The most valuable thing a hypertext such as Encyclomedia can do for its users (whether they are students, teachers, academics or simply intellectually curious people wanting to find out more about, say, the time period they have seen portrayed in the movie version of the Three Musketeers) is to allow them to travel through time and space through a click of the mouse, via instantaneous shortcuts.

For example, let’s say a user reading an entry about a scientist wants to find out about the artisticage he lived in or other scientists he may have come into contact with - thanks to Encyclomedia,it’s almost as if there was an invisible thread immediately connecting that entry to thousands of other entries which, in an ordinary library, might only be found after sifting through several different volumes.

As our user explores the myriad connections, he or she may decide to focus on a specific subject area in greater depth by reading one of the thousands of essay-length articles, accompanied by fully zoomable images of works of art, audio clips, and animations explaining scientific theories or the workings of mechanical devices. Users without a specific search objective or question to ask, meanwhile, can use the Encyclomedia to explore more playfully, allowing a sequence of chance encounters to gradually reveal the fabric of an entire century piece-by-piece - the movements of armies, the ebb and flow of national borders, the bubbling of social ferment, the appearance of new styles of architecture, the development of new musical instruments, the inventions, the voyages of discovery, the scientific, philosophical and religious debates.

By virtue of its cross-disciplinary capabilities, Encyclomedia encourages the user to make connections between events - between a war and a religious movement or between scientific research and social developments or crises.

Rather than Enyclomedia presenting users with predetermined connections, it is up to usersto create the connections for themselves.

A computer is not a machine which does things for us. Of course, it can do that if we want it to, but that is the least of its capabilities. A computer should be a friendly device which encourages us to do new things - not just to find out what we do not know, but also to find out that there are new ways of knowing waiting to be invented.