• Comment,  Perspective,  Uncategorized

    Re: Change is expensive

    In reply to “Change is expensive” by Frode Hegland. This is mostly sequential commentary in the order of paragraphs in the source. Would work better in a system that supports annotations, side-by-side, visibly connected. Where change is expensive, wouldn’t make it sense to work on making it cheaper? The example of Engelbart shows that change can be made sufficiently cheap so it becomes affordable to have lots of it. Who cares about actually changing standards (?) if you can have and make lots of them? Better to have standards than everybody doing their own thing in an incompatible, conflicting way! Isn’t the knowledge worker somebody with highly specialized needs, tools,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Meetings,  News/Updates,  Perspective,  Priorities,  Recordings,  Uncategorized

    after the 9th

    We had a fantastic Saturday together on the 8th, with many participating in person and Gyuri, Timour, Irina and Shane joining us online: thefutureoftext.org/8-december-2018.html The 9th was marked by a large celebration at the Computer History Museum, where we all demoed alongside such luminaries as Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee: So where do we go from here? We have all had some time to settle down from the events (and the work leading up to them), so we now need to decide how to move forward. It’s been suggested that we ‘eat our own dogwood’ and that we should therefore use Exaptive and KnowFlow, which I personally agree with. I…

  • Authoring,  hyperGlossary,  Perspective

    Posting Dialogue with In-Situ short definition

    I was reading Tom’s book for the Economist this morning and there was a normal Economist style sentence which defined a term. It was something like this: “Cap-Gemini, a consulting form,” and it seemed such a great display style of the short definition so let’s have the form be like this, with many of the fields having suggestions for content to help the user:   When the user starts writing the Short Definition though, it appears alongside the title, staying horizontally centered,  to help the user write it in a style which would work as an auto-inserted description after a comma: However, the issue comes up that if the term…

  • API,  Authoring,  Demo @ 50,  Perspective

    Things to have relationships with in the glossary

    So, we have this now in Liquid | Flow. Select text, keyboard shortcut for the menu and then simply ‘g’ for Add to Glossary. In this case I’ve added Chris: At the bottom we have this pop-up for relationships which is are so far only relationship terms for concepts. But what about for other types of entries, such as people (in the case of Chris), places, documents, things, projects, companies and so on? How should we organise the types? For example, if the entry is about a person, we should have at least these options for defining the relationship with another entry: Works with Works for Works on Created Created…

  • Authoring,  Perspective,  Priorities

    Symbol Maniplation as A Separate Topic

    You asked me what symbol manipulation is and how it is different from tool development. This is my reply. My personal fear in all this is that interaction will continue to be suppressed by the notion of ease of use and that simplicity propaganda will be more powerful than individual responsibility and thought. My personal dream in all this is simply to develop beautiful tools, like a beautiful mont blanc pen, to work on magical papers where information and interactions are as free as possible. In both cases, we need more of a McLuhan study of the media of interactive text, of symbol manipulation to really make progress I think.…

  • Authoring,  Demo @ 50,  High Resolution Addressability,  News/Updates,  Perspective

    Personal Hypertext Report #9

    Finally, I’ve managed to get the “change_tracking_text_editor_1” capability working reliable enough for beta testing and prepared a downloadable package: hypertext-systems.org/downloads.php. Java 1.6 or higher is required. A description of the tool/capability can be found in this video. From here, plenty of very interesting options to extend it present themselves, but I find important to point out that in my opinion, tracking the development of a text is fundamental for a hypertext system and serious writing on a computer. Without it, versioning and revision can only be done retrospectively with heuristical diffs as after-the-fact analysis, which can be wrong and lacks information like the order of changes or changes that later…

  • Authoring,  Perspective,  Publishing Options

    Integration Publishing

    Publishing is an act on integrating.  When sitting on a flight with my mother on our way to Zürich last night, I bought a new pen from Caran D’Ache (or something like that). It’s made from recycled nespresso pods so this has appeal. Since I had left behind my laptop (short trip, just two nights, but still) I had bought a notebook with ‘Journal’ emblazoned on the front. It’s a good pen and I had already been sketching and writing about Author and Liquid Space, so now I wrote the question:   ”…how can I write and have my writing-the intentions of my writings-understood, transmit-able, integrated.  The last few words…