Key Points

As We May Think (Bush, 1945) was written at the end of World War 2. During that time of war, most scientists and researchers were directly supporting the war effort. Bush, in this article, encourages those scientists to continue research pursuits now that the war is over. One of the key problems that Bush proposes is that the world is “bogged down” by research. If a researcher wants to find information on a specific topic, or something more general, they could spend a very long time reading through the literature and finding information that is relevant to their research pursuits. When researchers review literature or analyze data of some sort, they attempt to connect their ideas. Connecting ideas is how new research is made, and it is important to document this. Bush proposes technologies to assist with this, and how they may evolve over time. One specific device proposed by Bush is the Memex, which would provide features allowing information of this sort, for example, to be: connected, stored, and accessed at a later date for sharing amongst others. These technologies, to Bush, would help advance research in a world where, at the time, very few technological advancements help the pursuit of efficient research.

Bush’s vision in 1945

Bush’s vision was to allow people to utilize vast amounts of collected data and to harness advancements in technology as a method for doing so. He lays out how technology may advance, and in multiple domains. For example, speech recording, cameras, and printing will have advancements that will aid research. These technologies, as they evolved would allow for research to be performed across larger datasets, and simply allow more connections to be made. Bush also notes how menial tasks, such as mathematical operations can be off-loaded as a human task and onto a machine, giving a researcher more time to pursue things outside of these menial tasks.

Impact of the Article 

This article encouraged those working in support of the war to continue pursuit of their passions, especially that of research. Not only did this article propose how technologies may advance, it likely gave hope to researchers that their ideas could have larger impact than it may currently have. It is difficult to say how this article specifically affected the computer and technological world, but in 2019 his vision is something that is still in pursuit of today. For example, a company such as Google Search (2019), which has a mission statement to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” This is just one example, but it shows how the world is truly in pursuit of information and how it can be connected.

His Vision in Today’s World

In certain ways, today's world does match Bush’s vision. Technological advancements are very difficult to predict, but his vision lays out how these advancements may contribute to research. Not all of these advancements happened exactly as described, but close enough. Technology seems to still have its limitations today. It is something that is always being worked on. There is never a time it seems when we decide to stop working on technological advancements. Sometimes technology will get faster or smaller, and sometimes the technology will go in a completely different direction. A case of this is cameras or other technologies transitioning from analog to digital. This is something, likely not predicted, but one that is still in some ways supported. One limitation or problem still encountered in today's technological environment, is connecting different pieces of technology or information. As a researcher or analyst, you may want to connect dozens of information sources together that are gathered in different mediums (i.e., video from Netflix, chapter from a printed book, or pictures). Today, there is no great efficient way to do this that is not from a customized solution. There are specific methods or analysis tools, but they are difficult to learn, are expensive, and it seems as though not used regularly by researchers. We seem to have access to vast amounts of information, and it is relatively well organized, but there seems to still be trouble connecting and analyzing it.

What Bush did get right was that technology would evolve, and we would have new ways and methods to connect information from research. There are likely devices that were inspired by that of the Memex, and other technologies such as the camera have increased greatly in detail. Today, more than ever we are able to use many technologies and bring together our ideas. There are certain things that Bush did not get right, such as specific detail about implementation of the technology. But for the purpose of proposing future technologies, it is irrelevant to put down things that are not right. There is no mechanism or device such as a Memex, described specifically by Bush. But, there are personal computers which anyone can access and use as if it were a Memex.

What the world is still missing, and what researchers might need is a more central place to publish research, and the ability to trace research from its origins. An accessible record of how the research came to be, what other research inspired it, and data that was collected would be invaluable perhaps to other researchers. This is something that does not exist today, as there are many ways to collect data for research purposes and there is no standardized way to publish it (i.e., notes from the field, videos, etc.). If researchers had the ability to (1) connect their gathered research data across several domains (i.e., video, photos, field notes, etc.) and (2) store a record automatically and that is accessible in a flash. Oftentimes, data such as this is in a database and requires many operations to access, and oftentimes a video has no connection to field notes.

Towards Bush’s Vision

To get towards the vision of Bush, which the world is in consistent pursuit of, there needs to be standardization for large data sets and how to handle them. There could be, for example, some type of standard for collection, dissemination, and digestion of information. Examples of standards that may be similar today are XML. XML provides a structure in the form of tags. If data were provided, from its origin, in some type of structured tag format such as XML, it could help to connect it with other research and information.

Currently, there are websites that allow research journals to be published and provide direct links to related research. But these websites can be slow, often have a pay-wall, and do not make it as easy as Bush describes. In addition, there are typically no multimedia type information included within these websites. Often, some of the richest insightful information comes from speech or video. Research is standardized into written reports, but it would be interesting to see if new mediums could be incorporated into it.

The pursuit of research is something that will never end. As described by Bush, technology will advance, and research will need to be connected. As time passes we, as researchers, need to determine how to utilize existing and new technologies to help support our research pursuits. Oftentimes this is overlooked, but in the end it will be most impactful to the research done around the world, and not just our specific field or topics of interest.

References

Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, pp. 112–124.

How Search Works: Our Mission. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/