HT’24 keynote speakers: Cathy Marshall
Cathy Marshall, hypertext pioneer, legendary author and hypertext community builder will be joining us at this year’s ACM Hypertext 2024 conference in Poznań, Poland. Dr. Marshall, a senior research scientist at Texas A&M University and a former principal researcher at Microsoft Research and Xerox PARC will present the keynote “Data, Close-up and Contemporaneous.” NoteCards, as it was designed in 1984, was an early digital tool for research and writing, argues the speaker. Links were central to NoteCards, and, in fact, the whole point: NoteCards helped researchers maintain connections between sources and the conclusions they led to.
Of course, a lot has happened since then. As Dr. Marshall notes in her abstract: “First, the World Wide Web came along and rendered moot the hypertext community’s early efforts to explore the idea of links. Links became embedded markup. Then, digital stuff followed, way more than some of us cynics imagined. Better search and more personalization began to play an important role in how people used the Internet. Digital data and online collections burgeoned, bloomed: an ocean of structured and unstructured data washed over the web. The data, in turn, fed apps and services; you could tour real estate in the south of France from your couch while a human proxy shopped for you at a nearby Aldi.”
An important part of Dr. Cathy Marshall’s keynote, as she interrogates contemporary tools in relation to the kind of research that tools like NoteCards were addressing, is her work on a biography of a forgotten woman, which she has been working on for the past 10 years. Sifting through a combination of traditional archival collections, large corpora, online databases, interviews, records repositories, personal collections, and even microfiche, the hypertext pioneer will use examples from her own research—and that of her colleagues—to discuss how online data and distributed heterogeneous sources have caused tectonic shifts in research and why “we shouldn’t forget the links that brought us to the dance.”
The keynote speech, “Data, Close-up and Contemporaneous,” will be on Wednesday, September 11, at 10 AM in Collegium Maius in Poznań. Click here for more details about the ACM Hypertext 2024 conference.