• Journal

    1.2

    Introduction Welcome to ‘The Future of Text’ Journal. Why read this? This Journal serves as a monthly record of the activities of the Future Text Lab, in concert with the annual Future of Text Symposium and the annual ‘The Future of Text’ book series. We have published two volumes of ‘The Future of Text’† and this year we are starting with a new model where articles will first appear in this Journal over the year and will be collated into the third volume of the book. We expect this to continue going forward. This Journal is distributed as a PDF which will open in any standard PDF viewer. If you…

  • Journal

    1.1

    Introduction Welcome to ‘The Future of Text’ Journal. This Journal serves as a monthly record of the activities of the Future Text Lab, in concert with the annual Future of Text Symposium and the annual ‘The Future of Text’ book series. We have published two volumes of ‘The Future of Text’ and this year we are starting with a new model where articles will first appear in this Journal over the year and will be collated into the third volume of the book. We expect this to continue going forward. The full transcripts of this month’s dialogue has also been published: https://futuretextlab.info/2022/01/11/1-1/ Even though this dialogue is primarily computer generated…

  • 2020book

    FoT 2020 Book : Author’s Guide

      First of all, thank you so much for agreeing to submit a page to this book. One page is not a lot so please feel free to include links to other relevant works which elaborate on your thoughts. We define a page as around 500 words though if you feel you can express what you want to say in less than that, that is fine and we can accommodate slightly longer sections as well. The deadline for submissions is the 9th of December but of course it would be great to go through the work far earlier than that. As for the content, we will help you copy-edit of…

  • jrnl

    jrnl wordpress blog augmentation : 2020

    In support of the book and the symposium, we are convening weekly sessions to get together to focus on specific questions of how make interactive text more powerfully useful in the meta-context of supporting our own dialog on this WordPress blog jrnl. We will discuss: How can we build open systems to augment rich interactions with such Doug Engelbart inspired capabilities as high resolution addressing, glossary support, dynamic and non-linear views, support for analysis, advanced searches & more? What are the underlying technical, economic and other issues in the way of this and how can they be overcome?   These are urgent, complex problems and will require a broad community…

  • News/Updates,  The Team

    FoT 2019 Invitation

    You are invited to join us for the future of The Future of Text: I am producing a book called ‘The Future of Text : A 2020 Vision’ which will be published next year and I’d be honoured if you would like to contribute a page.  The book comes out of the series of symposia I have been hosting since 2011 in collaboration with the co-inventor of the Internet, Vint Cerf. This year’s symposium will be in London on the 9th of December, to which you are also very welcome. So far we have a wonderful group of people joining us, as contributors to the book and/or participants at the…

  • jrnl,  Perspective,  Priorities,  Wordpress Templates

    Mouse-Over search for jrnl

    I had a very useful conversation with Shane Gibson yesterday about how to incorporate glossary entries into a blog post and whether the user should manually do this or if the system should do it or something in-between. I designed an interaction based on this https://jrnl.global/2019/04/12/jrnl-wordpress-plugin/ but this morning I realised something quite different: Doug Engelbart talked about explicit links (what we might call hyperlinks) and implicit links (such as a link from a word to its entry in a glossary). This made me realise that when an author makes a link, whether to an external site, another blog post or to a glossary term, this is an explicit link,…

  • API,  Authoring,  jrnl,  Perspective,  RFC

    jrnl WordPress Plugin

    We are starting this journey using our WordPress blog jrnl both as a place for discussion and implementation and testing of text interaction ideas.   initial functionality : glossary   Authoring The user will select any text while authoring and in the text tools dialog a ‘g’ will appear, which the user can click on to view a list of all posts which have been categorised in the [Glossary Term] Category. Selecting such a term will mark the selected term has having that Glossary Term associated with it. Shane, how should we do this exactly, how should it be marked up?   Creating a Glossary Term Creating a glossary term…

  • 2020book,  jrnl,  RFC,  symposium,  The Team

    Future of Text 2019 Invitation

    We are hosting the 9th Annual Future of Text Symposium and would very much like it if you could join us. This is a ‘summit’ which means there are not audience and speakers, only participants who will all have time for a brief presentation followed by dialog.   futureoftext.org    Announcing the 9th Annual Future of Text Symposium : Connecting Texts    A major step in the story of our evolution was when we gained the ability to point out to each other what we could see. A further major step was when we gained the ability to point out what could not be seen and to interact with what…

  • Uncategorized

    FoT Invitation (draft)

    We are hosting the 9th Annual Future of Text Symposium and would very much like it if you could join us. This is a ‘summit’ which means there are not audience and speakers, only participants who will all have time for a brief presentation followed by dialog. Announcing the 9th Annual Future of Text Symposium Summit on the theme of ‘Connecting Texts’ A major step in the story of our evolution was when we gained the ability to point out to each other what we could see. A further major step was when we gained the ability to point out what could not be seen and to interact with what…

  • Integration,  Perspective,  Priorities

    Moving Forward

    Priority For me, the most important problem that I am interested in working on is the creation of documents which are as findable readable and citable as possible. By ‘document’ I mean an enclosed unit of information which links to other information implicitly or explicitly and is self-contained in its ability to be shared as an individual item. I think of a document as a framing of human intention and this is why it is a unit of knowledge worth investing in to make more accessible than simply a copy of the paper substrate document which had no inherent interactive or connective capabilities beyond what happened in the readers mind…