The Future of Text 3 [DRAFT]

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Foreword

by Vint Cerf

For nearly a decade, the Future of Text group has focused on interactions with text as largely a two dimensional construct. The interactions allowed for varied 2D presentations and manipulations: text as a graph, text with appendices for citation and for glossaries, text filtered in various ways. In the past year, the exploration of computational text has taken on a literal new dimension: 3D presentation and manipulation. One can imagine text as books to be manipulated as 3D objects. One can also imagine text presented as connected components in a 3D space, allowing for richer organization of context for purposes of authoring, annotation or reading. The additional dimension opens up a richer environment in which to store, explore, consume and create text and other artifacts including 3D illustrations and simulated objects. One can literally imagine computable containers as a part of the “text” universe. Active objects that can auto-update and signal their status in a 3D environment. Some of these ideas are not new. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a project called a Spatial Database Management System at the MIT Media Lab in which content was found in simulated filing cabinets arranged in a 3D space. One “flew” through the information space to explore its contents. What is new is the development of high resolution 3D headsets that have sufficiently high resolution and sensing capability so as to eliminate earlier proprioceptive confusion that led to dizziness and even nausea with extended use.

The virtual environment these devices create permit convenient manipulation of

artefacts as if they existed in real space. One of the most powerful organizing principles humans exhibit is spatial member. We know where papers are that are piled up on our desks (“about three inches from the top…”). VR environments not only exercise this facility but also allow compelling renderings of information, for example, highlighting relevant text objects in response to a search. Imagine walking in the “stacks” in a virtual library and having books light up because they have relevant information responsive to your search. One could assemble a virtual library of books (and other text artefacts) from online resources for purposes of preparing to engage in a research project. Could we call this an information workbench or machine shop? Because of the endless possibilities for rendering in virtual three-space, there seem to be few limits to a textual “holodeck” in which multiple parties might collaborate.

We are at a cusp enabled by new technology and techniques. The information landscape is open for exploration.

Figure 1. Vint Cerf @ The 11th Future of Text Symposium. Hegland, 2022.

Welcome

by Frode Hegland

Along with Vint Cerf, Ismail Serageldin, Dene Grigar, Claus Atzenbeck and Mark Anderson I welcome you to ‘The Future of Text’ Volume 3, where we focus primarily on text in virtual environments (VR/AR) and text augmented by AI. In other words, text in 3D and text in latent space. This volume of The Future of Text includes:

Presentations from the 11th annual Future of Text Symposium held on the 27th and 28th of September 2022 online and at The Linnean Society in London, either as transcripts, articles independent from presentations or presentation notes. Where presenters used images, they have largely been included here. No copyright infringement intended. Where there is an issue of rights, please contact us.

https://thefutureoftext.org
Articles from our Journal & Transcripts from Monthly Presentations.

https://futuretextpublishing.com

The hope is that this work will inspire you to think richly and deeply about a future where text is freed from the traditional flat rectangle. Soon we will live in a world where VR is just part of our daily experience. We have a brief opportunity left to dream of what this can be before big companies release their headsets and realise some of this potential. We now have an obligation to use the power of our imagination to think of alternative futures, un- clouded by the corporate implementations. Together, I think we can dream of amazing futures which can inspire future generations who will have lived with VR all their lives. We start with a slightly paraphrased quote from a relatively obscure Apple Macintosh commercial a from the 1990s: “The only limits will be the size of our imagination and the degree of our dedication.”Thank you for being a part of this journey. We can only improve the future of text if we do it together.

Frode Alexander Hegland | frode@hegland.com | Wimbledon, UK 2022

Our work in VR

We built a few VR experiences and experiments for the Symposium, listed below, which should work on most headsets since they are web based. Please feel free to give any feedback by clicking on the person’s Twitter handle. Dialog is so important but please remember these are experiments and not polished final experiences.

‘Simple’ Mural A simple and powerful introduction to VR, this shows a single Mural by Bob Horn, which you can use your hands to interact with: Pinch to ‘hold’ the mural and move it around as you see fit. If someone says VR is just the same as a big monitor, show them this!

https://zachernuk.neocities.org/2022/nirex-mural/ (By Brandel: https://twitter.com/zachernuk) Basic Author Map of the Future of Text Open this URL in your headset and in a browser and drag in an Author document to see the Map of all of the contributors to The

Future of Text book.

https://t.co/nEIoUpiUsW (By Brandel: https://twitter.com/zachernuk)

Self Editing Tool In this environment you will be able to directly manipulate text and even execute the text as code by pinching these short snippets. Fabien recorded a walkthrough video here: https://video.benetou.fr/w/ok9a1v33u2vbvczHPp4DaE https://t.co/oTClI9zxLx (By Fabien: https://twitter.com/utopiah)

Simple Linnean Library A rough and ready room made by a novice, this is something you can also do. I used Mozilla Spoke to build an experience which can be viewed on any browser, in 2D or VR in Mozilla Hubs: https://hubs.mozilla.com/spoke https://hubs.mozilla.com/Wun7r4m/distinct-mild-plane (By Frode: https://twitter.com/ liquidizer)

This Book as Augmented PDF

This book is available in printed form and as a PDF document with ‘Visual-Meta’ metadata, developed by the people behind The Future of Text. If you choose to read it in our free ‘Reader’ PDF viewer for macOS (download b), you can interact with the document in richer ways than you normally could.
the ability to fold the journal text into an outline of headings (cmd-)
pop-up previews for citations/endnotes showing their content in situ (simply click on them)
doing Find, with text selected, locates all the occurrences of that text and collapses the document view to show only the matches, with each displayed in context (cmd-F)
if the selected text has a Glossary entry, that entry will appear at the top of the screen when doing a Find command
copy text which will be pasted as a citation if using a Visual-Meta aware word processor, such as out own ‘Author’:https://www.augmentedtext.info

You can read more about what Visual-Meta brings to metadata here: visual-meta.info This work will also be made available in other formats, including .liquid and JSON for the purposes of developing text interactions, please get in touch if you would like any of these formats. Reader can be downloaded for free here: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/reader/id1179373118

Editor’s Introduction

VR (including AR) is about to go mainstream and this has the potential to offer tremendous improvements to how we think, work and communicate.

There are serious issues around how open VR work environments will be and how portable knowledge objects and environments will be. Think Mac VS. PC and the Web Browser Wars but for the entire work environment.

The potential of text augmented with AI is also only now beginning to be understood to improve the lives of individual users, though it has been used in various guises and under different names (ML, algorithms, etc.) to power fantastic services (speech understanding, speech synthesis, language translation and more), as well as social networks and ‘fake news’ for years.

More important than the specific benefits working in VR will have, is perhaps the opportunity we now have to reset our thinking and return to first principles to better understand how we can think and communicate with digital text. Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson and other pioneers led a ‘Cambrian Explosion’ of innovation for how we can interact with digital text in the 60s and 70s by giving us digital editing, hypertext-links and so on. But once we, the public, felt we knew what digital text was (text which can be edited, shared and linked), innovation slowed to a crawl. The hypertext community, as represented by ACM Hypertext, has demonstrated powerful ways we can interact with text, far beyond what is in general use. Still, the inertia of what exists and the lack of curiosity among users have made it prohibitively expensive to develop and put into use new systems.

With the advent of VR, where text will be freed from the small rectangles of traditional environments, we can again wonder about the possibilities. This will unleash public curiosity as to what text can be once again.

To truly unleash text in VR we will need to re-examine what text is, what infrastructures support textual dialogue and what we want text to do for us. The excitement of VR fuels our imagination again – just think of working in a library, where every wall can instantly display different aspects of what you are reading, having the outlines, glossary definitions and images from the book framed on the wall, all the while being interactive for you to change the variables in diagrams and see connections with cited sources. This could be inspiring or distracting but the key is you can change it at a whim.

This is an incredibly exciting future once headsets get better (lighter, more comfortable, as well as better visual quality). Because this cannot happen without

fundamental infrastructure improvements, what we build for virtual environments–VR–will benefit text in all digital forms. This is important.

The future of humanity will depend on how we can improve how we think and communicate and the written word, with all its unique characteristics of being swimmable, readable at your own pace and so on, will remain a key to this. The future of text we choose will choose how our future will be written.

Why VR, Why Now?

My starting position is that VR, sometimes also called ‘metaverse’ this days and ‘cyberspace’ before, is about to go mainstream.

This is based on Meta Quest 2, which is available for the mass market and currently out-selling the Microsoft Xbox game consoles. It is just the start of what VR headsets will be able to offer. The view inside such a headset is already rock-solid, whatever environment is present, it looks like it is there, right in front of you. With Apple’s headset coming next year and improvements coming along as we have seen with personal computers, smartphones and smartwatches, this will rapidly continue to improve to the point where the visual fidelity becomes high and the discomfort low.

The future is coming fast. It is worth emphasising that in the same way the room sized computer was not really a clear precursor to the smartphone, the current bulky, low resolution and narrow field of view devices does not illustrate what in the near future will feel lightweight and the visual quality will approach photo realism–it will feel like the world is transformed–it will not feel like we are wearing a heavy headset.

What this will unleash we do not know, but what I do know is that we, as a wider community of authors and readers of text, need to get involved in thinking about–dreaming and fantasising–about what it can be. For starters, we will not be using headsets all the time, any more than we now only ever use a smartphone or a desktop/laptop. We will enter VR when we need to focus on something, similar to how we enter a movie theatre, or turn on a large, flat screen TV when we want to be immersed or watch general video ‘content’ on all our devices.

The distinction between VR and AR will likely become different modes on the same device but will have very different uses. Where AR refers to the world, VR will refer to any world. There is also an interesting middle ground, where the view of the world is superfluous, and it is just there for a sense of place, where the knowledge objects being interacted with are in a space, and the background could be anywhere. This is demonstrated in Yiliu Shen-

Burke’s work where the user can interact with a constellation of knowledge, and the background is simply a background, even though it is a live video of the user's room. There is also what is referred to as ‘reverse AR’ where the whole room environment is synthetic but the main object in the room is real, as built by the team at Shopify to let shoppers try a chair and then look at the room as though they are at home c . There is a lot of creativity as to where boundaries will be and it will only become more and more interesting.

We had a historic opportunity to re-think text in the 1960s, and now we have another. This is a once in a lifetime, once in a species point in time. We are only a few years away–if that–from VR headsets becoming commonplace. The dreams of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson, among other true pioneers, have not had a place to put their feet over the last few decades. There has not been a foundation of need for improved text interaction from people. Now there is. With VR, it’s easier to see that there are new ways of working. Quite simply, we have an opportunity to dream again. ‘VR’ won’t be ‘VR’ for long, same as ‘hypertext’ became the web then became just ‘online. ‘VR’ will become ordinary very soon.

Why AI, Why Now?

The further assumption is that AI will continue to advance. We are looking at is the emergence and improvement in automatic pattern recognition, classification, summarization, extrapolation, and natural language query-based information extraction for everything from speech to text and text analysis. We are also keeping an eye on the development of Self- Aware Artificial General Intelligence with a mixed-initiative conversational UI, since it never hurts to dream far into the future.

AI, if left unchecked, can present real dangers for society, as seen already in the basic AI algorithms which shape social media interactions and more.

AI can expand our understanding of creative expression. In this volume we have the experience of Mez Breeze who explores the art of AI and associated text-driven potentials†.

One useful way to think of AI is as a digital map. I came to think of this when my 5 year old son started navigating for us when driving in Norway this summer. Since the map was not un-augmented paper but a digital map on an iPhone, he was helped by always knowing our location and there was always a blue line suggesting where we should go, so he could tell me ‘right’, ‘left’ and what exit to take off a roundabout, in his youthful happy voice. The map did not dictate where we went, we could always choose a more scenic route if we felt like it, and the blue line would update its suggestions.

More than anything, AI has been largely ignored when it comes to text. The Apple

Watch I use I can rely on to accurately understand my commands, which is quite mind- blowing. I have refined speech to text in my macOS word processor ‘Author’ to take advantage of Apple’s increasingly powerful API. Some software provides coloured grammar when required and some suggest changes to writing style. There are of course relatively brute force AI analysis of masses of academic documents and there are writing tools which will write based on supplied text, such as GPT-3, but I suspect, this is really just the snowflake on the top of the iceberg of what is possible.

What live analysis can a knowledge worker hope for when writing? How about hitting cmd-? and getting a list of suggested next paragraphs (not the less-then-helpful-help-menu). Maybe there are a few suggestions, one based on what the author has typed so far and the author’s own body of work, one based on what’s typed so far but including all known documents in the author’s field and a third maybe also including what’s found on the web? This is the digital map approach, giving the user guidance, but not dictating. This is work currently undertaken by Pol Baladas on Fermat, for example.

AI is both ‘just beyond the horizon’ and also becoming mundane so it is valuable to try

to understand, then to revise our understanding, of how AI can augment our interactions with text.

The Future of Us, The Future of Text

2022 is the year of a continuing pandemic, along with economic collapse, inequality, a significant war in Europe which threatens the stability of countries near and distant, as well as the underlying climate change catastrophe we are now seeing starting to make an impact on our daily lives.

There is no question that if we are to survive, let alone thrive as a species, we need to improve the way we communicate and relate to each other. This will mean looking at how we can improve education, politics, scientific discourse and even how we can bring our spiritual practices into play to improve, quite simply, how we get along as people, how we develop shared goals and how we deal with conflict.

Much of dialogue, from politics, law and international treaties, to social media, lab reports, journal articles and personal chat, is in the form of text. I believe that we have to improve how we interact with textual knowledge, otherwise, we will be manipulated by those who do, such as social media companies and we will continue to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information. We cannot rely on face-to-face speech and video alone. We have to improve what text is, how we can interact with text and how we can represent text.

From its invention almost five and a half thousand years ago, the written word has

proven remarkably powerful in augmenting how we think and communicate. The transition to digital text has transformed text, a medium which before becoming digital was primarily about fixity, about thoughts being securely placed on a substrate. When text became digital, this attribute largely vanished, with text now being interactive. A user could easily delete any text, cut & copy and edit the text freely, giving text a much more fluid character.

What was initially a revolution with the editabillity, and soon after the linkability of text became part of our daily lives, the magic of what was previously referred to as ‘hypertext’ simply became ‘text’ and analog text, previously only referred to as ‘text’ became ‘print out’ or ‘hard copy.’ The magic of digital text became mundane.

Other digital media continued to develop however. This was all the while digital images went from wireframes to photorealistic and games went from abstract ‘asteroids’ to deeply immersive and interactive experiences. We collectively thought we knew what text was, and little innovation took place. However, as digital text proliferated at an astounding pace, overwhelming those trying to stay on top of research, social media companies and those seeking to influence popular and political opinion went to work creating powerful tools for textual persuasion. We got social media echo chambers with algorithms designed to provoke, to increase ‘engagement’ (and thus ad views resulting in greater revenue) and modern ‘fake news’ at the start of the war in Ukraine in 2014, when Russian intelligence flooded digital mass media and social networks with fake and real news to the point where it became difficult to discern what was actually going on. Fake news continued to influence people’s opinions at the same time as research documentation stayed hardly digital, with little interactions afforded to the user. There are many issues to be discussed in the paragraph and I’d be very happy to go through them in person, but the point is simple: Text interactions became sophisticated where there was an incentive to invest in it in the form of money and political control. Where the greatest benefit to the end user could have been seen, there has been little innovation or investment.

We had a historic opportunity to re-think text in digital form but we dropped the ball. We don’t have the ability to ‘fly through cyberspace.’ We have the ability to cut and paste in Word, click on one-way, one-destination, un-typed links and edit a document together in Google Docs. We could do more, much more. We could imbue all documents with rich and robust metadata. This is a personal issue for me. We could provide authoring and reading software as powerful as Apple Final Cut. We could have reached for the stars, but the market and the few companies making text-focused software decided on ‘ease of use,’ and we were left with big buttons to click on.

Improving not only VR Text or AI Text, but ALL Text

It is important to point out that the opportunity is not just about working in VR or using AI augmented text.

The real opportunity is that we will have an opportunity to rethink everything with digital text because the public’s imagination will be energised–all text can benefit from a re- think and new dreaming.

It is clear that while text in documents will continue to matter, it will not just be text ‘floating in space’.

It is also clear that better metadata will make text more usefully interactive on traditional digital displays as well.

This is a historic opportunity primarily because we can restart and think from first principles: how to connect people and how to help us think with symbols/text. Our planet and our species is facing serious threats so it is important that we learn from the past and that we are not shackled by the past.

We need to look at how we can usefully extend our cognition to better think with other minds, as Annie Murphy Paul discusses in her book The Extended Mind [2] and in her talk in this book. Jaron Lanier–the man who embodies VR– and who presented the keynote at the Future of Text Symposium puts it ‘The solution is to double down on being humand.’.

The solution is at the same time to extend our mental faculties to really take advantage of the flexibility of representation and interaction these future environments will offer us. Just as we are today hamstrung by being tied to the models of paper documents, we must expand our minds in entirely new ways to get the most benefit out of what can now be created. This will mean building systems which connect with our physiology to learn to ‘read’ and ‘write’ in entirely new ways. Think how text seems entirely artificial if you take a human’s situation 100,000 years ago, but it seems natural today. Text is only lines on a substrate. What will be the future of text when the entire visual, aural–and soon haptic–field can be used for expression and impression?

What does it mean to be In VR?

Virtual environments will feel more like rooms or full environments than what we think of as textual ‘documents’ today. There will be intricate models of microscopic creatures for us to explore, we will be able to walk through cities; ancient, modern and futuristic. We will also be able to step into space ships and explore entire planets and more. This will be exciting, and valuable and it will take teams of people a serious investment in time, energy and money to

build these experiences. A great example is the work of Bob Horn who extends murals into multiple dimensions which at first glance is just an image shown large in VR but on further interactions becomes so much more than it could have been if it was simply printed onto a wall.

We will also have new ways of telling stories, as Caitlin Fisher who works on the opportunities for more immersive storytelling in VR† discusses in this book. The opportunities are vast for what we can be in virtual environments but for this book and this project we are looking at text primarily, which will include many types of packages and experiences, one of which will remain a kind of book.

Documents in VR

One of the key questions we ask is: What is a document in virtual reality, and more specifically, what is an academic document in VR and what does it become with AI augmentations?

We look at academic documents as a special case since academia is a field connected by documents and it is also a field where what is in the documents needs to interacted with and connected.

This is distinct from commercial books where the owners of the intellectual property have reason to restrain the use of the text and is therefore a different strand of the future of text, one with constraints outside of what we are currently looking for. We are, by the nature of trying to look into the future and wish what might be to augment how we think and communicate, dreamers, and as such our playground is information which is free to a large extent.

There are limits to online-only documents which are worth noting, since it is easy to consider virtual environments to be online. The first is addressability and the second is reliability. Imagine if you could only get a book at the library by knowing it’s location, as in its entry in the Dewey Decimal Classification system–and not by the title of the book or the author’s name(s). This is effectively what web locations are; you can locate information based on location, not by content or metadata. Academic citations, which simply presents the documents metadata, such as title, author(s) names and date of publication do not tell you where you can locate the document, but what information you need to locate it in many types of places, such as libraries and book shops. The second limitation is reliability based on the DNS (web domain system) where the documents cease to be available if there is non- payment of the DNS fees or if there is any technical issue with a specific server or set of servers. Many people exists in a tine sliver time, a few years before ‘now’ and with a few

vague prods into the future to have an idea of their career advancement, prospective new home, the lives of their children and so on. Academics have to live in much longer timespans, almost no matter what field of study. Their research will include ‘up-to-the-minute’ knowledge but also access to what’s behind it. Similarly, academic have a duty to the future to make their work available long after they are gone.

Documents for virtual environments can draw on previous types of documents and extend them. There is no reason why they should not have the option to be primarily text but still have a spoken presenter available if the reader would like to hear a perspective. There is also no reason why they should not be compressible into a portable document form like we have today. In this volume of The Future of Text, we can see how Bob Stein looks at the book’s essence in digitally empowered form and extends large collections of knowledge.

Metadata Matters

The more we look at how to realise the incredible potential of text in VR and text augmented by AI, the more it becomes clear that better† metadata which is needed to make it happen.

It is better metadata which augments AI to be able to make better analysis.

It is better metadata which makes text in virtual environments flexibly interactive.

Metadata is the data which makes data useful. A basic example is a document which can, but in practice in 2022 hardly ever does, contain embedded, or hidden, metadata to make the name of the author(s), the title and publication date known.

Visual-Meta, developed as part of the Future of Text Initiative (and which is also my PhD thesis result) includes this in the appendix in as simple a way as ‘author = {Name of Author}’ ‘title = {Name of Document}’ ‘month = {September}’ ‘year = {2022}’. This ‘self- citation’ metadata is what makes it possible to automatically cite the document, through a simple copy and paste, and to see it in a network of other documents, where the metadata is in the document itself and not a separated database.

Visual-Meta is my approach to rich, flexible and robust metadata and I highlight it to highlight the issue of metadata, it is quite clear that much work needs to be done beyond what Visual-Meta enables.

All the multimedia objects are included in this so that they are flattened into 3D when published as a document and can be re-invigorated with all dimensions when viewed in VR. This includes spatial information of how the document should be be shown, by default, in VR 3D space. It also includes all the chart information and image map data. Including image map data in the metadata in this way means that a document can contain a huge mural, shrunk down to a double page spread in the document, but then it can be viewed wall size, with all

data and links intact, at will.

Since Visual-Meta was developed as my PhD thesis, I find I need to come to its defence and specify that adding the Visual-Meta appendix to documents is completely effortless for the author when the system supports it. What is put into the Visual-Meta is usually metadata which the authoring software is aware of, such as headings, glossaries and glossary terms, references, and chart and graph information, but this is currently discarded on export/ publishing. Visual-Meta simply keeps it and makes it accessible.

Reading documents with rich metadata included, and working with the documents to produce new knowledge, is more flexible and robust: You can choose what to view and you do not need to worry about transcription errors or data loss.

Scale of Change

Having considered some of the scenarios and aspects of working in a virtual environment I hope you might agree that the difference between a laptop screen and working in VR will be as large as looking at the world through a small picture frame and putting the frame down and looking at the world fully and richly. Personally, I think that, after a while, it will effectively be bigger than going from analog to digital, but only time will tell. It will be something new and it will be a fundamental part of our lives. “VR will never be the same as physical reality… We'll just live life across multiple realities. Each with their own physics, bodies & affordances.” says Andreea Ion Cojocarue.

Concerns

Some of the wonderful potentials above seem almost pre-ordained. But it is not. The only thing pre-ordained is that large companies will invest masses of resources to own this new environment to create highly profitable cashflows, as this should be. Issues around the use of VR, such as how walking around virtually can produce a feeling of nausea for some, but if you instead pull objects, such as a massive wall-sized mural towards you with a gesture (such as pinch and pull) you will feel fine, even though visually it is the same impressions to your eyes. These usability issues is most certainly important and that is why they are being looked at by the companies building the VR environments. What the are not focusing on is ownership and transferability:

Ownership & Transferability

Considering that what is happening is the creation of a whole new world, it is probably not a

great idea for a few huge companies to own all of it. We need an ‘Internet’ for VR. We need open standards so that our information stays free for use, to use as we see fit, and not trapped in a corporately owned framework, as happened with the Microsoft Office formats, for example.

A simple dream would be to work on something on a traditional device, like a laptop, and to be able to don a headset, and take that information out of the screen and into the VR environment. But how can the VR environment know what is on your laptop's screen and how could any changes be communicated back?

Questions we need to ask include: What would happen if the document/knowledge object you worked with in one VR room, where you gave it fancy interactions and powerful views, simply won’t render correctly in another room when you try to share it with colleagues. It could also happen that we repeat the mistakes of digital text over the last decade and have shiny and involving social media text but little to interact with it to help us think, only share. We will need open, accessible and robust infrastructures to allow the VR world to flourish.

What We Are Doing

To help realise the potential of richly interactive text in a virtual and traditional environment, text which is directly manipulable and which can be interacted with through AI systems, we are doing the following:

Hosting the annual Future of Text Symposium for over a decade thefutureoftext.org
Hosting the Future Text Lab with twice-weekly Open Meetings & monthly Guest Presentations

futuretextlab.info
Publishing The Future of Text series of books of which this is volume 3 futuretextpublishing.com
Working on the metadata standard Visual-Meta (robust metadata storage in VR & traditional domains which Vint Cerf calls “exploitable self-contained self-awareness†”)

visual-meta.info
Building the Author and Reader software (as Alan Kay–contributor to volume 1– said: “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”)

augmentedtext.info

We also experiment with VR environments, where what we learn from experience continues to surprise us. On the positive side, it is impressive how stable the environments are, much more than we expected–when putting on the headset (we primarily use the Meta Quest 2), whatever environment we go into, it feels like we are really there, it does not wobble or feel off at all. There are small surprises which we need to take into consideration. For example, pulling a large mural towards you gives people significantly less motion sickness than if they simulate walking up to it, even though the visual display is practically identical. Furthermore, having lines in space to show relationships is quite annoying outside of very specific use- cases, as it feels almost like physical strings have been placed in your space. Similarly, text floating in space without a background can easily become very hard to read. Furniture is also an interesting issue since most people don’t have ‘VR Only’ rooms. Therefore the desk, chairs and other furniture must be taken into account when designing virtual rooms where the user can stand up and move.

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day I am asking you, if you are ‘sold’ on the idea that VR, or the ‘metaverse’ will become mainstream over the next few years, to consider what this truly could be to help us think and communicate, to help us work and learn–as well as how you can help inspire others to ask the same questions. Then I ask you to consider how we can keep this environment open and not as a series of corporate workrooms isolated from each other and the rest of our information.

The Invitation

In publishing this I am inviting you to join us in dialog about what text can and should be in an environment where text can be pretty much anything our imagination points to and implementation allows.

The Dream

The imagining and dreaming needed will be huge. It is exceptionally difficult to see and dream beyond a linear extrapolation of what we experience. We, therefore, need to support those who have the capacity to dream, in the spirit of Doug Engelbart, and foster dialogue for a broader community to dream together, and not simply fantasise, at a cartoon level, on a magic text which has no bearing on implementation. By this I mean purely shifting the act of reading and writing to artificial systems to somehow do the work for us. We need to augment ourselves, both through removing unnecessary hurdles and reducing clerical work, such as

the huge amount of effort placed on the cosmetic aspect of citations and formatting for journal articles.

The infrastructure to support the dreamt-up futures will need to be radically better than what we have now IF we want to have an open future for how we can interact with our knowledge and each other through the medium of the written word. The substrate of text used to be a plain material, such as paper or parchment, but now it is not the screen but everything behind the screen; the storage of the type, the metadata which makes the type useful and the means through which this can be shared openly and stored robustly.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru

Borges and Vygotsky Join Forces for BOVYG, Latest Virtual Reality Start- up

Figure 2. The Future of Text. Cojocaru, 2022.

Abstract

Can virtual reality reinvent text, revamp human communication, and chart a new course for us all? If there was ever any hope, it is in BOVYG. Investors are flooding in the seed round of this promising venture. The Guardian obtained a transcript of a private work session between Borges and Vygotsky. The discussion, centered on the process of concept formation and the mechanism through which words reflect reality, implies nothing short of a brand-new ontology.

For readers unfamiliar with the work of these two giants, we recommend at least a cursory reading of Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and Vygotsky’s Thought and Language before reading the transcript.

Body

[This transcript is based on a video recording. The capture is from BOVYG, a VR application Borges and Vygotsky are developing. The headset recording is Borges’s. We are not sharing this in a video format because the visuals are quite uninteresting. The entire conversation happens in what appears to be an empty scene with a white virtual box in the center.]

Borges: Vyg, this thing – do you see it? What’s this?

Vygotsky: It’s a box, B. I just put it there. The word “chair” is written on it because it’s supposed to represent the word and the concept. Let’s start with the simple stuff today, for a change.

Borges: Vyg, okay, but why are we starting with the end? This VR stuff is supposed to be a brand-new start. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Vygotsky: Of course. So we start with word and concept, then we work our way backwards, then, hopefully, forwards, and we see how things play out in here. We keep an eye out for different turns in the concept formation process.

Borges: Vyg, please. Look at this box and at this word on it. We are at THE END of the concept formation process. The process that got us into this mess to begin with! The world is simply not a grouping of objects in space. It is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. The world is successive and temporal. Idealized objects like “chair” should not be relied on. There shouldn’t be any fixed concepts to begin with. Instead, everything should be invoked and dissolved momentarily, according to necessity.

Vygotsky: B, sometimes I think that this predilection of yours towards subjective idealism is taking worrisome turns. Yes, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius was brilliant, and you got them all wrapped around your finger. But this is serious work! We are not here to write another five- pager on magical realism. In virtual form, but this IS reality. More than that, this is the FUTURE of reality! Humans master themselves FROM THE OUTSIDE! The development of thinking is from the social to the individual. People first receive language which leads to communicable concepts and world views. Language and world formation rely on stable concepts, not fleeting impressions that “dissolve”!

Borges: Vyg, what language do you see in here? This box with letters on it? What do these letters mean in here? Where is the chair? Can we sit on it? It is leather? Do we sit on it by moving out butts downwards or perhaps upwards?

Vygotsky: What’s your point, B? Just get to the point!

Borges: Vyg, there are no objects or concepts, at least no permanent ones. Not in physical reality, and definitely not in here. Is a dog seen from the side and then seen from the back the

same dog? Only if you rely on thinking processes that manipulate objects called “dogs”! Only if you need to – pointlessly if you ask me – extend existence and identity beyond the current moment and into some weird – and dangerous! – permanence. It’s all made up, Vyg, it really is…! And, in here, the lie is outright unbearable!

Vygotsky: What do you mean “in here”? What is so different “in here”?

Borges: Everything! Let’s take this box. Look at it from the side and look at it from the back. Is it the same box?

Vygotsky: Hmmm…

Borges: No! Of course not! Every second, this box is exactly 90 boxes!

Vygotsky: B, don’t go all techie on me. The only thing that matters is that we think this is the same box. Permanence and identity are necessary NOT fundamental.

Borges: What are they necessary for, Vyg?

Vygotsky: We need them to generalize, of course! We think by using concepts, encapsulated into words. Think of words as tools. That is how we can build thoughts on top of thoughts, using both our own words and those of other people.

Borges: Vyg, you are describing the labyrinth of abstractions we need to break out of! We are here to design the process that breaks us OUT of it!

Vygotsky: The labyrinth IS the process, B… Perhaps we can shift towards new ways of building the labyrinth, but we cannot exit it. There is nothing beyond it… Our functioning as human beings relies on this clear framework. You can call it a labyrinth if you wish.

Borges: This framework of yours, Vyg, is clear. Terribly clear. That’s precisely the problem. You forget that we are both Theseus AND the minotaur. As thought become verbal and speech becomes intellectual, as you so often like to say, we both trap and chase ourselves inside it. [Sighs for a while.] Let’s run this scenario with this box of yours in here.

Vygotsky: Which box?

Borges: This one, over here, with “chair” on it. Vygotsky: From which side?

Borges: From this side! Vygotsky: Now?

Borges: No, when I said it a second ago! Or… yes… now as well! Vygotsky: From which side?

Borges: This! Vygotsky: Now? Borges: Now?!

…….

[We pause our transcript here. This almost monosyllabic conversation about the virtual box continues for another hour. Then they break for lunch. When they return, the conversation continues to be monosyllabic although a clear change in tone indicates that they are now past the disagreement related to the box. Our best explanation for this change in communication is that, similar to a process often described by Tolstoy, the closeness between the two, in combination with the strange affordances of the virtual medium, has enabled them to abbreviate their communication to the point where it is incomprehensible to the rest of us.]

Author’s Notes

Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934) was a Russian cognitive scientist, psychologist, constructivist and critical realist whose work focused on the internal mental structure of an individual. Methodologically, he focused on relationships, processes and levels of analysis. He is best known for sociocultural theory, a developmental school of thought focused on the relationship between thought and language as independent and dynamic processes in ontogenesis, phylogenesis, and within a cultural context. This dialogue speculates on Vygotsky’s position regarding language and virtual reality based on his book Thought and Language.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) was an Argentinian writer, essayist and translator known for his trademark themes: dreams, labyrinths, libraries, language and mythology. His stories, non-linear narratives that mix fact, fantasy, hox and forgery, are generally considered to have reinvented modern literature. This dialogue speculates on Borges’s position regarding language and virtual reality based on his short stories Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and Funes, the Memorious. Moreover, the entire conversation makes use of many of Borges’s literary techniques. Most of the time I stay close to what the main characters could have plausibly said in such a situation, but, like Borges in his own stories, I also diverge from that and use the two characters to purse my own arguments. Hinted at by the fact that the footage was recorded in Borges’s headset, this is the kind of thing he would write.

Journal Guest Presentation ‘An Architect Reads Cognitive Neuroscience and Decides to Start an Immersive Tech Company’ : 13 May 2022

https://youtu.be/4YO-iCUHdog?t=678

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: Hi everyone. It's such an honour to be part of the group, and present to this group. Because this group is very different than the usual audiences that I speak to, I took the presentation in a very new direction. It's a bit of a risk in that I’m going much deeper than I’ve ever gone before in public in showing people the insides of how my method works. So part of what you will hear will be the messiness of what is a very active and sometimes stressful process for us at Numena. But hopefully, yes, there will be time at the end for you to ask questions, and for me to have the chance to clarify the aspects that were maybe a bit too unclear. Okay, with that mentioned I’m going to share my screen. All right. I just gave a title to this talk. This talk did not have a title until five minutes ago, and now it's called An Architect Reads Cognitive Neuroscience and Decides to Start an Immersive Tech Company. And this is pretty much what the story will be today.

I’m an architect. I have a master's degree in architecture. I’ve been in love with architecture and the idea of space-making for as long as I can remember. But there's a bit of a twist in my background in that, when I was young, I was learning letters by typing with my dad on a keyboard in the 80s, and I have this childhood relationship with computers and coding. And I’ve always been very passionate about philosophy. So a while back I discovered cognitive neuroscience and I began reading that from the perspective of an architect who can code and who is also an amateur philosopher. Reading this from this perspective and I don't know how many people read content neuroscience with this kind of background gave me all sorts of ideas.

When I discovered AR and VR, and specifically VR, I just found this opportunity to start pursuing some of the ideas that have been floating around my mind, in reading cognitive neuroscience for a while, this started. So the company started about four years ago, and it's been a crazy ride.

But I’m not going to start with what the company is doing.

I’m going to start at the deepest depth that I’ve ever started a presentation. So I believe that for us to be able to successfully discuss these concepts in the end, I need to be very clear about what my background assumptions are. Then, I also believe I need to be clear about how I think those assumptions work or can be implemented.

What kind of theories and knowledge do I use to imagine a mechanism?
Then, I’m going to go into how I’m using all of that to think of virtual space.
And then, how we are using those ideas about virtual space to try to create AR and VR applications that begin to test some of those assumptions.

So, the position part of the presentation. What are my assumptions? I want to propose first what's called ‘The Correspondence Theory of Truth’. This says that there is a reality out there, and its structure is homomorphic to our perceptions. What does this mean? It means that we don't know really what's out there, but we know that there is some correspondence between some sea of particles and radiation and whatever comes to our senses. In the history of human thought, this is a relatively new idea. And in everyday thinking and knowledge and culture, we still don't really take this seriously, as in, we still assume that we're seeing a chair, and the chair is brown, and we look outside the window and we see flowers and there's a certain colour. And that that reality is out there outside of ourselves. And even in reading a lot of the papers that are coming out of the scientific establishment, a lot of it is really not quite taking this proposition to heart that actually there is a huge gap between whatever that reality is and ourselves. And here I want to add a note that, actually, if you read words that are coming out from the computational branches of evolutionary theory, you will see that the correspondence theory of truth has refutations and it has fascinating mathematical refutations. So they're actually people out there who believe that there is no homomorphism between whatever reality would capital R is out there in our perceptions, that we might be completely imagining everything. But I will not go quite to that depth today.

So there's something out there but there's a gap between that thing out there and ourselves, our perceptions.

In practical terms, I like to make sense of this through what's called enaction theory. This was introduced by Varela and a few others in the 60s and 70s. I think in the book called The Embodied Mind [4] was published in 1990. And basically, this starts to deal with the fact that, this mapping between who we are and how we perceive the world in the world is really not tight at all. And it's not just that it's not tight, but we're continuously negotiating what this relationship is. And the reason why embodied cognition and the forum called inactive

cognition is very important is because it triggered a dialogue across science and culture that was about escaping what's called the Cartesian anxiety. So for many centuries, especially European-centric thinking was based on this idea that there is the subject and object, and they are two different things. That we have subjectivism, how things feel, and then there's objectivism, there is the world out there. And there are still a lot of struggles going on in a lot of fields to escape this Cartesian anxiety. It even goes into interesting discussions these days of what is consciousness and qualia and all of that and if we have free will, this is also about free will and all of that. My particular stance is to embrace Varela's inactive cognition and to stay there is no strict separation between who and what we are in the environment. We are defined by the environment and the environment defines us, and our entire organism is about negotiating this relationship. I know this is still a bit unclear, so I will just try to go a bit further into this. Basically, the proposition is that environments are shaped into significance, and these are quotes from the Embodied Mind by Varela. “Shaped into significance and intelligence shifts from being the capacity to solve a problem to the capacity to enter into a shared world of significance.” Or, “Cognition consists in the enactment or bringing forth of a world by a viable history of structural coupling.” So we become structurally coupled with the environment, and both our minds, our organism, and environment are adjusted through this structural coupling. And one interesting example that he gives in the book is of bees and flowers. We don't know if bees evolve the way they are because they are attracted to flowers who offer them nourishment, or the other way around, that flowers evolve beautiful colours because there were these creatures called bees that were attracted to them. Varela proposes that is neither or and that most likely both flowers and bees evolve together, to work together. So there was a common evolution because, from the point of view of the bee, the flower, and the environment, and from the point of view of the flower, the bee, and the environment. So each is both environment and subject from a different kind of perspective. And in that context, they evolved together through this structural coupling.

This also ties back in terms of examples. To focus a little bit on examples now, if you're

in Macy's papers from at the first conferences on cybernetics in the 50s, they were very concerned with research on frogs and I found that very interesting. So why were they so concerned with frogs? Because new research, at the time, showed that frogs cannot see large moving objects that... Actually, they can technically see but their brain just does not process large objects. So a frog is very good at catching small moving things like mosquitoes, but a frog will get run over by a truck. And it's not because the eyes of the frog cannot perceive the truck, is because the brain just doesn't process the truck. Large moving objects are not part of the frog's world. So that was actually very interesting and I think you can easily think of

similarities or start to have questions going through your mind about what things out there, that are very much in the environment and they very much exist, we might even see but just not perceive because they're just not part of how we deal with the world and how we interact with the world, they're outside the structural coupling that we have formed with the environment. And, although, this has been proved when it comes to frogs and many other kinds of organisms, we still have a hard time to imagine that, when we look out the window, there might be things out there which our cognitive system is just ignoring, perhaps, seeing but just ignoring, and I’ll bring up some examples later in this regard.

Another interesting thing is the ongoing research that's coming out about how the human eye is perceiving information. Here it turns out that, according to the latest studies, only about 20% of information that comes through the retina contributes to the image that we see to the image that a visual cortex forms. The other 80% is what's called top- down. So there's just other kinds of information happening in the organism that determines what we think we see out there, outside the window. Again, that number is now 80% and going up. And then, there's so much more out there in research in this sense. There's research that shows that if your hand is holding a cup of hot water, what you perceive from your other senses is different than when your hand is holding a cup of cold water. So just mind-blowing stuff that is just scratching the surface of this. Because we are still shaking off an intellectual culture of dualism, but also of this idea that we see what we see is what's really out there, many people still read about these things and catalogue them as illusions. And my work and my interests are about trying to understand to what is their limit and to what extent are they really illusions. And the more I work on this, and the more I read about this, the more I’m going down the rabbit hole of believing that they're not just illusions, they're probably correct. They're probably what the situation actually is. But why? Why do we think these are illusions? Why don't we perceive these variations? Or why is it so hard for us to even take these things into account? A lot has been written in what's called experimental phenomenology about the Necker cube. That cube that if you focus on it a little bit, it kind of shifts. And sometimes it seems like you're looking at it from the top-down, and sometimes from the bottom up. And again, everyone is cataloguing that as an illusion. It is not an illusion. And none of these things are illusions. But what's happening is, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher, very famous in the school of phenomenology says, “The world is pregnant with meaning.” So, we are born into a social world that fixes our perception to match a certain story. Our society tells us a story, and this story is very catchy. It's so catchy to the point where a lot of work and energy has to go into escaping that story. So our perceptions do not flip on us like the Necker cube. Because we are social animals and

we share a story about what the world is. And what is that story? How powerful is that story? Well, it is that 80%. It is that, at least, 80% that is influencing the way we process the information that comes from the retina, for example.

The other word that I like in this context, also from Merleau-Ponty, is thickness. He says, “The world is also thick with meaning.” So it is very hard for us to cut to this thickness. And because most of the time we cannot, or it takes too much energy, we just buy into this idea that there is a fixed way to interpret information and that is the shared reality that we all live in. And, of course, a huge component of this, that he also goes into in his work is a bunch of norms that dictate not just what you should expect to see when you look outside the window, but also what's the appropriate way of looking out the window, and the appropriate way of behaving, the appropriate way of even thinking about these things, as in, cataloguing them as illusions that come with a certain baggage and so on. Okay. So what can we go deeper into the mechanism that starts to unpack how we interact with the perceptions and how they're fixed and what they're fixed by. And something that I found very striking when I was looking for the first studies and information on this topic, is the work of Lakoff and Johnson. They wrote a very famous book called Metaphors We Live By [5]. They are cognitive neuroscientists interested in or working in the field of linguistics. And you're probably familiar with the work. The Metaphors We Live By was about how language has words like up, down, backwards, downwards, that are used in an abstract sense. And their conclusion was that metaphors are neural phenomena. They recruit sensory-motor interfaces for use in abstract thought. And this was just mind-blowing to me as I read it. I had to read it several times, not because I didn't understand what it meant the first time, but it was just so unbelievable. They're actually proposing that we take things that we learn by walking around in the environment, and then we use those structures to think. So in terms of a mechanism, explaining thoughts and perception I thought this was just absolutely mind- blowing. And there's actually a whole body of research that, both Lakoff and Johnson have done, together and separately, and other people, that are putting meat onto this theory. But again, because it's so unbelievable I feel like we're still struggling to really incorporate this into our intellectual culture. Varela also talks about how we lay down a path in walking. And a lot of people like this phrase, but many use it in a sense that's not literal. But read in the context of Lakoff and Johnson, I think, he might have actually meant it literally. As in, “Our thinking and our walking might not be different things.”

Something that also points at a very interesting mechanism that deals with the

muddiness of perception and thought is an article that came out in 2016, and it's about a very strange phrase called Homuncular Flexibility, the human ability to inhabit non-human

avatars. And again, when this came out I had to read the title a few times because it was just so unbelievable. And it states basically that this thing, called Homuncular Flexibility posits, this theory posits that the homunculus is capable of adapting to novel bodies, in particular bodies that have extra appendages. And that the recent advent of virtual reality technology, which can track physical human motions and display them on avatars, allows for the wholly new human experience of inhabiting distinctly non-human bodies. Ever since I read this, I started my own series of experiments in VR and I have discovered, to my surprise, that is actually extremely easy to, let's say, adapt to non-human bodies, to feel like you're truly embodying all sorts of things. I thought it would take much longer than it actually did. So, with technology like VR, these kinds of things are not even some super theoretical thing that can be achieved in a high-tech lab in some universities somewhere. It's actually in the hands of teenagers right now who are spending more and more hours a day on VR platforms, like VR chat. But I’m digressing a bit from the mechanism. So this is pointing again to a mechanism that is quite fascinating. Even things that we thought were fixed, like our identification with our body and our limbs, might really not be that fixed at all. And again, reading this, Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors that we recruit through sensory-motor interfaces are used in abstract thought, all sorts of things crossed my mind like, “Okay, so I’m inhabiting the octopus for a few hours. What kind of sensory-motor interface has that introduced into my brain and how will my abstract thoughts be changed by the fact that I’ve just spent half a day as an octopus?” Now, Merleau-Ponty and the traditional phenomenology and inactive cognition that I’ve started with, have been talking about things like this since the beginning and they all contain very precise examples of these mechanisms. For example, Merleau-Ponty has a famous story about how a man with a cane is actually using the cane as an extension of his body, because people who use canes, blind people who use canes, report feeling the tip of the cane touching the sidewalk. So they're actually very precise in that description if you read what they say about how they feel the graininess of the asphalt and the pavement. They really feel that they are there at the tip of that cane. So these mechanisms have been known, but I feel like now they are starting to be taken, quote- unquote, a little bit more seriously or their implications are starting to unfold much, much faster before us, because of technology like virtual reality.

And here is something that, for me, it's also a mechanism, but it does not deal directly

with perception, the movement of the body, and thoughts. It deals more with the sense of self. And I know that the sense of self is a very different topic than movement and environment, but it's going to come up later so I want to throw this in here. Foucault, the last book that was published about Foucault's writings is a series of lectures he gave called,

Technologies of The Self. He never finished those lectures. He passed away. But this is what he describes as where he saw his work going, and what he would like to do next. What does he mean by technologies of the self’? He's very interested in what he calls the ‘emergence of a subject’. He's very interested in how people feel like they have a ‘self’ and an ‘I’. How they describe that self and how that self changes. In this context, he's looking a lot at people like Rousseau and how Rousseau not only described the modern subject, but his writings actually contributed to what Foucault calls ‘The creation of the modern subject’. And this is important in the context of us dealing with, or having on our hands a piece of technology that allows people to spend half a day as an octopus. Foucault says for a long time ordinary individuality, the everyday individuality of everybody remained below the threshold of description, and then, people like Rousseau come in and start to describe how it feels to be human, and how it feels to be a subject of the modern state of France and so on. So, from now on, I will refer to this as subjectivity in the sense of, how does it feel to be a human self, a human individual, what could contribute to creating that particular form of how it feels to be you, and what could change how it feels to be you, and under what context does that change? And it's very interesting to me that Foucault himself uses the word technology, although in his writing he's not specifically looking at tech the way we think of technology right now. So just a quick summary, we're like halfway through.

But I want to summarise a bit of what I’ve been trying to, kind of, do so far:

I’ve been trying to establish the fact that there is a gap between objective reality and our human world.
And my work is about trying to understand this gap a little bit better.
And the mechanism that, basically, connects us to the world, that does this structural coupling, in the words of Varela, is malleable.
And we are just starting to scratch the surface of what that means.

But the establishment of this gap is the one thing that I want you to take away from the first part. I think I’m going to skip through this, but these are some of my favourite articles that I’ve been reading lately. They're all about how the things that we see might not, really, be about what's outside the window. They might be more about our own stories, and our own cognitive processes. It's that 80-plus percent that's about something else. And yet, we're talking about imagery, we're talking about what we think we see.

This paper, in particular, maybe I’m just going to explain to you very quickly what this one is about, it's about this fascinating thing called ‘binocular rivalry’. These terms are, kind

of, interesting sometimes: ‘binocular rivalry or ‘homuncular flexibility’. I’m very happy when scientists get so creative with naming these things. So, what is binocular rivalry? Basically, they did this experiment where they got a person in a room, and they showed that person either a face or a house, and then, they put some kind of glasses with a screen on that person, some kind of VR glasses, that flashed for a fraction of a second either a house or a face. And what they found was that the brain decided to, quote-unquote, show the person, or the person then reported that they saw either a house or a face based on one they had seen previously, basically. So the pressing mechanism was like, Okay. I’m seeing a house, and I’m seeing a face. What should I give access to consciousness? Which one would be more relevant for the story of this individual? And the one that was, quote-unquote, shown to consciousness was, of course, the one that related to what the individual was shown at length before these flashes of images.

So in this gap that we have established between reality, human beings, and our perception and thoughts, where and what are the strings, and can tech pull them? I think we have already answered this with things like, the homuncular flexibility and showing that we can inhabit an octopus and almost anything non-humanoid in VR. But I haven't seen any papers yet, maybe because this is just too crazy of a proposition, that takes the next step towards Lakoff and saying, “Okay. How does inhabiting that octopus then change the way you think? Change your thought process?” And, of course, there is no clear answer to that. The waters are very murky. The situation is incredibly complex.

But the fact remains that, tech is starting to interfere with these things. And it's starting to get more and more powerful.

And we are starting to see cognitive processes being altered.

I believe we just don't have a choice but to start daring, proposing things and forming hypothesis, and going into the murky waters of the complexity of this whole thing as long as we want to work in tech. So how does this relate to virtual space? Because at the end of the day I’m an architect. And I’m reading these things, and what goes through my mind is the possibility to test these things by designing spaces.

But before I go into a tentative framework that I’m using now, I want to start with what I call ‘Observations from Field Work’. So I spend a lot of time in VR. We develop a lot of VR applications in the office. I do a lot of events and talks in AltSpace and VR Chat. And I think it's important, before we dive into the theory, to also take into account just what are the stuff that I see out there that seems important. What is the bottom-up side of the work?

The one thing that I find fascinating is what I call the Control+Z effect. This is a series of behaviours that I started to notice in myself, and sometimes in other people as well, that

has to do with things you learn in VR, or in another kind of environment that, then cross over to physical reality and they reflect an inability of the brain to understand or to make a call between, “Okay. What are the rules of this reality that I’m in now and what are my behaviour allowances here versus my behaviour allowances in that other kind of reality?” And I’m calling this Control+Z because I first noticed it many years ago, and it was before VR, but I’m seeing similar things coming out of VR. I want to say when I was an architect, I’m still an architect, but when I used to just do architecture every day without this whole tech stuff, I used to build a lot of cardboard models. But the workflow for my architecture projects was actually just many hours a day in a screen-based software product where I would just model things with the mouse and the keyboard, and then I would also, have in parallel, sometimes a cardboard model running of the same thing, so sometimes I would make decisions in the screen-based software, and sometimes in the cardboard model. And on several occasions, late at night, when I was tired, so my brain was kind of struggling a little bit. While working on the cardboard model and making a mistake, my left hand would immediately make this twitching movement, and my fingers on my left hand would position themselves in the Control+Z position of the keyboard while I was working on a cardboard model. And I would always be kind of surprised, and then, of course, similarly realize what had happened and catch myself in the act and shamefully, a little bit, put my left hand down, “Okay. There is no Control+Z.” But what was happening was, basically, my brain was, kind of, deep into this screen-based computer software where there is a ledger that records all the actions that you do in that environment in time. And you do Control+Z and then you go back one step in that ledger. So my brain had gotten used to the idea that, that environment, quote-unquote, and reality can also go backward. And then, of course, in physical reality the hour of time does not go backward. So that's the first observation.

Then, I’m seeing a lot of emerging phenomena in virtual worlds. I’m seeing people

discover new possibilities for being, for interacting, crazy things happening in VR Chat, if you're not familiar with that platform, I highly recommend it. I think it's by far the most advanced VR interaction you'll see, and worlds being developed, and forms of community building, and community life intermediated by this technology. All of that is happening in VR Chat. And they're years, years, years ahead from any other kind of experience, or game, or anything else that I’ve been seeing. So I’m seeing signs that there are emerging social dynamics and mechanisms for negotiating meaning in these collective groups and interactions that are extremely interesting.

This is also a bit of a topic for another day, but I feel like it's so important that I cannot not mention it. We're slowly but surely not the only intelligent agents anymore. We

interact with bots on Twitter every day and we don't even know that they're bots sometimes. And people are experimenting with introducing all sorts of AI-driven agents into virtual worlds. We have Unreal and Unity putting out their extremely realistic-looking avatars that are AR driven and so on. So we're not really at the point where we go to VR Chat, my favourite platform, and we're not sure that the other person is human or not. But I think, well, I don't know, if we're not already there, we will be there pretty soon. So there's a significant layer of complexity that's being added right now on top of this already complex and messy situation, by the introduction of non-human cognitive systems.

All right, so what is the proposition for what is virtual space? This is how I think about it. A new environment is basically a system you're trying to solve. It's a little bit like a game. So this is the structural coupling of Varela. You go into a game, you go into a new building, you go to a new country to visit, you've just landed at the airport, the first thing you do is, you're trying to figure it out. You're trying to understand where you are and which way you go. Are there any things that are strange? Your brain is turning fast to establish, as soon as possible, this structural coupling with the environment, that gives you control over the environment and understanding.

But I want to argue, in that process, you're not just dealing with this foreign environment, you're actually also encountering the system that is you. You're also dealing, and discovering your own cognitive processes that are engaging with the environment in attempting to couple. So roughly put, designing the environment is designing the subject that interacts with it. So how would an approach to space making look like if we just assumed, in the light of all of this talk about cognitive neuroscience, that the environment and the person are the same thing? That, somehow, they're so tightly connected we cannot disconnect them. It's like the bee and the flower.

If we were to pursue this kind of methodology, what would our tools be? Where would we even start? And I can only tell you how I’ve started doing it. I’m basically doing the best that I can to form hypotheses that have to do with knowledge that I’m taking from these papers, and knowledge that I’m taking from my own experiences and introspection.

One of the mechanisms that I’m very interested in now, and I will show you how we use that in one of our projects is the fact that, unlike other kinds of screen-based software or interfaces, screen-based interfaces that only address or mostly address our visual cortex, VR throws in the ability to control or encourage behaviour that activates the motor cortex. And this is an absolute game-changer because, as a lot of these papers reveal, it is the organism's attempt to integrate sometimes, perhaps, conflicting information that comes from the motor cortex and the visual cortex, that it's one of the most important paths that we have in trying to

understand more complex cognitive paths.

One way is to try to understand this relationship, and then to try to use VR to test things. So what if the eye sees something, and then the body does that, what happens next? Can you always predict what the person there will do? You can if you only show them and make them do what they would see or do in physical reality. But the moment you depart from that, the moment they either see something else and do something they would do in physical reality or the other way around, very interesting things, very quickly start to happen. Now, to what end? I think this is something that will have a different answer for every developer or every company. I think this is, primarily for me, a methodology that I’m only able to pursue and explore using VR and AR. This is not something that's possible for me with traditional forms of architecture. That's primarily the reason why, as an architect, I am in AR and VR and not just in traditional architecture. To what end? For me, the answer is that there are many answers, but one today is that I’m interested in new ways of thinking, and new ways of subjectivity. So that's why I introduced that slide earlier about Foucault and subjectivity. I’M INTERESTED IN NEW FORMS OF BEING HUMAN. And I think that can be pursued through this kind of methodology, but we'll see how things go in AR and VR. I think, new forms of subjectivity can also be pursued through traditional architecture, but there are many reasons why that is a little bit slow.

Okay. And now the last part of the presentation is the fun part. This is where later you can tell me, “Hey Andreea. The things you said, and the things you did, or just the way things turned out do not quite match.” But I would love to hear those kinds of questions.

On the following pages: Implementation

This is an older project, but I think it's very relevant in this context, so I decided to start with it. This is a, let's call it art project, it's called Say It. Basically, I designed these different shapes, they're in wax here because I was planning on pouring them in bronze. I never got to pour them in bronze and integrate these RFID tags into them. But basically, this is based on a story from Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver goes to Lilliput. That's the country with the little people. And he runs into these Lilliputians that cannot speak in words, they speak with objects. They carry on their back a big bag with an object, that's a sample object of all the objects that they need to communicate. So if they want to tell you something about spoons, they will go into their bag and pull out a spoon and show it to you, and then you're supposed to like, quote-unquote, read that they mean to say spoon. So this intersection between language and objects, or objects as language, and then, the many complications that result when trying to use objects as language, because you don't have syntax, was something I became very interested in. So what is the syntax if you just have the objects? How does that arise? So, the idea with this project was to have two people and then give them a bag of these objects, and these are somewhere in between letters and objects. And to design ways in which this could maybe give some sort of feedback. But to observe how fast, or to what extent, or in what direction people start to use these to communicate. The people are not allowed to talk to each other, of course, so they're given something they're meant to communicate to each other and only have these objects. And then, they're given an hour to try to use these things to communicate, and basically, they have to negotiate meaning for these abstract shapes.

This is an AR game that we have developed for a museum. And here we used one of these approaches that I mentioned earlier. We hypothesise a certain reaction that would happen if we present the visual cortex with conflicting information from what the motor cortex is reporting to the central nervous system. And it worked. We were able to trick people into believing that their body is floating upward. About 20 meters. So we basically trigger the mild out-of-body experience. This is mild, it's something quite nice, it's a game that happens outdoors, it's triggered by GPS coordinates and you're basically exploring a story of the German [indistinct] in the south of Germany. It's very integrated with a story. It's a very mild thing. It's not scary at all. But we were surprised ourselves that we were able to use some of these theories to make something like this that actually, quote-unquote, works.

This is a three-dimensional menu. What you're looking at here is, basically, a folder with files. It's something that, from the technical knowledge that we have today, it's something very basic. Something a programming student will understand everything about in the first hour. But we wanted to see how we can take a folder with files and make that a three- dimensional experience. So we went very literal about it. We used what is called the metaphor approach to UI, UX, and interfaces, but with a bit of a twist. So you are in an elevator where you can go up and down to infinity. And in each one of these TV slots, you can save one of your files, that you produced in this application that we're working on. You can save it in here, and you can then rearrange them, because we're working on putting smart tags on them. So it's kind of like creating a map, but then, you can reorganise them so that they form a different kind of map. And what's even more interesting it's, we also tested another thing. You can go in, on this chair, and pull a file out of this slot next to this strange TV screen and throw it down into the abyss. It's like a big VHS tape that you kick outside of this chair and you can look down and see it drop. We're very interested in understanding how people react when they have to interact with abstract things like files as if they were physical objects they can throw. And this is part of a much more complex exploration that we're pursuing. This is part of the same application.

This is the kind of environment you can make that you then save on the screen. And the one thing that I want to point out here is that, you basically see the scene two times. What you're seeing here is that, you are in this roof that's shown to you at one to one scale, and you also have a mini version of that roof. So you're simultaneously perceiving, quote-unquote, this fake reality inside of your headset two times. And we're experimenting with all sorts of interactions in here, because you also exist in here two times. You exist at your perceived one-to-one scale. And what we call “mini-me” is also in here. So there's mini you in there that you can also interact with. So we're seeing very interesting things happening because, of course, this environment, where everything is twice and there's a mini you that you can do things to, it's a very different logic of the universe than what we are used to having in physical reality.

This is a Borgesian Infinite Library based on a Penrose tile pattern. We made this kind of for fun to explore the limit like the psychological limits of environments. This is actually a VR environment, but it's a bit much so when you go in, your mind starts to lose it a little bit. But we just wanted to make an environment where we observe, at what point is an environment too much, and what exactly are the psychological effects that you start to experience in the first person when that environment becomes too much. And why is it too much? Is it the repetition? Is it the modularity? What exactly makes triggers those psychological effects?

And this is my last slide. This is a game that we're working on, also highly experimental, where we're putting a lot of these things that we're thinking, and reading about, and exploring. We're collecting all of this into what we call a VR testing environment that is called GravityX. And the motto for this is, the first line from John, but with a bit of a change. So it goes, “In the beginning there was space, and the space was with God, and the space was God.” So we basically replaced the word, “Word” with space in the first line from John. All right that was it. Thank you for bearing with me through this.

Q&A

https://youtu.be/4YO-iCUHdog?t=3864

Frode Hegland: It was an absolute pleasure. Very, very grateful. I mean, obviously, lots of questions and dialogue now, and amazing. My initial observations, kind of, to you and to the group. First of all, thank you. And secondly, I was asked a while ago about, “Do I think the future is going up, improving? Or going worse?” And my answer was, “It seems to be diverging. Getting much better and much worse”. You're in Germany now, right? So we're dealing with a full-on war in Europe. We're dealing with horrible things in other parts of the world. And then, we have this. When I defended my viva to Claus and Nick about two weeks ago, they very rightly questioned some of my language use around mental capacities. And my defence to them was, “We just don't know enough to use hard language”. So Claus, if you don't mind taking the first half of this presentation mentally into my thesis, that would be great. What I’m trying to say with that is, if our species is to survive, we have to evolve. And we're the only species known who has a chance to have a say in our own evolution. So I think that what you have shown today is foundationally important. It was just really beautiful. We have to take this very seriously. In our group here, we call ourselves the Future of Text Lab. But we have decided that what we mean by Text is almost anything. It used to be very narrow, but because of VR, we're doing something else. And just two more comments before I open up the virtual floor here. One of them is: I believe that the most powerful thing human beings have is imagination. And imagination has an enemy, truth. A teacher, when I was in university, many years ago said, “Truth kills creativity. Because when something is something, it is something and you're not going to look at it in a different way”. We saw that with the normal, traditional desktop computing, it basically became word processing, email, web, and a few other things. A lot of the early stuff isn't there. When we today, in our community, try to make more powerful things, people say, “Huh. But that's not a word processor”. Or, “Uh. That's not that”. Because imagination has been killed by truth. It is something. A little thing that I read on New Scientist, I think two days ago, in our bodies we have this thing called fascia, which is a connective tissue that goes around all our organs. I’m mentioning it for two reasons. First of all: it is kind of like an internet for our body that's not our central nervous system. But until 2019 it was just thrown away. If you're doing a dissection, or if you're cooking a beef dinner, you would just get rid of this stuff. Because we didn't have the ability to investigate it. And again, 2019, nobody had looked at it before. And now we're realising that it has about as many nerve cells, roughly 250 million, as our skin.

When you are looking at the way that our brain connects with the world, what I really liked about the way you do it, you are clearly very intelligent, but you're also very humble. Clearly we have evolved with our environment, but the implications of what that means is extremely hard for us, humans, to fathom, I think. So, I just wanted to thank you very, very much for having the guts to look at this most foundational thing of what is to be human. And for us to together try to use virtual reality type things to examine how that may change.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: Yes, thank you so much for saying that. Well, I think I have the guts to talk about these things because I’m an architect.

Bob Horn: I’m so excited by this presentation. It's just so delightful. George Lakoff was a friend of mine and colleague. I audited his course over in Berkeley. I wrote the obituary for Varela, for the World Academy of Art and Science. The whole framework in which you enmeshed us in now is wonderful, and it really excites me now to get into virtual reality. I’m among the older people here in this group and I’ve resisted. Gulliver’s Travels metaphor was wonderful. I have a collection, one of the things I do is put words and images together. Visual spaces. As you can see behind me. Mostly I do it into two-dimensional murals that are 12 feet long and so forth. I actually work with the International Task Forces on this. The one behind me is the one I did on the avian flu 15 years ago. On what could have been the worst pandemic. And so, anyway in looking into into just the Gulliver thing. I mean, that I want to get off my mind. I had forgotten all about this bag of stuff. I have a bag of objects which are arrows. Which I use in these murals. I have a bag of 200 arrows. Different kinds of arrows, that have different kinds of meanings, that I would like to throw out there and give to you and see what you do with them, and see what you do with them in in virtual reality. So, anyway, I’m just filled with exciting possibilities after this. I don't want to occupy any more time, but thank you very much. It was wonderful.

https://youtu.be/4YO-iCUHdog?t=4317

Brandel Zachernuk: Thank you. This is super exciting. And your comment on the, sort of, the homuncular flexibility and, sort of, hinting at neuroplasticity is something that I’ve definitely observed in my work. I was one of the responsible for some of the launch titles for Leap Motion. One of the things that were really fascinating for me there was having the number of degrees of freedom that one has there, and being able to just turn those things into whatever you wanted. And after a while, the contortions that one's hands were undertaking,

completely disappeared. And the more simple of which was just tilting a hand, but then, amplifying that three to four times. Most people didn't realise that this angle wasn't that angle. They completely thought that their hand was down, despite the fact that that would have been anatomically impossible. So I think that we have an enormous range of opportunities available to us once we have the ability to, kind of, recruit more of our stuff. One of the first things that I wanted to talk about, or ask you about is; You were pretty disparaging of the term "Illusion," which I’m in agreement with. It reminds me a lot of Gerard [indistinct]’s frustration with people talking about cognitive bias and the sort of embodied situated cognition kind of things you're talking about also, prioritise cognition for a reason. So have you come across or what is your take on cognitive bias and how it relates to this, as well?

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: Well, most of the things I’ve encountered that were referred to as cognitive bias, where bias, with respect to some kind of main understanding of cognition, but we do not agree on what the main understanding of cognition is. So I don't know from what point of view do you think that that particular thing is biased. So I don't find those conversations particularly useful, or the term itself, from the perspective of my interests. Because I don't think we have that common ground or understanding that would allow us to meaningfully talk about bias.

Ken Perlin: Everything you're saying is absolutely wonderful and resonates very strongly. And it also, in support of this, I’m thinking that there's this phenomenon that, when something becomes normal, we tend to forget that there was a time when it wasn't normal. So everyone here has had the experience of an automobile being an extension of our body. And we all read a book, which is an object that kind of didn't exist at some point. Even the fact that we wear shoes now when there was a time when people didn't wear shoes, the whole world would have seemed very strange. And obviously, phones and all these things. So it seems to me what you're talking about is kind of the next phase, or actually putting some rigour behind, a phenomenon that is because we are the creatures of language, so, therefore, we live in this world where I say the word ‘elephant’, you've got an elephant in your head. And that happened a hundred thousand years ago. We're kind of catching up in some sense to understanding what we do as a species. And I think I agree with you completely that, because of the more radical vestibular nature of, “I put on a VR headset, and now I start having these new kinds of novel mappings”. But, on the other hand, the language of cinema is something that might not have made any sense to someone before we all learned how to watch movies, and that's a completely crazy mapping, if you were not used to it, that radical point of view

changes from moment to moment, but yet doesn't drive us crazy. So I feel like, not only is what you're saying make a tremendous amount of sense, but it's also making sense of things that happened long before we even had computers. And that's kind of what we do in a way, we just didn't kind of acknowledge it yet. And I wonder, what do you think about that?

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: I think we're social creatures. So sharing a reality is how we survive. It's the kind of organism that we are. So it's important that we can share a reality, and the reality that we share cannot be the actual reality. It's just not. So we share a story about that reality. And it takes society to change the story. Individual people cannot change the story at a level that's profound or meaningful enough at all. There are these lonely people that sometimes can become important, and we call them innovators, when everything is good we call them a pain in the ass. I think now is a particularly difficult time in which we happen to need innovators. I think now things are not looking good at all in terms of where society is going and what we're doing to the planet. So I think there's a particular urgency to call the people that can shake up the story. That's also a bit the reason why I introduced the talk about subjectivity. I believe that there are two reasons why I go into these things with VR. One is because I personally believe this is a path and a methodology that gives us the most ability to understand what the technology can do. But I also think the promise of a change, in the subjectivity of a change in the story, collective story, of a change in how it feels to be human is appealing to me, because we are, at a point, where we really need that right now and we can't afford to wait. So there are two slightly different reasons why I chose to kind of go down this path. And, yes. I think all of this has happened in the past. I think the collective story controls the narrative of everything. That's why, for me, the moment VR will reach mass market is actually very important, because, right now, we're still talking about this technology being at the fringes. We have what? Half a million people? A million people in VR Chat? But I think the numbers are much less in terms of concurrent users. But where are we taking things if half of our teenagers start spending half a day as an Octopus, how do we make sense of that, and how do we take this tech to a point where we... It's like, I think that if we continue to avoid a serious discussion on these mechanisms and methodology for XR developers, we will fail to have a good grasp on this technology. It's a hard conversation because a lot of people, as I said, either believe that these things are illusions or do not think is part of their discipline to go into this discussion. My position is, you just don't have a choice. We just have to go this path. Or at least have a conversation and debate methodologies. Because we will be in a situation where, on one hand the whole planet is going down the drain, and on the other hand we have to put half of our teenagers in some

mental institution because they spend their days as an octopus. So this is putting it extremely bluntly. I should mince my words, but sometimes I get this sense of urgency coming from these two directions. And the best I can do, with my ability to think through things, is to go as deep as I did today and try to ask these difficult, unanswerable questions, to try to prevent, perhaps, or contribute to the prevention of these two big dangers that I’m seeing.

Ken Perlin: Thank you, yeah. It will come a day when the people who get put into institutions are the ones who refuse to learn how to be an octopus.

Mark Anderson: I love this. Interesting enough, actually, it was interesting the bit about homunculus, because that actually, my understanding sort of came at a completely different angle, because I came across it in V. S. Ramachandran's book, Phantoms in The Brain, back in the late 80s, where this was about to do with neurological people with damage and how they were adapting their bodies. But, of course, it's blindingly stating the obvious, to me it says that this would map across, why would it not? Because just if you can wrap your mind around mapping your mind away from a limb you no longer have, putting a couple of extra octopus arms on isn't such a big stretch. I just come back to a couple of things that it's interesting to sort of getting your thoughts on a bit more. I was listening to your thing about the Command+Z and I was just wondering, it was hard to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound glass half empty, which isn't where I come from, but so when we bring these things back, I suppose the answer is we don't know whether we bring back good things or bad things because, in a sense, we can train ourselves to do things we do normally for not particularly societally good reasons. We train people to do things very well. And then we have problems teaching them to not do that. So I’m wondering if there's another interesting element in this as we explore it. On the one hand, potentially the gain, even the things, going back to my opening point about the neuroscience people at San Diego trying to mend broken bodies and things. But just being able to effectively work through a different set of control mechanisms is really interesting. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. And the other thing that I was interested in, when you mentioned sort of the 80/20 thing back you were also saying effectively we're not using, or we don't know how we're using 80% of our neurological inputs. Is it that we don't know what it's doing or we just think it's not being used?

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: Yeah. Oh, I can clarify that. The first example of this that I’ve

looked at, is actually Varela's own research. He was studying vision. And he talks about this in The Embodied Mind in 1990. He talks about how, basically, 20%... So the information is entering through the retina, the optical nerve. And the visual cortex is forming the image. So

that's what our consciousness perceives as it's out the window. And Varela concluded from his own studies on vision that only 20% of the information that's coming through the optical nerve is used by the visual cortex. And there's very recent research, a few months ago, that is reinforcing that about various parts of the brain. So 20% is like, quote-unquote, actual. But actually, the thing is, the percentage, in the beginning Varela was not really believed, and there was a lot of pushback on that. They were like, “There's no way this is true”. I've recently listened to a podcast by a neuroscientist saying amazing, completely shocking things are coming out of research right now showing that 80% or more is what's called top-down influences. And she sounded completely like, “Well. But this is science, so we must believe it. But we still can't really, or really want to believe it. And it looks like there could be more than 80%”. And she was kind of shaking. Her voice was shaking as she was saying that. And I was like, Well, Varela said this 30 years ago. So there's some degree of homomorphism, but again, if you listen to other people, there's no homomorphism, there's some degree of homomorphism between the environment. It is that 20% or less, the rest we're making it up. We're making it up. But it's a collective making it up.

Peter Wasilko: I was wondering if you had any thoughts about the use of forced perspective and other optical illusions in real-world architecture in order to create a more immersive environment?

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: I think, in the physical world, we are experimenting with AR in creating illusions. I don't know if that's what you mean. So my example of the AR app where we create this out of body experience was a little bit like that. But for me, it's very much connected with what are we trying to achieve. And for our work, it's not immersion. I’m not very interested in immersion for its own sake. It's like, what does that mean? Does it mean you really believe that you're in VR? I don't know if that's so relevant for my interest. We create illusions but only because we want to achieve a certain feeling, or emotion, or cognitive process, or trigger a certain thought process. So the illusion has to be connected to that by itself just being in an environment, and thinking it's another kind of environment, or if thinking, or having the illusion that is bigger, or smaller, or just different on its own, without part of the largest strategy, is not something that we would typically pursue. I don't know if this answer your question.

Peter Wasilko: Yeah, pretty much. I was thinking of trying to design environments to achieve certain emotional cognitive effects. So I think we're running in the same direction.

Claus Atzenbeck: Yeah. First of all, thanks for this talk. I have three quick questions, I

guess. So you showed one project. It was this elevator, basically, which you can use to go to some TV screens. Can you say a little bit about the limitations we may face in a virtual 3D world? For example, if I imagine that I have some zooming factors implemented that the user could zoom in to up to infinity, basically. This would change the perception of the room. So I would become smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and the space would just become bigger and bigger so I could, actually, have different angles. So is this something the human could still work with? Or for example, what about rooms which are of contradicting dimensions? I imagine this Harry Potter tent, for example, which is larger inside than outside. Is this something a human can actually deal with? Could a human, actually, create a mental model of, since this cannot happen in the real world? This was the first question.

The second one is a general question about vision space, VR, I mean, this is all about visuals. This is just one channel, basically, we look at. Did you think about, well, first of all, why did you pick that and not other channels which would target other senses? What do you think about multi-modality, for example? Using different senses? And also, what would be the potential, basically? When you said this Control+Z thing, I thought about the muscle memory I have for typing a password, for example. When I actually look at the keyboard, it becomes harder for me to type in the password. And if I see a keyboard which has a slightly different layout, possibly two keys would be exchanged, like the German keyboard and the U.S., American keyboard, it becomes almost impossible to type this password fast enough, because I’m kind of disturbed by the visuals. So wouldn't it make sense to actually ignore the visuals for some projects, at least, just thinking about the other senses, basically?

And the last question is more of a general nature. Do you think it's really beneficial to try to mimic the real world within the computer? Like a 3D world which almost feels like being in the real world? Or do you think we should focus on more abstract information systems which may be more efficient, for example, than using an elevator going up and down?

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: Yeah, thank you for that. I think one and three are connected. One and three are about the elevator. The first question was; could it be too much for us to deal with these infinite spaces and this shrinking and expansion of our perception of the body because it's so drastically different? Up to a point, we can definitely do it. Just like the octopus. I do think we can do it. We will hit boundaries and borders, and I’m fascinated by that. So part of our more experimental work is to see where those boundaries are, and what does that mean. Because, yes, we have adapted for quite a while through the physical Reality with, capital R, whatever cloud of particles and radiation that is for quite a while, right? But if the people that do not believe in homomorphism are right, and mathematically

so far they look like they're right, we actually have no structural coupling with what is out there. We completely make up the collective reality. But again, I’m going into speculation. Since I’m like not a scientist, I try not to speculate in public. And when I speak in public, I just focus on the papers and keep the speculation to my interpretation of the papers. Going in this direction would mean going into papers that are not commonly accepted as science. So it's a big parenthesis. I believe, assuming we have homomorphism structural coupling with Reality with capital R, I think we will hit boundaries. I think VR can quickly put us in environments that we can't deal with and will feel uncomfortable. I’m interested in exploring that boundary and have... I don't want to go beyond boundaries, I have no interest in making anyone feel uncomfortable. But I feel like we don't really know what the boundary is. So we're talking about what we think the boundary might be, without actually having a good understanding of where that is.

Then, the third question was related to the chair. So I would argue that that chair is like nothing you would ever experience in reality. We're taking something that is a little bit familiar to you, which is a chair and a joystick that moves the chair up and down, but the experience and the situation are drastically different than anything you would do in reality. Because you cannot take a chair to infinity in reality. So what we were doing in that environment, people say skeuomorphic, I’m like, "What is skeuomorphic about driving a chair to infinity?" So what we were doing is, we had some variables, some things that were controlled. We couldn't have variables everywhere. We couldn't have variables on the infinite wall, and variables on the chair and what's around you, because it would have been too much. So we made the chair and the control skeuomorphic, quote-unquote, so we can experiment with the other stuff. And the fascinating thing was that, basically, that environment is just a folder with files. But just by doing this, it's stupid, the whole thing is on the infinite elevator, and the infinite wall, on a basic level is the dumbest thing, but all of a sudden, people started to get exactly the same ideas that you just got with like, "Oh. What if I go to infinity? What if I start to have the feeling that I’m shrinking or expanding?" And you do. You do start to feel like you're shrinking and expanding and you're losing your mind. People started to think, “Oh. I could have infinite scenes”. This is like, they started to ask us, “Is this the metaverse? Oh, my God! The possibilities of seeing all of my files in here”. And people got excited about something that they already have. They already have that in a folder. You could almost have, well, not infinite, but you could have more files than you would ever want in a folder running on a PC. But their minds were not going, and exploring, and feeling excitement about those possibilities. So it was interesting how, just by changing the format, like spatialising something you already have, just open up this completely different perspective. So, yeah. We

call that our most spatial menu yet, because that's basically a menu. I think there is tremendous potential in this very simple, almost dumb, shift from screen-based 2D interfaces to 3D. It's dumb but for some reason no one is doing it. For some reason like, I posted this stupid elevator and some people were like, "Andreea, this is stupid. What the hell is this? Why are you doing skeuomorphism?" Because I’m known for these ideas, and known for hating skeuomorphism. And everyone saw my elevator was skeuomorphism and I’m like, “No, no, no. That's really not what we're doing”. And every single VR application out there opens a 2D menu on your controller and you push buttons. And it has like 2D information. So they're still browsing files and information in VR on a little 2D screen. So this elevator was our attempt to put out there a truly spatial file browser. And the extent to which it triggered this change in perspective over who you are, what do these files represent, who you are in relationship to them, what is the possibility, was really striking. We didn't really expect that. We almost did it as a joke. We were almost like, “Why don't we model this like 60s soviet-looking elevator and then, have an infinite wall and see what happens”. The idea with the infinite wall also came from like, I have a few pet peeves:

One is like, homomorphic avatars, which I hate.

The other one is the infinite horizontal plane that all the VR applications have. Why in the world do we have this infinite horizontal plane in VR?

So we wanted to make an infinite vertical plane in VR. Muscle memory, yes. So the reason why we're focusing on visuals is because that's what we've been focusing on. But in the game that I mentioned, we have an entire part of the game which is called, The Dark Level. So what we're doing in the dark level is exactly what you said, which is we're exploring sound and space. You don't see anything. So basically, the VR headset is just something to cover your eyes and to get sound into your ears. That's something brand new that we're embarking in, because I agree with you, everything that I talk about is not necessarily specific to visuals, it just happens that we're just now starting to do space and sound, as opposed to space and visuals.

Claus Atzenbeck: Just one more question on what you just said. Do you think this infinity virtual 3D environment is something that people like because it's something new but you're not solving a particular problem? Because I can imagine that we have a plain zoomable user interface like Jef Raskin did something like that, which you can zoom in and check your files on an infinite 2D space on canvas, basically, on the screen. So it's just because it's something new and people are happy to use that because it's new? So it's like a game? That's gamification, basically?

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: There are two things we're pursuing with that.

One is spatial memory as opposed to semantic memory. There are studies that show that spatial memory is more efficient than semantic memory. In other words, you're more likely to remember where you put something than how you named it. So we're interested in where people put things. And we don't want people to put something somewhere, this object that is their file, with the mouse. We want people to physically move their bodies to put that something there. So we're taking the file, which is an abstract thing, we're embodying it into an object in VR, and we're making people, literally, take it with this forklift, because we're just being stupid right now, with this forklift and literally putting it somewhere else. So that kind of testing of spatial versus semantic memory, I think, can only be done in this context. And I don't know of any other project that's doing it.

And the second thing is, yeah, just this pure idea of interacting with abstract entities as if they were embodied objects, and being able to apply physical movements of the body, and moving the body through space to interact with these abstract objects. So that's kind of clashing together Lakoff with all of these other theories. It's like, you're learning how to manipulate abstract thoughts, by learning mechanisms from how the body moves to space but in a perverted kind of way, VR allows us to smash the two together.

So we are, and we are just observing how it happens. So, no. At a conceptual level, we would love for people to have fun, but it is these two things that we are interested in learning more about. We have not just made it so people think it's just cool to go up and down.

Frode Hegland: I’m going to go all the way back to that 80% stuff. That, of course, in a very real sense doesn't mean anything. I’m sitting outside now and there are our trees, and birds, and everything. And we have to talk, of course, about affordances. What these things are to me, which is interesting. I can see that there's grass over there. There's no chance and no usefulness for me to know exactly how many blades of grass, exactly what angle they are, exactly what colour level they are, etc. That is not useful information for me. So obviously, the 80% stuff is all about where in our system, information gets filtered. And how it's used. There are, of course, different levels of this, and the reason I wanted to discuss this point is, in the physical world, if there is a fox or something that may come gnarling up at me, then a certain type of shadow has information that otherwise wouldn't have information for me. And it'll be very interesting to see when we start designing our environments in virtual reality, how we can choose to, more intelligently say, “This stuff is meant to be here because if it wasn't here, you would wonder why it's missing”. Like a wall. You know you don't need a wall in VR. But otherwise, it would feel unbounded, literally. And here's another

piece of information about this wall, which has actual meaning to you. So I’m wondering if you have any reflections on, let's call it hyper surrealist worlds, where you look out the window and you can choose to see the weather tomorrow. Some of it's kind of real and fancy, some of it is just completely insane. But that thing where some information is meant to be there, otherwise, you'd miss it. Other information has actual meaning. Thank you.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: Yeah, thank you for this question. I’m going to say some things now that I allow myself to say in public because I am an architect and not a cognitive scientist, so I’m not going to risk my reputation. But the reason why the 80% is meaningful to me is, because it means the 80% can be changed. The 80% is the story. So, again, this is kind of very out there statement, but I’m more interested in figuring out, rather than changing the environment and designing super interesting environments, and putting people in there. I’m very interested in pursuing what these research studies are implying and seeing to what extent the story can change what you see. Because the “over 80%” is the story, so if we change the story, you will not see grass anymore. Just like the way the frog cannot see a truck. Again I don't mean this quite so literally, but on the other hand, I do. On the other hand is the study that shows that if you're holding a glass with hot water, you hear different things than when you hold the glass with cold water. So the evidence is on the wall, but we are really scared of going into the implications of this. And the cognitive scientists do not risk their reputation. Some do and talk about things, but they're not exactly considered mainstream. So it is there. I mean, the study is there.

Frode Hegland: Oh, yeah. And I think that's phenomenally useful, but another half of this is the issue of... I had a friend who was obsessed with cars. He would know everything. So we'd be walking down the road and he would see, at night, a taillight from behind, at an angle, and he could tell me who designs the wheels of that car. So what he saw, what was information to him, was very different from what it is for me. And looking at my son, first time I’m bringing him up today, so I need a medal. Anyway, if he has touched grass, for instance, of a certain thing, when he sees the grass, he doesn't just see lines of green. We obviously feel something with it. So along with what you're talking about, I look forward to being able to put visual information that can have rich meaning for us, but in entirely new ways or something, the two literal examples. That's all, and thank you very much for your answer.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. So you mentioned a neuroscientist. Was that Lisa Feldman Barrett f? Because if not then I’d love to know another one. Yes? Okay, good. Yeah, she's amazing in terms of her exposure to the way that priors are so important, in terms of what

we're perceiving. So I’m glad we're on the same page there.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: Yes. She was recently on my Mindscape Podcast with Sean Carroll g , yeah.

Brandel Zachernuk: So that, specifically, was on Mindscape? Okay, great. Thank you. And then, the next thing I wanted to talk about was, so I’m really glad to hear about your disinterest, potentially, and antipathy for immersiveness, for its own sake, because I share that. People who are regulars to this meeting know my hostility to the notion of story for its own sake as well. But you've also brought up being an octopus. So it strikes me that you would probably not consider being an octopus to be, sort of, significant in and of itself. But for some kind of functional practical benefit, some cognitive change that you would expect to occur. Have you played with Octopus? And what kinds of things have you observed there? Are there any signs that you do different things there as a consequence?

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: Yeah. So I use their methods. Giuseppe Riva is a researcher from Italy who is using VR and these theories of embodiment to treat our sort of mental conditions. And he has an onboarding protocol for helping people identify with an avatar. He's using it with hominoid avatars. But I’ve used that onboarding protocol, again, on myself, these are not things I make public or ever will, but on myself. You basically tap, you use the thing from the rubber hand illusion. You have someone tap your actual body, and then, you program something that will tap your other body in a place that's kind of in the same place. And then, I did an experiment to see the extent to which I can embody other kinds of stuff. So this tapping helps quite a lot to go into it fast. And I like to embody spaces.

And this sounds nuts, but let's talk about it. I like to embody a room. I like to experiment with how big I can get. And again, this is completely crazy talk, but then here we are, in 2022, with VR in the hands of teenagers. So, yeah. It happens. I mean, it's real. How fast it happens and how profound that experience is will vary from person to person. It's kind of like, some people have lucid dreams, some people can trigger out-of-body experiences and some cannot. But the mechanism is there. And the technology now is there and costs 400 bucks. Why do I do it? I’m interested in observing how I change. I’m interested in observing myself, and most particularly how I perceive physical reality afterward. So I’m trying to understand this transfer and see if I can have any kind of insight into that, then, I can phrase it in a more methodological way and start to form hypotheses. There are changes that are happening in me. I’m not at a point yet where I can talk about them with enough clarity to communicate them to other people, but they exist.

And at the end of the day, I’m interested in what Foucault called, ‘Technologies of Self’. Because what I’m doing to myself is, I’m making myself the subject of technology of

self, I’m using VR. But you can use other things that are not technically technology or not technology in the modern sense, you can use books or other kinds of things to push a change in myself that is very new.

And I need to understand what I’m becoming. What's the possible direction of that?

Because we might potentially face this happening on a global scale soon with very young people. And because scientists are so scared to talk publicly about this, they're so scared to throw things out there, because the VR developers are so scared to really go into this, we are left in a bad place right now, where we know we struggle. And I mean, I get a lot of shit for talking about these things. There's a lot of people telling me on Twitter that I’m wrong but I do think it's necessary, so I do it.

I’m interested in how these things will change us, and what's the potential in that as well. I think it's even harmful to try to avoid it. So those developers working hard not to trigger these things are harming everyone. The tech will do that anyway, so we might as well understand it and let it happen, or at least control how it happens. But we can't if we don't look at the mechanism. And I think that when these developers are talking about what they do to avoid it, they are not talking about the mechanism. They're not even trying. They're not hypothesising any mechanism that triggers them. They're kind of like band-aids, right?

They're kind of like seeing something happening there and then they think it's something and trying to have local solutions for that. I don't know, did that answer your question?

Brandel Zachernuk: Yes, absolutely. And your point about being a building I think is really thrilling. Reminds me of some stuff that Terry Pratchett, in Discworld, was a remarkably neuroplastic kind of writer. But it also reminded me of, when we were talking about the channels of information that we're using to, sort of, explore and mess with, that proprioception is completely distinct from visual. And to that end, the most exciting thing for me is virtual reality's capacity to impact what it is that we mean to do with our bodies, and what kind of impact that has. So it's very exciting to hear all of these things put together.

Thank you.

Peter Wasilko: I was wondering if you'd ever read Michael Benedict's 1991 book, Cyberspace: First Steps [6]?

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: I did not no. Should I?

Peter Wasilko: Yes, you should. It has very interesting presentations of abstract information spaces. And one of the ideas was, to have higher dimensional space represented as multiple three-dimensional spaces that can unfold to reveal nested subspaces inside. Sort of like, you're looking at three walls of the cube, then another sub-cube could open based upon a point that was selected within the first cube representing another three dimensions of

the abstract information object. Also it introduced the idea that you could be representing a physical object in a space, but the space itself could represent a query into higher dimensional space. So the point in the space would represent the query corresponding to the three dimensions that were currently displayed in the one space, and that would then, control what was being displayed in another link space. So just the most fascinating thing I’ve read in a long time. And I keep coming back to that book and encouraging everyone in our group to take a look at it. So I highly recommend it. And when you do get a chance to read, I’d be extremely interested in what your reaction is to those chapters.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: I want to add something quickly. So the thing that crosses my mind, which again, it's not something I just say in public, but like, why not? Because today's discussion is already going interesting places. What crossed my mind, as you describe the book which I will absolutely read, is this: so let's say, I just said that I, sometimes, like to embody an entire room. We can't understand these complex spaces and nested spaces on four- dimensional spaces and so on. But can we, if we are a room? What kind of perceptual possibilities and cognitive possibilities would that open up? Because, of course, if you truly believe that you are the room, your brain is in an altered state of consciousness, basically. Not in the like spiritual sense in any way, but at the cognitive of the cognitive level. So again, this is kind of wild speculation. But that's just the thought that crossed my mind.

Andy Campbell

Dreaming Methods - Creating Immersive Literary Experiences

Dreaming Methods has “always been at pains not to place text in front of images, or beneath them or to one side, like labels on tanks at the zoo or explanatory plaques next to pictures in a gallery… we explore to read. This avoids the danger of us regarding the texts as more important than the imagery. It pulls us in, and it makes [the] work inherently immersive and interactive.” – Furtherfield

Figure 3. Campbell, 2022.

How can text – when it changes from ‘static’ to ‘liquid’ in digital environments – become as absorbing and comprehensible to readers as traditional text? And what sort of effect can it have?

Since 1999 Dreaming Methods has developed challenging and compelling works of digital fiction that blend text with immersive sound/visuals and explorative gameplay. These works often include experimental narratives-in-motion (animated, fragmentary, and multi- layered texts) which require different methods of both writing and reading.

This short talk explains how our approach has evolved whilst maintaining a clear artistic vision: from early browser-based technologies such as Flash to ambitious narrative

games and VR experiences. We offer some fascinating insights through several real-world examples from our portfolio, including a virtual reality mobile library van/space shuttle designed to encourage children’s literacy and a spoken-word VR poetry experience currently shortlisted for the London Film Festival XR Prize that tells the stories of three Northern women.

Video of presentation: https://vimeo.com/onetoonedevelopment/review/ 753519382/02550aa9bf

Presentation (pre-recorded for the Symposium)

Dreaming Methods is a creative studio that develops immersive stories with a particular focus on writing and literature. We’ve been producing digital fiction for over 25 years.

Much of Dreaming Methods’ early work was dark in tone and highly experimental. A mix of surreal dreams and urban horror, it was published online, mainly through Adobe Flash to shift away from the then quite tight constraints of HTML. My approach was to treat text as a visual and fluid entity, to challenge the reader to the extreme, to make the structure of the stories themselves something unreliable, unstable.

We use a lot of the techniques that we originally developed with Flash to inform our current approach to digital fiction – especially when working in VR.

WALLPAPER for example, part of a research project with Professor Alice Bell from Sheffield Hallam University called Reading Digital Fiction, is multi-layered in its approach to text. It’s an atmospheric and tense narrative with some surprising twists.

The text within WALLPAPER appears on physical items within the gameworld, such as on postcards and letters to give a sense of grounding and normality, but it also has a ghostly presence: hand-written, circular, and floating like the cobwebs of memories; and as a flowing underlying texture that exists just beneath the environment’s surface.

In The Water Cave, an explorable VR poem about depression, a single thread of glowing text acts as an umbilical cord through the entire experience, guiding the reader/ player out of the depths of the cave towards the surface, even though at times, ‘clinging to the words’ means having to submerge beneath the water.

Digital Fiction Curios, which we created as part of another research project with Professor Alice Bell, is a prototype digital archive for VR that uniquely houses a selection of our old poems and stories created in Flash – a response to Flash being made redundant in 2020.

Visualised in the style of a magical curiosity shop, readers/players can root around in

the environment, opening cabinets, digging into boxes, examining, and reading digital fiction from as far back as 1999. One of the most fascinating elements to this project is the ability to view old work in a completely new way. Curios also offers some re-imaginings of what these poems and stories might look like had they been created using today’s technologies.

Our most recent VR work, Monoliths – a collaboration with Pilot Theatre, funded by XR Stories – immerses participants in the evocative tales of three Northern women through a series of surreal and atmospheric virtual spaces. This project treads a fine line between giving the participant enough imaginative room to visualise the stories, which are told through spoken word poems, whilst also making them feel as if they are existing within them.

Interactivity is gentle and stripped back; during the final sequence, standing on a rocky beach at sunset, you’re ‘handed’ small, beautiful stones to examine as the poem flows.

A common thread throughout all our work is a sense of immersion – we look to create portholes into self-contained, often short-lived worlds; dream-like environments where text manifests and stories are told in all kinds of intriguing and unexpected ways. It’s taken a long time for us to develop our voice and approach – and of course, it’s still evolving. Methods of writing are changing but so are methods of reading. That’s what we’re seeing right now, through our current projects.

Links

https://dreamingmethods.com https://dreamingmethods.com/portfolio/monoliths

Annie Murphy Paul

Operationalizing the Extended Mind

In the more than twenty years since the publication of the seminal paper by Andy Clark and David Chalmers titled The Extended Mind [8], the idea it introduced has become an essential umbrella concept under which a variety of scientific sub-fields have gathered. Embodied cognition, situated cognition, distributed cognition: each of these takes up a particular aspect of the extended mind, investigating how our thinking is extended by our bodies, by the spaces in which we learn and work, and by our interactions with other people. Such research has not only produced new insights into the nature of human cognition; it has also generated a corpus of evidence-based methods for extending the mind. My own book—also titled The Extended Mind [9]—set out to operationalize Clark and Chalmers's idea. In this talk, I will discuss the project of turning a philosophical sally into something practically useful.

https://anniemurphypaul.com/books/the-extended-mind/

Apurva Chitnis

Journal : Public Zettelkasten

The future of knowledge management on the internet

These last few weeks I've been building my own Zettelkastenh. It’s an intimidating German word, but the idea is simple: when you’re learning something, take many small notes and link these notes to one another to create a web of connected notes. This is more effective than taking notes in a long, linear form (as you might do in Apple Notes or Evernote) because you can see the relations between ideas, which helps with your understanding and retention.

Figure 4. Zettelkasten. Clear, 2019.

The core idea behind Zettelkasten is that knowledge is interrelated — it builds off one another, so your notes — your understanding of knowledge — should be too. Wikipedia is structured in a similar way, using links between related pages, and in fact even your brain

stores knowledge in a hierarchical manneri.

Limitations today

But as powerful as they are, Zettelkastens implemented today are limited in two ways: firstly, they are only used for knowledge-workj, and secondly, they only represent knowledge in your mind, and no one else's. These limitations are debilitating to the potential of Zettelkasten, and more broadly how we communicate online.

I believe that not only knowledge, but all sentiment and expression is interrelated.

Further, my knowledge and sentiment is built off of other people’s knowledge and sentiment, ie it extends beyond myself.

For example:

I think that “NFTs are the future” after listening understanding “@naval’s belief that NFTs are necessary technology for the metaverse” in “this podcast”
I love “A Case of You” by “James Blake”, and “this is my favourite live performance”

Public Zettelkasten

So what would happen if we removed these constraints? Imagine if we each built our own, individual Zettelkasten, representing our thoughts, opinions and experiences, made them public, and related our knowledge and sentiment to each other. What could we do with that? A few ideas:
We could look back in time and see how someone we admire learnt about a topic. In the first case above, we can understand why @naval believes what he does about NFTs and the metaverse. We can see what influenced him in the past and read those same sources. Further, we could then build on his ideas, and add our own ideas, for example “someone needs to build a platform for trading NFTs in the metaverse”. Others could build off of our ideas, and others could follow their journey as they learn about something new.
We can understand how an artist we admire created something. In the second case above, we can see when James Blake first listened to the original “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell, what he thought and felt about it, and why he decided to perform a cover. We could use that understanding to explore Joni Mitchell’s back catalog, or be inspired to create our own content, for example by performing a cover. Followers of Joni Mitchell

and James Blake could easily see our covers by following edges along the graph.

These are just a few ideas, but if we each made our Zettelkasten public and interrelated to one another, then there would be as many interaction patters as there are people in the world. This would unlock new forms of consumption and creation that are not possible today.

This knowledge and sentiment graph could be queried and accessed in a huge number of ways to answer a broad range of questions. You could effectively upload your brain to the internet, search through it (and those of others), and build on top of everyone’s ideas and experience. This is a new way of representing knowledge and expression that goes beyond the limitations of paper and Web 2.0: it allows us to work collaboratively, in ways that Twitter, Facebook and friends just aren’t able to offer today.

Implementation

What data-layer should be used for storing this data? A blockchain is one idea: the data would be open and accessible by anyone, effectively democratising all knowledge and sentiment. It would be free of any centralised authority - you could port your knowledge in whatever application you wanted to use, and developers could build whatever UIs make most sense for the task at hand. Finally, developers could create bots that support humans in linking and connecting relevant ideas to one another — a boon for usability efficiency and discoverability.

Challenges

The biggest challenge with this idea, if we use the blockchain as the data-layer, is that the information a user would create is public and permanent. You may not want the world to know you believed something in the past (eg if you were a fan of X in your youth), but you cannot easily delete data on the blockchaink. You could, however, add a new note to explain that you no longer believe some idea — this would be particularly useful to any followers of yours, who now have additional context about why your opinion changed.

Similarly, you'd be revealing all of a piece of knowledge or none of it; with a rudimentary implementation, you couldn't partially reveal a belief to just those you trust. Zero Knowledge Proofs might be a fruitful solution here.

The second big challenge is how to present this data visually to end-users. Solving this particular challenge is outside the scope of this article, but it suffices to say that linear feeds

(such as Twitter or Facebook) wouldn’t work well. If these barriers could be overcome, public Zettelkasten could not only be how we represent knowledge online, but also how we understand ourselves and each other in the future.

Barbara Tversky

Journal Guest Presentation : Mind in Motion

https://youtu.be/RydjMrG9sDg?t=714

So, thank you for inviting me. I have far too much to tell you. And I’m trying to tell it through visuals not in the book. The talk will be like pieces of hors d'oeuvres, so a bit disjointed, but they're meant to set up talking points so that you can ask questions, or discuss things. I should say that you're more punctual than my students, but my students are far more geographically dispersed. Kazakhstan, China, Korea, Japan, just everywhere. And so, "Zoom" does enable that kind of interaction in one class.

I’m going to share a screen and I want to, before I show pictures, I just want to say a bit, without a picture, of how I got into this field at all.

I’m a bit of a contrarian. When I was a graduate student, people were reducing everything that people thought about all representations of the world to something like, language, or propositions. And my feeling, looking at that, and I did look at all the research at the time, is language is efficient, decomposable, it has all kinds of advantages. I rather like it, I’m using it right now. But it seemed to me that language couldn't begin to describe faces, scenes, emotions, all kinds of subtleties. And then, I started thinking that space is half the cortex. So, spatial thinking must be important. And by spatial thinking I mean the world around us, and the things in it, including our own bodies, other people objects, scenes. And that special thinking evolved long before language, which occupies a rather tiny bit, but important place in the cortex, but came much later, and is in less connected with the rest of the cortex. And then you think, anyone who's been a parent, or owns a dog, that babies, and other creatures think and invent so many marvellous things without language. And for that matter, so do we.

So, I got interested in spatial thinking. This is some of the early ways that we communicate. Gesture arises in children long before language. And in fact, children who gesture quite a bit, speak earlier. Games where we're imitating each other, taking turns, alternating what we're doing, this kind of interaction in games, rolling the ball, rolling it back, it builds trust. It sets up conversation, which is, you say something, I say something. So, it sets up cooperation, conversation, and many other things. This is done early on and communicated by action, not by actions of the body. And reciprocal expressions on the face it

isn't communicated by language. So, I’m going to jump lots of jumps, and I want to talk now, because you're interested in text, about kinds of discourse.

One important kind of discourse is a description, which is a state of affairs in space or time.
Explanations build on descriptions, but add a layer of causality and reasons.
Stories add on descriptions and explanations, they include both, and they add a point of view. The author, or authors, they add emotion, drama, there are a whole set of elements that stories can and each one isn't necessary. And there are deep arguments about what a story is. But I wanted to make those distinctions, and check with my colleagues in discourse analysis that the distinctions reflect the field. Stories are studied in so many disciplines.
Then we have directions, which build on explanations, but give you just an "A" to a "B."
And we have arguments, which bring together a set of stories, explanations, and descriptions to make a certain point. So, I’m not going to labour that.

I want to jump again, I already talked about how communication begins in humans and other animals as well. Through the body, through the face, through actions. And I could talk, at this point, about mirror neurons, but I’ll skip that, just leave it as a teaser.

The earliest human communication and probably human includes Neanderthals and other hominids goes back at least 40.000 years. It keeps going back, as this was a discovery in the last few years. You can see hands there, there are animals there. It's from Sulawesi. And, as I say, these are being discovered everywhere. Sulewasi, 40,000 current oldest cave art:

This is the former oldest map, 6000 years. It shows two perspectives, an overview of the paths and rivers, and a frontal view of landmarks. Linguists don't like this. Geographers don't like two perspectives. But people seem fine with them. Ancient Babylonian clap map:

This is the current oldest map, it's about two inches by one inch. A stone. It shows the surroundings around the cave where it was found, some 13.000, 14.000 years ago. And it's tiny. So, it could be taken with you, to guide you on going back. Map on stone block, southern Spain, 13,660 years ago:

A map of the sky going back 5000 years. Sky Map of Ancient Nineveh 3300 BCE:

This is a valley in Italy, it's a drawing of a petroglyph. Again, two points of view. Bedolina, Italy, 2000 BCE:

Eskimo maps. They were carved in wood, very beautiful, carried on canoes, they showed the outlines of the coasts. And they floated, in case they fell in the water. Eskimo Coastal Map:

South Sea Islanders Map, probably familiar to you. Shells representing islands, bamboo strips, the ocean currents, which are like the highways of the ocean. And at least some of the people that were trained and carried these with them, 2.000 miles on the open ocean, at least some of them returned home. South Sea Islanders Map:

A map by North Coast Indians, showing the various settlements on their hands. A map by North Coast Indians:

Now I’m jumping again to depictions of scenes. Again, going back 40.000 years. Chauvet. Going back even farther in Sulawesi, although I’m not sure. Chauvet Cave 40,000 years ago:

This one I especially like, it is in the book. It's a petroglyph on the left, and the drawing of it on the right. And it's showing two suns in the sky. Quite remarkable what could account for that. An Indian astronomer did some history on it and found that, at about the time they could date the petroglyph, there was a supernova. And it was such a remarkable event that someone inscribed it in a stone. Stones were, in a way, the newspapers of antiquity. Supernova: 4000 BCE Kashmir:

Here's another example from the U.S., a whole valley full of these. It's called Newspaper Valley, and it has many of these petroglyphs showing events. 'Newspaper' Valley:

So, events in making bread in a tomb in Egypt. Bread making in Egyptian toomb:

Events in the Trajan Column. Trajan Column:

Now we have calendars, they also go way back. Some circular. Some tabular. Calendars:

All these forms become important, but I won't be able to talk about them. Then we have number. We have tallies. Again, you can find them all over the world. It's not clear what they're representing. Incised ochre tallies Blombos Cave, South Africa 70-100k:

But having a one-to-one correspondence from a mark, to an idea, to an object, to people whatever they were counting, moons, is a rudimentary form of arithmetic that was again, inscribed in stone.

So, ancient visualizations represent:

Space
They represent people, objects
They represent time, and events in time
They represent number

These are all important concepts, and you will find them in the newspapers, journals, magazines of today. And they're so important that the brain has specialized areas for processing them. And what's extraordinary about all of these is, they can be spatialized. So, this is part of my argument that is, spatial thinking is foundational to all thought.

Early communications began as pictographs. In some way, you can still find... Well, there was a civil war colonel who collected these during battles and then, Dover later printed his findings. They're quite remarkable. This is a love letter between the two animals. On the left are her totem and her lover's totem. And it's a map leading him to her tepee, and she's beckoning him there in the map. Love letter:

In the 18th century, the age of enlightenment, we finally get graphs.

Figure 5. Trade-Balance Time-Series Chart. Playfair, 1786.

Because the early visualizations, that ones that I showed you, except for time, were more or less things that were actually in the visual spatial world. But more abstract concepts, like balance of payment and graphs, developed only in the late 18th century, and they began to blossom. So, Diderot, I would love to walk you through this, it's a way of teaching diagrams.

The top half is a scene, which would be familiar to 18th century eyes. The bottom is a diagram. It differs from the top, and things are arranged in rows and columns. There's a key. Lighting is used not naturally, but to reflect the features of the objects. The objects are sized. So, you can see them in the diagram, not in their natural sizes.

Figure 6. Pinmaker’s Factory. Diderot, 1751.

So, this is a visual way of teaching people what a diagram is. In fact, by now, we've diagrammed the world, and we've set up where different kinds of vehicles, pedestrians can go, where they can't go, where they can park, when they can go, and it moves us through space in an organized way. But we've really diagrammed the world.

Figure 7. Diagrammed the world. Tversky, 2022.

Graphics augment cognition, they:

record information
convey information
promote inferences, enable new ideas.
This is a lot through sketches, and I won't be able to talk about that. But can answer. They facilitate collaboration.

They're public, so we can both, or all of us, revise them, make inferences from them, enable new ideas from them, see them, and point to them. Gestures are important.

We can distinguish two kinds of graphics:
Those that are inherently visual. Maps would be a prime example, they're ancient
And visualizations of metaphorically visual. Graphs, charts, diagrams

And again, they seem to be a Western, at first production of the age of enlightenment.

Good graphics schematize. This is a prime example. They also annotate. They're multi-

modal.

Graphics consist of:
elements
relations among them

And my argument is, these can convey meaning directly. But they don't have to be learned. In many cases, they're quite natural. One of my claims is this visual spatial way of communicating is much more natural.

Pointing. Pointing draws a line from my finger, to the object that it's pointing at. So, it guides your eye to that object. And that's very natural. We saw babies use them. Chimps use them a bit, but other chimps don't follow them. It shows what the chimp is thinking, but it isn't taken as a communication by the other chimps, those can be separate.

And then again, we've done a lot of work on gestures, showing that many of them are really helping us think. But they can also help others think. So, graphics consist of elements, spatial relations among them, they convey meaning quite directly, and they:

represent thought directly, by using
elements and spatial relations on a page, a virtual page, or a page in the air, as gestures do
represent elements and relations in the world

Elements can resemble what they represent:
Iconic. They can bear a conceptual similarity to what they represent. We call them figures of depiction
Metaphoric. And they can be schematically related
Abstract
Symbolic

Early writing began as pictographic. And the alphabet was invented only once and took over the planet. Not everywhere, actually. Probably half the planet is still using some descendant of the pictographic language.

Meaningful marks. Our claim is that icons, dots, or depictions, lines, arrows, containers, can represent ideas quite directly, and we have some empirical evidence for it.

And I’ll show you those in a minute with a detour to a minimal diagram, or could be called a minimal diagram, a line and a dot namely points representing ideas or places in a real map, and lines representing relations among them. And this minimal diagram, a link between two points, is the building block for many.

This is the internet, in 1987, you could still draw it. Family trees. Social networks. These are social networks produced by some of our participants. Phylogenetic trees. Art. This is Mark Lombardi, no longer with us, who made beautiful networks representing where the money went, and other political, economic ideas. And people scrutinized them for hours.

So, the meanings of these abstract forms are:

simple, efficient, neutral, and abstract
Line: 1D, path, link
Cross: intersection of 2 paths
Arrow: Asymmetric path
Blobs: Enclosures, area
Circles: Cycles

Some of the meanings come from Gestalt Principles, some just from gestures, some from the way we behave in the world. Like the paths on the ground are the lines that people make from place to place. So, we've done empirical work on each of these, showing that people produce them from verbal meanings, and they understand the graphic meaning from the verbal. And I’m not going to be able to go into that.

Spatial relations (graphics, gesture, speech) can be:
Literal
Metaphoric
Proximity in space represents proximity on any dimension
Place: center, periphery
Direction
- Vertical: gravity, good, strong, health, wealth
- Horizontal: cultural
  
  The general inference that people make is, proximity in space represents proximity on any dimension. We use this in gesture and language. We say we've grown closer to people. We've grown far apart. Place, centre, periphery. Again, language represents that the centre is the centre, and the periphery is the periphery.
  
  Directionality is also important. The vertical. Anything that goes up is good in general, except the economist thought inflation going up, and unemployment going up. I could say they're perverse, but it's probably because of the numbers. We often get conflicting concepts wanting to go up. But this is gravity. Fighting gravity takes strength, health, wealth. So, anything going up is usually positive, and anything going down, like hell, is negative.
  
  The horizontal is pretty neutral. It's neutral in our lives, in our motion, in our world. But there are cultural constraints on it. Writing order that are quite strong and cross-cultural.
  
  There are cultures and languages like Hebrew and Arabic written from right to left. Originally the columns in Japanese and Chinese went that way. And many of these concepts get reversed in right-to-left languages. So, just to show you, we looked at diagrams in books, all in many disciplines. And the present day, or better things go up. And I should say, in evolutionary trees it's always man. Who gave birth to man?
  
  So, another thing we've looked at, and others of you have looked at going to graphs, now to information graphics is inferences.
  
  Figure 8. Different displays -> Different inferences. Tversky, 2022.
Bars: discrete comparisons
Lines: trends

This research needs to be done more, that different displays lead to different kinds of inferences. And the reason really is the underlying visual spatial representation.
Bars separate. They say there are a bunch of "A's" in this container, and a bunch of "B's" in another container, and therefore, encourage discrete comparisons.
Lines connect showing a relationship. They say "A" and "B" share a value, but "B" is higher than "A."

And we've shown these effects in a number of different contexts. Despite what the statisticians would recommend, the visual form of the displays override it, and people tend to make discrete comparisons from bars and trends from lines. So, this kind of research is ongoing, of how different displays, depending on the visual spatial characteristics, lead people to make different inferences.

Animation. People ask me about animation. Animation is something that's relatively easy to do now.

Figure 9. Horse in Motion. Muybridge, 1877.

There's tons of research showing that people don't understand animations the way they're intended. The Muybridge experiments looking at, whether all four legs were off the ground at any point when horses were galloping, as an instance. You can't see it when horses are galloping. But the stop gallop photography showed that, yes, all four legs are, at some point, off the ground. But the art museums of the world are filled with horses legs incorrectly aligned when they're galloping. Here's an example of how hard it is to perceive.

Conveying change over time:
Animations use change in time to convey change in time
But:
- Animations are hard to perceive
- Animations show but do not explain
- Animations conceived as discrete steps

Animations are compatible with thought, in the sense that, they use change in time to convey change in time, but they're hard to perceive. They show but don't explain. And most of the things that are animated, when we talk about them, chemical processes running, climate change, we talk about it in steps. So we think about these things in discrete steps, not in this continuous way. Which, as I’ve tried to show you, is difficult anyway. I’m sure good animations can be designed, but it's trickier than some people think. And obviously, animations appeal to the eye. We're all, in one way or another, addicted to movies and music.

Comics. I want to jump to comics because they show all kinds of lovely ways of expressing meaning that are rarely seen in traditional graphics.

Whether they're infographics or graphs and charts. So, one thing comics artists can do, is use space to segment and connect time and space. Here you get an overview of the scene, and then you get the action superimposed on it, in frames on it. This was used by the ancient Aztecs, not just modern comic artist.

Figure 10. Gasoline Alley. King, 1918.

Visual anaphora. You can get from one frame to another following this red book. The "New Yorker" cover is not just showing writing, but it's a visual story and a pun.

Figure 11. New Yorker Cover. New Yorker, 2008.

Visual anaphora provides continuity over changes in space & time. So the book ends up in a trash can being burned by homeless people to keep warm, and the verbal name is "Shelf- life." But you can follow it because of the anaphora provided. Something from frame one is preserved in frame n-plus-one. And so on, so that you can follow the continuity. As for good stories and good movies, often you want to break the continuity to create suspense.

Here, following the eyes, and the pointedness of the frames allows you to go back and forth and understand the David and Goliath.

This one's a little harder. It's a beautiful book called "Signal to Noise" by Neil Gaiman and illustrated fantastically by Dave McKean.

Figure 12. Signal to Noise. McKean, 1989.

It's showing an aging director, and he's actually dying of cancer, and he's got photographs from many of his productions on the wall. You can see he's thinking. And it shifts perspective

to what he's thinking about. He's looking, and you can see the perspective switch between the man in the blue coloured shirt and what he's thinking about, as he watches, looks at all of these frames, and then finally, he can't stand it. "Stop looking at me!"

Figure 13. Signal to Noise 2. McKean, 2022.

So, he's both reviewing his life and haunted by it. And again, it's conveyed visually. Steinberg, the master, a conveying peeping toms through a mirror that reflects the guy watching from the opposite apartment.

More Steinberg. A pun, "Time Flies." More comics (only one shown).

Figure 14. Don't. Steinberg, 2969.

So here, there are so many devices, visual spatial feed metaphorical, or figures of depiction.

You have puns here, polysemy, figure/ground. I want to draw your attention to the old- fashioned telephone cord, which some of you, at least, will remember. So this woman is drawing those other people into a conspiracy by calling them on the phone. So, the phone cord is a literal phone cord, it's a metaphoric phone cord, drawing them into the same conspiracy. It also serves as the frames of the panels. So it's doing triple duty. It's something kids can get right away. Like gestures, you get it almost without thinking. It just pops out at you. So, a beautifully crafted device.

Figure/ground. You're seeing the murder, and the noise of the murder is coming through in those black figures that are superimposed on the actual scene. And the black and white drawing is emphasizing the stark brutality of the punctual murder. You light out a life in a second.

(Not illustrated) More Steinberg. "Canceling Thoughts." Again, I don't need to tell you. Visual juxtaposition. This is another Gaiman, McKean cooperation. A child is at a birthday party. You can see on the right, they're playing musical chairs. Here, the child is not interested in the birthday party. So, goes out, and talks with an uncle, who told the child the story of the Saint Valentine's Massacre by Capone, where he tied his enemies up on chairs and killed them. Shot them one by one. So, you have the chairs there with the men chained to the chairs juxtaposed with it with the birthday, which is a little bit of a brutal game because one child is eliminated at each round from musical chairs. So, that juxtaposition of chairs, again, is a stark reminder of the comparison between brutality of children, and brutality of adults.

(Not illustrated) Okay, metaphor pun. "Puppet Governments," Feininger. This is Winsor McCay, a brilliant comics artist. This is from the early 1900s, New York. Parts of New York still look like that. And this is, of course, the rat race, running on a treadmill.

(Not illustrated) This is a dream, another one of his where a dream transports the child and

then dumps the child back in bed, the way dreams end before they should end.

(Not illustrated) This is onomatopoeia rhythmicity. It's showing a chase. And by putting the panels on a diagonal, showing the speed of the chase. "Coming out of the frame." The first pig, whose house was blown up, comes out of the frame, and talks to this second pig inside the frame, and says, "Get out of there. It's safe out here." And then, the pigs all go berserk.

They get out of the frames. And the frames are on the floor, and they're stamping on them. So, this version of the three little pigs is a riot. And again, kids can get it.

I’m going to end with another Steinberg. Steinberg drawing himself. Again, a visual way of understanding drawing portraits and so forth. So, I’ve raced through a lot, and I haven't covered everything that Frode wanted me to talk about.

Q&A

Brandel Zachernuk: Hi, Barbara. Thank you. This is brilliant. I love the fresh ground and the emphasis on the text here. So, my question is not about animations per see, but about progressively recomposed images accompanied by illustration, via the speech of the illustrator. The actual drawing of lines along with narration. Is that something that you've ever studied, or that you would expect to have any particular effect from, in contrast to seeing the completed image of its entirety?

Barbara Tversky: That's what we do in classrooms, right? I mean, that was the oldstown, I know I have many mathematician friends who still insist on going on the board as they speak. And watching it unfold, and the rhythm with which it unfolds, and the verbal accompaniment at the same time, I think is very effective. So, what you're pointing to is one way that animations can be made more effective. They unfold in time with narration and explanation. And they add a bit of drama. What's going to come next? So, I think that's great. And at the back of my head, when I was thinking about this is: What can you do on text? And it will amplify it. And that is exactly the sort of thing that one can do. And it is like a comic, combining language, and symbols, and sketches, and so forth, all at once. There are beautiful examples on the web. Just lovely examples of people using that technique. And I’ve been teaching comics for probably 20 years, on and off, not quite. And I see a younger generation, growing up with that medium, and drawing and writing at the same time. So, I think people will get adept and talented at doing that, at illustrating what they think, while they're thinking it. And I think that's just great. It gives people an extra way of expressing themselves that's quite poetic, or can be quite poetic, but it's also wonderful explanations. So, yeah. I’m a real fan of that.

Brandel Zachernuk: I’m curious, have you ever seen Ken Perlin's work at NYU around at being able to draw in Virtual Reality?

Barbara Tversky: I was an early fan. And Ken, as a friend, and I was an early fan of his, exactly on chalk talk. And in fact he and I and Steven Feiner, whom I work with, and Hiroshi Ishii at MIT, the four of us put in grant, after grant, after grant to expand, and NSF didn't like it, and didn't like it, and didn't like it. So, a real disappointment for all of us. Because classroom teaching that way is, again, natural and what Ken's animations did is, you're talking about a pendulum, and then it could animate the pendulum depending on the length of the string, and so forth. So, being able to speak, and use mathematical mathematics driven animations, I thought was super! Just a super way of understanding. So, yes.

Bob Horn: Oh, hi Barbara. Of course, the question I will ask will not be a surprise to you. I’m very interested in, and wonder the degree to which you've done research on the textual

elements intimately integrated with the spatial elements. That is most of what you've just presented has been the spatial aspects of the kind of visual language communication that we are all using. In addition, the diagrams and comics rely, it seems as much as maybe, 50/50 or even more sometimes, on the words, and how the words are integrated with the visual elements. And that's been something that I’ve been very interested in, particularly in diagramming. So, I’m wondering if you've gotten your research to go in that direction, to analyse, and find out how text is integrated with the visual elements?

Barbara Tversky: We've done a lot of work that skirts around that. We've shown that you can go back and forth between visual descriptions of maps, or many kinds of diagrams, and the visual spatial. That the same underlying concepts are driving both of them. But that the visual form, for example, root maps is usually not for everybody. But usually a more effective way of communicating that. It's a long story. But I agree with you that in many comics, what's going on is in the words. I think they're poor comics when they're talking heads. I talk about them as talking heads. If you look at Larry Gonick's science and history, if you look at his comics, they're cheap, 10, 12 dollars each. They're absolutely wonderful. His book on statistics is used as a textbook in many places. At one time, even Stanford. And he's a neighbour in San Francisco, and his books are absolutely fabulous. He was all about dissertation mathematics at Harvard. A self-taught cartoonist. And he began doing, essentially, visual spatial textbooks on different forms of math, science, history, sex, environment. He's got bunches of them. He always works with a domain expert. We've appeared together on many occasions. And once I had the temerity, stupidity to ask him," Larry, what do you put in pictures? What do you decide to put in pictures? And what do you decide to put in words?" So, he's very tall, I’m not, and he kind of looked down at me, with his full height and said, "Barbara, I do everything in pictures. What I can't do in pictures, I do in words." And he's incredibly inventive of what he does in pictures. I have my students go through one of his books, they each choose one, and they go through looking for the visual spatial devices, and every year they come up with things that I haven't thought of. They see things I don't. And it's usually the visual spatial telling the story. So he's an excellent example of that. There are others. And Scott McCloud and his book "Understanding Comics" is a gem. It's a gem about stories and narratives, not just about visual stories. But he does talk about the roles of language. And here you'd have to add symbols, like arrows and mathematical symbols. You have to add in comics the way the font, the size of the font, and all the squiggles that are added that give you information about movement, and mood, and smell, and sound. So, you can enrich the depictions in so many inventive ways. And what I’ve been trying to do is urge people who make charts, and graphs, and infographs for science books, to learn those techniques. And, as I say, I’m just pleased to watch younger people. I have a

sample of eight grandchildren, and the grandchildren of many of my friends, and watch them latch onto graphic books, and see the graphic books that are doing so much in the depictions besides text boxes, and I’m very optimistic about people coming up with really creative ways to do visual storytelling. So, long answer. Sorry.

Ben Shneiderman: Thank you, Barbara for a wonderful, intense, movement through all the space of these wonderful ideas. I think it aligned very well with Bob Horn's visual language thinking, which has been an inspiration for me as well. But one of the charms of your book was that, it went beyond the spatial and the visual, to the idea of mind in motion. And could you say more about dance and body movement? You talked about gesture, you talk about hands and how people communicate, express themselves, learn by being in motion. Tell us more about that side of the story.

Barbara Tversky: So, it means speech is in motion. And speech is accompanied by prosody. I emphasize certain words, and de-emphasize others. I can give you my mood by, I can sigh, I can sigh short or long, and that's motion, and it's just in our voices, and it's communicating so much more than just the words on page. Although, text again is words on page. And there are ways of amplifying text by putting "dot, dot, dot, dot," that capture some of that. And sure, our bodies indicate, I mean, I said gravity, if I’m feeling good, I’m standing straight and strong, and if I’m in a depressed mood, I’m down, and we can pick that up in others in a second, especially people we know. We can pick it up from hearing their feet behind us. What kind of a mood they're in. Who it is. We know these cues. Again, they're active, motion cues to people. They're very simple, not as complicated as dance. But really creative, and wonderful dancers, and choreographers can create absolutely amazing displays of emotion, human interaction, human non-interaction, individual feelings from the way they do dance.

They're uncanny. And you see that in theatre, they often hire choreographers to orchestrate how people are moving, and talking, moving their arm, agitated or smooth. So, yes. Huge amounts of human meaning gets conveyed through the motion of the body.

Ben Shneiderman: I do think really that deserves on a much-expanded part, just the idea of walking together, being in a forest, moving forward, sailing on an ocean, flying through the air, walking up a mountain. All of those to me, they're not just physical experiences, they're cognitive experiences as well. And they enrich us. And I found your book really opened my mind and thinking to the realization of, how much the body plays a role. Which your book adds so much to enrich the dimensions of analysis, which have been, as you point out, largely linguistic moving towards spatial, and visual, and maybe auditory. But the idea of moving towards body motion that was really, to me, a highlight.

Barbara Tversky: Thank you. I was limited in the book by what there was research on. This

is the problem of being a scientist. You don't want to go too much beyond research. I use a lot of examples, but the examples are all founded in research findings. But I couldn't go off the way until now. But really, if you think about it, every organism, even a virus, needs to move in space to survive. And the basic movement is approach or avoid. And those are replete with emotion. You approach things that you're attracted to, that might do you good, that you want. You avoid things that have negative valence. So that, from the get-go, movement is for survival. Even grasses have to move toward the sun or away from rain in order to survive.

Even things rooted in the ground. So, we all have to move in space to survive. The basic movement is approach or avoid. And those come with emotions, which I think underlies some of Damasio's claims, although he's got brain there too, without emotion nothing happens. And emotion and motion in English and other romance languages have the same root. I don't know about Germanic, or Chinese, or other languages. But they do have the same root. And we talk about being moved as an emotive response. So, I do think anything that has to do with life, really does derive from motion in space.

Ben Shneiderman: Exactly. But look at how they impact on design, or even the "Zoom" in front of us. Some people have just their text name. Some people have a frozen image. Others are live and animated. I like to be Zoomed standing up, so I can be freer to move around. And I think I express myself better, and I can reach out, or I feel the other person better when they are animated, as well. Anyway, thank you.

Barbara Tversky: Yeah, absolutely. I’m frozen in place in a classroom, I can't stand. But when I move around the classroom, I’m going the whole width, and sometimes the length of the classroom. So, I can't do that on "Zoom," it drives people crazy. So, I plant myself in a chair. And when I’m listening to "Zoom," it's often on my phone, walking. So, a longer story. "Zoom" has advantages and disadvantages. Like anything.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned the question of other languages like Germanic languages. In Norwegian, "følese" is the word for feeling. But that can be, you can touch, it's also touch feeling, as well as an emotional feeling. But the funny thing is that, "bevege seg," which means movement, is also what you would say if you were emotionally moved by something.

Barbara Tversky: Yeah, nice. I should ask my students who are in Japan, or China, or Kazakhstan, or Malaysia what their languages do. Yeah, thanks.

Peter Wasilko: Yes. Have you given any thoughts to the evolution and interplay of note- taking? And I was recently reading "Lines of Thought," (INDISTINCT) typesetting and textbook design. And also, do you have any thoughts about interactive fiction systems?

Barbara Tversky: I don't really know much about the history of textbooks. I do know there are a huge number of experiments trying to compare text and diagrams or graphics in one way. And many of them are unsatisfactory, because you can have good text, or poor text, and you can have good graphics, or poor graphics. And I think people in the info design graphics community have been developing standards, or best practices. For good graphics is complicated, because it depends on your audience, and what you're trying to convey. You can't have absolute principles like you can for font size. And there's a little bit of work on textbook design and what it should look like in good text and poor text. But the range, in both cases, seems so great. And studying it would take an historian of sorts, to know the evolution, the development of those things. And it would have to go across cultures. What happened in the East, as well as what's happened here. So, I think that's way beyond my expertise. but I don't think I answered all the parts of the question. Probably I can't answer them.

Frode Hegland: The second part was on interactive fiction.

Barbara Tversky: Ah, interactive fiction. I don't know whether people have done research on it. I know my kids, who are now parents themselves, loved it as a kid. They weren't around when I was a kid. But my kids loved it. And then, of course, the computer games that are built on storytelling. People get incredibly involved in. So, probably those designers know a great deal. They have a lot of heuristics and rules of thumb for that. So, the one kind of discourse I didn't put up is conversation. And that grounds interactivity. And conversation isn't like a lecture, it's two or more people speaking and no one can dominate. As I’m dominating now, in a normal conversation no one can dominate. What you get in that kind of interactivity also, is little bits of information. Bite size. That you can consume, and it arouses a question, and then there's another bit of information. And interactive graphics do that. They allow you to involve yourself in it, in little bits, where you can get background where you need it, or where you want it. Not all of us want, you know, there's that old joke about a book about penguins that told me more about penguins than I ever wanted to know. So, different people will want different amounts of information. And that interactivity allows me to have a conversation with a graphic, where I’m asking bite-sized questions, and getting bite-sized answers that lead to something else. So, I’m building up my own knowledge that way. And I think the interactive fiction can do that. And also add the suspense to it. We started at one point trying to compare comics with traditional graphics, or traditional graphics plus text. Too many things were going on at the same time. Too many uncontrolled variables. And as a cognitive scientist, it's those crucial variables that we're after. When you're a designer, or an educator, it doesn't matter to you what's doing it. The combination is probably doing it. It's in the interaction, amongst those elements. So again, then finding guidelines for creating good

ones becomes difficult, because there are so many moving parts. I mean, like building a city. But nevertheless, we can judge which ones are more and less effective and why. There are times when I want to lecture or a book. There are times when I want that interactivity. Again, I’m not sure I’m getting at your question, but.

Alan Laidlaw: Sure. I’ve got so many questions. Thank you so much for giving this talk. And I had the childish desire, which I still may succumb to, of showing off every reference you made. That's somewhere behind me because I’m a nerd. But that's great, I used to be a cartoonist, it's where I got started and a lot of that came from reading ‘Understanding Comics’ and that was my first entry to like, “Oh, this person thinks like me.” And I’ve never had these thoughts. But enough of that because could go on with many questions. So instead, I’ll throw one that just popped up while you're giving the talk. This may be out there, and feel free to dismiss it. The thinking in context of cave paintings, and sort of where we got started in scribing. The commonality, seems to me, that it's always the physical act of resistance against a surface. And so, I’m wondering about that in context to where a theme has been trying to probe into VR, what that'll be like? Is there any research around how that resistance, that pushing against something to create is different than, or I don't know, is it a class?

Because with VR, we could say at least, there's nothing to push against at the moment. But in dance, there's also nothing to... Well, there are motions, there's creation that doesn't involve resistance exactly, not in the same sense of pushing against something to. Does any of that make sense and is there any work on it?

Barbara Tversky: Yeah, thank you. And I could probably learn a great deal from you, as a cartoonist. I absolutely agree with you. I don't know about research, but it's one of the complaints that people in architecture schools have, that people no longer know how to draw. That drawing on pixels is just very different from using a pencil, or a pen, or a brush. And artists, and calligraphers, and so forth talk about what the thing is, how it's held in their hand, what are the motions they need to do. Cooks. Any of you who cook knows you have certain knives that work well with your hands, and others that don't. Resistance and dance is gravity. And your own body, what it can do. will it stretch enough or not? Does it have the strength? So, that feedback to the body is huge.

Alan Laidlaw: I guess I put it... Sorry to reframe that, the aspect of us versus surface is what I was kind of trying to... The creation always seems to have a surface that's separate from us. Anyway, continue.

Barbara Tversky: Yeah. I mean, I’m trying to generalize that to resistance, and feedback to the body, and the feel that it is when you're dealing with a surface. And again, different surfaces. Just writing, paper makes a difference. Which kind of paper you're writing on? Or

doing charcoal on, or watercolours, all of that. And that, I think, it's more than the resistance, it's the subtlety of your hand movement, and wrist movement, and our movement on that surface, what it takes. And in calligraphy, they practice for years the strokes, and how they make them, and how they twist the brush, and the kind of paper. So, all that interaction with the medium, what it gives your hand. And artists, I worked with a bunch of artists interested in drawing, and some of them had done doctoral thesis, and one of them looked at professional artists, and accomplished artists, and novices on drawing, how much they're looking, and how much they're drawing, and what are the time spans of the interaction. And in artists, it's much longer. They can look and draw a lot. And look and draw a lot. Novices are going back and forth. So, for artists the knowledge is already in their hand of how to translate what they see, this is life drawing, into their hands. And they talk about it as a conversation between the eye, and the hand, and the mind. And if you try to get them to talk words at the same time, they can't do it. The words get in the way. It's a visual, spatial, motor conversation that the words get in the way. And architects say the same. They can talk afterward. Explaining what they were doing from a video, but while they're doing it, they're deeply engrossed in this feedback loop. Does that align with your experience?

Alan Laidlaw: Yeah, to play off of that, that's actually great. And got me thinking that now we have keyboards as our main interface. Which is a sad state compared to the richness of the ideal, the nostalgia, for calligraphy and whatnot. And yet, we have translated our focus into the simple clicking of buttons at a repeated pace and moving a mouse around. We can still get to that flow state, right? Coders do it, etc. So, that gives me hope in the VR space that, even though we wouldn't have a surface to push against to create, we would still find a way to translate it through, I guess, just mainly the feedback, and the style of feedback travesty. The style of feedback would still come through, and we would still have that feeling. I was just wondering if there was something haptic, like in the way that we have gestures. I think Darwin said that, "Every culture does this." Some version of this to say, "I don't know." And if there was something about the creation of man that is pushing against something, and that equals the brain does something different then?

Barbara Tversky: Sure. I mean, the feedback, and the kind of feedback, and the mode of interactivity, and some of that, I mean, VR is trying to add the kind of haptics feedback. and you certainly need it for surgery. And the VR surgery does try to add haptics, because anything you do, as a surgeon, you're relying on that. And anything a cook is making. And it's how it feels, you need that feedback. And the interactivity that comes from touching and moving, you need it for taking care of babies. When you pick up a baby ant the baby is tense or relaxed, you feel it in your hands right away. So, yeah. We need that level of interactivity. Smell is another thing. When I cook I’m relying on the smells to know, I got three or four

pots going and I’m relying on the smells to know, "Is this butter about to burn? So, I better lower the heat." Or "Is the rice bubbling too much? Better lower." I’m monitoring those activities with many senses. And some of it, we become completely unaware of. We just respond. The way walking, right? Walking or running. We're not aware of all the movements. Or typing. Once we had to be aware, but by now we don't, it's automatic. And there are benefits and costs to that, as well.

Frode Hegland: I just wanted to say, I think that interaction was really nice to hear because, for so many decades, we have had this nonsense that interaction should be invisible. They should absolutely not be invisible, depending on when you need them. If you're walking on the ground, as you said, even with shoes you can tell what kind of ground you're walking on. That is really useful, especially now in winter, when it may be icy. So please, let's highlight how we use our bodies and interactions. That was wonderful.

Luc Beaudoin: Hi, Barbara. I’ve got a number of background projects. They're just background projects in spatial cognition. I’m associated with Aaron Sloman in Britain. I don't know if you know him. He has a project on spatial cognition, the evolution of spatial cognition from an AI. Aaron Sloman, you know him? There are two Aaron Sloman, one is the psychology guy, and the other one is the philosopher.

Barbara Tversky: No, I... The psychology guy was a student.

Luc Beaudoin: No, this one is technically a philosopher, but he is an AI person. But anyway, I’ll jump to something that's not with Aaron’s project, but another interest of mine is mnemonics. I’ve been doing visual-spatial mnemonics myself from a scientific perspective, I miss the beginning of your talk but I take it you've argued for the primacy of motion.

Basically, motion coming before language and evolution. And there are various arguments for that. So, that makes a lot of sense. I see, as you do, the spatial cognition, spatial and movement cognition being fundamental. So, as such, I would think that for mnemonics it would be helpful. So I, myself, when I’m memorizing lists, you know that lists are the hardest thing to memorize. But if you can turn them into a visual-spatial sequence. And I’m not a dancer, so I’m not very good at the visual-spatial motion thing. But I found that if I can use a gestural mnemonic, then I can remember these lists. So I remember, Jordan Peterson has these 12 rules in his first book and I thought, Okay. Well, how do I memorize that?" I'll turn it into a little bit of a dance and the whole thing came out within two repetitions. It was quite powerful. But I haven't actually delved into the science of this. But it's something I thought, "Well, if nobody's done this, I want to do it." Are you aware of research on using gestures for mnemonics? For remembering? Apart from drawing, I know that there's research

on drawing, how that helps remember stuff. Actually, I’m more interested in imagined gestures, because I don't think you need to do it. We know that in sports, athletes often will imagine themselves doing things and that helps them execute the behaviour and practice. So, there's your question. Imagine gestural mnemonics.

Barbara Tversky: So, a visual practice, or visual-spatial practice, visual motor practice for divers, golfers, or whatever does help. It helps mainly in sequencing. It doesn't help in the fine aspects of the motion. Real practice is better than imagining practice. But imagine practice is also effective in the absence of real practice. You can do it on the train. I remember, it has happened to me several times, on the New York subway, I see singers with scores in front of them, and they're imagining the music. So, the part of the method you're describing is one of the oldest in the world. It's the method of loci, that was invented by the Greeks, Romans to remember their long orations. They would imagine themselves on a walk through the Agora marketplace and put a portion of their oration at each of those places and then imagine that. So it links things together in an organized way. You still have to form that association between the place in the marketplace, and what you want to remember. The same would be true of gestures. When I was learning Latin ages ago, there was a whole set of what essentially were cheerleader exercises for remembering "amo, amas, amat," and you could go through it for real, or you could go through it gesturally. So, those things can work for some people, and it's usually for meaningless information. Meaningful information it's better to link through the meaning, but images will work. This famous mnemonist beautiful book by Luria, "The Mind of a Mnemonist," he certainly remembered himself going through walks and placing images. Again, you could place gestures in the same way. I mean, it can all be effective, what works for one person. And people rediscover these mnemonic devices. Every 10 years, write a book, it's a bestseller, and 10 years later, the field is ripe for it again. Diet books tend to come out a lot faster. I think more people are worried about their waistlines than their memories. But there are those advice books and they would include motion and gestures as well. We've done a number of studies, many on people learning complex material, like in how a car break works, or an environment. And as they're learning, they're reading text, they're gesturing. And the gestures are making a model of what they're learning. So, they're putting down dots and lines for the descriptions of the environments. And when they go to recall, they make those same movements again. So, it's clearly helping them recall as well. And if they gesture both at learning and at recall, they remember much better. And these are spontaneous, the people aren't even aware, really, that they're gesturing. We don't tell them to gesture. The gestures come from their body. Everybody learns them in different ways. Gestures, unlike words, aren't decomposable. And you could see that with conductors. You go and watch the same concert with different conductors. They're gesturing very

differently. The orchestra can respond in similar ways. So, that visual-spatial language of the conductor can be quite different. We went to the opera two nights ago, the guy was dancing up and down and he was a joy to watch. And there's research showing audiences respond better to conductors who jump up and down. There's a famous video you can find of Leonard Bernstein conducting, I think Mozart, some classical piece, with his eyebrows. He had very expressive eyebrows. Nothing but his eyebrows. Now, they were well-practiced. But (INDISTINCT) and if you want to watch a really gymnastic conductor, watch him. I haven't seen him in years but he was a master. And there were (INDISTINCT) using the motion in very complex ways to guide the music. And it makes a huge difference.

Luc Beaudoin: Okay, can I squeeze in another question? I’ve often thought people who learn pictorial languages, or languages with calligraphy, that they would basically have better memory for concrete words, as well, because they can actually go through the gesture in their head, so it kind of adds to it. Do you know of any research on that?

Barbara Tversky: There's research on having more than one code for memory. If you have a verbal code and a visual code, you're going to be better at remembering something, because you have more retrieval cues. And if you add a motor code, which could be gestural, you'll have even more. If you get too many you might get confused, and it might be hard to construct them. But having more retrieval cues for the same bit of memory does work. So, drawing, imagining what something looks like, imagining how you would interact with it, all of those things can enhance memory, and there is plenty of research on that.

Luc Beaudoin: But not specifically on people who know calligraphy, or who do calligraphy? Barbara Tversky: Some of that is going to be content-specific. Radiologists, who are trained to look for one kind of thing, like breast cancer, might not be good at broken bones. So, some

of it is going to be quite content-specifically. The particular patterns of pixels that tell you

that there's cancer, are going to be different from the particular patterns of pixels that are going to tell you it's a break. So, the movements for calligraphy are to make characters, they aren't to make images of people. Although, plenty of calligraphers could do both. Some of it is going to be content-specific, and some of it is going to be more general. And there you need to look at the specifics to know the answer.

Luc Beaudoin: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure meeting you. I cited you in my 1994 thesis, I counted four times.

Barbara Tversky: Okay. Thank you, thank you.

Brendan Langen: Hi, Barbara. Thanks so much for the talk, this is really neat. And as a funny aside, I’ve recommended your book to pretty much all of my friends who've recently become parents. I think there's so much in the first few chapters, where you just lay out how

children learn, and how to create trust. You mentioned some of that. I’m really curious about how some of your findings can come to life in some of our software tools? So, there's quite a movement going on in some of the knowledge creative tool space. You can think of things like "Notion," or maybe "Sigma," or even "Roam" research and other notebooks. What opportunities do you see for embodied cognition and spatial thinking in our knowledge tools?

Barbara Tversky: Oh, so many. And then, they'd be specific. But thank you for the recommendation. I keep thinking and saying to publishers, "Somebody needs to write a book for new parents, and what to watch for." From new-borns, because until children speak, I think parents aren't aware of the huge cognitive leaps that children are... Because they're just too subtle. And if you learn what to look for, it adds to the already thrill of having a baby.

And I don't really have the tools and the background to do that, but other people do. Yeah. I think there are so many opportunities for adding visual-spatial and embodied, what your body is doing. I mean, gestural interfaces have already done that. They've ruined my thumb. And I take pity on the people that have been exercising their thumbs from very young ages, because of what's going to happen to your thumb when you get to be my age. And voice interfaces may help them, but they have other disadvantages. And sometimes people ask me, I have worked with people in HCI, and computer graphics, in AR, VR, and I’m really enthusiastic about all those media. Some of the work we did with AR was trying to make people's interactions within finding their way in an environment, or repairing, or assembling something, as natural as finding your keys and opening a lock. So, there were ways of guiding your body to the right place. First, by having a virtual tunnel to guide your body to the right place, and then guide your head so that your eyes are looking at the right place, and then guide your hand to where you should make the motions. And then, it becomes as natural as doing something that you've been doing a thousand times other than doing something new. And so, that's one example, but I think there is a huge number, and I’m really excited about what are the things you guys can do, and how they can make them more natural and comprehensible on the input side to people. Maybe you have thoughts. Because there are specifics you're working on.

Brendan Langen: Yeah. Well, you just kind of hit on something that might make sense. There's been some talk in the chat about these findings for education. And I can almost imagine a crossover with a tool like "Figma," a design tool for early-stage designers. And if you can guide them through the process, that is helping them create something that's more stimulating or sound in its interaction design. I could see that being a huge advance. Really curious to keep seeing where this research leads. Thank you so much, I appreciate the time.

Barbara Tversky: Yeah. Probably in the late 80s, early 90s, there was a Shakespeare scholar

at Stanford, who was designing something that would stage Shakespeare for students. And that was prescient but close to what you're saying. And, yeah. I think you can go a long way. One problem is scale. And in there, maybe VR is better because you can get things at scale. I mean, same with architecture. But, yeah. Tools that can allow me to imagine things that would take forever to create. And therefore, create better. Would be phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal.

Brendan Langen: That's really interesting. Almost like bringing along a "now" sentiment into the mix, where something that takes so long to build, is often outside of the reach of what we can comprehend. That's really neat.

Barbara Tversky: And on education, I want to just put in a small plug for some research we did with Junior High Science Students. We had them learn molecular bonding, and then half were asked to make visual explanations, and half were asked to do the normal thing you do on a test. Make or take notes someone raised at verbal explanations. And first, we tested them after they learned it, which was several days in the classroom. And the two groups were equal, we divided them into two groups. After creating it, all the groups improved without new learning. So, the process of making an explanation consolidates the material, and makes you question, "How could this have happened for an explanation?" So, both groups do better. But the group that made the visual explanation did way better than the group that made a verbal explanation. So, this is natural for science, because science is so visual-spatial, chemical bonding. But their diagrams were so different. Some had sharks grabbing electrons. Some had stick people giving them. They were adorable. And you can do it for history, you could do it for a Shakespeare play. What are the relationships of all the characters? What happens over time? I discovered my father's old version of "Anna Karenina" and I stole it from him many years ago. He didn't mind. The first thing it has is the family tree. He made it to understand all the familial relations amongst the characters, and then all their nicknames.

Because Russians always have tons of nicknames. So that helped me reading it, and he made this. My kids doing "Dungeons & Dragons" years ago, the first thing they did was make a map. Again, from language. And that helped them with keeping track of where they were going in the game. So, education. Yeah. Creating visual-spatial representations of women's drawings is one form, they're easy, they're cheap. But doing it in a computer interface might work as well. Sometimes I ask, "What does all the technology add over pencil and paper?" And I think it's an important question to ask.

Brendan Langen: Without a doubt. Well, thank you so much for the exploration there.

Peter Wasilko: Yes. Do you use any mind mapping tools? And if so, how do you approach building a mind map?

Barbara Tversky: I’m sorry, what was that? How do I put what on a map?

Frode Hegland: He asked if you use any mind mapping tools and if so, how do you go about building a mind map.

Barbara Tversky: It probably depends on the content. I mean, you're going to start with a network of sorts. The trouble with the network is usually that the lines aren't labelled. The relationships, you're just labelling that there is an association between "A" and "B," or "B" and "C." And you probably want to do something more demanding, and specify what the relationship is, and then you can cluster things. But it really, in many ways, depends on the content. And you can see those of us who remember learning sentence diagramming, which was essentially a mind map, and I loved it. Or logic. You could visualize in one way or another. So, to some extent, it depends on the concept. But I think, just making networks, you want to go beyond that and talk about what is the nature of the lines. The representations. Are they inclusion? What are they? And then, go about grouping them perhaps, clustering them along common relations. And then you can go hierarchically like a phylogenetic tree. And even a phylogenetic tree has been the basis for a great deal of controversy in biology. Where do different creatures belong? Is there another life form? And of course, one eukaryote and whatever, it was long after I learned biology. So, that particular way of visualizing really helped. Bill Bechtel did great work in an actual laboratory, I think looking at diurnal rhythms. And they were diagramming for themselves almost every day what they were finding. How did they do uncertainty? This is a big issue and a big question. They put question marks. So, they put in relations, the best they knew, and where they didn't know things, there were question marks that meant, "That's an open problem, let's look at it." It really depends a great deal on content. But certainly, there is research showing that kind of mind mapping helps people organize their thinking, and learn, and communicate.

Frode Hegland: Thank you very much. So, I have a question. And that is based on my current passion, or what I think is a realization, but I may be wrong. I feel that, within five years, we'll be living a lot inside VR, AR, those kinds of spaces. And that's kind of a subset of the bigger cyberspace. But a lot of this seems to be about being disembodied, walking around with an avatar that's like a Lego situation. I know, Brandel, I see you're going crazy there. So, my question for you, Barbara, is: How do you see VR with full-body immersion where we really use our senses to the full, in the context, not of necessarily social interaction and gaming and play, but more in the relationship of work?

Barbara Tversky: Five years seems to me, very optimistic. Partly because people get fatigued in AR situations. I get fatigued. There is an uncertainty about moving around when you know you're not really in that space. And so, a lot of that needs to be worked through.

And like "Zoom," they're going to be advantages and disadvantages. And we'll see them as we go. The... I’m blocking on his name at Stanford, the guy doing VR in social situations. There are going to be, I mean, we're going to have to do it. There are cross-national teams doing design, and you can't fly everybody all the time to be together. So, it's going to happen. Yeah. Jeremy Bailenson, who's done wonderful work on social interactions, and those might be the most important for people. If we found that the internet was used to send emails to friends, children, and other people that we love, that was an early use of a massive. They're going to be early uses of VR to be with people we love. And "Zoom" isn't sufficient. I still can't have a grandchild sit on my lap and feel the closeness. But I do think they're going to be increasing uses, they're going to be difficulties encountered and some of them will be overcome. I doubt that we'll all be living in the metaverse, although again, I could be wrong. You need to talk to the 20-somethings that are already playing multi-person games. And it is a bit of a drug. And Yuval Harari imagines that AI is going to replace huge numbers of humans in the way that, the rest of us who are useless will exist as in this metaverse where we'll be, and it sounds a little bit, to me, when those people talk about it, like somebody's conception of heaven. You can have avatars of all the people you love. But then your interaction with them might not be taking place in their metaverse. How do you reconcile them? What age will they be? So, there are all kinds of cognitive and engineering ideas that need to be worked out.

Frode Hegland: I’m not going to let you get away that easily, Barbara. And first of all, Brandel is up after me, and he has an extensive, deep understanding of a lot of this. But let's forget about the "Oculus" and that kind of current stuff. And let's forget about timeline. Let's say that we have a future where we can, like the "Holodeck" in "Star Trek," we can go into it, whether we're wearing something or not, this is very secondary. But there are two things that we can change. The external stuff, the environment, and the things we interact with. But also ourselves. So, even though we do take advantage of all this VR, with our movable hands, a movable head, and all of that good stuff. With your deep knowledge of the human body and the human mind, and completely free of technical constraints, being completely fantasy, what kind of situations, or opportunities, or issues do you see for how we work together on important problems?

Barbara Tversky: First you talked about the individual, then interpersonal. As an individual, I could imagine situations, interactions, environments, objects I’m trying to create. I can imagine them. But until I put them in the world in some way, my imagination isn't complete. And this is why designers draw. They can't hold the whole thing in their head. So, they put it down with tokens or a VR in the world. And that gives you feedback. It makes you see things. It expands the mind in ways that your mind can't do. So, that power of technology is

awesome as ways of expanding the mind, so that I can create better fiction, better buildings, better interactions with people. I can imagine role-play. So taking the things that we already use for augmenting our imagination, like role-playing, like creating prototypes, scripts, stage designs, whatever it is, and turning them into technology, and making it easy to do those things, and explore them, could be awesome. In molecules, combining them in just games. A deep mind has changed the game of Chess and the game of Go. People are now interacting with those machines, studying the games that AlphaGo can do. So, I think that is mind- blowing, absolutely mind-blowing. The social interactions, I don't know how much we want to replace them. Now, there are times when I wish I had interacted with somebody differently. But I can't redo it. I can redo it in my mind, but I can't redo it for real. So, the social interactions, it seems to me, have to be in real-time. Space, we can change. We can all go to Machu Picchu together. Explore it together. Enjoy it together. But we can't replay and redesign. If I had an avatar of someone I’m interacting with, and I could interact with that avatar in different ways, and try out different things, that might help me in my interactions in the future. But I can't replay a real interaction in the way that I can replay a fiction. So, am I getting closer to what...

Frode Hegland: It's wonderful, and very deep what you had to say. Very unexpected, which is, of course, what I was hoping for. Thank you very much.

Brandel Zachernuk: I’m trying to decide which of the two questions I want to ask. I’d love to get you to go to both but I’ll start with just one. Have you done any work on the cognitive differences between writing script with a pen, versus typing, versus dictation for the purpose of producing text? What sort of internal cognitive impact there is in any distinctions that you would draw? Or do you see them as equivalent?

Barbara Tversky: Again, I would think it would depend on the person's adeptness with each of those and the content. One of my former students, Danny Oppenheimer, who does very innovative research, tried to show that taking notes in classes with a computer wasn't worse than writing. And the work didn't replicate. Unfortunately, that happens to a great deal of our research, and I think the failure to replicate means, probably, it works sometimes for some people, and it isn't a general phenomenon. But what I thought, at the time, is when you write it takes more time, so it makes you summarize. And when you type, the temptation to type down words in a row way is probably not the best way of learning. You want to wait, summarize, write down little telegraphic notes. And the other thing that writing allows you to do is array them in space conceptually. In that sense, I think that could help, but it depends, really, on what you want to learn. So, as a learning tool, the only research I know of is Danny Oppenheimer’s, and he did find writing was better than typing on a computer. And there, I

think, it really does have to do with how you attend to the lecture. But that work didn't quite replicate. But I have a feeling that those... I’m now in an ed school, I was in a psych department where you try to get the minimal features that are accounting for something, and in ed school, you throw the whole kitchen sink at something and you don't care about what works. But nevertheless, people are asked, Are animations good? Is writing good versus typing? And people want a blanket answer, and then we say, "It depends." And people don't like that answer. But I’m afraid that is probably closer to the truth. I mean, we're living in a Covid world now, and it's how do you give advice, and when the target keeps changing, and the disease keeps changing, and people are left with the old ones, and then complaining they can't give coherent, clear advice. So then, they toss everything out. Which is the wrong thing too, because there is good advice, it just keeps changing.

Brandel Zachernuk: Douglas Engelbart had a famous thought experiment of attaching a pencil to a brick and calling that a "de-augmentation" because of how much more difficult it would be to write with a whole brick on a pencil. But it occurs to me that, while it would be definitely slower, the words that you would tend to write, as a consequence, would be significantly more momentous and important for you. Only because you remember the effort that would be expended in it.

Barbara Tversky: Right. Any learning method depends on that. How much are you putting into it to learn it? And you're going to put different things in depending on how you're going to be tested. How you're going to use the information? How you're going to retrieve it? So, you want your encoding to anticipate your retrieval. What information are you going to need and when? And that's a more subtle set of considerations. I’m afraid I’m exhausting people.

Frode Hegland: Quite the opposite. I have two questions. But first, I’d like to ask, we have a few new people here today, Karin and Lorenzo. Have you got any questions or comments?

Karin Hibma: I am just typing my goodbye now. This was brilliant, Barbara. Thank you so much. And thank you for the invite, Frode. I am a name or a language creator, and I’m always thinking forward. So, it really helps me to understand the antecedence of these kinds of understandings. And I love the aspect of mapping as a place locator for putting words together. And thank you. I am still absorbing. So, really brilliant.

Frode Hegland: Karin, you said you are a language creator. First of all, I obviously pronounce your name completely wrong. What is your preferred way of saying your first name?

Karin Hibma: I’m Karin Hibma. People get the Himba, and there's a tribe in Africa. But that's not me, as you can. Hibma is a region in Northern Netherlands, a lot of last names with ‘ma’s’ in then. I think probably means ‘by the ocean,’ ‘by the sea.’ But everything in the

Netherlands is. I’m responsible, with my husband who's deceased now, for naming ‘Kindle’ and ‘TiVo’ and a few other little things in the world. And I work with companies doing strategic identities. So, a lot of times we're either creating names for new products or helping them define their language and their story, to get from where they are, to where they want to be. Which, of course, goes with (INDISTINCT) and the wonderful concepts you've done. So, I don't have your book, but I’m certainly going to be getting it and studying it to cover the cover. And the "Babies Build Toddler's" book that I mentioned is really brilliant. It's a Montessori method, but very often, as I think Brendan said, “New parents don't really understand the math.” I mean, they're suddenly given this human being, which we don't realize is going to come to its full awareness over a period of 25 years. And really being able to have some kind of guide rails for parents to be able to actualize that, is pretty wonderful.

So, thank you.

Frode Hegland: Karin, I have to ask you with that amazing background, if you would like to consider writing a piece for The Future of Text Volume III coming out this year?

Karin Hibma: I would love to. I am the worst writer, Frode. I like to interact, but I find, sometimes, putting words down... But send me a note at karin@cronan.com.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, we met through Twitter. Thank you. We met through Twitter so we'll continue there. But what you say there's very interesting because Barbara was talking, just a few minutes ago, about writing in space. Yes, that's something really worth drawing out, because, in one sense, that's not really true, unless you're writing on sand or a huge piece of paper. Because writing, very much, is linearizing. A sentence has to be linear to have grammar. And, of course, with software, you can write a little bit here, a little bit there. But then, at some point, you have to, and I just finished my PhD thesis, and the hardest bit was not writing, that's easy, but kind of blocking it into a thing is impossible. So, I’m wondering if Barbara has any advice for all of us, including Karin, maybe in how to consider this? And by the way, Karin, for the book, don't be intimidated with how you write. Please consider looking at the previous two volumes, it's all over the place, which is a good thing. Anyway, Barbara, any thoughts on that?

Barbara Tversky: Say what that refers to again?

Frode Hegland: Yeah. What I’m referring to is, when we talk about text, there is this kind of idealized notion that you can write it down in space. But unless you're working in a free-form mind mapping software, you're not writing it in space as such, you're writing it in a line. It is one single line. It happens to wrap, but it is still a linear line. And in our community here, we are trying to do many things with that. Putting it here, putting it there. I see Bob's put his camera back on because this is, obviously, very much his field too. But from your work, and your understanding, Barbara, can you talk a little bit about, how we should be writing in

space in an ideal environment?

Barbara Tversky: There's the writing for yourself when you're working through the ideas, and that should correspond to your ideas. Then you have to put it in a linear form for other people to understand, and organize it in a way that other people can understand it. If you want to communicate directly, like give directions for getting from my house to your house, or understanding how molecular bonding works and thereon. And there, one of the principles of InfoViz of giving a context, and then the details do go for text. And we found that a little bit in some of those experiments, where we go back and forth between a depiction and a description, that you want to give an overview, and then, fill it in in some systematic way.

And the systematic way should be conformed to somebody else's conception to make it clear. But that's for writing clear prose. If you want to do poetry or art in drawings, then you're free to go all over the place. And that ambiguity and openness allow many interpretations. And the ambiguity is what makes it beautiful. It's what makes you come back to it, and come back to it. Because you see new things in the same painting or the same poem. Because you're bringing things from you back into it and that's a bit of the interactivity that people like and talk about in music, in art, even walking the city, you're seeing new things, because you can't completely structure it. And that adds. But if you really want people to grasp scientific, or historical, or arguments in law, then you have to be more systematic in getting in a way that people will understand it. And creating a context, and then relating the details back to the context it's a general principle that goes for good writing and good diagrams at the same time. So, does that get it your question a little bit?

Frode Hegland: It really does, despite being distracted by Edgar, who just came here. Do you want to say hi?

Edgar Hegland: Hi.

Frode Hegland: So, Edgar is four and a half, and he's learning reading and writing in school. And to watch that process is endlessly fascinating. It's exciting.

Barbara Tversky: Yeah. Endlessly fascinating. When you think about it, reading is a cultural artifact. Cultural inventive. And one interesting fact in the brain and letters is, many letters, say in English, a small "B" and a small "D" are distinguished by their mirror images. And the visual cortex for recognizing figures, objects, whatever object like things, has many different parts to it that do slightly different computations. There's only one tiny area that is receptive to mirror images. Otherwise, the visual cortex ignores mirror images. So, flipping faces doesn't matter, same person. And for many objects, that's true. Letters depend on which way they're facing. And every culture, even cultures that read idiographic languages, like Chinese, and Japanese, use that same area of the brain to read. The one that distinguishes mirror

images. And on branding which, Karin talked about earlier, we have icons. Do you want them symmetric? Not symmetric? I mean, they become extremely recognizable. Fonts become extremely recognizable. Letters are harder to discriminate. But, as anyone learning a new script knows, they can be hard to discriminate. But ideographic letters, faces were graded at millions of them. Millions may be an exaggeration, but thousands, certainly.

Lorenzo Bianchi: My question has been partially answered. It was about writing in space. Because, it occurred to me, when I was learning Mandarin, so Chinese characters, what happened to me is that, even if I was using an App like "Skritter," where you can actually trace the character with your fingers, I noticed that the movement, the range of motion wasn't ample enough. So, I started experimenting and I noticed that, if I increased the range of motion if I started to use my whole body, instead to trace the person, the character of a person, I started to do something like that. It was incredibly more effective. But just for me. I don't have any more data about that. So it was that curiosity. Because I’m a student of cognitive linguistics. I have an interest in body cognition. And I noticed that. And instead of reading and writing the characters, I was just actually living the characters with my whole body. It was incredibly more effective.

Barbara Tversky: Very interesting. And you know, the great calligraphers use their whole body. And it's the motions and not what they see. It's really the motions they practice, like the piano. And they are large motions. I don't know quite what would happen to them, or anyone, when they get to be small hand motions instead of the whole shoulder and upper body. And it would be interesting to look at that. And if you ever get to Xi’an, which I highly recommend, there's a calligraphy museum that has blocks of granite with calligraphy, mostly ancient. And they are just stunning. Stunningly beautiful. Without knowing you or someone that knows the characters, they will appreciate it much more. And from my understanding, people who look at calligraphy make the body motions. Miniatures of them, this is the mirroring. The mirror motor idea. So, when they see the calligraphy, there are feeling in their bodies, the motions that it would take to make them. And then your pleasure is enhanced. The same thing happens with dancers. When ballet dancers watch ballet, their motor cortex is more alive than when they're watching capoeira. And the opposite happens to capoeira dancers. But when you know the motions well, your motor cortex is activated just from the visual motion. There's more to say on that, and there's a bit in my book on recognizing. If there's time I can tell that story about the point life. But I see there's, at least, one more question.

This is a former Stanford student who did a rather brilliant work, Maggie Shafar. There was a technique that was invented by a Swede, Johansson, in the 70s, of dressing people in black, and putting lights on their joints. So then, when you take videos of the people, all you

see are the joints moving. And if you look at a static display, you can find this on the web, on "YouTube," point light. And if you look at static people you can't even recognize that it's a person. But once the person starts moving, you can see if it's a male or a female. You can see if they're happy or sad. You can see if they're old or young. You can tell that from the body motion, from the pattern of lights. It only works for upright, upside down doesn't work.

Although I bet for gymnasts it would. I don't know. But what Maggie did was take pairs of friends, have them come into the lab, and just walk, dance, run, play ping pong, all sorts of motions that they would do with the point light. And she had several pairs of friends. And then, three months later had them come back into the lab. And look at the point light and identify them as, "Are they my friend? A stranger? Or me?" So, they could identify friends better than chance. But what was most surprising is they could recognize themselves better than friends. Now, they've never seen themselves do these motions. Unless you're a dancer, or a gymnast, or a tennis player you don't watch yourself doing these motions. So, they've never seen themselves dancing, playing ping pong, and so forth. Yet, they could recognize themselves better than their friends whom they had seen doing these things. So, the explanation is that, watching it activates your motor system, and it feels right. It's like trying on clothes, they fit me. So, you're watching that dancing movement, or the ping pong movement, and it's more effective for the more vigorous movements, than just the simple ones like walking, that you recognize yourself. Your body is resonating to what you're seeing. And when it resonates to you it says, "Yeah, me!" So, that I think is fascinating. How much the human motor system or mirror motor system acts to understand the motion of others. And we've taken those ideas into understanding action, static pictures, and so forth, so we've taken those ideas further. But the basic phenomenon, I think, is fascinating. My guess is, with calligraphers would be a similar thing. They could see their own calligraphy. But as far as I know, no one's done that.

Frode Hegland: Edgar just wanted to show he has a real bus ticket. He thought it was worth showing to the community today. Thank you. But I have to ask you, just really quickly. Who here has seen the movie "Hero?" The Chinese movie "Hero" with Jet Li? Oh, a good couple of hands. If you haven't seen it, you have to see it. Randomly it was playing in Soho when it came out, many years ago. I was there with Ted Nelson and my brother said, "We have to see this." We sat in the front row. Literally, after two minutes in the intro, they both went to the side and said, "Thank you." It is basically about, I love "Hamilton" because it's about American being written into existence, "Hero" is about China being written into existence.

That's the worst summary you could ever imagine. It's the most beautiful movie. If you haven't seen it, please do. Brandel?

Brandel Zachernuk: Thank you. So, the question is a little all over the place, but I’m really curious what will you do with it. So, first of all, it occurs to me that, I’m not sure whether it's psychologically this is the case, but that there are sort of two motor systems in the sense of there being a gross motor system, and a fine motor system. Certainly, the way that I seem to sort of marshal my actions reflects that. So, I’m curious as to whether you have research on whether, the points of light sort of study is clearly about the gross motor system, people being able to understand the movement of large-scale kind of limb alternation I’d be curious whether that...

Frode Hegland: Is he frozen? Or is he just playing with us?

Barbara Tversky: I know. I think he's frozen. He's somewhere in the cyber space.

Frode Hegland: At least he's frozen at a very engaged moment.

Barbara Tversky: Yeah, right. But I can answer the questions, sort of, anyway. And that is, I think people when they see handwriting, imagine how it would be written. At some point, many years ago, I needed to forge my husband's signature on many documents. He was out of the country, and I needed to forge his signature. And I sort of went through the motor movements that it would take to make his signature. And he couldn't tell the difference between mine and his. So, I don't know of research that's directly looked at fine motor. But my guess is that the same phenomenon would happen. I do know that when, this is again, years ago, more than 20, a friend was working on a pen whose writing could be recognized by a computer. And for English, at least, there were 13 strokes that underlay script writing in English. And with those 13 strokes, they could read handwriting, and you could pick it up with a pen by where people stopped and started. So even processes that we think of as continuous are often truncated. So, my guess is that... So, we missed you, Brandel. You froze at some point. But maybe you heard. Maybe I anticipated your question and answered it?

Brandel Zachernuk: Well, I’ll have to go back and watch the "YouTube." But I look forward to doing so. The next part of the question that I can't imagine you got to was, in linguistics, and in information theory, we have this concept of Levenshtein distance. The number of permutations that it requires to move from one word to another word. And to me, it occurs that the number of points of difference within a word are the things that make it differentiable and distinguishable from another word. The more different something is, the lower the amount of information required to distinguish it. In terms of action, what are your thoughts on the way that different motions are distinguishable and differentiable in terms of their cognitive impact? I’m thinking that when we use computers, it's all the same stuff. You were just using a mouse and a keyboard in exactly the same way. So, browsing "Facebook" is

the same as writing a thesis. At least in so far as the forms of the inputs. Do you see it as possible or beneficial to draw some of those activities apart from a physical perspective? Even if it results in individual input modalities being less optimal insofar as they then have the capacity to be cognitively separated?

Barbara Tversky: That's again going to be a complicated answer, I think. And even your question about language, is that hearing or reading? The distinctions that you have to keep in mind. Because my hunch is, they might not be the same. And the Roman alphabet, with some variations, is used all over. And that's visual discriminability. Fonts vary. Handwriting varies in what's distinctive and what isn't. What's important to one language as distinguishable might not be important to another. Hearing would be something else. And their expertise is going to matter. And redundancy. One thing Tufte always recommends, he has contradictory recommendations, but he likes to eliminate chart junk. But ultimately doing that, eliminates redundancy. And we need redundancy to understand. Because we're going to be missing things. And have redundancy is an error correction in part. On the visual side, similarly, what I need to watch a football game is minimal. What other people need to watch it is, again, going to be varied on the motor side. And same with dance, or music. I go to the opera a lot, and I love it. But my sophistication is at a kindergarten level. There are things I like and don't like. And I rely on critics to tell me what to watch, what to attend to, to distinguish one singer's... So, a lot of that is going to depend on my expertise. How much I can distinguish? A radiologist, we talked about that earlier, they're going to see things in clouds or in points on an image that the rest of us won't be seeing. And you need a lot of training to see. So, I don't know if that completely addresses your question, but.

Brandel Zachernuk: I think it's excellent context, thank you.

Aaron Sloman: Well, since you asked. This conversation has reminded me of a strange experience I had many years ago. I always liked music, and at one point, I did play the piano, and not very well, then I learned to play the flute somewhat better. And then, I started trying to play the string quartets with friends, using a flute to play the violin. Which didn't work very well, but I then, thought I should learn to play the violin. And I really struggled. And I remember on one occasion when I was trying to get the kind of tone quality that I knew, my wife could get out of the violin, I couldn't do it at all. I put it down and I started watching a television program, in which, the Israeli violinist Itzhak Perlman was playing something, and I felt as if something had changed in me. It was a very peculiar experience. And the next time I picked up my violin I could do vibrato. And I’ve never heard anybody else reporting a similar experience. And I have no idea whether any neuroscientist has any idea how that works. But it seems to be relevant to what you've just been talking about.

Barbara Tversky: Yeah. And I’ve had that experience as well as a small child. I skated a lot without any lessons at all, and watched people twirl, and couldn't do it, and couldn't do it.

And then I learned what you need to do, and it was a state change of competence. And I agree that sort of thing happens. And a good coach will often use metaphors to get you to do that.

Telling you, for a tennis serve, how to hold the racket and how to swing. You have to have a metaphor for it. And the right coach, or right music teacher, or even the right artist, the art teacher will give you the right metaphors to set you up to do the set of actions properly. And again, it is that cycle of listening, and doing, and listening, and doing that I talked about earlier with the artist. That is a conversation of the eye, and the hand, and the page. So, for music, it would be your ears and your hands. And that cycle. And then, you could have, all of a sudden, this insight that you often can't articulate. That changes the whole frame of reference.

Aaron Sloman: I felt it was not my eyes and hand, but some deep ancient part of my brain that I hadn't been using, suddenly got turned on by watching paramount in a way that I don't think anything else could have changed me, not in that space of time. It was a matter of just seconds and then I felt different, and the next time I picked up the violin, I knew I was different.

Barbara Tversky: Well, presumably you saw his arms hands bowing, or?

Aaron Sloman: Yes, I saw something. It was very abstract. I mean I could try to imitate the hands and I wouldn't be able to do that. But there was something else about both, what he was doing, and also the sounds that were coming out, which together, drove something in me. But I may just have misremembered, or misdescribed, and I’ve never had any other experience like it.

Barbara Tversky: You know what I have, and some of how you learn a new language, and how to pronounce words, "R's" are always a problem in different languages and all of a sudden getting the insight in how to make that sound that you've been hearing. And I’m not an adept linguist at all, but there, when I go to a country where, at least once I knew the language, I just listen to it. I’ll turn on the radio and just listen to the sounds and that helps me go back to that way, "maybe I can do it," to make it sound that way. And there I think some of it is the motor resonance. From the seeing or the hearing, it transforms into motions of your body, in one way or another. But you're absolutely right. It needs to be studied. It really needs to be studied. Yeah.

Aaron Sloman: And it has to make a permanent change in the brain. What that change is? I don't know.

Barbara Tversky: Yeah, I wonder if you go back to the violin. I go back to try gymnastics. That was effortless when I was a kid. The muscles aren't strong anymore. The joints don't

work. Better not.

Aaron Sloman: Semi-permanent, I should have said.

Frode Hegland: So, Aaron. I just did the thing of looking you up on "Wikipedia." So, obviously from your voice, it's easy to tell that you're from the same island where we're sitting. I’m in Wimbledon. And I’m wondering, first of all, how you came across our presentation today, our meeting? And also, if you might have perspectives around the notion of The Future of Text, which is tangentially and deeply what Barbara has been talking about today?

Aaron Sloman: I’m in Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. I was born in Southern Africa, in a little town called Kwekwe, in what was then Southern Rhodesia. And then I had a lot of my education in Cape Town, because my parents were misinformed by a teacher. They persuaded my parents that I’d get a better education in South Africa than I would in Rhodesia. I later discovered, when I had fellow students who'd done their A levels in Rhodesia, that they knew all sorts of things and had competencies that I didn't. So, it was a struggle to catch up with them. But anyway. So, I had a collection of different backgrounds. I came to the UK in 1957. I was going to do mathematics, but I had got interested in philosophy, and then I discovered that most philosophers said things about mathematics that I thought was wrong. I thought wrong and I read that Immanuel Kant said something that I thought was right. So, I switched to philosophy to defend Kant. And I’m still trying to defend what Kant was saying in 1781 or thereabouts about the nature of mathematical discovery, which has to do with being able to see possibilities and impossibilities in structures and processes. Which is totally different from what's currently going on in AI systems with neural nets. Where they collect lots of statistics, and then, derive probabilities. And you can never get an impossibility out of that. You can just get more probabilities. So, you're asking me to say something about where I’m coming from, and what I’m doing, and that gives you some of a feel for it. And I now feel that there's a whole lot going on in different disciplines, in various branches of biochemistry, microbiology, and developmental biology, which I’m trying to put together in my head in a way that will enable me to explain, first of all, how something in an egg can produce a bird that has all sorts of competences that it hasn't learned? Like they can go and pick for food and then paddle in the water and other things.

But not only birds but there are also all kinds of things that go on in eggs of different sorts, which produce different sorts of competencies. So I’m trying to see if I can assemble enough information from different sources to explain how that works. Because, at the moment, I don't think anybody knows it. I don't think anybody understands it. I don't think I will be able to explain it. But I might inspire some of the very bright younger people, who are working in different sub-fields, to talk to each other, and come up with the new senses as they'll answer

my questions. That's what I’m hoping for. Sorry, that goes a long way. Well, it's partly related to this because I thought there might be something relevant in this. But I couldn't get here in time. But at the end, I think, what you were talking about is relevant.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. So, thank you, Aaron, very happy to have you here. So, this talk will, of course, go up on "YouTube," depending on my Wimbledon internet access speed. And we will also have a fellow do the transcript. A human, who is very good. He'll make sure he gets our names and all that good stuff. Barbara, do I also have your permission to do screenshots of your slides interspersed in the transcripts?

Barbara Tversky: Yeah, it's okay. My caveat is, I’ve been swiping slides from all kinds of sources for 25 years and I no longer know even where I’ve swiped them from. And I worry about that. I obviously don't have copyright. And my understanding is, it's okay to post things that have no copyright. But I’m not absolutely sure. So, that's my only concern. And that said, there are plenty of "YouTube" recordings of my slides in different situations.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, no. That sounds fine. And that's an interesting question. I mean, the journal we publish is non-profit, and all of that good stuff, or completely open access. So, if someone has a problem with it, that's not a problem. We take it back. So, thank you for that.

Barbara Tversky: Yeah, I know. When I wrote the book, I had about four times more images than my publishers would let me use. So many I got Wiki creative comments. But even then, there were doubts and so forth. And I was dismayed when the Metropolitan and other museums released all their images without any demand to copyright, only a tribute or no payments. And that was too late for me because I wanted to use, instead of quotes, I wanted a depiction at each chapter. I’m glad to see, at least, some places are releasing copyright.

Frode Hegland: That's very good. I’m just going to post them in the chat here as we wind down. futuretextlab.info, that's where we will be putting all this data. And this is where we carry on our dialogue. Now that it's been 2 hours and 20 minutes, which is quite poetic in terms of numbers, I’d just like to say, thank you, Barbara. Thank you, everyone, who was still here. Thank you, everyone, who was here earlier. And thank you, everyone, who will be listening in the future. And I hope we can continue the discussion. You're all invited to our general weekly meetings, as well as of course, our forthcoming special monthly sessions.

Which I hope will be even a sliver, as good as today, in order to be successful. So, thanks very much and have a wonderful weekend everyone.

Barbara Tversky: And thank you for your excellent questions and thoughts, it was a pleasure.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, it was a wonderful group. All right, take good care. Bye.

Bjørn Borud

Time, speed and distance

…or “why we’re going to have to talk to each other and not bet on aliens for interesting conversations.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with someone who was convinced that within our lifetime we will speak to aliens. I pointed out that while I certainly wish that he is right, if you start to do some napkin math the numbers tend to suggest that this is never going to happen. The likelihood is so close to zero that, for all practical purposes, you can assume it is zero.

I was reminded of this conversation when Frode sent me a video showing what the speed of light looks like at the surface of the earth. A video of one circumnavigation of the globe at light speed.

https://youtu.be/1BTxxJr8awQ

To our senses, the globe is huge. Even just travelling from Europe to Asia or to the US drives this point home. You are hurled around the globe in a winged tube at speeds that are not that far from supersonic - and still it takes forever to get anywhere. Amsterdam to Tokyo takes about 13 hours. Amsterdam to New York is almost 9 hours.

At the speed of light you can circumnavigate the equator 7.5 times in one second. To our intuition of the physical world the speed of light is immense.

Computers and light speed

We are confronted with the fact that the speed of light isn’t particularly fast in our everyday life through computers. The most useful time-scale, if you are working with computers, is nanoseconds. For instance an integer division on an Apple M1 CPU is about 0.624 nanoseconds. The piece of code I work on right now can, according to my benchmarks, do one unit of work in about 166ns.

During one nanosecond, light travels about 0.3 meters (in vacuum). Or roughly

one foot. Which means that by the time my program has executed that one unit of the operation that I was measuring, light won’t even make it across the street to my neighbor. Imagine how much work my computer gets done in the time it would take light to travel from here in Trondheim, to New York, and back again.

Jeff Dean at Google used to maintain a list of “numbers every engineer should know”. This list tells you roughly what timescale things happen at. There is a website that not only shows these numbers in relation to each other, but also shows how these numbers have changed over the last 27 years.

https://colin-scott.github.io/personal_website/research/interactive_latency.html

Notice the how intercontinental packet roundtrip times have been almost constant over time. In cases that are dominated by distance, physics dictate the limits.

To be fair, there are things we can do about intercontinental packet travel. It turns out that the speed of light in a fiber optic cable isn’t c (the speed of light in vacuum), but about 2/3 c. With satelites in Low Earth Orbit using laser interconnect in mostly vacuum, we can probably get the time to traverse the globe down a bit. But there is a hard stop at c. If we’re going to communicate faster we need things that only exist in somewhat exotic physics. And even then it would be “fiddly” to put it carefully.

There is a video that shows the speed of light when travelling from the sun and passing the planets of our solar system. This really drives home the scale of our solar system. https://youtu.be/2BmXK1eRo0Q

It takes about 8 minutes and 20 seconds before we pass earth. At around 43 minutes we pass Jupiter, and as the video ends at 44 minutes and a bit it is still over half an hour until we pass Saturn.

Voyager 1 has just managed to back out of our driveway. It is at present roughly 22 light hours away from earth. Which gives us the opportunity to talk about another limiting factor.

Signal strength and distance

Communicating over distances with the kinds of technologies we use usually implies using some form of electromagnetic radiation. From radio waves, through the visual spectrum to higher frequencies such as gamma radiation.

The signal strength of an electromagnetic carrier decreases by the square of the distance

between sender and receiver. So when you move 4 kilometers from your house, the signal strength is roughly proportional to 1/16 of the original signal strength.

Remember Voyager 1, the little spacecraft that could and which has now managed to make it down our driveway and past the heliopause at the edge of our solar system? Voyager 1 has a radio that transmits at about 23 watts of power. By the time its radio signal reaches us, there isn’t much signal strength left. The signal is on the order of one attowatt - or 10^-18 watts due to the distance it has to travel.

A mosquito buzzing in front of your face at a Rammstein concert is going to be very loud compared to the signal we get from Voyager 1. So in terms of our senses, this is very hard to fathom. Voyager 1 is a very faint whisper in the universe - set to a background of a lot of local noise.

On wikipedia there is a page called “List of nearest terrestrial exoplanet candidates” with distances given in light years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_nearest_terrestrial_exoplanet_candidates

We know that we’re capable of picking up a signal that is on the order of an attowatt.

We know this because we have received signals from Voyager 1. We can probably detect weaker signals, but this becomes tricky.

The Drake equation

The second to last piece of the picture that really drives home the reality that while we probably aren’t alone in the universe, we will probably never speak to anyone else is the Drake Equation.

The Drake Equation is described as “[…] a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy”. It lists a bunch of factors which it then multiplies together to arrive at an estimate. The problem is that even the intervals of these factors span vast value ranges. Have a look at the Wikipedia page for the equation to get an idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Note that it only talks about our own Galaxy. The Hubble space telescope revealed about 5500 galaxies over an area that took up just one 32 millionth of the sky. Today’s estimates suggest there are about two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

But of course, the distances from “here” to “there” are so great that they aren’t even relevant candidates.

Our civilization

Homo sapiens sapiens hasn’t been around for all that long. About 160.000 years. As hominids go, we haven’t been around for all that long. The fossil record for Homo Erectus suggests she was minding her own business for around 1.5 million years before disappearing.

We have about another 1.3 million years before we make a dent in that record - give or

take.

On the other hand, we have figured out multiple ways of not only causing our own

extinction, but taking everything else with us in the fall. So there’s that.

So where does this leave us? Well, we’re not going to be talking to aliens. We might at some point hear squaks somewhere in the electromagnetic spectrum that could be indicative of intelligent life, but by the time we discover it and get around to responding, it is unlikely the’ll even be there anymore.

And we certainly aren’t going to pay them a visit unless we figure out a way to download our consciousness and somehow transmit it somewhere else – which is dubious at best. Perhaps we can create some artificial representation of ourselves.

We don’t have to get into the physics of transporting a useful amount of mass a useful distance across the universe to say hello, but let’s just take it as read that the numbers aren’t with us on that. We’re thoroughly stuck here.

And in all likelihood, long before talking to aliens may even becomes a real opportunity, we’re likely to wipe ourselves out. Which means the only interesting conversations we’re going to have are right here. On this pale blue dot. In whatever brief moments we have left before someone pushes the wrong button.

Bob Horn

Information Murals for Virtual Reality

I have been helping International task forces address with big challenges facing us today (e.g. climate change, sustainability, etc.) by creating large 5 x12 information murals. Some of these murals have been ported into virtual reality as examples of the complexity VR might be able to help us think better. The text used on these info-murals appears in small chunks that present interesting syntax-semantics problems for us creators and synthesizers. When we can solve them, we may be able then to address other difficult issues such as how to manage context, how to better portray process diagrammatically, and how to improve our scaffoldings for thinking.

Introduction: my recent work

For the past 20 some years I have been helping International task forces address some of the biggest challenges humanity faces today including global climate change sustainability, energy and resources, various aspects of the nuclear situation. Weapons and waste disposal good management.

My role as synthesizer

My role has been that of a synthesizer, integrating the deep analysis and considered recommendations – wall size information displays that contain hundreds of textual chunks and hundreds of visual elements, icons , images and diagrammatic shapes.

Examples of Information Murals

Here is what some of my information murals look like:

Figure 15. Mural 1. Horn, 2022.

Figure 16. Mural 2. Horn, 2022.

Figure 17. Mural 3. Horn, 2022.

Figure 18. Mural 4. Horn, 2022.

Overwhelmed by complexity?

I know that some of you will feel overwhelmed by the amount of information contained in information mural. That has to do with your expectations (I imagine) as to how fast you should be able to grasp what is on one of these murals. Rather it would be best to consider stepping back and looking for the big picture and then walking up to them and looking at individual bits of detail and how are they related. Understanding a whole mural like one of these is like reading a 50 page report. Some of your fast readers and may read them in 10 to 15 minutes. Others will take 30 minutes or longer.

Why am I here at this Symposium?

The question: What am I doing here at a conference about the future of text that is mostly focused on virtual-reality?

The answer: Information murals: I got into this work of making information murals with the help of a British diplomat who saw my work and said “This will replace all those stacks of reports that sit it all the bookshelves In the foreign office which no one ever reads. You must come to the Foreign Office and show them what you do. “ He arranged it. And my first big public work was with the British Foreign Office explaining their policies on climate change to 180 offices around the world. That was in the early 2000s.

We then went on to work for four British government ministries to investigate on climate change policy.

Text as idea chunks with subheads

Yes, information murals are visual. But you will see that there is lots of text on them. You will see that all of the text on information murals is displayed in small idea chunks that are related by space, color, shape, size, and diagrammatic elements.

One of the major reformulations of text for complex subject matters will be to divide much of it into such small idea chunks. You can call them paragraphs if you like, or concept blocks, or boxes, or snippets or anything else.

The small idea chunks on info-murals consist of one to (roughly) 7 to 10 sentences or often in tight diagrammatic format, and sometimes in table, chart or graph structures.

One of the next major tasks in the future of text is to learn how to manage, arrange, sequence, and display small idea chunks with informative subheads.

Benefits of small idea chunks with subheads

I believe these small idea chunks will eventually replace the long endless scrolls a writing that appear in academic papers and many reports in science and commerce. They will save us all immense amount s of time by enabling quick scanning and skipping of what we already know. They will help us re-use many idea chunks more easily repositioning them in different info-murals.

Why am I here at this conference? – second answer

My second answer is the number of the speakers at this conference who are much more qualified to talk about virtual-reality and to make advances in it saw some of my information murals in a small workshop that Frode leads.

These VR-makers immediately – that is overnight – enthusiastically put one of my information murals into virtual reality. And in the workshop team began an intense investigation how the information murals may help us to think better about our major human problems using virtual reality. One of the big puzzles was and is: “What is the unit or element of an information map that we should attach meta data to?”

Using info-mural in VR is been very encouraging to me. I have offered to help them in any way I can because we have very large problems in front of us as a civilization and as humanity. And we may be able to make some advances on them in VR.

Transition to other offerings

Okay that’s what I am here. For the rest of the time that I have on this platform I want to identify a few of the things that we have begun to discuss about info-mural in VR.

Assumption: improve human thinking

First I repeat an assumption that most of us are making. We believe that we must improve our thinking methods. We must improve are thinking together in teams and groups and communities of different sizes. Einstein is often quoted as saying… “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” l

What can we do to move toward Einstein’s goal?

There are some aspects of information mural reasoning that can help us. Here are three ways we need to get started on.

Problem: Show and link context

One of the difficult problems is how to represent and to link important context to the thinking that we are doing and trying to communicate this context to others. There is great possibility for helping many kinds of creative thinkers in virtual reality to do this context-representation

and linking work.

Show and link context…in Multiple Dimensions

Figure 19. Mural 5. Horn, 2022.

Problem: Show process visually

Generally the best way to show history or future scenarios is to use some form of diagrammatic information murals. In the previous volume two a future of the text, I outlined a one million diagram project. I’m looking for young leaders and contributors to such a project. The diagramming software I have seen is not good enough for such a project. We

need a next level of development in this domain.

Problem: build solid and supportive “scaffoldings for thinking”

Different kinds of social messes and problems that we face require multiple structured ways to represent the various points of view. We have to figure out the semantic and technical structuring of this scaffolding. Many of these may eventually be much more effective in virtual reality.

Offer of help

These are only some of the tasks ahead of us. There are a great many challenges ahead for our species. Some of the work by people in this conference will be important. If I can help any of your get started or continue working on these issues, please get in touch. Thank you.

Bibliography/Further Reading

Horn, R.E. (2021) Diagrams, Meta-Diagrams and Mega-Diagrams: One Million Next Steps in Thought-Improvement, The Future of Text, Vol. 2

Horn, R.E. (2021) Art + Science + Policy: Info-Murals Help Make Sense of Wicked Problems, Cadmus, 4-5 Nov. 2021

Horn, R.E. (2020) Explanation, Reporting, Argumentation, Visual-Verbal and The Future of Text, The Future of Text Vol.1

Horn, R.E. (2016) The Little Book of Wicked Problems and Social Messes (currently in draft form and downloadable from: https://www.bobhorn.us/assets/

wicked_prob_book bob_horn-v.8.1.pdf

Horn. R.E. (1998) Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, MacroVU, Inc. Bainbridge Island WA,

Horn, R. E. (1989) Mapping Hypertext: Analysis, Linkage, and Display of Knowledge for the Next Generation of On-Line Text and Graphics, The Lexington Institute, (Japanese translation published by Nikkei Business Publications, 1992).

Bob Stein

Journal Guest Presentation : 4 July 2022

https://youtu.be/aWK39a7a6Gs

Bob Stein: So what I'm going to show you is Brewster Kahle asked me to sort of think about how the archive could be more useful and I got him to hire one of my colleagues from the Institute for the Future of the book, Dan Wiesel. And ee chatted for a long time and started exploring and we ended up someplace that I wasn't expecting, which was that after 40 years of elaborating linear texts, I think we have finally figured out a way. At least we're hinting at what comes next in terms of how people are organizing content and presentations.

Bob Stein: Whenever I have a new tool, I put Vannevar Bush's as we may think into it. My colleague was a literature major, and he fell in love with Emily Dickinson. And he always starts with Emily with a favorite poem by Emily Dickinson. And so these are eight versions of the exact same poem in the Internet Archive. And these are all operating book reader windows from the archive. And you can zoom in and they all work. And this is going to be fast. I mean, it's been running through a bunch of these quickly. This is Dan's wife.

Recorded Kim Beeman: “Hi, I'm Kim Beeman. And I'm going to talk about a few of my favorite cookbooks today.”

Bob Stein: That's introduction she makes. She is a librarian. If I click on one of the cookbooks down here below, it opens up. There's another introduction by her. Dan put this background image and these are two versions of the of the cookbook that he found in the archive. Here we're just showing that. Let me see if I can get with this. Here, we're just showing that we can sync up an audio or video with an object. So I'm going to play this. And when she gets through a short introduction, the focus is going to shift to the First Amendment and then it would shift to the others.

Computer Voice: “The United States Bill of Rights. The ten original Amendments to the Constitution of the United States read for LibriVox dot org. By Andrea Fiore December 27, 2007. One.”

Bob Stein: We were trying to do a demo where we and we were look, I was looking for that famous image on of the first four nodes of the Internet, and I couldn't find it at the Internet Archive. I'm sure it's there somewhere, but their search is so terrible. But by complete accident, found this talk that Alan Kay gave in 1995 at a symposium event. You may have been there, and it's really quite a remarkable presentation of the history of computing in the sixties. And I was so excited because Alan made it very clear that the ideological basis of what was happening in the sixties was quite different than what emerged by the by the mid seventies with Microsoft and Bill Gates. And I really wanted just everybody under 50 who's working in inventing our digital future. I wanted them to watch this film, but I realized there was no way I was going to get anybody under 50 to watch a film by somebody that they had never heard of. So breaking it up into chapters and it just there was nothing out there that did what we wanted it to do. And so these are just three very short bits at the beginning. If I talk, click on the Engelbart section you get I'm sorry. I'm on a slow connection in a hotel in Birmingham, but you get Doug Engelbart's Wikipedia page, you get the mother of all demos video.

You get the mother of all demos Wikipedia page, and you get the brilliant, which I'm sure all of you have seen Ted Nelson's brilliant eulogy for Engelbart.And then back to spatial data management. Voyager published this fantastic video disc that the Architecture Machine Group now the Media Lab made, and these were the liner notes for the video disk. But it's all of the early sort of greatest hit demos from the architecture machine group. And these are these four were sort of four of my favorites. This is the Aspen Movie Map. And if you'll recall, there's a point at which you can stop your the joystick, turn to the left and go into a building and explore it. Well, several weeks ago, Google showed their immersive map system and it only took them 40 years. But now they're showing people going inside of a restaurant and exploring it. And I just thought it was sort of perfect to be able to add that to the tapestry, because one of the things about tapestries, I think it's important is that the dividing line between a reader and a writer is as thin as we can possibly make it. So it's very easy for a reader of a tapestry to fork it. And as I did here, I added this video from the Google presentation. This is really an art exhibit. In 2000, we put out a tool called Tc3, which was our attempt at the time to get as close to HyperCard as we could. And we gave it to an artist who made these remarkable books that they don't run anymore, of course. But I had videos that I had made of people working through them. And so this is just a bunch of these videos and. I it just it plays but it as a curatorial tool to make this presentation and work perfectly. (Get this out of the way. Yeah. Yeah.)

Vint Cerf: You said. Of course it doesn't run any more. Would you tell me what's missing? Is

it an operating system and Apple?

Bob Stein: I mean, it runs on Windows, actually perfectly. It doesn't run on the Mac anymore.

Vint Cerf: Got it.

Bob Stein: I mean I mean, almost everything that we did in the eighties and nineties, I mean, not almost without without exception on the Macintosh, nothing runs anymore. And almost without exception, everything does run on windows.

Vint Cerf: Wow. That's actually quite an impressive observation.

Bob Stein: It's an amazing thing that that they have kept this stuff going in windows.

Bob Stein: So this is interesting. These eight windows are different for different hours of the day from a particular television station in Russia. And we wanted to show what Russians were seeing during the Ukraine war on their home televisions. And these are all so, you know, I can zoom in on these and they all play.

Computer Voice: Actually. Really, I'm not in Ukraine. Um, but now.

Bob Stein: What's interesting is that fast forward a little bit and this is the Internet Archive just released this. It's a visual explorer. These seven windows are seven different television stations in Russia. And these are thumbnails captured during the entire day's presentation. And any one of them, I can just click on it.

Here's basic. Running in in a window.

Vint Cerf: Wow.

Bob Stein: A programming book for kids on how to program in basic. And I was thinking, wow, wouldn't it be fantastic for a teacher to be able to give high school students the assignment of I want you to see what what computing what programming was like in 1980. So here's the assignment. Here's a place where you can do it and here's an instruction manual if you need it.

Kim Beeman: Now, this is simply a Wayback Machine page. Got to get this out of the way. And one of the things we've done is when we when you put a Wayback Machine page into a tapestry, it comes with a with a a scrubber at the bottom. So if I want to get a different date for this website.

Vint Cerf: Wow.

Bob Stein: It's all just here. And which is pretty wonderful.

Vint Cerf: This is startlingly fascinating. And I'm I'm assuming something that I want to verify. It looks almost as if each window in the tapestry is running as a virtual machine. So I have quite a base for different operating systems and different applications running within each each window. Is that a correct assumption?

Bob Stein: You're probably above way above my technical pay grade at the moment. What we're I mean, each one of them is is basically iframes.

Vint Cerf: Okay.

Bob Stein: So I don't I don't think there's anything conceptually about what you're saying that couldn't be true. In other words, could I be running Parallels in a window here if I want?

Maybe. I suppose I could.

Vint Cerf: Well, if we could make it work that way, if these were really VMs, then you just showed a way of hanging on to old software and old content.

Bob Stein: I think that I think that's certainly that would be a goal. I mean I mean, it's not we're not there. That's not what I'm showing you right now. But I think in terms of getting there, absolutely. That's the intent.

Vint Cerf: That would be nothing short of spectacular.

Bob Stein: Good.

Bob Stein: So this is another piece based on the book blog post. And if you'll remember, there was this point around 2005 when Jaron wrote this terrible essay about why he hated the Wikipedia. And a whole lot of us wrote in response to it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200801071657/http://futureofthebook.org/blog/2006/06/08/ shirky_and_others_respond_to_l/

Bob Stein: And I was looking at this at this blog post, and I was realizing that all this blog posts really was was is a an annotated guide to a bunch of Web links. And I thought it would be interesting because we could do it in a tapestry of turning it inside out. And instead of just functioning, instead of featuring our annotation to a list of web links, why not just put the links themselves live into a tapestry? So you have here's Darren's original essay, and all the other essays that are referred to are all here now. We think that the tapestries are hinting at least a new media type, but in order for it to be a new media type, it has to be portable. It can't just sort of live only at the Internet Archive. So what's interesting is that if I add the word 'embed' here. It's going to take me to a page. Where... I'm going to change the width here. (1792) And then I'm going to grab this HTML and I'm going to go to. This dashboard. This is just a WordPress blog that I've got and I'm going to make a new post. And 'demo

tapestry'. Demo for future of the book or whatever. I think I got that wrong. But text, future of text.There we go.And then I'm going to put in. The custom Html. And. I'm going to go up here and preview and a new tab. And it's going to take that tapestry and it's going to embed it into. This blog post. And this is all this is all operating. And so at least showing the concept of. Of portability. And there's one more thing to show you, which is that.

Vint Cerf: So in this particular case, what has actually happened, what has been imported into the Web page that you just created?

Bob Stein: So the tapestries, as you see them, are simply a collection of URLs. I frames that so that each one of these windows. It calls a URL from the Internet Archive.

Vint Cerf: Okay. Okay. Wow. I could call it from anywhere but in this case. Exactly.

Bob Stein: Exactly. And I believe, for example, when the the tapestry that the Ted Nelson YouTube video. I don't know that that tapestry actually. I don't think we had to import that video into the Internet Archive. I think we're just grabbing for Wikipedia and YouTube both. I think we can just grab the URL. So here's the last one. One of the things that is that we're able to take a collection, which is what from the Internet archive and imported automatically into a tapestry. And this happened to be a collection of Atari magazines. And I was just playing around and I imported it. And so these are all active windows, and each one of these is a different magazine. And when I saw this, I got really excited because I realized that in some ways what was happening was that I was. Let me go back to the. Don't die on me now. Go ahead. Just go back. We said that I was. No. Sorry. I hate to screw everything up at the end.

Anyway, that that this started to feel like going back into the stacks.

What we have what we've learned with these tapestries at this point is that. Having all of these objects operating in the same visual field is way more different than we expected. That seems to reduce friction for the reader dramatically. I mean, if you think of something like this, that. Oh, it's fine. Let me go back to one of these. Yeah, something like this, where instead of having to go somewhere, every time I click on one of these things and come back like you do on the web and you. So you have to think all the time, do I want to explore? Is it worth clicking on this? How do we get everything visual at once, visible and once starts to make a very big difference that makes it makes the reader encourages the reader to explore more. And so when I saw the Atari magazines all together, I realized it started to feel like being in the stacks again, where all the books are sitting on the shelf and you just sit there and you pick them off serendipitously, one after another. And the cost of opening up another book is so low compared to what it's been on the Internet. So this is an interesting shift that we're seeing. So I'm going to step yeah.

Vint Cerf: It's been, actually I think there's something more powerful happening beyond the stacks metaphor and that's context preservation. What's what's happening in the tapestry is that it is preserving a substantial degree of context for the user. Exactly. That's a strikingly powerful notion. I've never seen it illustrated quite so with such facility. This is really fascinating. Have you published anything at this point?

Bob Stein: No.

Vint Cerf: Wow. There's one other odd coincidence. There is a company which got started about a year ago called V Tapestry. Lowercase v. Capital t. It was started by a woman who does. Montages in the course of conferences. You have somebody with a giant canvas and people are talking and they illustrate what was being said. And so she does these things one after the other. Sometimes it could be a dozen or more of these very big canvases reflecting what was discussed and with lots of symbolism. She's automated this process, and so Tapestry is a company that will take the incoming text of the discussions and generate imagery to automate the process. It's quite different from.

Frode Hegland: Bob, thank you very, very much. Really good to see this. I'm going to go back to the other window because that's my notes. You say that it's way more different than you expected. And I know that you obviously have experience with VR going way back and to different degrees, and I only became converted by Brandel in January. Before that, I'd actively stayed away from it because the future of text was a specific focus and then I decided to branch out. Now, obviously, what you're working on here would be tremendous to have wall size. Bob Horne often joins our community and he is all about murals, as you know. And one of the things that was really shocking to me is that Brandel took one of his murals, built a little, relatively speaking, Brandel a little app for it where all you can do is stand in a room.

There's nothing but the mural. A mural is really big, but you pinch to move it away from you and move it towards you. So there's no walking so that you don't get sick or anything like that and you can move it sideways. That's all you can do. It's just incredibly powerful. Because yeah, it's it's almost undescribable how powerful it is considering there's nothing there. So I can imagine what you're working on here. First of all, obviously on the wall, but if this was even a normal kind of office room, because when you talk about preserving contexts that I could imagine that you literally keep one wall for work, one for a specific project, the one in front of you for something else. Because everybody talks about this. What I'm saying is obvious. aBut what was so amazing to see today is all the aliveness that comes through it.

Bob Stein: Yeah. You know, I didn't use the phrase that I should have is that tapestries are infinite canvases, so they can go on forever. At which point you need some form of zoomable

UI. You need to be able to. You need to be able to fly around in there and zoom in on something and expand it.

Frode Hegland: Oh, that was the other thing I wanted to praise that you showed when you clicked on a thing it became ‘full screen’.

Frode Hegland: That is so important. When I worked with someone on the Chinese website for the NBA, the American NBA in China. We built a version of hyper worlds where you can click on a player's name and you get a little bit of stats and you would click on that and we'd go big. She wanted it to be semi-transparent and smaller, and now that's been arguing with her. That's when I realized that if you're looking at something, make it big, because that's what you're looking at. Make it quick to go small again. But here, you know, you didn't play it with a little bit of this and that. I was just so relaxing on the AI. Thank you, Brandel.

Brandel Zachernuk: Amazing work, really exciting. One question is, if you are browsing the same tapestry in multiple windows, is there there would be a facility for synchronizing them, more aspects of them. Is that something that you've considered in terms of either the maintenance of sort of view state or the or in order to be able to use multiple sort of nominal windows, be they real or virtual, to be able to synchronize sort of views over things?

Bob Stein: Nope. Really interesting, though. I mean, I think that we just sought to answer that partially by going back to what Frode said, which is that I think what somebody asked me, so how long does this take you to do? And I said, Well, it's either three months or 40 years. There's nothing technically very interesting yet about what we've done. Right. But it's conceptual. I mean, I was showing this to somebody the other day to Howard Besser. I don't know if, you know, he's an archivist at NYU. And Howard was Howard was saying, oh, my God, this is the stuff that we imagined 40 years ago that we would do someday. And now and what's happened is that the Internet has gotten so much more powerful that things that we could only imagine back in the pre-Internet days, but we we couldn't do once once the Internet took over in terms of electronic sort of expression, we had we had to really reduce our sense of what was possible. But now the Internet, the Web has gotten so much more so much better that we're suddenly we're able to do things that we forgot we were interested in, in a way.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. Another question that I have for observation is one, obviously, in assuming using a user interface, your documents need to sort of withstand a lot of zooming. Does that does that direct and guide your sense of which which documents work? Well, you know, like you have you have YouTube videos and archive.org videos that have star frames

that are or frames that are representative at some level of them, that that can do sort of once not all content on the Internet is so well kind of entitled or predisposed to being being able to kind of zoom like that deel like there's anything that can be done to help it in terms of having having those things be different sizes or or do have you put signposting that is something other than the the documents themselves inside these type of stress to support that.

Bob Stein: Signposting. Yes. I mean, those are I mean, we are able I mean, just in terms of it goes back to to Vint's comments. I mean, let me... First of all, let me try this. One of the things that were the key thing that got us where we got to was that when we were working on the Alan Kay videos and showing and there were all these objects and ideas that we wanted to put together, Dan was reading Merlin Sheldrake book on the communication that goes on with fungi in the forest. And Dan said well suppose we actually thought for a minute about the fact that the objects in the Internet Archive are like trees. They're the nodes. But suppose the connections between the trees had had as much, or at least the important information that showing the connections between objects is actually crucially important. And that was how we really ended up with tapestries and the Brandel. Both of the things you've asked, you've you've asked we haven't thought about, you know, we're it's so early, but that's why I like showing it to the smart people, because they, you know, they start to raise questions that show us where we have to go.

Frode Hegland: Well, Bob, that's why you need to come back. We're here same time every Friday. Every Monday, except for last week when we had our projects. I see your hand, Peter, but I just wanted to do my little standing up on a soapbox for a few seconds, because you made such a really important point there, Bob, about this is what we dreamt about 40 odd years ago and why hasn't it happened? It's not just because the Internet is more powerful and computers more powerful, although, of course, that's useful. It's also because you did it. It's really important. So in both paying you a compliment and I'm really trying to highlight the fact that commercial pressures are one thing what can augment is another thing. And the reason our little group here is now 99% focused on VR is because we're going to go into the same situation. You know, I feel almost like badly fired, you know, original Mac people and all of that stuff. There's an excitement now and that's all nice. It makes me feel very youthful. But what I really, really fear is if that if there isn't a user, an academic community that is saying the stuff that you are saying, it's like these are the things we can use to augment how we work. It's only going to be How can Apple make more money? How can Facebook Sushmita make more money? And that's totally fine. There's nothing wrong with commercial development, but what you've done, as you said, technically it isn't the miracle. The miracle is that you're paid in the effort and you're not making it available. Right. So when it comes to

VR, right now, we have this beautiful oh, it's exciting and new. But in a few years, I think we're going to be where we've been for the last 30 years in Flatland. You know, there's so many things that can be done, but the market forces are so powerfully doing, you know, Macintosh pages and Microsoft Office. Where is the Bob Stein innovation going to fit in that? Right. So that is why we're fighting and that's why this future of text this year will be how can we work? And we are. Over to Peter.

Peter Wasilko: Okay. I was wondering if you'd given any thought to multi user scenarios so that you could be looking at a tapestry on your machine, but have that synched with the tapestry on my machine so we could have multiple cursors visible on the screen at the same time, and we could have mixed initiative and exploring together.

Bob Stein: That is certainly something that we imagine we will get to. I mean, what I'm showing you today is simply a proof of concept. We are we have to build this on the on the on the other hand, what used to take millions of dollars and years, we now are quite confident we can do a 1.0 version for in in months for hundreds of thousands of dollars. But it's you know, it's it's going to grow. I mean, you know, and who knows? Our version of tapestries may not be the one that grows. I think that's you know, it will happen and and it will be multi user and it will be collaborative.

Vint Cerf: It's been again just I had written down the multi user question, Peter, so thank you for for asking it. Our experience with multi user documents at Google has been very powerful and for small groups of people. If you imagine, however, that a tapestry is broadly available to tens of millions of people, you would not want to have state information for 10 million people all dicking around with the same document. So you can immediately see the need for some kind of data structures that would isolate the behaviour of a group against this background tapestry without interfering with other people who might be interacting with the tapestry. So it's an interesting challenge because the current implementation, the object contains the state information in our implementation of Google Docs.

Bob Stein: Our assumption is that tapestries there is there's the there's the understanding that if you want to be in a tapestry with somebody else, you have to give each other permission. And you're in that instance of that tapestry. And if you decide to fork it, you fork it for whoever is for yourselves and not for everybody else, obviously. I mean, we we dealt with a lot of these questions when we were doing social book where which never didn't, didn't come to market. But, but this idea of, of people reading together and annotating something together and how you could do that as a group and not screw up other people's experience. Although where we went with social book, which I think was important, was that if the if the permissions were in place, I might be reading a book with with Vin. And our annotations, if

we made them public, would be available to other people as well. They could basically click on a community tab and see everybody's comments. But anyway, the social experience of of documents, I think, I mean, Google Docs has sort of been by far the most successful example of that. But I and anything less than that isn't good enough at this point.

Frode Hegland: A hugely important underlying thing here is and I'm going to start with Web and go backwards is the infrastructure because also one of my I have two fears about the near future. One of them is we're going to run out of imagination in terms of the audience, just like Doug and other people, that amazing things in the sixties and then eighties and nineties.

Desktop PC was defined at being specific things. Imagination went out the window. That's going to happen to VR. But the other thing that I'm really concerned about is you go into VR an environment, you create an artifact, a connected artifact, you go to another environment by another vendor and you either can't open it, which would be absolutely insane. Just like a word file in the olden days, right? So what I'm saying, you are contributing here is an infrastructure for how you thread these things together. So I think that, yes, this is really nice to see on a traditional display, but I think that with real support this and of course what we're working on with visual mata a few things to allow you to go in, do amazing stuff, whether it's 2D, 3D, whatever, and then go somewhere else will be so important. I am so scared. I mean, I love and adore Brandel. I'm a mac user fanboy and I'm really scared that when Apple comes out with their headset, whatever formats they decide are the initial ones, it's going to be cemented in reality forever. We need to scream and say these are the useful and open ones. I think that's one of the reasons, it's so amazing to see what you're doing because it's not static. It's so dynamic.

Peter Wasilko: Okay. I was wondering if you'd ever seen the Chat Circle's user interface. I'm dropping it into the chat now. That was an MIT Media Lab project that dealt very nicely with dealing with groups of people interacting in the same space. And it used a. Basically a large spatial plane representing each person in a space as a circle. And you could move around and you'd be able to hear people who are within a certain radius of your location, but you'd also be able to see the circles of people further away twitching. So you could get a sense of where there were clusters of people and that overlay that on your system to provide an interface for managing the large numbers of people, potentially interacting in the same tapestry. So you can sort of think of they'd be in different phases and you'd be able to see that there are other people who are out of phase with you and bring yourself into phase with their conversations very fluidly.

Brandel Zachernuk: I'm curious so about sort of the authoring picture and and more broadly, the way in which you feel so based on the sort of the arrangement of the tapestry that you have so far. They seem like they're fairly canonical and durable in so far as you would you could point to this tapestry or that tapestry. And so that there's a rationale to have them existing as a as a as a distinct artifact that is intentionally constructed and delineated so that this is the end of the tapestry, this is what it is. And so, one, I'd be really interested in sort of the current state of authoring as you sort of have it, as you desire it and all as well, whether whether there's room to to pull on the thread, pardon the pun, of that, that continuity of it, you know, how intentionally it needs to be created versus what other options exist in that sort of space.

Bob Stein: Well, first of all, I mean, our assumption is that version 1.0 will you'll you'll simply be dragging and dropping from a from a folder of of objects onto a onto the field. I mean, right now it's clunkier than that, but it will be very simple to drag and drop and assemble it as you want. And when you, quote, publish a tapestry, it is frozen. But as I was trying to say earlier, that it's very easy for a reader to push a button and, in effect, fork the tapestry and either add things or rearrange things as as suits her and can publish or not publish, etc..

I mean, I think everybody here will understand what I mean when I'm saying this. I think that for me, I'm not a programmer. But when we had the prerelease version of HyperCard, when it was called Wild Card, and suddenly I was able to hook up a video disc player to a computer and I could start to make things that were had value without being a programmer. So HyperCard sort of became and then my, my son, who's now an engineer at Google, you know, cut his teeth on HyperCard. And so I it killed me when when jobs killed that. And Tapestry's in some ways is our attempt to go back to a time when there were tools for teachers and students to start to make things that had value and currency. I mean, it's ridiculous that we haven't had anything as good as HyperCard in all these years, and that's sort of where conceptually I'm starting from. You know, the tapestries need to have hyper talk of some sort. You need to be able to have an event statement in a tapestry. We'll get there. I but that's I think that's where we're that's where where our focus is at the moment. But it's back to your your question statement. Several people have, when I've shown them this, gone a direction that in some ways, thankfully, none of you have gone yet. Which is, So can can this can this be hooked up to AI in a way that I, I give I give it I give a subject matter and the tapestry is automatically built from. And the answer in my mind is always, Yeah, I imagine we could do that. But that's sort of not where I'm starting from.

Frode Hegland: And so Mark and I spent the last week at the hypertext conference and two

relevant things came up again and again. It's. Spatial hypertext is one. This is related to that. Why hasn't it been invested in. And also the kind of basic programming you're talking about now, if you're going to have a proper hypertext environment, you need to be able to have clever links that have a little bit of fun and have a little bit of knowledge of previous stuff. So to have like a hyper talk thing now is not going against what you said about not being a programmer, even though it could obviously sound like that. I think it's really, really crucial to enable users to be able to do some basic scripting without having to go whole hog to write this much code to initialize before they can decide what they're going to write below.

Anyway, that's just me.

Mark Anderson: I was just wondering, looking at the tapestries and seeing that. So you showed us a number of interesting sort of set ups there, and some were in a central grids and some of them had a bit more of a theme versus a narrative structure to them. Do you do you capture the. I'm trying to avoid the word link, but for the intentionality of placing this thing alongside that thing. And I say that with there's no hidden question in that. I'm just I'm just thinking of the fact that if I put, say two things together within the same tapestry, I'm doing it with some intent. And that's worth capturing at some point, both perhaps for me, for my future self, or for someone whom I wish to inform by the tapestry making.

Bob Stein: The best way to answer that, I think, is that one thing that's driven all of my workAll this time has been that when you make an authoring tool that it's important not to restrict a single pixel. In other words if I if I, if I'm really going to empower people to make things, then I have to allow them to decide what goes on, what page, where what goes into what visual field, where. Because it's a very slippery road. Once you start to restrict pixels, you end up in a in a different place.

Mark Anderson: I just I'm perhaps thinking of I see that. And I called with it. I was thinking more than just a sense of understanding that how I when I view your tapestry and understand the relationship between the first box and any other box that might be in there.

Bob Stein: I think that's up to the tapestry maker. In other words, if the connections between objects in the tapestry can be made in lots of different ways, it can be made with arrows, it can be made with contextual text, it can be made by the placement of two things next to each other. I mean, there are so many ways of doing it. And you know, hopefully when tapestries come out into the world, whoever does it, there's going to be a lot of exploration at first of people discovering new ways to put things together.

And you know, I'm pretty excited to see what my grandchildren do with tapestries. It won't be the same thing. I'm hoping it's far enough away from from linear, from the linearity of text that they will get someplace interesting. And I, you know, I, I, I do think we will be

most tapestries will be looked at in three dimensional heads, whether it's some X, some form of X or, you know, not at first. At first we're going to be on our computer screens. But that will change.

Mark Anderson: Yeah, well, that's good. It's good to hear your point about it, not just being a matter of handing it all over to I. Not that's not the iceberg thing per se, but the idea that it should be doing everything is is potentially horrifying. So thanks. I'll see to.

Bob Stein: Well. Thank you, everybody. I really appreciate the opportunity and very there's a lot of I looking forward to having the video of this so I can go back and get each one of these questions and really think them through.

Vint Cerf: This is pretty amazing. In an hour or less you managed to essentially upend a lot of people's thinking. Mine certainly just one thing which strikes me as being extraordinary about this whole design. And it harks back to the basic architecture of the World Wide Web. The entire structure that you've described is deeply dependent on reference and resolution. In the sense that tapestry is this collection of references and the fact that the references have to be resolved opens up this wonderful indirection. Because the resolution could change over time. If you had huge demand for something, maybe you turned it into a reference later because you couldn't serve up all the video from one website, all those things. This is this fact that it is there's indirectness and resolution involved in this. Then the tapestry itself is just a collection of references. In fact, it's amazingly powerful when you think about the compactness of the tapestry relative to the content that it presents.

Brandel Zachernuk: I really love... My last question. My my last question is it's hopefully a good thing to put a bow on that. So first of all, this is amazing. What's next? And then second and related is what do you want from other people, including and most importantly, perhaps us?

Bob Stein: I'm going to think of a good ask. I mean, we're I'm I'm so pleased by your collective response. I'd like to think of a really good answer to that question.

Peter Wasilko: Yes. I just wanted to come out. How much? I liked the observations about the need to embed systems so they'd be available and how it's impossible to run old Mac software. And putting on my lawyer hat. I think a big problem is everyone is afraid of the licensing issues on the core roms for old platforms and Congress could really fix this if they just pass a clear bill. It could be a one pager that simply says for purposes of fair use, if the rom of an obsolete computing system is not available, copying and reproducing that ROM

and making it available to people until such time as the current owner of the IP makes it available in a commercial form, shall be deemed fair use and just put that in the law one page bill. They can have it worked through in an afternoon and it would solve so much of this difficulty. I found wonderful Mac emulator systems, but they would require me to be able to boot my old broken Mac that I had a license to the ROM and to be able to get the data on the ROM off, which I can't do because the old machine is broken. So even though I'm legally licensed, even under the current intellectual property scheme to be able to access that or on my physically can't access it and no one is willing to share them on line because they're afraid of a lawsuit by Apple or some other mega corp coming after them. And it can be fixed very easily. Just declare fair use to reproduce ROMS of obsolete hardware.

Screenshots

Caitlin Fisher

Daveed Benjamin

Thoughts about Metadata

I applaud the Editor’s Introduction. Below are some thoughts that I had while reading the sections The Future of Us, The Future of Text and Improving not only VR Text or AI Text, but ALL Text. I present these thoughts because they add to the conversation and are part of the design requirements for the Overweb, a decentralized meta-layer that augments online, virtual, and physical realities.

The creator cannot own, be responsible for, or control the metadata for their creation. We can’t rely on the creator having the knowledge, capacity, and interest to create or moderate metadata for their own work. Different metadata have different sources. Some can be automated, such as creator, title, and date. Others can be from the creator, such as the creator’s notes and tags. Some need to be the creation of the crowd and/or AI. The opposite of this is Today’s Web.
Best practice abstracts metadata creation into a decentralized public space that any known persona can contribute to. While we can embed metadata in documents, we can also abstract metadata into decentralized storage that bi-directionally links to the document. This enables large amounts of metadata, including multiple perspectives

to connect to but not weigh down the original document. This model facilitates metadata creation by others than document creators. But this presupposes a unified metadata model across documents and applications.
Metadata can overlay everything (e.g., the Web, virtual worlds, the physical world) and be triggered by anything that creates an event (e.g., QR, text, imagery, 3D models, sounds).
Anyone can publish (subject to verification), curate, prioritize, and filter metadata. And they should duly receive rewards for their contributions. We call this a fair value exchange.
Censorship-free environments need effective metadata filtering mechanisms. People need the ability to create their own algorithms and thereby choose their own adventure.

Personal algorithms should be tunable, transparent, adaptive, and portable. We call these smart filters.
People can be pseudo-anonymous. They should benefit from their creations and activities and also be accountable for them. This suggests a unified one-account for life decentralized identity and security model. This is a non-trivial problem.
If Twitter is the digital town square a la Elon Musk, it needs a digital town library for the metadata. The purpose of the digital town library would be to generate insight and knowledge that can support understanding and decision making, and cycle knowledge and information back into the town square. This would be both a Gruberian collective knowledge system and a boundary infrastructure for matters vital to the future of humanity.

Cynthia Haynes & Jan Rune Holmevik

Teleprompting Élekcriture

“Writing is a physical effort… One runs the race with the horse, that is to say, with the thinking in its production. It is not an expressed, mathematical thinking, it’s a trail of images. And after all, writing is only the scribe who comes after, and who has an interest in going as fast as possible.”

Hélène Cixous

It is 1994. You see a command-line interface. A c> prompt invites you to log in to this essay’s directory. It is now 2013. A prompt indicates your Google glasses are ready to receive input. What a difference 20 years makes? Not so much. The directory for this collection of essays is accessed through the CyberText Yearbook Database, but the thought contained therein is not unlike what will have been (in the Nietzschean mode of the future perfect) a scrolling text readable on devices like virtual reality headsets, the progenitor of today’s Google glasses.

Such devices are not so much an innovation in reading as a reading of innovation. Similarly, this collection is not so much a curated set of texts (or the preservation of conservative reading protocols) as they are texts that insist on a proto-curation: typo(-il)logically prototypical. We could use a more simple framework and just announce a redux of High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs (1998). The prompts for reading this directory of our collective redux are Movement (Haynes and Holmevik), Justice (Vitanza), Grammar (Butts), Web (Kuhn), Trauma (Sirc), and Reason (Ulmer). Or, if you prefer, we can regress even further and sit in the wings of an Elizabethan theatre and serve as prompters (book-holders) cueing the actors in this six-act play. Perhaps it will be kinder on our readers to set up a virtual teleprompter that gets things moving.

Cynthia whispers: “Cue ‘Teleprompting Élekcriture’”

The teleprompter has become as ubiquitous in politics as it has in entertainment, creating an historical convergence of reading protocols that depend on machine and movement.

Teleprompted discourse is especially critical for politicians who must simulate their oratory skills, and who need to appeal/appear as if they are simultaneously informal and improvising. Such ethos is emblematic of Plato’s concern that writing would merely equip us with the

‘semblance’ of truth; “Once a thing is put in writing, it rolls about all over the place” (Phaedrus). So, too, the 24-hour news cycle (by some accounts less journalism than entertainment) situates the teleprompter both in front of the individual who ‘reads’ to viewers from a vertical syntagmatic streaming text, then reversed toward viewers and placed along the bottom of the screen in a horizontal paradigmatic text scroll that anticipates the next ‘story’ or recaps previous stories.

FOX News ticker

There is something primitive (intuitive) about the way words appearm. Conversely, there is something frightening (exhausting) about the way they dis/appear—scrolling upward with alarming speed, with the momentum of history, at the behest of time. In between, we inhabit the scroll bars, the space where movement and moment embrace. We witness language in action, in the languid flow of thought, the lurch of long-winded fragments, and the staccato bursts of out/landish play. We bid farewell to words with each keystroke, watching as they dwindle and fade from view. Imbuing them with invisible protection, we whisper, “may the force be with you.” We imagine them on their way—they travel as image.

Star Wars: Episode 1, The Phantom Menace© opening text crawl

Who can forget the opening scene of Star Wars, the text marching into the infinite universe of the Galactic Republic. This filmic device tapped into our cultural experiences of moveable type, such as ticker-tape, cinema marquees, follow the bouncing ball sing- alongs, and vintage newsreel footagen. It joined forces with a simple premise—moving text transforms thought into image and image into memory. It is perhaps uncharacteristic to claim that moving words stay with us longer. But we are interested in the un-character that un-does static print—that imagines us caught in a thicket of the thickest thieves: language and motion.

There is, however, a crucial caveat, or noise, in this system: the material action of writing sets language into motion, whether by programming or raw physicality. Composition happens, to riff on Geoffrey Sirc and Jacques Derrida. And, as it happens, language speaks us and re-members us at the same time (in the same moment). By some accounts, a focus on writing and motion must start by studying the parts of writing we see, such as letters, words,

i.e. printed static texts. John Trimbur argues that “studying and teaching typography as the culturally salient means of producing writing can help locate composers in the labor process and thereby contribute to the larger post-process work of rematerializing literacy” (192). As “the turn-of-the-century Austrian architect and graphic designer Alfred Loos put it so concisely, ‘One cannot speak a capital letter’” (191; qtd in Helfand 50). But Trimbur is narrowly focused on the typographical conventions that “[enable] us to see writing in material terms as letter-forms, printed pages, posters, computer screens” (192), while we are adjusting the focus to capture the images of writing in motion and the momentum that accrues in the backwash of memory. Through the many years we worked in MOOs, we came to understand such synchronous virtual space as a primary location of writing as images in motion. In other words, the appearance and disappearance of language inside a screen, the limits of which were beyond our vision, turned the scrollbar into a memory pole where words

unfurl in the prevailing and transient winds of writing’s warp-speed momentum. Typography became biography—the life-world of writing on the fly.

Though the following exchange occurred in real time on October 9, 1999, it gives readers a sense of what we mean by ‘writing on the fly.’ William Gibson (author of the novel Neuromancer) logged in to Lingua MOO as part of a trAce Writing Community event in the

U.K. We only had 30 minutes notice that he was logging in, so we hastily put out the word to Lingua users. He conversed with players in the MOO and created a ‘battered suitcase’ object into which you could place whatever MOO object you wanted. This is an excerpt of the MOO log that day:

Helen says, "Bill's here" snapdragon waves at Bill_Gibson. Jan waves at Bill_Gibson. Bill_Gibson says, "Hello, this really is Wm. Gibson, tho you won't believe me..."" Cynthia [to Bill_Gibson]: We're honored to have you here at Lingua MOO!

Tzen nods.

traci says, "we're likely to believe just about anything" You laugh at traci.

Mark Cole says, "Hi Bill. Enjoyed the talk downstairs. Any advice for a budding writer of speculative fiction (don't u hate labels?)"

Bill_Gibson says, "Thanks. This is the very last gig on my lightning UK All Tommorrow's Parties tour.""

Helen says, "How would a beginner get that ball of elastic bands going? (Bill's metaphor for writing a novel)"

Helen says, "Anyone want me to buy them a signed book?" Tzen says, "Which book is it?" Nolan . o O ( and pay for it? whooohooo. )

Bill_Gibson says, "Heinlein's advice: write, finish what you write, submit it, submit again when it's rejected.""

Jan smiles.

Helen says, "All Tomorrow's Worlds" You take Neuromancer.

Mark Cole says, "Thanks... have a jelly bean" You hand Neuromancer to Bill_Gibson. Helen says, "Good advice Bill ;-)" Tzen says, "ah."

Cynthia [to Bill_Gibson]: yes, would you virtually sign my virtual copy of your book? :)

William Gibson interacting with Lingua MOO users (Oct 9, 1999)

The MOO, as locus and instrument of linguistic register and re-collection, circum/scribes this composite image of writing and memory. Bruce Gronbeck reminds us that Aristotle makes a clear distinction between memory and recollection and tallies the attributes of recollection in his treatise De Memoria, “Recalling is always a matter of reconstructing ‘movement’ or sequences of action” (140; McKeon 451b-453a). For Aristotle, memory stems from recollection as such: “For remembering [which is the condicio sine qua non of recollecting] is the existence, potentially, in the mind of a movement capable of stimulating it to the desired movement, and this, as has been said, in such a way that the person should be moved [prompted to recollection] from within himself, i.e. in consequence of movements wholly contained within himself” (McKeon 452a).

Thus, early on our knowledge of how memory works is derived from Aristotle’s notion of motion contained. In her essay, “Habit as Memory Incarnate,” Marion Joan Francoz explains the containment model, the hydraulic model, and the physiological models of memory, advocating the latter and its association with habit. According to Francoz, “‘Image schemata,’ which Lakoff and Johnson propose as dynamic alternatives to abstract schematic representations in memory, find their most basic manifestation in the spatial aspect of the body, ‘from our experience of physical containment’ (Johnson, Body 21)” (14).

But the movement we have in mind must also be a movement that is enduring, that

gains momentum from the start, that keeps going. Viewed in this way, writing becomes a force, as Cixous writes, with which we contend and by which we leave our own trail of images. The trajectory of this essay follows three moments, or movements, along the trail of images we have left like bread crumbs for ‘the scribe that follows after’ and has somehow re- forged the relation between writing as image and learning via text in motion.

MediaMOO MMTV Studio (May 9, 2011;17th anniversary of our meeting on May 9, 1994)

In 1994, when we first met in the text-based virtual community, MediaMOO, we quickly understood the power of writing in motion. The MOO is a blend of text and image, and of orality and literacy. Oral insofar as the interaction among writer/speakers in the MOO reproduces oral conversation via written text, literate insofar as the writing requires fluency to produce meaning. The interesting, and innovative, aspect of this phenomenon is that in the MOO tightening (and blurring) the orality/literacy split is achieved visually. Within months we created our own community using the LambdaMOO database, and within two years of creating Lingua MOO we had published our collection of essays, High Wired (University of Michigan Press), following which we created a graphical web-based interface called enCore Xpress, and soon thereafter, the 2nd edition of High Wired. Our task in the introduction to

High Wired was, we believed, to articulate (insofar as we could) a new name for such writing. We coined the term élekcriture, borrowing from the Greek for the beaming sun (Elektra) and French feminism’s notion of writing (l’ecriture feminine), to describe a thematic conjunction between electricity and the streams of writing that spill forth in a discourse that resists traditional ways of organizing and controlling the flow of conversation.

And even after we combined the textual and graphical registers of meaning- production with a graphical interface that split the text side and the graphical side, élekcriture still dominated the production of meaning. Rhetorically, the design allowed for style to enhance input and for an intertextual-graphical interface to border the space in which learning takes place, while the web-based interface also made many MOO functions easier to learn and execute. But the fact that graphical MOO interfaces such as enCore Xpress had helped move MOO technology along at a pace in concert with other web-based communication software in the late 90s is not central to the idea we are promoting of text as image; we considered it merely a bonus.

LinguaMOO graphical interface, enCore Xpress (2005)

Nineteen years ago we got to know one another in language, in real-time. It was both a ‘home’ we could share and one we built for others to enter and build as they saw fit. We were living/writing in a visible text. The question of writing became a manifestation of personal and professional discourses, the crossing of which became for us an invisible boundary—we

did not distinguish between the space of our belonging to one another and to our academic others. It is akin to Bruno Latour’s reminder that “in the eyes of our critics the ozone hole above our heads, the moral law in our hearts, the autonomous text, may each be of interest, but only separately. That a delicate shuttle should have woven together the heavens, industry, texts, souls and moral law -- this remains uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly” (5).

The second moment is really a fast forward ten years when MOOs began to wane as the graduate students who created, administered, and populated them moved on to “real” lives and jobs, and we found other platforms where writing in motion served as our template for play and purpose: Neverwinter Nights, Diablo II, Second Life, and World of Warcraft.

Yet, in citing our own experiences we are somewhat torn. On the one hand, we believe the durability of these texts in motion seals the sagacity of our argument (not to mention the reality of our lives, which is hardly virtual any longer, though we tend not to make that distinction). On the other hand, as rhetoricians we understand the need for a critical eye.

Roland Barthes expressed it in this manner: “…my desire to write on Photography corresponded to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis…” (Camera 8). This is how we approach writing about writing in visible texts; like Barthes, we are both “Operator” and “Spectator” (9). “The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive” (6).

Barthes is instructive in an additional sense—as purveyor of the line between forms of visibility. In the static (print or web) iteration of this history, we understand that we cannot de/pict the motion of text we are de/scribing here. Even a “still” image (i.e., screenshot) of some MOO tran/script does not do justice to the movement experienced as graphé/flux (the flux of moving writing). But we can work with the concept of the photo/graph as theorized by Barthes because he re-animates it in order to ponder our pandemic belief in the invisibility of its animation of us. “Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see” (6). “In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. The photograph itself is in no way animated (I do not believe in ‘lifelike’ photographs), but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure” (20).

There is, then, something that wants animating, that reveals itself when time and motion call certain features of text into the unconcealedness of typorganisms—of writing on

the move. Barthes meets Martin Heidegger at this juncture, redefining the ‘origin of the work of art,’ following the workness until we can see it at work. What Heidegger saw in a pair of worn out peasant shoes, Barthes sees in the instruments of time and photography: “For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches—and I recall that at first the photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood” (15). The third moment along the trail of images comes into view now. Are MOOs and World of Warcraft like clocks for seeing writing? What happens in the seeing of composition as it happens?

It is time—time that moves into a new topos where momentum gathers itself unto itself, where (it turns out) moments are re-turned to time. Who are we to think we owned them in the first place? We are so bound up in our sense of sovereign subjectivity that we dare to preface topos with its own ‘u’—unbounded topos—utopia. But in so doing, we have managed to create every dystopia known to humanity. MOOs and WoW are, thankfully, no utopias; they are more along the lines of what Alok Nandi calls a fluxtopia. According to Nandi: “Virtu/RE/alities explore the gap between virtuals, ideals and realities. Fluxtopia can only be understood in the act of attempting to achieve the traject of any flow. But how do we achieve what we mean by it if we do not know what it is, except that IT is in constant mutation, flowing apart?” (np). Nandi exploits our collective delusion that we can capture the flow of media by setting up various fluxtopic passages designed to foreground both delusion and passage. MOOs and WoW are portals into this “fluxography”; or, as Geoff Sirc might call it, this “fluxus-inflected practice” (“Fluxjoke” 3). The key to understanding how momentum assists memory rests not on the rests, or pauses, we inject in writing and reading, rather in the in/visible border between delusion and passage, one that is (hopefully) not subject to Aristotelian or Platonic border patrols. In synchronous writing environments we are lulled, by the momentum of language, into no complacent region of learning, but an active accumulation of meaning we commonly think of as memory. The movement of language, its marching momentum, lulls us into thinking we are pushing things along, when it is more accurate to say we are being pulled into a remembering machine without being aware of it.

The question is how does momentum and language do this. And here we issue a patch to our earlier thinking on this topic by adding a small “t” to élekcriture—télekcriture. To underscore how télekcriture accomplishes this lulling, we should sample the most basic qualities of flux: rhetoric, rhythm, and reciprocity.

As a rhetorical machine, télekcriture mixes language, writers, and distance, then reconfigures them as sustained contextual real-time interactivity. But distance itself also figures within language. Barthes suggests, as have others over the years, that all language is

rhetorical, that is, it is highly figurative. There are countless ways we attempt to maintain the distinction between two dimensions of language, the literal and figurative; but in the end, language is all figurative (Semiotic 82-93). In short, Barthes argues, “the meta-rhetorical expressions which attest to this belief are countless. Aristotle sees in

it a taste for alienation: one must ‘distance oneself from ordinary locutions we feel in

this respect the same impressions as in the presence of strangers or foreigners: style is to be given a foreign air, for what comes from far away excites admiration’” (88). There is, then, in language itself a dimension of distance, a sense in which words travel across time and distance in order to ‘mean’ something in the here and now. Words exhibit the wear and tear of distance and time, and no amount of anti-rhetorical rhetoric can undermine this fact. But critics like Paul Virilio misdirect their fears at teletechnologies (like MOOs and WoW) in an effort to restore to language (and thus to ourselves) a degree of nearness and sovereignty that seems to have slipped away (when it was never ours to begin with). As Virilio argues, “[b]etween the subjective and objective it seems we have no room for the ‘trajective,’ that being of movement from here to there, from one to the other, without which we will never achieve a profound understanding of the various regimes of perception of the world that have succeeded each other throughout the ages” (24). In short, he laments the “loss of the traveller’s tale” (25), he longs for the “essence of the path, the journey” (23).

Whereas Nandi’s fluxtopia situates the trajective within the work (i.e., the act) of writing, Virilio situates it in the achievement of writing—the having travelled along a path. This is precisely the tension at work in the difference between print and electronic texts, something we think Richard Lanham missed in The Electronic Word, but not something Michael Joyce missed. In attempting to articulate the pulse of Carolyn Guyer’s phrase “tensional momentum,” Joyce finds evidence of a missing rhythm—a rhythm not present, literally, in print texts. But he’s torn, too. “And yet I know, in the way someone watches water slip through sand, that words are being displaced by image in those places where we spend our time online; know as well that images, especially moving ones, have long had their own syntax of the preliminary and the inevitable” (314).

Writing in visible texts, like sand and water, flows at a rhythmic (ragged or silken) pace. In the exchange of languaging beings typing along this tempo-trajectory, reciprocity arises. It is woven by the ‘delicate shuttle’ of an/other interaction—sustained contextual real- time reciprocal interactivity. Reciprocal interaction partakes of a fluidity of movement related to (and determined by) tides and time. The backward (re-) and forward (-pro) movement of the tides, the ebbing and flowing of Oceanus in Homer’s Iliad, lends its sense of fluid and cyclic language to real-time reciprocity. It is constant, continuing without intermission, steadily present, the constancy of real-time. Writing resists slowing down; it has its own force

of forward movement. In digital environments such as MOOs and WoW, this momentum rushes ahead of us and we are merely the scribes following after, somewhat engulfed by/in visible texts and set in motion by our words—in their current—on their way.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981. Print.

. The Semiotic Challenge. trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988. Print. Cixous, Hélène and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. trans. Eric Prenowitz. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Francoz, Marion Joan. “Habit as Memory Incarnate.” College English 62.1 (September 1999): 11-29. Print.

Gronbeck, Richard. “The Spoken and the Seen: The Phonocentric and Ocularcentric Dimensions of Rhetorical Discourse.” Rhetorical Memory and Delivery: Classical Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication. ed. John Frederick Reyhnolds.

Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993. 139-55. Print.

Guyer, Carolyn. “Along the Estuary.” Mother Millennia . http://www.mothermillennia.org/ Carolyn/Estuary.html (5 June 2005). Web.

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Deena Larsen

Access within VR: Opening the Magic Doors to All

Within each new technology lurks hidden obstacles. There are financial barriers to overcome, for those who struggle to put food on the table can not purchase the equipment or spare the time. There are physical obstacles for people who must maneuver this world in ways that differ from the norm. A cry that has often been offered in these situations is that we are working within unique media that simply can not trans(fer)(form) for all situations. Don’t ask the painter to explain art to the blind? Don't ask a symphony to exalt to the deaf? Perhaps. The wilderness is a wild and dangerous place, where only the intrepid can (ad)venture. Yet there are mountain trails with ropes and braille signs designed to provide a taste of the wilderness to the blind or widened slopes to give access to quiet forests for wheelchair users. We need to take a few minutes to explore setting up best practices for access to VR. Let's discuss solutions!

Supporting all channels. There are a myriad of physical capabilities needed to fully enjoy VR (mobility, sight, sound). How can we provide multiple channels within the VR environment to engage those people who can not participate in all of these channels (e.g., provide a canned experience for those with mobility issues, provide a caption for those with hearing issues, provide a running explanation for those with sight issues)? Conveying the VR kernel. We are using VR to communicate experiences and ideas in ways that could not be accomplished in other media. How then, can we convey the essence of this experience to those who can not physically participate in VR?

Access within VR: Opening the Magic Doors to All

“Hey, there is a great new VR Piece you just have to check out!” your friend exclaims, But you don’t have the equipment, so you cannot access the piece, and the Way to Save the Universe and the Grandest Message of Them All just passes you by. Or you actually have the equipment and you put it on. But the moment you do, you get so dizzy and so ill that you have to stop and lie down. Or you cannot hear the sound. Or the sound hurts you. Or you can not see the images. Or you cannot manipulate the controls. And again, the world passes you by—and you are left on the sidelines without ever getting the message.

A protest that has often been offered in these situations is that we are working within unique media that simply cannot trans(fer)(form) for all situations. Don’t ask the painter to explain art to the blind? Don't ask a symphony to exalt to the deaf? Perhaps. The wilderness is a wild and dangerous place, where only the intrepid can (ad)venture. Yet there are mountain trails with ropes and braille signs designed to provide a taste of the wilderness to the blind or widened slopes to give access to quiet forests for wheelchair users. We need to take a few minutes to explore setting up best practices for access to XR.

Another objection is that everyone is grappling with a different barrier, so how can we actually address everyone’s needs? The good news about accessibility design is that one measure often works for more than one handicap or purpose. Curb cuts, for example, are not only terrific for wheelchair users, but also for people with strollers, heavy dolly loads, etc.

So rather than seeing accessibility as an individual problem, address the needs of all users. Accessibility should be a primary consideration in developing the XR software as well as the pieces created using that software. After all, our implicit goals are to help as many people as

we can use our softwares and grok our messages. Simply being aware of the needs is the first

step. At the beginning of a software or creative project, ask:
How can we support all users and developers within the software and hardware environment? You need a myriad of physical capabilities to fully enjoy XR (mobility, sight, sound). How can we provide multiple channels within the XR environment to engage those people who cannot participate in all of these channels (e.g., provide a canned experience for those with mobility issues, provide a caption for those with hearing issues, provide a running explanation for those with sight issues)?
How can we create inclusive pieces to convey the messages using the software and hardware? We are using XR to communicate experiences and ideas in ways that could not be accomplished in other media. How then, can we convey the essence of this experience to everyone, regardless of ability, age, race, gender, etc.?

Luckily, you do not have to answer these questions by yourself! There is an entire community dedicated to accessibility and inclusive design within XR. There are best practices to minimize barriers and provide multiple channels to get the message, including:
Applying Universal Design principles to the technology
Creating more than one channel to convey the message (providing both audio and visual channels, text descriptions of actions, using both colors and shapes rather than color alone etc.)
Avoiding triggers (flashing lights, dizzying motions, etc.). If these can not be avoided, at least provide warnings
Following guidelines for accessibility, including the W3C working group (https:// www.w3.org/TR/xaur/)
Working with XR developers and researchers (https://xraccess.org/symposium/ and https://xraccess.org/research/)Examples of tips for writing pieces include:
Have adjustable volumes. Let the user determine the loudness.
Have warnings just like we do with flashing lights for seizures (this artwork/music contains high pitches)
Have captions (this helps hard of hearing, second language speakers, people on the spectrum, and others as well)
Try to provide multiple channels for the same information. Use visual patterns along with music or text descriptions. If you cannot reproduce the whole thing, carve out one piece that can be reached. For example, with VR, try to explain or introduce one small piece so people can get a feeling for it.

Use metadata consistently to describe pieces and their accessibility, including:
Warnings (pitch, flashing lights, inconsistent volume levels--standardized warnings would be great)
Content delivery (sound, imagery, structure, navigation--explain where the content is)
Content duplication effort (yes/no--does the piece try to convey the spirit or the same meaning in different ways? So having captions would be yes, but having just sound music would be no.)This is of course, the tip of the iceberg. The key here is to open up these wonderful realms of possibility in XR to everyone and lower all barriers.

Dene Grigar & Richard Snyder

Metadata for Access: VR and Beyond

Abstract

Interacting with virtual reality (VR) environments requires multiple sensory modalities associated with time, sight, sound, touch, haptic feedback, gesture, kinesthetic involvement, motion, proprioception, and interoception––yet metadata schemas used for repositories and databases do not offer controlled vocabularies that describe VR works to visitors.

This essay outlines the controlled vocabularies devised for the Electronic Literature Organization’s museum/library The NEXT. Called ELMS (Extended eLectronic Metadata Schema), this framework makes it possible for physically disabled visitors and those with sensory sensitivities to know what kind of experience to expect from a VR work so that they can make informed decisions about how best to engage with it. In this way accessibility has been envisioned so that all visitors are equally enabled to act upon their interest in accessing works collected at The NEXT.

Introduction: Proof of Concept

Turning their head slowly, the player spots five neon green pins in the horizon and aims their controller at the one peeking behind the conical dark-green cedar. The player is situated amid a strange, bright blue terrain undulating beneath a cloudy gray and blue sky. In the background they hear voices chattering and laughing softly. Moving their head further to the left, the player sees more green pins hovering over bleak squat buildings and an earth-like, blue globe. It seems like they are walking toward the globe, and as they get closer, they see a bookshelf sunk backwards into the ground. Approaching it, the chattering grows loud and then stops.

This is one of the scenes in Everyone at this party is dead / Cardamom of the Dead by Caitlin Fisher o, one of the first VR literary works produced for the Oculus Rift. Published in 2014 in the Electronic Literature Organization’s Electronic Literature Collection 3 (ELC3), it is now hosted at The NEXT.

Like the 3000 other works of born-digital art, literature, and games that The NEXT holds, Fisher’s VR narrative is presented in its own exhibition space. A carousel of still shots from the work presents visitors with highlights from the work. The description of the work, cited from the ELC3, provides information about the storyline, the artist’s vision, and its

production history. To the right is a sidebar containing the “Version Information”––metadata built on the MODS schema detailing bibliographic information expected from a scholarly database. This information includes the author’s name, date of publication, publisher, and language all associated with the 1.0 version of Fisher’s work. Visitors, however, also see additional information that goes beyond that provided by MODS: the work’s digital qualities, its genre, the sensory modalities evoked when experiencing the work, its accessibility, original media format, authoring platform, and peripheral dependencies. These are controlled vocabularies that move beyond the bibliographic and, instead, provide visitors with the information they need in order to experience the work. In this context, Everyone at this party is dead / Cardamom of the Dead alerts visitors that the work involves kinesthetic involvement, proprioception, sight, sound, graphical and spatial navigation, and that it was built with Unity and requires a VR headset.

About The NEXT’s Extended Metadata Schema

The metadata schema for The NEXT, ELMS or the “Extended eLectronic Metadata Schema,” is the framework developed to provide a common understanding of the highly complex, interactive, digital artifacts, like Fisher’s, held in its collections.

Because The NEXT collects and hosts a wide variety of interactive media pertaining to digital art and writing––the bulk of which it makes freely available for access and download in their original formats or in formats that have been preserved through migration and emulation––its schema both utilizes and extends the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) maintained by the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress. By extending MODS, The NEXT attends to the media specificity of the works, an approach to the analysis of digital objects suggested by theorist N. Katherine Hayles in Writing Machines [26] and also reflected in taxonomies created by the global, scholarly federation, the Consortium on Electronic Literature (CELL), over a decade ago p.

At the heart of ELMS is the contention that visitors accessing a work at The NEXT need to be made aware of its hardware, software, peripheral specifications, and other salient features so that it can be experienced fully. Taxonomies developed for extending MODS include Software Dependency(ies), Authoring Platform(s), Hardware Dependency(ies), Peripheral Dependency(ies), Computer Language(s), Digital Quality(ies), Sensory Modality(ies), and Genre(s).

Equally important, disabled visitors need to know the physical requirements of a work in order to prepare for the experience via assistive technologies and/or other methods. Thus,

ELMS’s metadata has been further extended to meet the needs of disabled visitors and those with sensory sensitivities so that they know the kind of experiences a work involves and can make informed decisions about engaging with it. Specifically, the system, aligned with crip theory and relaxed performance methodologyq, pairs a controlled vocabulary that extends traditional metadata fields to include those related to disability access––what we refer to as sensory modalities–– with descriptive language expressed in Plain/Simple Englishr that further details particular hazards disabled visitors need to know before encountering a work.

Because the participatory, interactive, and experiential qualities of born-digital art, literature, and games involve what Vince Dziekan refers to as “virtuality” and a sense of “liveness” [27], principles underlying the development of the space and the treatment of the works it holds align well with practices associated with live performance. The concept of the performative nature of computers has been raised early on by scholars, such as Brenda Laurel and Janet Murray. Thus, in extending The NEXT’s metadata schema to address a multitude of disabilities and sensory sensitivities, ELMS’s approach to access draws upon the practice of relaxed performance visual story guides, similar to those created for relaxed theater/concert performances, etc., when creating a statement for each work in The NEXT. These statements outline in Plain Language what a visitor can expect from their experience with a work and are tied directly to controlled vocabularies in the metadata that make it searchable and able to be filtered for a customized experience.

A relaxed performance offers a comfortable, welcoming visitor experience that accommodates a wide range of needs. Disabled people and those with sensory sensitivities are able to participate and enjoy an event as valued patrons (“Sensory Relaxed Performances”). A common practice for relaxed performances is the distribution of a guide that lets visitors know in advance what to expect at the performance and how it has been modified to accommodate specific needs. In context of The NEXT, the metadata located in the sidebar of an individual work’s exhibition space describes its unique, searchable features. The section called “experiencing the work” that follows the description of a work’s content provides the kind of detailed information, written in plain and clear language, that conveys to the visitor what to expect from the work and when specific actions occur.

Applying ELMS to VR Narratives

Going back to Fisher’s VR narrative, visitors would be alerted to the fleeting text that appears briefly and then disappears. They need to know that text moves across the environment and that the reading time is also brief. If they have color-blindness associated with distinguishing

greens and blues, tritanomaly for example, they may not be able to differentiate easily the color of the pins and of other objects such as the cedar tree, many of which carry important information for navigating the experience. They should be also aware that much of the poetic content is communicated over audio, and that the sound oscillates between soft and loud and, so, could be challenging to sensitive visitors. They would need to know that it is necessary to manage a controller and vibrations occur to signal that the visitor has successfully targeted a green pin. Head movements are also required. Some of the work’s meaning is communicated spatially via perception of artificial depth. Finally, visitors need to be alerted that they may be affected with internal sensations, such as nausea or dizziness, due to the VR experience.

The NEXT’s Exhibition Space for Caitlin Fisher’s Everyone at this party is dead / Cardamom of the Dead with Controlled Vocabularies and Statement for Disabled Visitors and those with Sensory Sensitivities

Final Thoughts

The ELMS metadata schema starts with the premise that all visitors to The NEXT need some type of accommodation to access the born-digital works held in its collections, whether it is information relating to the hardware a hypertext novel needs to function or the sensory modalities it evokes as it is experienced. Visitors who use screen readers, for example, should know in advance that they will need this technology to access a net art piece that requires sight; likewise, those who do not have access to an Oculus Rift headset will be informed when a work, like Fisher’s, requires one. In this way all visitors are equally enabled to act upon their interest in accessing works collected at The NEXT.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the organizers of Triangle SCI 2022 for providing our team of researchers the opportunity to work together in person during October 2022 on our project “Improving Metadata for Better Accessibility to Scholarly Archives for Disabled People,” which we have drawn upon for this article. We also acknowledge the contributions of our three other team members who hail from the fields of electronic literature, digital humanities, and disabilities justice: Erika Fülöp, PhD, U of Toulouse; Jarah Moesch, PhD, RPI; and Karl Hebenstreit, Jr., MS, Dept. of Education.

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Eduardo Kac

Space Art: My Trajectory

This paper traces the author’s trajectory in space art. It starts in 1986, when he first conceived of a holographic poem to be sent in the direction of the Andromeda galaxy, and continues into the twenty-first century through several works, including Inner Telescope, realized with the cooperation of French astronaut Thomas Pesquet aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2017. The author discusses his theoretical and practical involvement with space-related materials and processes. Special attention is given to his space artwork Adsum, conceived for the Moon.

Introduction

I started my career in 1980, with a multimedia practice that integrated poetry, performance, and the visual arts. Beginning in 1982, I pivoted towards an engagement with technology as my creative medium, a sustained orientation that marks its fourth decade in 2022. Albeit lesser known than my other bodies of work, space art has been central to my interests since the early 1980ss. In what follows I will revisit some of the key moments in my space art trajectory.

Ágora: a holopoem to be sent to Andromeda

In 1983 I introduced a new art form that I named holographic poetry, or holopoetry [28], which consisted in the use of unique properties of holography to create poems that floated in the air and changed their configurations according to the relative position of the observer.

One of the fundamental tenets of holopoetry is what I called antigravitropism, i.e., the use of language in a way that does not follow the perceivable effect of gravity on writing. In other words, the creation of works that, albeit produced on Earth, were not limited by the action of gravity on matter because the holopoems were composed of light (i.e., photons, massless particles). This meant that, contrary to telluric objects, the letters and words in the holopoems were anti-gravitropic; they hovered freely outside, inside, or through the surface of the recording medium (i.e., holographic film or glass plate). Through the manipulation of this plasticity I created shape-shifting works; I produced a word-image continuum that, from the

point of view of a moving observer, exists in a constant state of flux. I developed this art form until 1993, resulting in a body of work comprised of twenty-four pieces.

In 1986 I created my first space artwork, a holopoem to be sent in the direction of the Andromeda galaxy (see Kac 1). This work is in Portuguese and is entitled Ágora (agora, in English). In the work itself, we see the word Agora (now, in English) rendered in wireframe. The difference between the two words, in Portuguese, is the acute accent, used to mark the vowel height. With this diacritic mark, the word makes reference to space; without, it makes reference to time. Taken together, they allude to the intertwined relationship between space and time.

Figure 20. (Kac 1) Ágora, holopoem conceived to be sent in the direction of the Andromeda galaxy (not launched). Kac, 1986.

As seen in the holopoem, the letters of AGORA (all in uppercase, in order to create a weight equivalence between the letters) are written three-dimensionally with a wireframe font. This enabled all strokes and angles of the letters to be seen simultaneously, dramatizing their immaterial form through emphasis on the outlines. Thus, the ‘emptiness’ of the letters echoes the perceived ‘void’ of space.

Ágora was conceived to be released in space and propelled in the direction of the Andromeda galaxy, like a message in a bottle travelling through the vacuum of space. Ágora

was made with an angle of incidence of 45 degrees. This means that whenever light would shine on the hologram at approximately 45 degrees, the hologram would ‘irradiate’ the word AGORA in wireframe, visible to the naked eye. My vision for this work was that, throughout its trajectory in space, it would function as an ‘intermittent star’: whenever light would strike it at approximately 45 degrees, it would diffract the incoming light and output a wavefront that would be visible as the word AGORA. As it tumbled amid the darkness of the cosmos, it would occasionally ‘emit’ light in different directions, always encoded with the urgency of its message: ‘now’.

Spacescapes

In 1989, I transmitted from Chicago my artwork Spacescapes [30] via Slow-Scan Television (SSTV) simultaneously to Pittsburgh (to the DAX Group) and to Boston (to a local group of artists). The transmission took place in the context of the Three-City Link event, a three-node ephemeral network configured specifically for the event.

SSTV was an early type of videophone that allowed the transmission/reception of sequential still video images over regular phone lines. On average, it took from eight to twelve seconds to transmit each image.

In Spacescapes (see Kac. 2), an alternating sequence of satellite views and microscopic images of digital circuits fused into one another at the receiver's end, forming an electronic palimpsest in which large and small merged.

Figure 21. (Kac 2) Spacescapes, slow-scan television, screen, telephone line, satellite and microchip images. Example of a transitional frame as seen by recipients. Kac, 1989.

This work explores the analogy between patterns seen up close at a minute scale and forms revealed at great distances. Spacescapes creatively manipulates an intrinsic characteristic of the system, which was to scan, from top to bottom, the incoming image over the preceding one. As a result, their amalgamation took place at the receiver’s end, producing a continuous transformation of landscapes seen top-down—in which it was very difficult to discern what was the Earth seen from a satellite and what was a microchip seen through a microscope.

Through this work I wanted to convey an aesthetic of magnitudes, alternating perspectives from the inward motion into a microscope to the vantage point above the surface of the Earth, and back again, continuously. The transitions between the two deliver a one-of- a-kind experience, interlaced as they are with the same electronic glow. Ultimately, the uninterrupted fusion of ultra-close and ultra-far images suggests the interconnectedness of the infinitesimal and the monumental, and the awe of our relative position in the world.

Monogram

My ink drawing Monogram [32], which evokes an orbital trajectory, a rising rocket, and a

moon (and is also my emblematic signature), flew to Saturn on the Cassini spacecraft in 1997. Traditionally, a signature is a complement to an artwork, a graphic surplus often placed on the lower right corner of a picture or at the bottom of an object, to indicate authorship and authenticity. However, in the case of Monogram, I elevate the signature to the condition of artwork itself by drawing attention to its visual qualities and semantic resonances. The curlicues of Monogram configure stylized representations of visual elements unique to space exploration (see Kac. 3). Its iterability assures its legibility in the absence of the sender or a specific addressee.

Figure 22. (Kac 3) Monogram, Kac's ink drawing, which evokes an orbital trajectory, a rising rocket and a moon (and is also the artist's emblematic signature), flew to Saturn on the Cassini spacecraft in 1997. Cassini entered orbit around Saturn in 2004. Kac, 1996.

The original, wavy ink drawing was digitized and included in a DVD, which was placed between two pieces of aluminum to protect it from micrometeoroid impacts, and mounted to the side of the two-story-tall Cassini spacecraft beneath a pallet carrying cameras and other space instruments that were used to study the Saturnian system. A patch of thermal blanket material was installed over the disk package.

The Titan IVB/Centaur rocket carried the Cassini spacecraft, as they launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 40, on October 15, 1997. Cassini entered orbit around the giant planet in 2004 and completed 294 Saturn orbits. On September 15, 2017, Cassini deliberately dove into Saturn's atmosphere, burning up and disintegrating, in order to prevent the contamination of Saturnian moons targeted for research on the possibility of life.

This means that the artwork, with each curve sweeping into another, was in deep space

for twenty years, a meaningful fact in itself and also for its symbolism: the presence in the cosmos of a unique physical mark that stands for the individual maker, a personal glyph, a manu propria sign that points to the signer and voluntarily expresses it. A signature is indexical by definition, that is, it is a signifier that is physically connected to the signified, it unequivocally affirms the existence (in the present or the past) of the signee by contiguity. A “signature work” means an emblematic piece, one that epitomizes the aesthetic vision of the artist. The loops and curves of Monogram define, instead, a work-cum-signature, a consistent graphic pattern made of variable twirling traces that, overall, can be repeated.

If today we already travel telerobotically between the planets of the Solar System (with the exception of Voyager, which has flown beyond the heliopause and has entered interstellar space), in the future crewed interplanetary spaceflight will become more common. In this new context, art will be a meaningful participant in the journey. In its singular, swift lines, Monogram seeks to express the vitality of cultural practice in interplanetary space.

The Lepus Constellation Suite

Created, produced and transmitted in 2009 from Cape Canaveral, Florida to the Lepus Constellation, the suite is composed of five line drawings that were also rendered as five engraved and painted steel discs, measuring 20 inches in diameter each [34] [5].

The Lepus Constellation Suite is part of a larger series entitled Lagoglyphs, ongoing since 2006, in which I develop a leporimorph or rabbitographic form of writing. The larger series includes prints, murals, sculptures, paintings, an algorithmic animation, and satellite works created specifically for visualization in Google Earth (more on the latter below). As visual language that alludes to meaning but resists interpretation, the Lagoglyphs series stands as the counterpoint to the barrage of discourses generated through, with, and around my GFP Bunny (a green-glowing transgenic bunny, called Alba, that I created in 2000, and that has been featured in exhibitions and publications worldwide).

The pictograms that make up the Lagoglyphs are visual symbols representing Alba rather than the sounds or phonemes of words. Devoid of characters and phonetic symbols, devoid of syllabic and logographic meaning, the Lagoglyphs function through a repertoire of gestures, textures, forms, juxtapositions, superpositions, opacities, transparencies, and ligatures. These coalesce into an idioglossic and polyvalent script structured through visual compositional units that multiply rather than circumscribe meanings.

Composed of double-mark calligraphic units (one in green, the other in black),

the Lagoglyphs evoke the birth of writing (as in cuneiform script, hieroglyphic orthography,

or ideography). However, they deliberately oscillate between monoreferentiality (always Alba) and the patterns of a visual idiolect (my own). In so doing, the Lagoglyphs ultimately form a kind of pictorial idioglossia or cryptolanguage.

In the specific case of The Lepus Constellation Suite, the five lagoglyphic messages were transmitted towards the Lepus Constellation (below Orion) on March 13, 2009, from Cape Canaveral, Florida (see Kac. 4). The transmission was carried out by Deep Space Communications Network, a private organization near the Kennedy Space Center. At a frequency of 6105 MHz, the transmission was accomplished through high-powered klystron amplifiers connected by a traveling wave-guide to a five-meter parabolic dish antenna. Based upon its stellar characteristics and distance from Earth, Gamma Leporis (a star in the Lepus constellation that is approximately 29 light-years from Earth) is considered a high-priority target for NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder mission. The Lepus Constellation Suite will arrive in its vicinity in 2038.

Figure 23. (Kac 4) The Lepus Constellation Suite, 5 engraved and painted steel discs (20 inches diameter each) with lagoglyphic interstellar messages transmitted to the Lepus Constellation on March 13, 2009 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Illustrated is disc #3. Kac, 2009.

Lagoogleglyphs

Another suite of works in the Lagoglyphs series is entitled Lagoogleglyphs (2009-ongoing)

[36] [6], space artworks that inscribe pixelated lagoglyphs (my abovementioned green rabbit glyphs) onto the environment and make them visible to the world through the perspective of satellites. These pixelated artworks are created at a global scale and can be experienced in person at their respective venues, directly via satellites, or through Google's geographic search engine (hence their name). In the latter case, the viewer may choose to see the work in one of the following three options:

the familiar Google Maps (in satellite view),
Google Earth (which can be accessed by typing “Google Earth” on a web browser) or
the equally free Google Earth Pro app (which has the additional feature of allowing the viewer to see a map over time by activating the Historical Imagery slider).

In addition to the distributed artworks (seen in person; online; from space), I have created a video for each individual Lagoogleglyph by capturing, in Google Earth Pro, the view from space all the way down to the eye of the rabbit glyph on Earth (and back again to outer space). The videos loop, are silent, and average one minute in duration. Between 2009 and 2022, I have created five Lagoogleglyphs (and their respective videos) in the following locations: 1) Rio de Janeiro; 2) Mallorca; 3) London (see Kac. 5); 4) Strasbourg; and 5) Geneva. The videos #1 through #4 were exhibited together, for the first time, at the Venice Biennale, from April 20 to November 27, 2022.

Figure 24. Lagoogleglyph 3, space artwork realized in London to be seen by satellites, to be experienced in person and/or through Google Maps (satellite view), Google Earth or the

Google Earth Pro app. It measures 20 x 15m (65.6 x 49.2 ft). Kac, 2018.

Lagoogleglyph 1 was implemented on the roof of the art center Oi Futuro, in Rio de Janeiro, in 2009, as part of my solo exhibition Lagoglyphs, Biotopes and Transgenic Works, curated by Christiane Paul, on view at Oi Futuro from January 25th to March 30th, 2010. Printed on a large, polygonal canvas measuring approximately 8 x 17 meters, it covered the entire roof of the building. For the inaugural work in the series, I custom-ordered a WorldView-2 satellite photograph, which was subsequently incorporated by Google into its search engine by pulling it from the DigitalGlobe catalogue. Even though the roof installation was ephemeral, the work still remains visible in Google Earth Pro. To see it, the reader is encouraged to drag the Google Earth Pro time slider to the date of January 2010. The time slider is accessible through a topbar icon that consists of a clock capped by an arrow pointing counterclockwise. The original Lagoogleglyph 1 canvas, together with documentation material, is in the permanent collection of the Museu de Arte do Rio-MAR, Rio de Janeiro.

Lagoogleglyph 2 was also printed on canvas. This time, the work measured approximately 10 x 12 m (32 x 34 ft) and was displayed on the roof of Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in 2015. The work was commissioned by the museum and is also in its permanent collection. Its image was captured by the WorldView-3 satellite.

Lagoogleglyph 3 and Lagoogleglyph 4 were both made and exhibited in 2018; the former in London and the latter in Strasbourg. This time, instead of rooftops, both works were installed on the ground and were composed of grass and field marking paint. In addition to their distinct compositions, they also differ in scale and execution. Lagoogleglyph 3 measured 20 x 15 m (65.6 x 49.2 ft). It was painted directly on the grass at Finsbury Park, London, on the occasion of my solo exhibition Poetry for Animals, Machines and Aliens: The Art of Eduardo Kac, realized at Furtherfield, an art center located at Finsbury Park, from April 7th to May 28th 2018, and curated by Andrew Prescott and Bronac Ferran.

Lagoogleglyph 4 measured approximately 8.5 x 4.2 m (28 x 14 ft). It was made of sod squares and installed in the garden of the art center Apollonia – European Art Exchanges, in Strasbourg.

Lagoogleglyph 5 was installed in the Cimetière de Plainpalais, generally known as Cimetière des Rois, in Geneva, in the context of the group exhibition Open End 2, from September 15 to January 31, 2022, organized by Vincent Du Bois. The Cimetière des Rois (Cemetery of Kings) is renowned for being the final resting place of notables such as Jorge Luis Borges and Jean Piaget, and for hosting group shows with artists such as Sophie Calle and Olafur Eliasson.

Inner Telescope

After ten years of work as artist-in-residence at the Observatoire de l'Espace (Space Observatory), the cultural lab of the French Space Agency (CNES), in 2017 my artwork Inner Telescope was realized on the International Space Station (ISS) with the cooperation of French astronaut Thomas Pesquet (see Kac. 6). Inner Telescope was specifically conceived for zero gravity and was not brought from Earth: it was made in space by Pesquet following my instructions. The fact that Inner Telescope was made in space is symbolically significant because humans will spend ever more time outside the Earth and, thus, will originate a genuine new culture in space. Art will play an important role in this new cultural phase. As the first artwork specifically conceived for zero gravity to be literally made in space, Inner Telescope opens the way for a sustained art-making activity beyond our terrestrial dwelling.

Inner Telescope was made from materials already available in the space station. It consists of a form that has neither top nor bottom, neither front nor back. Viewed from a certain angle, it reveals the French word “MOI“ [meaning “me”, or "myself"]; from another point of view one sees a human figure with its umbilical cord cut. This “MOI“ stands for the collective self, evoking humanity, and the cut umbilical cord represents our liberation from gravitational limits. Inner Telescope is an instrument of observation and poetic reflection, which leads us to rethink our relationship with the world and our position in the Universe.

In the course of developing the work, I created a protocol for its fabrication aboard the ISS, which I personally transmitted to Pesquet in 2016 during our work session at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre, a training facility in Cologne.

Figure 25. (Kac 6) Inner Telescope in the cupola, ISS. Kac, 2017.

In addition, I also created a separate protocol for the video documentation of the work aboard the ISS. From the raw footage produced by Pesquet I edited a 12-min video, which is an artwork in itself; in it we see Inner Telescope being made in the Columbus module, its perambulation through the station, away from the module and in the direction of the cupola, and finally its arrival at the cupola with the Earth in the background. I published this video in a limited edition of five copies. The video Télescope intérieur (Inner Telescope) is in the permanent collection of Les Abattoirs, Museum - Frac Occitanie Toulouse, a public institution that houses both a French museum and the Regional Fund for Contemporary Art. I have made additional artworks in the Inner Telescope series, including drawings, photographs, prints, embroideries, installations, and artist’s books.

The project also included the documentary film "Inner Telescope, a Space Artwork by Eduardo Kac", directed by Virgile Novarina (French, with English subtitles, 2017). Since its release, the documentary has been continuously screened internationally at museums, theaters and other places, including notable venues such as the Louvre Museum, Paris. The film was published as a DVD in 2017t. In addition, the bilingual book Eduardo Kac: Télescope intérieur / Inner Telescope was edited by Gérard Azoulay and published by the Observatoire de L'Espace/CNES, Paris, in 2021 [39].

My Space Poetry manifesto was published in 2007 [40], when I started to work on Inner Telescope. In 2017, I finally realized the dream of challenging the limits of gravity I had pursued for more than thirty years: the creation, production, and experience of a work directly in outer space. The astronaut's mission was entitled "Proxima" and was coordinated

by the European Space Agency (ESA). Inner Telescope was coordinated by L'Observatoire de l'Espace, the cultural lab of the French Space Agency.

Adsum, an artwork for the Moon

Conceived for the Moon, Adsum is a cubic glass sculpture inside of which four symbols are laser engraved (see Kac. 7). The cube measures 1x1x1cm (0.4x0.4x0.4”). The symbols are positioned one in front of the other, thus forming a spatial poem inside the solid glass cube that can be read in any direction [41]. ‘Adsum’ means ‘Here I am’ in Latin, as used to indicate that the speaker is present (equivalent to the exclamation ‘here!’ in a roll call).

Figure 26. Adsum (in progress), space artwork (laser-etched optical glass), 1x1x1cm (0.4x0.4x0.4"). Kac, 2022.

To create this space poem, I developed a new typeface in which the letter “N” takes the form of an hourglass and the letter “S” has the shape of the infinity symbol. This makes the work legible from any point of view within the cube. The two other letters, which stand between “N” and “S,” are a lowercase “o” and an uppercase “O” (evoking the Moon and the Earth, respectively). Taken together, it is always possible to read either “NoOS” or “SOoN” in three dimensions.

In addition, the design and spatial arrangement of the letters also produce a purely visual

experience: a reversible transition from hourglass (representing human experience of time) to infinity (representing cosmic time). The shift in scale from the lowercase 'o' to the uppercase 'O' suggests a zoom effect going from time as apprehended by human cognition to the temporal expanse of the universe (and vice-versa)u.

Adsum flew on an Antares 230+ rocket from Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia, to the International Space Station on February 19, 2022. The artwork was aboard Cygnus NG-17 (Northrop Grumman-17), a cargo resupply mission of the Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft to the ISS under the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASAv. Adsum was housed in the Columbus module of the ISS.

Adsum’s journey to the ISS in 2022, traversing anaerobic, radioactive coldness, was a test to confirm its readiness for space flight. Adsum will progressively approach the Moon in three additional steps, each with its own visual and material version: 1) Adsum (regex version) is composed of typographic characters and is designed to orbit our nearest celestial neighbor, in digital form, on a USB drive aboard the Orion spacecraftw; 2) Adsum (planar version) will arrive on the Moon aboard Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, etched on a Galactic Legacy Labs’ nickel nanofiche disk; 3) Finally, Adsum (lander version), identical to the cubic glass sculpture that flew to the ISS, will be aboard an Astrobotic lander that will arrive on the Moon NET 2023. As a result, both the planar and the sculptural versions of Adsum will literally be on the Moon, there staying for endless time, protected from the harsh lunar environment inside their respective landers, awaiting discovery by future space explorers—possibly inhabitants of the first lunar settlements.

In order to communicate the work’s message on Earth, I have created a series of pieces that can be exhibited together or separately, including a limited edition of the laser-engraved glass cube itself, dozens of ink drawings, and a looping video in which we see the minute cube up close, continuously turning to reveal its multiple meanings, with the myriad reflections and refractions of the symbols adding a unique aesthetic quality to the experience. Adsum embodies and expresses the fugacity of the human condition and our awe before the cosmos.

Conclusion

As demonstrated in the preceding pages, since the 1980s I have been theorizing and producing art and poetry that challenge the limits of gravity. It is my conviction that space art can be pursued in many different ways, all equally valid in their respective approaches.

However, in light of the fact that what enables space exploration is its underpinning material

reality, it is clear that art that directly engages with the technologies of space possesses a particularly distinct characteristic. Not in the sense of style or form, but in the sense of its contiguity with human presence and agency outside of our home planet. Making art on Earth through the use of space media (such as satellites), making art directly in space (in Earth’s orbit or beyond), or making art on Earth specifically to be flown to space — all are modes of creation and production that correspondingly have the symbolic and factual meaning of pointing to a future in which art and space exploration are intrinsically, and routinely, intertwined. Ultimately, art that directly engages with the technologies of space has the potential to contribute to the creation and development of what we may call “space native” culture—one created in space and for space.

Fabien Benetou

Why PDF is the wrong format to bring text to XR and why the Web with proper provenance and responsive design from stylesheets is all we need

For the Future of Text numerous discussions started on the premise that PDF is an interesting format to bring to VR or AR.

This is the wrong question. It assumes a medium can be transcluded in another. It assumes that because VR or AR or here XR for short has been named “The Ultimate Display” in 1965 Ivan Sutherland, it could somehow capture all past displays, and their formats, meaningfully.

Even though XR eventually could, we are not actually watching movies today that are sequentially showing pages of books. Rather we are getting a totally new experience that is shaped by the medium.

So yes, today, we can take a PDF and display it in XR, showing page after page as just images at first and try to somehow reproduce the experience of reading in a headset. It could open up a lot of new usages because, unlike with a television or screen we can actually interact back. We can write back on the content being displayed. Yet, what is the very reason for a PDF to exist? A PDF or Portable Document Format exists to be the same on all devices. It is a format used not be interacted with but rather be displayed untouched, verbatim. It has been somehow modified recently to allow the bare minimum of interaction, i.e signature, while remaining integrity for the rest of the document. This has tremendous value but begs the question, why would one want this in a spacial world? What is the value of a document keeping its shape, namely A4 or Letter pages, while the entire world around it can be freely reshaped? What is the value of a static document once interactive notebooks allowing one to not just "consume" a document but rather play with it, challenge it, share it back modified?

PDF does provide value but the value itself comes from a mindset of staticity, of permanence, of being closed.

The reality of most of our daily life, our workflow, is not that static. A document might be read printed in A4 or Letter yes but it might just as well be read on a 6.1" portrait display to an A4-ish eink device to a 32" 4K landscape monitor. Should the document itself remain the same or rather should its content adapt to where and how one wants to consume and eventually push back on it?

I would argue that any content that is not inviting annotation or even better the actual attempt at existing in its target context is stale. Beyond that it is not promoting hermeneutics or our own ability to make sense of it. Rather, it presents itself as the "truth" of the matter, and it maybe very well be, but unless it can be challenged to be proven as such, it is a very poor object of study.

Consequently a PDF, like a 4.25 x 6.87" paperback is a but a relic of an outdated past. It is an outdated symbol of knowledge rather than a current vector of learning.

The very same content could using HTML provide the very same capabilities and more. An HTML page can be read on any device with a browser but also much beyond. An HTML page with the right CSS, or cascading stylesheets, can be printed, either actually printed to paper or virtually to a document, including a PDF or an ePub, and thus become something static again. With the right stylesheets that document could look exactly like the author wants on whatever devices they believe it would be best consumed yet without preventing the reader from consuming it the way they want, because they have a device nobody else has.

So even though HTML and PDF can both be brought within XR, one begs for skeumorphism. The PDF is again, by what it claims to be its intrinsic value, trapped in a frame. Bringing that frame in XR works of course but limits one can interact with it.

Consequently focusing on bringing PDF to XR means limiting the ability to work with text. HTML, especially when written properly, namely with tags that represent semantics rather than how to view the content, insure that this is properly delegated to stylesheets is not trapped in skeumorphism. The content from an HTML document, in addition to being natively parseable by browsers that are already running on XR devices, can then be shapped to the usage. It can also be dynamic, from the most basic forms to image maps to 3D models that can in turn be manipulated in XR to, last but not least, computational notebooks. While PDF are static in both shape and execution model, namely none, an HTML document can also embed script tags that can modify its behavior. That behavior allows the intertwining of story and interaction. The content then is not just a passive description delegating, poorly as argued before due to the minimum ability to modify it while reading it, the interpretation to the reader but practically makes the exploration of complex system impossible. An HTML document in contrast can present the content so that the system itself being studied can be embedded and thus run, not through the mind of the reader, but actually run. The simulation become the content letting the reader become an explorer of that content and thus able to try to understand much richer and complex systems while confronting their understanding to the truth of that system.

Unfortunately even though there exists today a solution for true responsiveness of 2D content, namely stylesheets, this is not true of 3D content, even less spacial content that could

be manipulated in VR or AR or both. True responsiveness remains challenging because interactions are radically different and the space in which one has such interactions are also radically different. A 6.1" portrait display, an A4-ish eink device or a 32" 4K landscape monitor are still in the end flat surfaces one can point at, scroll within, etc. Reconsidering this and more in both a physical room and a virtual one, eventually with some understanding (e.g flat surface detection for floor and walls), leads to a richness of interactions vastly different. Consequently one must not just consider how to reflow a 2D document from a rectangle to another rectangle but rather to a partly filled volume. Currently there is no automated way to day so beside display skeumorphically the document in the volume. This works but is not particularly interesting, the same way that one does not watch a movie showing pages of a book, even a good book. Instead, being serious about picking a document format, being PDF, HTML, ePub or another, means being serious about the interactions with that document and the novel interactions truly novel interfaces, like VR and AR, do bring.

Assuming one still does want to bring 2D documents to a volume, the traditional question of provenance remains. As we bring a document in, how does the system know what the document is, its format in order to be displayed correctly but also its origin and other metadata? The Web did solve most of that problem through URIs and more commonly URLs, or DOI being looked up to become URLs pointing to a document, either a live one or the archive of one. The Web already provides a solution to how the content itself can move, e.g redirection, and browsers are able to follow such redirection to provide a pragmatic approach to a digital World that changes over time.

The question then often becomes, if formats already exist, if provenance can be solved, is there not a risk to point only to live documents that can become unaccessible? That is true but unfortunately death is a part of life. Archiving content is a perpetual challenge but it should not come at the cost of the present. For that still though mechanisms are already in place, namely local caching and mirroring. Local caching means that once a document is successfully accessed the reading system can fetch a complete or partial copy then rely on it in the future if the original document is not available. PWA or Progressive Web Applications feature such a mechanism where the browser acts as a reader of documents but also a database of visited pages, proxying connections and providing a fallback so that even while offline, content that is already on the device remains accessible. Finally mirroring, centralised or not, insure that documents do remain accessible if the original source is not available for whatever reason. The fact that most websites do not provide either PWA or downloadable archives for efficient mirroring is in no way a testimony that the Web does not have the capacity for resilience, only that good practices for providing documents over time are not yet seen as valuable enough. Luckily efforts like the Internet Archive do mirror content even

while the original owner has made no effort to make their content more resilient. Finally technical solutions like IPFS, or the InterPlanetary File System, make replication across machines more convenient and thus more reliable, again despite more authors not putting the necessary care into having their work remaining available beside providing them to a third party that will archive without necessarily facilitating access.

Finally, being PDF, HTML, ePub or another format, the focus hitherto has been on bringing text, thus 2D, even arguably 1D if seen as a single string, to a volume, thus a 3D space with, i.e AR, or without, i.e VR, context. Even though this provides a powerful way to explore a new interface, XR, we must remain aware that this is still a form of transclusion. We are trying to force old media in a new one and thus will remain a limited endeavor. Yes it would surely be interesting to bring the entirety of Humanity's knowledge to XR but is it genuinely a worthwhile pursuit? Past media still exist alongside XR and thus allow use, either while using XR (e.g using a phone or desktop screen while using AR or a collaborative experience with one person in VR and another video calling from a museum) or before and after it (e.g using a desktop to prepare a VR space then share it after) ... or even through our memory of it. Consequently even without any effort of bringing the content in XR, it does remain accessible somehow. The question rather could become, what native to 3D format could better help to create novel usages, based or not on older format. For this there are already countless solutions as 3D software long predates XR. That said 2 recent formats did emerge, i.e glTF or USD, Graphics Language Transmission Format and Universal Scene Description. Both are roughly equivalent but glTF, beside relying on the most popular Web format for data, namely JSON, already provides community extensions. This I believe is the most interesting aspect. glTF does not try to be encompassing but rather provide the minimum feature set then one can build on it for their own usage. That means there is an escape valve allowing to be readable by all other software but if one does find it insufficient can build on it and adapt it to their needs. This means glTF could become a format not just to exchange 3D models to display manipulable objects in XR but finally that such objects could address the points touched on before, namely text as a primitive, its provenance explicit.

Fabien Benetou

The Case Against Books

{Analysis: https://fabien.benetou.fr/Analysis/Analysis}

Books are amazing. Books are compact affordable ways to help Humanity extract itself from a naive state of Nature.

Yet... books are terrible. Books actually were amazing centuries ago. Books are symbols of knowledge in the sense that as we look at a book we imagine how it will helps us learn. Yet, the truth is far remote from it. Books can be terrible, with poorly written content or even arguably worst, beautifully written content is either factually wrong or deceiving.

Books were once the state of the art of conveing knowledge. That time is long gone, if it actually ever existed. Books are terrible because they give the sense of learning. They give the impression that because one has read about a topic, they are now knowledgeable about it. And yes, imagining that if one knows absolutely nothing about a topic, even the most modest book can improve the state of knowledge of that reader. Yet, is it actual knowledge of the topic or rather the impression of it? The only way to validate or invalidate that claim is to test against reality. The only way to insure that one did learn from a book is to check that newly acquired knowledge against the object of the topic itself. That means the reader must not just read but rather test. This can be relatively inconvenient, for example of the topic of the book is the temperature of the Sun the the reader would need a complex apartus, e.g a spaceship, to go and measure. This instead of often delegated to exercises, end of chapters questions with answers from the author. The reader instead of reading what the author wrote then have to temporarily let go of the book and use their own memory of the content of the book then try to see how that knowledge can help solve the challenge. This can be assimilated to a simulation, the reader tries to simulate the topic and solve. This already shows a very different way to interact with a book then "just" reading. Yet, this leaves much to be desire in the sense that the answer provided is often succint. The reader verifies that their answer matches the one of the author. If it is correct they assume they know. A great exercise will provide ways for the reader to actually verify on their own, like a mathematical proof done 2 different ways, that the result they find is indeed correct. This though entirely redefine both the consumption and creation of a book. At that point a book is not anymore a thing to read but rather simultaneously a thing to read and a thing to exercise with.

This is a delicate situation for everyone involved. Designing exercise that are genuinely bringing the person involved to a better understanding without the ability to correct on the way is not the same skill as writing. Also having the confidence in launching oneself in exercises is vastly more demanging that reading a sequence of words and assuming they are indeed interpreted in a way that the writer would find correct. That means a traditional book to read is fundamentally different from what is usualliy refered to as a textbook. Yet, the very fact that expensive textbooks are the basis of classes, the one place and moment in time dedicated to learning, is not random. Over time the consensus has been that a book itself is not sufficient, rather it is a text intertwined with checkpoints that can validate or at least invalidate the acquisition of that knowledge that is superior. Most textbooks though are not consumed outside of the classroom. This begs the question of why. How come, if a textbook is generally regarded as superior, it is limited to a classroom whereas anybody at anytime could use it?

The hypothesis here is that both designing and actually learning from a textbook is more demanding than solely reading from a book. Consequently the classroom provide support in terms of direct help from the teacher and also motivation from a broader curriculum with social markers like a diploma. Yet, textbook in or outside a classroom themseves are also relics of the past. For decades now the computer provides a new way to both design and consume textbook. Namely that a textbook can now provide not just an intellectual environment to run exercises inside of but rather a computational environment.

A modern text provides the text, the exercises but also the computational environment to complete exercises. This sounds like a minor technical improvement but it is a radical difference because that environment becomes reality to the reader. The reader now has a place, even though an imperfect one in the sense of being simplified, where they can test their knowledge. This is a fundamental difference because the reader is not bounded anymore but the challenging yet very limited space offered by exercises and their solution. Instead the reader can complete carefully crafted exercises but also everything in between. Exercises become ways to efficiently navigate through concepts the author believe as essential but nothing more. The environment provided is of incredible value to the reader.

So yes, a book is an amazing device. It has tremendously helped us to progress due to compactness and now affordability. Today though a book is not sufficient anymore except for the pleasure of reading itself. As a device to improve knowledge the book is outdated. The book should instead become computational notebooks providing environments to explore, to learn from the reality of the topic.

Finally, if that is truly the case, how come computational notebooks are not prevalent in every field? A simple answer would be that progress takes time and that author of books

might not have the skills needed to design computational notebooks. If so, time will hopefully solve that issue. A more subtle challenge though might be that the challenge of accepting to be challenged through exercises is intelectually and emotionally challenging. It requires one to be humble to let reality, even in the form of a simulated one, to push back. It always feels easier to assume one know versus discovering that no, truly, one does not. This form of interactivity can be seen as a spectrum. From consuming passively a medium, being a book to a movie, to consuming it actively while annotating it individually or socially, a form of hermeneutics, to finally interacting with the medium itself. That spectrum of interactivity might not be solely correlated to the depth of knowledge acquire but also the decision fatigue one must go through in order to complete such challenges.

If computational notebooks should replicate books as the new medium to acquire knowledge, we must remain aware of how both designing and consuming them is genuinely more demanding to everyone. Hard fun remains hard but the agency it brings to both is a truly beautiful prospect for a learning society.

Fabien Benetou

Interfaces all the way down

How prototyping and VR go hand in hand to explore the future of text

This presentation will explore through one online experience-as-toolkit why interfaces are so precious.

We are navigating our offline and online lives constantly through interfaces. Some are visible and explicit like the table of content of books or the API, or Application Programing Interfaces, of software libraries while others, like our worldview or virtual reality headsets remain implicit and transparent.

Designing and using interfaces is not trivial and arguably some of the most pressing challenge on how to interact with text in all its forms. The experience while showcase its own scaffolding in order to invite modifying itself. The objective is, without being fully implemented yet, to question if computational notebooks truly are the future of text and if so, how if VR is our currently most advanced interface to information can the two become coupled to provide the best interface to discovering and sharing knowledge.

Fabien Benetou

Stigmergy Across Media

There is nothing to do to think. One just has to be faced with a random of the countless problems we face daily and the brain does its thing, trying to solve it however it can. The process seems seemingly transparent, simple even because we just do it, constantly. Yet when one has to solve a complex problem, one that arguably does not "fit" in their head, thinking takes other forms than an invisible process going through a single head. Thinking extends itself through media, being through voices in a heated debate to paper on a poster in an academic conference to a research paper or in a computation notebook.

As we look at the extensions of thoughts, being a printed article, a data visualization, an audio recording of a debate, etc we often look at it as a record. That is only partly correct in the sense that yes it is a trace of the thought on a medium but it is most than that for the author at least. Beyond just a record or a trace, it is a vestige of past live thoughts in the making. What it means is that the very action of putting thoughts down on a medium, whichever it may be, does help the thinker to think further.

Feynman reacted with unexpected sharpness: “I actually did the work on the paper,” he said.

“Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.”

“No, it's not a record, not really. It's working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper, Okay?”

James Gleick

We must stop limited an artefact to just conveying meaning. We must stop limit the perception of an artefact as a way to solely convey meaning but rather always as an intellectual stepping stone as it lead to a genuinely new thought that was hitherto impossible until then.

Writing, sketching, programming or waving hands in VR, does not actually matters. It is not the preferred medium per se that makes a difference in order to reach furthest thoughts. What does matter is actively doing something about the problem on a medium, so stigmergy with one self and optionally others. This specific act is extremely powerful creates the

potential for us individually and collectively to move forward, wherever we might decide to go.

Author’s original note in email

I share this because I imagine most people checking the book cover of Drawing Thought [44] would imagine it's about illustration but, just like I was arguing the prototype itself doesn't matter, I believe the drawing itself here doesn't matter anymore after, only that it lead to a genuinely new thought that was hitherto impossible until then.

Also I believe drawing, in the case of Kantrowitz, or writing, in the case of Feynman, or waving hands in VR for us and others, does not actually matters. What does matter is doing something about the problem on a medium, so stigmergy with one self and optionally others. This specific act is extremely powerful and as Frode you repeat to us, nearly ad nauseam when asking for articles we can then reference, creates the potential for us individually and collectively to move forward, wherever we might decide to go.

Editor’s note

Also consider Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought [45] and to a degree, Lines of thought: Drawing from Michelangelo to now [46].

Fabien Benetou

Journal : Utopiah/visual-meta-append-remote.js

Not very helpful for publication in a PDF but at least demonstrate a bit how part of the poster (or another sliced document) can be manipulated in social VR. Would be better I didn’t let it go through the wall or if another avatar was present to better illustrate the social aspect but at least it is somehow captured.

Also here is the code to save back some meta-data, e.g in VR world position, in visual- meta in an existing PDF on a remote server https://t.co/yYH9yuSkUs as I noticed the other one is in the PDF of the preview of the journal issue.

It’s challenging to capture it all as its constantly changing but I’m dearly aware of the value of it, having traces to discuss on and build back on top thanks to that so precious feedback, constructive criticism and suggestion to go beyond.

~~~~~ code sample ~~~~~

const fs = require('fs');

const bibtex = require('bibtex-parse');

const {PdfData} = require( 'pdfdataextract'); const {execSync} = require('child_process'); const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit'); const express = require("express");

const cors = require("cors"); const PORT = 3000

const app = express(); app.use(cors());

app.use('/data', express.static('/'))

const doc = new PDFDocument(); let original = '1.1.pdf'

let newfile = '1.2.pdf'

let startfile = '/tmp/startfile.pdf' let lastpage = '/tmp/lastpage.pdf'

let stream = doc.pipe(fs.createWriteStream(lastpage)) let dataBuffer = fs.readFileSync(original)

var newdata = ""

/* client side usage :

setup
const source = new EventSource('https://vmtest.benetou.fr/'+"streaming"); source.onmessage = message => console.log(JSON.parse(message.data));
query
fetch('https://vmtest.benetou.fr/request/test2')then( response => { return response.text() } ).then( data => { console.log(data)})

function addDataToPDFWithVM(newdata){ PdfData.extract(dataBuffer, {

get: { // enable or disable data extraction (all are optional and enabled by default) pages: true, // get number of pages

text: true, // get text of each page metadata: true, // get metadata info: true, // get info

}).then((data) => {

data.pages; // the number of pages data.text; // an array of text pages

data.info; // information of the pdf document, such as Author data.metadata; // metadata of the pdf document

var lastPage = data.text[data.pages-1]

bibRes = bibtex.entries( lastPage.replaceAll("¶",""))

newContent = lastPage.replace("@{document-headings-end}","@{fabien-

test}"+newdata+"@{fabien-test-end}\n@{document-headings-end}") doc

//.font('fonts/PalatinoBold.ttf')

.fontSize(6)

.text(newContent, 10, 10)

.save doc.end();

execSync('pdftk '+original+' cat 1-r2 output '+startfile) stream.on('finish', function () {

execSync('pdftk '+startfile+' '+lastpage+' cat output '+newfile)

})

sseSend('/'+newfile)

});

}

var connectedClients = [] function sseSend(data){

connectedClients.map( res => {

console.log("notifying client") // seems to be call very often (might try to send to closed clients?)

res.write(`data: ${JSON.stringify({status: data})}\n\n`);

})

}

app.get('/streaming', (req, res) => {

res.setHeader('Cache-Control', 'no-cache'); res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/event-stream');

//res.setHeader('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', '*');

// alread handled at the nginx level res.setHeader('Connection', 'keep-alive'); res.setHeader('X-Accel-Buffering', 'no');

res.flushHeaders(); // flush the headers to establish SSE with client

res.write(`data: ${JSON.stringify({event: "userconnect"})}\n\n`); // res.write() instead of res.send()

connectedClients.push(res)

// If client closes connection, stop sending events res.on('close', () => {

console.log('client dropped me'); res.end();

});

app.get('/', (req, res) => { res.json('vm test');

});

app.get('/request/:id', (req, res) => { const {id} = req.params; console.log(id)

res.json({"status":"ok"}); addDataToPDFWithVM(id)

})

app.listen(PORT) console.log("listening on port", PORT)

~~~~~ end code sample ~~~~~

Frode Hegland

The state of my text art + the journey to VR

At the close of 2022, the year before I expect text in VR (including AR) to take off, I thought I should take stock of where my own text systems are and where I plan to go. There are a few tweaks I feel are needed in Author, particularly with the Map, some extensions with Visual- Meta and minor but useful Reader additions. What has become very apparent over the last few months is how hard it has been to envision text in VR.

Historically the introduction of a new substrate took a while to be taken advantage of. This is nothing new. To truly take advantage of a new substrate for, which becomes a new textual medium, nothing can replace actual use and experience to inform thinking and discussion. We are still struggling to use ‘traditional’ digital media to its full. It is no surprise that in the 360, top to bottom, high resolution, powerful computer, high-speed connected virtual environment we are still barely scratching the surface.

For reading, for me, it is about making the experience pleasant. This can be done mostly through tradition typography and layout I think. Although text (in the western tradition at least) is an operation moving the foveal gaze from left to right, this is not what the user has a mental image of, we do not read in the way of a Turing machine. We read with a mental impression of the whole document (however weak or strong) and we read with prior knowledge. We further read using different points of focus on a page, such as paragraph breaks, bolds, and other layouts and so on.

Basic writing, typing–that is to say text entry–is also good today. I really don’t mind what we have today, even the 13” MacBook Pro is pretty great. The way I have polished and polished Author for writing, the font styles, the colours and such, have been polished primarily for my preference. Others have commented and have their opinions implemented, but the software is a testament to what I want for the basics. So yes, this is, to a large extent done, in my opinion (for now).

What I want however, and what I think digital text can afford and XR text can unleash, is truly interactive text with flexible views. This is not a new value or vision, it goes all the way back to my philosophy of ‘Liquid Information’ and the inspiration of Doug Engelbart’s augmentations. Most of what I will describe here can and should be done in traditional digital environments, which is what I have been working on doing with Author and Reader. Hopefully XR will provide enough curiosity to make it happen and enough interest from

then public to make it viable.

State of the my art

A few specific interactions in my software Author and Reader I’d like to highlight of the way it is at the end of 2022 include:

Much word processing and reading is quite stilted in my opinion and this is something I try to address with my software, to make the process flow better, to make it more liquid. I therefore outline some of the interactions currently possible in Author and Reader:

See only headings by folding the document {cmd-+/-}
See all the occurrences of Selected Text plus headings (to see where the occurrences are)

{cmd-F}
See Summaries of sections plus heading (not implemented yet)
See all the occurrences of Bold text plus headings (not implemented yet)
See all the occurrences of author Highlighted Text (currently implemented in Author and to be exported via Visual-Meta so that a reader can choose to see author highlights)

{cmd-+/- in Author}

When using my software, simply called Liquid, a macOS wide text utility, the following is also available easily with point and click and instantly when the basic keyboard shortcuts have been learnt:
Select any text and instantly look it up in any number of resources
Select a section of heavy text and have it be opened up with double breaks on period and singles breaks on command etc.† (as can also be done with Liquid)
Select any text and translate
Select any number and convert

The innovation needed, in my mind, is primarily with Editing & Research:

Editing

Once I have my basic text down, it becomes a task to extend some sections, shortening others and–this is the difficult bit for me–making sure that the flow of the text makes sense and different sections relate and that there is a coherent way to read as an overview.

I want to be able to write an executive summary ‘outline’ of sorts and make the document flow from that. A traditional outline is not what I mean however. A Table of Contents can be an overview but in a normal long academic paper there is so much in each headings section that disappears below the surface. This is a question I continuously grapple with.

To write the kinds of documents I want to write, where the executive summary really serves as a starting point to the whole document and should be self contained as a useful unit to read, with supplemental text should be written as ‘units’ of knowledge rather than laboriously written long-form text written afresh every time I write something.

A workflow for this needs to be able to involve both the authoring and the reading.

This is what I am doing with the ‘Defined Concepts’ in Author, which become exported as a Glossary to Reader (in PDF). There is so much more that should be possible though.

An important side note: I am not wedded to PDF but I find its frozen aspect reassuring for the long term and with Visual-Meta the metadata is not hidden which should make it more useable.

Defining your concepts as you write & access as you read (what I have started on) Imagine continuously and easily defining as you are writing, including the word ‘I’ with information about yourself at the time of writing and having this available automatically in

the future. When someone reads your work they should be able to stay on the surface layer if

they know enough about you and your work but if they need further information then can make use of the definitions you have written, which is safely stored in the document as a Glossary. Defining concepts for re-use is the key to my approach to what I see as the future of text.

The reader should be able to choose what to see when reading a document, including access to the Glossary in the appendix:
Select text and cmd-F to see all the occurrences of the selected text and if the text is a Defined Term, and also show the Glossary definition on top of the screen, with any other

terms in bold so that they can be clicked on to load. (This is possible now in my ‘Reader’ application for macOS, hopefully for iOS in 2023)
See all the occurrences of Defined Concepts in the document plus headings {cmd-shift- D}
See a Map of Defined Concepts to see how they relate, in a visually clutter free format

{cmd-M in Author}
See all the occurrences of Names plus headings {cmd-shift-N}
Glossary definitions after each term in the document, as a hypertext stretchtext

(currently only a concept since re-flowing PDF documents is very hard)

A key is this: Less text is better. In order to be able to write less text per ‘document’ we need some mechanism to write in a more modular–and well connected–hypertext fashion, and not just connected to external sources, but within, hence the attempt to re-invent glossaries and endnotes x. It is clear from my experiments in XR that simply having a massive display is not the answer, or many large displays, it is still an effort on the side of the software developer and the user to decide what goes where and how this changes.

Research

Reading for research is partly about navigating a document for relevance, close reading for critical comprehension and to see connections.

Navigation

Reading for research needs better ways to navigate the document. We have experimented with many ways of doing this where the issue is how much of each section needs to be shown for it to be useful and not overwhelming. I have found that simply having an arrow key right and left for next and previous –as is normal now–can be augmented with an arrow key down and up, which will take the reader to the next or previous page with a heading, is a good solution. The user does not need to spend time analysing every page when scrolling through the document and does not need to guess based on a plain table of context, the pages speak for themselves.

Close reading

Close reading is aided by good typography and layout for basic readability and the basic interactions outlined in the section State of the my art above. Further work can of course be done here to really elevate the reading experience through giving the user complete and near- transparent control over the appearance and interactions of what they read.

Connections

It is also important for me to be able to cite easily and that means that within a community, such as academic community or our Future of Text community, to be able to cite a document and have it open on click if I have on my hard drive/cloud/system), not just a link to a website for download or to open a Reference Manager. This is part of the future of Visual- Meta. Already Visual-Meta allows for copy and paste to cite, but the reading and following of citations needs to be improved.

Other Perspectives

Research with highlights by authorities in the field, such as the highlight above. This is social annotation but it matters who did the annotating, it can be a DJ and you can choose to cite a document with a specific person’s annotations.

Xtended Reality for text

I can so easily imagine a laptop display extending into different displays to let me have at-a- glance access to at least the following elements one on each display, as discussed in my article on Displays:
Table of Contents
Map of Defined Concepts
References

VR gives us a much wider workspace, which can truly help some with editing and seeing connections, both in our own work and in what we reading for research. I think we need to start with the basics, allowing for traditional digital documents to be accessible in VR environments, with as much metadata robustly attached (of course I suggest Visual-Meta as part of the solution to this) and then have the interactions magically grow out of this document as our experience and imagination grows. Similarly, those who can imagine completely new textual worlds should do so, and in dialog we can realise the actual Future of Text.

Making it happen

Much of what I plan to do can be done and should be done in 2D but although I have built some of it, it’s hard to finance more, partly since there is only a limited curiosity among users for different ways to read and write outside the Microsoft Word and Apple Pages paradigm and the Google Docs online method. Of course there are brilliant software out there such as Literature & Latte Scrivener, iA Writer and The Soulmen’s Mac Ulysses. In my experience as a small, independent developer however, it is very hard to break through to actually show people another way, which may or may not be to their taste and style. As I highlight, in several places since I feel it is so crucial, VR gives us an opportunity for renewed curiosity. I hope I can make use of this for my own perspective, my own software, and for the whole community to get to the next level of text augmentation.

Frode Hegland

The case for books

Fabien wrote a piece on the case against books and here is my small piece on the case for

books.

Books, in my view, are intentionally bound collections of pages which are explicitly ‘published’ though not necessarily shared with a wider audience, at a specific time. Books are also self-contained though they rely on explicit and implicit connections to convey meaning.

Explicitly published is important since they are not ‘forever documents’ like a Google Doc or that Word document manuscript you have languishing in your word processor. They are defined as being done, at least for the current version.

The fact that they are published at a specific time marks them in the history of the evolution of ideas and assertions and allow them to be cited and for flexible views to be built.

Robustness

Of course books should be able to come in many formats but a basic format of the book is that it can be self-contained and therefore, with metadata solutions such as Visual-Meta, can contain rich information about the book even it is printed on paper.

Book Bindings

The fact that a books are bound is of significance. When books were only physical, the physical bounding was not something which could be changed unless the spine was cracked or pages photocopied or hand copied.

Digital Bindings

Digital bindings should allow the author/publisher to produce an initial binding but the reader should also quite easily be able to break the book up and further share, or publish, their section of the book (rights pending of course). Their edit of the book into a new binding could be just a single article, a single page or a collection of articles.

If the book is in a series, such as The Future of Text is, then the user should be able to bind it all into one binding, should they wish.

Or combine different sources into a binding, as a teacher might do with photocopies. Further, the user should be able to annotate the bound book as a book ‘DJ’ of sorts,

where people might even subscribe to get that persons’ views of books.

And there you have it. We should not only share information as books or even journals or magazines, but books do have their place and I suspect always will, but their utility will change with what the technologies make possible.

Future Books

There is no reason books need to stay rooted in the past, they can be set free with increasing technological opportunities. We are only just beginning to imagine books which have special characteristics in VR, without being locked into only being readable in VR. We will need to radially rethink what a book is, what a document is, what units of knowledge are, how we share, how we archive and how we interact with books and documents. And we need to keep rethinking this so I am grateful for Fabien for his ‘provocation’.

Frode Hegland

‘Just’ more displays?

At the close of 2022 when the Quest 2 has become quite popular, the Quest Pro has just been released (I’ve used mine for one day so far) and we are all expecting the Apple HMD early next year, a comment is see every once in a while is that XR should be’ more than just more displays’. This is because it is relatively easy it seems to use a HMD as a receiver of a computer’s display information taking over the main display and adding more ‘virtual’ displays when needed. The implication is that this is simply too easy and does not take good advantage of what VR has to offer. As a huge fan of the potential of VR, I disagree. Yes, it might very well be technically easy and yes, the future will bring truly new dimensions to VR, there is no question in my mind. However, let’s not bury what it useful just because it is easy to build–not everything has to be a demonstration of technical prowess.

A key issue is that text is hard to read when it does not have a clear and plain background. This is why text floating as a hologram in sci-fi looks cool but is not practical to work with. When you have a background you in effect have a screen. And that’s ok. It does not have to be a regular sized screen, it could be a magically resizable screen which can go anywhere and be moved anywhere without physical effort. Perhaps most importantly, eye tracking can allow screens to fade away when not needed. This can mean that the user can have the best of a focused writing experience-ore reading experience–but the user can look to the sides and supplemental information appears–without being intrusive.

Displays/floating windows of any size which can be accessed and removed at a glance, is huge.

The thing is, the way screens currently works is that it is the computer which generate extra screens for the HMD to access and display, not the applications. To have instant integration with VR/AR, the windows should be on an application basis or created through Web VR for extra screens on demand. These screens should also be addressable by the host software for display sizing and show/hide (based on eye tracking, gesture or other).

This would allow me as a developer to have my software almost instantly available in VR and AR in a more useful form. Both my Author word processor and my Reader PDF viewer. I would simply add a function to the software to allow for the creation of such extra displays and then voila, the user will have a much more useful workspace in VR.

On the left, for example, a table of contents could appear when glancing left.
On the right, for example, could be all my available citations.
A concept map could appear on the wall opposite the user when the user wishes to view it (which might be all the time of course). Flexible displays, both small and large, which are aware of each other (same software running them) can help developers quickly port to HMD’s.

Hardware developers, build this as an easy to access API and us developers will come. This can be much more powerful than what we saw 20 years ago in Minority Report. More human scale, more useful and almost instantly available to developers to use.

Figure 0. Minority Report. Anon, 2002.

Stepping out

Further interactions can be extended to have objects from within the displays be pulled out, where they exist in the AR space as a flexible, 3D shaped display for their contents, such as photographs etc. Dragging text out of a display could make it float as a clipping, with a memory of where it comes from.

If this can work, then it would be great to allow for gestures to work to modify the contents of the displays–maybe–since the user will already be on keyboard and mouse/ trackpad. What will definitely be useful will be to allow the user to effortlessly modify where the displays are and their sizes. For example grab the display by one (or two) vertical sides to move it. Grab by top or bottom to rotate on the x-axis and grab by corners to re-size. Simple.

Size matters

What testing showed however, is that while multiple and large screens add a powerfully useful dimension, interactivity will still need to be designed to make it useful. For example, in the screenshot on the next page is the Table of Contents of my thesis, you can see it is much too tall to be readable from a single head position.
On the left is only the level one headings and a few highlighted pieces of text.
On the right is the full table of contents with the level one shown in the same size, to show the massive scale.

This indicates that it’s great to have mod displays but with ‘infinite’ scale we can easily surpass human scale and therefore we will need interactions to help us define the view flexibly.

Fabien Benetou responds

On the notion of windows by the application: That exists. This is not "just" a potentially good idea anymore : I tried one 3 years ago https://twitter.com/utopiah/status/ 1164059349490249728 and a bit later again with much more demanding content https:// twitter.com/utopiah/status/1261753166321909760

It has been funded by Valve and is open source https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xrdesktop/ xrdesktop

What's interesting also is to put this back in perspective. This was already implemented in 2014 https://twitter.com/utopiah/status/1560500042963771392 as Motorcar that I discovered. while trying another open source VR window manager https://twitter.com/

utopiah/status/1560607202314174465 , namely SimulaVR https://github.com/SimulaVR/ Simula/

My point here is obviously not to criticize the idea but rather to focus on the gaps of these existing solutions.

These are desktop windows managers for desktop VR. They take existing windows, e.g text editor or video player, and let you organize them in space.

For you to try them you'd need a desktop computer with a relatively powerful GPU running Linux then connect your headset, Quest 2 or Quest Pro, to it.

Frode Hegland responds

Thank you Fabien, this is great to see. If it could be transparently available to desktop software developers for use in VR that would be a huge step. I am happy that it technically works though, we need keep testing and experiencing.

Frode Hegland

Page to Page Navigation

Originally email to group:

There are different issues when reading a document for navigation. One issue is that you simply want to skip to the next heading since you are done with where you are and there are many pages of text before the next heading for you to skip through–judging all of them on the way to see when the next heading appears–to find if the text section is worth reading.

I have made three brief tests using our book as example.

The issue is how to let a user jump around our book in a convenient way.

A table of contents is useful but only if you know the author of the section (as in the case of our book) or if the title is very clear, which is rare.
A table of contents with tags/further metadata is hard to establish and can get messy, though this is definitely worth further investigation, particularly in VR/AR environments.
It therefore seems to me that the ability to jump to the next or previous heading, not just page, is of use. Several of our articles are very long, so if you are not interested in one you should not have to click or gesture multiple times. The short video below shows a test on this basis. In that video’s description there is a link to a version of only one page, rather than two page spread, and also a continuous scroll test.

https://youtu.be/6hnr0jwT4kM

Anyway, thanks for looking at this. The point of doing these is simply that in VR/AR we are not free of all constraints, we have different constraints, which is taking us time to learn as we explore the environment. The potential is vast, and we are just calling our way to greater understanding. We should do fully interactive tests of course, but we should also do tests like this which is simply a mock-up of our book where I deleted all the pages which didn’t have headings on them. I think that this will be useful for Reader in 2D and might work in VR, but I don’t know. I hope there will be tests or mockups or presentations or pencil sketches from

whomever is interested, because otherwise we stay discussing abstract generalities and that is worthwhile, but we should also try to be grounded in this new reality, and on the way discover what ‘grounded’ actually means.

Adam Wern responds:

Heading-by-Heading (and sub-heading) navigation is standard in many PDF readers (like Preview on Mac). Works with any PDF that has a proper ToC. That's how I usually read longer non-fiction PDF books. And you can still scroll or navigate page-by-page with [Space]

Frode Hegland responds:

Yes and thanks for showing me this, it is indeed the same principle. However you need to have the focus in the table of contents, which is different since the table of contents needs to be visible. What I propose is that down arrow always goes to next heading, no matter what view and right arrow next page (and in reverse of course the opposite). Either way, the metadata for headings needs to be present, which it rarely is, but great when it is. This is of course a Visual-Meta issue for me and Reader should also support ‘native’ PDF headings.

Adam Wern responds:

Yeah, a digital ToC without interactions is sad. Another takeaway is that we should always include regular PDF ToC:s for books as can help millions of readers directly without any special software (and also screen readers). I've noticed that more recent academic texts include a ToC as well, which is excellent.

Frode Hegland

Journal : Academic & Scientific Documents in the Metaverse

Recall the world before it all became digital. You are in a meeting where you have a printout of a relevant document and a notepad. You underline relevant parts of the document, you write notes and draw diagrams in your notepad. You are also given a stack of index cards so that you can all do some brain-storming and those cards are pinned to a wall and moved around as you discuss them as a group. The facilitator even pins a few lines of string between related cards. You take a picture of this and since you don’t need the document you printed out–since the meeting went so well—you fold it into a paper airplane and fly it into the bin.

Now picture yourself in a fully digital environment where you have the same document and notepad and you use systems like Google Docs to collaborate and even a projector or a big screen for the cards to be put up and moved around by the facilitator. This is pretty much the office life many of us live in today. You can’t exactly fly the airplane to the bin, you have given up arbitrary interactions for those which are more useful in a work environment, such as the ability to instantly edit and share your information. Every environment you work in will of course have tradeoffs as to what you can do there.

So let’s go to the near-future and don our AR/VR headgear and enter a meeting in the Metaverse with the same document and a notepad, in richly interactive knowledge room. You will now be able to do magical things, as we can dream about today, and even build demos of:

You can spread the document out in and have it float in the air where you want it to.

Any included diagrams can be pulled out and enlarged to fill a wall, where you can discuss it and annotate it.

Any references from that document can be visualised as lines going into the distance and a tug on any line will bring the source into view.

You can throw your virtual index cards straight to a huge wall and you and the facilitator can both move the cards around, as well as save their positions and build sets of layouts.

Lines showing different kinds of connections can be made to appear between the cards.

If the cards have time information they can also be put on a timeline, if they have geographic information they can be put on a map, even a globe.

If there is related information in the document you brought, or in any relevant documents,

they can be connected to this constellation of knowledge.

What you can do is only limited by our imagination and the tools provided. And it is also limited by the enabling infrastructures. What you cannot do is leave the room with this knowledge space intact. The actions you can perform on the knowledge elements in the room is entirely predicated by the ‘affordances’ the room gives you, to use a term from psychology which is also used for human-computer-interaction. It is akin to taking a picture from one picture editing program to another program–even though it’s the same picture, you cannot expect to be able to perform the exact same functions–such as special photographic filters. The difference in the metaverse will be that the entire environment will be software, both the visual aspects of the environment and the interactions you will have, and that means it will be owned by someone. Meta owns everything you do in their Quest headsets when in their environments, such as Horizon Workrooms, you cannot perform operations which they have not made possible through programming the space they own.

Apple and Google will try to own the knowledge spaces they provide as well.

Consider just a few documents: Currently you cannot fully open a document into a VR space, you can either view your Mac or Windows computer screen or you can have the document as sheets, but let’s skip ahead to when you can indeed open the document and its metadata is available to you. You open a document in the knowledge space and you:

Pull the table of contents to one side for easy overview.

Throw the glossary into another part of the room.

Throw all the sources of the document against a wall.

You manipulate the document with interactions even Tom Cruise would have been jealous of in Minority Reporty.

You read this new document with the same interactions and decide to see the two documents side by side with similarities highlighted with translucent bands, Ted Nelson style.

Then you have a meeting and you have to leave this knowledge room. Your next meeting is in a different type of room developed by a different company but the work you have just done is so relevant to your next meeting so you wish you could take across the work you have done but you cannot. The data for how the information is displayed and what interactions you can do are determined by the room you are in, since that is the software which makes the interactions possible. What we need is to develop open standards for how data, in the

form of documents but also all other forms of data, can be taken into these environments and for how the resulting views, which is to say arrangements, of this information is stored and handled. How will the stored, how will it be accessible and who will own it? This will be for us to decide, together. Or we can let commerce fence us in.

Jack Kausch

Why We Need a Semantic Writing System

Can there be non-sequential text?

The Greeks thought Egyptian hieroglyphs were allegorical icons which conveyed pure ideas. This interpretation was passed down to the Renaissance, and combined with misconceptions about Chinese language. In the early modern period, Europeans dreamed of creating a universal pictographic language which, combined with an encyclopedia, would translate all knowledge into every language in the world.

We now know that Egyptian hieroglyphs are not just pictures. They also convey sound.

The boundary between pictographic proto-writing and what we consider writing with a grammar is the Rebus Principle, where a picture begins to stand for a sound by a process of visual punning. This was practiced in an extreme form in early Egyptian history, and gave rise to the multi-layered nature of the writing system. The best term to describe writing systems like this is not “logographic” or “ideographic” but the Mandarin 形声 “xíng shēng”, which roughly translates to “phonosemantic.”

Both Cuneiform and Egyptian have the quality of conveying spoken speech alongside semantic classifier symbols, which disambiguate transcriptions. The convention for how to read Hieroglyphs is not justified against any one direction on the scroll or stela, but follows the rule to read “into the faces of animals” or in the opposite direction that all the characters are looking. Thus hieroglyphs can be read from right to left, left to right, top to bottom, and vice versa, depending on how they are written.

However: every inscription is still sequential. Even boustrophedon texts from the early Greek period, which reverse direction every line, continue to convey language linearly. The reason for this is that speech, while continuous, is sequential, and text encodes speech. Text takes continuous phonological features and represents them as discrete symbols, yet the content of the representation remains sound-based. There is not, and has never been, a “non- discursive” writing system, like the Greeks once thought about Egyptian hieroglyphs.

This is not to say that there is not great value in pictographic systems of representation which have no relation to language, such as Emoji. It is just that they are not considered writing because they have no phonological content, and as such they do not represent the grammar of natural language. Birchbark scrolls such as the Ojibwe wiigwasabak or the Mi'kmaq hieroglyphs can convey complex layers of narrative meaning, but their

interpretation is limited to those already initiated into an oral tradition. What we consider text remains a function of what is speakable.

We are entering an era that wishes to challenge the linearity of text. The distributed nature of the Web, and the “horizontal” potential of hypertext to link documents together, seems to invite a world in which the sequential nature of the printed book is altered. What this change amounts to is another transformation in documentation. The codex made very different social modes of organization possible from the scroll (indeed, it may have been partly responsible for the rise of Christianity) and printing transformed the relations between individuals and the book. The nature of documents, including how they are stored and disseminated, will now inevitably change.

There is a limit, however, to how non-sequential we can make text in its own right, for the reasons discussed above. Emoji appear to offer an interesting alternative, yet for all their expressive power, like most pictographic symbol sets, they remain ambiguous. Icons provide an ability to convey certain kinds of information, and even establish natural classes. We encode them with the same standards as text, and they are treated as text-like entities. Yet metaphorical combinations of icons can have many interpretations, and there are too many things in the world to create an icon for every one. There is thus no small inventory of icons which will satisfy the constraint of being able to combine them into every possible concept.

Our new tools have nearly endless potential for the representation of mathematical, particularly geometric, entities. Text on the other hand is dependent on standards which encode individual characters, and in turn influence how the text is formatted, and what interfaces can be made for users to work with it, i.e., to read and write. This is foreign to our visual interfaces, whether phones or monitors, which, composed of pixels, are ideally suited to displaying graphics and shapes.

To return now to the European dream of a universal character language from the Enlightenment: where such a writing system is similar to emojis and geometry, it loses many of the characteristics we ascribe to text, because it transcends the limits of language. It is non- sequential, but it is too vague to consistently convey the writer’s intent. Where such a writing system conveys linguistic and grammatical information, it is constrained by the phonological traits of each language, and cannot be said to be “universal.” This is the conventional text we already have.

The answer is probably somewhere in between, similar to what the Egyptians discovered all those years back during the period between the reign of Mena-Narmer and Djoser. Some combination of sounds and meanings could serve as a mnemonic device to clarify both categories, and potentially integrate well into current speech synthesis technology. If there can be non-sequential text it will be found at the intersection of the visual image, geometry, well-formed semantic logic, and phonological natural language.

Jad Esber

Monthly Guest Presentation : 21 February 2022

Video: https://youtu.be/i_dZmp59wGk?t=513

Jad Esber: Today I’ll be talking a little bit about both, sort of, algorithmic, and human curation. I’ll be using a lot of metaphors, as a poet that’s how I tend to explain things. The presentation won’t take very long, and I hope to have a longer discussion.

On today’s internet, algorithms have taken on the role of taste-making, but also the authoritative role of gatekeeping through the anonymous spotlighting of specific content. If you take the example of music, streaming services have given us access to infinite amounts of music. There are around 40,000 songs uploaded on Spotify every single day. And given the amount of music circulating on the internet, and how it’s increasing all the time, the need for compression of cultural data and the ability to find the essence of things becomes more focal than ever. And because automated systems have taken on that role of taste-making, they have a profound effect on the social and cultural value of music, if we take the example of music. And so, it ends up influencing people’s impressions and opinions towards what kind of music is considered valuable or desirable or not.

If you think of it from an artist’s perspective, despite platforms subverting the power of labels, who are our previous gatekeepers and taste-makers, and claiming to level the playing field, they’re creating new power structures. With algorithms and editorial teams controlling what playlists we listen to, to the point where artists are so obsessed with playlist placement, that it’s dictating what music they create. So if you listen to the next few new songs that you hear on a streaming service, you might observe that they’ll start with a chorus, they’ll be really loud, they’ll be dynamic, and that’s because they’re optimising for the input signals of algorithms and for playlist placement. And this is even more pronounced on platforms like TikTok, which essentially strip away all forms of human curation. And I would hypothesise that, if Amy Winehouse released Back in Black today, it wouldn’t perform very well because of its pacing, the undynamic melody. It wouldn’t have pleased the algorithms. It wouldn’t have sold the over 40 million copies that it did.

And another issue with algorithms is churning standardised recommendations that are flattening individual tastes, they’re encouraging conformity and stripping listeners of social interaction. We’re all essentially listening to the same songs.

There are actually millions of songs, on ‘Spotify’, that have been played only partially, or never at all. And there’s a service, which is kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it’s called ‘Forgotify’, that exists to give the neglected songs another way to reach you. So if you know are looking for a song that’s never been played, or hardly been played, you can go to ‘Forgotify’ to listen to it. So, the answer isn’t that we should eliminate algorithms or machine curation. We actually really need machine and programmatic algorithms to scale, but we also need humans to make it real. So, it’s not one or the other. If we solely rely on algorithms to understand the contextual knowledge around, let’s say, music, that’ll be impossible. Because, at present, human effort, popularity bias, which means only recommending popular stuff, and the cold start problem is unavoidable with music recommendation, even with very advanced hybrid collaborative filtering models that Spotify implies. So pairing algorithmic discovery with human curation will remain the only option. And with human curation allowing for the recalibration of recommendation through contextual reasoning and sensitivity, qualities that only humans really can do. Today this has caused the formation of new power structures that place the careers of merging artists, let’s say on Spotify, in the hands of a very small set of curators that live at the major streaming platform.

Spotify actually has an editorial team of humans that adds context around algorithms and curates playlists. So they’re very powerful. But as a society, you continuously look to others, to both validate specific tastes, and to inspire us with new tastes. If I were to ask you how you came up discovered a new article or a new song, it’s likely that you have heard of it from someone you trust.

People have looked to tastemakers to provide recommendations continuously. But part of the problem is that curation still remains an invisible labour. There aren’t really incentive structures that allow curators to truly thrive. And it’s something that a lot of blockchain advocates, people who believe in Web3, think that there is an opportunity for that to change with this new tech. But beyond this, there is also a really big need for a design system that allows for human-centred discovery. A lot of people have tried, but nothing has really emerged.

I wanted to use a metaphor and sort of explore what bookshelves represent as a potential example of an alternative design system for discovery, human-curated discovery. So, let’s imagine the last time you visited the bookstore. The last time I visited the bookstore, I might have gone in to search for a specific book. Perhaps it was to seek inspiration for another read. I didn’t know what book I wanted to buy. Or maybe, like me, you went into the bookstore for the vibes, because the aesthetic is really cool, and being in that space signals something to people. This book store over here is one I used to frequent in London. I loved just going to hang out there because it was awesome, and I wanted to be seen there. But

similarly, when I go and visit someone’s house, I’m always on the lookout for what’s on their bookshelf, to see what they’re reading. That’s especially the case for someone I really admire or want to get to know better. And by looking at their bookshelf, I get a sense of what they’re interested in, who they are. But it also allows for a certain level of connection with the individual that’s curating the books. They provide a level of context and trust that the things on their bookshelves are things that I might be interested in. And I’d love to, for example, know what’s on Frode’s bookshelf right now. But there’s also something really intimate about browsing someone’s bookshelf, which is essentially a public display of what they’re consuming or looking to consume. So, if there’s a book you’ve read, or want to read, it immediately triggers common ground. It triggers a sense of connection with that individual. Perhaps it’s a conversation. I was browsing Frode’s bookshelf and I came across a book that I was interested in, perhaps, I start a conversation around it. So, along with discovery, the act of going through someone’s bookshelf, allows for that context, for connection, and then, the borrowing of the book creates a new level of context. I might borrow the book and kind of have the opportunity to read through it, live through it, and then go back and have another conversation with the person that I borrowed it from. And so recommending a book to a friend is one thing, but sharing a copy of that book, in which maybe you’ve annotated the text that stands out to you, or highlighted key parts of paragraphs, that’s an entirely new dimension of connection. What stood out to you versus what stood out to them. And it’s really important to remember that people connect with people at the end of the day and not just with content. Beyond the books on display, the range of authors matters. And even the effort to source the books matters. Perhaps it’s an early edition of a book. Or you had to wait in line for hours to get an autographed copy from that author.

That level of effort, or the proof of work to kind of source that book, also signals how intense my fanship is, or how important this book is to me.

And all that context is really important. And what’s really interesting is also that the bookshelf is a record of who I was, and also who I want to be. And I really love this quote from Inga Chen, she says, “What books people buy are stronger signals of what topics are important to people, or perhaps what topics are aspirationally important, important enough to buy a book that will take hours to read or that will sit on their shelf and signal something about them.” If we compare that to some platforms, like Pinterest for example. Pinterest exists to not just curate what you’re interested in right now, but what’s aspirationally interesting to you. It’s the wedding dresses that you want to buy or the furniture that you want to purchase. So there’s this level of, who you want to become, as well, that’s spoken to through that curation of books, that lives on your bookshelf.

I wanted to come back and connect this with where we’re at with the internet today and

this new realm of ownership and people are calling social objects. And so, if we take this metaphor of a bookshelf and apply it to any other space that houses cultural artefacts, the term people have been using for these cultural artefacts is social objects. We can think of, beyond books, the shirts we wear, the posters we put on our walls, the souvenirs we pick up, they’re all, essentially, social objects. And they showcase what we care about and the communities that we belong to. And, at their core, these social objects act as a shorthand to tell people about who we are. They are like beacons that send out the signal for like-minded people to find us. If I’m wearing a band shirt, then other fans of that artist, that band will, perhaps, want to connect with me. On the internet, these social objects take the form of URLs, of JPEGs, articles, songs, videos, and there are platforms like Pinterest, or Goodreads, or Spotify, and countless others that centre around some level of human-curated discovery, and community around these social objects. But what’s really missing from our digital experience today is this aspect of ownership that’s rooted in the physicality of the books on your bookshelves. We might turn to digital platforms as sources of discovery and inspiration, but until now we haven’t really been able to attach our identities to the content we consume, in a similar way that we do to physical owned goods. And part of that is the public histories that exist around the owned objects that we have, in the context that isn’t really provided in the limited UIs that a lot of our devices allow us to convey. So, a lot of what’s happening today around blockchains is focused on how can we track provenance or try to verify that someone was the first to something, and how do we, in a way, track a meme through its evolution. And there are elements of context that are provided through that sort of tech, although limited.

There is discussion around ownership as well. Like, who owns what, but also portability. The fact that I am able to take the things that I own with me from one space to another, which means that I’m no longer leaving fragments of my identity siloed in these different spaces, but there’s a sense of personhood. And so these questions of physical ownership are starting to enter the digital realm. And we’re at an interesting time right now, where a lot of, I think, design systems will start to pop up, that emulate a lot of what it feels like to work, to walk into a bookstore, or to browse someone’s bookshelf. And so, I wanted to leave us with that open question, and that provocation, and transition to more of a discussion. That was everything that I had to present.

So, I will pause there and pass it back to Frode, and perhaps we can just have a discussion from now on. Thank you for listening.

Dialogue

https://youtu.be/i_dZmp59wGk?t=1329

Frode Hegland: Thank you very much. That was interesting and provocative. Very good for this group. I can see lots of heads are wobbling, and it means there’s a lot of thinking. But since I have the mic I will do the first question, and that is:

Coming from academia, one thing that I’m wondering what you think and I’m also wondering what the academics in the room might think. References, as bookshelf, or references as showing who you are, basically trying to cram things in there to show, not necessarily support your argument, but support your identity, do you have any comments on that?

Jad Esber: So, I think that’s a really interesting thought. When I was thinking of bookshelves, they do serve almost like references, because of the thoughts and the insights that you share. If you’re sitting in the bedroom, in the living room, and you’re sharing some thoughts, perhaps you’re having a political conversation, and you point at the book on your shelf that perhaps you read, that’s like, “Hey, this thought that I’m sharing, the reference is right there.” It sort of does add, or kind of provide a baseline level of trust that this insight or thought has been memorialised in this book that someone chose to publish, and it lives on my bookshelf. There is some level of credibility that’s built by attaching your insider thoughts to that credible source. So, yeah, there’s definitely a tie between references, I guess, in citations to the physical setting of having a conversation and a book living on your bookshelf, that you point to. I think that’s an interesting connection beyond just existing as social objects that speak to your identity, as well. That’s another extension as well. I think that’s really interesting.

Frode Hegland: Thanks for that. Bob. But afterward, Fabien, if you could elaborate on your comment in the chat, that would be really great. Bob, please.

Video: https://youtu.be/i_dZmp59wGk?t=1460 Bob Horn: Well, the first thing that comes to mind is:

Have you looked at three-dimensional spaces on the internet? For example, Second Life, and what do you think about that?

Jad Esber: Yeah. I mean, part of what people are proposing for the future of the internet is what I’m sure you guys have discussed in past sessions. Perhaps is like the metaverse, right? Which is essentially this idea of co-presence, and some level of physicality bridging the gap between being co-presented in a physical space, in a digital space. Second Life was a very

early example of some version of this. I haven’t spent too many iterations thinking about virtual spaces and whether they are apt at emulating the feeling of walking into a bookstore, or leafing through a bookshelf. But I think if you think about the sensory experience of being able to browse someone’s bookshelf, there are, obviously, parallels to the visual sensory experience. You can browse someone’s digital library. Perhaps there’s some level of tactile, you can pick up books, but it’s not really the same. But it’s missing a lot of the other sensory experiences, which provide a level of context. But certainly, allow for that serendipitous discovery that another doesn’t. Like the feed dynamic isn’t necessarily the most serendipitous. It’s it is to a degree, but it’s also very crafted. And it there isn’t really a level of play when you’re going around and looking at things that you do on a bookshelf, or in a bookstore. And so, Second Life does allow for that. Moving around, picking things up and exploring that you do in the physical world. So, I think it’s definitely bridging the gap to an extent, but missing a lot of the sensory experiences that we have in the physical world. I think we haven’t quite thought about how to bridge that gap. I know there are projects that are trying to make our experience of digital worlds more sensory, but I’m not quite sure how close we’ll get. So, that’s my initial thought, but feel free to jump in, by the way, I’d welcome other opinions and perspectives as well.

Bob Horn: We’ve been discussing this a little bit, partially, at my initiative, and mostly at Frode’s urging us on. And I haven’t been in Second Life for, I don’t know, six, or seven, or eight years. But I have a friend who has, who’s there all the time, and says that there are people who have their personal libraries there. That there are university libraries. Their whole geographies, I’m told, of libraries. So, it may be an interesting angle, at some point. And if you do, I’d be interested, of course, in what you came up with.

Jad Esber: Totally. Thank you for that pointer, yeah. There’s a multitude of projects right now that focus on extending Second Life, and kind of bringing in concepts around ownership, and physicality, and interoperability, so that the things that you own in Second Life, you can take with you, from that world, into others. Which, sort of, does bridge the gap between the physical world and the digital, because it doesn’t live within that siloed space, but actually is associated to you, and can be taken from one space to another. Very early in building that out, but that’s a big promise of Web3, so. There’re a lot of hands. So, I’ll pause there.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, Fabien, if you could elaborate on what you were talking about,

virtual bookshelf.

Fabien Benetou: Yep. Well, actually it will be easier if I’ll share my screen. I don’t know if you can see. I have a Wiki that I’ve been maintaining for 10 plus years. And on top, you can

see the visualisation of the edits when I started for this specific page. And these pages, as I was saying in the chat, are sadly out of date, that’s been 10 years, actually, just for this page. But I was listing the different books I’ve read, with the date, what page I was. And if I take a random book, I have my notes, the (indistinct), and then the list of books that are related, let’s say, to the book. I don’t have it in VR or in 3D yet, but it’s definitely from that point wouldn’t be too hard, so... And I was thinking, I have personally a, kind of, (indistinct) that they’re hidden, but I have some books there and I have a white wall there and I love both because when I bring back if either I’m in someone else’s room or my own room. Usually, if I’m in my own room, I’m excited by the book I’ve read or the one that I haven’t read yet. So it brings a lot of excitement. But also, if I have a goal in mind, a task at hand, let’s say, a presentation on Thursday, a thing that I haven’t finished yet, then it pulls me to something else. Whereas if I have the white wall it’s like a blank slate. And again, if I need to pull some references on books and whatnot. So, I always have that tension. And what usually happens is, when I go in a physical bookstore, or library, or bookshop, or friends, serendipity is indeed, it’s not the book I came here for, it’s the one next to it. Because I’m not able to make the link, and usually, if the creation has been done right, and arguably the algorithm, if it’s not actually computational, let’s say, if you use the doing annotation or any other basically annotation system, in order to sort the books or their references, then there should be some connection that were not obvious in the first place. So, to me, that’s the most, I’d say, exciting aspect of that.

Jad Esber: This is amazing, by the way, Fabien. This is incredible that you’ve built this over a decade, that’s so cool. I think what’s also really interesting to extend on that thought, and just to kind of like, “yes” and that, there is a certain level of, I mean, I think what you’ve built is very utilitarian, but also the existence of the bookshelf as an expression of identity, I think is interesting. So, beyond just organising the books, and keeping them, storing them in a utilitarian way, then serving as signals of your identity, I think are really interesting. And so, I think a lot of platforms today cater to the utility. If you think about Pocket or even Goodreads to an extent, there is potentially an identity angle to Goodreads versus Tumblr, back in the day, or Myspace or (indistinct) which were much more identity-focused. So there is this distinction of utilitarian, organising, keeping things, annotating, etc. for yourself. But there’s also this identity element of like, by curating I am expressing my identity. And I think that’s also really interesting.

Frode Hegland: Brandel, you’re next. But just wanted to highlight today to the new people in the room including you, Jad. This community, at the moment, is really leaning towards AR and VR. But in a couple of years’ time, what can happen? And that also includes projections and all kinds of different things, so we really are thinking connected with the physical, but

also virtual on top. Brandel, please.

Brandel Zachernuk: So, I was really hooked on when you said that you like to be seen in that London bookstore. And it made me think about the fact that on Spotify, on YouTube, on Goodreads for the most part, we’re not seen at all, unless we’re on the specific, explicit page that is there for the purposes of representing us. So, YouTube does have a profile page. But nothing about the rest of our onward activity actually is represented within the context of that. If you compare that to being in the bookstore, you have your clothes on, you have your demeanour, and you can see the other participants. There’s a mutuality to being present in it, where you get to see that, rather than merely that a like button maybe is going up in real-time. And so, I’m wondering what kind of projective representation do you feel we need within the broader Web? Because even making a new curation page still silos that representation with an explicit place, and doesn’t give you the persistent reference that is your own physicality, and body wandering around the various places that you want to be at and be seeing at. Now, do you see that as something that there’s a solve to? Or how do you think about that?

Jad Esber: Yeah, I think Bob alluded to this to a degree with Second Life. And the example of Second Life, I think the promise of co-presence in the digital world is really interesting, and potentially could solve for this, part of. I also go to cafes, not just because I like the coffee, because I like the aesthetic, and the opportunities to rub shoulders with other clientele that might be interesting, because this cafe is frequented by this sort of folk. And that doesn’t exist online as much. I mean, perhaps, if you’re going to a forum, and you frequent a specific subreddit, there is an element of like, “Oh, I’ll meet these types of folks or this chat group, and perhaps, I’ll be able to converse with these types of folks and be seen here.” But I think, how long you spend there, how you show up there, beyond just what you write. That all matters. And how you’re browsing, there’s a lot of elements that are really lost in current user interfaces. So, I think, yeah, Second Life-like spaces might solve for that, and allow us to present other parts of ourselves in these spaces, and measure time spent, and how we’re presenting, and what we’re bringing. But, yeah. I’m also fascinated by this idea of just existing in a space as a signal for who you are. And yeah, I also love that metaphor. And again, this is all stuff that I’m actively thinking about and would love sort of any additional insights, if anyone has thoughts on this, please do share, as well. This is, by no means, just a monologue from my direction.

Frode Hegland: Oh, I think you’re going to get a lot of perspectives. and I will move into... We’re very lucky to have Dene here, who’s been working with electronic literature. I will let her speak for herself, but what they’re doing is just phenomenally important work.

Dene Grigar: Thank you. That’s a nice introduction. I am the managing director, one of the founders, and the curator of The NEXT. And The NEXT is a virtual museum, slash library,

slash preservation space that contains, right now, 34 collections of about 3,000 works of

born-digital art and expressive writing. What we generally call ‘electronic literature’. But I’ve unpacked that word a little bit for you. And I think this corresponds to a little bit of what you’e talking about in that when we cut when I collect when I curate work I’m not picking particular works to go in The NEXT, I’m taking full collections. So, artists turn over their entire collections to us, and then that becomes part of The NEXT collections. So it’s been interesting watching what artists collect. So it’s not just their own works, it’s the works of other artists. And the interesting, historical, cultural aspect of it is to see, in particular time frames, artists before the advent of the browser, for example, what they collected, and who they were collecting. Michael Joyce, Stuart Moulthrop, Voyager, stuff like that. Then the Web, the browser, and the net art period, and the rise of Flash, looking to see that I have five copies of Firefly by Nina Larson because people were collecting that work. Jason Nelson’s work. A lot of his games are very popular. So it’s been interesting to watch this kind of triangulation of what becomes popular, and then the search engine that we built pulls that up. It lets you see that, “Oh, there’s five copies of this. There’s three copies of that. Oh, there’s seven versions of Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story.” To see what’s been so important that there’s even been updates, so that it stays alive over the course of 30 years. One other thing I’ll mention, back to your early comment, I have a whole print book library in my house, despite the fact I was in a flood in 1975 and lost everything I owned, I rebuilt my library and I have something like 5,000 volumes of books, I collect books. But it’s always interesting for me, to have guests at my house and they never look at my bookshelf. And the first thing I do when I go to someone’s house, I see books is like, “Oh, what are you reading? What do you collect?” And so, looking at having The NEXT and all that 3,000 works of art and then my bookshelf, and realising that people really aren’t looking and thinking about what this means. The identity for the field, my own personal taste, I call it my own personal taste, which is very diverse. So, I think there’s a lot to be said about people’s interest in this. And I think it’s that kind of intellectual laziness that drives people to just allow themselves to be swept away by algorithms, and not intervene on their own and take ownership over what they’re consuming. And I’ll leave it at that. Thank you.

Jad Esber: Yeah, I love that. Thank you for sharing. And that’s a fascinating project, as well. I’d love to dig in further. I think you bring up a really good point around shared interests being really key and connecting the right type of folks, who are interested in exploring each others libraries. Because not everyone that comes into my house is interested in the books that I’m reading, because, perhaps, they’re from a different field, they’re just not as curious about the same fields. But there is a huge amount of people that potentially are. I mean, within this group, we’re all interested in similar things. And we found each other through the

internet. And so, there is this element of, what if the people walking into your library, Dene, are also folks that share the same interests as you? That would actively look and browse through your library and are deeply interested in the topics that you’re interested in so there is something to be said around how can we make sure that people that are interested in the same things are walking into each others’ spaces? And the interest-based graphs exist on the Web. Thinking about who is interested in what, and how can we go into each others’ spaces. And browse, or collecting, or curating, or creating is a part of what many algorithms try to do, for better or for worse. But sometimes leave us in echo chambers, right? And we’re in one neighbourhood and can’t leave, and that’s part of the problem. But yeah, there is something to be said about that. And I think just to go back to the earlier comment that the Dene made around the inspirations behind artists’ work. I would love to be able to explore what inspired my favourite artist’s music, and what went into it and go back and listen to that. And I think, part of again, Web3’s promise is this idea of provenance, seeing how things have evolved and how they’ve become. And crediting everyone in that lineage. So, if I borrowed from Dene’s work, and I built on it, and that was part of what inspired me, then she should get some credit. And that idea of provenance, and lineage, and giving credit back, and building incentive systems that allow people to build works that will inspire others to continue to build on top of my work is a really interesting proposal for the future of the internet. And so, I just wanted to share that as well.

Frode Hegland: That’s great. Anything back from you, Dene, on that? Before we move to Mark?

Dene Grigar: Well, I think provenance is really important. And what I do in my own lab is to establish provenance. Even if you go to The NEXT and you look at the works, it’ll say where we got the work from, who gave it to us, the date they gave it to us, and if there’s some other story that goes with it. For example, I just received a donation from a woman whose daughter went to Brown University and studied under Coover, Robert Coover. And she gave me a copy of some of the early hypertext works, and one was Michael Joyce’s Afternoon Story and it was signed. The little floppy disk was signed, on the label, by Michael and she said, “I didn’t notice there was a signature. I don’t know why there’d be a signature on it.” And, of course, the answer is, if you know anything about the history is that Joyce and Coover were friends, there’s this whole line of this relationship and Coover was the first to review Michael Joyce, and made him famous in the New York times, in 1992. So, I told her that story, and she’s like, Oh, my god. I didn’t know that.” So, just having that story for future generations to understand the relationships, and how ideas and taste evolve over time, and who were the movers and shakers behind some of that interest, so. Thank you. https://the- next.eliterature.org/.

Frode Hegland: Dene, this is really grist for the mill of a lot of what we’re talking about here. Because, with Jad’s notions of identity sharing via the media we consume, and a lot of the visualisations we’re looking at in VR. One of the things we’ve talked about over the last few weeks is guided tours of work where you could see the hands of the author or somebody pointing out things whether it’s a mural, or a book, or whatever. And then, to be able to find a way to have the meta-information you just talked about, be able to enter the room, maybe it could be simply recorded as you saying it, and that is tagged to be attached to these works. Many wonderful layers, I could go on forever. And I expect mark will follow up.

Mark Anderson: Hi. I just think, they’re really reflections, more than anything else. Because one of the things that really brought me up was this idea of books being a performative thing, which I still can’t get my head around. It’s not something I’ve encountered, and I don’t see it reflected in the world in which I live. So maybe a generational drift in things. For instance, behind me you might guess, I suppose, I’m a programmer. Actually what that shows is it’s me trying to understand how things work, and I need them that close to my computer. My library is scattered across the house, mainly to distribute weight through a rather old crumbly Victorian house. So, I have to be careful where we put the bookcases. I’m just, really reflecting how totally alien I find the notion of books, I certainly don’t have... I struggled to think of, I never placed a book with the intention it’ll be seen in that position by somebody else. And this is sort of not a pushback, it’s just my reflection on what I’m hearing. Because I find it very interesting because it had never occurred to me. I never, ever thought of it in those terms. The other sad thing about that means that, so, are the books merely performative? Or the content is there? I mean, one of the interesting thing I’ve been trying to do in this group is trying to find ways just to share the list of the books that are on my shelf. Not because they are any reflection of myself, but literally, I actually have some books that are quite hard to find, and people might want to know that it was possible to find a copy. And whether they need to come and physically see it, or we could scan something. The point is, “No, I have these. This is a place you can find this book.” And it’s interesting that that’s actually really hard to do. Most systems don’t help because, I mean, the tragedy of recommender systems is they make us so inward-looking. So, instead of actually rewarding our curiosity, or making us look across our divides, they basically say, “Right. You lot are a bunch. You go stand over there.” Job done, and (the) recommender system moves on to categorising the next thing. So, if I try to read outside my normal purview, and I’m constantly reflecting on the fact that the recommended system is one step behind saying, “Oh, right.

You’re now interested in…” No, I’m not. I’m trying to learn a bit about it. But certainly, this

is not my area of interest in the sense that I now want to be amidst lots of people who like this. I’m interested in people who are interested by it, but I think those are two very different things. So, I don’t know the answers, but I just raise those, I suppose, as provocations.

Because that’s something that, at the moment, our systems are really bad at allowing us to share content other than as a sort of humblebrag. Or, in your beautifully curated life on Pinterest, or whatever. Anyway, I’ll stop there.

Jad Esber: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I think it does exist on a spectrum, the identity expressive versus utilitarian need that it solves. But if you take the example of clothing, that might help it a little bit more. So, if we’re wearing a t-shirt, perhaps there’s a utilitarian need, but there is also a performative, or identity expressive need that it solves the way we dress, speaks to who we are as well. So I think the notion of a social object being identity expressive, I think is what I was trying to convey. Think, if you think about magazines on a coffee table. Or you think about the art books that live scattered around your living room, perhaps. That is trying to signal something about yourself. The magazines we read as well. If I’m reading Vogue, I’m trying to say something about who I am, and what I’m interested in reading. The Times, or The Guardian, or another newspaper is also very identity expressive. And taking it out on the train and making sure people see what I’m reading is also identity expressive. So, I think that everything sort of around what we consume and what we wear and what we identify with being a signal of who we are. It’s what I was trying to convey there. But I think you make a very good point. The books next to your computer are there because they’re within reach. You’re writing a paper about something and it’s right there. And so, there is a utilitarian need for the way you organise your bookshelf.

The way you organise your bookshelf can be identity expressive or utilitarian. I’ll give you another example. On my bookshelf, I have a few books that are turned face forward, and a few that I don’t really want people to see them, because I’m not really that proud of them. And I have a book that’s signed by the author, I’ll make sure it’s really easy for people to open it and see the signature. And so, there is an identity expressive element to the way I organise my bookshelves as well that’s not just utilitarian. So, I think another point to illustrate that angle.

Mark Anderson: To pull us back to our, and as a sub-focus on AR, VR, it just occurred to me it’s something that, the (indistinct) reminder that Dene was talking about, people don’t look at the bookshelves. I’m thinking, yeah and certainly not saying I miss, and it happens less frequently that the evening ends up with a dinner table just loaded with piles of books that have been retrieved from all over the house and are actually part of the conversation that’s going on. And one thing that some of our new tools would be nice to help us recreate that, especially maybe, if we’re not meeting in the same physical space, is to have that

element of recall of these artefacts, or at least some of the pertinent parts of the content they’re in. It would be really useful to have because the fact that you bothered to walk up two flights of stairs or something to go and get some book off the top shelf, because that’s, in a sense, part of the conversation going on, I think is quite interesting and something we’ve sort of lost anyway. I’ll let it carry on.

Frode Hegland: It’s interesting to hear what you say there, Mark, because in the calls we have, you’re the one who most often will, “Look, the book arrived. Look, I have this copy now.” And then we all get really annoyed at you because we have to buy the same damn book. So, I think we’re talking about different ways and to different audiences, not necessarily to dinner guests. But for your community of this thing, you’re very happy to share. Which is interesting it’s also two points, to use my hand in the air here. One of them is, clothing came up as well. And some kind of study, I read showed that, we don’t buy clothing we like, we buy clothing that is the kind of clothing we expect people like us to buy. So, even somebody who is really, “I don’t care about fashion” is making a very strong fashion statement. They’re saying they don’t care. Which is anti-snobbery, maybe. You could say that I’m wondering how that enters into this. But also, when we talk about curation, it’s so fascinating how, in this discussion, music and books are almost interchangeable from this particular aspect. And what I found is, I don’t subscribe to Spotify, I never have, because I didn’t like the way the songs were mixed. But what I do really like, and I find amazing, is YouTube mixes. I pay for YouTube premium so I don’t have the ads. That means I’ll have an hour, an hour and a half, maybe two-hour mixes by DJs who really represent my taste. Which is a fantastic new thing. We didn’t have that opportunity before. So that is a few people. And there, the YouTube algorithm tends to put me in direction of something similar. But also this is for music when I work. It’s not for finding new interesting Jazz. When I play this music, when I’m out driving with my family, I hear how incredibly inane and boring it is. It is designed for backgrounding. So the question then becomes, maybe, do we want to have different shelves? Different bookshelves for different aspects of our lives? And then we’re moving back into the virtuality of it all. That was my hand up. Mark, is your hand up for a new point? Okay, Fabien?

Fabien Benetou: Yeah a couple of points. The first to me, the dearest to me, let’s say, is the provenance aspect. I’m really pissed or annoyed when people don’t cite sources. I would have a normal conversation about a recipe or anything completely casual, doesn’t have to be academic, and if that person didn’t invent it themselves, I’m annoyed if there is not some way for me to look back to where it came from. And I think, honestly, a lot of the energy we waste as a species comes from that. If you’re not aware, of course, of the source, you can’t cite it.

But if you learn it from somewhere not doing that work, I think is really detrimental. Because

we don’t have to have the same thought twice if we don’t want to. And if we just have it again, it’s just such a waste of resources. And especially since I’m not a physician, and I don’t specialise in memory, but from what I understood, source memory is the type of memory where you recall, not the information, but where you got it from. And apparently, it’s one of the most demanding. So for example, you learn about, let’s say, a book, and you know somebody told you about that book, and that’s going to be much harder but eventually, if you don’t remember the book itself, but the person who told you about it, you can find it back.

So, basically, if as a species, we have such a hard time providing sources and understanding where something comes from, I think it’s really terrible. It does piss me off, to be honest. And I don’t know if metadata, in general, is an answer. If having some properly formatted, any kind of representation of it, I’m not going to remember the ISBN of the book, on the top of my head in a conversation, but I’m wondering in terms of, let’s say if blockchain can solve that? Can Web3 solve it? Especially you mentioned the, let’s say, a chain of value. If you have a source or the reference of somewhere else whose work you’re using, it is fair to reattribute it back. They were part of how you came to produce something new. So, I’m quite curious about where this is going to be.

Jad Esber: Yes, thank you for that question. And, yeah. I think there are a few points. First is, I’m going to just comment really quickly on this idea of provenance. And I want to just jump back to answer some of Frode’s comments, as well. But I think, one thing that you highlighted, Fabien, is how hard it is for us to remember where we learned something or got something. And part of the problem is that, so much of citing and sourcing is so proactive and requires human effort. And if things were designed where it was just built into the process.

One of the projects I worked on at YouTube was a way for creators to take existing videos and build on them. So, remixing essentially. And in the process of creating content, I’d have to take a snippet and build on it. And that is built into the creation process. The provenance, the citing are very natural to how I’m creating content. TikTok is really good at this too. And so I wonder if there are, again, design systems that allow us to build in provenance and make it really user-friendly and intuitive to remove the friction around having to remember the source and cite. We’re lazy creatures. We want that to be part of our flow. TikTok duets feature and stitching is brilliant. It builds in provenance into the flow. And so, that’s just one thought. In terms of how blockchains help. So, part of what is a blockchain other than a public record of who owns what, and how things are being transacted. If there was a way if we go back to TikTok stitching, or YouTube quoting a specific part of a video, and building on it, if that chain of events was tracked and publicly accessible, and there was a way for me to pass value down that chain to everyone that contributed to this new creative work, that that would be really cool. And that’s part of the promise. This idea of keeping track of how

everything is moving, and being able to then distribute value in an automated way. So, that’s sort of addressing that point. And then really quickly on, Frode, your earlier comments, and perhaps tying in with some of what we talked about with Mark, around identity expression. I think this all comes back to the human need to be heard, and understood, and seen, and there are phases in our life, where we’re figuring out who we are, and we don’t really have our identities figured out yet. So, if you think about a lot of teenagers, they will have posters on their walls to express what they’re consuming or who they’re interested in. And they are figuring out who they are. And part of them figuring out who they are is talking about what they’re consuming, and through what they’re consuming, they’re figuring out their identities. I grew up writing poetry on the internet because I was trying to express my experiences, and figure out who I was. And so, I think what I’m trying to say is that there will be periods of our life where the need to be seen, heard, understood or we’re figuring out, and forming our identities are a bigger need. And so, the identity expressive element of para-socially expressing or consuming plays a bigger part. And then, perhaps when we’re more settled with our identity, and we’re not really looking to perform that, becomes more of a background thing. Although, it doesn’t completely disappear because we are always looking to be heard, seen, and understood. That’s very human. So, I’ll pause there. I can keep going, but I’ll pause because I see there are a few other hands.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, I’ll give the torch to Dave Millard. But just on that identity, I have a four-and-a-half-year-old boy, Edgar, who is wonderful. And he currently likes sword fighting and the colour pink. He is very feminine, very masculine, very mixed up, as he should be. So, it’s interesting, from a parental, rather than from just an old man’s perspective to think about the shaping of identity, and putting our posters and so on. It’s so easy to think about life from the point we are in life, and you’re pointing to a teenage part, which none of us are in. So, I really appreciate that being brought into the conversation. Mr. Millard?

David Millard: Yeah, thanks, Frode. Hi, everyone. Sorry, I joined a few minutes late, so I missed the introductions at the beginning. But, yeah. Thank you. It’s a really interesting talk. One of the things we haven’t talked about is kind of the opposite of performative expression, which is privacy. One of the things, a bit like Mark, I’ve kind of learned about myself listening to everyone’s talking about this, is how deeply introverted I am, and how I really don’t want to let anybody know about me, thank you very much, unless I really want them to. This might be because I teach social network and media analytics to our computer scientists. So, one of the things I teach them about is inference, for example, profiling, I’m reminded of the very early Facebook studies done in the 2000s, about the predictive power of keywords. So, you’d express your interests through a series of keywords. And those researchers were able to achieve 90% accuracy on things like sexuality. This is an American study, so

republican, democratic preferences. Afro-American, Caucasian, these kinds of things. So I do wonder whether or not there’s a whole element to this, which is subversive or exists in that commercial realm that we ought to think about. I’m also struck about that last comment, actually, that you mentioned, which was about people finding their identities. Because I’ve also been involved in some research looking at how kids use social media. And one of the interesting things about the way that children use social media, including some children that shouldn’t be using social media, because they’re pretty 13 or whatever the cut-off date is. Is that they don’t use it in a very sophisticated way. And we were trying to find out why that was because we all have this impression of children as being naturally able. There’s the myth of the digital native and all that kind of stuff. And it’s precisely because of this identity construction. That was one of the things that came out in our research. So, kids won’t expose themselves to the network, because they’re worried about their self-presentation. They’re much more self-conscious than adults are. So they invest in dyadic relationships. Close friendships, direct messaging, rather than broadcasting identity. So I think there’s an opposite side to this. And it may well be that, for some people, this performative aspect is particularly important. But for other people, this performative aspect is actually quite frightening, or off- putting, or just not very natural. And I just thought I wanted to throw that into the mix. I thought it was an interesting counter observation.

Jad Esber: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. To reflect on my experience growing up writing online. I wrote poetry, not because I wanted other people to read, it was actually very much for myself. And I did it anonymously. I wasn’t looking for any kind of building of credibility or anything like that. It was for me a form of healing. It was for me a form of just figuring out who I was. But if someone did read my poetry, and it did resonate with them, and they did connect with me, then I welcomed that. So, it wasn’t necessarily a performative thing. But it was a way for me to do something for myself that, if it connected with someone else, that was welcomed. I think to go back to the physical metaphor of a bookshelf. Part of my bookshelf will have books that I’ll present, and have upfront and want everyone to see, but I also have a book box with trinkets that are out of sight and are just for me. And that perhaps there are people who will come into my space and I’ll show them what’s in that box, selectively. And I’ll pull them out, and kind of walk them through the trinkets. And then, I’ll have some that are private, and are not for anyone else. So, I totally agree. If we think about digital spaces, if we were to emulate a bookshelf online, there will be elements, perhaps, that I would want to present to the world outwardly. There are elements that are for myself. There are elements that I want to present in a selective manner. And I think back to Frode’s point around bookshelves for various parts of my identity. I think that’s really important. There might be some that I will want to publicly present, and others that I won’t. If you think about

a lot of social platforms, how young people use social platforms, think about Instagram. Actually, on Tumblr, which is a great example, the average user had four to five accounts. And that’s because they had accounts that they used for performative reasons. And they had accounts that they used for themselves. And had accounts for specific parts of their identity. And that’s because we’re solving different needs through this idea of para-socially curating and putting out there what we’re interested in. So, just riffing on your point. Not necessarily addressing it, but sort of adding colour to it.

David Millard: No, that’s great. Thank you. So, you’re right about the multiple accounts thing. I had a student, a few years ago, who’s looking at privacy protection strategies. I’m basically saying, people, don’t necessarily use the preferences on their social media platforms, who can see my stuff. They actually engage differently with those platforms. So they do like that, as you said. They have different platforms, or they have different accounts, for different audiences. They use loads of fascinating stuff, things like social stenography, which is, if they have in-jokes or hidden messages to certain crowds, that they will put in them, their feeds will never miss it. There are all of these really subtle means that people use. I’m sure that all comes into play for this kind of stuff as well.

Jad Esber: Totally. I’ll add to that really quickly. So, if you look at... I did a study of Twitter bios, and it’s really interesting to look at how, as you said, young folks will put very cryptic acronyms that indicate or signal their fanships. They’re looking for other folks who are interested in the same K-pop band, for example. And that acronym in the bio will be a signal to that audience. Like, come follow me, connect with me around this topic, just because the acronym is in there. A lot of queer folks will also have very subtle things in their bios, on their profile to indicate that. But only other queer folks will be aware of. And so, again, it’s not something you necessarily want to be super public and performative about, but for the right folk, you want them to see and connect with. So, yeah. Super interesting how folks have designed their own way of using these things to solve for very specific needs.

Frode Hegland: Just before I let you go, Dave. Did you say steganography or did you say stenography?

David Millard: I think it’s steganography. It’s normally referred to as hiding data inside other data but in a social context. It was exactly what Jad and I was just saying about using different hashtags or just references, quotes that only certain groups would recognise that kind of stuff, even if they’re from Hamilton.

Frode Hegland: Brendan, I see you’re ready to pounce here. But just really briefly, one of the things I did for my PhD thesis is, study the history of citations and references. And they’re not that old. And they’re based around this, kind of, let’s call it, “anal notion” we have today that thing should be in the correct box, in the correct order, if it isn’t, it doesn’t belong

in the correct academic discipline. Earlier this morning, Dave, Mark, and I were discussing how different disciplines have different ways of even deciding what kind of publication to have. It’s crazy stuff. But before we got into that, we have a profession, therefore, we need a code of how to do it. The way people cited each other, of course, was exactly like this. The more obscure the better, because then you would really know that your readers understood the same space. So it’ s interesting to see how that is sliding along, on a similar parallel line. Brendan, please. Unless Jad has something specific on that point.

Jad Esber: I was just sourcing a Twitter bio to show you guys. So, maybe, if I find one, I’ll walk through it and show you how various acronyms are indicating various things. And I was just trying to pull it from a paper that I wrote. But, yeah. Sorry, go ahead, Brendan.

Frode Hegland: Okay, yeah. When you’re ready, please put that in. Brendan?

Brendan Langen: Cool. Jad, really neat to hear you talk through, just really everything around identity as a scene online. It’s a point of a lot of the research I’m doing as well. So, interesting overlaps. First, I’ll kind of make a comment, and then I have a question for you that’s a little off base of what we talked about. But the bookshelf, as a representation, is extremely neat to think about when you have a human in the loop because that’s really where contextual recommendations actually come to life. This idea of an algorithm saying that we’ve read 70% of the same books, and I have not read this one text that you have held really near and dear to you might be helpful but, in all honesty, that’s going to fall short of you being able to share detail on why this might be interesting to me. So I guess to, kind of, pivot into a question, one of my favourite things that I read last year was something you did with, I forget the fella’s name, Scott, around reputation systems and novel approach, and so, I’m studying a little bit in this Web3 area, and the idea of splitting reputation, and economic value is really neat. And I’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about ‘Koodos’ and how, either you’re integrating that, or what experiments you’re trying to run in order to bring like curation and reputation into the fold. I guess like, what kind of experiments are you working on with ‘Koodos’ around this reputational aspect?

Jad Esber: Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to share more. But before I do that, I actually found an example of a Twitter bio, I’ll really quickly share, and then, I’m happy to answer that question, Brendan. So this is from a thing I put together a while ago, and if we look at the username here. So, ‘katie, exclamation mark, seven, four Dune’. So, the seven here actually is supposed to signal to all BTS fans, BTS being a K-pop band that she is part of that group, that fan community. It’s just that simple seven next to her name. Four Dune is basically a way for her to indicate that she is a very big fan of Dune, the movie, and Timothée Chalamet, the actor. And pinned at the top of her Twitter account is this list of the bands or the communities that she stands, stands meaning, being a big fan of. And so, again, sort of like, very

cryptically announcing the fan communities she’s a part of just in her name, but also, very actively pinning the rest of the fan communities that she’s a member of, or a part of. But, yeah. I just want to share that really quickly. So, to address, Brendan, your questions, just for folks who aren’t aware of the piece, it’s basically a paper that I wrote about how to decouple reputation from financial gain in system and reputation systems, where there might be a token. So, a lot of Web3 projects promise community contributions will earn you money. And the response that myself and Scott Kominers wrote was around, “Hey, it doesn’t actually make sense for intrinsic motivational reasons, for contributions to earn you money. In fact, if you’re trying to build a reputation system, you should develop a system to gain reputation, that perhaps spins off some form of financial gain.{ So, that’s, sort of, the paper. And I can link it in in the chat, as well, for folks who are interested. So, a lot of what I think about with ‘Koodos’, the company that I’m working on, is this idea of, how can people build these digital spaces that represent who they are, and how can that may remain a safe space for identity expression, and perhaps, even solving some of the utilitarian needs. But then, how can we also enable folks, or enable the system, to curate at large, source from across these various spaces that people are building, to surface things that are interesting in ways that aren’t necessarily super algorithmic. And so, a lot of what we think about the experiments we run around how can we enable people to build reputation around what it is that they are curating in their spaces. So, does Mark’s curation of books in his bookshelf give him some level of reputation in specific fields? That then allows us to point to him as a potential expert on that space. Those are a lot of the experiments that we’re interested in running, just sort of, very high level without getting too in the weeds. But I’m happy to discuss, if you’re really interested in the weeds of all of that, without boring everyone, I’m happy to take that conversation as well.

Brendan Langen: Yeah. I’ll reach out to you because I’m following the weeds there.

Jad Esber: Yeah, for sure.

Brendan Langen: Thanks for the high-level answer.

Jad Esber: No worries, of course.

Frode Hegland: Jad, I just wanted to say, after Bob and Fabien now, I would really appreciate it if you go into sales mode, and really pitch what you’re working on. I think, if we honestly say, it’s sales mode, it becomes a lot easier. We all have passions, there’s nothing wrong with being pushy in the right environment, and this is definitely the right environment. Bob?

Bob Horn: Well, I noticed that your slides are quite visual and that you just mentioned visual. I wonder if, in your poetry life, you’ve thought about broadsheets? And whether you would have broadsheets in the background of coming to a presentation like this, for example,

so that you could turn around and point to one and say, “Oh, look at this.”

Jad Esber: I’m not sure if the question is if I... I’m sorry, what was the question specifically about?

Bob Horn: Well, I noticed you mentioned that you are a poet, and poets often, at least in times gone by, printed their poems on larger broadsheets that were visual. And I associated that with, maybe, in addition to bookshelves, you might have those on a wall, in some sort of way, and wondered if you’d thought about it, and would do it, and would show us.

Jad Esber: Yeah. So, the poetry that I used to write growing up was very visual, and it used metaphors of nature to express feelings and emotions. So, it’s visual in that sense. But I am, by no means, a visual artist or not visual in that sense. So, I haven’t explored using or pairing my poetry with visual compliments. Although, that sounds very interesting. So, I haven’t explored that. Most of my poetry is visual in the language that I use. And the visuals that come up in people’s minds. I tend to really love metaphors. Although, I realise that sometimes they can be confining, as well. Because we’re so limited to just that metaphor.

And if I were to give you an example of one metaphor, or one word that I really dislike in the Web3 world it’s the ‘wallet’. I’m not sure how familiar you are with the metaphor of a wallet in Web3, but it’s very focused on coins and financial things, like what live in your

physical wallet, whereas what a lot of wallets are today are containers for identity and not just the financial things you hold. You might say, ‘Well, actually, if you look into my wallet, I have pictures of my kids and my dog or whatever.’ And so, there is some level of storing some social objects that express my identity. I share that just to say that the words we use, and the metaphors that we use, do end up also constraining us because a lot of the projects that are coming out of the space are so focused on the wallet metaphor. So, that was a very roundabout answer to say that I haven’t explored broadsheets, and I don’t have anything visual to share with my poetry right now.

Bob Horn: What is, just maybe, in a sentence or two, what is Web3?

Jad Esber: Okay, yeah. Sure. So, Web3, in a very short sense, is what comes after Web2, where Web2 is what we as, sort of, the last phase of the internet that relied on reading and writing content. So if you think about Web1 being read-only, and Web2 being read and write, where we can publish as well. Web3 is read-write and on. So, there is an element of ownership for what we produce on the internet. And so, that’s, in short, what Web3 is. A lot of people associate Web3 with blockchains, because they are the technology that allows us to track ownership. So that’s what Web3 is in a very brief explanation. Brendan, as someone who’s deep in this space, feel free to add as well to that, if I’ve missed anything.

Bob Horn: Thank you.

Brendan Langen: I guess the one piece that is interesting in the wallet metaphor is that, I

guess, the Web2 metaphor for identity sharing was like a profile. And I guess I would love to hear your opinion on comparing those two and the limitations of what even a profile provides as a metaphor. Because there are holes in identity if you’re just a profile.

Jad Esber: Totally, yeah. Again, what is a profile, right? It’s a very two-dimensional, like... What was a profile before we had Facebook profiles? A profile when you publish something is a little bit of text about you, perhaps it’s a profile picture, just a little bit about you. But what they’ve become is, they are containers for photos that we produce and there are spaces for us to share our interests and we’re creating a bunch of stuff that’s a part of that profile.

And so, again, the limiting aspect of the term ‘profile’ exists a lot of on what’s been developed today, again, just hinges on the fact that it’s tied to a username and a profile picture and a little bio. It’s very limiting. I think that’s another really good example. Using the term ‘wallet’ today, again, is limiting us in a similar way to how profiles limited us in Web2. If we were to think about wallets as the new profile. So that’s a really good point I actually hadn’t made that connection, so thank you.

Fabien Benetou: Thank you. Honestly, I hope there’s going to be, let’s say, a bridge to the pitch. But to be a little bit provocative, honestly, when I hear Web3, I’m not very excited. Because I’ve been burnt before. I checked bitcoin in 2010 or something like this, and Ethereum, and all that. And honestly, I love the promise of the Cypherpunk movement or the ideology behind it. And to be actually decentralised or to challenge the financial system and its abuse speaks to me. I get behind that. But then, when I see the concentration back behind the different blockchains, most of the blockchains are rougher, then I’m like, “Well, we made the dream”. Again, from my understanding of the finance behind all this. And yet, I have tension, because I want to get excited, like I said, the dream should still live. As I was briefly mentioned in the chat earlier, civilians, capitalism, and the difference between doing something in public, and doing something on Facebook, it’s not the same. First, because it’s not in public, it’s not a proper platform. But then, even if you do it publicly on Facebook, is the system to issue value and transform that to money. And I’m very naive, I’m not an economist, but I think people should pay for stuff. It’s easy. I mean, it’s simple, at least. So, if I love your poetry, and I can find a way that can help you, then I pay for it. There is no need for an intermediary, in between, especially if it’s at the cost of privacy and potentially democracy behind. So that’s my tension, I want to find a way. That’s why I’m also about provenance, and how we have a chain of sources, and we can reattribute people back down the line. Again, I love that. But when I hear Web3 I’m like, “Do we need this?” Or can we can, for example, and I don’t like Visa or Mastercard, but I’m wondering if relying on the centralised payment system is still less worse than a Cypherpunk dream that’s been hijacked.

Brendan Langen: Yeah, I mean, I share your exact perspective. I think Web3 has been

tainted by the hyper-financialisation that we’ve seen. And that’s why, when Bob asked what is Web3, it’s just what’s after Web2. I don’t necessarily tie it, from my perspective to crypto necessarily. I think that is a means to that end but isn’t necessarily the only option. There are many other ways that people are exploring, that serve some of the similar outcomes that we want to see. And so, I agree with you. I think right now, the version of Web3 that we’re seeing is horrible, crypto art and buying and selling of NFTs as stock units is definitely not the vision of the internet that we want. And I think it’s a very skeuomorphic early version of it that will fade away and it’s starting to. But I think the vision that a lot of the more enduring projects in the space have around provenance and ownership, do exist. There are projects that exist that are thinking about things in that way. And so, we’re in the very early stages of people looking for a quick buck, because there’s a lot of money to be made in the space, and that will all die out, and the enduring projects will last. And so, I think decoupling Web3 from blockchain, like Web3 is what is after Web2, and blockchain is one of the technologies that we can be building on top of, is how I look at it. And stripping away the hyper- financialisation, skeuomorphic approaches that we’re seeing right now from all of that. And then, recognising also, that the term Web3 has a lot of weight because it’s used in the space to describe a lot of these really silly projects and scams that we’re seeing today. So, I see why there is tension around the use of that term.

Frode Hegland: One of the discussions I had with the upcoming Future of Text work, I’m embarrassed right now, I can’t remember exactly who it was (Dave Croker), but the point was made that, version numbers aren’t very useful. This was in reference to Visual-Meta, but I think it relates to Web2. Because if the change is small you don’t really need a new version number, and if it’s big enough it’s obvious. So, I think this Web3, I think we all kind of agree here, is basically marketing.

Jad Esber: It’s just a term, yeah. I think it’s just a term that people are using to describe the next iteration of the Web. And again, as I said, words have a lot of weight and I’m sure everyone here agrees that words matter. So yeah, I think, when I reference it, usually I’m pointing to this idea of read-write-own. And own being a new entry in the Web. So, yeah.

Bob Horn: I was wondering whether it was going to refer to the Semantic Web, which Tim Berners-Lee was promoting some years ago. Although, not with a number. But I thought maybe they’ve added a number three to it. But I’m waiting for the Semantic Web, as well.

Jad Esber: Totally. I think the Semantic Web has inspired a lot of people who are interested in Web3. So, I think there is a returning back to the origins of the internet, right? Ted Nelson’s thinking as well as a big inspiration behind a lot of current thinking in this space. It’s very interesting to see us loop back almost to the original vision of the Web. Yeah, totally.

Brandel Zachernuk: You talked a little bit about algorithms, and the way that algorithms select. And painted it as ineffable or inaccessible. But the reality of algorithms is that they’re just the policy decisions of a given governing organisation. And based on the data they have, they can make different decisions. They can present and promote different algorithms. And so that ‘Forgotify’ is a take on upending the predominant deciding algorithm and giving somebody the ability through some measure of the same data, to make a different set of decisions about what to be recommended. The idea that I didn’t get fully baked, that I was thinking about is the way that a bookshelf is an algorithm itself, as well. It’s a set of decisions or policies about what to put on it. And you can have a bookshelf, which is the result of explicit, concrete decisions like that. You can have a meta bookshelf, which is the set of decisions that put things on it, that causes you to decide it. And just thinking about the way that there is this continuum between the unreachable algorithms that people, like YouTube, like Spotify, put out, and the kinds of algorithms internally that drive what it is that you will put on your bookshelf. I guess what I’m reaching for is some mechanism to bridge those and reconcile the two opposite ends of it. The thing is that YouTube isn’t going to expose that data. They’re not going to expose the hyper parameters that they make use of in order to do those things. Or do you think they could be forced to, in terms of algorithmic transparency, versus personal curation? Do you see things that can be pushed on, in order to come up with a way in which those two things can be understood, not as completely distinct artefacts, but as opposite ends of a spectrum that people can reside within at any other point?

Jad Esber: Yeah. You touch on an interesting tension. I think there are two things. One is, things being built, being composable, so people can build on top of them, and can audit them. So, I think the YouTube algorithm, being one example of something that really needs to be audited, but also, if you open it, it allows other people to take parts of it and build on top of it. I think that’d be really cool and interesting. But it’s obviously completely orthogonal to YouTube’s business model and building moats. So composability is sort of one thing that would be really interesting. And auditing algorithms is something that’s very discussed in this space. But I think what you’re touching on, which is a little bit deeper, is this idea of algorithms not capturing emotions, and not capturing the softer stuff. And a lot of folks think and talk about an emotional topology for the Web. When we think about our bookshelf, there are memories, perhaps, that are associated with these books, and there are emotions and nostalgia, perhaps, that’s captured in that display of things that we are organising. And that’s not really very easy to capture using an algorithm. And it’s intrinsically human. Machines don’t have emotions, at least not yet. And so, I think that what humans present is context and that’s emotional context, nuance, that isn’t captured by machine curation. And so, that’s why, in the presentation, I talk a little bit about the pairing of the two. It’s important to scale things

using programmatic algorithms, but also humans make it real, they add that layer of emotion and context. And there is this parable that basically says that human curation will end up leading to a need for algorithmic curation. Because the more you add and organise, the more there’s a need for then a machine to go in and help make sense of all the things that we’re organising. It’s an interesting pairing, what balance is important, and it’s an open question.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, Fabien, please. But after that, Brendan, if you could elaborate on what you wrote in the chat regarding this, that would be really interesting.

Fabien Benetou: It’s to pitch something to potentially consider linking with your platform, it’s an identity management targeting mostly VR, at least at first. And there is completely federated and open source. The thing is it’s very minimalist. It just provides an identity. And you have, let’s say, a 3D model and a name and a list of friends. I think that’s it. But if you were to own things, and you were to be able to either share or display them across the different platforms, I think it could be quite interesting. Because, in the end, we discussed this quite a bit, so I’m going to go back, but there is also a social or showcasing aspect to creation we want to exchange. Honestly, when I do something that I’m proud of, first thing I want to do is to show someone. I’m going to see if my better half is around, she’s not going to get it, but still, I can’t stop myself, I want to show it. I have a friend, they’ll get it, hopefully. I want to show you also here. And so, I want to build, and I want to show it. And I imagine a lot of the creation is, as soon as you find something beautiful, it’s like, “No, I don’t want to keep it to myself. I want to share with my people.” So, I’m wondering at which point that could also help this kind of identity platform or solution, because they were quite abstract in the sense that they’re not specific, let’s say, to one platform, they are on top of that. But then people think, “What for?” Okay, I can log in with, let’s say, Facebook or Apple. I know them. I trust them. So that’s it. I’m just going to click on that button. But it’s always a way for the identity maybe, like again, the discussion we had here is, my identity, me also, what I showcase around me that define me, and I want to not just share it to establish myself as, but also help others discover. So maybe it could be interesting to check how there could be a way to be more than an identity.

Jad Esber: Totally if you think about DJs, their job is essentially, their profession is essentially to curate music and stitch things together. There are professions that centre around helping other people discover, and that that becomes work, right? So I think helping other people discover can be considered something that gives you back status or gives you back gratification in some form. Perhaps, it just makes you happier. But it also could give you back money and that it’s a profession. Arts curators, DJs. So, there’s a spectrum as well, I think a lot of folks will recommend it because they like it. They will recommend it because gives them some level of status. At the end of the spectrum, it becomes a job. Which I think is

certainly an interesting proposition, is like, what does it look like if internet curators are recognised as professionals? Could there be a world where people who are curating high value stuff could be paid? And I think, Brendan alluded to this briefly, beyond just adding links, like the synthesis, the commentary is really valuable, especially with the overload that we have today. And so, I think I alluded to this idea of invisible labor, curation being invisible labor. What if it was recognised? And what if it became a form of paid work? I think that could also be very interesting as an extension to your thought around curating to help others.

Fabien Benetou: So, sorry. I’ll just bounce back because it’s directly related, but I’m just going to throw it out there. If someone wants to tour through WebXR and have some of their favourite spaces and give me a bit of money for doing it, I’m up for attempting that. I know exactly how, but I think it could be quite interesting to have a tour together, and maybe put in our backpack whatever we like, or with whom we connect. And again, across platforms, not just one.

Jad Esber: Totally, yeah. There is precedent to that in a way, like galleries, and museums are institutionalised, like spaces of curated works. We pay to enter them. Is there a way where we can bring that down to the individual, right? A lot of the past version of the Web is taking institutionalised things and making them user-generated. Is there a version of galleries or museums that are user-generated and owned? And that’s an exploration that we’re interested in, as well, at ‘Koodos’. So, something we’re exploring.

Frode Hegland: Fabien, I saw you put a link here to web.immers.space. Reminds me to mention to you guys that someone from ‘Immersed’, the company that makes the virtual screens in Oculus will be doing a hosted meeting soon. On a completely different tangent from what this is about, but I just wanted to mention to you guys. Brendan, would you mind going further about what you’re talking about?

Brendan Langen: Sure. I think it’s minimal, but the act of curation, I suppose, I should have qualified the type of research that I’m talking about. My background is in UX research. So, when you’re digging into any one of our experiences with a tool, and we run into a pinpoint, or we stop using, we leave the page. The data can tell us, we were here when this happened. But it takes so much inference to figure out what it actually was that caused it. Could be that we just got a phone call, and it was not a spam call for once, and we’re thinking, “Oh, wow. I have to pick this up and talk to my mother.” Or it could be that this is so frustrating, and as I kept clicking, and clicking, I just got overwhelmed, and I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. And everything between there. And that’s really where the role of user research comes in.

And that was the comparison to curation, is that, we can only understand what feeling

someone had, when they heard that song that changed their life, or read a passage that triggered a thought that they then wrote an essay out. And it’s something that I have to dive into further, and further. It’s like, the human is needed in the loop at all times. Mark and I have talked a lot about this. It does not matter how your data comes back to you, regardless, you’re gonna need to clean it. And you’re going to need to probe into it, and enrich it with a human actually asking questions.

Jad Esber: Totally, yeah. That resonates very deeply. And I can share a little bit about ‘Koodos’, because I’ve alluded to it, but I will also share that it’s very early, and very experimental. So that’s why there isn’t really that much to share. But I think it centres around that exact idea of, how can we bottle or memorialise the feeling that we have around discovering that thing that resonated. And the experience, right now, centres on this idea of, “Hey. When I’m listening to this song, or I’m reading this article, or watching this video, and it resonates. What can I do with it to memorialise it, and to keep it, and to kind of create something based on it?” And so, right now, people create these cards that sort of link out to content that they love from across the Web. And on those cards, they can add context or commentary. And a lot of what people are adding tends to be emotional. The earliest experiment centred on people adding emojis, just emoji tags to the content to summarise the vibe of the content. And these cards are all time-stamped, so there’s also a way for you to see when someone came across something. And they’re all added to a library, or an archive, or a bedroom, or bookshelf, whatever you’re going to call it, that aggregates all the cards that you’ve created. So it becomes a way for you to explore what people are interested in. What they’re saying and feeling about the things that they come across that resonates. The last thing I’ll share, as well, is that these cards unlock experiences. So, if I created a card for Brendan’s paper, for example, I’ll get access to a collection, where other people have created cards for Brendan’s work live, and I can see all of what they commentated and created, and who they are, and maybe go into their libraries and see what it is that they are creating cards for. So, that’s the current experience. And again, in the early stages. Most of our users are quite young, that’s why I sort of speak a lot about identity formative years, when you’re constructing your identity being a really important phase in life. And so, our users are around that age. And that’s what we’re doing and we’re thinking about. And just provide some context for a lot of the perspectives that I share.

Brendan Langen: I have to comment. I love the idea of prompting reflection. Especially at a stage where you are identity-forming. There’s nothing like cultivating your taste by actually talking about what you liked and disliked about something. And then, being able to evoke that in the frame of, how it made me feel in a moment, can build up a huge library of personal understanding. So, that’s rather neat. I need to check this out a little further.

Jad Esber: Totally, yeah. We can chat further. I think the one big thought that has come about, from the early experimentation is that, people use it as a form for mental health reasons. Prompting you to reflect, or capture emotion over time, and archiving what has resonated, and what you felt over time is a really healthy thing to do. So that was an interesting outcome of the early product.

Closing Comments

Frode Hegland: There are so many opportunities with multiple dimensions of where this knowledge can go. We also have, upcoming, Phil Gooch from Scholarcy, who will be doing a presentation. He doesn’t do anything with VR, AR or anything. But what he does do is, scholarcy.com analyses documents, academic documents. So they do all kinds of stuff that seems to be on more of the logical side, where it seems, Jad, you’re more of the emotional side. And I can imagine, specifically for this community, the insane amount of opportunities for human interactions in these environments. And then how we’re going to do the plumbing to make sure it is vulnerable. You said earlier, when defining Web3.0, one of the terms is ownable. The work we’ve been doing with Visual-Meta is very much about, we need to be able to own our own data. So, it was nice to hear that in that context. We’re winding down.

It’s really nice to have two hours, so it’s not so rushed. So we can actually listen to each other. Are there any closing comments, questions, suggestions, or hip-hop improvisations? Fabien Benetou: I’m not going to do any hip-hop improvisation, not today at least. Quick

comment, though is, I wouldn’t use such a platform. And also, I would say, without actually

owning it, meaning for example, at least a way to export data, and have it in a meaningful way And I don’t pour my life into things, because especially here, is the emotional aspect without some safety, literal safety of being able to extract it, and ideally live, because I’m a programmer. So, if I can tinker with the data itself, that also makes it more exciting for me. But I do hope there is some way to easily, conveniently do that and hopefully, there is a need to consider leaving the platform. Tinkering I think it’s always worthwhile. No need to leave, but it’s still being able to actually have it do whatever you want. I think is pretty precious.

Jad Esber: Yes, thank you. Thank you for sharing that, Fabien. And absolutely. That’s a very important consideration. So, the cards you create are tied to you, not to the space that you occupy or you create on ‘Koodos’. That’s a really key part of the architecture. And I hear you on the privacy and safety aspect. Again, this is a complex human system and so, when designing them, beyond the software you’re building, I think the social design is really important. And aspects of what is in the box, that’s for yourself. The trinkets that you keep to yourself, versus the cards that are the books that you present to the rest of the folks that come

into your space. I think is an important design question. So, yeah. Thank you for sharing, Fabien.

Fabien Benetou: A quick little thing, that is a lot more open, let’s say, unfortunately, I can’t remember the name, but three or four years ago, there was a viewer experience done by Lucas something, maybe somebody will remember, where you had like a dozen or two dozens of clouds on top of your head, couple of scenes, and you could pull a cloud, in order to listen to someone else’s voice. And each space, virtual space was a prompt to, when is the last time you cried? Yes, www.lucasrizzotto.com. And so, his experience must be there in his portfolio, is three or four years old. But maybe half a dozen different spaces, with different ambiance, different visuals, and sounds. And every time prompting, well, I don’t know, what’s the meaning of life, simple, easy questions. And then, if you want to talk, you can talk and share it back with the community. And if you don’t want to talk. you don’t have to. So, it’s not what you do, but I think there are some connections, some things could be inspiring, also, to check it out.

Jad Esber: I guess, on my part, I just want to say thank you for the conversation, and for being here for the two hours. It’s a long time to talk about this stuff. But I appreciate it. And yeah, I look forward to, hopefully, joining future sessions, as well. Sounds like a really interesting string of conversations. And it’s great to connect with you all virtually and to hear your questions and perspectives. Yeah, thank you.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. It’s very nice to have you here. And the thing about the group is, okay, we are today, except for Dene, we’re all male and so on. But we do represent quite a wide variety of mentalities. And this is something we need to increase as much as we can. It is crucial. And also, I really appreciate you bringing in, literally, a new dimension dealing with emotions and identities into the discussion. So, it’s going to be very interesting moving forward. I was not interested in VR, AR at all in December. And then, Brandel came into my life. And now it is all about, I’m actually decided I can use the word metaverse because Meta doesn’t own it, I’ve decided to settle down. But the point is, I feel we’re already living in the metaverse. We’re just not seeing it through as many rich means as we can. And I don’t want to go into the metaverse with only social and gaming. And today, thank you for highlighting that we need to have our identities managed in this environment, and taken with us. So, I’m very grateful. And I look forward to seeing those of you who can on Friday. And we’re going to be doing, as I said, every two weeks presentations in this format.

Fabien Benetou: I have a quote for this. It’s on my desktop, actually. It’s, “When technology shifts reality, will we know the world has changed?” it’s from Ken Perlin that we mentioned last time. I’ll put it in the chat.

Gavin Menichini

Journal Guest Product Presentation : 25 February 2022

https://youtu.be/2Nc5COrVw24?t=1353

Gavin Menichini: Immersed is a virtual reality product, working productivity software, where we make virtual offices. And so, what that means is, Immersed is broken down into two categories, in my opinion. We have a solo use case, and we have a collaboration meeting use case. So, the main feature that we have in Immersed is the ability to bring your computer screen, whether you have a Mac, a PC, or Linux, into virtual reality. So, whatever is on your computer screen is now brought to Immersed. And we’ve created our own proprietary technology to virtualize extensions of your screen. Very similar to, if you had a laptop or computer at your desk, and you plugged in extra, physical monitors, from our screen real estate. We’ve now virtualized that technology. It’s proprietary to us. And we’re the only ones in the world who can do that. And then, now at Immersed, instead of you working on one screen, for example, I use the MacBook Pro for work, so instead of me working on one MacBook Pro, with an Oculus Quest 2 headset, or a compatible headset, I can connect it to my computer, have a Immersed software on my computer, in my headset, bring my screen into virtual reality, have the ability to maximize it to the size of an iMac screen. I can shrink it and then create up to five virtual monitors around me for a much more immersive work experience for your 2D screens. And you can also have your own customized avatar that looks like you, and you can beam into all these cool environments that we’ve created. Think of them as higher fidelity, higher quality video game atmospheres. But not like a game, more like a professional environment. But we also have some fun gaming environments, or space station offices, or a space orbitarium, auditorium. We have something called alpine chalet, like a really beautiful ski lodge. Really, the creativity is endless. And so, within all of our environments, you can work there, and you can also meet and collaborate with people as other avatars, instead of us meeting here on zoom, where we’re having a 2D, very disconnected experience. I’m sure each of you probably heard the term Zoom fatigue or video conference fatigue? That’s been very real, especially with the COVID pandemic. And so, fortunately, that’s hopefully going away, and we can have a little bit more in-office interactions. But we believe Immersed is the perfect solution for hybrid and remote working. It’s the best tech bridge for recreating that sense of connection with people. And that sense of connection has been very valuable for a lot of organizations that we’re working with, as well

as enhancing the collaboration experience from our monitor tech, and our screen sharing, screen streaming technology. So, people use it for the value, and the value that people get out of it is that, people find themselves more productive when working in Immersed, because now, they want to have more screen real estate, like all the environment we’ve been potentially created, to help preach cognitive focus. So, I have lots of news for customers and users who tell us that when they’re Immersed. They feel hyper-focused. More productive. In a state of deep workflow, whatever term you want to use. And people are progressing through the work faster, and feel less distracted. And then, just also, generally more connected, because when you’re in VR, it really feels like you have a sense of presence when you’re sitting across from a table from another avatar that is your friend or colleague. And that really boosts employee and person satisfaction, connection, just for an overall engaging, better collaborative experience when working remotely. Any questions around what I explained, or what Immersed is?

Dialogue

https://youtu.be/2Nc5COrVw24?t=1549

Fabien Benetou: Super lovely. When you say screen sharing, for example, here I’m using Linux. Is it compatible with Linux? Or is it just Windows or macOS? Is it web-based?

Gavin Menichini: So, it is compatible with Linux. And so, right now, you can have virtual monitors through a special extension that we’ve created. We’re still working on developing the virtual display tech to the degree we have for Mac and Windows. Statistics says that Linux is only one of two percent of our user base. And so, for us, as a business, we obviously have to optimize for most of our users. Since we’re a venture-backed startup. But that’s coming in the future. And then, you can also share screens with Linux. And so, with some of the extensions, you can use it for having multiple Linux displays, you can share those screens, as well, within Immersed.

Video: https://youtu.be/2Nc5COrVw24?t=1594

Alan Laidlaw: That’s great. Yeah, this is really impressive. This is a question that may be more of a theme to get into later. But I definitely see the philosophy of starting with, where work is happening now, and like the way that you make train tracks, bringing bits and pieces into VR so that you can get bodies in there. I’m curious as to, once that’s happened or once you feel like you’ve got that sufficiently covered, is there a next step? What would you want the collaborative space in VR to look like that is unlike anything that we have in the real world, versus... Yeah, I’d love to know where you stand philosophically on that, as well, as whatever the roadmap is?

Gavin Menichini: Sure. If I’m understanding your question properly, it’s how do we feel about how we see the evolution of VR collaboration, versus in-person collaboration? If we see there’s going to be an inherent benefit to VR collaboration as we progress, versus in person?

Alan Laidlaw: Yeah, there’s that part. And there’s also, the kind of, is the main focus of the company to replicate and provide the affordances that we currently have, but in VR? Or is the main focus, now that you know once we’ve ported things into a VR space, let’s explore what VR can do?

Gavin Menichini: Okay. So, it’s a little bit of both. It’s mostly just, we want to take what’s possible for in-person collaboration and bring it into VR, because we see a future of hybrid remote working. And so, COVID, obviously, accelerated this dynamic. So, Renji, our founder, started the company in 2017, knowing, believing that hybrid remote work was gonna become more and more possible as the internet and all things Web 2.0 became more prevalent. And we have technology tools where you don’t have to drive into an office every single day to accomplish work and be productive. But we found that the major challenges were, people aren’t as connected. The collaboration experience isn’t the same as being in person. So those are huge challenges for companies, in a sense of a decrease in productivity. So, all these are major challenges to solve. And those are the challenges that Renji set out to go build and fix with Immersed. So when we think about the future, we see Immersed as the best tech bridge, or tool for hybrid or remote working. Where you can maximize that sense of connection that you have in person, by having customizable avatars, where fidelity and quality will increase over time, giving you the tech tools through multiple monitors and solo work. Enhancing the solo work experience. So people become more productive, which is the end goal of giving them more time back in the day. And then also, corporations can continue to progress, as well, in their business goals, while balancing that with giving employees more time back of their day to find that beautiful balance. And so, we see it as a tech bridge, but we, as a VR company, we’re also are exploring the potentials of VR. Is there something that we haven’t tapped into yet that could be extremely valuable for all of our customers and users to add more value to their life and make their life better? So, it’s less so that, it’s more so we want to virtualize, make the hybrid remote collaboration, work experience, much more full, better value, with more value than it currently exists today with the Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams paradigm.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah, I’m curious. It sounds like, primarily, or entirely, what you’ve built is the the connective tissue between the traditional 2D APPs that people are using within their computer space, and being able to create multi-panels, that people are interacting with that content on. Is that primarily through traditional input? Mouse, keyboard, trackpad? Or is

this something where they’re interacting with those 2D APPs through some of the more spatial modalities that are offered hands or controllers? Do you use hands or is it all entirely controller-based?

Gavin Menichini: Yeah, great question. So, the answer is, our largest user base is on the Oculus Quest 2. It’s definitely the strongest headset, bang for your buck on the market for now. There’s no question. But, right now, you can control your VR dynamics with the controllers or with hand tracking. We actually suggest people use hand tracking, because it’s easier, once you get used to it. One of the challenges we face right now is, there is an inherent learning curve for people learning how to interact with VR paradigms. And, as me being on a revenue side, I have to demonstrate Immersed to a lot of different companies and organizations, and so it can be challenging. At some point, I imagine it would be very similar. And I was born in 95, and so I wasn’t around these times. But I imagine it feels like demoing email to someone for the first time, on a computer, and they’ve never seen a computer, where they totally understand the concept of email. No more paper memos, no more post-it notes.

Paper organization and file cabinets, all exist in the computer, and they get it. But, when I put a computer in front of them for the first time, they don’t know how to use it. What’s this track? They had the keyboard, the mouse, they don’t understand the UI, UX of the Oculus, the OS system. They don’t understand how to use that, so it’s intimidating. So, that’s the challenge we come across. And then, that answers your point with your first question, Brandel?

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah, I’ve got some follow-ups, but I’ll cede the floor to Frode. Frode Hegland: Okay. I’m kind of on that point. So, I have been using Immersed for a bit. And the negatives, to take that first, is that I think the onboarding really needs help. It’s nice

when you get that person standing to your side and pointing out things, but then... So, the

way it works is, the hand tracking is really good. That is what I use. I use my normal keyboard, physical keyboard on my Mac, and then I have the monitor. But it’s, to me, a little too easy to go in and out of the mode where my hands change the position and size of the monitor. You’re supposed to do a special hand thing to lock your hands to not be doing that. And so there’s pinning. So, when you’re talking about these onboarding issues, that’s still a lot of work. And that’s not a complaint about your company. That’s a complaint across the board. The surprise is also, it really is very pleasant. I mean, here, in this group, we talk about you know many kinds of interactions, but what I would like, in addition to making it more locked, to make the pinning easier. I do find that, sometimes, it doesn’t want to go exactly where I want. I’m a very visual person, kind of anal in that way, to use that language. I want it straight ahead of me, but very often it’s a little off. So, if I resize it this way, then it kind of follows. So, in other words, I’m so glad that you are working on these actual realities, boots

on the ground thing, rather than just hypotheticals. Because it shows how difficult it is. You get this little control thing on your wrist, if there was one that says “hyper control mode”, different levels. Anyway, just observation, and question, and point.

Gavin Menichini: Yeah. I can assure you that we obsess over these things internally. Our developers are extremely passionate about what we’re building. We have a very strong XR team. And our founder is very proud about how hard it is to get to our company, and how many people we reject. So, we really are hiring the best talent in the world, and I’ve seen this first-hand, getting to work with them. And we also have a very strong UI, UX team. But we’re really on the frontier of, this has never been done before. And we are pioneering. What does it mean to have excellent UI, UX paradigms and user onboarding paradigms in virtual reality? And one of the challenges we face is that, it’s still early. And so people are still trying to figure out, even foundations for what is good UI, UX. And we’re now introducing space, like spatial computing. And we’re going from 2D interfaces to 3D. What have we learned from good UI, UX or 2D translate to 3D, and paradigms of this? And people are now not just using a controller and mouse, they’re using hand tracking and spatial awareness. And how do we build good, not only do we understand what’s a good practice for having good paradigms in UI, UX, how do we code that well? And how do we build a good product around that, while also having dependencies on Oculus, HTC, and Apple? Where we’re dependent upon hardware technology to support our software. So we still live very much in the early days, where there’s a lot of tension of things are still being figured out. Which is why we’re a frontier tech. Which is why it takes time to build. But even with VR, AR, I think, it’s just going to take longer because there are so many more factors to consider. The people who pioneered 2D technology, Apple, Microsoft, etc, they didn’t have to consider. And so, I think the problem we’re solving candidly is exponentially harder than the problem they had to solve. But we also get to stand on their shoulders, and take some precedence that they built for us, and apply that to VR, where it makes sense.

Brandel Zachernuk: So, in terms of those new modalities. In terms of the interaction paradigms that seem to make the most sense, it sounds like you’re not building software that people use, as much as you’re using making software that people reach through to their other software with, at this point. Is that correct? You’re not making a word processor, you’re making the app that lets people see that word process. Which is a big problem. I’m not minimizing it. My question is:

Do you have observations based on what people are using the way that they’re changing, for example, the size of their windows, the kinds of ways that they’re interacting with it? Do you have either observations about what customers are doing as a result of making the transition into effective productivity there? Or do you have any specific recommendations about things

that they should avoid or reconsider given the differences in, for example, pixel density, or the angular fidelity of hand tracking within 3D, in comparison to the fidelity of being able to move around a physical mouse and keyboard? Given that those things are so much more precise. But also, much more limited in terms of the real estate that they have the ability to cover. Do you have any observations about what people do? Or even better, any recommendations that you make to clients about what they should be doing as a result of moving into the new medium?

Gavin Menichini: Yeah, really good question. There are a few things. There’s a lot of things we could suggest. So, a lot of what we’re building is still very exploratory, of what’s the best paradigm for these things? And so, we’ve learned a lot of things, but we also understand there’s a lot more for us to build internally and explore. First and foremost, we definitely do not take, hopefully, this is obvious, but to address it, we definitely do not take a dystopian view of VR, AR. We don’t want people living in the headset. We don’t want people strapped it to their face extremities, like a feeding tube and water, etc. That’s not the future we want. We actually see VR, AR as a productivity enhancer, so people can spend less time working, because they’re getting more done in our products, because we’ve created a product so good that allows them to be more productive, so they get more done at work, but also, have more time to themselves. So, we suggest people take breaks, we don’t want you in a headset for eight hours straight. The same way no person would suggest for you to sit in front of your computer, and not stand, use the restroom, eat lunch, go on a walk or take a break. We could take the same paradigms. Because you can get so focused on Immersed, we also encourage our users to like, “Yeah, get stuff done, but take a break”. But then we’re also thinking through some of the observations we found. We’ve been surprised at how focused people have been. And the onboarding challenge is a big challenge, as Frode was mentioning. It’s one that we think about often. How do we make the onboarding experience better? And we’ve made progressions based on where we came from in the past. So, Frode, you’re seeing some of the first iterations of our onboarding experience, in the past, we didn’t have one.

There’s something we actually pushed really hard for. We saw a lot of challenges of users sticking around because we didn’t have one. And we’re now continuing to push how do we make this easier. Explain things to people without making it too long, where people get uninterested and leave. It’s a really hard problem to solve. But we found, as we’re having an easier onboarding experience, helping people get used to the paradigms of working in VR and AR, and explaining how our technology works, and letting them get to, what we like to call this magic moment, of where they can see the potential of seeing and having their screens in VR. Having it be fully manipulative, you’re like the Jedi in the force. You can push and pull your screens with hand tracking, to pinch and expand. Put them all around you. If I’m

answering your question, Brandel, we’re still exploring a lot of paradigms. But we found that it’s surprising how focused people are getting, which is awesome and encouraging. We find, which isn’t surprising as much anymore, companies, organizations, and teams are always very wild at how connected they feel to each other. So we always try to encourage people to work together. So, even on our elite tier, which is just our middle tier, like a pro think of it as a pro solo user, you have the ability to collaborate with up to four people in a private room.

But we also have public spaces, where people can hang out and it’s free to use. Just think of it as a virtual coffee shop. You can hang out there, and meet with people. You can’t share your screens, obviously, for security reasons. But you can meet new people and collaborate. And it’s been cool to see how we’ve informed our own community where people can be connected with each other to be able to hang out and meet new people. So, hopefully, that answers a little bit of your question. There’s still a lot more we’re learning about the paradigms of working in 2D screens, and what people prefer, what’s the best practice.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. One of the issues that I face when I think about where people can expect to be in VR productivity at this point, is the fact that Quest 1, Quest 2 and Vive, all of these things have a focal distance. Which is pretty distant, normally a minimum accommodation distance is about 1.4 meters, which means that anything that’s at approximately arm’s length. Which is where we have done the entirety of our productivity in the past. Is actually getting to within eye strain territory. The only headset that is out on the market that has any capacity for addressing that kind of range is actually the Magic Leap.

Which I don’t recommend anybody pursue, because it’s got a second focal plane at 35 centimetres. Do you know where people put those panels on Quest? On Vive? I don’t know if you’ve got folks in a crystal or a coral value, whether that has any distinction in terms of where they put them? Or alternatively, do you recommend or are you aware of anybody making any modifications for being able to deal with a closer focal distance? I’m really interested in whether people can actually work the way they want to, as a consequence of the current limitations of the hardware at the moment.

Gavin Menichini: Yeah. There are a few things in response to that. One: We’ve actually found, internally, even with the Quest 2, although the screen distance, et cetera, focal point, is a challenge, we’ve actually found that people in our experience are reporting less eye strain working in VR, than they are working from their computer. We’re candidly still trying to figure out why that’s the case. I’m not sure how the distance and the optics games that they’re playing in the Quest 2 and other headsets we use. But we’ve actually found that people are reporting less eye strain, just solely on customer reviews and feedback. So we haven’t done any studies. I personally don’t know a lot around IPDs and focal length distance of the exact hardware technology of all the headsets on the market. All I’m doing is paying attention to

our customers, what they’re saying, and our users. And we’re actually, surprisingly, not getting that much eyestrain. We’ve actually said that a lot of people say they prefer working in VR than from their computers, without even blue light glasses. And they’re still getting less eye strain. So, the science and technicalities of how it’s working, I’m not sure. It’s definitely out of my realm of expertise. But I can assure you that the hardware manufacturers, because of our close relationship with Meta, HTC, they’re constantly thinking about that problem too, because you’re strapping an HMD to your face, how do you have a good experience from a health standpoint for your eyes?

Brandel Zachernuk: Do you know how much time people are clocking in it?

Gavin Menichini: On average, our first user session is right around an hour 45 minutes to two hours. And we have power users who are spending six to eight hours a day inside of Immersed, clocking that much time in and generating getting value out of it. And it’s consistent. And I’m not sure what our average session time is. I would say it’s probably around an hour, two hours. But we have people who use it for focus first, where they want to go and focus sessions on Immersed, or people will spend four or five hours in it, and our power users will spend six, seven, eight hours.

Frode Hegland: I can address these few points. Because, first of all, it’s kind of nice. I don’t go on Immersed every week, but when I do, I do get an email that says how many minutes I spent in Immersed, which is quite a useful statistic. So, I’m sure, obviously, you guys have more on that. When it comes to the eye strain, I tend to make the monitor quite large and put it away to do exactly the examination you’re talking about, Brandel. And I used to not like physical monitors being at that distance. It was a bit odd. But since I am keyboard, trackpad, where I don’t have to search for a mouse, I don’t need to see my hands anyway, even though I can. I do think that works. But maybe, Gavin, would you want to, you said you had a video to share a little bit of what it looks like?

Gavin Menichini: Sure, yeah. I can pull that up real quick. So it’s a quick marketing demo video, but it does do a good job of showcasing the potential of what’s possible. And I’m not sure if you guys will be able to hear the audio. It’s just fun background music. It’s not that important. The visuals are what’s more important. Let me go ahead and pull this up for us real quick.

Frode Hegland: I think you can just mute the audio and then talk if you want to highlight something, I guess.

Gavin Menichini: Okay. Actually, yeah. That’s probably a good idea. So, this is also on YouTube. So just for each of your points, if you guys are curious and want to see more content, just type in Immersed VR on YouTube. Our Immersed logo is pretty clear. Our content team and marketing team put out a lot of content, so if you’re curious. We also have a

video called “Work in VR, 11 tips for productivity”, where a head of content goes through some different pro tips. If you’re curious and just want to dive in more of a more nuanced demo of how you do things, etc, to see more of the user experience. So, this is a good, helpful high level video. So you can see you can have full control of your monitor. You can make it ginormous, like a movie screen. We have video editors, day traders, finance teams, and mostly developers are our main customer base. As you can see here, the user just sitting down at the coffee table, the keyboard is tracked. We also have a brand new keyboard feature coming out, it’s called keyboard passthrough, where we’ll leverage the cameras of your Oculus Quest to hold the VR and see your real-life keyboard, which we’re very excited about. And here you can just see just a brief collaboration session of two users collaborating with each other side by side. You can also incorporate your phone into VR, if you want to have your phone there. And then, here you’ll see what it looks like to have a meeting in one of our conference rooms. So, you can have multiple people in the room, we usually had 30 plus people in an environment, so it can easily support that. It also depends on, obviously, everyone’s network strength and quality, very similar to Zoom, or phone call. And that shows how quality the meeting is from their audio and screen sharing input, but if everyone’s on a good network quality, that’s not an issue. And then, lastly here, you can see one of our users with five screens, working in a space station. And that’s about it. Any questions or things that stood out from that, specifically?

Frode Hegland: Yeah. A question about the backgrounds. You have some nice environments that can be applied. I think we can also import any 360 images, is that right, currently? And if so, can we also load custom 3D environments in the future? Are you thinking about customization for that aspect of it?

Gavin Menichini: Yes. So, we are thinking about it, and we do have plans for users to incorporate 3D environments. There are a few challenges with that, for a few obvious reasons, which I could touch on a second. But we do support 360 environments, 360 photos for users to incorporate. And we also have a very talented artist and developer team that are constantly making new environments. And we have user polls, and we figure out what our users want to build and what they’d like to see. And as we, obviously, continue to grow our company, right now we’re in the process of fundraising for a series, and once we do that, we’re hoping to go from 27-28 employees right now, to at least 100 by the end of the year. The vast majority of them will be developers to continue to enhance the quality of our product. And then, we also will support 3D imports of environments. But because the Quest 2 has some compute limitations, we have to make sure that each of our environments have specific poly counts, and specific compute measurements, so that the Quest 2 won’t explode if they try and open that environment in Immersed, as well as making sure that your

Immersed experiences can be optimized in high quality and not going to lag, et cetera. So right now, we’re thinking: How do we enable our users to build custom environments? And then, two: How do we make sure they meet our specific requirements for the Quest 2. But naturally, over time, headsets are getting stronger, computing powers are getting better. Very similarly when you go from a Nintendo 64 graphics, to now the Xbox Series X. The ginormous quality. Headset quality will be the same. So, we’ll have more robust environments to have some more, give and take optimizations for environments our users give to us. So it isn’t our pipeline, but we’re pushing it further down the pipeline than we originally wanted. Just doe to some natural tech limitations. And also the fact that we are an adventure back startup, and we have to be extremely careful of what we work on, and optimize for the highest impact. But we’re starting to have some more fun and having some traction in our series A conversations. And hopefully have some more flexibility, financially, to continue pushing.

Alan Laidlaw: Yes. So, this is maybe a, kind of, Twilio-esque question about the design material of network strength bandwidth and compute, like you mentioned. And I’m wondering, I saw in the demo, the virtual keyboard that, of course, the inputs would be connected to a network versus a physical keyboard that you already have in front of you, if it were possible to use the physical keyboard and have those inputs go into the VR environment, or AR environment, in this case, would that be preferred? Is that the plan? And if so, you know, that opens up, I mean, this is such a rich pioneer, as you mentioned, territory, so many ways to handle this. Would there be a future where, if my hands are doing one thing, then that’s an indication that I’m in my real world environment, but if I hand at something else and that’s suggesting, you know, take my hand into VR, so I can manipulate something? I’m curious about. Any thoughts about, essentially, that design problem, versus the hard physical constraints of bandwidth? Is it just easier? Does it make a better experience to stick with a virtual keyboard for that reason? So, you don’t, at least, have a disconnect between real world and VR? And I’m sure there are other ways to frame that question.

Gavin Menichini: No, that’s fine. And I can answer a few points and a few follow up questions to make sure I understand you correctly. For the keyboard, specifically, the current keyboard tracking system we have in place is not optimal. It was just the first step of what we wanted to build to help make the typing VR problem easier, which is our biggest request. So we are now leveraging, I think, a way stronger feature, which is called “Keyboard pass- through”. So, for those who you know, the Oculus Quest 2 has a pass-through feature, where you can see the real world around you through the camera system, and they’re stitching the imagery together. We now have the ability to create a pass-through portal system, where you can cut out a hole in VR over your keyboard. So, whatever keyboard you have, whether it’s

Mac, Apple, whatever. The funky keyboards, that a lot of our developers really like to use for a few reasons, you can now see that keyboard in your real hands through a little cut-out in VR. And then, when it comes from inputs, of what you mentioned of doing something with your hands, it being a real life thing versus VR thing. Are you referring to that in regards to having a mixed reality headset where it can do AR and VR and you want to be able to switch from real world to VR with the hand motion?

Alan Laidlaw: Yeah. A piece of my question. I can clarify. I am referring to mixed. But specifically where that applies is the cut-out window approach, is definitely a step in the right direction. But it seems that’s still based entirely on the Oculus understanding of what your fingertips are doing. Which will obviously have some misfires. And that would be an incredibly frustrating experience for someone who’s used to a keyboard always responding, hitting the keys that you’re supposed to be hitting. So, at some point, it might make more sense to say, “Okay, actually we’re going to cut out. We’re going to forget the window approach and have the real input from the real keyboard go into our system”.

Gavin Menichini: So, that’s what it is, Alan. Just to further clarify, we always want our users to use their real hands on the real keyboard. And you’re not using your virtual hands on a virtual keyboard. You’re now seeing, with pass-through, your real hands and your real keyboard, and you’re typing on your real keyboard.

Frode Hegland: A really important point to make in this discussion is, if for a single user, there are two elements here: There is the thing around you image of 3D, and then you have your screen. But that is the normal Mac, Linux or Windows screen. And you use your normal keyboard. So, I have, actually, used my own software. I’ve used Author to do some writing on a big nice screen, so it is exactly the keyboard I’m used to.

Alan Laidlaw: Right. So, how that applies to the mixed reality question is, if I’m using the real keyboard, have the real screen, but one of my screens is an iPad, a touch screen, that’s in VR, where I want to move some elements around, how do I then, transition from my hands in the real world to now I want my hand to be in VR?

Gavin Menichini: So, you’re going to be in Immersed, as of now. You’re going to be in VR, and you’re going to have a small cut out into the real world. And so, it’s just, right here is a real world, through a cutout hole, and then, if you have your hands here, and you want to move your hands into here, the moment your hands leave the pass-through portal in VR, it turns into virtual hands. And so, to further clarify, right now, your virtual hands, you have in hand tracking, will still be over your hands on the pass-through window. We’re experimenting taking that out for further clarity of seeing your camera hands on your keyboard. But, yes. When you’re in Immersed, it’ll transition from your camera hands, real life hands, to virtual hands. If you have an iPad and you want to swipe something, whatever,

it’s that’s seamless. But then, for mixed reality dynamics, in the future, we’re not sure what that’s going to look like, because it’s not here yet. So, we need to experiment, figure out what that looks like.

Fabien Benetou: Yeah, thank you. It’s actually a continuation of your question because you asked about the background environment using 360, and including the old model. It’s also a question that you know I was going to ask, and I guess Gavin did, because I’m a developer, you can imagine it too. If it’s not enough, if somehow there are features that I want to develop, and they are very weird, nobody else will care about it, and, as you say, as a start-up you can’t do everything, you need to put some priorities. What can I do? Basically, is it open source? if not, is there an API? If there is an API, what has the community built so far?

Gavin Menichini: Yeah, great question. So, as of now, we currently don’t have any APIs or open SDKs, open source code for users to use. We’ve had this feature request a lot. And our CEO is pondering what his approach wants to be in the future. So, we do want to do something around that in the future. But, because we’re still so early stage, and we have so many things we have to focus on, it’s extremely important that we’re very careful with what we work on, and how focused, and how hard working we are towards those. As we continue to progress as a company, and as our revenue increases, as we raise subsequent rounds of funding, that gives us the flexibility to explore these things. And one of the biggest feature requests we’ve had is having an Immersed SDK for our streaming monitor technology so people can start to play with different variations of what we’re building. But I do know that Renji does not allow for any free, open source coding work whatsoever. Just for a few reasons legality-wise, and I think we had a few experiences in the past where we experiment with that, and it backfired to where developers were claiming they owed, they deserved equity, or funding. It was a hot mess. So, we don’t allow anyone to work for us for free, or to give us any form of software, to any regard, any work period, to prevent any legal issues, to prevent any claims like that ,which is kind of unfortunate. But he’s a stickler and definitely will not budge on that. But in the future, hopefully, we’ll have an SDK or some APIs that are opened up, or open source code, once we’re more successfully established for people to experiment and start making their own fun iterations to immerse on.

Brandel Zachernuk: I have a question about the windows. You mentioned that, when somebody has a pro subscription, they can be socially connected, but not share screens. I presume, in an enterprise circumstance, people can see each other’s windows. Have you observed any ways in which people have used their windows more discursively, in terms of having them as props, essentially, for communicating with each other, rather than primarily, or solely for working on their own? The fact that they can move these monitors, these windows around, does that change anything about the function of them within a workflow or

a discussion context?

Gavin Menichini: Yeah. So, to clarify under the tier and your functionality. We have a free tier, where you can connect your computer and traverse the gap. You get one free virtual display. You cannot, on a free tier, ever share screens in all of our public rooms. You can’t share screens, regardless of your license. Here, the only place you can share screens is in a private collaboration room. Which means, you have to be on our elite tier, or a teams tier. On our elite tier, which is our mid-pro-solo tier, you can have up to three other people in the room with you, four total, and you can share screens with each other. And the default is, your screens are never shared. So, if you have four people in a room, and they each have three screens up, you cannot see anyone else’s screen until you voluntarily share your screen and confirm that screen. And then, it will highlight red, for security purposes. But if you’re an environment where, Brandel, you wanted to share your screen, when you share your screen and say, we’re all sitting at a conference room table, if I have my screens like, one, two, three, right here, and I share my middle screen, my screen is then going to pop up in your perspective to you. To where you have control of my shared screen. You can make it larger. Make it bigger. Shrink it, etc. And we’re also going to be building different environment anchors to where say, for example, in your conference room, and in a normal conference room you have a large tv on the wall, say, in virtual reality, you could take your screen and snap it to that place, and once it’s snapped into that little TV slot, that screen will be automatically shared and everyone sees it at that perspective, rather than their own perspective. And then, from a communication standpoint, we have teams who will meet together in different dedicated rooms, and then they’ll share screens, and look at data together. There’s... I can’t remember quite the name, it’s a software development team where something goes down, they have to very well come together. Devops teams come together, they share screens looking at data to fix a down server or something, and they can all see, and analyse that data together. And we’re exploring the different feature adds we can add to make that experience easier and more robust.

Brandel Zachernuk: And so, yeah. My question is: Are you aware of the ways in which people make use of that in terms of being able to share and show more things? One of the things about desktop computing, even in the context where people are co-located, co-present in physical meet space, you don’t actually have very good performability of computer monitors. It kind of sucks in Zoom. It kind of sucks in real life, as well. Do people show and share differently, as a consequence of being in Immersed? Can you characterize anything about that?

Gavin Menichini: Yes. So, the answer is yes. They have the ability to share more screens, and so, in meet space, in real-world, a funny term there for meet space, but. You can only

have one computer screen if you’re working on a laptop, and that’s frustrating. Unless you have a TV, you have to airdrop, XYZ, whatever. But, in Immersed, you have up to five screens. And so, we have teams of four, and they’ll share two or three screens at once, and they can have a whole arrangement of data, 10 screens are being shared, and they can rearrange those individually so it all pops up in front of them, and then, they all rearrange them in order that they want, and they can all watch a huge sharing screen of data. That is not possible in real life because of the technology we provide to them. And then, there’s different iterations of that experience where, maybe, it’s two or three screens, it’s here, it’s there. And so, because of the core tech that we have where you can have multiple screens and then share each of those, that opens up the possibility for more data visualization, because you have more screen real estate. This opportunity to collaborate more effectively, and if you had one computer screen on Zoom, which as you mentioned, is challenging, or even in real life, because in real life you could have a computer and two TVs, but in Immersed you could have eight screens being shared at once.

Brandel Zachernuk: And do you share control? Is it something where it’s only the person sharing it has the control, so other people would have read-only access? Or do you have the ability for people to be able to pass that control around? Send the user events such that everybody would be able to have shared control?

Gavin Menichini: So, not right now, but we’re building that out. For the time being, we want everyone just to use collaboration tools they are currently using. Use Google Docs. Use Miro. Use Slack. Whatever. So, the current collaboration documents you guys are using now, we just want to use those applications on Immersed, because whatever you can run on your computer, you can run on your screen in Immersed. It is just your computer in Immersed. So, we tell people to do that. But now they get the added benefit of deeper connection. Just actually to be sitting next to your employee, or your colleague and then, now you can have multiple screens being shared. So, now it’s like a supercharged productivity experience, collaboration experience. Any other questions? I have about four minutes left, so I want to make sure I can answer all the questions you guys have.

Fabien Benetou: I’ll make a one minute question. I’ll just say faster. If I understood correctly, the primitive is the screen. But is there anything else beyond the screen? Can you share 3D assets? Would the content can be pulled from the screen? If not, can you take capture of the screen. either as image, or video? And is it the whole screen only or part of the screen? And imagining you’ve done that, let’s say, part of the screen as a video of 30 seconds, can you make it permanent in the environment so that if I come back with colleagues tomorrow? Capture? Because that’s the challenge we have here all the time, we have great discussions and then, what happens to the content?

Gavin Menichini: So, it’s in our pipeline to incorporate other assets that will be able to be brought into Immersed, and then remain persistent in the rooms. So, we’ve created the technology for persistent rooms, meaning, whatever you leave in there, it’s going to stay. Very similar to a conference room that you’ve dedicated for project. You put post notes around the wall, and obviously, come back to it the next day. So there same concept when in VR. And then, we also have plans to incorporate 3D assets, 3D CAD models, et cetera, into Immersed. But because you have your screens and teams are figuring out how to collaborate on 2D screens, we’re just, for the time being, we’re saying just continue to use your CAD model software on your computer 2D. But in the future we’ll have that capability. We also don’t want to be like F3D modelling VR software. So, we’re trying to find that balance.

Which is why it’s been de-prioritized. But it is coming. And hopefully, in 2022 and then, we have also explored having video files that are in form of screens, or an image file, or post-it notes, We’re also going to improve our whiteboard experience, which is just some of one of our first iterations. And so, there’s a lot of improvements we’re going to be making in the future, in addition to different assets, photos, videos, 3D modelling software, et cetera. We’ve had that request multiple times and plan on building it in the future.

Fabien Benetou: Oh, and super quick. It means you get in, you do the work, you get out, but you don’t have something like a trace of it as is right now?

Gavin Menichini: As in persistence? As in you get in, you leave your screens there? Fabien Benetou: Or even something you can extract out of it. Frode was saying that, for example, he gets an email about the time he spent on a session, but is there something else?

Again, because usually, you have maybe another eureka moment, but you have some kind of

realization in the space, thanks to the space and the tools. And how can you get that it’s really a struggle.

Gavin Menichini: I’m not sure, I’m sorry. I’m not sure I’m understanding your question correctly, but well, so it’s...

Brandel Zachernuk: Maybe I can take a run of it. So, when people play VR games, at a VR arcade, one of the things that people will often produce is a sizzle reel of moments in that action. There’s a replay recording, an artifact of the experience. Of that process.

Gavin Menichini: Okay, yes. So, for the time being there is no functionality in Immersed for that. But Oculus gives you the ability to record what you’re watching in VR. And you can pull that out and take that experience with you, as well as take snapshots. And then, we have no plans on incorporating that functionality into Immersed because Oculus has it, and I think HTC does, and other hardware manufacturers will provide that recording experience for you to then take away with you.

Frode Hegland: Thank you very much, Gavin, a very interesting, real-world perspective on a

very specific issue. So, very grateful. We’ll stay in touch. Run to your next meeting. When this journal issue is out, I’ll send you an update.

Gavin Menichini: Thank you, Frode. It was a pleasure getting to chat with each of you. God bless. Hope you guys have a great Friday, weekend, and we’ll stay connected.

Further Discussion

https://youtu.be/2Nc5COrVw24?t=3987

Frode Hegland: Oh, okay. That sounds interesting. Yeah, we can look at changing times and stuff. So, briefly on this, and then on the meeting that I had with someone earlier today. This is interesting to us, because they are thinking a lot less VR than we are. But it is a real and commercial company and obviously a lot of his words were very salesy. Which is fine. But it literally is, rectangle in the room. That’s it. So, in many ways, it’s really, phenomenally, useful. And I’m very glad they’re doing it. I’m glad we have a bit of a connection to them now. But the whole issue of taking something out of the screen and putting it somewhere else, it was partly using their system that made me realize that’s not possible. And that’s actually kind of a big deal. So that’s that. And the meeting that Elliot and I had today, he mentioned who it was with. And I didn’t want to put too much into the record on that. But it was really interesting. The meeting was because of Visual-Meta. Elliot introduced us to these people. And Vint. Vint couldn’t be there today. We started a discussion. They have all kinds of issues with Visual-Meta. They love the idea, but then their implementation issue, blah, blah, blah. But towards the end, when I started talking about the Metaverse thing, they had no idea about the problems that we have learned. And they were really invigorated and stressed by it. So, I think what we’re doing here, in this community, is right on. I’m going to try now to rewrite some of the earlier stuff, to write a little piece over the weekend on academic documents in the Metaverse to highlight the issues. And if you guys want to contribute some issues to that document, that would be great or not, depending on how you feel. But I think they really understood that, what I said to them at the end is, if you have a physical meeting of a piece of paper, you can do whatever you want. But in the Metaverse, it can only do with the document, whatever the room allows you to, which is mind-blowingly crazy. And they represent a lot of really big publishers within medicine. They are under the National Institute of Health, as I understand. I’m not sure if Elliot is still in the room. So, yeah. It is good that we are looking in the right areas.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah, that’s really constructive. For my part, one of the things that I’ve realized is that the hypertext people, the people who understand the value of things, like structured writing, and relationship linking, and things like that, are far better positioned than many, possibly most, to understand some of the questions and issues that are intrinsic to the idea of a Metaverse. I was watching, so I linked a podcast to some folks, it’s called, I think is it called Into The Metaverse, but it was a conversation between a VP of Unreal and the and the principal programmer, whatever, architect of Unity. So Vladimir Vukićević, who was who created Unreal and Unity, and Vukićević, I don’t know if I’m garbling that name, he was the

inventor of WebGL. Which is the foundation for all of the stuff that we do in virtual reality on web, as well as just being very good for being able to do fancy graphics, as I do at work and things like that. But their view of what goes into a Metaverse what needs to be known about entities relationships descriptions and things was just incredibly naive. I’ll link the videos, but they see the idea of a browser as being intrinsic. And another person, who’s a 25-year veteran of Pixar and the inventor of the Universal Scene Description format, USD, which as you may know, Apple is interested in, sort of, promoting as being useful in the form of what this format of choice for augmented reality, quick look files, things like that. And again, just incredible naivete in terms of what are important things to be able to describe with regard to relationships, and constraints, and linkages of the kind that hypertext is. It’s the bread and butter of understanding how to make a hypertext relevant notionally and structurally, in a way that means that it’s (indistinct). So, yeah. It’s exciting, but it’s also distressing to see how much that thinking of people who are really titans of an interactive graphics field don’t know what this medium is. So, that looks fun.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, it’s scary and fun. But I think we’re very lucky to have Bob here, because I’ve been very about the document and so on, and for about to say, “Well, actually, let’s use the wall as well”. It helps us think about going between spaces. And what I highlighted in the meeting earlier today was, what if I take one document from one repository, and let’s say, it has all the meta, so I’ve put a little bit here, a little bit there, but then, I have another document, from a different repository over here and I draw a connection between them. That connection now is a piece of information too. Where is stored? Who owns it? And how do I interact with that in the future? These are things that are not even begun to be addressed, because I think, all the companies doing the big stuff just want everything to go through their stuff.

Bob Horn: And what kind is it? That is the connection.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, exactly. So, we’re early naive days, so we need to produce some interesting worthwhile questions here. Fabien, I see your big yellow hand.

Video: https://youtu.be/2Nc5COrVw24?t=4369

Fabien Benetou: I’ll put the less yellow hand on the side. Earlier when I said, I don’t know what I’m doing, it wasn’t like fake modesty or trying to undermine my work or this kind of thing. I actually mean it. I do a bunch of stuff and some of the stuff I do, I hope is interesting. I hope is even new, and might lead to other things. But in practice, it’s not purely random, and there are some let’s say, not heuristic, but there are some design principles, philosophy behind it, understanding of some, hopefully, core principle of urology, or cognitive science, or just engineering. But in practice, I think we have to be humble enough about this being a new medium. And figuring it out is not trivial, it’s not easy, and it’s not, I think, it is part of it,

is intelligence and knowledge, but a lot of it is all that, plus luck, plus attempting.

Frode Hegland: Oh, I agree with you. And I see that in this group, the reason I said it was I just wanted him to have a clue of the level of who we are in the room. That’s all. I think our ignorance in this room is great. I saw this graphic when I started studying, I haven’t been able to find the source, but it showed if you know this much about a subject, the circumference is the ignorance, it’s small. The more you know, the bigger circumference it is. And I found that to be such a graphic illustration of, you know something, you don’t know. We need to go all over the place. But at least we’re beginning to see some of the questions. And I think that’s a real contribution of what we’re doing here. So, we just got to keep on going. Also, as you know, we now have two presenters a month, which mean, for the next two or three months, I’ve only signed up one. Brandel is going to be doing, hopefully, in two to three weeks something, right?

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. I’m still chipping away. Then I realized that there’s some reading I need to do, in order to make sure that I’m not mischaracterizing Descartes.

Frode Hegland: Okay, that sounds like fun. Fabien, would you honour us, as well, with doing a hosted presentation over the next month or two or something?

Fabien Benetou: Yeah, with pleasure.

Frode Hegland: Fantastic! Our pathetic little journal is growing slightly less pathetic by the month.

Fabien Benetou: I can give a teaser on... I don’t have a title yet, but let’s say, how a librarian, what a librarian would do if they were able to move walls around.

Frode Hegland: That’s very interesting. It was good the one we had on Monday, with Jad. It was completely different from what we’re looking at. Looking at identity. And for you to now talk about that aspect, is kind of a spatial aspect, that’s very interesting.

Bob Horn: I’m looking forward to whatever you write about this weekend, Frode. Because for me, the summaries of our discussions, with some organization, not anywhere near perfect organization, not asking for that, but some organization, some patterns are what are important to me. And when I find really good bunches of those, then I can visualize them. So, I’m still looking for some sort of expression of levels of where the problems are as we see it now. In other words, there were the, what I heard today, with Immersed, was a set of problems at a certain level, to some degree. And then, a little bit in the organization of knowledge, but not a lot, but that’s what came up in our discussion afterwards and so forth. So, whenever there’s that kind of summary, I really appreciate whatever you do in that regard, because I know it’s the hardest work at this stage. So I’m trying to say something encouraging, I guess.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, thank you, Bob. That’s very nice. I just put a link on this document

that I wrote today. The next thing will be, as we discussed. But information has to be somewhere. It’s such an obvious thing, but it doesn’t seem to be acknowledged. Because in a virtual environment, we all know that you watch a Pixar animation, they’ve made every single pixel on the screen. There is no sky even. We know that. But when it becomes interactive, and we move things in and out. Oh, Brandel had a thing there.

Brandel Zachernuk: One of the things that they that Guido Quaroni talks about, as as well as people have talked a bunch about, some of the influences and contributions of. Quilez makes Shadertoy, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen them or heard of that. But it’s this raymarched based fragment shader system for being able to do procedural systems. And so, none of the moss in brave, if you’ve seen that film, exists. Nobody modeled it. Nobody decided which pieces should go where. What they did was, Quilez has this amazing mind for a completely novel form of representation of data. It’s called the Signed Distance

Fields raymarched shader. And so it’s all procedural. And all people had to do was navigate through this implicit virtual space to find the pieces that they wanted to stitch into the films. And so, it never existed. It’s something that was conjured on a procedural basis and then people navigated through it. So yes, things have to exist. But that’s not because people make it, sometimes. And sometimes it’s because people make a latent space, and then, they navigate it. And I think that the contrast between those two things is fascinating, in terms of what that means creative tools oblige us to be able to do. Anyway.

Frode Hegland: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Like No Man’s Sky and lots of interesting software out there. But it’s still not in the world, so to speak. One thing I still really want, and I’m going to pressure you guys every time, no, it’s not to write your bio, but it is some mechanism where, as an example, our journal, I can put it in a thing so that you guys can put it in your thing. Because then we can really start having real stuff that is our stuff. So if you can keep that in the back of your mind. Even if you can just spec how it should work, I’ll try to find someone to do it, if it’s kind of rote work and not a big framework for you guys.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah, I definitely intend to play more with actually representing text again. And somebody made a sort of invitation slash prompt blast challenge to get my text renderings to be better. Which means that I’ll need something to do it better on. And so, yeah. I think that would be a really interesting target goal.

Frode Hegland: Awesome. Fabien, I see you have your hand, but on that same request to you guys, imagine we already have some web pages where you can click at the bottom, view in VR, when you’re in the environment. That’s nice. Imagine if we have documents like that, that’ll be amazing. And I don’t know what that would mean, yet. There are some thoughts, but it goes towards the earlier. Okay, yes. Fabien, please?

Fabien Benetou: Yeah, I think we need to go a bit beyond imagining. Then we can have

some sandbox, some prototypes of the documents. We have recorded, that’s how I started, the first time I joined, you mentioned Visual-Meta. And then, I put a PDF and some of the media data in there. No matter how the outcome was gonna exist, so I definitely think that’s one of the most interesting way to do it. The quick word on writing, my personal fear about writing is that, I don’t know if you know the concept, and I have the name of the people of my tongue, but yeah, ID Depth. So the idea is that you have too many ideas, and then at some point, if you don’t realize some of them, if you don’t build, implement, make it happen, however the form is, it’s just crushing. And then, let’s say, if I start to write, or prepare for the presentation I mentioned just 30 minutes or 10 minutes ago, the excitement and the problem is, it’s for sure, by summarizing it, stepping back, that’s going to bring new ideas. Like, “Oh, now I need to implement. Now I need to test it”. There is validation on it. I’m just not complaining or anything. Just showing a bit my perspective of my fear of writing. And also because in the past, at some point I did just write. I did not code anything. It felt good in a way. But then also. a lot of it was, I don’t want to say bullshit but, maybe not as interesting as that or it was maybe a little, so I’m just personally trying to find the right balance between summarizing, sharing, having a way that the content can be reused, regardless of the implementation, any implementation. Just sharing my perspective there.

Frode Hegland: That is a very important perspective. And it is very important to share. And I think we’re all very different in this. And for this particular community, my job as, quote- unquote editor, is to try to create an environment where we’re comfortable with different levels. Like Adam, he will not write. Fine. I steal from Twitter, put it in the journal, and he approves it. Hopefully. Well, so far he has. So, if you want to write, write. But also, I really share, so strongly, the mental thing you talked about. We can’t know what it’s like to hear something until it exists. And we say, if an idea is important write it down, because writing it down, of course, helps clarifying. But that’s only if it’s that kind of an idea. Implementing, in demos and code is as important. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with building our summer house, in Norway, doing a renovation here. And because it’s a physical environment, even doing it in SketchUp it’s not enough. I made many mistakes. Thankfully, there were experienced people who could help me see it in the real thing. Sometimes we had to put boards up in a room to see what it would feel like. So, yeah. Our imaginations are hugely constrained. So, it’s now 19 past. And Brandel was suggesting he had to go somewhere else. I think it’s okay, with a small group, if we finish half-past, considering this will be transcribed, anyway. And so, let’s have a good weekend. Unless someone wants a further topic discussion, which I’m totally happy with also.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. I’m looking forward to chatting on Monday. And I will read through what you sent to the group that you discussed things with today. Connecting to

people with problems that are more than graphical, and more than attends to the Metaverse, I think is really fascinating. Providing they have the imagination to be able to see that, what they are talking about is a “Docuverse”. Is these sort of connected concepts that Bob has written about. I’ve got a book but it’s on the coffee table. The pages after 244. The characterization of the actual information and decision spaces that you have. It’s got the person with the HMD but then it’s sort of situated in an organization where there are flows of decisions. And I think that, recognizing that we can do work on that is fascinating.

Bob Horn: I can send that to everybody, if you like.

Frode Hegland: Oh, I have it. So without naming names or exactly who I was speaking to today since we’re still recording. The interesting thing is, of course, this feeds the, starting with the Visual-Meta, it feeds into some part of the organization desperately wants something like that and they’ve been pushing for years. But there are resources, and organization, and communication, all those real-world issues. So then, a huge problem is, I come in as an outsider and I say, “Hey, here’s a solution. It’s really cheap and simple”. It’s kind of like I’m stealing their thunder, right? I am not doing that, I’m just trying to help them realize what they already want to do. And today, when they talked about different standards, I said, “Look. Honestly, what’s in Visual-Meta, I don’t care. If you could, please, put it in BibTeX, the basic stuff, but if you want to have some json in there, it’s not something I would like, but if you want to do it there’s nothing wrong with that”. So, to try to make these people feel that they are being enabled, rather than someone kind of moving them along is emotionally, human difficult. And also, for them to feel that they’re doing something with Vint Cerf. All of that, hopefully, will help them feel a bit of excitement. But I also think that the incredibly hard issues with the Metaverse that we’re bringing up also unlock something in their imagination. Because, imagine if we, at the end of this year, we have a demo, where we have a printed document, and then we pretend to do OCR, we don’t need to do it live, right? And then, we have it on the computer, very nice. And now, suddenly, we put on a headset. You all know where I’m going with this, right? We have that thing. But then, as the crucial question you kept asking Gavin, and I’m glad you both asked it, Fabien and Brandel, what happens to the room when you leave it? What happens to the artifacts and the relationship if we solve some of that? What an incredibly strong demo that would be. And also, was it a little bit of a wake- up call for you guys to see that this well-funded new company is still dealing with only rectangles?

Brandel Zachernuk: No. I know from my own internal experience just how coarse the thinking is, even with better funding.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. And the greatest thing about our group is, we have zero funding. And we have zero bosses. All we have is our honesty, community, and passion. Now, it’s a very

different place to invent from. But look at all the great inventions. Vint was a graduate student, Tim Berners-Lee was trying to do something in a different lab. You know all the stories. Great innovations have to come from groups like this. I don’t know if we’re going to invent something. I don’t know. I don’t really care. But I really do care, desperately, that we contribute to the dialogue.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah, I think that’s valuable. I think that the fact that we have your perspective on visual forms of important distilled information thought is going to be really valuable. And one of the things I’d like to do, given that you said that so many people make use of Vision 2050 is start with that as a sculpture, as a system to be able to jump into further detail. Do you have more on that one?

Bob Horn: Well, I can take it apart. I can do what different things we want to do with it. For example, when we were clearing it with the team that worked that created some of the thought that went into it, the back cast thought, I would send the long trail of the four decades of transportation to Boeing, to Volkswagen, and to Toyota. I didn’t send it to the rest of the people. So, I could take that, I actually took that out and sent a PDF of that, only that to them. And that’s one dimension. Another dimension is that five years later, I worked on another project that was similar called Poll Free. Which is also on my website. And it narrowed the focus to Europe, to the European Union, rather than the whole world. But the structure is similar in many ways. So each one of those are extractable. Then also, I have a few... The two or three years after working on the Vision 2050, I would give lectures of different kinds. And people would ask me, “Well, how are we doing on this or that requirement?” And so, I would try to pull up whatever data there was, two, or three, or four years later, and put that in my slides, so there, that material is available. So, that we can extract, you could demo, at least that, “Here’s what we thought in 2010 and here’s what it looked like in 2014”. For one small chunk of the whole picture. So, yeah. And I have several, maybe I don’t know, six or eight, at least of those, that where I could find data easily and fast. So, there’s a bit of demo material there that one could portray a different kind of a landscape than the one that you were pointed out just a minute ago.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. That would be really interesting to play with. I was just looking to add some of the things. I think that the one thing that I had seen of the Vision 2050 was the fairly simple one, it’s a sort of a four, this node graph here, the nine billion people live well and within the limits of the planet I hadn’t seen yet. The sustainable pathway toward a sustainable 2050 document that you linked here on your site, which has a ton more information. And, yeah. One of the things that I’m curious about, one of the things that I think I will do to play with it first is actually get it into, not into a program that I write, but into a 3D modelling APP, to tear it apart, and think about the way in which we might be able

to create and distribute space for it. But first, do you have thoughts about what you would do if this was an entire room? It obviously needs to be a pretty big mural, but if it was an entire room, or an entire building, do you have a sense of the way in which it would differ?

Bob Horn: Until you ask the question, and put it together with the pages from the old book, I haven’t really thought of that. But from many of the places in Vision 2050 one would have pathways like this. This was originally a pert chart way back when that I was visualizing, because I happened to have, early my career edited a book on pert charts for Dupont. And so, that’s a really intriguing question. To be extracting in and laying it out and then, connecting those and also flipping the big mural, the time-based mural in Vision 2050, making that flat, bringing different parts of it up, I think would be one of the first ways that one would try to explore that, because then, one could (indistinct) pathways, and alternatives, and then linkages. So, they’re different. Depending on one’s purpose, thinking purpose, one would do different things.

Fabien Benetou: Brief note here. I believe, using Illustrator to make the visuals, I believe Illustrator can also save to SVG. And SVG then can be relatively easily extruded to transform a 2D shape into a 3D shape. Honestly, doing that would be probably interesting but very basic, or very naive. It’s still, I think, a good step to extrude part of the graph with different depth based on, I don’t know, colour, or meaning, or position, or something like this. So, I think it could be done. But, if you could export one of the poster in that format, in SVG, I think it would be fun to tinker with. But I think, at some point, you personally will have to consider, indeed, the question that Brandel asked. If you have a room, rather than a wall beyond the automatic extraction or extrusion, how would you design it?

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah. It’s something that I think would be really useful as an exercise, if you want to go through one of those murals and with a sketchbook, just pencils. And at some point, you can go through with us to characterize what I think, like you said, different shapes, different jobs call for different shapes through that space. But one can move space around, which is exciting. Librarians can move their walls around.

Bob Horn: I was going to say the other, if you strike another core, just as from the demonstration we saw earlier this morning. The big mural could be on one wall. There was a written report. There is a 60 or 80-page report that could be linked in various ways to it. And it exists. And then, there’s also, in that report, there’s a simplification of the big mural. It reduces the 800 steps in the mural to about 40. And it’s a visual table look. So, already there are three views, three walls, and we’ve already imagined putting it flat on the floor and things popping up from it. All right, there we go. There’s a room for you.

Brandel Zachernuk: Exciting, yeah. I think that’s a really good start. And from my perspective, I think that’s something that I can and will play with is, starting from that JPEG

of the PDF, I’ll peel pieces of that off and try to arrange them in space, thinking about some of the stuff that Fabien’s done with the Visual-Meta, virtual Visual-Meta. As well as what Adam succeeded in doing, in terms of pulling the dates off, because I think that there’s some really interesting duality of views, like multiplicity of representations that we can kind of get into, as well as being able to leverage the idea of having vastly different scales. When you have a, at Apple we call it a type matrix, but just the texts and what what’s a heading what’s a subhead. But the thing is that, except in the most egregious cases, which we sometimes do at Apple, the biggest text is no more than about five times the smallest text. But in real space you can have a museum, and the letters on the museum wall or in a big room are this big.

And then you have little blocks like that thing. And there’s no expectation for there to be mutually intelligible. There’s no way you can read this, while you’re reading that. But because of the fact that we have the ability to navigate that space, we can make use of those incredibly disparate scales. And I think that’s incumbent on us to reimagine what we would do with those vastly different scales that we have available, as a result of being able to locomote through a virtual space.

Bob Horn: Well, let me know if you need any of these things. I can provide, somehow. I guess you and I could figure out how to do a dropbox for Illustrator or any other thing that can be useful for you.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah, thank you. I may ask for the Illustrator document. One of the things that I’ve been recently inspired by, so there’s an incredible team at Apple that I’m trying to apply for called prototyping. And one of the neat things that they have done over the years is describe their prototypic process. And it mostly involves cutting JPEGs apart and throwing them into the roughest thing possible in order to be able to answer the coarsest questions possible first. And so, I’m very much looking forward to doing something coarse ground with the expectation that we have a better sense of what it is we would want to do with more high fidelity resources. So, hopefully that will bear fruit and nobody should be, hopefully not, too distraught by misuse of the material. But I very much enjoy the idea of taking a fairly rough hand to these broad questions at first, and then, making sure that refinement is based on actual resolution, in the sense of being resolved, rather than pixel density.

Bob Horn: Yeah, well, okay. If you want JPEGs we can make JPEGs too.

Frode Hegland: You said almost as a throwaway thing there. Traverse. But one thing that I learned, Brandel, particularly with your first mural of Bob’s work is that, traversal, unless you’re physically walking if you have room scale opportunity, is horrible. But being able to pull and push is wonderful. And I think that kind of insight that we’re learning by doing is something we really should try to record. So, I’m not trying to push you into an article. But if

you have a few bullets that you want to put into Twitter, or sent to me, or whatever, as in, this, in your experience has caused stomach pain, this hasn’t. Because also, yesterday, I saw a...

You know I come from a visual background, and have photography friends, and do videos, and all that stuff, suddenly, a friend of mine, Keith, from some of you have met, we were in SoHo, where he put a 8k 360 camera, and it was really fun. So, I got all excited, went home, looked up a few things, and then I found the Stereo 180 cameras. And I finally found a way to view it on the Oculus. It was a bit clunky, but I did. It was an awful experience. There’s something about where you place your eye. When we saw the movie, Avatar, it was really weird that the bit that is blurry would actually be sharp as well, but somewhere else. Those kinds of effects. So, to have a stereoscopic, if it isn’t exactly right on both eyes and you’re looking at the exact, it’s horrible. So, these are the things we’re learning. And if we could put it into a more listy way, that would be great. Anyway, just since you mentioned.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yes. It’s fascinating. And that’s something that Mark Anderson also observed when he realized that, unfortunately, the Fresnel lenses that we make use of in current generation hardware means that, it’s not particularly amenable to looking with your eyes like that. You really have to be looking through the center of your headset in order to be able to get the best view. You have this sense of the periphery. But will tire anybody who tries to read stuff down there, because their eyes are going to start hurting.

Frode Hegland: Yeah. I still have problems getting a real good sharp focus. Jiggle this, jiggle that. But, hey! Early days, right? So when it comes to what we’re talking about with Bob’s mural, and the levels, and the connections, and all of that good stuff, it seems to be an incredibly useful thing to experiment with exactly these issues. What does it actually mean to explode it, et cetera? So, yeah. Very good.

Fabien Benetou: Yeah. I imagine that being shared before. But just in case, Mike Elgier, who is, or at least who was, I’m not sure right now, but a typist and designer at Google, on the UXL product. Wrote some design principle a couple of years ago. And not all of these were his, but he illustrated it quite nicely. So, I think it’s a good summary.

Brandel Zachernuk: Yes, I agree. He’s still at Google he was working on Earth and YouTube. Working on how to present media, and make sure that it works seamlessly so that you’re not lying about what the media is, but in terms of presenting a YouTube video in VR in a way that it isn’t with no applied and like I see it screen or whatever. But also, making sure that it’s something that you can interact with as seamlessly as possible. So, it’s nice work, and hopefully, if Google ramps up its work back into AR, VR, then they can leverage his abilities. Because they’ve lost a lot of people who are doing really interesting things. I don’t know if you saw, Don McCarthy has now moved to New York Times to work on 3D stuff there. And that’s very exciting for them. But a huge blow for Google not to have them

back.

Frode Hegland: Just adding this to our little news thing. Right. Excellent. Yeah. Let’s reconvene on Monday. This is good. And, yeah. That’s all just wonderful. Have a good weekend.

Chat Log

16:46:14 From Fabien Benetou : my DIY keyboard passthrough in Hubs ;) https://twitter.com/utopiah/status/1250121506782355456

using my webcam desktop

16:48:25 From Frode Hegland : Cool Fabien

16:50:49 From alanlaidlaw : that’s the right call. APIs are very dangerous in highly dynamic domains

16:51:47 From Fabien Benetou : also recent demo on managing screens in Hubs https://twitter.com/utopiah/status/1493315471252283398 including capturing images to move them around while streaming content

17:03:43 From Fabien Benetou : good point, the limits of the natural metaphor, unable to get the same affordances one does have with “just””paper

17:04:07 From Frode Hegland : Carmack? 17:04:16 From Frode Hegland : Oh that was Quake

17:04:48 From Frode Hegland : Can you put the names here in chat as well please? 17:05:16 From Fabien Benetou : Vladimir Vukićević iirc

17:05:53 From Frode Hegland : Thanks

17:06:40 From Brandel Zachernuk : This is Vukićević: https://cesium.com/open-metaverse-podcast/3d-on-the-web/

17:07:17 From Brandel Zachernuk : And Pixar/Adobe, Guido Quaroni: https://cesium.com/open-metaverse-podcast/the-genesis-of-usd/ 17:11:09 From Frode Hegland : From today to the NIH:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9xyl6xgmaltojqn/metadata%20in%20crisis.pdf?dl=0 17:11:25 From Frode Hegland : Next will be on academic documents in VR 17:12:07 From Fabien Benetou : very basic but the documents used in https://twitter.com/utopiah/status/1243495288289050624 are academic papers 17:13:19 From Frode Hegland : Fabien, make an article on that tweet?… 17:13:30 From Fabien Benetou : length? deadline?

17:13:34 From Frode Hegland : any

17:13:44 From Frode Hegland : However, do not over work!

17:13:54 From Frode Hegland : Simple but don’t waste time editing down 17:14:07 From Fabien Benetou : sure, will do

17:14:11 From Frode Hegland : Wonderful

17:14:52 From Fabien Benetou : (off topic but I can recommend https://podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/burnout-and-how-to-avoid-it/id1474245040? i=1000551538495

on burn out)

17:28:05 From Brandel Zachernuk :

https://www.bobhorn.us/assets/sus-5uc-vision-2050-wbcsd-2010-(1).pdf 17:28:17 From Brandel Zachernuk :

https:// www.bobhorn.us/assets/sus-6uc-pathwayswbcsd-final-2010.jpg 17:39:10 From Fabien Benetou : https://www.mikealger.com/

17:39:27 From Fabien Benetou : design principles for UX in XR, pretty popular

Harold Thimbleby

Getting mixed text right is the future of text

When we read text, at least text that we are enjoying as we read it, we get immersed in it, and it becomes like a stream of consciousness we willingly join in with. We lose awareness of the magic reading skills that took us years to learn — these marks on screen or paper somehow create mental images or sounds, feelings like laughter, disagreement, anger, plans for action, anything, in our heads. If we pause from the flow, we may reflect about the text’s metadata

— who wrote this; when did they write it; how much do we have to pay for it; when was it written? — we want to know lots details about the text.

If we are feeling critical, we may notice the typography: some text is italic, the page numbers are in a different font, there are rivers in the paragraphs, and the kerning perhaps leaves a lot to be desired. Then we notice how the author italicises Latin phrases, like ad nauseam, but does not italicise Latin abbreviations like e.g. for example.

If we are programmers, we might wonder how the text works, how it was actually implemented. What is the data format? How did the writer and the developers store this information, and yet convey a coherent stream of consciousness to the readers? Some texts mix in computed texts, like indices and tables of contents; then there are footnotes, side notes, cross references, running headings, page numbers — all conventional ways of mixing in different types of text to help the reader.

If the text is on a web page or represented in VR, even more will be happening. VR text is typically interactive. Perhaps it scrolls and pans in interesting ways, is reactive to different sorts of reading devices, fitting into different screen sizes and colour gamuts, and it probably interactively needs information from the reader. Increasingly, the reader will need to subscribe to the text, and the details of that are held in very complex metadata stored in the cloud, far away from the text itself yet linked back to it so the reader can have access to it.

The author’s experience of text

For the sake of concreteness, familiarity, and simplicity, we will use HTML as an initial case study.

HTML is a familiar, well-defined notation, and it is powerful enough to represent almost any form of text. For example, Microsoft Word — which provides a WYSIWYG experience

for the author — could easily represent all of its text using HTML; in fact, Word now uses a version of XML (which is basically a fussy version of HTML) to do so. Furthermore, in this chapter it’s helpful that we can talk about HTML on the two-dimensional printed (or PDF or screen) page, unlike examples from VR. (If we had used Microsoft Word as the running example, it has plenty of mixed texts, like tables of contents, references, forms. Even basic features like tables and lists are very different sorts of text than the main document text.)

Despite the widespread use of HTML across the web, and its widespread use in highly critical applications, such as managing bank accounts and healthcare services and writing pilot operating manuals for aircraft, HTML is a surprisingly quirky and unreliable language for text. The main reason for its quirkiness is that HTML was originally designed to implement some innovative ideas about distributed hypertext, and nobody then thought it would develop to need designing to be safe to use in critical applications, let alone that it would need designing to integrate reliably with many other notations.

We’ll give some examples. If you get bored with the details, do skip forward to the end of this chapter to see what needs to be learned to improve future mixed text.

Remember these examples illustrate problems that can occur when any text mixes any notations, but using HTML makes it easy to describe. (Also, you can easily play with my examples in any web browser.) We’ll take very simple examples of mixed text, not least to wonder why even simple mixes don’t work perfectly. For brevity, we’ll ignore the complexities and flaws of mixed texts like tables of contents, indices, and so on (there aren’t many word processors that ensure even just the table of contents has the right page numbers all the time).

In addition to the text, styles and layout HTML can define, HTML allows developers to mix comments in the text. Comments are texts that are intended to be read by developers but not seen by readers. Perhaps a developer is in a hurry for people to read a text but they haven’t yet completely finished it. How will the developer keep track of what they want to write but haven’t yet done? One easy solution is to use a comment: the developer writes a comment like “XX I need to finish writing this section by December” or “I need to check this! What’s the citation?” or “I must add the URL later”, but the readers of the text won’t see these private comments. The developer, as here, might use a code like XX so that they can easily use search facilities to find their important comments where they need to do more work.

The actual notation for comment in HTML is . Here, I’ve used another mixture of texts: the italic typewriter font word comment (in the previous sentence) is being used to mean any text that is used as comment and hence will not be visible to the text’s reader.

One problem with this HTML notation is that it is not possible to comment out arbitrary HTML: if it already contains comments, where the commented out HTML will end with the first -->, not with the last.

Why would you want to comment out entire blocks of HTML, which might contain further comments? A very common reason to do this is that the HTML text is not working properly: there is some sort of bug in the text. One of the fastest ways of finding the cause of the problem is to systematically comment out chunks of the text. If commenting out this bit doesn’t affect the bug, the bug must be somewhere else. Try again, and continue doing this until the bug is precisely located. (There are systematic ways to do this that speed up the debugging, like binary search.)

HTML is structured using tags. A simple tag is <p>, which generally starts a paragraph. Tags can also have parameters (HTML calls them attributes) to provide more specific control over their meaning or features. For example, <p title = "This paragraph is about HTML"> typically makes the specified title text appear when the user mouses over the paragraph. The spaces in this title mean that it has to be written between two quote symbols (the two " characters) — otherwise the four words here after the first, paragraph, is, about and HTML, would be taken as further attributes; the title would just be set to This, and all the other words would be silent errors. However, we obviously want the entire text to be a single value made up of all the words and spaces between them. Unfortunately what is obvious to us is not obvious to HTML. HTML has to cope with many authors’ ideas that are not obvious, most of which won’t be so obvious to us, so it needs another feature to avoid it having to somehow intuit what we think we mean. So, sometimes, but not always, we have to use " around attribute values.

Unfortunately, using " around attribute values means that yet another random convention is needed if we need " itself to be part of a value.

For example,

does not work. Instead, the HTML author is required to use a single quote instead. Here, this would do:

— which solves that problem, but now we are in a mess if for any reason we need both sorts of quote. So, what about the title of a book about a book?

which needs to use both " and ' in the attribute value! HTML cannot do that, at least without relying on even more conventions: for instance, knowing that any character in HTML can be

written as &code; we could correctly but tediously write

This is just bonkers isn't it? It relies on the author knowing what numeric codes (or names) need to be used for the problematic characters, and also relies on the author testing that it works.

Other languages use a different, much better, system to allow authors to mix types of text. For instance in the widely-used programming language C, within a value like "stuff", characters can be represented by themselves, or more generally codes, after a slash. Thus \' means ', \" means ", and more generally \nnn means the character with code nnn like HTML’s own &#nn; but using octal rather than decimal. This approach means in C one could write a value for a book title like

title = "J. R. R. Tolkien\'s \"The Hobbit\"";

and it would work as intended — and it is much easier for the author to read and write. Note that the \' is being used correctly even though in this case a bare ' alone, without a slash, would have been equally acceptable too. So one must ask: given this nicer design of C, and nicer design or lots of similar, popular, textual languages which pre-dated HTML, why did HTML use a scheme that is so awkward?

Note that a scheme like HTML’s that is sometimes rather than always awkward means that authors are rarely familiar with the rare problems. The problems come as surprises.

HTML gets worse.

HTML has ways to introduce further types of text, such as CSS, SVG, MathML, and JavaScript. For example, <script> document.write(27*39); </script> is JavaScript mixed inside of HTML text. Here the JavaScript is being used to work out a sum (namely, 27 times 39) that the author found easier to write down in JavaScript than work out in their head.

Moreover, JavaScript is often used inside HTML to generate CSS and SVG and other languages (such as SQL, which we will return to below).

What an author can write in JavaScript has many very unusual constraints. Consider this simple example:

This will not work, because HTML finishes the JavaScript prematurely at the first </script> rather than the second one. HTML does not recognise JavaScript’s syntax, so it has no idea that the first </script> is inside a string in JavaScript and was not intended to be HTML at that moment, which the second one was.

The workaround for this is a bit bizarre: HTML’s & entities can be used to disguise the <> characters from HTML! Here’s how it can be done:

I think we get so used to this sort of workaround, we lose sight of how odd it is to have to understand how two languages, here HTML and JavaScript, mess each other up before we can safely use either of them

Here, next, is some routine JavaScript that displays an alert for the developer if (in this case) x>y, which might mean something has gone wrong:

Assume the author, or another author working on the same text, decided to comment out a stretch of HTML for some reason. Weirdly, this JavaScript will now produce the text “x > y"); -->”, because the ‘harmless’ arrow in the JavaScript code has turned into HTML’s --> end of comment symbol, even though it is still inside JavaScript. Confusingly, the JavaScript used to work before it was commented out!

Ironically, because HTML is designed to ignore errors, when it is mixed with JavaScript, as here, authors may make serious errors (much worse than this simple example) that are ignored and which nothing helps them detect. In complex projects, especially with multiple authors sharing the same texts, such errors are soon impossible to avoid, and are very hard to track down and fix because they are caused by strange interactions between incompatible text notations. They aren’t errors in HTML; they aren’t errors in JavaScript; they are errors that only arise inside JavaScript inside HTML text.

Here’s another confusion. Like HTML, JavaScript itself has comments. Thus, in Javascript, anything written after // to the end of the line is ignored. But // </script> is a JavaScript comment ignored by JavaScript but includes valid HTML that is not ignored by HTML.

To summarise so far: HTML is a text notation that allows, indeed encourages and relies on, other languages (such as JavaScript) being mixed in, but HTML and these languages were developed independently, and they interact in weird and unexpected ways that can catch authors and readers out.

These examples, chosen to be quick and easy to explain, may give the misleading impression that the problems are trivial. They may also, wrongly, give the impression that mixed text problems are restricted to HTML. But it gets worse.

An HTML text may use JavaScript that needs to use the language SQL, a popular database language. The problem is that when SQL is embedded in JavaScript in HTML, it raises security risks. “SQL injection” is the most familiar problem.

A user using an HTML text on a web page may be asked to enter some text, like some product they want to buy. The product needs to be found in the store’s database, so SQL is

used to make the connection. But if, instead of a product description, they type a bit of valid SQL, this SQL will go straight to the SQL engine. This is the SQL injection, and then the user (presumably a hacker) can get the SQL backend to do bad things.

If a web site allows (by accident and ignorance) SQL injection, a hacker can do much damage by taking over and programming the SQL database. In addition to this problem, SQL has its own different weird rules for strings and mixing texts, making examples like the simple HTML+JavaScript problems look simple. To make matters worse, an SQL database may well store HTML and JavaScript, for instance to make nice descriptions of the products the store sells. So mixed text can mix text.

Hackers can have fun with the bugs. There was a UK company registered under the name DROP TABLE "COMPANIES";—LTD, a company name that is contrived to be valid SQL. If injected into a database with a table called companies it would drop (that is, delete) the company’s data.

Interesting aside…

We’ve mentioned comments, and shown how they can be useful for authors of texts. HTML also allows text to be optionally hidden or made visible to readers, a sort of generalisation of comments but available to both authors and readers. This feature is the hidden attribute. Thus

<span>Hello</span> says hello, but <span hidden>Hello</span> says nothing at all for the reader, a little bit like  would too. Ironically, to do anything useful, like allowing text — maybe an error message — to appear only when it is needed requires using JavaScript to dynamically edit HTML attributes (here, to interactively disable or enable hidden).

Mixed texts in single systems

Instead of mixing two text systems, like HTML and JavaScript, it ought to be easier to use a single integrated system. I’ve already hinted that there is more to the mixing of single-system texts like mixing in tables of contents into documents, but let’s stick with “trivial” mixing — because even that goes awry (and its weirdness is easier to explain briefly).

I wrote this chapter using Microsoft Word. For the examples in HTML, I copied and pasted the text in and out of this chapter into a web browser, ran the text, and double-checked it did what I said it did. As I improved my discussion of the examples, text went backwards and forwards — hopefully without introducing errors or dropping off details, like the last > character in a bodged cut-and-paste. It would have been easier and more reliable had I used

an integrated mixed text system like Mathematica, then the entire text could have been authored in one place and could have stayed in place without any cut-and-pastes.

In HTML if I say “<hr> is a horizontal rule,” then I have already used up the four letters

<hr> to display themselves, namely as <, h, r, and >. (The fact that I actually had to write <hr> is another HTML mixed text problem.) In HTML I can’t reuse the same text to show what this <hr> does. However since Mathematica is programmable, I can write <hr> once and get it displayed numerous times, and each time processed in any way I like: sometimes to see the specific characters, sometimes to see how it renders (for instance as it would in HTML, as a horizontal rule), and sometimes to do arbitrary things. How many characters is it? 4. And if I changed the <hr> to, say, <hr style = "width: 50%; height: 1cm">, that 4 would change to the correct value of 38 without me doing anything.

While Mathematica is an example of a sophisticated system originally designed for mixing text with mathematics, it still has text-mixing design flaws. For example, a Mathematica feature for embedding text inside text — exactly what this chapter is about — is called a string template in its terminology. String templates use the notation <* … *> to indicate a place to mix arbitrary Mathematica text into strings of otherwise ordinary text, using <* … *> a bit like HTML’s own <script> … </script> notation.

For example, here is a single line easily written in Mathematica:

“The value of π is <* N[4ArcTan[1]] *>” turns into “The value of π is 3.14159” Very nice, but how would you write a string template that explains how to insert

Mathematica text? You’d want to do this because using string templates to explain string

templates would ensure the explanations were exactly correct. Indeed, Mathematica comes with a comprehensive user manual written as a Mathematica text, which does exactly this to illustrate how all its features work. Unfortunately, you can’t document string templates so easily (without complex and arbitrary workarounds). If I had written the example above entirely in Mathematica, the first <*, which you are supposed to read as showing how to use the mixed text feature, would already have been expanded, so the example wouldn’t work at all. “The value of π is 3.14159” turns into “The value of π is 3.14159” doesn’t say anything helpful!

Mathematica allows you to write special characters from other texts explicitly. Thus the Greek (or Unicode) symbol \[pi] written in ordinary text can be used to mean π itself. If they had thought of having \[Less], which they don’t, then the <* problem would have been fixed. Yet they have LessEqual, for ≤, and lots more symbols. The omissions, like having no abbreviation Less, are arbitrary, even when they are needed, because Mathematica itself made

< a special character! The designers of systems like HTML and Mathematica don’t seem to realise that a simple feature needs checking off for compatibility right across the language —

when string templates were introduced in Version 10.0 of Mathematica, evidently nobody thought to go back over the basic text notations introduced in Version 1.

There are various workarounds of course, which perhaps experienced Mathematica users will be shouting at me. Ordinarily, though, an author of a text won’t realise workarounds are needed until after something unexpected goes wrong, then they have to waste time trying to find the problem, then find an ad hoc solution using tricks they have to work out for themselves. Remember, “experienced” authors are just those who have already come across and overcome these “trivial” problems. String templates are clever, but suddenly what was supposed to be empowering mixed text feature has turned into a slippery, wiggling eel.

We should not admire experienced authors who know all the problems and workarounds for mixed text. We should be despairing at the people who design mixed systems that don’t work reliably together.

Future text mixed with AI and …

This chapter has discussed the unavoidable need for interleaved mixed text, so text can fulfill its many purposes — whether for authors or readers. It showed (mostly by way of HTML- based examples) that many practical problems remain. Mixing text leverages enormous versatility, but at the cost of complexity. The devil is in the details.

We hinted that embedded languages like JavaScript can be used to help the author add power and features to text to enrich the readers’ experience. The example we gave was simple, but made the point: if the author does not know what 27 times 39 is, they can get JavaScript to work it out and insert the answer. Another example would be to display the date

— JavaScript knows that even if the author doesn’t. These are simple examples of mixed text that build on computational features.

The world of computation is rapidly expanding in scope and impact with new tools.

Examples that can transform the author’s experience of writing include such AI tools as https://www.gomoonbeam.com

https://elicit.org

https://lex.page, and more.

These fascinating AI tools can do research, can do writing, and can inspire people out of writer’s block. There are surprisingly many such tools, leveraging every gap imaginable in the writing and reading process. We are still learning how AI can help, and every way it helps relies on mixing in more forms of text together — they didn’t mix, then they would not be

contributing directly to the text or the author’s work.

A final example is the use of programmable systems like Mathematica and R, which can mix text and computation and AI, as well as access curated databases of all manner of sources that can help the author. Unlike normal AI systems that are generally packaged up to do one thing well, Mathematica and R can be programmed by the author to help in any way.

Mathematica, for instance, not only includes AI and ML and lots more, but can draw a map of Africa, get the country names and boundaries right and up to date, and find out all other details, like the weather in Sudan, its GDP or its adult literacy, even for very the day the reader reads about it, and mix it all in to the text the author is writing. Indeed, research papers often require detailed computations, often involving statistics, and doing this reliably mixed in the text, as Mathematica can, makes the papers much more reliable than when the computations being done conventionally — that is, done elsewhere and manually copied-and- pasted into the text, often introducing typos and other errors, as well as raising problems of the author forgetting to update the statistics when something relevant in the paper is updated. Consistency is a problem best solved by computers doing the text mixing.

Conclusions

The future of text requires and cannot avoid mixing different sorts of text. We already interleave all sorts of text without thinking and often without problems. Occasionally, however, things get tricky. When we use internet technologies to leverage our mixed texts, they can be read and used by millions of people. This means that what seem like arcane tricky things to us and of no real importance can happen to hundreds or thousands of people, and can have dire consequences for them.

Unfortunately, mixing different types of text is a mess. Text has become very powerful thanks to computers and computation; but text has also become unreliable thanks to the poor design and inconsistencies between different types of text. We gave examples of the mess of HTML and JavaScript being mixed, and examples of mixed text problems within the single Mathematica application.

Developers keep adding new types of text to representations, historically HTML being a notable example, that were never intended to be extended so far as they have been. And each new type of text (CSS, MathML, etc) has to work with other and all previous types of text that did not anticipate it — to say nothing of the complexities of backwards compatibility with earlier versions of each type of text. The Catch-22 of “improving” the design of text often means compromising lots of text authored before the design was improved.

Special cases routinely fail, and workarounds are complex and fragile. In a saner world, HTML, JavaScript, SQL, and all the other languages would have been designed to work closely and better together, with no need for author workarounds.

It’s maybe too late to start again, but here are a few ideas that may help:

Authors should use checking systems, and use servers that check for known problems (like SQL injection). I’ve suggested that the standards for languages like HTML are inadequate, but at least checking that your text conforms to relevant standards is a start. Like spell-checking, it won’t fix all your problems, but it’s still really worth doing.
When new forms of text are invented, ensure they work well with existing types of text — in particular, by reporting errors so that authors do not release unreliable texts to unsuspecting readers. An extreme form of this idea is polyglot markup, which is markup (like HTML is) but designed to work in different dialects consistently.
If you are a developer, and you find yourself writing very specific code like this: … “<*”

… "*>" … (i.e., using <* and *> as built-in strings, as there must be somewhere inside the Mathematica implementation code) please notice those are totally arbitrary strings you devised, and there is no reason why the author — who is not you — using your system will

want exactly those codes. At least make them parameterisable so the author can work around clashes you failed to anticipate, or devise other ways to be more flexible.
Read up on other people’s attempts. For example, the reasoning behind the divergence between the different philosophies of HTML, particularly the snapshot based standards of HTML 4, 5, 5.1, etc, and the living standards most of us now user that are continually updating, is both fascinating and a warning.

This chapter discussed a problem that is more generally called feature interaction. That is, texts have features, but in mixed texts the otherwise desirable features of each text interact in unhelpful and unexpected ways. In general, there are no good solutions to feature interaction, other than taking care to avoid it in the first place and providing mechanisms to help detect it (even block it) before any downstream reader is confused. In healthcare, the problem would be seen as a failure of the problem called interoperability, a potentially lethal problem that undermines the reliability of the mixed texts of patient records.

If we are going to have feature interaction, which we are, we should take all steps to minimise it, and design the amazing powerful things mixed texts can do to eclipse their problems.

http://www.harold.thimbleby.net

Jamie Joyce

Guest Presentation : The Society Library

https://youtu.be/Puc5vzwp8IQ

In case any of you don’t know who we are, we are The Society Library.

We’re non-profit, a collective intelligence non-profit. I’m going to start this presentation just by talking about who we are and what we do. Then I’m actually going to show you what we're up to. And I’d love to store some of your feedback and some of your ideas because some of you have been thinking about these types of projects for decades, and I’m only three years in. I have been thinking about it for about seven to ten, but I’m only three years in, in terms of implementing these things. So I’d love to get feedback and to hear how you think we could grow and expand what we do.

We’re The Society Library, the main projects that we’re working on are essentially:

How can we model societal scale deliberation?
How, in modelling societal scale deliberation, we can actually start creating ways in order to have more informed, inclusive, and unbiased decision-making?
How can we generate policy more collaboratively by taking in the inputs of individuals? And then, ultimately:
How can we have a common knowledge library on complex social and political issues that can inform the general public?

All of these are very like pro-social, pro-democratic projects. The Society Library itself is attempting to fill a role in society. In the United States, we have something called the Congressional Revenue Service, it’s run by the Library of Congress. In the U.S., the Library of Congress actually prepares all of these lovely briefs and does all of this research for our members of Congress, our senators, and our house representatives. However, if I’m not mistaken, at the state and local level, as well as for the general public, these types of research services don’t exist. So our congresspeople, they can make a request to be brought up to speed on the topic of AGI and an entire library will work to organise and do all this research to deliver the knowledge products. And the Society Library is looking to do that for

the general public, and also at the local and state level in government. So some of these projects that we work on are deliberation mapping projects, like our great American debate program, which I’ll talk about, specifically. We want to get into a project which we’ll probably rename because everyone hates it. I called it The Internet Government, people assume we’ve been governing the internet. We certainly do not mean that. It just means enabling governance platforms on the internet. So how can we generate policy? How can we produce decision-making models that are informed from the collective input and deliberation of? Essentially, what we’re aiming for is an entire nation. So we’re really working at the societal scale and I will talk about how we do that. And then, ultimately in our timeline, we want to fill this role as being accumulative common knowledge resource for the public. And so I’m going to talk about where we’re at right now, which is model and societal scale deliberations. And I’m going to get into how we actually go about accomplishing that.

Currently, the topics that we’ve worked on, that we’ve cut our teeth on, in the past few years have been the topic of nuclear energy, climate change, COVID-19, and election integrity issues. We’ve mapped a few other spaces, as well, essentially, associating actors with actions in political movements. So, for example, we were mapping these kinds of things out in the George Floyd protest. But what we’re really interested in is finding what are the fundamental questions that society has about specific issues. Currently, we’re working within the English-speaking United States. And then, can we go ahead and deconstruct the collective knowledge content that we have, to go about compiling answers to those questions so that we can compare, and contrast what propositions, what positions, what arguments have more or less evidence. What kind of evidence, how much evidence, produced at what time in corroboration with what. We’re really interested in just being able to start visualising the complexity of our social and political discourse. So that, again, it can, down that timeline, start forming decision-making models in the production of policy.

If it’s not obvious, to me what we discovered when we undertook the project of, Okay, let’s start mapping these debates is that, debates in the United States, on these high-impact persistent polarising issues, are actually unbelievably large. So the topic of climate change, I think we’re now up to 278 unique sub-topics of debate, and there can be tens of thousands of arguments and pieces of evidence in each one of those sub-topics. But interestingly, what we found is that all of these sub-topics correspond to answering only one of six questions. So all of these debates that are happening across various subjects related to conceptualising the problem of climate change and its severity, to solutions, and things like that, all of them are really responding to six fundamental questions.

Our latest subject that we’re working on is nuclear energy, and we’re still assessing what those fundamental questions are. For COVID-19, because it was such a new subject,

and I think it was so global and so viral, we found over 500 and basically 13 fundamental questions. And for election integrity, there were 81 subtopics and two questions.

Today I’m also going to be showing you a project that we’re going to be releasing at the end of this month, which I’m really excited about. I’ll actually take you through the data structure and tell you more of what all of this actually means. I’ll show you questions, I’ll show you sub-topics, etc. So, how do we go about creating these debate maps? Which, again, I will show you what they actually look like towards the end.

We have this process that we’ve developed. Essentially:
it starts with archiving and collecting mass content,
transcribing it and standardising it to text,
extracting arguments, claims and then evidence,
categorising those,
clustering those into hierarchical categories,
inputting that structured content into a database,
and then tinkering with visualisation so that we can compress as much knowledge as possible in visualisations that can convey the complexity, without being way too overwhelming.

Something that we’re really interested in is: How do we create knowledge compression where people can see as much knowledge as they want to see and they have the flexibility to work in various dimensions to unpack what they want to explore as they want to explore it?

So instead of an author, who’s writing a book or a paper, taking a reader through a specific narration, instead it’s about: How can we visualise all the possible narrations that a reader can go through and they can unpack in the direction that they want to? And I think we’ve had a recent breakthrough in how we’re going to go about doing that in a really simple way, so I’m really excited about that. I’ll show you a tiny little sneak peek of it. But most of it is on wraps until we launch the project at the end this month if all goes according to plan.

So that’s the basic process, but let’s get specific because that kind of matters. So when we talk about archiving what do we mean? Well, first we built a bunch of custom search engines, to essentially, make sure that we’re pulling from all across the political spectrum and across different forms of media. We also have curated feeds that we keep an eye on. We are also aware that it’s really important to break the digital divide. There are just some things that people are not going to be willing to write a medium post about or post on Twitter about ideas

that they have, that they do want to express. So, facilitating conversations and recording those interviews with permission, in order to gather that audio data is very important. We’ve also acquired access to various searchable databases, GDELT, and Internet Archive, which have just been absolutely wonderful to us.

One thing I do want to emphasise is that The Society Library takes very seriously our research methods. We have over 22 methods that we developed to try and counteract our own research biases. On our own echo chambers, we have a list of policies, also, on our website that talk about all the wicked problems of knowledge management that we’re seeing.
When it comes to inputting content in the database, are we going to platform a dog whistle that we’re aware is a dog whistle?
Are there going to be policies about trying to referee if one group is calling another group’s language a ‘dog whistle’ when, perhaps, it isn’t?

There’s all these wicked issues that we care very much about in addition to the methods that we’ve already deployed in order to overcome our own biases. And we’ve got a virtues and value page related to how we see ourselves in relation to knowledge. When it comes to us digging and scaring around, and archiving all this content, how do we feel about misinforming and disinforming content and things like that it’s, we like to approach our work with total intellectual humility, and those virtues and values are listed on our website. So we talk about that often in the culture of the Library, we often hire librarians who have their own code of ethics, which we also appreciate very much. The librarians in general, in the United States, take a very anti-censorship stance and instead argue that, if there’s the right context, any information can be interacted with to enable enlightenment. It’s not that some information should be hidden away, but what is the right context for knowledge to be experienced so that it informs and enlightens, rather than corrupts and persuades. So, we have developed our own code of ethics. We are also members of the ALA, so we adhered to those rules as well. I just love to say that. And then the process also begins by this, kind of, flyover, we call it, where we quickly find a whole massive topic, this can be done manually or computationally, where we just collect a bunch of topics across various media types, and we do that by specifically targeting and grabbing sample collection across different media types that contain certain keywords that are related to certain topics. If we’re mapping something related to nuclear energy and tritium leaking into the environment, which is a radiological hazard is one of those topics, our archivists and librarians are going to go through and find where does that keyword happen in podcasts, books, definitions, and government documents, etc, not only through time but also from news articles that are across the political spectrum.

Once we have that diverse set, that’s when we do the next step, and let me just quickly say where we collect content from, scholarly, articles, research papers online, news, websites, blogs, social media, Twitter, recently Tik-Tok, Facebook and Reddit, we pull from documentaries, videos, and television, topics, specific community forums, and groups conference, videos and summaries, government publications and websites, existing FAQs and online resources. And then, we also conduct interviews with industry leaders, thought leaders, and experts.

And pro-tip, so many government agencies in the United States actually have in- house librarians and they are so helpful. We just send them our research questions like, “Hey, can you look through your entire agency’s library and help us find the relevant documentation?” And oftentimes they’re more than willing to help. So that’s just really lovely.

Anyway, once we grab the sample sets of data, we deconstruct all of that into text, we transcribe it, we translate it, we parse it, sometimes we even hire people to actually type up descriptions, text-based descriptions of videos, and graphic imagery, so we have that text, so it’s searchable. And then, once we have that content, what we do is, we start deconstructing the arguments, claims, and evidence. So we’ve got a training program for that. We have our own standards for what we mean by claim. Drive claim, implied claim, implicit claim, argument, etc. And I’m going to show you what deconstruction looks like just because it’s good to know what we’re talking about. So this is a transcript from a Sean Hannity† clip. It’s an old example, but it’s one of my favourite examples, because one of our favourite people at the Internet Archive asked us, specifically, to deconstruct this, because they couldn’t believe that Sean Hannity would make all these claims. I think this is only about like 17 minutes in length, yeah, it’s about 16 minutes and 20 seconds and all the claims that we were able to extract, I think, let’s see here, 100, oh, the implied ones are hidden away, so, in terms of directly derivable claims, Sean Hannity made 179 claims in his 17-minute snippet, and there was way more implied, I accidentally pulled up the wrong example, so sorry about that. I’m not an excel spreadsheet wiz, so I don’t know how to unlock the hidden implied claims. But anyway. From the exact transcript, which is right here, we actually pull out the arguments and claims directly, so oftentimes, you can see that there’s one line right here that can actually pull various claims from that. And that’s because language is complex. It’s dense. And we really want to extricate all of those tiny little fundamental units of reason, because we actually want to fact check it, qualify it, debunk it, ‘steel man’† it, devil’s advocacy, at all these things.

Another example I’d like to show, this is the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal is a famous legislation in the United States. When we’re training our students, because we

have various educational internships, we’ve worked with 32 universities in the United States. One of the training projects the students do is, they deconstruct the Green New Deal to, kind of, get a handle on what the Society Library standard for clean is. So I think there are 438 claims in the Green New Deal. It’s a very short piece of legislation. If you just copy-paste it to a Google Doc, it’s like, 13 pages, I think, in a relatively big font. So it’s a relatively short documentation, yet, there’s 438 claims. And there’s very little evidence that’s usually provided in the legislation. It usually qualifies itself within like the... It actually does have an interesting structure. It’s a very complex argumentation. It has a premise where it says, “Congress fines given this document”. Which they reference the IPCC report if I’m not mistaken. These are our findings and our conclusion, which is the recommendations by congress to create a specific policy program or whatever. So, yeah. We deconstruct pretty far, I would say.

And then, going back to the presentation, what happens when we have all of these claims? That’s when we start categorising them. So these claims are going to have keywords, those keywords are going to be semantically related to other keywords. There’s ways in which, I hope in the future, we’re going to be better at computationally clustering these things together. I’m really interested not only in taking the data that we’ve created, using it as training data for claim mining, but I’d also like to start seeing if we can generate syllogisms just by the relationship between the keywords in text snippets. So that, potentially, with enough training, maybe our analysts would have more of a fact-checking role than constructing arguments from the base claims role.

But technically what we do is, we categorise cluster claims based on the relatedness to specific topics. So they may be, for example, on the topic of nuclear energy, it could have to do with grid reliability or stability, the tritium leakage, other radiological issues. We just cluster those into categories, and then from those categories, we’re able to derive different positions and more complex argumentative structures. I’m going to show you what some of that looks like in the debate map as we go on.

And I will say also that we’ve been very fortunate to have a very large tech company, who we’re not allowed to name, and a lovely university who we’re not allowed to name, who have made fantastic argument mining technologies, and they’ve given it to us to use. But we’re a small non-profit, so they’re like, “Yeah, don’t tell anyone we’ve done this”. So we also have interesting argument mining tools and we’re hoping that the training data we’re creating can make things even better. And this is just an example, again.

In this one natural language text snippet, we can pull all these claims.

A derivable claim means that we can, essentially, use the same language in the text snippet and just cut out some things and reconstitute it, in order to create claim.

When an implied claim is that you have to have some, sort of, insight into the meaning of the claim itself, which requires human intelligence in order to suggest that this claim would have to be a part of the argument, or one of the premises of the argument, in order for the claim to be proven to a certain extent, or made sound or valid.

So our analysts are also trying to put in implied claims but also mark them, so they don’t get confused with things that have been derived from evidence or from sources. That’s just an example of that.

And then, understanding our hierarchy is really important too. What we found is that if we just randomly choose a question, or randomly choose some dimension of a debate, what happens is, as we’re hand mapping the logical argumentation from that one point in the debate, we start to quickly get into a spaghettification problem. So we start having arguments that are somewhat relevant, it just, kind of, spiders out, and curls in on itself. It’s very messy. From what I’m told from people who’ve worked in AI for a long time, it’s called a good old-fashioned AI problem. But what we’ve discovered is, if we just do this kind of hierarchical clustering, over time, essentially, what we can do is have this descriptive emergent ontology that occurs. And what’s interesting is that the questions that are derived from finding the references and evidence, extracting arguments in the claims, organising those into those categories, and then, identifying those positions. In finding those questions, the questions, in turn, shape the relevance of what can be modelled in response to the question. So if we’re interested in having the most steel man formal deliberation possible, it’s the responsibility of our analysts to make sure that the positions are actually answering the question. So finding the questions that give shape to the relevance of the argumentation, which has really helped us to avoid that whole spaghettification problem. I don’t know if it solves that good old-fashioned AI problem in general, but it’s just something that has really helped us. We call it descriptive emergent structuring. And we’ve used it on all of our debates since we learned the first few tests that, just picking a random part of a debate isn’t going to work for us.

And then, we go ahead and map this content. We have a debate mapping tool. Every single week we ship new features and make it even better.

Some of the things that we can put into this debate mapping tool includes:

Question nodes
Category nodes
Argument nodes
We can create multi-premise arguments, unbelievably rigorous logical proofs.
There are claim nodes.

We can also, within every single node, have:
DefinitionsVariant phrases
Videos
Images
Media
Equations
References
Quotes
There’s ways in order for people to participate in calculating impact and veracity scores.
And then, every single claim and node can have a pro, con, truth, relevance argumentation associated with that, as well.

So we’re able to have a pretty complex argumentation that’s mapped out using this specific tool. And then, of course, we want to model it. And like I said, of the knowledge products that the Society Library produces, creating these maps is just one thing. We’re really interested in creating a much more accessible visual libraries apps. I would love to put it in VR, how fun would it be to stretch and open claims, to unpack them? It would be lovely. I would love to take some of our data and maybe work with someone who would have an interest in visualising these things. I think it could be lovely.

But the other things that we do, as I mentioned, we create decision-making models, so we’re moving into the smart city space. We’re trying to pitch it like, smart cities could be smarter if they had ways to augment their intelligence by externalising the decision-making process. Some of the work that we’ve already done, I mentioned earlier that, something that we’ve discovered in our work is when you really map a space, you find out how dense and complex it is.

So a city council wrote to us, and they asked us to help map a debate that they were having locally. And they thought it was a binary issue, like yes or no. And we found there were over 25 different dimensions of the decision that they were facing. And there were anywhere from two to five arguments with or without evidence in each one of those

dimensions that they would consider. So we created a micro voting protocol that essentially allowed them to zero in on one dimension at a time. And the feedback that we got from that project was just so wonderful. People who felt like they were being marginalised, felt that they were heard. People who felt like they were on the fence, we were finally able to see that they were actually really certain of a specific position, they just need to externalise it.

So we’re moving in that space, and we’re pitching to various city councils to, essentially, not only do research work for them, like the Library of Congress does for congress, but also create these decision making models because that can increase transparency, accountability, and decision making, and it helps overcome a little bit of cognitive bias. Because if we’re making decisions in our heads, who knows what kind of black-box calculations and waiting is actually going on.

But if we’re forced to externalise it, and work with things one-on-one, and actually identify what dimensions we’re in agreement with, it just, I think, helps improve the process in some way at least a little bit. So we’re hoping that we can just improve decision-making in general.

And then, we’ve also been hired to create legislation. So using our method of deconstructing content down to the claim level, we produced federal level legislation. We essentially took hundreds of pages of congressional recommendations, broke them down to the claim level, and then, we compared those with legislation that was passed, failed, and pending at the state and federal level in order to, essentially, say, what, in the congressional recommendations, on this specific issue, is missing from the existing legal code at the federal level, and then, borrowing language from where it’s been attempted in the past, and produce a bill, just essentially, by claim matching, and filling in the blanks. So we were willing to work on something like this because it’s a very non-partisan issue. It had to do with the infrastructure bill. It had to do with the integrity of the electrical grid in the United States and recommendations to harden or make it more resilient. So it’s a totally non-partisan issue, we were happy to do it. And we also got amazing feedback from that work. We were able to, literally, deconstruct hundreds of pieces of legislation, and hundreds of pages of congressional recommendations in under three weeks, and deliver this proposal. So, most likely, we’ll continue doing non-partisan legislative work.

And then, also, we think that some of the data sets that we’re creating may actually be very useful training data, not just for us, but for other people as well. We’re thinking about that, also, being a potential revenue stream as a non-profit.

Oh, one more thing. I mentioned before that this debate mapping software has a lot of different features. We can pack videos, images, quotes, equations, references, and all these different things in a single node. And so, when we made a submission to the Future of Text

book, it was about our concept of web-based conceptual portmanteau. I’m going to show you a little bit of what that looked like when we were initially mocking it up, and then by the end of this presentation, I’m going to show you where we’re at currently because I think it’s a huge improvement.

So our first foray into web-based conceptual portmanteau is, we were, essentially saying, portmanteau, when you combine a couple of words together, and it’s like this more complex meaningful word. And we’re like, “Okay, well, we’re trying to create portmanteau in terms of media assets. We want to combine references with images, videos, text and different variant phrases of the text, and all these different things”. So we mocked up this new node structure. And we were talking about different ways in which people could unpack and repack all of that knowledge. I’m going to show you our debate map and take you through a little bit, and then, I’ll show you the new version of web-based conceptual portmanteau, which is still being a little like tinkered with currently. I’m happy to show you a little bit of what we’re doing. So here’s an example of one of the debates that we’re going to be pushing out. This is the data staging area, so you’re very much seeing the behind-the-scenes. These are the tools that our data brains and librarians use to input structured knowledge.

I’m going to show you how complex it gets. So we were asked to map the deliberation about the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in the United States. It’s the last one in California that’s in operation and there’s a great big debate about it. I think even Elon Musk has alluded to it in tweets. So it’s a high-profile issue for the state of California, and we were very lucky to be asked to start mapping it before it really blew up. What we’ve found so far is that there are generally like two fundamental questions that the community has which is:
What should happen to the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant?
And why is it being decommissioned?

I put little trophies as notes to myself so I don’t get lost. And so far what we found is there’s about seven different positions that the community is taking on these issues. And by community we mean academics from MIT, we mean the governor, we mean activists, we mean members of the local community. Essentially we had an interest in finding all the different stakeholders, checking out the media that they were producing, and then, extracting that media.

This data set, I believe is drawing knowledge from 880 different media artefacts. I have a list here. In this database, there are references to 52 knowledge from 51 scholarly articles, eight TV segments, 112 reports, five books and textbooks, 367 news and websites, 194 social

media posts, 66 videos, 24 podcasts, 53 government international documents, together for 880.

And so far what we found is, there’s seven general conditions. One of those is that it should just be left to be decommissioned as scheduled. And then, we see that this breaks up into a variety of different categories. So there’s economic issues, environmental issues, safety and well-being issues, ethical issues, all in support of why it should be decommissioned to schedule. So, as we unpack this, we can actually start seeing some of the reasons that people pose for why it should be commissioned.

And you may notice that there’s these little brackets right here. Those brackets are important because, in order for us to translate data from this data set to the visualisations that we’ve created, we’re actually substituting these lines, which are indicators that the relationship between nodes with this language. So we’re doing this, even though we’re just creating this knowledge graph structure. And these lines, their colours, and orientation are indicators of their relationship. We actually will substitute with that language, so it’s completely readable (indistinct) visual.

Some of these claims in support of it being decommissioned that are related to economic issues include: that closing the plan won’t harm the local economy as much as previously thought, and that market forces have made the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant redundant and uncompetitive, so we can unpack this even more. And again, in brackets means that we’re essentially identifying the relationship between these tech snippets, other tech snippets, so as we move on from this one which won’t hurt the local economy as much as we thought, the economic impact of the local economy would be smaller than previous estimates in part due to economic resources that we made available, and over time, the region will overcome economically and experience positive growth. Now I’m just going to take a moment to start unpacking a little bit of what’s available in this node. So what you’re seeing is this text and these references here. What we also actually have is a bunch of different phrases, a bunch of different ways of expressing the exact same point in a similar linguistic register. So we’ve identified that as standard. We also want to make all of these nodes really accessible to people with less subject matter familiarity and can handle less cognitive complexity. So this simple version uses much more simple vocabulary. It says, even though it seems like there will be a lot of bad economic consequences when it closes down, some experts think it won’t be that bad. So it’s a very simple way of expressing the same thing.

And we have some more technical versions of this claim that actually refer to the economic assessment. Why that assessment was commissioned? What type of specific input-output modelling tool was used to derive those conclusions? It’s a much more technical way of

expressing that same claim. And then, in support of this particular claim, we have a multi- press right here which actually breaks, this is the summary of the multi premise which we can unpack here that actually breaks down the logical argumentation that led to this particular conclusion. So every single stage of, not the experimentation but the conclusion, so the first step of the decommissioning process will result in this kind of economic growth, and we’ll have economic losses, then we’ll have economic benefits. Overall it will conclude that. And this can unpack even further because each one of these premises in this argument can also have pro/con argumentation that can argue whether it’s true, support it, or its relevance. We have an example of a relevance argument here, which calls out that the economic impact assessment didn’t look at the economic impact after the decommissioning of the plant was complete. So when it talked about positive economic growth, it was only so far out of a projection and they didn’t include certain things in their model. And, of course, this comes from news articles. So it’s about collaboratively finding where the conversation is happening, distributed across different media artefacts, and then bringing that argumentation actually close together in one spot for people to explore. I’ll show another little example and there’s tons of these. Based on market forces demand for CCP nuclear energy is expected to decline. We have another multi-press here which essentially breaks down all of the different economic trends that are happening, which have been collaboratively expressed. So it’s not just that energy efficiency policies are going to reduce overall electricity consumption, there’s also increased solar then CCAs also don’t prefer to buy nuclear energy. And as you can see, it can get pretty dense pretty quickly because all of these are unique arguments that support these more vague generalisable premises. So the more that we go upstream and go left, the more vague the statements are, and the more interested someone is in to, actually, digging into the argumentation and evidence that’s available to support these vaguer, high level, commonly expressed sentiments, people can really dive in deep and explore.

But of course, this begs the question: Why on earth would anyone do this or want to find knowledge organised this way?

And even though when we publish this collection, we’re going to have a viewable version of this map accessible if people love to explore this map. Hopefully, we’ll deal with the functionality a little bit, we will centre things and make it a little bit better. But we know that this isn’t really going to cut it, in terms of making this accessible, legible, etc. So what I’m really excited about, going back to the web-based conceptual portmanteau, we’ve been wondering, how can we take all of this knowledge and really compress it down? So I’m going to show you a sneak peek, I wasn’t originally going to show up because this is recorded and I didn’t want this to end up on YouTube yet, so I’m just going to show you one image and just give you a little taste of it.

This is what we call Society Library papers. This is just the design mock-up, we’re building it right now. But we’ve figured out a lot of different features that I’m really excited about, and we’re hopefully going to have more time to test it and make sure that it’s actually as visible as we think it is. Actually, a lot of knowledge can be compressed in a paper, and what we’re doing is actually allowing the paper itself to unpack in different dimensions. And by clicking on different snippets, each one of these are arguments. It can open up different screens where people can view the variant phrases and things like that. So we’re going to drastically simplify and compress a lot of this knowledge while maintaining all of the complexity. But making it more of like a bulleted outline that opens up and closes back up as people want to dive in deep to each one of these sections. And we want to have ways in which people can track how much of it they’ve seen, etc. There are other ways, in which, we’re thinking about visualising content too. But that still needs to be flashed out more before I’m excited to share it. Although there are things I really think, just like we are figuring out all the ways in which we can have all the complexity and features of this debate map in a piece of paper, I think we’ll be able to do the same with video, and if some magical VR magician comes by and wants to take this data and start changing visualisations as well, I think experimenting with it in VR, is going to be very important for us as well. So I think those are all my tabs that I had an interest in showing you all. And 45 minutes in, wow, I think it’s a good time to pause and ask:

You all have been thinking about these issues longer than we have, what should we be learning? What have we missed? Who should we be learning from? Would love your feedback. And thank you all for your attention and time, too.

Dialogue

https://youtu.be/Puc5vzwp8IQ?t=2030

[Frode Hegland]: Yeah, thank you. That was intense, and our wonderful human transcriber is going to work overtime on your presentation. Danillo, he is very good, so it’ll be fine. I’m going to start with the worst question just to get that out of the way and that is: You’re American, we’re British. You had Trump, we have Boris Johnson. It seems a lot of that politics is just personality-based, “Oh, I like him”. Or some kind of statement like that.

Where would you fit that in here? Or do you consider that, for this, out of scope?

[Jamie Joyce]: To a certain extent, I think there are certain things that are relevant, and some

of it is out of scope. So, one thing I just want to acknowledge is that I think we’re in the middle of an epistemic movement. So there are a lot of people who are working on different dimensions of how can we have an epistemic revolution? I like to call it the e-Lightenment. So how can we use new technology to transform our relationship with information?

[Frode Hegland]: Hang on, e-Lightenment? Has anyone else on the call heard that expression before? That’s pretty cool. Let’s just underline that. The e-Lightenment. Okay, that’s wonderful.

[Jamie Joyce]: That was the name of my TED Talk†, yes, I called the e-Lightenment. [Frode Hegland]: Oh, no. You caught us not having seen your TED Talk, now we have to watch it. Okay, fair enough.

[Jamie Joyce]: No, no. It’s old. It’s not amazing. I really want to redo it. If I redo it, I’m going to call it something like Big Data Democracy, and talk about the complexity, volume, and density of our social deliberations, and how we need new tools to really experience our big data society in the way in which it actually exists in reality. But anyway, yeah, so I think some things are relevant, some things are out of scope. There are a lot of people who are working on different dimensions of these issues. And one of the contributions that The Society Library is making outside of knowledge projects is also education. We’ve been working at the university level, we’re trying to bring it down to high school, and then we’ve been collaborating with some people ideating how we can start an epistemic appreciation, learning about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and the various ways in which you can be disinformed on the internet into a younger and younger children’s programming to develop literacy, and a standard for what we should appreciate, in terms of, high-quality work versus not high-quality work. And obviously, there’s people who are working on making social media less effective and less addictive. There’s lots of different people who are working on this. And you’re right, I think a lot of politics is about personality. So what I think about often is, “Okay, well. How do we, essentially, make smart really sexy in the United States?”. So once we have these knowledge products, you have to create the demand for people to want to use them. So, what kind of people need to associate with these knowledge products?

[(IN CHAT) From Peter Wasilko]: Do you flag logical fallacies in the presented text? [Jamie Joyce]:Yes, we do. So I didn’t mention it. Thank you for your question, Peter. We have a tagging feature and we use our tags and it actually appears on the paper. So when

someone unpacks a node in the paper and we have a tag on it, it appears as a handwritten note

off to the side in the marginalia that just lets people know like, Hey, this is an opinion. This needs to be checked. This is cherry pick data, etc. Sorry, I saw your note and just wanted to answer that really quickly. So how do we create the personalities? You know, fictional or not?

These could be in kids’ shows, for example. How do we create the personality and personas that are sexy and attractive that are pointing people towards the cultural values of appreciating more rigorous research higher standard for argumentation and these sorts of things? And some of our donors and supporters have been thinking about this also. And thinking about supporting subsequent and related projects to help drive up demand for people appreciating this. And something that we see in the Trump era in the United States is that there’s been a huge decrease in trust. I think this was happening well before Trump, I think Trump was a consequence of this happening. But I think he also helped make it a little bit worse. There’s been mass amounts of distrust in existing knowledge institutions. Like news media, universities, government agencies, these sorts of things. Some sections of the population are not as trusting to get their information from those institutions. However, I think libraries, very interestingly, have maintained their level of trust in American society. So we do recognise that there is an element of branding and storytelling to be attractive to the community. It’s probably going to be very long-form relationship development. And that’s one of the reasons why the Society Library takes its culture so seriously. We take our virtues and values so seriously because we are going to be an institution that isn’t going to get thrown away immediately. That means we have to always have the out-facing communication, the branding, look, and the integrity to earn and maintain that trust.

[Frode Hegland]: On that issue, on the fake news. This [holds up book] (Snyder, 2018) is a phenomenal guide to fake news, as opposed to propaganda. It basically makes this simple obvious statement that, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, the point of fake news was not wrong news. It was simply wrong and true mixed, so no one would believe the media. And, of course, clever people like to think, “Oh I don’t trust the BBC”. And, you know, the situation we’re in today, which is pretty awful. And then I have a very specific semi-technical question, this goes back to having conversations with Marc-Antoine, of course, and that

is, the last thing you showed, that normal document where you can click and things open, that is, of course, phenomenal, and it is something that, we in this community, we really like the idea of being able to get a summary and then digging into it. So my question to you is: In what way is it open and interconnected? Can I use it in my academic document? Can Fabien use it in a VR environment? And can Marc-Antoine, I guess you can, extract it into his knowledge graph? How does this data move around?

[Jamie Joyce]: Well, good question. So all the data coming from the debate map can be referenced and extricated elsewhere. The paper document is so brand spanking new, we haven’t even thought about integrating it with other platforms. So we’re still wrapping it up as we speak. When it’s finished though, I would love to start inquiring into, how it can be, not

only maybe productised so other people could use it, essentially, it would require a different interface to input data. Most likely because I can’t imagine people are going to quickly get up to speed with our really complex debate map. So creating a user-facing product input form into a structure that will probably be more helpful to others. So I don’t have an answer to your question yet. I would love for it to be productised and for it to be ported elsewhere. But the debate map does, that data can be extracted and referenced and all of that through an API.

[Frode Hegland]: Marc-Antoine, do you have anything to add to that?

[Marc-Antoine Parent]: We certainly both believe in the value of making these new ways of expressing information, both in continuous text, in graphs, and making them interrelated.

How interrelated, there’s many models. And I think we’re both, separately and together, exploring ways to do these interrelations. Certainly, the ability to tag concepts or arguments in text, I doubt very much that it won’t be connected to a graph realisation. In that way, if you have an export from the graph, the question is: Can you identify these things in the text document, right? And then we can speak about offline annotation. We can speak about edition. We can speak about... Somebody mentioned stretch text in the notes, yes, I believe in that. I believe in side-by-side views, personally. These are having the graph with the text coordinated, that’s something I’m pursuing. As I said, I’m not part of that team. I don’t know how Jamie’s doing that part. I am helping her more with the extraction a bit, so, yeah.

[Jamie Joyce]: Very much so. Well, you can join the team, Marc-Antoine. I’d love to get your thoughts. We’’ve just been so swamped in the world of design, I didn’t even think about tapping on your shoulder. But I always love working with you.

[Frode Hegland]: Yes, you two, yes. So, okay. I’ll do something controversial, then, and show you something. Just briefly. most of the people here know this all too well. This is the most poverty-stricken thing I could possibly show you. But it’s about an approach, not a specific thing. I’ll do really briefly. At the beginning of documents in a book, you normally have a bit of metadata. PDFs, of course, normally never have anything. So this approach that we call ‘Visual-Meta’, is to take metadata on the last page, right? This obviously wasn’t made for you, so I’ll just show you a few brief things and mention the relevance. It is formatted to look like BibTeX, and that just means it looks this is this, this is this, really, really simple, right? So this example here happens to be for the ACM Hypertext Conference last year† and this year. But the idea is that, all we do, when we export to PDF, is to write at the back of the document what the metadata is. And that includes, first of all, who wrote it, because very often, an academic article, when you download it, you don’t even know the date that was published, because it’s from a specific bit of the journal. It also includes structural metadata, i.e. headings. They can also include who wrote the headings and what levels. And

then they can include references. So all of this is in the metadata that we then take into VR, or wherever, and use it. So one thing you might consider, and this is something we’d love to work with you, but if you do it entirely by yourself, that’s fine. All this stuff you have, when you do that top-level presentation, just stick it in the appendix. As long as you explain in the beginning what it is, in normal human language, let’s say, in 500 years when someone comes across the PDF and everything else is dead, they can reconstruct it.

[Jamie Joyce]: Yep. I checked out some of it, I think one of your explainer videos on it. I just got to say, I absolutely love it. I love it.

[Frode Hegland]: I’m glad you do. And thank you. I mean, every couple of months there’s a circle of arguments of, “Oh, we shouldn’t use PDF”. We don’t just use PDF. It depends where you’re doing stuff. When we go into VR, we use different formats. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to archive something. And that’s why it’s used by billions of documents.

Somebody will keep it going. So when it comes to the finish bit, yeah, you know that whole workflow. I’m just glad we had that little back and forth. Any other questions? And by the way, Daveed and Karl, it looks like you’re wearing the same hat. It’s so funny. Because of the green background.

[Daveed Benjamin]: Oh, that’s funny. Yes. Nice. I have a question, Jamie. Where are you headed with the visualization on screens?

[Jamie Joyce]: We’re working on creating this multi-dimensional explorable and interactive piece of paper. And then, I think we’re going to move on to recreating the newspaper and recreating TV as well. Because again, all of those nodes can be the ones that have video content because we clip it where the expression of the claim is associated in video with the node itself. So, as especially we get more and more sophisticated with automating some of our processes, and making sure each one of the nodes are actually multimedia, I think the same way of compressing and compounding into a dense layered interactive set can be translated across medias. So I’m really excited about that. But again, I cannot state enough how interested we would be in creating a VR library, because I think that would be so exciting. Or a VR debate. I think that’s really important. So we’re just tinkering right now.

And we’re just finishing up the last really complex argumentation structure and creating corresponding paper features and visualisations for that. And we’re looking to push it out by the end of this month. And then we’ll test and get feedback and see how useful it is and all of that.

[Daveed Benjamin]: That’s super cool. I look forward to seeing that.

[Frode Hegland]: Yeah, that’s really wonderful. I see Fabien has his hand up, which is great

because I was about to call on him. I was just going to say two things in context for Fabien. Number one, we’re doing some basic murals in VR now. And even just a flat mural is really powerful. And we’re looking at all kinds of interactions. But also, we do meet every Monday and Friday. All of you should feel free to dip in and out as you have time, because right now we’re at the stage where we’re learning how to do folding, or this, and that. So we’re at the detail level which could be really quite exciting. Fabien, please.

[Fabien Benetou]: Thank you. And thanks for the presentation. What I wanted to say, I have a presentation due for this group named “What if a librarian could move the walls?”. I think it should pique your interest. But I’ll give a little spoiler for this presentation, which is to say, in my opinion, even if, for example, your information or your data structure is very well organised, it might not be the most interesting for participants, because that might become a little bit boring. If it’s too structured, let’s say, if you go to a hospital or a large public building, if every floor is a copy-paste of the other, we get lost, basically. So being structured is extremely powerful. And we can process and we can do quite a bit with it. But I don’t think it’s sufficient. It’s not a criticism in any form or way. I’m just saying, today if you give me the data set, I can definitely make an infinite corridor, a very long corridor, with all the information. But, yes. I think it would be fun to do, but I think it’s not sufficient. I think you will experience it, have a form of way to be through it, but one of the, at least my motivation for VR porting of text, documents, or information, is how smart our body is, and how we can remember when we’ve been to? Like I was mentioning a bakery in Berkeley, because I haven’t been for a while, but I did go and I remember how to get there, and how to go in the bathroom of a friend. This mind-blowing stuff that any of us, every one of us can do. But because we have some richness of the environmental diversity, So it’s a bit of a word of warning to say, porting it to VR it’s definitely feasible today. It’s not a problem. It would definitely be valuable and interesting. But it would probably be quite interesting or more valuable to consider what 3D assets you do have. Is there actually a structure behind, let’s say, an argument map? Can you actually visualise it, not to visualise it, but in a way that you mentioned knowledge is compression that you can synthesise in a way that is meaningful.

Not just to specialise it in order to specialise it, but to specialise it because that mapping or that visualisation makes sense. So I think that’s a little bit of a challenge there. And again, I say this candidly or naively, I don’t have sadly an obvious or immediate answer to this. But in my opinion, that’s where the challenge would be.

[Jamie Joyce]: Yeah, I absolutely completely agree. And when you mentioned how intelligent our bodies are, what immediately came to mind is how, when we were looking at different visualisations for the data on, essentially, a 2D screen, where we can’t interact with it in a three-dimensional space, so to speak, I was trying to find a lot of inspiration from

video games. So, I was looking at a lot of video games, of how they compress knowledge and organise it. They have all their accessories, and this is how they upgrade their armour, and blah, blah, blah. So I was looking at tons of those. And what I was really interested in and inspired by, were these things called star charts. So there are ways in which people can develop their character, where they move through a three-dimensional space of lighting up nodes and it essentially shows that they’re headed in a specific direction, it shows them enough of what’s ahead of them, so they know to move in a direction, Final Fantasy does this, for example. And they also know there’s a whole other section over here of undeveloped traits because their character is moving in a specific direction. And so when I was thinking about our argument maps, if we were to take those trees, and essentially lay that out in physical space, is there some kind of metaphorical thing that we can pull from real life that would map onto people’s brains really easily so that they could use their geospatial intelligence to, not only remember the content but be interacting with a little bit more? And I couldn’t help but think like, essentially roads. So all of these different signs that would indicate if you want to go to economic here, blah, blah, here, blah, blah, blah, here. And they could be taking a walk through the debate. And it could be an enjoyable experience because there could be lots of delightful things along the way that they could be seeing. As they’re walking in the direction of the economic arguments there’s another signpost with all the different signs pointing in different directions, they take this one, etc. There’s the map up on the corner showing them what territory they’ve explored. This is something that exists in video games. And I mean, given the structure of our data in debate map, it seems as though so long is similar to how we are designing all of the assets in the paper to unlock, unfold, split up, and blah, blah, blah. If those similar assets could be rendered in a 3D space, you could just map out entire territories of physical traversable space. So I don’t know, given that you’re an expert, if you think an idea like that could be worthwhile. But I completely agree with you that just visualising it as books or something on a shelf isn’t going to do it, because we’re a different kind of society now. And so, part of the reason why we conceptualise this idea of a web-based conceptual portmanteau is that we know that we have to develop new media to express knowledge. We can’t just directly digitise books, or pages, or essays, or newspapers anymore. It’s multi-dimensional.

[Frode Hegland]: But there is a really interesting ‘however’ which we experienced recently. Bob Horn gave us a mural that we put in VR. And if you pull it towards you and push it, no problem. But if you walk it’s so easy to get queasy. Motion sickness, for so many of us, can happen. So the idea of walking down a road it’s great for some, but it can easily just not go. But also, before I hand it over to Mark here, Brandel forced me to buy this book last time by holding it up, that’s how we force each other here. And the introduction is not very good. It

really threw me off, because she’s a journalist. However, when you get to the chapters, the embodied thinking and so on is absolutely phenomenal. I think you would greatly appreciate it. But, yeah. The reason I highlighted that point is me having been in VR only three months now. Properly on and off. I had so many preconceptions that are just getting slaughtered. So to work with Fabien, with such rich deep experience, and also with Brandel, who’s working on these things to really learn to see differently, we have to re-evaluate this. For a while, we call what we’re working on, Metaverse. But just looking at the proper definition, that’s all about the social space. What we’re doing in this group is not so much social and definitely not gaming as such. It is about working in virtual environments. And it seems hardly anybody’s focused on that. So for you to come into this dialogue with actual data, actual use case, actual needs, that’s a really wonderful question. So, I want to thank you very much.

Jamie Joyce: Yeah, and thank you for that advice. And thank you, Fabien, too. So, are there meetings that maybe I could sit on so I could benefit from this sage insight and experience of translating things to VR?

[Fabien Benetou]: Sorry to interrupt, but to be really direct, did you put up your headset for the last couple of years?

[Jamie Joyce]: It’s probably been about a year since I’ve put one on my face.

[Fabien Benetou]: Okay, but you did. So that’s fine. Because, I think, honestly, with all the due respect to everybody around here. Putting their heads at once recently is more valuable than any or all of our meetings. And then coming in, discussing, and then, proposing a data set is definitely valuable. Yeah, but that’s the first step. You’ve done that part, you’ll get it.

[Jamie Joyce]: Yeah, I’ve played some games. I love the painting games a lot, actually. That’s pretty fun.

[Frode Hegland]: Very good. Just to answer your question about sit in. You’re all invited to just be in any of the meetings. It is the same time. It should be four to six UK time, but you Americans move the whole clock. So we follow you. Right now we will catch up with you. But sit in, say nothing, speak, whatever you feel like. It’s just a warm community. Mr, sorry, professor, not professor, Dr. Anderson.

[Mark Anderson]: Okay. Well, thanks. I really enjoyed the presentation. And I’d love to hear someone just mentioning the idea of a data set because given the deconstruction you’re doing, there’s something really interesting there. At the moment, when people talk about data set, that just means “something I scraped out of an excel spreadsheet and shoved in a box and I now think it’s worth money”. Fundamentally not what I think data is. And it’s

really interesting too for this thought of VR, one of the things, so I’m kind of completely new, I suppose, two months, I guess, since I’ve looked at any certainly any mode in VR, and I’ve been using Oculus. And then, one of the things I’m really seeing is that lots of things that you’d think would work, just won’t. So take pretty much any 2D print visualisation you’ve thought of, it’s not going to be instantly better for seeing it with an extra D. That’s for certain. Which is, in effect, why the data is so much more interesting. So rather than think, “How do I make this picture, this 2D picture appear in 3D?”. With all this richness, “how can I see things that I can’t show?”. Anyway, probably something that preaches to the converted there. Just a couple of thoughts but against you rather cheeky and I feel bad about it because they’re only possible to make given the mass amount of work you’ve done and the wonderful deconstruction of the arguments. But I suppose the hypertext researcher are used to looking at non-linear paths and I was thinking, does your deconstruction process show you where the same sources or the same arguments occur in multiple parts in the graph? Because I think that becomes useful. And also, the whole ‘Johari window’† problem of the ‘unknown unknowns’. There is a danger and we’re all prone to it, is that, because it takes time to do this, by the time you’ve mapped everything out, that seems like the known world. And I can’t see how to still force myself to say, “Ah, that’s just the bit I know. Now let’s look at the broader thing” I don’t know if there’s an answer to that, but it’s an interesting challenge. And the one other thing I was thinking about prompted by the thought of changing views about how we trust data, sources, and things is, we seem to have moved into a world where there are massive first-mover advantages in being the first to complain, for instance. So there’s moral ascendancy being the first person to call the other person bad, regardless of the truth or situation. And it also tends I’ve been a thing creeping away if there are two pros and one con or vice versa, that’s seen as actually being an empirical measure of work. How do you cope without or does the deconstruction model not attempt that? Because I’m not saying it should, but what are your feelings on that side of things?

[Jamie Joyce]: Yes, okay. So there are a couple of different things that you said and I’m going to try to remember and respond to them all. So, One—can the system understand that the sources are the same? Yes. But there’s no features built on top of that to make that easy. And it’s deceptively linear because we can actually copy and paste nodes all across and it does link all around it. And if we update one, it updates the other, etc. So it’s deceptively linear. But definitely, it could be more rich and useful as a knowledge graph if we build features to actually filter content like that. We don’t currently do that. The other thing that you mentioned is about knowns and unknowns. Actually, we’ve had extensive conversations at the Society Library about this very thing, because we have this technique called ‘Devil’s Advocacy’ research. It’s something we borrowed from the CIA. So, if you take a claim and

you just invert it to its opposite, and then, you go and try and steel man that, that’s a CIA technique at least as recent as 2009. And so, because we generate so many claims, I think our climate change database is like 396 thousand claims of a single expression, not variant phrases but single expressions. We could just invert all of those and have a whole other set. And then there’s, of course, you don’t just invert things in a binary sense, there’s all these shades of grey in between, there’s all these adjectives that you could add that slightly change the meaning of a claim. So there’s a lot that we could do there to, essentially, once we have the set that we have, the known, knowns, to invert, slightly adjust to drastically expand that. And then what we could show as visualisation and we thought about this, would it be a useful epistemic tool to show people? This is what we were able to steel man, but these are all the different research questions we have, that we were just able to generate that are relevant to a certain extent. It’s not just nonsense created by GPT-3, right? It could be relevant and we haven’t done the work yet. And we didn’t know if that would be that would increase intellectual humility and curiosity, or that would be really disincentivizing and discouraging. So it’s beyond our organisational capacity to that experiment. But we have been thinking about and are interested. When it comes to trust first movers, I see people coming into this space and being the first movers of complainers and I’m seeing them rise in popularity and it’s very interesting to watch. But I can’t remember why you brought that up.

[Mark Anderson]: Well, it bleeds into this point about people getting overly empirical. So, “I’ve seen two supporting things. So clearly that’s more than one countervailing argument”. So, in other words, not just the user, the learner from this not actually learning, they actually have to evaluate. Having got to these sources and actually having to evaluate them. It’s not so much just counting up pros and cons.

[Jamie Joyce]: Yes. I’m going to quickly see if I can pull this up really fast. So we’ve been thinking about that also. And one of the reasons why we have tags is to start qualifying things so we’ll call out if an argument has no evidence since it’s just an opinion or logical fallacy, etc. Because we’re trying to combat some of those cognitive biases. And so one of the things that we want to do as clunky of an idea as this is, we do have an intro video where we’re going to try and prime people to not fall for these different cognitive biases. To tell them explicitly do not fall for this trick. Having more does not mean this is better argumentation or what have you, do not fall for this trick. We’re thinking about making it so that you can’t even unlock the paper map decision or library until you play a video that helps inoculate against that. And something that I’ve been just personally wondering is, can cognitive biases cancel each other out? So if people are one: more likely to remember the first thing they read, but they’re also more likely to remember things that are negative, should we always show the con positions or the no positions at the end? And should we, in these intro videos, tell them

that there’s no way that we can get around some of these biases? Because they’re hardwired in our brains. We’re just primed for them. So we’ve organised things in this way. If you think it’s biased, it’s because it is, but we’re trying to counteract this other bias. So we’re trying to find that, is there a communication medium whether asking them to watch a video or have a little character pop up, a little tiny robot librarian bloop up and be like, “Hey, just so you know, we did this for this reason because humans are biased and flawed and we’re just really trying to get you to enlightenment here”. We’re thinking about it. We have no great answer. And we do have a partner at Harvard and NYU who offered to run a polarisation study to see if the way that we map content can depolarise attitude. So we are interested in partnering with universities to really rigorously test some of the features that we’re thinking about, just to see if it does have a pro-social positive impact because we’re not interested in persuading anyone. We’re not interested in driving anyone towards any conclusions. We just have the librarian goal of enabling enlightenment through access to information. And for us, enlightenment means potentially open mind through depolarised attitudes, inoculation against disinformation, intellectual humility, increased subject matter knowledge and increased comprehension of complexity. So just overall more curiosity, open-mindedness, and comprehension without being inflicted by bad attitudes, depolarisation, disinformation, and things like that.

[Mark Anderson]: Well. that’s lovely to hear, actually. And I’m thinking, of course, that again, the joy of you having such a deep and rich data set is, for instance, although, you can’t necessarily answer some of the stuff on these biases, there’s a lovely substrate for someone to work on. I mean this is again where I think people fail to see where the real value in the data is. It’s not like you’re going to sell this to somebody. It’s the fact that it’s just hours of dedicated work. And especially doing it from, in a sense a neutral, for a want of a better word, but a standpoint which tremendously important because you rightly stay. I mean if you’ve got some bias in there or if you’ve got more than a trivial amount of bias in there to start with, then you’re building on sand. And just because I see hands up, but one final thought is, when you mention the fact, yes, inputs to turn up across the piece. That, for instance, might be an area where having extra dimensions visualisation might be exploitable because it’s really hard to do on a flat surface because the worst thing is all you said end up with lines all over the place, and it’s alternatively complicated. But I think that one of the things that are submerging in our exploration of what VR is its ability to, you don’t necessarily have to remove things, it’s reducing the salience of some things. Bringing it, dialling it upon others. So it’s all there. It’s all somewhere in the space, perhaps. But what you’re seeing is the connection that’s pertinent at the time. It’s a different sort of interaction. You will ask for the thing you’re interested in knowing and bring it forward. Of course,

thinking that and making that up is the journey we’re on at the moment. But, thanks. I find that really interesting.

[Jamie Joyce]: Thanks for your questions, Mark.

[Daveed Benjamin]: Excellent. Hey, Jamie. So my question is, well, the premise of it, is that what you’re producing is going to be incredibly valuable, I’m just making that assumption.

And I’m also looking at it and just seeing it, seems like there’s just such a tremendous amount of work that goes into just one inquiry. And what I’m wondering is: What does it take right now, for example, to do something like the California Nuclear Plant both in kind of human resources, as well as elapsed time? And then I’m also wondering what do you foresee in the future, in terms of being able to streamline that with both automation and potentially AI? What do you what are you shooting for, in terms of human resources and elapsed time? And then, the third part of that is: Is decentralisation, at all, on your radar in that possibility of bringing in a much larger group of analysts to do certain pieces of the work?

[Jamie Joyce]: Yep. Great set of questions. So I believe the Diablo Canyon Power Plant project is about 10 weeks old. We got two more weeks left to wrap it all up. And that was inventing the paper visualisation along the way. We had four full-time analysts. I was a part- time analyst. So it’s kind of a small team in a relatively quick period of time and I think we owe a lot of that to the tools we built ahead of time in the past and our methodology. And the fact that we have years of experience training students through our educational curriculum, so we know how to train people to like quickly understand debate map, quickly understand what we might claim, use the tools to find content, but I honestly think, a lot of the different tasks, not the work, I think we’re going to be working with librarians and human analysts for a long time, but I think a lot of the tasks, discrete tasks, can be automated. We’re tinkering with some of those right now. I’m fundraising for some of that right now. I’ve got a lot of ideas about what’s possible in both like claim mining, syllogism generation, mass deconstruction, there’s a whole bunch of ideas that I have. And there’s already tools that exist that we could be experimenting with more. So I’m excited about that. You mentioned decentralisation, I think there’s a question between that. With decentralisation, the thing is that, language is so flexible and dense, and some people are not very precise in their expression. So it depends upon the knowledge that you are working with, first of all, because we’re working across different media types, there’s a lot of flexibility in that language, there’s a lot of ways in which people can misinterpret, they can imply, they can bias the interpretation. So if we were to welcome more of a crowd, there would be discreet tasks that I would allocate to them. But I would not trust a crowd to be responsible for the emerging structuring of a deliberation. And

that’s because, unless this entire crowd is somehow really well trained in understanding what is relevant argumentation and what is not relevant argumentation, you’re going to end up with a humongous spaghettified mess. If you look at existing platforms, I’ve looked at a lot of platforms, if you look at existing platforms, you’ll notice that the argumentation is either very vague enough, where a lot of the relevance can be applied. Or it’s not really fine enough in terms of actually establishing the logical relationship between the points even if the points are more specific. So it’s not to the level of rigour that we’re interested in the Society Library. And that’s because like the knowledge project products that we’re looking to create, even though we’re creating the options for people to simplify things. Simplify this and put it into simple variant phrasing, for example. Just give me the gist of it. We want to give people that option. We actually want to do, as rigorous work as we possibly can, in terms of deconstructing arguments into their processes and conclusions. Because if I feel like if you don’t do that then it’s always going to yield more and more argumentation because people will misunderstand what’s implied. So, if you actually pull apart the argument like, “This is every single stage of what we mean. This is all the data that supports those things”, maybe it allows some tiny small subsection of readers to really appreciate that more. A lot of people are not going to want that level of detail. Just give me the gist so I can see and make my decision. So there are certain things I think the crowd could do really well. I think archiving is something the crowd could do really well. I think tagging is something the crowd could do really well. Modelling argumentation I think that’s a really high skilled skill. I think that’s a really technical skill and I wouldn’t trust like a hundred thousand people to do that in a meaningful way. I already get in wiki wars on Wikipedia, for example, and that’s just an encyclopaedia page and there are no rigorous rules about the relationship between sentences and Wikipedia. And yet, people still fight about that. So yeah, that’s my point on that.

[(IN CHAT) From Marc-Antoine Parent]: That does not mean that it cannot be partly crowdsourced in principle, but certainly not naively

[Jamie Joyce]: Yeah, partly crowdsourced in principle. That’s right. I agree. There are parts of it that could be crowdsourced like finding the topics, getting the resources, finding how topics, and base arguments appear in certain resources. So again, archiving and tagging, I think it was a great crowd job. But modelling, I think requires a lot of skill and a lot of editorial review. I review the work of all of the analysts. We review each other’s work. In the future I want us to have more of an inner coded system, where a lot of the work is actually redundantly performed, the same people performing the exact same task so we can actually see the difference, and see if that difference is statistically significant. There are people who build distributed content analysis platforms that I really like. They’re friends of ours, they

collaborate with us on certain things. I’m not yet finished with fine-tuning our method enough to know what we want to have as a part of distributed content analysis and what can be automated. So maybe a few moderations down we’ll have the right combination of like, “Okay, we’re going to hard code this modelling into something that is distributed”, and then also have AI help us with certain discrete tasks, and maybe a crowd. We’ve been poked and provoked to do a DAO, as well. So, I don’t know if we will, but.

[Daveed Benjamin]: The question that that was in between was actually related to the first question. In the best of all worlds, where do you see the elapsed time getting to... Because, especially, when we’re talking about a culture with this first complaint dynamic happening. It’s like getting this information out quickly, I think could be really valuable.

[Jamie Joyce]: Yeah I like to think and try to orient our work towards constantly imagining it being possible instantaneously. There being constant monitoring, construction, and modelling that’s happening, I think we’re really far away from that. But that’s what I would like to get to. Essentially, the Society Library, being a large enough institute to have the manpower to respond where we need human analysts intervening, and also the technology to be observing, deconstructing, labelling, and doing base categorisations. De-duplicating these sorts of things. Finding the right combination, a lot of the unloaded work is being done by AI, and we have enough staff, librarians, essentially, serving society quickly, modelling up this content, where just absolute elite experts, and then, having all the tools that they need, in order to quickly do that. So, journalists are reporting and stuff is happening on TV we can be quick on incorporating that into higher dimensions and more complex mapping, epidemic mapping of a situation. So I’m hoping one day, I don’t know if it’ll be in my lifetime, I’m probably underestimating technology, but I don’t always imagine that it’s in my lifetime, but I’m angling towards us having an instantaneous institution for this. At least for publicly accessible knowledge.

[Frode Hegland]: I see Fabien has his hand up, but I just want to say thank you for something very specific. And that is surfing the line between being popularist and being arrogant, or elitist. Because I do think it is really important to still value expertise, and our current culture isn’t so happy with that. I’m sure you have seen ‘Hamilton’. I’m sure you remember Aaron Burr, I could have a beer with him, right? This is horrendous damage that is being dealt to us. So by you standing up for expertise without being arrogant, without taking a position, that’s just fantastic. So, thank you for that. And, Fabien?

[Fabien Benetou]: Yeah, my question is, and maybe I missed it, but how do you interact with the result? Or how does somebody who wants to learn, let’s say, get the expertise out of a topic, gets that? What I saw through the presentation, and again, maybe I misunderstood, but was unfolding the different part of the map. But is there another way to interact? I’m

asking this specifically to see also again how could this eventually be coded or considered for VR? Because a visualisation, of course, is an object and you can see it but you can do more with it. You can, for example, fold and unfold, but once you got, again for VR, their controllers, or even your hands, you can manipulate it. Or if it’s text, you can copy-paste it.

So they are very different and rich interactions. So, yeah. I’m wondering what’s the styles of interactions right now? And what was the thinking process behind it? Because more interaction doesn’t necessarily mean better. You want to concentrate on something productive. So, yeah. If you could dig a bit more there, I’d appreciate it.

[Jamie Joyce]: Yep there’s a couple of different visualisations that we currently offer. It’s essentially the same data, but we compress it and organise it differently. For some visualisations, we filter things out. One thing that we do is we do make the map available. People can un-click and expand and do all that. I don’t think a lot of people are going to find that attractive. Some people are going to love it. Two is, we’re revealing something called Society Library Papers, where all of the data in that debate map is actually structured in a piece of paper, where you can click on the lines and it opens up options to further unfold, not only the argumentation but into the note itself. You can refresh so the different phrases and different ways of expressing things show up. You can press keys that will swiftly change it from technical to simple language. So you’ll have your standard way it’s expressed, you can flip between those like, “Show me the more technical. Show me the more simple”. It unpacks the argumentation. So, Papers is the new thing that we’re rolling out. The other thing that we do is create decision-making models. So we just zero in on one sub-section of argumentation at a time, and people can add values to how they’re weighing the different arguments. And then, essentially, we ask them to micro vote. Where is the strongest argumentation in this one subset? And then they move on to the next set, and they move on to the next set. At the end, it’s shown to them like, “Okay, well. Where do you stand on these issues? Economic, environmental, etc.”. The decision-making model is the thing that we do at City Council. And then the other thing we do is we just make all the resources that we generated available in a tech searchable library. So you can look through all the references that have been included in this data set, you can keyword search and find the claims not necessarily associated with each other. You can search it on the map as well, so it’ll bring you to the part of the map where that claim is. And that claim can be in multiple places, so you can bounce around and see where all the places that this claim is. Or you can just search it in a library list. So those are the four things that we have, in terms of visualising content now, but I’m excited about, thinking about doing the same, kind of, paper unpacking and unfolding, but with video. And then unless we do something specific, like write legislation. We also have a designer who’s working on a phone app version of it. In terms of being able to interact, for example, with the

paper, you can click on any line and it gives you the option to expand it in various dimensions. Show it to me in a video. Show it to me in a podcast where the references that, support this, where the bearing phrase is, etc. It would be so cool if in VR, and again, I don’t know if this would actually translate well. It’d be cool if you could take a statement and actually open it up. Grab that statement, open it up, “Oh, I can see all the videos, TV clips, where this occurred”. Swipe to the left, okay, here are the references. Okay, definitions. Okay, media artefacts. Okay, close that one up, star that, want to look at that later, grab the next one, let’s open that up and take a look at what that looks like, or do a motion like this, and it just spills out all the different claims that support it. I think there could be a lot of cool interactive ways that could make text a little less boring, simply because you’re moving your body. And moving your body may create endorphins, and make you a little bit more happy and excited about stuff. And that’s what we’re trying to do with Papers. With Papers, I didn’t show you any interactivity at all, I just showed you the mock-up. But we’re really focused on how it feels. The slickness of the unpacking. The slight little sounds. We’ve been looking at the colours when rendered to accommodate for different like visual, I don’t want to say impairments, but different visual differences. And it looks gorgeous, all of them, in my opinion. So we’ve been really focusing on the feel of it. Because we know it’s limited by text, but if we could translate that to VR, I think, it could be much more interesting just by being able to literally work with knowledge. Grab knowledge, put that over there, unpack, all that stuff.

[Fabien Benetou]: A quick remark on this, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the interactive explorations. Basically it’s the idea that you can have exercises in the middle of a piece. You don’t just have a piece of text but, you have an exercise. And it’s not just a textbook exercise, but it’s part of a story. So that you, in order to get the core idea of this article or concept or paper, you go through an exercise. So it’s a guided interaction, basically. You’re not just freely moving things around, but you’re solving a small challenge that’s going to get you to this eureka moment that the author of the paper had at some point and that’s why they were sharing this some kind of information. And I think that, also, is something that could be valuable. Of course, freely manipulating, but a guided manipulation that makes the person, who has to interact with, get the point of it. It could also be quite interesting, I think. Here, I don’t know how literal or metaphorical you want to be. Let’s say, you display a nuclear power plant. How close you are. You can zoom in and out to the atomic level or not. Yeah, there is a lot that can be done there.

[Jamie Joyce]: Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you if you saw my hand waving, because I got really excited. That’s good because we did a mock-up once. We didn’t get enough money for this project. But we actually did that for our Covid collection. So we built a 3D

lab. We just did this in Prezi so it was a very superficial mock-up. We did it in Prezi because it has that zooming in and out feature. And we built a 3D lab where you could essentially zoom into the lungs of the lab worker who was there and explore all the different argumentation about respiratory health, and what Covid does to the body. You could zoom into the microscope to learn about argumentation about what SARS-COV2 as a virus is, what are its features, what are the pictures that have been grabbed, what kind of telescope, etc. We did that, where we built a scene and people could zoom into different dimensions of it, to explore different topics, sub-topics of debate within that. But we didn’t get enough funding to really do for real. But I think that would be really fun.

[Fabien Benetou]: The funding part, to be honest, it’s about to lack in the sense that, it’s super demanding to get this kind of materials. Designing a 3D experience. But I think for those two cases, nuclear or Covid, they are excellent for it, because there are skills that are not graspable for most of us. And I think for a technical expert then it becomes natural because you did the exercise so many times that it does become natural. But being able to change scales, in a way that still makes the intangible, tangible, it’s a perfect use case for this.

[Jamie Joyce]: Amazing. I’m excited to sit on all these meetings.

[Frode Hegland]: Peter are you is that an earlier hand or is that a fresh hand?

[Peter Wasilko]: It’s an ongoing hand that’s been having things added to the queue. Your description of waving your hands around reminds me a little bit of the user interface depicted minority report. That was a very interesting movie to take a look at for the VR-type visualisation. Well, more AR-style visualisations in it. Also the talk about instant votes and things remind me of a wonderful episode of The Orville called ‘Majority Rule’ where everyone would walk around with smart badges that had an up arrow and a down arrow. And if you accumulated too many down arrow votes, you’ll be lobotomised by the society. So, just fascinating. Then substantively, have you taken a look at the foresight literature? There’s a concept called ‘Futures Cone’, and I put a link for that in the chat. The basic idea is to represent multiple possible futures. And it seems like that could be a good visualisation for providing an organisational access layer to the dialogue, because some of the different points would correspond to the same possible future. And that could provide a different view on the evolving debate structure. So, for instance, there would be one possible future where the claims that the climate temperature is going to go out of control is correct. Then there’s another possible future where it turns out that those studies might not necessarily have been accurate, more an artefact of modelling software. So you could take those possible futures and represent them in a visualisation, and use that as a filter onto the debate structure. Also, another very interesting diagramming technique is the use of state machines. Very popular in

computer science. And it’s been touched on in linguistics and parsing to some extent. And the notion there is that you have a series of states, with transitions between states, and you could associate different arguments with transitions between states, where the states could represent possible futures in the futures cone visualisation. Also, I would suggest having a look at the system dynamics literature, which has its own suite of visualisations. Some of which are very nice web-based tools that look at feedback loops between different stocks and flows. And that again could provide a filter into the diagram structure as some of the diagrams would relate to different elements in that visualisation. So those are a couple of possible filtering access layers that you might want to have a look at. I have all the links to the side chat.

[Jamie Joyce]: Thank you so much. I think I found everything that you post in the side chat. I super appreciate that. Getting some interaction interfacing with the forecasting community has been of interest. But I haven’t had the capacity to explore what is the extent to which they model futures. Because I obviously would be interested in taking those projections, deconstructing it and seeing what it looks like, in terms of, translating it to Society Library language and concepts, so I can get a handle on it. But I haven’t had the capacity to check that out. But thank you for these links, because it’s definitely on my list.

[Frode Hegland]: Talking of links. First of all, as you know, this will be transcribed and put into the journal, both your presentation, this dialogue, and the chat log. So whoever’s interested, go and have a look at our first two issues. Mark and I are still learning how to make it navigable because there’s a lot in there. But then my question is actually quite different and that is, a few years ago I took an online quiz in a Norwegian newspaper on politics, and it asked me, what do you think of this, what do you think of that? Click through, very simple. At the end of it, turned out that I should be voting for the Christian Democrats. Which was a huge surprise because, whatever. But so my question to you then is: Have you considered letting your users model themselves in such a way, so that when they go into this, they have a stated position that the system understands that is based on their answers?

[Jamie Joyce]: I mean, when I think about those kinds of quizzes, the first thing that pops into my mind is, I really want to see the data that they’re using to suggest that. Because I want to know if their interpretation of this candidate’s position is the same as the language I would use to describe my position, interpreted by the language that they’re giving me, maybe a multi-choice format to express it. So I personally have trust issues with those particular things. There are so many different possibilities to create products from these data sets.

[Frode Hegland]: I’m thinking not necessarily about the quiz, because, yes, that may just have been a journalistic gimmick. I’m thinking more about coming in and let’s say, most of

us here, we go and say environment concern, high. We state where we are on specific issues. Health care should be shared or not? Just a few yes or no. Because that’ll put you because you talked about a constellation earlier, there’s also the thing, the spider graph, where you have lots of different dimensions and you can then see the shape of different people. But as long as people can be shown that dimension of themselves and say, “this is who I believe I am”, that may help their interaction, somehow. I don’t know if I’m going on a huge tangent or not.

[Jamie Joyce]: I mean, one thing I think is interesting is that, these types of quizzes, whether it’s Enneagram, or Myers-Briggs†, or whatever, people love to conceptualise themselves, I think. These things are popular because, within a certain subset of people, they want to call themselves and identify themselves as something. Just being like, “Oh, I’m INTJ. Or I’m ‘this’ or ‘that’.”. Some people really love that stuff. I think that could be a cool offering in terms of, “Here is your graph of beliefs”. Like an astrological chart. Here’s your sun sign and whatever sign. Here’s the dimensionality of your beliefs. I think that could be cool. But also, you made me remember something, which is, when we were talking earlier about trying to combat cognitive biases, and I mentioned that I believe it’s the cognitive bias that people remember the first thing that they see. Or people may have a backfire effect if they see something that immediately contradicts what they already believe. So people taking a quiz upon being introduced to a new subject, it would require for us to have an account system.

They’d have to create an account, so we can remember these preferences. I think it could be, potentially, a way to combat bias if we knew what people strongly held beliefs are so that those could be expressed first, and then, they can be confirmed as being understood. Because I think that’s how you can overcome backfire, is you let people know you model to them who they are, we hear you, we understand you, and here’s the strongest version of the thing that you believe, here’s everything that you could possibly want, and now let’s go explore everything else. So I think that would be useful. Again, to start changing the way we interact with information, to enable enlightenment and open-mindedness for people who want to opt into something like that.

[Frode Hegland]: Yeah, I think that’s very interesting what you’re saying because a cognitive bias is not a bad thing, in and of itself. Same as prejudice. Also, is not a bad thing, in and of itself. Without them, we can’t function in the world. And, of course, who you express you are, depends on the circumstances where you are asked to show who you are. I do think it is really an important issue because, for instance, our son, beautiful four and a

half-year-old, Edgar, he goes to a Catholic school. But we weren’t sure about putting him in a religious system. But the reason we decided to do that was, I’d much rather argue morals with him at home, rather than him go to a school that doesn’t allow that. And then, try to teach him

to be nice, because a lot of these decisions come down to how do you see your neighbours, how do you see yourself, how do you see the planet, all that stuff. Everything is filtered. You can’t argue facts is something we keep being told again, and again. So I’m just wondering, you have this incredible information landscape that is intelligently put together, if there was a mechanism of someone, maybe even stating their beliefs, and then when they go into the system finding out that they’re not actually behaving within their stated beliefs. The typical thing being a right-wing Christian. There’s no chance in hell Jesus was a right-wing Christian. As an example. To not only get the information in, but having a thing that is representing where it goes in.

[Jamie Joyce]: I think in the future we’re going to have a lot more capabilities to do things like that. And I hope so because knowledge and information is so powerful and impactful, and if we could just improve that relationship or objectify knowledge and have a new type of etiquette around how we interact with it, and allowing it to change us, and open up us. And mirroring that it understands us and can, again, contrast us. I think that could be really wonderful. I think it’s far out for the level of sophistication that you’re talking about, or I’m just failing to imagine. But I hope we get there, because I think that would just be so lovely. I personally love to think of humanity as a species on an information diet. I think how we really survive is on information. All the different inputs that we have. I think making that relationship even more sophisticated is, hopefully, in our future and for the best.

[Frode Hegland]: Yeah, that’s wonderful. And sorry, as a just a tiny little thing, and that’s, if you read Jaron Lanier’s book† on his VR experience journey, it’s very little about the environment and very much about the self. How you change yourself in the environment. So to think about this, in this context of being able to go into this information with an awareness of different ways you are yourself in this space. I know we’re talking a huge down-the-line kind of thing, but it was just interesting to hear that. Right, Mark. I will shut up for a minute.

[Mark Anderson]: Okay. Very quickly because I see other hands are up. And just to restrict myself to just one observation. Another thing I think is interesting that comes out of the really interesting deep landscape, data landscape you’re making, is the ability to look at the, well, almost the meta-metadata. So when you look across the problem space, where are the references coming from? So, in other words, there’s a whole skein that goes over the top of this, which is not part of the augmentation or argument discovery, per se. That’s quite useful in an intelligent, very small ‘i’ sense, in terms of, understanding the problem environment space, I think. Anyway, I’ll leave it there because I see there are some people, and some haven’t spoken yet.

[Jamie Joyce]: I will just say quickly, Mark, what you may love to hear is that we do take

great care to steel man things. So if we find arguments on TV or in news, we will try to see where is the rigorous academic literature on this. So it’s not just by luck that we’re identifying and associating arguments with media types, because we always try to get the most rigorous as possible, and the most accessible. So if it exists in different media sets, we’re really looking for them.

[Mark Anderson]: Yeah, it’s just this interesting thing that sometimes now, it seem certain sorts of arguments seem to come from a... Or in a certain type, I don’t want to typify it too much because then you get into the labelling, but it’s just the sentence that, whereas you might think it’d be distributed across the piece, going through all channels, or all age groups, or whatever: it can be quite fragmented. And that’s the kind of thing that the rich data that you’re collecting also enables you to see, I think.

[Jamie Joyce]: Yep, I agree. Okay, who would like to go next? Karl or Peter?

[Karl Hebenstreit Jr]: Yeah. I posted a link on, Peter Elbow had this article about the ‘Believing Game’ and it’s some nice connection between that and the ‘Six Thinking Hats’. So it’s systematically speaking validity in what you don’t agree with. And then, it’s interesting with dialogue mapping and Jeff Conklin’s. Both Jeff and Edward de Bono, they focused so much on dialogue mapping and Six Thinking Hats being a meeting facilitation process. But then, there’s also the whole individual sense-making process too. I’m very big into dialogue and the facilitation process. How do we get people engaging in real-time? A thought I had to bring that to your attention.

[Jamie Joyce]: Yeah, thank you. I copied those I’ve never heard of the Believing Game or the Six Thinking Hats, actually. And I think that there’s a lot that we could learn from bridging communities and facilitation communities. Because what we’re trying to do is a technologically induce a space where people can interact with knowledge maybe as if and the different positions maybe as if they were interacting with a person. We’re not simulating that. But like what are some things, in terms of, the visualisation itself that could create that container? That would make people feel receptive and that sort of thing? So I think there’s a lot that we can learn, and I try to pick up things here and there from facilitation, mediation, and bridging, to learn those things.

[Marc-Antoine Parent]: Just a quick thing. I mean, Conklin—I’m working with Jeff Conklin right now. His work really shows the value of facilitators in de-personalising arguments and creating these syntheses, usually in real-time. And I think it goes with what we were saying earlier about the importance of argumentation as a skill. And this was synthesis map-making and consensus making as a skill. And, yes. I agree totally. The question is how

to weave individual sense-making, which is a more and more important activity, into creating these synthesis maps? And the question of creating synthesis from individual curated maps to collective curated maps is really the key articulation. But it’s not going to be just crowdsourcing, it has to be learned. And there are many paths towards learning to do that. And it has to be social learning about how to create these consensus maps.

[Karl Hebenstreit Jr]: Just one quick thing too with the way Jeff separated out. So you have the issue mapping, which is gaining the competency with compendium and creating the maps. And then there’s the dialogue mapping, which is the facilitation process. I think that’s really important for all these tools.

[Marc-Antoine Parent]: I personally believe, sorry, Jamie, we will need more than one mapping when we will need to connect them. For example, I think what Jamie is doing is a wonderful epistemic map. Why do people believe this? And someone was bringing these future maps. But when you do a future map it’s, this may lead to that, this may lead to

that. It’s a totally different temporal presentation. They shouldn’t be on the same map. But you would want to know why do you believe that this may lead to that, which is the epistemic dimension. Connected to that and vice versa, right? Why is the belief that this may lead to that also feeding into the epistemic questions? They’re different representations. I don’t think there’s ever going to be one representation to them all, but we need to make a representation (indistinct).

[Jamie Joyce]: Speaking of communication. One of the things that I was thinking too is that I’m not a facilitator. So I have very limited knowledge of what that tails. But my understanding is, facilitation and mediation include deploying all sorts of different communication techniques to position people in the space where they can then proceed with a conversation and interact with something that’s potentially conflictual. So I’ve been thinking too is, maybe there could be, in thinking of how do we borrow from facilitation to enable interaction with our content in a successful way, it may there be a chat bot feature where we turn it on different facilitation communication strategies. So someone’s interacting with knowledge. And someone’s going off track, they know how to like, “Oh, hey. Okay. Let me reframe what you just said, and let’s move it now over back to the map”. So there’d be a relationship between a chat bot that could carry on the conversational AI element, to walk people through the epistemic map, because it may be too dry to ask someone to go back and forth, pro and con, down from a position to more precise argumentation. That may be too much. Besides readers who are just generally interested in exploring a deliberation. But in deploying it to a chat bot, integrating it with that, I think is something that could be in the future, as well. And if someone isn’t already working on capturing all of the facilitation techniques, I hope they do and they train an AI to be having that, would be cool.

[Frode Hegland]: Yeah. You’re talking about something being too cold. I think that’s a very good question here. You’re building an incredible intellectual tool and of course, emotions will come into it at some point. So you’re enthusiastic for VR and I think you understand VR like we do. Just multi-dimensional. Doesn’t matter if it’s a headset, or whatever particular.

Will definitely come in to make people feel more embodied, more involved, and more aware. One of the great things about this book† I keep holding up is, it points out that, if you want to be more rational, you listen to your body more than your head. Your head is more emotional than your body. Which was a bit of a surprise. So, we can help people get those understandings. I’m not sure why Brandel is not here. He’s always available. He’s very involved, so there must be a good reason. So when he watches the video of it at some point, we miss you, Brandel. I hope to see you together with the group soon. We have seven more minutes. And Peter will have one of the final questions.

[Peter Wasilko]: All right. I was wondering whether you’re doing anything to flag bias of the sources that are behind the sources that are being referenced in the articles? A very common phenomena is that you’ll have some group with the name like, ‘Concerned parents trying to improve safety in schools’ and etc. Then you look at it, and you find out that it’s really a front group for gun manufacturers. Or you’ll have a piece of legislation and the name of the legislation is the exact inverse of what the functional result of the legislation would be. Also, I was wondering whether you’re looking at pop culture as sources of argumentation too. There’s a wonderful wiki called TV Tropes that has links to just about every single movie, book, manga piece of resource out there. Plus they also cross-link examples of those probes in real life. So, you can find whole sections on every TV show that discuss climate change in there. And sometimes, you’ll actually have people use the fictional medium to express policy diagram disputes because they’re afraid that if they put it out on Twitter, they might get cancelled from Twitter, but you can have an alien of some crazy race make the argument in a science fiction story, and you can discuss those social and policy issues that you couldn’t otherwise. The Orville is a great source of those sorts of stories.

[Jamie Joyce]: First of all, I just want to say, Peter, oh, my god. Thank you so much. I’m so excited for TV Tropes. Thank you. We deconstruct film, but not television shows and non- documentary films. So this actually just may be a whole other source of media that we may really dive into, because I mean, we do archive memes, and we make memes available. So when you said pop culture, I was like, “Oh, yeah. We do the graphic image memes, for sure”. But I didn’t think about, yeah, an alien on a sci-fi film making a critique about something.

Didn’t think of that. Thank you very much, Peter. And then as for your other question. Yes. But we have to be careful with labelling. Because labelling is very much a matter of fact and

we don’t want to make a mistake and be incorrect about matters of fact. So when we label something opinion, or needs to be fact-checked, or no evidence provided, or this is cherry- picking or something like that, it’s because it is very easily associated with matters of fact. There’s a definition for a thing that’s commonly accepted. This meets a definition (indistinct). But when it comes to astroturfing, predatory journals and things like that, it’s more of a matter of argumentation. And so, we actually do model that in argumentation. So, for example, there’s this whole set of content from this one person who has published only in predatory journals, and we had to deconstruct the website and essentially build out all the argumentation about how the data is not verifiable, the journal in which it was published, it is not credible in these ways. But we had to model that as argumentation. And what we have to do, in terms of our responsibility, is just, we have to make sure when it’s visualised, they pop up at the same time. So it’s not buried, all the counter argumentation that suggests this is invalid it’s, “Hey, because of the severity and weight of the argumentations, they get this other data, you need to see these things at the same time”. So, yeah. We do that. We do our due diligence and look on those lists of suggested predatory journals. And then we check out the website. Did the website, essentially, say it’s pay-to-publish? Do they have no peer review? Do they have no editorial board? Essentially pick it apart. And then, make sure that, that metadata express through argumentation. Essentially saying this is invalid or, you know...

[Peter Wasilko]: And it also can be subtle, for this person might have a gorgeous new office in the Pfizer wing of his school and be publishing strong arguments in favour of Pfizer’s latest designer drug. And then, you’d wonder if he did a study that was designed to be able to find problems with that drug, would his school still have the funding to build that building? Or would he suddenly find that the primary source of his salary has gone away? And that might be influencing the way he structures his science. There’s also a community, I think it’s called ‘Tea’†, that’s looking at reproducibility in science, which you might want to have a look at, if you aren’t already familiar with that work.

[Jamie Joyce]: There’s a whole bunch of people working on the reproducibility issue. But what are they called?

[Peter Wasilko]: ‘Tea’, I think is their acronym.

[Frode Hegland]: Since we started a bit late, we will do a few more minutes. And, actually, Fabien, you go first.

[Fabien Benetou]: Just to bounce back, I also posted on the chat a book on agnotology† and the study of political ignorance. I really warmly recommend it. I say warmly even though it’s a horrible thing. But I think it is important. It’s very exciting to hear the process you’re going through. And that prompted me to wonder. So, what I did at some point was, I

gathered most of the links of the articles whatever random pages I read. And I put them on my wiki. And what I did was the opposite. Meaning that I have a plugin from the browser that says, “Oh, you’ve already read that page, and that page is on that topic”. So I can browse back to my own notes based on what I’m seeing on my browser, on my screen right now. And I’m wondering if that could, also, be a way, because it sounds like your process is very thorough and could be practical behind, quote-unquote, just the map itself.

But on your normal browsing session, being able to connect back to the map, for example. So I’m wondering if you’ve done that? Or if you believe that could be useful to browse the web? And then, as you go through a document, a piece of information that you already analysed, and it’s already referenced, if we could link back and browse the map at a certain point? I’ll do a bit of promotion for the book I put in the chat, in the meantime. If you’re wondering about the tobacco industry, alcohol industry, and oil industry too. Different sales(?) of Nobel prizes on topics that we’re not necessarily familiar with. And that you see the same heads, that’s a great book. That’s an extremely sad one, but you see the history of convincing people that don’t actually have the expertise but still have the intellectual prestige. So, yeah. Very valuable.

[Jamie Joyce]: Okay. So, yeah. Short answer, yes, we’ve been thinking about that, Fabien. One of the new tools that we want to build, actually, is going to be a web annotation system. So that people can go all the way through the chain of us collecting content, extracting it. You saw the spreadsheets where we copy things over to text and then deconstruct from there, that’s really lovely because if linked to those things people can see the exact line. But it would be lovely if it was just native. They can go to the archive.org website and see we’ve highlighted this and here is. And then, having that as a plugin that other people can go and traverse and just opt in to see, “Has the Society Library pulled this out?” And seen this somewhere, and implemented this somewhere, is definitely in the timeline of things that we want to incorporate, for sure. Not possibly yet, but yes, we’ve been thinking about it. And here’s the other thing too. I don’t have a huge amount of hope for integrating with Twitter and Facebook and things like that, because I know a lot of friends of mine, who created great products have not been able to get through the door. But that could be a thing too, also, let’s say, if there was a way of detecting the semantic similarity of a tweet with a Society Library snippet. They do this with Wikipedia on YouTube for example. There’s a particular topic with the, “Here’s the Wikipedia page on it”, in like a bar underneath, to try and promote people going to a source that YouTube finds to be substantial, in order to look and research into that more. And then, it could also be such that, journalists could reference our databases, and essentially, cite it in their news articles and people could link out to go see the Library. So it’s in the creation of new content, it connects to the Library, and then, the Library can also

backtrack to, this is where we derive the claims that populate this library in other media content as well. And that’s just web annotation of plugins and things like that.

[Frode Hegland]: So final for me, anyway, is the work that I’m doing with my basic software, Author and Reader it’s bizarre. It took me two hours to see how it kind of connected with this. I think it’s probably because what I’m doing is so insanely much simpler than this. But the reason I want to highlight it to ask you a question is, in Author, which is very much targeted at students, part of the writing is for them to define things. If it’s important for them, write what it is. So you would write something like, Doug Engelbart and then a definition. In my case I would write, Doug Engelbart was my friend blah, blah, blah. So it’s personal. It’s not pretending to be objective truth. And then, maybe I’ll mention SRI. If I then somewhere else write SRI, when I then go back to the map, and I move anything I want, click on Doug there will be a line to SRI, purely because the text mentions it. Nothing fancier. But the reason I’m highlighting it to you is that you have this incredibly rich environment, it’s simply that, it seems that, if you make people define things, it helps their own thinking. And if they can then see how they connect. So I’m wondering if you can have a layer within the work you have, or maybe, I’m throwing a 10 million dollar research project at your hair, so I’m not realistically saying, do it now. But you go through this knowledge environment. You pick things up. And you say, “Well, I think this is bullshit, or I think this is important, or I think this relates to…” Whatever it might be. But in a separate space, so that after a while, when they keep doing this, they get a better insight into their heads. And I can see Mark and Antoine making all kinds of head movements because I know it’s related to their work. But I’m wondering if you both have a brief comment and then we need to wind up.

[Jamie Joyce]: I’ll just say one thing is that, what you express reminds me of some exercises we do at the Society Library when we teach students about having them extricate what is meant and claims, it’s not the same thing in terms of defining things. But it is an exercise.

And I will just say that the feedback we get from students, from performing logical deconstruction exercises pulling out all the claims and media, is that we’ve heard many times that, by the end of the semester they gain a new sight. Because they just inherently see the density of language in a way that they didn’t see it before. And it’s really lovely because so many of them get so excited, and they come back and volunteer for us. They’re really enthusiastic about what they’ve learned, and they find it to be very valuable. So I think that an exercise like that could also be very valuable just based on the feedback we get from our exercises, which are not the same, but similar. And then, what you expressed reminded me of is that, I just had the thought just now, of a new kind of exercise where students could be compelled to be presented an argument, and then counter-argue with it, and then they can also

see like how the Society Librarians actually steel man that argument. So they could work through the database only seeing partial pieces. And are doing their own research and counter-arguing. And then comparing that against the professional version. And maybe it’s better, maybe it’s not better. And that could help refine their thinking, as well. So, yeah. I

think that those types of exercises really do help people with critical thinking. And I think just increasing their epistemic literacy, as well. Just really knowing how many assumptions that we pack in, to our everyday expressions, and understanding. And we’re forced to extricate that by defining or deconstructing. We really start to appreciate the density and complexity of meaning in knowledge.

[Frode Hegland]: Fantastic. I mean, Tools for Thought is part of this big thing. Marc- Antoine, was that your hand or was that a little mouse?

[Marc-Antoine Parent]: That was me. Sorry, I’m going to diverge a bit. And this is my thinking, not the Society Library. But the definitions, as you put it, is fundamental and what you’re doing, Frode, is helping encourage people to do their local contextual definition. And Jamie’s tool and work certainly does contribute to identifying specific definitions and work. And what I’m currently most interested in is these, how to assemble social definitions from individual definitions? And how to identify how they relate? Where are the differences? Including in emerging concept conversations. In some conversations, the concepts are emerging, the definitions are being negotiated, and evolving, and renegotiated. And this is where the ability to show the relationships between the concepts is extremely important. And when I say show the relationship, and that’s another thing I wanted to say to you, I think that the ability to qualify links is primordial. Bruno Latour, who’s a historian of science, has said that erasing the nature of links is one of the great crimes of 21st-century thinking. Saying these things are related. How? Doesn’t matter. That is absolutely terrible.

Understanding how things are related is really key to a certain precision of thinking. And having a good epistemology and ontology of how things are related, I think is absolutely fundamental. And how things change when you push them from one domain to another, that’s Latour’s work. When you shift from one definition to another is when there are these shifts of meaning, which are necessary, they’re not always bad. Some of it is confusion, some of it is fluidity. But you need to be able to identify it. and that means naming the relationship.

[Jamie Joyce]: Yep, I just want to quickly say because this may be relevant to everyone else, the conversation of definitions has come up in communities that Marc-Antoine and I have both been in. And you may all find this to be very interesting that the Society Library approach definitions are also descriptive. So, for example, when we actually create definitions, we can disambiguate them for the situation. Which is really important in the data

architecture. But also, we only give definitions to things that aren’t heavily contested. So the definition of climate change, for example, in the Society Library database, there are 19 different definitions. That’s because it’s such a common phrase, that’s actually just a zip file of 19 different files. It’s the same name for 19 different zip files of meaning of what people apply when they’re using the term. So when it comes to modelling argumentation you can’t just say, “Okay, climate change”. Because so many people are just going to come to that and interpret different meanings. So, we’ve had to find different climate crisis, this is a little bit different than catastrophic climate change, this is a little bit different than global warming.

All these different things. And then we’re just going to have to get to the point where we start creating new names. Like the climate change hoax. All these different small differentiations to let people know that we’re not talking about climate change in the same way at all. So for us that is actually a debate. Our primary question within the climate change database is: what has changed? And there’s 10 different arguments about what climate change actually means and entails and the evidence that support that it’s derived from different media sets, etc. But many of the definitions that are not contested like, what is the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant? Oh, it’s like a double loop Westinghouse, blah, blah, blah. That’s not really something people argue about, so we just give it its definition.

[Frode Hegland]: And on that bombshell, thank you very much, Jamie, and everyone else. And we’re here every Monday and Friday. I look forward to having this transcribed, will take a while to organise and clean it up. And continue the dialogue and make amazing things happen. In this community, we’re looking forward to doing some sort of, a flatland, which is what we call, what we’re on now into VR environments. And back again a demonstration of the Future of Text at the end of the year. So it’s very interesting to have the insight, knowledge, and questions from today, and hopefully, some degree of dialogue collaboration. Have a good weekend everyone.

Jamie Joyce: Thank you all so much for your time. Thanks for having me.

Jaron Lanier

Keynote

https://youtu.be/uZIO6GHpDd8

I would like to discuss a few topics today that are related:

I’m going to start with a discussion of whether the combination of computation with text, as we've known it, poses a danger of placing people into something of a trap, something of a loop in which we lose our future. That's topic number one.
Topic number two is going to be whether text as we know it is something that we should think of as an eternal central feature of the human condition, or whether it might eventually become less important because other things come along and I will that will be topic number two.
Topic number three will be about so much spiritual question of whether a degree of mystification of people or text is appropriate going forward in different ways than it has been in the past because of computation.

So let me start with topic number one. In my peculiar life–and it is really a very strange life

that I can hardly believe–one of my roles is as what's called the prime scientist for one of the tech giants, which is Microsoft. And as it happens, our office is the funder and also the distribution channel for a lab called Open AI that you might have heard of that has created probably the highest performing so called AI text service now, which is called GPT. There are different versions of it. I'm sure you're all familiar with this. So it's essentially what our colleagues at Stanford have started to call a ‘foundational model’, a very, very, very large scale model in which all the available text that can be gathered has been gathered and then analyzed in the context of a very, very large computational system.

The result is a service that can simulate a human interlocutor and actually perform in ways that impress people. I would say in general, for instance, it can often do reasonably well at passing high school or college level math classes, which even though there's no representation of math inside it, it's just one example. It can explain jokes, it can do do all sorts of things, reasonably effective translations between languages in some cases. And yet it also has this curious property of suddenly running into., very strange failures where it's obvious that it doesn't in fact have any representation internally of what's being talked about.

So what do we have here? The first thing to say about this type of model? So what does this program actually do? Well, it really addresses the core feature of what we call text, which is sequence. Ultimately, text is a sequence of a number of things where the number of possible sequences is vastly larger than the number of original things that are sequenced. So the things that are sequenced are, well, in some languages the letters, but in all languages, the words. And if all we do is we capture the sequences and we can statistically predict what sequences are more likely than others, we can create a simulacra of language that is remarkably effective.

Now, here on something interesting, which is that it's all about scale or all about the size of the model.

If the model is too small, obviously it won't do anything, which is why this kind of illusion of a person inside the computer didn't really start to work until recently because we just couldn't build big enough computers. The ones that we build to accomplish this effect are truly vast. The they're the size of cities. They often are in remote places by rivers that can be used to cool them. They often have their own power sources, hopefully huge renewable, non- carbon emitting ones. There very, very few organizations in the world that can afford to have these models. Microsoft is one, Google is another. The Chinese cluster of companies closely related to the government are another. And there aren’t, there aren't really that many more.

And the I would contrast this with a hypothetical but impossible infinite model. And this was imagined by Borges in the Infinite library. And of course, that one would be absolutely useless because it would take infinite time or energy to to get to any sequence in it.

And so it's effectively none. It's useless. Could it exist? Should it exist? And of course it cannot.

So there's the the effect happens at a large scale, but not too large. And you might ask, do we know exactly what that scale is? Not really. We know the beginning of where it starts to work. We know it'll work even better at a larger scale. But there's some point at which it will start to collapse on itself. We don't know exactly where that peak is now.

But what can we say about this? What have we learned about language?

I think the first thing we can say is that we've learned that most language use is not creative. If we look at it from a global perspective, and we've never had a global perspective before.–we’ve never had a way of looking at everything everybody said–only locally at what somebody published and what somebody said in a conversation and so on. And the Internet doesn't give us everything everybody said, but it does give us everything everybody said on the Internet, which is a lot, especially for younger generations, and also for anything that's been in a library. It's also in the model. And the fact that regurgitating in a sense or interpolating between what has already been said can simulate somebody saying new things, tells us that from a global base on a global basis. There's a lot of redundancy or a lot of a lot of parallel restatement of things because that's the only basis for the solution to work, which perhaps shouldn't be a surprise. And yet it's different to actually have evidence of something rather than surmising it and now we have evidence for the first time of what language as a whole for everyone at once contains, which we didn't have before.

Now what is of interest to me? One thing, one of many things of interest to me is that as we start to use these algorithms, not only just as a novelty to say, ‘Oh, isn't it cute that it can seem like a math student or a psychologist or whatever we might have at simulating?’ It is also of interest to me whether if we start to integrate these types of tools into our own conduct of life, whether we essentially increase the degree of redundancy and lose track of the possibility of creativity.

Now, when I say this, I have to say I'm speaking in a way that strongly violates what we can call tech culture or the usual milieu that I function in, because there's a sort of a I would say a dogma or even an orthodoxy that there is not really such a thing as creativity, which sounds a little mystical, but instead there is some sort of a playing out of large scale recombination. And then eventually this turns into something we think of as creativity very much as Darwinian evolution is very creative, but in any particular instance, it's thought to be sort of random with feedback, and perhaps that's how everything is and that there is no creativity now.

I think there's an important difference between the foundational models that we can build today and say Darwinian evolution for just one example. And that difference is

that Darwinian evolution is always about something. There can be some difference of opinion that persists to this day about exactly what it is about. There are some sort of hard nosed adaptation is to say it's only about survival. And then there are others. Including going back to Darwin, who would say, actually, there's sort of a some sort of aesthetic process involved sexual selection and other points of intervention where evolution seems to function a little outside the boundaries of pure survival and have an intrinsic creative quality to it. But at any rate. One can debate those things, but when it's very, very hard and I say this after having debated them for many years, it's very, very hard to come to a definitive conclusion on such a question.

However, the when a program like a foundational program like the GPT generations is not really about a topic external to itself. It's regurgitating original conversations that in most cases were in the original instance about something. So it's it's a degree removed from being about anything, from being about a topic.

And and so then the question is, is there a sense in which if we rely on these things, for instance, if this type of program is used as our tutor, there are many proposals that they become the universal tutors for kids or even adults in education. If it is used as a criminal detective, if it is used as a physician if it is used as well. Any other task were previously there might have been a human.

Is there a danger that it limits what then happens to repeats of what has happened before? Now you'll find many who argue, especially with the tech industry, that we already are seeing creativity, and there are those who think that these things might be conscious inside or something. And once again, very much as with the question of adaptation to human evolution, it's extremely hard to get to an absolute definitive conclusion. However, it is not that hard to design situations to trip up the systems, which is not done that often because people actually want to see them succeed at simulating a human. There's a tremendously strong drive for that, which I'll get to in a second, which which I'm deeply suspicious of.

So I was thinking about a sort of an irony here, which is the tech culture ethos or Silicon Valley ethos, if you like, is very much that the future will be not only different from the present or the past, but so different that it's incomprehensible.

There's often talk of a singularity, which is when everything changes so much because of our advances in computation that we can't even recognize it, that everything transforms, that the whole universe becomes fluid in a new way because of nanotechnology spreading out to the edges of creation, always everywhere or something, something like that. And this happens all the time. All the time. There's a very frequent idea that these artificial intelligence systems will become so effective that they'll solve all of humanity's problems. You'll often

hear and I mean very often at like a dinner party that well, if you look at how effective GPT is, we can be assured that a program will solve our climate change problem. We can be assured it'll solve any problems related to infectious disease, it'll solve any problems related to supply of fresh water, etc., etc., etc.. So it's the only problem we have to work on and then that that will solve everything else now. So there's this. Let's leave aside for a second whether that hope is well placed or not or whether it's not, and I think it's not. But well, let's leave that aside.

What I want to note is this sense of the one of the terms is exotropia (?? Jaron?). And there are many other popular terms within tech culture. This notion that the future is taking off and going into places that are unimaginable, that it's radically creative, radically different. Now, so when I talked about irony, what I mean is we built this thing that would appear to be regurgitated and profoundly nostalgic, profoundly trapped into interpolating things that have already been said. And yet that's in the service of this thing that's supposed to be profoundly future oriented. And I find that extremely interesting.

It reminded me a little bit of the curious effect of Finnegans Wake, which I was rereading recently, where you have this this text that's maximally inventive with as many. Puns, puns, and weird ideas and double entendres and everything per word, as is conceivable in English, I suspect. In the service of depicting this being in this cycle in which nothing is really new, right and so there's this contrast between the nature of the text and what the text is about being almost opposite and I feel like we have a set of opposites like that in Silicon Valley now, but going in in the other direction where we have a regulative, fundamentally uncreative text depicting an infinitely creative future. So it's like the tech culture is the opposite of Finnegans Wake in a funny way now. This concerns me a great deal.

The effect is even more apparent maybe not so much in text, but in visual art, where foundational models of visual stuff. So from the same lab we have something called DALL- E, and now there's some other versions of it, like stable diffusion. Some of you might have seen where you can ask for a piece of art where you can say, ‘I would like to have rats flying in a flying saucer in the style of Turner’, and it'll produce this thing and you think, Wow, this things are creative. And yeah, and yet it is fundamentally regurgitated. It can eat, it can input the style of Turner and regurgitate it, but it cannot be a Turner. And also another interesting thing I mentioned failure modes. It's easier to see them in the visual.

If you look at the images that are produced by the visual foundational models like DALL-E, they can be very impressive doing such things as what I just made up. And I mean, not that I've tried that particular one. You never know for sure, but probably if you ask for rats in a flying saucer in the style of Turner, it would do it and it would probably looked at, I

don't know. Somebody can try it now if they have it open. But if you ask it to do hands or any creature with hands still tend to not be good, the fingers will be mangled. And the reason why is that hands have structure, they’re not just surface, the hand has to make sense as a functional hand, and interpolating between images of hands tends to mess up that thing. So you tend to have a lot of mangled and weird hands or hands that don't quite work now as is, if you point this out within those who really want to believe in these things as being alive, you'll find the excuses are that people often can't draw hands, which is true. So there might very well be some degree of similarity between what goes on in a human brain and what goes on in these programs. I would say that it is beyond our current horizon of science to say how much similarity, but it does seem reasonable to say that there's a little bit or some amount. I don't think it's total, but I think it's zero.

I think we overstate the similarity when we call the accumulators and set our models neurons. And I think the term artificial intelligence (AI) overstates the similarity, and yet there might be something there, I have to say.

Now, this problem I was bringing up of a regurgitate of culture filtered through devices that we can build based on recordings of our past behaviors and communications reminds me a little bit of how many systems that are related to something in the world that might involve representation of it or response to it can become overly narcissistic, if you like, or self self self oriented. So for instance, the immune system can generate autoimmune diseases and economy can become focused on artifacts of itself and become dysfunctional, leading to market failures. Many, many other examples. And so there's there's a if we can think of these things instead of as people as a representation system that's vulnerable to… (system announcement by LiSA: It’s 4 PM) It is 4 p.m…. You can think of this as a system that's vulnerable to becoming trapped in a self reflection rather than being responsive to the thing that it's supposed to be aligned with. And that would be a maybe a less charged way of stating the concern I have about regurgitated culture, but ultimately I want to get to sort of a mystical level of this.

And what I mean by mystical is in a way kind of literal, if mystifying, an aspect of what we're doing instead of attempting not to. So, I have long held. And when I say long, I mean my one of my mentors when I was quite young was Marvin Minsky, who was probably the most important source of the current ideas about artificial intelligence in terms of the images and cultural references that are in use.

I used to argue with Marvin when I was young, and Marvin, having been one of the original generation of people who believed in artificial intelligence (AI), loved the argument (but people, as is always the case, the subsequent generations become more orthodox and lose their sense of humor and don't have the kind of charm and openness that the original

people had, at least in person). So it's my belief that you cannot have perfect ideas. I don't think there's such a thing as a perfectly completed science or perfectly completed cultural theory or perfectly completed mathematics. Any time we apply thought or any time we conceive our world or ourselves–we do so with fractures. That doesn't scare me. I think it's a miracle that we can do anything. The fact that we can even do it partially or imperfectly is fantastic. For some it bothers them that they can't achieve perfection. I don't know why that should bother them.

Here's what I want to propose in the future that we must think about where we place our fractures. And we do have through some miracle, which is the beginning of my mystification. Through some miracle, we have the ability to choose to degree where the fractures will be. And what I would propose is that instead of trying to say, well, here we understand what an intelligence is and we can reproduce it in a machine which then offsets the fracture somewhere else, because then you have the problem of trying to explain, well, where did all this language come in the first place? That's been input into the machine. You end up pushing the fracture out backwards back in time or to some other spot.

I think the better thing is to put the fracture inside the person. In European thought we went through a process of recognizing that you can't prove the existence of God. It's a matter of faith. I think the new thing in response to these models is that we have to start to have a radical, mystical belief in the existence of people as the source material from which these models can be built. And we have to treat ourselves as mystical, transcendent sources, as sort of supernatural, because any other alternative puts us into a regurgitated trap and puts and makes us subservient to creations that will become self resonant and limit our world, and also concentrate wealth and power unsustainably among the nerds who run the models.

I only got to one of the three things I was going to talk about, but there you go.

Q&A

Frode Hegland: I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you mean by fracture. Thank you.

Jaron Lanier: By fracture, I mean the limits to the ability to make a consistent and complete and perfect assessment of oneself or one's world. In mathematics, we have many such fracture fractures, the most famous maybe being girdles theorem, but this is also true everywhere. If you look in in the sciences, in physics, you can push, push, push, push back to, I don't know, the big Bang or something, but there's always some kind of an artifice that

you have to make up at the edges of what you can understand and you can push it back, but not infinitely. And that's formal. I mean, there's just no there's never going to be an absolutely complete, fully rounded circle, closed physics. It can get better and better, but not perfect.

Similarly, I think our understanding of text. It can become deeper and deeper. But I think ultimately, as I say, there's always going to be a bit of a mystery about how this thing works at all. We can offset that mystery to something other than text, but we can't offset entirely because we can't make a completely consistent universal view. So I'm proposing that we position the fracture and the person in order to mystify the person and make us sort of special and supernatural rather than machines or any other artifice.

Fabien Benetou: Thank you. So I'm wondering if one way to put it, is that the trap? I mean, is it a genuine trap in the sense that we all lose agency or that the loss of agency is just temporary, or is it just for some of us or maybe we actually properly earn agency?

Jaron Lanier: Yeah, well, you know, this was a theoretical question 20 years ago that I used to talk about and write about quite a lot and. If anybody is interested in looking at my early concerns about it. There are some essays from the nineties. One is called ‘Half the Manifestoz’, I think, and the other one's called Agents of Alienationaa. So that was when it was purely theoretical. But at this point it's done, it's empirical.

So the, the text management programs that we call artificial intelligence are overwhelmingly used for the manipulation of humans now and not for any discernible productive purpose. And this is, of course, the problem with the social media companies and what we've seen. The answer is not 100% one thing or another thing. It's a statistical distribution. It's definitely the case that these things have reduced agency among people. For instance, they've reduced rationality and increased mental disease, I would say in people as a whole, and this has been studied very widely. They've decreased the quality of political discourse very widely, and this is also been studied. And so you see a statistical degradation of what I would call sensible autonomy in people when they are exposed to the algorithms thus far empirically. Now, as with, it's important to understand that. There might be a way of in fact, I think there probably is a way of incorporating these algorithms into life that doesn't have this effect. And it's not the algorithms per se, it's the algorithms combined with an economic incentive because of stupid business models, the so-called this is the whole thing. Anybody who wants to read this, I've written about it a lot, obviously so. And it's also stupid philosophy. So it's bad economics. Bad philosophy combined with the algorithms that make the algorithms destructive of human autonomy, if you like, and dignity. I think the algorithms actually can be useful, and there's no reason for them not to be. But it requires a change in philosophy and economics.

Max Drake: Hi. Max Drake here. I really like what you were saying about mysticism. And I think as someone who's worked a lot with GPT three so far and seen Internet responses to it, I can definitely imagine a kind of like a dueling. I just the bottle itself, kind of. Oh, sorry to cut out it. Kind of. Yeah, so I can imagine. Yeah, there's like the possibility of some other kind of mysticism or merging that is more nefarious in places, the model itself as kind of the source of that. And I was wondering, is that what you see as a kind of like is that similar to. Is that what we need to fight against or is what's your imaginary for?

Jaron Lanier: You know, right now people roughly speaking, there's two ways of interacting with big models online. One of them is where the model is kind of intrinsic to the interaction and the other one where is where it's explicit and you know about it. So, so far with releases like GPT people, no, they're interacting with GPT, that's the whole point. And, and, and so if the person is led in on the joke, so to speak, if there's an awareness of what's going on, then I think then what you were calling the nefarious nature of it is greatly reduced. And so and in fact it's in those terms. So one of the problems that a lot of technical culture is formed when people are, especially people with any technical skill or interest, are interacting with these things. And in that case, they're cute. I mean, it's not nefarious, but then when the transition happens is when people are using a social media system or anything that has recommendations or anything that constructs an experience feed. And instead of being said, well, here's the model, here's how you can tweak it, here's how you can play with it. It's just intrinsic to their experience. And in that case, it becomes sneaky and very subject, in fact explicitly subject to corruption, because the whole point is that third, third parties are paying in an attempt to control the attention and manipulate the people who are using it. And that's all the Facebook or media companies do that. TikTok does it as an example now, and they're all they're all doing that. And that is that is where the damage comes in. It's when people are having experience created by algorithms that you start to see degradation of human decency and and intelligence. And it happens so far universally.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: I would be interested to know where you personally, what you personally see as the main source of mysticism or potential mysticism inside people. Are you are you primarily looking at consciousness or some of those things like you personally?

Jaron Lanier: Sure. Well. There has been a strong wind of sort of anti consciousness acknowledgement in technical culture for decades and. This. I, I disagree with with that tendency. The the argument is something like we used to think the earth was the center of the universe, and now we should recognize that our consciousness is at the center of anything and we're not special and all that. And at first it seems kind of humble and kind of in the line

of the of the Enlightenment. But I think actually all it does is it forces the mysticism somewhere else. And for instance, people who talk about AI algorithms and believe in that they're conscious or something will never stop sprinkling magic dust on the algorithms. Oh, it's so magical. It's come alive. But then they'll say for people, Oh no, these people are just, you know, it's a kind of an inconsistent thing. Like what you're doing is you're you're moving the magic dust from people to the machine. But the machine is owned by some company.

And it's it's it's politically and economically a terrible idea, but it's also just philosophically sloppy. And I just think we should admit that we can't get rid of magic dust and might as well put it on the person. There are many, many angles on this, and I've been in the consciousness arguments for many years, but. I would say consciousness is the one thing that cannot be reduced if it's an illusion. And we should treat it as a uniquely efficient place to put our themes.

You know, it's like the most sensible place. And so consciousness is some kind of impure. It's some kind of a channel that's not empirical, it's something else. I don't think you can prove it. I used to sometimes argue with people who were skeptical of it, like Daniel Dennett, that the only way you can. There are some people who are professional philosophers who claim not to be conscious, and maybe you can believe them. But in general, one should have the faith that other people are conscious, and maybe that's the more appropriate and useful contemporary faith instead of faith in God. It's similar, actually, but it's slightly different. It's just. And then the other question I would ask is, if we're going to create a society that's run by algorithms, if we don't elevate people in some mystical or supernatural way, how can it serve people if it's all just information components, why doesn't it just devolve to whoever owns the computer and serving them? I don't see any other way unless you make people special and you see that in the early Enlightenment documents about democracy and society, You see this recognition that you have to just treat people special and there's no ultimate logical justification. There's a there's a pragmatic reason, given a set of opposing beliefs that can't be resolved through logical competition, that you have to become pragmatic. And weirdly, we have come to a point where mysticism is the most pragmatic choice, as well as, I believe the most philosophically gracious one.

Vint Cerf: Hi, Jaron. It's so good to see you. Thank you so much. So it's been I'm sorry you couldn't be here in person. Actually, this isn't the question. It's an observation, as usual, listening to you as an intellectual romp and several new phrases have occurred to me as I listen. The first one is stochastic retrieval, which is basically what a lot of these things do.

Second, casual retrieval, which is what happens when you have the dialogue. And I really like your idea of the universal computer. These things know more than we do, although they

also know false things as well as true things. And that's a problem we have to deal with. And the last point is that since this is really recreating the already existing dialogue, so to speak, human discourse, this could be used to create a dialogue with a dead person. And that suggests that another label for these is rhetorical zombie.

Jaron Lanier: Let us be clear about the power relationship here. And so nice to see you. I what? This tendency to want to revive the dead using algorithms is very, very widespread in tech culture. And I. I think. We should treat it as an evil. I understand there could be some circumstances where it could have utility and there are often scenarios discussed where, oh, I don't know, some kid has a traumatic loss of a parent. I did when I was when I was young, by the way. I lost my mother when I was young. And then this notion that maybe it could be therapeutic. I think we should. Adopt. It's kind of interesting looking at the Islamic resistance to representing people as images that that has been traditional. Perhaps I'm not proposing that we adopt that. And yet I think looking at the impulse in its source is instructive and worthwhile. I, I think there's a terrible danger in telling a kid that the parent can be represented in code. I think demystifying the parent, turning the parent into something that's a portion of a database or an algorithm demystifying the parent will inevitably instead mystify the computer or whoever provides the service or something. There's no way to remove mystification because there's no way to have a complete point of view. So the inevitable conclusion of simulating a dead person is to subsume that person into somebody else's scheme. Just given how politics and economics work. And so I think we should treat it as an evil and I would like to see it become treated as a moral outrage, possibly even illegal in some circumstances. I really do feel that this is a road to civilizational ruin. Few agree with me, but I think more will come to see the merit in this concern.

Jim Strahorn

The Future of ... More Readable Books ... a Reader Point of View

One should NOT have to read an entire article or chapter to understand what it’s about. Unfortunately, I read slowly. I remember far less of what I’ve read, than I would like.

I highlight to understand. That slows me down. I try to scan, read and skip selectively. Like most people, I'm a little smart, not brilliant. I can't read and retain entire pages.

Many writers waste reader time in not communicating their main points more effectively. I'm talking about books focused on specific topics, problems or opportunities, things that affect our daily lives, technical books and subject-specific books that draw conclusions.

Textbooks seem a lone exception: they typically are heavily formatted for reader benefit.

I'm NOT talking about fiction, the great novel or narrative stories that flow across time. I'm arguing that many books would benefit from being more like textbooks than fiction.

The Problem

English teachers and schools teach style, great literature and writing, of fiction not fact. They don't teach organization, structure, content hierarchy, sub-titles and formatting!

Most books thus have no subtitles, no bold text and minimal formatting.

They have endless paragraphs of unformatted, unsub-titled oceans of text that readers have to search for and struggle with to find the author's main message and conclusions.

Some authors seem to write technical or topic-specific books as if they were writing fiction, as if style, flow and exemplar stories are more important than message clarity.

That's makes reading, absorbing and understanding an author's message very difficult.

Objectives

Make non-fiction written communication more effective for the reader.

Authors should be making what they're trying to say to readers more explicitly clear. They typically don't use the simple tools available to them to help readers understand.

Make section headings, sub-titles and bold-text more the typical norm.

The general focus of a document, it’s conclusions and major messages should be obvious to a reader, visible at a glance, NOT buried in oceans of run-on text all the same tiny size.

Specific Format Suggestions:

Structure and format text to facilitate quick scan and selective reading.

Most of us have too little time, and careful reading takes time, regardless of profession.

On occasion, when frustrated by what I was reading and by its near total lack of sub-titles and formatting, I've taken time to reorganize and reformat other people's written work.

I've been surprised by how much more effective the reformatting experiments have been. Rather than trying to convince anyone here that a "structured format approach" is preferable, I'll simply suggest that authors and readers do their own short experiments.

Make important key ideas large and bold ... so visible at a glance!

So what is important looks important:! So major message can quickly catch one’s eye. So key ideas are self-evident and captured in short, single line sentences or short phrases. A reader's eye naturally jumps from one Bold statement to the next Bold in a sequence, skipping the lines of text in between almost automatically, as if they weren't even there.

Figure 27. Example 1. Strahorn, 2022.

Prioritize content graphically, in layers of importance and declining size

Authors should give readers a sense of the structure and relative importance of content. Content typically contains hierarchies of information, that range in declining order from specific major conclusions, component points, related logic, reasoning and support detail.

Such hierarchic organization, unfortunately, is difficult in narrative story-telling mode.

Figure 28. Example 2. Strahorn, 2022.

Short sentences and paragraphs generally are preferable to long.

Keep sentences to a single line, if possible, and only two or three lines if they're needed. Sentences are easier to read it they start at the left edge of page, not mid-line.

They're easier to understand because key ideas are more visible, not lost in text. A reader's eyes and mind get lost all too often in overly long run-on paragraphs.

Key Ideas in Short Phrases remain in mind more than long sentences.

Short-phrase subtitles enhance a reader's recall of the author's content and related logic. They facilitate reader retention and recall; they trigger related associations in our mind. In fact, it's those associations that makes the key-idea-short-phrases effective sub-titles.

Use Section Headings and Sub-Titles to ...

help readers scan, skip and read selectively ... and more purposefully
make document structure more visible to the reader
keep the reader better oriented within the author's content and flow
divide pages of endless text into more digestible chunks
help the reader listen and stay focused on what the author is saying
provide short, keyword phrase summaries that are easier to remember:

a visual image of a sub-title is more memorable than 2-20 lines of text.
trigger associations with a reader's existing knowledge more effectively
make content easier to read, absorb, review, re-read and understand
utilize the ways our human minds work more effectively
make remembering content easier in the short-term
facilitate improved reader retention in the long-term
Sub-titles are road signs for reader use, guides to the path ahead and behind.
Thus, they're also a shorthand overview or summary of a document's structure.

Effective formats clarify both author message and reader understanding.

Our eyes can capture paragraph essence at a glance if the page effectively formatted. Text formatting, done right, enhances both reading speed and retension of content!

The texture and appearance of words on a page affect ease of reading in beneficial ways. Graphically prioritized formatting clarifies document structure and information priorities.

Few books have adopted PowerPoint's focus on just a few major points.

An author’s most important ideas and statements are too often buried in volumes of text. Supporting details are far less relevant if the key ideas are not visually self-evident.

Few books have replicated the communication impact of a good video.

Why is a 20-minute video interview often more insightful than a 200 page book?

Because the author is summarizing the book’s major points, not the details and the reader’s time is typically too limited to invest 3-6 hours or more reading that book.

Written text, ideally should be structured, written and formatted to allow one to scan, skip and read the book selectively, much-like a 20-minute video summary.

Conversation often uses incomplete sentences; so should our written text!

The missing parts of the sentence are implied. And generally understood by both parties. Formatting written text is analogous to modulating one’s voice in a conversation, where changes in pace, volume, a pause or the use of hand gestures for emphasis are the norm.

We can use Ellipses … for pauses and CAPS for emphasis … as in conversation.

Lists buried in paragraphs are more effective if formatted as lists.

When an author announces three or four points or conclusions to follow, that three-ness or four-ness should be visually obvious to the reader, and a list makes that very clear.

Readers should NOT have to waste time searching paragraph or next pages to find the next item in a sequence when it should be visually obvious and easy to find at a glance.

List formats make reading and review far easier, as in the two paragraph examples below:

EXAMPLE: Traditional Continuous Text Paragraph

The books I read are typically about politics, democracy, the dysfunctional political system in the United States, money in politics, the dominance of corporate power, and the rigged political system, capitalism, giant corporate capitalism versus decentralized entrepreneurial capitalism, capitalism's strengths and weaknesses, rising and income and wealth inequality in the U.S., economics, investments, real estate, the stock market, the Federal Reserve Bank and big banks in general, the causes of the S&L crisis and the 2008 financial crisis, intelligence, the human brain, body and mind, psychology multiple personalities, collective intelligence, team chemistry, knowledge maps and dynamic knowledge repositories, computers, software, neural networks, society of mind, and computer aided design, architecture, urban design, design thinking, and design, in general.

EXAMPLE: Same Paragraph Formatted as List with Seven Subject Groups

The books I read are typically about ...
politics, democracy, the dysfunctional political system in the United States, money in politics,
the dominance of corporate power and the rigged political system
capitalism, giant corporate capitalism versus decentralized entrepreneurial capitalism,
capitalism's strengths and weaknesses, and income and wealth inequality in the U.S.
economics, investments, real estate, the stock market, the Federal Reserve Bank,
big banks in general, the causes of the S&L crisis and the 2008 financial crisis
intelligence, the human brain, body and mind, psychology and multiple personalities
collective intelligence, team chemistry, knowledge maps and dynamic knowledge repositories
computers, software, neural networks, society of mind, and computer aided design
architecture, urban design, design thinking and design, in general

Conclusions

I want to acknowledge that these Format Suggestions & Conclusions are my opinions, based simply on experience and common sense, and not based on any scientific research.

Authors are in charge here, so they must make a conscious choice to:
take the traditional, quick, less effective, no formatting approach, or
format more extensively with the reader in mind, clarify their own thinking and understanding, communicate more effectively and deeply, enhance their own message significantly, and

enhance the reader's understanding far more deeply.

Jonathan Finn

2D vs 3D displays in virtual worlds

At the 11th Future of Text Symposium it was striking that many virtual worlds we saw contained displays of various kinds: monitors, information boards and so on. Yet something feels wrong about 2D displays in a 3D world, or is it specifically 2D monitors that seem wrong?

Pursuing this line of thought, no doubt using some common ideas: Our computer GUIs have long been a simple virtual world in 2D (pretending to be shallow 3D), with virtual paper, calendars, buttons and other objects. In a VR world the natural step is to set these objects free, showing documents and tools out in the world not on a monitor. So why are there apps to show 2D monitors in VR - is it just a temporary step to get existing apps running? We can just ‘remove the bezels’ and make windows or their contents into 2D objects: but that seems wrong because 2D objects in 3D are physically impossible, and they would also miss a big opportunity.

So we could propose a strict VR design rule:

2D is shallow, 3D is deep: objects must use the 3rd dimension.

By following this rule, instead of 2D monitors in VR we could have 3D objects such as stacks of paper loose in the world. Or maybe they could be inside a 3D window: what would that be like, and have it? Perhaps a glass box just like a museum display case - call it a window box - with edges that you can see and pull to change the size in 3 directions. Indeed the only reason our current displays are 2D is technological. If they could display depth like a hologram we’d use that for everything: buttons, documents and people on Zoom calls, and our windows would cast real shadows not fake ones. A holographic display is just easier in VR. Of course, some media like video aren’t yet easy to show in 3D, but they could be simulated (maybe in shallow 3D) for now.

And why have an object trapped inside a window box at all? The box would be a view showing an object (or part of a large object) residing in another space. That space could be another room, maybe to see someone you’re talking to; but for a large document it might be a space containing just the document, or maybe a collection of documents you’re working on, arranged in various possible ways. You’d be able to scroll and zoom what the box shows you,

much like a 2D window. This is instead of moving around large documents in your actual room - two documents side by side would get ridiculous - or relying on old 3D compressed formats like books. In VR, space will still be at a premium: you may not want to share your room with everything and everyone you’re working with, or join a crowd of thousands to watch a presentation in a lecture theatre. Instead of visiting your VR office you could have a home office where you can arrange window boxes (as we do 2D windows now).

So far window boxes sound much like 2D windows, but are less so when it comes to sharing objects. Let’s say you can see a document or whiteboard in a window box, and other people in other rooms can also see it in other window boxes. To edit, you’d just reach through the glass, maybe grab a pen in the box and scribble away. Other people elsewhere could do the same, and maybe the physics could allow you to interact with them, say by handing each other tools inside the box.

It could also be useful to actually visit the space where a document resides, especially if it’s in a larger collection. Normally you’d edit the document from your home or office via a box, but sometimes you’d jump in to wander around the collection itself. Proposals for virtual libraries (and the like) sometimes assume documents are available in your workroom, or in a dedicated document space, but not both.

Conclusion

Objects in VR are treated as actually there, full-sized and complete. But a window box round a document or a person’s head would show it’s really in a different space, isn’t necessarily the same size as the box, and that other people (in other spaces) can view and edit it.

This improves on existing 2D windows, not just because they lack a dimension, but because they don’t make a clear distinction between objects which are real (here and editable by me alone) and objects being viewed (remote, shared and editable by others).

Kalev Leetaru

[to be confirmed]

Ken Perlin

Closing Keynote: Experiential Computing and the Future of Text

A decade from now, smart-glasses, and the networked infrastructure that will make them possible, will fundamentally alter everything from how children learn to how work is conducted to the meaning of shared public spaces. The reductive emojis of today's smart phones will give way to richer means of expression. It is hard to fully anticipate the impact of such a profound change on the nature of text, but we can make a few predictions.

Perhaps the most fundamental long term change may be that text, and in fact language itself, will evolve to work together with physical gesture, because gestures will be able to make things happen in our shared computer-mediated physical space. The greatest agents of this change will be small children, because children seven years of age and younger are actually the creators of natural language. Once this technology is in their hands, they will evolve the uses and meaning of text in new and powerful ways that we can hardly imagine.

Presentation

Ken Perlin: So this is talk of experiential computing and the future of text.

So my first experience is virtual reality. Probably. I've been thinking about this probably

happened when I was probably about six years old, and our neighbor who was a salesman, gave my brother and myself a set of. Plastic toy dinosaurs. And I would spend hours and hours and hours taking them on stories and adventures and making up all kinds of narratives with my dinosaurs. And then when I was probably about ten or 11, I discovered Harold and his purple crayon [50]. And that inspired me to think that, Oh, you can actually just create whatever worlds you want.

And then when I was 16, I saw Fantasia, and then that completely expanded my consciousness and I said, ‘That's what I want to do when I grow up!’. And in fact their dinosaurs moved.

And then about five years after that, I worked on the movie Tron, and I realized that working

with computer graphics in 1981 was not the same as what I had seen in nine made in 1940 with Fantasia.

So I started developing techniques to try to make computer graphics more interesting. I developed procedural techniques, what are now called compute shaders, the idea of running a complete program at every pixel, and that combined text and art in interesting new ways.

And then eventually those techniques made their way to making even better dinosaurs. This is a scene from Jurassic Parkbb.

And so so then I joined NYU, where I worked on all sorts of things. I fled industry for the safety of academia. I developed the first Zoomable interfaces, which is apparently become a thing.

I did all sorts of crazy experiments, like I discovered playing with 3D printing. So I said, How could you print four dimensions? In fact, how could you print five dimensions? So this is a a tumbling hypercube. So I guess that's four dimensions plus one projected down to four, and it's a five dimensional object.

And then eventually, I founded a lab that was specifically about trying to look at what would be everyone's shared experience of the future (NYU’s Future Reality Lab). I was reacting to the fact that VR is a thing where you put on this headset and you go off into your own space and you're disconnected from the physical world around you and the people in the same room.

This reiterates the historical experience of Edison's kinetic scope, which really didn't catch on, it wasn't until the Lumiere brothers put everybody in a big room with other human beings that movies became the dominant medium the early 20th century. It's because people really like to gather with each other. It's instinctive. It's part of our survival as a species.

We did a whole bunch of experiments at NYU in which we put people in the same physical room in shared virtual worlds. Probably our biggest was in 2018, which we first showed at SIGGRAPH and then at the Tribeca Film Festival. We had 30 something people experience the same virtual theater piece together, but the people could all see each other and hear each other as avatars. And we showed that to several thousand people at SIGGRAPH and then 1000 more people in Vancouver. And the idea was to see what could you have as a VR experience that was socially shared. So it could be experienced eventually by hundreds of millions of people.

Well, meanwhile, in 2006, I had read Rainbows End [51], a science fiction story that influenced me very deeply. The basic idea is it's 40 years in the future. Everyone wakes up in the morning, pops in their contact lenses, and they can see whatever they want.

This might seem a little fanciful until you think about Gordon Moore's prediction, Moore's Law, made in 1963, which turned out to be quite prescient, which is that computer power doubles roughly every 18 months in one way or another.

And if you just start taking this and thinking about it, then this is what the future of VR is very likely to look like:

And in fact, we can dive down into some details. Anything I can put on my head that's essentially like an Android phone is, which is what an Oculus Quest is, etc., etc. I can only get a few watts of power, but if I can plug something in the wall that's 300 watts of power, that's ten years in the future from whatever I can put on on my on my head.

Fortunately, Fast wireless is coming. We're only in the era of 5G now, but in another ten years we'll have 60. So we're going to go from from three gigahertz to 100 gigahertz. And when that happens, basically most of the computation is going to be happening not on your headset, but on something plugged into the wall.

So you'll be wearing some very, very lightweight thing that looks just like a pair of glasses.

But not just the graphics, but the vision, the machine learning, the gesture recognition, the object recognition, all of the smart stuff is going to be happening basically in the cloud, and that's going to change the nature of reality.

We will have virtual objects that we just accept as part of the built world, and we won't even think about it just the way as creatures of text when we go to a restaurant now and open up a menu and we look at the text on the menu, we don't think that's amazing. We just think that's normal. Even though, of course, any non literate creature wouldn't understand why we're staring at cardboard to order food. Similarly, there will be creatures that will exist in the world and we'll just accept them and interact with them as though they're part of our build world because they will be.

People will have face to face conversations in which whatever they want will be floating between them, and there'll be new kinds of interfaces that have very low cognitive load that will just be around us, instead of menus.

There are dystopian scenarios. We don't want to recreate this for everybody.

We we want to have the ability to have calm interfaces as opposed to just say when I have to put on my glasses, just as today people have to have their smartphones and yet everybody is advertising at me. So ideally (by the way, everything I'm showing you is a live demo), I want to be able to just sketch out a creature.

And the fact that I drew that creature means the creature is in my world, maybe wants to eat my plants, interacts with things, etc. and we want to have that kind (Ed: of interactions)…

I was heavily influenced by reading in 1990, 93, Steven Pinker's book, Language Instinct [52], where he pulls together work by many, many people on computational evolutionary linguistics. So, for example, we learn that children up to the age of seven invent language ,languages evolved by children. And when you think about this, it makes sense because if anything, that's not learnable by children, up to seven cannot be passed on, so

children actually evolved language, not grown ups.

And then I learned about things like Nicaraguan sign language studied by (??) Cengiz and others, where you see a generation of children, deaf children evolve grammar before everyone's eyes, learning how to create more interesting visual constructs to create more and more complex re-combinatorial syntax, which is only found in natural nature and natural languages and DNA, as one of the earlier speakers pointed out. I started playing around with these ideas. What would a future visual language look like?

And this is this thing called ChalkTalk, where I basically say, okay, so you have this idea of nouns, and because the nouns have a certain quality, they move. But, but maybe the way you draw this thing, so I'm drawing this live now changes the way it moves and. You can tie things together and ask questions. I use it to teach science and computer graphics. So, for example, here, this is a pendulum. And I can also find out like, Oh, what is it about this pendulum that is interesting? And it's that it has actually a sort of decayed sine function.

But notice that again, in terms of adjectives, if our adverbs, if I draw this thing differently, it's the same object, but it now has different physics and I can tell entire stories with this. So, for example, let's say I wanted to talk about energy conservation, so we have an idea of light. We have an idea of of a motion sensor, and I can tie the motion sensor to the light. And this is the part of the talk where I do a little bit of hand-waving so I can have a hand. And if the hand moves in front of this and all that's going on here is code that anybody can edit. And as you edit this code, different things happen and you can create different sorts of objects.

And just to sort of sum up, by the way, one nice thing is that computers are now

millions of times faster than when I first developed procedural textures. So now these procedural textures can happen in real time. This is the same sort of texture I made to make that marble vase, but now it's running many, many times a second and people can do real time design with this.

The software hasn't changed. It's just that the computers have gotten faster and faster and faster. So to sum up, I feel as though language is going to evolve. And I think about little six year old me. And in the future, when kids are able to create and evolve language using a visual component, what's going to be normal, everyday reality is going to basically be like what we today might think of as Harry Potter meets Harold and the Purple Crayon. And I'm hoping that we can all help to make that future of text happen.

Q&A

Alan Laidlaw: I've seen you demo ChalkTalk Ken, many years ago and I love it. And it's been a probably a cornerstone of what I try to build towards and think about. It's interesting in the context of GPT three, seeing the demo again and realizing, Oh, this is like prompt engineering before prompt engineering, which kind of got me thinking around. The. Do you imagine a version of to a general audience of drawing with Chalk Talk? But the response, the translation is wrong. You know, the ball, the pendulum is not what you had in mind, right? Would would the. Would there be a way to I guess in the daily world, you could say like regenerate the image, try again. What are the other possible near matches?

Ken Perlin: Well, I think language is a funny thing because and this is hard for me to wrap

my head around as I started thinking about it. We are all experts. Children are learning machines that are specifically good at learning natural language like language. Natural language is by definition, the thing that children learn really well. You try to teach kids Esperanto and they will spontaneously fix it because it's not a natural language. It doesn't match the way their brains want to learn. And so what Chalk Talk is trying to do in a way, is suggest when you have whatever is the future language, that there then what will be the feeling of that kind of conversation? So clearly, I'm I'm an expert at this. You know, I know what the vocabulary is, but I'm trying to imagine a world where everybody is in on the conversation, which is astonishing, is that every single person on this conversation can spontaneously, with no cognitive load, put together a grammatically correct sentence that's never been uttered before. And we just take that as the the base of human experience. So I'm not too worried about people making mistakes and having errors because that's part of how people talk. You know, somebody said somebody forms a sentence and creates an accidental one. That's just part of the common.

Alan Laidlaw: So just a quick follow on on that then, because that's interesting that using the metaphor of speaking and creating a language and language evolving 100% on board with.

When it comes to drawing the language, writing it out, the just, I guess how much is a. How much there is our hand, a kind of intonation versus a kind of language? Like when we sketch something, we we all sort of sketch arrows differently, right? Is that like a figure of a way of speaking that differentiates us? Is it kind of like a voice, or do you see that the hand being an essential part of. This new evolved language. Does that make sense?

Ken Perlin: One of the things that I do know a number of people have studied this is that the centers of our brain that control hand manipulation are very strongly tied to the parts of our brain where we use the word articulation for both verbal language and our hands. And in fact, there are some there are theories that the parts that are the language parts evolved out of the parts that are used for prehensile manipulation. So and in fact, everybody that you watch that speaks, they just automatically start moving their hands. So there already is a very strong connection. And I think if you look at the the beauty of what's been created and not here in communities with sign languages, which are incredible, I mean, they're just there's this there's this wonderful power of simultaneity that we don't have as serial speakers that I think we can all move toward that.

Fabien Benetou: I remember I tried ChalkTalk , I think, in 2019 when you presented it at NYU and released it on GitHub. And I remember cardboard mode, but I don't remember trying it in VR. Namely that you would, let's say, pinch in the air to start to do the same shapes and then be in immersive mode, even though it is web based. I'm wondering, has it

have you tried that before? If not, it not. Wasn't it interesting? And if you haven't tried it, why not?

Ken Perlin: Well, we've ported in our lab at NYU. We've ported chalk talk to shared socially shared VR, and we just look at it as one of the aspects of the many, many research questions about sharing virtual and extended worlds together. We don't focus entirely on the language question, but it is one of the things that we look at. So it's in there, but we also look at, for example, asymmetries and scale. How do you how do you use virtual characters as agents?

And they're just lots and lots and lots of the relationship between tangible objects and their virtual proxies. But one of the things we do look at is gestures as semantic creation.

Brandel Zachernuk: Thank you for the talk and for the presentation on ChalkTalk. I'm curious as to the sort of the extent of the utility that you found in real experiments with Chopped talk. I recall Ivan Sutherland talking in the nineties about sketchpad in the in the sixties, saying that ultimately it only really had two uses. One was to present the graphics for his thesis and the other was to draw some hexagons for his mother. And he never asked why she wanted them and the limitations being that a lot of things need representations or metal representations that that he wasn't able to come up with a graceful representation for. How do you find how have you tried and how do you find scaling chalk talk and what ends up being representational and where it ends up software?

Ken Perlin: Well, the big secret to ChalkTalk is that and this I got this insight from from I got to meet my my one and only hero who just like Ozma which is Randall Munroe who does xkcd and he I asked him what he thought about and he suggested a chalk talk and he said, draw the simplest possible thing. So what I found was the big insight was I go up to I want to say, Oh, I want to draw a planet or I draw an A person or I want to draw a duck. I go up to a whiteboard and make the simplest possible drawing, and I find that that's the right visual representation to start. And behind that I can put whatever code I want. I mean, I believe sketchpad was very pure. It was doing everything. I mean, I've been doing everything through this very pure system of constraints, and Chalk Talk is really a hodgepodge of techniques. It's it's really a way of, of, of sort of having an interface without apps so that instead of here's an app and here's an app, everything can talk to everything else. So I would I'd say I'm not running into the same limitations he was running into because I'm not trying to make something pure. I'm just basically trying to make something to present ideas for people. And if I have a new idea, I program it. I come up with some simple representation. I have ways of morphing things, and I think he was going for something much more idealistic in 1968 than what I'm going for. So it may be a little apples and oranges.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru: Hi. Thank you so much for this. This is wonderful. Are you thinking of this tool more in the sense of a cognitive tool or a communication tool? And I'll try to qualify that. I've been reading a bunch of Barbara Tversky studies and two of them come to mind that might be relevant in this context. One, she, she, she, she found out that when people are presented with a process or a mechanism that they need to understand, when she asked them to use gestures to mimic the movements of the process of the mechanism, they learn better. And also, when she asked them to sketch out the steps involved, they also learn better. But she also has a study on animations, and she actually found that where people were shown an animation when all the parts are moving, they it ended up not helping as much as they thought they would. So there seems to be something about either the internal movement of the mind trying to understand or a movement of the body trying to help the mind move and understand versus the low hanging fruit of just being given the movement that seem to be quite advantageous in terms of a cognitive approach, a cognitive perspective. And I believe Barbara is in the audience. So I this is more also a prompt for her to to step forward and correct my interpretation of her work. Thank you.

Ken Perlin: Yeah, I'm a big fan, of course, of Barbara Tversky's work, and I've learned a lot from reading her papers and having conversations with her. And I think it strongly informs what we do. As I mentioned to the previous answer, Chalk Talk is one of the early artists.

Chalk Talk is just a component of the kinds of questions we like to ask in our lab and the question of embodiment and in fact, shared embodiment between multiple people is really important. And all of her work, not just on that you cited, but also the use of dictates. Like when I'm in the same room with somebody as she and her students showed, you can say this or that or then or refer to things implicitly. And because things are embodied and you have gesture and eye gaze, etc., you're able to use language in this more implicit way, which is very, very powerful. So we're hoping that everything that we do will lead to a trajectory where people are in their bodies and using the full power of language which is meant to be used together with evolved to be used together with the physical embodied human in the same room. And I. Temporarily being stuck on Zoom is doing a terrible disservice to our power as humans, because who am I looking at right now? We are really, really good at integrating language with attention, direction, and I think once the technology catches up to the studies that she's doing, we're going to get a lot more out of these communicative technologies.

Livia Polanyi

Virtual Vision

I have bad eyes. They don't focus together and reading is difficult. I read almost exclusively on my tablet now which limits my choice of material largely to e- books. Very few scholarly or academic books are available for the screen and they are expensive especially for people without access to a university library system.

At the moment, propelled by a nagging curiosity to read about the work of the psychoanalyst, D. W. Winnicott, I have broken out of my digital prison and am currently deeply immersed in the messy theoretical and personal wars that roiled British psychoanalysis for the first half of the last century. Currently, I have ordered a “marks of paper” volume about the life and work of Melanie Klein, a formidable force who led one of the main combatant forces in the conflict to increase my understanding of what went on and, while am awaiting delivery on that book, I am breaking up my reading about Winnicott with quick dives into a volume of short biographies of Freud's patients ̶ whom he seemed to have been of no use to ̶ and a hard cover dealing with obsessives who collect 78 rpm records.

So here I sit, in my oversized comfy brown leather chair, with a small pile of books that is about to grow larger strewn about within reach of my arms. One volume on my lap, perhaps, another on a table to my left, the third wedged in between me and the side of the chair.

Finding where I broke off reading one when switching to another is always a bit of a hassle and locating a delicious quote to share with someone else requires fumbling around and frequent giving up before I locate the titbit. Of course, my tablet and phone are close at hand, too, since I need to chase down references, read up on articles I can get access to in the web, consider buying another book, get lost in some side path triggered by something or other and, of course, capture images of particularly interesting, enraging or downright silly passages I come across in my sedentary voyages across various landscapes.

So, what does this all have to do with text, knowledge, XR? Well, quite a lot actually. Allow me for a moment to propel myself into an XR future scenario. I am once more at work pursuing knowledge, the books I am reading strewn about my digital chair. I move from one to the other and from the books to other digital resources effortlessly, simply asking for which one I need now or maybe merely searching out the volume I want with my eyes. Following up on a reference, a question, an intuition is a snap ̶ I merely request more information and it appears ̶ similarly notes to myself I might want to make or messages I might want to send to others can be composed merely by asking they be created. Those memoranda can easily

include all the information I or my correspondent might need to access the sources mentioned. Capturing texts and creating linked files or other representation of exact quotations, relevant images, sources consulted or to be consulted and even snarky comments appear almost with the speed of thought. Editing, changing, deleting ̶ are effortless.

Physically still seated in my comfy leather chair with a cup of non-digital tea nearby, my mind roams freely through an imaginary library, filled with digital tools and resources, trusted amanuenses and tireless creators of indices and notations that allow me to wander through the fields of knowledge whether from psychoanalysis to vintage recording collection or from any topic to any other topic where my mind and poor sight want to go.

While physical books are comforting “transitional objects”, I look forward to roaming around a virtual library, my personal reality augmented by emerging technologies. While seated in my chair, drinking my entirely real world cup of tea. Unlike Captain Picard, however, I will prepare my tea in a real kitchen. It will not be Earl Grey.

Lorenzo Bernaschina

Gems

Gems is a personal knowledge management tool to explore and connect ideas visually with the help of AI

The total amount of information in the world is growing exponentially. Information overload is everywhere: on media, in companies, at school, on both our physical desks and digital desktops. There is a hyper-production of content and many contradictory sources available. Finding signals in the noise is becoming increasingly challenging and expensive. In 1982, Richard Buckminster Fuller estimated the knowledge production rate of humankind. In his book "Critical Path" he described the "knowledge doubling curve" by explaining that the rate at which information doubled was getting faster and faster.

Today knowledge workers are drowning in information they don’t have time to process.

We save interesting web articles and social posts we rarely revisit. We have messy desktops and folders. We have many books we barely have time to read, let alone interpret and digest. Same for newsletters, videos, podcasts, PDFs etc.

To make sense of this flood of information and make use of it, we have note-taking tools and cloud storage services that share a common design pattern:

They are built around hierarchical file directories (folders) which are the digital equivalent of the filing cabinets or shelves we had before the existence of computers and software. Back in the early days of personal computers and GUIs, designers needed to make them as familiar as possible to users. So they made skeuomorphic adaptations of the Desktop, the Trash, etc. Similarly, it felt natural to keep digital information organized as the physical one. It was easier to be adopted by users but the drawback was it didn’t leverage the full potential of the new tool. It’s hard to keep information updated, create cross-references, find patterns, surface ideas, or even just find something in filing cabinets and shelves

(the Zettelkasten of Niklas Luhmann is probably the most audacious endeavor in this regard). These limits are reflected in file directories.
To overcome them, they introduced tags and metadata, so we can attach semantic meaning to each note or file. However, it is manual work that requires a lot of cognitive effort. It’s time-consuming and the larger the knowledge base, the harder it is to keep it consistent

over time. We have to set conventions that are difficult to follow because sometimes we forget to add a label, sometimes we say “I’ll do it later” (which is never), sometimes we use synonyms or slightly different spelling, etc.
For many of them, the primary interface is a text editor. This forces us to think linearly within the boundaries of the page. It’s hard to see how the moving parts of a learning topic or project come together from there.

Because of these design choices, existing note-taking tools and cloud storage services act as passive storage containers. We create a note or save a file, add some tags, and leave them in a folder that we rarely revisit. We have to remember what kind of information we saved in the first place. We have to know what keywords or search methods will allow us to find it again. We have to develop ways to integrate old ideas with new ones. We have to prompt ourselves to expand on our notes, combine them, synthesise them into new realisations, and critique our own conclusions. None of these tools is designed to help us draw associations between concepts, which is how we really make sense of the world and generate new ideas.

Gems is designed to encourage associative and non-linear thinking through a combination of graph visualization and artificial intelligence:
The main interface is an infinite whiteboard. You can import, create and visually arrange notes on it. You can group notes into nested layers as in folders, but keep visual references between them with connections. So you have a flexible structure that matches your non- linear way of thinking, to build networks of thoughts instead of siloed containers that don’t talk to each other.
On top of it, AI constantly indexes your knowledge base. If you need to observe notes from non-trivial angles, such as semantic similarity, you can ask the AI to do it for you. You can make sense of retrieved results in dedicated views and make updates from there (e.g. connecting two similar notes) which will automatically reflect in the knowledge base. Once you return to the main whiteboard, you will see how the updates fit into the rest of your knowledge structure and you can rearrange some of it accordingly. This helps you review your overall understanding of a topic in light of the new insights suggested by the AI.

If you are a lifelong learner, for example, you can visually build a map of concepts from your readings and ask the AI to suggest connections between them. If you are a non-fiction writer,

you can keep track of all the sources and use AI to get a list of the most relevant to write an outline in a fraction of the time. If you are a fiction writer, the whiteboard helps you build the narrative world of your story visually, define characters, places, events, and see how they come together in your plot.

Artificial intelligence and human intelligence ultimately solve very different classes of problems. Machines are very good at processing a huge amount of information fast. We are very good at finding meanings, generating new original ideas and making connections between them. The magic happens when we combine the two. Gems captures the semantics of both your brain and AI, the former through the digital whiteboard, the latter through sophisticated large language models, and makes them communicate together harmoniously.

Computer science was born with the promise of extending the human mind with technology. Personal computers have kept the promise and now the technology is ready to take that bold vision forward with AI. That’s why I focused my studies on it after graduating in software engineering. Gems brings this power to creators, educators, researchers, journalists, and any other knowledge worker.

If you want to be part of this journey, please visit https://gemsnotes.app/

Mark Anderson

Image Maps and VR: not as simple as supposed

Abstract

Although it might be supposed that interacting with infographics in VR is ‘just’ a matter of using existing 2D image maps, it turns out to be less straight forward. Here, a few of the unexpected issues are explored with implications both for human users and the tools they employ in this context. The user’s methods and their tools both need some improvements to make the most of these new opportunities. Bolded text indicates sections of note for the skim- reader. Re-using infographics in VR need more effort than merely adding a simple image map.

Background

The Future of Text (FoT) weekly discussions have included exploration of interacting with infographics in VR, using Bob Horn’s various muralscc as the initial subject matter. Doing so, it became clear that a number of issues associated with that process are not well integrated, tool support is poor and that more explanatory documentation would be helpful.

The Problem Space

Whilst this exploration started with the above murals, the process is actually generic to moving any infographic from 2D to VR/AR use. Within that, there are two types of presentation to consider: bitmap/raster vs. vector graphics. Not considered here is the further complication of static displays based on dynamic data (static render of a dynamic source). A further issue is a degree of mismatch of the 2D pixel concept and 3D modelling methods.

It is reasonable for the casual reader to not care, personally, about the differences of the 2D vs. 3D/VR medium. But for those intending to move artefacts from one to the other—or create artefacts for such re-mediation, the differences of the two media’s design methods and formats do affect re-mediation in VR.

Display in 2D and bitmap (raster) vs. vector formats

On a 2D screen a pixel originally described the smallest discretely addressable part of the screen, an area that can hold a discrete colour value or pixel (explaineddd). In a bitmap† image each the image grid maps 1-to-1 with a pixel. In reality, it is far more complex than the simple physical grid we imagine partly due to constant improvements in displays, leading to notions like the ‘CSS pixel’.

Vector artwork defines an image in terms of a series shapes that can have strokes (borders) and/or fills. The vector approach makes the image independent of any particular resolutions (i.e. pixel size). However, such artwork is almost always rasterised on-the-fly to display it on a normal 2D display, though it allows scaling without loss of clarity (if scaling is applied before the image is rasterised).

The (HTML) Image Map

It is useful to describe the image map in the context of the Web for two reasons. Firstly it is the context in which the reader is most likely to have met the concept. Secondly, discussions in the FoT group have suggested that Web, or Web-compatible, standards will be important in how our work may move to/from the VR environment.

An image map defines (non-overlapping) shapes within the area of a webpage apportioned for a given image. The aim is interactivity: clicking on map area A opens link X, whilst clicking on area B opens link Y, etc. Thus one map may contain links to many different resources.

Image maps have been with us since the very early days of the Web. Insertion of images in web pages were first proposedee by Marc Andreessen in early 1993ff and shortly after Mosaic added an ‘<ismap>’ element† which was essentially the first image map, implemented server-side. Even then, Tim Berners-Lee had noted that whilst fine for bitmaps, this mapping method was less useful for vector artwork gg —though the latter was not used natively in Web pages at the time. Though current web browsers can now support the vector SVG format, crucially, the image map areas (shapes) are defined in pixels as offsets within the host images declared display size.

In 1997, the server-side ‘ISMAP’ concept was adopted as the W3C HTML v3.2’s client-side ‘map’ elementhh and it lives on into the current W3C HTML5 specificationii. Initially popular, especially for page navigation sections, push-back against use of text

embedded in images saw interest move on. As a result image maps, implemented in HTML, are encountered far less often.

Pertinent too, is the fact that software tools had to adapt fast to add features to make map mark-up easy; Adobe had to quickly develop a whole new tool ImageReadyjj (later subsumed into Photoshop) and similar happened for other vendors. This problem of a lag of affordances for new uses in our creative tools continues, as elaborated below.

Raster vs. Vector Data

In the early Web images were all raster graphicskk, those using the 2D ‘pixel’ grid, were the only graphics supported. This is the type of data for which the above image map was envisaged.

Much more recently vector graphicsll arrived in the form of SVGmm. Another visualisation form is the HTML <canvas> elementnn that uses JavaScript to draw shapes, in a vector-like manner but essentially results in a rasterised display. Most recently we have the likes of WebGL that can draw shapes in 2D or 3Doo. Whilst these methods support embedded interactions there appears to be no consistent notion of an image map. Unsurprisingly this means that relevant image creation tools lack affordances for making ‘image’ maps.

Whilst static infographics (i.e. with no dynamic elements†), like the murals above) can be brought into a VR space and displayed, they offer little further affordance unless within the context of a web browser object. There is no simple and consistent way to interact with the data (of which more below). These ‘dumb’ documents were designed to be displayed and read but not for digital interaction, especially in a VR environment; this poses a challenge for digital enrichment and re-mediation. Static images/charts have limitations for easy VR enrichment & remediation.

Simply displaying the graphic in VR, as if a painting on a wall, is comparatively simple. The harder part is being able to interact with a particular element—or a set of elements—within the image. This might be to explore the sources of an annotation or the issue it addresses. Or, it might be to re-present content in a different type of view, such as in a timeline. Consider too, that the source image—or its VR frame—will potentially be folded, zoomed or skewed in a manner that displays the graphic differently from its normal 2D display; this may occur either to display it on the surface of a 3D object or to re- mediate the content into other visualisations.

Issues for Presentation of Infographics in VR

Given the newness of VR, unsurprisingly the larger amount of infographics we might wish to bring into VR today predate notions of such use, so it is useful to consider legacy files from those we may create today or in the future.

Displaying image data in VR

Here, methods are less well defined than for 2D, reflecting the newness of the medium. An important point is to understand that 3D/VR is not created using cubic pixels, i.e. a direct extension of the 2D pixel. Image data, such as infographics, will normally end up as a rasterised fill laid onto the surface of a 3D object; this potentially removes some existing advantages of vector formats (in 2D).

Even if displayed in VR like a picture hung on a wall, the ‘picture’ is still part of a 3D object—albeit of tiny depth—so skeuomorphic 2D descriptions can be unintentionally unhelpful: skeuomorphic descriptions help describe the visual experience but can obfuscate how it is constructed.

All surfaces are not web displays

One way to display existing images is in an object that holds a web browser object, but that then interposes another whole layer of structure (the web browser) to ‘just’ display a picture. If the display has a dynamic element it may be useful—indeed necessary—in the short term to use an embedded browser object. Yet, if we wish to interact with an infographic, must the targets of the interactions be an endless growing collection of browser objects? If so, we should give attention to lighter ‘weight’ web objects so multiple use doesn’t generate unseen and unwanted overhead. Do we always need a ‘full’ browser object to display a usable HTML image map?

What is to be linked and where will the linked resource be found?

The HTML image map assumes a (click) interaction loads a URL. Originally, those URLs would have been web pages but now might be any valid resource such as a query-driven dataset relating to the clicked source. A question to ask, given the FoT group’s focus on

Visual-Meta and local resolution, is that—for new documents—what of the linked data travels in(side) the mapped artwork, or as a local but discrete (‘sidecar’) resource, or simply uses a URL and trusts to the current environment to de-reference it? How much re- mediating data should travel in/with the main image?

Considering this has implications for how data (transfer) format should evolve to support movement into and out of VR, as for a while work will likely involved mixed environment use or AR. Additionally, the type and range of environments my vary by participant in a shared workspace, so a ‘one size fits all’ is over-optimistic.

Hitherto stable text formats like RTFpp (or text+image RTFDqq) served the paper age well but their utility is lessened when re-mediation benefits from access to the document structure and style information is stored separately from the text, making it easier for different media to style optimally for that medium whilst reflecting the spirit of the author’s intent. RTF hides that relationship. Although RTFD stores image data outside the RTF stream, the intermixing of style and content in the text still remains..

Whether data always need be strictly Web-compatible is not yet clear. But the Web’s notion of a ‘DOM’ (Document Object Model rr ) is useful—the exposure of a text’s semantic structure. Whether only for anchoring visual styling or for allowing more complex interactions, a DOM—or similar structural description—clearly offers more in the VR environment than in 2D. In 3D, we are less strongly bound to manifesting essentially Print-era presentation and may more readily move to more complex interactions and reconstructions.

Legacy Files—re-mediating pre-existing resources

For raster images, using a Web (HTML) ‘frame’ to hold an infographic image is a tractable approach for creating discrete interactions but the frame object requirement may limit the ability to do much more than display/scale the image. Plus there are the scale issues of using multiple such object, as already discussed. Unless the source is high resolution, a paucity of pixels may also limit effective transformations in VR.

For vector files the image will, at present, likely be rendered in raster form even if from a vector source. So the click event anchors directly to the HTML defined area. Less clear is whether direct interaction with SVG embedded in a web object offers an advantage. For instance, it is also unclear how the SVG click event responds if part of the parent image is folded (i.e. hidden). Most likely, in a web frame context, this will be down to the browser object rather than the VR object on which it is displayed. Thus for some transforms and extra

level of complexity is added: to transform the 3D object, the limitations of the embedded browser must be acknowledged.

Current files—content designed for combined 2D/3D use

For pre-existing images little changes for raster files as the HTML image map remains in the HTML specification. By comparison, vector artwork mapping could improve considerably if creative tools were to add clearer tools for marking/mapping images and making it easy to connect the right data but that may be over-optimistic.

As vector artwork offers greater scope for transformation, also open is the nature of the the likes of the SVG click event (as discrete from an HTML image map click). Rather than simply point to a URL as in the past, the event might actually trigger a visual transformation, reveal extra information, etc.

Indeed, being able to ‘paint’ the SVG data more directly onto a VR object without a ‘browser’ layer would offer a less complex interaction moving in and out of VR, even if only in the volume of cross-environment traffic.

The nature of VR interaction

Even having imported an infographic into VR, drawn it onto a suitable object, we now need to consider interaction. Due to the way an infographic may be rendered onto a VR object, we may know what we wish to ‘click’, but doing so may not be so easy. A busy graphic may require fine-grained interaction to reach a specific point of interest but that must nonetheless match the fine-positioning ability of the interacting agent (human or otherwise), or else the degree of interaction is impoverished.

A useful affordance of VR is to give a limitless screen allowing for large changes of scale. Therefore, if interactive elements are tightly positioned within a 2D design, there needs to be some sort of metadata to signal the creator’s intent as to what—if anything—becomes an interaction target when the granularity of discrete targets is finer than that of the interacting agent. To do this requires a means to the creator of the infographic to define and store that information; such features do not yet existing meaningfully in mainstream creative tools.

Tool support for linking and re-mediation

Creative tools do seem to be a current constraining factor. These are not the tools used by the prototypers at the leading edge, where the tools themselves are evolving. Rather, the tools for the ordinary creators who represent the larger volume of such creative work. For instance, when a new infographic is planned and which will have a lot of mapped (linked) resources, it would be useful to be able add a pre-structured grid of links or per-VR-addressable-item layers. In parallel, it may help to have methods where more complex data is simply bound via a GUID, and the GUIDS mapped with to either a grid- or layer-based document structure.

Such VR-mapping-inclusive thinking does not yet seem present in the design of large scale creative tools.

However, the example of early Web graphics offer a clear example of how change is problematic for established genres of creative tools. New features can be added but this is not necessarily optimal for the user. When adapting for new methods it is not always optimal to simply try to force new methods into old processes. This is a challenge, because for new environments like VR, the necessary feature set for tools is not yet defined. The experimental nature of prototyping means that it may only hint at such features—unless the prototyping is intended to codify new processes and the tools/features to service it.

Lest some of these new tasks seem trivial, take as an example Bob Horn’ s mural† on

the UK’s nuclear waste program. Whether in vector or raster form, the discrete textual elements alone number over 450 (i.e possible discrete click targets), without even addressing some of the purely pictorial with which the VR user might wish to interact. Consider the task, today, of defining each target, manually, and its associated target data. This shows we need tools to allow intake, into an otherwise purely creative space, of structured data that can ether be used to scaffold the infographic creation (i.e. one object per layer). Alternatively, we need a means to rapidly attach data to each large numbers of objects in the source file.

Even with such new tools, user education matters—we can’t just assume everything is intuitive or made usable by ‘someone else’. The gap between imagined exploratory re- use of existing infographic data and what any but the expert may achieve remains large. For the person trying to use such material in VR, there is a human issue of education: both understanding the implications of thinking beyond legacy static publishing notions and an interest in and learning of the tools that can deliver a richer VR experience.

Conclusion

If our temptation is to think “we will just use an image map” as the process for infographic display in VR, it suggests that in our rush to imagine VR working we aren’t also taking time to consider the emerging process to render our imaginings. It may be the case that image maps are a part of the solution but aren’t the complete answer. Why so? An image map with appropriate data, is only a help if the rendering tool can understand it, whilst even appropriate data is insufficient if the human user doesn’t fully understand creation of that data or know which tools if any they can use to make or manipulate the data.

Even if all or most VR objects are essentially browser-type displays, an image map with appropriate enrichment data is only a help if the VR environment can render it, whilst retaining the ability for appropriate interaction. Alongside this metadata is insufficient if the human user doesn’t fully understand the how to structure the data for interaction nor has the tools at their disposal to do this other than manually.

Thus it is that (re-)using infographics in VR go beyond the current notion of the thing we call an image map.

Mez Breeze

Artificial Intelligence Art Generation Using Text Prompts

With novel terminology such as ‘image synthesis’ and ‘latent spaces’ percolating rapidly through the AI arena, the realm of Artificial Intelligence in relation to art generation is currently accelerating with breakneck speed.

Since the advent in early 2021 of OpenAI’s text-prompted image generation program DALL- E, an explosion of AI text-to-image generators have emerged including Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Imagen, Craiyon, and NightCafe Studio. Along with this burst of AI art generators harnessing text in a very functional way – as text-to-image crucibles – the corresponding wave of image synthesis is instigating a fresh reliance on, and examination of, the role of text itself as an imagination engine, with accompanying microstories proliferating alongside AI- genned imagery. With each update and/or subsequent jump in the innovations these AI art generators are providing creators, there’s a corresponding surge towards text exploration and experimentation especially in terms of explanation, description, and narrative manufacturing. Alongside these surges is the need to develop associated ethical guidelines and best use principles when using these text-prompted AI art generators, including rules for prompt engineers, and the moral - and potentially legal - minefields it provokes. This paper will trace such explorations, experimentations, and ethical considerations associated with the use of using such text-dependant AI art generators, while outlining the concepts involved in text-to- image synthesis and the process of text prompting through an examination of the AI-human collaboration ‘[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories [Book One]’.

https://mezbreeze.itch.io/portraits-volume-one

Beginnings

So it’s 1988 and I'm hungover and crouched over a desk half-heartedly watching my University lecturer give a talk about societal impacts and future trends. At one-stage the lecturer uses the term Cyberspace, a concept which at the time is new to me, but it gets my attention to the point where I'll later look up the term (when I'm less hungover) and have my tiny 17-year-old mind blown by what I find.

Jump to 1994 and I'm sitting in an offwhite computer lab where a friend, a mechanical engineering student, is telling me all about the wonders of the Internet and the World Wide Web. After she leaves I dive full force into the guts of programs like Telnet, Fetch, and Mosaic: and thus begins my becoming hooked on the joys and terrors of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Jump again to the year 2022 and I am sitting in my studio listening to the founder of an Artificial Intelligence organisation who is currently onboarding us, a group of beta testers, who have been invited to test their AI image synthesis generator. This is not my introduction to AI Art generators which happened a few years prior, but it is still a pivotal moment where the true societal and cultural impacts of such technology start to manifest in my limited consciousness.

In all three instances just described, each encounter can be viewed as a milestone regarding introductions to, and interactions with, technology that would (and will) proceed to shape our contemporary world for better and/or worse. Cyberspace, the Internet, XR and VR, and Artificial Intelligence have had (and will continue to have) explosive societal impacts. In terms of the cultural gravitas with which they should be viewed, just as the Internet has become inextricably embedded into the very fabric of humanity's relationship with technology, Artificial Intelligence in general – and the use of text in relation to the production of AI-generated artwork using text prompts specifically – holds the potential to critically impact industries, institutions, individuals, and societies at large.

The Stage

Since April 2021 when OpenAI’s text-to-image generator DALL-E intro-splashed across the AI scene, AI Art generators have burst onto the ‘next-big-thing’ stage in spectacular fashion. If you’re a regular user of social media, it’s highly likely that you’ve recently (and regularly) been exposed to a stream of AI imagery shared by eager creators using text-to-image generators like DALL-E2, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Craiyon, NightCafe Studio and Imagen who are keen to explore and in some cases unfortunately exploit such methods of producing visual output. Creators, developers, critics, academics and commodifiers all seem keen to jump on the AI Art bandwagon and hitch their fortunes to the next tsunami tech- wave.

The Lowdown

Text-to-image AI Art generators are for the most part based on neural networks trained on massive datasets (some of which are scraped from the Internet itself) that produce output through Diffusion, a practice where images are produced effectively from randomness through a process involving image noising and denoising. Using text structures called prompts that contain a combination of descriptors, tokens, styles, punctuation, modifiers and concepts, the resulting visual outputs can mix the strangest combination of elements to produce unique results. Such image synthesis occurs out of what is termed a ‘Latent Space’ or a type of abstract, multi-dimensional limbo which contains visual potentialities dependent on the datasets used in the AI training which are almost ‘summonsed up’ from this space by a specific combination of words and punctuation.

In the rush to embrace text-to-image generation, the term prompt engineers - used more broadly in machine learning - is now being co-opted to describe people using such text-to- image generators who craft such prompts. Prompt engineers deploy text in particular ways to direct their desired image output, with manipulation and experimentation playing a key role. This need to play with text and semantic structuring has fostered a fast-moving subcultural base, one that is gestating and evolving rapidly with digital spaces like Github, Hugging Face, Replicate and Google Colab being harnessed as playgrounds in which to test such experiments. Alongside the role that text takes in such explorations (that being one of an imagination engine), with each AI Art generator upgrade or modification like inpainting, outpainting and upscaling, the AI Art field becomes broader and more adventurous. Text-to- image adopters are also using text in novel ways alongside their generated AI Art, with a surge of poetic and fiction-based stories proliferating – AI Artists like Vladimir Alexeev and Dr Siobhán O’flynn have been using such AI output as the backbone of larger story-based projects.

One such storytelling project I’ve been constructing since July this year is a book series based around text-to-image output. The first book in this series, [Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories [Book 1] is a collaborative effort between myself and the AI DALL-E2.

The book is comprised of a fusion of AI generated portraits and microstories written in my signature English/code-hybrid language called Mezangelle, and was inspired by being invited by the OpenAI team to participate in their AI Artist Access Program (OpenAI being the organisation responsible for creating DALL-E2). This book can be accessed here: https:// mezbreeze.itch.io/portraits-volume-one.

The Impact[s]

Academics, artists, and non-artists of all stripes have begun to wade into debates concerning the legitimacy of text-to-image generated art, with a large percentage of the resulting dialogues veering predictably towards the hyperbolic. There are also valid concerns being expressed by certain societal sectors regarding the potential seismic cultural shifts that might well be associated with such AI tech, and although the term ‘disruptive’ has been ridiculously co-opted to represent anything even vaguely associated with non-standard use, I can’t really think of a more apt arena for true disruptive impact than AI text-to-image (and very soon

text-to-video, text-to-animation, and text-to-game) generation. [Author Note: examples of how quickly AI generative fields are accelerating can be seen in the fact that in the three weeks since this paper was presented at the 2022 Future of Text Symposium, Google and Meta have both released new text-to-video generators and Microsoft has announced the inclusion of text-to-image AI Art generator into a new Office app called Microsoft Designer.]

Just some of the creative industries and individuals likely to be heavily impacted by the growing use of AI Art generators include graphic design, concept artists, photography, illustration (storyboarders, cartoonists, plastic arts practitioners), film and video editors, curators, animators, game developers, and interactive storytellers. And this doesn’t even cover how AI will impact and is in fact right now affecting businesses like stock photo outlets, advertisers, and publishers. In fact, there’s already been several controversies surrounding the use of text-to-image generators, such as the furore over the Midjourney- crafted AI image that recently won a Colorado State Fair Digital Artwork Prize, and the disturbing report of real medical photos being included in datasets used to train AI image synthesis models. There’s also the fact that as of September 2022, Getty Images have banned any AI works from being uploaded or sold via their platforms.

It's been extremely enlightening being involved in the both the DALL-E2 and Stable Diffusion Beta Testing programs: alongside the absolute wonder and delight in using such tech, seeing inbuilt implicit bias concerns arise has been less than ideal, as has problematic content leaning towards misogyny, hatespeech and racial stereotyping, as well as training sets (and even worse, beta testers themselves) perpetuating the myth of the 'great' male artist with some women-identifying artists and representations being relegated to muse status and/or male gaze fodder. But this is just the tip of the AI Art generation iceberg: other issues being raised over text-to-image art include legal ramifications regarding copyright, the ease of propaganda creation, and problems surrounding the datasets on which generators have been trained that include living artists work without any permissions or compensation given.

The Rules

The development of crucial ethical guidelines and best use principles when using text- prompted AI Art generators, including rules for prompt engineers, can’t come soon enough. Some ethical questions that might be considered when using such text-to-image generators

include:

When writing text prompts, do you absolutely need to include references to particular artists, living or deceased?
If you must include artists in prompts, should you make sure to use a mix of many artists and styles, and preferably only included the names of deceased artists?
Think long and hard about whether it is acceptable to use text-to-prompt generators for the creation or dissemination of hateful or harmful content.
Consider if your text prompts replicate or emulate any overarching biases or lopsided power structures, and if they do, whether it is ok to a) use them in the creation of AI Art and

b) to promote or publicise such images?
Consider the implications of the long-term use of AI Art generators on our increasing Climate Emergency due to image synthesis being extremely computationally demanding.

Conclusions

Jumping back to that hungover morning in 1988, if I’d known then what I do now about the wide-ranging impact of Cyberspace and the Internet in general I’d probably have laughed and then sobbed, especially given the epistemic crisis humanity is currently facing due in part to the development and use of such technologies. Just as in the 1990’s I would never have been able to predict how impactful the Internet would become, it’s almost impossible to ascertain just how text-to-image AI Art generation will manifest in the future – but if we’ve learnt anything from the past (including the weaponisation/politicisation of text and media in relation to propaganda and political grandstanding) we’ll be wise to hardbake lessons learnt from such technologies into all aspects of AI Generation, including the textual nuances and moral considerations relevant in the construction of such imagery.

Michael Roberts

Metaverse Combinators: digital tool strategies for the 2020’s and beyond

Introduction

For the last 30 or so years, one of the dominant paradigms in tools for making digital content has been the “node-code”, “flow-based programming” or “visual programming” style more accurately referred to as “node-based programming”.

In these tools, digital content is expressed by connecting together “nodes” into graphs using edges or “wires”, with this variant of programming being commonly known as “wiring”.

Modern examples of the genre include Touch Designerss, the Maya Hypergraphtt, PDuu, Blueprintsvv and others.

Example applications of this technology have ranged from shader editing all the way though to controlling high-level behavioral interactions, as would normally be performed using some sort of conventional scripting language, such as Lua or JavaScript. Application areas are now extending to distributed network applications.

The tools typically exhibit much finer grain control of the “look and feel” of digital content than the current direction of using natural language input to “generate” AI-based art, which is disrupting the art content generation pipelines. They allow users to “tweak” on minor visual appearance properties in a way that is not currently possible with text input AI tools.

On the other hand, in AI tools “complexity is free”, meaning that users to not have to explicitly code or “make” it. This paper attempts to analyze some of the potential interactions between these two, non-mutually exclusive, paradigms, as well as provide some “language” for discussing such relationships.

Programming using node-based languages

Standing in contrast to conventional textual programming, node-based programming straddle the gap between so-called “real programming” using conventional textual languages (typed

or untyped) and simple, typically database driven, configurations.

Node-based languages allow the user to use or combine small modules (or nodes) which express limited behaviors controlled by parameters (or properties). The behaviors of the concert system expressed by such tools thus controlled by 3 elements: the selection of the nodes used; how the nodes are connected together (topology) and the properties of the nodes.

Nodes typically express “ports” which are used to connect to other nodes. The act of “wiring” involves drag-and-drop type operations in which “wires” or “edges” are connected between the ports as well as the setting of properties for nodes using some sort of property editor.

In a 3D/VR, multimedia or a similar context, nodes can function as “media objects” – with high level properties such as “resource locators” that point the runtime system to load a mesh, character, sound, area of text, or other media object. Likewise, lower-level surface appearance data, such as mesh textures, procedural geometry, height maps, etc., can all be expressed by graphs with appropriate runtime and node support.

A variety of underlying implementation mechanisms have been used as execution engines for such graphs. In the author’s current work, this engine is a parallel message passing virtual multicomputer, but other approaches have included compilation into machine code or intermediate representations such as SPIR-Vww, conventional sequential textual languages, dataflow models, execution using function evaluation or, in the author’s 1989 work [53] [54], compilation into a parallel programming language.

Combinatorial thinking

Combinators are a higher-order functions that uses only function application and previously defined combinators to derive a result from supplied arguments.

Based on original work by Moses Schönfinkel and Haskell Curry in the early 20’s, combinators have found widespread application in functional programming though languages like Haskellxx.

The essential idea behind combinators is that function state is bound into the function invocation using only bound variables (as opposed to free variables) – I.E., arguments to functions, and then functions are combined to end-results of arbitrary depth.

However, “constants”, such as “1” in a function declaration, can also be considered “state” when viewed though a certain lens (changing the function by changing the “constants”). Such splitting of hairs leads to a grey area between object-oriented and functional languages in which the act of editing a function definition can be regarded as

“changing the state of an object” – analogous to the setting of properties on a node in a node- based language.

Similarly, the act of connecting nodes together with edges can also be regarded as combination – or the process of enumerating combinations or configurations of the smaller, simpler functions “contained” in the nodes. We therefore use the term “combination” and use this to refer to the act of programming a node-based system via the connecting of various nodes together into a working system via wires and the setting of their properties.

Node-based languages are deeply combinatorial, as are other systems commonly in use for digital art, like painting programs. Such programs define a “combinatorial space” which can be explored by users making digital artifacts – artists serve as navigators of such a space, making aesthetic choices and exploring pathways though the space defined by the tool that make sense both from a cultural perspective and also with their own sense of how things “should be”.

Meta tools

Metaprogramming is generally held to be a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as data. It is a part of the genre of thinking which believes that tools should have the ability to make more, and higher-level, tools.

Traditional crafts have a notion of a “mother craft” or “fertile” tools. These are toolsets and processes which can give rise to artifacts that can be used for the same or other applications. Blacksmithing (the traditional craft concerned with forging metal) is one example. Using a relatively simple set of underlying or “bootstrap” tools (hammer, tongs, forge and anvil), blacksmiths can forge all the tools they need to make both tools for their own use and also tools for other domains, such as farming, pottery, or even sewing. Over their lifetime in the craft, blacksmiths typically accumulate large numbers of self-forged tools, ranging in application from simple to complex. The entire western industrial revolution can be considered as emerging from this historical activity.

The h-graph or “hierarchical” graph model used in some node-based languages holds one key to the development of such “fertile” tools in the visual domain. In this representation, nodes and edges can conceptually be “wrapped up” into a higher-level object – itself a “node” – the composite behaves like a “primitive node” but is itself a compound object formed from the combination of multiple lower-level objects, in the same sense that we build modern software using libraries. When such an object can, via component objects, make other objects, access/set their properties, and connect them in various different

topologies, we have a true “metaprogramming” tool, in which we can write tools “in the tool” that themselves make things. The result is capable of spawning complexity and up leveling the functionality of the toolset – a “strange loop” in the sense of Hofstadter.

Making tools expands the combinatorial space defined by the original tool, leading to an entity that “grows” with time.

Information Hiding

One of the key critiques of visual programming languages is that they “lead to mess” – detractors see a mass of “boxes connected with lines”, and it is true that many implementations of the paradigm do suffer from this fault. Hence, visual programming applications that don’t implement “information hiding” force users to consider “all the nodes” at the same time – an overwhelming process give the large amount of bandwidth available in our visual system.

We think that the unreasonable effectiveness of textual programming is somewhat caused by the information hiding properties inherent in text – instead of navigating a large, complex structure “all at the same time”, good programmers wrap up their code into hierarchical pieces – classes, functions, and methods - which perform simple, well-defined operations that can be tested and reasoned about separately. The motivation for this is probably related to the fact that we can only hold a relatively small number of concepts simultaneously (normally equated to 7 [55]).

Given that the textual representation is “opaque”, textual programmers probably mainly navigate a mental model, informed by their reading of the text. To be effective, visual programming systems must implement explicit “information hiding” mechanisms that allow users to flexibly consider sub-pieces of their program rather than the “whole”, which is outside comprehension parameters.

Hyperparameters

It is well known that adjacency matrices can be used to express graph structures. Such matrix representations (with weights) are heavily used in deep learning systems, for example tensor- flowyy.

Similarly, individual low-level parameters, perhaps the properties in the nodes in the aforementioned systems can be encoded as “weights” in a much larger matrix structure representing the overall parameter space defined by the visual programming system. The size

and scale of these structures means that they are not readily comprehensible by humans because many of the information hiding properties from the previous section simple do not exist over this representation.

Likewise, the scale of such a system can be heavily affected by the combinatorial nature of the node-based language, as well as additional parameters defining sum-of-linear function structures that appropriate potentially non-linear parameters inherent in the graph model. We have thus come to a situation in which it is possible to encode the “program” in a visual or other content creation tool using a matrix representation which is almost completely opaque to a human overseer.

This is, in fact, exactly what tools like Midjourneyzz and Dali-E-2aaa do, but they approach it from the point of view of learning the structure (and thus hyperparameters) for such a representation though consideration of the output from such tools.

Once trained, such a structure cannot “grow” unless it is retrained on different input data, a limitation that reinforcement learning sidesteps, by constantly retraining itself by “playing a game and observing the results” with the domain it is working in.

Machine learning approaches

Midjourney and Dali-E-2 create realistic images and “art” from descriptions phrased in natural language which are used to activate particular sets of hyperparameters inside a learned representation. As such, they form part of the “future of text”.

In a short time period, these tools have become so prevalent in popular culture that we will skip over a more in-depth description of the process of using such tools, and merely point out several key take-aways.

Such tools leverage the computer graphics tool set built over the preceding 30 years, because they process (as input) imagery primarily generated using such tools. The process of processing such images encodes properties of the images into a set of hyperparameters expressed in a neural network.
Likewise, they leverage and implicitly encode the individual process and techniques of artists who originally used the digital tools.
Techniques for texturing, painting and other mechanisms, accessed by the artists, have explored a significant portion of the combinatorial space made possible by the original tools and thus the space over which the learning operate.
AI cannot, at least conventionally, invent “new” space – it merely remixes and combines hyperparameters extracted from the combined original work of the artists.
Fine details – what would normally be referred to as “technique” in art or programmed for in a tool (such as surface appearance) is essentially “free” in such a model – users of the tool no longer have to make this fine level of detail.
Operating at this level, imagination is “constrained” by the textual navigation method. Consider that I imagine a cat – if I am drawing a cat, I am going to have a lot of latitude in how I represent the cat. Some of this complexity (the sum of all possible input cat art) is expressed in the hyperparameter space of the AI model, but we currently lack the tools to navigate it, view it in any sort of totality, or really understand it’s nature.
Much of the conventional computer graphics pipeline, as exhibited by generations of SIGGRAPH papers, has focused on hand-encoded techniques for producing particular visual appearances. This pipeline, which encodes a lot of knowledge about process and performance, could potentially be obsoleted, if we move to a world in which “rendering engine output” is directly encoded neutrally, as pointed to by techniques like NERF [56].

Moving forwards together

It is tempting to look at the “AI art tsunami” and think that the sky is falling for conventional tools.

However, some companies making tools, such as Adobe, are beginning to release products in which AI is used to augment more conventional digital content creation tools.

If we choose to continue to represent content in ways that make sense from a cognition perspective for human beings, then these representations look a lot like the tools and processes that have gotten us to the point we are at now and which generations of people have thought about with a view to simplicity of representation.

Instead of making AI tools which make remixed content from parsing the output from the conventional tools, why not begin to focus on making tools which learn into the common computer graphics representational stack and thus unlock the combinatorial power of human creativity?

For example, rather than making a tool which synthesizes images directly, rather make tools which generate 3D models and surface descriptions suitable for use in conventional CG pipelines, surfacing control over such objects in the form of the node-based programming which countless technical artists are already familiar with. Learning into such a representation also allows artists to “tweak” at the fine grain knobs and dials to obtain exactly the results they want, rather that accepting art “made” to quite a vague specification.

Such an effort clearly is not without difficulties – for example learning over complex

parameter spaces of non-linear functions is a current open research problem. However, the payback is that successive generation of tools writers both learn fundamental mechanics in the operation of their tool and have access to AI functionality that makes life easier.

The alternative, unfortunately, holds possibilities of a world in which the creative process that defines much of what we are as humans is progressively decoupled into the computer’s domain.

Conclusion

We have tried to outline with a broad brush the productive area of synthesis between conventional node-based art tools, and the newer digital tools based on machine learning - both discussing the parameterized space over which all such tools work and drawing some conclusions about how to think about this space. Finally, we have offered some suggestions for ongoing work in this space.

Omar Rizwan

Journal : Against ‘text’

Figure 29. Figure 1. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1300565745147863040. Rizwan, 2022.

I don’t know if text has a future, or even if it should have a future.

I guess, fundamentally, I’m uncomfortable with the whole framing of ‘text’. I think that it comes with a lot of unhelpful baggage and connotations. When I start with ‘text’ as my basic concept, at some level, I’m starting with English prose, and alphabetic letters, and keyboards, and a rectangular screen or a piece of paper on a desk, and ‘plain text’ filesbbb.

Yes, you can say that 'text' also includes mathematical notation, or YouTube videos, or comics, or other writing systems, or any other media that humans have come up with, but I think that’s a sort of slippage. I think that if you articulate your goals in terms of text, you may pay lip service to all of those other forms, but you will always tend to treat them as exceptions and deviations from the norm. The picture in your mind will always start with the blank Word document or text file where you type some words in, and then you'll jam in some carve-outs to ‘embed’ everything else among the wordsccc. Things other than words will always be second-class.

My background is in computing, and in programming, and in trying to come up with new ways to interact with computers, and I think that computing has suffered very deeply from the centrality of text. Maybe that centrality was understandable, say, fifty years ago— computers were slowddd, and text is relatively easy to store and process, after all. But today, our computers are more than capable of processing graphics and video and sound and other

rich media, and I’m struck by how weak our tools still are when it comes to anything that isn’t texteee.

Figure 30. Figure 2. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1351319206692868097. Rizwan, 2022.

I’m struck by the fact that if I write a paper with LaTeX, or make a Web page with Markdown, it’s trivial to add prose, and it’s a monstrous inconvenience to add a figure. The figures are the important part!fff Text exerts this gravity, because it’s the container, it’s the norm. The text lives directly in the file you’re editing (and the figures live in separate ‘mage files’ outside it). You’re constantly (subconsciously) pushed to explain things with text, because it’s so much easier at a micro-interaction level to edit text than to add or change a ‘figure’ggg.

(I think that this constant low-level push to use text is a way in which computing is a regression from paper—on a computer, it’s so easyhhh to produce and edit text that it dominates otheriii, richer, potentially more appropriate media. On a piece of paper, if you want to draw something in the middle of your prose, you can just draw it. Imagine if making these were as easy as typing:)

Figure 31. Figure 3. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1201359487661223936. Rizwan, 2022.

Figure 32. Figure 4. https://twitter.com/Sonja_Drimmer/status/1368966157106114561.

Rizwan, 2022.

(On a piece of paper, drawing is no different from writing; it doesn’t represent a change of mode; you don’t have to build up the emotional energy to move off your keyboard and open a different file and a different application.)

Even when I’m programming—there are so many things that deserve a graphical representation. I see it even when I have a bug or when I just want to know what’s going on with my program. It’s easy to log text, but it’s also so limited. What if I have a pile of data and I want a chart of it, not just summary statistics or random samples? What if I’m working in a domain (like designing a user interface, or drawing a map, or designing a building) that is inherently spatial and graphical? Yes, I can make a computer program that produces graphics,

but it often feelsjjj like ten times the effortkkk of producing text. Text is the default, and it’s a bad default.

As you think about the future of media, I want to make the case that micro- interactionslll will dominate over conceptual models and data structures. I think that how it feels is a lot more important than what the concepts aremmm. I think that people will gravitate toward interactions that feelnnn good and interactions that are immediately at hand.

Figure 33. Figure 5. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1327901730235793411. Rizwan, 2022.

That’s why I’m so concerned with whether I have to go into a separate file, and whether I have to switch from the keyboard to something else, and whether I can just call a print() function versus having to look up some graphics library, and with what things I have to go out and ‘embed’ into my document as opposed to entering in place. I believe that these little frictions and barriers are overwhelmingly important.

I think that we live in a world that is dominated by systems that get the micro- interactions right. The iPhone, video gamesooo, social media (scrollingppp as a formative interactionqqq)…

And I think that a lot of the power of ‘text’ on the computer is that it has some really greatrrr interactions associatedsss with it (typing, selection, copy and paste, Unix tools, text editors, files…). Text has this manipulability and ‘open space’ naturettt, a bit like the nature of files or of objects in the physical world. There are all these operationsuuu you can do (and know how to do) to text. Part of this is built-up capital that already exists: the hardware capital that every computer has a keyboard, and the human capital that everyone knows how

to use that keyboard. How can we get those kinds of interactions, that at-hand-ness, for other media?

But that’s also why I don’t know if text has a future. What if the smartphone is the real personal computer in the endvvv? Then we have a future where the microphone and camera and multitouch surface, not text input, increasingly become the favored modes of interaction.

Figure 34. Figure 6. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1351377818769231875. Rizwan, 2022.

As much as anyone, I admire Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and all their colleagues and heirs. But I also think that there is a certain arrogance to saying that the task ahead is simply to complete and execute their vision, that any problems are just problems of implementation. What can we learn from how the computer has actually been adoptedwww? What can we learn from the actual interactions and applications that have appealed to people? What can we learn from the genuinely new media that have popped up on laptop screens and smartphones, that could not have existed before the Internet or the phone camera?

Figure 35. Figure 7. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1073639143878492161. Rizwan, 2022.

Text is a strangely (historically and culturally) specific bundle of technology to orient a vision of the future around. Text is important, but it’s gotten a lot of attention already. There’s something that’s always a little exclusionary about text. It excludes the complexity that can go into full-fledged speech and writingxxx. It excludes inline graphics and diagrams and notations that are often vital tools for understanding and problem-solving. I hope that the future of media will be broader than that.

And – above all – to build that future of media, I believe that we'll have to find a set of interactions that really work, not just a set of concepts.

Patrick Lichty

Architectures of the Latent Space

Since 2020, I have been working on elements of writing with various Machine Learning platforms, and these are some rough working notes of that epistemological arc, focusing on my work with Prompt-based image generators.. Initially, I had created a project called “Personal Taxonomies,” in which I was painting “Asemic” calligraphies based on Japanese, Mongolian, and Persian calligraphies, which were fed into a GAN on the playform.io platform. The goal was to see if, given a large set of images, a form of “Digital Rorschach” by looking at the commonalities between all the images, based on Noam Chomsky’s notions of Deep Structures. If I fed a comparative machine learning engine based on finding patterns, could I find internal consistencies in my own cognitive/creative processes? I invite the reader to find my writings on this subject. For our purposes, this text is based on the author’s next step: visual concretism in prompt-based machine learning image generators, and the centrality of writing in the creation methods, and my aims for finding alterior spaces in Machine Learning’s latent image spaces as forms of concretized writing.

Context

Since the beginning of 2022, when I started using NightCafé, I became very interested in the notion of text-prompted machine learning image generation.

The first foray into this was a visual poem, "The Martin: for Negin," which showed at last year's Electronic Literature Organization conference. I'm not afraid to say that it was a concrete animation of a poem I wrote for my wife and partner, Negin Ehtesabian, during our first time together in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2018. I fed the poem into that particular engine, and with my voiceover and guitar improvisation, I created this specific work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w O5luxZlQ

Because of its visual qualities, I found Night Café tedious in a short time. Next, I started working with Midjourney AI, which is probably one of the more middle-aged text-based AI programs, which now, I believe, is in its third version. It's a pay system with a well- established community and a wide set of tools to explore prompting.

Content

NOW, HERE IS WHERE I'M BEING A TERRIBLE WRITER – GETTING TO THE

THESIS HERE, and maybe that's part of the point – working through visual narrative in AI is an indirect proposition. In talking with people like Ben Grosser, Marco Cadioli, Casey Reas, and Talan Memmott, there are several points that I would like to make about this form of imaging.

1: This form of imaging is not about art making but writing. Prompt-based AI image generation is a concretization of syntax in the form of the prompt that the translator decodes. The differentiator then maps this interpretation to the latent space of however many billion or so images in the database. To be more precise, these practices are about exploring the latent image space through text as a form of index apparatus. As discussed later, that “index” can be a wide range of content.

2: Machine learning-based image generation is undoubtedly a disruptive technology within the creative field, and its effects have unfolded in real time. Therefore, I will not be very prescriptive about it being art or not beyond my ideas on writing.

3: My colleagues and I generally think that most of the work is derivative, often looking like something from an old Del Ray science-fiction novel book covers or photos shot through a small Funhouse mirror. In short, most of it is pretty terrible, leading to the next idea.

4: I find the prompt-based image generation process manipulative or at least scopophilic in nature. I find it manipulative when one types a prompt with certain flags, etc., giving them something back that resembles the subject entered, thus making them somehow feel intelligent for “controlling” an indeterminately large post-photographic AI apparatus to do something they want. The result is a subject that the user more or less "expects ,” therein being the manipulation. The prompt-response loop leads me to scopophilia in that the result gives a minor rush of visual excitement, pushing the user to go back and refine their prose.

5: From talking with Ben Grosser, this is where it gets strange. Considering cybernetics and human-computer evolution, the human being would challenge the machine to improve and therefore have the human being strive to improve. This is Douglas Engelbart's notion of the

Augment or human-computer co-evolution. But this is not what is happening. Quite the opposite.

6: With prompt-based machine learning image generation, the paradigm is flipped. The algorithm is training the human to adapt itself so that the algorithm can give the human something that it finds more acceptable, pleasurable, and so on. In short, we have computer– human evolution, in which neoliberal technocratic systems explicitly program, inscribe, and evolve their aesthetics and poetics onto the user.

7: Let's face it; artists like to break things. I have been trying to do something with my machine learning work over the last six months:

7a: I have been trying to find unusual prompts that give highly unexpected results and gently move them into place. An example of this is my cyber/steampunk, biomorphic assault tank with big, fuzzy cat ears. Aleatorism to provoke surprising results is equivalent to trying to see what's behind the curtain. One does this using a tightly constrained set of prompts to explore usually unseen quadrants of the latent space.

7b: This is used in tandem with the machine learning system’s adapting itself to the user's set of prompts so that the modulation of my text is dynamic in coordination with the feedback received from the machine learning engine. This subtlety is fascinating.

7c: With my deep ties to the Fluxus movement, I'm also trying to see what element of the improvisational is in this process. Prompt as Fluxus score.

7d: With all due respect to my colleagues for the following language, I try to break the machine, to see the cracks in its sense of logic, or generally get chaotic. That's what artists do.

8: To compound this, I have been feeding the resulting series into other artificial intelligence algorithms. Various time stretches in Adobe Premiere taken to extremes to create other artifacts within my "texts."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t2lEFECQLg&t=46s

9: I do all this generally with the following constraints: no people, no animals, no landscapes, no architecture, and a few other nonrepresentational terms in my prompt set. Working in these tight, non-representational is an attempt to get into the weird little corners of the latent space.

I've been trying to find the places where others are “Not”, and I've made 14 series based on a single epistemological arc spanning about 700 images, with about six or seven other sets of pictures that are divergent but still try to seek the outré in the latent space.

Other strange things underway are taking sections of my whole genome sequence, which I have a digital copy of, and throwing chunks of amino acid sequences into the engine, which has yielded exciting results. Another one was when I was lecturing on Marshall McLuhan in my media history class; I fed a number of his thought-probes into Midjourney AI and was not entirely surprised to see the images lining up very closely with the images.

McLuhan himself might have found that fascinating.

Also, in line with McLuhan, I am highly fascinated and suspicious of this technology. In the spirit of his "do you mean that my whole fallacy is wrong?" axiom, I submit this rather lengthy musing on the subject. It will eventually become a paper explicating that I have been obsessing over these processes. But, in no way do I believe in Machine Learning images having any veracity in themselves.

I hope this little piece of thought lands favorably, as I have been ruminating through the start for a few months but have committed very little of it to text. Thanks to Scott Rettberg for urging me to send this across.

If you are interested in some images, look at my Facebook and @patlichty_art feeds on Instagram. I've shown only about 8 out of 800 so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t2lEFECQLg&t=160s

Phil Gooch

Guest Product Presentation : Scholarcy

https://youtu.be/pdVHOoh-EL8?t=899

My name is Phil Gooch, I founded a company called Scholarcy about three years ago. But my interest in interactive text goes a bit further than that, mainly through the field of natural language processing, which is what I did my PhD in. And really, I was trying to solve this problem that I had when I was doing my PhD, was that, discovering new materials to read wasn’t a problem. I discovered lots of papers, lots of resources, I downloaded folders full of PDFs, as I’m sure you all have sitting on your hard drives at home, and in Google Drive, and in the cloud elsewhere. So I had all these documents I knew I needed to read, and I wanted to try to find a way of speeding up that process. At the time, not necessarily connecting them together or visualising them, but just really pulling out the key information and just bringing that to the forefront. So I started building some software that could try and do this. And what emerged was something called Scholarcy Library, which I will show you now.

Scholarcy Library is like a document management system. You upload your documents, and they can be in any format. They can be PDFs. They can also be Word documents, they can be PowerPoint presentations, they can be web pages, they can be LaTeX documents, they can be pretty much any format. And what it does is, if we look at... This is the original PDF for one of the papers that I’ve got in my system. So this is a typical PDF, in this case, it’s like the original author manuscript that’s been made available ahead of time, as the open-access version of this paper, if you like. And as you’re obviously familiar with PDFs that aren’t created in software such as Liquid, Author that Frode has built, most PDFs don’t give you any interactivity or anything at all. You can’t click on these citations or go anywhere from here, for example. So the first thing I wanted to solve was if I bring this into Scholarcy, what does this look like? The same paper. Well, the first thing it does, is try to pull out what is the main finding of the study and it brings that to the forefront. The other thing that it tries to do is take the full text and then make citations clickable. So you saw in the original text, the original PDF, that citations aren’t clickable. So my first goal was to make citations clickable. So I can go on to that citation and go straight to that paper, and then read that, or pull it into my system and link it together.

So that was the first goal. And then, the second goal was, well, once I’ve broken this PDF

down, can I do things like extract the figures and so on, and again, just make them first-class citizens so I can zoom in on them? And that was the other goal. And this all really then turn into a process to turn documents into structured data. And so, what I’ve built was this back- end API, which is freely available to anybody. It’s in the public domain. It’s not open-source code, but it’s an open API, so anyone can use it. If you go to api.scholarcy.com there are a number of endpoints here, which look a little bit esoteric. So there is some documentation on this on GitHub. If you go to scholarcy.github.io.slate there’s a whole bunch of documentation on what this API does. But essentially, what it does is, you give it a document, such as a PDF, but it doesn’t have to be PDF, and you upload it, and it basically turns it into JSON. And as you know, once you’ve got JSON, or you’ve got XML, or any structured data, then you can pretty much do what you want with it. So what it’s done is turn that into JSON with all the information broken down into key-value pairs. So you’ve got a key for the references and you’ve got all the references there, you’ve got a key for the funding group that has been broken down. So once you’ve got structured data, then it’s quite easy to bring it into this nice interactive format like this, where everything is, kind of, hyperlinked and clickable. So we can go straight to the study subjects and so on and find out there were 16 people involved in the study. And then, we can deal with things like, what were the main contributions of the study, and we can just scroll down, click on one of those, and it takes us straight to that finding. So the idea was really, I suppose, not really to cheat, but to, basically, speed read this paper by highlighting the key findings and making them clickable, as we made the references clickable. So all this is in the JSON data that’s underlying all this. And then it makes it more interactive, basically. So that’s the goal.

That’s all well and good, basically what we’ve done is turn PDF into an interactive HTML with clickable citations and expandable and collapsible sections. But obviously, you want to deal with more than one paper at a time. And so, what I looked at doing was building something that could turn this into linked data. Now, I didn’t want to build a new piece of software like Noda, or a triplestore, or anything like that. And so I found that the lingua franca for a lot of new tools that try to connect stuff together is this format called Markdown. One of the tools I use for hosting Markdown, and you may be familiar with it, is called Obsidian. But there’s many tools like this there’s Roam Research, there’s Bear, there’s Logseq, there’s a whole bunch of tools, I’m sure you’re aware of, that handle Markdown data. So here is that same paper that was once a PDF, now in Scholarcy. But now we can export that to Markdown, and we can do this one at a time. Or if I really want to, I can export all of them in one go. So I’ve only got four here, but I could have 400. Export them all in one go as Markdown and then I can load those into Obsidian. Put that in my Obsidian library, and when I open that in Obsidian, it looks like this. So it’s the same data but now it’s in

Markdown format, now it’s editable so if I want to, then, edit the Markdown in here I can go away and start doing that and visualise it. But now we’ve got the same information along with all the other papers that I had in my collection that were also converted to Markdown using Scholarcy. I can connect them together.

So, I’ve got some of the key concepts, if I click on one of those, then it shows me other papers in my collection, like this one that also talks about functional connectivity. I can go straight to that paper, and then, I can see the main finding of that study, and I can see other things that it talks about, like the medial prefrontal cortex, and I can see other papers that talk about that. As you can see we’ve got this network graph going on, but it’s, kind of, embedded in the text, I can read the papers I wouldn’t have before, and I can view all the figures and zoom in on them. But they’re in this Markdown format where you get all this linking for free, which is great. And in common with other tools that handle Markdown, you can do these visualisations, so it’s going to show me here, if I could click on this graph view, how these papers are connected, in this case, by citations that they have in common. But if I really want to see all the concepts that I have in common, then I can click the tags view, and then suddenly you’ve got all these green nodes here that show me where all these papers are and how they’re connected by their key concepts. And as you know, Mark and I were discussing, just before this session started, the issue that you’ ve got too much information. This becomes a question of: What do we do with these kinds of visualisations?

And I’m sure many of you here will have suggestions and ideas about how to deal with this because once you’ve got more than 10 or 20 papers, these kinds of visualisations become a bit intractable, but Obsidian lets you do that kind of graph analysis, can write queries and so on. Which I haven’t really done much with, my background is not, at all, in visualisation, it’s in NLP and converting documents from one format to another. That’s been my motivation in building this, is being able to turn documents from PDF into Markdown or other formats.

And that’s what Scholarcy does. It’s a document conversion software, it’s a summarisation software, it gives you the key highlights of the paper, its objectives, methods, and results. It pulls all that automatically from each document using NLP and deep learning and it makes it interactive. But it does also extract into these various different formats. And one other thing it tries to do is to show you how the paper relates to what’s gone on before.

So, when an author has talked about how their work sits within the wider field of research, Scholarcy tries to pull out that information and highlight it so it shows you where are some potential differences with previous work, and who’s talked about that, in terms of, counterpointing with what this author is saying, and again, we can click on that and go straight to that paper if we want to. Or which studies does it build on, for example. Does it build on a study by these guys? How is it different? So it’s pulling out all those citation

contexts, and then classifying them in, is it confirming, is it contrasting, is it just building on it, how does it relate? It doesn’t always get it right, but most time it gets in the right ballpark and it just gives you that extra context. And again, just making that information interactive. I guess the next step is: What more could be done with this data?

At the moment, it’s in the very two-dimensional view, either in Scholarcy as one paper at a time, or in Obsidian via a network graph view. But what else could be done with this data? And maybe some of you have some suggestions about how that could be visualised, perhaps using virtual reality or some other means. But really, the motivation for this was to make it easier for me to read all the papers that I had to read for my PhD, make it into a friendlier format that I could, for example, read on my mobile phone. This tool called Obsidian has an iOS app and I can actually read this paper in a nice friendly format that will be responsive, including the tables, because Scholarcy also converts the tables in the PDFs to HTML. So I can get all that data out as well and read that on the go, which was the goal of doing this, really. So that’s Scholarcy in a nutshell. It exports to various other formats as well, so if I really wanted to export my paper, imagine this was my own paper and I want to export it to PowerPoint, I will turn that into a presentation. That is one thing I did do with the chapter of my PhD, was turn that into a presentation. I could just export this as a PowerPoint slide deck, and it will summarise this paper and distil it down into a series of slides. But that is the goal, really, is to be able to convert and switch between different formats without having to worry about whether did it start off as a PDF, or was it a Word document, or was it something else? Really, every document gets turned into this standardised format that we call our summary flashcard, where it’s got that same structure. I was hoping to show you the PowerPoint export that doesn’t seem to be playing ball today.

So that’s basically, in a nutshell, I mean there’s a free demonstrator you can try out because we do have a number of free tools including the reference extraction component that Frode was alluding to earlier, that links all the references together, and that’s a freely available tool. And so is this. If you want to try this out with any document, you just upload a paper and it does exactly the same as what I showed you in the main document management tool, but it’s just one document at a time. You can load a paper and it breaks it down into this flashcard and then you can download that in Markdown if you want and then visualise that with all your other documents. So there’s a whole sequence of other tools, as well, that we have, but this is the main one. It’s what we call our Flashcard Generator.

So, yeah. That’s it, really, in a nutshell. Let’s maybe bring it into a discussion and get some feedback, really, because it’d be good to know about how we could take the structured data and do something else with it other than put it into Obsidian, or Roam, or other Markdown- aware tools. Maybe there are some more interesting things that could be done there. So, I’ll

pause at this point.

Dialogue

https://youtu.be/pdVHOoh-EL8?t=1768

[Frode Hegland]: It really is a nutshell, and it’s just amazing what you have done. And you presented like you’ve done a few Lego blocks, and that’s about it. It’s just a British understatement. But there’s one thing before we’re going to proper dialogue I’d really like to see more of. And that is the bit where you come across a citation in a document and you can click on it to find out, to put it crudely, its value or relevance. Would you mind showing that? Because when you do these big graphs, where to go next is always a huge question and I think this, navigationally, really helps.

[Phil Gooch]: Sure. So, let’s look at that same paper that I was looking at earlier. If we’ve got a citation, we can mouse over it and we can click and go to that paper. But in terms of what is the value of this citation, we’ve partnered with another start-up called syte.ai, that you may be familiar with, and what we can do is show the statistics that sites have gathered on every citation. And I think we’ve got a huge database now, we’ve got about a billion citations. What this shows me is how many other people have, not only just cited this study but how many people have agreed with it. So this had about 1,258 citations, but of those, 18 have been confirming the results of this study. What that means is if I click on that link there, it’s going to give me some more background. Here’s the paper by Stam that this author cited here. And we can see that it’s got 18 supporting citations, and three contrasting. Let’s see what that means. It basically means that they’re saying things like, “Our results agree with previous studies which include Stam, and so on”. Consistent with this guy, for example.

Basically, 18 of these citations are ones they’re all saying, “Yeah, we found something similar.” But three of these, they found something different. So what do they say? Well, we can just click on that. So, previous studies, blah, blah, Stam. Looks a bit ambiguous to me, not sure if it’s definitely contrasting or not. This is the thing with machine learning, sometimes you don’t get it quite right, and it’s a bit borderline if it’s actually contrasting. But you can see that, again, the context in which the other people have cited this study, that these guys have also cited it. Were they positive about it? Or were they negative? And so, syte.ai is a really cool tool for showing you this context about how everyone else has talked about this paper. So, for example, in this paper here, we could find out who else has spoken about it.

Because these relationships go in two directions, we want to know what this paper is saying about other people’s studies, and what other people have said about those same studies. But

also what other people say about this study itself that I’m reading. If I click on this link here, it should take me to what other people say about this van Lutterveld paper, and we can see that actually people are a bit neutral about it, there are 31 citations and they just mention it, but none of them are contrasting, and none of them are supporting. They’ve cited it, but they haven’t really said anything positive or negative about it. So syte.ai is a really cool tool that just lets you explore those citations. And we link to it as a matter of course. So every citation in here should have a button where you can see those stats. And then the other thing we try and do, and this doesn’t always work is, say, “Well, rather than going, looking, and reading all these cited papers, can we just get the gist of them?” We have a little button here that will go and find each of those papers and it will just do a quick summary of what was done in that paper and then we can see. It’s like a subset of the abstract, effectively. What was this paper about? Is it something that I’m actually interested in going and reading more about? If I am then I can click on it and go and read it. So the idea is to bring all that information, from each of those studies, into one place, either with citation statistics from the site. Again, this looks like a reliable study, 13 people have supported it, so that looks good. But what did it say? And again, we can just click the findings button here and it will go and try to pull out what the study found. And there are some of the findings there. So that’s another aspect of

what Scholarcy does, that citation linking and classification.

[Frode Hegland]: Question to everyone in the group before I do the hands up thing. how amazing is this? It is absolutely amazing, isn’t it? And also, the way that Phil works with other APIs from other services. The way these things can link together is just so incredibly amazing. And I don’t think most academics are aware of it. Because you’re the newest in this session, Ismail, please you go. And then, Peter.

[Ismail Serageldin]: Thank you. You probably are very familiar with the work of David King and a few others at Oklahoma State. I was quite interested in their work a few years ago, because they had done hermeneutics of Islamic and Quranic work on 12,000 things. Phil, you had this diagram with all the nodes connected with the greens, and you said, "Well, where you go from here?" It all looks pretty much like one big tapestry. What struck me about what David King was doing at that time was that, they were able, and this was really stunning for me, able to put all the authors and then, surprisingly, the graph tended to group authors together. So, all of a sudden, the group of these Israelite debaters, back in the 10th century were all in one part of the graph, and all the Ash'ari were in another part of the graph. And the schools of thought, somehow, emerged out of that. So it didn’t look exactly flat, like the diagram. Based on the diagram of this thing, they were able to group them into,

maybe the citations, maybe other things would be able to assist in that, but if it did that, then you might see schools of thought emerging in the pattern in front of you.

[Phil Gooch]: Yeah, that’s great. I think there’s a huge amount like that, that could be done. So that network that I showed was in another tool, in which I’m not involved in, it’s called Obsidian. And I’ve just put a link to it in the chat. So it’s obsidian.md. And that is just the tool that allows you to visualise these relationships. It’s quite basic, and it doesn’t show, I don’t think it can show those levels of annotations that you mentioned that David King showed, where he had the authors, and so on. But there are other tools that do a bit more than this, along the lines of what you’re suggesting. And one is called Connected Papers, which I’ll put in the chat, where they do try to find out similar schools of thought. The idea is, you put in one seed paper and it will find other related papers, not ones that are related by citations, but also similar themes. I will also quickly share my screen to show you. And I think that, what they’re trying to do at Connected Papers, is trying to generalise what you were suggesting, what you’re talking about with David King, where they show, here they’ve got the authors for a given paper and what they’ve tried to do is show related papers where, maybe other people have cited them together in a group, or they’ve got similar themes. And so you can click on each of those and find out more about them, and you’ve got the abstract and so on. And there’s another one, there’s quite a few tools like this, there’s one called Research Rabbit, which is pretty cool, but unlike Connected Papers, it only works if you’ve got an academic email address, which I don’t have anymore. But those of you that have, you might want to check out Research Rabbit because that tries to do that. So in answer to your question, Ismail, there are other people doing those visualisations and trying to generalise them. It’s not something that I’m going to do myself. My role, really, is just to build tools that do convert from one format to another, so that other people can do those visualisations. But, yeah. I think it’s a great suggestion. And I think the potential hasn’t really been fulfilled of all this visualisation and linking yet. Partly because, when the data sets become large, it does get hard to then keep track of all these nodes, edges, and what they mean. I think, Mark, you’ve done some work on this with citations, showing things about who’s citing it and who cited it by, looking at alternative ways of doing it, other than a network graph. But I think there’s still room to come up with some new type of visualisation that would show all those relationships in a compact way. But you guys know more about the people that are doing that and me. I’m an NLP person. I’m not a visualisation person. So I’d love to hear more about those that kind of work.

[Peter Wasilko]: I was just wondering, have you received any pushback from any of the Scholarcy publishing houses complaining about your personal document?

[Phil Gooch]: No, because I think... That’s a good question. We haven’t had any complaints because we’re not making those converted papers publicly available. So it’s a tool like Dropbox or Google Drive. You drop your papers in, you’re the only person who has access to those condensed versions of those papers, those interactive versions of papers. We’re not putting them out there in a massive database that everybody could access. So, no one’s complained about copyright breaches because it’s really only for personal use. But I think there could be a lot of value in taking every open-access paper and putting it into this kind of structured format and showing how they’re connected. And I think, if we were to do that, then, yes, publishers would complain. But we are in discussions with some publishers about, maybe, doing it on a subset of their papers, in some way. But it’s just a question of priorities. There’s only me and one other person working on this at the moment. So it’s about where do we spend our time, and publishers are a bit of a distraction at the moment for us. So we’ve had one or two conversations, but yeah, they haven’t complained, basically, is a short answer.

[Peter Wasilko]: Ah, that's encouraging. Also, have you taken a look at the bibliometric literature?

[Phil Gooch]: The bibliometric literature? I’m familiar with some of it. But not massively, no. I know there’s lots of stuff about the whole open citations, thinking about making every citation open. There’s the open citations initiative, but did you have something in mind, particularly?

[Peter Wasilko]: Just that there’s like a whole subset of the information retrieval literature looking at co-citation relationship and term clusterings amongst society documents. And also, there’s a whole sub-community that’s been poking at those statistics for quite some time, and you might be able to find some useful connections there.

[Phil Gooch]: Yeah, I’ve talked to a couple of people. There’s a chap called Bjorn Brems, and there’s also Bianca Kramer and David Shotton, who’s in the open citations initiative. I’ve had a conversation with some of them. We’ve actually created an API that some of them are actually using within open citations, I’ll just put it in here, to extract references from papers so that they can be connected together. Because one issue with citations, although it’s not so much of an issue now as it was, was that these citation networks were not freely available, publishers weren’t making them available unless you signed up to Web of Science or Scopus. But now more publishers are putting their citations into Crossref, so that people can do those kinds of network analysis that you mentioned. But we’ve also created this tool that other people can use, authors can put their own papers in there or pre-print, and they will extract the references and then they can be used. Some of the people at open citations have used this API to do some of that extraction. We’ve made that freely available for anyone to use as

much as they want until the server falls over. It’s not on a very powerful server. But, yeah. There’s a lot of work going on in this, but it’s not something that I’m personally involved in. I focus more on the data conversion side, and then, once that data is converted, I like to give it to other people to actually do the analysis, if that’s what they want to do with it.

[Peter Wasilko]: Also, have you considered applying your tool to bodies and source codes like, throw to GitHub and look at all of the citation relationships that actually take the form of code inclusion?

[Phil Gooch]: No. It’s a great idea, though. No, I haven’t done that. That could be a good project.

[Brandel Zachernuk]: This is a really cool tool. I’m really excited by the idea of rehydrating things that are essentially inherently already in hypertext and just making them navigable in the way that they should be based on that conceptual content. In terms of suggestions or questions about further directions, the main question that I would have is what drives my work, so it hopefully doesn’t come across as offensive: What is the point of the functionality? What are the intentions that people have that they follow as a result of using the system? And in particular, when somebody is good at using the tool, what are the primitives that they establish mentally and procedurally that drive their behaviour and action within it? And then beyond that, what are the ways in which you can render those primitives concretely in order to make sure that the use of the tool intrinsically lends itself to understanding things in the way that an expert does?

So, right now, you have a lot of things in it that are useful, but they’re not especially opinionated about what you do with them. And so, the suggestion I would have and the question is: How do you ramp up that opinionation? What are the ways in which you can, more strongly, imply the things that you do with the things and the way to read the specific things?

So there are numbers, like the confirmations and address become the contrasting results and things like that. What do those mean and how can people understand those more directly, if they need to? One of the things, as these folks have heard me bang on about, I am not from academia, so I’m not familiar with the sort of, people’s relationship with academic papers and what people spend their time doing. Something that I have spent time in, within the context of academia is, debugging my friend’s prose. So where is (indistinct) in neuroscience, and I’m sure it’s not peculiar to his discipline, but you can end up with an incredibly tangled prose, where it’s, essentially, trying to do too many things in a single sentence, because there’s a lot to get through. And the sort of approach that I take is very similar to... Have you

ever heard of visual syntactic text formatting? It’s a system of breaking sentences and indenting on prepositions and conjunctions. Oh, you built it into Liquid (Author)? Right. Yeah, you did too. And it’s basically taking something more like code formatting and turning something that I think is pretty generally the case to academic text, that it can end up pretty hard to read. And so that it allows you to follow individual ideas, and understand the regards in which they’re nested and indented through that.

So, I guess, what is the hardest stuff to do with these academic texts? And then also, potentially, I’m sure you’ve read and reread “As We May Think”, Vannevar Bush’s book, paper, column, article in 1945. Have you read it before? In large part kicked off the idea of computing for everybody who does computing. And it was made by the man who was responsible for the National Science Foundation during the American War Effort. And he was then complaining about the impractically large body of knowledge that was being produced year on year. And needing some memory extension that would allow him to navigate all of the, I think, academic papers, be able to create hyperlinks between them, and have some kind of desktop environment for doing. It’s a really wonderful read, because he’s basically describing the modern desktop computer, except built out of gears and microfiche, because that’s what his mind was thinking of in the 1940s. The reason why I bring it up and belabour the point is because one of the things that were really wonderful about Bush’s conception of it is that, the navigation of the information was just as important as the information itself.

One of the things that I would be really curious with is, in terms of somebody’s use of Scholarcy to navigate the Docuverse, what are the artefacts that might be kind of re- rendered themselves about somebody’s consumption and processing of a series of documents? Because it strikes me that the browsing interacting behaviour that somebody engages in within the context of your system and framework that you have set up, could itself be a valuable artefact. Not only to the individual doing that navigation, but potentially to other people. Bush envisioned people being trailblazers, constructing specific trails for other people to navigate. Where the artefact was solely the conceptual linkages and navigation through those specific documents, which I think is something that Google essentially is able to leverage in terms of making page rank. But most other people don’t have access to it. But your individual trip, and the traversal of people, actually, between pages is one of the major indicators of what are going to be good Google search results. They have the benefit to be able to make use of that data, whereas other people don’t. But in your case, because you are particularly interested in the individual, the user making the connections, and drawing it between that actual browsing history, and navigation through specific things, it strikes me itself as a very useful artefact to see what people have missed, what people have spent their time on, and things like that. But, yeah. Really exciting work.

[Phil Gooch]: Great. There are some really great questions there. To answer them briefly, the first motivation and use case for this was my own need to understand the literature in what my PhD, which was in health informatics. So the actual idea of linking all this stuff together, at the time, wasn’t there. It was, actually, can I break this single paper down into something I can read on my iPad without having to scroll through the PDF in tiny print? Can I turn this PDF into interactive HTML? So it’s really much focused on, what can I do with individual papers to make them easier to read and digest? And what we started hearing back from users was that, actually, particularly novice users, novice academics, I should say, most of our users are people doing master’s degrees, or maybe in the first year of their PhD, where they may not be used to reading academic literature, and it takes them a couple of hours or longer to go through a paper and figure out what’s going on. People tell us that it helps them reduce the time by, as much as 70% in terms of understanding the key ideas of the paper and just being able to follow up on the citations and the sources and so on. That was the prime motivation, just to really make the reading experience easier.

And, in fact, as recently just at the beginning of this year, we’ve been awarded the status of assistive technology by the U.K. Department of Education, because we’ve got a large user base. People who have dyslexia or attention deficit type disorders, where they have specific needs, they’re in university and find it’s hard to deal with an overwhelming amount of information in one go, and they really find it beneficial to have it broken down. And there’s a lot of research on this, in terms of, generally, why students don’t read the literature that they’re given by their lecturers or by their educators. They enrol on a course, they’re given a long reading list, and then, they have a lecture, and they go to the next lecture, and the lecturer says, “Okay, who’s read the material?” And most people haven’t. And educators have been tearing their hair out for years trying to figure out how do we encourage people to read. And there’s some research on this about what will encourage students to read, and basically, it’s: break the information down, make it more visual, make it more interactive, highlight some of the key points for them. Just give them a bit of hand-holding, if you like.

And so that’s what the technology here tries to do. It provides that hand-holding process. But in terms of the linking of everything together, that’s a bit of a late addition, really, to Scholarcy. And it was really motivated by the fact that, I noticed there was a big academic community on the Discord channel for this tool called, Obsidian, where people were saying, “Well, how can I incorporate all these tools into my research workflow?”

The big need that most researchers, or most students, anything from masters level onwards, the big tasks they have to do is, they have to write a literature review that justifies the existence of their research. What have other people said about this topic? And

then, when you write your thesis, or you write your essay, you’ve got to say, “Well, all these people said this. This is my contribution.” So the task of doing literature reviews is an ongoing one that everybody, every academic has to do. And so we wanted to make that process easier.

Once you’ve got those papers that you’re going to write about, drop them into something like Scholarcy, and it’ll break them down, and you can export them into a tabular format. So, one of the things I didn’t show is the export of everything to this, what we call, a literature review matrix in Excel, where, basically, you have about 100 papers say in your review, and you want to compare them side by side. That was one of the other motivations for building it. It was to do that side by side comparison of papers, which I can quickly show you, actually, while I’m talking. So, yeah. Writing literature, some people in academia, there’s this whole department that is just writing literature reviews. If I’ve got all my papers here, and there are 26 of them in this case, what do they look like side by side? So, in Excel, here’s the raw format, I’m just going to make that a table in Excel, and then, what I can do is just make this a bit bigger. And then, what I can do is slice and dice the information. Excel has this really cool functionality called slicers. So I can say, “Right, I want the authors as a slicer, I want the keywords as a slicer, and maybe the study participants”. And so, what we’ve got now is able to slice and dice these papers according to their keywords. So most academics are quite familiar with tools like Excel. Let’s just look at all the papers that had 112 individuals or 125 participants, for example. And we can just show those. Or look at all the ones that are about cerebral palsy or DNA methylation. So we can do that quick filtering of papers and compare them side by side. And obviously, I can make this look a bit prettier, but the key idea is being able to filter papers by different topics or by numbers of participants, for example.

We typically want studies that have a lot of participants, and ones that only got eight subjects, for example, maybe aren’t going to be as useful to us. So that was the other motivating factor and this is how people use it to help with their literature review. So the whole thing about linking everything together, as I showed you in Obsidian, is a relatively new development if you like. And so, yeah, I’m open to hearing about how people might use this. At the moment I don’t think many people are using it for this kind of linking. They’re mostly using it for reading, and they’re mostly using it for creating these matrices that they then use to help figure out the literature and what’s going on. For example, you might say, “Well, I’m only interested in papers that have open data availability”. So I can just look at ones that are non-empty, for example. So if I select all the ones that are not blank, then it filters those papers, the only ones that have got some open data available are the ones I’m going to look at. Or I might want to say, “I’m only interested in papers that talk about the

limitations”. It’s quite important for studies that talk about the limitations, but not every paper does. So again, I can filter by the presence or absence of limitations. So this kind of literature review is one of the ways that people are using Scholarcy. But primarily as a reading tool or as a document ingestion tool. So for example, the other way I can get information in is, if I’m reading a paper for nature, for example, I want to get it straight in, while I’m reading it, I can just run this little widget that we built for the browser which basically will read, go away, read and summarise that paper for us. And then, we can click save and then it’ll save it to our library, so I’ve got that nature paper here. Again with its main findings, highlights, and everything. And I can do that with a news article as well. If I’m reading a page in The Guardian, I can click on my extension button, and again, get some of the highlights, key points and links to, you know, who’s Sophie Ridge, I can click on that, she’s a BBC journalist and newsreader, for example. So, it does all that key term extraction as well. And again, I can save that. So if I’m interested in news articles, then I can also use that. And then the other thing that people use it for is to subscribe to feeds. So you’re probably all familiar with RSS feeds, which seems to be making a comeback, which is great. So, if I want to, I can subscribe to The Guardian U.K. politics feed, and just put our asses in front of that. And then, if I go back to my library and say, let’s create Guardian politics, and put in that feed it’s going to go away and pull in those articles and turn them into that interactive flashcard format for me. And I can do that with a journal article, so I’m actually subscribed to a feed on neurology from a preprint server called ‘medRxiv’ and it’s pulling in each day, it’s going to pull in the latest papers. So it’s like an RSS reader as well. So people are using it for that. So, yeah. They’re mainly using it as an enhanced reading tool. And there’s a tool to help with literature reviews.

But the whole hypertext linking and things like that is a relatively new thing that we’re not quite sure how many people are actually using to create those relationships between things. While I was talking, it’s gone away and just started to put in those Guardian articles here. So, I put in Guardian Politics and already it started to pull in those articles here. It doesn’t just work with PDFs, it works with news articles as well. So it tells us more about Grant Shapps, he’s the Secretary of State for transport. People use it if they’re new to a subject. If I’m new to neurology, I want to know what some of these terms mean. We’ve got these hyperlinks to Wikipedia, so if the Akaike information criterion is unfamiliar to me, I click on that and it tells me what it means. I’ve got the Wikipedia page about it. If I don’t know what basal ganglion is, I click on it and it tells me all about it in Wikipedia. So that level of linking is something we’ve had right from the beginning and this is well used by people who use Scholarcy. But this kind of graph view is not really well used at the moment. And we’re trying to figure out how to make this friendlier, because we have to do this in a

separate application at the moment. But the Wikipedia linking is very popular. So the basic level of doing those key concepts, and their definitions is certainly something that people use to get up to speed on a subject if they’re quite new to it.

[Brandel Zachernuk]: That’s awesome. In terms of the use of things like site linking to people and concrete entities like the basal ganglion, I would love to see in the direct adornment and representation of those entities within the document that you have as being reinforcing the category of things that they are. So, having a consistent representation, for example, of people so that you have, if available, a thumbnail, but otherwise some indicator that these things are definitely people, show them, rather than concepts. I saw that you have a little bit of, it’s being able to pre-emptively pull a little bit more information about what you’ll find behind those things. One of the things that I really love to do is make sure that people minimise the surprises behind clicks so that they have the ability to anticipate what kind of content they’re in for. And that helps frame their experience because hypertext is very valuable insofar as it allows you to navigate those things. But if it’s anybody’s guess what’s behind them, then that can be very distracting. Because it means that it’s difficult for them to process things in those flows. Another thing that I’m really excited by just looking at that, natural language processing lends itself incredibly well, it’s a question answer and agentive mediated action and stuff. Have you played with the speech-to-text and the text- to-speech engines within browsers in order to be able to create conversational agents and participants? And it strikes me as a lot of fun to be able to do, where you could actually ask pre-formed questions of a certain kind about your corpus, in order to be able to do things like that.

[Phil Gooch]: Yeah, that would be a great idea. I know there are some other tools. There’s a tool that does some similar stuff to what we do, it’s called Genei and they have a question answering thing. We haven’t done that kind of thing. But, yeah, certainly something we could add. Either you may type in a question like, “What is the best evidence that supports the use of this particular drug against Covid-19?” for example. And then, it would go and search all those documents and show you which ones generally support the use of that drug, for example. We could do that. And that could also be a speech-type interface. So, yeah. That’s something that we could add to it, certainly, as a future enhancement, that’s a great idea.

[Brandel Zachernuk]: The other benefit of a speech primary environment is that you have the opportunity to use the visual feedback as a secondary channel, where you can say “I’ve found these documents and they are here”. And then the documents are up here and things like that. But, yeah. It’s super cool. One of the things again that strikes me, that you’re doing with it, as well, is the academic paper format is very curious and very dense, in no small part,

because it’s for shipping important information on (indistinct). And so, as a general concept being able to be a little bit more generous with the space, in order to be able to characterise and categorise the different things that are in a paper, is a really good viewpoint perspective on what it is that you're able to do. Because, like I said, even though an iPad is a smaller, in many regards, device than the papers that you’re going to be reading, or especially a phone, you do have the ability to renegotiate the space, the real estate that’s devoted to those things. And, yeah. Being even more generous with the space that you use to carve out the, this thing is this, that thing is that, might be a valuable way of playing with all of the different elements that you’re presenting.

[Phil Gooch]: Yeah, that’s right. That was one of the main motivations. To reduce that problem of squinting at PDFs on screen. Because they were meant for print. But everyone’s using them as an online distribution format, as well, which wasn’t what their intended purpose was. And so, just to try to transform that content into something that was a bit easier to read on screen, I don’t think we always succeed. And I think, actually, within the academic community, there is this, people are trying to move away from PDFs as a means of distributing knowledge, but people are still struggling to get away from that format for various reasons. Which is a subject for another discussion, perhaps. But, yes.

[Frode Hegland]: For a long time. But since you just talked about the provocative three- letter word, PDF. It is something we’re discussing here. We use it archival, and we accept academics use it, but as an intermediary in rich format, clearly, it’s not up to snuff.

[Mark Anderson]: Well, first of all, thanks so much. Fascinating to see Scholarcy again. It’s something I’ve been meaning to find some time to dive into again. Because it's interesting you talking about the Obsidian graph and things. So, for instance, one of the problems there is what it actually does. It shows you the links that you made. When I say you made, now this gets to the interesting part. If we begin to do automatic extraction, who made what link for what purpose, this is where we get lost. And there’s a massive, I mean, obviously, there’s Obsidian and Roam and there’s a whole cult around zettelkästen. But a lot of these things, unintentionally, is the ‘underpants business gnomes—the Underpants Gnomes business theory, where if you collect enough stuff, a magical thing will happen, and success at the end, and no one quite knows what the magic is. I think one of the interesting challenges, but opportunities, actually, to the data set you’re now sitting across is to be able to start to surface some of the relationships. The real privilege you have with the dataset is that you know what’s there, and you can begin to make more objective study comments as to what the links mean, that many people can’t. So some interesting, in a sense, research to be done there. So one way one could look and try and make sense about diagramming would be, to take an area

that we know has been just really well trampled by people, so you might say, “Well, there are a few surprises in the literature”. And then play around with the visualisation.

Because you want to be able, to then, have something that’s otherwise really hard to do, saying, “Okay, I’ve made this wonderful-looking thing. Is it meaningful or not?” And most of the time we do this, we just don’t know. The main thing is we know it looks pretty. And that’s another problem because we like to make pretty and aesthetically pleasing graphs, whereas life would tend to suggest that the messier it is, probably the closer you are to the ground in truth. So I think that might be an interesting area to look at. I think, then, to make sense of what the either inferred or extracted hypertextual nature or linkage in the data is. It’s probably most meaningful to take, or most useful to take a bit that’s essentially well known for whatever reason. But one where there isn’t a great thing. So, don’t pick something that’s a great topic of anxiety, or social warfare at the moment. But I think that there ought to be places where we can see this. Which brings me on to another thought which is the degree to which I’m guessing that the sciences, the paper in the sciences are more tractable to this process than the arts. Because the language is, by and large, more direct. So we’ll talk about a thing, and that’s the thing that we can go and look up, whereas, in a more pure humanities side, the reference is just maybe elliptical, and did you have to know the subject matter quite well, to know that they’re actually referring at one form removed from the subject that’s actually under discussion. I think that’s just a state of where we are with the art, rather than a limitation, per se. But is it the case you get more back from science areas?

[Phil Gooch]: Yeah, that’s right. It does. For the reasons that you mentioned, the structure tends to be quite standardised. They have what they call the IMRAD format, Introduction Methods Results And Discussion. They’re very much about stuff that can be packaged neatly into facts if you like, or the factoids, or things that got some evidence about it. Well, we have tried using it on certain subjects in the social sciences, things like philosophy and biography, and well, I mean, literature generally, as you go towards the literature, and particularly fiction, it doesn’t really work at all other than the fact that we can pull out named entities from people and places and so on. But in terms of pulling out the argumentation structures, is much harder in the humanities. But interestingly though, actually some of the feedback we’ve got from some of the users is that, in a more social sciences subject, it does really well. And less well in things like philosophical and rhetorical-type articles, in the hard sciences, or the stem sciences. It doesn’t do very well in engineering. And I think the reason for that is a lot of mathematics, and we don’t really handle mathematics very well. Getting decent mathematics out of PDF is hard. And then often, an engineering or mathematics paper is all about the equations, and the discussion around it is maybe not peripheral but it’s secondary to the main maths and formula that you’re presenting and putting forward. So, yeah. There are some

subjects that are harder to apply this kind of NLP to, and certainly, humanities is one of them, anyway.

[Mark Anderson]: I hope you’re mentioning it because I don’t share that as a negative at all, I was just interested to see how the coverage goes. Because another thing that occurred to me, in terms of, again, because you’ve got this fabulous rich data set, one of the things I always find myself worried about when I was doing the research was avoiding the Stalinist theory of art—because 81 people said this was really good, it must be good. And indeed one of the things in our PhD group in Southampton was discussing was actually a way that you could start, for instance, to classify what’s a drive-by citation. “Oh, I have to cite that because otherwise I get shouted at”. And that was, to my mind, a meaningless citation, because actually it’s been done for no real good intent, as opposed to the thing you actually genuinely wanted to cite because it actually added interest. And that strikes me as a challenge when doing this extraction, not because of the sin of commission, but you get to the next level. So, in a sense, do we need to start learning new ways to read this? So as a student or a user of this rich data set, what are the new questions I need to learn to ask? Because, to a certain extent, we arrive at this technology at the moment. Sort of, “Oh, look. This number is bigger than that number”. And we don’t often stop ourselves from thinking, yes, but is that a deep enough thing? There are some interesting angles to be played there as well. How one might tease apart some of the raw numbers which otherwise float up the surface. Because this is what I was thinking with bibliographies and these raw citation counts. Because maybe it’s just a field I was working but I don’t think so, that I was often surprised at how many times I went to a really highly cited paper, I’m thinking, I just don’ see what is so special about this. And even when I put in the context of what was known at the time, it’s still not special. It’s clearly being cited because it’s getting cited a lot. But no one has ever thought to say, “This actually isn’t a very interesting or useful paper”. And at a slight tangent, I’m interested to know what do you see as an edge, as to how far back you can easily go with things? Because, presumably, with PDFs, you don’t get back very far before the OCR and stuff was not that hot. Or are you re-OCRing stuff, or?

[Phil Gooch]: No, we don’t have an OCR engine at the moment. The PDFs do need to have extractable text. We did a project a few years ago with the British Medical Journal where we were just pulling out the end of article references from a collection of PDFs which were only scanned images. They did the OCR themselves, they sent them off to a company to do the OCR. We got the OCR versions of the PDFs back. And then we did all this extraction for them. And the data was really noisy, but at that time, we were just interested in getting the bibliography from each other. So the trouble is, we’re doing OCR on-demand, we often get people uploading 200, 300 page PDFs, and the idea of doing that on-demand just fills me

with fear, having that run at scale. So we don’t do that. But, yeah. It could be done but that would be a separate standalone project, I think, that would be a research project to go and try to text mine that archive if you like old PDFs. And do something interesting.

[Mark Anderson]: The reason that it sticks in mind is it so there’s an almost implied temporal cliff somewhere, some distance back from us, where things start to come into easy digital focus. Which is unavoidable, but it’s perhaps something we need to start to recognise. Yeah so there was one other thought but it’s passed from mind, so I’ll let that be.

[Frode Hegland]: So, Phil. The reason you are here, as we’ve discussed before, is you allow for analysis, for interactivity. And I’m wondering, before, actually, I’m going to ask the question first, not to you, actually. Brandel and Fabien. I’m going to waffle on it for a minute now, but if you guys have something you want to show Phil that you have worked on or something else in VR, to help him see where this fits. I just want to highlight, for my own personal work, with my own personal software, when I look out and I see so many people doing amazing stuff, the only thing that I’m trying to contribute to is simplification. Because you can make things really horrendously complex, obviously. So I’m wondering if, maybe, by making interactions with this more tangible, we can have more... Yes, here we go. I can stop waffling now, Fabien would like to show something.

[Fabien Benetou]: Hey, everyone. So this is not actually a network analysis, graph analysis, or any Scientometrics. Simply putting the PDFs in space of an upcoming conference, it was for a VR conference. And then I think a lot of people got that struggle, a lot of people look interested, but then you have to start with one. I know, at least I can’t read two or ten papers at once, so I need to find which one. And basically what I do is, I put them in space, I set up the space to make it friendly or wanting with the conference. And then I’m going to put them, I have a little annotation system with a 3D object where I put a post-it note if I need to write something on it if I’m not sure if it’s interesting if it’s really mind-blowing and I want to read it first. And, yeah. That’s the result. It’s a social space, so I can invite somebody to go through and then we can discuss which one to read first. And then, at the bottom right, I don’t know if you can see clearly, there is a grey platform, and then I can send it to my ink reader and writer so that I can sketch on top and update it and all that. I have a couple of other examples where it’s more the graph view. And then you can go through it, but it’s a bit more abstract.

So I think this was the more tangible way, and I would definitely like to have my personal annotation through this, for example. But I could very easily list to next to a paper or an article, information related to it. For example, scaling based on popularity or anything like this. Just a simple example.

[Phil Gooch]: That’s great. Yeah, that looks like a really nice way of navigating and picking out which sections you want to read, and papers you want to read. What I was looking at when you were showing that, just reminded me of a paper I saw years ago called document cards, which was one of the motivations for Scholarcy. Where they turn each paper into what they call ‘Top Trumps’. So, if you’ve got a lot of papers to visualise, it turns each paper into a single graphic that’s got the main image from the paper and maybe a couple of quotes from the paper. And it’s a way of showing everything on a paper in a single thumbnail. And maybe there’s a way of doing something like that, instead of showing those PDFs in your virtual reality, you’re showing, maybe, a condensed version of them, that maybe has just enough information to decide whether you want to read it or not, perhaps.

[Frode Hegland]: That's definitely worth us having a good look at just a little bit. Phil, on a sales pitch for the whole VR thing: How long ago has it been since you put on a

headset? More than a year? Because, Phil, you must have done some VR at some point, right?.

[Phil Gooch]: I’ve not done anything. I might have put on a headset in a museum once or something, but...

[Frode Hegland]: Because the key thing is, it’s nothing like Second Life at all. And what Fabien was showing there is, once you're in that space, it becomes really useful and navigable. I sometimes write using Author, my own Author in VR. For the opposite reason that it’s normally good for because it means I have a limited field of view, I have a nice background, I have a decent size screen, the visual quality is good enough for writing, and it’s good enough for reading. You wouldn’t want to read forever. Sure, absolutely. But where the whole system is now is that we’ve done some experiments of a mural, and just having a single mural is absolutely amazing. Because it is really hard to describe, when that mural as an image, is on a computer screen, you kind of move it about, yes, of course, you can do that. But when you can have it huge and then you do a pinch gesture and it comes towards you and you zoom in different things, it’s kind of not explainable why it’s so special. And one of the reasons Ismail is here, we’re looking at doing some mural and timeline related to Egyptian history. It is really hard for us, we only started. I mean, Fabien and Brandel have been going for a long time, but the rest of us, we only started, basically in January. So I have my headset here, goes on and off depending on what we’re doing, but it’s really hard to explain the point of it. Because sitting down VR is one thing, but what really brought me over the edge was when Brandel said just moving your head a little bit as you naturally do, it changes everything. When we have meetings in VR, which we sometimes do, the sense of presence and being with other people, because the audio is spatialised, so if someone’s sitting there,

the sound comes from there, it’s absolutely phenomenal.

So, I really think that Obsidian and all of that it’s nice, and even, as you saw in the beginning, Mark has taken, not even that many documents, but enough documents that that’s all the system can do, into this space, it quickly becomes messy. So, I think what you contribute is the ability to change the view rapidly and intelligently. There are so many interfaces for VR, and a lot of them is about using your hands, grabbing, and moving, and that’s all well and fine. But in some of them, you can have literally buttons to press for certain things to happen. So, I could easily imagine a document space, you start with one document, and at least in the beginning, you have a huge set of buttons underneath, very inelegant, obviously, that when you come across a citation, you can do what you already showed. They can start growing the trees. But all these buttons, again, initially can help you constrain and expand that view. It would be nice to have a spoken interface, it would be nice to pull, and that needs to be experimented with. But the reason I was so excited to have you here today was and is the real interactivity that you give. You take data that’s out there and you make it tangible in a whole new way.

So I hope that, what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to do some sort of a demo for the next Future of Text. We’re looking into building some work room. And Brandel has already taken, from Author, because Author documents are dots. They’re called dot Liquid, like, dot, dot, dot, Liquid. Inside them, we have JSON. So we have some of those goodies already.

He’s been able to take the map view, with the relationships into VR. And, of course, it’s relatively static, but you can already touch things and see lines appear. To be able to go further, and to do, with what you have made available, would be really quite exciting. I mean, I could very well imagine doing the reading you’re talking about. You talked about making it fit on an iPad, but what about making it fit a whole room, right? Just putting one wall, to begin with. Where do you actually put the pictures? Where would you put the graphs? So many questions come up. It gets really interesting. It’s not very obvious at all. But thank you for allowing us to think with available data.

[Phil Gooch]: Thanks. Well, it was great to have the opportunity to chat with you all. Thanks for inviting me. I just wanted to touch on one thing that we spoke about in an email. Because at the time I had a hard time thinking what is the VR/AR angle on this. But you can imagine, in an augmented reality setting that you might have a book or a document in front of you, and you’ve got this augmented view that says, “Actually, here are the main people citing this paper. This is what they say about it. Here are the main findings of this paper” as a separate layer. So you’ve got the paper there you can read and navigate in this 3D space, and you’ve also got this layer that says “Hey, here’s the really important stuff in this paper that you need

to know. And this is what other people are saying about it”. And maybe that’s one of the use cases for AR in this kind of idea. And as you know, Frode, the API is open, so if there’s anything that you want to add for your demo, just give me a shout and we can make it available to you.

[Frode Hegland]: I’ll go over to Brandel, but just really briefly, the thing about how things are connected in a VR space is really up for grabs at the moment. It really is the wild west. So one thing I think we need to do now is, just dream crazy dreams. For instance, the Egyptian opportunity, let’s say you have the mask of Tutankhamun sitting literally on your desk as you’re working on a project, you should then be able to say, “Show me how that relates to timeline, when it was found, and when it was used. Show me that geographically”. All these things should be able to come together. And right now, other than some idiot on Zoom, me, doing it with his hands, it doesn’t really connect. And I’m hoping that your, first of all, your parsing and your genius, but also your willingness to open your APIs to others, and to use other APIs can be a really powerful knowledge growing hub. And, yeah. Brandel, please?

[Brandel Zachernuk]: Thank you. Yeah, I definitely echo everything Frode is saying. If I can characterise what it is virtual reality, augmented reality, spatial computing at large does is that, when you have a display, be it a phone or a screen, even if it’s 30 inches or whatever that is, it’s still very much performs the function of a foveal vision. The central vision of what you’re looking at. And there was a lot of really neat exploration of the practical cognitive consequences that in the 1980s, where they’re saying, “It’s like browsing a newspaper through a hole the size of one column wide”. And what virtual reality does is take that filter away, so that you’re able to read those newspapers but you’re also able to see the whole space around it. And to that end, I think we, unfortunately, as a result of having 50-odd years of computing being the primary mode of interaction for at least some information knowledge workers, and certainly 30 years of it being in the absolute dominant form, is that we have surrendered the space that we would typically do information and knowledge work in, to a small computer with a very even smaller visual real estate. So we don’t have the ability to think about what the entire space is for, can be encoded for. And to that end, I feel like we have to go back to the metaphors that spring from understanding something like a kitchen or a workshop, where you have tools, they have places, when you’re standing in those places, when you’re gripping things in certain ways, that means you’re doing certain things. And that you might move a workpiece from one place to another in order to be able to undertake some kind of manipulation over it. And so, my hope is that, when people can return to that, within the context of knowledge work, where you can say, “I’m looking at this thing right now. But I

have this stuff around me”. One of the things that I showed Frode and other folks in this group was being able to have writing that you’re doing here, and then having the word count over here. So you don’t have to click a button, open a menu in order to see that that information is available. Simply from something as simply reflexive as turning your head.

Likewise with visual image search happening at the same time. But the other thing that this increased capacity for context does is that it increases, by orders of magnitude, the way in which scale can be used. If you think about a museum, in contrast to a book, or in contrast to an academic paper, which is even more compressive constrained, the way that type scale can be vastly changed in order to tell you things. Like, the exit signs and the titles over things are not just two times larger, but they’re maybe a hundred times larger. When you have a big piece of writing on a wall talking about how great (indistinct) is, they’re four different things but the sort of experiential consequences are absolutely legit. Because of the fact that you can devote that space to that, and this space to this. And so, yeah. I’m really excited about seeing all of the semantic information and insight that you have in Scholarcy, and really excited thinking about how to encode that into an entire space that people can manipulate and intervene on, at that scale.

[Phil Gooch]: Yeah, that would be awesome to be able to do that. Our API is open, so if people want to try doing that, integrating it into other systems they can do that. So, thank you. And also thanks for your suggestions about (indistinct) those entities. What type of thing are they? Are they a person? A place? And so on. Like you said, clicking on those links so you know where it’s going to take you in advance without having to wonder. Some great suggestions here, so thanks very much, Brandel. That’s great. I’m afraid I have to go. Lovely to meet you all. And, yeah. I’ll chat to you again soon. Hopefully at the next Future of Text.

Peter Wasilko

Benediktine Cyberspace Revisited

When we speak of Benediktine Cyberspace, we mean a 3-D visualization inspired by Michael Benedikt’s seminal text, “Cyberspace: First Steps” [64] and in particular Michael Benedikt’s chapter therein on “Cyberspace: Some Proposals” [65] and Alan Wexelblat’s chapter therein on “Giving Meaning to Place: Semantic Spaces” (Wexelblat, 1991) [66]. The main takeaway here is that a VR Environment need not simply mirror the three dimensions of our real world, presenting a First Person Shooter like representation of real or stylized spaces (which we can call Architectural Spaces), but can instead directly render datasets containing more than three dimensions, or attributes if you prefer.

This can be achieved in an intelligible fashion by presenting a series of “slices” of our higher dimensional objects, in which arbitary object attributes are mapped, three at a time, to our familair X, Y, and Z axes. Since multiple objects might share these three attributes, an occupied point in our initial space can be thought of as holding the entire Result Set of querying our database for all entries that share those three values of those three attributes.

Attributes that we choose to represent positionally in terms of the axes in a visualization can be said to be Extrinsic. Whereas, any additional attributes whose values we indicate with say shape or color or brightness or opacity of an occupied point are said to be Intrinsic.

Each axis can be said to represent an extrinsic dimension that can correspond to an attribute or property of the objects in our dataset. How the values of attributes are mapped to points along an axis allows us to classify the kind of dimension that attribute represents.

Wexelbart posits that there are two kinds of dimensions Absolue and Relative [66].

An object’s position along an Absolute Dimension is directly controlled by the scaled mapping of the values of one or more of its properites to that dimension.

The location of objects along a Relative Dimension are determined by making pairwise comparisions of all entries using an ordering relation like greater than or after without necessarily knowing exact values for the attribute in question. Since multiple objects may satisfy a given ordering constraint it is possible for them to overlap, making any visualization of edges connecting such nodes unintelligible, unless one or more extra orthogonal (i.e. set at 90 degrees to the other axes) spacer dimensions are introduced so we can spread overlapping points out to view them and their connections individually.

Since a Relative Dimension corresponds to a relation between elements we can subclassify it based on the properties of that relation.

Here we are concerned with the mathematical property of transitivity, which is to say whether the relation’s holding between an element and a second element, and the same relation’s holding between the second element and a third element, implies that that it also holds between the first element and the third element. If this is the case, we can conclude that the relation describes an acyclic graph so there will be no cycles among elements and the that the relation can be represented in Euclidean Space. If a relation is not transitive, it may describe a general graph containing cycles — as in the case of the winning relation in Rock, Paper, Scisors which loops around on itself with Rock beating Scisors, Scisors beating Paper, and Paper breating Rock. Such relations can’t be represented in Euclidean Space since moving far enough in one direction causes one to loop around to one’s starting point. This can of course be represented in one dimension by cutting the loops and stretching it out in a line and then “warping” from one edge back to the other — as in early Video Games where exiting the screen on the right side would cause one to re-enter it from the left or by duplicating a point at opposite ends of the display range or only drawing its right half up against the left edge of the screen and its left half up against the right edge of the screen.

Alternatively a graph relation can be represented From the Outside by embedding it in a 2-D or 3-D Space. General Graphs can be represented in 2-D by drawing their verticies as points at arbitrary locations and connecting them with potentially crossing lines called edges or in same manner in 3-D without any overlapping edges.

We can visualize a Non-Euclean Geometry From the Inside where all Three dimensions in a volume might represent non-transitive relations, in which case the six faces exiting a unit cube are logically glued together in one of a number of possible configurations mapping pairs of faces under possible rotation called manifolds.

But rather than viewing the relations captured in such unnatural spaces From the Inside, it is much easier to visualize them From the Outside as traditional graphs in a 3-D volume.

If the comparison relation underlying a relative dimension is dervied from values, such that we can determine relative distances between pairs of points in the space, we can compress the dimension based on these values and space points to preserve the degree of differnce between pairs — spacing points relative to the greatest distance between points in the set of all pairs relative to the minimal distance between the points in such pairs; otherwise we can simply give them a uniform spacing.

Alternatively, in dealing with absolute dimensions we can place points at their natural locations along the dimensions and then compress or fold the space to collapse large empty regions while adjusing axis labels to reflect this non-uniform metric. We can call all of these

sorts of presentations Elastic Spaces as they will be expanded or contracted based on the density of their contents to make optimal usage of available screen realestate.

We can also classify dimenions based on the type of values they can represent and how many points they can contain.

Wexelblat’s Taxonomy of Dimensions

Linnear Dimensions

A linnear dimension will corespond to the set of Real Numbers expanding in both directions from an origin to hold an uncountably infinite number of points. It can also be thought of in terms of the output from a grammar containing repeatable productions that can generate an arbitrary number of strings whose lexical order will place them between any two other strings generated by that grammer. In other words, any grammar that can produce infinitiely subdivisible or refinable lists! The Grammar describing the representation of Real Numbers (where we can generate 1.5 which sorts between 1 and 2, and 1.25 which sorts between 1 and 1.5, and so on up to infinitity) falls in this class.

Ray Dimensions

A ray dimension is also uncountably infinite, but will be bounded by an origin at some point on the number line and extend in only one direction to positive or negative infinity. The sets of Positive and Negative real numbers fall in this class as well as Age and Weight properties along with the output of a grammar describing Ted Nelson’s Tumblers (which can be refined with new dot delimited sub-sequences).

Quantum Dimensions

A Quantum Dimension is most similar to a linear dimension but holds only values that can be mapped to the Countably Infinite set of Integers, making the space granular with no subdivisions of “cells” being possible. Whole Numbers, Natural Numbers, Prime Numbers, and arbitrarily long strings drawn from a fixed alphabet of sysmbols that are sorted by length have this property, as do any sets drawn from a fixed pool of possible elements.

Nominal Dimensions

A Nominal Dimension is a Quantum Dimension that has been constrained by Domain Knowledge such as the Names of Employees as opposed to a grammatical notion of Possible

Names in the abstract. This corresonds to the invokation of a Semantic Predicate like “Previously Defined” in a Parsing Expression Grammar which might consult a look-up table to reject syntactically valid inputs that haven’t yet been declared to be recognizable.

Ordinal Dimensions

An Ordinal Dimension may have up to a Countably Infinite number of members and can be thought of as being an ordered set or more generally a list that might contain multiple copies of any given element (as opposed to having an element composed of multiple copies of a given symbol — e.g. the list of elements [ ‘a’, ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘a’ ] vs. the element ‘aaba’) in a fixed sequence, such that we can query the first, second, third, or fourth element; or determine that element ‘a’ recurs three times in the a list as its first, second, AND third elements.

Functional Dimensions

Here Wexelblat would place all attributes defined by complex forumulae whose values are subject to change, presuming their evaluation “at run time” as computer programmers would say. This aspect of the taxonomy seems a bit at odds with the others since the values generated at visualization time would be ammenable to classification under one of the other categories in his Taxonomy. So a Functional dimension is perhaps better thought of as an Aspect or Modifer of one of a core dimension type; or as being analog to the function of the Volatile keyword in the C Programming Language.

The other weakness of this categorization is that it tends to conflate the Name of the Method, its Type Signature (i.e. what kinds of data objects it expects as inputs and what kind of value it produces) which might vary across data object (in which case the dimension would be most properly understood as representing / holding a Multimethod in Programming Language Design parlance), its Implementation(s), and the results of its Application to the dataset being visualized.

It is unlikely that average system users would be concerned with the internals of the functions represented, so in a practical system having gobaly unique function names bound to code objects (holding their actual implementation code as an intrinsic attribute) would probably make the most sense. Alternately, we might be concerned with whether data objects support the invocation of a given method (e.g. Which data objects have a notion of “local time”?); how that value is computed (e.g. By querying a nearby time-server and returning its result vs. looking up Grenwhich Mean Time from its office time-server and then applying a local time-zone offset adjustment); or its current value (i.e. running the code to get its final

value).

Visualizing, Editing, and Navigating Benediktine Cyberspaces

Visualization

A system for working with a Benediktine Cyberspace will be a hardware/software amalgam called a Cyberdeck. On activating one’s Cyerdeck, one will be presented with a menu of pre-defined visualizations like “Peter’s Personal Library” as well as the option to create a new visualization, which would walk one through a set of dialogs to select a dataset or datasets of interest, which could be inspected to select one or more dimensions of interest and to describe how to map them to 3 extrinsic dimensions plus optional intrinsc dimensions. The final result will be a fully specified volumetric visualization called a Chamber or Space.

At this point we can assume that even smooth linnear dimensions will be quanticized for display purposes, so each mathematical point in 3-space represented in the visualization will be mapped to one or more logical pixels on the display which taken together will constitute a Cell in the cyberspace containing one or more display space Voxels (ie.

Volumetric Pixels).

Each cell can be colored to represent up to three intrinsic dimensions or we can scale the visualization to increase each logical cell’s physical voxel count enough for it hold an arbitrarily large nested sub-visualization that might take the form of a simple stylized 3-D shape, a compact block of line-wrapped text, a 2-D image, an arbitrarily detailed 3-D model, or a nested visualization in which the walls of the cell might even be treated as independent 2-D display surfaces (in which case a spin affordance would let one rotate the cell around to see its hidden exterior faces).

Editing

Where a cell contains only a single data object, a grab affordance can be provided through which the user can take hold of the object within the cell and drag it relative to the visualization’s extrinsic dimensions to update the attribute values of the selected object, (e.g. dragging a timeline item update its start date attribute). When several items are present within a cell, a modifier affordance should a allow a user to select All or SOME of

the data objects within the cell for a grab and drag to update operation.

Regardless of whether a cell contains any data objects, it can be regarded as holding a Cursor or Probe into the data-space, such that a new operation could be invoked with the cell selected to create a new data object with that object’s attributes to which the visualization’s extrinsic dimensions are mapped automatically set to those values of the currently selected cell.

Navigation

As alluded to above, Chambers can be nested to hold linked visualizations, or they be can entered zooming in or crossfading to visually replace the current top level visualization with the one contained in the selected point, or they can be unfolded to create a dynamically linked top-level sibling or nested child visualization of a chamber holding the cell’s content bound to a different set of extrisic and intrinsic attributes. When a point is unfolded to open a linked visualization within the volume of its parent chamber, we call the resulting nested chamber/cell a Subspace.

There is a certain level of terminological ambiguity in the use of the terms Cell, Chamber, and Subspace with Chamber generally being use in the case of top level visualizations whilest cells can refer to subvolumes or subvisulizations.

Unfolding can be applied to one or more data objects to look inside of them, or to a Probe (conventionally represetned as 3-D cross-hairs) to look at the result set returned by treating it as a Query By Example. Dragging a Probe that has been unfolded around in its orgin space, will have the effect of scrubbing (in video editing parlance) through the result sets returned by dyaamically updating the Probe’s attribute query values (based on its extrinic location in its origin space) to dynamically update the contents of any nested or unfoled linked visualizations!

In VR, these linked visualizations could be seperately positional by dragging them around in the virtual environment, with perhaps glowing 3-D Bezier Curves sweeping out behind them to maintain a visual connection to their cell of origin.

Comparing Objects

In his chapter, Benedikt offers a brief taxonomy of how pairs of objects can be compared both within and across chambers/cells [67]. If two objects share the same values for both their extrinsic and intrinsic dimensions in one or more (assuming we are dealing with

mutliple copies of the same top-level chamber with independent probes and sub-spaces) chambers/cells they are said to be Self-Same (i.e. the same underlying entity in the dataset).

If they share the same intrinsic attributes and the same values for them, but occupy different extrinsic coordinates within the same extrinsic dimensions, they are said to be identical. If they occupy different coordinates within the same extrinsic dimensions and share the same intrinsic dimensions but with different values, they are similar; but if they don’t share the same intrinsic dimensions we say that they are different. This roughly corresponds to notions of class membership in Object Oriented Programming.

If objects in spaces with different extrinsic dimensions are compared and found to share both the same set of intrinsic dimensions and the same values for each of them, they are said to be super-identical. If they share the same intinsic dimensions but with different values for them, we say they are super-similar. However if they don’t share the same intrinsic dimensions we say they are wholly different.

These relationships are a function of both the objects in our dataset and our choice of how we map their attributes to intrinsic and extrinics dimensions. So the same two objects might be similar in one representation and super-similar in another.

If an object is dragable within a dataspace such that its extrinsic coordinates are othogonal to its instrinsic dimensions and their values, the object is said to have self-identity. If its intrinsic dimensions are preserved with movement, but their values are computationally bound to its extrinsic coordinates it is said to have self-similarity. If movement determines its set of intrinsic dimensions, it is said to have a strange identity.

As crazy as this might sound, it can be practically applied in a user interface where placing an object in a designated region changes its class / prototype as can be accomplished via adornment actionsyyy and smart adornmentszzz in Tinderbox Map Viewsaaaa (Note that on a deep level all notes within a Tinderbox document are similar in that they share a single global set of potentially instantiated attributes/intrinsic dimensions).

The DataProbe HUD — An Additional Possiblity in VR

It addition to the aformentioned visualizations, we can also imagine providing a VR user with a DataProbe HUD that would have a set of 2-D or 3-D virtual display panel slots that would remain at fixed positions (relative to a user’s head or external environment — depending on user preference) to display visualizations of slices of attributes of the cyberspace cell being looked at, as determined by eye tracking.

For example, one might have an employee visualization depicting the faces of everyone

in the shipping department and use HUD slots to show the full name, age, rating, and accumulated vacation days of whichever face one was looking at. Or one might be looking at a textual list of deparments and have a HUD Slot hold a 3-D overview of all of the departments by employee count, budget, and revenue with the cell correspoding to the name one was looking at light up in the HUD to give a perhiperal sense of how it relates to other departments.

An inward swiping gesture could swap the main visualization for one in the HUD or vice versa with an outward swipe!

Future Work

Considerable work remains to be done in cleaning up the nomenclature associated with Benediktine Cyberspaces. It would probably prove useful to ground them in Category Theory and also to look at their relationship to Type Systems in the realm of programming langauge research.

In this brief overview we have tried to tease out a large number of useful distinctions which suggest User Interface Design opportunities in VR, but the terminology will likely prove somewhat offputting to readers without a strong maths background, so some sort of Illustrated Guide for casual system users might be desirable particularly when we reach the point of deploying functional demonstration systems.

Peter Wasilko

Putting It All Together

This talk revisits the ontology of Benediktine Cyberspace† and speculates on how it can be extended with affordances from other areas of CHI research to produce a usable platform for Serious VR.

An optimal system will support mixed initiative mutli-modal interaction between Spatialized Content in a VR Pane, a history of State Transitions and User & Software Agent Messaging in a Transcript Pane, and a Textual Dialog leveraging references to selections in the other panes to drive the overall system via a Command Line Interface Pane.

In discussing the VR Pane we will first consider the nature of Dataspaces and the Kinds and Types of Semantic Dimensions that can be used to define them. We will also consider how points can represent a Query or Datum and how we can link and transition between visualization via Embedding, Unfolding, and Semantic Zooming.

We will then argue for adapting the MIT Media Labs’ Chat Circles UI as the centerpiece of a Transcript Pane and conclude by considering how the Inform 7 UI can inform the design of our Command Line Interface Pane.

Future VR Systems Should Embody The Elements of Programming

Primitive Expressions ( Data Literals & Special Forms ) that can be Evaluated to Yield a Value or Perform a Computational Effect.
A Means of Composition to build Data Structures & Functions.
A Means of Abstraction so those aggregates can be Named and Manipulated as First Class Values.

( See The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs §1.1 )

They Should Also Provide User Interface Affordances that make Simple Tasks Easy and Arbitrarily Complex Tasks Possible

Requisite Affordances for Productive Work in VR
A Way to Browse, Navigate, and Reference: Spatialized Content — A VR Pane
A Way to Browse, Navigate, Reference, and Manage Attention among: Active Views, The Command Line History, and Messaging in a Mixed Initiative Dialog with Other System Users and Local or Remote Software Agents — A Transcript Pane
A Way to painlessly and efficiently drive the system that supports references to selections in the other Panes — A Command Line Interface Pane
The three panes should be independently resizable, duplicable, nestable, and positionable in the overall VR World and their state at any point in time should be a first class value in the Transcript Pane that can be bookmarked and manipulated.

The VR Pane
The VR Pane is the primary region for summoning up Spaces each of which can be imagined as being a dedicated conventional monitor, that might hold a traditional document, a Domain Specific Visualization, a Hyper-Othogonal ZigZag Structure, a Second Life or Sinespace style 3-D Chat Region, or an abstract Benediktine Cyberspace.
We can embed an arbitrary Graph structure in a 3-D Space as a set of vertices connected by non-crossing edges; but if the relation represented by the graph is non-transitive so the graph contains cycles ( like winning at “Rock, Paper, Scissors” ), one would need to simulate a non-euclidean space to view it from “the inside” (i.e. to assign the relation to the X, Y, or Z axis for use as an extrinsic dimension).
Cyberspaces can be Overlaid / Superimposed on one another as in AR or a Geographic Information System supporting multiple layers
Spatial Layout Managers can let us call up standard tableaux of relatively positioned spaces that we can reference in a Command Line Viewspec

The Transcript Pane
The Transcript Pane lets us Manage Attention, Navigate Temporally. and Abstract Over Variable Scale Hierarches of Timespans and Communication Channels.
A Communication Channel can represent the messaging history of a Class or Subclass of Human System Users or Software Agents; it can also capture the Worldlines of Linked Spaces in the VR Pane or Context Tags Introduced by the User to aid future recall.
A selector widget or 2-D Spatial Chat Room controller can be used to direct utterances to specific actors and filter inbound message traffic to view it in full or passively monitor it

via an Ambient Display.
In General messages will be depicted as horizontal bars sized proportionately to message length on a vertically oriented timeline. Cursoring over a bar will cause its underlying text/data/visualization to be displayed in a Linked View.

The Command Line Interface Pane
A text prompt with scroll back is NOT enough, we need Documentation and Context.
Inform 7 follows the Memex tradition to juxtapose 2 resizable Info-Panes with horizontal and vertical tabs running along their top and side edges to allow one to select any of 7 primary views and one of up to 8 sub-views depending on context.
In VR we aren’t limited to two tabbed views and can “Tear Off” as many as we desire!
In addition to Tabbing, Hyperlinks can be followed to jump between views, while each pane’s view selection history can be navigated with Backward and Forward buttons.
A “Source” pane provides a typographically rich Terminal-Pane for entering Quasi- Natural Language commands and entire programs that can be copied over from the docs with a single click.
“Documentation” and “Index” panes offers access to two manuals and a sub-catorized data dictionary including Maps of how elements are connected.

Viewspecs
For Our Purposes, Viewspecs are essentially functions that define how data will filtered, styled, projected, and interacted with in a visualization.
We Build Up Viewspecs by mapping object properties to dimensions and specifying the appearance and content of the point at their intersection using an unambiguous subset of English that can be defined with a Parsing Expression Grammar
As a result, Viewspecs are Quasi-Natural-Language Expressions that can be:
- Named and parametrized and composed from simpler Viewspecs
- Shared in Email or Visual Meta
- Derived and Extracted from Live Views
- Represented with branch-able Wordlines in The Transcript Pane
- Modified in real time via Direct Manipulation of the View they represent or via Textual directives
  
  What Can We Specify with Viewspecs?
We can use Viewspecs to Scale different ranges along a given axis to compress or expand the space between displayed points in a view analogous to using Glue in typesetting.
We can specify how to represent N-Dimensional Objects where multiple items may be mapped to the same point in any given 3-Dimensions by linking a series of Views/Spaces.
- This can take the form of Semantic Zooming (i.e. Replacing) the Original View; Rotating the Dimensions of a ZigZag View; Embedding a New View as a 3-D “Cell” in the Current View; or Unfolding a selected point into a linked independently positionable adjacent 3-D child view that can Persist as we move a Probe in the parent space to select new result sets, indicating their size with sound or by altering the Probe’s shape, brightness or color.
Can also invoke Mutli-Dimensional Scalling & Numerical Taxonomy methods to organize our data.
We might also overlay scaled avatars to see who else is present and what they are looking at.
We can enable editing an item’s extrinsic properties by grabbing and dragging it within a view.

Examples of Driving Complex Visualizations with a Command Line Viewspec Domain Specific Language (DSL)
Plot “Start Date”, “Headcount”, and “Number of Milestones” in “Spring Projects” colored from green to blue by “Urgency”; embedding each project’s “Project Type” icon in a 10 by 30 by 20 voxel cell, that semantically zooms into Project Financial Summary Space.
Unfold the selection’s “Manager” exposing “Experience Level”, “Number of Active Projects”, and “Failure to Success Ratio”, lit by relative number of “Complaints on File” and colored red if “Human-Resources Flag” is set, or blue otherwise. Set “Human- Resources Flag” if “Complaints on File” is > 3.
Define “Project Financial Summary Space” as a horizontally split planar view of a “Project Names” list, bound to a “Financial Summary” outline of the selected project’s subtasks; where the “Financial Summary” outline lists the “Funds Spent”, “Funds Projected to be Spent” and “Contingency Fund Balance” of each entry over a linear plot of

all projects (viewed by budget on a log scale) highlighting the currently selected project.
Cluster “Butterfly Survey Expedition Specimens” in a 3-D Space based on all of their attributes.

UI Support for Discovery of the Viewspec DSL
Interactive Textual Dialog — a dialog based “wizard”
IntelliSense (i.e. code completion hints)
A Tile-Based Structure Editor (e.g. Blockly)
A Data Flow / Wiring-Based Editor (e.g. Nodes)
The Cut, Paste, and Edit of Hyperlinked Examples (e.g. Inform 7)

The Gestalt We Are Aiming At
We Want Our Interface to Support Fluidly Shifting Among Multiple Views
We Want to tame High-Dimensional Data Sets
We Want An End User to Be Able to Create New Views On The Fly without needing to Hire a Programmer to build a dedicated “App for that”.
We Want to Leverage Direct Manipulation and Text as Co-Equal Input Channels
Once we learn the Viewspec language we can use it to produce effects that would entail too many direct manipulation GUI interactions to be worth the effort.

In a World of fully immersive VR, Old Fashioned Text is the Secret Sauce for getting Serious Things Done.

Bibliography
Blockly: https://developers.google.com/blockly/
Chat Circles: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/chat_circles.pdf
Cyberspace: First Steps: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262023276/cyberspace/
Inform 7: https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/
Intellisense: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/intellisense
Inverse Parser: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/jcgd-

volume-6/how-to-build-an-inverse.html
Nodes: https://nodes.io/
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/ books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/index.html
ZigZag: https://xanadu.com/zigzag/

Pol Baladas & Gerard Serra

There are two great points to be shared after our practical explorations:

Playing with an AI on a spatial canvas: Text is one of the most effective ways to transform our thoughts into a physical memory. We can visualize our mental processes, reflect on them and even rearrange them spatially to make connections between our ideas or separate different concepts. In addition, by extending our thinking processes externally, others can join our shared space and help us to reflect and move on with our thinking. Many modern tools allow us to visualize our collaborators and co-create by sharing the same space.

The next question comes when we imagine how to collaborate with an artificial intelligent agent in a shared space. What happens when an AI agent can respond across a shared spatial canvas rather than only continue what we are writing in one direction? We may be able to ask an AI agent to combine different thoughts filling our empty canvas with some ideas to help us overcome our creative block.

Then, we'll become curators of AI-produced content, rather than focusing on the creation itself. We can imagine ourselves providing possible directions and letting these AI tools be in charge of transforming, organizing, and making connections between our ideas. In that future, we become the conductors of an orchestra of agents that write following our orders.

Discovering new fundamental operations on text with LLMs: When we analyze a tool like Fermat under Engelbart's H-LAM/T System one stops at the "M" (Methodology) and wonders. I always refer to the handwritten long-division algorithm used at schools to explain the "M" in the acronym - it's a good example, for it shows how mathematical notation augments us, how pen & paper augments us, and it definitely needs some training to use, completing the system under the H-LAM/T lens. In our exploration (using Fermat) we can very cheaply play with Large Language Models (LLMs) and, in doing so, create complex prompt engineering or specific tasks and abstract them away in atomic UI elements like buttons: one for summarizing a text, another that generates counter- arguments from a statement, or propose creative solutions for a problem. After imbuing our digital workspaces with these AI-enabled buttons, the user starts using them as new

fundamental operations on text. Where one previously would cut & paste or find & replace, now the user can summarize or criticize a text automatically, extract relevant keywords, generate counter-arguments, generate more ideas… in less than a second, which makes these (complex) actions feel like automatisms - in other words: new Methodologies for working with digital text under the lens of Engelbart's H-LAM/T.

Sam Brooker

Supplementary Material: Devaluing the Work and Elevating the Worker

Early hypertext scholarship recognised the power of the book as both object and artefact, its physical stability and defined boundaries asserting the personhood of the writer. “Each author produces something unique and identifiable as property” as George Landow [68] put it, while Espen Aarseth described boundaries between literary works as a cultural construct, a product of print media [69]. Whatever the disadvantages of the print work, it at least ensured that there was an object to be traded.

The value chain for publishing has historically been comparatively stable, if not always advantageous to the individual writer seeking to make a living. Releasing one-off works has always required the cultivation of a complex network of engaged, motivated individuals keen to access them. This structure of distribution is very labour-intensive, however, and reliant on a willingness to wait (sometimes for years) for a work to be released. An advantage of the historical publishing value chain is that publishers themselves can (at least in principle) apply the tools of marketing and promotion to maintain audiences and build anticipation prior to release. They can also (again, in principle) sustain a writer during periods of development and research.

Web-oriented models of distribution offer a compelling answer to some historical problems of distribution. The infrastructure it provides promises that works can reach an audience without the material costs of a traditional publisher – see its value for writers of Twine fiction, for example, who were able to easily distribute their works online.

Two related questions emerge from this new publishing environment: how best to maintain those value-adding networks necessary for commercial success, and how to ensure that creative people can make a living from them. “A very small number of authors gained visibility during this period”, wrote merritt kopas [70] of the Twine community’s most active period, “and almost all of them still struggle with material insecurity.” Alison Harvey too notes that Twine’s emancipatory potential, its much-discussed facility to amplify marginalised voices, does not provide “an adequate answer to the problem of creating a sustainable life for these game makers.”

“Individuals could now no longer count on the support of their employers,” wrote Fred Turner [71], of the world envisioned by Silicon Valley in the 1990s. “They would instead

have to become entrepreneurs.” In the convergent, Transmedia space of the web some might argue that the tools for promotion and commercial success are already in place. An interlocking complex of platforms – Twitter, Patreon, YouTube, Twitch – provides the creative individual with the necessary tools to create and sustain a bespoke value chain which can support their working life. If Transmedia is “a collection of different segments of content that are brought together into a whole larger than any individual segment” [72] then this may offer the creator a means to cultivate such a following. Comedian Brian Limond found initial success through a largely self-produced comedy series on BBC Scotland, but now dedicates his time to the community he has cultivated on Twitch.

Ultimately this pattern may invert the standard order of an audience’s relation with writers and their work. Rather than curiosity about the person being prompted by interest in their output, the relationship is with the person themselves. Works become manifestations of an identity or personality which audiences recognise through various social channels. By exposure audiences increasingly seem to engage more readily with social media content than the ostensible “work” of the individual. Young creatives shift their self- identification of employment from medium – filmmaker, writer – to either oblique descriptions of personality or medium-agnostic terms like content creator.

Academic communities have been slow to respond to this change. An artefact-oriented media culture that fetishizes objects still prevails in many critical environments - even as wider cultural attitudes shift from an emphasis on the work to the persona of the worker. Are we really experiencing a fuller inversion of text and context, a perhaps natural evolution of poststructuralist ideas? Do audiences increasingly see the creator as locus of enquiry, their output valuable mostly as explanatory of person or endorsed as a means of supporting what amounts to a favoured stranger’s hobby? What might happen if we move more fully from a text-oriented culture to a context-oriented one?

What does this mean for the writer? There are certainly advantages to making the worker, not the work, the locus of attention. An intimate, personal relationship with the creator, one that fosters a small but highly motivated audience, may sustain work that would be unlikely to find wider appeal. The need to sell thousands of units becomes irrelevant when the wider infrastructure costs are so comparatively low. Value networks that do not scale may work at the level of the indie content creator.

And of course, there are disadvantages. Publishers, recognising this phenomenon and under significant financial pressure themselves, increasingly expect writers to bring the audience as well as the work. Time-poor individuals with limited resources, already struggling to complete creative work, now must maintain a complex, coherent identity across a plurality of social media platforms. Access to well-funded and well-connected networks

will still permit advantaged individuals to get ahead, while those from less privileged backgrounds struggle to make themselves heard over the noise. A reorientation away from the object may also render the “real” work – the book, the film - a benign hobby tolerated by an audience there to engage primarily with the persona of the individual. Building an audience imputes an instrumentalist view of social interaction, encouraging performative activity which may act against our instinct toward truth and authenticity. Such parasocial relationships have consequences for audiences as well, particularly in their deepening connection with a creator whom they are unlikely to ever meet.

Scott Rettberg

Cyborg Authorship: Humans Writing with AI

2022 is AI Spring: new very large language models are exploding exponentially, lending AI such as GPT-3 and its various successors and competitors increasing power to replicate and respond to human language as active cognizers, producing writing that is becoming nearly indistinguishable from human-authored text.

At the same time text-to-image programs such as DAL-E 2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and others are enabling new acts of interlocution and image production. At the same time more conventional modes of computational narrative systems are being used by electronic literature authors in the process of authoring books that engage with algorithms along with human-authored language and structures. In this paper I’ll explore what these systems mean for human authorship and consider examples of how some authors are working with AI in creating narratives that are neither solely the product of human consciousness nor AI but the product of a hybrid process – cyborg authorship.

Timur Schukin

Multidimensional

There is a new book by Slavoy Zizek that is called “Hegel in a connected mind”. He is talking to Elon Musk exploring and bringing his idea of direct thought to thought brain interface. He does that on the basis of his understanding of how ideas and text are related. That is not just his but Hegel’s and is basically mine as well, as the same ideas underlie Vigotskinian psychology, which is basically the main line in Russia, Ukraine and many other ex-USSR countries. He says that text is not just an artifact of thought–a ‘hardcopy’ of mind’s ‘softcopy’.

The basic ideas is that text, not language, shapes thought. Without text one can not think, one needs to find words to make ideas clear and defined.

Ideas’ own realm is imagination’s realm which does not provide the tools of symbol operations which text provides. So one needs to put his or her ideas to words and to text to really think in a way that has prominence.

There is an old Russian approach to classification of professions that puts them in several categories. One is human to human, other is human to technology and another one is human to text.

If one looks at VR and AR tech they seem to be build around two scenarios of interaction - these are human to tech and human to human, and when you see human to text - they are also built on other two approaches, they are not real human to text environments.

Also we can bring into consideration Marshall McLuhan’s approach to media and big epochs of media, where we had text environments before electricity and now we are entering digital. What he says in his laws of media is that media is transforming our literacy and changes collective subconsciousness in many ways, they suppress something and they retrieve old media. Digital retrieves scribal, the epoch when texts were human written, not printed.

Bringing these three contexts together, one on relation of ideation and text, one on special kind of relations between human and text and one of Mcluhan, one can arrive at a few statements about all those placed inside an extended and controlled environment.

I would say that its embodiment context comes from space understood in a limited way. Space of text is a space of thought and aspace of conceptualisation, strongly connected to a space of imagination. Mcluhan says that text is a medium that works with unconsciousness

and implements it’s workings on a massive culture-wide scale. And the human to text type of professions are based on idea of interfaces between text and human mind that are not equal to interfaces between body and it’s environment or it’s technical extensions.

Text is linear and its makes thought transform and shape itself when graph-like, network based ideation coalesces into trains of words. These transformation between multidimensional thought space and two or three dimensional text space that consists of symbolic representation of un-dimensional reality is a concept-creating space.

There are many ontologies which shape the attention filters for objects in question– which are described by text. Most of those ontologies evolved during time which has passed since times Engelbart invented his engine. Now we can bring new inference logics and structures to ideation and representation spaces–system, thermodynamics, active inference, bayesian logic, quantum models and many others, most of them are already implemented in one or other kind of artificial agency algorithms. New structural relations between concepts, inferences and models, concept evolution and implementations practices are made into technologies, assistant algorithms and methodologies–all of which can be implemented in a new set of operators, surpassing copy–paste uplink–downlink etc models of Engelbart.

They require a new multidimensional space and interfaces to be fully and user-friendly implemented. So I see VR and AR for text work as a new environment that which with ideas in forms of their brain-like diffuse and irrational multidimensional representations with it’s own, probably partly brain–computer interface enabled tech. Also text-hypertext editing tools as well as tools that can model and represent the object of text–physical or ideal. At the same VR space, with a completely new set of instruments for different levels and types of consciousness and cognition–working together as a whole augmented by agent–like instruments, which make that new kind of text work more of complex assemblage collaboration than just human–tool extension.

Yiliu Shen-Burke

Introducing Softspace

An initial design for a collaborative spatial knowledge graph.

Abstract

A critical step in creative knowledge work is synthesis: the distillation of disjointed data into coherent ideas. As information problems become more complex, and good ideas increasingly valuable, individuals and groups demand better tools for managing and synthesizing knowledge.

We observe three trends in software aiming to meet this demand: spatial canvases (e.g.

Muse, Figma), knowledge graphs (e.g. Roam, Obsidian), and collaboration (e.g. Zoom, Teams).

However, legacy tools remain constrained by their flat, bounded interfaces. Our design for Softspace proposes a collaborative spatial knowledge graph that transcends the 2D paradigm, offering creative knowledge workers the ultimate tool for thought.

Introduction

Knowledge Synthesis

The creative knowledge economy runs on great ideas, executed well.

A critical step in developing these ideas is knowledge synthesis: the work of recombining a large, disjointed collection of information into something simple, coherent, and valuable.

A designer synthesizes a wall of references into a beautiful product design. An entrepreneur synthesizes stacks of market data into a bold business strategy. A researcher synthesizes a myriad of observations about the world into an elegant explanation.

Synthesis is hard. To do it well, we have to hold many pieces of the puzzle in our head at once, and test innumerable combinations of ideas. Synthesis gets exponentially harder as the quantity and complexity of the information we’re working with increases.

Spatial Computing

By making the sharing, processing, and storage of information fast, cheap, and reliable, computers have become invaluable to knowledge workers. Yet when we use computers for knowledge synthesis, it becomes apparent that the UI is now the bottleneck.

Simplistically: laptop screens are too small and flat for working on big knowledge problems. They don’t let us see enough of the puzzle at once, and the way they show information makes remembering or reasoning about it difficult when it’s out of view—which is most of the time.

Spatial computing offers a solution. XR headsets let us see, remember, and think about far more information than before, by displaying it in immersive 3D. This may be a new paradigm for software, but it’s one to which our brains and bodies are exceedingly well- adapted.

Softspace

Softspace is an XR productivity and creativity app that gives creative knowledge workers a powerful new way to organize, develop, and communicate great ideas.

In our design, users work with conventional content types (e.g. text, images, PDFs, and websites) within a radical new paradigm: a collaborative 3D knowledge graph.

Through a workflow that combines elements of notetaking, mindmapping, and moodboarding, users build up spatial information workspaces that reflect the structure of their ideas.

Users then compose and export linear syntheses of their knowledge graphs, in the form of markdown files, for use in downstream workflows.

The immersive virtual workspace allows collaborators to step into the same information space for discussion and co-creation, regardless of physical distance.
Design

Items

The entity primitive in Softspace is the item. Items are single pieces of content data, or containers that hold other items. Items correspond to what are called blocks in some other knowledge-management tools, such as Notion or Roam.

Content Items

Conceptually, content items map best onto single files, although in cases such as text and URLs this correspondence does not strictly hold. Initially, content item types in Softspace include:
- text paragraphs
- static images
- PDF documents
- bookmarked websites
  
  Future updates to Softspace may implement, among others:
- tweets
- videos
- podcasts
  
  Container Items
  
  As their name suggests, container items hold other items. The initial design for Softspace only specifies a single type of container: the topic.
  
  Topics can either be expanded or collapsed.
- While expanded, the contents of a topic are displayed in a fixed ordinospatial layout that makes use of all three spatial dimensions while constraining contents to a single linear order. This ordinality makes topics mappable to conventional document formats (such as markdown), and usable as 3D notes.
- While collapsed, the text contents of a topic become hidden. However, backlinks from hidden text to other topics are visible as connections between the collapsed topic and referent topics. Images, PDFs, websites, and other non-text contents remain visible—they float free of the collapsed topic, but remain visually and spatially connected to it.
Topics have a title: a string value that identifies that topic within the workspace. Future updates to Softspace will implement topic aliases: alternative titles (to accommodate capitalization, synonyms, orthographical variants, etc.) by which one topic is identified.

When exporting a Softspace workspace, each topic is interpreted as a markdown file whose filename is the topic title, and whose contents are those of the topic.

For performance and technical implementation reasons, the initial design of Softspace will only permit a single topic to be expanded at a time. Later updates will allow multiple topics to be expanded simultaneously.

For performance and technical implementation reasons, the initial design of Softspace

will not permit nested topics—i.e. topics cannot contain each other. Later updates will enable this.

Transclusion

Transclusion is a term coined by Ted Nelson in his 1980 publication Literary Machines. It refers to the concept of including a single piece of content across multiple contexts as live instances, so that a change in one instance is reflected across all instances.

Softspace implements transclusion by allowing item types to be contained by any number of topics. Adding a transcludable item to a topic does not remove it from its other containers.

Initially, this will be possible for item types which are highly atomic (semantically independent of their immediate context) and/or relatively immutable. Text items do not meet this criterion, and can therefore only be contained in a single topic at a time.

Transclusion allows topic containers to function as tags.

Backlinks

The popularity of the note-taking app Roam Research (and Roam-like apps) can be largely attributed to its use of the backlink as a core interaction primitive. A backlink is an in-line reference from text to a conceptual entity. In the case of Roam, backlinks point to notes. In Softspace, backlinks point to topics.

Our design borrows the [[]]-notation of Roam. Terms within a text item which are surrounded by double square brackets will be visually and spatially linked to the topic with the same title as the enclosed text. If no such topic exists, one will be created.

When a topic is collapsed, the backlinks from its hidden text items remain visible as indicator lines that connect the collapsed topic to referent topics. In future updates, these indicators will display the snippet of text which contains the backlink.

Spatiality

Whiteboarding apps like Miro have proven the tangible value of being able to lay out information spatially in a software tool. Many apps which feature a canvas for UI design purposes, such as Figma, are often used as general-purpose boards instead. New tools built on this basic pattern seem to emerge daily, from Muse to Heptabase to Apple’s upcoming Freeform.

Spatial interfaces are effective because our brains have evolved to be astoundingly good at perceiving, remembering, and interpreting where objects are in our environment.

But a spatial canvas displayed on a laptop screen suffers from three drawbacks:
1. 2D supports less spatial complexity than 3D, limiting spatial semantics.
2. The view cuts off at the edge of the screen, limiting contextual awareness.
3. The user is not situated within the workspace, limiting spatial memory.
The design premise of Softspace is a 3D spatial canvas within which the user is situated; therefore, it bypasses the above three constraints.

Further, our design incorporates three distinct modes for the spatial positioning of items in a workspace. These modes are optimized for different phases in the workflow.

Ordinospatial Layout

Within an expanded topic, items are laid out using a front-to-back, left-to-right, top-to-bottom system called an ordinospatial layout. All three spatial dimensions are used to arrange contents, but there is a definite order that makes each topic interpretable as a linear document.

This mode is best for the content a user is working on directly at that moment. Using this layout is conceptually similar to drafting a 3D note.

Force-Directed Layout

Items whose positions are not fixed within an expanded topic are subject to the force-directed layout system. This is a simulation-based layout system that automatically gathers related items closer together in space, and pushes unrelated ones further apart.

Related items are those with a semantic relation in the knowledge graph. The initial design specifies two such relation types:
- containment: the relation between a topic and its included contents
- reference: the relation between a text item and topics it links to via [[]]-notation
  
  This mode is best for content that is not currently being worked on. Items move themselves into a spatial configuration that makes visible the relationships between them.
  
  Cartesian Layout
  
  Items not in an expanded topic can also be pinned in place, so that their position and rotation is no longer determined by the force-directed graph simulation. Instead, they remain at a fixed, user-determined Cartesian coordinate.
  
  This mode is best for reference items that should be held in a specific spatial configuration.
  
  Workspaces
  
  The highest-level organizational unit of Softspace is the workspace.
  
  Items are always created within a workspace. Initially, items will only have a single parent workspace; later updates may enable cross-workspace transclusion.
  
  Users can create, manage, open, close, and delete workspaces using an in-headset UI. The initial design for Softspace only permits a single workspace to be open at a time.
  
  Workspaces can either be local or cloud. Local workspace data is stored completely on- device, and are not multiuser-compatible. Cloud workspaces store their data to the cloud, and are multiuser-compatible. Softspace will launch with only local workspaces; cloud workspaces will be implemented shortly afterward.
  
  User permissions are managed at the workspace level. Permissions roles can include owner, administrator, and guest access.
  
  Workflow Integration
  
  A key challenge when using mobile devices for productivity is the lack of a common file system. XR headsets are no exception. This deficit adds friction to the process of bringing files into and out of mobile software. If this friction is too high, it can feel like work gets “stuck” in the device, which understandably deters use.
  
  Softspace is a designed to minimize this friction. It does this by:
- Prioritizing support for content formats that are common across knowledge workflows, such as images, PDFs, and markdown files
- Integrating with popular cloud file storage services like Dropbox, with automatic exports to maintain a readily-accessible copy of work outside the headset
- Implementing a full-featured in-app browser that makes the web easily accessible from within the headset
  
  The goal is to maximize upstream and downstream compatibility with existing workflows, while retaining the unique advantages of this new computing medium. Users can quickly bring files into Softspace, work on them there, then easily access the contents of that workspace from their other devices at any time.
  
  Common File Formats
  
  Initially, users will be able to import:
- Text files (.txt)
- Markdown files (.md)
- Image files (.jpg/.jpeg, .png, .tif/.tiff)
- PDF files (.pdf)
  
  Users will be able to export workspaces as a collection of 1) markdown files that correspond to its topics, and 2) image and PDF files.
  
  Cloud Storage Integration
  
  Cloud file storage access is available in the form of a simple 2D web app that is accessible in- headset. It allows users to log into their cloud storage accounts, select files and folders for import, and select folders to export workspaces into.
  
  The first such integration will be with Dropbox, because of its large user base. We are also exploring Google Drive and local network drive access.
  
  In-App Web Browser
  
  A good web browser is central to almost all knowledge workflows. We implement a full- featured browser within Softspace that gives users access to the rest of the web, including the web app versions of complementary tools.
  
  The in-app browser will allow the user to:
- Browse websites, including web apps
- Bookmark websites for future reference
- Save images files from the web into workspaces
- Snip any portion of the browser window into workspaces
- Copy/paste text to and from text items
  
  Multiuser Support
  
  Although by catalyzed the pandemic, we expect the importance of remote work to continue well into the future as companies seek top talent, and talent seeks geo-flexibility.
  
  However, video-based remote collaboration tools fall far short of the creative magic that is possible when working together in-person. XR closes the gap by creating a true sense of social co-presence between collaborators in the same virtual workspace.
  
  Softspace will not initially support multiple users, but its technical architecture has been
  
  designed from the beginning with multiuser collaboration in mind. We will enable this feature once cloud workspaces are implemented, as this is a key technical prerequisite.
  
  Interaction Model
  
  Spatial computing remains in its infancy, and is evolving rapidly and divergently.
  
  The Softspace interaction model is designed to rely as little as possible on the specific features of today’s headsets, and to be highly portable across hardware and input paradigms.
  
  Therefore, our design only assumes a head-mounted 6DoF AR device (passthrough or see-through) with high-fidelity hand tracking and bluetooth keyboard support.
  
  Augmented Reality
  
  Full-occlusion virtual reality is unsuitable (at least as the default mode) for a tool intended for use in professional settings. Blindness to one’s immediate physical surroundings gives rise to a sense of unease and vulnerability. This prevents many users from entering the state of flow that is necessary for doing their best creative work.
  
  The design of Softspace is premised on an augmented reality paradigm that allows users to see their immediate environment. Virtual UI elements appear to float in this space. Initially, it will not be possible to anchor items to specific points in the physical environment, but this functionality will come with later updates.
  
  Happily, even the low-resolution passthrough augmented reality of the Quest headset is sufficient to dispel the discomfort that arises from visual occlusion.
  
  Hand Tracking
  
  Currently, the most common input device for XR headsets is the hand controller. Optimized for gaming, this device is poorly suited to productivity use cases, because:
- It must be held in the hand at all times, precluding the use of a keyboard
- Its form, balance, and button placement are reminiscent of weaponry
- It adds two more devices to keep charged, remember to pack, etc.
  
  Therefore, all non-keyboard inputs in Softspace rely only on computer vision-based hand tracking, which has already been developed to a very high level of usability and reliability.
  
  Locomotion
  
  The way that virtual objects are overlaid on the view of the physical environment in Softspace makes user locomotion through the workspace technically equivalent to the spatial
  
  repositioning of the workspace around the user. The only difference between the two is frame of reference.
  
  Locomotion—or correspondingly, workspace repositioning—is initiated by forming a fist with one or both hands. This action “grabs” the workspace where the hand(s) is positioned. The user then moves the grabbing hand(s) to move, rotate, and scale the workspace.
  
  Manipulation
  
  Our philosophy for the design of the Softspace UI can be characterized by leveraged direct manipulation. We want to give users a feeling of high agency, effectiveness, and control when interacting with objects in the workspace.
  
  Users highlight UI elements with a line-of-sight system, which uses an imaginary ray from the eye to the hand as its targeting vector.
  
  Once an item is highlighted, pinching the tip of the index finger to the thumb is interpreted as a click action, which either causes the highlighted object to be used or grabbed.
  
  Movements in the grabbing hand cause the grabbed item to be repositioned, with a leverage factor being applied to its motion along the user’s vector of view.
  
  Grabbing an item with two hands enables rescaling and resizing.
  
  Text Input
  
  Given the centrality of natural language in knowledge work, text is a first-class content type in Softspace. Fast, accurate, frictionless text input is therefore absolutely critical.
  
  Given these requirements, there is simply no viable alternative to the use of a physical (bluetooth) keyboard as the primary text input device. However, a backup virtual keyboard is available at all times.
  
  Future releases of Softspace will explore additional text input methods, such as speech- to-text.
  
  Art Design
  
  The designer of XR software has much more control over the sensory input of their user than the designer of a 2D app does. While in Softspace, everything a user sees (and much of what they hear) is the result of decisions we will have made. This gives us great power to shape the user experience, but also comes with greater responsibility to ensure it’s a good one.
  
  Two principles underpin the art design of Softspace: comfort and productivity.
  
  Comfort
  
  Comfort in Softspace has both an aesthetic and a performance component.
  
  Given the full-immersion nature of XR, less is more. Our aesthetic design is restrained and minimal. We rely on a limited palette of colors and a familiar set of geometries. We prefer to subtract, adding only when necessary.
  
  Performance-wise, maintaining a smooth 90fps on the Quest 2 (and 72fps on the Quest) is critical for user comfort. We therefore make creative use of a few simple meshes and shaders, to minimize compute load as the number of items in the workspace increases.
  
  Productivity
  
  Most XR software today is for gaming, entertainment, or other use cases where there is heightened value in sensory stimulation and excitement.
  
  In contrast, we are building software for deep work. To support this, we wish to promote focus, creativity, and flow instead.
  
  Softspace UI elements, passthrough color filtering, animation behaviors and velocities, and other aspects of its look-and-feel are calibrated to foster these qualities.
User

The intended user of Softspace is a high-agency knowledge worker whose livelihood depends on her ability to quickly and effectively synthesize complex sets of information. She might be:
- An entrepreneur writing a product requirement doc
- A design researcher summarizing user interviews
- An independent analyst drafting a Substack post
- An architect crafting a deck about a new project
- A grad student outlining a chapter of her thesis
She currently uses a combination of analog tools (pen and paper, physical boards) and digital ones (Notion, Apple Notes) to collect information, make sense of it, and draft documents.

Crucially, she feels an acute frustration with the limitation of existing tools. She may be exploring spatial canvases (Muse, Figma) or structured note-taking apps (Roam, Notion) to help her manage and make use of her knowledge base.

These apps are steps in the right direction, but she wonders why there still isn’t software that gets close to the creative magic of a shared team project space.

Of course, to be able to download and use Softspace, she will need to have access to a compatible headset (e.g. a Quest 2).
Flow

Workflow Phases

Formally, the intended user flow of Softspace can be divided into three phases:

Collection: adding relevant information to a workspace via cloud storage and the web
Construction: building up the knowledge graph by writing notes and composing topics
Collation: composing synthesis topics intended for export as linear outlines or drafts In practice, we expected users to cycle through this flow many times, jumping between steps as they seek to make sense of a knowledge problem and explore different solutions to it.

Example Flow

For example, this is how somebody might use Softspace to draft a design proposal:

Collect images and PDFs related to the project into a Dropbox folder. Export notes from a note-taking app as markdown files into the Dropbox folder. This content likely includes:

project brief reference images client interview notes

previous project materials
Launch Softspace on headset, and create a new workspace.
Using the cloud storage UI, import the contents of the Dropbox folder to the workspace.

Text and markdown files are converted into Softspace topic items Images and PDFs are converted to the corresponding content items
Build up a project knowledge map from these contents by: Creating and writing text blocks

Creating topic and adding content to them Referencing various topics from within text Adding images using the in-app web browser Copy/pasting text using the in-app web browser Bookmarking URLs using the in-app web browser
Create a new synthesis topic which is intended for export. Compose a draft of the design proposal through a combination of 1) including content items already in the workspace and 2) writing new text that ties ideas and content together.
Using the cloud storage UI, select a Dropbox folder to export the workspace to. (This can be a one-off action, or be set to recur automatically.)
Copy the synthesis topic’s markdown file into a word processor for editing and formatting.

Yiliu Shen-Burke

Journal Guest Presentation : Discussing Softspace

https://youtu.be/SjQrimm4mGU

Yiliu Shen-Burke: My own journey into the specific question of VR and text is actually a little bit circuitous, it's not where I started out. In fact, only very recently in my process of prototyping and building what is ultimately intended to be a commercial product, an app that people will download and use, and be financially self-sustaining. The role of text has only recently become a very central one, and probably, honestly, the reason for that was because I was a little bit scared of this question, of working with text in VR. Because I think all of us, who use computers on a regular basis, we know how central text is, and it seems to be the point at which all of the shortcomings of the hardware, up until very recently, came to the most obvious head, where it seemed like the screen resolution, more than the screen resolution, the fact that text is just presented in it on a 2D plane. And it didn't seem to be a need to work with it in a three-dimensional way, or at least at first glance. I think all of these factors contribute to my reticence in tackling text. I recently I started doing it, and it's been absolutely, incredibly mind-opening, and I think there are, to refer to earlier about the combination of spatial interfaces within text being one of the most transformative technological opportunities that are coming our way, I totally agree with. And what Brandel was saying about this combination actually being an existing way back in the earliest histories of computing. And also with Ivan Sutherland’s AR Experiments. Actually, people have been wanting to do this for decades, and only very recently because of these billion- dollar tech giants and their investments, it has become technically usable for people like me just to throw things together, and actually, have it work and be usable.

Five years ago I was a VR research resident at an artist's studio here in Berlin. I was on leave from architecture school. There's an artist here in Berlin called Olafur Eliasson who has a very big operation, over 100 programmers, designers, craftspeople, PR people, social media people, and among them myself, the VR research resident. And the reason why I got this job was because the DK2 had just come out, someone in the studio had bought two of them, and they realized that there was nothing to run on these apps. They couldn't just download something and run on it, was the very early days. So I convinced someone that I knew enough programming to do something interesting with these headsets. I didn't. But I was able to, very luckily, throw together enough of something every two weeks or so to show

the rest of the studio that I was able to teach myself more and more of these, sort of, technical skills required. But coming from architecture, I was very comfortable with remodeling in Unity and things like this. And what happened over the course of that one year was that, we were building these prototypes to explore the potential of virtual reality as either a medium for actual artworks, or as a tool for the production process of other works which may not end up being digital at all, but as a working environment. Both very, sort of, fruitful and still very fruitful avenues for the application of the technology. At the time I was using Evernote, because that was kind of like the best digital notebook that was around, or the only one I knew about, and very quickly, it became super annoying to use Evernote to manage those processing cycles. So I was trying to build something every two weeks, collecting ideas by talking to people in the studio, throwing together a working program, and then, showing to them at the end of the cycle. And to manage all the ideas that were coming in, and all the ideas were coming going out, I was using Evernote, and it was a huge pain to make sense of all the ideas that I’ve been collecting, and there's stuff in there that you'll never find again. It's a classic issue with 2D UIs. And at the same time, I was in this artist studio that is just covered from floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall, taking up this entire old beer brewery in Berlin, with the physical artifacts of the design processes, and creative processes of the other teams around. And so I started thinking, and this isn't just me, there were also snippets of this idea during the demos and during my conversations with artists themselves, about why we couldn't use this inherently spatial medium to actually start recreating some of the advantages of a physical workspace with physical artifacts, and pieces of information around. And this really started getting me thinking, and thinking, and I started prototyping some things, pulling information from their in-house CMS that used to power the website with archival images and things from previous exhibitions and works. And it quickly became clear that, "Okay, an artist studio is not the right, kind of, environment to start trying to build a brand new general-purpose tool." And I was coming from architecture school, I knew I didn't actually want to become an artist or an architect for that matter. And so I decided, "Okay, this is probably a tech start-up. I don't know if that is, but that sounds a thing, and people give me money to do it."

So in 2018, we founded a company, got a little bit of investment from an accelerator in Silicon Valley, and started trying to build a spatial virtual studio for designers called Softspace, and that's still the name of the company and the product. And at the time, the overriding, I guess, was quite skeuomorphic. A paradigm that I had was that you would have this very large like, your dream studio workspace, where the laws of physics, and the constraints of physical materials didn't apply, but you would still have a lot of the behaviours and affordances of the physical media that, especially, visual artists or designers are used to

working with.

I’m going to just quickly jump into my headset now, Frode, and show you the version of the software that we built and released on SideQuest, which is an indie app store and it's where we first tested our vision for what the future of creative knowledge work might be.

SoftSpace is what we called it, just for shorthand SoftSpace version 2020, because it was first released in July 2020, almost exactly two years ago. And this is what it looks like. I know the field of view here is not going to be massive, so I’m trying to keep my hands in the middle of my field of view. But you can see here that what you have is, very literally, a massive white wall room. So what I’m doing now is, I’m actually sharing the screen instead of the feed now, so that should work. It forces Zoom to just show this through-the-lens view to everybody. The only downside to this mode is that the frame rate is going to be quite low, so I’m just going to move very slowly, and that way, you should see what I am doing. Does that sound good? Okay. So I’ll just (indistinct) again which is that SoftSpace version 2020 is:

In many ways, a recreation of the big, empty, white room that you can pin stuff up in wherever you like that came out of the experiences I have working at this artist's studio. That's a very simplistic way of describing the paradigm here.
A slightly secondary, or second-order understanding or explanation for why this app works the way it does is that, I didn't have any idea of what the right layout paradigms, or what the right revealing structural relations between pieces of information in a three- dimensional user interface should be, at all.

This version of the app was never intended for a broader distribution on an official app store or anything. It's what we were calling internally, a cartesian sandbox. You can grab any item, and I just wanted to do something over here to find my text, so I’m going to grab this little text note here, so I can make it big, I can make it small, I can move it freely in a three- dimensional space, and I can rotate it within a certain, like, it snaps in terms of its rotation, but I can, kind of, put it wherever I want. And within this cartesian playground, in a sense, you have all of the freedom and power of spatiality to express relations between things, by positioning them and scaling them relative to each other. So if any of you are familiar with the whiteboarding app, Miro, this is essentially a 3D version of Miro. And you can see that there are objects which are containers, and these containers can hold other things. There are objects which are boards, which are 2D containers, you can pop items off and put them onto the boards. And there even is, for example, a fully functional built-in web browser that you can agree to get cookies installed onto, and you can Google for topics that might be of interest during your research process. And if you find an image of something you like, you can pop it out and save it to your workspace, like so.

Frode Hegland: So one of the things we have discussed, and that I have a great fear of, is

ghettoizing or sandboxing, or whatever it might be. And currently, there are, of course, many applications where you can view your laptop screen in VR, and they're all quite neat. But the problem is that, that is just a texture, it's just isolated. So can you, please, elaborate on how you took something from that screen into the room? Because, I think, that is really wonderful and important.

Stephanie Strickland: Can I ask a question too? Which is, can you get the text off a 2D surface and set the letters free in the 3d space?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Not yet, but I will get there. So that's a really great question.

And Frode, the context of the question you asked about sandboxing is exactly what prompted me at the end of the 12 months of having this version of the app out in the wild, hearing feedback from that, watching people using it, deciding, "No. This is not the direction." And kickstarting my latest cycle of prototyping.

But just to really speak, specifically about the technical, I guess, implementation of this popping things off, this is a fully functional Firefox web browser running inside the SoftSpace app. And I’m using a package called Viewplex, and this is all running in Unity C#. But what Viewplex lets me do is pass messages between the HTML-JavaScript environment inside the browser. And the C# environment outside of the browser in this app itself. And so, whenever my cursor touches something that is marked as an image, the browser tells the VR app, and the VR app then knows, "Ah, okay. Your cursor is actually hovering over something that can be downloaded out as an image." And so, you see this icon, it changes from this manipulation icon to this copy-out icon. And if I press the trigger then, actually, it's going to the URL, the original URL of this image, and downloading the full resolution version of this image, and then saving it to the cloud storage backend that we're using for this particular version of the app.

Frode Hegland: Can you also copy and paste that way?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: You can also copy and paste, and the way you do that is, there's a separate tool called Snip. For example, if this whole thing, this website were not actually accessible as an image, sometimes website makers decide to hide everything under an element that blocks your ability to directly select things, I can press the trigger on this controller, switch to a snipping tool, which will just make a copy of this entire, any part of the web texture that I wish to make a copy of. So that's just a straight, one-to-one texture copy of what the browser was seeing. And that same tool, actually, just with a click, lets me make a copy.

Frode Hegland: Can you have more than one person in this room, currently?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Yes. This is fully multi-user enabled. Okay, as I was saying earlier, this was released on SideQuest, in the app store, which is a side-loading early access marketplace

for apps. We have gotten 3.000 registered users, and 6,000 downloads of the app, and even a handful of paying users of the premium plan. But when I was thinking about, “Okay, how would we, then, take this and bring it to market, to the official app store for the Quest headset?” Which is a much larger user base, I realized that, I was, at a fundamental level, immensely dissatisfied with the paradigm that this app represents. And in fact, this paradigm was never intended to be the final paradigm. This was very much research, an applied research vehicle, to understand what people wanted to do if they were given the ability to place 2D content, largely because, we're talking about images and text blocks, what they would want to do with 2D content in a 3D space that they could freely place things in, and move themselves around? And this is what prompted, then, me to kickstart the cycle of rapid prototyping, and then, releasing those prototypes to the public, on Twitter, mostly. I started in February of this year, which has been incredibly rewarding and fruitful, and I’m just going to show you a couple of those experiments which will then lead you all the way up to the final point of where I am today, questions I have for you as a group of people who have been thinking about these problems for a lot longer than I have, or much more deeply than I have.

And also, I believe it was Stephanie, who asked the question about being able to pull text off. I’ll get to that at the very end of it. I don't want to forget about you, I’ll show you what I mean.

Stephanie Strickland: And also changing the font at any point and so on.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: I see. Okay. Yeah. So specific text formatting tools, I actually have not spent a lot of time building out, but I will show you what I have been looking at. So this is, in a literal nutshell, if you scale (indistinct). This is SoftSpace version 2020. And a very instructive research environment for figuring out what the actual paradigm for SoftSpace that would actually tap into the full power of this CDM should be.

Frode Hegland: Do you need a PC to run this or can it be run independently in just a headset?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: This is all standalone. Although we do have a PC version, this is running completely on the Quest. I’m actually going to go backwards a little bit from the prototypes that I’ve been building starting from February, and I’m going to start with prototype number 3, which is the latest one that I’ve published, and which I was very happy with for getting a bunch of attention on Twitter.

Prototype 03, there are a couple of things you will notice right off the bat. The first thing is that, this is an augmented reality, or mixed reality enabled application. So there's no longer this completely immersive virtual environment that you're thrown into, which blocks out your view of your physical surroundings. And I had come to the realization that, even me personally, someone who's worked in VR for many years now, and should be

very comfortable with this medium, every time I went into VR and covered up my eyes, I had this really inevitable low-level sense of unease and vulnerability that came from not being able to see my surroundings. And so, when Oculus, back when it was still Oculus, released the pass-through SDK and made it possible for app developers to access pass-through video, I was sceptical at first, I tried it, and I just thought, “This is the future. SoftSpace will always be an augmented reality or a mixed reality app from now on.” And then the second thing is that, I just put my controllers down because everything is now being controlled by my hands only. So this is just the standard Oculus hand tracking. It's gotten very good. It's gotten a lot better than it was when I first started playing with it. And the combination of these two features, the pass-through video, and hand tracking, also were the enabling factors for me to really start thinking seriously about text input because it means that you can have a physical Bluetooth keyboard that you can easily start typing on, without putting your controllers down first and that you can see because it's pass-through enabled.

So this is the context of the prototyping cycle that I currently embarked on. And the specific question that Prototype 03 was trying to answer was, how could you map an ordinal set of information onto a three-dimensional space? And I’m sure you all know what those words mean, but specifically what I mean is, in the previous version of SoftSpace, and as Frode was saying, there is this issue that information that is arranged in a three- dimensional cartesian layout, 2D has this issue as well, but 3D makes it interesting for me, more impossible, is forever stuck inside a 3D environment.

Because there is no reliable, dependable, sensible way to take a collection of information that is arbitrarily placed in a 3D space and, for example, export it to something you could email and have someone else read it on their phone on the train. And if that's going to be the case, then, I mean, I found this from our users, and from myself as well, you're just not going to be willing to invest time and energy into working on something if it's only going to be stuck inside the headset.

And by the way, 95% of the time, you yourself, in the future, will not have access to a headset. So if the work you do, you can't even access it yourself reliably, you're just not going to want to put any time into it. And so, Prototype 03 was trying to figure out, “Okay. Could or in what world would it make any sense, for the underlying data structure that your 3D workspace is represented, to actually be an ordinal data format?” For example, I’m just using an example here. Markdown. So if everyone's familiar with Markdown, a wonderful standard for interchange between different applications.

Could a VR, AR app actually be working with Markdown? And what would that even mean? And so that's the one question.

And the dumbest possible way, of course, to answer it would be, and this is

something that you do see out, around in different applications, would be just to put a 2D window inside a VR that has a 2D-UI, and shows you a Markdown file. It shows your website or whatever. Shows you ordinal content the same way you see it on your laptop. But, of course, if you take that approach, you're giving up all of the richness of the expressiveness of spatial semantics. You're giving up the whole point of putting the headset on. And I didn't want to go to that.

I’m sure other people are working on the virtual desktops because they're going to be amazing, but that's not just where I felt like I can make the biggest contribution. So how would you represent the Markdown file in 3D without resorting to importing a 2D paradigm?

Markdown in Ordinospatial Layout

The answer I came up with, and I’m going to call here the Ordinospatial Layout, is one where you do have a set of very strict rules for determining the order of things. But you're using all three spatial dimensions to express that order.

So to make it clear what I’m talking about. This block of text, this text block, is its own object, and it can live at a specific point place in this column. And so, if you were to take this, and you were to export it as a Markdown file, which, by the way, the headset is doing, this entire workspace is, right now, saved out as a Markdown. Every time you write something here, it's saved out as Markdown. This could be the first paragraph, this could be the second, this could be the third, etc. You can also move it over here, and maybe, I just want to place another block of text below this. And I can start typing on it. I can say, “Hello.” I really can't touch type, by the way. “Hello, everybody.”

And so, you can see that I can move this along this plane. I can start constructing columns of text.

And I can move things relatively freely, if I want to move this thing way only over here, I don't want to think about it, for now, I can do so. But it has a definite point and definite order within the global set of content: There's no place I can put it that doesn't have a meaning.

And to extend this to the third dimension, I can always move these blocks of text between these series of planes that are, actually, not visually represented at all. That's one of the shortcomings of this prototype. They're invisible and you, kind of, have to just know that, "Okay, there will be a plane there if I pull this thing far enough." So this is prototype number three, and this got a lot of attention on the internet, and people started asking, "Could you do this? Could you do that? Could you start breaking free of this very strict ordinal layout?" And it was great because I suddenly started having really rigorous and in-depth conversations with people who had thought very seriously about this kind of question. How do you represent

ordinal content in a three-dimensional way without losing the benefits of one or the other, including being introduced to this group here? And what I just want to show you now, again, I’m jumping through between the prototypes. Stephanie, you asked about the possibility of pulling something off. And so, in this particular prototype, you can move things around, but the objects are always, or the text blocks are always going to have a place within the underlying, essentially, Markdown file. There's no way that I can pull this over here and say, "This is going to be in a completely different area altogether. I don't want to think about it." It's going to end up in the Markdown file, this entire space is just one 3D Markdown file. And, of course, this cannot be where this experiment ends. And so I want to show you prototype number four, a work in progress because is what I’m currently working on.

Prototype 04

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Okay. Well, I hope you have some capacity left for both enjoying this demo, and also, questions, critiques, thoughts, avenues of research, and exploration. Because this is exactly the phase I’m in right now. So, okay. Prototype 04 says, "Well, yes, it's great that I can take these blocks of text, and I can work with them in 3D, and have this beautiful board of stuff in front of me that I know will be exportable easily as an email, or exportable as presentation, or I can finish writing here, or I can draft up something here and finish writing it on my phone, on the train ride home." But aren't we over-constraining things a little bit? What if you want something that is not actually in this document, let's think of this board as a document, but it's related to it and lives nearby, or maybe lives in another document over here because it's a 3D canvas, so we can do all these things that we can't easily do in a 2D-UI. Well, maybe you could just take something, like this text block, and pop it off and just have it start floating nearby. And you could run a little 3D force directive graph stimulation, so that everything is spaced out very comfortably. Is everyone here familiar with Roam Research, by the way? Okay. So using something like Roam Research, it's double square bracket notation for indicating references to other topics. Maybe as I’m typing here, I could start adding references on this topic or that topic, and those references, actually, become newly created free-floating objects, which then start, through the force-directed graph simulation, start pulling the blocks of text, which are related to that block you're working on, closer to where you are working. And pushing the things that are not so related further out, so you start getting a three-dimensional representation of these semantic relations of all the elements inside a project you're working on. And so you can see here, I just pulled a couple of little blocks of things off, they're floating around, they try to flee from each other, so.

Stephanie Strickland: I do have a question here. Who decides what's related to what

here?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: You do it manually.

Stephanie Strickland: You said that things started aggregating on the basis of their relation. Yiliu Shen-Burke: Yes, and so, what I was mentioning earlier was, in Roam, what you can do... And this is my current work-in-progress prototype, so it's not implemented here. But, in

Roam, you could create a tag, or create a new topic, actually, in Roam it's a new note. You

can create a new note, but using this notation of a double square bracket, and say, for example, Frode, right? And this would create, automatically, for example, a Frode object over here. And then, in other parts of the document, where I have mentioned Frode, or I’ve written exactly this string of text, [[Frode]], the Frode object would start floating, and the thing is, there would have to be some visual indication of the relation. So there would there be some line that would draw from...

Stephanie Strickland: Okay, so my question is; that means that ahead of time you had to tag things. So what I’m interested in is, what kind of space, whereas I glance over it, and now the connections are occurring to me that have not occurred before, am I able to create some kind of skeleton, or structure, or whatever kind of structure I use, a tree or otherwise, that I can, on the fly, create this thing? I don't want to have to have this (indistinct) ahead of time. If I decide ahead of time, I already know all I need to know about the text in it.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Yeah, I see what you mean. I would, actually, say that the secret to Roam Research, and its success, was its insight. Even if you are manually adding in these references as you're writing up your notes, it doesn't mean that you are able to hold in your mind a global picture of where else an entire set of notes you've ever mentioned in this one topic.

And so you're always working locally and you're saying, "Okay, today I’m going to write up some reading notes about this book that Frode presented." For example. And I’m reading some reading notes I’m going to create some square brackets to annotate topics. And then, you switch to a different view in Roam, and you see all the other places where that topic has been backlinked, and you have a global picture. And so, I would say that, actually, it's not that you have to tag things ahead of time, it's that, as you are working, you're just pulling out these instances of references, and then you take a step back, and you look around, and you see...

Stephanie Strickland: Okay, wait a second. All relations are not references. Okay. So you have a very citation-based idea. I mean, obviously, a huge database and you can aggregate different parts of it as you query it different ways, right? But the point is, how do you create different structures of relation on the basis of interacting with lots of texts. Do you see what I’m saying it's (indistinct)?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: I see what you're saying. I actually, so, I don't know if you are familiar

with Jack Rusher he's based here in Berlin, and he worked on semantic web, and he and I had this exact same conversation. And you're absolutely correct. Not all relations between two things are a reference, or even, I mean, yes, it is a reference, but it's much more nuanced than that. It's a kind of reference, it is supporting evidence, it is refuting evidence, it is that qualifying information, it is an instance of that.

Stephanie Strickland: It's architectural. I refer you back to your architectural training. I mean, I might have a whole set of terms from architecture, or from music, in terms of which I could create a structure which is not based on citational reference.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Correct. And so, in that case, you might be talking about containment relations, where there is a taxonomy that you're trying to build up. And that is also absolutely possible in this work-in-progress that I’m building, or the future version of it. I haven't built it out yet. I’ll show you in the next demo something that you know what it could look like. But just to, maybe, hint at where the possibility for doing that kind of relation-building comes from, I would just like to note that, this document itself can be seen as, for example, an instance of this Frode-type topic, in which I have placed a bunch of Frode-related blocks. So I could also create many of these containers in a nested fashion and start building up these taxonomies of meaning, and of information that's something you're talking about. I’m just going to go to the final demo, which will maybe hint at where this is all going. Boom.

Stephanie Strickland: So, I think it would be nice if everybody could build their own kind of memory palace out of the material. Do you know what I mean by memory palace?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: I do. And I would say that, even the paradigm I’ve just shown you would make that totally possible. So this is actually Prototype01, and I just want to show you, and the order is intentional here. So Prototype 01 is very different from what I’ve shown you before. This is actually an interface for navigating my personal Dropbox and here's there's one folder called SoftSpace Research. I’m going to select this Dropbox folder to be spatialized and you'll see what it's doing. So, this is why, I’m sorry, Stephanie, that I cut you off a little bit, I wanted to move on to this demo to show you what some of the possibilities start to be, right? So this is very simple. We're looking at folders and folders with images.

And I’m just using that very simple directed-tree containment structure to build a three- dimensional force director graph, it's pulling in previews...

Stephanie Strickland: Can you put your hand into there to twist that structure?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Yes. So I could, for example, say, "Oh, this branch needs to go over here." It's going to take a second because there's a lot of stuff to pull, but...

Stephanie Strickland: Can you, then, put it all on the surface of a dome?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: No, but by combining this and the previous demo I just showed, you would be able to, for example, indicate, "Okay. I want to see this topic, but laid out

ordinally." Once I get to start working on it, I want to be able to write notes and place things in a specific order, that makes sense to read from beginning to end. And this is the point I found earlier, while the rest of the content, which is not contained in that ordinal layout, can still float nearby and can adapt to the positioning of the things in the ordinal layout? So you can look around and say, "Okay. Actually, this other topic is also related, let me make sure I mention that, or pull something from there." Prototype01 doesn't have any text. I kind of worked backwards here because Prototype01 was very much about three-dimensional force- directed graph, hand tracking, pass-through video. Text was too scary for me, even at that point, and it took me a while to like, build up the courage, almost, to really tackle it, because what if it turned out that there was just no good way to work with text in VR? That's a major dead end to run into, but happily, I think, prototype two, three, four, proves that, actually, is very pleasant to write in VR. You have no distractions. You can place the text you're working on right in front of you. It's actually really nice. The only issue being, right now, the ergonomics of the headset need to be improved. I’m going to leave this running, just over here, and put my headset down with a nice close-up view of it. Questions? Prototype4 is a work-in-progress. There are a lot of things I want to like... I haven't finished building yet, but I’m very open to ideas, like the ones that Stephanie has been offering about how to connect all these technical and whiz-bang UI demos, back to real things that real people do to get real things done.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, that's important. I have to have an initial question, actually. And that is, on the issue of collapsing, and especially in expanding. Especially in your previous view, there was a lot of stuff which is amazing. What mechanism do you have for, "Okay. I’m dealing with this. I want that stuff out of the way right now."?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Yeah. None, on these prototypes. I was literally thinking about this earlier today. Because you do get to a point, pretty quickly, when you have a few hundred items.

And by the way, text level of detailing, LOD, is another very interesting issue that arises in the 3D environment. Because you can't read text that's just far away enough that the letters are too small. But collapsing things, I don't fully know the answer yet, but probably it will be via the topic containers. So probably you will do your querying in a sense, or highlighting the content items by saying which topics I want to keep visible, and which topics I don't need to be distracted by at this point. And maybe, by turning on or off certain topic containers, the nodes themselves, any content item that is not directly, or maybe two degrees of separation, related to those topics, would, probably, not disappear altogether. You probably want some visual indication, "Oh, there's something over there." But it could be a small icon representation, instead of the full content itself. But I don't know the answer to that, because I

think the best approach will make itself known through people actually trying to use this thing, and then realizing, "All right. I need to hide certain kinds of things away." And what is the logic, even, to decide which things to hide, and which things to keep in the workspace?

Passthrough/background

Frode Hegland: Okay. And then, a tiny question before I’m sure there's going to be billions from everyone. In your AR use here with a pass-through, the background on my screen, at least, is monochromatic, slightly warm. Is this something that I will have the ability to decide how it's rendered?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: So the fact that it's monochromatic is the hardware limitation of this headset. Very happily you can see in all the promotional videos that MedVa has been releasing about their upcoming hardware, and also on the various leaks on YouTube that Meta and also, rumour has it, Apple, all these billion dollar projects are leaning very heavily into full colour, high resolution, low latency pass-through, so.

Frode Hegland: I’m kind of leaning in the other direction because the normal pass through it's kind of harsh. So did you tilt it a little bit to reduce the contrast?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Yeah, I did. I dramatically reduced the luminance levels, and also reduced contrast a little bit. Because it is impossible to focus on free-floating digital content when you also see your full colour room around you. So when that pastel gets much better, I’m sure I will still have to tone it down to make it usable.

Frode Hegland: Do you have an interaction feeling for how that should be done? Because I could imagine, with the next generation hardware, you'd want to be in really great resolution to see the room, and then, you want to tone it down. Have you thought about how (indistinct)?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Yeah, I have. So the short answer is, yes, because to make a lot of the promotional videos for this these prototypes, I’ve actually used a dummy 3D environment in Unity and so it's not this grainy video of my kitchen, it's actually this fake pleasingly rendered mountain cottage. So there it's, of course, by default, full colour. And I had to play with the settings a little bit to figure out what you have to do to the pass-through video to make it not distracting. And it seems that just by reducing the luminance, the exposure value quite a bit, maybe cutting it by half or by two-thirds, it's enough that your brain can distinguish background to the foreground. I mean, that's the main issue, that you need to quickly, automatically distinguish foreground virtual content from background irrelevant information.

Frode Hegland: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And in 2D we have drop shadows, outlines, and all that kind of stuff. But what I’m wondering is, have you thought of the interaction?

Does the user do this thing? Twist their hand? Move their head? wWhat might be natural? Because what we're seeing here is something that we're going to be doing 100 times a day in the near future, I think.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Are you asking about how to turn on the filtering for the pass-through? Or maybe I’m not fully understanding the question.

Frode Hegland: I’m saying, I’m in a room, looking as high-res and beautiful as I can, and I’m working on something which is really special, and I want to dim the light, so to speak. Have you thought of human-computer interaction for that?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: No, I haven't. Because the paradigm, right now, is that, you would open up this particular app to be able to work with this content, and therefore, there's no provision in my app for running without the background filter on, because there always is going to be SoftSpace virtual content. But if I think, at an OS level, then there would need to be something. Yeah. I don't know. I actually haven't played with ways to control that reality modulation using user-controlled gestures or inputs.

Peter Wasilko: Yes. Would it be possible to generate a fog effect? So it would be like the room but in a heavy ground fog?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: I guess you could. So the upcoming hardware is supposed to have better depth detection, which is something you would need in order to map a Z value to the different parts of the path through video. So because with this headset, it doesn't know which parts of this image are further away, and therefore, should be foggier, and which parts are closer. But that's actually a great idea, because what you really want is, you want to be able to see, well, I mean, so you may notice that like this object, this virtual object, can actually float behind this table, for example. And that's, by design, intentional. I just think it's going to be too constrained to design a design interface that's really reliant on physical features in your room. What if you're in a hotel room and you don't have enough space to work on your PhD dissertation, which is massive? I think that would be really problematic. So part of toning down the background is also to make it easier for your brain to accept that this virtual object can be floating behind the desk. And it's okay. It actually looks strange at first. It doesn't cause any physical discomfort or anything, which it would if the background were full exposure.

Stephanie Strickland: A new thing just occurred to me, it seems like you should be able to just select out that floating tree of things and have the background completely disappear. I mean, because I’m just looking at the selected thing, so that would tone it down. But my real question was, at what point can we expect hardware that isn't any more difficult to wear

than a pair of glasses? Or if, almost, a pair of goggles?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: I think a while. What I do know is that, from all these YouTube leaks that happened, things are coming quite soon, in the order of, definitely not years, so sooner than that from all the major players. New hardware is coming that has a much greater emphasis on ergonomics, comfort, the balance of weight on your head, and pass-through that will actually make it feel less socially awkward to be wearing a headset and to have your eyes covered in a professional setting or in a social setting. It's going to be incremental. I don't have any insider knowledge on this, but from what I’ve seen in the press, see-through augmented reality display technology is incredibly difficult, to the point of maybe physically impossible. So that's going to take a long time and I don't know that that's necessarily the end game. It might just be that we end up with really high quality pass-through displays, because you can also do a lot more with pass-through displays because you have full control of the colour of every pixel. So you can have occlusion, you can have filtering, and you can have stuff that is really difficult in smart classes.

Stephanie Strickland: But pass-through, that does not allow me to change my location, my visual location, at will, between this room I’m in right now, which you don't see, and the VR location.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Well, it could. Because you could have selective filtering. I haven't seen any great interface design examples of this, but you could have a virtual room that had windows through, which you had the pass-through coming through. So you could peek out the window to see what's going on in your physical kitchen that you're sitting in.

Stephanie Strickland: No I don't want to peek out. I want to look out and see where three small children have disappeared around the whole space. I want to actually see the space, and then I want to see this space. I want a choice of spaces. That's what I want to be able to have.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: I mean, my mind is going to all sorts of things. 3D scanners set up in your house that you could then see a recreated theme all over your house. But, I mean, at least a pass-through would be much closer to offering that possibility than to the see-through headset. So, yeah.

Brandel Zachernuk: But, Stephanie. One of the things that I’ve played with in the past is having passed-through portals, where you place objects in your virtual reality environment that are stand-ins for where you always want to be able to see specific things, so you can have a doorway. I placed a specific persistent pass-through portal over my keyboard, such that I have the ability to be able to see that. So once you have an overarching capacity to alternate those things, there are all sorts of different ways of attenuating the virtual view, so that you have the ability to see the different pieces of it.

Stephanie Strickland: That would be great, the attenuation. In other words, you could dial it

down, right? If I just had an analogue dial that would remove the virtual view completely from my view, so that I now had my default, realistic view. But then I could just turn it up again so that I could, you know, now I’m back seeing the VR view.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: I'll give you a functional example of this. If you step outside the safety boundaries, the Oculus headset will just show you pass-through. So I’m trying to show that I’m just moving the headset outside the safety boundary, and you can see the virtual object coming in and out.

Stephanie Strickland: You have to take that off your head to do that, right?

Brandel Zachernuk: Yeah, it's simply a function of where you're standing. Because in the parlance of the system there's a safety boundary in which you've designated. You promise nothing's going to come in, and you're going to smash a vase or hit a kid in the face, unless they come in, in which case, you know, it's sad for them. But, yeah. One of the things I think it relates to, for me, is the idea of having an application in the sense of a space or a context being applied to something. Because we talk about apps, and we forget where the word comes from, but this is an app in the sense of applying oneself to a particular directory structure, and you can make all kinds of different inferences about what application you are considering at a given point. It could be that you're looking in a certain place. It could be that your hands are posed in a certain place. So there will be a number of ways of mediating and making determinations about what to do.

Frode Hegland: The term used earlier, reality modulation, comes into this, because what Brandel was talking about is you can cut a hole to see the reality there, maybe where you have your coffee cup, if you're in a fully VR environment, which is quite useful, or your keyboard. But also, we can pipe in other things, a lot of us have video doorbells like the Ring doorbell, so if you wanted to, you could say, on this wall in your room, where you currently have a picture, a painting, remove the painting and have that doorbell, so you will always see the front of your house, for instance. So the notion of having a window, because a normal window, with VR, would normally be blown out, because there's too much light coming in. So why not replace it with something else? And then you get into, when you're talking about that kind of reality modulation, about different spaces, if you're at a home office, or if you're in an office or a coffee shop, you may still want the same information on walls. But if these are places you use frequently, you can design, you can tell the system, this wall is always for messages, this is always for timeline or whatever it might be. So when you go to the different rooms, it'll shift a bit, but it'll still be mapped onto.

Stephanie Strickland: But it's always just as much as a window, right? It's not a 180 or 360 view?

Frode Hegland: Well, you can choose. VR normally is a completely synthetic environment,

which is either 3D generated or can be based on photographs or whatever you want, so you can choose those. I think, also, the discussion here is, that sometimes you want to know what's in your physical environment, and one aspect of that is simply to see the video of it, another one is to have it rendered in 3D. You won't knock into the desk, because the desk is indicated, but the desk may look completely different. Maybe it looks like you're in a nightclub, or in a jungle, or something, whatever you think might be fun, but you still have the geometry, so that you don't just sit down, you can move around your environment. So there are a lot of options for choices with that. But the thing that I just wanted to mention is, that you talked a little bit about Markdown and so on, which is interesting. So one thing we've discussed here in this group, which is actually part of my PhD thesis, well, it is my PhD thesis, is the notion of Visual-Meta, which is super simple. A PDF document normally doesn't have any metadata. It can, but normally it doesn't. A normal book, one of the first pages, it has a page of printers information, copyright, and so on. Are you familiar with the BibTeX standard for notation? Doesn't matter. So just imagine that you download a PDF, at the last page, there's an appendix that says, Visual-Meta, and then you have, author equals and then a name, date equals and then the date. It can also have the structure of the document, headings, or so-and-so, references, or so-and-so, all these things are there. One of the things that we've discussed, very much with Peter Wasilko’s input, is how that can be extended with further appendices. So a document that goes from your normal word processor with this information into your environment, you can then choose to put let's say, the glossary over here, the references. You do whatever you want. But when you go out, all those spatial representations, which is why it was so great to hear you talk about the coordinates, is then encoded. So you can keep working in a 2D document. Do whatever you want. But when you then go back in your environment again, all these things will snap back into that space.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Yeah. On a general level, coming up with some, sort of, legible mapping from something like metadata relations, or some other non-inherently, non-spatial qualities of the 2D media that we work with all the time, so in this case metadata about text or about PDFs, a legible and reliable mapping of that to a 3D representation, or spatial representation that you can manipulate, and you can make sense of and see very clearly in front of you, but then, when you take the headset off, you go back to the original file, those manipulations have resulted in the changes that you expect those manipulations to enact. That is, in general, I think, really going to be a very powerful quality of these spatial interfaces that you will be able to quickly, intuitively, kinaesthetically make sense of this metadata, that usually, on a 2D interface, is at best, just listed out and that works hidden away or doesn't exist at all, as you said.

Fabien Benetou: Yeah, I was wondering, we discussed about the transition of the boundary

between the real or modularization of that. I was wondering, using the inverse of a window, so that you have either your normal display or the e-ink that you stick on the wall and that shows the lens you add to your notes. For example, here you have the mirroring of your Quest, so it's a prompt to dive back and see that space. But I imagine you don't have it always on. But as you have that position in space, you could save it in this space. With the e-ink device, you can even physically print it if you don't think you've done it a lot from a window. And if you have, let's say, the virtual world, that's your point of view of the headset toward that virtual world. And maybe you have a mirror so that I can't put my e-ink here, that would not be very convenient in my office, but if I stick it there on the wall, then I can actually leave it. And it's again, always a problem to reconsider how you organize that space. So I’m wondering if that could be an interest in this area, you have your organized virtual space, because most of us have a desk with documents on it, and that permanence is pretty valuable. And we also have libraries or bookshelves behind us, and we do like to reach behind, and somehow, organize it, another reference we have. So I’m wondering, there is the beauty of having this infinite space you could reconfigure, but somehow, it's hidden away. If you put your Quest on the side, then it's all hidden. You, of course, have your desktop, you can just start with a prototype of just changing the desktop, or having a window there. But I’m wondering how being disconnected from the whole desktop would be interesting, having this virtual permanent window of that organized base? How we would feel? I have no idea, but that should be interesting to try.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: That's a great term, this a prompt, this little reminder, like a magic window back into this garden. The garden of ideas that you occasionally glance at. I think not now, but it's reminding you, "Okay, it is there." I mean, the practical question of how to access this information when you don't have the headset on you, or if you want to share it with somebody who doesn't have the hardware, I think, that was, very much, the underlying motivation for the experiment I did with the ordinal spatial layout. Because if you have such a layout, what you could do is, for example, always be reading and writing back to a Dropbox folder, and to Markdown files in the Dropbox folder. And many of these note-taking tools like (indistinct) and Obsidian actually just work with Markdown files in exposed folders in their local first applications. And so, if that's the case, then your reminder to go back to the headset could be that you are actually working on the exact same notes, most of the time on your laptop, but when you need to look at a bunch of images... Visual content is really difficult to make sense of in these interfaces. Or when you have just finished doing a brain dump, and you need to see, "How can I, in five minutes, just make sense of all this?" And if you put the headset on, and there is this reversible mapping from the 2D information, the ordinal information, and it's metadata two or three representation, then you can just put the

headset on, and be looking at exactly your Obsidian notebook, do some stuff, move some things around, take your headset off, and then, when you in the headset, create a little outline of like, here are the three categories, here the three relations between them. And when you take your headset off, go back to your laptop, it's there. But I think that's a more practical, sort of, you need to be able to do this, for such a tool, to be at all practically usable. But that's separate from, Fabien, your suggestion. And this very lovely, poetic suggestion of having a magic mirror view that's always reminding and subtly updates itself in response to changes that have been happening in the 3D workspace. And it even might just be that, even being able to quickly glance at the global structure, for example, even this thing that we're looking at on the screen right now. I don't really know what it means at the moment, because I haven't really worked in it, as a 3D object for long enough. But if you have worked in it for an hour or two, you might start getting a sense of this cluster of ideas over here, this part of my research means there's a big distance between that and the next cluster. Maybe having something like that, just easily accessible, would be enough to trigger some of these memories that you will have developed working in a 3D space.

Frode Hegland: So you, kind of, almost, made a throwaway remark that this is a little practical thing, or whatever. I think this is probably the most important thing we can discuss. Because we'll look at how best to use it, that will be iteration, testing, and discussing, but how to be able to share it. It is so important to take it in and out. I have a word processor called Author, and Brandel has been kind enough to dig into my files and to provide access to a VR view. So that's a nice little hack that, if we can provide an ecosystem where these things can be used, it is the dream. It would be absolutely fantastically wonderful. I see Keith has joined us, which is lovely. I’m not going to tell anyone where he works... Meta... Anyway, Peter?

Peter Wasilko: Okay. I have a few links on the sidebar. The first link that I dropped in was to an NHK program. It was a cultural heritage piece that had a segment in it on 3D imaging of temples and historical cultural sites to generate VR replicas of them. It's a very nice video to watch. And about, maybe, halfway to two-thirds-ish in for that segment of it. Then, I dropped a link to Mark Bernstein’s essay discussing typed Hypertext links, which also seemed relevant to today's discussion. Then, I included a link to a small excerpt from the 1990s movie Johnny Mnemonic, depicting the use of a VR headset for accessing the internet. And the interesting is, the time scenario was targeted as it being 2021. So it seemed incredibly timely, that back in 1995, they anticipated that 2021 would be the exact time that that technology would be coming online. So you might enjoy watching that short little video clip.

Then I put in two links related to BibTeX, and I finished out with a link to Michael Benedikt's paper re-examining some ideas from their seminal book, Cyberspace First Steps, which was an MIT Press book, currently out of print, that I’ve talked about many times in here, which introduced the idea of the unfolding of spaces in VR. So you can be looking at three spatial dimensions that will be associated with three parameters of a higher dimensional object, and you then, be able to select a point within the first three, that would effectively, either correspond to an actual object or to a data point, allowing you to open it to a whole range of other objects that correspond to, basically, having those first three search parameters at the value of the location you set. So, in this case, instead of positioning objects in VR, your positioning is the query to access the higher dimensional object, and then, unfolding it, which was depicted, almost as if, a second cube being opened with half the face cut away so that you're, basically, looking in on an open cut-out slice of a box, in a flipped orientation depicting three additional dimensions. And you'll then be able to do that. Another idea that I’ve been kicking around for a long time in Hypertext systems, would be to have a mirror mode, where you'd be able to reverse the nesting structure that you'd use to traverse to a given point. So you'd be able to effectively turn around and look back up through the containment hierarchy that allowed you to reach the node that you were currently at. And being able to toggle on and off a mirror node, strikes me as a very useful affordance that I have yet to see in any systems I’ve had to work with.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: I’m going to spend the next week digging into all of these. One point that you mentioned about mapping the actual position, the cartesian position of a node in some values, or some metadata, that's very close to what I’ve been sketching out for prototype number five, or I don't know which number it will be in the end. But a way to represent properties, for example, and there's metadata of these content blocks. For example, if it's a quantitative property, then it's very clear how you might map that to a spatial dimension. But even something like a Boolean, has this image already been edited or has it not, right? You could do all sorts of things in terms of mapping it to positions. You could snap it to one plane or another, depending on the Boolean value. You could also represent the Boolean values true/false as two free-floating nodes, in and of themselves, that try to pull the things that are true closer to themselves, and they try to pull things that are false closer to themselves. And then if you had five, ten, probably at a certain point it would stop making sense, but if you did multiple properties like these, so you did a couple of Boolean properties, you did a couple of like numerical properties, and you just let them all settle into the configuration that the whole system wants to. I mean, it's like a principal component analysis but really rough, and maybe, interactive, manipulable, and really difficult to understand, because it's not, at all, mathematically rigorous. But for some collections of information, maybe you're writing a

paper and you start adding some quantitative properties, or toggle properties to things, and you just want to see, "Okay, I’m kind of stuck here. I just want the system to tell me what shape can these bits of information take if I prioritize these properties or de-prioritize those other ones." That's definitely something I’m thinking about for prototype number five. But that's another parallel track altogether. I just wanted to kick it back to everybody a little bit, because Frode sent an email a couple of weeks ago talking about the question of how to relate text and information more generally in a 3D environment, one to another. Either the question of like literally the visual representation of the relations between things or a more conceptual level. So something that I’m struggling with, but definitely I’m in the thick of it, at the moment, with prototype zero four is how to represent, and how to think about the relations between blocks and text to each other, blocks of text to topics, blocks of text to multimedia, like images or URLs. Stephanie made a very good point that either all relations are references because it's a reference, but then, you should specify what kind of reference it is. Or references but one of many possible kinds of relations. I have a lot of conversations with people about semantic triples, in relation to semantic web, recently, but specifically to text, which is very slippery as well. It's natural language. There's interpretation involved. How have you all been thinking about, or what examples have you seen of ways to relate things?

I’m thinking all the way back from Ted Nelson's, Xanadu style transclusion indicators, to, I don't know, something like this prototype I’m showing here, with these radial links and lines.

Fabien Benetou: I want to step back just a bit on, it's going to sound a bit harsh, I find your work very interesting, but I’m probably never going to use it because I need to make it myself. I think the research you do is interesting, but I don't think you can explore all of it. And some, for example, of my quirky ideas, I think nobody is going to explore. But why I find and rightfully so, but I still going to explore it. And then, that's also why I like programming, is because I can have some really strange ideas, and maybe, nobody should explore them, because it's going to be useless for them, but I want to be able to do that. So the problem I have is, if I use somebody else's system, at some point, I get stuck. I don't want to reinvent the whole wheel, and I, obviously, can't even do that. So what I’m going into here is some of the idea both of us have, some of the ideas are not shared. One of the beauty of the power of tools like Notion or all the PKM-PIM trend of the moment, is also that some of the effort is being distributed through the community. So I’m just wondering, are the components, patterns, or things for example that make Unity so famous or popular that we should do together? That we, as a community, should have, maybe, I don't know, implementing some way to explore Dropbox or Google Drive or whatnot, we don't have to keep on re-implementing that? Or maybe, some way to spatialize? We don't have to so. I’m

just thinking it completely naively. I don't have an answer to this, but I’m wondering:

What are the things we should re-implement from scratch because we need to dig there and there is no answer?

What are the things we should not reimplement? Do you have some patterns?

Do you have some plugins, or a cookbook, or recipes that you want to rely on, that also, maybe, you don't want to explore because you don't find interesting, but you know it could be interesting and you want to rely on this?

So I’m wondering, at the larger scale, a community of people who are interested in managing knowledge, writing, or reading text here, how can we be a bit more strategical about the work we can do?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: That's an excellent question. And I think answering this question is going to make all the difference in whether things like what I’m building, can become useful.

Nothing good enough that there is mainstream adoption or not. I mean, I think the shorthand answer is open sourcing some or all parts of these projects. I’m in conversation with Brian Eppert of Noda, which is a VR mind mapping application. He's brought up a lot of similar points, which is like, we are all either reinventing the wheel, or we're relying on very poorly adapted frameworks that come from the gaming world, where, essentially, you're given options to fire weapons at your PBS. And there probably is a lot of, well, I would say there's going to be increasing duplicated effort. Now that it seems that people are actually tackling this class of applications seriously, I would say, even a couple of years ago, there wasn't necessarily much duplication because everyone was only making games in VR. So often I had things like, I had to re-implement, by hand, an image processing library, and I had to implement, by hand, an image texturing LOD system. TextMeshPro is already pretty good, but I had to definitely tweak that a lot to make it usable. And so there are a lot of these things that if you're like developing a web app, you would never, ever, in a million years, in 2022, want to build by yourself because there you'll have a thousand excellent libraries already available. And that's just not where we are. But I think, not duplicating effort while, as you're saying, being mindful of the areas where it's productive to just dig on your own because there's much more there than has already been discovered, balancing between those two. But I think, I’ve just moved so much more slowly than I would have liked, with building the first version of the app, version 2020, the one with the big white room, because of the need to just reinvent a lot of these building blocks that exist in abundance in other platforms. I have many of them now in the toolbox, and that's been great, and that's one of the factors. And these prototypes I’ve been showing you, I started building in February, and so I’m quite happy. I could be faster, but I’m pretty happy with how quickly they've come together. In large part

because I had done years and years of work. The pinch, the spatial cursor thing took, I don't know how many months to really figure out and built, and that's the kind of thing that I also would be happy to promote as an alternative paradigm to the larger community. I mean, there are issues with it, we have to tweak and all this stuff. But just as an alternative to the laser pointer, which just has so many issues, both ergonomic and conceptual. To me it's a mock weapon, right? Those are examples of things I’d be more than happy to have other people adopt, offer feedback on, and if it's open source, to other people to improve on at a much faster rate than one party would be able to do. So Fabien, basically, yes, let's talk about that because I absolutely don't want to reinvent the entire operating system from scratch.

Frode Hegland: I share your frustration about doing something commercial, and also being part of a community. It's really hard to decide what's going to be your secret sauce, so to speak. And what has to be shared. My initial feeling with what you're doing here is, data in and out should be shared and working on protocols, that people should be able to choose your environment and you have your amazing interactions. It's a stressful and longer discussion.

Brandel Zachernuk: Awesome. So in an answer to your question of how you apply spaces and attributes to data, I dropped a link in the chat to a researcher, who used to be at the University of Monash, now at the University of Queensland, Maxime Cordeil.

He did these immersive analytics, actually, I’ve shown in this group before, but it's really phenomenal, in terms of being able to show multivariate data. And more generally, one of the things that I think is really valuable, is having the ability to really, rapidly, and substantially alter the arrangement layout and visual appearance with gestural manipulation that has a quick and one-to-one impact in terms of scaling things, or moving things, or colouring things, changing aspects of their objects velocity. Those things that are the most detectable to us, in a lizard brain kind of way, but once that we can, actually, modify and sculpt the presentation. Which is, somewhat, at odds with another really important thing for us, which is the persistent speciality aspect. but there are interesting ways of trying to square that circle for individuals doing different things. The question that I had for you was, with all of these prototypes, including back to 2020, but also your one through four, have you sat with them, used them, and thought about the impact that they have on what you do?

Like with this beautiful tree view, and I’d love for you to move your headset around, and talk a little bit, especially for Bob, because he became about what this is, I think you'll get a kick out of it. Has it changed what you think of, or how you understand what these things are, and what you want to do with them, as a consequence?

Yiliu Shen-Burke: That's a great question. So to eat my own dog food, on a practical level,

can I use these tools I’m building to, actually, do some very minimal amount of the work that I proposing people to use them for. And so the blog posts that I published for prototypes two and three I wrote, the first drafts are in the prototypes themselves. And prototype two, I wish I didn't show you because it was a really dumbed-down version of prototype three, totally focused on text editing and writing.

My benchmark for success for that one was if I could sit for one hour and just write. And at first, I thought I could qualify this with like, “Oh, can I write well? Or can I write X number of words?” It actually turns out that, if you can't write comfortably and productively, you're going to stop after 30 seconds, because it's just the most frustrating thing in the world to try to write something with interfaces getting in your way or whatever. And once I got to the point where I could actually write, and it was like, an 800-word draft I think, and published, it was 1200 with additional comments and images. Once I got to one hour mark I knew, “Okay, that's pretty good for me. I’ve surprised myself, that I’m convinced you can write comfortably in your VR headset.” Which, again, I was very scared of the answer to that question when I embarked on that process.

The higher level question of, have I changed how I think about what this is, what this information is? Absolutely.

Itemized OS

And this is all just making me want to go back to work and finish building prototype four, because, are any of you familiar with Alexander Obenauer's Itemized OS? I will post that in the chat. So the Itemized OS is a proposed paradigmatic design for a computer operating system, where the lowest level primitive is an atomic item which can be any, sort of, block of content. So a block of text, an image, a PDF. It can also be a composite of those things. So you can have a calendar event that's a text at a time, et cetera. And these atomic units are infinitely, flexibly recombinable into different configurations, and they can be contained, and the containers can have certain logic about what they do to the containees, but the containees are only ever temporarily contained within the container. It's not that if you delete the container all the items go away, as well. So, I guess, one of the differences between the Itemized OS and the OSs that we actually use, that are actually out in the world, is that items have a primacy that files and folders don't. And files and folders have a definite location on your computer. The containment structure is a tree. And the Itemized OS it's a full graph. You can have any sort of (indistinct) pointing any which ways. Which, to me, does sound a little bit overwhelming, potentially for someone who just wants to check their email, and make sure they get to their (indistinct) on time with their calendar app. But maybe as an

underlying layer that would give power users or developers all this flexibility that they currently don't have, it's not a bad idea. And all the examples that Alexander Obenauer gives, and especially the visual mock-ups he's created of how this would work in the 2D environment always run into this problem of views, so give you a very concrete example, I think one of his examples is, you receive an email with a calendar invitation in it, and in the Itemized OS, the calendar invitation would be its own item that you can move into your calendar, and the calendar invitation has this existence independent of the email that arrived in, and the calendar view that you're seeing in relative to other events. And in the mock-ups, you see the email as a window with the event in it. And then, you see the calendar window with the event in it. And you're always jumping between these views, even if the data is living in the same spot, in IPFs or whatever this is. The way the interface represents this is as different things that are in different locations, because you know from the physical world, we've learned that a cup that is in my apartment right now, cannot be the same thing as a cup that is in Brandel's apartment, because, almost by definition, that makes them different cups. Whereas, in the Itemized OS, they can, and should be the same item. And so, with Prototype04, right now, the missing step is that that document container is actually just another type of item that has been expanded, and has pulled in all the other items that are contained in it. You could collapse it, and then, everything goes back to the force director graph structure. Or open up another container that would, then, temporarily take over the layout. And all the items that it contained would, for brush into it, and so you have this literal continuity of existence of items, which have a canonical representation of each canonical thing. And the reason why I’m calling all these things projects is because I have no idea if this is a good idea or not, actually, in practice. But I’m pretty sure, in some use cases, it is an excellent idea. And a concrete one is coming from architectural design, I have a lot of early users who are architects themselves, because I harass them into using SoftSpace.

And when you're doing visual research, you're doing report, you don't want to, actually, duplicate... Images are interesting because they are very immutable, they rarely change. So you really have one image, and you don't want to make a copy, because you're not going to make changes to that image if you move it into a folder or if you want to reference it in a different part of your project. It's the same image. It's the same core idea.

And so for mood boarding, as a use case, or for any visual heavy research, this ability to, actually, see the same idea represented by a canonical visual representation of it, moving between the different places where it is playing a role in your project, I hope, I think could be very powerful and actually useful. So this is something that has only occurred to me, Brandel, as a response to your question, after having played with my prototype three, and then asking... I had a call with Conor White-Sullivan at Roam, and we butted heads over

references, containment, and things, and afterward, I realized, “No, Conor is right.” I just couldn't see the possibilities that my prototype was presenting, just because I was so stuck in the items in folders living in only one place, and therefore, to show that thing somewhere else it had to be a sim link, or it had to be some other type of relation. But, actually, no, it could just be the same kind of relationship of being contained in something, or not contained, but referenced in something. So, yeah, that's one small example. I hope to find more. But also, the reason why I’m really excited about this one, in particular, is because I’m wary of these insights that might come to me, that only occur to someone who has worn a headset and tried these things. But the fact that I’ve come to this idea for certain information architecture, and then I find examples of it, not only in contemporary writings, like Alexander Obenauer's, but also going all the way back to transclusion. What's transclusion? This is transclusion, right?

That makes me really excited, though, it feels like, okay, this is two ends of the donut finally coming together. We had the conceptual possibility and the technical possibility. And one was really far away from the other, but now they're finally able to touch.

Bob Horn: I’m interested in several topics back now, and if I’m mistaken, please, just pass on to what you're interested in. But I thought I heard that Yiliu was interested in the relationships between different parts of text that might have to do with content that goes beyond metadata? And if that is a topic, then, I would be interested in having a conversation about that.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: Absolutely. Just to frame it a little bit, and Bob, I want to hear what you have to say on this topic. But the framing is this, which is, if you go looking for information on the semantic web on the internet, as I did, you come across this core concept of the semantic triple, which is, an object, a predicate, and a subject. So Eve eats the apple, or whatever. And to me, and the semantic web painted this picture of a web that was, basically, full of these semantic triples, and you could do all this processing, querying, and automatic deduction based on these semantic triples. But what always struck me is this like, people who work on semantic web themselves acknowledge, is that, it's obviously very labour intensive, every single relation between one thing and another has to be clearly, manually defined. And then, all these questions are made up of aliasing, what if the verb and the noun version of that concept should really be the same thing? Or just gets really messy, really quickly. And also it was unclear to me, in the system, what level of abstraction this meaning should really live? Is it something that's very low-level, technical, pervasive, machine legible? Or on the other end of the spectrum, is it something that is almost, by definition, human and poetic and it will vary subtly from one speaker of the language to another and be completely open to interpretation? Which is why I think for example, Roam, and its, sort of, clones have settled

on this typeless reference, where you just point a block of text to some other concept, and there's just this directed reference, and there isn't a way to get, I don't know if it's in the works, to define what kind of reference that might be. Whether it is supporting evidence, refuting evidence, or an instance of something, et cetera. So then it got me thinking, "Okay, well." One is, if that were the case, if you did have typed references, does having a spatial interface open a new possibility for representing them? For example, you have a line from the object block to the subject block in this line with the predicate displayed in the middle. That's a very simple example. Is that even useful or would that be overwhelming? And then I thought, "Well, maybe we're thinking about it backwards. Maybe the block of text, itself, is the predicate." Normally you would be writing a sentence like, "Yiliu works in VR." This is a sentence in the text block, and Yiliu might be one topic, and VR might be another topic. And it might actually be that Yiliu is the object, VR is the subject, and this messy, squishy natural language content object, which is not typed at all, it is what it is, it's literally that unique string of characters, is the relation, is the predicate from one to the other, and therefore, from one to the other it could be every place where those two concepts are ever mentioned in the same paragraph. That paragraph is a predicate. And then, you could take another level and say, any place where there's an indirect relation, it's also a deducible predicate between Yiliu works in VR, VR is an emerging technology, in which case Yiliu has this relation to emerging technologies. And then, once I got thinking of that, then I just thought, "Well, I’m not going to try to make sense of this. What if it were all just a force-directed graph and you could visually see it as being connected from the Yiliu node, to the VR node, to the emerging technologies node?" And I don't know what exactly that would mean, but it would mean something. And you would be able to concretely look at it, and do something with it. But I don't know. And that's just the train of thought that I’ve gone through. And I’m sure there's been a lot more work and research in this area that I’m not aware of. So I’m very happy to get pointers, references, and ideas.

Bob Horn: What I’ve heard you saying is that there are maybe structures that have already been discovered that relate chunks of text that, maybe, one sentence to seven to nine sentences. Which is what I saw in your demo. The answer is, yes, there are such things. They were invented 50 years ago or more by me. There are, for example, in stable subject matters, the kind that exists in textbooks, procedures policies, and documentation, training materials in business, there are 40 such structures with a few loose ones at the end, some others. But 40 stable ones, they've been used in business industry and government for the last 50 years.

When I left being CEO and Chairman of that company that sold them, we had trained

400.000 technical writers in business, in 30 countries, around the world. They all paid for this information. So that's one structure. I sold the company long ago, 30 years ago, and I

presume it still exists. So, anyway, there are other structures that relate text like that. There are about 15 to 20 that I could tell you about, and outline. And there are a bunch more that need a lot of intellectual work to improve human thinking.

Frode Hegland: So on that note, we have come up to the two-hour mark. And we try to keep to that. So this will be, now, uploaded, transcribed, and distributed. Any final comments? And to make it clear, you're very welcome to come back, and continue the conversation on any Monday or Friday. It's a very worthwhile topic. It sure is related to what we're dealing with, and obviously, that goes for all of you, not just the monthly meeting.

Yiliu Shen-Burke: I have only a question which is like, can I come back to this forum? Because this is incredible. Fabien, thank you for the connection, and thanks to everybody for taking the time. And I definitely have the sensor you know a thousand other threads that we could have chased down and if I can come back on a more regular basis. Maybe have more opportunities to chase them.

Frode Hegland: So, let's have a thousand more meetings. Have a good weekend everyone, it's good to see you.

Figure 36. Screen 1. Shen-Burke, 2022.

Figure 37. Screen 2. Shen-Burke, 2022.

Figure 38. Screeen 3. Shen-Burke, 2022.

Yohanna Joseph Waliya

Post Digital Text (PDT) in Virtual Reality (VR)

With the aid of VR lenses, VR headsets as well as VR joypads, text in virtual reality (VR) blends itself immersively with its readers because both of them are datafied to be virtual embodiments, noticeably, in the metaverse. Thus, virtual reality technologies (VRTechs) turns such text into experiences that make readers to interactively feel a sort of bodily astral projection into oneiric world. In other words, VRTechs convert algorithmically coincided literary utopias of the author into vivid experiences through Artificial Intelligence (AI), brainpower signals and the noninvasive Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). Bansal and Mahajan rightly confirm that Facebook, which is now, Meta has already advertised in April 2017 the development of its mind-controlled noninvasive BCI for typing using brain signals in order to make typing five fold faster than usual by applying a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals to scan the brain many times within some moments so as to translate thoughts into text [76] on digital platforms.

VR textual experience is equally an ekphrastic form of technological induced phantasmagorical, hypnotic and hallucinatory reading that capture readers’ soul, spirit and body then glue them to particular physical location at the same time whilst they are absorbed in reading the text. In fact, the future 3D texts in VR will print automatically from the authors or readers’ brain and mind into the metaversal ecosystem in a matter of moments while they engage themselves in imaginary creative thoughts influenced by the text read or its prompts. Therefore, text in VR could be reified like gravel fetched by bricklayer to mould blocks.

Thus, it will be seen, fetched and felt. It is obvious that digital poetics must be redefined to fit metaversal VR text environment.

Graffiti Wall on the Future of Text in VR

In response to the Editor’s question via email to the wider Future of Text community: “Do you have any thoughts on text and knowledge work in VR/AR/XR which you would want to put in the book?” Listed roughly in order the replies were received:

Tom Standage

Not really.

I have not got Workrooms to work.

My main thought is simply this: there has got to be a better model than Miro and Zoom.

So I think there is scope for a more immersive approach. But that does not mean today’s vendors and today’s solutions are the right ones.

Talk of the “information superhighway” in 1993 was directionally correct but none of the vendors that delivered the vision (Google, Netflix, Amazon) existed at the time.

Martin Tiefenthaler

Since there is no progress in humanism without reading involved, the main question will be if (in alphabetical order) ar/mr/vr/xr will technically and typographically be able to provide texts that are long enough to convey content that is telling enough, and deep enough, and encompassing enough.

Ken Perlin

For creating text, it's not clear to me that we will want to use a keyboard, either real or virtual, in a future where millions of people wander around together in a shared extended reality. Perhaps we will simply move away from the use of text altogether.

After all, speech-to-text is now quite reliable, and in many cases is faster than typing. Still, there is something appealing about using our hands rather than our mouths to create text. It allows us to work with text while continuing our conversation with other humans, which is very useful for collaboration.

Because of the recent emergence of XR at the consumer level, a lot of people are now

thinking about the text input question. But what properties should a “virtual XR keyboard” have?

One of the great things about using your hands to type on a QWERTY keyboard is that you don’t need to look at your hands. You can keep talking with other people, maintain eye contact, be able to absorb their body language, all while typing away.

I suspect that we will continue to value those two constraints:

the ability to continue talking with people while creating text, and
not needing to look at your hands while you are creating text.

Exactly what form that will take, as XR continues to go mainstream, only time will tell.

Bernard Vatant

Got it, but never tried that kind of technology, and not eager to try. I've never supported headsets even to listen to music, too close to my ears. I rarely listen to music at all, actually, although it's a unique experience and I love it, but I need a lot of silence before, and after, and a lot of space around. And all those things are rare and difficult to find in this noisy world.

The computer screen and the keyboard have been my ultimate concession to technology, because they still looks like a page. But I try to go back whenever I can to paper, with my old fountain pen and bottle of ink. For me, text has the smell of violet ink, a childhood's smell. I have no smartphone, touchscreens (I had to search right now the English word for "écran tactile" which I had forgotten) drive me crazy, applications drive me angry.

Augmented reality, or virtual reality, are arrogant and scary terms. There is so little we know about the real world, so much to discover in every corner of the real world, I could use the rest of my life to read every stone, every leaf of grass, every chunk of wood in my small garden, the way to move of every living thing I'm related to.

I'm aware all this looks like the rant of an aging man, more and more a stranger in his epoch. This will not improve now, I'll turn 70 next year ... some say this is still young age ... but I already felt a stranger in my epoch when I was young...

What else. Bon voyage vers le futur :-)

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

While I absolutely believe XR will impact the way we view, read, and interact with text, I don’t know for sure what that will look like. Traditional text has a ‘sense of place’ that

doesn’t seem to perfectly match the one a user experiences in VR. People complain about how uncomfortable it currently is to read long texts in VR, and I think it has to do with that sense of place.

How do you locate yourself in both a 2D text and a 3D world?

Does it even make sense to force some artificial one-to-one mapping of those two mediums, or should we completely reinvent what text looks and feels like in VR? Time—and space—will tell.

Stephan Kreutzer

There’s apparently the natural tendency of obsessing about layout and presentation repeated all over again, while little is done in the area of augmentation, handling structure and building common infrastructure for knowledge work. A main benefit of text as a medium is that it can avoid or reduce the unnecessary distractions introduced by mis-applied visuals and this way help with focus on the actual content. Unsurprisingly, the VR hype cycles don’t seem to contribute much in regards of improving how we go about our ever-increasing amounts of information.

Phil Gooch

Here is what I would like to see. I love the tactile experience of opening a book or a magazine. The physical medium. Turning the pages. I love the tactile experience of writing on paper, and also typing on a keyboard.

If there was a way to combine that tactile experience - which is something almost universal, that we can all share, irrespective of any auditory or visual impairments - with some kind of augmented reality, then this could be part of the future of text.

But this would be beyond a 3D interactive visual hologram. We need to think beyond that towards something like the NeuraLink, where we have augmented thought and an augmented 'minds eye'.

We interact with a physical medium by touch. And we close our eyes. And a beautiful, interactive world opens up.

Of course, this is science fiction now. But so was Douglas Adams' BabelFish forty years ago, and now a reality that we take for granted.

Stephanie Strickland

Is it disabled, or unwieldy?

David Lebow

XR war rooms - virtual wall-size arrays and other technologies for multi-source knowledge- building activities.

Jim Strahorn

Text, Writing, Reading, Word Processing, Dictatinging or Talking Verbally ... on stone, papyrus, paper, screen, or in video, Virtual Reality or holography ... who knows ... not all of the above, but many ... in an uncertain world ????

Esther Wojcicki

VR spices up the real world, and makes it exciting, but we will still need text. Reading is key to understanding what we see with VR

Barbara Tversky

There are many routes to the human mind, alone and together, sight, sound, smell, touch, proprioception, taste, each with its own uniqueness and richness. The mind can savor each one and can imagine one from another, the movie that runs through the mind reading a novel, the floating images evoked by poetry, the ecstasy from music.

The enveloping presence that VR may provide can be awesome, virtual worlds and “real” ones can be further enriched by AR. XR may create worlds we have yet to sense or imagine, worlds that may elevate and expand imagination.

For ill or for good.

Michael Joyce

While not text, the λόγος of the mystic Johannine evangelist, is also not not-text as well as one of the earliest instances of XR. The American poet Charles Olson situated this process of ex-ternalizing/tending writing from speech at the dawn of Western consciousness, speaking of how humans extend reality a/k/a (make meaning) together as mythology, which Olson understood as the way people talk about words, or “what is said [i.e., muthos] about what is said [i.e.,logos].” In the poem “Letter 23” of his four-volume 20th epic Maximus Poems Olson indicts Plato for having “allowed this divisive / thought to stand, agreeing / that muthos / is false. Logos / isn’t—was facts,” and instead declares “I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking/ for oneself/for the evidence of what is said.” Thus, for Olson, mythology, rather than spec-fict stories of strange gods and goddesses, was a supremely local and humanly grounded occupation, an extended reality.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat

Communication devices are of long duration. Our Latin alphabet is more than 3000 years old. The clay tokens invented ca. 7500 BC by the first farmers to keep records of goods were still an important tool in the first millennium BC Assyrian imperial in administration. Their use can be traced over 6000 years. ( see John MacGinnis, et alliae, “Artefacts of Cognition,…” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24:2, 289 ff.)

Cynthia Haynes

We must become the wall upon which all manner of inscriptions (texts) live alongside each other. Text is alive.

David Jay Bolter

A now popular myth of the metaverse—that immersive virtual reality can serve for more or less all human interaction—seems to exclude traditional text-based communication. But it is worth considering XR (in particular VR) could accommodate new forms of discursive writing. Earlier media (papyrus roll, codex, printed book, and the 2D web page) have each constituted a particular writing space. Perhaps VR could constitute a space in which text,

images, and videos can be inscribed in or on a 3D space. This would be the digital equivalent of the millennia-old practice of inscribing on wood or stone. In VR, however, terrestrial physics need not apply: space itself becomes manipulable. In an "immersive book" the architecture of the 3D space—the layout of text and the relationship among textual elements

— can contribute to the argument. This suggests a kind of digital writing that is both familiar and new.

Johannah Rodgers

Johannah's Graffiti

Never forget: On Zoom, everyone is a homonym. We are all in the process of being “written by” the networked electronic computational devices we are using to communicate and interact with other humans and devices. Reading the Future of Text will help you to better

understand how this is happening and why it matters for humans, for machines, and for their relations.

-- Johannah Rodgers, Author,

Engineering Language: Teaching Machines to Read and Write in the U.S. 1869 - 1969

Johannah's Notes

As most people know, I consider all forms of digital communication types of inscription practices. Zoom is an automated writing system. The thing we all need to consider is what is being proprietized and how this is changing human communication practices. Inscribed alphabetic communication has always been a multimodal practice.

However, the modes of that practice are being reconfigured by the machines that we are now using to “write” with. XR is an inscribed reality composed by humans and machines. It has all of the biases of the past written into it but will also enable the expression of new types of critiques. One question is whether those critiques will

result in any structural changes. The “platform” is the “writing system” and that has been privatized. New systems of notation are possible for humans across distances because of the participating of

digital electronic calculating machine networks. Human and non-human

communications practices are merging/ in new ways with XR. As

humans, we need to come to some kind of agreement about exactly what those changes are in order to ensure that human communication and human interests, as opposed to machine communication and machine interests are prioritized over the next decades. You can say that the

20th c. was all about prioritizing machine interests over biological interests and that the 21st c. may very well be all about the fate of the biological interests that remain; will they be further

“de-naturalized” or will we begin living within the natural constraints that remain. It should be interesting to see how these issues play out.

Graffiti Wall on the Future of Text in VR from Twitter

In response to the Editor’s Tweet: “Do you have any thoughts on text and knowledge work in VR/AR/XR which you would want to put in the book?” Listed in order the replies were received:

Nova

Text is generally so 1D and that's hard on many neurodivergent people, if we add more spatial dimensions to it we can make it contain more readable information :D https://twitter.com/technobaboo/status/1588125433127702529?

s=20&t=rrkN7egmDYKh5oJK_E_SeQ

@JumbliVR's Idea Engine is a great place to start, using text as a primary element while still augmenting it with other symbols and graphics... https://twitter.com/technobaboo/status/1588138195945922561?

s=20&t=ZPKjCISlpr-4ksHYS2HYAA

Noda - Mind Map in VR

The future of text in VR will be dynamic and responsive. Adjusting to user intention for increasingly precise rendering: Eye tracking in XR opens up some interesting UX possibilities. Specific to adjusting the visual display in response to directed attention. Noda is using the feature on Meta Quest Pro to scale distant text for legibility and to inspect additional detail for items that are near.

https://twitter.com/Noda_Tech/status/1588234308673642497? s=20&t=ZPKjCISlpr-4ksHYS2HYAA

Jimmy Six-DOF

Working with 2D info in VR is a nested reflection of how we do so in real life but with the real time enhanced 3D infinate possibility space canvas layered to create a human centered feedback loop between 2D/Text as both at once an input & an output. Web Transclusion in 3D=2D+!

https://twitter.com/jimmy6DOF/status/1588465010531237888? s=20&t=ZPKjCISlpr-4ksHYS2HYAA

Kezza

Real insights on effect of text presentation type, location on reading experience in VR are missing & how it aids accessibility. E.g.Edge-fixed or in head-fixed location if user needs to move within virtual environment & using RSVP reading with rich interaction possibilities.

https://twitter.com/Kezza_PR/status/1588549554751696899? s=20&t=ZPKjCISlpr-4ksHYS2HYAA

Conversations from the Journal

Conversation: Adam’s Experiment

Adam Wern, Frode Hegland, Alan Laidlaw, Brandel Zachernuk

Adam Wern: Been playing with the Library idea for a while, and can also show PDF pages in 3D. But that is not very useful in itself. Much more is needed than visualisation to beat 2D, or analog.

Figure 39. 1. Wern, 2022.

Adam Wern: Here is my first Active Reading test in 3D. You can select text and bring phrases out, floating and movable in 3D. Hovering over snippet’s highlights where they came from in the text (the yellowish in the screenshot):

Figure 40. 2. Wern, 2022.

Adam Wern: Mostly eye candy. But with some imagination we can see that it would be really useful to read like this. There is something about the 3D that makes text “Rich” for me. I connect better.

Especially with manipulation: Fiddling. Moving. Thinking with hands.

But as you say Frode, without storing the work it’s not much. The actual saving it is where it is. And a system like this must really be able to work with both PDFs and HTML. Two incredible important formats in digital (in what is stored in them).

Brandel has done some interesting translations of HTML text into 3D (preserving typographic styling).

Frode Hegland: Yes! How shall we do that? We have a Wordpress plug-in but should go further…

Adam Wern: Two main approaches (not mutually exclusive): start hanging VM ‘directly’ onto text – like an Author to a paragraph, or carve out a section of the document (for example with a custom visual-meta tag) and put VM there. A main questions is whether it should be formatted as BibTex, JSON or markup when in HTML-land.

Meanwhile, here is FoT vol 1 in 3D. Testing larger amounts of text.

Figure 41. 3. Wern, 2022.

Adam Wern: OK, it looks like we can fly through half a million characters on screen in 120 fps in the browser without a problem. Clickable characters. Good to know :)

Alan Laidlaw: Hi all. Will be out of the woods soon. Adam, if you’re willing, I’d like to try to install your code on my machine in order to tinker.

Integrating w real data is stage two, now? We’re still at faker.js stage

Adam Wern: Yes, it’s pretty fake. Well, the data comes from a real PDF (earlier screenshot), and a real EPUB but it has no interface (just hardcoded file references).

Would at least be interesting to support dragging a PDF/EPUB onto the web-app and open it, and save the montage to file after you are done (to be opened again)

Frode your export/save-to-Wordpress option in Author, does it export HTML, or how does it work?

Color coding and seeing lengths of articles feels nice, and it kind of forms the navigation equivalent of a ragged margin for better memorability (if the view stay constant)

Figure 42. 4. Wern, 2022.

Adam Wern: The actual screenshots is just material for discussion. I’m very aware that showing lots 3D texts can look cool, but it maybe useless for doing anything more meaningful. So feel free to shoot down bad things, everyone!

One thing that I do like is the seamless transition between overview and detailed view of texts. Basically a ZUI

Frode Hegland: Author posts to Wordpress but it’s broken at the moment, please tell me what it should do, for our purposes and I’ll see what I can do. This is all very exciting!

Brandel Zachernuk: I really liked what Mike Alger said about text, backing and contrast - and there was a good talk at Google IO a few years ago where they introduced ‘Distance- Independent Millimeters’ (‘DMM’) as a perceptual unit for describing sizes too: https://t.co/ 3VrvoN6v1L

Adam Wern: It’s interesting – with text in 3D on a regular screen (like the above prototypes) it feels natural to ‘just pinch’ to get a nice zoom level for your particular eye-sight and type of

reading. It’s effectively moving your body (camera view) there, but in VR that movement feels like a more brutal thing, as it affect your sense ‘gravity’, peripheral vision, and has implications for nausea, etc. So something like DMMs, perhaps adjusted for your vision like your default browser font-size, will be much more important in VR than ‘flat’ 3D.

Brandel Zachernuk: Absolutely—there are implications from the stereo-parallax aspect of size as well as the perceptual degrees of arc. There are also aspects of technical implementation for display—small-and-close text will feel different because of the eye-strain caused trying to focus on it.

But, small-and-close feels more different than you would expect to large-and-distant, especially in 6DoF.

Adam Wern: Contrast will also be interesting, especially for AR. Colourful text with poor contrast or eye-sore combinations (like my things above ;) is more useful for categorising & scanning than reading. In XR we'll have to use blur, font outlines, and semi-transparent materials to do effective floating text – as the background can be anything from real life

Brandel Zachernuk: Yes I can definitely expect that real-world detail will get in the way pretty badly.

It’s fantastic that Troika actually creates “Signed Distance Field” type - it’s one thing I didn’t succeed in implementing in the rich format, I wonder if it would be possible to supply my dom-to-three stuff as encouragement to support more complex hierarchies of type.

SDF retains crispness at small sizes without jagged aliasing effects, and surprisingly smooth contours from a relatively small source texture size—Valve introduced it here: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/

SIGGRAPH2007_AlphaTestedMagnification.pdf

Adam Wern: SDF is nice, but not perfect. Sharp edges are slightly 'tapered'. So it’s more round than ideal

Fonts look friendlier :)

But overall it feels nice, and scaled well both in quantity and zoom-level

Brandel Zachernuk: Absolutely! I haven't peeked under the hood yet - do you know if Troika-text does directionally-biased SDF atlases or are they greyscale? The Valve paper indicates that by using multiple channels for directional biases you can dramatically increase the maximum detail for sharp contours

Adam Wern: DOM to Troika would be really useful. Basic rich text - bold, headlines, links, and we have ourself a hypertext system that scales well - counted 500K characters until it started complaining.

Haven't looked under the hood in Troika yet.

Brandel Zachernuk: ooh actually either spector.js or @thespite’s WebGL inspector tools might help (and to a lesser extent the canvas inspector in Safari).

Adam Wern: Thanks! Will try them to figure out. 500K was probably not a limit that can’t be worked around. Something exceeded some GL “texture dimension”. Troika can also be used with shaders that curve text, or automatically billboard things on the gpu.

Brandel Zachernuk:Something I did and really like for timeline VR is ‘greeking’—creating nontransparent quads per-word in a document for display below the threshold of legibility based on display size. It’s effectively a level-of-detail option to alternate between in order to balance the value of seeing layout vs. the cost of rendering all those glyphs. Adobe InDesign has done it in the past for 2D, it looks like present-day Illustrator doesn’t.

Frode Hegland: And then there is this: TikTok: https://t.co/0giU6iRfAl

Figure 43. Date Chooser Solar System. Vidovic, 2022.

Adam Wern: That date-picker may be a joke, but the underlying idea of rotations for scrubbing time is very solid. And virtual controls have the advantage over a regular rotational knobs in that you can move outwards from the centre to get more fine-grained control. I’ve missed that in video scrubbing many times: scrubbing roughly first - and then going to specific frame with precision. Regular sliders don’t cut it.

Frode Hegland: Yes, a joke, but a thought provoking one.

Adam Wern: On interfaces, I wonder if something looking like this would work for voice recognition, surfacing alternative interpretations for a phrase. To me, being misunderstood by voice recognition feels so irritating that I never use it. Fixing mistakes should be much easier.

https://twitter.com/azlenelza/status/1331623011049500678

Figure 44. Threads Interface. Elza, 2020.

Conversation: Experiments with Bob Horn Mural

Brandel Zachernuk, Frode Hegland, Adam Wern, Brendan Langen

Frode Hegland: Yesterday, 11th of February we had a regular Friday meeting where we were joined by Fabien Benetou and semi-regular, now more regular, Bob Horn. Because of Bob’s work with murals, we spent some time going through the basics of what a mural could be in AR and VR, so Brandel built the following. The dialog below is from our discussion on Twitter. The video is quite hard to watch because of the constant movement, which is a great example of the power of VR: For Brandel this was a completely smooth experience and we really should experience it in VR ourselves. I have put up a link to the VR version in our blog, so that when you are in VR you can simply go to our page and easily access this. It is in the VR Resources Category:

https://futuretextlab.info/category/vr-resource/

Chat log is on our blog, as usual: https://futuretextlab.info/2022/02/11/chat-11feb-2022/ Video of full meeting: https://youtu.be/Oh8yDKtPXD8

Transcript will be up in this category when done: https://futuretextlab.info/category/transcript/

Brandel’s Mural

Figure 45. Bob Horn Mural. Zachernuk, 2022.

Brandel Zachernuk: I dropped a static export of the mural in here: https://t.co/jH26I9JFIY Video walkthrough : https://t.co/jH26I9JFIY with transcript:

“The NIREX poster in WebXR right now, it’s just a series of 2048 by 2048 rectangles and the end as well. But it’s nice, you know, it’s big and we can kind of navigate around it. I have this. Navigation is non-linear, so that small movements are small, but big movements result in big translations and sort of it’s proportionate to the square of the magnitude of the original motion so that we have the ability to get from one side of it to another without losing that fine detail. But now I’m zeroing out the vertical translation for the most part. This is kind of navigable with my hand at that this height. But it’s interesting. It’s really cool to be able to have these views of it and to be able to appreciate it at the size at which it’s sort of intended to be viewed at. Yeah, I’m pretty interested in it, and if necessary, obviously this information here is giving it the limits of its readability based on this particular set of pages that I’ve exported. But it, if necessary or possible, you can increase the resolution of this double edit or more or make use of some kind of adaptive display. I’m not aware of a specific PDF or at this point that would be able to pull this in natively, but a little bit of working. That’s definitely possible. Yeah, I like it. I also like this nonlinear thing. This is something that I’ve kind of made use of quite a bit in in my own work is having something that always has some action.

But given that we only have a certain arm reach range, being able to kind of pinch here and then throw this way back. It’s really useful. These are one meter by one meter squares on the ground, and I don’t have arms that long, but it means that we are able to relatively fluidly and effortlessly. And if? Get into these different kind of vantage points without having to have strict changes in modality. So, yeah. Hmm. I think it’s an interesting thing to play with, and I look forward to making use of more data for this kind of visualisation in the future.”

oh, it only works with the left hand - I am left handed and also inconsiderate

Adam Wern: Nice - and really like the non-linear navigation!

Could be coupled with gestural ‘modifiers’ so it’s turned on by when needed. (like sticking out a pinky).

The whole idea of mural in VR is interesting. A perfect fit for the really big posters.

And where the depth dimension fits in. Could imagine stepping through a region to get more information.

Or that the some labels like headings and dates stick out like tabs when the mural is viewed from a sharp angle. Or that the floor doubles as that timeline.

An audio guide with moving hands for the actual mural would be nice. The place of the listener can be further back and floating hands can be expressive near the material without a body covering the view. Can be sectioned like a museum guide with numbers and indicated by floating markers.

Adam Mural with Extracted Dates

Adam Wern: Brandel, Here are dates dynamically extracted from the PDF-text through pdf.js (which also renders the texture via a canvas) and added as rotated text tabs. Imagine

searching by voice and tabs pop out with results .

Figure 46. Extracted Dates. Wern, 2022.

Brendan Langen: Yes! very good to see the data we can pull out from this.

Brandel Zachernuk: Oooh excellent! I got recording voice in places in VR working last night, it’s at

https://zachernuk.neocities.org/2022/audio-record/

Adam Wern: Other ideas: folding out large font-size text (probably headings) so that you can see headings from far away.

Could be added to his mural, and is would be very interesting with voice search or Named Entity Recognition (NER).

220 AD BCE Chinese Zhuanshu completed simplified to Lishu (Clerical script)

Conversation: USD (Universal Scene Description)

Brandel Zachernuk, Adam Wern

This is from the creator of the USD format, ex-Pixar, now-Adobe: https://youtu.be/FAY39CUEKpE

“I keep thinking about - when I think about the metaverse, I keep imagining there is a metaverse browser, that is, you send links and the USD is the HTML of it that gives you the - it’s not a web page, it’s a web space now. And so then this browser, you know, it’s a browser that on desktop looks like a browser but in VR—you get in there and so that is more

immersive but conceptually has the same model. And so there’s almost like a JavaScript or something that on top of it that gives you that execution and things that can happen based on triggering from events and things like that.”

Guido Quaroni

Oh, the full, tidied transcript is up here too: https://t.co/qVzD3PEIwu or

https://cesium.com/open-metaverse-podcast/the-genesis-of-usd/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Scene_Description for wikipedia definition.

Adam Wern: I’m glad they seem very aware of the limits of declarative formats for things like animation, UI behavior, physics, etc. Looking at SVG, CSS, HTML, SwiftUI, and tons of other (mostly) declarative formats we always seem to need to bypass rigid default behaviours for doing anything ambitious. And the expressiveness of imperative code has proven unmatched.

Ambitious interactive 3D would be more like and app - a world rather than a model. And JavaScript is the main switch board for very dynamic things like webapps, while HTML becomes more of an empty shell. In that sense I would rather go to an index.js directly (or JavaScript baked into the USD), and skip the double declaration of HTML and JavaScript.

On the other hand: an index.html can act as a loading screen, fallback page, manifest file, and metadata wrapper – functions which should be filled anyway

Stephen Fry

In closing: A Prediction

Language has the astonishing capacity to send and receive pictures, ideas and full dramatic scenarios to and from the minds of those who use it. Artificial Intelligence seems now to be developing the ability to do something similar - convert language into images. Dall-E and Midjourney are, at the time of writing, popular free examples of this. How text will be integrated in, exploited or harnessed by AR/VR and the like is an open question, but this new, or at least newly celebrated, capability of AI must, one presumes, be a part of it.

But we only have to look back to realise how unknowable a future it is. Midjourney’s very name should remind us that technology is always moving.

When I first showed friends a smartphone in the 90s (a Nokia Communicator or Sony Ericsson, probably) they thought them slow, cumbersome and consequently without apparent use.

Twitter would suffer routinely in its first five to ten years from server outages, and cause DDoS type crashes to other sites if you sent too many people there.

The apparent flakiness of the technology caused people to miss the real point of what such technologies could actually do to our species socially, psychologically, culturally - existentially. They were so hung up on the primitive early rollouts that they couldn’t see what the implications were.

I say “they” I mean “we” of course, because I was as blind as everyone else.

Then again, who looked at early Karl Benz automobiles and foresaw Formula One racing, four lane highways, multi-storey carparks, EVs, adaptive cruise control, drive through burger joints, decades of brain damage in children from gasoline lead-poisoning and rising pollution and climate change? They just saw noisy machines that were only for the rich, which required either a skilled chauffeur/mechanic, or a fair deal of knowledge concerning chokes, carburettors, jets, magnetos, spark plugs, double-declutching and the lord knows what else, just to drive a few miles.

Who looked at Twitter, Facebook etc and foresaw the maelstrom of convergent storm systems that has swept like a destructive tornado through so much of human intercourse and comity over recent years?

It’s hard to trust any predictions from anyone. But just as the “paperless office” is a sick joke to anyone working in real offices, so is the idea of “keyboardless computer interfacing” - both always just around the corner, but always defied by our human liking (when it comes to virtual communication at least) for manipulating the visual symbols of language rather than deploying vocal utterance, text rather than speech. Yes, we have FaceTime and Zoom, but most people hate them and only use them to please their bosses or their mothers. We’d rather write a letter (as we should call emails now, surely?), or send a WhatsApp/iMessage. I suspect this will be just as true for those who like the idea of stepping into Zuckerberg’s Metaverse or wander about wearing digital spectacles of some kind of other…

My only prediction is that everyone’s predictions will be wrong. Including mine of course.

With this pleasing paradox, I will leave you.

Appendix : History of Text Timeline

This timeline is included partly as a resource to look through, but also as an extra data point for when you might look up text in the document with a Find command and the associated dates will then also appear.

We understand that this will never be, nor aims to be, a complete and accurate history of text. There will be errors in omission, facts and dates will only be solid for the most recent events. The timeline format is ill suited for non-sharply delineated periods of time so we have tried to address that with language, such as liberal use of ‘ca’ and date ranges. The history of ideas is especially fraught and there will be issues we have not even thought about. What this aims to be however, is a useful guide for at least some of the major events and sequences which has brought us where we are, and which may help guide us to where we want to be with text. Since the format is so simple we aim that it should at least be useful to students to get a lay of the temporal land.

In the Future Text Lab we are looking at how to incorporate timeline information into concepts so this timeline is also available as a JOSN file.

For any suggestions or issues, please email the editor Frode Alexander Hegland at frode@hegland.com and you will be credited as a Contributor in the next Edition. It would be great if you could use this format: Year (even if you have to use ‘ca’ or other terms) Event/ thing by person at organisation (if applicable)

13,8 Billion Years Ago

ca 13,800,000,000 years ago the universe comes into being. There was no ‘instant’ of creation. The universe didn’t flash into existence, it came into being as an all-encompassing, interactive, quantum wave. There is no going back. From pure energy to all there is today, the universe gets more complicated and more interactive one Planck moment at a time

ca 4,540,000,000 years ago the earth and the solar system is formed

ca 4,400,000,000 years ago oceans form, providing a substrate for life with rich potential for interactions

Let’s pause before we continue the journey into the next, great step (that of life itself ). Look at these dates - the solar system has been around for roughly 1⁄3 of the universe’s existence. That is something to marvel at. It’s easy to imagine vast intergalactic civilizations having come and gone over the life of the universe, but it turns out that there actually isn’t that much time in the past. We’re pretty early inhabitants. There may have been one generation of stars similar to our own before us —maximum. So, maybe there hasn’t been enough time for advanced civilizations to evolve. That we might be one of the most advanced consciousness in creation (or perhaps the only one) is a sobering thought. Can we handle this responsibility?

ca 4,000,000,000 years ago Self-replicating molecules appear. Life is happening. It’s pretty basic, but it’s happening

ca 3,500,000,000 years ago Single-celled organisms

ca 3,000,000,000 years ago Viruses, though they may be much older

ca 580,000,000 years ago Complex multicellular life

ca 250,000,000 years ago or less–it is hard to be sure, DNA, with complex ‘letters’ of interaction takes life to a whole new level

250 Million-3,6 Million

2,7-2,5, 1,9-1,7 and 1,1-0.9 million years ago, the earth sees rapid climate change (on the scale of lifetimes of individuals, not species) spurring on hominid evolution in the Rift Valley in Africa, with each period coinciding with brain development. During the period 1,9-1,7 the number of hominid species reached its peak and Homo Erectus appeared. Tool development also coincided with these cycles of rapid climate change, including Oldowan, Acheulean and

Mousterian. For more on this topic, and how the planet shaped us in general refer to Origins by Lewis Dartnell

ca 3,600,000 years ago Our ancestors walk upright and they loose body hair

ca 2,300,000 years ago Homo Habilis, the tool user, is our oldest ancestor to use tools ca 2,000,000 years ago Olduwan tool Culture begins. Its key feature was the method of chipping stones to create a chopping or cutting edge.

2,000,000-50,000 BCE

ca 500,000 years ago Earliest evidence of purpose-built shelters. Found near Chichibu, Japan

ca 400,000 years ago Early humans begin to hunt with spears

ca 280,000 years ago First complex stone blades and grinding stones

ca 150,000 years ago Humans possibly capable of speech

ca 100,000-200,000 Modern Humans

50,000-3,000 BCE

ca 50000 BCE Our ‘Great leap forward’. Human culture starts to change more rapidly (burying our dead ritually, clothes from animal hides, complex hunting techniques)

ca 44000 BCE Oldest known cave painting, found in the Franco-Cantabrian region in western Europe and Sulawesi, Indonesia

ca 35400 BCE Oldest-known example of figurative art, in Sulawesi, Indonesia

ca 11000 BCE Cave art by young children in the Rouffignac Cave

ca 7500 BCE Near Eastern counters ‘Tokens’ to keep track of goods are the earliest known antecedents of the Mesopotamian Cuneiform script

ca 6600 BCE Eleven isolated symbols carved on tortoise shells were found at Jiahu, an archaeological site in the Henan province of China, some bearing a striking resemblance to certain modern characters but the connection is not established

ca 4500 BCE Proto-Indo-European language developed, probably somewhere near the Black Sea, and probably spreading because its speakers invented horse riding. Today 60% of modern humans speak a daughter language, 27% as their mother tongue

ca 4000 BCE Possible preliterate images which may have been symbols (such as Gerzean pottery) which could have been precursors to Egyptian hieroglyphic writing

4000 BCE

ca 3500 BCE Egyptian Proto-hieroglyphic symbol systems

ca 3300 BCE Reduction of three-dimensional Near Eastern tokens into two-dimensional signs on envelopes holding tokens

ca 3200 BCE First logographic Near Eastern accounting lists written on clay tablets by impressing tokens

ca 3100 BCE First logographic proto-cuneiform signs traced with a stylus on accounting tablets

ca 3000 BCE First proto-cuneiform phonetic signs to represent personal names on economic tablets

ca 3000 BCE First known use of papyrus for writing. Previously Egyptians had been writing on stone and pottery

ca 3000-1000 BCE Hieratic (‘priestly') cursive writing system used for Egyptian until the rise of Demotic. Primarily written in ink with a reed pen on papyrus.

3000 BCE

2900 BCE First known air mail. Egyptian sailors released carrier pigeons from ships to pre- announce their arrival

ca 2800 BCE First full sentence written in mature Egyptian hieroglyphs so far discovered.

Found on a seal impression in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa'ab

ca 2700 BCE First cuneiform texts which departs from accounting: funerary texts

At least 2600 Ink was used in Ancient Egypt for writing and drawing on papyrus, Chinese inks go back further

ca 2600 BCE Sumerian language develops ca 2600 BCE Egyptian language develops ca 2400 BCE Akkadian language develops

ca 2400 BCE First cuneiform tablet dealing with trade

ca 2300 BCE First written sentences. These texts were inscribed on worshippers’ votive statues dedicated to a god and requesting immortality

ca 2300 BCE First named author, Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon the Great

ca 2300 BCE Oldest known dictionaries of cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian– Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla (modern Syria)

ca 2000 BCE Classical period of the Sumerian Cuneiform Script

ca 2000 BCE First known library catalog in the Sumerian city of Nippur

ca 2000 BCE Abacus (from Greek meaning “board strewn with sand or dust used for drawing geometric figures or calculating”), the first known calculator, is invented in Babylonia (Iraq)

ca 2100 BCE Elamite language develops

ca 2100–1500 BCE Proto-Sinaitic script, the earliest trace of alphabetic writing known, in the Egyptian Pharaoh’s turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula

2000 BCE

ca 1900 BCE First known cipher (not yet decoded), in tomb of Khnumhotep II

ca 1750 BCE Hammurabi’s Code, by Hammurabi, ruler of Babylon

ca 1700 BCE Hittite language develops

ca 1600 BCE Earliest known medical document, the Edwin Smith Medical Papyrus, thought based on material from 3000 BCE, including the first reference to the human brain

ca 1500 BCE Phoenician alphabet of 22 consonants was among the early mature alphabets. It spread over the Mediterranean and led to the Greek, Hebrew, Roman, Arabic and modern alphabets

ca 1450 BCE Greek language develops

ca 1500 BCE Earliest book known, the Ebers papyrus, a 20 meter scroll

ca 1500 BCE First known use of movable type (stamps reused to repeat symbols identically), the Phaistos Disc, and first font

ca 1300 BCE First known inclusion of words on a map, in Mesopotamia

ca. 1300–1190 BCE The Ugaritic writing system a cuneiform augmented abjad (consonantal alphabet) for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language

ca 1300s BCE Wax tablet with stylus: origins are uncertain but known to have been used at least until the 1860s CE, for example in the fish market in Rouen, France

1200s BCE Late Bronze Age collapse

ca 1250–1192 BCE Earliest confirmed evidence of Chinese script, Oracle bones script

ca 1200 BCE Torah was copied onto a scroll by Moses according to the Hebrew tradition

(date disputed)

ca 1200 BCE Old Chinese language develops

ca 1100 BC–256 BCE Chinese Jinwen (Bronzeware Script)

1000-300 BCE Chinese bronze inscriptions/script

1000s BCE the Gezer Calendar, first vertically-formatted list

ca 1000 BCE Hebrew language develops

1000 BCE

1000 BCE Chinese Seal script evolved organically out of the bronze script

900–400 BCE The Greek Alphabet emerged around the ninth or eight century BCE which had distinct letters for vowels, not only consonants. Many versions of the Greek alphabet existed but by the fourth century it had been standardised into twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega

ca 700 BCE Latin language develops

700s BCE Alphabetic writing entered the Greek world from the Levant

650 BCE Demotic Egyptian script following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts

500s First known curated museum. Mesopotamian artifacts spanning 1,500 years, by Princess Ennigaldi, daughter of King Nabonidus

ca 500 BCE Sanskrit language develops

ca 550 BCE First official mail service, by Cyrus the Great, stretching from Post, Iran to Hakha, Myanmar

ca 500 BCE Aṣṭādhyāyī by Pāṇini, quasi-generative grammar of Sanskrit, anticipating Chomsky

300s BCE The basic form of the Codex invented in Pergamon

ca 300 BCE Tamil language develops

300s BCE Reed pens for writing on papyrus

310/305–240 BCE The Pinakes, the first library catalog at the Library of Alexandria

285–246 BCE Alexandria founded by Alexander the Great

283 BCE Library of Alexandria founded by Ptolemy I and II

257–180 BCE Punctuation is invented at the Library of Alexandria by Aristophanes of

Byzantium

256-206 BCE Chinese Zhuanshu (Seal Script).

206 BCE Chinese Zhuanshu starts being simplified to Lishu (Clerical script) 250 Parchment Scrolls

ca 230 BCE The letter ‘G’, by Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first known inventor of a letter

200s BCE Quill used until about the 19th century CE, when replaced by the pen

200s BCE Alphabetization developed, probably in Alexandria by Callimachus to catalog the Great Library

200s BCE Erya, first known dictionary

ca 131-59 BCE BCEActa diurna, daily news by government, published in Rome

179–141 BCE Earliest extant paper fragment in Fangmatan in Gansu province, China before 134 BCE First character encoding, by Cleoxenus and Democleitus, described by Polybius. Each Greek letter was converted to 2 digits (1 to 5), then to smoke or fire signals

63 BCE & ‘ampersand’ proposed by Marcus Tiro

ca 55 BCE The book in the form of folded sheets, not just a stack of sheets, by Julius Caesar, in his reports on the Gallic Wars

0 CE

ca 50 Earliest surviving example of Old Roman Cursive script: a speech by Claudius

79 Earliest tables of contents by Pliny the Elder in Naturalis Historia (Natural History) 79 Earliest known marketing pun and portmanteau word: wine jars in Pompeii marked ‘Vesuvinum’ (Vesuvius wine)

79 Two SATOR AREPO word squares in Pompeii, perhaps with Christian associations, making them the earliest surviving Christian inscriptions

100 CE

200

ca 200 New Roman (or Minuscule) Cursive script which evolved into modern lower case letterforms

ca 220 Earliest surviving woodblock printed fragment (China)

220 Chinese Zhuanshu completed simplified to Lishu (Clerical script)

300

ca 300 Maya writing

ca 300 Latin handwriting starts to use larger letters at the start of sentences, though the same shape (not mixed case)

330–360 Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest extant codex; a biblical manuscript written in Greek 367 Old Roman Cursive script banned except for official imperial documents, eventually leading to lower case text (derived from New Roman Cursive) being normal and upper case

exceptional

400

420–589 Chinese Kaishu script (Regular Script) replaces Lishu

400s Demotic Egyptian script dies out from active use

500

Before 500s Literacy introduced to Japan in the form of the Chinese writing system, via Baekje

500-1000 Florilegium, which are selections of ‘flowers’(select passages) from work, rather than a summary, to help people deal with the volume of books

593 Woodblock printing starts in China

600

600s Quill pens, made from the outer feathers of crows and other large birds, becomes popular

700

ca 700s Word spacing pioneered by Celtic monks

ca 700 St Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest surviving Western book, which still has its original goatskin leather cover

700s Japanese writing develops away from Chinese

764 Empress Kōken commissions the earliest known examples of woodblock printing in Japan

800

800s paper starts to replace parchment as the primary writing material for administrative uses in Baghdad

813 Council of Tours decreed sermons should be in vulgar language not Latin. This may have triggered early Romance languages to be spelt literally, rather than as Latin with distorted pronunciation

842 Oaths of Strasbourg, first surviving document in Romance (early French), with parallel version in Frankish (early Germanic)

868 The oldest known printed book, The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist book in China 854–931 Prototype professional peer-review process recommended in the Ethics of the Physician written by Ishāq ibn ʻAlī al-Ruhāwī

900

ca 900 Screen Printing in China during the Song Dynasty

900s Arabic numerals come to Spain, though they were not commonly used until the fourteenth century.

960–1279 Chinese Kaishu script evolves to Songti script

1000

1080 The Missal of Silos, the oldest known document on paper created in Europe

1056 First recorded paper mill in Xàtiva on the Iberian Peninsula

1100

1190 First paper mill in France

1200

1200s The term ‘Originalia’ is coined in contrast to Florilegia, indicating a greater authority to original sources than excerpts

1246 Call numbers associated with the location of books, in the Library at Amiens Cathedral in France

1276 Paper mills established in Italy

1290 Ars Magna by Ramon Lul

1300

1377 Jikji the oldest surviving book printed using moveable metal type by Gyeonghan in

Korea

1300s The word ‘history' meant, “relation of incidents whether true of false.” The word goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root of wid-tor weid, it literally mean “to know” and “to see.”

1304–1374 Humanism founded by Francesco Petrarch, reviving enthusiasm for ancient Roman thinkers, with books as the centre of their discourse

1320 First paper mills in Germany

1340–1350 First paper mills in Holland

1346 First known two-color print, a frontispiece to a Buddhist sutra scroll

1400

1400s First prototype of a Jacquard-type loom by Jean le Calabrais

1424 The University of Cambridge has one of the largest libraries in Europe with just 122 books. Books are still handwritten on parchment

1453 Constantinople captured by the Turks and books from its Imperial Library are burned or removed, marking the end of the last of the great libraries of the ancient world

1455 ‘Gutenberg Bible’, also-called Forty-two-line Bible, or Mazarin Bible, the first complete moveable type printed book extant in the West, printed by Johannes Gutenberg 1457 First known color printing is used in Mainz Psalter by Johann Faust and his son-in-law

Peter Schöffer

1470 Roman typeface, the first recognisably modern typeface, a combination of capital letters inspired by ancient Roman architectural inscriptions and Carolingian minuscules, developed by Nicolas Jenson

1470 First printed joke book, Facetiae by Poggio Bracciolini

1470 Earliest extant example of sequential numbering in a book, Sermo in festo praesentationis beatissimae Mariae virginis, printed in Cologne. This did not become standard for another half century. Peter Schoffër, apprentice of Gutenberg, is the inventor of the title page and Arnold Therhoernen in Cologne, is one of the first to use both a title page and page numbers

Late 1470s, title, author, and publisher information included by printers on the first inside page of a book

1479 Manicule in Breviarium totius juris canonici, compiled by Paolo Attavanti printed in Milan by the German firm of Leonhard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenzeller

1481 First marginal annotations used in printed texts on a Venetian edition of Horace with commentaries by Acro and Porphyry

1483 First Talmud printed

End of the 1400s almost all printed books have title pages

End of the 1400s the numerals 4, 5, and 7 begin to take the forms we are familiar with today

1500

1500-1700 Handwritten newsletters in Europe called avvisi, reporti, gazzette, ragguagli, nouvelles, advis, corantos, courantes and Zeitungen

1500s Garamond typeface. Claude Garamont, a French type designer, publisher and punch- cutter lived in Paris. Thus, many old-style serif typefaces are collectively known by his name as ‘Garamond’

1500s The word ‘history’ is differentiated into ‘history’ and ’story’ in English, though in other languages, such as Spanish and Norwegian there is still no distinction

1500s Maya writing mostly fallen out of use ca1500 Etching for printing by Daniel Hopfer 1501 Italic typeface by Aldus Manutius

1513 Likely first pagination with Arabic numerals in Cornucopiae by Niccoloo Perotti

1517 Martin Luther posts a thesis against indulgences and thus sparking what would be called the Reformation, a questioning of authority which would spur greater literacy rates and interest in education

1530s Monasteries disolved in England

1538 Latin-English wordbook by Sir Thomas Elyot

1539 Henry the Eighth’s Great Bible, by Myles Coverdale banning all glossing

1540 Henry the Eighth’s authorised Grammar, of which formed the basis of schoolbooks in England for the next 300 years

1545 Bibliotheca universalis by Conrad Gessner, a complete bibliography of all printed books (except itself)

1556 Notizie Scritte, first monthly newspaper published in Venice

1557 The Geneva Bible, the primary Bible of 16th-century English Protestantism displaces the Great Bible

1560 First blueprints for the modern, wood-encased carpentry pencil by Simonio and

Lyndiana Bernacotti

1564 Graphite for pencils comes into widespread use following the discovery of a large graphite deposit in Borrowdale, England

1568 Bishops' Bible, English translation of the Bible produced under the authority of the established Church of England and later used as the base text for the King James Bible 1575 First paper mills in Mexico

1565 Mechanical/Lead holder pencil by Conrad Gesner

1588 First commercially successful paper mill in Britain by John Spilman in Kent

1593 Index to content in a book, by Christopher Marlowe in Hero and Leander 1595 The first printed catalog of an institutional library, the Nomenclator of Leiden University Library

1600

1600 Orbis Sensualium Pictus textbook for children by John Amos Comenius

1604 Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, first weekly newspaper, published in Germany by Johann Carolus

1611 King James Bible

1642 Mezzotint Printmaking by Ludwig von Siegen

1648 Part emoticon ‘(smiling yet:)’ by poet Robert Herrick

1665 Journal des sçavans, in Paris, first academic journal

1665 Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society, in London, second academic journal

1665 Oxford Gazette, first English newspaper

1667 Acoustic string telephone by Robert Hooke

1674 First decipherment of a script, the Staveless Runes, by Magnus Celsius

1677 Artificial versifying by John Peter

1600s Quills become more pointed and flexible

1690 First paper mills in the USA

1700

1702 The Daily Courant, the world's first daily newspaper, printed on paper so cheap it was designed to be thrown away after reading

1704 Daniel Defoe, considered the first journalist, publishes The Review

1704 Newton’s Opticks, the first major scientific book published in English, not Latin

1706 Newton’s Opticks translated into Latin

1714 First patent for a mechanical typewriter issued to Henry Mill

1723 De Etruria regali libri VII Thomas Dempster used sans serif typeface to represent inscriptions in Ancient Greek and Etruscan

1725 Improvement to the Jacquard-type loom by Basile Bouchon who introduced the principle of using a perforated band of paper

1731 First peer-reviewed journal, Medical Essays and Observations (Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, Edinburgh).

1739 Last international treaty written in Latin, the Treaty of Belgrade, indicating the new pre- eminence of living languages over dead ones

1748 First modern use of sans-serif (“grotesque”) lettering, anonymous letter carver, grotto at Stourhead, England

1755 A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson

1767 Index Card organization by Carl Linnaeus

1769 Every house in Britain needs to have a number for addressing, introduced with the Stamp Act

1770 Natural rubber used as an eraser by Edward Nairne

1771 UK Parliament formally gives journalists the right to report proceedings

1772 Aquatint printing by Peter Perez Burdett, named by Paul Sandby

1780 Didot and Bodoni by Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni, the first modern Roman typefaces

1780 First card catalog by librarian Gottfried van Swieten, Prefect of the Imperial Library, Austria

1783 James Madison of Virginia proposes the creation of a congressional library

1786 Rounded sans-serif script font developed by Valentin Haüy for the use of the blind to read with their fingers

1787 Constitution of the United States, mentioned here as a milestone in written documents producing and framing a society

1787 The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton with John Jay and James Madison in The Independent Journal, considered the most important documents for interpreting and understanding the original intent of the Constitution of the United States

1791 First card catalog for libraries, using the back of playing cards by a group of men with

bibliographic experience led by Barthélemy Mercier 1795 Modern Pencil by Nicholas-Jacques Conté 1796 Lithography by Alois Senefelder

1796 Colour Lithography by Alois Senefelder

1799 The Fourdrinier machine, a continuous paper making machine by Louis-Nicolas Robert of France

1800

1800 The Library of Congress established when President John Adams signed an act of Congress also providing for the transfer of the seat of government from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington

1801 Blackboard by James Pillans

1801 Carbon Paper by Pellegrino Turri

1804 Jacquard loom by Joseph Marie Jacquard 1806 Patent for Carbon Paper by Ralph Wedgwood 1875 First literary agents

1810

1816 First typeface without serifs by William Caslon IV

1816 First working Telegraph by Francis Ronalds used static electricity; it was rejected by the Admiralty as “wholly unnecessary”

1817 A Code of Signals for the Merchant Service, the first general system of signalling for merchant vessels by Captain Frederick Marryat

1819 Rotary printing press by David Napier

1820

1822 Mechanical Pencil with a ‘Mechanism to Propel Replaceable Lead’ by Sampson Mordan and John Isaac Hawkins

1828 Pencil Sharpener by Bernard Lassimonne

1829 Embossed printing invented by Louis Braille

1830

1836 Chorded Keyboard by Wheatstone and Cooke

1837 Early forerunner of Morse Code by Samuel F. B. Morse, Joseph Henry, and Alfred Vail

1839 Vulcanized rubber used for erasers by Charles Goodyear

1839 Electrical Telegraph commercialised by Sir William Fothergill Cooke

1840

1843 Rotary Drum Printing by Richard March Hoe

1843 Wood pulp introduced to paper mills for paper production

1844 Newsprint by Charles Fenerty of Canada. Designed for use in printing presses that employ a long web (continuous sheet) of paper rather than individual sheets of paper 1844 Morse Code by Samuel F. B. Morse, Joseph Henry, and Alfred Vail, in use

1846 Printed Output envisioned by Charles Babbage from his Difference Engine 2

1850

1854 Boolean algebra the mathematical basis of digital computing, developed by George Boole in The Laws of Thought

1855 International Code of Signals drafted by the British Board of Trade

1857 International Code of Signals published as the Commercial Code

1857 National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide lists emoticon precursors <3 and :* as shorthand for ‘love and kisses’

1857 Study On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, which identified seven distinct shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries published by the Unregistered Words Committee of The Philological Society, a small group of intellectuals in London headed by Richard Chenevix Trench

1858 Eraser on pencil by Hymen Lipman

1858 First transatlantic telegraph cable laid by Cyrus West Field

1860

1860s The first card catalog, designed for readers, rather than staff, by Ezra Abbott, Harvard’s assistant librarian

1860 Herbert Coleridge succeeds Richard Chenevix Trench as the first editor of the Unregistered Words Committee’s effort; this work was the precursor of what eventually became the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

1860 Hectograph, gelatin duplicator or jellygraph printing process by Nelson S. Knaggs

1860 The New York Herald starts the first ‘morgue’, meaning archive

1861 The Unregistered Words Committee published the first sample pages, Herbert Coleridge dies and Frederick Furnivall takes over as editor

1864 Non-Digital ‘spam’. Unsolicited group telegram advertisement

1868 Kineograph / Flip-Book by John Barnes Linnett

1868 The Remington by Christopher Latham Sholes, the first successful typewriter

1870

1870s QWERTY layout by Christopher Latham Sholes

1874 Stencil Duplicating by Eugenio de Zuccato

1876 Telephone patent by Alexander Graham Bell

1876 Telephone Switch, which allowed for the formation of telephone exchanges and eventually networks by Tivadar Puská

1876 Autographic Printing by Thomas Edison

1879 The Oxford University Press agrees to publish The Unregistered Words Committee’s dictionary, to be edited by James Murray

1879 Index Medicus edited by John S. Billings and Robert Fletcher, published by Frederick Leypoldt

1880

1828 On the recent Improvements in the Art of Printing published in The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, and Art, by Edward Cowper

1850 On Printing Machines, Especially Those Used in Printing 'The Times' Newspaper published in Institution of Civil Engineers. Minutes of Proceedings, by Edward Cowper,

outlining his contribution to printing which had increased newspaper printing from 200-250 copies per hour on a hand press to 10,000 copies per hour

1873 First illustrated daily newspaper, The Daily Graphic, published in New York.

1877 Current definition of entropy, by Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann

1881 Harvard Citation Style (author date) by Edward Laurens Mark at Harvard University 1881 Emoticon precursors as Puck magazine published a set of type-set faces expressing joy, melancholy, indifference and astonishment using basic type characters

1883 Téléphonoscope concept by Albert Robida

1884 Linotype by Ottmar Mergenthaler

1884 The Oxford University Press agrees to publish A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society

1887 Snigger Point by Ambrose Bierce, a precursor emoji/emoticon symbol in the form of an opening parenthesis character ‘(’, but rotated 90° to the left

1888 Ballpoint Pen by John J. Loud

1890

By 1890 Some papers boasted circulations of more than one million

1890 US Census undertaken using the punched-card technology, an invention suggested by John S. Billings to Herman Hollerith in the company which would become IBM

1891 Automatic Cyclostyle duplicating machine by David Gestetner

1895 Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), starting with the Universal Bibliographic Repertory (RBU: Répertoire Bibliographique Universel) by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine with the implementation being as card catalogue by Herbert Haviland Field, using the Dewey Decimal Classification system by Melvil Dewey

1894 Information and Entropy in Thermodynamics by Ludwig Boltzmann

1895 A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles renamed as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

1900

1901 Trans-Atlantic Radio Signal by Marconi Company

1902 The term Diglossia coined by Karl Krumbacher to refer to the phenomenon of

divergence between spoken and written language

1903 First message to travel around the globe by Commercial Pacific Cable Company, from US President Theodore Roosevelt, wishing “a happy Independence Day to the US, its territories and properties...” It took nine minutes for the message to travel worldwide

1903 The Daily Mirror, the first tabloid-style newspaper

1904 Patent for a ‘type wheel printing telegraph machine’ filed by Charles Krum which would go on to become Teletype in 1929

1906–7 Photographic Copying Machines by George C. Beidler at the Rectigraph Company

1907 Commercial Transatlantic Radio Telegraph Cable opened by Marconi Company

1910

1910 Felt-tip marking pen by Lee Newman

1910’s Teleprinter, Teletext via telegraphs, by

1910 Mundaneum by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine

1910 First criminal caught via wireless telegraph: the murderer Dr Crippen on board a transatlantic ship

1913 Plantin typeface by Frank Hinman Pierpont and draughtsman Fritz Stelzer of the British Monotype Corporation, based on a Gros Cicero face cut in the 16th century by Robert Granjon

1914 Optophone (OCR precursor) by Emanuel Goldberg, a machine which read characters and converted them into standard telegraph code

1914 Handheld Scanner (OCR precursor) by Edmund Fournier d’Albe a machine which read characters and converted them into tones

1920

1920s First full-time Type Designer Frederic Goudy

1922 Ulysses by James Joyce, first extensive use of stream of consciousness: text conveying thoughts not speech

1923 Spirit duplicator (also referred to as a Ditto machine, Banda machine, or Roneo) by Wilhelm Ritzerfeld

1925 Corkboard by George Brooks

1926 Information in physics by Leo Szilard

1926 research and development which would become Telex initiated by Reichspost in Germany

1927 The Statistical Machine patented by Emanuel Goldberg

1927 Futura typeface family by Paul Renner

1924 Art Color Pencils by Faber-Castell and Caran d’Ache

1928 Standardised punch cards by Clair D. Lake

1929 Hellschreiber by Rudolf Hell, precursor to dot matrix printing

1929 Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment by Richards, I.A

1930

1930 The Readies, a concept for portable speed reading by Bob Brown

1931 Knowledge Machine by Emanuel Goldberg

1931 Biro by brothers László Bíró and György Bíró

1931 The American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) introduced its teletypewriter exchange service, TWX

1932 Times New Roman typeface by Victor Lardent under the direction of Stanley Morison, on a commission of the Times newspaper, based on the Plantin typeface

1932 Information in quantum and particle physics by John von Neumann

1933 Telex by Reichspost in Germany operational

1933 Machine translation by Petr Petrovitch Smirnov-Troyanski

1934 Logik der Forschung by Karl R. Popper advanced the theory that the demarcation of the limit of scientific knowledge, is its ‘falsifiability’ and not its ‘verifiability’

1934 Mundaneum/ “Mondothèque,” by Paul Otlet. Includes automated linking between “card catalogs with sixteen million entries, photos, documents, microfilm, and more. Work on integrating telegraphy and multiple media, from sound recordings to television”

1935 Monde book by Paul Otlet

1936 Dvorak Keyboard Layout by August Dvorak

1937 World Brain by H. G. Wells

1940

1940s-60s Information as a concept, through the works of Claude Shannon (information theory), Warren Weaver (machine translation), Alan Turing (universal computer), Norbert Wiener (cybernetics) and Friedrich Hayek (invisible hand is information)

1942 Xerography Patent by Chester Carlson. The technique was originally called electrophotography

1943 The term ‘acronym’ coined, meaning word formed from the first letters of a series of words

1944 Marking pen which held ink in liquid form in its handle and used a felt tip by Walter J. De Groft which becomes ‘Sharpie’” in 1964

1945 Memex proposed by Vannevar Bush in As We May Think

1945 ENIAC first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer by J. Presper Eckhart and John Mauchley (University of Pennsylvania)

1946 A Logic Named Joe by Murray Leinster

1946 Works on Machine Translation by Andrew Booth

1947 Machine translation, suggested in a letter from Warren Weaver suggests to Norbert Wiener

1946 Electric Printing Telegraph by Alexander Bain, precursor to the fax

1948 A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon, including the word ‘bit,’ short for binary digit, credited to John Tukey

1948 The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society by Norbert Wiener. The word cybernetics was first used in the context of the study of self-governance of people by Plato and in 1834 by André-Marie Ampère to mean the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge. Here Norbert Wiener introduced the term for the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine

1949 El libro mecánico by Ángela Ruiz Robles

1949 Translation memo by Warren Weaver

1949 The Lumitype-Photon Phototypesetting by the Photon Corporation based on the Lumitype of Rene Higonnet and Louis Moyroud

1949 Fr Roberto Busa starts work on computerizing his Index Thomisticus (St Thomas Aquinas), in the process founding Humanities computing

1949 The Chinese Language Character Reform Association established

1950

ca 1950 Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten system for storing and cross-referencing information in card indexes

1950 Whirlwind computer at MIT including a display oscilloscope becomes operational 1950 Computing Machinery And Intelligence by Alan Turing where he proposes the question ‘Can machines think?’

1950s-60s Simplified Chinese characters created by works moderated by the government of the People's Republic of China

1951 Doug Engelbart’s Epiphany: “Problems are getting more complex and urgent and have to be dealt with collectively – we have to deal with them collectively”

1951 Qu’est-ce que la documentation? by Suzanne Briet

1951 Regular expressions by mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene

1951 Linear B deciphered as a syllabic script for early Greek, by Michael Ventris 1951 LEO I the first general-purpose business computer, Lyons Ltd, text on paper-tape readers and punches

1951 UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at EMCC/ Remington Rand

1952 Manchester Mark I computer Love Letter Generator by Christopher Strachey, using a random number algorithm by Alan Turing

1952 Antitrust Investigations And Trial Against IBM starts, dragging on for thirty years, finally being dismissed in 1982. IBM will cautiously monitor its microcomputer business practices, fearful of a repeat of government scrutiny

1952–4 Dot Matrix Teletypewriter developed by Fritz Karl Preikschat

1952 ‘Love letter generator’ aimed to generate a literary text from scratch, by Christopher Strachey

1953 UNIVAC 1103 designed by Seymour Cray at the Engineering Research Associates and built by the Remington Rand corporation

1953 Magic Marker by Sidney Rosenthal

1953 The Lumitype-Photon Phototypesetting System first used to set a complete published book and to set a newspaper

1954 Charactron by J. T. McNaney at Convair was a shaped electron beam cathode ray tube functioning both a display device and a read-only memory storing multiple characters and fonts on the UNIVAC 1103

1954 IBM 740 CRT used computers to draw vector graphics images, point by point, on 35 mm film 1956 Keyboard and Light Pen for computer text input at MIT on the Whirlwind

computer

1954 The Chinese Language Character Reform Committee was founded

1955 Teletype-setting used for newspapers

1956 Chinese List of Simplified Characters issued by State Council

1956 First commercial computer sold with a moving-head ‘hard disk drive’, the 305 RAMAC by IBM

1956 ‘Artificial Intelligence’ term coined by John McCarthy at MIT

1957 COMIT string processing programming language by Victor Yngve and collaborators at MIT

1957 Univers typeface family by Adrian Frutiger

1957 The term ‘initialism’ coined, a written word formed from the first letters of other words in a name or phrase. NATO, where the letters are sounded as a word are regarded as acronyms. FBI, where the letters sound as letters, are initial-words or initialisms

1957 Dye-Sublimation printing by Noël de Plasse at Sublistatis SA

1957 Helvetica typeface family by Max Miedinger

1958 The Uses Of Argument by Stephen Toulmin introduces the argumentation diagram 1958 Lisp programming language designed by John McCarthy at MIT and developed by Steve Russell, Timothy P. Hart, and Mike Levin

1958 Integrated Circuit (IC) by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments

ca 1958 Speed reading by Evelyn Wood

1960

1960s ‘Word Processing’ term invented by IBM

1960 PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) generalized computer- assisted instruction system by Donald Bitzer at the University of Illinois

1960 Colossal Typewriter by John McCarthy and Roland Silver at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN)

1960 Ted Nelson’s epiphany about interactive screens becoming universal, on-line publishing by individuals

1960 Suggestion for emoticon by Vladimir Nabokov

1960 Man-Computer Symbiosis by J.C.R. Licklider at BBN

1961 Selectric Typewriter by IBM with a ball print head instead of jamming bars, which

could be easily replaced for different fonts and left the paper in place and moved the type ball instead

1961 Information Flow in Large Communication Nets by Leonard Kleinrock

1961 Synthesised Speech by John Larry Kelly, Jr and Louis Gerstman of Bell Labs

1961 Expensive Typewriter by Steve Piner and L. Peter Deutsch

1962 TECO (Text Editor & Corrector), both a character-oriented text editor/word processor and a programming language, by Dan Murphy

1962 the Western Union Telegraph Company established its Telex system in the United States (where the name Telex is a registered trademark)

1962 Highlighter Pen by Frank Honn

1962 Modern fibre-tipped Pen by Yukio Horie at the Tokyo Stationery Company

1962 Enciclopedia Mecánica by Ángela Ruiz Robles

1962 RUNOFF by Jerome H. Saltzer. Bob Morris and Doug McIlroy (text editor with pagination)

1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

1962 Spacewar! by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen 1962 Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework by Doug Engelbart at SRI 1963 Sketchpad (a.k.a. Robot Draftsman) software by Ivan Sutherland at MIT

1963 The ‘smiley face’ by Harvey Ball, emoticon precursor

1963 Augmentation Research Center by Doug Engelbart at SRI

1963 Transport font, a sans serif typeface first designed for road signs in the United Kingdom by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert

1963 TJ-2 (Type Justifying Program) by Peter Samson (first page layout program)

1963 ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) a character encoding standard for electronic communication developed from telegraph code

1963 ‘Hypertext’ word coined by Ted Nelson

1963 Computer Mouse and Chorded Keyset by Doug Engelbart

1964 ELIZA natural language-like processing computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

1964 LDX (Long Distance Xerography) by Xerox Corporation, considered to be the first commercial fax machine

1964 Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

1964 ASCII 7-bit standard

1964 TYPSET text formatting software used with the RUNOFF program

1965 TV-Edit, one of the first CRT-based display editors/word processors that was widely used by Brian Tolliver for the DEC PDP-1 computer

1965 Semi-Conductor based thermal printer by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments

1965 ‘Hypertext’ by Ted Nelson first in print, as well as first design (zipper lists)

1965 MAIL Command for MIT’s CTSS, proposed by Pat Crisman, Glenda Schroeder and Louis Pouzin, implemented by Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris

1966 Object Oriented Programming by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygard at the Norwegian Computing Center

1966 Computers and the Humanities, Journal founded by Joseph Raben at Queens College in the City University of New York

1967 HES (The Hypertext Editing System) co-designed at Brown University by Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam and Steve Carmody, as well as other student implementors, based in part on a spec Ted Nelson had written previously for Harcourt Brace

1967 The Quick-Draw Graphics System masters thesis by Jef Raskin

1967 Logo programming language designed by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon at Bolt, Beranek and Newman

1967 Newspapers use digital production processes and begin using computers for operations 1968 A ‘low-tack’, reusable, pressure-sensitive adhesive accidentally created by Dr. Spencer Silver at 3M which would eventually be marketed as Post-it® Note

1968 Doug Engelbart’s Seminal Demo of the NLS system at FJCC, including windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse & chorded keyset, word processing, dynamic file linking and revision control

1968 Dynabook Concept computer by Alan Kay

1968 Digi Grotesk, digital typeface by Rudolph Hell

1968 The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth

1968 OCR-A monospaced typeface for Optical Character Recognition by 23 American type foundries

1968 OCR-B monospaced typeface by Adrian Frutiger for Monotype, following the European Computer Manufacturer’s Association standard

1968 Serial Impact Dot Matrix Printer by OKI

1968 SHRDLU natural language understanding computer program by Terry Winograd at MIT

1969 FRESS, inspired in part by HES and Engelbart’s NLS by Andy van Dam and his students at Brown University

1969 GML, leading to SGML by Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie at IBM

1969 Ed line editor/word processor for the Unix, developed in by Ken Thompson 1969 Vladamir Nabokov presents concept of emoticon/emoji to New York Times 1969 Structured Writing and Information Mapping by Robert E. Horn

1969 ARPANET based on concepts developed in parallel with work by Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Leonard Kleinrock and Lawrence Roberts

1970

1970s Gyricon Electronic Paper by Nick Sheridon at Xerox PARC

1970 Xerox PARC founded by Jacob E. Goldman of Xerox

1970 The Western Union Telegraph Company acquires TWX from AT&T 1970 IBIS (issue-based information system) conceptualised by Horst Rittel 1970 Journal by David A. Evans

1970 Bomber by Len Deighton, first published novel written with the aid of a commercial word processor, the IBM’s MT/ST (IBM 72 IV)

1970 Daisy Wheel Printing by Andrew Gabor at Diablo Data Systems allowing for proportional fonts

1971 New York Times article refers to “the brave new world of Word Processing”

1971 Laser Printer by Gary Starkweather at Xerox PARC 1971 File Transfer Protocol (FTP) by Abhay Bhushan 1971 Project Gutenberg by Michael S. Hart

1971 Email with @ by Ray Tomlinson

1971 PUB scriptable markup language. Brainchild of Les Earnest of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and implemented by Larry Tesler

1972 TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) founded by Prof Marianne McDonald at the University of California, Irvine, to create a comprehensive digital collection of all surviving Greek texts from antiquity to the present era

1972 C programming language by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson

1972 Xerox Star memo written by Butler Lampson, inspired by NLS

1973 Xerox Alto by Xerox PARC designed primarily by Charles P. Thacker

1973 Addison-Wesley replaces its mechanical typesetting technology with computerised typesetting

1973 Copy & Paste by Larry Tessler at Xerox PARC

1973 Click & Drag by Jeff Raskin at Xerox PARC

1973 Micral, first personal computer using a microprocessor by André Trương Trọng Thi, Réalisation d'Études Électroniques (R2E), (Orsay, France)

1973 Community Memory Bulletin Board precursor

1974 Omni-Font Optical Character Recognition System (OCR) Scanners by Ray Kurzweil at Kurzweil Computer Products

1974 Bravo word processor by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi at Xerox PARC. They would go on to produce Word

1974 Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson

1974 ‘Writing with light, writing on glass’ were the closing words of Wilfred A. Beeching’s Century of the Typewriter

1974 Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) an internet working protocol for sharing resources using packet switching among network nodes forming the foundation of the Internet (short for internet working)

1975 ZOG by Allen Newell, George G. Robertson, Donald McCracken and Robert Akscyn at Carnegie Mellon University

1975 Microsoft founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen

1975 MUSA Speech Synthesis systems (MUltichannel Speaking Automaton) project led by Giulio Modena

1975 Altair 8800 computer by Ed Roberts and Forrest M. Mims III

1975 Gypsy document preparation system/word processor by Larry Tesler, Timothy Mott, Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi, with advice from Dan Swinehart and other colleagues 1975 Colossal Cave Adventure text adventure game by Will Crowther and later expanded by

Don Woods

1976 Second edition of The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth, published by Addison-Wesley, which was typeset using phototypesetting which inspired him to develop TeX since he found the typesetting inferior to the original, Monotype typeset edition

1976 Frutiger series of typefaces by Adrian Frutiger

1976 Apple Computer (later Apple Inc.) founded Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne

1976 The Metanovel: Writing Stories by Computer by James Meehan

1976 Emacs (Editor MACroS) word processor by David A. Moon, Guy L. Steele Jr. and Richard M. Stallman, based on TECO

1976 vi word processor by Bill Joy (now Vim)

1976 PROMIS (Problem-Oriented Medical Information System) by Jan Schultz and Lawrence Weed the University of Vermont

1977 Apple II computer by Steve Wozniak at Apple

1977 DataLand developed at MIT

1977 Zork interactive fiction computer game by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling at MIT

1977 Inkjet Printing by Ichiro Endo at Canon

1977 Preliminary Description of TEX Memo by Donald Knuth

1977 Name/Finger protocol (provided status on a particular computer system or person at network sites) by Harrenstien

1978 Aspen Movie Map, the first hypermedia/interactive videodisc by Andy Lippman, Bob Mohl and Michael Naimark of the MIT Architecture Machine Group

1977 Personal computers as dynamic multimedia by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg

1978 Public dial-up BBS by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess

1978 TeX by Donald Knuth released as the first version which was used by others. Written in SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language)

1978 American Mathematical Society Gibbs Lecture by Donald Knuth, Mathematical Typography; published in the Bulletin (New Series) of the American Mathematical Society, volume 1, 1979, pp. 337-372

1978 Vancouver Citation Style (author number), as a part of the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (URMs)

1978 QuarkXPress desktop publishing software by Quark

1978 Earliest documented electronic Spam (although the term had not yet been coined) by Gary Thuerk

1978 LISA computer by Apple design starts, with a requirement for proportional fonts

1978 Speak & Spell by Texas Instruments

1978 Highlighters with fluorescent colours by Dennison Company

1978 Wordstar word processor by Rob Barnaby

1979 WordPerfect word processor by Bruce Bastian and Alan Ashton at Brigham Young University

1979 Hayes Modem by Dennis C. Hayes and Dale Heatherington

1979 Metafont by Donald Knuth

1979 -) proposed by Kevin Mackenzie as a joke-marker precursor emoticon

1979 Architext by Genette, Gerard. Hypertext as based on a hypotekst

1979 EasyWriter for Apple II by John Draper

1979 TV-EDIT word processor was used by Douglas Hofstadter to write ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’

1979 Macintosh Project started by Jef Raskin and included Brian Howard, Marc LeBrun, Burrell Smith, Joanna Hoffman, and Bud Tribble. Named for Raskin’s favourite apple, the succulent McIntosh. He changed the spelling of the name to avoid potential conflict with the audio equipment manufacturer named McIntosh

1979 Post-Its® by 3M sold commercially

1979 Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, organized by Jef Raskin, as part of an investment agreement

1980

1980s SPAM used as a term to describe users on BBSs and MUDs who repeat it a huge number of times to scroll other users’ text off the screen. It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple postings

1980s Telex usage goes into decline as fax machines grow in popularity

1980 ZX80 by Sinclair

1980 Smalltalk designed by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg and developed by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, Scott Wallace, Peter Deutsch at the Learning Research Group of Xerox PARC

1980 PC by IBM

1980 Imagen founded by Les Earnest, sold to QMS in 1987 1980 Floppy Disks become prevalent for personal computers 1980 Vydec1800 Series Word Processor by Exxon

1980 ENQUIRE proposed by Tim Berners-Lee

1980 USENET by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis

1982–3 The Encyclopaedia Project by Alan Kay, Charles Van Doren, Brenda Laurel, Steve Weyer and Bob Stein at Atari Research Group

1981 Movie Manual by David Backer at the MIT Architecture Machine Group

1981 Raskin leaves the Macintosh project and Steve Jobs takes over

1981 BITNET, EARN and NetNorth network university IBM mainframes, allowing text (mail, files, chat) to be shared by non-Arpanet institutions

1981 TPS (Technical Publishing Software) by David Boucher at Interleaf, allowed authors to write text and create graphics WYSIWYG

1981 First major use of Information Murals in Organizations by David Sibbet

1982 Guide by Peter J. Brown at Canterbury University

1982 Adobe founded by John Warnock and Charles Geschke

1982 First ASCII emoticons :-) and :-( by Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University

1982 CD-ROM by Denon

1982 Tron movie released, the first movie written on a computer, an Alto at PARC. Written by Bonnie MacBird based on inspiration by Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib with consultation from Alan Kay, whom Bonnie would later marry

1982 TeX82, a new version of TeX, rewritten from scratch, renaming the original TeX TeX78

1983 Viewtron by AT&T and Knight Ridder

1983 MILNET physically separated from ARPANET

1983 ThinkTank outliner for Apple II

1983 ARPANET switches to TCP/IP

1983 Lisa by Ken Rothmuller, replaced by John Couch with contributions from Trip Hawkins, Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs, at Apple

1983 Word word processor for DOS by Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie for Xenix (Unix OS) and MS-DOS, at Microsoft. Originally called ‘Multi-Tool Word’

1983 KMS (Knowledge Management System), a descendant of ZOG by Don McCracken and Rob Akscyn at Knowledge Systems (a spinoff from the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University)

1983 Hyperties by Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland

1983 Multi-Tool Notepad word processor by Richard Brodie at Microsoft

1983 ‘1984’ Macintosh Television Commercial by Apple

1984 Literate Programming introduced by Donald Knuth, and approach to treat a program as literature understandable to human beings. Implemented at Stanford University as a part of research on algorithms and digital typography under the name WEB

1984 Macintosh launched. In addition to the original contributors, the team also included Bill Atkinson Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, George Crow, Bruce Horn, Jerry Manock, Susan Kare, Andy Hertzfeld, and Daniel Kottke

1984 MacWrite word processor included with Macintosh, by Randy Wigginton, Don Breuner and Ed Ruder of Encore Systems for Apple. Also known as ‘Macintosh WP’ (Word Processor) and ‘MacAuthor’ before release

1984 The Print Shop designed by David Balsam and programmed by Martin Kahn at Brøderbund

1984 Metafont by Donald Knuth updated to a version still in use at the time of writing this book

1984 FidoNet bulletin board system software by Tom Jennings

1984 LaserWriter printer by Apple

1984 ‘Cyberspace’ term coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer

1984 Organizer by David Potter at Psion

1984 PostScript by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton at Adobe, influenced by Interpress, developed at Xerox PARC

1984 MacroMind founded by Marc Canter, Jay Fenton and Mark Stephen Pierce

1984 PC Jr desktop computer by IBM

1984 Notecards by Randall Trigg, Frank Halasz and Thomas Moran at Xerox PARC 1984 Highlighted Selectable Link by Ben Shneiderman and Dan Ostroff at University of Maryland

1984 TIES by Ben Shneiderman at University of Maryland

1984 LaserJet by HP

1984 Text Messaging / SMS (short message service) developed by Franco-German GSM cooperation by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert

1984 Filevision by Telos

1984 LaTeX by Leslie Lamport who was writing a book and needed macros for TeX, resulting in ‘Lamport’s TeX’ (‘LaTeX’)

1984 Zoomracks for Atari by Paul Heckel

1985 Symbolics Document Examiner by Janet Walker

1985 Guide, commercial edition, by OWL (Office Workstations Ltd)

1985 Pagemaker desktop publishing software by Aldus, bought by Adobe in 1994

1985 StarWriter word processor by Marco Börries at Star Division

1985 Intermedia by Norman Meyrowitz and others at Brown University 1985 Windows operating system spearheaded by Bill Gates at Microsoft 1985 Write word processor by Microsoft, included with Windows

1985 Word word processor by Microsoft ported to Macintosh

1985 Amiga computer by Commodore

1985 Emacs General Public License by Richard Stallman, the first copyleft license

1985 TRICKLE by Turgut Kalfaoglu at Ege University, İzmir; BITNET-to-Internet gateway allows sharing of text and programs between two disparate networks

1986 Guide by Peter J. Brown at the University of Kent, marketed by OWL

1986 Harvard Graphics desktop business application by Software Publishing Corporation 1986 Texinfo GNU Documentation System by Richard Stallman and Bob Chassell, developed by Brian Fox and Karl Berry

1986 FrameMaker document/word processor by Frame Technology. Developed by Charles ‘Nick’ Corfield based on an idea from Ben Meiry and commercialised with Steve Kirsch. Bought by Adobe 1995

1986 Hyperties commercial version by Cognetics Corporation

1986 Solid Ink Printing by Tektronix

1986 SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), ISO 8879

1986 Uncle Roger by Judy Malloy released on Art Com Electronic Network on The Well 1987 PowerPoint presentation software created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at Forethought Inc., bought by Microsoft same year and released as a Microsoft product 1989

1987 MacroMind Director multimedia authoring by MacroMind

1987 V.I.P. (Visual Interactive Programming) by Dominique Lienart at Mainstay Inc

1987 Storyspace by Jay David Bolter & Michael Joyce, maintained and distributed by Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems

1987 Afternoon a story, by Michael Joyce, first digital hypertext narrative

1987 Unicode by Joe Becker from Xerox with Lee Collins and Mark Davis from Apple

1987 Franklin Spelling Ace by Franklin Electronic Publishers

1987 Canon Cat by Jef Raskin at Canon Inc

1987 Apple Knowledge Navigator visionary concept video initiated by John Sculley, sponsored by Bud Colligan, written and creatively developed by Hugh Dubberly and Doris Mitsch with input from Mike Liebhold and advice from Alan Kay, inspired by the MIT Media Lab, with product design by Gavin Ivester and Adam Grosser at Apple

1987 TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) ‘Poughkeepsie Principles’: text encoding guidelines for Humanities texts

1987 HyperCard by Bill Atkinson at Apple

1987 Amanda Goodenough’s children’s point and click stories in Hypercard published by

Voyager

1987 Hypertext’87 First ACM conference on hypertext

1988 Microcosm by Wendy Hall, Andrew Fountain, Hugh Davis and Ian Heath

1988 NeXT Cube by NeXT

1988 IRC by Jarkko Oikarinen

1988 Think’n Time (Visual outliner with dates) by Benoit Schillings & Alain Marsily at Mainstay Inc

1988 # (hash) and & (ampersand) used in IRC to label groups and topics (RFC 1459)

1988 Wolfram Mathematica by Stephen Wolfram

1988 Hypertext edition of Communications of the ACM using Hyperties by Ben Shneiderman

1988 Idex by William Nisen of Owl, based on Guide

1988 Hypertext Hands-On! by Ben Shneiderman and Greg Kearsley, first commercial electronic book

1988 Reflections on NoteCards: seven issues for the next generation of hypermedia systems by Frank,G. Halasz

1988 Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) by J. Romkey

1988 Breadcrumb Trail navigation metaphor in Hypergate by Mark Bernstein

1989 GRiDPad 1900, the first commercial tablet by GRiD Systems Corporation 1989 Robert Winter’s CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, published by Voyager, the first viable commercial CD-ROM

1989 Markup (Visual document annotations with markup signs - Groupware) by Dominique Lienart & all at Mainstay Inc

1989 SuperCard by Bill Appleton at Silicon Beach Software

1989 gIBIS by Jeff Conklin and Michael Begeman, commercialised in the 1990s as CM/1 and QuestMap

1989 Bidirectional Email-to-Fax Gateway hosted by UCC

1989 Word for Windows word processor by Microsoft

1989 Mapping Hypertext: Analysis, Linkage, and Display of Knowledge for the Next Generation of On-Line Text and

Graphics by Robert E. Horn

1989 Information Management: A Proposal by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. World Wide Web protocols published on USENET in alt.hypertext

1990

1990s T9 invented by Martin King and Cliff Kushler, co-founders of Tegic

1990s Compendium by Al Selvin and Maarten Sierhuis

1990 MarcoPolo (Visual Document Management - Groupware) by Benoit Schillings & Alain Marsily at Mainstay Inc

1990 Archie, a tool for indexing FTP archives, considered to be the first Internet search engine, by Alan Emtage and Bill Heelan at McGill University/Concordia University in Montreal

1990 Python programming language by Guido van Rossum

1990 The SGML Handbook by Charles F. Goldfarb

1990 Designing Hypermedia for Learning by David H. Jonassen and Heinz Mandl (editors) in which updated conference proceedings are annotated by the authors with typed hypertext links in the margins connecting passages between the articles

1991 Gopher protocol by the University of Minnesota (initial version of the protocol appeared in 1991, codified in 1993 as a RFC 1436)

1991 Seven Issues: Revisited Hypertext ‘91 Closing Plenary by Frank G. Halasz at Xerox Corporation

1991 World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee becomes the first global hypertext system

1991 DocBook DTD by HaL Computer Systems and O’Reilly & Associates

1991 Camelot Project started as in at Adobe, later to become PDF

1991 PowerBook Laptops by Apple

1991 Aquanet by Catherine C. Marshall, Frank G. Halasz, Russell A. Rogers and William C. Janssen Jr.

1991 Visual Basic programming language by Microsoft

1991 Java programming language project launched by James Gosling, Mike Sheridan and Patrick Naughton. Originally called Oak, then Green, and finally Java

1991 Instant Update by ON Technology

1991 HTML by Tim Berners-Lee, influenced by SGMLguid, an in-house markup language at CERN

1991 CURIA (now CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts) first corpus in Early Irish to be published on the World-Wide Web by University College Cork, Ireland

1991 Expanded Books Project by The Voyager Company

1991 TeachText by Apple, included with System 7

1992 First Text Message (SMS) is sent by Neil Papworth reading: “Merry Christmas” to Richard Jarvis at Vodafone

1992 Veronica a search engine system for the Gopher protocol by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada, Reno

1992 Lynx internet web browser by Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe, and Charles Rezac at the University of Kansas

1992 Frontier by Dave Winer at UserLand Software released on Mac

1992 OpenDoc by Kurt Piersol and Jed Harris at Apple. First code named ‘Exemplar’, then ‘Jedi’ and ‘Amber’

1992 Palm Computing founded by Jeff Hawkins

1992 The End of Books By Robert Coover, Hypertext fiction cover story in the New York Times Book Review

1992 Before Writing by Denise Schmandt-Besserat

1992 Portable Document Format (PDF) by Adobe

1992 BBEdit word processing software by Rich Siegel at Bare Bones Software 1993 Mosaic web browser by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA massively popularises the web

1993 Microsoft Word word processor celebrates its 10th anniversary with 10 million Word users

1993 Encarta multimedia encyclopedia by Microsoft

1993 Hypermedia Encyclopedias sell more copies than print encyclopedias

1993 Newton MessagePad PDA by Steve Sakoman, Steve Capps, Larry Tesler, Michael Culbert, Michael Tchao and others at Apple under John Sculley

1993 Early Blog by Rob Palmer

1993 Open Agent Architecture (OAA) delegated agent framework by Adam Cheyer et al. at SRI International

1993 Georgia typeface designed by Matthew Carter and hinted by Tom Rickner for Microsoft 1993 Searching for the Missing Link: Discovering Implicit Structure in Spatial Hypertext by Catherine C. Marshall and Frank Shipman. First occurrence of Spatial Hypertext in print

1993 AppleScript launched with System 7 by Apple

1994 PDF made freely available

1994 Links.net blog by Justin Hall, before the term would be used

1994 TrueType Open by Microsoft

1994 Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) enabled internet communications between two routers

directly by W. Simpson

1994 Netscape Navigator web browser by Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen at Netscape Communications Corp

1994 Scripting News by Dave Winer

1994 Yahoo! founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo

1994 Amazon founded by Jeff Bezos

1994 Semantic Web vision presented by Tim Berners-Lee at the first World Wide Web Conference

1994 QR Code System by the Japanese company Denso Wave, a subsidiary of Toyota

1994 World Wide Web Consortium founded

1994 PageMill HTML authoring by Seneca Inc., bought by Adobe one year later, discontinued 2000

1994 VIKI: Spatial Hypertext Supporting Emergent Structure by Catherine C. Marshall, Frank M. Shipman III, James H. Coombs

1994 A Subversive Proposal by Stevan Harnad at the University of Southampton

1995 WordPad word processor by Microsoft is included in Windows 95, replacing Write 1995 Netscape goes public and gains market value of almost $3B on first day of stock market trading

1995 The World Wide Web Handbook by Peter Flynn, first comprehensive book on HTML

1995 Ruby scripting langauge by Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto

1995 Windows 95 operating system by Microsoft

1995 WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki, by Ward Cunningham

1995 Java public release by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems (since been acquired by Oracle), the first programming language to use Unicode for all text

1995 JavaScript by Brendan Eich at Netscape (orignally called Mocha, then LiveScript and later JavaScript)

1995 AltaVista founded by Paul Flaherty, Louis Monier, Michael Burrows and Jeffrey Black

1995 FutureSplash by FutureWave, sold to Macromedia in 1996 and renamed Flash 1996 Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos at the World Wide Web Consortium

1996 Palm OS PDAs including the Graffiti handwriting system

1996 Vaio laptop by Sony

1996 Cyberdog OpenDoc based Internet suite of applications by Apple

1996 OpenType by Microsoft joined by Adobe

1996 Anoto by Christer Fåhræus to provide digital pen capability to paper

1996 Hotmail email system by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, bought by Microsoft in 1997

1996 The Internet Archive by Brewster Kahle

1996 GoLive HTML authoring software by GoNet Communication, Inc., bought by Adobe 1999

1996 TextEdit word processor by Apple. Not meant for use, it was sample code

1996 Live word count by Keith Martin, demonstrated in the Wordless word processor, later appearing in Microsoft Word 98

1997 Emoji developed by Japanese mobile operators during the 1990s including SoftBank and Shigetaka Kurita for i-mode

1997 Meta Content Framework developed by Ramanathan V. Guha at Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group, leading to RDF

1997 OpenDoc by Apple cancelled

1997 Apple Data Detectors by Jim Miller, Thomas Bonura and others at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, which would also lead on to LiveDoc

1997 Resource Description Framework (RDF) derived from W3C’s PICS, Dublin Core and from the Meta Content Framework (MCF) developed by Ramanathan V. Guha at Apple and Tim Bray at Netscape

1997 Dreamweaver HTML authoring software by Macromedia, bought by Adobe 2005

1997 Yandex by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich

1997 Flash multimedia authoring and platform by Macromedia, later bought by Adobe 1997 ‘weblog’ term coined by Jorn Barger to describe a log of his internet activity 1997 Jabberwacky released online by Rollo Carpenter

1997 E-Paper by Barrett Comiskey, Joseph Jacobson and JD Albert at E Ink Corporation

1997 Newton PDA by Apple cancelled after Steve Jobs return

1997 Unistroke by David Goldberg at Xerox PARC

1997 9000i Communicator monile phone by Nokia, the first mobile phone with a full keyboard

1997 OpenType by Microsoft

1997 Liquid Mail email system by Frode Alexander Hegland featuring smart Views

1998 iMac desktop computer by Apple

1998 First blog published on an established news site by Jonathan Dube at The Charlotte Observer

1998 Can Computers Think? History and Status of the Debate. Seven posters. Industrial strength argumentation map by Robert E. Horn

1998 Open Diary blogging service by Bruce Ableson

1998 Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century Robert by E. Horn 1998 (possibly 1999) Fluid Links demo video at the ACM CHI conference by Polle T. Zellweger, Bay-Wei Chang, and Jock D. Mackinlay

1998 ‘SPAM’ in The New Oxford Dictionary of English 1998 Google founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin 1998 XML 1.0 becomes a W3C Recommendation

1998 Netscape goes open source with the name Mozilla

1998 XML-RPC text-based networking protocol between apps running across operating systems

1998 Frontier blog software by Dave Winer at UserLand Software released on Windows

1998 MathML by W3C

1998 @font-face by W3C

1998 AOL buys Netscape for $4 Billion

1999 Open eBook

1999 The short form, ‘blog’, was coined by Peter Merholz. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used ‘blog’ as both a noun and verb and devised the term ‘blogger’ in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms

1999 LiveJournal blogging service by Brad Fitzpatrick at Danga Interactive

1999 Blogger blogging service by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan with significant coding by Paul Bausch and Matthew Haughey

1999 RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9) the first version of RSS, by Dan Libby and Ramanathan

V. Guha at Netscape

1999 RSS 0.91 by Dave Winer at UserLand 1999 my.netscape.com and my.userland.com 1999 Edit This Page by Dave Winer

1999 Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Larry Lessig

1999 Mac OS X operating system by Apple

1999 Ajax web development techniques for asynchronous web applications emerges

1999 ActiveText: A Method for Creating Dynamic and Interactive Texts by Jason E. Lewis and Alex Weyers at Interval Research Corporation

1999 Spatial Hypertext: An Alternative to Navigational and Semantic Links by Frank M. Shipman and Catherine C. Marshall

1999 Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) founded by Scott Rettberg, Robert Coover, and Jeff Ballowe

2000

2000 Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is made available online for free

2000 1 billion indexable pages on the Web, estimated by NEC-RI and Inktomi

2000 ClearType by Microsoft

2000 XML Linking Language (XLink) an XML markup language for creating internal and external links within XML documents, and associating metadata with those links, by Steven DeRose, Eve Maler, David Orchard and Bernard Trafford

2000 EPrints by Stevan Harnad, funded by Wendy Hall, supervised by Les Carr and implemented by Rob Tansley and others at the University of Southampton

2000 CoolType by Adobe

2000 ScholOnto by Simon Buckingham Shum, Enrico Motta and John Domingue at the Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University. This evolved over the next decade into ClaiMaker and Cohere with Victoria Uren, Gangmin Li, Anna De Liddo and Michelle Bachler

2000 Riding the Bullet by Stephen King, the first mass-market e-book for encrypted download

2000 EverNote founded by Stepan Pachikov

2001 ‘Chinese General Language and Character Law’ rolled out.

2001 Tinderbox by Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems

2001 Semantic Web vision popularised in a Scientific American article by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila

2001 G4 Titanium PowerBook laptop computer by Apple

2001 The Wiki Way by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham

2001 Creative Commons by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred

2001 Wikipedia online collaborative encyclopedia by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger at Nupedia

2001 Movable Type weblog publishing system by Benjamin Trott and Mena Grabowski Trott at Six Apart

2001 JSON by Douglas Crockford

2001 Douglas Adams’ speech about Virtual Graffiti held at the 3GSM World Congress 2002 Bibliotheca Alexandrina founded, the modern Library of Alexandria, with Ismail Serageldin as the founding director

2002 EPrints version 2 lead developer Christopher Gutteridge

2003 Android Inc founded by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White

2003 Friendster social media service Jonathan Abrams

2003 Myspace blogging and social media service by Brad Greenspan, Josh Berman and Tom Anderson at eUniverse

2003 Deep Love by Yoshi, first cell phone novel ( Japanese ‘Keitai Shousetsu’)

2003 The Legal Deposit Libraries Act widens the definition of what publishers should send to the libraries to include digital publications, pending further regulation

2003 WordPress blogging service by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little

2003 Blogger blogging service is bought by Google

2003 TypePad blogging service by BizLand, later Endurance International Group (EIG)

2003 Ulysses word processor by Max Seelemann and Marcus Fehn

2004 Facebook social media service by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes

2004 First hypertext format full length articles accepted at ACM’s Hypertext Conference with Twin media: hypertext structure under pressure by David Kolb awarded ‘Best Paper’

2004 First hypertext format article at ACM’s Document Engineering conference by James Blustein and Mona Noor

2004 Institute for the Future of the Book founded by Bob Stein 2004 Tag Cloud at Flickr, Technorati, WordPress Plugins and more 2004 Scala programming language by Martin Odersky

2005 Pages word processor by Apple

2005 Markdown by John Gruber collaboration with Aaron Swartz

2006 Time Person of the Year is ‘You’

2005 Writely by programmers Sam Schillace, Steve Newman and Claudia Carpenter at Upstartle

2006 Upstartle bought by Google

2006 Google Docs by Google

2006 Twitter social media service founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan

Williams at Twitter

2006 One Laptop Per Child by Nicholas Negroponte

2006 HyperScope Project by Doug Engelbart and Brad Neuberg, Eugene Kim, Jonathan Cheyer and Christina Engelbart

2006 Hyperwords Project by Frode Hegland, Fleur Klijnsma and Rob Smith

2006 Office Open XML by Microsoft

2006 The Semantic Web Revisited by Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt, and Wendy Hall, in IEEE Intelligent Systems

2006 Debategraph by Peter Baldwin and David Price

2006 Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark’s, the first networked book, produced by the Institute for the Future of the Book

2006 Dialogue Mapping: Creating Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems by Jeff Conklin

2007 Hashtag by Chris Messina (name by Stowe Boyd)

2007 iPhone by Apple Inc.

2007 Kindle by Amazon

2007 Scrivener for macOS by Keith Blount at Literature & Latte

2007 EPUB by IDPF

2008 MacBook Air by Apple

2008 Last Stable Build of Netscape Navigator

2009 Like Button by Facebook

2009 Webfonts by Typekit

2009 OmmWriter by Herraiz Soto & Co

2009 iPhone Copy & Paste by Apple

2009 Twine open-source tool for authoring interactive fiction by created by Chris Klimas 2009 Worst year in decades as far as advertising revenues for newspapers and newspapers begin moving online

2010

2010 Thumbs Up Emoji

2010 Retina Display by Apple

2010 iA Writer word processor by Oliver Reichenstein

2010 iPad tablet by Apple

2010 Swift programming language development by Chris Lattner, with the eventual collaboration of many other programmers at Apple

2010 Siri developed by Dag Kittlaus, Tom Gruber, and Adam Cheyer, bought by Apple

2010 Emoji ratified as part of Unicode 6.0

2011 iMessage by Apple

2011 ByWord word processor by Metaclassy

2011 Scrivener word processor for Windows by Keith Blount at Literature & Latte

2011 Annual Future Of Text Symposium by Frode Alexander Hegland launched

2011 Liquid text utility by Frode Alexander Hegland at The Liquid Information Company

2011 Siri personal digital assistant released as part of the iPhone 4S by Apple

2011 Swype by Cliff Kushler allying users to drag their fingers on a virtual keyboard to connect the dots between letters

2011 ClaiMaker by Gangmin Li, Victoria Uren, Enrico Motta, Simon Buckingham Shum and John Domingue

2012 Knowledge Graph by Emily Moxley, Google’s lead product manager, at Google

2012 Muse by Adobe

2012 The Web-Extended Mind by Paul Smart

2012 Inventing on Principle presentation by Bret Victor

2012 Google Now Assistant launched by Google

2012 Medium online social publishing platform by Evan Williams

2012 LiquidText by Craig Tashman

2012 Outlook by Microsoft replaces Hotmail

2013 Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations further define the digital elements of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act and lead to large-scale on-going transfer of e-journals and e-books to the legal deposit libraries for posterity

2013 Distant Reading by Franco Moretti

2013 First Full-Scale Harvest of the UK Domain by the UK Web Archive, using the Non- Print Legal Deposit Regulations

2013 Ulysses III (major rewrite) by Max Seelemann and Marcus Fehn

2014 Xanadu by Ted Nelson

2014 Alexa assistant released by Amazon

2014 Cortana assistant released by Microsoft

2014 Framtidsbiblioteket (The Future Library project) launched, a public artwork that aims to collect an original work by a popular writer every year from 2014 to 2114

2014 Author reboot by Frode Hegland at The Liquid Information Company with coding by Jacob Hazelgrove

2014 Most up to date version of TeX is 3.14159265 as of the publication of this book

2014 Swift programming language launched at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)

2014 Author iOS by Frode Hegland at The Liquid Information Company

2014 Augmented Writing by Textio

2015 Notion by Ivan Zhao at Notion Labs

2015 Watch by Apple

2015 Hamilton musical, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, makes it Broadway debut, highlighting the beauty and power of the written word, with an opening line stating that Hamilton “put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain”

2016 Reactions, also-called Tapback, for iMessage by Apple

2016 Universal Clipboard by Apple

2016 Viv Labs, developed by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham, acquired by Samsung

2016 Notion founded by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last

2017 Roam Research founded by Conor White-Sullivan

2017 Web Annotations Standardised by the W3C Web Annotation Working Group 2018 Bixby Marketplace, an open assistant ecosystem based on Viv Labs Technology, launched by Samsung

2018 GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer ) released by OpenAI

2019 GPT-2 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2) released by OpenAI

2019 Reader PDF viewer with Visual-Meta support by Frode Alexander Hegland at The Liquid Information Company with coding by Jacob Hazelgrove

2020

2020 Muse by Adobe discontinued

2020 Flash by Adobe discontinued

2020 iPad Keyboard with Trackpad by Apple

2020 Adobe Liquid Mode for Easier PDF Viewing on Mobile Devices powered by Sensei Machine Learning

2020 GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) released by OpenAI

2022 Meta Quest released

2022 The Future of Text volume 3 published

Future

2023 (Jan 1), Adobe Type 1 (Postscript) fonts reach end of life; no further support in Adobe products (other software unaffected)

unknown The “absolutely final change (to be made after my death)” of TeX will be to change the version number to π,

at which point all remaining bugs will become features. Likewise, versions of Metafont after

2.0 asymptotically approach e (currently at 2.7182818), and a similar change will be applied after Knuth’s death.

unknown All the pioneers of digital text will die, leaving it to future generations to rediscover and hopefully improve upon how we interact with our textual knowledge, and each other. unknown You will read this. What will you do with what you have learnt in this book, what

will you think of the way we

saw text in 2020, how do you think the way we present and interact with text can be improved?

Contributors to the Timeline

Frode Hegland and Mark Anderson editors, with Peter Flynn, Mark Bernstein, Bernard Vatant, Bob Horn, Jonathan Finn, Niels Ole Finnemann and more. Thank you.

Gallery from the Symposium

The 11th Annual Future of Text Symposium was held at the Linnean Society in London on the 27th and 28th of September 2022 and online. Below are a few photographs from the event.

These are not intended to be a complete record but rather snapshots for experimenting in XR with how attached images can be displayed.

Glossary

.liquid the document format for the Author Software. It is a macOS wrapper with JOSN and RTFD. This is a free and open standard optimised for VR. #Infrastructure Timeline: -

6DoF Six degrees of freedom (6DOF) refers to the freedom of movement of a rigid body in three-dimensional space. Specifically, the body is free to change position as forward/backward (surge), up/down (heave), left/right (sway) translation in three perpendicular axes, combined with changes in orientation through rotation about three perpendicular axes, often termed yaw (normal axis), pitch (transverse axis), and roll (longitudinal axis). Three degrees of freedom (3DOF), a term often used in the context of virtual reality, refers to tracking of rotational motion only: pitch, yaw, and roll.

Used by us in VR context.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_freedom

academic someone who reads academic documents, usually associated with an academic institution, but not necessarily.

#Profession | Timeline:

ACM From Wikipedia: “The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US- based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_Computing_Machinery

ACM’s ‘Hypertext’ Conference piloted Visual-Meta in 2021.

#Institution. #Timeline: 1947-. USA

Adam Wern Working on spatial hypertext software.

Adam, Adam Wern Future Text Lab collborator.

Addressability refers to how something can refer to something else. In the digital world this primarily means in a local file structure and a server based network. In academia is can refer to citation or references. In the physical world it can refer to a formal location layout, such as a flat so and so in house so and so, as well as co- ordinates. It can also man relative addressing, such as saying take a left after the third yellow house.

#dougconcept #term

Adobe “originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware[3] and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the creation and publication of a wide range of content, including graphics, photography, illustration, animation, multimedia/video, motion pictures, and print.” https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Adobe_Inc.

Founded by: John Warnock and Charles Geschke. #institution. #timeline: December 1982.

AI ‘Artificial intelligence’ is “intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans.” https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

#Technology. Timeline: 20th century-. Keywords: ML. Machine Learning.

Alan Laidlaw https://twitter.com/alanlaidlaw

Alan Laidlaw https://twitter.com/alanlaidlaw #person. Timeline:

anaphora “the use of a word referring back to a word used earlier in a text or conversation, to avoid repetition, for example the pronouns he, she, it, and they and the verb do in I like it and so do they.”

From Oxford Languges.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru Andreea Ion Cojocaru is a licensed architect and a software developer.

She is the co-founder and CEO of NUMENA, an award-winning German company. Andreea works at the intersection of traditional architecture and immersive technologies to develop projects that require a new approach to cognitive and spatial challenges. Currently, she is working on a tool that allows users to create, share and edit environments at 1:1 scale. She is also leading projects that mix physical and virtual elements to explore social and economic models based on collective agency across multiple spatial modalities.

She is featured in issue 1.4 of our Journal: https://futuretextpublishing.com/journal/ #person. Timeline: -. Company: NUMENA. Lives in: Germany. Key interests VR / AR / AI, embodiment, cognitive neuroscience / cognition, architecture. Works with: Bob Horn, Claus Atzenbeck.

Andy Campbell is the Digital Director for the arts/media organisation One to One Development Trust and the founder/director of Dreaming Methods - an immersive digital storytelling studio.

storytelling. Often called upon by international arts and culture organisations as well as universities across the globe, his work includes Lead Developer for the multi-award winning episodic digital novel Inanimate Alice and services to the Orient Foundation for Arts and Culture creating the world’s largest online archive of digitized Tibetan cultural resources. His most recent collaborative work Monoliths with Pilot Theatre and One to One Development Trust has been nominated for the Immersive Art/XR award at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival.

https://twitter.com/dreamingmethods facebook.com/dreamingmethods https:// www.instagram.com/dreamingmethods/

#person. Timeline: 23 April 1975-. Born in: Halifax, UK. Company: One to One Development Trust and Dreaming Methods www.onetoonedevelopment.org www.dreamingmethods.com. Currently: Wakefield, UK. Interests: Digital fiction, digital art, VR, WebGL, HTML5, video games, game engines, 3D graphics, software, programming, digital environments, immersive audio, AI, XR, TV, electronic music, film, cinema, books, experimental literature, poetry, literacy, engagement, accessibility, inclusivity, collaboration, education, web design, CSS

Anne-Laure Le Cunff Founder of Ness Labs and contributor to The Future of Text volume 1.

Annie Murphy Paul From an interview in GQ: “We make better use of our cognitive resources, says Paul, when we use them in conjunction with “extra-neural” resources: our body (embodied cognition), our environment (situated cognition), and the people around us (distributed cognition). The brain evolved to move the body, to navigate through space, to interact with other people,” says Paul.

“Those are these human strengths that we're totally putting aside when we focus on the brain and we think, ‘To get real thinking and real work done, I have to sit still, not talk to anybody, and just push my brain harder and harder.’ It's just not working very well.”

https://www.gq.com/story/extended-mind-annie-murphy-paul Author of The Extended Mind.

#person. Timeline: -.

Apple HMD an as yet not released VR/AR headset which is expected to be announced late 2022, early 2023 and which will enlarge the market considerably. #Hardware | Timeline: 2023 | Company: Apple

Apurva Chitnis Head Of Engineering, koodos labs. #person

AR “Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory.”

AR includes the real reality, as opposed to VR which does not.

“Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality #Technology | Timeline: 20th century-

ARC Engelbart Concept: Augmentation Research Center, The name of Doug's lab at SRI where he proposed a system called H-LAM/T in 1962 and developed and in 1968 demonstrated NLS: oNLine System, his platform for shared knowledge work research, later renamed Augment and from which I decided on the name Author, since Author and Augment share etymological roots.

#Institution. Timeline: 1960s-1970s. USA

Architectural Spaces VR Represenations of landscapes, buildings, and interiors designs modeled after the physical world.

Art a category used here to help the reader identify artist and discussions around artworks.

Augmented Text Company The company which produces the Author software, Reader software and Liquid software.

Director is Frode Hegland. https://www.augmentedtext.info #Institution. Timeline: 9 March 2016-

Author means in the context of this work someone who writes a document, which includes academic papers and books. Can also refer to the Author software by The Augmented Text Company.

Etymology: “mid-14c., auctor, autour, autor “father, creator, one who brings about, one who makes or creates” someone or something, from Old French auctor, acteor “author, originator, creator, instigator” (12c., Modern French auteur) and directly from Latin auctor “promoter, producer, father, progenitor; builder, founder; trustworthy writer, authority; historian; performer, doer; responsible person, teacher,” literally “one who causes to grow,” agent noun from auctus, past participle of augere “to increase,” from PIE root *aug- (1) “to increase.”” From https://www.etymonline.com/ search?q=Author

Barbara Tversky Guest presenter at the Future Text Lab. Issue 1.1 on the 21st of January 2022.

Professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University and a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.Tversky specialises in cognitive psychology.

Author of Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. Basic Books, 2019. #person

Benediktine Cyberspace A 3-D visualization inspired by Michael Benedikt’s seminal text, “Cyberspace: First Steps”

BibTeX is a specific format for conveying citation information within the LaTex environment, developed by Oren Patashnik and Leslie Lamport, released in 1985. The benefit of the system was to separate citation information from presentation style and it is human readable, though it slightly looks like code. It inspired the format of Visual-Meta and Visual-Meta contains a straight BibTeX section to allow the document which contains it to be cited.

Bob Horn, Robert E. Horn is a political scientist with a special interest in policy communication, social and organizational learning, and knowledge management (especially in sustainability and national security affairs), known for producing large scale murals.

Was Senior Researcher at Stanford University's Human Science and Technology Advanced Research Institute (H-STAR) for 27 years. While he was a research associate at Columbia University, he created a widely used methodology for the analysis of any complex stable subject matter. This research became an international consulting company, Information Mapping, Inc. He was CEO and chairman for 20 years. He has taught at Harvard, Columbia, and Sheffield (UK) universities. Recently, he has been developing large info-murals and leading “mess mapping” projects and workshops to enable decision making groups get their minds around larger contexts for strategic discussions of wicked problems and mega-messes. The projects range from global climate change, energy security, nuclear waste disposal, NASA’s research programs. He was the synthesizer and visualizer for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s Vision 2050 project the European-Commission-supported project on policy options for a resource efficient Europe (POLFREE). His development of visual argumentation mapping has resulted in the publication of the Mapping Great Debates series, which, in the same year received a full-page review in Nature, as well as being hung as artwork in a national museum in The Hague as part

of an exhibit on information design as a fine art.

His 7 books include Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century (1998) and Mapping Hypertext (1989, a book about the web 2 years before the web was created). His most recent book (still in draft) is: The Little Book of Wicked Problems and Social Messes.

He has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the International Society for Performance and Instruction. He is a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.

www.bobhorn.us

#person. Timeline: - Lives in: California, USA

Bob Horn Robert E. “Bob” Horn is a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. For 27 years, he was a Senior Researcher the Human Science and Technology Advanced Research Institute (H-STAR), Stanford University, where he worked with international task forces and governments on wicked problems an social messes. He has taught at Harvard and Columbia universities and is the author/editor of ten books.

He produces large scale murals. www.bobhorn.us

Bob Stein is the director of the Institute for the Future of the Book

He founded The Voyager Company in 1985, the first commercial multimedia CD- ROM publisher, and The Criterion Collection in 1984, a collection of definitive films on digital media with in-depth background information (including the first films with recorded audio commentary). Worked with Alan Kay at the Atari Research Group on various electronic publishing projects. Currently works on The Tapestry Project.

#person. Timeline: 20 April 1946-

Book a published work, on any substrate, inclduing paper or digital.

Generally longer than a ‘paper’ but in terms of digital work, there is little technical difference, the difference is mostly social.

Brandel Zachernuk AR / VR Creative technologist by day, digitally-embodied cognition enthusiast by night!

Something that I've been very passionate about trying to investigate and play with over the last 10 years or so is what is the most pedestrian thing that you can do with virtual reality and a technology that was was word processing was reading and reading and thinking about what are the basic building blocks of that process of writing and reading that can fundamentally be changed by buying virtual reality? Realising that if you don't have a screen, you have the ability for information to mean what it means for your purposes, rather than the technical limitations that apply as a consequence of a mouse or keyboard or things like that, and also deeply invested in understanding some of the emerging cognitive science and and neurophysiological sort of views about what it is that the mind is and the way that we work best. So reading about learning about what people call for in cognition, it's embedded, embodied in active and extended mind and how that might pertain to what we should be doing with software and systems, both as well as hardware if necessary to make it so that we can. We can think properly and express properly and stuff.

https://youtu.be/2Nc5COrVw24?t=879 https://twitter.com/zachernuk https:// www.youtube.com/channel/UCOP9cT-IwB6oxAcfvS1x_ZQ https://futuretextlab.info/tag/bybrandel/ http://www.zachernuk.com/

#Person. Timeline: -. Lives in: California, USA.

Caitlin Fisher is professor and Chair, Cinema and Media Arts and Director, Augmented Reality Lab, Director, Immersive Storytelling Lab, School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, York University

President, Electronic Literature Organization

Works with AR and VR and electronic literature, future cinema, emerging technology. #person. Timeline: -

Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada #Location

Chalktalk Chalktalk is a digital presentation and communication language in development at New York University's Future Reality Lab. Using a blackboard-like interface, it allows a presenter to create and interact with animated digital sketches in order to demonstrate ideas and concepts in the context of a live presentation or conversation.

citation In this work, the term’ citation’ is both the ‘citation’ mention in the body of the document, and its corresponding ‘references’ entry for the source material in the Reference Appendix at the end of the document, though for the sake of clarity I will mainly use ‘citation’ to refer to the in-body half and ‘reference’ for the entry of the source in the References section.

#term

Claus Atzenbeck is a cocurator of The Future of Text Symposium.

He holds a professor position at Hof University, Germany and is leading the Visual Analytics research group at the university’s Institute of Information Systems.

He served as general co-chair of the 30th Anniversary ACM Hypertext Conference 2019 in Hof, Germany (https://human.iisys.de/ht2019/, 7 @ACMHT), is co-organizer of the HUMAN workshop series (https://human.iisys.de/human/, 7 @HUMAN_HT), and the initiator of the Historic Hypertext Project (https://human.iisys.de/hist_HT/, 7 @hist_HT).

http://www.atzenbeck.de https://twitter.com/clausatz https://www.iisys.de #person. Timeline: . Born: Germany. Lives in: Germany. Research Interests:

Hypermedia including spatial and navigational structures, spatial and temporal parsing

for spatial hypertexts, and hypertext narratives. A specific focus of his work is on intelligent user interfaces for visual analytics.

Co-Evolution Engelbart Concept: Most capabilities are improved, or augmented, by many interdependent technical and non-technical elements, of which tools make up only a small part: On one hand, there is the human system, which includes paradigms, organizations, procedures, customs, methods, language, attitudes, skills, knowledge, training and so on- all of which all exists within the basic perceptual and motor capabilities of the human being. On the other hand, there is the tool system, which includes media, computers, communications systems etc. Together, they comprise the augmentation system.

#dougconcept #term

Cognition “is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition

concept, defined concept, defined concepts is, in the context of this book, any text which is defined by an author.

When using the Augmented Text Tools Author this is exported in a PDF as a Glossary which becomes interactive when opened in Reader. In Author, The Map view uses the definition to draw lines where text from a definition is also present on the Map. When a document is exported to PDF the Defined Concepts become Glossary Terms.

This is as opposed to inferred concept.

Also aView in Author and in Reader (with Visual-Meta) to show all named entities (and headings).

#term

CRS (Commercial Resupply Services) are a series of flights awarded by NASA for the delivery of cargo and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) on commercially operated spacecraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Resupply_Services

Cyberspace “The term "cyberspace" first appeared in the visual arts in the late 1960s, when Danish artist Susanne Ussing (1940-1998) and her partner architect Carsten Hoff (b. 1934) constituted themselves as Atelier Cyberspace.” Used in this context to mean a digital world, not necessarily in VR or AR.

Cynthia Haynes is former Director of Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design Ph.D program and currently Professor of English at Clemson University.

Her research interests are rhetoric, composition, multimodal pedagogy, virtual worlds, VR, critical theory, computer games studies, and the rhetoric of war and terrorism.

Her recent book, The Homesick Phone Book: Addressing Rhetoric in the Age of Perpetual Conflict (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016) won the 2017 Rhetoric

Society of America annual book prize. She is currently working on a book, Unalienable Rites: The Architecture of Mass Rhetoric.

She is, along with Jan Holmevik, member of the Kairos Editorial Board and co- founders of the journal's electronic partner LinguaMOO.

#person. Timeline: -. Lives in: Clemson, South Carolina, USA.

DALL-E DALL-E (stylized as DALL·E) and DALL-E 2 are machine learning models developed by OpenAI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions.

The name is a portmanteau of the names of animated robot Pixar character WALL-E and the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DALL-E https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ #technology. AI. Machine Learning. ML.

Daniel Dennett is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett #person Timeline: 28 March 1942-

Deena Larsen is a new media and hypertext author involved in the creative electronic writing community since the 1980s. From USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deena_Larsen

#person. Timeline: 1964-

Dene Grigar is a cocurator of The Future of Text Symposium.

PhD, Director of the Electronic Literature Lab; Managing Director and Curator of ELO’s The NEXT.

Digital artist and scholar based in Vancouver, Washington. Professor and Director of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver, USA. A prioneer of digital literature. Former president of the Electronic Literature Organisation.

Contributed to this book with Richard Snyder. #person. Timeline: -. Interests: Electronic Literature.

Distance-Independent Millimeters, DMM Google researchers needed a way to design screens that could be easily read at any distance. To help solve this, they came up with "Distance-Independent Millimeters" or DMMs. A VR and AR term.

More detail at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES9jArHRFHQ #term

DOI ‘Document Object Identifiers’

An effort to make addressing academic documents via the web more robust.

Used in Author software to let the user paste a DOI to cite an academic document which is then sent to CrossRef to be parsed into BibTeX which is then used to create a full citation.

#Infrastructure

Doug Engelbart “He was an engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human– computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the

development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart's law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

He was also my mentor and greatly influened my work, resulting in my company called The Augmented Text Compant and my word processor being called Author, in honour of his ‘Augment’ system. Visual-Meta is inspired by his Open Hyperdocument work.

Doug Engelbart, Douglas Carl Engelbart, Doug From Wikipedia: “He was an engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart’s law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.”

His seminal paper was ‘Augmenting Human Intellect’, 1962.

#person. Timeline: 30 January 1925- 2 July 2013

Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking work in contemporary art and poetry.

In the early 1980s, Kac created digital, holographic and online works that anticipated the global culture we live in today, composed of ever-changing information in constant flux. In 1997 the artist coined the term "Bio Art," igniting the development of this new art form with works such as his transgenic rabbit GFP Bunny (2000) and Natural History of the Enigma (2009), which earned him the Golden Nica, the most prestigious award in the field of media art. GFP Bunny has become a global phenomenon, having been appropriated by major popular culture franchises such as Sherlock, Big Bang Theory and Simpsons, and by writers such as Margaret Atwood and Michael Crichton. In 2017, Kac created Inner Telescope, a work conceived for and realized in outer space with the cooperation of French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. Kac’s singular and highly influential career spans poetry, performance, drawing, printmaking, photography, artist's books, early digital and online works, holography, telepresence, bio art, and space art. Kac has also authored or edited several books, including Telepresence and Bio Art -- Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots (University of Michigan Press, 2005). Kac’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as New Museum, New York; Pompidou Center, Paris; MAXXI- Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; and Seoul Museum of Art, Korea. Kac's work has been showcased in biennials such as Venice Biennale, Italy; Yokohama Triennial, Japan; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Bienal de Habana, Cuba. His works are in major collections such as Museum of Modern Art-MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Museum Les Abattoirs—Frac Occitanie Toulouse, France; Valencian Institute of Modern Art-IVAM, Spain; Museum ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; and Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo, among others. Kac was elected as full member to the IAF (International Astronautical Federation) Technical Activities Committee for the Cultural Utilisation of Space (ITACCUS).

#person. Timeline: -. 1962 -. Born: Brazil. Lives in: USA .

Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt #Location

Electronic Literature “Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from computation", "work that could only exist in the space for which it was developed/written/coded—the digital space”.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_literature

ESA (European Space Agency) is an intergovernmental organisation of 22 member states dedicated to the exploration of space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency

Extrinsic Attributes of an object that are represented visually though that object’s spatial position in a coordinate system represening the domain of their possible values.

Fabien Benetou Prototyping - European Parliament Innovation lab WebXR consultant - Former UNICEF Innovation Fund WebXR technical advisor. VR prototypist.

https://twitter.com/utopiah https://fabien.benetou.fr #person. Timeline: 6 November 1982-

Fermat is a spatial canvas where every element is programmable by the end user. Users can create their own tools and share them with every other user via a public

toolbox.

Recently, we discovered that the most transformative tools built on top of Fermat were using Artificial Intelligence.

(We're bringing back HyperCard!). A tool for thought. https://fermat.ws

#Software. Timeline: -. Keywords: AI. GPT-3. Stable Diffusion.

flatland a semi-humorous term we use to refer to traditional displays, as opposed to the augmented environments of VR and AR. We feel that it is important to be able to move data, including metadata between these environments.

Folding Folding of a document into a table of contents is enabled through Visual- Meta.

Frode Hegland, Frode Alexander Hegland is cohost of the Future of Text Symposium.

Director of The Augmented Text Company where he designed the macOS Author word processor, Reader PDF viewer and the Liquid software. https:// www.augmentedtext.info/

Editor of the 'The Future of Text' series of books and The Future of Text Journal. Designed Visual-Meta.

His mentor was Doug Engelbart. Greatly influenced by his friend Ted Nelson.

PhD from the University of Southampton. Advisors Wendy Hall, Les Carr and David Millard.

#person. #Timeline: Born 2 June 1968-. Born in: Bergen, Norway. Lives in: London, UK.

Future Reality Lab New York University's Future Reality Lab.

https://frl.nyu.edu

Future Text Lab a group of people who meet to work on the future of text. Active members currently include Vint Cerf, Adam Wern, Fabien Benetou, Bob Horn, Alan Laidlaw, Mark Anderson, Peter Wasilko and Frode Hegland.

Future Text Lab A lab dedicated to studying how working with knowledge, particularly text, can be done effectively in VR/AR/Metaverse.

We host Guest presenters and publish a Journal which is part of The Future of Text series.

https://futuretextlab.info #Institution. Timeline: - 2021

Gavin Menichini Guest presenter at the Future Text Lab. Issue 1.2 on the 25th of February 2022.

Strategic Account Executive at the VR company Immersed. “Work Faster in VR” https://immersed.com

George Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff

#person Timeline: 24 May 1941

Gerard Serra Gerard Serra

Interested in augmenting human creativity and AI

Finishing his PhD exploring the role of AI in creative exploration at la Salle Ramon Llull University, Barcelona. Supervisors: David Miralles and Oriol Guasch. #person. Timeline: -. Born: Valls, Catalonia, Spain. Lives in: Barcelona, Spain.

Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany #Location

Glossary means, in the context of this work, a specific user or editor list of definitions for a specific document.

Defined Concepts in the Author Software is exported as a Glossary.

This is different from a dictionary since dictionary definitions have general validity. Inspired by discussions with Doug Engelbart.

Glossary In the context of my work and thinking, a glossary is a set of Defined Concepts which an author has created and which is then exported as a Glossary for the reader.

The primary purpose of this is for the author to have to think through their writing by explicitly stating what something is. The definition of the defined concept can then include text which also has a definition and in the Map view in Author this connection can be shown as a line when either defined term is selected.

The secondary purpose is for the author to edit this Glossary to make sure it is

coherent for export and it can then help a reader understand the author’s intentions. #term

Glossing A way of elucidating parts of text. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=gloss

Google “is an American multinational technology company that focuses on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.” https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

#Institution. Timeline: 1998-. USA

GPT “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” inclduinig GPT-2 and GPT-3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 Product of OpenAI.

GPT-3 ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3’ (GPT-3; stylized GPT·3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3

“In a July 2020 review in The New York Times, Farhad Manjoo said that GPT-3's ability to generate computer code, poetry, and prose is not just "amazing", "spooky", and "humbling", but also "more than a little terrifying". https://www.worldcat.org/issn/ 0362-4331

Timeline: 11 June 2020-. Keywords: Deep Learning. AI. ML. Machine Learning.

HMD Head Mounted Display for use in VR or AR. #Hardware | Timeline:

HTML “The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser.” https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/HTML

A technology we are also using, along with PDF.

hypertext a term invented by Ted Nelson for interactive and connected digital text.

Immersed Immersed is a virtual reality product, working productivity software for virtual offices.

https://immersed.com

Intrinsic Attribute of a data object that are not represented by that object’s spatial position in a given visualization but which may be represented by its size, shape, color, transparence, or other positionally independent visualization technique.

Ismail Serageldin is a long time collaborator of the Future of Text Symposium. Founding Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) and was Vice President of the World Bank.

#person. Timeline: 1944-. Born: Egypt.

ISS (International Space Station) is the largest modular space station currently in low Earth orbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

Jack Kausch is an academic whose research interests are in linguistics, ontologies and the semantic web, embeddings and the history of writing.

He is a PhD student at the Western University of Ontario in Canada. His advisor is Kamran Sedig.

He works as a data labeller for OpenAI and is interested in AI.

#person. Timeline: 14 October 1993-. Born in: Ann Arbor, Michigan. Lives in: Ontario, Canada.

Jacob Hazelgrove is the programmer for the Augmented Text Company for Frode Hegland, including Author and Reader, as well as imlementor of Visual-Meta export from Author and import and interaction in Reader.

#Person | Timeline: -

Jad Esber Guest presenter at the Future Text Lab.

CEO of koodos and an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard.

https://twitter.com/Jad_AE

Jan Holmevik, Jan Rune Holmevik is Associate Professor of English and Special Advisor to the Vice President for Information Technology & CIO, as well as Past President of the Faculty Senate at Clemson University.

PhD in Humanistic Informatics from the University of Bergen, Norway and a Master’s degree in the history of technology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

He specializes in Interactive and Social Media and conducts research in game design,

game culture, digital literacy, social media, visual communication, humanistic informatics, information design, data visualization, social media forensics, transmedia, and electracy.

http://t.co/7OV4voInkm https://twitter.com/holmevik #person. Timeline: -

Jaron Lanier “American computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music.

Considered a founder of the field of virtual reality.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Jaron_Lanier

VR pioneer.

#Person. Timeline: 3 May 1960- . Born: NY USA

Kalev Leetaru is an American internet entrepreneur, academic, and senior fellow at the George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science Center for Cyber & Homeland Security in Washington, D.C. USA.

Best known for his role as the co-creator of the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) with Philip Schrodt: "an initiative to construct a catalog of human societal-scale behavior and beliefs across all countries of the world, connecting every person, organization, location, count, theme, news source, and event across the planet into a single massive network that captures what's happening around the world, what its context is and who's involved, and how the world is feeling about it, every single day.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDELT_Project https://blog.gdeltproject.org/web- summit-2017-video/

#person. Timeline: -.

Ken Perlin, Kenneth H. Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, founding director of the Media Research Lab at NYU, director of the Future Reality Lab at NYU, and the Director of the Games for Learning Institute.

B.A. degree in Theoretical Mathematics from Harvard University. M.S. and PhD in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. from the same institution. He developed or was involved with the development of techniques such as Perlin noise, real-time interactive character animation, and computer-user interfaces. He is best known for the development of Perlin noise and Simplex noise, both of which are algorithms for realistic-looking Gradient noise. “Received an Academy Award for the development of Perlin noise. He had introduced this technique with the goal to produce natural-appearing textures on computer-generated surfaces for motion picture visual effects, while working on the Walt Disney Productions' 1982 feature film TRON for which he had developed a large part of the software.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Perlin

Research interests include graphics, animation, multimedia and science education, VR and AR.

#person. Timeline: -

Liquid Information, liquid Frode Hegland’s philosophy of interactive computing. Developed while a student in New York, the fundamentals are removing barriers to rich interaction. Later influenced and expanded by the work of his mentor Doug Engelbart and fleshed out in discussions with Sarah Walton. https://www.liquidinformation.org

Discontinued: http://www.liquid.info/lisa/

Livia Polanyi is also a contributor to the first volume of The Future of Text. #person

Lorenzo Bernaschina is a software engineer.

Founder of Gems, a PKM SaaS to visually manage notes with the help of AI. Interested in tools for thought, human-computer interaction, and everything related to mind- expanding technology.

Master’s degree in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence from Politecnico di Milano. Full-stack developer (MEAN/MERN stack + iOS).

#person. Timeline: 3 July 1995-. From Lake Como, Italy.

Machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks.

A type of Artificial Intelligence (AI). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning #Technology. Timeline: 20th century-.

manuscript the authoring format, such as Microsoft Word, which is then either shared as-is, and stays editable, or is exported to be published in a publish format, such as PDF.

#term

Here the user can place text anywhere they want. If there are defined concepts on the map, the user can click on them and lines will emanate to any text on the map which is in that text’s definition.

#term

Mark Anderson is a cocurator of The Future of Text Symposium.

Independent researcher and consultant in hypertext, knowledge systems, and the retention/support of organisational knowledge. A background in organisational structure, knowledge, process change and data interchange consulting across public, private and NFP sectors.

A long-term contributor to open projects and online communities since the mid-90s. Also a contributor to various data formats: PDF metadata, IPTC v4 and most recently the technical specification of Visual-Meta including facilitating ACM’s implementation of Visual-Meta. Part of hypertext study has included the recovery for use of early hypertext systems otherwise lost to current researchers and creating ebooks for some of Ted Nelson’s key (out of print) books.

Publications & datasets: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations? hl=en&user=jn8crEAAAAAJ

Other public resources: https://www.acrobatfaq.com

PhD in Web Science from the University of Southampton: advisors Les Carr and Dave Millard A Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton, associated with its Web & Internet Science (WAIS) Lab.

#person. Timeline: 1959 -. Lives in: Portsmouth, UK.

Mark Anderson Independent researcher in Hypertext and Knowledge systems. Associated with the Web & Internet Science (WAIS) Lab at Southampton University. Mark was heavily involved in the technical specification and ACM launch of Visual-

Meta.

Mark has a background in organisational structure, knowledge, process change and data interchange.

Co-Editor of the Journal.

Marvin Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky #person Timeline: 9 August 1927 – 24 January 2016

Mesopotamia a historical region within the Tigris–Euphrates river system in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent where early writing developed (in parallel to, or influenced by/influencing Egyptian writing), including the use of colophons.

Meta is a large social media company which is focusing on what they term the ‘metaverse’.

Formerly called Facebook. https://about.facebook.com

#Institution. Timeline: 4 February 2004-.

metadata information about other information, in the case of documents, this can include structural information (headings for example), biblio.

Metaverse From Wikipedia: “A metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused

on social connection”

“The term metaverse was coined in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse

At the time of writing, 2022, the term has been popularised by Meta, the company previously called Facebook. Most often used in conjunction with AR/VR augmented environments, not such much the 3D worlds where the user access the world through a flat screen.

Mez Breeze is an Expert and Innovator of contemporary digital culture.

Since the early 1990’s, Mez Breeze has published over 300 seminal works including award-winning electronic based writing, Virtual Reality literature, Artificial Intelligence artworks/projects, books, games, and other genre-defying output all while teaching and supporting digital art and electronic literature. In April 2022, Mez’s Artificial Intelligence Artwork ‘Post Glee[son] - Outside [R]’ (created through digitally stitching GauGAN and VQGAN+CLIP output) made the finals of the 2022 Goulburn Art Award. In July 2019, Mez won the 2019 Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award which: “…honors a visionary artist and/or scholar who has brought excellence to the field of electronic literature and has inspired others to help create and build the field.” Mez's projects are taught worldwide with her works residing in Collections as diverse as The World Bank, Cornell's Rose Goldsen Archive and the National Library of Australia. She currently serves as an Advisor to the Mixed Augmented Reality Art Research Organisation, an Editorial Board Member of the Digital Journal Thresholds, and is a Senior Research Affiliate of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab.

Her latest book ‘[Por]TrAIts: AI Characters + Their Microstories’ (written in her trademark Mezangelle style while incorporating AI output) was a Top Seller on the publishing platform Itchio in September 2022.

https://www.mezbreezedesign.com, https://mezbreeze.itch.io/portraits-volume-one #person. Timeline: 1970-. Company: Mez Breeze Design. Lives in: Australia. Key Interests: AI. VR. XR.

Michael Roberts is a Scientist Mike Roberts currently resides in the Santa Cruz Mountains, California, USA.

He received his doctorate in the early 90’s, working on the intersection between parallel computing and no-code visual programming, specifically defining an isomorphism between Tony Hoare’s Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) calculus and graph theory.

After moving the US, he began work on tools for interactive, creative, computer-based media, specifically targeting computer graphics, multimedia, augmented and virtual realities. His work has influenced the technical and business direction of many US- based fortune 500 companies including Xerox, Autodesk, Progress Software, IPS/ Motorola as well as prominent Japanese companies like DNP.

Prior to founding ConstuctiveLabs, his current metaverse company, he recently spent

9.5 years at renowned research lab Xerox PARC, where he worked on projects including conversational agents, contextual and artificial intelligence, and AR / VR. His interests in tool-making for creatives are informed by studies in traditional tool ecosystems and slow food production.

Founder of Constructivelabs. #person.

Murals, mural This is a special entry to experiment with layouts.

NIC Doug Engelbart concept: Networked Improvement Community “Consider an "Improvement Community" (IC) as collectively engaged in improving an agreed-upon

set either of individual capabilities, or of collective group capabilities-e.g. a professional society. Let's introduce a new category, a "Networked Improvement Community" (NIC): an IC that is consciously and effectively employing best-possible DKR (Dynamic Knowledge Repository) development and usage.”

(augmenting society's collective IQ).

NLS From Wikipedia: “NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system developed in the 1960s. Designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the NLS system was the first to employ the practical use of hypertext links, the mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, presentation programs, and other modern computing concepts. It was funded by ARPA (the predecessor to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), NASA, and the US Air Force.” https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/NLS_(computer_system)

SRI sold NLS to Tymshare in 1977 and renamed it Augment.

Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway #Location

NYU (New York University) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_University

Omar Rizwan Contributor to the Journal.

Omar has been interested in new computer interfaces and new ways of programming

(aren't these the same thing?). He has worked at Dynamicland, at Stripe, and at Khan Academy.

"i am determined to move beyond this way of interacting with systems"

Among other things, I'm the creator of Screenotate, a tool for macOS and Windows which captures the text and origin (URL, window title, ...) whenever you take a screenshot.

https://screenotate.com/

https://twitter.com/rsnous https://omar.website

Open AI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory consisting of the for- profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc.

Products: DALL-E, GPT-3. GPT-2. OpenAI Gym https://openai.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory consisting of the for- profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc.

Products: GPT-1. GPT-2. GPT-3

https://openai.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

PDF ‘Portable Digital Format’. Developed by Adobe. Now free with no license restrictions. It is a print to digial medium with few digital affoardances which my

work on Visual-Meta expands to allow for users to interact with the document in useful ways, while staying compatibel with the basic PDF format. #Infrastructure. Timeline: Introduced 15 June 1993-.

Peter Wasilko is an Attorney, Programmer, and Indepedent Scholar.

He holds a J.D., LL.M., and Certificate in Law, Technology, and Management from Syracuse University’s College of Law. He is admitted to practice law in New York State and is a member of the New York State Bar Association and its Intellectual Property Section. He also maintains memberships in the ACM, IEEE Computer Society, and Association for the Advancement of Aritificial Intelligence. His primary technical interests are Hypertext, Intelligence Augmentation, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Symbolic AI, Law and AI, and Programming Language Design. His intertests beyond computing focus on Foresight and Futures Studies with an emphasis on University Futures and forays into a wide range of related disciplines ranging from Innovation Studies, Design Futures and Speculative Design; Medieval Universities and Trade Guilds; World’s Fairs and Theme Parks; TechnoCities and Prototype Communities of Tomorrow; Architecture; and Urban Planning. He founded Founders’ Quadrangle — an unincorporated association of academics explorng the design space for Universities and Quasi Academic Enterprises of the Future. He can be found with email, LinkedIn, ORCID iD, and Twitter.

#person. Timeline: -. Lives in: New York, New York, USA.

Pol Baladas is the CEO and Artisan at Fermat, a computational medium where people can build their own tools and use tools built by others (we're basically bringing back HyperCard).

Fermat is made inside Batou.xyz, an industrial research lab that rethinks how people

interact with tools, computers and ideas. Interested in tools, media, thought and a better future. Computing philosopher and charlatan.

Interested in Tools, thought, interfaces and a better future. https://twitter.com/polbaladas

#person. Timeline: -

Quest 2 The headset we currently use the most in the Future Text Lab. It sold more than Xbox in 2021 and next year we will see the Apple HMD which will enlarge the field of VR/AR even further.

#Hardware | Timeline: 13 October 2020- | Company: Meta

Reader Software is a minimalist PDF viewer for macOS.

Can read any PDF and can provide added interactions if the PDF has Visual-Meta attached. This can either be produced by Author or any other word processor with Visual-Meta capability, or downloaded from an online repository which features Visual-Meta, such as the ACM digital library. Produced by The Augmented Text Company LTD, with programming by Jacob Hazelgrove.

https://www.augmentedtext.info #Software. Timeline: 12 July 2019-

references is a list of all the citations a document uses, in an Appendix. In-Body citation, point to these References. This language is not fixed, it is sometimes used interchangeably with Bibliography but in my context a Bibliography is a list of work not expressly cited but which are relevant.

in this context ‘Reference’ with uppercase ‘R’ refers to the appendix in an academic document which lists cites sources. In contrast, the citation in the body of the

document is referred to as in-body citation. A form of metadata.

#term

Relative Dimension A dimension capturing the ordering of data objects based on the pairwise application of a comparison function.

Result Set The set of data object satisfying a database search query.

Richard Snyder Electronic Literature Lab, Washington State University Vancouver. Contributed to this book with Dene Grigar.

#person

Sam Brooker I am an academic specialising in digital communication. His research explores the relationship between digital technologies & theories of literature and culture.

Associate Professor of Digital Communications at Richmond American University London, UK.

His research explores the relationship between digital technologies & theories of literature and culture. He is a regular contributor to ACM Hypertext and Social Media, frequently serving on the programme committee. Additional contributions have featured at the ICIDS and SHARP conferences. I am a member of the PRCA International University Advisory Group and academic reviewer for numerous journals.

https://www.richmond.ac.uk/school-of-communications-arts-social-sciences/dr-sam- brooker/

#person. Timeline: -. Research interests: Digital cultures. Electronic literature. Book history. Digital humanities, Theories of authorship. Transmedia. Lives in: London, UK.

Scott Rettberg is professor of digital culture in the department of linguistic, literary, and aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Rettberg was the project leader of ELMCIP (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice), a €1.000.000, six nation, HERA-funded collaborative research project, from 2010-2013.

Leader of the Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group. Director of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. Rettberg is the author or coauthor of novel- length works of electronic literature, combinatory poetry, and films including The Unknown, Kind of Blue, Implementation, Frequency, The Catastrophe Trilogy, Three Rails Live, Toxi*City, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project and others.

Rettberg’s Electronic Literature (Polity, 2018) is the first comprehensive study of the history and genres of electronic literature. Rettberg was recently awarded a SAMKUL grant from Research Council of Norway to lead a four year research project “Extending Digital Narrative.”

https://twitter.com/scottrettberg

#person. Timeline: 1970. Born: Norway. Lives in: Bergen, Norway.

Search Search in this context refers to instant search enabled by Liquid.

Softspace “Softspace is inventing a new kind of tool for thought for thinkers and makers using virtual and augmented reality.”

A tool for thought. https://soft.space

#Software | Timeline: -. Keywords: VR. AR.

Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spain #location. Timeline: -.

Spatial Computing “was defined in 2003 by Simon Greenwold, as “human interaction with a machine in which the machine retains and manipulates referents to real objects and spaces”. With the advent of consumer VR, AR and mixed reality, companies use ‘spatial computing’ in reference to the practice of using physical actions (head and body movements, gestures, speech) as inputs for interactive digital media systems, with perceived 3D physical space as the canvas for video, audio, and haptic outputs. It is also tied to the concept of 'digital twins'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_computing

SSTV (Slow-Scan Television) is a picture transmission method, used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio in monochrome or color.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television

stable diffusion is a deep learning, text-to-image model released by startup StabilityAI in 2022.

Keywords: collective intelligence. augmented technology. AI. #technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion https://stability.ai

Stigmergy (/ˈstɪɡmərdʒi/ STIG-mər-jee) is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions.

The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same or different agent. Agents that respond to traces in the environment receive positive fitness benefits, reinforcing the likelihood of these behaviors becoming fixed within a population over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy #concept

Ted Nelson, Theodor Holm Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist.

He coined the term ‘hypertext’.

Presented at The Future of Text Symposium. #person. Timeline: 17 June 1937-.

Text is the basic ’stuff’ of this work.

The Future of Text Annual Symposium and Book Series (first volume published

2020) as well as community for fostering dialogue around the future of text which I started over a decade ago and which is often co-hosted or presented by Vint Cerf. https://futuretextpublishing.com

The Future of Text Symposium is a series of symposia, books and Journal under the name ‘The Future of Text’ produced by the same people who run The Augmented Text Company.

Co-presented by Frode Hegland, Vint Cerf and Ismail Serageldin. Curated by Dene Grigar, Claus Atzenbeck and Mark Anderson.

This is considered as level C of Doug Engelbart’s Three Levels of Activity. https://futuretextpublishing.com

#Event | Timeline: 2011-

Tom Standage Deputy Editor of The Economist and contributor to The Future of Text volume 1.

#person

tool for thought is both a book and a category of tools, primarily software tools, to augment how people think.

The book: “Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology is a work of "retrospective futurism" in which Smart Mobs author Howard Rheingold looked at the history of computing and then attempted to predict what the networked world might look like in the mid-1990s. The book covers the groundbreaking work of thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and J.C.R. Licklider, as well as Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, and Microsoft (when Microsoft was "aiming for the hundred-million-dollar category"). Rheingold wrote that the impetus behind Tools for Thought was to understand where "mind-amplifying

technology" was going by understanding where it came from.” https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Thought

UK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom #Location

Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine #Location

University of Southampton University in the UK. #Institution. Timeline: 1862-. Southampton, UK

USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States #Location

ViewSpec Engelbart Concept: View Specifications for a user to see their work in different views.

#dougconcept #term

Vint Cerf, Vinton Gray Cerf, Vinton G. Cerf is cohost of the Future of Text Symposium.

IEEE, ACM, BCS, AAAS, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society. Member of the US National Academies of Engineering and Science and foreign member of the Royal Society and the Royal Swedish Engineering Society.

#person. Timeline: 23 June 1943-.

Visual-Meta An open and robust way to augment flat PDF documents to make them more interactive.

Frode Hegland’s PhD thesis. Realised in the Author software and Reader software by The Augmented Text Company. Intended to support Doug Engelbart’s notion of hyperdocuments and xfiles.

Inspired by the BibTeX format and the colophon in books. http://visual-meta.info

#Infrastructure

VR VR, ‘Virtual Reality’ is a technology whereby the user is visually immersed in a computer generated world. When this world allows the physical world to also appear as background, it is called AR ‘Augmented Reality’.

#Technology | Timeline: 20th century-

Yiliu Shen-Burke Yiliu Shen-Burke is a designer and coder.

He is building Softspace, a VR / AR knowledge-mapping tool for creative people (https://www.soft.space). Previously, he was a research resident at Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin. He has a B.A. in econometrics from Columbia University, and dropped out of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He creates out of a love for making beautiful things that elevate those who use them.

https://twitter.com/yiliu_shenburke https://www.yiliu.sh

He is featured in issue 1.4 of our Journal: https://futuretextpublishing.com/journal/ #Person. Timeline: - Keywords: tool for thought. Spatial computing.

Endnotes

a https://youtu.be/FJhXh4eboS8

b Reader and Author apps are described at: https://www.augmentedtext.info

Download Reader (AppStore): https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/reader/id1179373118

Download Author (AppStore): https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/author-basic/id1587711811

c https://twitter.com/StrangeNative/status/1562450155080597505?

d https:// www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/12/jaron-lanier-book-dawn- new-everything-interview-virtual-reality

e https://twitter.com/andreeavr/status/1211743140144721922

f https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/about/

g https:// www.google.com/url? sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwik3e3B08H6AhWKQfE DHZlVCpoQFnoECAcQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fpodcasts.apple.com%2Fus%2F podcast%2Flisa-feldman-barrett-on-emotions-actions-and-the- brain%2Fid1406534739%3Fi%3D1000498839819&usg=AOvVaw2nEVnX_zoNj9oN AdyjXZss

h Singular: Zettelkasten (Englisg), Zettelkasten (German)

Plural: Zettelkastens (Englisg), Zettelkästen (German)

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0319

j https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

k Though perhaps that's something we should get comfortable with as society — that people are continually evolving as their own ideas and knowledge change.

l https://www.oculus.com/desktop/

m In the past thirteen years or so since our collection High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs (University of Michigan Press, 1998; 2nd ed. 2001) appeared, we have presented at numerous conferences, conducted workshops, and written essays on MOOs. We want to thank Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa for inviting us to publish this High Wired ‘redux,’ which folds in an earlier version of the essay by Cynthia Haynes (“In Visible Texts: Memory, MOOs, and Momentum”) with talks given by Jan Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes at the Computers and Writing Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan (2011). Victor J. Vitanza also presented on that panel; and thus the idea for this collection was conceived.

n For an interesting example of vintage newsreel, bouncing ball singalong, and scrolling text, see this montage of Jill Sobule’s “Resistance Song”: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyUk1tv6CUU.

o Caitlin Fisher 2014. Everyone at this party is dead / Cardamom of the Dead. ELO’s The NEXT.

https://the-next.eliterature.org/works/754/0/0/.

p See The CELL Project, https://cellproject.net.

q See this guide for an example: Cripping the Arts. Access Guide. Tangled Arts & Disability, January, 2019. http://tangledarts.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cta- access-guide-spreads-digital.pdf

r Acton, Kelsie, On Plain Language, Critical Design Lab, Jan 14, 2021 https://

www.mapping-access.com/blog-1/2021/1/14/on-plain-language

Simple English: use common words so readers aren’t stopped by unfamiliar words, use an active voice, short sentences. Use headings, lists, bullet points and white space to make information clear. And when you do need to use complicated words because they convey a big, complicated thing quickly, make sure you define them.

s In 1985 and 1986, respectively, I published two texts on space art. They are reproduced in: E. Kac, Luz & Letra. Ensaios de arte, literatura e comunicação [Light & Letter. Essays in art, literature and communication], Rio de Janeiro, Editora Contra Capa, 2004, pp. 32-34 and pp. 65-74. Albeit not discussed in the present paper, my creation and development of telepresence art since 1986 also engages with the materialities of space, since the bulk of space exploration is carried out through telerobotics. For my work with telepresence art, see: E. Kac, Telepresence and Bio Art

— Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2005. An extensive interview about my space art was published as follows: J. André, Entretien avec Eduardo Kac, Espace(s) 9 (2013), 131-146.

t The documentary was produced by Observatoire de l'Espace (Space Observatory), the cultural lab of the French Space Agency, with assistance from the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation; it was published by a.p.r.e.s editions and is distributed by Les presses du réel, France.

u In 2019 I produced Adsum (Proof-of-Concept version), which consisted in an edition of five 4x4x4 in (10x10x10 cm) laser engraved glass cubes.

v I conceived and produced Adsum in 2019, during a Maison Malina Residency in Paris, curated by Annick Bureaud and organized by Leonardo/Olats with the support of Fondation Daniel & Nina Carasso. Adsum flew in 2022 to the ISS with the support of the Stichting Moon Gallery Foundation. Adsum was publicly presented for the first time at the EuroMoonMars workshop, November 18-20, 2019, realized at the European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC), Noordwijk, Netherlands. w The Regex version of Adsum uses only letters to reinterpret the visual symbols that

make up the work, as stipulated by NASA through a ‘regular expression’ script when the agency collected “symbols of cultural significance” for the flight (per NASA’s press release of August 5, 2022). As such, my Adsum (Regex) was included in a USB drive that was placed aboard Orion for travel around the Moon during Artemis 1 (as listed in NASA’s Artemis 1 Official Flight Kit).

x such as this, which is hidden until you click on it.

y https://youtu.be/PJqbivkm0Ms
1. https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-one-half-a-manifesto
2. http://www.jaronlanier.com/agentalien.html
3. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/13/style/chronicle-073679.html
4. Bob Horn’s infographics:
  
  http://www.bobhorn.us
5. The Pixel:
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel
6. http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.html
7. Proposed new tag: IMG [Marc Andreessen] (25 Feb 93): http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.html Inlined image demo/explanation [Marc Andreessen] (14 Mar 93): http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0263.html
8. <IMG> and ISMAP [Dave Raggett] (1 Jun 93): http://1997.webhistory.org/
  
  www.lists/www-talk.1993q2/0421.html Dave Raggett notes:
  
  “Tim BL reminded me on the phone why this approach can't work in general. Pixels only make sense for image data NOT for drawings, equations etc. This means that we really do have to consider scaling the mouse click coordinates. Tim suggests we use real numbers with 0 to 1.0 for each axis (assuming square borders) with the upper left
  
  as (0, 0).”
9. https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/SPSD-html32-20180315/#map
https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110525/the-map-element.html
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ImageReady
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element
6. WebGL has an ‘overlay layer’ that can be targeted via its API. However, that is some conceptual distance from the simple concept of an image map. It requires noticably more, and more complex, code.
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format_Directory
9. https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-DOM/introduction.html
10. https://derivative.ca/
11. https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/ cloudhelp/2023/ENU/Maya-Basics/files/GUID-5EC40DB1-FBD9-4553-
  
  A2FD-6D3508C9B868-htm.html?st=hypergraph
12. https://puredata.info/
vv https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-scripting-in-unreal- engine/

ww https:// www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/SPIR-V - accessed October 2022

xx https://www.haskell.org/
1. https://www.tensorflow.org/
2. https://www.midjourney.com/home/
1. https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
2. I'm interested in looking at history to find counterexamples that defamiliarize our ideas of what 'text' is and what it can be. Manuscripts, odd printed books, other languages…
  
  https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1261296867494653955
3. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1470009606285914114
4. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1300623059963977730
5. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1464506090146746368
6. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1133863044512079873
7. I'm repelled by the entire concept of 'figures', which feel like historical baggage inherited from the printing press. The idea that you write a bunch of text and then provide a bunch of figures, and then it's the job of the typesetter to put those together – it's very strange to me. There was a time when authors might leave spelling and punctuation to the editor, too, and now that seems absurd – shouldn't
  
  'figures' (graphics) be just as integral a part of the text? Shouldn't you, as the author, interleave them as finely with your prose as you possibly can to communicate your message? To be honest, I wonder if the way we conceptualize 'text' and the future of text is all just an artifact of the printing press, for better or worse. It's contingent; it's something people invented and developed; it's not part of nature. (You can imagine other cultures and other universes where there is no analogous notion of text.) 'Text' is the stuff that was easy to print.
  
  https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1275322091005329408 https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1277266878889463808 https://www.reddit.com/r/mesoamerica/comments/g4norl/comment/fo1c2wn/? utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
8. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1449891630794768388
https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1453124927364612102

https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1365451590098817025
https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1487586970528268293
https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1489782240749916165
https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1327901527072116736
https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1257801104030482432
When they were making Super Mario 64, the first thing that they did was create a room where you just run around as Mario. "We wanted to make a game where just moving Mario around was fun." I think about that a lot. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1257902565850640386
https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1497954393261498378
https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1480632170322534406
https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1428779758964248580
https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1351375798142267392
https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1460108841899597826
https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1223438844126613505 vvv https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1180705812433391616 www https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1180726548371931136 xxx https://omar.website/posts/against-recognition/

https://acrobatfaq.com/atbref9/index/Windows/DocumentWindow/Viewpane/ Mapview/Adornments/Adornmentactions.html
https://acrobatfaq.com/atbref9/index/Windows/DocumentWindow/Viewpane/ Mapview/Adornments/SmartAdornments.html

aaaa http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

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Kac, E. 2009. (Kac 4) The Lepus Constellation Suite, 5 engraved and painted steel discs (20 inches diameter each) with lagoglyphic interstellar messages transmitted to the Lepus Constellation on March 13, 2009 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Illustrated is disc #3. [image].
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Visual-Meta Appendix

The information in very small type below allows software to provide rich interactions with this document.

See Visual-Meta.info for more information.

This is what we call Visual-Meta. It is an approach to add information about a document to the document itself on the same level of the content. The same as would be necessary on a physically printed page, as opposed to a data layer, since this data layer can be lost and it makes it harder for a user to take advantage of this data. ¶ Important notes are primarily about the encoding of the author information to allow people to cite this document. When listing the names of the authors, they should be in the format ‘last name’, a comma, followed by ‘first name’ then ‘middle name’ whilst delimiting discrete authors with (‘and’) between author names, like this: Shakespeare, William and Engelbart, Douglas C. ¶ Dates should be ISO 8601 compliant. ¶ The way reader software looks for Visual-Meta in a PDF is to parse it from the end of the document and look for @{visual-meta- end}. If this is found, the software then looks for {@{visual-meta-start} and uses the data found between these marker tags. ¶ It is very important to make clear that Visual-Meta is an approach more than a specific format and that it is based on wrappers. Anyone can make a custom wrapper for custom metadata and append it by specifying what it contains: For example @dublin-core or @rdfs. ¶ This was written Summer 2021. More information is available from https://visual-meta.info or from emailing frode@hegland.com for as long as we can maintain these domains.

@{visual-meta-start} @{visual-meta-header-start} @visual-meta{

version = {1.1},¶ generator = {Author 8.2.3 (1136)},¶}

@{visual-meta-header-end}

@{visual-meta-bibtex-self-citation-start} @book{2022-11-05T16:26:26Z/TheFutureo,

author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶ editor = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶ title = {The Future of Text 3 [DRAFT]},¶ month = {nov},¶ year = {2022},¶ institution = {The University of Southampton ENGINEERING AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES Electronics and Computer Science Web & Internet Science},¶ vm-id = {2022-11-05T16:26:26Z/TheFutureo},¶}

@{visual-meta-bibtex-self-citation-end} @{references-start} @misc{frodeAlexanderHegland/VintCerf@T,

author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶ title = {Vint Cerf @ The 11th Future of Text Symposium},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {10},¶} @book{annieMurphyPaul/TheExtende,

author = {Annie Murphy Paul},¶ title = {The Extended Mind},¶ publisher = {Eamon Dolan Books},¶ year = {2021},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=Dk-_DwAAQBAJ},¶ isbn = {9780544947665, 0544947665},¶}

@misc{andreeavIonCojocaru/TheFutureo,

author = {Andreeav Ion Cojocaru},¶ title = {The Future of Text},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {9},¶} @book{franciscoJ.VarelaEvanThompsonEleanorRosch/TheEmbodie,

author = {Francisco J. Varela and Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch},¶ title = {The Embodied Mind, revised edition},¶ publisher = {MIT Press},¶ year = {2017},¶ month = {1},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader? id=gzLaDQAAQBAJ},¶ isbn = {9780262529365, 026252936X},¶}

@book{georgeLakoffMarkJohnson/MetaphorsW,

author = {George Lakoff and Mark Johnson},¶ title = {Metaphors We Live By},¶ publisher = {University of Chicago Press},¶ year = {2008},¶ month = {12},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader? id=r6nOYYtxzUoC},¶ isbn = {9780226470993, 0226470997},¶}

@book{l.BenediktMichael/Cyberspace,

author = {L. Benedikt Michael},¶ title = {Cyberspace},¶ publisher = {Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press},¶ year = {1991},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=SABRAAAAMAAJ},¶ isbn =

{UOM:39015021635829},¶}

@misc{andyCampbell/DreamingMe,

author = {Andy Campbell},¶ title = {Dreaming Methods},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {10},¶} @article{andyClarkDavidChalmers/TheExtende,

author = {Andy Clark and David Chalmers},¶ title = {The Extended Mind},¶ journal = {Analysis},¶ publisher = {[Analysis Committee, Oxford University Press]},¶ year = {1998},¶ pages = {7--19},¶ volume = {58},¶} @book{annieMurphyPaul/TheExtende,

@misc{davidBClear/Zettelkast,

author = {David B Clear},¶ title = { Zettelkasten},¶ year = {2019},¶ month = {3},¶ url = {https://writingcooperative.com/zettelkasten-how-one-german-scholar-was-so-freakishly-productive-997e4e0ca125},¶} @misc{williamPlayfair/Trade-Bala,

author = {William Playfair},¶ title = { Trade-Balance Time-Series Chart},¶ publication = {Commercial and Political Atlas},¶ year = {1786},¶} @misc{denisDiderot/Pinmaker’s,

author = {Denis Diderot},¶ title = {Pinmaker’s Factory},¶ publication = {Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers},¶ year = {1751},¶} @misc{barbaraTversky/Diagrammed,

author = {Barbara Tversky},¶ title = {Diagrammed the world},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {10},¶} @misc{barbaraTversky/Differentd,

author = {Barbara Tversky},¶ title = {Different displays -> Different inferences},¶ year = {2022},¶} @misc{eadweardMuybridge/HorseinMot,

author = {Eadweard Muybridge},¶ title = {Horse in Motion},¶ year = {1877},¶} @misc{frankKing/GasolineAl,

author = {Frank King},¶ title = {Gasoline Alley},¶ publisher = { Tribune Content Agency},¶ year = {1918},¶} @misc{newYorker/NewYorkerC,

author = {New Yorker},¶ title = {New Yorker Cover},¶ publication = {The New Yorker},¶ publisher = {New Yorker},¶ year = {2008},¶ month = {2},¶} @misc{daveMcKean/SignaltoNo,

author = {Dave McKean},¶ title = {Signal to Noise},¶ year = {1989},¶} @misc{daveMcKean/SignaltoNo,

author = {Dave McKean},¶ title = {Signal to Noise 2},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {10},¶} @misc{saulSteinberg/Don't,

author = {Saul Steinberg},¶ title = {Don't},¶ publication = {The New Yorker},¶ year = {2969},¶ month = {11},¶} @misc{robertHorn/Mural1,

author = {Robert Horn},¶ title = {Mural 1},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {9},¶} @misc{robertHorn/Mural2,

author = {Robert Horn},¶ title = {Mural 2},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {9},¶} @misc{robertHorn/Mural3,

author = {Robert Horn},¶ title = {Mural 3},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {9},¶} @misc{robertHorn/Mural4,

author = {Robert Horn},¶ title = {Mural 4},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {9},¶} @misc{robertHorn/Mural5,

author = {Robert Horn},¶ title = {Mural 5},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {9},¶} @book{n.KatherineHayles/WritingMac,

author = {N. Katherine Hayles},¶ title = {Writing Machines},¶ publisher = {MIT Press},¶ year = {2002},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OYibzDRPNZwC},¶ isbn = {0262582155, 9780262582155},¶ pages

= {29-33},¶}

@book{vinceDziekan/Virtuality,

author = {Vince Dziekan},¶ title = {Virtuality and the Art of Exhibition},¶ publisher = {Intellect Books},¶ year = {2012},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=DMc9UrW1gDIC},¶ isbn = {9781841504766, 1841504769},¶ pages = {253},¶}

@misc{eduardoKac/Holopoetry,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ editor = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {Holopoetry},¶ publisher = {Intellect Books},¶ year = {2007},¶ address = {Bristol},¶ url = {https://elmcip.net/sites/default/files/media/critical_writing/attachments/ kac_eduardo_ed._-_media_poetry._an_international_anthology-1.pdf},¶ pages = {129–156},¶}

@misc{eduardoKac/Kac1)Ágora,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {(Kac 1) Ágora, holopoem conceived to be sent in the direction of the Andromeda galaxy (not launched)},¶ year = {1986},¶} @misc{eduardoKac/Spacescape,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {Spacescapes, 1989},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {10},¶ url = {https://www.ekac.org/spacescapes.html},¶} @misc{eduardoKac/Kac2)Space,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {(Kac 2) Spacescapes, slow-scan television, screen, telephone line, satellite and microchip images. Example of a transitional frame as seen by recipients},¶ year = {1989},¶} @misc{eduardoKac/Monogram(1,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {Monogram (1996), Eduardo Kac},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {10},¶ url = {https://www.ekac.org/cassini.monogram.html},¶} @misc{eduardoKac/Kac3)Monog,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {(Kac 3) Monogram, Kac's ink drawing, which evokes an orbital trajectory, a rising rocket and a moon (and is also the artist's emblematic signature), flew to Saturn on the Cassini spacecraft in 1997. Cassini entered orbit around Saturn in 2004},¶ year = {1996},¶}

@misc{eduardoKac/TheLepusCo,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = { The Lepus Constellation Suite},¶ year = {2022},¶ url = {https://www.ekac.org/lepus.constellation.html},¶} @misc{eduardoKac/Kac4)TheLe,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {(Kac 4) The Lepus Constellation Suite, 5 engraved and painted steel discs (20 inches diameter each) with lagoglyphic interstellar messages transmitted to the Lepus Constellation on March 13, 2009 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Illustrated is disc #3},¶ year = {2009},¶}

@misc{eduardoKac/Lagooglegl,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {Lagoogleglyphs},¶ year = {2022},¶ url = {https://www.ekac.org/lagoogleglyphs.html},¶}

@misc{eduardoKac/Kac5)Lagoo,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {(Kac 5) Lagoogleglyph 3, space artwork realized in London to be seen by satellites, to be experienced in person and/or through Google Maps (satellite view), Google Earth or the Google Earth Pro app. It measures 20 x 15m (65.6 x 49.2 ft)},¶ year = {2018},¶}

@misc{eduardoKac/Kac6)Inner,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {(Kac 6) Inner Telescope in the cupola, ISS},¶ year = {2017},¶} @misc{eduardoKac/Télescopei,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {Télescope intérieur / Inner Telescope},¶ publisher = {Les presses du réel},¶ year = {2021},¶ address = {France},¶ url = {https://ekac.org/inner_telescope_book.html},¶} @misc{eduardoKac/HODIBISPOT,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {HODIBIS POTAX},¶ publisher = { Édition Action Poétique, Ivry-sur-Seine},¶ year = {2007},¶ url = {https://www.ekac.org/hodibis.potax.html},¶} @misc{eduardoKac/Adsum,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {Adsum},¶ year = {2022},¶ url = {https://www.ekac.org/adsum.html},¶} @misc{eduardoKac/Adsum(inpr,

author = {Eduardo Kac},¶ title = {Adsum (in progress), space artwork (laser-etched optical glass), 1x1x1cm (0.4x0.4x0.4")},¶ year = {2022},¶} @book{jamesGleick/TheInforma,

author = {James Gleick},¶ title = {The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood},¶ publisher = {HarperCollins UK},¶ year = {2011},¶ month = {3},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=CwCHIScqmZsC},¶ isbn

= {9780007432523, 0007432526},¶ pages = {409},¶}

@book{andreaKantrowitz/DrawingTho,

author = {Andrea Kantrowitz},¶ title = {Drawing Thought},¶ publisher = {MIT Press},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {10},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=6bVYEAAAQBAJ},¶ isbn = {9780262544320, 0262544326},¶}

@book{nikolausGansterer/DrawingAHy,

author = {Nikolaus Gansterer},¶ title = {Drawing A Hypothesis},¶ publisher = {Springer},¶ year = {2011},¶ month = {9},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=9fINtwAACAAJ},¶ isbn = {3709108020, 9783709108024},¶}

@book{bridgetRileyHugoChapmanIsabelSeligman/LinesofTho,

author = {Bridget Riley and Hugo Chapman and Isabel Seligman},¶ title = {Lines of Thought},¶ year = {2016},¶ month = {9},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=68nLjwEACAAJ},¶ isbn = {0500292787, 9780500292785},¶}

@misc{/MinorityRe,

title = {Minority Report},¶ year = {2002},¶ month = {10},¶} @misc{jimStrahorn/Example1,

author = {Jim Strahorn},¶ title = {Example 1},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {9},¶} @misc{jimStrahorn/Example2,

author = {Jim Strahorn},¶ title = {Example 2},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {9},¶} @book{johnsonCrockett/Harold'sIm,

author = {Johnson Crockett},¶ title = {Harold's Imagination: 3 Adventures with the Purple Crayon},¶ publisher = {HarperCollins},¶ year = {2018},¶ month = {9},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader? id=IxSwswEACAAJ},¶ isbn = {0062839454, 9780062839459},¶}

@book{vingeVernor/Rainbow'sE,

author = {Vinge Vernor},¶ title = {Rainbow's End},¶ publisher = {Pan Macmillan},¶ year = {2011},¶ month = {12},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=AiEscCXu7TIC},¶ isbn = {9781447217473, 1447217470},¶}

@book{stevenPinker/TheLanguag,

author = {Steven Pinker},¶ title = {The Language Instinct},¶ publisher = {Penguin UK},¶ year = {2003},¶ month = {2},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=UtFqXQosVP0C},¶ isbn = {9780141929682, 0141929685},¶}

@misc{mikeRobertsPMSamwell/Avisualpro,

author = {Mike Roberts and P M Samwell},¶ title = {A visual programming system for the development of parallel software},¶ publisher = {IEEE},¶ year = {1989},¶ pages = {75-80},¶} @unpublished{m.Roberts/Visualprog,

author = {M. Roberts},¶ title = {Visual programming for transputer systems},¶ year = {1990},¶ url = {https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/28547/},¶} @misc{laurenSchenkman/IntheBrain,

author = {Lauren Schenkman},¶ title = {In the Brain, Seven Is A Magic Number},¶ publisher = {Phys.org},¶ year = {2009},¶ url = {https://phys.org/news/2009-11-brain-magic.html},¶} @misc{10.48550/ARXIV.2003.08934,

author = {Ben Mildenhall and Pratul P. Srinivasan and Matthew Tancik and Jonathan T. Barron and Ravi Ramamoorthi and Ren Ng},¶ title = {NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis},¶ publisher = {arXiv},¶ year = {2020},¶ url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08934},¶ doi = {10.48550/ARXIV.2003.08934},¶ note = {Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV), Graphics (cs.GR), FOS: Computer and information sciences, FOS: Computer and information sciences},¶}

@misc{omarRizwan/Figure1.ht,

author = {Omar Rizwan},¶ title = {Figure 1. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1300565745147863040},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶} @misc{omarRizwan/Figure2.ht,

author = {Omar Rizwan},¶ title = {Figure 2. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1351319206692868097},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶} @misc{omarRizwan/Figure3.ht,

author = {Omar Rizwan},¶ title = {Figure 3. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1201359487661223936},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶} @misc{omarRizwan/Figure4.ht,

author = {Omar Rizwan},¶ title = {Figure 4. https://twitter.com/Sonja_Drimmer/status/1368966157106114561},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶} @misc{omarRizwan/Figure5.ht,

author = {Omar Rizwan},¶ title = {Figure 5. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1327901730235793411},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶} @misc{omarRizwan/Figure6.ht,

author = {Omar Rizwan},¶ title = {Figure 6. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1351377818769231875},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶} @misc{omarRizwan/Figure7.ht,

author = {Omar Rizwan},¶ title = {Figure 7. https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1073639143878492161},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶} @Book{michaelL.Benedikt/Cyberspace,

author = {Michael L. Benedikt},¶ title = {Cyberspace: First Steps},¶ publisher = {Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press},¶ year = {1991},¶ pages = {462},¶ note = {Computers},¶} @Incollection{michaelL.Benedikt/Cyberspace,

author = {Michael L. Benedikt},¶ title = {Cyberspace: Some Proposals},¶ publication = {Cyberspace: First Steps},¶ year = {1991},¶ pages = {119-224},¶} @Incollection{alanWexelblat/GivingMean,

author = {Alan Wexelblat},¶ title = {Giving Meaning to Place: Semantic Spaces},¶ publication = {Cyberspace: First Steps},¶ year = {1991},¶ pages = {255-271},¶} @Incollection{alanWexelblat/GivingMean,

author = {L. Benedikt Michael},¶ title = {Cyberspace: Some Proposals},¶ year = {1991},¶ pages = {119-224},¶} @book{paulDelanyGeorgeP.Landow/Hypermedia,

author = {Paul Delany and George P. Landow},¶ title = {Hypermedia and Literary Studies},¶ year = {1994},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=u_NFngEACAAJ},¶ isbn = {OCLC:748984347},¶} @book{georgeP.LandowProfessorGeorgePLandow/Hyper/text,

author = {George P. Landow and Professor George P Landow},¶ title = {Hyper/text/theory},¶ year = {1994},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=IxMKcd7tYg4C},¶ isbn = {0801848377, 9780801848377},¶} @book{merrittKopas/Videogames,

author = {Merritt Kopas},¶ title = {Videogames for Humans},¶ year = {2015},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=4sjPsgEACAAJ},¶ isbn = {0990452840, 9780990452843},¶} @book{fredTurner/FromCounte,

author = {Fred Turner},¶ title = {From Counterculture to Cyberculture},¶ publisher = {University of Chicago Press},¶ year = {2010},¶ month = {10},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=2SNFpgX_WigC},¶ isbn

= {9780226817439, 0226817431},¶}

@book{elizabethEvans/Transmedia,

author = {Elizabeth Evans},¶ title = {Transmedia Television},¶ publisher = {Taylor & Francis},¶ year = {2011},¶ month = {2},¶ url = {http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=JRojy3YsdLYC},¶ isbn = {9781136740824, 1136740821},¶}

@misc{yiliuShen-Burke/Screen1,

author = {Yiliu Shen-Burke},¶ title = {Screen 1},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {7},¶} @misc{yiliuShen-Burke/Screen2,

author = {Yiliu Shen-Burke},¶ title = {Screen 2},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {7},¶} @misc{yiliuShen-Burke/Screeen3,

author = {Yiliu Shen-Burke},¶ title = {Screeen 3},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {11},¶} @misc{10.1016/B978-0-12-814687-3.00001-6,

author = {Dipali Bansal and Rashima Mahajan},¶ title = {Introduction},¶ journal = {EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces},¶ publisher = {Elsevier},¶ year = {2019},¶ month = {3},¶ url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ b978-0-12-814687-3.00001-6},¶ doi = {10.1016/B978-0-12-814687-3.00001-6},¶}

@misc{adamWern/1,

author = {Adam Wern},¶ title = {1},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶} @misc{adamWern/2,

author = {Adam Wern},¶ title = {2},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶} @misc{adamWern/3,

author = {Adam Wern},¶ title = {3},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶} @misc{adamWern/4,

author = {Adam Wern},¶ title = {4},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {2},¶} @misc{domagojVidovic/DateChoose,

author = {Domagoj Vidovic},¶ title = {Date Chooser Solar System},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶} @misc{azlenElza/ThreadsInt,

author = {Azlen Elza},¶ title = {Threads Interface},¶ year = {2020},¶ month = {11},¶} @misc{brandelZachernuk/BobHornMur,

author = {Brandel Zachernuk},¶ title = {Bob Horn Mural},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {2},¶} @misc{adamWern/ExtractedD,

author = {Adam Wern},¶ title = {Extracted Dates},¶ year = {2022},¶ month = {3},¶}

@{references-end} @{glossary-start} @entry{

name = {.liquid},¶ description = {the document format for the Author Software. It is a macOS wrapper with JOSN and RTFD. This is a free and open standard optimised for VR. #Infrastructure Timeline: -},¶}

@entry{

name = {6DoF},¶ description = {Six degrees of freedom (6DOF) refers to the freedom of movement of a rigid body in three-dimensional space. Specifically, the body is free to change position as forward/backward (surge), up/down (heave), left/right (sway) translation in three perpendicular axes, combined with changes in orientation through rotation about three perpendicular axes, often termed yaw (normal axis), pitch (transverse axis), and roll (longitudinal axis). Three degrees of freedom (3DOF), a term often used in the context of virtual reality, refers to tracking of rotational motion only: pitch, yaw, and roll. Used by us in VR context.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_freedom

},¶}

@entry{

name = {academic},¶ description = {someone who reads academic documents, usually associated with an academic institution, but not necessarily. #Profession | Timeline: },¶}

@entry{

name = {ACM},¶ description = {From Wikipedia: “The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_Computing_Machinery ACM’s ‘Hypertext’ Conference piloted Visual-Meta in 2021. #Institution. #Timeline: 1947-. USA},¶}

@entry{

name = {Adam Wern},¶ description = {Working on spatial hypertext software.},¶} @entry{

name = {Adam},¶ alt-name1 = {Adam Wern},¶ description = {Future Text Lab collborator.},¶} @entry{

name = {Addressability},¶ description = {refers to how something can refer to something else. In the digital world this primarily means in a local file structure and a server based network. In academia is can refer to citation or references. In the physical world it can refer to a formal location layout, such as a flat so and so in house so and so, as well as co-ordinates. It can also man relative addressing, such as saying take a left after the third yellow house.

#dougconcept #term},¶} @entry{

name = {Adobe},¶ description = {“originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware[3] and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the creation and publication of a wide range of content, including graphics, photography, illustration, animation, multimedia/video, motion pictures, and print.” https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Adobe_Inc.

Founded by: John Warnock and Charles Geschke. #institution. #timeline: December 1982.},¶} @entry{

name = {AI},¶ description = {‘Artificial intelligence’ is “intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Artificial_intelligence

#Technology. Timeline: 20th century-. Keywords: ML. Machine Learning.},¶} @entry{

name = {Alan Laidlaw},¶ description = {https://twitter.com/alanlaidlaw},¶} @entry{

name = {Alan Laidlaw},¶ description = {https://twitter.com/alanlaidlaw #person. Timeline: },¶}

@entry{

name = {anaphora},¶ description = {“the use of a word referring back to a word used earlier in a text or conversation, to avoid repetition, for example the pronouns he, she, it, and they and the verb do in I like it and so do they.”

From Oxford Languges.

},¶}

@entry{

name = {Andreea Ion Cojocaru},¶ description = {Andreea Ion Cojocaru is a licensed architect and a software developer.

She is featured in issue 1.4 of our Journal: https://futuretextpublishing.com/journal/

#person. Timeline: -. Company: NUMENA. Lives in: Germany. Key interests VR / AR / AI, embodiment, cognitive neuroscience / cognition, architecture. Works with: Bob Horn, Claus Atzenbeck.},¶} @entry{

name = {Andy Campbell},¶ description = {is the Digital Director for the arts/media organisation One to One Development Trust and the founder/director of Dreaming Methods - an immersive digital storytelling studio.

A judge and speaker at the New Media Writing Prize since its inception in 2010, he has been producing electronic literature, digital art and experimental narrative games for over 25 years and has won many international awards. He is a speaker and workshop leader giving masterclasses in Unity and digitally delivered storytelling. Often called upon by international arts and culture organisations as well as universities across the globe, his work includes Lead Developer for the multi-award winning episodic digital novel Inanimate Alice and services to the Orient Foundation for Arts and Culture creating the world’s largest online archive of digitized Tibetan cultural resources. His most recent collaborative work Monoliths with Pilot Theatre and One to One Development Trust has been nominated for the Immersive Art/XR award at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival. https://twitter.com/dreamingmethods facebook.com/dreamingmethods https://www.instagram.com/dreamingmethods/

@entry{

name = {Anne-Laure Le Cunff},¶ description = {Founder of Ness Labs and contributor to The Future of Text volume 1. #person},¶}

@entry{

name = {Annie Murphy Paul},¶ description = {From an interview in GQ: “We make better use of our cognitive resources, says Paul, when we use them in conjunction with “extra-neural” resources: our body (embodied cognition), our environment (situated cognition), and the people around us (distributed cognition). The brain evolved to move the body, to navigate through space, to interact with other people,” says Paul.

https://www.gq.com/story/extended-mind-annie-murphy-paul Author of The Extended Mind.

#person. Timeline: -.},¶} @entry{

name = {Apple HMD},¶ description = {an as yet not released VR/AR headset which is expected to be announced late 2022, early 2023 and which will enlarge the market considerably. #Hardware | Timeline: 2023 | Company: Apple},¶}

@entry{

name = {Apurva Chitnis},¶ description = {Head Of Engineering, koodos labs. #person},¶}

@entry{

name = {AR},¶ description = {“Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

AR includes the real reality, as opposed to VR which does not.},¶} @entry{

name = {AR},¶ description = {includes the real reality, as opposed to VR which does not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality #Technology | Timeline: 20th century-},¶} @entry{

name = {ARC},¶ description = {Engelbart Concept: Augmentation Research Center, The name of Doug's lab at SRI where he proposed a system called H-LAM/T in 1962 and developed and in 1968 demonstrated NLS: oNLine System, his platform for shared knowledge work research, later renamed Augment and from which I decided on the name Author, since Author and Augment share etymological roots.

#Institution. Timeline: 1960s-1970s. USA},¶} @entry{

name = {Architectural Spaces},¶ description = {VR Represenations of landscapes, buildings, and interiors designs modeled after the physical world.},¶} @entry{

name = {Art},¶ description = {a category used here to help the reader identify artist and discussions around artworks.},¶} @entry{

name = {Augmented Text Company},¶ description = {The company which produces the Author software, Reader software and Liquid software. Director is Frode Hegland.

https://www.augmentedtext.info #Institution. Timeline: 9 March 2016-},¶} @entry{

name = {Author},¶ description = {means in the context of this work someone who writes a document, which includes academic papers and books. Can also refer to the Author software by The Augmented Text Company. Etymology: “mid-14c., auctor, autour, autor “father, creator, one who brings about, one who makes or creates” someone or something, from Old French auctor, acteor “author, originator, creator, instigator” (12c., Modern French auteur) and directly from Latin auctor “promoter, producer, father, progenitor; builder, founder; trustworthy writer, authority; historian; performer, doer; responsible person, teacher,” literally “one who causes to grow,” agent noun from auctus, past participle of augere “to increase,” from PIE root *aug- (1) “to increase.”” From https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Author},¶}

@entry{

name = {Barbara Tversky},¶ description = {Guest presenter at the Future Text Lab. Issue 1.1 on the 21st of January 2022.

Professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University and a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.Tversky specialises in cognitive psychology. Author of Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. Basic Books, 2019.

#person},¶} @entry{

name = {Benediktine Cyberspace},¶ description = {A 3-D visualization inspired by Michael Benedikt’s seminal text, “Cyberspace: First Steps”},¶ cite = {michaelL.Benedikt/Cyberspace},¶} @entry{

name = {BibTeX},¶ description = {is a specific format for conveying citation information within the LaTex environment, developed by Oren Patashnik and Leslie Lamport, released in 1985. The benefit of the system was to separate citation information from presentation style and it is human readable, though it slightly looks like code. It inspired the format of Visual-Meta and Visual-Meta contains a straight BibTeX section to allow the document which contains it to be cited.},¶}

@entry{

name = {Bob Horn},¶ alt-name1 = {Robert E. Horn},¶ description = {is a political scientist with a special interest in policy communication, social and organizational learning, and knowledge management (especially in sustainability and national security affairs), known for producing large scale murals.

#person. Timeline: - Lives in: California, USA},¶} @entry{

name = {Bob Horn},¶ description = {Robert E. “Bob” Horn is a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. For 27 years, he was a Senior Researcher the Human Science and Technology Advanced Research Institute (H-STAR), Stanford University, where he worked with international task forces and governments on wicked problems an social messes. He has taught at Harvard and Columbia universities and is the author/editor of ten books.

He produces large scale murals. www.bobhorn.us},¶}

@entry{

name = {Bob Stein},¶ description = {is the director of the Institute for the Future of the Book

He founded The Voyager Company in 1985, the first commercial multimedia CD-ROM publisher, and The Criterion Collection in 1984, a collection of definitive films on digital media with in-depth background information (including the first films with recorded audio commentary). Worked with Alan Kay at the Atari Research Group on various electronic publishing projects. Currently works on The Tapestry Project.

#person. Timeline: 20 April 1946-},¶} @entry{

name = {Book},¶ description = {a published work, on any substrate, inclduing paper or digital.

Generally longer than a ‘paper’ but in terms of digital work, there is little technical difference, the difference is mostly social.},¶} @entry{

name = {Brandel Zachernuk},¶ description = {AR / VR Creative technologist by day, digitally-embodied cognition enthusiast by night!

https://youtu.be/2Nc5COrVw24?t=879 https://twitter.com/zachernuk https:// www.youtube.com/channel/UCOP9cT-IwB6oxAcfvS1x_ZQ https://futuretextlab.info/tag/bybrandel/ http://www.zachernuk.com/

#Person. Timeline: -. Lives in: California, USA.},¶} @entry{

name = {Caitlin Fisher},¶ description = {is professor and Chair, Cinema and Media Arts and Director, Augmented Reality Lab, Director, Immersive Storytelling Lab, School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, York University

President, Electronic Literature Organization

Works with AR and VR and electronic literature, future cinema, emerging technology. #person. Timeline: -},¶}

@entry{

name = {Canada},¶ description = {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada #Location},¶}

@entry{

name = {Chalktalk},¶ description = {Chalktalk is a digital presentation and communication language in development at New York University's Future Reality Lab. Using a blackboard-like interface, it allows a presenter to create and interact with animated digital sketches in order to demonstrate ideas and concepts in the context of a live presentation or conversation.},¶}

@entry{

name = {citation},¶ description = {In this work, the term’ citation’ is both the ‘citation’ mention in the body of the document, and its corresponding ‘references’ entry for the source material in the Reference Appendix at the end of the document, though for the sake of clarity I will mainly use ‘citation’ to refer to the in-body half and ‘reference’ for the entry of the source in the References section.

#term

},¶}

@entry{

name = {Claus Atzenbeck},¶ description = {is a cocurator of The Future of Text Symposium.

He holds a professor position at Hof University, Germany and is leading the Visual Analytics research group at the university’s Institute of Information Systems.

He served as general co-chair of the 30th Anniversary ACM Hypertext Conference 2019 in Hof, Germany (https://human.iisys.de/ht2019/, 7 @ACMHT), is co-organizer of the HUMAN workshop series (https:// human.iisys.de/human/, 7 @HUMAN_HT), and the initiator of the Historic Hypertext Project (https://human.iisys.de/hist_HT/, 7 @hist_HT).

http://www.atzenbeck.de https://twitter.com/clausatz https://www.iisys.de

#person. Timeline: . Born: Germany. Lives in: Germany. Research Interests: Hypermedia including spatial and navigational structures, spatial and temporal parsing for spatial hypertexts, and hypertext narratives. A specific focus of his work is on intelligent user interfaces for visual analytics.},¶}

@entry{

name = {Co-Evolution},¶ description = {Engelbart Concept: Most capabilities are improved, or augmented, by many interdependent technical and non-technical elements, of which tools make up only a small part: On one hand, there is the human system, which includes paradigms, organizations, procedures, customs, methods, language, attitudes, skills, knowledge, training and so on- all of which all exists within the basic perceptual and motor capabilities of the human being. On the other hand, there is the tool system, which includes media, computers, communications systems etc. Together, they comprise the augmentation system.

#dougconcept #term},¶} @entry{

name = {Cognition},¶ description = {“is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition},¶}

@entry{

name = {concept},¶ alt-name1 = {defined concept},¶ alt-name2 = {defined concepts},¶ description = {is, in the context of this book, any text which is defined by an author.

This is as opposed to inferred concept.

Also aView in Author and in Reader (with Visual-Meta) to show all named entities (and headings). #term},¶}

@entry{

name = {CRS},¶ description = {(Commercial Resupply Services) are a series of flights awarded by NASA for the delivery of cargo and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) on commercially operated spacecraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Resupply_Services},¶}

@entry{

name = {Cyberspace},¶ description = {“The term "cyberspace" first appeared in the visual arts in the late 1960s, when Danish artist Susanne Ussing (1940-1998) and her partner architect Carsten Hoff (b. 1934) constituted themselves as Atelier Cyberspace.” Used in this context to mean a digital world, not necessarily in VR or AR.},¶}

@entry{

name = {Cynthia Haynes},¶ description = {is former Director of Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design Ph.D program and currently Professor of English at Clemson University.

Her research interests are rhetoric, composition, multimodal pedagogy, virtual worlds, VR, critical theory, computer games studies, and the rhetoric of war and terrorism. Her recent book, The Homesick Phone Book: Addressing Rhetoric in the Age of Perpetual Conflict (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016) won the 2017 Rhetoric Society of America annual book prize. She is currently working on a book, Unalienable Rites: The Architecture of Mass Rhetoric.

She is, along with Jan Holmevik, member of the Kairos Editorial Board and co-founders of the journal's electronic partner LinguaMOO. #person. Timeline: -. Lives in: Clemson, South Carolina, USA.},¶}

@entry{

name = {DALL-E},¶ description = {DALL-E (stylized as DALL·E) and DALL-E 2 are machine learning models developed by OpenAI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions. The name is a portmanteau of the names of animated robot Pixar character WALL-E and the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DALL-E https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ #technology. AI. Machine Learning. ML.},¶}

@entry{

name = {Daniel Dennett},¶ description = {is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett #person Timeline: 28 March 1942-},¶} @entry{

name = {Deena Larsen},¶ description = {is a new media and hypertext author involved in the creative electronic writing community since the 1980s. From USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deena_Larsen

#person. Timeline: 1964-},¶} @entry{

name = {Dene Grigar},¶ description = {is a cocurator of The Future of Text Symposium.

PhD, Director of the Electronic Literature Lab; Managing Director and Curator of ELO’s The NEXT.

Contributed to this book with Richard Snyder.

#person. Timeline: -. Interests: Electronic Literature.},¶} @entry{

name = {Distance-Independent Millimeters},¶ alt-name1 = {DMM},¶ description = {Google researchers needed a way to design screens that could be easily read at any distance. To help solve this, they came up with "Distance-Independent Millimeters" or DMMs. A VR and AR term.

More detail at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES9jArHRFHQ #term

},¶}

@entry{

name = {DOI},¶ description = {‘Document Object Identifiers’

An effort to make addressing academic documents via the web more robust.

Used in Author software to let the user paste a DOI to cite an academic document which is then sent to CrossRef to be parsed into BibTeX which is then used to create a full citation. #Infrastructure},¶}

@entry{

name = {Doug Engelbart},¶ description = {“He was an engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart's law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

@entry{

name = {Doug Engelbart},¶ alt-name1 = {Douglas Carl Engelbart},¶ alt-name2 = {Doug},¶ description = {From Wikipedia: “He was an engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart’s law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.”

His seminal paper was ‘Augmenting Human Intellect’, 1962.

#person. Timeline: 30 January 1925- 2 July 2013},¶} @entry{

name = {Eduardo Kac},¶ description = {is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking work in contemporary art and poetry.

In the early 1980s, Kac created digital, holographic and online works that anticipated the global culture we live in today, composed of ever-changing information in constant flux. In 1997 the artist coined the term "Bio Art," igniting the development of this new art form with works such as his transgenic rabbit GFP Bunny (2000) and Natural History of the Enigma (2009), which earned him the Golden Nica, the most prestigious award in the field of media art. GFP Bunny has become a global phenomenon, having been appropriated by major popular culture franchises such as Sherlock, Big Bang Theory and Simpsons, and by writers such as Margaret Atwood and Michael Crichton. In 2017, Kac created Inner Telescope, a work conceived for and realized in outer space with the cooperation of French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. Kac’s singular and highly influential career spans poetry, performance, drawing, printmaking, photography, artist's books, early digital and online works, holography, telepresence, bio art, and space art. Kac has also authored or edited several books, including Telepresence and Bio Art -- Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots (University of Michigan Press, 2005). Kac’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as New Museum, New York; Pompidou Center, Paris; MAXXI-Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; and Seoul Museum of Art, Korea. Kac's work has been showcased in biennials such as Venice Biennale, Italy; Yokohama Triennial, Japan; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Bienal de Habana, Cuba. His works are in major collections such as Museum of Modern Art-MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Museum Les Abattoirs—Frac Occitanie Toulouse, France; Valencian Institute of Modern Art-IVAM, Spain; Museum ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; and Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo, among others. Kac was elected as full member to the IAF (International Astronautical Federation) Technical Activities Committee for the Cultural Utilisation of Space (ITACCUS).

#person. Timeline: -. 1962 -. Born: Brazil. Lives in: USA .},¶} @entry{

name = {Egypt},¶ description = {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt #Location},¶}

@entry{

name = {Electronic Literature},¶ description = {“Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from computation", "work that could only exist in the space for which it was developed/written/coded—the digital space”.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_literature},¶}

@entry{

name = {ESA},¶ description = {(European Space Agency) is an intergovernmental organisation of 22 member states dedicated to the exploration of space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency},¶}

@entry{

name = {Extrinsic},¶ description = {Attributes of an object that are represented visually though that object’s spatial position in a coordinate system represening the domain of their possible values.},¶ cite =

{michaelL.Benedikt/Cyberspace},¶} @entry{

name = {Fabien Benetou},¶ description = {Prototyping - European Parliament Innovation lab WebXR consultant - Former UNICEF Innovation Fund WebXR technical advisor. VR prototypist. https://twitter.com/utopiah https://fabien.benetou.fr

#person. Timeline: 6 November 1982-},¶} @entry{

name = {Fermat},¶ description = {is a spatial canvas where every element is programmable by the end user. Users can create their own tools and share them with every other user via a public toolbox. Recently, we discovered that the most transformative tools built on top of Fermat were using Artificial Intelligence.

(We're bringing back HyperCard!). A tool for thought. https://fermat.ws

#Software. Timeline: -. Keywords: AI. GPT-3. Stable Diffusion.},¶} @entry{

name = {flatland},¶ description = {a semi-humorous term we use to refer to traditional displays, as opposed to the augmented environments of VR and AR. We feel that it is important to be able to move data, including metadata between these environments.},¶}

@entry{

name = {Folding},¶ description = {Folding of a document into a table of contents is enabled through Visual-Meta.},¶} @entry{

name = {Frode Hegland},¶ alt-name1 = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶ description = {is cohost of the Future of Text Symposium.

Director of The Augmented Text Company where he designed the macOS Author word processor, Reader PDF viewer and the Liquid software. https://www.augmentedtext.info/ Editor of the 'The Future of Text' series of books and The Future of Text Journal.

Designed Visual-Meta.

His mentor was Doug Engelbart. Greatly influenced by his friend Ted Nelson.

PhD from the University of Southampton. Advisors Wendy Hall, Les Carr and David Millard. #person. #Timeline: Born 2 June 1968-. Born in: Bergen, Norway. Lives in: London, UK.},¶} @entry{

name = {Future Reality Lab},¶ description = {New York University's Future Reality Lab.

https://frl.nyu.edu

},¶}

@entry{

name = {Future Text Lab},¶ description = {a group of people who meet to work on the future of text. Active members currently include Vint Cerf, Adam Wern, Fabien Benetou, Bob Horn, Alan Laidlaw, Mark Anderson, Peter Wasilko and Frode Hegland.},¶}

@entry{

name = {Future Text Lab},¶ description = {A lab dedicated to studying how working with knowledge, particularly text, can be done effectively in VR/AR/Metaverse. We host Guest presenters and publish a Journal which is part of The Future of Text series.

https://futuretextlab.info #Institution. Timeline: - 2021},¶} @entry{

name = {Gavin Menichini},¶ description = {Guest presenter at the Future Text Lab. Issue 1.2 on the 25th of February 2022. Strategic Account Executive at the VR company Immersed. “Work Faster in VR”

https://immersed.com},¶} @entry{

name = {George Lakoff},¶ description = {is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff #person Timeline: 24 May 1941

},¶}

@entry{

name = {Gerard Serra},¶ description = {Gerard Serra Interested in augmenting human creativity and AI

},¶}

@entry{

name = {Germany},¶ description = {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany #Location},¶}

@entry{

name = {Glossary},¶ description = {means, in the context of this work, a specific user or editor list of definitions for a specific document. Defined Concepts in the Author Software is exported as a Glossary.

This is different from a dictionary since dictionary definitions have general validity. Inspired by discussions with Doug Engelbart.},¶}

@entry{

name = {Glossary},¶ description = {In the context of my work and thinking, a glossary is a set of Defined Concepts which an author has created and which is then exported as a Glossary for the reader.

The secondary purpose is for the author to edit this Glossary to make sure it is coherent for export and it can then help a reader understand the author’s intentions. #term},¶}

@entry{

name = {Glossing},¶ description = {A way of elucidating parts of text. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=gloss},¶}

@entry{

name = {Google},¶ description = {“is an American multinational technology company that focuses on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

#Institution. Timeline: 1998-. USA},¶} @entry{

name = {GPT},¶ description = {“Generative Pre-trained Transformer” inclduinig GPT-2 and GPT-3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 Product of OpenAI.},¶}

@entry{

name = {GPT-3},¶ description = {‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3’ (GPT-3; stylized GPT·3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 “In a July 2020 review in The New York Times, Farhad Manjoo said that GPT-3's ability to generate computer code, poetry, and prose is not just "amazing", "spooky", and "humbling", but also "more than a little terrifying". https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0362-4331

Timeline: 11 June 2020-. Keywords: Deep Learning. AI. ML. Machine Learning.},¶} @entry{

name = {HMD},¶ description = {Head Mounted Display for use in VR or AR. #Hardware | Timeline: },¶}

@entry{

name = {HTML},¶ description = {“The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML A technology we are also using, along with PDF.},¶}

@entry{

name = {hypertext},¶ description = {a term invented by Ted Nelson for interactive and connected digital text.},¶} @entry{

name = {Immersed},¶ description = {Immersed is a virtual reality product, working productivity software for virtual offices. https://immersed.com},¶}

@entry{

name = {Intrinsic},¶ description = {Attribute of a data object that are not represented by that object’s spatial position in a given visualization but which may be represented by its size, shape, color, transparence, or other positionally independent visualization technique.},¶ cite = {michaelL.Benedikt/Cyberspace},¶}

name = {Ismail Serageldin},¶ description = {is a long time collaborator of the Future of Text Symposium. Founding Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) and was Vice President of the World Bank. #person. Timeline: 1944-. Born: Egypt.},¶}

@entry{

name = {ISS},¶ description = {(International Space Station) is the largest modular space station currently in low Earth orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station},¶}

@entry{

name = {Jack Kausch},¶ description = {is an academic whose research interests are in linguistics, ontologies and the semantic web, embeddings and the history of writing. He is a PhD student at the Western University of Ontario in Canada.

His advisor is Kamran Sedig.

He works as a data labeller for OpenAI and is interested in AI.

#person. Timeline: 14 October 1993-. Born in: Ann Arbor, Michigan. Lives in: Ontario, Canada.},¶} @entry{

name = {Jacob Hazelgrove},¶ description = {is the programmer for the Augmented Text Company for Frode Hegland, including Author and Reader, as well as imlementor of Visual-Meta export from Author and import and interaction in Reader.

#Person | Timeline: -},¶} @entry{

name = {Jad Esber},¶ description = {Guest presenter at the Future Text Lab.

CEO of koodos and an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard. https://twitter.com/Jad_AE},¶}

@entry{

name = {Jan Holmevik},¶ alt-name1 = {Jan Rune Holmevik},¶ description = {is Associate Professor of English and Special Advisor to the Vice President for Information Technology & CIO, as well as Past President of the Faculty Senate at Clemson University.

PhD in Humanistic Informatics from the University of Bergen, Norway and a Master’s degree in the history of technology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

He specializes in Interactive and Social Media and conducts research in game design, game culture, digital literacy, social media, visual communication, humanistic informatics, information design, data visualization, social media forensics, transmedia, and electracy.

http://t.co/7OV4voInkm https://twitter.com/holmevik #person. Timeline: -},¶}

@entry{

name = {Jaron Lanier},¶ description = {“American computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. Considered a founder of the field of virtual reality.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

VR pioneer.

#Person. Timeline: 3 May 1960- . Born: NY USA},¶} @entry{

name = {Kalev Leetaru},¶ description = {is an American internet entrepreneur, academic, and senior fellow at the George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science Center for Cyber & Homeland Security in Washington, D.C. USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDELT_Project https://blog.gdeltproject.org/web-summit-2017-video/ #person. Timeline: -.},¶}

@entry{

name = {Ken Perlin},¶ alt-name1 = {Kenneth H. Perlin},¶ description = {is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, founding director of the Media Research Lab at NYU, director of the Future Reality Lab at NYU, and the Director of the Games for Learning Institute.

B.A. degree in Theoretical Mathematics from Harvard University. M.S. and PhD in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. from the same institution. He developed or was involved with the development of techniques such as Perlin noise, real-time interactive character animation, and computer-user interfaces. He is best known for the development of Perlin noise and Simplex noise, both of which are algorithms for realistic-looking Gradient noise. “Received an Academy Award for the development of Perlin noise. He had introduced this technique with the goal to produce natural-appearing textures on computer- generated surfaces for motion picture visual effects, while working on the Walt Disney Productions' 1982 feature film TRON for which he had developed a large part of the software.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Perlin Research interests include graphics, animation, multimedia and science education, VR and AR.

#person. Timeline: -},¶} @entry{

name = {Liquid Information},¶ alt-name1 = {liquid},¶ description = {Frode Hegland’s philosophy of interactive computing.

Developed while a student in New York, the fundamentals are removing barriers to rich interaction. Later influenced and expanded by the work of his mentor Doug Engelbart and fleshed out in discussions with Sarah Walton. https://www.liquidinformation.org},¶}

@entry{

name = {LiSA},¶ description = {Software by Frode Hegland, featuring the voice of Janine Earl. Discontinued: http://www.liquid.info/lisa/},¶}

@entry{

name = {Livia Polanyi},¶ description = {is also a contributor to the first volume of The Future of Text. #person},¶}

@entry{

name = {Lorenzo Bernaschina},¶ description = {is a software engineer.

Founder of Gems, a PKM SaaS to visually manage notes with the help of AI. Interested in tools for thought, human-computer interaction, and everything related to mind- expanding technology. Master’s degree in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence from Politecnico di Milano. Full-stack developer (MEAN/MERN stack + iOS).

#person. Timeline: 3 July 1995-. From Lake Como, Italy.},¶} @entry{

name = {Machine learning},¶ description = {Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks.

A type of Artificial Intelligence (AI). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning #Technology. Timeline: 20th century-.},¶} @entry{

name = {manuscript},¶ description = {the authoring format, such as Microsoft Word, which is then either shared as-is, and stays editable, or is exported to be published in a publish format, such as PDF. #term},¶}

@entry{

name = {Map},¶ description = {In this context, a view in the Author software.

@entry{

name = {Mark Anderson},¶ description = {is a cocurator of The Future of Text Symposium.

Publications & datasets: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=jn8crEAAAAAJ Other public resources: https://www.acrobatfaq.com

PhD in Web Science from the University of Southampton: advisors Les Carr and Dave Millard A Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton, associated with its Web & Internet Science (WAIS) Lab. #person. Timeline: 1959 -. Lives in: Portsmouth, UK.},¶}

@entry{

name = {Mark Anderson},¶ description = {Independent researcher in Hypertext and Knowledge systems. Associated with the Web & Internet Science (WAIS) Lab at Southampton University. Mark was heavily involved in the technical specification and ACM launch of Visual-Meta.

Mark has a background in organisational structure, knowledge, process change and data interchange. Co-Editor of the Journal.},¶}

@entry{

name = {Marvin Minsky},¶ description = {was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky

#person Timeline: 9 August 1927 – 24 January 2016},¶} @entry{

name = {Mesopotamia},¶ description = {a historical region within the Tigris–Euphrates river system in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent where early writing developed (in parallel to, or influenced by/influencing Egyptian writing), including the use of colophons.},¶}

@entry{

name = {Meta},¶ description = {is a large social media company which is focusing on what they term the ‘metaverse’. Formerly called Facebook.

https://about.facebook.com

#Institution. Timeline: 4 February 2004-.},¶} @entry{

name = {metadata},¶ description = {information about other information, in the case of documents, this can include structural information (headings for example), biblio.},¶} @entry{

name = {Metaverse},¶ description = {From Wikipedia: “A metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection” “The term metaverse was coined in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse

@entry{

name = {Mez Breeze},¶ description = {is an Expert and Innovator of contemporary digital culture.

Since the early 1990’s, Mez Breeze has published over 300 seminal works including award-winning electronic based writing, Virtual Reality literature, Artificial Intelligence artworks/projects, books, games, and other genre- defying output all while teaching and supporting digital art and electronic literature. In April 2022, Mez’s Artificial Intelligence Artwork ‘Post Glee[son] - Outside [R]’ (created through digitally stitching GauGAN and VQGAN+CLIP output) made the finals of the 2022 Goulburn Art Award. In July 2019, Mez won the 2019 Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award which: “…honors a visionary artist and/or scholar who has brought excellence to the field of electronic literature and has inspired others to help create and build the field.” Mez's projects are taught worldwide with her works residing in Collections as diverse as The World Bank, Cornell's Rose Goldsen Archive and the National Library of Australia. She currently serves as an Advisor to the Mixed Augmented Reality Art Research Organisation, an Editorial Board Member of the Digital Journal Thresholds, and is a Senior Research Affiliate of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab.

#person. Timeline: 1970-. Company: Mez Breeze Design. Lives in: Australia. Key Interests: AI. VR. XR.},¶}

name = {Michael Roberts},¶ description = {is a Scientist Mike Roberts currently resides in the Santa Cruz Mountains, California, USA.

After moving the US, he began work on tools for interactive, creative, computer-based media, specifically targeting computer graphics, multimedia, augmented and virtual realities. His work has influenced the technical and business direction of many US-based fortune 500 companies including Xerox, Autodesk, Progress Software, IPS/Motorola as well as prominent Japanese companies like DNP.

Prior to founding ConstuctiveLabs, his current metaverse company, he recently spent 9.5 years at renowned research lab Xerox PARC, where he worked on projects including conversational agents, contextual and artificial intelligence, and AR / VR. His interests in tool-making for creatives are informed by studies in traditional tool ecosystems and slow food production.

Founder of Constructivelabs. #person. },¶}

@entry{

name = {Murals},¶ alt-name1 = {mural},¶ description = {This is a special entry to experiment with layouts.},¶} @entry{

name = {NIC},¶ description = {Doug Engelbart concept: Networked Improvement Community “Consider an "Improvement Community" (IC) as collectively engaged in improving an agreed-upon set either of individual capabilities, or of collective group capabilities-e.g. a professional society. Let's introduce a new category, a "Networked Improvement Community" (NIC): an IC that is consciously and effectively employing best-possible DKR (Dynamic Knowledge Repository) development and usage.”

(augmenting society's collective IQ).},¶} @entry{

name = {NLS},¶ description = {From Wikipedia: “NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system developed in the 1960s. Designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the NLS system was the first to employ the practical use of hypertext links, the mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, presentation programs, and other modern computing concepts. It was funded by ARPA (the predecessor to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), NASA, and the US Air Force.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system)

SRI sold NLS to Tymshare in 1977 and renamed it Augment.},¶} @entry{

name = {Norway},¶ description = {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway #Location},¶}

@entry{

name = {NYU},¶ description = {(New York University) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_University},¶} @entry{

name = {Omar Rizwan},¶ description = {Contributor to the Journal.

Omar has been interested in new computer interfaces and new ways of programming (aren't these the same thing?). He has worked at Dynamicland, at Stripe, and at Khan Academy. "i am determined to move beyond this way of interacting with systems"

Among other things, I'm the creator of Screenotate, a tool for macOS and Windows which captures the text and origin (URL, window title, ...) whenever you take a screenshot. https://screenotate.com/

https://twitter.com/rsnous https://omar.website

},¶}

@entry{

name = {Open AI},¶ description = {is an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc.

Products: DALL-E, GPT-3. GPT-2. OpenAI Gym https://openai.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI},¶} @entry{

name = {OpenAI},¶ description = {is an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc.

Products: GPT-1. GPT-2. GPT-3

https://openai.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI},¶} @entry{

name = {PDF},¶ description = {‘Portable Digital Format’. Developed by Adobe. Now free with no license restrictions. It is a print to digial medium with few digital affoardances which my work on Visual-Meta expands to allow for users to interact with the document in useful ways, while staying compatibel with the basic PDF format.

#Infrastructure. Timeline: Introduced 15 June 1993-.},¶} @entry{

name = {Peter Wasilko},¶ description = {is an Attorney, Programmer, and Indepedent Scholar.

#person. Timeline: -. Lives in: New York, New York, USA.},¶} @entry{

name = {Pol Baladas},¶ description = {is the CEO and Artisan at Fermat, a computational medium where people can build their own tools and use tools built by others (we're basically bringing back HyperCard). Fermat is made inside Batou.xyz, an industrial research lab that rethinks how people interact with tools, computers and ideas. Interested in tools, media, thought and a better future. Computing philosopher and charlatan. Interested in Tools, thought, interfaces and a better future.

https://twitter.com/polbaladas #person. Timeline: -},¶} @entry{

name = {Quest 2},¶ description = {The headset we currently use the most in the Future Text Lab. It sold more than Xbox in 2021 and next year we will see the Apple HMD which will enlarge the field of VR/AR even further. #Hardware | Timeline: 13 October 2020- | Company: Meta

},¶}

@entry{

name = {Reader Software},¶ description = {is a minimalist PDF viewer for macOS.

https://www.augmentedtext.info #Software. Timeline: 12 July 2019-},¶} @entry{

name = {references},¶ description = {is a list of all the citations a document uses, in an Appendix. In-Body citation, point to these References. This language is not fixed, it is sometimes used interchangeably with Bibliography but in my context a Bibliography is a list of work not expressly cited but which are relevant.

in this context ‘Reference’ with uppercase ‘R’ refers to the appendix in an academic document which lists cites sources. In contrast, the citation in the body of the document is referred to as in-body citation. A form of metadata.

#term},¶} @entry{

name = {Relative Dimension},¶ description = {A dimension capturing the ordering of data objects based on the pairwise application of a comparison function.},¶} @entry{

name = {Result Set},¶ description = {The set of data object satisfying a database search query.},¶} @entry{

name = {Richard Snyder},¶ description = {Electronic Literature Lab, Washington State University Vancouver. Contributed to this book with Dene Grigar.

#person},¶} @entry{

name = {Sam Brooker},¶ description = {I am an academic specialising in digital communication. His research explores the relationship between digital technologies & theories of literature and culture. Associate Professor of Digital Communications at Richmond American University London, UK.

#person. Timeline: -. Research interests: Digital cultures. Electronic literature. Book history. Digital humanities, Theories of authorship. Transmedia. Lives in: London, UK.},¶} @entry{

name = {Scott Rettberg},¶ description = {is professor of digital culture in the department of linguistic, literary, and aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Leader of the Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group. Director of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. Rettberg is the author or coauthor of novel-length works of electronic literature, combinatory poetry, and films including The Unknown, Kind of Blue, Implementation, Frequency, The Catastrophe Trilogy, Three Rails Live, Toxi*City, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project and others.

His creative work has been exhibited online and at art venues including the Venice Biennale, Santa Monica Museum in Barcelona, the Inova Gallery, Rom 8, the Chemical Heritage Foundation Museum, Palazzo dell Arti Napoli, Beall Center, the Slought Foundation, The Krannert Art Museum, and elsewhere. Cofounder and served as the first executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Literature Organization, where he directed major projects funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Rettberg served on the ELO board of directors from 2001-2015. Rettberg’s Electronic Literature (Polity, 2018) is the first comprehensive study of the history and genres of electronic literature. Rettberg was recently awarded a SAMKUL grant from Research Council of Norway to lead a four year research project “Extending Digital Narrative.” https://twitter.com/scottrettberg

#person. Timeline: 1970. Born: Norway. Lives in: Bergen, Norway.},¶} @entry{

name = {Search},¶ description = {Search in this context refers to instant search enabled by Liquid.},¶} @entry{

name = {Softspace},¶ description = {“Softspace is inventing a new kind of tool for thought for thinkers and makers using virtual and augmented reality.” A tool for thought.

https://soft.space

#Software | Timeline: -. Keywords: VR. AR.},¶} @entry{

name = {Spain},¶ description = {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spain #location. Timeline: -. },¶}

@entry{

name = {Spatial Computing},¶ description = {“was defined in 2003 by Simon Greenwold, as “human interaction with a machine in which the machine retains and manipulates referents to real objects and spaces”. With the advent of consumer VR, AR and mixed reality, companies use ‘spatial computing’ in reference to the practice of using physical actions (head and body movements, gestures, speech) as inputs for interactive digital media systems, with perceived 3D physical space as the canvas for video, audio, and haptic outputs. It is also tied to the concept of 'digital twins'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_computing

},¶}

@entry{

name = {SSTV},¶ description = {(Slow-Scan Television) is a picture transmission method, used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio in monochrome or color. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television},¶}

@entry{

name = {stable diffusion},¶ description = {is a deep learning, text-to-image model released by startup StabilityAI in 2022. Keywords: collective intelligence. augmented technology. AI.

#technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion https://stability.ai},¶} @entry{

name = {Stigmergy},¶ description = {(/ˈstɪɡmərdʒi/ STIG-mər-jee) is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy #concept

},¶}

@entry{

name = {Ted Nelson},¶ alt-name1 = {Theodor Holm Nelson},¶ description = {is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the term ‘hypertext’.

Presented at The Future of Text Symposium. #person. Timeline: 17 June 1937-.},¶} @entry{

name = {Text},¶ description = {is the basic ’stuff’ of this work.},¶} @entry{

name = {The Future of Text},¶ description = {Annual Symposium and Book Series (first volume published 2020) as well as community for fostering dialogue around the future of text which I started over a decade ago and which is often co-hosted or presented by Vint Cerf.

https://futuretextpublishing.com},¶} @entry{

name = {The Future of Text Symposium},¶ description = {is a series of symposia, books and Journal under the name ‘The Future of Text’ produced by the same people who run The Augmented Text Company. Co-presented by Frode Hegland, Vint Cerf and Ismail Serageldin. Curated by Dene Grigar, Claus Atzenbeck and Mark Anderson.

This is considered as level C of Doug Engelbart’s Three Levels of Activity. https://futuretextpublishing.com

#Event | Timeline: 2011-},¶} @entry{

name = {Tom Standage},¶ description = {Deputy Editor of The Economist and contributor to The Future of Text volume 1. #person},¶}

@entry{

name = {tool for thought},¶ description = {is both a book and a category of tools, primarily software tools, to augment how people think.

@entry{

name = {UK},¶ description = {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom #Location},¶}

@entry{

name = {Ukraine},¶ description = {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine #Location},¶}

@entry{

name = {University of Southampton},¶ description = {University in the UK. #Institution. Timeline: 1862-. Southampton, UK},¶}

@entry{

name = {USA},¶ description = {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States #Location},¶}

@entry{

name = {ViewSpec},¶ description = {Engelbart Concept: View Specifications for a user to see their work in different views. #dougconcept #term},¶}

@entry{

name = {Vint Cerf},¶ alt-name1 = {Vinton Gray Cerf},¶ alt-name2 = {Vinton G. Cerf},¶ description = {is cohost of the Future of Text Symposium.

Coinventor of the Internet, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. Chairman of the Marconi Society. Former executive at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and member of the Faculty of Stanford University. Fellow of IEEE, ACM, BCS, AAAS, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society. Member of the US National Academies of Engineering and Science and foreign member of the Royal Society and the Royal Swedish Engineering Society.

#person. Timeline: 23 June 1943-.},¶} @entry{

name = {Visual-Meta},¶ description = {An open and robust way to augment flat PDF documents to make them more interactive.

Frode Hegland’s PhD thesis. Realised in the Author software and Reader software by The Augmented Text Company. Intended to support Doug Engelbart’s notion of hyperdocuments and xfiles. Inspired by the BibTeX format and the colophon in books.

http://visual-meta.info #Infrastructure},¶} @entry{

name = {VR},¶ description = {VR, ‘Virtual Reality’ is a technology whereby the user is visually immersed in a computer generated world. When this world allows the physical world to also appear as background, it is called AR ‘Augmented Reality’.

#Technology | Timeline: 20th century-},¶} @entry{

name = {Yiliu Shen-Burke},¶ description = {Yiliu Shen-Burke is a designer and coder.

https://twitter.com/yiliu_shenburke https://www.yiliu.sh

He is featured in issue 1.4 of our Journal: https://futuretextpublishing.com/journal/ #Person. Timeline: - Keywords: tool for thought. Spatial computing.},¶}

@{glossary-end} @{document-headings-start} @heading{

name = {Foreword},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {by Vint Cerf},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Welcome},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {by Frode Hegland},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Our work in VR},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {This Book as Augmented PDF},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Editor’s Introduction},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Andreea Ion Cojocaru},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Andreea Ion Cojocaru},¶} @heading{

name = {Borges and Vygotsky Join Forces for BOVYG, Latest Virtual Reality Start-up},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Abstract},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Body},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Author’s Notes},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Journal Guest Presentation ‘An Architect Reads Cognitive Neuroscience and Decides to Start an Immersive Tech Company’ : 13 May 2022},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Q&A},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Andy Campbell},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Andy Campbell},¶} @heading{

name = {Dreaming Methods - Creating Immersive Literary Experiences},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Presentation (pre-recorded for the Symposium)},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Annie Murphy Paul},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Annie Murphy Paul},¶} @heading{

name = {Operationalizing the Extended Mind},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Apurva Chitnis},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Apurva Chitnis},¶} @heading{

name = {Journal : Public Zettelkasten},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶}

@heading{

name = {Limitations today},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Public Zettelkasten},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Implementation},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Challenges},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Barbara Tversky},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Barbara Tversky},¶} @heading{

name = {Journal Guest Presentation : Mind in Motion},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Q&A},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Bjørn Borud},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Bjørn Borud},¶} @heading{

name = {Time, speed and distance},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Computers and light speed},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Signal strength and distance},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {The Drake equation},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Our civilization},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Bob Horn},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Bob Horn},¶} @heading{

name = {Information Murals for Virtual Reality},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Introduction: my recent work},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {My role as synthesizer},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Examples of Information Murals},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Overwhelmed by complexity?},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Why am I here at this Symposium?},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Text as idea chunks with subheads},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Benefits of small idea chunks with subheads},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Transition to other offerings},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Assumption: improve human thinking},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {What can we do to move toward Einstein’s goal?},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Problem: Show and link context},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Show and link context…in Multiple Dimensions},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Problem: Show process visually},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Problem: build solid and supportive “scaffoldings for thinking”},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Offer of help},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Bibliography/Further Reading},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Bob Stein},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Bob Stein},¶} @heading{

name = {Journal Guest Presentation : 4 July 2022},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Screenshots},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Caitlin Fisher},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Caitlin Fisher},¶} @heading{

name = {Daveed Benjamin},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Daveed Benjamin},¶} @heading{

name = {Thoughts about Metadata},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Cynthia Haynes & Jan Rune Holmevik},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik},¶} @heading{

name = {Teleprompting Élekcriture},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Works Cited},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Deena Larsen},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Deena Larsen},¶} @heading{

name = {Access within VR: Opening the Magic Doors to All},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Dene Grigar & Richard Snyder},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Dene Grigar and Richard Snyder},¶} @heading{

name = {Metadata for Access: VR and Beyond},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Abstract},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Introduction: Proof of Concept},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {About The NEXT’s Extended Metadata Schema},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Applying ELMS to VR Narratives},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Final Thoughts},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Acknowledgements},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Bibliography},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Eduardo Kac},¶ level = {level1},¶ author = {Eduardo Kac},¶} @heading{

name = {Space Art: My Trajectory},¶ level = {level2},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Introduction},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Ágora: a holopoem to be sent to Andromeda},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Spacescapes},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Monogram},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {The Lepus Constellation Suite},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Lagoogleglyphs},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Inner Telescope},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Adsum, an artwork for the Moon},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{

name = {Conclusion},¶ level = {level3},¶ author = {Frode Alexander Hegland},¶} @heading{