Category: Future Of Text

Continuing symposium on the future of text.

FoT Day 2 Planning

Christopher Gutteridge proposed two questions we need to answer and said: The second, cultural change, question is at least as important as the question about technology. Some great projects and ideas have gained no traction because they only concentrate on technology. Open access, while flawed, corrupted and diluted, is an idea that is now rooted in academic culture – maybe we can learn from that?

 

In terms of interactive text:

* how do we want the world to be

We want textual discourse to require less effort (freeing more energy for work thought away from ‘how to do work’ thought’) and to deliver more cognitive benefit in terms of deeper understanding of the issues, while authoring and while reading.

* how do we get there from here

We will need to develop tools and infrastructures (for meta-informaiton and more) as well as engage with the user communities to raise their expectations.

Posted on by frode 2

A more Liquid, Post GUI-UI.

How can a more Liquid, Post GUI-UI for authoring and reading textual knowledge contribute to deeper literacy?
• Definition of Liquid UI: A Low Friction, High-Flexibility Interaction ‘UI’ (‘User Interface’) providing High-Speed interaction.

• Definition of Post GUI-UI: GUI’ stands for ‘Graphical User Interface’ which is a paradigm for user interfaces which allows users to interact through graphical icons and visual metaphors primarily through pointing and clicking, while de-prioritising controls which need to be learnt and cannot be seen on the screen. This was a development of XEROX PARC after SRI’s command line interfaces, where the explicit target user was the knowledge worker’s secretary.

I therefore define a ‘Post-GUI UI’ as a User Interface which recapitulates the prominence of textual information on the screen (with an absolute minimum of controls being visible unless summoned for specific, mostly immediate use) and employ modern technologies to provide richer ways to display the text (such as high-resolution screens with high-refresh rates) and interact with the text (such as though commonly used and new keyboard shortcuts, trackpad gestures and methods for bringing up visible controls when needed, including a contextual ctrl-clicking and click-and-hold etc.).

• Definition of Deeper Literacy: Deeply Literate users are those who, to use an analogy, would prefer to learn to drive a car in order to have control over exactly where they go and what they see on the way, rather then just take a bus and end up on predefined stops. The goal is that for such users who put more effort in to learn how best to use powerful tools is that their knowledge becomes a different thing to them, not a superficial substrate for reading across but a deep and immersive space of opportunity to always learn more, question more and develop ever deeper understanding.

(definition of deep literacy added Monday 17th of July 2017)

Posted on by frode 0