On Jan 20, 2016, at 3:16 AM, Glen Chiacchieri wrote:
I've also been thinking a lot about state both in Flowsheets and in Hypercard in the World. If we take Rich Hickey's dictum seriously that state is the hard part of programming, we should think hard about how it should be represented in our system.
I like that data, behavior, and virtual state are attached to physical objects. It seems worth pushing that idea further. Something I worry about is that in our haste to physicalize everything we'll forget that "disembodied" search is actually incredibly powerful (e.g. searching with cmd+f vs. trying to do a visual scan). I bet RMO probably has more thoughts on this.
[clears throat]
Why yes, Glen, I do have thoughts on disembodied search.
This is a strange angle in, but I’ve been sensitive lately to the phrase “it’s a thing.” Of course, the expression never refers to physical objects, but instead to social protocol (“Monday lunches are a thing”) and convention (“slurping Ramen is a thing”).
I used to collect obtuse words in common between critical theory and programming, and my favorite is how Marx’s reification (“Verdinglichung”) somehow made its way into the data modeling discourse. (I have no idea how to reconcile the OOP “first-class citizen” with Marx’s class analysis.)
There’s more to say about Marx’s alienations (they seem to connect to what we mean when we say “humane”), but I am the wrong person to fill in this intellectual history.
Instead, let’s move to Engelbart. I’ve discussed this before with some of you, but I find the strangest idea of the ’62 proposal to be his fixation with acronyms as a Whorfian lever towards “thinking the unthinkable.” It seems to be the idea of his that’s the most obviously wrong. I’m not specifically anti-acronym, but I don’t recall Engelbart acknowledging any cognitive burden to the recursive layering of acronyms, which strikes me as absurd. Still, it’s worth trying to make sense of what was underlying his thoughts at the time, and I claim he was thinking about how to most directly allow the expression, capture, and dissemination of human thought. The acronyms to him, then, are an attempt to “thingify” concepts and give them a persistence and tactility, but moreover to make them mutable.
Finally, we return to search. Inspired by OS X’s spotlight and tokenizing Mail.app search, I started prototyping highly-responsive archive search interfaces at and after the last Dau Media Project workshop last year: it was a revelation. The InterLace timelines were helpful—sometimes insightful, sometimes surprising—but the search was amazing: anything you remembered within an enormous search space you could pull up almost instantly. The combination of visual representation (timelines, text, images) with a hyper-responsive, semi-structured search was very convincing. I’m sorry I can’t show that prototype as-is, but it has made a big impression on me and I will work to have something demonstrable on these themes soon.
I’m interested in how paradigms do—or don’t—scale, and Dave’s made some very compelling renderings on this theme recently re: physical video manipulations. My belief is that a semantic space (words becoming things) can predictably, interactively, and scalably accumulate and be made navigable through search. Search is a big idea. It’s similar to what I mean when I speak of “focusing attention”; instead of “reading as writing,” I could present Hyperopia as a literalization of my dad’s favorite Corbusier quote: “Creation is a patient search.”
I think having a "wall of system state" (Big Board) has been great and should be developed further, but has had clear limitations. I've noticed a lot of awkward shuffling back and forth between the thing you're trying to make in one part of the room and Big Board in the other. Maybe it would be interesting to have a mobile Big Board, or possibly be able to instantiate a new Big Board elsewhere in the room while you're working on something else.
I’m interested in participating in development of a mobile Big Board. Let me know if anyone’s interested in remotely collaborating!
R.M.O.