Video: https://youtu.be/FK5ad23a-_g
Chat log: https://futuretextlab.info/2022/01/11/10th-of-january-2022/
Mark Anderson: [00:02:42] I was thinking, you know, well, it’s one going a bit now, but in the doctoral consortium there was, well, they were, you know, over the time they had about 70 people plus who’d gone through that pipeline. We’re sort of not saying instead of just assuming not saying at the outset, right? Well, if, for instance, if you’re going to be putting diagrams [00:03:00] in your documents, you might think to make them scalable because if they can be read as digital documents, people might need to and begin the picture as opposed to, you know,
Bjørn Borud: [00:03:10] It’s going to take this call. Sorry, guys. One second.
Mark Anderson: [00:03:15] And so, you know, it’s yes, another thing where everyone assumes that somebody else is going to going to sort it out.
Frode Hegland: [00:03:48] It’s so embarrassing. I’m trying to sync a file here, the most technical thing in the whole world and just at the beginning of our meeting, anyway, you don’t get to see you. Do you want to [00:04:00] introduce it? Well, actually wait a little bit until there’s more people to introduce yourself to. I’m glad you are.
Bjørn Borud: [00:04:14] Virtual reality.
Frode Hegland: [00:04:18] Yeah, also real reality. Oh, Adam, is there, so Adam and beyond your neighbors, Adam’s Swedish. It’s not his favorite restaurant was a Swedish restaurant, right?
Bjørn Borud: [00:04:34] Mm-hmm.
Frode Hegland: [00:04:34] What wasn’t your favorite? Yeah, it was not Swedish.
Bjørn Borud: [00:04:39] Yeah. Unfortunately, the head chef decided he wanted his life back.
Frode Hegland: [00:04:51] I think life is overrated.
Bjørn Borud: [00:04:54] Yeah, yeah. That’s what I told him. Told him that now I have to find [00:05:00] a new favorite restaurant, which is going to be a pain in the ass.
Frode Hegland: [00:05:06] That’s it. That’s a good one. London. Oh, I’m finished with that nonsense. Sorry, I just rushed back home and then I get an email from anyway. Oh, Alan is here also so very good. We haven’t seen Brendan for a while and I hope Brenda will join us. We will see. So beyond before you introduce yourself, I think maybe I should introduce you, doesn’t introduce us to you a little. So I’ve known him for quite a while, and he is super clever with a resumé considerably longer than my arm and all kinds of technologies, and I suggested maybe he join us a little bit because we are now at least partly moving into this. And [00:06:00] we are doing a more focused community where we will be publishing a monthly journal. Somehow, we have these twice weekly meetings, which in the beginning tends to be fluff for about 15 minutes, then it tends to be trying to organize something. And as most hippie communities, we will mostly fail. And then towards the second hour, suddenly somebody has some idea. We go down rabbit holes and it’s really amazing. So that’s fair. Well, we’re waiting for maybe a few more people. And do you guys want to do maybe 30 seconds introductions of yourselves?
Alan Laidlaw: [00:06:43] Sure, you start, yeah. First off. That’s what you’re sorry, what’s your name again? Borud as your tag, but I’m not sure if that’s if that’s [00:07:00] your name. Great. Wonderful.
Frode Hegland: [00:07:03] Funny how you could type that faster than me.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:07:10] Well, welcome. Glad to have you. I’m Alan. And Mike, quick thing is. I have been attending this last year because I’m very interested in. Well, the tools for thought area, but specifically the the messiness of words and categorization as a as a much deeper problem than than most of the tools and the conversations to get to. In this group we get we seem more comfortable with those deeper issues, which is great. I think that applies both to PDFs, e-books and VR. Vr [00:08:00] is totally uncharted territory, which will take, you know, probably many more steps to get somewhere close to even getting to a language and how to talk about the issues. But at professionally, I work at Tullio as a solution engineer, but I am probably the worst engineer here. No, no, actually, I’ll take that back. I’m about middle middle of the road. Sure, there are some worse than me on the call.
Bjørn Borud: [00:08:33] Thanks, Alan. But you are our customer.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:08:36] You are correct, how are you?
Frode Hegland: [00:08:37] So sorry, what did you say Bjørn, you know, Twilio, right?
Bjørn Borud: [00:08:41] Yeah. A customer. It’s fantastic. So the interesting thing is, about 10 years ago, I tried to get a telco to do what you are doing. Uh, there we go. Ever since you started getting some success, [00:09:00] I’ve been pointing to three and saying, see, see, see, see what they’re doing.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:09:07] Yeah, that’s that’s wonderful. That’ll be something to touch on because it’s in a way it’s compelling because it’s dealing with some late legacy latent systems of telecom that has its all this confusion, which is a rough metaphor for where PDFs are at. But in the other sense, it’s become it’s become an enterprise so quickly that I live the pain of the nation, they often talk about it.
Frode Hegland: [00:09:40] Excellent. So the other ‘a’, Adam.
Adam Wern: [00:09:49] I really don’t like introductions, but
Frode Hegland: [00:09:53] I can introduce you if you prefer.
Adam Wern: [00:09:56] I can take a shot at it, but yeah, [00:10:00] try.
Frode Hegland: [00:10:02] Well, OK, other than being a small Norwegian person and trying to do quips at the Swede. Yeah, so Adam is all kinds of things, but it’s also someone who actually makes things happen. You know, we have ideas on this group, and then he shows up and saying, no, I didn’t actually write something, but let me show you this. And he has kids and he has Oculus. I think that’s all I need to say, right? Over to you, I’m sure you can complete my sentences.
Adam Wern: [00:10:29] You have a very generous definition of making things happen because I do lots of prototypes. But to me, it feels like these are just ideas. And not really making things happen, making things happen is making tools that are used by millions and that I don’t do.
Bjørn Borud: [00:10:50] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Frode Hegland: [00:10:57] Peter?
Alan Laidlaw: [00:10:59] Ok, I’m [00:11:00] an attorney by formal training. I’ve been a programmer since my undergraduate days and probably essentially I’m like undocumented PhD equivalent in the computer science side. My primary technical interests are programming language design and user programming law, and I hypertext, of course, very much interested in both looking at interactive, fiction literate programming technical topics geared towards building systems, although I don’t know any system about the moves of people using yet. Other interests include foresight, future studies and university futures primarily. So I have a project I’m working on called Founders Quadrangle that’s going to attempt to be a community for people to explore the design space for future universities with an eye eventually to funding one myself down the road. But that’ll take a while and an awful lot of planning first before it gets to fruition. In the meantime, of course, I’m incredibly [00:12:00] excited about this community and the kinds of tools that we could use to create the next generation of academic tooling for university people to be using. I’m also very interested in typesetting and the formal presentation aspect, so I’ve spent more time staring at internal lab tech than any human being should ever have to do.
Frode Hegland: [00:12:24] Well, that’s anything more than a minute, but fair enough, Mark.
Mark Anderson: [00:12:30] Oh gosh, I don’t know.
Frode Hegland: [00:12:33] I may have. You may have met in London, actually.
Bjørn Borud: [00:12:38] Yeah, probably.
Mark Anderson: [00:12:40] Ok. So I mean, sort of my connection here in the most recent sense was I’ve just completed a PhD at Southampton in the same program as Brisbane, and I got wounded into the very early stage discussions, which led to visual matter. And and [00:13:00] now I’m basically I’m basically in recovery from finishing, thinking about turning it off my arse and do something reasonable, find a job.
Bjørn Borud: [00:13:09] But I guess
Mark Anderson: [00:13:12] I’m listening to Adam’s comment earlier. I think it’s fair to say that I look at his doodles, and I think if only I could I. I’ve bounced around the edge of computer technology since my first career that I was a naval signal source of moons ago and had many years of having technology and software done unto me. And but that got me involved. Also, when I end up writing techniques, which is documentation in any other sense and in a sense, that’s probably been a strand that’s carried me through did that. And then in the 90s, I also did a start up through the early stage of the web selling CAD software that went nowhere. But it was very interesting to be there, you know, doing e-commerce when people didn’t even know what it was. And then I fell into doing a lot of to do with meditation fed data. So I ended up effectively as an information emergency [00:14:00] plumber. Anything that people said was too boring, too hard or too difficult tended to end up at my door, often the same person ringing by four different numbers, you know, in the morning. Anyway, so I’m an odd fit around the edge of this, but I very much come from the perspective of the middle ground between people who hate anything technical and those who know far more about it
Bjørn Borud: [00:14:19] Than I do.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:14:20] Don’t forget a debrief.
Mark Anderson: [00:14:23] Yeah, sorry. And I’ve also well, since 2004, I’ve been a sort of lead tester and community, I guess, with a community person for East Gates knowledge management tool. So tinderbox and story space. So I have an interest in hyper textual information as well.
Frode Hegland: [00:14:41] Yep. So Brandel, you joined at a good moment. So my old friend Bjorn Borg is here joining us for today and everybody’s done brief introductions. He will introduce himself lost to make sure we have the most people, which is you. So do you want to spend 30 seconds on who you are interested in? That kind of good stuff?
Bjørn Borud: [00:15:01] I [00:15:00] a.. An interactive graphics engineer, so I do computer graphics, but in particular, the real time stuff that you can you can interact with. And right now and for the last seven years, I’ve been working at Apple. Previously on Apple dot.com websites and things like that. But now I do have VR sort of research and there’s a lot of fun. And the particular tech that I have is that I’m very interested in understanding the impact of embodied cognition and extended mind on the way that we ought to consider using computers so that we that we actually think by doing things, particularly with our hands. And also as much as possible with each other. And that most computing hasn’t incorporated that world view. And [00:16:00] that text is one of the areas that could be kind of re-imagined and reinvented through the lens of understanding that our appreciation of the physical world through our bodies and with each other is something that is important for being able to do more with the technology that we the the sort of the technical basis of the technology we have today. Yeah, that’s me.
Frode Hegland: [00:16:29] It’s all part of you. Yes. Rafael Bjorn is here today, we’ve all done really brief 20 30 second introductions. You’re the last one to enter. Do you want to do a brief intro on yourself before Bjorn introduces himself?
Bjørn Borud: [00:16:45] I’m just trying to get to my computer, if that could be a little bit later.
Frode Hegland: [00:16:51] Yeah, that’s absolutely fine. Do you want to say a few things about who you are, where are you coming from, whatever? I’d like to warn everyone that in a way just beyond means bear. [00:17:00] So beware.
Bjørn Borud: [00:17:03] Well, what I usually say and that’s that probably comes from my my. The period of my life where I worked on search engines is that at the time I was born, a lot of people were called Bjarne. So in essence, my name carries very little information. So that’s why I usually use my last name, I think, out of a group of 70 people that used together about a couple of decades ago. Thirty five were called Bjorn. Oh, yeah, yeah, my my name is beer. I tend to think of my professional career as having four periods, so initially I started writing software for money when I was about 14 years old. So my first job [00:18:00] was to automate the manufacture of cigarettes.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:18:05] So, uh, yeah.
Bjørn Borud: [00:18:08] So I spent some, some years doing industrial automation in my spare time. And then I discovered the internet, and then I spent a decade writing bits of code that you never see. Hopefully, very few people know that, I wrote, because they were I was kind of learning these things, but I still discover things that I’ve written that that you can still find in in the fabric of the internet. So if you are typing a query into a search engine, you probably end up running some code, I wrote at some point. So during the nineties, I [00:19:00] started in a company that was supposed to make a product, but we ended up being the weird people you called if you had a problem that you couldn’t find anyone. Willing to deal with. So we did a lot of really weird stuff. I think the weirdest stuff I did was to write the system for calculating the isolation thickness of oil pipelines. Um. And then we wrote a Web crawler as a consulting project, which meant that I ended up getting sucked into the search engine industry where I spent a decade.
Bjørn Borud: [00:19:43] And this is also where. A lot of my interest in text came from. Although there have been two parallel tracks, one is how do you make a search engine? And the other part is how do you actually make sense of text? And the reason [00:20:00] I got interested in that was I wanted to do attribution analysis. Because there was an article in some hacker magazine that mentioned me and I wanted to know who had written it. And I eventually managed to find out who had written the article, so and then about 10 years ago, I set out to try to reform the telco industry. Uh, it turns out you can’t reform the telco industry by being part of it, so. Alan probably knows all about that, but the telco industry left me a little bit scarred. If anyone says standard to me now, I get frightened and I want to hide. If you had used the word standard 20 years ago, I would have said Yay standards. [00:21:00] Um, yeah, right now, I would say I have PTSD,
Alan Laidlaw: [00:21:06] But I hate acronyms.
Bjørn Borud: [00:21:10] So the one thing I did that was actually led into the next in. I spent 10 years in Tokyo and then during the last five years I was leading an underfunded but fun team that was called exploratory engineering. Which essentially meant that we could do whatever we like. The problem was we never got any budget for for actually making any damage. Um, so I started leading this department in the direction of Internet of Things. That’s where where we’re kind of at now. So [00:22:00] I run a small startup with four people, and we we try not to design any hardware if we can get out of it. But we write a lot of IoT related software. Um. Now, I have a bunch of interests that are pointing in every direction and my my way to understand things is to build them. So sometimes electronics, sometimes software. Yeah, and that’s for VR. I’m. Uh, I guess this is the third or fourth time the air becomes hype during Know When My My Lifetime So. I’m kind of skeptical, but I’m [00:23:00] willing to be convinced. So my my my experience of VR as of late is is puking into a bucket after trying to to drive car simulators and we are. And it almost works there, just on the on my favorite track, there are only two points where I get carsick. So. Yeah, but I’m interested in looking where this we are thinking is going, and, you know, some some things take a lot of attempts to bear any fruit. And I think the best example of that in later years is I, which was this useless field where where people would have pointless arguments and not make much progress. And all of a sudden a lot of things happen at the same time. And now [00:24:00] we actually have a machine learning that can be used for something.
Frode Hegland: [00:24:04] So I think that’s where we are with VR, so, you know, I’ve been very much flat screens, we need to solve them first and then Brundle said, Well, actually? And then I bought an Oculus. And there’s two kind of points for me here that are important regarding VR. One is at some point you will be up for the lightweight thing on your head, RV or whatever, and it’ll just work. That will happen. I think that’s completely inevitable. I don’t think that’s controversial.
Bjørn Borud: [00:24:35] Oh, no, I mean. That’s part of it, yes, but I think the the component that is the most useful that we have this time around is air.
Frode Hegland: [00:24:51] Ok. This is part of our discussion here, because, believe it or not, I don’t actually agree with that. But that’s kind of irrelevant. That’s part [00:25:00] of our longer discussion. But if you take it as given that in, let’s say, five years, you’ll be able to buy relatively cheaply ahead, set to put it on RB or whatever, but so to speak. And it’s got very good hand recognition, which we already have in the Oculus. It will be normal. Everybody will have one. I just I take that as a given at this point, just the way that I’ve seen various waves. So then the question becomes number one. What work productivity stuff for your brain can you do there? But what I’ve realized is almost as important is how can it be moved around? I just wrote this piece on ownership, and I’m going to share with you guys tonight or tomorrow morning where it says, you know, let’s say we’re in a room like we are now. We have laptops and then magically we we are we take stuff out of laptop into the room, move it around all these amazing things. Now who owns the room? Who owns this sculptural object? We’re working. How can you give me a piece to add to it? How can I give it to you? How can we work with it when we’re outside [00:26:00] of the environment? That is the big battleground. And so in this group, we’re really fighting a interaction and B ownership. And I’m glad to see so
Bjørn Borud: [00:26:11] Many shaky heads. I mean,
Alan Laidlaw: [00:26:19] I guess
Bjørn Borud: [00:26:20] I guess part of the thing that has made me not buy a VR headset yet is all the. All the troubled people are having with it being tied to some kind of account somewhere.
Frode Hegland: [00:26:35] I’m not going to do too much speaking, but on that point, no one personally, I view it as a toy. This is not my car for life. You know, I’ll do whatever and there and then throw it away, even though it’s expensive, but also a lot of things have gone away, like motion sickness. It’s 120 hertz refresh rate, so it’s a completely different thing than what it was not so long ago. It just feels like [00:27:00] we’re at this level where technically things are happening on boarding is absolutely crap. Cool things on top and we have the opportunity here. Adam’s already looked at some of the web VR stuff, and Brando’s got huge experience. So in this community to discuss these things is just really amazing. Anyway, I’m going to keep talking unless someone else does. So please someone and trust me, it would be a very good time right now. Yeah. Rafael, why don’t you introduce yourself?
Rafel Nepô: [00:27:26] Let’s go. I’m sorry, I have a connection. So nice to meet you, Bjorn. Introduction. It’s always nice to see, you know that people are a lot, lot smarter than than me in the room. That way, I can learn a lot from all of you. And it’s it seems like a constant that there’s always these kind of like unsung heroes of people who are on the backstage doing things that nobody has ever heard about and which just makes me think that, you know, life [00:28:00] continues to be kind of like this theater and whoever is on stage, is it really the ones that are building things? So when I hear stories like like yours, I always think of life as a theater, and whoever is controlling the theater is not on the stage. It’s the backstage. But about me, I played a lot of video game and then I worked a lot in the presentation industry. That’s why this this idea of life as a theater for about 10 years, creating presentations for corporate clients and mostly Gartner for technology research things. And then the interest for text came out of typography. There was also another conference that I used to be a part of. I still am part of it, which is the biggest typography conference here in Brazil. [00:29:00]
Rafel Nepô: [00:29:00] It’s called Jackpot Day Type or Day of Type. And then from that I started a lot of research on finding things that had a seed on education. So it started with education. From education, we went into learning, which is different than education. Education is what you get in school. Learning is what you get by yourself. And then from learning, I took another step back because learning is based on, you know, finding the right information and the right time and the right place, the right context, a lot of things. So if we make information better than we make learning and education better because, you know, teachers, they they drink from seed, they drinks, they drink from font of information to create educational materials. So basically, if if we make the foundation better, then everything else gets better [00:30:00] by default. And then the foundation of information is pretty much text. That’s how I ended up here, and that’s how I ended up with with my company to try to organize a little bit of the mess of the web because it’s a messy place.
Bjørn Borud: [00:30:21] Yeah. Definitely. And I would know because I used to write web crawlers,so I have to interface with all of the craziness of the web.
Rafel Nepô: [00:30:33] And I think the only difference that I would like to mention is that instead of going, you know, the fully automated crawling A.I. kind of things is that I I put a lot of value on on people and I love I love human curation and people who are passionate about subjects and showcasing those things. So I would love to bring [00:31:00] the idea or the personality of having to interact with a librarian type of person to have access to information. I miss that.
Bjørn Borud: [00:31:12] That’s actually interesting.Yeah, I mean, that was kind of the promise of intelligent chat bots. And then I guess there is going to be. Some number of iterations before that type can deliver.
Frode Hegland: [00:31:31] Is it? Yes, I think I think Brandel has a strong point on this, and Brandel also you had your hand up, but did you want to say something more about motion sickness while undergoing simulated motion or did you want to talk about something else?
Bjørn Borud: [00:31:46] Uh, well, so with with emotion stuff, it’s one of the problems that is particularly hard. So similar to getting enough light up about resolution into people’s eyes, it’s something that we’ll [00:32:00] be able to get better at. We’ll be able to go up to 2K 4K, but that’s not anywhere near the total angular resolution of the human eye. Until you get to something that’s truly variable, that is that you are able to accurately track and put something right in there. Then we will still have more to go. That said, so that means that the current generation of VR is not there in any sort of reasonable, meaningful sense in terms of being finished. Nor will the sort of the research program for being there finish within even 20 years. But now that there is money in it, then it will begin to pick up where the sort of Moore’s last free lunch kind of left off and that there is stuff to be done to improve it. I’m with you in that I actually don’t particularly have an interest in VR itself, but more immersive computing, the context, [00:33:00] the concept that computers will be able to be things that we can interact with without having to touch a keyboard or the mouse. Not that we want. Those are necessarily going to go away, but that they are currently the only means through which we use them. And having gestural or interactive sort of interfaces would be beneficial for a number of people and also in a number of domain tasks, a task like being able to manipulate information by tweaking the view of multiple parameters rather than having to use sliders or anything like that.
Bjørn Borud: [00:33:39] Being able to use gestural interfaces means that you have a more nuanced ability to bring your understanding of the physical reality to bear on the way that we use computers and that, like the people who have managed to make it into computers, are the ones who are willing to make those concessions to their physical awareness. [00:34:00] And the other people say, Well, I just really like using my hands, or there’s just really something about books that are a lot better and those people are all right and they all have a point. And unfortunately, a lot of the people who have managed to make it through that sort of trial by fire into computing have forgotten that. But we actually are really amazing with our hands and there really is something amazing about books they don’t have control over. But the affordances that exist as a consequence of turning pages is a consequence of having physical reminders of the shape of your hand. Grip and stuff like that are are really valuable for understanding what it is that you’re doing with the book, how to respond to it, what to do next, and not to be distracted by trying to load a Twitter feed or something like that. So there’s there’s a ton of stuff there. Vr headsets are currently the least worst. Go ahead, brother.
Frode Hegland: [00:34:52] I was just going to say, I think we strongly agree, but it’s worth highlighting that we need to consider we’ll be living in a hybrid world. I [00:35:00] can imagine very easily, you know, small update to the Apple Watch, tiny little camera. I’m reading a physical book, you know, maybe it’s just scanned the cover because that’s not that difficult, right? So I’m reading and I say, you know, search for this and then if I’m wearing it, will actually show it on the side. Is very much your world brand. I was just playing off the fact that you said a physical book does not command F, but very soon it will have.
Bjørn Borud: [00:35:24] And that’s where it. Right, right. And the advances in iOS 15 and Mac 12 are sort of case in point of that of being able to actually find those things. Also, if anybody manages to make a personal privacy preserving way of putting a lot of cameras in your home, then being able to have camera feeds over your shoulder would mean that you could have an ambient sort of general computing environment that is aware of what you might be doing with your hands in front of your computer without having to include that as as a way [00:36:00] of sort of presenting it to the machine. And yeah,
Frode Hegland: [00:36:05] You or anyone here know if there has been real research on how a baby manipulates its mother because I like to joke, and I think it’s very true that our first interface is our mother. And they may be, yeah, crying, but different kinds of crying for different reasons, in different ways, at different times, and they are very attuned to to, you know, for the mother to know what’s going on with us. Maybe a good starting point.
Bjørn Borud: [00:36:34] Well, I mean, there’s a lot of work on the recognition of motor babbling. So motor babbling is the process whereby the the the the the name for when you have muscles in your body and they’re connected all the way up into your brain, it’s called innovation, and that’s not actually complete when you’re when you’re born. We’re barely finished. It’s just that that’s the last [00:37:00] moment that we would be able to fit out the birth canal. And so we take that moment to get out, but we’re really not really born in a meaningful sense in terms of having the wherewithal to actually understand our stimuli. And so motor babbling is the process where we we are just randomly firing. There are multiple connections from each muscle up through the spinal column into the brain, and we and we just pinch those and we wait. And we look at the same thing that’s happening with our optic nerve, and we try to try to pare it down that stimuli and response until we get some kind of one for one. I use this neuron, this motor neuron, and I use, yes, motor babbling. That’s correct. And when we do that, we have the ability to know this is my finger muscle. And so that happens for babies at the same time. There’s a lot about our eyes that that [00:38:00] is actually more neural. You know, people say that there are more connections from your brain to your ear than there are back. And that sort of is indicative of the fact that hearing is an active process, but also that in that same way that eyes are much more complicated organ.
Bjørn Borud: [00:38:19] And so to your point, one of the things that we do with our eyes is we we learn how to apply emotional affect. And so babies will be learning at that point how to make sure that they can convey things with their eyes at a time, probably before they learn how to convey things with language. And I know I must have asked with Daniel Kahneman did a lot of work on eyes and what it is that can be discerned from them? I’m not sure if that’s something that has been a field of interest for Barbara. But it would be fascinating to talk to psychologists and developmental [00:39:00] psychologists about that. I know Meadow has a lot of stuff about hand. She may know about early childhood development, enhance as well. But yeah, there’s a there’s a lot there. I’m not familiar with really early childhood development and specifically the stuff that children do to parents. But yeah. Those are some places to start. What else is happening there? When I joined Brenda, I was talking about embodied learning. And I think then I don’t know which point it was connected to embodied learning and the troubles of VR, because when you’re VR, you have this kind of placebo embodied learning effect. You’re there, but you’re not quite there. So if you’re if I want to learn piano and then I VR environment, I lose, you know, the physicality of these and the context, awareness and the width [00:40:00] and the depth and the pressure and a lot of a lot of these things not necessarily about.
Frode Hegland: [00:40:05] Not if you bring the physical keyboard into VR.
Bjørn Borud: [00:40:10] Like then.
Frode Hegland: [00:40:12] Yeah, and that’s just the whole hybrid thing of, you know, you try to take from the best what you can into different things.
Bjørn Borud: [00:40:19] But then I would in that case. My regular glasses with amplified information on screen would be kind of better because I would be there with the extra information that I need based on the context. Um, I don’t know if I want to get anywhere, I just wanted to comment that I’m a really fan of embodied learning, especially because if you think of all of the other areas that that are non non digital nine interface non screen, for example, dancing or theater, it’s all embodied learning. After you do it, you know, a certain amount [00:41:00] of times. And you know, related to the context, I don’t think about the keys that I’m going to press. My body does, my body remembers the keys of the song and I play the song. So what is that?
Frode Hegland: [00:41:13] You’re holding that to show you guys this? It’s kind of interesting. And so it’s oh. It’s not, in reality, all that good in terms of what is on it, the scales are a bit off. But I’ve been
Bjørn Borud: [00:41:31] Talking about
Frode Hegland: [00:41:35] This at a company called Suck, believe it or not, at Duke. But I was talking to Christopher Gutteridge today about using this for the Solar System. So let’s say this is the size of the Sun and then you have the planets. It turns out they don’t actually make these long enough to fit Neptune. Right. This is a giant that’s been going on and on about, but it’s not really embodied [00:42:00] in that sense, but it still helps give a sense of scale. And there’s so many ways to do that. I mean, one thing we have to do is build the Solar System, and we are I haven’t found any good apps for that. But you know, and then how to speed the journey, how long does it take to go from the Sun to Neptune at light speed,
Bjørn Borud: [00:42:17] From the Sun to Jupiter, I think, is four six minutes, depending on the position of the planets. And I think that, you know, the Solar System is really hard to grasp in terms of human scale because I mean, it’s mostly empty space. And if you are, there was a TED talk many, many years ago where, you know, a guy talked about what an average place in the universe looks like. Well, it doesn’t look like anything because an average place in the universe, you can’t even see stars.
Frode Hegland: [00:42:55] Oh, yeah, I mean, the only stars we can see here are the Milky Way, we can’t see anything [00:43:00] further.
Bjørn Borud: [00:43:00] Exactly. Yeah. And if you live in the city, you can you can hardly even see that. But but I think that that’s kind of also tied into I spend a lot of time these days talking to people who care about energy and climate. People struggle a lot with large or small numbers and and with change. So, yeah, there are there are some things that it would be really interesting to be able to visualize. But it’s really hard. So Solar System is actually giving people a realistic idea of how large the Solar System is. It’s surprisingly difficult.
Frode Hegland: [00:43:53] Hmm. Yeah, it is. So here’s the thing to kind of roughly go back to to what we’re talking about [00:44:00] as a community. Let’s let’s imagine this. We start with a PDF, obviously, and in this PDF, in plain English with visual matter is something about the Solar System. Ideally, we should be able to don our virtual glasses or whatever virtual environment literally pull that off the page, put it as a sculpture in the room. Right, interact with it, do all these cool things and someone else, you’ll be able to say, Well, actually, I have a model of Sarah’s which is better than yours. Plop it in, do things. And when we’re done close down our glosses, that information will still be reflected in our outside of VR environments. I think it is so important that we work towards that maybe this could be something like this could be an example project to try to make that possible.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:44:52] A couple of thoughts to scatter shot around. First off, I love that thinking. [00:45:00] And even in the sense of. Future text labs. There’s the side that we’re doing now, which is scattershot and big ideas, but it’d be interesting if the labs is actually like, Hey, let’s let’s let’s learn by doing right, let’s figure out something and see what we can test the boundaries. So Solar System is one another one I had which to say I think would be too difficult to do. But if it’s difficult, then everything else is even more difficult. This is Burns Euclid, which is a beautiful, typographic description of the concepts.
Frode Hegland: [00:45:45] Come on, you’re costing me money again. What? What is it called?
Mark Anderson: [00:45:50] It’s certainly the position.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:45:53] Yeah, it is, yeah, it’s very made like in the early, like maybe a nineteen twenties or something, right? [00:46:00] But because it has color that goes that is in line with the concepts. What’s the name of a?
Frode Hegland: [00:46:10] Elements of Euclid, thank you.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:46:13] Bye bye burn, right? So obviously, there’s Euclid’s garbage copy. Nobody wants that. Yeah, there you go. Ok, hold it up one more time so I can get a screenshot, do you?
Mark Anderson: [00:46:24] I’ll go and look for it. But but because maybe people haven’t seen it, there is a guy recently who you know again, because no one told him not to went and created all of what you just seeing in CSS
Alan Laidlaw: [00:46:35] Is to let you have the poster that he made. I can bring him in here. If you guys want to see it, it’s beautiful. It’s just great. And so this is an inspiration. In fact, it might even be a collaboration with him. He he created a beautiful CSS version of it.
Mark Anderson: [00:46:49] I’ll try to find it.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:46:51] Ok, great. But I was thinking it would be wild continuation of that conversation that started all the way back with Euclid to see what [00:47:00] a VR version of this would be like. Right. Would it just be the pages depicted, would it be interactive? Would it be somehow immersive? I feel like even though it’s exceptionally difficult, we could just do one chapter. There could be a lot of lessons in the the parts of VR that I’m interested in, and I believe Rendell is at this kind of like what is low fidelity, but not not physically representative VR learning. Working look like, you know, anyway,
Frode Hegland: [00:47:40] That’s my opinion, but probably not for an early stage, but you have my vote completely. I mean, one thing I selfishly want is for Edgar to learn geometry in that. I want them to learn things in that.
Bjørn Borud: [00:47:54] I think one one, one project that we still have to do, guys, is to unify [00:48:00] our libraries because every session we have amazing book. Yes.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:48:07] Ok, so this is the main point I wanted to talk about.
Frode Hegland: [00:48:09] Yeah, this is what Helen and I talked about this weekend. How do we want someone who has an interesting resource for the group? What do we do? Helen?
Alan Laidlaw: [00:48:16] No, this is yeah, let’s get tactical for a moment. Over the weekend, Frode bought the domain name, which is great. I threw well,
Frode Hegland: [00:48:28] Text info or whatever fits your text.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:48:33] I’ve been working in craft lately. I invited you guys to the workspace. It’s understandable that that is not ideal, but it’s still I can even show you the notes that I’ve made from this call so far. I think I think if we’re going to move forward, it is vital that we have a way to collaborate a synchronously. Um, I know we have the meetings right now, but there’s [00:49:00] the there’s the matter of the transcript and I think you’ll find even in just the very quick one off notes that I’ve been making from today’s, which I’ll just go ahead and share my screen, that it’s immediately more useful than think than digging through a transcript, right? So like right here, I’ve just got attending. I’ve got when we were talking, we were introducing ourselves. These are terms that we all mentioned, right? And and now we’ve got like observations. Mark mentioned a book. So if I jump over to books, I can see that today was mentioned reading and writing for an electronic book, right? And similarly, I can go over here and see other books mentioned. Almost perfect creative selection, right? I’m not suggesting this is the right way to do it, but we need to start if we’re going to be more. Effective [00:50:00] this year, we need a place that has certain baseline requirements where we can work asynchronously kind of document curate a library is the first place to start.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:50:13] I’ve I’ve I’ve started to put together just a mention of obviously this is a little sided with just what we’ve recently mentioned. You know, I’ve made different docs for that. It doesn’t have to be a doc could just be a reference. But wherever this lives, we need to have something like that. And I think some of the requirements go along the lines of. Pc and Mac, which sort of makes. Craft problematic, something where I don’t have to log in every time, something that is easy to, you know, download work across devices, et cetera. We can go into what those requirements are, but I [00:51:00] would just press that we should have something like that to the point that not only do we have the library and that we have this loose categorization of. Uh, how how we’re phrasing things like what I love about even just talking through this versus writing it out is that we’ve got, you know, terms that we would say that very quickly come to mind when we’re talking, but we might struggle with if we’re trying to write it out or turn it into a category and then separately, get to a point where we can actually have agendas or things that we want to talk about during some of these calls, right? Sort of future planning that is that is it? Go ahead, frode.
Frode Hegland: [00:51:41] I just wanted to underscore what you’re doing and ask, I think maybe beyond, because you’re kind of the newest person dipping in here today, I don’t know how often you will be here. It’s completely free and easy. But let me just take the pulse. I can see you all on the side here. First easiest thing to suggest is we just make this a normal [00:52:00] WordPress blog. Everybody who is involved in the community has their own account, and it’s an admin account, so you can actually do anything. But we do agree on a few things, such as anybody can post a post, but only together do we make a new page. So the page is kind of become public facing to introduce new people and kind of decisions and announcements. But the posts are entirely internal and we agree on a few rules, such as resource or whatever. So it’s easy to build a page to see tags. Should we consider that or should we go further beyond and everyone else? What do you think about that old fashioned idea?
Alan Laidlaw: [00:52:40] I have an issue, a small issue with that, but I’ll I’ll wait till everybody else chimes in.
Bjørn Borud: [00:52:50] Hmm. I was trying to remember a friend of mine has a start up that is trying [00:53:00] to do a system that is really hard to describe. I think I did. I send you a presentation from them through.
Frode Hegland: [00:53:11] Uh, what’s the company?
Bjørn Borud: [00:53:13] And I’m trying to remember the guy who started this called Jeremy Iverson. Um. So their product is really hard to describe. So you can think of it as a cross between a wiki, a database and a spreadsheet so you can put information into it and then you can start to organize it later. So, for instance, you can you can put things like devices, descriptions of devices into it. And then later, you can say this is actually these objects are or these things in this information domain are devices and [00:54:00] devices have these properties. And then you can retroactively and incrementally apply structure to information and then also. Automated. Unfortunately, they have gotten way too much funding, so they’re probably going to operate under the radar for a while. But in general, I have very few. Preferences, since I usually have several modalities when when I work, so I’m very old fashioned, I make notes with with a fountain pen. Usually I didn’t bring one today, but. Uh, and then so I usually have distinctive. Um, writing and organization faces, if that makes any sense. So first first stage is always to just do information capture and then later try to [00:55:00] organize it so that I can actually find what I’m looking for. Um.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:55:09] So sorry, Peter, go ahead. Yeah, I think we should actually try to do a test bed with our own front end user interface. Now we could use WordPress as a backend content management system. That’s what I’m going to be doing with Founders Quadrangle. I have code that can reach into the WordPress API and pull in all of the posts, and then frontend code can scan that and manipulate it. Add extra linkages that aren’t present in the WordPress portion of the feed. Merge that with bibliographic material being stored in a literal public group. I think actually, that’s what we should do for exchanging references. So Turrell has a system where you can have public groups and then anyone who’s a member of the public group can have their local literal desktop client put citations into the communal database and pull updates out of it. So that’d be a really good way for us to start [00:56:00] merging our libraries.
Mark Anderson: [00:56:05] You know, I certainly keep all my books in my. It happens to be in bookends at the moment, but I keep it there simply. So I’ve got it handy for a site, mainly if people want know more than just a title, I can normally means I can quite quickly get them something. Well, more than a title and not just an Amazon link, because I just posted earlier because other sources are available.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:56:29] Uh, yeah. Anyone else?
Mark Anderson: [00:56:35] I it’s funny that fountain pens came up because there is something, as I know when I was studying and my supervisor, Oh God, he’s writing it down with a pen, you know, as if this was no. But it is. There is something, even even though it all ends up basically on on the back of envelopes and stuff. But this is my short term memory and I struggle to move off that. And I know there are all these wonderful digital things, but [00:57:00] actually, I just don’t find them. I think it’s partly because it’s a spatial thing too. I sort of know I wrote it on the third envelope, down on the top right hand corner. And you know, that’s just an odd way of remembering stuff. And I read it greening cannot purple ink or whatever, you know,
Frode Hegland: [00:57:15] I could not imagine putting my library, you know, on the other side of the room where this thing into a digital form, unless it is to share with someone. Yeah, I know what’s on the shelf. But anyway, there are all kinds of comments back to Alan’s main kind of concern to use that term.
Alan Laidlaw: [00:57:37] Yeah, my main concern is that we we’ve got a good thing going here. We’ve got some tailwind, right? The transcription is useful, but I think that there’s a way that we could do something more without a whole lot more lift. There, I think. The the way to approach [00:58:00] it is. Whatever is close closest at hand and can evolve over time, get better over time. With those few caveats, like one of my my two main issues, I think with WordPress yarn brought up one is that, you know, I want to be able to put information in and organize it later. I don’t want to feel the pressure of I’m putting something in the wrong place, which is a lot of the reason why I don’t use circle so much. Another is the necessity of or the the degree to which I have to log into something first before I access it versus something that’s sort of kind of like always on and I can just jump to it. Something as simple as that, it’s going to be, to be honest, you know, for me and I think for a lot of others, it’s just going to be one of those little frictions where you go, like, I don’t have time to do this now and then it doesn’t ever get used, right? So so the main goal is to find a [00:59:00] tool, even if it’s not perfect, that does get used. Even if we take it later on and put it somewhere else,
Frode Hegland: [00:59:07] We do have another constraint. Agreeing with all of those and that is I really want Adam and Brando, particularly if they want to use this data for some kind of experiment of what’s in the group to be able to very easily access it. That’s also constrained constraint, not necessarily a huge one. Brundle has already said he’s very good and happy with scraping, so just mentioning it. I don’t.
Adam Wern: [00:59:31] Now, I wonder. To me, it’s really hard to with those community resources. One is that they only get half finished and then people have real life to attend to and they yeah. People love to do hundreds of categories. There are mostly empty and the opposite problem is that someone dumps everything into that. And what I need is kind of a the best resources, not the not the [01:00:00] same thing as a well-crafted Google search will give me so. And the same. And we also have different tastes as well. Someone in this group recommended free guy. And when I had the flu just before the Christmas, that is why I was away because I had like four or five weeks of fevers in the family to attend to. Oh yeah, crazy. Not regular colds, but fevers. But I watch foundation, which was OK from your recommendation and free guy, which was hopeless. It is kind of the high production value, low, low meaningfulness. I think that
Frode Hegland: [01:00:45] It was a popcorn
Bjørn Borud: [01:00:46] Movie. Yeah, but
Adam Wern: [01:00:48] We have enough popcorn in our life. It’s kind of saturated with popcorn with so. But we don’t swimming, meaningfulness, so we have to be a bit more. Less [01:01:00] popcorn, I think. And while the resources brand isn’t in the chat like The View, the future mundane and they are absolutely excellent, so where it’s I want those kind of resources, those videos that are really, really worth watching. And thank you, Brandon, because many of the things you’ve sent out. So yeah, high quality. And so it’s it’s a matter of taste and also discernment on what you send to others and what you collect. Because as Mark often says, it’s putting many things into a bucket doesn’t make it valuable or useful, but you really need to rank them and hide things and promote things so you have a small selection that is good.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:01:50] Oh yeah, over Peter. I think maybe we should do, say, an electron based desktop client. [01:02:00] So it’d be cross-platform. And there’s some libraries out there that could help us synchronize data and address that. So it could be something could be local on your desktop first and then automatically using some back end that exchange mechanism for sharing collaboration purposes. Ok, so I’m arguing for roll our own if we really want to be happy.
Frode Hegland: [01:02:26] We’ll roll our own, I think is not a bad idea, but I do think still we should use WordPress, but mostly as a data storage mechanism. And the thing is, yeah, that makes sense. You know, I like doing the expert interviews for my own work with visual meta author and reader. One thing came up is there will be a learning curve, but that’s not bad. If it’s a learning curve that gives a benefit to the right user, it’s a good thing most people will never use my products. Fine, it’s not for most people. So similarly here, when Alan rightly [01:03:00] says that logging into WordPress is a bit of an effort, I agree it’s kind of countered by. If we imagine that we are all together writing a thesis or making the next volume of the book, we are producing a thing we’re not. This is not only for thinking. So if we then log in and we have to give way before we make a basic formalization like, for instance, the subject has to do in the name of the book or the web page or whatever, then we have to write why we think it’s important. We can’t just put it in simply not socially allowed, and then we have a few tags and whatnot. That’s fine. But what that can mean is that because this data is in a structured form, we can then build powerful views for this. Like Adam can see any recommendation by Brandel and maybe mute me a little bit because I like free guy as an example. It means that these higher level interactions can become possible without having to build the whole world and maybe even build a balance going to show something, though.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:03:58] Anyway, no, I’m [01:04:00] just I’m just noting what we’ve been talking about.
Frode Hegland: [01:04:03] No, no. But I can tell you I was done anyway. I’m sure you’ll have a counter point of interest.
Bjørn Borud: [01:04:10] Go ahead, Mark.
Mark Anderson: [01:04:12] I’m just saying, I mean, in terms of thinking about, you know, sharing library and things, I’d much rather in the first instance I’d much rather be able to sort of share my library, which is sort of what that pinkie said of Amazon Ideas list. So I’ll simply because I know they’re online and I know they have to run the server. But there’s an important point in this. I’m not interested in writing. I don’t want to waste time writing a review for a person that might. That might be useful. One person I find him, I like, you know, I think when I was in the lab, I used to go and look at other people’s bookshelves, and I might spot something interesting. If it was interesting, I would ask them. And normally one or two things would happen. They they’d say, Yeah, something you might find interesting or more useful. It might say, I actually had to look at that and actually doesn’t really cover the stuff you’re looking at, and it’s fine if [01:05:00] you want it. I mean, if you want to have a copy of it, but it’s not, it’s not something you probably need to have. And that thing doesn’t tend to work in, you know, when you’re just told, you must write something about this because either you get five star OMG and must read or zero stars would not read again how whether it’s dressed up in sort of fancy language or not. They’re pretty much boils down to that level of use. So being able to see what’s in the library is remarkably useful and often more useful than wading through all the comments on it because it’s the first sift. Oh, right. Somebody I know knows a bit about that. I might want to. I might want to then actually have a direct communication with it to ask about
Frode Hegland: [01:05:42] My real hand trumps your artificial hand, Alan, just for a second, just to hit back at Mark. I think we’re talking about two different kinds of libraries, which is very useful. I really wouldn’t mind being able to pair at your physical self, even if it’s virtual for exactly the reason you say. But I do think that [01:06:00] writing for a specific community and remember it’s the expectation we might read it. Plus, when it’s published, here’s a research resource. So and so I think it’s interesting because blah blah, it’s this.
Mark Anderson: [01:06:13] It’s very contextual, though,
Frode Hegland: [01:06:16] Of course it is. But you know, like an author, when you do the defining for the map, right? You say you’re just right in plain English and then you can build something later. So all I’m saying is that if it’s not important enough for you to write why it’s good, you shouldn’t put it in and expect us to read it. Like Brendel has got such huge interest and is read so much for me to go through his library would be a complete waste of time. Well, not complete. It will be fun, but it would be very random. But if Brundle says for this group here, I built this be our word processor demo. Why don’t you have a look?
Mark Anderson: [01:06:48] Boom, that’s different to what I mean, library. I’m really, actually really, really thinking books, not academic papers or bits of software. That’s that’s I accept you can you can expand it like [01:07:00] that. But I just to clarify, I was talking mainly in terms of books or what pamphlets. That was not not effectively journal articles and things like that.
Frode Hegland: [01:07:10] A very important point to have that clarified. Yes.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:07:16] All right. I’ll just, you know, we don’t have to talk the whole time on this. It’s just something that I think should be figured out and knowing, like pretty much this is exactly all the points mentioned. You know, this is how we all feel. There’s not going to be a solution for it, right? The way that I’ve been thinking about that then, is a sort of a separation of concerns. Speaks nothing to whether they’re in different places or different environments. But to Adam’s point, yes. When all of these things tend to become dump trucks and on the other hand, if you have formalization, then you tend to either stress about it or use it so rarely that it just doesn’t get used, right? [01:08:00] So if we have a separation of concerns like public facing or public interaction space versus project planning, meeting, planning, whatever versus library versus capture, then our tolerances, our expectations could be different and in each of these have sort of different affordances requirements. Right. But I don’t think that there is a way to to handle all of these needs. And at least for me, you know, I’m not going to be at every meeting and I’m certainly not going to be paying attention. So this is not going to be consistent even if it’s desired. But for me, I want to continue to at least extract some of these points, either from chat or from the actual talk and put them in something that is slightly more organized. Regardless of where it winds up, and [01:09:00] maybe we could all do little bursts or attempts of that and just kind of like. Just try it out, doesn’t use your own platform and then dump it into a place later on. I don’t know how you resolve right now, but something to think about.
Frode Hegland: [01:09:19] It’s so important. And before we move towards VR, this was one of those forever discussions. I agree with you. But let me just ask both Adam and Brundle. Let’s say that, for instance, metasearch over the book I was talking about recently, let’s say that I put it in a place. This is really fantastic. Blah blah blah. What is the most convenient way to put it that that can be completely, easily accessed while I got my headset on?
Bjørn Borud: [01:09:48] I’m hearing. Go ahead, Linda. At this point, headsets are pretty garbage for doing anything that hasn’t been explicitly built [01:10:00] for them. They’re not a general purpose kind of computing device in the sense that you can kind of construct something on the fly. I really love the work that’s being done at Monash University toward that end, but it’s still fairly tightly constrained in terms of what sort of parameters you have available. As such, I don’t recommend browsing in it, but rather using it as a destination. Once you’ve found something, that’s something that obviously I would love to be able to change, but it’s something that nobody’s managed to make enough headway on. So to the end of having having an endpoint that that is compatible with being able to construct a view or being able to to to view things that aren’t explicitly for VR within the VR, I don’t I don’t have a clear perspective of a way of being able to facilitate that in the near future. If anybody’s got anything that’s better than nothing, then I’d be thrilled to see it, but I would need to build something for it. And so to that end, the most important aspect of what would need to be available is cross origin resource sharing, such that I would be able to pull it in from [01:11:00] wherever and then for it to be marked up in a way that’s easily discernible. That this is a book title versus this being a book description and this being an image URL that I can make use of kind of the cross origin. Resource sharing is actually the more important thing, and it’s a small thing, but it’s it’s essential for me not to have to send up my own server to procure those assets. So yeah, like I don’t know that there’s anything experientially that that can be done without explicitly sort of targeting that. And then the rest of the concerns are just the bog standard technical ones of being able to obtain those resources programmatically.
Frode Hegland: [01:11:35] The piece that I started writing this morning probably is entirely about that without me knowing that term. And I think this is probably the most important issue we face. You know, taking things in and out of VR because of what Adam said with some links, I managed to go to our web website and then click the button. Suddenly, it was VR space. But it certainly wasn’t this. But if we were to really push on such a point, [01:12:00] could we do? What would you want? Would you want us to maybe do this in WordPress? Or is there something else where we can work on some kind of a plug in that when you’re viewing it on a web browser in VR, you click a thing and suddenly the list has come out. Or something?
Bjørn Borud: [01:12:23] Well, if somebody wants to build the thing that I would build, then that would be lovely. But you know, the thing that I would ambition is to consume some kind of data feed, XML or JSON or some other language, some other markup format that has the information about the pictures of the books. And if there are any other useful pieces of information about the relative sizes of that or or sort of attending information, then from the books in VR that I’ve done, then I would build something that is able to then render those into positions and have them have those positions be updated as a consequence [01:13:00] of things like the relative word count of first person pronouns and the feminine versus the masculine. My sister was asking my daughter, Sorry, my sister was asking whether Alice in Wonderland says she more than hate because of the relative frequency of she and he and the English language. And so I wrote a program to be able to do that yesterday and was able to say, Actually, no, you’re right. It does say she and her much more than that, says he and has an Alice in Wonderland. So those are the kinds of things that I would hope to be able to do within it. Ideally, we ought to be able to kind of come up with gestural or conversational ways of coming up with that search. But yeah, I don’t. I don’t I don’t see, you know, computer programs as value systems. And unless, you know, what are the value systems, what is important about the way that you’re representing things ahead of time? It’s exceptionally difficult to construct that and couple that within the context of the application.
Frode Hegland: [01:13:56] That’s really cool. So, Mark and then Rafael, but just [01:14:00] really briefly, I interpret what you’re saying is we need some money for this lab. That’s what I think, anyway, we need some monies to get some of this coding done, not just by the people in the group, but spread it out. So let’s let’s keep that on the back on the back burner.
Mark Anderson: [01:14:15] Mark, just a couple of things. One is I assume that what Alan mushiness is craft, which I apologize they haven’t got round to log into yet. So the journals that is craft, is it?
Bjørn Borud: [01:14:27] Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Mark Anderson: [01:14:29] And I mean, I find it interesting because just watching it being used, that is sort of that came close to sort of what I imagine in the journal might be for what it’s worth, you know, so exposed to it raw. That’s sort of the depth and degree of granularity because there’s a limit to the amount of effort put into this. And I’m very aware. I mean, I am totally distracted by the most things. So, you know, typing when I’m fully concentrating is hard enough, typing it, typing and listening and talking to somebody not going to happen for me. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s a lifelong embarrassment, [01:15:00] but there we are. But I put that out there that some of the things you may think we want to do, maybe not not as widely accessible to, you know, to give someone as a task because we may assume. And then I just loop back quickly something that came to mind as Brenda was talking about and saying, Well, you know, you need to consume some data format. And I was thinking, yes, and that links us back neatly to what Bjorn was talking about in terms of IoT, because some of the things we’re going to be talking with or interacting with will essentially be the Internet of Things. So the data, the data formats become less trivial. I know it’s a little bit that no one wants to work on because it sounds like the and the standards were gets invoked as well. But it does sort of matter. I mean, and that’s why it’s been actually I found this year, although it felt like drawing teeth, doing the visual matter has actually been very, very interesting [01:16:00] in that regard because of what it of what the journey of getting it from. Let’s do it to suddenly, Oh, we need to do it in a month’s time. All the things they did on Earth that I didn’t think we trip over. So your data feeds and structures is an interesting thing, right? I see the flock.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:16:18] Hey, go.
Frode Hegland: [01:16:21] Yeah, Rafael.
Bjørn Borud: [01:16:24] Yeah, I took some notes and everybody was speaking. So regarding I’m just going to throw a bunch of words and then try to thread it all into something cohesive, so we all use different platforms. Connecting with Alan’s point of finding where we could add the things that we talk about and that still is an issue because we all use different platforms that we find better, you know? I know [01:17:00] that I know that Peter is a huge fan of Thunder Box, and he always has ideas of creating something of our own that would create something custom of our own would always be better. But you don’t have the time to dedicate to building some complex things, so it’s always easier to do something that is already done and something. And the tools that are done that are collaborative are things that are being widely used, things like slack and discord and notion and craft and all of those things. Some of them, you know, have different platforms, but it connects to the idea. You know that we need to put in an effort to be able to do it. And there’s always the question of friction also connected to that. So has to be low. Friction effort needs to be something. And the [01:18:00] idea of so I don’t have a specific answer for having the perfect platform.
Bjørn Borud: [01:18:08] It could even be Google Docs, but I mean, we just have to put in the effort to put it in, right? And that’s, I think, where time and having you know, other projects and having work comes in. So I think. The possibility of dedicating more time to this would be amazing, and I think that if any of us, I think if people in this room would be given the possibility of here you go, you have now we have this, you know, either outside investment or sponsorship or something. And now we can dedicate one hundred percent of our time doing things related to text. I’m sure some of us would be delighted to do so, and we would be able to create and get more things out of paper [01:19:00] into into reality. So I think that’s something that, you know, even Frode mentioned that we’re going to look into this year, which would be which would be nice even to have. Maybe we can hire a couple of developers to develop some of the ideas that that go that happen throughout these conversations and related to sharing books, connecting to mark sharing physical books. And then I was thinking related to curation and context because every I think every book is important given the need for the content, but the need for the content comes up kind of randomly.
Rafel Nepô: [01:19:48] So curation is good up to a point because, as Marc mentioned, you can stumble upon a book in the library and it’s better than trying to find the curation for that. So [01:20:00] if if we had something on the lines of you take a photo of your bookshelf and then technology happens and, you know, OCR the spines of books, and it automatically searches for Amazon links of all those books and little snippets and previews. And then I could very easily see the books that are in Alan’s library just with very little effort. And then I can choose the ones that that intrigue me based on those those little previews. So that’s the easiest way I could think of if we had, you know, a social media for my own personal library. You know, you take a photo, a photo of your little library and it creates automatically all of the things that it could find. And then you fill in the blanks if some books don’t have spines or some books are sideways or things like that. Yeah, but that’s my my rambling for for the past couple [01:21:00] of minutes.
Frode Hegland: [01:21:03] The brand just really briefly, I don’t think we should separate resources, the resources, a resource, whether it’s web video, audio book, magazine journal, it’s all really important for for the library, I think. But yeah, Randall, you had your hand up, right?
Bjørn Borud: [01:21:20] Yeah, so I agree with Rafael, I think there are lots of really interesting things that you can do at all sorts of different across a continuum of level of effort. I’d really like to explore what what kinds of capabilities you can sort of conjure out of very low effort or very sort of seamless use of technology to the OCR. And it’s something that I’ve been doing. I think I mentioned last week that I was looking at web based OCR and this week it’s not working perfectly, but I’ll paste a little snippet of it. I managed to get a [01:22:00] web page that is able to look at the stuff not in that web page, but actually just happening on my computer screen and is watching the participants box for who’s speaking and then writing out the list of names. Unfortunately, it mangles the the mark on the end of your name, Rafael, because it’s just the currently the English training set. But I actually imagine if I were to use Portuguese, it might. It might do a better job if if it knew that it was a common diacritics mark Portuguese. Anyway, so but yeah, I think I’m actually not particularly invested in being completely right about infrastructural stuff at this point, because I don’t think that will get it perfectly right first press time.
Bjørn Borud: [01:22:55] And I’m more interested in understanding that continuum of results across [01:23:00] the continuum of approaches and and levels of effort. So one of the things that would be really interesting to do is, for example, if it’s too onerous and I think it often is to write something about a book, I think it’s actually a lot easier to say something about a book, and I think that those are interesting artifacts to be able to encode. So something I did many years ago from my grandparents was a page that let you record audio commentary about photographs. So annotate those things and voice the same sort of thing that you would do when talking to them, ideally to actually do it while talking to them and then have the ability for people to hear each other’s notes and then kind of respond to them so that you can have sort of a conversation among very close, intimate sort of center of people around what it is that an artifact represents. And I think that that that kind of thing might be interesting within something like a library as well. It’s a lot [01:24:00] easier in conversation to talk about why a book is interesting and if you have the wherewithal to to kind of bookend, so to speak, the conversation, to say this piece of conversations about this book, then I think you can get a lot of really interesting things out of that.
Bjørn Borud: [01:24:12] So. So, yeah, I agree that it would be cool to have these things. I’m not super concerned about the specific implementation details other than to clearly enumerate them when we’re trying them and then to be able to talk about the results. And yeah, I think that that would be a lot of fun to the end of having money on that would be really cool. I’d love to be able to to work on this kind of stuff. But at this point, Apple is very cushy job. So I. So I may have to end up being the last to jump. So, yeah, no, that all sounds like really useful goals. But yeah, I think that enumerating the specific goals and values before the tools is really valuable and then taking [01:25:00] the time to then go back over how well they’re doing and what kinds of things you’re not capturing as a consequence of this particular run are also really useful.
Frode Hegland: [01:25:09] And thank you, I’ll give the floor to Rafael and then pull it, but I just want to remind
Bjørn Borud: [01:25:15] You guys, I forgot to lower my hand. Sorry.
Frode Hegland: [01:25:17] Oh, OK. And then after me, I just wanted to remind us all how incredibly spoiled we are. The fact that we can do amazing things is almost paralyzing us if this was 200 years ago. We find a meeting room with the books on the shelf and be done with it. We may develop a system of taking books out and maybe we’ll invent an index card system to, you know, that kind of stuff. But the fact that we can do anything now is putting us in this absolutely ridiculous state. So if this was a company and any one of us was the boss, I’m sure that boss would say, pick one and stick with it. We’ll fill it up. It’ll fail. We’ll move something else. So I think in this conversation, [01:26:00] because Bjorn is, you know, is an absolute genius, wonderful guy, close friend. I don’t want him to come in here and think we’re another bunch of hippies sitting around the fire with coffee, just talking all night. You know, be really good as this new person to say, Oh my God, they actually decided on a thing over.
Bjørn Borud: [01:26:20] I just remember that when I was five or six years old, I asked my my mother if a computer I had the impression that you could ask a computer any question I would actually answer you. And she said, No, no, you stupid kid. Of course it can’t do that. You know, if you try to google something, then well, you kind of have that today. Oh, what? I was, what I kept thinking about while we were talking was, so I see essentially this has three distinct. I deal with information in three distinct ways, so you have capture [01:27:00] and then you have trying to make sense of it or trying to to systematize it or structure it, and then you have finding it because the irony, the irony was I used to download everything and store it on my computer. And then eventually I discovered I can’t actually find anything on my computers, so I stopped doing that. And instead, I started focusing on how did I find it in the first place? And if you think about how you how you figure out where your car keys are, for instance, you do that by association, you don’t your brain doesn’t have that information at hand. You think about I was in that room, I was doing that, etc. So they are association links and I’ve talked to through them about this for I think it was four or five years ago. With using [01:28:00] using graph databases to link pieces of information to each other. One other thing that struck me was. You know, you kind of need projections of that graph. So, for instance, there might be, you know, the public private domain, so there might be associations between nodes in the graph that that are that makes sense to me.
Bjørn Borud: [01:28:31] So for instance, I can remember that I was listening to Chapter two of the book while I was crossing a stream somewhere in Oslo, for instance. And for some reason, that memory sticks in my head. But if true, there is going to try to find that information I was consuming at that moment. This is not going to make any sense to it. So I [01:29:00] kind of had this image in in my mind where let’s say you’re recording a conversation, OK, so you have you have a transcript from the audio down the middle and then associated with that, you have all the notes that different people take. Um, what other ideas they are linked to? They might be. You are not even in the same domain as what is being discussed. So I think that the you know, the third challenge, which is to to find the things you are interested in finding and accessing the information you’re interested in accessing. I. I spend a lot of time doing that with my notes. So I do exercises like, you know, try to look at something or remember something from that day. And I also see that [01:30:00] whenever I read the notes, I remember things about the situations where the notes were taken. So I guess when when a group needs to or wants to to maintain some some piece of knowledge together. That’s that’s kind of. So you have you have the objective transcripts that is hopefully correct. And then you have all of the things that that people thought about or wrote down while we were discussing this. And then also you have the, you know, the projections of that. Um, if that makes any sense.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:30:47] Does I’m a huge fan of that line of thinking, and I’ve posted a tweet about that and have other thoughts. But sure, there’s other hands up. And [01:31:00] if not, then
Bjørn Borud: [01:31:03] Need to take my hand on.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:31:06] Yeah, so so I totally agree, I think that’s part of what we have wrong about our TFT approach right now. It’s functional, arguably, but it falls apart pretty quickly, much like. And this is going to get real hippy, much like classical physics was based around particles. And then we found out that, you know, hey, particles are only accurate up to a point, right?
Frode Hegland: [01:31:34] What’s that up to a point? That’s funny.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:31:37] Yes. Yes. The the different ways to think about it that I think are really useful, for example, or or starting places. Ernst Mock said to stop thinking of objects and to think instead of objects as nodes between phenomena. Right. Which is which is great, [01:32:00] but it also can get you pretty close to nominal ism, which is that everything is a particular and nothing is a group, so that’s a problem on the group side. It’s it’s that Hofstadter would say that, you know? Are the fuel and fire of cognition is our ability to make metaphors, which Tversky its diversity would would call essentially like mimicry are our ability to see what someone else is doing in a situation and mimic it is the same thing as our ability to make a metaphor. And metaphors are, if you think about a broadly enough, are very similar to the association that you’re talking about because, you know, and I do the same thing. Uh. So rather than I’ll find better success in finding the thing that I was trying to find by loosening my grip and and and and [01:33:00] reliving whatever I was associating with at that time. So a metaphor doesn’t have to be a strict parallel in a computational sense. It could. It could simply be a kind of an association, but it still creates that kind of glue. And hopefully in VR, I would love to see it along. In the word processing side of things is more affordances to create those kind of loose associations and find again via via that. Like, I should drop a link. And I’ve always, always wanted to make an iOS game where you pull in your links to whatever you find during the day and then say you’re on the subway, you get those links back, but you just sort of like tossed. You either drag it over to a bear, a palm tree, you know, whatever crazy image comes up and then whatever feels more right to you, even though they’re all nonsensical, that’s where you place the link and then just see if you find it better [01:34:00] that way, right? Anyway.
Bjørn Borud: [01:34:03] Yes.
Frode Hegland: [01:34:05] So what I think we should do is to work towards exactly that, I think for knowing everyone here, this would be a worthwhile goal, basically insanely interactive graphs. That’s what we’re talking about, graph. I mean, things connected in space. And as far as what you’re talking about in the beginning, I mean, my philosophy is based on the fact that the most fundamental thing is not even information, it’s interaction because it is interaction that makes things what they are, which is exactly what you’re quoting there, which is nice. And that’s all very interesting along the lines of where we want to go. But first, we need a library. But so what I suggest we do was set up WordPress on this thing and we just start populating it. Let’s say that because one of the benefits we have currently, I am taking the transcript and putting it in my blog because [01:35:00] it’s too big to fit in the YouTube comment box. So I just put a link. It’d be much better if this was in our joint future text that we all owned together, because then if we spend a little bit of resource time, we can do things like show everything that, Randall said. That is the resource you put or even from the transcript. Excuse me, not transcript from the text chat, right? Or is there anything that is open enough that is different? Should we maybe do a wiki?
Alan Laidlaw: [01:35:31] I mean, I don’t. Yes, sorry. I mean, yeah, like. I’m open to a wiki tiddly wiki notion, Obsidian sitting as a problem of being local first, I was a big fan of log stuck for a moment, but it is also local first than in our case of collaboration. That wouldn’t be great. Notion is, of course, sort of maybe trapped and harder to extract. I’m I’m totally open to options. WordPress may be the best option, but [01:36:00] WordPress gives me pause because it’s still sort of based on hierarchies and files structures where that seems to go against. I don’t know the opportunity space also in the sense of if we’re trying to get out there a little bit more, showing our support for the current zeitgeist would be maybe useful.
Frode Hegland: [01:36:24] I mean, a benefit from using a wiki is that word Cunningham wants to be part of what we’re doing. So he would come in and, you know, put his expertise to this and in a rich way. Know, so that’s nice. WordPress, just because it’s simple, it’s the only reason I’m advocating it. I have had tons of problems with WordPress ones that go beyond simple. But guys, what shall we use? Let’s let’s say that for this, we need to be web based because at one point we have to be able to do the magic thing and left it out of our laptop into VR space. I mean, to be an Oculus Horizon, which is really impressive for [01:37:00] what it is. It’s ridiculous that I can have a good rendering laptop in front of me, but I can’t take anything else I can’t take anything out to to do something with it. It’s bizarre. That’s probably something we need to work on together, right?
Bjørn Borud: [01:37:18] Yeah, in terms of WordPress, it’s a it’s a reasonable one, I would also say I’m not sure if other people’s experience with it, but I have enjoyed making use of media wiki. So the Wikipedia engine is a pretty reasonable one and relatively opinionated in terms of what what you end up doing with it. I had a an entertaining thing that I was trying to do for my family around the time was building that photo instead of making use of it as a genealogy wiki. One of the things that it was interesting to play with was rather than making pages for people saying that, that [01:38:00] people were only ever categories. And so then that meant that it automatically generated the the list of the stuff. You then tagged a photo or a specific event with that that person, which was a category, then the person was just a composite of all of the references of that of the events and the memory, something like that. So there are a number of flexibilities that can be afforded if you start playing with media with you in a way that it’s not really intended for. Why not? Not even not intended for, but not the way it’s deployed in the context of Wikipedia? So yeah, I thought, does anybody hate that idea?
Mark Anderson: [01:38:45] Like I like, and I’d be interesting to see how sort of Ward’s view of a wiki because of course, most of us now the general experience of a wiki is is through the means of Wikipedia, which has moved some way and arguably has now has [01:39:00] opinions about what things are not always to the good. I don’t mean in terms of the page content, but even just in the way it works.
Frode Hegland: [01:39:08] Who would like to install the media quickly on the website and do a kind of a collective run through?
Alan Laidlaw: [01:39:18] I can I can look into that. There’s also I also created, by the way, if anybody’s interested, a GitHub organization called Future of Tech’s Labs for for any future use. Know there’s even some options that. Lip sync to GitHub, which I think would be a good home for something. Well, with the MediaWiki topic for another time or ideally a topic offline, the brand will start a broach, is the structure of it. Light, easy, flexible structure, but with some [01:40:00] basic guidelines so that it doesn’t become a dumpster fire on day one. Um, and so thoughts on that we can get into later, but I I went into some of those thoughts in the craft workspace. You know, which is basically like having a. A very few top level categories so that they’re easy to get into and the top level categories are roughly header or meta, you know, about itself, the library or the main content area. And then the backlog forgotten forest places where we can put things that we don’t want to delete but don’t know where they go. And then that allows us to kind of move things into degrees of curation over time. But we can we can dig into that later.
Frode Hegland: [01:40:46] To Peter, I say you have your hand up, but just on that briefly, I think there should be maybe only two categories or things. One is a thing about itself or something that is a thing about something else. Meaning [01:41:00] if it has a citation, it’s a resource. Otherwise, it’s somebody thought without a citation.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:41:07] So to clarify, there’s there’s there’s site structure, which is what I was referring to. And then you’re almost referring to entity categorization at a top level, which I agree those need to be very simple. But there’s there’s different there’s different frames of reference to categorization that will need to clear up our language about, right? But you know, it’s it’s a it’s a deep topic and probably actually would be better suited. O final idea that I actually think is the answer for the short term. Let’s just all jump into a narrow space, throw these ideas around, and that can be kind of like where we can work collaboratively. I can show you an example of it right now, if you like point to things and then that that can be our sand bed or dumpster fire to [01:42:00] to, then
Frode Hegland: [01:42:01] I don’t think that’s a bad idea because that they have a native Oculus up as well. But while you set up. Peter, what did you want to say?
Alan Laidlaw: [01:42:11] I want to say that I lean towards passive classification schemes, and that’s something worth taking a look at from the information science literature. And also, you’re mentioned about being able to pick something up out of the computer brought back a memory of a couple of very interesting papers. I think they were early 1990s on pick and drop. And that was the phrase that they used and that was trying to provide mechanisms for being able to use some sort of a physical of forms that might actually be a dumb object that would be read at one system, associate it with DOD on one system, have the association link transparently stowed away in the network. And then when you bring that object to another system, the object itself would be a physical marker bound to the identifier and then [01:43:00] pull in the data over the network. So it would almost be like you could have, you know, a dumb piece of wood that had a barcode on it. If you are using that sort of an interface and you could associate that with 50 gigs worth of data, you could carry your dumb piece of wood. You wouldn’t have to worry about a battery ever running out on it. We’re running out of storage space and then you get to the target location. Scan the ID you want for that dumb piece of wood and then put it all in. But to the user of the system, it almost looked as if the little Fortnite that you are carrying around with you had the data on it, even though it really didn’t.
Frode Hegland: [01:43:32] Peter Brendel has put in a link to YouTube. Is that a poem or was that a Newton device? This is on what you’re talking about, Peter.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:43:40] Yeah, that would be what I’m talking about exactly. He found it amazing work, Brundle.
Frode Hegland: [01:43:49] Allan, did you want to do a bit of a mirror? Are you OK with that few minutes of that guy’s?
Bjørn Borud: [01:43:57] Uh, yeah, no problem. Yeah, those those [01:44:00] are concepts. Uh, Peter, are very much in line with sort of the general ubiquitous computing principles of being able to have kind of basic credentials, things that are representative of other things and being able to pass those around. They can drop. It is a really useful reference point, but also put that there, which I think is actually mid to early eighties as as a demo of voice recognition and gestural interface of being able to infer sort of lexical intent through the use of the natural language that we that we typically expect to be able to interpret amongst one another and human beings. There, there are a lot of really interesting, very surprisingly early explorations of what what computer interaction as dialogue might be able to kind of ultimately become. The [01:45:00] fact that we call them dialog boxes, I think, is a funny kind of carry over from that original vision of making use of a computer as a as kind of a dialogue process of sort of doing something, responding and having an awareness of intent as part of that.
Frode Hegland: [01:45:20] Helen, before you go into this, and I think it’s really cool that you are. Is there a way where a node can have some kind of a tiger category and you can say, show me only nodes that are with this thing? Not that you should do it, but it’s their way of doing that.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:45:35] Not that I know of, right? I believe it’s mainly for the idea of white boarding, and if I can find it, it’s really great for. And I’ve got a video of this where we had that Xanadu two meeting kind of town hall. We got everybody into a mirabaud together and kind of rode out what concerned us and then voted and collaborating [01:46:00] grouped together these things organically. It’s really wonderful. But as far as transitioning it to something resembling a pqm, no. Um, I don’t think there’s a way that I can add tags or or filter views.
Frode Hegland: [01:46:20] Is there a way you can link different mural boards?
Alan Laidlaw: [01:46:31] Not that I know of. We see if I can find the other one.
Bjørn Borud: [01:46:35] I think you can have links in can. So I mean, those links can be links to other Mirabaud. That’s a fair point. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that’s important, I think about what Mario is, and it’s it’s mostly a a a context to create visual representations of whatever semantic significance you sort of imbue it with. So at this point, you can color things. You can put words [01:47:00] next to lines and that can serve the purpose to serve the function of characterizing or qualifying sort of link properties. But it isn’t an opinion and as such would need to be extracted through whatever means to represent that. You know, you’d need to say you’d need to have either sort of a glossary or a legend or some kind of API that is able to identify those features as having those semantic significances. So from my perspective, if one was actually going to use it as the source of truth, it would be ideal to have the ability to to get a dense kind of data manifest of those those things in a way that would allow me to to infer those relationships or better yet, have them made explicit. I don’t know that there’s a way in the camera to do that. But yeah, I’m also fairly drunk with power of having this new OCR [01:48:00] capability. So that’s something I’m very much looking forward to to thinking about that the capacity to to derive structure from things that aren’t readily willing to give them as well.
Frode Hegland: [01:48:13] All right. Cool. Yeah.
Bjørn Borud: [01:48:15] Um, yeah, so I have to I have to get going soon because my wife is wondering where dinner is. I just realized that you know what Peter was talking about is actually something that I have to solve in a different domain before mid-February for a customer that is just across the road here. So essentially, what they need is the ability to to pick a small device out of a box amounted to a wall and have have it connect [01:49:00] to a local gateway and then all the way up to a service via several hops while telling the world, I am this kind of device. I’m in this building. I’m connected to this this bit and then automatically have everything pop up so that it turns up in the correct building with the correct customer. And you don’t open the door so that anyone can can fake it and claim that they are. You know, for instance, a temperature sensor. So it’s kind of interesting that you mentioned that since. It kind of reminded me that there are there are problems in some domains of of computer science or related sciences that are solved elsewhere and vice versa. And I remember discovering this in the beginning of the 2000s [01:50:00] when. We were trying to figure out some computing problems, and then I talked to some guy from the biology department and he said, Oh, that’s actually easy to compute. We do that routinely. Good point. I was going to make another point as well, but I kind of forgot
Frode Hegland: [01:50:25] While you’re thinking on that mark, but also briefly, we have to wrap up in 11 minutes because I’m having another call on this zoom, I’m afraid. Family stuff.
Mark Anderson: [01:50:34] All right. Understood. I was just I just stuck my head up to it. As I heard Brunelle talking about the mirabaud, I was thinking, Gosh, this is so common. This is the thing that comes up all the time. I’m sorry to mention another place, but in a tinderbox community where people start using open ended maps, these basic whiteboards and get completely lost and it ends up as a drawing space. So they write labels against [01:51:00] the lines, which the in the case of in the case of Tinderbox are actually link types and extractable, you know, and possible to other things. But trying to get people to understand that it’s sort of like what this word on this screen actually isn’t just a label. And the really interesting thing that comes out of it. I mean, I was thinking when I just opened up the the miro’s website just now, and I think, gosh, this is this is spray blue and colored paper writ large, you know, are we still we still stuck there? Because it’s another thing I find is how quickly people who really embrace this sort of these open maps quickly move from the visual mapping to it being a mental skill. So they do the map abstraction almost in their head. But it’s not a very efficient way of storing stuff. Basically, you never have a map that’s big enough to be able to see at the same time, so you end up coloring off the edges and then and then the lovely affords. Seeing [01:52:00] this wonderful structure is lost to you and the people who are able to move that are the ones you see are right. What we’re in the game of is doing some abstraction. So if it’s the thing I want to know about later, I need to put some sort of a semantic meaning on it. Let’s stop, though.
Frode Hegland: [01:52:13] I have a threat to everyone if we don’t solve our library today. Now the next few minutes, then I’m going to put the next chat blog back in my blog like I’ve been doing for the last few. Haha. So should we,
Bjørn Borud: [01:52:31] You
Frode Hegland: [01:52:31] Know, everything doesn’t have to be in the same place, should I start putting a chat logs on our future text
Bjørn Borud: [01:52:37] Lab, for instance,
Frode Hegland: [01:52:40] Because I don’t want to do anything with that word press if we’re about to delete it and blow blow the top level domain aspect of it.
Mark Anderson: [01:52:48] Define what you mean by library before you go any further, because I think it means different things to different people.
Frode Hegland: [01:52:53] It does, indeed. And I think that one thing that I like about my own software is Command [01:53:00] F, because an author, the command of just shows you the lines of where that occurrence is. That means that if I have an absolutely massive document, I can see all the occurrences and it keeps the headings. So when I go through the transcripts, for instance, it shows me who said it. It’s such a simple thing, but it’s the fact that it’s one place that’s a huge benefit. So I would really like to have library for all resources plus are on record, whether that’s a transcript or chat log in the same thing so that with relatively simple tools in the near future, we can do. Show me every time Adam mentioned Hypertext, et cetera.
Mark Anderson: [01:53:40] So that feels like the journal. What I hear you describing is the journal. Like just the library seems more of a reference place to journalists, somewhat more living in space you navigate through and, you know, and it has the connections. The library is almost the endpoint where you
Frode Hegland: [01:53:58] Are in terms of language, [01:54:00] the article that I hope to share to you with you guys. So I have three new words of introduced just for my own self. I’m sure there are better words
Bjørn Borud: [01:54:07] In the room.
Frode Hegland: [01:54:07] You have a meeting room like Oculus around the table. Then you have the data thing. I call that a sculpture because I want this to feel it’s a sculptural thing. But then there’s the third thing, which is what I call the lab, which is when you go into with other people or alone into space that can be owned by one company or many, it actually doesn’t matter. It’s like going into Photoshop. You should take data in and out there, but it’s a specialized thing, right? So I’m thinking that. I think we have to decide how these things relate to that.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:54:43] You know, I think that the the next step in the meantime, go ahead, put it in WordPress, it’s very likely that we’ll wind up using different tools as our own little engines. But I’d like to dig into the media wiki format [01:55:00] and see what it can do because you know, that needs some exploration, can’t can’t see what it’s about, but I think that there’s a lot of promise there.
Frode Hegland: [01:55:10] Oh, I agree with you, al. I’m sorry, we’ve got a bit derailed with Myra, which I think is Myra, which I think is great for another use case. But should we then just start using WordPress for our public facing thing? What you see when you get on the page, but then you have media wiki or should we have the media wiki at the top level? That’s an important thing to decide. But should a new person see when they go to the website, first of all?
Alan Laidlaw: [01:55:39] Oh. Well, I got a jump, but
Frode Hegland: [01:55:46] I’m going to jump, but we got to decide the why don’t we just make media wait
Alan Laidlaw: [01:55:51] Before you know what’s? How about this? How about you send us or let’s just put, even if it’s in Google Docs, what [01:56:00] the current transcripts are, if we can do a sifting exercise, going through some of the transcripts and extracting what we think are good statements? You know, I think that’ll help a lot. To be natural and then to figure out, OK, yeah, these are the top level. Some top level ideas and that may then naturally fall out to be like, Hey, this is the this is the first page. You know, we said this in here, we said this, these are some things we’re talking about. But if we can just get the transcripts and kind of like, curate very quickly. That would be better than defining. Maybe it would be better than defining, Hey, this is what needs to be on the front page.
Frode Hegland: [01:56:42] So I’m just replying to Adam here. Right. I mostly agree. I mean, I think we should have a front page that says, hi, welcome to the future Text Lab. We published books. We have a monthly session. You can find information about that here. And [01:57:00] this is our record of our chat and everything we published. We also have a shared library. Once you click on those, let’s say, shared library that may go into the media wiki that has all kinds of other connections.
Bjørn Borud: [01:57:15] Yeah. So I think the most protective thing is to to not have the media Wookiee at the top level, although media Wookie does allow you to create certain aesthetic HTML with whatever representations it would be possible to to do that. Yeah, I think that it would be. Possible, though, to do go to Ireland’s exercise of what is sort of extractable, but I mean, I think that goes for us like what? What do you what do you want to achieve with it? It’s a useful thing to keep to keep focus on them and then work out the sort of the technical implementations that flow sort of necessarily hopefully minimally from the sort of the final goals that you have for that thing. So to that end, I [01:58:00] think that it would be useful to work on the impression you want to build and think about what are the tools that make the most sense for it. But in terms of making a snap decision right now, I would say simply not having the wiki at the top level, it gives you the most freedom to make those decisions.
Frode Hegland: [01:58:18] Let’s let’s say that we have professionally decided to have normal top section for media wiki, but we’ll decide more on Friday. Any closing words from you, Peter, before anyone else?
Alan Laidlaw: [01:58:31] Yeah, I agree. We shouldn’t have any interactive systems at the very top level where we have a static landing page and links so that we could change them. Maybe we might decide that something’s much better than media wiki that comes out in six months. And if we were starting at the top level at media wiki, it can be problematic changing that later on. So static page talking about what we’re about. Many links to some of our other stuff on different media and then we keep our options as open as possible. [01:59:00]
Frode Hegland: [01:59:00] Good, good. I look forward to Friday. Interact as you want before then. Yeah, don’t worry, Alan, I will make you all accounts to be full admins on the WordPress and then we decide on Friday what we do with it. Alan. Am I frozen, all right? Yep. Oh, sorry, I thought you wanted to say something.
Alan Laidlaw: [01:59:23] No, no, no, no, I agree, I definitely don’t. None of what I mentioned today had anything to do with a public facing venue. So I definitely think a simple. She is the best, and let’s go with that.
Frode Hegland: [01:59:40] I see what Adam is saying personally, I’m interested in doing a minimal metaverse doc rivers linked spaces in 3-D so beyond. Now you know what this is all about. Hope to see you back here. Hope you’re all well and bye. And thanks for today.
Bjørn Borud: [01:59:54] Guys have a great week, guys. Bye bye.
1 comment