AI: Summary
The session explored how scholarly knowledge can be structured, connected, and experienced in XR, focusing on the tension between fixed documents and fluid, reader-driven assemblies of text, metadata, and annotation, with sustained attention to reading practices, binding and curation, and the shifting audiences of academic writing in a machine-mediated world.
AI: Highlights
The introduction of two new participants from the XR field broadened the discussion toward open XR, public libraries, and community formation in virtual spaces.
The concept of releasing a scholarly book both as a single volume and as a set of independently linkable PDFs was emphasized as a way to preserve robustness while enabling recombination.
The distinction between editor and curator was explicitly articulated as central to future scholarly practice.
The metaphor of an orange with removable segments was highlighted as a powerful image for modular knowledge objects.
The idea that academic writing is increasingly addressed first to machines rather than humans was underscored through examples from publishing, hiring, and pedagogy.
The possibility of reading analytics, aggregate annotation signals, and attention data shaping future authorship was raised as a provocative shift in scholarly feedback loops.
AI: Insights
Scholarly coherence no longer needs to be enforced through a single canonical sequence, but can emerge from metadata-rich bindings that allow multiple curated perspectives to coexist without destabilizing the underlying texts.
Reading in XR does not primarily benefit from spatial abundance, but from carefully constrained layouts that respect human visual and cognitive limits, challenging assumptions about infinite virtual space.
Annotation can be reframed as spatial extraction and recomposition rather than marginal markup, blurring the boundary between reading, thinking, and authorship.
The historical functions of tables of contents and indexes reappear as design problems for XR, suggesting continuity rather than rupture with print culture.
Writing for machine readers introduces a new rhetoric, where explicit structural cues and semantic signaling become as important as prose clarity.
Scale itself emerged as a critical constraint, with participants recognizing that total connectivity risks cognitive overload unless guided by focus-driven decomposition.
Curation was recognized as a first-class scholarly act, distinct from authorship and editing, enabling plural interpretations without collapsing authority.
AI: Resources Mentioned
Roy Ascott’s collected writings, edited and contextualized by Eddie, referenced by Dene Grigar.
The concept of Webrings, referenced by SafariMonkey in relation to fragility and linkage.
Gwern Branwen’s website, cited by SafariMonkey for its pop-up reference browsing model.
Libraries of the Future by J.C.R. Licklider, referenced by Peter Wasilko.
The book on historical marginalia, referenced by Dene Grigar.
The Next virtual library and museum, mentioned by Dene Grigar.
Understanding Media, discussed via commentary relayed by Brandel Zachernuk.
OpenUSD 1.0 specification, mentioned by Brandel Zachernuk in relation to standards and interoperability.
Unicode Consortium activities, referenced by Brandel Zachernuk.
Song
This track is an AI orchestrated piece inspired by the transcript of this meeting, meant as a fun provocation to further thought. (suno.com)
The session closed looking forward.
Less abstraction without grounding.
More experiments that could be experienced, not just discussed.
Attention to data models as much as visuals.
Langu