Continuing to tear through reading

July 8th 2024

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I'm continuing to work on a long-form bit of writing about Computers as
Theatre but I seem to be running afield with other books and papers,
trying to get more context for some of the observations she's making.
One of the big detours is through some of these really early papers on
HCI, like one about using context-free grammars to describe all the UI
actions of workflows and deduce, from there, character of the
interactions people were experiencing by looking at the shapes of
production trees of the grammar

There was also the first paper that was talking about the idea of
"direct manipulation", which---okay---if you've ever done live coding
you kinda already know what this is just not necessarily with that name

but it's when you have the ability to interact with a system in a way
that allows for small, reversible, changes and a simple series of
actions whose behavior you can watch as you perform them

now the author of Computers as Theatre says that direct manipulation
should require "labeled buttons" but I don't think that's true I think
if you have a small library of functions like, say, a fantasy computer
does or something like processing I think that also counts as direct
manipulation

I've also been reading a very scathing book of cultural criticism about
the ways that computer science easily embraces authoritarian and fascist
thinking

I've been posting on the fediverse as I read because I kind of like
low-stakes live blogging books and papers

but I had two different interactions today where I felt like people were
engaging in really wild misinterpretations of either myself or the text
I was reading and it has left me feeling so weird and unanchored that I
think I'm going to stop that for now and, I don't know, maybe post here
on gopher where it feels a little less likely that someone will decide
to fight me in a stream-of-consciousness way

(if you're on rawtext.club or tilde.town feel free to mail me using the
internal mail, and if rawtext starts having external facing mail I'd
love to hear from folks that way. or maybe I'll figure out a different
way for folks to contact me

Update: I have an email! [email protected] )