Future of Text Symposium 3, at London College of Communication I was very happy for the opportunity to meet Ted Nelson and Vint Cerf, two internet visionaries that have shaped my generation.  At the end of the conference I spoke with Ted about his project of hyperlinked text, changing the way in which literature is currently formatted.  His vision of linking each concept to the original source would be an amazing tool for a PhD thesis.  I told Ted, I hope in my phd student lifetime I will still get to see his technology come to be useful for all researchers.

"Centered around the premise that the written word is a fundamental unit of knowledge and as such is of universal importance.  Before we can look at the future of text we need to take a step back and try to unlearn, to un-culture ourselves of the current way of doing symbolic notation we are living in and with.  The present is only one possible outcome of the past - what other useful outcomes could there have been? What can we learn if we manage to think fresh and what lessons of remote history is relevant for today?"

"Becoming human" - Chris Stringer of The Natural History Museum, Research Leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum

"First writing" -  Jonathan Taylor of The British Museum,  Assistant Keeper, Cuneiform collections, Mesopotamia

"Social networks" -  Tom Standage of The Economist, Editor and author of Writing On The Wall and TED X presenter

"Preservation" - Vint Cerf of Google, Co-inventor of the internet

"Parallel text" -  Ted Nelson, visionary who not only first saw the potential of interactive text, but who also coined the term ‘hypertext’

Bob Stein -  Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book