The Future of Text ’25 will be hosted at The Royal Society in London, UK Thursday November 27th 2025, with a theme of ‘a multitude of perspectives’.
We ask: What can it be like to unfold the promise of working in a richly interactive knowledge environment?
In this quest we are not limited to VR/AR/XR (though this is where our current research lies). We also look at pen and physical paper, academic digital papers, digital tablet, printed books, reams of sketches and beyond. We look for richly interactive knowledge environments in all of the instantiations of text.
Such an environment cannot come from a canned demo, a single company’s product or even a research project such as we are doing, all by itself. We firmly believe that richly interactive knowledge environments can only be unleashed through all of the above, in deep and engaging dialog.
This is why we host weekly open office dialog, the annual Symposium which has been going for over a decade and that is why we are putting together the sixth volume of the book on The Future of Text.
And this is why we invite you to join us. The future of text is literally and figuratively in our common hands, where we can develop a truly extended cognitive reality.
You can see what we have been up to in the Future Text Lab, where you can see the record of our open office dialog, experience our XR experiments.
You can join us any given Monday, just look at the Future Text Lab website.
You are also very welcome to submit an article to the next volume of the book, and attend the Symposium, if you are interested. The only requirement is simply that; that you are interested. As this year’s theme proclaims, we are looking for ‘a multitude of perspectives’ to come together in productive dialog.
Co-Chairs & Co-Editors
We Dream, We Wonder
We dream of richly connected reading, richly connected writing and richly interactive views of our information. We dream of using technologies to truly augment how we learn, think and communicate, not to outsource our thinking, agency and ownership of our common future.
We wonder how the challenging problem of organizing the knowledge of our thoughts and sources in space could be improved through XR and not only be made into a ‘bigger mess’–how we can interact to clarify—how we can fold and unfold knowledge, how we can connect and see connections. How we can truly extend our brains into a rich spatial experience outside the confines of our skulls to degrees traditional media has never been able to deliver.
This Symposium and Book is sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Washington State University Vancouver, Electronic Literature Lab, and the Augmented Text Company
