Cosma / Documentation / Notes
Cosma uses a “embedded and distributed documentation” approach. This means that there is some basic information on the About page, and then some standard information on the FAQ and Credits pages. Beyond that, there are many passages and footnotes about the project distributed across many pages in the context where they are relevant. These are also gathered together in one place on the this page, so this is a cumulative and evolving collection of clippings about the history, theory and structure of Cosma.
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1. Cosma is just the most recent iteration of a project that has been evolving for decades, and it’s based upon years of R&D in information, knowledge and communication systems. It’s been a long and winding road — here are some pointers to some stops along the way …
Hopper, M. E. (1993). Purdue Knowledge System. HyperCard, HyperNews, Gopher and World Wide Web Prototype. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.
Hopper, M. E. (1993). Educational Courseware Production in Advanced Computing Environments. Doctoral Dissertation. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.
Hopper, M. E. (1993). Expert’s Views about Courseware Development in Advanced Computing Environments [Abstract]. Proceedings of ED-MEDIA 93 – Conference on Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 607.
Hopper, M. E. (1998, October). Hypertext in Historical Context: Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson revisited. Media-in-Transition Project / Communications Forum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (1999, October). A Project About Projects: Watching Academic E-Media Projects Evolve [Presentation]. Media in Transition: An International Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (1999, December). MIT E-Knowledge System: A Systematic Approach to Improving Academic Enterprises at MIT and Beyond [Proposal]. Submitted to iCampus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (2000, January). Knowledge systems 101: From Alexandria to Hitchhiker’s Guide. Independent Activity Period, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (2007, April). The Knowledge Gates to SecondLife. Media in Transition 5 Conference: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (2009, April). Cosma: Constructing a Kingdom of Knowledge. Media in Transition 6 Conference: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
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Use this outline to begin exploring knowledge!
1. The Contents page is a “Basic Table of Contents” for getting started with exploring Cosma.
There is also a complete Table of Contents for advanced explorers.
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Human’s advanced abilities in the use of symbols and tools is what makes them so unique, so it is not at all surprising that the discipline that concerns itself with the use of symbols as tools is one that can subsume all other disciplines and encompass the entirety of humanity’s accomplishments. — M. E. Hopper
Communication is a discipline that can subsume all other disciplines.
Use the outline on this page to systematically master it!
1. This is a special, full Table of Contents for advanced users.
One goal of Cosma is to embed the knowledge used to make it within it.
This is to help others who want to create knowledge resources.
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Cosma is founded upon the premise that when Knowledge Resources are systematically identified, intuitively organized, and presented in an easily navigatable way, everyone can master finding them quickly and easily. This premise drove the development of Cosma. That is why there are a number of ways of getting around this Web site. For example, you can browse a visual menu of some popular Categories of content, and you can also read “posts” about Adventures through interesting and fun resources on the Web.
Most importantly, a key goal of Cosma is to have a 3D interface to enable truly spatial Knowledge Navigation, so you will also find special 3D interfaces to this Web site on the Worlds page. Finally, if you want to see a thorough description of what is on the Web site, then just go to the traditional Contents and Index pages.
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knowledge : the sum of what is known : the body of truth, information, and principles acquired by humankind — M. Webster See also OneLook
navigation : to steer a course through a medium — M. Webster See also OneLook
knowledge navigation : to steer a course through the information and knowledge acquired by humankind — M. E. Hopper
A key goal of Cosma is to have a 3D interface to enable truly spatial “Knowledge Navigation”of the Knowledge Resources hosted on the Cosma Web site. It would be impossible to overstate the centrality of the concept of Knowledge Navigation to Cosma. The project is founded upon the premise that when knowledge is intuitively organized, and presented in a spatial format, everyone can easily master it. This premise drove the development of Cosma, and that is why this site features Worlds for you to use to explore this Web site. You can find out a lot more about the ongoing quest to provide a 3D interface to Cosma on the Worlds Challenge page.
1. One stop in the saga of M. E. Hopper’s mission to enable truly spatial knowledge navigation took her to MIT where she developed content for a presentation, proposal and course during her Post Doc in Comparative Media Studies.
Hopper, M. E. (1998, October). Hypertext in Historical Context: Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson Revisited. Media-in-Transition Project / Communications Forum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (1999, December). MIT E-Knowledge System: A Systematic Approach to Improving Academic Enterprises at MIT and Beyond [Proposal]. Submitted to iCampus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (2000, January). Knowledge Systems 101: From Alexandria to Hitchhiker’s Guide [Short Course]. Independent Activity Period (IAP), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper’s obsession with Knowledge Navigation has gone so far as to lead to making up a significant percentage of her New Media Museum! In actuality, that museum is truly a sister project to Cosma at the deepest level. Here are links to the part of the collection related to Knowledge Navigation (Navigation, Trailblazers, Service, Hypermedia, World).
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1. Much of the content on this page was originally developed for two presentations at MIT.
The first presentation in April 2007 was attended by Cory Ondrejka (SL Alt. Cory Linden, Chief Technology Officer@Second Life/Linden Lab) and John Lester (SL Alt. Pathfinder Linden, Second Life Lead Evangelist, Market Development, Boston Operations Director, Market Development in Education@Second Life/Linden Lab).
Hopper, M. E. (2007, April). The Knowledge Gates to SecondLife. Media in Transition 5 Conference: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (2009, April). Cosma: Constructing a Kingdom of Knowledge. Media in Transition 6 Conference: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
2. Dr. Hopper was near the end of her Postdoc at MIT in 2002 when she saw Mitch Kapor give a demo of Linden World (only had a single region/sim at that time). Then she saw a demo of Active Worlds a few years later. Standards for the 3D web were starting to mature as well. It was becoming clearer that one of the three would probably be the software platform that would allow her to finally fully implement the project she had envisioned for decades. She continued watching the three platforms develop over the next few years. Hopper knew for sure which platform she would use after attending the demos of them at SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston. The answer was crystal clear and shortly after that serious development in SecondLife began.
3. Knowledge Places and Knowledge Objects were developed by Dr. M. E. Hopper while she was President of Knowledge Foundry, a small company that developed traditional Web, social media, 3D, eBook and mobile sites. Remnants of the original website are still online.
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1. Much of the content on this page was originally developed for two presentations at MIT.
The first presentation in April 2007 was attended by Cory Ondrejka (SL Alt. Cory Linden, Chief Technology Officer@Second Life/Linden Lab) and John Lester (SL Alt. Pathfinder Linden, Second Life Lead Evangelist, Market Development, Boston Operations Director, Market Development in Education@Second Life/Linden Lab).
Hopper, M. E. (2007, April). The Knowledge Gates to SecondLife. Media in Transition 5 Conference: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (2009, April). Cosma: Constructing a Kingdom of Knowledge. Media in Transition 6 Conference: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
2. It would be impossible to overstate the centrality of the concept of Knowledge Navigation to Cosma. The whole project is founded upon the premise that when knowledge is intuitively organized, and then presented in a visual and/or spatial way, everyone can master it quickly and easily. This premise has driven the development of Cosma and, truthfully, Mary E. Hopper’s career. You can find out more about some of the saga on the Worlds Challenge page.
One stop in the saga of Hopper’s mission to enable truly spatial knowledge navigation took her to MIT where she developed content for a presentation and then a short course during her Post Doc in Comparative Media Studies.
Hopper, M. E. (1998, October). Hypertext in historical context: Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson revisited. Media-in-Transition Project / Communications Forum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (2000, January). Knowledge Systems 101: From Alexandria to Hitchhiker’s Guide [Short Course]. Independent Activity Period (IAP), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper’s obsession with the subject of Knowledge Navigation has gone so far as to lead to the related software and materials she has collected making up a very significant percentage of the collections in her New Media Museum!
In actuality, the New Media Museum is truly a sister project to Cosma at the deepest level. Here are links to the part of the collection related to Knowledge Navigation (Navigation, Trailblazers, Service, Hypermedia, World).
3. The first Knowledge Objects (K-Objects) in Second Life were created in 2006 by Mary E. Hopper with programming assistance from Neil R. Carlson in 2006 while Hopper was President of Knowledge Foundry (K-Foundry), a small company that developed Web, 3D, eBook and mobile sites. Remnants of the original website are still online.
4. Hopper had taken graduate courses in Cataloging, Reference, Digital Libraries and Archives at Simmons College’s School of Library and Information Science just a few years before creating K-Objects. Needless to say, Dewey Dots were near and dear to her heart, and they also served as tongue in cheek “Librarian bait” for K-Places.
5. Hopper was very highly dedicated to creating and publishing free educational resources from early on in her career. This was reflected in many of her activities at MIT between 1990 and the early 2000s, and it culminated in a well attended presentation on the subject just two months before MIT OpenCourseWare was announced on April 4, 2001 with Steven R. Lerman as Director (he had been Hopper’s Doctoral Committee Member and then employer at the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives during her decade at MIT). The goal of the presentation was to start an initiative to create free courses. Hopper’s position was that the best model was shareware based upon the success of Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (i.e. The Oregon Trail, Munchers, Lemonade Stand, etc.).
Hopper, M. E. & Summer, R. B. (2001, February). Where’s the media? Models for creating and distributing teacher and student made digital media. Second Wiring the Classroom Conference. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
In addition, Hopper was serving as a full-time faculty member in Lesley University’s Technology & Education Graduate Program at the time she created the Learning Link. The idea behind this K-Object was to have K-Places serve as an exercise for her students (who were teachers) to explore free educational resources in a fun way.
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1. Much of the content on this page was originally developed for a presentation at MIT in 2007.
The presentation was attended by Cory Ondrejka (SL Alt. Cory Linden, Chief Technology Officer@Second Life/Linden Lab) and John Lester (SL Alt. Pathfinder Linden, Second Life Lead Evangelist, Market Development, Boston Operations Director, Market Development in Education@Second Life/Linden Lab).
Hopper, M. E. (2007, April). The Knowledge Gates to SecondLife. Media in Transition 5 Conference: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
2. Knowledge Gates and Knowledge Objects were developed by Dr. M. E. Hopper while she was President of Knowledge Foundry, a small company that developed traditional Web, social media, 3D, eBook and mobile sites. Remnants of the original website are still online.
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1. Some of the content on this page was originally developed for a presentation at MIT in 2009.
Hopper, M. E. (2009, April). Cosma: Constructing a Kingdom of Knowledge. Media in Transition 6 Conference: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
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1. Some of the content on this page was originally developed for a presentation at MIT in 2009.
Hopper, M. E. (2009, April). Cosma: Constructing a Kingdom of Knowledge. Media in Transition 6 Conference: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
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A key goal of Cosma is to have a 3D interface to enable spatial Knowledge Navigation of the Knowledge Resources on this site. Toy Worlds are a new, fun way of accomplishing this goal.
They are literally “Toy Worlds” because they are dioramas created with dollhouse furniture and other miniature toys that are photographed with a RICOH THETA S 360° Camera. The resulting 360° photos are posted on the RoundMe 360° photo sharing service in order to overlay links to YouTube videos and web pages.
They are also figuratively “Toy Worlds” in that they are really just prototypes intended to serve as placeholders for more sophisticated Worlds created with advanced software such as Unity. The reason they do not exist yet is because there is no reasonably sophisticated platform for publishing sufficiently complex 3D worlds on the Web at the present time.
Find out more about Toy Worlds on this post …
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A key goal of Cosma is to provide a 3D interface to enable spatial Knowledge Navigation of the Knowledge Resources hosted on the Cosma Web site. Dr. M.E. Hopper has experimented with creating many different 2D visual and 3D spatial interfaces to internet resources with a wide variety of software platforms since the 1980s. The first generation of experiments were created with Apple’s HyperCard that ran in color on an Apple IIGS with ProDOS. Since that time experimental interfaces have been created with most of the “hypermedia” software that could support making such interfaces (MicroWorlds Pro, HyperStudio, Power Point, Director, etc.). It’s been quite a journey, and the saga is still continuing today because the truth is that there is no ideal software platform available to the general public at the present time. This page includes a history of past interfaces, current work and pointers to future directions.1
1. Hopper worked on a number of academic projects that used Logo and HyperCard during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and she also co-published about some of her work on those projects.
Hopper, M. E. and Lawler, R. W. (1991, August). Pre-Readers’ Word Worlds: Results of Experiences with Young Children and New Directions [Poster]. Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Evanston, IL.
Hopper, M. E., LeBold, W. K., Feghali, A. A. (1991). A Hypermedia-based Problem Solving Approach to Engineering, Learning, Working, and Playing. Frontiers in Education Conference Proceedings, 73-78.
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Human’s advanced abilities in the use of symbols and tools is what makes them so unique, so it is not at all surprising that the discipline that concerns itself with the use of symbols as tools is one that can subsume all other disciplines and encompass the entirety of humanity’s accomplishments.–M. E. Hopper 1
1. The debate about whether communication should be called a “master discipline” could fill volumes. Even the question as to whether or not to use the words “master” or “discipline” at all could fill stacks of books. Many tomes have already been written about the relationship between the subject of communication and a myriad of other subjects that are related to it in some way or another. I could certainly fill a book about how and why I came to to call communication a master discipline, and I might do it someday. However, I’m too busy finishing Cosma to do it now. That’s why, for now, I will just say that I spent decades trying a multitude of ways to “lay out” thousands of subjects on a map such that they would make sense as a coherent whole, and communication was the only subject that could fit the bill of being in the center and encompassing the others from an organizational standpoint — it was a pragmatic and aesthetic decision. Furthermore, given the state of humanity at the present time and for the foreseeable future, as well as human nature in general, how can promoting the subject of communication in such a way be a bad thing?
2. Many of the resources on this page as well as the organizaion of it and the rest of this site coalesced while I was co-organizing, managing and summarizing events for the MIT Communications Forum during my Post Doc in the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. The MIT Communications Forum sponsored panel discussions and symposiums concerning a very wide range of topics related to communication.
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1. The resources on this page are are organized by a classification scheme developed exclusively for Cosma.
2. Some of the information on this page as well as the classification scheme used for the resources on all of the pages on Cosma was initially developed in the year 2000 while Mary E. Hopper was taking a course entitled LS407 Reference/Information Services at the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. It was a legendary, very rigorous course taught by Dr. Allen Smith.
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1. This subject/page has been deprecated, so it no longer used, and it does not appear in the contents.
2. The resources on this page are are organized by a classification scheme developed exclusively for Cosma.
3. At first glance, one might assume that Cosma is “just another” directory, or worse yet, a link farm. However, this would be a very inaccurate assumption. While it can serve some of the same purposes as a Web directory, its origin, purpose and method of production are quite different. Cosma even began before the World Wide Web was “invented” and link directories began to emerge in the late 1980s. Its closest relative and immediate predecessor was actually a project called the Purdue Knowledge System that was initially designed to be a career guidance system for Freshman students at Purdue University. It was created in HyperCard and then translated to Sun Microsystem’s HyperNews for UNIX workstations. A few years later the project was translated and posted on Gopher. Then it was only published on the Web as an afterthought, and at the time it was one of the first university wide sites and also one of the largest sites. The main difference between Cosma and the earlier Purdue Knowledge System is that Cosma is designed to serve more functions than just career guidance and do so in more subject areas than just those taught at Purdue University. All of that being said, it is the case that once Web directories began to appear in the mid-1990s, then the potential for Cosma to also serve a similar function was apparent. For awhile it even appeared that the World Wide Web Virtual Library might evolve to serve the same goal as Cosma, but eventually it became clear that wasn’t going to happen. Then, sadly, many of the best Web directories evaporated over the last few decades (e.g. Yahoo!, BUBLINK, Intute, Schrock’s Guide and KidsClick!). There’s plenty of talk about them being rendered irrelevant by Google and other search engines. Clearly, not everyone agrees with that sentiment. Commentary on why systematic inventories of knowledge are valuable could fill a book, and maybe someday it will, but first there’s that ongoing task of demonstrating the full potential of such things 😉