Texplora

Target, Problems, Needs
The linear nature of spoken language obviously is limited by our body. As we have one tongue only, we are forced to serialize thoughts in order to express them with language. Reading may be seen as the process that translates a stream of concepts into the spatial domain. Writing on the other hand converts temporally arranged concepts back to the spatial domain. A mental image therefore could be considered mainly as a spatial phenomena, even though time and space are clearly interdependent. Mental models are formed over time.

Natural language, direct translation into formal system, non-linear schematic representation / visualization in a interactive visual editor. Note that the verb «minus» has been replaced by the operator «-» which can be evaluated by the machine. Processing is not limited to numeric and logic calculations.

Solution
To articulate and visualize relationships between elements, directed graphs offer increased expressiveness over seemingly linear language. External representations like schematic drawings, storyboards or maps augment our thinking process. Unlike a thought, an external representation on paper or on a computer screen is persistent and can be shared among people. It can also be easily manipulated. Interactive computer graphics coupled with semantic systems further extend static representations on paper as they can be based on arbitrary models that can be represented visually manipulated dynamically.

Unified Modeling Language: Description of (sub)process logic.
 

Autodesk Maya Hypergraph: The yellow nodes represent verbs that produce data. The verbs (methods) create the sphere and the cube as well as the result of the boolean operation «ResultingShape». A small application made with Maya’s HyperShade can be seen here.

Tools, Applications
In the area of computer animation and software development the need for simple to use, yet expressive interaction models caused many innovative applications. It started with visualizing the syntax of program code in order to make is more readable for the developer and to spot common errors. Increasingly, flow diagrams have been used to visually represent the high-level logic of the system to be built. 

Example, Images, Publisher
Unified Modeling Language like Maya’s Hypergraph (Hypergraph is a visual editor of a 3D animation application named Autodesk Maya) are methods to specify behaviour of systems. The idea is that behaviour can be expressed on a meta level that can ultimately be turned into arbitrary representations such as natural language, images or even machine code that can be executed. Like in language, the idea is to represent nodes and relations between them. A node is an abstract object that can be a method, an attribute or data like text, a number or an image). Descriptions are made by linking the desired objects in a particular way.

QuartzComposer by Apple. Visual authoring system aimed at application developers. Quartz Compositor is part of every OS X distribution. It is hidden in the «Developer Tools». Aa wide variety of node types are present and can be connected to build applications. Nodes range from Text processing (XML, RSS, etc.) to image processing and general purpose operators. Image by Noiseindustries.com

Shake by Apple is a node-based image compositing application for post production. The name «Shake» is derived by the node’s behaviour. Connected nodes can easily be detached by shaking them off the established connections visualized by lines. Images can be either inputs or outputs. The direction of the flow is defined by the order of the connections.
 

Ideas, Thoughts, Relevance
Written language generally is «read only», meaning that the medium like a book contains just text or «data». This data or content can only be interpreted by the reader itself. Executable content like a software application on the other hand can be interactive and therefore communicate with reader. The «reader» turns into a «user» or even an «author». In other words, the document can become a tool. This is a fundamental change. Clearly travel literature could profit from node-based representations of information as much as 3d graphics.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 1:02 am and is filed under Innovative Schreibprozesse, Philosophie, Sprache, Theorie, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.