In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote a visionary essay that urged scientists to redirect their creative capacities from weapons of war to instruments for the intellect. In this article, he develops the idea of the Memex, a desk-sized device imagined to mimic the mind's associative workings in order to store and link information.
This is Textarium, an experimental interface created in 2025 for interpreting textual sources.
Bush is concerned about the rapid expansion of human knowledge.
He describes the overwhelming surge of scientific output exceeding our capacity to make sense of it. While research proliferates, the tools for navigating it cannot keep up with the mass.
At the same time, a wave of promising technologies is ushering in an era in which mechanical and electrical devices are about to change how we work with information.
Before we discuss these new technologies, it is worth noting how he focuses on knowledge work throughout this essay. For Bush, this type of work is characterized by a tension between consumption and production.
On one side are the consuming tasks strained under the weight of specialization.
On the other side stand the producing tasks relying on outdated methods.
These tasks are part of a larger cycle of knowledge work.
Bush pays close attention to the new technologies of the time that could help accelerate and alter knowledge work.
First, he recognizes new ways of capturing data.
Then he highlights advances in miniaturization in storage.
Bush also maps a highly dynamic media landscape in which textual and audivisual records can be transmitted.
Access technologies enable flexible control over how records can be consulted.
Lastly, processing is where Bush places maybe the greatest transformative potential.
Overall, these technologies are becoming smaller, faster, and more capable of recording, storing, transmitting, displaying, and processing information. It is almost as if these technologies herald the advent of the information society…
For Bush, the central concept is the record. In his writing, it is both an archive and an infrastructure: a cumulative body of human knowledge that is continuously extended, stored, and consulted.
Records can be texts, observations, images, or notes. They are the building blocks of the larger record, but their value lies not in mere accumulation, but in being accessed and made sense of.
Without effective mechanisms of consultation, the whole point of the record becomes inert.
Beyond the record, Bush distinguishes between data as raw input, material as working medium, and records as structured output.
Scholarly work depends on the efficient flow between these phases. This is where he situates his futuristic vision of knowledge work augmented by technology.
Bush describes the Memex as a technologically enhanced workspace for storing and navigating large collections of documents, notes, and correspondence.
He mentions a range of well-known artifacts, to help readers of the 1940s imagine this unique setup.
The system is based on the idea that thinking is associative, not hierarchical.
Instead of relying on indices or categories, one would create and follow trails.
These trails are navigable paths between records that can be extended, revisited, and shared.
The concept of navigable trails is widely considered an early precursor to hypertext, and consequently, the web.
Codes serve as precise addresses for retrieving specific records and as connectors for forming associations between them.
Akin to hyperlinks, codes allow users to create custom trails and quickly access records, turning static storage into a dynamic network of meaning.
The Memex vision anticipated many of today's information systems, including some of their shortcomings. While aspects of its associative principle endure, others remain fragmentary or forgotten.
In the face of eroding trust in science, how might we think further toward a human record that is not just wider, but also deeper and more entangled?
Textarium is an experimental interface designed to open a space for linking text fragments, making interpretive gestures visible, and following threads of meaning.
Learn more about it in the research paper presented at VIS4DH during IEEE VIS 2025.
Textarium was created by Philipp Proff and Marian Dörk at UCLAB of FH Potsdam. It builds on Philipp's MA thesis completed in Design&Computation at TU Berlin/UdK.
Textarium uses the !nflect framework for the scrollytelling environment, the Monotone Chain Convex Hull algorithm to visually group annotations, the Porter Stemmer to identify annotations of the same stem, and Marked to parse markdown text files.
The font is Atkinson Hyperlegible.
Textarium is freely available under an MIT license: provided 'as is', you can use it for whatever, and the creators take no liability.