real world columns: loops

Right from the start of web publishing, standard structures of information were quick to emerge. Probably the most basic of these was the chain; a linear related sequence of chunks of information. Think of stepping through back issues of an on-line magazine, think of clicking ‘next’ and ‘previous’ to scan through a collection of photos. The sequence is a very basic organization of information. I do not claim to be an information historian, but I suppose it could have had something to do with the switch from scrolls of parchment to pages. (Although didn’t Moses have a sequence of separate stone tablets when he descended from Mount Sinai?).

The shift to separate pages does make information more manageable if it comes with a way of holding those pages together in some way. Without a binding technology a collection becomes difficult to keep in order. Think of flicking through someone’s photos in a group of people while the owner shouts ‘Try and keep them all in order!’

Organizing information in one big chunk and presenting it as a continuous scroll does have some inherent design advantages though. Scrolls are not bound by the restrictions and meta-issues that have to addressed with separate pages. Issues like size, number, how to chunk the information up. Typesetters even have terminology referring to isolated bits of text on a page, they speak of widows and orphans. Despite this scrolls seem to have had little place in the gap between the Egyptians and today’s scroll-bars on computer screens. Now and then they have cropped up; Jack Kerouac used to write his ‘stream-of-consciousness’ prose with a teletype roll of paper fed into the back of his typewriter meaning that his stream of consciousness would never have to be broken with worries about page breaks or scrabbling for new sheets of paper.

A counter example are those awful fax machines that work with a big roll of thermal paper instead of separate sheets. They are cheap and useful and fine for single page faxes, but when you have received your thirtieth multipage contract you realize that your project archive is starting to resemble a pharaoh’s tomb with shelves full of rolls that have to be unrolled for about five minutes to see what they are about! However, you never find yourself in the situation of losing a page from the middle of a vital fax.

The shift away from physical information carriers to the digital world has meant new information structures. Vanevaar Bush was the first to describe the idea in 1945. The simplest of these novel ideas is the loop, unencumbered by having things in piles with a beginning and an end items can just be dealt with in a virtual circle. However the idea of loops is not just something that came about with the computer, there are several bits of good solid hardware where the loop is the basis of organizations.

Remember the ‘View Master’? That 3D scene viewer shaped a bit like flat binoculars that was around in the 70s? They took a disk of small slide images, in stereo pairs, arranged in a circle so that once you had clicked your way around the collection you ended up back at the beginning again.

The early days of moving pictures and animation had similar ideas. The zoetrope was a tall cylinder with slits in and a sequence of pictures that would string together as a short animation when it was spun (explaining it in full is not appropriate here). The key thing is, that because the pictures were on the inside of the cylinder they played and repeated as a loop. Thus the most effective animation sequences were those where the first picture was the same as the last and the animation seemed to be a repetitive motion, (it’s a similar story with animated GIF images on the web today).

In terms of classic information organization we have the trusty Rolodex. This is basically a collection of index cards mounted in a circle on a central axis and looks like an Elizabethan neck ruff. Spin the handle on the axle and you can whizz effortlessly through the cards from beginning to end and round again.

Finally there is that solid work horse of countless lecture theaters; the Kodak Carousel slide projector. This has a circular slide holder so that when it is full of slides the collection can be looped through endlessly if need be. A brilliant piece of information organization, the only problem with it is working out which way is forward in the collection of slides, and which way up to put the slides and which way around they go and … but that’s another story.