The Future History of Text as a UI: Scott Waterman, BayCHI Program
Channel: BayCHI, San Francisco Bay Area ACM SIGCHI
Date: 2023-01-23

July 12, 2016
https://baychi.org/calendar/20160712

We tend to think of text as a linear representation of speech. Perhaps it is, some of the time. (We'll show some historical examples.) Documents are typically how we encounter text, however, with structure and relationships beyond the linear. Layout and reference in particular define critical meaning that would be difficult to convey by other means.

Historically, advances to textual and meta-textual representation have been slow to change and be adopted. The codex, table of contents, page numbers, index, standard typefaces - all of these are crucial inventions that make text more meaningful. These have taken centuries to develop, although we now take for them for granted.

The rapid growth of web text over the past quarter century gives us a new set of text properties that add new dimensions of meaning. The link is a device that allows us to layer textual relationships in entirely new ways. Textual links provide cross-document references, and pointers to authoritative sources and indexes. More often than not, these links are constructed automatically and presented dynamically, delivering a modern and novel reading experience.

These two forces - metatext, in the form of the the link; and automation - are rapidly evolving along with the ways text is built and used. We will try to put the link, dynamic presentation, and automated linking services such as search engines, into perspective with traditional print-based non-linear text features, to show how they expand and redefine how text is consumed and construed.
Scott Waterman, founder of back-quote, was formerly chief scientist of Diffbot, where he built machine learning and computer vision systems to understand the web. He has built systems and algorithms for text classification, information extraction, search, and semantic markup for the past 20 years. Scott studied EECS at UC Berkeley and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brandeis University. Follow Scott at @tswaterman.