HyperDoc

Summary

The World Wide Web was built around the idea of hypermedia: pieces of information of various kinds are connected by links that allow navigation across large information networks. Wikipedia and its supporting projects Wikimedia and Wikidata are the most impressive demonstration so far of how this technology supports packaging and presenting humanity's accumulated knowledge.

But the World Wide Web integrated only the kinds of information that were already established in the pre-digital era: text, images, tables, sound and video clips, etc. Digital technology unified all of these into a single representation: bits. But digital technology also created a new medium: software. This new medium is at the same time a new form of information in the form of executable procedural knowledge, a new means for interacting with information through automation, and a raw material for building representations for information.

HyperDoc is an information substrate that integrates software with traditional hypermedia. Narratives can explain software, by referring to and transcluding source code. Source code can refer to documentation and examples. Diagrams can refer to the code or data they document, but also to the code that implements them. Small tailor-made software tools allow interacting with data, but also serve as documentation for how to work with that data.

I believe that knowledge workers should be able to write software tools in their domain of expertise, and share these tools with their professional communities, with their clients, and with decision makers in government and industry. This works best when software lives in the information substrate they work with, rather than in external tools made by software professionals. Konrad Hinsen

Key concepts

• Software as an information medium We tend to think of software as tools, but its source code is valuable information about algorithms, software engineering techniques, and about the data that is being processed.
• Situated software is software written for very specific use cases. It is smaller and simpler than general-purpose tools, making it easier to understand and thus better in its role as an information medium.
• Software turbo-charges hypermedia Hypermedia help making software more transparent, and software makes hypermedia more powerful. Narratives and diagrams explain software source code. Example datasets illustrate its algorithms. Source code explains data analysis methods and permits provenance tracking for derived data.

HyperDoc focuses on publishing knowledge in the digital era. It's a prototype for the next generation of technical reports, scientific articles, and teaching material. It also explores how larger knowledge networks such as Wikipedia could evolve to integrate software, not only as a tool but also as a repository of knowledge in its own right.

This idea was originally published by Konrad Hinsen in Explaining software and computational methods and Explorable explorable explanations.