Mr Frode Hegland

University Teacher

Frode Hegland is a Norwegian living in London with his wife and (almost) 1 year old son. He has worked on interactive text for most of his career, including with his mentor and friend Doug Engelbart. Has has been a university teacher and he has hosted the annual Future of Text Symposium with Vint Cerf for 7 years and runs an independent software company called The Liquid Information Company which produces the Author academic word processor and the Liquid text interaction utility.

Presentations:

Deeper Literacy through more Interactive Text

The power of the written word derived by it’s ’symbol’ nature will not be eclipsed by the more accessible voice interfaces or representational visual media; The five and a half odd thousand years of evolution of writing has produced a complex and rich symbol space which the power of interactive computers will enhance, not make obsolete and we have the potential to be on the cusp of an age of ever deeper literacy. I will look at this from some perspectives of what interactive text can be, with brief examples of my own commercially available work and that which I am building for my computer science PhD at the University of Southampton. I will also introduce the effort we are making to honour Doug Engelbart on the 50th anniversary of his seminal demo, on the 9th of December this year. This is an effort which I invite you to join us in exploring.