Though the title made me believe the article would similar to As We May Think (extremely wordy and difficult to follow) I was pleasantly proven wrong. The concepts of this article were, at times, hard to understand. But I am beginning to accept that all things technology and mechanical do not come easily to me. Though the article explained many intricacies of this file structure, the article structure made the ideas easy to follow. In his intro, Nelson clearly laid out what the article would address, identifying a problem, an explanation of the problem, suggestions for solutions to the problem, and finally, implications of his attempted informational retrieval and data structure.

Overall, Nelson mentioned three main ideas to achieve the ideal filing system:

1. The information structure (Zippered Lists)

2. File Structure (Evolutionary List File)

3. FIle Language (PRIDE)

The ELF was drawn out to look like this:

Though the intricacies of each of the three parts are pretty complex, the fact that Nelson clearly outlined what he was talking about made things relatively easy to follow. Nelson even made sense of our first assignment with just a few sentences. He mentioned Bush’s article in his work, recapping the entirety of “As We May Think” by saying:

This idea is by no means new. To go back only as far as 1945, Vannevar Bush, in his famous article “As We May Think “, described a system of this type. Bush’s paper is better remembered for its predictions in the field of information retrieval, as he foresaw the spread and power of automatic document handling and the many new indexing techniques it would necessitate.

This simple, short recap of the difficult article made me feel very stupid. That’s what I was supposed to get from Bush’s work? At least now I can conceptualize the main idea from Bush’s work. So, thank you Nelson!

One quotation that I really enjoyed from Nelson’s writing was, “Writing is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.” Personally, I’d never heard this before and I find it to be extremely accurate and extremely poignant. Even writing this article, I’m finding that I have only a small amount of actual inspiration (Nelson’s article) and am working SO hard to make sense of the article and craft something that people will read and say, “Okay I got that.”