Earlier today, Professor Dame Wendy Hall gave a presentation at the Mixed Reality Lab here at Nottingham as part of the MRL’s distinguished lecture series.  Her lecture ‘What is Web Science and why is it important?’ scoped the Web Science Research Initiative as an emergent discipline, discussed the semantic web, and, by way of introduction, described her own route into Multimedia.  If you want to hear more on this from Wendy herself, Nodalities are hosting a podcast interview with Professor Hall covering just these topics.

Amongst other sources of inspiration, Prof. Hall cited Hyperland (1990) a BBC2 ‘fantasy documentary’ by Douglas Adams. This 50 minute film examines (then) contemporary cutting edge research through dream encounters with a software agent (played by Tom Baker) and hypermedia visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson, to propose how interactive multi-media might constitute the future of TV.

As Douglas Adams’ website notes, whilst Adams was creating Hyperland – a student at CERN in Switzerland was working on a little hypertext project he called the World Wide Web…  To discover this vision of futures past, watch Hyperland below.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7190175107515525470]