3 ms·
As far as OP goes, matching on n-grams is a reasonable & fast idea, but the presentation is not good. The problem with lots of links is that they are a tax on t
by gwern 3y ago
As far as OP goes, matching on n-grams is a reasonable & fast idea, but the presentation is not good. The problem with lots of links is that they are a tax on the reader's attention and limited decision-making reserves; unfortunately, not having links is an even greater tax, because now one has to exert much more effort and use one's fingers as well as one's eyeballs to see if there is anything at all worth looking at.
My suggestion would be to relegate this to the authoring interface, and just show regular links to readers. This is still bad for authors, however, and so my suggestion would be to explicitly annotate 'possible links'. For example, you could draw an underline under all words, count how many hits that word would have across all possible n-grams, normalize document-wide, and set the opacity 0-100% based on that. So you would see most words have no underline (0% opacity), dubious links get hard to see lines, and then various proper nouns and titles and technical terms would have heavy dark underlines; the author can then easily see which ones might be viable links, and right-click or hover to check & instantiate. And this could be set to automatically hyperlink at certain % or run in an interactive modal to approve/disapprove hyperlinks as a final editing pass.
- dredmorbius 3y agoI'm increasingly inclined to see classical footnotes or endnotes as a preferable compromise. Simply hyperlinking text often provides little context as to where that link is going, though alternatives (as with your own pop-up context cards, see also Mediawiki's use of same) are useful. I've played with sidenotes as an option, implemented in CSS (I've a few CodePens on this concept). That also works reasonably well (and can even be responsive to screen size). There's also a fantastic quote of Walter Benjamin's I've just run across: “Already today, as the current scientific mode of production teaches, the book is already an obsolete mediation between two different card file systems. For everything essential is found in the index box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar who studies it assimilates it in his own card file.” -- Walter Benjamin - Attested Auditor of Books, in One Way Street (1928) <https://writingslowly.com/2023/07/24/walter-benjamin-on.html https://writingslowly.com/2023/07/24/walter-benjamin-on.html> The thought of books (or Web articles) as inter-process communication between author's personal datastors (Zettelkasten, databases, wikis, org-mode notes, ...) is a fresh and illuminating one.
- gwern 3y agoI don't like footnotes/endnotes at all, because they still incur the opacity of a link and require reader effort. Even a simple link-icon (to denote within-site links, before/after self-links etc) gives you more information than that! > I've played with sidenotes as an option, implemented in CSS (I've a few CodePens on this concept). One idea I've played with is having links be partially expanded and sort of 'docked' into the side, so you can glance over at any link and see the title & snippets. Crude mockup: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/sidenote/2022-11-16-gwern-gwernnet-dockedannotationsidebarmockup.jpg https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/sidenote/2022-11-16-... It doesn't work with 1-column layouts on most monitors because not enough space, but could work with more newspaper-like layouts or a 2-column layout with the right column reserved for the bibliography/sidenotes-esque cards.