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      <p class="heading">Overview, progress, and goals</p>
<p class="subheading"><i>by Adam Thornton<br>
June 1994</i></p>

<p class="subheading">Overview</p>	
      <p class="main_text"> <span class="main_text">The Galileo Project is a hypertext 
        textbook that is being written for use in Professor Albert Van Helden's 
        new course on Galileo to be taught in the Spring of 1995. The course will 
        focus on Galileo's life, work, and social environment, and may eventually 
        be integrated into the more general history of Early Modern science. </span>
      <p class="main_text"> The text itself is being written by Professor Van 
        Helden; images have been and are being acquired from various and sundry 
        sources: scanned from books, downloaded from Internet ftp sites, or accessed 
        via the World Wide Web. All of the increasingly sticky copyright issues, 
        and much of the resource location and acquisition, is being handled by 
        librarian Elizabeth Burr. Adam Thornton is providing the technical expertise--for 
        the most part, knowledge of HTML<A HREF="#fn1">[1]</A> and Unix<A HREF="#fn2">[2]</A> 
        tools--that furnishes the "glue" holding the project together. Two more 
        students will be joining the project next year: Nell Warnes, who will 
        be performing essentially the same functions as Adam Thornton, and Adam 
        Lasics, an image manipulation specialist charged with taking scanned images 
        and massaging them to professional quality. Martha Turner, currently studying 
        in Israel, may also be recruited for the Galileo Project. 
      <p><span class="main_text"> The Galileo Project is funded by a grant from 
        the Council of Library Resources to Fondren Library</span>.</p>
      <p class="main_text"><em>Philosophy Behind the Galileo Project</em></p>
      <p class="main_text">This could, perhaps, be more succinctly phrased as 
        "why are we doing this?" The short answer is not very informative: "serendipity". 
        Expanding this theme, we find that an unusual combination of circumstances 
        that happened to set off the right sparks at the right time, combined 
        with a need for a core text for the History of Science courses. 
      <p class="main_text"> The project also exists because of an admittedly radical 
        belief I hold: 
      <blockquote class="main_text"> A cheaply and widely accessible global 
        information network is to the printing press as the printing press is 
        to the hand-illumination of manuscripts.</blockquote> 
        <p class="main_text"> This dogma forms the ideological substructure of 
          the Galileo Project; in the section on "Distribution of the Project", 
          the implications will be made much clearer. </p>
      <p class="main_text"><em>Chronology of the Galileo Project</em></p>
      <p class="main_text">In the spring of 1993, Van Helden had just finished 
        teaching his modern history of science course, covering the period from 
        1700-1960, and was somewhat dissatisfied with it: simply put, the exponential 
        expansion of knowledge since the Scientific Revolution makes it almost 
        impossible to reasonably teach an overview of the history of science. 
        The problem is less acute with ancient and medieval science, since the 
        primary texts are--at least in translation--relatively accessible. By 
        the modern period, each branch of science has developed its own unique 
        language and primary sources are completely impenetrable to anyone not 
        part of the scientific community that forms the intended audience. This 
        makes teaching the history of science after Newton extremely difficult. 
      <p class="main_text"> We still have come to no solution to this problem; 
        however, Van Helden was also dissatisfied with his Early Modern course, 
        which covered the period from 1400-1750. It is during this period that 
        knowledge first begins to get out of control. However, while the volume 
        of scientific material skyrockets, most of the texts are still accessible 
        to the layman, as a specialized scientific language has not yet developed. 
        This combination makes it an excellent period to teach, as one can cover 
        the core texts (e.g. the <i>Siderius Nuncius</i> and the <i>De Revolutionibus</i>), 
        give a reasonably detailed overview of the scientific topography of the 
        period, and still leave plenty of nooks and crannies for students to do 
        their own exploring in. 
      <p class="main_text"> However, no particularly good introductory overview 
        of the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution exists. While coming up 
        with excerpts from primary documents for students to read is not terribly 
        difficult, finding a coherent text to present this material in a basic 
        conceptual framework is. While writing an entire such text might be difficult, 
        writing the text for a course specifically about Galileo seemed a reasonable 
        project for a year of sabbatical. 
      <p class="main_text"> Van Helden discussed these concerns in late spring 
        and early summer with me. At that time, Rice had just acquired a new Vice 
        President of Information Systems, Tony Gorry, who had proclaimed the "Year 
        of the Network", and had making funds available to upgrade network connectivity 
        on the campus and to promote the use of computers in the humanities. I 
        speculated that, rather than a traditional text, perhaps what was needed 
        was a hypertext. The idea of teaching via a network-accessible text stems 
        from my belief that the exponential spread of the Internet is the wavefront 
        of a paradigm shift of the same type and order of magnitude that the printing 
        press represented, as well as my conviction that the nonlinear nature 
        of hypertext makes possible a much more individually tailored way to present 
        information than a book. 
      <p class="main_text"> The idea of writing a hypertext "textbook" bounced 
        back and forth between us for a few months, gathering momentum and a life 
        of its own as it went; because this would be a trial balloon for the use 
        of computing in the humanities--and thus central to the Electronic Studio 
        project, which the Galileo Project became part of--funding was relatively 
        easy to secure. The summer was spent learning the limits of the various 
        systems available to us, settling on a choice of platforms, and evolving 
        a basic structure for the document we would produce. 
      <p class="main_text"> In the fall, Elizabeth Burr joined the team and work 
        began in earnest; we began writing and incorporating links and images, 
        worrying about copyright issues, and brainstorming for alternate organizations 
        of our information. By the time of writing, we have a fair number of links 
        in place, a basic structure well-defined, and a few images and maps. At 
        the moment, the Galileo Project is basically at a proof-of-concept phase: 
        for most of the areas we wanted, we have working examples that really 
        only need to be further expanded to be complete; it is only in a few areas--such 
        as inclusion of a bibliography--that work has not yet begun. 
      <p class="main_text"> The document is intended to be complete enough that 
        a course can be taught using it by January of 1995. This is not meant 
        to suggest that it will be finished--one of the most exciting things about 
        the Project is that it is almost infinitely extensible--but it should 
        be fully usable and very useful. We feel this is a realistic goal: many 
        of the difficult design choices are, I think, behind us. What lies ahead 
        is mostly implementation, which will not be trivial, but should be fairly 
        straightforward.<b> 
      <p class="subheading"> Hypertext</b>
      <p class="main_text"><em>What does "Hypertext Textbook" mean?</em></p>
      <p> <span class="main_text">This is best answered by analyzing the terms 
        one at a time. Hypertext is simply nonlinear text. The concept takes a 
        little getting used to, as all traditional text is overwhelmingly linear. 
        What is meant to be suggested is just that there is no one correct path 
        through the text; this will be much more fully discussed below. </span>
      <p class="main_text"> For our purposes, all "textbook" means is the central 
        non-primary source material for use in teaching a class. Therefore, a 
        "hypertext textbook" is a non-linear document intended for use in a classroom.
		
      <p><em>Linear vs. Nonlinear Texts</em></p>	
		
      <p class="main_text">The distinction between plain text and hypertext will 
        be much clearer if we first examine the similarities and differences between 
        linear and nonlinear media. This should also provide insight into why 
        we feel that hypertext is the appropriate approach for the Galileo Project. 
        Initially I will discuss only the relative merits of text and hypertext; 
        later I will move to discussion of non-text (graphical images, sound, 
        et al.) objects imbedded in hypermedia.
		<p class="main_text"><b>Linear Text</b></p>
		
      <p class="main_text">Traditional texts are linear: the reader is supposed 
        to read them in a continuous fashion, starting at the first page and reading 
        through until he or she runs out of book. In, for example, a work of fiction, 
        there is usually a linear progression of action: the characters and situation 
        are introduced, an element of conflict is presented, the plot develops 
        around the conflict, some sort of climax occurs, and the work concludes. 
        In a language textbook, a very basic lexicon is developed and the fundamentals 
        of grammar built--perhaps the present tense and simple sentences are presented. 
        Then the student progresses to more complex grammatical constructions: 
        interrogative and imperative sentences, for example, and a variety of 
        useful adjectives. Eventually, the sphere of student knowledge will have 
        expanded to encompass most of the language. This is developed in a linear 
        fashion, where each chapter builds on the material learned in the previous 
        ones. 
      <p class="main_text"> There are advantages to linear media. One of the biggest 
        points in its favor is that it presents an extremely familiar and comfortable 
        user interface. By the time a student gets to Rice, it can be assumed 
        that he or she is not only highly competent at reading, but that he<A HREF="#fn3">[3]</A> 
        probably derives some pleasure from it as well. Books are, almost by definition, 
        structured linearly, and have been as long as writing has existed: no 
        new skills need to be learned to read a book. 
      <p class="main_text"> A further advantage of linear media is that the information 
        is usually highly structured. The author probably has a good reason for 
        presenting the material in the order in which he chooses to do so. For 
        works that cumulatively build on their earlier parts--physics or language 
        textbooks, philosophical tracts, or novels, for example--this is extremely 
        important. 
      <p class="main_text"> However, there are drawbacks as well to linear text. 
        The first is the converse of the second advantage above: the order in 
        which an author structures a work may not be the order in which it would 
        make the most sense to a reader. Imagine, for example, a discussion of 
        forms of governments in the Classical Mediterranean basin: the author 
        might present it in a geographical way, progressing from North to South, 
        tracing the entire history of each region before moving on to the next. 
        A reader might well find it more useful to read it chronologically: a 
        snapshot of each of the various governments at 500 BC, and a similar picture 
        for each century. A linear medium would prevent him from doing so. 
      <p class="main_text"> Another problem with traditional text is pointing 
        to additional references. Typically, a book will have a bibliography; 
        the interested reader is then encouraged to go to the library, find the 
        referenced book that interests him, and read it. This is not ineffective, 
        but not all readers are able to have high-quality libraries at their disposal. 
        Even if a reader does, the book he wants may not be in the collection 
        or may be in use by another patron. In any event, he has to expend a significant 
        amount of effort to get to any of the secondary texts. This is, as we 
        shall see, not necessarily the case with hypertext.
      <p class="main_text"><b> Nonlinear Text</b></p>
      <p class="main_text"> There are four major advantages I find in hypertext 
        as compared with linear text. First, the reader decides in what order 
        the material is to be presented. This was discussed above, and while it 
        is inappropriate for some applications, for many it is best to let the 
        reader choose the order in which the information appears. 
      <p class="main_text"> Second, the bibliography can be active rather than 
        passive. When another source is referenced, the reader does not necessarily 
        have to search for it. Provided the material is also on line, the text 
        can be directly linked into the document. This process can be automated 
        to provide for the automatic maintenance of an up-to-date concordance 
        or index without human intervention. 
      <p class="main_text"> Third, hypertext is a superset of linear text. There 
        is no reason whatsoever that a hypertext cannot contain passages of linear 
        text--in fact, most do include significant amounts of linear text. Thus, 
        nothing is lost by moving from a linear medium to hypertext. 
      <p class="main_text"> Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the information 
        does not have to all fit into one book or one series of books. There is 
        no longer a need to put interesting but only marginally relevant material 
        into the text when a link will suffice; size can be arbitrary since there 
        is not necessarily an expectation that the entire document must be digested. 
        If a networked approach, such as the Galileo Project employs, is taken, 
        then even geography becomes irrelevant. Part of the document can exist 
        on a computer disk in Houston and part in Florence; the user need never 
        know where the information he uses physically resides. 
      <p class="main_text"> There are also some problems with hypertext. The first 
        is directly related to the lack of well-defined structure traditionally 
        imposed by the author. In short, it's easy to get lost; if no structure 
        is given, it is easy for the hypertext to become a chaotic mess of randomly--and 
        tenuously--linked documents. 
      <p class="main_text"> Hypertext tends to lead to an "everything, the kitchen 
        sink, and your little dog Toto too" approach; developers get so entranced 
        with the freedom to include links to anything and everything that they 
        do so with wild abandon. Thus much of the material found in a traditional 
        hypertext application is often completely irrelevant. There is also a 
        tendency to emphasize form over content--particularly with hypermedia 
        that includes non-textual elements--and thus to throw in a lot of things 
        that look neat or that seem flashy, but do not in fact contribute much 
        of anything to the document itself. 
      <p class="main_text"> Finally, hypertext presents a very different user 
        interface than the traditional book. A reader will have to learn how to 
        read a hypertext. Since hypertext presentation methods have not had the 
        benefit of half a millennium of printing technology to standardize an 
        interface, a reader may very well have to learn new skills for each hypertext 
        he reads. This learning curve may be steep and certainly functions as 
        a deterrent. Even if the document is interesting, it will, at least initially, 
        be much easier to simply read a book.
      <p class="main_text"><em>When is Hypertext Appropriate?</em></p>
      <p class="main_text"> The easiest way to answer this question is to first 
        show when it is inappropriate. As mentioned above, novels (James Joyce 
        and Thomas Pynchon notwithstanding) are generally poor venues for hypertext. 
        Any subject in which knowledge must build cumulatively is not suitable 
        for hypertext--this includes science and language textbooks, chronologically-oriented 
        material, and recipes. 
      <p class="main_text"> Hypertext <i>is</i> appropriate for interactive fiction. 
        This includes traditional "text adventure" games, such as <i>Zork</i> 
        or <i>The Horror Of Rylvania</i>: even though these often have a linear 
        plot, in which the player must perform certain actions in a certain order, 
        the order in which he travels between locations in the game or the order 
        in which he picks up items is his to control. A reference manual is a 
        good candidate for hypertext: if it is likely that the user will simply 
        want to look at the section that he needs to consult, and then be able 
        to instantaneously bring up related topics, then this is precisely what 
        hypertext is good for. In general, hypertext works best in a text with 
        many unordered but related topics. If I am consulting on-line documentation, 
        I should not have to read through commands instructing me how to print 
        the contents of a file to get to the section on formatting disks; however, 
        when I get there, I want to be informed that a link exists to the commands 
        that check whether a disk is damaged or not, since that is logically related 
        to the process of formatting a disk.
      <p class="main_text"><i>Why do we feel hypertext is appropriate for 
        the Galileo Project?</i></p>
      <p class="main_text"> The way the Galileo Project is structured is highly 
        topical, but does not usually need to be read in any particular order. 
        It really makes no difference to the reader's comprehension of the subject 
        whether he reads about Copernicus's geocentric universe before or after 
        he finds out about seventeenth-century Florentine politics; thus, we want 
        to give him the option to order his reading as he pleases. For those sections 
        that do require sequential comprehension--the timeline of Galileo's life, 
        for instance--we can make the timeline a single linear text with links 
        branching out from it. One of the great strengths of hypertext is that 
        it can include as much linear text as desired. 
      <p class="main_text"> We also have wanted Galileo to be easily extensible; 
        rather than doing this with a huge bibliography (although we certainly 
        will include an appropriate bibliography), we can include links to hypertexts 
        about other subjects. For instance, in the section about telescopic astronomy 
        in the seventeenth century, we can include a link a network resource about 
        current developments in astronomy, a link to a presentation on the architecture 
        of Renaissance Florence, or to material about the lives of other scientists.
      <p class="main_text"><i>Digital Hypermedia</i> 
      <p class="main_text"> The medium we have chosen is not limited to text; 
        it is a digital medium, and anything that can be represented in bit patterns 
        can be represented here. Very nearly everything can be represented as 
        bit patterns.
      <p class="subheading">Bits Are Bits</p>
      <p class="main_text"> Books are limited to words and pictures. Occasionally 
        a book will be packaged with a cassette tape (e.g. the hardback version 
        of Ursula K. Le Guin's <i>Always Coming Home</i>), but this usually smacks 
        of a promotional gimmick and is extremely rarely an integral part of the 
        text. 
      <p class="main_text"> There is no such restriction in hypermedia. We can 
        have text, images, sounds, animation clips, and interactive simulations. 
        These can be bound as tightly to the text as we care to design; we can 
        even make them a necessary part of our--now more broadly defined--hypertext. 
      <p class="main_text"> Media in digital format take up essentially no space. 
        The compact disc, which is a technology ten years old, can pack roughly 
        600 megabytes onto one side of a 5-1/4 inch platter. If this were represented 
        as text, it would use up about 150,000 pages. Images have a much higher 
        information density, but still much lower than that which can be routinely 
        expected from a digital format. Finally, digital texts are more durable 
        than paper texts. Paper becomes brittle after 50 years or so; while magnetic 
        tape should be recopied roughly every 25 years, the labor involved in 
        duplicating it is much less than that involved in reproducing a book. 
        The lifespan of a compact disc, barring catastrophe such as melting or 
        breaking, and assuming proper storage, can probably be measured in millennia<A HREF="#fn4">[4]</A>.
      <p class="subheading">Implementation of the Galileo Project</p>
      <p class="main_text"><i>Choice of Platform</i></p>
      <p class="main_text"><b> Minimal System Requirements</b></p>
      <p class="main_text"> As with anything else in the computer world, a trade-off 
        existed between accessibility and performance. We needed a system that 
        would be capable of displaying crisp graphics, but not something that 
        would be more expensive than students could be expected to have or at 
        least to have access to. 
      <p class="main_text"> It was fairly easy to decide that the base system 
        ought to be a color computer capable of displaying at least 640x480 pixels 
        with an eight-bit (256 colors) color depth. Most color Macintoshes and 
        PCs sold in the last three years meet this requirement: few of the personal 
        computers on campus fall short. Many of the PCs in Mudd, however, fall 
        short, as they are only capable of 320x200x256. Nonetheless, this is really 
        the minimum screen size necessary for decent image quality.
      <p class="main_text"><b> Distribution of the Project</b>
      <p class="main_text"> The scope of the project was obviously too great for 
        distribution on floppy disks: it would be both expensive and clumsy to 
        distribute 20 or 30 diskettes to each student in a course. A CD-ROM is 
        more manageable, but would have been expensive to produce, and would not 
        have allowed customization of the material. Therefore, the most natural 
        approach was to make the Galileo Project available over the campus network. 
        This seems immediately to exclude reaching it from student rooms; at the 
        moment this is mostly true. However, in the next round of campus renovations, 
        individual college rooms probably will be wired. The Electronic Studio 
        project already seeks to provide course materials via the campus network, 
        and therefore, the Galileo Project can and should exist under its auspices. 
      <p class="main_text"> Most importantly, a networked approach means that 
        we are no longer restricted to Rice. The Galileo Project can access resources 
        literally halfway around the world via the Internet. Conversely, we eventually 
        hope to be able to open up the text to the entire Internet community: 
        an interested student in Sri Lanka would then be able to read the documents 
        in the Project just as easily as someone sitting at a terminal in Mudd. 
        The most marvelous thing about the Internet is that geography finally 
        becomes truly irrelevant. Communities are defined by interest and language 
        rather than by location. I am convinced that the Galileo Project is at 
        the leading edge of the new educational methods that will be explored 
        as global network connectivity grows cheap enough that it becomes like 
        telephone connectivity: an assumed and necessary resource.
      <p class="main_text"><b> Interoperability</b>
      <p class="main_text"> Another primary concern was that the Project should 
        run on different kinds of hardware; while Mudd is predominantly Macs and 
        Sun workstations, a great many students use PCs at home; ideally, we wanted 
        a program that would run on Macintoshes, PC clones running Windows or 
        Win/OS2, and Unix Workstations running the X Window System. This would 
        allow us access to all of the major graphical computing environments on 
        campus. This design choice ruled out Hypercard and Toolbook; while both 
        are excellent systems, each is very platform-specific. While tools exist 
        to migrate Hypercard stacks to Toolbook presentations and back, this still 
        leaves Unix workstations out in the cold. 
      <p class="main_text"> After deliberation, we settled on the HyperText Markup 
        Language (HTML) as our format, with Mosaic the preferred viewer<A HREF="#fn5">[5]</A>. 
        Mosaic is available from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications 
        and is free. Versions currently exist for Windows, the Macintosh, and 
        Unix with the X Window System.
      <p class="main_text"><b> HTML</b>
      <p class="main_text"> HTML has its own particular advantages and disadvantages. 
        One of its strengths is that it includes a very general mechanism to make 
        available files anywhere on the World Wide Web (WWW). The World Wide Web 
        is loosely defined as the set of all computers on the Internet which run 
        a program that makes available resources via a certain communications 
        protocol, called http, for "HyperText Transport Protocol". 
      <p class="main_text"> HTML has evolved from IBM's Standard Generalized Markup 
        Language (SGML), which is a language designed precisely for formatting 
        and presenting text, so complex text formatting is extremely easy. Since 
        it is basically intralinear annotations in a text, it is easy to write 
        and modify with standard text editors; it also can be easily sent via 
        e-mail. How HTML is displayed is left entirely to the discretion of the 
        program used to view it. This means that the same file can be read by 
        Mosaic, a full-featured graphical interface, or by Lynx, a very basic, 
        text-only, interface to the hypertext; while Mosaic will only run on Windows-based 
        IBM clones, Macintoshes, or Unix systems with the X Window System, Lynx 
        can be compiled and run on any platform that has a C compiler and the 
        curses libraries<A HREF="#fn6">[6]</A>, which should include practically 
        any computer likely to be encountered in a university environment. 
      <p class="main_text"> HTML does, however, have its drawbacks. Tables are 
        not yet well supported, and creating maps in which a region is clickable 
        is not as easy as it should be. Further, the viewer-dependent display 
        means that the interface is inherently inconsistent: accessing an HTML 
        document via Lynx will be completely different from accessing it via Mosaic.
      <p class="main_text"><b> Mosaic</b>
      <p class="main_text"> Mosaic will be our primary viewer, since it, unlike 
        Lynx, supports all of our requirements. It is available via ftp from the 
        site <tt>ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu<A HREF="#fn7">[7]</A></tt>, and is absolutely 
        free. This is perhaps the strongest point in its favor: since it and its 
        source code are freely available, its popularity is immense. It has migrated 
        to a plethora of Unix platforms and has become an accepted standard on 
        the Internet. 
      <p class="main_text"> Text presented through Mosaic looks wonderful; it's 
        generally nicely formatted and very legible. However, the only way to 
        explicitly control formatting at the moment is to use preformatted text, 
        which is much uglier: it is in Courier<A HREF="#fn8">[8]</A> font and 
        line breaks are no longer automatic. As long as one is content with the 
        default formatting--which is more than acceptable most of the time--Mosaic 
        does fine. 
      <p class="main_text"> To do anything besides displaying inline GIF<A HREF="#fn9">[9]</A> 
        images and HTML-formatted text, Mosaic relies on helper applications. 
        This is another point in its favor, as it simply makes use of the tools 
        appropriate for the platform on which it runs: images are displayed using 
        the program xv on Unix, and by JpegView on the Mac; audio files can be 
        run through /dev/audio on Unix boxes or played through a SoundBlaster 
        under Windows. It is the responsibility of the "helper applications" wherever 
        Mosaic is installed to handle other file formats. This allows the Mosaic 
        developers to concentrate on HTML interpretation and leave the bells and 
        whistles to established programs. 
      <p class="main_text"> Mosaic has its own share of problems as well. The 
        reliance on default text formatting makes it impossible to create a document 
        with the same degree of control as in a desktop publishing program; the 
        user can always resize the window and have the text flow to fit it in 
        Mosaic. Mosaic is not intended to be a collaborative tool. It is difficult 
        for multiple users to change the same document at the same time, although 
        much can be achieved with local annotation. It is hard to implement action 
        links well in Mosaic. Although it is fairly simple to state a process 
        of execution that certain actions within Mosaic can invoke, it is difficult 
        to do this without compromising the security of the system. The capability 
        for user authentication completely isolated from Unix security could presumably 
        be added to Mosaic to get around this problem, but it would be difficult 
        and perhaps not very useful to do so.
      <p class="main_text"><b> Our Approach</b>
      <p class="main_text"> The "textbook" will be a read-only HTML structure. 
        Students can then access the text through Mosaic or Lynx. With this approach 
        we can ultimately make the HTML text accessible to the entire world merely 
        by allowing off-campus access to the document.
      <p class="main_text"><i>Structure of the Project</i> 
      <p class="main_text"> At the moment, we have three major paradigms of organization, 
        with two more proposed or under development. Galileo's Villa, a geographic 
        metaphor; the Timeline of Galileo's Life, a straightforward chronology; 
        and the Table of Contents Of Links, which is a simple subject-based hypertext 
        that contains pointers to our various resources. All of these point to 
        the same links; it is only the manner in which access to the links is 
        organized that changes. The Bibliography is under development, and an 
        Index, searchable by keyword, has been proposed and will probably eventually 
        be implemented.
      <p class="main_text"><b> The Links</b>
      <p> <span class="main_text">"Links" are the central feature of the Galileo 
        Project. Although they sound mysterious, they are, in fact, quite straightforward. 
        A link is simply a short piece of text--typically 250-1000 words--written 
        by Van Helden, translated to HTML, and put into the document. A link may 
        also be an image, a map, or some other object we want to include in the 
        hypertext. Links are, to a large degree, given meaning by the way they 
        are fit into the superstructure; the framework in which we arrange them, 
        while loose, does give them a certain necessary degree of context.</span>
      <p class="main_text"><b> Galileo's Villa</b>
      <p class="main_text"> The <i>Domus Galileanis</i> is a digitized floor plan 
        of a seventeenth-century Florentine Villa<A HREF="#fn10">[10]</A>. Each 
        room has its own function: for example, one is the Chapel, one the Portrait 
        Gallery, one the Observatory, one the Laboratory. The user can click the 
        mouse inside a room (or select a room name from a list beneath the Villa 
        map, so that text-only users are still able to get somewhere from the 
        Villa), and be presented with the "contents" of that room. Thus, in the 
        Chapel, one might find links to Cardinal Bellarmine, Pope Urban VIII, 
        the Spanish Inquisition, and the Protestant Reformation. The Observatory 
        contains links to Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and comets; soon it will also have 
        a flip-book animation made of Galileo's sunspot sketches and a short history 
        of telescopic astronomy in the seventeenth century. 
      <p class="main_text"> A link can be referenced from many points in the Villa; 
        Urban VIII, for instance, is equally at home in the Hall of Patronage 
        and in the Chapel. This document will probably itself be found by clicking 
        on the cellar stairs, showing that it details the "substructure" that 
        tells about the design decisions made during the Project's implementation.
      <p class="main_text"><b> Timelines</b>
      <p class="main_text"> Currently, there exists a Timeline of Galileo's Life; 
        it, and the more general European Timeline (which covers the period from 
        1450 to 1700), are linear chronologies which include links to the topics 
        mentioned within themselves. Since internal reference points can be embedded 
        within a document, it has also been possible to put pointers back from 
        the various links to their first occurrence in the timeline. These serve 
        as a good example of how even a fundamentally linear text can be used 
        to good advantage within a hypertext document.
      <p class="main_text"><b> Table Of Contents</b>
      <p class="main_text"> This is exactly what it sounds like: a list of links, 
        grouped by type. Selecting any of them will bring up that link. It's handy 
        if a reader knows what he wants to read about and doesn't want to have 
        to figure out where that link can be found in its context.
      <p class="main_text"><b> Index</b>
      <p class="main_text"> The index does not yet exist. What I would like to 
        do is to maintain a list of keywords, each of which has a connection to 
        a page that lists links that relate to the keyword chosen. Prentiss Riddle 
        is currently working on the search engine that would make this scheme 
        feasible. The index would be somewhat tedious to implement, and would 
        require a lot of testing to get even a majority of the keywords people 
        wanted to search by, but would also be immensely useful. I feel that the 
        utility of the index probably outweighs the drudgery of its creation.
      <p class="main_text"><b> Bibliography</b>
      <p class="main_text"> The bibliography will be a single large document, 
        formatted to conform as nearly as possible within the constraints of HTML 
        to the <i>Chicago Manual of Style</i>'s format. Each entry will be marked 
        with its own internal reference so that clicking on any mention of a referenced 
        book within any of the links will bring the reader to the appropriate 
        entry in the bibliography. This is extremely easy to do with HTML, but 
        will prove very time-consuming.
      <p class="main_text"><b> Other Formats</b>
      <p class="main_text"> We will have several maps, with regions defined on 
        them such that by selecting a region the appropriate link can be activated. 
        For example, in our map of Italy, clicking in the north should bring up 
        the link about Florence and Tuscany. These maps can be on as large a scale 
        as Europe or as small as Galileo's Villa. 
      <p class="main_text"> Eventually Galileo's notebooks showing the motion 
        of Jupiter's moons and of sunspots will be made into short animation clips. 
        The effect should be rather like a flip-book in giving the illusion of 
        motion, and will provide an interesting graphic representation of the 
        actual motion of sunspots. This is a technique that simply does not work 
        in a printed book; one must be content to print each picture, and then--if 
        one so chooses--instruct the reader to flip through very quickly. However, 
        by implementing this as an MPEG<A HREF="#fn11">[11]</A> file, we get to 
        choose the frame rate and ensure that the "pages are flipped" at an appropriate 
        speed. 
      <p class="main_text"> Vincenzo Galileo was a musician. There is no reason 
        that--should we think it relevant--we cannot take digitized sounds of 
        the instruments he would have played and include those in the Project, 
        although not all of the workstations currently have sound capability. 
        We can also do visual and aural representations of classical physical 
        demonstrations--such as the harmonics of a taut wire--very easily with 
        these techniques.
      <p> 
      <p class="subheading">Galileo in the Classroom</p> 
      <p class="main_text"><i>How will this work?</i> 
      <p class="main_text"> The Project will replace the course textbook, but 
        will assuredly <i>not</i> replace primary sources. Most of the class will 
        probably still revolve around reading translations of actual documents, 
        such as the <i>Siderius Nuncius</i>. I envision handing out a syllabus 
        containing a "core" of must-read links for a given day's discussion, and 
        having the other ones be optional reading. It will not be necessary that 
        all links be hit during the course of the semester. 
      <p class="main_text"> One of the great things about the HTML format is that 
        it is very simple to translate a document from a popular word processor 
        format into HTML. Thus, extremely good student papers can be rewritten, 
        turned into HTML, and made links within the course text. This will allow 
        the Project to grow synergistically, especially as it starts to overlap 
        with other courses taught using the same technologies<A HREF="#fn12">[12]</A>.
      <p class="main_text"><i>Will it work?</i> 
      <p class="main_text"> The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Those of 
        us working on the Galileo Project think it's an extremely exciting experiment. 
        However, while <i>we</i> all feel it's a really neat way to teach history, 
        it will ultimately be the success or failure of the course with the students 
        that determines whether or not it works. This may be hard to determine; 
        the students' necessity to learn a new interface before reading the course 
        text will be a strike against us, as they may reject the system before 
        ever coming to grips with the material itself on the grounds that the 
        interface is unreasonably difficult. 
      <p class="main_text"> This has never been tried before. Standard textbooks 
        are simply not very good in this area: the Galileo Project should have 
        at least as much cogent text as the introductory History of Science textbooks 
        it is trying to replace. I think that the format has two great advantages 
        over paper text: first, it allows the student to approach the material 
        in the order he finds most useful. Second, and at least as important, 
        is that this allows extension and improvement on the course text. There 
        is no need to wait for the next edition from the publisher, when publishing 
        a new version is as simple as editing a file; further, if either a student 
        or the professor writes a good paper on material relevant to the course, 
        that document can become a link in the course text<A HREF="#fn13">[13]</A>.	
      <p><span class="main_text"> Finally, we must recognize that globally networked 
        information is the direction in which education seems to be inexorably 
        heading. I find this a great--though not an unmixed--good. Copyright problems 
        are among the first bugbears to appear as traditional notions of "publishing" 
        are challenged by a communications infrastructure that makes "store-and-forward" 
        the only reasonable means of transmission, and anyone with a laser printer 
        is his own printing press. They will not be the last. As the distribution 
        of information shifts from being paper-based to being electron-based, 
        a great many old and valued paradigms will crumble. I believe that, eventually<A HREF="#fn14">[14]</A>, 
        many if not most new "texts" will resemble more closely the Galileo Project 
        than the traditional book. It is and will remain exciting to be at the 
        leading edge of the transition. The Galileo Project is a radical experiment; 
        its success is far from assured. The eventual success of projects like 
        it is almost certainly unstoppable.</span> 
      <p class="sources"><strong>Notes:</strong><br>
<A NAME="fn1">[1]</A> HyperText Markup Language, about which more later.<br>
<A NAME="fn2">[2]</A> Unix is a trademark of AT&amp;T Bell Laboratories.  AT&amp;T is the first four characters of a modem test string.<br>
<A NAME="fn3">[3]</A> Hereafter, when "he" is written, accept it as notational shorthand for "he or she".<br>
<A NAME="fn4">[4]</A> The more interesting question is: will anything besides historians' tools be able to read compact discs in a century?  The same applies to magnetic tape: realistically, tapes are not copied because the medium begins to age but because the old magnetic tape format has become obsolete and, unless it is copied onto a newer medium, shortly nothing will be able to read it.<br>
<A NAME="fn5">[5]</A> Students accessing the Galileo Project via modem will probably prefer to use Lynx, however, to speed up the process.  While Mosaic <i>can</i> be used over a modem, the inclusion of images makes it painfully slow.<br>
<A NAME="fn6">[6]</A> A popular screen-handling package.  You are not expected either to understand it or to care about it.<br>
<A NAME="fn7">[7]</A> If you don't know what this means, and you want Mosaic, find a beginner's guide to the Internet.  There are several out there.<br>
<A NAME="fn8">[8]</A> <tt>This is Courier.  The typewriter look is <i>out</i>.</tt><br>
<A NAME="fn9">[9]</A> Graphics Interchange Format; a very popular picture format.<br>
<A NAME="fn10">[10]</A> No, it's not really one of the houses Galileo lived in.  Hopefully someday we can get such a plan and make it into a map, though.<br>
<A NAME="fn11">[11]</A> A common animation format.  I don't know what it stands for.<br>
<A NAME="fn12">[12]</A> There's no reason this shouldn't happen, if the first year is a success and other history or philosophy courses adopt a similar approach.<br>
<A NAME="fn13">[13]</A> This does indeed suggest that publishers may not be crucial to the textbook publishing business.<br>
<A NAME="fn14">[14]</A> Probably not within twenty years; probably within one hundred. <br>
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