A personal perspective on the direction of text research at the Seventh Future of Text conference at the University of Southampton.

1. Text, Publishing & Sustainable Cultural Capitals
Professor Leslie Carr, Web & Internet Science Research Group

2. My Past in Text
• TextLab
• Fonts, Laserwriters, Postscript, TeX, Metafont, SGML, DSSSL, HyTime
• W3C
• HTML
• PDF, DocX, EPub
• The problem used to be: can the hardware represent what is written
• Now: is what is written worth the effort of the hardware?
• #adverts #trolling #dickpics
• Or perhaps I’m just getting old

3. Future of Text
• “Don’t study AI. Study documents. Because it’s there you will
find how humans think, reason and communicate.”
• PhD advice from Professor David Barron
• The end of the future?
• Realtime, high fidelty rendition
• Instantaneous global dissemination
• Interaction
• Collaboration
• Generation
• Analysis and understanding

4. Insanity of Academic Publishing
• Universities and researchers are knowledge producers and knowledge
consumers
• Scholarly communications have been outsourced & privatised
• Literally nothing to show as evidence of research activities
publishersresearchers
read
write
$$$$$$$
I.P.

5. Dystopia of Publishing
• The World Wide Web is not the basic client-server environment
taught in “Network Programming 101” courses.
• Content is dynamically constructed by third party computation engines
spread across continents, precached in a phalanx of strategically located
network exchanges to provide optimum delivery and intercepted by
thousands of user tracking agents before appearing in your browser.
• A complex interaction of cloud services, content delivery networks,
application platforms and real-time user behaviour analytics.
• A new breed of superpublishers, replacing bricks and mortar
warehouses, retail outlets and sales networks with their own
international data centres, bespoke hardware platforms and potential
audiences of billions of users.
• Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News.

6. Dystopia of Publishing
• The Web is not a just piece of technology that can be installed like a new
machine; it is an international network of networks of technologies, companies
and markets.
• distinct and deeply interrelated
• disruptions and reorganisations of one network causing knock-on changes in others
• ‘phases’ of Web growth over time
• Repeated renewal and reconfiguration of the Web, constantly changing the
playing field for users and for industry.
• the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) brokers consensus in the form of technical standards
to improve the Web for everyone.
• We are in the middle of a distinct Web phase - a highly centralised, powerful
new publishing layer has been emerging on top of the existing Web of resources
(documents, data, people) which is itself built on the Internet of information
exchange (transport and traffic).
• We haven’t yet achieved a state of stability
• the monetisation through advertising networks is highly contested and very inefficient
• the relationships between content production and content distribution are still being
negotiated

7. W3C
• The Open Web Platform
• HTML
• DOM
• CSS
• SVG
• MathML
• Web APIs
• JavaScript
• HTTP
• URI
• Media Accessibility Checklist
Make publications first class
citizens on the Web - EPub
Merge with IDPF

8. How Can Writers Make a Living?
• Ted may be unreasonable and inflexible, but he was right.
• Information doesn’t just exist in an abstract space
• it’s owned
• the result of
human effort
• Copyright isn’t just a
corporate evil
• it’s a social contract that
establishes fungible value
• Payments, Provenance
Nicolas Levin’s implementation of Xanadu transclusion