The implications for publishing seem . . . well, if not exactly clear, then super intriguing. For all the distinctions being drawn between print and electronic publications, along comes a technology that points toward a both-and option: our print text can also be our e-text. Imagine a serif-rich font printed with the new ink and in which the interconnected letters become logic gates within the flow of the text. The text becomes language made of language, and each book, chapter, or research article becomes a little working machine. Maybe the operating system is contained within the spine.

What might we do with such intelligent text? For one thing, the text could constitute the program for performing keyword searches on itself — every proper noun, term, and phrase would know its own name. For another thing, the text could constitute the programming for animating elements of itself — figures that come to life when the reader turns the page, for instance, or words that literally glow with significance.

Beyond imitating web pages, such a new kind of publishing could take full advantage of the medium through interaction, a kind of publishing for the makers culture. An essay about diabetes, for instance, could include a lab-on-a-chip test of one’s blood-sugar level on a diagrammatic surface in the book’s appendix. A book about photography could present editing techniques demonstrated by the book itself. A book about environmentalism could include chapter-by-chapter tests for air, soil, and water quality. A book about dance could dance.

The new circuit pen can also draw antennas, which suggests that the text could generate its own Wi-Fi network to transmit and retrieve information as the need arises. Not only might such publications have access to the resources of the internet — every book a netbook — but such books might even chat among themselves. Public libraries become cluster-based supercomputers that change with each acquisition and with each book lent.

Your private library generates an image of you, suggests the book that will make you both that much closer to complete. Your brilliant tattoos begin to blink.

Link to the Physorg article.

Link to the research article appearing in Advanced Materials.

Photo by: Bok Yeop Ahn

Last week, Lisa Bayer passed along a link to a Chronicle of Higher Education article by Tushar Rae about the issue of citation standards for e-books: since e-text reflows based on a user’s preference settings, what’s the best way to list page numbers in our citations of such text? William Rankin, director of educational innovation at Abilene Christian University, gets the last lines of the article:

Citations have always been symbolic . . . I don’t think I need symbolic anymore. I want an actual link.

Right on.

Doesn’t page numbering seem like a problem unique to this moment in history? Push the calendar forward 10 years or so, and everything will be digitized and interconnected, and these problems will all be discussed in the past tense. Implicit in this is the passing of the page as an organizing principle.

Among the UIP journals that I manage, the Journal of American Ethnic History has the most interesting citation problems. Articles with standard citations are rare, and more common are ones that require a large measure of improvisation to account for archival sources, some of which were established before the electric grid. Fortunate for me, other professionals compose, copy edit, and proofread these citations, but it’s fascinating to manage the consensus-building process that brings it all together. These special citations point to locations in space, not text. “In this city, in this building, in this room, in this carton, in this folder, in this document, is this anti-war petition” sort of thing. On long days, I’m tempted to replace CMS with GPS.

The Rae article prompts us to imagine what might replace the page in the evolution of academic research. My first guess is the panel—a digital plane of any size encoded with text, graphics, video, user comments, blinking lights, and whatever else comes along. Research panels could be developed like cities, and citations of panels could replace page numbers with vertical and horizontal coordinates similar to those used on street maps, making the cited text into little niche neighborhoods within an article’s overall city plan. Hyperlinks finally living up to their prefixes by seeming like forms of teleportation. // More: Layout templates based on the principles of landscape architecture. Research panels that grow metropolitan in size and spawn suburbs of ancillary data sets. Museums presenting collections of fine research prints that visitors might stand before and ponder. Meta-analyses that deconstruct a text like a monster marching through SimCity.

Perhaps scholarship of the future will jetison spatial design entirely and take the form of hyperdimensional objects, the shape of which changes as their authors change, and the form of which is not defined by the protocols of the hypertext markup language—scholarship as a ghostly weft passing through living thoughts that transform as we grow and age. “Encountering the text” will give way to haunting the thought-form, and knowledge will seem unmistakably organic, interactive, and awe-inspiring. // Every new idea will hold out the possibility of literally changing everything we know. // The totemic image of this new age might be the mycelial mat—the living network of underground fungal fibers that form symbiotic chemical communication networks across whole forests and do much to define the shape and health of the forest ecology.

The largest organism in the world is a 2400-year-old mycelia in Oregon. It is 2200 acres in size. It produces honey mushrooms in the fall.

***

Update: The problem of page numbering in e-books was already finding its solution coincident to the publication of the Rae article—it appears that a software fix will display standardized page numbers regardless of user preference settings. Woot.

I don’t think this diminishes my fungus proposal one bit.

Link to the Chronicle story.
Link to JAEH.

(Image: Honey Mushrooms, a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0, image from AnneTanne’s photostream)
(Image: Chataway’s Map of Winnipeg (1919), a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0, image from Manitoba Historical Maps’s photostream)

Understandably, the article only hints at the complex architecture involved in pulling this off, but two qualities seem apparent: that Watson automatically assimilates the information  given to him and that his success is based on applying meaningfulness to a series of choices. The first quality seems like a kind of superpower — “watch me absorb Shakespeare by noon” sort of thing — and the second feels like criteria we might use to distinguish a kind of intelligent behavior. Watson is only three years old.

Here’s a bit from the article that leaves the game show theme behind:

I.B.M. plans to begin selling versions of Watson to companies in the next year or two. John Kelly, the head of I.B.M.’s research labs, says that Watson could help decision-makers sift through enormous piles of written material in seconds. Kelly says that its speed and quality could make it part of rapid-fire decision-making, with users talking to Watson to guide their thinking process.

While it’s fascinating to imagine the many ways specialists might collaborate with Watson — in medicine, in law — I wonder why they would build another version when Watson can add anything that’s placed in front of him to his already large knowledge base. Sure, the programming might need to be adjusted to account for non-Jeopardy-like human interaction, but the point is that adding subjects like neural anatomy and environmental law to his memory won’t displace expertise about, say, the highest waterfall in the world.

If we follow this alternative far enough, we find ourselves with something more than a search engine or question-answer system, something like an intelligent research library that can negotiate its contents with a variety of readers. The more expert the question, the more precise the answer, and such answers might well draw from reference book entries, research articles, classroom lectures, and blogs. Watson might be the ideal reader the publishing industry has been searching for.

Perhaps this isn’t likely to come about in the short term, but we might imagine a time a generation from now when our primary subscribers are not individuals or institutions, but forms like Watson that spend every moment of every day reading what we make, remembering it, and telling us about it later — a form that anthologizes human understanding as a sort of transcendental media. I like the symmetrical sense of supposing that the information economy, so vastly automated, is leading to another based on extrahuman comprehension.

Link to the NYT story.

Wilson regards the LHFGA as the ultimate history book, but that might be underselling the idea, given that it would contain the concept of history itself and every thought about it, plus every imaginable alternative to “history,” “book,” and “archive.” It would include this blog post and you reading it. Presumably the only sentience that could read such a book would be the LHFGA of a different galaxy, and once one read the other, perhaps all the information would divide, cell-like, to become part of the other LHFGA. (Still with me?) Thus would the hundreds of billions of LHFGAs begin to grow a new informational universe from the remnants of the old.

This poses a number of interesting questions about the future of book publishing. No, I’m kidding; it doesn’t — but it reminds me of a recent article from the Times Online about the Total Recall e-memory project. In this version of book making, an individual collects as much of the informational content of the life as possible — everything from email messages and grocery receipts to cell phone photos and biotelemetry data — and adds it daily to a lifelog. Data builds at a rate of about 1GB per month.

While the project as it exists now seems a bit incomplete, at least as far as the demands of autobiography are concerned, it’s not hard to imagine a next-generation cell connection that would transmit one’s interior thoughts to a server account somewhere, each day an enormous soliloquy of interior and exterior monologue rendered as text. A lifetime of this might result in a new sort of hyper-completist book media: a book that is millions of pages in length but only useful as a searchable, browsable text. The book as solipsistic virtual reality program.

Cue the WikiReader: a little Kit Kat Bar-sized device that includes the Wikipedia database in its entirety minus the graphical stuff. That’s a thousand volumes worth of searchable information encoded on a chip for $99. Two AAA batteries are included.

Link to the Mammoth article.
Link the Times Online article.
Link to the WikiReader.

The packaging possibilities for a special edition of Larry and Alaina Kanfer’s Barns of Illinois leap immediately to mind.