Today, with the digitisation of texts, sounds and images and their circulation on the Internet, we are deploying new techniques for storing knowledge which will increasingly supplement and even replace older memory recording systems, such as books, vinyl discs, and photographs on celluloid. It looks as if the extent of these changes will be far reaching. And if, as many believe, the practical methods of inscribing thought have an impact on the way it is developed through the writing and reading process, we can understand why the changes now taking place could profoundly affect our ways of thinking. Here we have gathered together specialists in ancient means of recording memory - clay tablets, papyrus rolls and manuscripts - along with experts from the electronic age - originators of man-machine interfaces, enterprise knowledge management systems, hypermedia and intelligent agents - with the purpose of elucidating the present by reference to intellectual technologies of the past.

Hypertext encompasses a particular aspect of the virtual book that is playing an increasingly important part with the expansion of the Internet and the web. The success of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) - attests to its dynamism. Nowadays it seems so natural and so usual that we manipulate it with ease and we discover its ancestors among medieval cabalists or among other commentators of sacred texts. Every indexation, every note and every comment suggests a potential rudimentary hypertext. However, before its expansion over the entire planet, with the network of worldwide telecommunication, before being programmed on to every PC, hypertext took form in the minds of a few learned visionaries. We will refer to two of them.

Since the theme of this issue is ‘back to the future,’ especially to the ways in which information formats before the age of printing anticipate and perhaps even may give some guidance to principles of organization and cognitive layouts for the ‘new’ science of information design, I am going to focus in my presentation on the design of memory storage, as it was taught and practiced in the Middle Ages. It is important to recognize that ‘memory-art’ accompanied every aspect of education in the ancient trivium, though different aspects and capacities of human memory were emphasized as appropriate to its various disciplines. What is commonly now taken to be ‘the art of memory,’ namely the advice to link powerful images of ‘content’ (imagines rerum) together in dramatic scenes conceived within a mental location (locus) (as described most completely in the early first century B.C. Rhetorica ad Herennium) is not a universal technique but specifically a device of Rhetoric, and thus of composition. There is also an ‘art of memory’ associated with Dialectic, and this is the device of the ‘topics’ or ‘seats’ (topoi) of argument, syllogism and enthymeme arranged in an orderly schematic of specific mental ‘places.’ Aristotle expounded this scheme as a variety of mnemonic art in his treatise Peri Topoi, and in turn it was further disseminated to later antiquity and the Middle Ages in works by Cicero and Boethius.

The links which connect the nature of the medium to the methods of access and to the objects of knowledge, relationships between form and content, are a broad continuum whose interlinked facts require a transdisciplinary study.

Nowadays, attempts to discern these links seem to concern two central groups of correlations, which have been analysed from the perspective of different disciplines.

In the foreground of correlations we find the relationship between the material characteristics of the mediums and the methods of access to their contents; in this field of cultural technologies, the history of verbal language is punctuated first by the ‘invention’ of writing and its different systems, then by a series of transformations of manuscripts and the printed word, and finally by electronic communication. In the study of this first relationship, the history, psychology and physiology of reading establish a relationship between several parameters: on the one hand, the system of signs and spaces in the organization of the written code, and on the other hand, the methods of appropriation of this code by the reader (both reading aloud and silent reading), linear progression or freedom of selection of the contents, degree of speed, amount of information” habits of memorization, etc.

Maps and libraries are ways of externalising memory and knowledge, making them not only concrete, visible and accessible, but also durable, reproducible, communicable and socially active. Both are linked to processes of totalisation. Maps add together and incorporate individual, particular and partial experiences of a space: they provide a summary and synthesis of points of view concerning a given territory, obscuring their empirical content in order to construct a coherent degree of visibility and intelligibility. Libraries represent the sum of the reading and knowledge of the individual readers who frequent them. A library is one of the places that embody the intellectual, literary and spiritual heritage of a community; it is here that written memory, with its importance as a foundation for identity, can be seen in complete and tangible form.

‘One thing, however, seems certain: the manuscripts should be completely deciphered and transcribed, and studied as a group, as an individual manuscript, as an individual page (in many cases!), and then put in chronological order.

For example: yesterday I carefully examined the results of the page by page transcription of the manuscripts of Daybreak. I drew a sort of diagram of all the aphorisms in Daybreak following their appearance in the different manuscripts. Two things came out of this, which are basically the two sides of the same coin, that is: 1) the evolution of Daybreak, and 2) the exact chronology of each manuscript.

It is difficult to give a precise definition of hypertext since, in addition to its use as a technical tool, there is the conceptual dimension of a space for organizing memory and mapping connections. People often confuse the hypertext system, which makes it possible, through the digital medium, to link objects of different types, with the products (compositions?) created by means of this technique. Hypertext cannot be limited to either of these aspects. Like ink and paper, it is a medium for composition and expression and should also be seen as such. Whatever its purpose, and even if it involves collecting together pages on the Web in an ad hoc manner, hypertext delineates areas of knowledge and thus helps to produce a dual temporality, one that belongs to documents, the other characterized by instant actualization (which coincides with the eradication of any distance of space or time between the items of information).

In May 2000 a group of researchers, university teachers and publishers met to consider the impact of the new media for knowledge transmission on the intellectual world and listed the projects ongoing in France for publishing content electronically. Eighteen months later no one is able to say whether there will one day be a significant body of electronic publishing with French content. Such a transformation calls for a moment's consideration. So what has happened?

Mesopotamian works are usually anonymous; at best the names of some copyists are known. Some significant exceptions, such as Saggil-kênam-ubbib, the author of Théodicée babylonienne, Kabti-ilî-Marduk, author of the ‘myth of Erra’, and Shamash-muballit, the son of Warad-Sîn, who may have been the author of a hymn to the goddess Inanna, do not make up for this lacuna.

Increasingly in certain circles the idea is growing up that ‘intellectual property is theft’. With companies being concentrated into multimedia groups, literary works being captured electronically, products being created for a mass-media culture, commercial exchange on a worldwide scale, the legitimacy of the creator's literary and artistic property is being challenged. Originally the ‘droit d'auteur’ or copyright were mainly protective rules laid down by law to regulate the author's status. The legal system of literary and artistic ownership still ensures that creators receive revenue each time their works are reproduced, adapted or communicated to the public. In addition the droit d'auteur has another aspect through the existence of moral right, which establishes a personal link between author and work. It is true that moral right, which is sometimes seen as an obstacle to economic development, is almost non-existent in the systems of law recognizing copyright, which do not incorporate the same balance of interests as between the author and the company. On the other hand, in its formulation the droit d'auteur takes a more human approach and to say that intellectual property is theft would be equivalent to weakening, or even eradicating, a system that protects individual creators facing the reality of the exploitation of their work. This is why this criticism of legitimacy should, in my view, be considered in the context of a debate about the status of the author. The electronic capture of creative works has meant that the general public has easier access to them.

‘External memories’ raise a question about context: ‘external to what?’ External memory is a technical term applied to everything that can be memorized in an individual's environment. As a general rule I have decided to retain the technical terms that characterize the area of the topic under discussion. It was Ted Nelson who coined the word hypertext in 1967 to signify non-sequential writing as well as a computer technology that allowed the user to move about freely by means of software links. I shall use the term software to mean computer programs. Electronic publishing started with the Xanadu system developed by Nelson. At the lowest level a hypertext is a system for managing databases that allows the user to connect together information screens using links. It is a collection of texts interconnected by means of interactive switches. This dynamic presentation of non-linear texts could not be printed on a conventional page. Hypertext allows the origin of a piece of information to be traced. In this article traceability is synonymous with explanation: ‘Why was this equipment designed in one way rather than another?’ It is about discovering the route of the design process that led to the eventual idea for the equipment. The necessary explanations are often required long after decisions were made, and this is why traceability is a matter of memory. The term agent is often used to mean those members of a community that act on its behalf. There are agents for a company or public department. There are biological agents. In a non-technological world traceability is ideally carried out by human agents who explain to other human agents. The term agent has been extended into the computer world to mean software to which the user delegates, sometimes unwittingly, tasks of varying complexity. These are then called software agents. In this article I refer to agent in its wider meaning, to be understood as an actor or an entity able to act in a limited context and having a quite specific role and appropriate resources.

A great deal of thought has been given to the effects of information technology on reading, books and printed material. Its impact on writing, the production of texts, which is, however, the counterpart of reading, has not aroused the same interest. It is true that witnesses to the act of creation are less familiar objects than books or newspapers: in spite of the passion of the media and the educated public for writers’ manuscripts, these remain predominantly the prerogative of researchers and are still rarely taken out of libraries and archive collections. In extremely literate Western societies, reading is an activity practised by large sectors of the population. The same cannot be said about writing as an active producer of texts, for this encompasses a much more limited group of professionals, and is thought, more or less, to require a special gift in its literary form. Written production is rather the hidden face of McLuhan's Gutenberg galaxy, and the commercial businesses which manufacture and distribute writing in its printed form are better known to the public than the mysterious secrets of creation.