“information design”
58 posts under this tag.
oSkope many views are a nice, rich way to browse Amazon (for other engines it isn’t nearly as successful) but this simple diagram in particular —plotting book covers against price and sales rank— is genuinely useful. Shame there’s no option to choose your axes. How about price vs stars? Stars vs. length?
Apropos of trusty old Cartesian planes, ain’t it weird they weren’t with us 500 years ago? What could be more straightforward than a coordinate system?
Where, but the web, would you find someone like Oliver Steele? This ain’t no metaphor. That name was a link. I’m not talking about Oliver Steele the person, I haven’t met him (though I apparently am 1-degree of separation from him; weird, that). I’m not talking about the sweating, walking, pinchable, space-and-time-and-flesh-bound avatar, I’m talking about his online persona. And either I’ve gotten crazy enough or technology has advanced enough that I’m ready to treat Oliver Steele —the link, his blog, words, diagrams, code, and further media— as a person by its own merits.
And, boy, is he an interesting guy:
Boy, boy, boy. Syntax across languages, a massive compilation of programming language features, is so damn cool, so damn useful, so damn usable in its text-only simplicity, in its many angles to approach the collection (sorted by language or by categories, or all in one big page). If you’re a programmer you must bookmark this. Now. (If only a similar thing existed for general languages…)
All the world is full of knowing men, of most learned schoolmasters, and vast libraries; and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato’s time, nor Cicero’s, nor Papinian’s, there was ever such conveniency for studying as we see at this day there is. Nor must any adventure henceforward to come in public, or present himself in company, that hath not been pretty well polished in the shop of Minerva. I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters, tapsters, ostlers, and such like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now than the doctors and preachers were in my time.
Francis Rabelais, Five Books Of The Lives, Heroic Deeds And Sayings Of Gargantua And Pantagruel, see eemadge #334
Starting an artificial language has been a recurrent dream of mine. As a subscriber to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the shape of our language is the shape of our thought), a believer in ending Babel through an auxlang, a pathological formist, and an admirer of the grace, elegance, and pleasure to be found in conlangs such as Esperanto and toki pona, I believe the enterprise worth a lifetime, worth my lifetime.
But of course, given my extremist bent, I want to start an artificial language that subsumes all languages. A language to make languages, like in John Varley’s beautiful Persistence of Vision. An extensible language to gobble up and be enriched by the thoughts and feelings of as many souls as the universe will ever have. A perfectly regular language that can be learned in a week but never mastered. The creation of a self-conscious, language-obsessed culture but learnable by the illiterate. A language so abstract and basic, it can be embodied inside any symbolic system, be it based on sounds, graphics, gestures, raised dots, or farts; be it English, Maori, or Farsi. A language of infinite expressibility, synthetic and analytic, vague and precise, formal and casual, exquisite and coarse. A language that will outlast the stars.
The key, I think, lies in internal flexibility. The ideal is to do for language what the Hindu-Arabic numeral system did for numbers. Not only will there be no arbitrary, capricious limits to word creation, it will be a language of pure word creation, able to convey books in a word, lifetimes in a sentence. It will be a language complete in itself yet always growing.
After years of frenzying about it late at night, the language finally got its first name, despite it not yet having a transliteration, let alone any words. It’s self-referentially called, among infinite names, the-language-this-word-belongs-to.
In this sense: In the physical world, perhaps one of the biggest, most basic hurdles to overcome for any creature (above plant) is navigating space. Whatever you may want (eat, talk, watch, mate..) you have to be there first. That’s the tyranny of space, a tyranny that lingers despite telecommunications easing it to a degree we can’t really imagine now.
But technology has uncovered a new hurdle, even more basic in some ways, that we hadn’t even glimpsed some decades ago (you don’t much care about space when you live in a pen). The new hurdle is interface—a device’s how, its ways of interaction, what you have to wrestle with to get things done through it. Whatever you may want to do through technology (moving, watching, writing, browsing, talking, killing,...) you have to overcome the interface first. The need is more acutely felt the more plastic and dynamic the technology. The web ranks right up there. The information superhighway delivered its promise of abolishing space but the freedom has shifted the load from our legs to our brains, from space to interface. The challenge is no longer motive, it’s cognitive.
Consider malls. Besides modern comforts and breathtaking opulence, the single main thing they have going for them, their reason for being, is that they get stuff closer. They ease space. That’s also why similar stores cluster together, closeness is so valuable for customers that they force owners to set shop right next to the competition. Big box stores are the climax of contiguity.
A very similar thing happens in the web under interface constraints. Beyond critical-mass, Amazon, eBay, and the myriad vertical marketplaces (etsy is a good one) thrive because there’s a nontrivial number of interface details you have to tiresomely learn, divine, or settle if you go somewhere else. And these details are particularly painful in shopping because the whole process is staggeringly complex: it involves a lot of searching, browsing, foraging, comparing, digesting, authenticating, etc.
But in other areas the reality of the tyranny of interface is just as real. Wikipedia, we’ve now come to realize, is useful chiefly because it provides a single unified interface to knowledge. The blog is one of the most significant web innovations in recent years and at bottom it’s just a genre for the efficient exploitation of interface, uniforming it, streamlining it, adapting content interfaces to the new realities of the web, kind of what convenience stores did for space and cars. Heck, even search engines, interface-saving devices in a way (the search engine is the modern steam engine, directories are human-powered transport), have nontrivial interfaces all their own, as I’ve attested recently trying out torrent engines (mininova, torrentSpy, and isoHunt are my favorites).
You could have once said that downloading was the web’s equivalent of moving but broadband quickly made that friction negligible. In our current web, figuring out interface is the new moving. Interface is the new space.
People who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea.
Edwin Land, inventor of Polaroid
Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.
Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.
Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.
The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.
A JS library JS’s first great app? Indeed. jQuery is the shit. It makes JavaScript, and particularly the intersection between JS and HTML, more fun than you thought it could be. It is one big lump of syntactic sugar, sweet as only truly elegant thinking can be. It is crossbrowser, lightweight (~20kb, compressed), and it leverages your CSS knowledge. jQuery + FireBug is raw sex. You’ll find yourself traversing the DOM just to feel the wind on your face.
It’s because they’re so bad.
Some days ago I bought my first mangaWP on a whim (Kare KanoWP, IH and FurubaWP, IH). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.
They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.
Remember that wacky koanELZR about reading processors (“what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) and how it led to the idea of a text spacer (illustrated at length in this example)?
Well, I just found out about Live Ink by Walker Reading Technologies (via KurzweilAI.net’s newsletter, though it was slashdotted earlier) and realized people have been toying with the idea for over a decade now. Live Ink is clumsy marketese for what they also elegantly and precisely describe as visual-syntactic text formatting and these guys have not only coded it and are now marketing it, but they have already done some interesting homework, carrying on a year-long experiment where it allegedly improved reading proficiency. They offer a 30-day trial program implementing the technology called ClipRead (screencast) and though the interface is positively abysmal (why, god, why, must bad interfaces happen to good people?), it’s still very much worth downloading to play with.
Here below is a (fitting) paragraph from Charlie Stross’s Accelerando for comparison.
Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards—a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law – the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her—that’s what her grammar engine is for – or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning chattel slaves.
I like how they limited the spacing to linebreaks and indents; it’s a good starting constraint—it simplifies the task enormously and the results are still quite good. Highlighting the verb is also a clever touch—the nuance with the biggest syntactic payoff. Overall, while the simple flaws do stand out (because we’re such effortlessly gifted syntactic parsers), what surprises me is how decently it works, how the formatted text feels more accessible than the monolithic paragraph. At several points—interestingly, at some of the most usefully formatted parts—the algorithm at work seems oddly straightforward: nestedly indent and linebreak prepositions. Ahh… I’m itching to write some regex hack… Probably will write one in a couple of days, together with some handcrafted spacing of the above paragraph, just to see what we’re aiming at.
According to VentureBeat, meanwhile, the company is poised to taking the world any minute now. I doubt it. But they have given spacing (visual-syntactic text formatting) a broad hearing and there’s now a flurry of attention on it and, probably, on the broader idea of reading processors. There are bound to be some intriguing reinterpretations and extrapolations in the coming months.
|
RSS
email
