The End of Cyberspace

Spelling with my hands

I have a strong interest in learning how people's uses of technologies changes the way they think-- or less grandly, how it shapes the way they perform cognitive tasks or approach problems. Recently, I found an example of something I do that's definitely an artifact of my long engagement with a very specific technology: I realized I spell with my hands.

The other night, my wife and I were at the dining room table, each of us working on stuff. (Since she's a teacher at a pretty demanding school, she often has papers to grade in the evening.) She asked me how to spell a long word. I thought about it for a second, and couldn't just recite the letters, even though I was sure I knew how it was spelled. So I typed it.

Of course, I can recite the spelling of plenty of words, but after thirty years of typing, complex spelling is something I do with my hands more than my mind's eye. I know a word is misspelled when I feel my fingers hit the wrong keys, or reverse the order of a pattern. For me, correct spelling is a matter of feeling my fingers move over the keyboard in the right, comfortable way, not a matter of thinking "this word is spelled like this," then translating that into a set of motions. The keyboard has become an interface between the words I know how to spell, and the actual act of spelling them correctly.

This helps explain why I find using the predictive text feature on cell phones a somewhat puzzling experience. On a keypad with predictive text turned on, you really do have to think about the spelling of a word, because you're essentially feeding the phone clues about the word you want it to spell. Hit the wrong number on the keypad, and it's led astray, a sure as giving someone the wrong clue in a mystery will lead them to a mistaken conclusion. What makes it more confusing is that as you hit the keys, the phone may guess a completely different word than it had before; and of course, some keypad combinations can spell several different, equally popular words (46 can be "in" or "go," or a bit less likely, "ho").

For someone accustomed to spelling on a QWERTY keyboard, this is a pretty mystifying interaction. Of course, I'm getting better at it; but writing on a traditional keyboard and a keypad aren't merely different activities in terms of the fingers you use, or the prominence of the thumb versus the other digits; it places different cognitive demands on someone who's grown up spelling with his hands.

Technorati Tags: cognition, end of cyberspace, interface, keyboard, N95

links for 2008-02-25

• ForesightDevelopment@UAT-CourseWiki
  Course wiki for "Foresight Development (TCH110), a core course in futures studies and personal futuring taught at the University of Advancing Technology (UAT)."
  (tags: future forecasting)
• Wendell Bell, A community of futurists and the state of the futures field
  "[F]utures studies is unified by interlinked and overlapping networks of communications and influences among futurists, a shared transdisciplinary matrix, and the growth of a futurist canon."
  (tags: future forecasting)
• ScienceDirect - Futures : A vision of futures studies
  "The article looks at futures studies.... It suggests that visions are essential for conducting futures studies and education in futures studies is vital for preparing future oriented new generations."
  (tags: future)
• Stuff White People Like
  As Homer Simpson said, "It's true! It's true! We're so lame! HA HA HA!"
  (tags: blogging humor culture)
• The Top 10 Rap Songs White People Love | Catsandbeer.com
  I've heard of maybe two of these songs. Where's the Ice Cube? The Run-DMC?
  (tags: humor music)

Write Room and Skype

Recently I've been using a couple tools a lot, for reasons that are worth noting (worth it to me, anyway). Increasingly, I find my choice of technologies depends on fairly small and specific things, keyed more to the way I'm able to use them than to functional specs.

The first is WriteRoom. I've had it for a while, but I've now made it my default basic text editor. The interesting thing about WriteRoom is that it revives an old interface for a new purpose: it turns it into a tool for focusing an author's attention. This is writing without distraction, the Web site promises.

Walk into WriteRoom, and watch your distractions fade away. Now it's just you and your text. WriteRoom is a place where your mind clears and your work gets done. When your writing is complete, exit WriteRoom and re-enter the busy world with your work in hand.

With so much e-mail and information pouring in, the digital life we lead can sure be a blur. If you've found it getting harder to focus on the words you want to write, if you've forgotten how great it feels to really write distraction-free, then let WriteRoom help you rediscover your muse.

Of course I find the spatial metaphor interesting.

But what I find I really like about it is that it's particularly well-suited for writing late at night. I have these regular bouts where I'm up until 2 or 3 at night writing-- periods when I can really get a lot done, or have those conceptual or organizational breakthroughs that every writer finds really satisfying. Most of the time I'm not writing something that requires elaborate formatting or layout, so I can use a simpler writing tool. But when I'm in bed, the lights are out, and I'm trying to work without keeping my wife up, the amber lettering on a black screen seems especially fitting. The amber and black screen are gentler on the eyes. They focus attention on the words at a time when I don't have much energy, but have some of my best ideas.

The other tool I'm using a lot these days is Skype. Of course, I have lots of ways to talk to people-- two cell phones (one used mainly for text messaging), but I'm finding Skype really good for work-related calls, for a couple reasons.

First, I just bought a headset, which has made it possible to walk around while talking. Before I had it, I had to lean over the computer and yell into the microphone (wherever it is on my computer), which is not a superior communications experience. With the headset, on the other hand, the sound quality is excellent, and I can get up and move about. Much better.

Further, when I'm working, I'm never at my desk-- I don't even have a desk-- but I'm always at my computer. (When I'm not working I'm also often at my computer.) Since I actually lost my office phone a long time ago, it's a lot easier to do calls through Skype.

Finally, the combination of talking and texting makes it possible to share notes with the person you're talking to, pass URLs back and forth, etc. Since I generally have to send a follow-up e-mail after any phone conversation, having the ability to write those notes in real-time is really useful. And since Skype can save text threads, you can use it as an archive of previous conversations. That's really useful for things like weekly conference calls, which I'm now doing with some Oxford students I'm advising on a project.

ZuiPrezi

The latest version of the Kitchen Budapest zooming interface/presentation tool, ZuiPrezi, is out. It is fantastic. I can't wait to get my hands on it. Go check it out.

Technorati Tags: Budapest, interface

links for 2008-02-20

• Sohail Inayatullah, "Future of science in Islam"
  1998 assessment of the current state and future of science in the Islamic world.
  (tags: X2 science)
• Microsoft Research: External Research & Programs
  "eScience addresses the increasingly close integration of computing with basic scientific research. It is about how computing can revolutionize the sciences and how the sciences can revolutionize computing in return."
  (tags: science X2 microsoft)
• European Science Initiative
  "The Microsoft European Science Initiative (ESI) is focused on enabling and accelerating ‘new kinds’ of science and computing – new fields emerging at the intersection of computer science and the natural sciences."
  (tags: X2 science microsoft cambridge)
• eScience - Silicon Valley - Home
  "We are researching ways that information technology can help solve these problems [in managing scientific information] by organizing data in new ways, by automating many of the tasks, and by building tools that streamline scientific workflows."
  (tags: science X2 information)
• Scientific Data Management in the Coming Decade
  On "data-intensive science requirements for databases and science centers. It argues that peta-scale datasets will be housed by science centers that provide substantial storage and processing for scientists who access the data via smart notebooks."
  (tags: microsoft science information X2)
• Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft
  (tags: escience science X2)
• Microsoft customizes its workspaces
  "A new Microsoft Research headquarters building, slated to open in Redmond next week, is the first Microsoft building to be constructed under a new approach that will let different groups customize their spaces based on their needs."
  (tags: microsoft laboratory office design architecture)

links for 2008-02-19

• David Bleich, "The Materiality of Reading, "New Literary History 37:3 (2006)
  "Reading and other meditative activities affect bodily functions and feelings because reading is a material practice."
  (tags: reading materiality)
• Stephen M. Colclough, "Procuring Books and Consuming Texts: The Reading Experience of a Sheffield Apprentice, 1798," Book History 3 (2000), 21-44.
  "This essay examines the evidence of reading recorded in the diary of a single young Englishman, the fifteen-year-old Sheffield apprentice, Joseph Hunter (1783-1861)."
  (tags: reading history)
• Signer Harris Architects: Projects: MIT W20 Reading Room
  "Accommodate new university pedagogical directions in team/group study assignments by creating spaces where students can work collaboratively outside of the classroom environment."
  (tags: library library2.0 collaboration study)
• Learning Spaces | Resources | EDUCAUSE
  "Space, whether physical or virtual, can have a significant impact on learning. Learning Spaces focuses on how learner expectations influence such spaces, the principles and activities that facilitate learning, and the role of technology."
  (tags: library space education design library2.0)
• JISC infoNet - Learning Spaces
  "Learning space design and development is becoming a hot topic as our colleges and universities seek to provide 21st century learning facilities."
  (tags: library architecture design technology)
• JISC infoNet - Designing Spaces for Effective Learning
  "'Designing Spaces for Effective Learning' highlights current thinking about the use of learning technologies and their impact on a range of physical spaces, using noteworthy examples from current new-build and refurbishment projects."
  (tags: design library architecture)
• Planning & Designing Technology-Rich Learning Spaces - a photoset on Flickr
  A thousand-picture photoset "created to support the JISC infoNet applied infoKit 'Planning & Designing Technology-Rich Learning Spaces'."
  (tags: photographs learning library collaboration education)
• ScienceDirect - The Journal of Academic Librarianship : The Choice for Learning1
  "We have the choice of focusing on the delivery of electronic information and abandoning many of our claims on physical space or of designing library space for learning."
  (tags: library2.0 architecture reference_work)
• ScienceDirect - The Journal of Academic Librarianship : Redefining library space: managing the co-existence of books, computers, and readers
  "Library design must better integrate space for collections and computers than it has. This article presents planning strategies that integrate digital products and print collections based on patron needs."
  (tags: library architecture digital-physical)
• Anke te Heesen, "Boxes in Nature," SHPS 31:3 (September 2000), 381-403
  On the use of "written lists and notes, and boxes and cases" in 18th century exploration, and the "the intellectual and practical traditions in which learned activities and strategies took place at the beginning of the eighteenth century."
  (tags: history_of_science expeditions fieldwork media instruments)

Reading, observing, and thinking

From Lorraine Daston, "Taking Note(s)," Isis 95:3 (2004), 443–448, on 444.

I would like to explore, in a tentative vein, the implications of the history of scientific reading for other, more familiar forms of scientific practice, such as observation, but also for what might be called cognitive practices: economies of attention, arts of memory, the solidification and erosion of belief. Reading is and has been for millennia so central and seminal an intellectual practice that it has long served as the principal metaphor for understanding tout court. More concretely, ways of reading, absorbed at a young age and constantly practiced, may supply the templates for other ways of making sense of objects quite distinct from the manuscript or printed page —the morphology of a plant, the trajectory of a comet, the slide under the microscope, the “reading” of an instrument. This would especially have been the case for those who —for reasons of class, gender, and the cultural status of literacy —would have learned bookish skills before or to the exclusion of manual ones. Reading practices may also mold the self of the reader, at least among those who devote many of their waking hours to intercourse with books. Despite the bibliophobic rhetoric that since the seventeenth century has upheld the study of things over that of words, portraits of scientists even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still depict their subjects with books as well as with test tubes, skulls, chemical models, and other tools of empirical inquiry. The norms of scientific publication ensure that scientists continue to read for much the same reasons they continue to write — and both incessantly. The library remains as essential to most sciences as the laboratory. What imprint do these ingrained habits leave upon the scientific reader?

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, history of science, reading

links for 2008-02-13

• PETER ANDERS (USA)
  In 1995, NJIT architecture students "surveyed ten [text-based] MUDs on the Internet," studied "the spatial metaphors provided by the text," and created a 3D model. "Each domain had its signature structure despite similarities in... underlying code."
  (tags: endofcyberspace MUDs mapping metaphor)
• Interactive Architecture dot Org » Peter Anders - Cyberspace Interview
  "Peter Anders has been involved with work at the Institute of Digital Art and Technology at Plymouth University, in particular Arch-OS and discussing its potential." Here he discusses "the similarity of imaginary or virtual space and physical space."
  (tags: architecture endofcyberspace interaction_design)
• Peter Anders, Envisioning Cyberspace: Designing 3D Electronic Spaces (Amazon.com)
  "Free of the constraints of physical form and limited only by imagination, new environments spring to life daily in a fantastic realm called cyberspace.... this book is a hard-eyed look at cyberspace's impact on physical, cultural, and social reality."
  (tags: endofcyberspace architecture design)

Textual spaces

If you're in Philadelphia in the next couple months, check out the "Textual Spaces: an Architecture of Reading" exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania:

As we seek to understand the way in which the act of reading is defined by its material constraints, our line of questioning necessarily extends to the spaces in which reading takes place. Where do we read? And how do those places affect our reading? To answer these questions is to move toward an architecture of reading. To place a book within the rooms of a house or public space shifts the significance of historical context from background to foreground. Just as the material constraints involved in the process of printing, binding, and selling books arguably shape the attitudes of readers, so do their physical surroundings add to the shape of their reading experiences.

Technorati Tags: architecture, reading

links for 2008-02-12

• TidBITS : Peering into the Future of the Infosphere
  On "future developments in digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their impact on our lives. And since there is no merit in predicting the obvious... I will, instead, seek to capture the new worldview that might be dawning on us."
  (tags: forecasting future internet)
• Daedalus, or, Science and the Future
  "A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923," by JBS Haldane
  (tags: science future Cambridge)
• Icarus, or, the Future of Science
  Bertrand Ruseell's 1924 respose to JBS Haldane's "Daedalus."
  (tags: science future X2 cambridge)