George Landow has been making the connections between the new worlds of networked hypertext and literary theory. Today that's what it takes to create new forms of art and culture, or at least new forms worth having; it takes artists, scientists, and scholars, all working together.

Fox: Most people think of business and commerce, not the arts and humanities, as the chief beneficiaries of the Internet — at least when it isn't being used for pornography.

Renear: Aaargh! But we are the game itself! Look at it another way: if the business of America is business, then the business of business is art, which is to say: music, movies, novels, fashion, design.

So if you want to strengthen America economically, to prepare it for the next millennium ... then you have to improve our ability to tell stories, make pictures, produce music — and to do those things in reflective, innovative ways.

Fox: Huh? The humanities scholar now becomes a captain of industry?

Renear: Did I get a bit carried away there? Maybe a little. But not much. Really. You want to improve the balance of trade? Make actual competitive advantages sustainable? It's easy: fund the arts and humanities! Certainly in the U.S. — this country's business success stories are, as often as not, in the arts: American movies, music, books, fashions, design. We sell stories, pictures, images, ideas, ways of dressing and talking, ways of presenting information. But it really isn't just the U.S. In general, work these days is work with words, images, sound, concepts.

So what sort of research should governments fund? Research into words, images, sound, pictures and stories; into how to analyze, organize, communicate and present ideas; into developing tools for working with this material; into research that helps us understand how culture works.

Fox: So the arts and humanities are really just all about business?

Renear: No, despite what I just said, all of which is true, and which is indeed all by itself an argument for more funding for the arts and humanities, the principal work for the humanities is not, to be sure, improving the national economy. And it is not national at all. The real work for the humanities, in the new millennium, is... well, exactly the same as it has always been: to help us, as human beings, understand who we are — by creating, participating in, and reflecting on, cultural products and practices. That is still our work — work which can provide insights and forms of sensibility, thought and experience which sustain meaning and value, and which can liberate us to enjoy rich and deeply satisfying, deeply human, lives.

Fox: And who'll be doing this in the new millennium of digital culture?

	"So if you want to strengthen America economically, to prepare it for the next millennium ... then you have to improve our ability to tell stories, make pictures, produce music — and to do those things in reflective, innovative ways"

Renear: Now that's the bad news. As we begin this period of convulsive change, very few of our institutions are stepping up to the task of providing the moral and intellectual leadership needed to stimulate reflection and insight into the changes happening around us. There are isolated efforts, writers and 'public intellectuals' mostly, and a few academics, but nothing remotely like what is necessary. Perhaps the problem is cognitive, recognizing the imminence and significance of the changes that are beginning. But in trying to locate the real problem, my money would be on shortcomings in courage and leadership in major American institutions: government, foundations, universities, cultural organizations. The work is too hard, too strange, and the world is changing too fast.

Fox: You are going to leave us on that pessimistic note?

Renear: No. As trite as it is to say so, every challenge is really an opportunity, and the greater the challenge the greater the opportunity. Never have the humanities been more important, and yet never has it been so hard to directly engage the problems we face. So the institutions, groups, individuals that would make this project theirs couldn't ask for a more interesting and promising field of action in the new millennium.