# The Future of Text  ## Metadata - Author: [[Frode Hegland]] - Full Title: The Future of Text - Category: #books ## Highlights - The hashtag holds its gunpowder-potential as a quantum symbol of invitation, participation, or defiance. ([Location 1826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=1826)) - 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. ([Location 1835](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=1835)) - 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] ([Location 1929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=1929)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - 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. ([Location 2107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2107)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - 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; ([Location 2163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2163)) - 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. ([Location 2276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2276)) - In a sense, each discipline trains and enculturates its initiates in practices of sanctioned cognitive bias [9]. ([Location 2299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2299)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. ([Location 2523](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2523)) - 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? ([Location 2616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2616)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 2660](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2660)) - 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 ([Location 2666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2666)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 2820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2820)) - 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. ([Location 2920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2920)) - 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? ([Location 2927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2927)) - 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? ([Location 2944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=2944)) - 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—coded ([Location 3017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3017)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 3039](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3039)) - 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”. ([Location 3068](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3068)) - 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. ([Location 3075](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3075)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 3085](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3085)) - 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”. ([Location 3108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3108)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 3175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3175)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Note: Systems as reduction of complexity. Language as technology. - 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. ([Location 3210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3210)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Note: Infosec perspective of library collections - 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. ([Location 3471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3471)) - 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] ([Location 3541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3541)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 3615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3615)) - Tags: [[blue]] - N Whitehead’s view that “That the actual world is a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities.” ([Location 3799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3799)) - Tags: [[blue]] [[favorite]] - Note: Process of becoming - 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. ([Location 3889](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3889)) - Tags: [[blue]] - We used to manipulate symbols to create meaning on paper, we now also manipulate symbols to create action through machines both digital and mechanical. ([Location 3929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=3929)) - 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. ([Location 4221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4221)) - 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). ([Location 4255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4255)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 4262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4262)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 4275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4275)) - Tags: [[favorite]] [[blue]] - 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.” ([Location 4395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4395)) - Note: Open text editing as obsidian interface of md text files - 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. ([Location 4444](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4444)) - 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. ([Location 4460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4460)) - 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. ([Location 4618](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4618)) - 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. ([Location 4713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4713)) - 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. ([Location 4808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4808)) - Video is great for explaining some things; plastering, for example. It’s much less great for complex, detailed ideas. ([Location 4846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4846)) - 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. ([Location 4851](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4851)) - Text originally meant “woven together.” ([Location 4897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=4897)) - 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. ([Location 5521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=5521)) - 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. ([Location 5976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=5976)) - 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. ([Location 6032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6032)) - 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. ([Location 6035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6035)) - Note: Britannica already does this. Good role for ai - I would design the Future Of Text computationally. It can answer questions directly from an open knowledge base such as Wolfram Alpha. ([Location 6037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6037)) - Note: Prolog reasoning and stem graphs - 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). ([Location 6067](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6067)) - Tags: [[pink]] - structuring thought as semiformal hypertextual networks is a new literacy. ([Location 6072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6072)) - 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). ([Location 6098](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6098)) - Tags: [[blue]] - DIKW pyramid “Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom” describes the hierarchy of the encoding of meaning in information systems. ([Location 6233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6233)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 6258](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6258)) - Tags: [[pink]] - (Registry of Open Access Repositories, ROAR). ([Location 6350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6350)) - (Various prototypes may be seen in Youtube videos “Xanadu Basics 1a” and “Xanadu Basics 2”). ([Location 6578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6578)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 6728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6728)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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 ([Location 6739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6739)) - 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”. ([Location 6967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6967)) - Tags: [[favorite]] [[blue]] - 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.” ([Location 6978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=6978)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Outline of sans coursEs for example. Metablocks in knowledgebase like md obsidian - There will be more text and less context to text about. Shallow words. ([Location 7055](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=7055)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 7165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=7165)) - 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. ([Location 7383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=7383)) - 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. ([Location 7413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=7413)) - Note: Coptic - As text becomes more and more digitalised, I believe the future of text could be telepathic text. ([Location 7437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=7437)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Because text, a sequence of patterns, is used to represent other patterns, it is appropriate to consider it a metapattern – a pattern about patterns. ([Location 7697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=7697)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Thus, digital text can appropriately be considered matter-energy metapatterns. ([Location 7712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=7712)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 7731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=7731)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As long as humanity exists, stories will exist, and as long as stories exist, hope exists. So read, write, create... and build that utopia. ([Location 7952](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=7952)) - Tags: [[pink]] - 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. ([Location 8163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08NGB2S1G&location=8163))