February 2019 – liquid thoughts

Right & Left in Politics

Published by Frode Hegland on February 28, 2019

The fashionable polarisation between ‘democrats’ and ‘republicans’ or ‘liberals’ and ‘the right wing’ in politics, particularly in the US, with the accompanying ‘free market’ vs ‘socialism’ arguments is as useless and inane as a discussion of whether food or drink is better for you.

The way forward to building a better society (in whatever way you choose to define it) must surely lie in the spectrum of elements of all of these perspectives. Until we mature enough to clearly articulate our goals for society (particularly in terms of ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’) and then discuss the nuances of what policies and perspectives will get us there, we are just monkeys slinging poo and deserve the politics we get.

Supporting Systems

Published by Frode Hegland on February 22, 2019

The Liquid View is part of a wider workflow which is as least as important as the visualisations since if the user cannot comfortably add to the system, interact with it and publish in a useful way, it simply will not be of more than ‘academic’ interest.

Liquid | Flow

The user can use the application Liquid | Flow to create HyperGlossary entries for concepts from any point in their workflow.

HyperGlossary on WordPress/Blog/HTML

A significant part of the system is the use of WordPress to store what will be the nodes in the view, using the HyperGlossary system which is a means of using basic formatting for systems to parse. The information stored as WordPress posts uses the Header tags to specify attributes like ‘Short Definition’, ‘Long Definition’ and how they refer to other HyperGlossary Terms/Nodes.

Liquid | Browser Plugin

The user can import PDF documents from download sites and have them automatically converted to Rich PDF documents through the Liquid Browser Plugin. This has the benefit that when the user downloads the PDF document it gets all the useful Citation information appended so that the user can simply copy text from that document into their work and it will automatically be pasted as a Citation, and that the Liquid View will be able to open the full PDF when the user requests.

Liquid | Author

Liquid | Author is the base application for this and is an active, successful application on the macOS App Store. It’s function is as the word processor the student will be authoring their Literature Review in.

Flow & Storage

Published by Frode Hegland on February 22, 2019

The basic flow is that the user imports concepts directly into the Liquid View or by using the Liquid | Flow application and imports documents, books, blogs or web pages via the Liquid | Browser Plugin (which also downloads creates and downloads a linked Rich PDF document).

The user then interacts with this information in Liquid View, where the user can also add annotations and add saves keyword searches.

Exporting

The result can be exported into Liquid | Author as a live view and then onto other formats, including PDF, JATS, Word and Rich PDF where the interactions of the Liquid View will be preserved.

Month: February 2019