Final Report
Sloan Project MouseSite
Principal Investigator: Tim Lenoir
This project aimed to construct
a website that would engage the community of computer scientists and
engineers who participated in the early developments of the field
of human computer interaction in documenting and writing their own
history. We focused on the work of Douglas C. Engelbart and the group
of researchers who worked with him at Stanford Research Institute
in Menlo Park, California from 1962 until the mid-1970s. Engelbart
and his colleagues invented the computer mouse and hypertext, including
in-file object addressing and linking, multiple windows with flexible
view control, 2-dimensional display editing, networked collaboration
using distributed shared resources, and a video channel for face-to-face
collaborate work. The vision Engelbart and his group articulated was
decades ahead of its time and has only been fully appreciated since
the development of the Internet. Indeed, some of the innovations the
group first demonstrated have yet to be incorporated in standard Internet
technology. We aimed at documenting the formation of the vision and
the specific contributions of individuals in the group to its technical
realization. We also sought to elicit personal stories about their
work that would reflect upon SRI culture and the San Francisco Bay
Area during the turbulent 1960s.
Funding for this project
began on January 1, 1997. In the months between January and June 1997,
discussions took place with experts on best approaches to web and
database design for the project, plans were made for building the
site infrastructure, staff was hired, and equipment and software purchased
to begin the project.
Ramping Up
Among the preliminary steps
taken toward launching work on the MouseSite was contacting Doug Engelbart
and gaining his support for the effort. I talked with him several
times (four or five times in person in addition to several phone conversations)
about the project, enlisting his support and participation, discussing
ways to mount the project as a large-scale collaborative history project,
and getting names and contact information of persons associated with
the technological developments to be documented in the MouseSite.
A listserve was created as a means of eliciting cooperation from the
group and keeping them informed about the ongoing effort. In addition
to personal contacts I participated in two public events to promote
the project, one at Xerox PARC in March in which I moderated a panel
discussion on the history of interactive computing with Doug and a
large audience of interested persons. A number of valuable contacts
were made at this event. The second was at the WWW6 conference in
Santa Clara on April 6, 1997 where I conducted a pubic interview with
Engelbart and a panel of several of the members of his original group
as part of the history of the World Wide Web. This panel interview
was taped and included as part of our archive.
Website Planning: Building A Community of Historical Actors
I had decided to build
a website that addresses two main functions. I wanted to enlist the
cooperation of the engineers and computer scientists who built the
technologies associated with the mouse, hypertext, windowing, and
networked collaborative work including videoconferencing. The strategy
for initiating discussion with them was to begin with an "attractor
site" consisting of a sufficiently rich set of documents, interviews,
video and audio clips to engage their interest in adding to and wherever
appropriate rectifying the historical record. We started by making
available key documents from Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect
project at SRI in the 1960s. The collection of historical documents
covered the period from roughly 1961 through the first public demonstration
of Engelbart's project at the Spring Joint Computer Conference held
in San Francisco in 1968. This documentary base serves as resource
for posing questions to the group in four online forums devoted to
different thematic areas. The online forum format serves to elicit
responses in the form of commentary, stories about the events of the
period, or new documents that might become part of the historical
record. These materials were added to our online database and eventually
joined the large collection of materials related to Engelbart in Stanford
Special Collections.
The rationale for developing
an "attractor site" and interactive forums was based on my experience
that the engineers in this community (like every other engineering
community I know of) are not particularly moved to write about their
involvement with earlier projects. Many of the alumni of the Engelbart
project are themselves still very active in building technologies
and new companies, and hence cannot easily devote time to writing
about their work. Furthermore, because they are still active producers
of technology, many are averse to participating in writing histories
of their work. They are all looking to the future and continue to
think about how their work can be leveraged to build that future.
History for them is looking backward, and asking them to write about
their past achievements can suggest they are no longer active participants
in the technological revolution they helped to launch. Moreover, many
have an aversion to discussing past events for fear of offending someone
among their friends and former colleagues. In spite of these factors,
however, these people are all extremely interested in having a historical
record of their accomplishments, and they are particularly keen on
setting the historical record straight.
In order to address these
issues of participant history it seemed best to point to documents
and events as a subject of discussion in a forum environment in order
to elicit reactions from the group. The idea was to post an image,
a video clip, or reference a passage from an archival document and
solicit information from the group about the persons involved, the
historical background and context. In addition narratives of events
and claims made in already published historical work could be cited
as a stimulus to expanding or correcting the record. The forum postings
by the group would be indexed and stored in the database, eventually
to be used in constructing a narrative history embedded within and
drawing upon the database. The narrative history itself would be written
by professional historians of the subject with the participation of
the actors themselves. This participation might consist in contributions
of particular parts of the narrative or reaction to the story as composed
by the historians.
A second function I wanted
the MouseSite to address was the construction of an authenticated
stable digital resource for scholarly purposes. This aspect of building
the archive is crucial to gaining the confidence of my historical
subjects and their willingness to participate. The engineers and scientists
I have worked with do not want to spend time contributing to a resource
that is ephemeral and not recognized as an "official" legitimate archive.
There are additional considerations to recommend building an archival
source to emerging digital library standards. Having built numerous
digital teaching and research resources to date, I have been particularly
concerned to insure that whatever I put online is done to the documentary
standards of the library community. I want to insure that my materials
will be authenticated for other scholars to use as trustworthy resources
for building their scholarship, and I want these materials to be supported
in the future as the system of digital libraries evolves and changes.
In addition, I have had considerable experience with putting materials
in a digital form and using them for teaching purposes and for my
own personal scholarship. But the resources required to maintain these
documents and to put them into formats capable of being searched in
systematic ways, such as SGML, that render them more useful to the
wide spectrum of other scholarly resources and electronic libraries
far exceeds the resources available to me as a normal academic. An
additional essential feature of the documentary support base for such
projects is the requirement that they be stored in a powerful multimedia
databasing system, such as Sybase or Oracle. Further complications
arise when we want to incorporate video into the database. The size
and utility of a digital collection are substantially constrained
and limited by the database structures it incorporates. Most resources
we find on the web today are "hand built," more or less hard-wired
in the sense that any future modification requires a human to go in
and re-code something. Such resources have value primarily for the
persons who built them, but are not capable of being multi-purposed
and made serviceable to a spectrum of publics.
For these reasons I have
regarded it essential to the MouseSite project and to each of the
other Sloan STIM projects to make alliances and local arrangements
with the library communities at the universities where our projects
will be housed. When the project ends, we want each of these five
resources to be picked up and maintained (and hopefully expanded)
by the local libraries where they are being constructed. Creating
the basis for this cooperation has entailed making contacts with the
appropriate library persons and encouraging them to support our initiative
by assisting us in preparing our materials to meet their documentary
standards. This was a time-consuming task in the early phase (January-July),
but it was successfully achieved at Stanford and at Berkeley, where
the libraries in both places contributed personnel and considerable
resources to mounting, storing, and formatting our materials. I believe
the foundation for a future larger-scale collaboration between Stanford
and Berkeley in documenting the history of high technology in the
Bay Area has begun and will continue as a result of the Sloan project.
Efforts at UCLA and MIT were less successful, but encouraging developments
are occurring at both of these institutions as the STIM project winds
down. The door has been opened in both places for future developments
in the history of recent science and technology. There were clear
reasons for the different degrees of success in these different institutions
having to do with the previous history of personal connections of
the principal investigators of the projects to their local support
networks, including such matters as how much AFS space is allotted
to a tenured faculty at different institutions.
Building the Site
The core set of documents
for the attractor site was selected from the Engelbart Collection
of Stanford Special Collections, which consists of more than 300 boxes
of documents, video, and data tapes. I went through the collection
identifying documents from boxes 1-17 of the collection covering the
period 1960-1968. I subsequently added some documents dating as late
as 1975. In addition to these materials in Stanford Special Collections,
I obtained from Doug Engelbart the beta-version videotape of the original
90-minute demo of the NLS system in 1968, including the mouse and
other features described above. I had this tape digitally mastered
by a professional video service in San Francisco, converted it to
streaming video, mounted it in several (37) annotated segments on
a Stanford video server, and linked it into the Mousesite. I also
obtained many hours of video footage from Doug Engelbart relating
to the 1968 demo, several other public presentations of his system,
and discussion of the work in TV documentaries, such as the very important
Silicon Valley Boomtown , broadcast by San Jose public broadcasting
station KTEH in 1988, where Engelbart is interviewed and characterized
as a forgotten visionary. I created Quicktime clips of much of this
footage and it is stored in our digital archive for use in the forums.
In addition to the video, the core document set contained technical
reports, correspondence, a variety of conference programs, memoranda
and reports of meetings, such as the ARPA planning session for ARPANET,
and a small collection of images. The documents were all scanned,
ocr-ed, edited, and put into html. Documents too fragile to treat
in this way or which contained annotations that would be lost were
scanned as gif or jpeg files embedded in an html page. A digital copy
of the entire Stanford Special Collections Finding Aid for the Engelbart
collection was included so that people could see the titles and descriptions
of documents not included in the Mousesite, and links were created
that enabled users to request additional documents to be added. A
table of contents of the documents in the Mousesite was provided,
and brief abstracts were given for each entry in the table of contents.
The entire collection of documents was indexed with metatags according
to the categories for digital documents established by the "Dublin
Core" convention. This data was used to enable a full content search
engine which was designed by the STIM core staff (see Coleman's discussion
above).
In addition to original
archival documents from the Engelbart Collection, I included additional
resources for situating Engelbart's work, such as Vannevar Bush's
important article "As We May Think," J.C. Licklider's article on human
computer symbiosis, and other similar texts. Engelbart cites these
documents in his technical reports and indicates they influenced his
thinking. Such documentation provides useful references for posing
queries in the forums about related work and influences. Documents
like these also aid actors in recalling the timeline of important
events and meetings.
An additional feature of
the Archive was its inclusion of links to other related websites,
such as a valuable website constructed by a Xerox PARC scientist on
the Xerox Star computer, which was the first commercial system to
incorporate many of the features of Engelbart's system. Negotiations
were also undertaken with the author of this site to house it in Stanford
Special Collections in the Silicon Valley Project and Mousesite in
order to preserve it for future users.
A considerable amount of
discussion and debate took place among STIM PIs and the core team
about the style of the web interface for each of our projects. I favored
building a site with visual interest in spite of the (at that time)
longer loading times for persons accessing the site from telephone
modems. My reasoning was that, at least in the case of the engineers
documented in the Mousesite who were key figures in building the internet,
one could expect higher bandwidth connections to be available. Moreover,
it was already clear that midway through the project 56K connections
were going to be routine and most interested users would have computers
running processors of more than 100mhz. I thought the presence of
a more professional looking website would encourage our target group
to participate more readily. The Mousesite was designed by me and
my assistant, Rosemary Rogers, from the History of Science Program
at Stanford.
Interactivity and Participation
The main goal of this project
was to experiment with productive forms of interactivity. My sense
was that to stimulate contributions to the site would require more
than advertising on the web, bulletin boards and newsgroups. The Mousesite
was addressed primarily to two levels of potential contributors: a)
original members of the Engelbart group and their progeny at places
such as Xerox PARC, and b) interested and informed people who were
not part of the original group, but who were aware of their work and
contributed to other aspects of the development of human-computer
interaction. I was also interested in allowing the general public
to comment as well, although decisions about inclusion of their contributions
was on a case-by-case basis. A number of the original members of the
Engelbart group are now at retirement age, but many are still extremely
active. Indeed many are at the heights of their careers running very
large companies. Jeff Rulifson, for instance is a central figure at
SUN Microsystems, and after leading the design team for the Nintendo64
chip at Silicon Graphics, Charles Irby (a second generation, post-1968
demo participant) has recently gone on to build a new startup. Getting
particpation from such persons required personal contact and follow-up
reminders. Accordingly, I assembled addresses of all known alumni
of the Engelbart group and sent messages to all of them encouraging
their participation.
In order to collect focused
information as opposed to general reflections, I organized the site
in terms of several forums, each with its own capability for submission
activity by users. The forums are on topics related to "persons,"
"devices," "context," and "culture." The postings from the forum on
"persons," for instance, are collected and used to construct individual
biographies and career trajectories of the group members. These biographies
in turn become part of the digital archival collection. Each forum
was run for three weeks, followed by a new topic suggested by the
previous input or an entirely new topic posed by me. Contributors
to the forum were able to post a message response to the general question
posed, and in addition provisions were made to attach files of many
sorts, such as PDF-files, video, audio files, etc. These were managed
by the STIM site administrator. Contributors were able to see what
they had contributed, and with the forum system we implemented were
able to view a threaded conversation of other submissions. When a
new message thread was added to an existing message, an email notification
was automatically generated to the person whose message had been commented
upon. In this way I hoped to facilitate sustained participation of
our target group rather than single visits to the site. I hoped that
at the conclusion of the project a semi-automated system could be
put in place that would catalog, sort, and store new contributions
in the archive with automatic updates on tables of contents viewable
through our site and through the Stanford University Library Catalog
interface. This has turned out not to be feasible at this time. The
way it actually works is that newly acquired comments and contributed
files are cataloged and indexed by the Mousesite site manager, Alex
Pang, who was hired by Stanford University Libraries and by the Program
in Science, Technology, and Society to manage the digital collections
I have been engaged in creating.
Launching the Website and Initial Responses:
The site was launched on
November 5, 1997, at the 35th Anniversary celebration of the Mouse
at SRI in Menlo Park. The audience for that occasion was about 500
persons from the computer community, including many members of the
Engelbart group. The site was briefly introduced by Doug Engelbart
as part of the evening's event and he encouraged his friends to contribute.
The initial responses of
the audience were encouraging indeed. One of our first responses was
from Charles Irby, an original member of the group. He submitted the
slides he used for his presentation at the November 5 celebration.
These are a very valuable resource, since many of our documents relate
to points he discussed. A video of the talk was also made, and it
has become part of our material collection as well. Other participants,
such as Bill English, Jeff Rulifson, and Harvey Lehtman, agreed to
contribute material as well, but to date their contributions have
been minimal. Reasons for this will be discussed below.
Responses to the forums
were quite enthusiastic and the contributions valuable additions.
For example, a forum on "Persons" included a photograph related to
the backstage operations of the famous 1968 demo. We asked "who are
these people and what are they doing?" We received many responses
to this from Engelbart group members. The most valuable response was
not from a group member but from Don Nielsen, who was the director
of SRI at the time of the Engelbart project and head of SRI for many
years. His field is artificial intelligence. Nielsen identified all
the figures in the image for us and provided much useful additional
information. The forum on "devices" has also received valuable postings.
Most people today have never heard of the chord keyset which was an
original component along with the mouse and keyboard of the NLS system.
An initial posting of an image of the chord keyset and questions about
its use and reason for disappearance produced several excellent responses
by members of the group. Several valuable responses to issues of culture
within the group also generated some excellent material.
Outcomes: Surprises, Successes, and Outreach
The conclusion I have drawn
from this experiment is that it was in large part extremely successful.
The use of the forums has proven to be a useful and valuable means
for engaging a community of scientists and engineers. They are interested
in participating in the documentation of their history and they are
willing to respond to calls for material. I could have done even more
in the way of using forums to generate new material. The problem was
one of time and resources rather than a failure to achieve the goals
of project. Because it was necessary to change the forum topics regularly,
almost constant site maintenance was required, and having already
devoted about six months of my time to scanning, editing, designing,
etc. the site, I could not personally devote additional time to maintaining
the site. My assistant, Rosemary Rogers, did quite a lot in this regard
as the webmaster for the site, but running the forums requires someone
with background in the field and an interest in collecting the history.
I hope that we can continue this project in the future with the new
person, Alex Pang, hired as the manager of my Silicon Valley Project
who is indeed a historian of science and technology eager to seize
the opportunity.
We had intended to use
the web not only to pose forum questions to our target group but to
collect new archival material, and we built capabilities for receiving
and indexing a variety of file types to accommodate this. As it turns
out most of the persons in the target group do not still have files
from the period to submit. In fact most of them never did, because
their work was literally embedded in the NLS system and its databases.
This entire system continues to exist, but accessing it would require
translating the old (and rapidly deteriorating) DAT tapes to a Sun
Ultrasparc station emulator of the original system. Price estimates
on doing this made it impossible to accomplish with the resources
of the STIM project, which in any case were intended for web collection.
Moreover, very few of the
target group could be encouraged to write autobiographically about
their experiences. Instead they preferred to participate in focus-group
interviews in which they would reminisce about particular events.
We conducted and taped several such sessions and we will eventually
convert these videotapes to streaming video. The big surprise to me
was that focus-group interviews rather than web submission of stories
or documents is what these creators of the technologies that launched
the Internet really wanted to participate in.
As soon as these preferences
of the community became apparent, I made an outreach effort to encourage
the use of the web for collaborative history. Together with Michael
Keller, the Director of Stanford University Libraries, and Paul Saffo,
Director of the Institute for the Future, I organized a reunion of
the Englebart group at Stanford on December 9, 1998, the 30 th
anniversary of the mouse. Engelbart and his colleagues were not interested
in an event that only reminisced about past events; they wanted a
gathering that would address the unfinished business of the vision
they articulated. With this in mind we organized a birthday party
for the mouse and called it Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution. We
raised funds from Silicon Valley companies for this event. It was
an all-day celebration, the first half of which was devoted to focus-group
panels and talks by figures who were participants. The afternoon was
devoted to discussions of the future of Engelbart's vision. The event
was advertised only on the Internet. Participants included the alumni
of the Engelbart group, Alan Kay, Marc Andreesen, Stewart Brand, Jaron
Lanier, several prominent journalists and many others from a "Who's
Who" list of Silicon Valley. This was the single most successful event
I have ever been associated with, near to a spiritual happening. Sixteen
hundred persons from the computer industry filled the largest auditorium
at Stanford. There was not a vacant seat in the house from 8:30 AM
until 6 PM. The all-day event was televised and Cisco Systems contributed
its new technology for realtime conversion of a television signal
to streaming video. About 900 persons were logged onto the streaming
video throughout the day. The entire event was captured and is now
part of the Mousesite, accessible through the "Archive." The event
made national news coverage, including the ABC and CBS Nightly News,
and it was even mentioned on the Howard Stern Show, for reasons that
completely escape me. There was heavy press coverage in the local
press, such as the San Jose Mercury News, and significant pieces were
included in Wired online and in Salon, an online magazine. Interestingly,
the event was not covered by the Stanford Daily.
We used this event to advertise
the Mousesite and encourage people to contribute. This has produced
some striking contributions. A major contribution has been the image
archive that went live on the site earlier this fall. Unfortunately
that material was not submitted to us over the web. It is a collection
of more than 1000 photographs of people at work in the Engelbart project.
These were taken in the 1960s and 1970s and were not in digital form.
I had these images scanned professionally and saved to archival quality
cd-roms to become part of the Engelbart collection. A large sample
of these images is now in the Mousesite Gallery. Several members of
the Engelbart group have used the web to identify who these individuals
are and in many cases what happened to them. Much more work will be
needed to add biographical information to these individuals, but this
is an encouraging result in line with the goals of the project.
The deposition of a large
image collection is only one of the outcomes of the stimulus of the
December 9 th event. Inspired by Don Nielsen, former SRI
Director mentioned above, the original creators of the ARPANET wanted
to put together a similar but non-public event that would bring their
group together to discuss the development of the net. They were particularly
concerned to correct what they view as errors in the historical record
that have arisen through the large interest in the subject by historians
and journalists following the explosion of the Internet. We facilitated
this event, videotaped and edited it, and gathered considerable documentation
from these individuals that expands the record on this important piece
of the history of the web. We are still in the final stages of wrapping
up that project and it will be linked in with the Mousesite.
Another similar project
spawned by the December 9 th outreach event has been an
oral history project on the early days of the AI community at Stanford
and SRI similar to the ARPANET project.
Finally the Engelbart group
itself was inspired by the event to continue the focus-group discussions
in a seminar-like format. Due to the interest in this topic on the
part of the Bay Area community, the Stanford Channel is broadcasting
a weekly live television/webcast with Doug and friends with an invited
audience of participants. The Mousesite and the Unfinished Revolution
are being used as resources for this live webcast. The show is being
captured in streaming video and will also be part of the Mousesite.
Outreach within the History of Science and Technology Community
I have made presentations
of the STIM project and the Mousesite at numerous conferences, including
a keynote presentation delivered at the international meeting of the
Research Library Group in London on May 5, 1998, an international
meeting on issues connected with doing research on contemporary science
held in Copenhagen, August 23-25, 1998, the annual meetings of the
History of Science Society in November 1999. I have given invited
lectures on the project at several universities, including Cornell
and University of Minnesota, and I presented a lecture series on the
project in Brazil in June 1997. The general reaction to the project
has been enthusiastic and very supportive, although I do not see many
other historians signing up to do this kind of work. I have also used
the Mousesite in a course I taught at Stanford and simultaneously
at Georgia Tech using IP videoconferencing in the spring of 1999.
This was the first use of IP videoconferencing at Stanford. The course
has drawn considerable attention.
Awards
The Mousesite has received
awards from StudyWeb, one of the Internet's premier sites for educational
resources for students and teachers. It was also selected by the Tech
Museum of Innovation in Silicon Valley as one of the TechTop10 technology
and science web sites for middle-school and above students, teachers,
and parents; and by Philadelphia's Seven Wonders Site of the Day;
and by Bonus.com as in the top 5% of educationally useful websites.