On Saturday, November 23, 2024, Dene Grigar and Frode Hegland (University of Southampton) co-hosted The Future of Text in XR Symposium (https://thefutureoftext.org/symposium/) at the Murdock Building in downtown Vancouver, WA. Joining us were 46 in-person and 14 online participants from the U.S., UK, Belgium, Demark, and Italy. The event was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and sponsored by Washington State University Vancouver, the Electronic Literature Lab, and the Murdock Trust.
Begun in 2011 by Hegland (UK), The Future of Text Symposium is envisioned to bring scientists, programmers, digital humanities scholars, and media artists from around the globe together for one day of conversation about “what lies beyond our [current] understanding of the potential of text” (FoT Symposium, https://thefutureoftext.org/symposium/). Along with the Symposium is an edited volume of articles, entitled The Future of Text, and based, in part, on presentations given by Symposium participants.
The Future of Text Volume 5 reflecting the presentations given at the 2024 Symposium will be ready for free distribution in December.
Because the Symposium has been in existence for well over a decade, it has developed a strong following. Additionally, the Symposium is tied to the Future Text Lab (FoT), a group led by Hegland that has met for years each Monday for a two-hour discussion on the topic of the future of text and, so, forms the core of the Symposium. The reputation of the group and its individual members fuels interest in the annual Symposium, helping to grow and strengthen the event. Presenters from outside the group are generally invited to present.
In 2024 seventeen presentations were given, three of which by graduate students new to the Symposium and funded by the grant Hegland and Dene Grigar secured from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Also new in 2024 was the participation of 15 undergraduates, drawn from Washington State University Vancouver’s Department of Digital Technology & Culture, who demonstrated their Extended Reality (XR) projects at the event. This year also offered Zoom participation. Vint Cerf, co-founder of the Internet, joined the Symposium online from Washington, D. C., in a Fireside Chat with Grigar and Hegland. Audience members participated in the conversation through the Zoom chat.
The themes of the 2024 Symposium focused on the question “How can we improve academic reading, writing, and thinking in XR?” Topics included the role of AI in XR spaces, the human experience in Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality environments (re: XR), the efficacy of data and data representation in XR, among others. Identified as one of the major challenges is the effective transference of knowledge in XR spaces, whether that be through the structure of the metadata we use to convey information or the systems we create to foster human expression.
The takeaway from the 2024 Future of Text Symposium is that progress has been made to develop open-source, non-commercial solutions for XR environments can be used effectively in scholarly communications, certainly an ethical approach to tool production and use.
The videos from The Future of Text in XR Symposium will be available on YouTube at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYx4DnFWaXV9xoAIagq6cA5piwQEiCuU7&si=2JrDwfadxiNmVO2o.