Welcome and thank you for having a look at our work. The Future of Text is an initiative by Frode Hegland with a great team of advisors.
Frode Hegland
I am passionate about the potential for the future of text to augment how we think and communicate. I am therefore a cheerleader and experimenter. I think someone has to be.
I believe that when we develop the means through which we can interact with text in richer ways, we develop the means through which we can interact with our knowledge–and each other–in richer ways. This will not be done through technique or tool alone, it will need to be done by building more powerful tools to support more techniques, unceasing a deeper literacy.
It is all too easy to think that we know what text is, yet the way we interact with text has changed beyond recognition from analog to digital text. Tom Lombardo wrote* that “truth kills creativity”. We think, from our everyday experience, that the truth of what text is what text does for us today. This ignores the long history of experimentation with what text can be, such as by the great pioneer thinkers of early digital text. With extended reality, we have an opportunity to fire up our imagination again, and to truly question what text is and what it can be.
Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in any aspects of this work, including if you are interested in hiring me for consulting on text with your corporate work.
I’m a former infantry soldier, advertising executive and teacher of the year, who is now entirely focused on realising the most powerful futures of text. For myself, for you, but most of all, for my beautiful son Edgar.
Frode Alexander Hegland
frodehegland.com
Twitter : twitter.com/liquidizer
Mastodon : federated.thefutureoftext.org/web/@frode
The Team
My advisors are Vint Cerf (co-inventor of the Internet) who also co-hosts the Symposium, as well as Andreea Ion Cojocaru (co-founder and CEO of NUMENA), Barbara Tversky (author & professor emerita of psychology at Stanford), Bruce Horn (programmer of the original Macintosh Finder and now back at Apple), Brandel Zachernuk (Apple Web Technologies), Dene Grigar (digital artist & scholar at Washington State University, Vancouver), Fabien Benetou (European Parliament Innovation lab WebXR consultant), Ismail Serageldin (founder of the modern Library of Alexandria), Mark Anderson (University of Southampton), Peter Wasilko (Attorney, Programmer & Independent Scholar), and Ted Nelson (who coined the term ‘Hypertext’).
Our Future Text Lab Team meets weekly.
Doug Engelbart (inventor of much of modern computer interactions) was my mentor and his philosophy of augmenting our intellect is the primary inspiration for this work.
PhD advisors at the University of Southampton are professors of web and computer science are Dame Wendy Hall, Leslie Carr & David Millard.
Adam Cheyer (inventor of Siri), says of this work that the “Augmented Text tools are essential components for textual thought productivity.” Stephen Fry (actor & technologist) writes about my tool Liquid: “Get used to it & you’re hooked”
You will find nothing high-tech on this site or in my work. All my effort is towards simplifying towards the goal of augmenting how we think and work.