tags: #lit --- Notes and highlights for The Future of Text: A 2020 Vision Hegland, Frode =============================================================================== --- ARTICLES -------- ### Highlight (yellow) - Chris Messina > Page 144 · Location 1827 The hashtag holds its gunpowder-potential as a quantum symbol of invitation, participation, or defiance. ### Highlight (yellow) - Chris Messina > Page 144 · Location 1836 And occasionally, a thousand voices cohere around a hashtag into a rising chorus to cut through the prattle: the sound of humanity’s tea kettle whistle shrieking, piercing torpidity with energy, light, awareness. ### Highlight (yellow) - Daniel M. Russell > Page 152 · Location 1930 In an earlier, less civilized age, making connections was the ability of the privileged class that had the time and leisure to read many texts, taking many notes, finding correlations, connections, and intertwinglings. \[Shneiderman, 2015\] ### Highlight (yellow) - Daveed Benjamin > Page 166 · Location 2108 In the future, sensemaking will be augmented. In the Ubiquitous Context future, wherever you are – online, in a virtual world, or in the real world you have access to deep layers of context. Every location, object, and idea has accessible contextual information through its connections into a universal knowledge map. The accessible context is the portion of the map that is currently most relevant the information directly connected to the focus of your attention. Through extended-reality, you use your attention (line of sight), gestures, and voice to navigate and interact with a rich, interactive digital overlay. Your overlay is a composite view of the relevant portion of the universal knowledge map filtered by your digital assistant based on your preferences, needs, and activities. [[Augmented sensemaking through ubiquitous context delivered by IoT connectivity and Heads Up Display]] ### Highlight (yellow) - Dave King > Page 170 · Location 2164 Wordplay is text’s past. Ideaplay is text’s future. When we can build poems from all we know and all we’ve learned, borrowing like good artists and stealing like great ones; ### Highlight (yellow) - David Johnson > Page 182 · Location 2277 Argumentz.com has some screens showing how such diagrams might be made into a puzzle or game, challenging the “reader” to place text “cards” in appropriate locations on an existing diagram. Legal regulations and statutes written in this format could assist a reader by displaying the legal conclusions that arise from particular combinations of facts. ### Highlight (blue) - David G. Lebow > Page 184 · Location 2300 In a sense, each discipline trains and enculturates its initiates in practices of sanctioned cognitive bias \[9\]. [[Paradigm shifts]] ### Highlight (yellow) - Derek Beaulieu > Page 202 · Location 2524 Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. ### Highlight (blue) - Elaine Treharne > Page 212 · Location 2617 A model that permits access to the holistic investigation of text has been developed by Stanford Text Technologies at https://texttechnologies.stanford.edu/. All texts are comprised of four principal components: intentionality + materiality + functionality +/—cultural value. This model asks: what did the producer intend in their communication; how did they produce that communication; what function does the text have in the real world; and what kind of value is attributed by society to that textual object? ### Highlight (yellow) - Élika Ortega > Page 215 · Location 2661 Indeed, the many new literary forms and genres that have emerged following the technological developments of the last four decades (text ad-venture, hypertext, interactive fiction, animated poetry, locative narratives, literary games, augmented reality poetry, etc.) speak not just of experimentation and innova-tion, but of a profound reimagination of the print codex and digital devices as con-veyors of literary text and meaning. ### Highlight (blue) - Élika Ortega > Page 215 · Location 2667 A particular manifestation of the still ongoing novelty years are print-digital literary works that meaningfully “bind” a codex with a digital application. I call this phenome-non “binding media”. A key characteristic of these works is that often their text hap-pens at the intersection of print and digital media rather than being different versions of it. Examples of this practice can be found as early as 1984 when Synapse and Brøderbund, two software companies, produced and published Robert Pinsky’s elec-tronic novel Mindwheel ### Highlight (yellow) - Ewan Clayton > Page 228 · Location 2821 Using voice alone we can create text without a keyboard; we can issue verbal commands to digital technology, biometric data is replacing the signature; Youtube videos are supplanting instruction booklets and some elements of education. Podcasts and audio books are edging into the space where text was used as entertainment. Sometimes, as with an app like Instagram, we communicate by sending pictures only, on other apps we reach out to each other simply by sharing music. ### Highlight (yellow) - Fred Benenson & Tyler Shoemaker > Page 235 · Location 2921 But should you wish to write across scripts in the spirit of Unicode’s original vision, you will encounter a problem: no one font package is large enough to contain the requisite address locations for all the characters that comprise Unicode. While most of the 1,114,112 code points it offers still sit empty, like vacant hotel rooms, even the 143,859 points Unicode has thus far assigned exceed what font packages can store. It is now too large to render into text. ### Highlight (yellow) - Fred Benenson & Tyler Shoemaker > Page 236 · Location 2928 We think this paradox is both a major obstacle and an opportunity. There are 970,253 unassigned code points remaining in Unicode—what happens when it assigns them? If the standard’s coverage of modern and historic scripts already makes it unwritable, what about new scripts? There is room for them, but will we be able to write them? How will text processing have to change to render all of Unicode now and to render future expansions to the standard? For that matter, what will these new Unicode characters be? ### Highlight (yellow) - Fred Benenson & Tyler Shoemaker > Page 237 · Location 2945 At present, we primarily understand Unicode to be a method of ensuring computers accurately transmit our messages. But it would be wrong to see the standard as merely that. Unicode is also an open semantic project, and in the future, the code points we will have assigned will tell readers how we once chose to speak. In this sense, the standard is an archive, a permanent ledger, a corpus representing the lexigraphic bones of our communications. When these bones become fossils, what do we want Unicode to have said about us? ### Highlight (blue) - Garrett Stewart > Page 244 · Location 3018 In Tajima’s tandem installation, under the title Negative Entropy, her abstract weaving is based on the original punch cards of the Jacquard loom, renowned forerunner of computer technology— ### Highlight (yellow) - Günter Khyo > Page 246 · Location 3040 Many of the exciting promises of (hyper)text and computing are still waiting to be rediscovered and fulfilled: knowledge workers blazing their trails through the masses of records, making connections between the seemingly unrelated, poets weaving stories in Xanaspace with its magnificently beaming links and researchers drawing interactive maps in networked information spaces. ### Highlight (yellow) - Gyuri Lajos > Page 249 · Location 3069 Wendy Hall remarked at the 2017 Future Of Text Symposium, Ted Nelson was right: we need two-way links, transclusion, and micropayments. In his vision “Everything is deeply intertwingled”, or as Charles Eames put it “eventually everything connects” and “the quality of the connections is the key to quality, per se”. ### Highlight (blue) - Gyuri Lajos > Page 249 · Location 3076 The two-way linked nodes span a “Knowledge Graph” created primarily for humans as “Semantically Linked Texts”, we call MindGraphs. They capture semantics much like Linked Data does for machines. ### Highlight (yellow) - Gyuri Lajos > Page 250 · Location 3086 Having a bridge to Linked Data facilitates “Weaving a Decentralized Semantic Web of (Personal) Knowledge”. MindGraph relies on OrbitDB’s peer to peer database technology. OrbitDB is built on top of IPFS (the InterPlanetary File System). IPFS is a new peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol powering the decentralized web. ### Highlight (blue) - Gyuri Lajos > Page 251 · Location 3109 Everything in MindGraph is anchored in (inter) personal federated HyperKnowledge Graphs and Linked Open Data. We aim to combine them to form a global, emergent, self-organizing decentralized “Conceptipedia”. ### Highlight (yellow) - Howard Rheingold > Page 257 · Location 3176 Howard Rheingold Language As Trance I would say that words, from the spoken to the written, change thought, by reducing a far more complex universe to that which can be funnelled into language. The first verse of the Tao te Ching. “The Tao that can be put into words is not the true Tao.” This, to me, was the fundamental lesson of psychedelics: Language is a marvelous tool for understanding and manipulating the universe by throwing a kind of grid or map over a highly complex cosmos. That grid or map can be use to navigate, understand, and manipulate. But language entrances us into believing and acting as if the universe is as simple as language can convey. Psychedelic experience brings one into direct contact with the complexities that can’t be shoehorned into words. ### Note - Howard Rheingold > Page 257 · Location 3181 Systems as reduction of complexity. Language as technology. ### Note - Howard Rheingold > Page 257 · Location 3182 Sza as aberrant salience of new relations as new entity. Dmt etc as expanded awareness of psychosis as psychedelic ### Highlight (yellow) - Ian Cooke > Page 259 · Location 3211 The “Library of the (near)Future” would need to provide or enable meaningful use of texts, through ensuring authenticity, confidence and preservation of context as well as the works themselves. ### Note - Ian Cooke > Page 259 · Location 3212 Infosec perspective of library collections ### Highlight (yellow) - Jane Yellowlees Douglas > Page 279 · Location 3472 Currently, suppositions about the increasing scarcity of deep reading have two significant flaws. First, this view, most prominently represented by Maryanne Wolf (2007, 2018, 2019), that argues neuroplasticity has biased our brains—now stimulated by smartphones, video games, and a barrage of digital stimuli—toward skim reading, the antithesis of the deep reading she sees as necessary to both learning and true engagement with texts. However, the studies Wolfe cites to support this view rely on readers using .pdf versions of print books or situations where the rewards for close reading over skimming were virtually non-existent. Second, this view also privileges a kind of attentional focus that has been historically rare and limited to well-educated and socio-economically privileged readers. ### Highlight (blue) - Jeremy Helm > Page 285 · Location 3542 The inspiration I’m working with here is the original vision for Hypertext\[2\] Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu, which has been called “First thought, best thought.”\[3\] ### Highlight (blue) - Jesse Grosjean > Page 290 · Location 3616 Imagine if Microsoft Word was built from day one around a Markdown like format. Imagine that your Facebook posts were a directory of plain text files. Add a file to create a post. Your Twitter feed just a text file–add a new line to create a new tweet. You might not use this escape hatch often, but it would add possibility. And I think that possibly could fundamentally change how authors today work and think in text. I think only with plain text on the filesystem do authors have full computing ownership over their writing. [[PKM longevity greatly supported by plain text files]] ### Highlight (blue) - John Armstrong > Page 306 · Location 3800 N Whitehead’s view that “That the actual world is a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities.” ### Note - John Armstrong > Page 306 · Location 3801 Process of becoming ### Highlight (blue) - Joris J. van Zundert > Page 313 · Location 3890 Separating a machine from its instructions to make it more versatile by feeding it some form of operating code, goes a considerable way back. At least as far as Ada Lovelace’s 1843 algorithm for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine (Petzold 2000:250–251) and the invention of the punched card operated Jacquard Loom in 1704 (Ceruzzi 2012:7–9), probably even beyond that. However, it was Alan Turing’s work, the Von Neumann architecture, and a score of related developments that eventually led to the introduction of the personal computer, which made code as a form of text suddenly far more pertinent to the lives of billions. ### Highlight (yellow) - Joris J. van Zundert > Page 317 · Location 3930 We used to manipulate symbols to create meaning on paper, we now also manipulate symbols to create action through machines both digital and mechanical. ### Highlight (yellow) - Ken Perlin > Page 339 · Location 4222 In the near future, people will put on a pair of cyber-glasses before they leave the house in the morning When they look at a tree or flower, or a beautiful building, they will be able to know instantly, should they so wish, its particular genus and variety, its age and country of origin, without needing to make a clumsy gesture like taking out their phone and pointing at the object in question. ### Highlight (blue) - Leslie Carr > Page 342 · Location 4256 Unsurprisingly, as the Web brought more forms of text to the attention of readers, people began to panic about information overload (access to too much information to be able to cope with individually) and then filter bubbles (access to not enough information to fairly represent all ideas globally). ### Highlight (blue) - Leslie Carr > Page 342 · Location 4263 This mass hypertext capability is amazing, but it is not the epistemological utopia that hypertext pioneers anticipated. The present of text has become an urgent problem of incomprehension, uncommunication, malignant disinformation and political polarisation. ### Highlight (blue) - Leslie Carr > Page 343 · Location 4276 To tackle the current problem of “fake news”, our social apps need to be substantially upgraded. Rather than make four reading choices per year, readers are being asked to make dozens of trust judgments per minute. Every time they read their social media timeline they need provenance support from AI and data science algorithms – network analyses, time series analysis, natural language processing, topic modelling and sentiment analysis. The future of text is reading between the lines. [[Support from AI to combat fake news]] ### Highlight (yellow) - Lori Emerson > Page 353 · Location 4396 Alan Kay’s 1970s vision of the computer as “meta medium” that not only provides us with “the ability to ‘read’ a medium \[which\] means you can access materials and tools created by others” but also gives us “the ability to ‘write’ in a medium \[which\] means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate.” And we can only write tools, and tools for tools, with an interface that is open, accessible, extensible. Surely this is the true meaning of “insanely great.” ### Note - Lori Emerson > Page 353 · Location 4399 Open text editing as obsidian interface of md text files ### Highlight (yellow) - Luc Beaudoin & Daniel Jomphe > Page 357 · Location 4445 Enough macOS apps already support linking APIs to render possible this new type of software: truly universal (URL-scheme agnostic) context-sensitive bookmarking and link management. ### Highlight (yellow) - Luc Beaudoin & Daniel Jomphe > Page 359 · Location 4461 We therefore strongly encourage all developers to ensure their software provide APIs and easily accessible user interfaces for getting and serving links to their data. ### Highlight (yellow) - Mark Baker > Page 372 · Location 4619 This is not to say that the ability to create sense experience artificially through pictures and movies is not also powerful. But its ability to call forth memory simply does not match that of language. It can sometimes achieve depth, but it fundamentally lacks breadth. The book is always better than the movie. ### Highlight (yellow) - Martin Tiefenthaler > Page 379 · Location 4713 most text and therefore most reading behaviour has shifted to an extreme of brevity that might appear to be highly efficient, but is actually detrimental to in-depth discourse and damaging to thinking beings. A text may, should, must and indeed will be long in order to qualify as text. ### Highlight (yellow) - Michele Canzi > Page 388 · Location 4809 Hence, there are only two ways to play the game: either you make a tiny bit of money from a lot of people (traditionally, through advertising) or you make a lot of money from a handful of folks. This generally entails subscriptions. ### Highlight (yellow) - Michael Nutley > Page 391 · Location 4847 Video is great for explaining some things; plastering, for example. It’s much less great for complex, detailed ideas. ### Highlight (yellow) - Michael Nutley > Page 391 · Location 4852 But because people read faster than they speak, the emphasis on short content combined with the growth of video meant the amount of information being conveyed in each piece of content dropped still further. ### Highlight (yellow) - Mike Zender > Page 395 · Location 4898 Text originally meant “woven together.” ### Highlight (yellow) - Pip Willcox > Page 440 · Location 5522 This feeling of crisis, common to the best of our knowledge in every age of sociotechnical evolution, permeates everything: we fear that our machines will overpower our minds as they can our bodies. ### Highlight (yellow) - Shane Gibson > Page 477 · Location 5977 Diluting accurate information can be accomplished by polluting public consciousness with disinformation. By decreasing the signal to noise ratio in this manner, the ordinary public is unable to effectively differentiate what is objectively true and then the mind retreats to where it is most at ease: the seeking of information which confirms preconceived ideas. ### Highlight (yellow) - Shuo Yang > Page 481 · Location 6033 As described by Bret Victor in his 2011 essay “Explorable Explanations”, the future of documents allows the reader to play with the author’s assumptions and analyses, and see the consequences. ### Highlight (yellow) - Shuo Yang > Page 482 · Location 6036 I would design the Future Of Text to have multiple levels of details. A content can be read in multiple forms such as overview, outlines, and detailed view. A reader can zoom in and out between multiple levels and always see the big picture. ### Note - Shuo Yang > Page 482 · Location 6038 Britannica already does this. Good role for ai ### Highlight (yellow) - Shuo Yang > Page 482 · Location 6038 I would design the Future Of Text computationally. It can answer questions directly from an open knowledge base such as Wolfram Alpha. [[Text as computational open graph and levels of details]] ### Note - Shuo Yang > Page 482 · Location 6039 Prolog reasoning and stem graphs ### Highlight (pink) - Simon Buckingham Shum > Page 484 · Location 6068 We shifted to the Web, developing a series of collaborative tools (ClaiMaker; Cohere; Evidence Hub) for making meaningful ‘claims’ about the connections between ideas in documents (Buckingham Shum, 2007; 2008). ### Highlight (yellow) - Simon Buckingham Shum > Page 485 · Location 6073 structuring thought as semiformal hypertextual networks is a new literacy. ### Highlight (blue) - Simon Buckingham Shum > Page 486 · Location 6099 Developing what I believe to be the world’s first tool to give instant feedback on reflective writing has been exciting, but we’ve only scratched the surface. Our AcaWriter tool can give helpful prompts to writers seeking to learn other genres of writing too, recognising whether they are making rhetorical moves that are canonical hallmarks (Knight, et al. 2020). ### Highlight (blue) - Stephan Kreutzer > Page 497 · Location 6234 DIKW pyramid “Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom” describes the hierarchy of the encoding of meaning in information systems. ### Highlight (pink) - Stephan Kreutzer > Page 499 · Location 6259 Microsoft Word is a restrictively licensed software application in the tradition of earlier word processor packages. Its main purpose is to allow digital editing of short corporate or personal letters for print. It isn’t a writing tool nor designed for writing books, it’s not for typesetting or desktop publishing. ### Highlight (yellow) - Stevan Harnad > Page 507 · Location 6351 (Registry of Open Access Repositories, ROAR). ### Highlight (pink) - Theodor Holm Nelson > Page 521 · Location 6579 (Various prototypes may be seen in Youtube videos “Xanadu Basics 1a” and “Xanadu Basics 2”). ### Highlight (blue) - Tiago Forte > Page 537 · Location 6729 Imagine a future where instead of lending someone a book, you lend them your bookmarks – the notes, annotations, and references you’ve added. What you are really sharing is a collective conversation, the cumulative strata of many layers of marginalia built up through the skillful application of attention. ### Highlight (yellow) - Tiago Forte > Page 537 · Location 6740 Embracing the digital book, Craig Mod The Technium: What Books Will Become Why Information Grows tweetstorm Post-Artifact Books and Publishing, by Craig Mod Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto: A Collection of Essays from the Bleeding Edge of Publishing ### Highlight (blue) - Tom Butler-Bowdon > Page 554 · Location 6968 The dysfunctionality of the paragraph was noticed by Robert E. Horn, a political scientist at Stanford University. Horn wondered: what if there was a rule that said a paragraph or a sentence could only contain one meaning? Then, they would start to become “information blocks”. Horn imagined the information block as a substitute for the paragraph. He pioneered a better form of technical manual and business document that was a lot more understandable. Horn called it “structural writing”. [[Structural writing as eprime version of paragraph]] ### Highlight (blue) - Tom Butler-Bowdon > Page 555 · Location 6979 Links meant that people no longer had to read in a linear way. They could jump around to get the information they wanted. This web-based learning mimicked how the brain worked. Knowledge could be liberated from information normally kept in silos. And the more pieces of information you have, the more possible links you can make between them. “Write once—use many times.” ### Note - Tom Butler-Bowdon > Page 555 · Location 6982 Outline of sans coursEs for example. Metablocks in knowledgebase like md obsidian ### Highlight (blue) - Tor Nørretranders > Page 561 · Location 7056 There will be more text and less context to text about. Shallow words. ### Highlight (yellow) - Dame Wendy Hall > Page 571 · Location 7166 The motto of the Royal Society , which was founded in 1663, is Nullus in verba which is usually translated as “take nobody’s word for it”. Scientific societies and scholarly publications have been founded on this principle ever since. ### Highlight (yellow) - Niko A. Grupen > Page 587 · Location 7384 With the rising effectiveness and prominence of translation and text-to-speech software, it is only a matter of time before the wall between cultures is torn down to the point that we live in a world of almost total globalisation. ### Highlight (yellow) - Niko A. Grupen > Page 588 · Location 7414 Civilization rose and fell, each with their own methods of communications. The Egyptians and their hieroglyphs. The Romans and the Latin. The Greeks and their language. Over time humanity started to make technological advancements such as computers and cameras. ### Note - Niko A. Grupen > Page 588 · Location 7415 Coptic ### Highlight (blue) - Niko A. Grupen > Page 589 · Location 7438 As text becomes more and more digitalised, I believe the future of text could be telepathic text. ### Highlight (blue) - Niko A. Grupen > Page 602 · Location 7698 Because text, a sequence of patterns, is used to represent other patterns, it is appropriate to consider it a metapattern – a pattern about patterns. ### Highlight (blue) - Niko A. Grupen > Page 603 · Location 7713 Thus, digital text can appropriately be considered matter-energy metapatterns. ### Highlight (blue) - Niko A. Grupen > Page 604 · Location 7732 This new form of literacy – hyperliteracy – bears a high degree of responsibility. Hyperliterates must decide how to use their expanded cognitive capabilities. For instance, hyperliterates can work to spread their new form of literacy throughout public education systems, or, they can bring their skills into the democratic process to enhance civic decision-making. ### Highlight (pink) - Niko A. Grupen > Page 615 · Location 7953 As long as humanity exists, stories will exist, and as long as stories exist, hope exists. So read, write, create... and build that utopia. ### Highlight (yellow) - Niko A. Grupen > Page 625 · Location 8164 Writing is for humankind; reading is for machine-kind. This is not a determination of roles. It’s a result of our trust in machine decisions (mathematical decisions) like we expect from wise people who don’t express something new but paraphrase the existing knowledge.