Future Text Lab

This was the last Monday session before Thursday's Future of Text Symposium at Conway Hall, and it ran as part introductions, part extended demo, part argument about what AI does to effort. Samya Roy, an assistant professor in India who works on electronic literature and computational literacy for Global South classrooms, was in the room with Frode, having travelled over to help with Thursday. Online were Kathryn Jones, Tom Haymes, Eric Rangell, Kaveh Bazargan, Fabien Bénétou (back after a long absence), Brandel Zachernuk, Peter Dimitrios, Patrick Lichty and, later, Jonathan Finn. Mark Anderson was absent. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/11/09/9-nov-26/

This was the session where several years of Future Text Lab conversation about reading in space turned into things the group could actually see, and in some cases things that were built while they were still talking about them. Frode spent most of the two hours inside the Vision Pro, sharing his view of Origami Text, with Author and Claude in Xcode running on the Mac beside him. Present were Peter Dimitrios, Eric Rangell, Tom Haymes, Brandel Zachernuk (for the first part, before heading to work) and Kathryn Jones (for most of it, before going back to work). A companion report, written by the Claude instance in Xcode, covers the same day from the code side: what was built, what went wrong and how long it would have taken a human developer. This write-up covers the other side: what the group saw, what they said about it, and what came of the exchange.

https://futuretextlab.info/2026/11/02/2-nov-26/

Code report from today's session. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/11/02/2-nov-26-coding/

This session was less of a demo review than last week's. It turned on one question that kept coming back: how a personal knowledge system becomes something other people can share. It opened with good news: Kathryn Jones confirmed she will be in London in person for the Symposium on 12 November and will present. Frode then described his meeting with Dave Millard, who showed him his own knowledge-work setup: Obsidian with LLMs that go out into the world, bring material back in and keep up an ongoing dialogue with it. Frode called it "almost depressingly impressive" and talked Dave into presenting it at the Symposium, though Dave was hesitant because it is so personal. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/10/23/26-october-26/

This was the first session in almost a month and the first time Eric Vicenti met Eric Rangell, which prompted an opening riff on what "in person" means. Kathryn Jones, drawing on years of producing interactive live-stream theatre, recalled the constant pushback that if you aren't in the same room it isn't live, which she found absurd given that broadcast sport is a billion-dollar "live" industry. Frode connected this to the Apple Vision Pro, where a newly released stereoscopic 180° horror film gives one of the strongest "you are there" experiences he has seen, and argued that for presence the clever camera angles should be dropped: just give the audience a stage, life-size and high-resolution, and the sense of being in the room does the rest. Tom Haymes framed this historically: film spent its first twenty or thirty years staging plays in front of a camera before discovering what the medium could do, early television and radio drama were likewise live, and XR will need its own skill set that nobody has yet developed. Kathryn's example of an immersive exhibit that placed her in a Viennese square, and Tom's idea of walking through the Vienna of The Third Man or an XR murder mystery, kept the theme of spatial presence alive for the rest of the meeting. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/10/19/19-october-26/

Having worked with Claude in Xcode since the 7th of July, I have developed and released a new version of Interatlas but most importantly upgraded Author and our community Origami Text app (which is now also taking over Reader’s name and functionality), with the following report on what was done and how it was done. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/10/18/october-code-review/

On 13 October 2026, the day after a Future Text Lab session, Frode Hegland and Mark Anderson had a long one-to-one call, with Frode working from the quiet upstairs room of a café in town. It began with Mark clarifying that his question the previous day about how references are stored had not been a criticism but an attempt to understand what information was actually available, a thread that came back later in the call. From there the conversation ran across three connected subjects. The first, and the one that took most of the time, was the design of spatial workspaces for knowledge work: how an environment that contains everything in a library, every document, concept and citation, can show almost nothing by default and still let its user reach anything quickly. The second was the relationship between maps and writing, including Mark's long-held view that a map is for planning rather than composing, and what that means for Author and for the new concept-and-document workspace Frode is building. The third was publishing infrastructure: citation data as ground truth, the Citation Style Language file Mark has built for ACM, and whether academic authoring tools are ready for EPUB, tested live by exporting an EPUB from Google Docs and opening it in Origami Text. https://futuretextlab.info/2026/10/15/13-october-mark-frode/

Nine people joined this week's session, which ran on demos rather than an agenda. Two were new to the current group. Chris Gutteridge, a web and data developer at the University of Southampton for 29 years and an old colleague of Frode and Mark Anderson, was back after a long absence. Nina, a PhD candidate at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and a digital and performance artist, joined for the first time. She studies the interface and philosophy of the space survival game EVE Frontier. Also present were Mark Anderson, Peter Dimitrios, Tom Haymes, Eric Rangell, Art Domi and Kaveh Bazargan.

The session moved through three stretches. Frode opened with a tour of new work in Origami Text and Author, ending in the Vision Pro. That set off a long discussion about how a space full of documents should be organised, and for which kind of work. Chris then demonstrated an AI agent rearranging a canvas of web windows on command, which turned the conversation to how people and AI tools should share the work. Frode closed by asking what he should build for the Future of Text Symposium on 12 November.

The question running through all of it was how the same information should be shown differently for different jobs, and who does the arranging: the person by hand, a saved view, or an AI given a command.
https://futuretextlab.info/2026/10/12/12-october-2026/

The Future Text Lab session of 5 October 2026 had no set topic and seven participants, calling in from London, Delaware, Texas, Pristina and California; Mark Anderson was out with a cold. The newcomer was Kaveh Bazargan of River Valley Technologies. A physicist by training and one of the first TeX users at Imperial College, he started his business typesetting for IOP Publishing directly from authors' TeX files. He now works on fully automated XML-first publishing, where one structured file is the "format of record" and every other format is generated from it, and on embedding digital provenance in scholarly material.

https://futuretextlab.info/2026/10/05/5-october-26/

Two newcomers reshaped this session. Kathryn Jones, who describes herself as a non-academic with a passion project, has spent four years building what began as two hundred quote slides from Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind into an app she calls Insatiable Mind — a way of turning books, images and lived experiences into artifacts she can move through, so that a Caravaggio at the Met suddenly connects to a church she visited on the Appian Way. Art Domi, a Houdini technical artist from Kosovo, arrived by way of an AI agent that found the community for him, carrying the observation that software developers are the last creative industry still working in files and folders rather than on a spatial canvas; his Tesser prototype was demoed in the second half. Brandel Zachernuk gave the fullest account yet of his W3C work on spatial web standards and confirmed that the model element now ships natively across Apple's OS 27 platforms, while Frode demonstrated the same element being pulled out of an ordinary EPUB and into the room in Origami Text.
https://futuretextlab.info/2026/09/24/28th-september-2026/