Fine-grained provenance, Automerge updates
We hope you’re having a great Fall! In this Dispatch we’re sharing some explorations of new editor interactions for writing science papers, as well as a trio of projects advancing the future of Automerge.
Malleable Software
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.
Local-First Software
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 lot more details, you can watch the video recording of the call.
LIVE 2024
Next week, many of us will be attending LIVE 2024, an academic workshop held in Pasadena as part of the SPLASH conference. There will be work presented by Marcel Goethals, Alex Warth, and Ivan Reese of our Programmable Ink track, as well as Researchers-in-residence Elliott Evans and Lu Wilson. We look forward to sharing reflections on the workshop in a future update!
Researchers-in-residence
Lu has been giving far too many talks recently, presenting some of their projects for the first time. Check out their talk on What it means to be open, which has been provoking some good discussions about process within the lab.
What’s a few more open tabs?
- We’ve been enjoying digging through the Dynamicland archive.
- Jamie Brandon’s excellent HYTRADBOI conference is happening again on Feb 28, 2025.
- Gridfinity: for the organization nerd in your life.
That’s it for now — until next time.