Fine-grained provenance, Automerge updates, LIVE workshop

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• October 2024
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We hope you’re having a great Fall! In this Dispatch we’re sharing explorations of new editor interactions for writing science papers, a trio of projects advancing the future of Automerge, and links to some recent presentations about our work.

Fine-grained provenance

In a prior Dispatch we introduced Jacquard, a project exploring collaborative editing interfaces for authoring science papers.

Lately, we’ve been exploring the theme of fine-grained provenance: connecting specific parts of one file with corresponding parts of another file. We’ve been trying out some new UI interactions that take advantage of this provenance information, such as:

• mirroring comments between a PDF and source text file
• allowing users to edit underlying source text directly from a rendered PDF
• using provenance information as a “map” of a project

Based on our own tests and some conversations with scientists, we’re feeling that there’s a promising path here towards more fluid editor interactions. We’re also thinking about how it might work to have fine-grained provenance information available as a core primitive in an operating system.

To see some video demos, take a look at our lab note on fine-grained provenance.

Automerge updates

It’s been a summer of change for Automerge, the local-first data library developed at Ink & Switch. Recently the team shared updates on three ongoing projects at a community call:

• Memory usage: Orion Henry is working on drastically reducing memory usage. He’s taking the columnar encoding already used to store Automerge documents on disk, and using it at runtime. This project is at the correct-but-slow stage right now.
• Multi-document sync: Alex Good is working to build a new sync protocol which doesn’t require the document to be in memory, works over encrypted documents, and enables syncing collections of documents more efficiently.
• Auth: Brooke Zelenka is leading the Beehive project, which implements end-to-end encryption and local first authentication + authorization for Automerge (and hopefully other systems as well).

For a deeper dive, you can watch the video recording of the call.

LIVE 2024 presentations

Last week, many of us attended LIVE 2024, one of the main academic workshops focused on live programming environments that make programming feel tangible and concrete. Several lab-affiliated folks presented work there, and you can watch video recordings of their talks:

• Ivan Reese and Alex Warth presented Inkling, Sketching Dynamic Systems, a system for sketching with constraints developed at Ink & Switch together with Marcel Goethals.
• Marcel Goethals presented Subsequently: Telling stories with pictures makes programs, a visual programming environment inspired by comics.
• Researcher-in-residence Elliott Evans presented Live Programming a Live Programming Environment: An Experience Report, work done together with Philippa Markovics, Martin Kavalar, Andrea Amantini, and Jack Rusher on developing a live programming environment using the Clerk live programming environment.
• Researcher-in-residence Lu Wilson presented Arroost: Unblocking creation with friends. They’ve also given several other talks in the past month; check out What it means to be open which has been provoking some good discussions about process within the lab.

We also recommend the keynote presentation by Jonathan Edwards: The Meaning of LIVE.

You can see all the talks from LIVE in the full video recording of the day. (You may find the talk schedule helpful for navigation.)

Malleable Software in the Age of AI

Lab researcher Geoffrey Litt recently presented Malleable Software in the Age of AI at the Nemertes Next conference, exploring what qualities make software malleable, and how we might thoughtfully incorporate AI.

In addition to demos of the dynamic document environments Potluck and Embark, the talk includes some more recent findings from Patchwork on using version control to support collaboration on documents—and some early glimpses of applying those same ideas to collaboratively editing the software itself.

What’s a few more open tabs?

• We’ve been enjoying digging through the Dynamicland archive from Bret Victor and team.
• Jamie Brandon’s HYTRADBOI conference is happening again on Feb 28, 2025. We enjoyed the last one!
• Gridfinity: for the organization nerd in your life.

That’s it for now — until next time.