Future Text Connect
augmenting developers ability to unleash the power of interactive text
It's important to be able change your view instantly without losing data or context and no single software developer can, or should, deliver all the tools in your digital arsenal.
It's not enough to be able to 'export' or 'publish' a document as black boxes. It is also vital to be retain as much richness as the authoring process can generate, both for the author to view and interact with the work in different ways as well as for readers and collaborators.
To enable this we need richer means through which we can allow ourselves to share our information. This includes how we link and cite as well as how we split and connect information as the projects we are involved with illustrate.
This is why we have built a virtual ‘lab’ to support dialogue and experimentation focusing on how developers most powerfully support augmented work-flows between applications and systems.
This is not a standards settings body, we are too small and loosely joined for that. This is simply a venue for discussion and experimentation based on real-world projects where we can share how we connect our work with the expectations of discussion for future improvement and expansion.
Focusing Questions
We are organised around specific user questions, all aimed at augmenting the users ability to connect, addressing them in projects with the resources as have available to us:
Practical
We are using the jrnl.global wordpress blog as the main venue and connection point for our dialogue. This is where we will post our Meeting Notes as all as other dialogue records and News. The Future of Text Symposium is the annual face-to-face meeting for Future Text Connect as well as a general symposium on the future of text. The next event will be on the 8th of December 2018.
Topics
Topics discussed on jrnl includes:
Projects
We engage in a wide-ranging dialogue but we feel it's useful to have the dialogue grounded in real project work so therefore also work on implementations:
Further Topics of Concern: Publishing, Citations, Rich PDF, etc.
The act of publishing is an act of integration so the means through which the author can do this and what the systems support will constrain or expand the integration and findability of work. We are looking at Rich PDFs and other means for the author to have a richer way of conveying intent to the reader of the document or to the analyser of the document in small or huge aggregate.
These issues are discussed on the jrnl blog under Publishing.
RFCs
All relevant material will be hosted on the jrnl.global blog under the appropriate categories.
People
Frode Hegland
Christopher Gutteridge
note: this list will transition to bios on https://jrnl.global/category/team/ once we get past the 8th of December and keep working.
Please feel free to join us.