Welcome to ‘The Future of Text’, the largest survey of the future of text ever undertaken.
Contributors from the fields of the arts, computing, politics, science and beyond have contributed articles, giving this work a breath not seen anywhere else, including a foreword by Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of the Internet and Ismail Serageldin, founder of the Modern Library of Alexandria.
Volume 1 was published 2020. It is a collection of dreams for how we want text to evolve as well as how we understand our current textual infrastructures, how we view the history of writing, and much more. The aim is to make it inspire a powerfully rich future of text in a multitude of ways today and to still have value in a thousand years and beyond. It should serve as a record for how we saw the medium of text and how it relates to our world, our problems and each other in the early twenty first century.
Volume 2 will be published on the 9th of December 2021, during the ‘Summit of the Book’ and the anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s demo.
Volume One | Volume Two
Community & Symposium
Please feel free to join our community. We meet through Circle every Monday and Friday (8-9AM Pacific, 11-12 Eastern, 4-5 UK time, 5-6 Central European), with special meetings twice a month, starting January 2022. We also host an Annual Symposium which has been running for a decade.
Community on Circle | Symposium
The Best Way to Predict the Future…
Alan Kay (who is a contributor to the book) famously said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. This is why we are also producing authoring software and document reading software as The Augmented Text Company. This is also why we have developed the most robust way to encode rich metadata in a PDF, as we have done with the book, through what we call ‘Visual-Meta’.
