Deliverables & Timeline

Our timetable is starting January 2024 and end date is December 2026, with a one year review December 2024.

Deliverables

We have three objectives, hence three categories of deliverables:

1) Community building and support for dialog.

This will be delivered through weekly lab meetings and the associated record, annual Symposia, a student competition, and continued publication of volumes of The Future of Text, with a focus on text in XR. 

2) Software development for WebXR with a focus on reading for the first year and authorship the second year. 

This will be delivered thorough building a system where a user can connect their Library of documents to a WebXR interface in a headset and choose what code to run, with documents synchronised.

3) Visual-Meta Infrastructure support for more robust & open metadata, at very low cost to users & publishers.

This will be delivered through experiments in using Visual-Meta on local machines and/or in XR.

Academic Papers

ACM Hypertext ’24 (working titles)

  • “High resolution thinking and Journals (Reading in XR)”. Main author Frode, contributions from everyone.
  • “XR and Spatial Hypertext” By Dene, contributions from anyone.
  • “Citation Views” By Mark and Adam.
  • “The Inner Hypertext of Digitally Native Documents” by Mark.

Timeline

Year 1 “Reading”
January 2024-December 2024

January

  • Project begins; Hegland works with Grigar at her lab at WSU to finalize workflow for communication channels (Slack for remote in-the-moment interactions, Basecamp for project management and archiving materials, Zoom for weekly meetings), and social media plan
  • Phase 1 of software development and Visual-Meta begins with developers in place and onboarded by Hegland and Grigar
  • Website updated with project and team information.
  • Student Competition plan, including judging criteria, reach and marketing plan finalised.

January-December

  • Weekly Future Text Lab meetings take place, with new participants onboarded by Hegland and meeting recordings uploaded to YouTube
  • Social media plan executed
  • Phase 1 of software development underway
  • Future of Text call for proposals is announced
  • Future of Text book begins production

September

  • Grigar and Hegland present this project at the ACM Hypertext conference in Poznan, Poland

November

  • The Future of Text Symposium takes place in the Portland-Vancouver Metropolitan Area; event recording is uploaded to YouTube

December

  • The Future of Text book is published, marketed, and distributed widely


Year 2 “Authoring”
January 2025-December 2025

January

  • Hegland works with Grigar and team at her lab at WSU to engage in a SWOT assessment of Year 1 to determine the community’s growth, progress of software development, efficacy of the social media plan, and ability to meet project deadlines; and to refine approaches and plan to improve outcomes
  • Phase 2 of software development and Visual-Meta begins

January 25-December

  • Weekly Future Text Lab meetings continue with new participants onboarded by Hegland and meeting recordings uploaded to YouTube; social media promotions of Lab meetings and Book continue

February-May

  • Complete software in preparation for testing
  • Prepare for The Future of Text Symposium

June-August

  • First round of software testing and refining takes place

September

  • Grigar and Hegland attend the next ACM conference; give project demo, receive feedback from conference participants, refine project based on testing results

September-November

  • Complete project

November

  • The Future of Text Symposium is held in the Portland-Vancouver Metropolitan Area
  • Event recording is uploaded to YouTube
  • Grigar and Hegland demo project at the event

December

  • The Future of Text Book is published and distributed widely
  • Hegland works with Grigar and team at her lab at WSU to produce project report for the Sloan Foundation