Mastodawn

Cerstin Mahlow Apr 23, 2023

Interesting point:

Using copilot or even chatbots to (help with) writing code means you don't have to look on stackoverflow anymore.

Which drives you out of this community—you don’t go there *for* help.

Which also means you're not contributing to this community—you don't go there *to* help.

So in the end, it renders the community superfluous. It essentially destroys this community

#in2writing #Consequences

Cerstin Mahlow Apr 23, 2023

I'm at #CHI2023 , first big conference since some time. Looking forward to the workshop #in2writing!

Cerstin Mahlow Apr 3, 2023

Monday morning is for publication announcements:

For the workshop #in2Writing (co-located with #SIGCHI in April in Hamburg) I wrote a position paper: "Writing Tools: Looking Back to Look Ahead"

I argue that new writing tools should be inspired by "failed" projects from the 1970s and 1980s

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.17894

#WritingTechnology

Writing Tools: Looking Back to Look Ahead

Research on writing tools started with the increased availability of computers in the 1970s. After a first phase addressing the needs of programmers and data scientists, research in the late 1980s started to focus on writing-specific needs. Several projects aimed at supporting writers and letting them concentrate on the creative aspects of writing by having the writing tool take care of the mundane aspects using NLP techniques. Due to technical limitations at that time the projects failed and research in this area stopped. However, today's computing power and NLP resources make the ideas from these projects technically feasible; in fact, we see projects explicitly continuing from where abandoned projects stopped, and we see new applications integrating NLP resources without making references to those old projects. To design intelligent writing assistants with the possibilities offered by today's technology, we should re-examine the goals and lessons learned from previous projects to define the important dimensions to be considered.

arXiv.org