Reading Processor

Styling tables presents lots of fun infodesign opportunities that are largely still untapped. Backbars is of course an example of that.

We were chatting. I was grasping for a great, recent quote that congealed my thoughts well but I couldn’t find it in my quote collection nor recall anything but the vaguest of phrasings.

This sort of thing has happened often to me and I’m sure it has to you: googling for vague recall, for completing your thoughts. Instead of closing your eyes and willing an unconscious mind racking you outsorce to Google the unconvering of the tip of your tongue. What stroke me this time was the chaining and the speed (just-in-time-thinking). What got me to write this down was that in a few years such a thing will be so unremarkable I’m sure we’ll wonder how it felt before, if those in transition ever noticed how their mind was being steadily extruded.

Much improved! http://elzr.com/reader It’s really getting fun now! Now you can really read the whole magazine in a single page! Plus: columns, much better design (section separators!), and… flags!

Note that there are some weird bugs in Safari, to be fixed later. And all bets are off on what will happen in IE, I don’t have a machine to try it in for the moment.

The idea is to give you subtle non-verbal clues to improve your browsing experience almost subconsciously. The backbars don’t replace the count they represent, what they do is convey you its magnitude unobtrusively, and, crucially, compare that magnitude to those around it. So you can now see, almost without thinking, that, say, some comment is popular, but that there’s a comment around that’s twice as popular.

An experiment in improving the reading interface of the world’s best news magazine. Very early days. Check it out at elzr.com/reader.

I’ve read The Economist for many years now, almost since the beginning from the web (I subscribed for a year when it was behind a paywall, the only time I’ve paid for content). And almost as long, I’ve been struggling with it’s interface. I guess it’s not that bad for casual readers, but for longtime junkies it can be much improved. Which is what I’ll try to do in the coming days.

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.

Remember that wacky koan^ELZR 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.

Charles Stross, Accelerando

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.

Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast

Reading processors

Trying out some information-design ideas inspired by Doug Engelbart,

I’m just so much interested in.. the kind of capabilities this perceptual machine we have in our brain. Like one thing I really, really want to try that I never had the resources, and part of it was that I didn’t understand grammar well enough, I’d like a parsing processor going that parses your sentences, and then it gives you the option of having the different parts of speech in different color or different brightness. And I’m just intuitively certain that if you started reading that way that this machinery would start adapting to it and pretty soon you’d be reading faster with more comprehension than if you had monocolored, monosized, etc. Things as they’re now. That’s the kind of thing that the computer aids can really really help you. So tell me if anybody can try it. Let me try it.

Doug Engelbart, ITConversations: Large-Scale Collective IQ

, (and the koan “what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) I came up with two text-transformations: parts-of-speech coloring,

and spacing (pdf),

What do you think about them? Did they help you? Did they confuse you? Assuming that a “reading-processor” could apply such transformations instantly and perfectly (there’s a leap of faith) to whatever you read, would you use them?

...it can only give you answers.

He died quite a few years before Google (or the Internet, for that matter) started, but I’m sure Picasso would have said that. And I think there would have been some truth in it.

Yesterday I spent most of my day just trying to find out why my local web-apps had crashed horribly ever since I upgraded to Rails 1.1. It was all a complex dance between Google, my web-apps, and all sort of forums. I painstakingly build my web-apps one-step at a time, several times, just trying to find out exactly what step was causing the problem.

And finally the question emerged: ¿Is there a known problem between RMagick, a ruby image-manipulation library that I use, and Rails 1.1? The answer from Google was nigh immediate: Rails 1.1 requires Ruby 1.84, which in turn kills RMagick. I’ll simply have to do without it until a fix is posted.

It is not the results that drive us, but the query.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of a search engine is not that it provides with immediate answers, but that this immediacy allows us to pose far more questions.

This preponderance of questions over answers is what makes me believe there might be some future in clustering techniques (Marissa Mayer to the contrary): when it works best, clustering works by hinting at good questions.

A question machine

Do we need a question-machine? What is a question-machine? Is that the question to ask? Is the name of god a question? Where can I buy the Whole Earth Review? Is the universe recursive? What is this “fly on the wall” syndrome? When did I first hear the song There Was An Old Woman? What might Sergio Rivas be doing this very moment? Where is that story we wrote together? Was it any good? What is a question? What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? Is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis true? How is Ray Kurzweil like? Is it true that “the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use?” Is the universe discrete or continuous? Will they come when you do call for them? Will we ever achieve post-symbolic communication? Is symbolic systems a career for me? What does a “reality conversation” look like? Will there be a singularity? Are we becoming a Gaia? Is there an I? Is everything a prosthesis? Is everything an interface? Will interface design be the art form of the twenty first century? Will I be any good as a web-app craftsman? Will sex ever be free? What are the classic walks of the world? What is meaning? Will I ever find out? Is copyright fair? Are there better solutions? Is it wrong for me to download music illegally? When will this post be lost forever? Why are there so few women in scientific careers? How can Orson Scott Card be so smart and yet so frighteningly conservative? Is abortion the cause for a drop in U.S. crime rates? Was the pill the cause of the sudden increase in U.S. crime rates? Is technology the answer? Will they really build a robotic team that can compete and defeat the world soccer champions by 2050? Is it too late for Esperanto? Will an A.I. ever read these very words? Will anyone? How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? Will I die? Will I really be rich by 30? How was Borges like? Did AMLO know about Bejarano and Ponce? Which is the best candidate in this presidential elections? Will Caja Negra work? Will I work at Google? Should I’ve taken that Etsy offer? Would I be happier in New York? Am I scared? Am I too easy on myself? Is it wrong that I don’t finish what I start? Is this good or bad procrastination? Will I ever meet annzah? Am I foolish to believe, deep down inside me, that in my life “everything happens for the best”? How should I love her? What’s char doing right now? Is she happy? Did she find out the title of the song of that ad? What is the equivalent of a word-processor for reading? How can you improve reading? How can you automate understanding? As in, say, how can you automate or speed up the process of understanding a legal document? With diagrams? Is Doug Engelbart’s idea of a parts-of-speech highlighter any good? Is speed-reading real? If it is, why is it so marginal? Will Jef Raskin’s Archy ever pan out?