Please note, this draft does not contain many citations, this I will add when I have the flow and logic working
A Liquid View
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON
Faculty of Physical and Applied Science, School of Electronics and Computer Science
By Frode Hegland
Supervisors: Prof Dame Wendy Hall and Prof Les Carr
Nine month progress report
June 2017
1) Context
I assert that we need to develop a deeper literacy in order to equip us to cope with the increasingly complex urgent problems we face. A headline illustration of this is the discourse of recent political events {Trump, Brexit, General Election} where the use of fake news is bad when the opposition does it, but it is considered ‘illustrative’ when our side does it.
Away from politics, in our own profession of academia I can find nothing in the literature to suggest that we ourselves are deeply literate in terms of how deeply we read, write, think and connect the knowledge in our field at a rate fast enough to keep current with new developments, let alone those in adjacent fields. In academic ‘papers’ in the field of knowledge management, such as this 9 month report, it is not novel for the author to state that information is being produced at a prodigious rate and it is also not novel to highlight the effect of Moore’s Law on the advancements of powerful digital devices {I currently have a wireless headphone in my ear which is more powerful than any machine Doug Engelbart developed for, for example} – in fact, it can be argued that digital tool development for academia has stagnated.
Deeper Literacy
What is needed is a defined goal for how we can more efficiently develop computer software for advanced computer systems, beyond vague notions of ‘better’ or ‘easier to use’. I propose the perspective of deep literacy, which Livia Polanyi has co-defined:
Deep Literacy emerges when cognitive strategies enhanced by powerful computational tools enable knowledge workers to interact effectively with the ever growing inter-connection of digital information needed to carry out their work successfully.
Livia Polanyi 2017
The Elements of Deep Literacy
To be literate originally literally only meant to know the letters. Deep literacy however, is authoring and reading beneath the surface, connecting and collaborating deeply:
• Deep literacy means means authoring honestly, cleanly and clearly – providing deep citations to increase the credibility and comprehension.
• Deep literacy equally means that the reader is responsible for active, thoughtful interpretation.
• Deep literacy is about knowing the tools and techniques of your trade very well, supporting your ability to thrive immersed in your work, while continuously updating your knowledge of new tools, perspectives and developing deeper connections – deep literacy is not something acquired once, like the ability to ride a bike – it comes from skills and perspectives nurtured over a lifetime.
• You become deeply literate when you no longer just try to stay on top of your information – you become deeply literate you dive in – when you work hard on getting the most out of your mental and computer tool sets.
Supporting Deep Literacy
Supporting Deep Literacy then becomes a task of developing software solutions and best practices for working to augment dept of reading, thinking, connecting and authoring.
Barriers to Deep Literacy
Barriers to developing ever deeper literacies are largely based on the entrenchment of legacy systems and mindsets, something which will have to be taken into account when developing continuously more deeply literate systems.
Writing & Scholarly Writing
Writing is an act of visually recording a human intention, a human perspective, with a rich history of how things came to be the way they are today and inspirations as to how things can be.
Scholarly Writing is the process of making knowledge conscious, helping to remember facts, to analyze concepts, and to construct new knowledge (Alister H. Cumming, 2006). It is also worth adding the importance of integrating the new work into the academic discourse through citations.
Current State of The Art Scholarly Writing Tools
This is where I will paste in my overview of current writing tools.
Limitations of Current Approaches & Systems
It is no longer controversial to state that we think with our tools, our tools do not simply record our thoughts. I think it’s worth looking at the deep span of time of where we are right now, before we look at our development horizons:
• It is worth noting however where we are in the development cycle of our species; we are at the very start: Our solar system is about half way through its life, which gives us another 4 or 5 billion years of life on this planet {barring deeply illiterate human behaviour, which is a real threat to our survival}.
• The first tools which augmented our ancestors physical and mental reach was about 2.5 million years ago. Our own species is 200/300,000 or so years old, depending on the criteria used to define Homo sapiens and cultural artefacts first really bloomed about 40,000 years ago, including cave painting which in important ways represent the start of literacy.
• Pre-alphabetic writing is something like 5,5000 years old and the alphabet was invented in stages around 3,500 years ago.
• Printing on paper – our most recent legacy which defines how we see documents even in the digital age, as vertical rectangles, was employed by Johannes Gutenberg to print text about 550 years ago.
• In terms of digital literacy then, Doug’s demo was just half a century years ago and the web was launched a quarter of a century ago so our digital literacy pales in comparison. We are at the very start of the digital age yet we have fallen into looking at the future through a rear-view mirror, as McLuhan warned us – we are basing our digital technologies primarily on the prior medium of static print.
2) The Liquid View Project
Visually Augmented Thinking
My project, the Liquid View, is based on the ancient insight that we can benefit from thinking with visual mental space (writing lists for example) and the ancient insight of the importance of experience/interaction, previously by using the medium of lines in the sand or pieces of paper.
Limitations of such thinking systems have always been the limited opportunity to re-organise and then to integrate with a conventional communications ‘document’. There are two opportunities to overcome these issues today however: Digital technology completely removes the issue of re-organization by making the elements interactive with zero degradation of information quality and I have developed a word processor called Liquid | Author which publishes academic standard formatted .doc and .pdf documents, which the Liquid View will be another view of, so the work done in the Liquid View is not separate from an academic document, it is simply another view of the document.
The Liquid View will be accessed when viewing a regular word processing document, through a user interaction gesture (preferably, since a goal is to make the information feel more tangible than a keyboard short can deliver) which results in all body text being hidden through being collapsed under the headings – it is the headings which the user primarily views and interacts with in the Liquid View.
3) Future Work
Deeper Literature Review
I believe that we can really benefit from looking far back in our evolutionary history, look deeper at our perceptual processes, recorded communications history and examine current and near technological advancements as well as information theory to guide an experimental series of developments to support and encourage deeper literacy, which is why this will be my deeper literature review:
• Evolutionary history studies can help us understand why we perceive the way we do, from our vision being attuned to the wavelengths our sun proceeds the most of, to how ambient colours change our states of mind. I will be discussing this with Chris Stringer of the Natural History museum as well as continuing with reading.
• Perceptual processes are based on our evolutionary history and as we learn to better understand what has been coined heuristics and other ‘hardware live’ processes, we can learn to extend and augment them, including taking into account how the capacity of the human visual system is about 12 million bits per second while 16 bits per second is the bandwidth of consciousness (Norretranders, 1999).
• Recorded communications history is the history of writing which also takes into account pre-alphabetical and pre-grammatical writing, as a source of understanding and inspiration for re-invention of writing for thought and communication.
• Examine current and near technological advancements of computer platforms, hardware, APIs, libraries and standards to better understand the current technological landscape which we have at our disposal to build upon.
• Information theory, with a focus on my own Liquid Information perspective, as developed with Sarah Walton, which approaches computer information as interaction and interaction as fluid not simplistically ‘digital’.
• Investigations into how best to convey ‘human intentions’ via electronic documents, since the measure of an academic document is a combination of the value of the originality and context of what is stated, wrapped in how clearly and understandably it is stated.
Development of Specific Research Questions
Learning from the perspectives outlined above, in the ‘Foundations’ section, it is already clear that several issues will need to be worked out through prototyping and testing, with the ultimate goal of delivering what I like to imagine as being an ‘incredible thinking space’, where users, primarily university students, produce measurably deeper work. The way I propose measuring the depth of their work is aligned with how Craig Tashman developed his iOS product LiquidText (the name has no relationship to my work) and how other work has been developed and tested.
Research Question
How can textual knowledge best be represented in a non-linear format of nodes and connections, incorporating a rich set of data elements to augment the depth of thought when authoring a document?
Visual Display Considerations
This is where I will list what visual issues I can see now
Other Elements in Liquid View
This is where I will list what visual elements need to be considered
Interactions
This is where I will list what interactions need to be catered for
Proposal for Work to Answer the Questions
The work to answer these questions will be to continue with a deeper literature review, dialog with experts in their fields and building prototypes and actual implementation of the Liquid View.
Timetable and Plan
I have currently allocated 1 month of programming time with a maOS expert level coder, who used to work at Nuance, to make the macOS version of Liquid | Author fast and robust enough to ship. Once this is done I will look for money to finance the Liquid View component and work to implement it, while continuing my deeper literature review, which will be posted on my blog as well as in my full paper.