• Journal

    1.3

    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. This Journal is distributed as a PDF which will open in any standard PDF viewer. If you choose to open…

  • 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…

  • Hypertext

    Resilient Citations

    A fragile citation is a citation with a mutable source, that is, source text that can be modified or deleted after the citation is published. Referencing a conventional web URL (such as in the traditional “Retrieved at” format) would be a fragile citation since the webpage may be changed, the server may go down, the domain name may expire, etc. A resilient citation, in contrast, is a citation with an immutable source, or permanent link to its source text. Great strides are being made towards a permanent web with technologies such as IPFS, Arweave, and Swarm. Such a Web would effectively make all published resources resilient. These are early technologies…

  • Hypertext

    Transclusion, Sovereignty, and Psychosomatic Overhead

    My central concern was to create a publishing system with universal quotability by transclusion, a concept I saw as vital Ted Nelson. Possiplex, p258.  I like it [transclusion] as a concept but it can’t work in reality, in my mind, unless it’s on a very small system. Frode Hegland That’s fair. I think transclusion is doable when the percepts are highly constrained. Intelligently representing context (and allowing intuitive viewing of the same content across multiple contexts) is I believe one of the core design challenges for the field of Cybersemics (extended sensemaking). Transclusion/contextuality is core to em’s view and data model.  I also like being able to ’take’ and ‘own’ something and not…

  • Hypertext

    Digital Dialog & Publishing

    Here are some extemporaneous thoughts about dialogic publishing, loosely in response to http://wordpress.liquid.info/10/pdf-notifications/frode/. No authoring system will satisfy everyone, but a common structure of dialogue (truly, a common semiotic structure) is, in my belief, while not perfectable, pragmatically feasible. Such a universal system must be based on an interoperable format/protocol. I will refrain from going into technical details at present. I just wish to frame/name this core part of the problem.  I think the social and group dynamics of the intended interaction are important. Is it 1-on-1 dialog? 3-person? More? Each of these forms has different dynamics, just as they are in-person. For example, when a third enters a 1-on-1 conversation, body…

  • 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,…

  • Hypertext

    Change

    In response to: http://wordpress.liquid.info/10/change-is-expensive/frode/ This is why I am happy to piggy-back on PDF and WordPress/HTML and web standards such as Linked Data Notifications. PDF really, truly, needs to be sunset. It is only holding us back. WordPress is excellent for content self-publishing and much can be built on it. At the same time, it is an older codebase with some inherent limitations that I suspect will present some obstacles to more advanced interaction architectures. I personally swore off PHP years ago. Web Standards including Linked Data Notifications are the future when it comes to implementation AND they largely do not specify the necessary design patterns for the kinds interactivity…

  • Uncategorized

    Ideas for Rich Documents

    Frode and I have spent a long time discussing rich text documents. Or augmented or enhanced. Whatever you want to call them. The basic idea is that structured supporting information should be included in the document. Generally this should be little or no work for the author as they will already have the structured information so it’s just about tools to attach it in creation and exploit it in consumption. The proof of concept demo Frode has recently shown just writes the BibTeX version of the bibliography at the end of the document (in a small font). Discovery is as simple as looking for a line starting with a “@”…

  • 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…