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What a fascinating concept, especially this part: > We have only started to develop how to hold a conversation in UNLWS itself. As we currently have it, it's a

What a fascinating concept, especially this part: > We have only started to develop how to hold a conversation in UNLWS itself. As we currently have it, it's a very, very different kind of thing than linear atomic turntaking. Rather, it's a sort of ongoing mutual edit of a shared structure, where revision history playback (or live observation) expresses the 'conversational' tone expected by linear conversation, and the fixed form expresses the integrated totality of what the participants have expressed. Different ink colors help to distinguish participants, but there are no boundaries preventing one participant from using another's ink as part of their own expressions. Indeed, there are a few special conversational variants of glyphs which are meant to be easier to drop in to an already-drawn passage than the normal forms; these are recognizable by their use of two ink colors. (It’s a pity that it’s so fiddly to edit pencil or pen drawings.) I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts? (Similar to how Slack already introduces a small amount of non-linearity in the form of threaded conversations, but applied on a much larger scale, so that non-linear collaborative communication becomes the default instead of an afterthought.)

joesavage 6y ago
It's definitely an interesting thought. Max Krieger also explores this at some length in "Chatting with Glue": https://a9.io/glue-comic/ https://a9.io/glue-comic/
- skoodge 6y ago
  Thanks, that comic looks fantastic! Any idea where else these ideas are explored nowadays? I've seen that there are references to related projects mentioned at the end, but so far I had the impression that any research around hypertext (understood broadly) has pretty much fallen out of fashion in academia (and it sure doesn't help that hypertext is usually associated with the specific implementation of the modern web). Lately there has been a lot of buzz around bidirectional outliners / note taking apps like Roam and Obsidian, so it seems that there is some interest. But somewhat ironically, all the more research oriented attempts that I could find seem to be scattered around the web without any kind of cohesive community. (Of course there are still a lot of unexplored ideas dating back to Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more modern hypertext research seems comparatively hard to find.)
  - joesavage 6y ago
    Glad you found it interesting! Personally, I get a lot of interesting information around these kinds of topics from Twitter. In addition to @maxkriegers, the author of that comic, I think you might find some value in checking out users like @andy_matuschak, @rsnous, @geoffreylitt, @yoshiki, and @elzr, as well as the broader communities that surround them.
karl-j 6y ago
I took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden approach to conversation, as opposed to the normal stream approach. I wonder what the medium would have to be like to be useful for instant messaging, since not all things being said need to endure or benefit from linking. Maybe the ink fades unless new things are written nearby, proving its relevance? [1] https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/ https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te...
- strogonoff 6y ago
  Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine). Some of the challenges I see: — Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch. — Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes. — Ideally it should not be limited to two dimensions only, but multi-dimensional sketching poses hard UI challenges.
  - saizai 6y ago
    Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the other will add, there are relatively few places to look. Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which makes it easy to spot another's writing. Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be difficult. That is entirely in keeping with our sense of what is "natural" to a non-linear language. The order in which something was written is temporal, and everything temporal is linear, so it's disfavored semantically & grammatically. We prefer to challenge concepts like "conversation" at the root on such issues, rather than try to adapt UNLWS to afford them. Sketching: we assume an infinite plane writing canvas. In practice, this means eg that one can use scaling to fit anything anywhere. However, we generally do not make use of images, unless it's purely quotative. We do have e.g. graphs grammaticalized, though (inspired by Tufte's sparklines, but with a few more affordances from not being in a linear embedding.) 3d+: We considered that early on — and it's addressed in my essays on language design — but we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice. However, I've recently been thinking about a UNLWS-ish tactile 2.5D concept, which would use texture and a shallow height dimension — like a topographic map, not like an ants' nest. That's still in early conceptual stage, and not documented anywhere except a couple posts on CONLANG-L.
eterps 6y ago
As this seems to mediate consensus building, this also reminds me of: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-will-see-the-rise-of-civic-hackers https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-will-see-the-rise-of-civi... https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-media https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi... Especially having a global social media network with linear discussion maxed on 280 characters seems to be one of the most efficient ways to reach disagreement.
- saizai 6y ago
  Interesting. I've long been interested in ways to make systems more pro-social, but I hadn't previously thought of UNLWS in that context. Thank you for giving me a new idea to mull.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts? Sounds a lot like Google Docs. Maybe all this time that Google has been struggling to develop the killer chat app, they were sitting one the ultimate one this whole time.
- saizai 6y ago
  You're describing Google Wave¹, which (sadly) was killed as unsuccessful. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
  - eterps 6y ago
    Still wondering whether it was unsuccessful as a product or as a concept.
    - saizai 6y ago
      Can we even distinguish those in practice? AFAICT its main problem was being so general-purpose that it was hard to describe as a compelling use case. Of course, I also don't subscribe to the belief that the popularity or memetic prowess of an idea defines its "success" except commercially. I thought it was a very nifty thing. To me, that counts as a success. Alas, that is not the metric used by companies. :p
saizai 6y ago
See also Ouwi¹ by Schuyler Duveen, which is one of the very few other non-linear written languages. It takes a somewhat different approach, and (IIRC) has some examples of conversational output. (Ouwi & UNLWS were developed without either of us knowing about the other, though we got to know each other later on.) ¹ https://ouwi.org https://ouwi.org
saizai 6y ago
I believe that *Pad¹ does what you describe. In multi-user mode, it has an option to show each contributor's writing in a separate color. (I'm not sure if one can pick the color, though.) ¹ eg https://cryptpad.piratenpartei.de/pad/ https://cryptpad.piratenpartei.de/pad/

joesavage 6y ago

It's definitely an interesting thought. Max Krieger also explores this at some length in "Chatting with Glue": https://a9.io/glue-comic/ https://a9.io/glue-comic/

skoodge 6y ago
Thanks, that comic looks fantastic! Any idea where else these ideas are explored nowadays? I've seen that there are references to related projects mentioned at the end, but so far I had the impression that any research around hypertext (understood broadly) has pretty much fallen out of fashion in academia (and it sure doesn't help that hypertext is usually associated with the specific implementation of the modern web). Lately there has been a lot of buzz around bidirectional outliners / note taking apps like Roam and Obsidian, so it seems that there is some interest. But somewhat ironically, all the more research oriented attempts that I could find seem to be scattered around the web without any kind of cohesive community. (Of course there are still a lot of unexplored ideas dating back to Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more modern hypertext research seems comparatively hard to find.)
- joesavage 6y ago
  Glad you found it interesting! Personally, I get a lot of interesting information around these kinds of topics from Twitter. In addition to @maxkriegers, the author of that comic, I think you might find some value in checking out users like @andy_matuschak, @rsnous, @geoffreylitt, @yoshiki, and @elzr, as well as the broader communities that surround them.

karl-j 6y ago

I took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden approach to conversation, as opposed to the normal stream approach. I wonder what the medium would have to be like to be useful for instant messaging, since not all things being said need to endure or benefit from linking. Maybe the ink fades unless new things are written nearby, proving its relevance? [1] https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/ https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te...

strogonoff 6y ago
Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine). Some of the challenges I see: — Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch. — Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes. — Ideally it should not be limited to two dimensions only, but multi-dimensional sketching poses hard UI challenges.
- saizai 6y ago
  Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the other will add, there are relatively few places to look. Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which makes it easy to spot another's writing. Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be difficult. That is entirely in keeping with our sense of what is "natural" to a non-linear language. The order in which something was written is temporal, and everything temporal is linear, so it's disfavored semantically & grammatically. We prefer to challenge concepts like "conversation" at the root on such issues, rather than try to adapt UNLWS to afford them. Sketching: we assume an infinite plane writing canvas. In practice, this means eg that one can use scaling to fit anything anywhere. However, we generally do not make use of images, unless it's purely quotative. We do have e.g. graphs grammaticalized, though (inspired by Tufte's sparklines, but with a few more affordances from not being in a linear embedding.) 3d+: We considered that early on — and it's addressed in my essays on language design — but we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice. However, I've recently been thinking about a UNLWS-ish tactile 2.5D concept, which would use texture and a shallow height dimension — like a topographic map, not like an ants' nest. That's still in early conceptual stage, and not documented anywhere except a couple posts on CONLANG-L.

eterps 6y ago

As this seems to mediate consensus building, this also reminds me of: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-will-see-the-rise-of-civic-hackers https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-will-see-the-rise-of-civi... https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-media https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi... Especially having a global social media network with linear discussion maxed on 280 characters seems to be one of the most efficient ways to reach disagreement.

saizai 6y ago
Interesting. I've long been interested in ways to make systems more pro-social, but I hadn't previously thought of UNLWS in that context. Thank you for giving me a new idea to mull.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts? Sounds a lot like Google Docs. Maybe all this time that Google has been struggling to develop the killer chat app, they were sitting one the ultimate one this whole time.

saizai 6y ago
You're describing Google Wave¹, which (sadly) was killed as unsuccessful. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
- eterps 6y ago
  Still wondering whether it was unsuccessful as a product or as a concept.
  - saizai 6y ago
    Can we even distinguish those in practice? AFAICT its main problem was being so general-purpose that it was hard to describe as a compelling use case. Of course, I also don't subscribe to the belief that the popularity or memetic prowess of an idea defines its "success" except commercially. I thought it was a very nifty thing. To me, that counts as a success. Alas, that is not the metric used by companies. :p

saizai 6y ago

See also Ouwi¹ by Schuyler Duveen, which is one of the very few other non-linear written languages. It takes a somewhat different approach, and (IIRC) has some examples of conversational output. (Ouwi & UNLWS were developed without either of us knowing about the other, though we got to know each other later on.) ¹ https://ouwi.org https://ouwi.org

saizai 6y ago

I believe that *Pad¹ does what you describe. In multi-user mode, it has an option to show each contributor's writing in a separate color. (I'm not sure if one can pick the color, though.) ¹ eg https://cryptpad.piratenpartei.de/pad/ https://cryptpad.piratenpartei.de/pad/