- creating new system-agnostic primitives for structuring information. I’m currently working on “content-addressed relations” as one such primitive I think may be helpful.
- developing a theoretical account of “objects” (I.e. the basic occurrence of things/entities/units in computational systems). This is something I’m working on for a paper which I hope to have drafted by end-of-year.
- and other things, but these came to mind as prominent and important parts of my research

- supporting structural representation at the infrastructure level (I think this is a central infrastructural failure, and points to a limitation of text-as-representation that I think we can overcome without losing any of the benefits)
- enabling multiple representations to coexist in the same “space” allowing for more plurality/variety (I refer to this as “non-rivalrous representation”)
- supporting dissagregation of large/opaque objects (e.g. a file into a set of smaller, connected objects)

@dnorman to more directly answer your question in relation to spatial canvases and the like: I’m working on improving our capacity for representation *in general*, so not specifically tied to code representation or visualisation, but tackling basic challenges like:
(moving this list to separate post… still learning Mastadon here…)

@dnorman working on a few different things! Probably too many…
The core of my work right now is around “Digital Representation Infrastructure”, which is about applying work/insights from the field of knowledge representation to socio-technical systems, and looking at things like filesystems, text encodings, interchange formats, etc, through a unified theoretical lens so that we can more robustly reason about how they might be changed or improved.