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What a fascinating concept, especially this part:

> We have only started to develop how to hold a conversation in UNLWS itself. As we currently have it, it's a very, very different kind of thing than linear atomic turntaking. Rather, it's a sort of ongoing mutual edit of a shared structure, where revision history playback (or live observation) expresses the 'conversational' tone expected by linear conversation, and the fixed form expresses the integrated totality of what the participants have expressed. Different ink colors help to distinguish participants, but there are no boundaries preventing one participant from using another's ink as part of their own expressions. Indeed, there are a few special conversational variants of glyphs which are meant to be easier to drop in to an already-drawn passage than the normal forms; these are recognizable by their use of two ink colors. (It’s a pity that it’s so fiddly to edit pencil or pen drawings.)

I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts? (Similar to how Slack already introduces a small amount of non-linearity in the form of threaded conversations, but applied on a much larger scale, so that non-linear collaborative communication becomes the default instead of an afterthought.)

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I took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden approach to conversation, as opposed to the normal stream approach.

I wonder what the medium would have to be like to be useful for instant messaging, since not all things being said need to endure or benefit from linking. Maybe the ink fades unless new things are written nearby, proving its relevance?

[1] https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te...

Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine).

Some of the challenges I see:

— Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch.

— Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes.

— Ideally it should not be limited to two dimensions only, but multi-dimensional sketching poses hard UI challenges.

Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the other will add, there are relatively few places to look.

Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which makes it easy to spot another's writing.

Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be difficult. That is entirely in keeping with our sense of what is "natural" to a non-linear language. The order in which something was written is temporal, and everything temporal is linear, so it's disfavored semantically & grammatically.

We prefer to challenge concepts like "conversation" at the root on such issues, rather than try to adapt UNLWS to afford them.

Sketching: we assume an infinite plane writing canvas. In practice, this means eg that one can use scaling to fit anything anywhere. However, we generally do not make use of images, unless it's purely quotative.

We do have e.g. graphs grammaticalized, though (inspired by Tufte's sparklines, but with a few more affordances from not being in a linear embedding.)

3d+: We considered that early on — and it's addressed in my essays on language design — but we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice.

However, I've recently been thinking about a UNLWS-ish tactile 2.5D concept, which would use texture and a shallow height dimension — like a topographic map, not like an ants' nest. That's still in early conceptual stage, and not documented anywhere except a couple posts on CONLANG-L.

> we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice

I’m imagining a conversation as a space containing multiple regular UNLWS planes, intersecting at certain [binding?] points.

Such an approach would ideally leave dimensionality to the medium, language itself could remain under same constraints as before.

A conversation plane would be viewed in 2D, but certain points could indicate connections outside of current plane. For such a point, viewer can pull up a projection that shows connecting conversation planes in some way (possibly 3D or pseudo-3D).

Of course, there are some technical challenges in implementing a medium that works this way, and it’s unclear how groundbreaking or useful it would be in practice (after all, all conversation planes should be possible to represent as areas on one larger plane, just with longer connecting lines).

I have two concerns with that, above the (major) technical challenges: 1. we wanted this to be writable using colored pens 2. if we add a dimension, we must add it for real.

#2 is to me the vastly harder problem. Just like in UNLWS, we always have to challenge our own assumptions in order to get a sense for what would be "native to" a two-dimensional written langauge, we'd have to do the same for 3D (or 2.5D). Merely slapping 2D planes together with some links would not come anywhere even close to a robust use of the medium, just like merely having English sentences branch off from each other isn't anywhere close to a robust use of two-dimensionality.

Fully 2D language is already an extremely conceptually challenging problem, at least to me. Hardly anyone has even tried. There are fundamental challenges, like "how do you tell a joke when you don't control the ordering".

I don't think anyone is currently able to do 3D in a way that would truly serve the medium - and the medium would need to be much better defined, since humans' inability to actually see anything 3D instantaneously (we see 2D with an imputed distance and assumptions about what the rest looks like) implies that there must be interaction-in-time of some sort (like, at minimum, moving your head or the object in order to see the whole thing). That's going to be very specific to the medium. Are we talking about arbitrary 3D disconnected polytopes, ants' nest casts, convex hulls, computer-manipulated 2D, VR goggles, ...? Those all have radically different affordances.

Simultaneously, it would trivialize problems in 2D that we have to deal with. E.g. in 3D, there's no circuit wire-crossing problem, whereas in 2D, Borromean rings e.g. have unavoidable collisions. It would be cheating to use 3D in some shallow way to get rid of that issue, without also dealing with 3D's own problems.

Design constraints are a good thing.

My concern with smaller screens is that naive zooming out would make conversation too small to be readable.

Perhaps some aspects could be borrowed from mapping apps—one-handed zoom, gradually simplifying conversation as it’s zoomed out, and highlighting which participant is looking at which area of the conversation.

I sense an exciting new approach to communication…

PS I really like the garden vs stream metaphor for UNLWS-native "conversation". I agree that it's very apt. It nicely captures the spirit of non-linear interaction.

Thank you for this new way of looking at / describing it. We may borrow it for the UNLWS documentation. ;)

Your thank you goes to karl-j, who brought it up and whom I responded to!

Thank you for your work on UNLWS!

It's definitely an interesting thought. Max Krieger also explores this at some length in "Chatting with Glue": https://a9.io/glue-comic/

Thanks, that comic looks fantastic!

Any idea where else these ideas are explored nowadays? I've seen that there are references to related projects mentioned at the end, but so far I had the impression that any research around hypertext (understood broadly) has pretty much fallen out of fashion in academia (and it sure doesn't help that hypertext is usually associated with the specific implementation of the modern web).

Lately there has been a lot of buzz around bidirectional outliners / note taking apps like Roam and Obsidian, so it seems that there is some interest. But somewhat ironically, all the more research oriented attempts that I could find seem to be scattered around the web without any kind of cohesive community.

(Of course there are still a lot of unexplored ideas dating back to Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more modern hypertext research seems comparatively hard to find.)

Glad you found it interesting! Personally, I get a lot of interesting information around these kinds of topics from Twitter. In addition to @maxkriegers, the author of that comic, I think you might find some value in checking out users like @andy_matuschak, @rsnous, @geoffreylitt, @yoshiki, and @elzr, as well as the broader communities that surround them.

As this seems to mediate consensus building, this also reminds me of:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-will-see-the-rise-of-civi...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi...

Especially having a global social media network with linear discussion maxed on 280 characters seems to be one of the most efficient ways to reach disagreement.

Interesting. I've long been interested in ways to make systems more pro-social, but I hadn't previously thought of UNLWS in that context. Thank you for giving me a new idea to mull.

> I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging: We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which color to use and where to add our thoughts?

Sounds a lot like Google Docs.

Maybe all this time that Google has been struggling to develop the killer chat app, they were sitting one the ultimate one this whole time.

You're describing Google Wave¹, which (sadly) was killed as unsuccessful.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

Still wondering whether it was unsuccessful as a product or as a concept.

Can we even distinguish those in practice? AFAICT its main problem was being so general-purpose that it was hard to describe as a compelling use case.

Of course, I also don't subscribe to the belief that the popularity or memetic prowess of an idea defines its "success" except commercially. I thought it was a very nifty thing. To me, that counts as a success. Alas, that is not the metric used by companies. :p

See also Ouwi¹ by Schuyler Duveen, which is one of the very few other non-linear written languages. It takes a somewhat different approach, and (IIRC) has some examples of conversational output.

(Ouwi & UNLWS were developed without either of us knowing about the other, though we got to know each other later on.)

¹ https://ouwi.org

I believe that *Pad¹ does what you describe. In multi-user mode, it has an option to show each contributor's writing in a separate color. (I'm not sure if one can pick the color, though.)

¹ eg https://cryptpad.piratenpartei.de/pad/