Autodidacts & Artists

Parable of the Polygons, by Vi Hart and Nicky Case (2014), is an ‘explorable explanation’ of the dynamics of self-segregation. It was distributed on the internet via the social media audiences of both authors, and garnered media coverage on a dozen outlets (give or take one, depending if you count link-aggregator social media) and seventeen translations.

The licensing of the piece is that of free and open source software, a tradition analagous to that of mathematics libraries, which also contain a great number of ideas which demand time-investment rather than monetary. The tendency of such vessels is to be anethema to engineering practice (which must be able to replace its workers) as well as academia (which has inflexible prerequisite structures), except nearer the graduate level.

The blog post format resembles a coding tutorial, as if combined with inline Processing sketches, or perhaps various instances of a more-polished Ludum Dare game-jam output. Parable of the Polygons runs in the reader’s browser, using ‘playable post’ infrastructure based on the HTML5 Canvas [1].

The Parable adapts academic citation as well, doubled up with the ‘background section’ in its postscript. But it does not use the distributional mechanisms (neither journal nor conference) of academia, because it is not legible to their evaluation, nor does it yet belong to a field with a recognizable audience.

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Autodidacts & Professionals

Personal Dynamic Media, by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg (1977), is a hardware proposal for the Dynabook coupled to an examples gallery for the Smalltalk software ecosystem, which was academically published.

Alan Kay has made multiple attempts since to reproduce Xerox PARC, the blue-sky R&D at which the Dynabook was (not) invented. A promotional interview (Pavlus, 2015) retells Kay’s hiring of Bret Victor and Vi Hart to the short-lived Communications Design Group at SAP Research (2014 - 2016), a lab whose story is currently emerging through research at Dynamicland (Handy, 2018) and The Art of Research (Hart, 2019), among other projects of its alumnus.

Thus, a professional source of funding used to exist for explorable explanations. By now, the people have all slid from ‘professional’ into ‘artist’ because those incentive structures have segregated along timescale: their projects require something like decades.

Meanwhile, the professional interests of SAP Labs Sillicon Valley (SAP, n.d.) lie in transitioning businesses to digital technologies. On the product page for Leonardo, they tout, “Get the facts: 80% of processes and products will be reinvented, digitized, or eliminated by 2020”.

By contrast, academia too tends to run slower. (The fastest element of computational media may be the videogame industry. Yet it is neglecting mechanical innovation, from an academic perspective.) Kay and Goldberg proposed originally some goals of evaluating Dynabook usage. Paraphrasing, they wished to:

• provide coherent examples of the tool’s use in and across subject areas
• study the tool’s use to expand a person’s audiovisual skills
• provide the tool to kids who can spend a lot of time studying details, seeking a key to their personal daily processes
• study the unanticipated use of the tool and language by children in all age groups

Yet where the first two are indeed academic, the latter two appear strictly autodidactic. Indeed, many artifacts of computational media research benefit from being played with, and dreamt about.

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