Summary
The question of what happens to text lifted from a document has been a big issue for me and how it should be treated and stored. I now see a simple approach where we have a ‘Lift’ command which simply lifts text into space (on desktop and in XR) and it is temporary (stored by the app) but in XR this can be stored with the document or exported (to be discussed).
Background
This morning I read another chapter in Roland Allen’s ‘The Notebook’ (Allen, 2023) where he discusses the rise of reading and copying sections of interesting materials onto one’s own notebooks, really starting with Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus 1512 De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia where he gave the reader advice on how to make arguments by employing an abundance of styles of expression and subject matter. He therefore urged the reader to collect a ‘mass of material’, and to arrange it in ‘common places’. As noted further, this was not new, but it became bigger because of the advent of increasingly cheaper paper in Europe. Pliny the Elder had would never read without taking ‘extracts’, and that is why I am adding this paragraph here.
For terminology of what we are doing we need to think of:
- Annotations as what is done to the document and stays in the document (notes and highlights), though accessible from outside
- Extracts as what is taken from the document.
We need to decide on what happens when a selection of text is extracted; where will it be stored, what document/app/environment will ‘own’ it, what will the information and workflow be?
Reading in desktop app
In Reader we already have Copy (cmd-C) and Quote (shift-cmd-C) and I could see the addition of Extract (option-cmd-C or something like that).
In the case of Reader, a Copy or copy as Quote results in the selected text going onto the macOS Clipboard, with the citation information attached, so that it can be pasted into an Author document either as plain text or a Quote with an associated Citation Reference. I have long thought about a means through which the user selects text in Reader and it opens Author to the Research Notes or Ideas, all ready for pasting as Quote, allowing rhetorical user to write whatever they want around the text, to make it easy to Find and Browse to it later. This means that the extract is designed to not exist in the vicinity of the document but rather go straight to the user’s authoring program.
Focus (temporary ‘tear off’). In Reader we have a ‘Focus’ command which lifts selected text–or the full document–and presents it as processed text for easier reading. This text is in its own window but is intended to be temporary (as designed now), not for saving as an extract.
Reading in XR
This makes sense in my closed environment but when I look at XR it looks much more complicated. I imagine someone reading and extracting a section of text by ‘tearing’ it off (rather than selecting and keyboard shortcut) and placing it in space.
The question then becomes first of all where this torn off text (with associated metadata including citation information and time it was extracted) is/what software owns it (the original document or the WebXR app?), and what the user can actively and passively do with it, such as place it into a Notebook of Common Places. If an important freedom is to place things in the space, to help the user read and think, then the action is quite different from my little select and extract from Reader to Author and the intermediate step of the extracted text floating in step needs to be addressed.
Focus. We have also looked at Focus in XR, at least discussed it, to have any text torn of to be read in the environment.
Object Overview
In this view we have the following types of objects:
Defined Concepts
- Name
- Defintion
- Category
- (should be also able to refer to Citations?)
Citations/Extracts
- Citation Information
- Abstract
- Note by user for inclusion in References on export
- Quote/Extract from Reference
- Category/Tag(s)
- (Should be also able to refer to Defined Concepts?)
Annotations (in document but accessible from outside, in the user’s Library for example)
- Notes
- Category Annotation Highlights
Focus
- Selected text held in the reader environment until dismissed or saved/exported as Extract
Integration & Possible Solution
I am wondering then if extracts in XR might be some sort of a mix between Reader’s Focus and extract modes. Text can be torn off in XR and that is considered a piece of Focused text and will be owned by the document it came from, as an off-document annotation so to speak. The user can then perform an action to transfer this Focused text into an Extract which would result in it appear in the user’s authoring space, whatever we decide and design that to be.
Update
After walking down in the dark and icy cold to get a haircut I thought further about this. First of all is the question that maybe there is little, or no difference between citation and extract in terms of the data, the user simply copies from one document (text plus citation information) and pastes into a Notebook/Research Notes or a document to be published and it’s the use that determines what it is.
This then brings the focus back to the thing that happens when a user in XR moves some text from the page out to float in space. In Reader macOS this is analogous to what we now call ‘Focus’. In XR it makes more sense to maybe call it ‘Lift’. That might make sense for desktop use also, having a command called ‘Lift’ which lifts selected text into a more readable view (larger font, color by user preference) which can be then closed or Copied.