You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.

• Steph Ango (@kepano)

If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.

• Steph Ango (@kepano)

Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools.

• Steph Ango (@kepano)

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

• Steph Ango (@kepano)

When freedom is practised in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere image of itself. The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment, "ordinary life" may prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation. Every game takes place within the boundaries of its own spatial domain.

• Debord G. Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (1959)

Tape, string and wood where my favorite toys when I was a kid.

A document is not necessarily a simulation of paper. In the most general sense, a document is a package of ideas created by human minds and addressed to human minds, intended for the furtherance of those ideas and those minds. Human ideas manifest as text, connections, diagrams and more: thus how to store them and present them is a crucial issue for civilization.—Ted Nelson

there’s a self-discovery that happens when you revisit things you’ve accumulated over a period of time. You look back and begin to recognize patterns in your own thinking.

Everything is a remix. We usually think of this in terms of content but not as much in terms of the medium or vessel for the content.

What if the medium was as easy to remix as it is to remix content?

What if medium becomes so intertwined with content that it’s hard to tell apart?

What's the difference between a map, a pdf, an image, and a digital canvas/room?

The difference between a spatial document vs an image, map, pdf or website is that the spatial document conveys a sense of space by separating its content into independent but related objects in 3D space.

Even though an image can show us a snapshot of 3D space (a screenshot of a canvas) the actual information that's being stored does not distinguish pixels.

How do I connect all these ideas?

I've been seeing more conversations around spatial software and formats to store spatial information. There are some interesting ideas about what format to use to encode spatial information like with canvasprotocol.org which has the goal to "Discover a lowest-common denominator file format for storage and serialization" of canvas.

There are many approaches at storing spatial information for our digital media.

I think a lot of times we care more about the content and its direct usage and meaning more than we do about the context in which it was created and intended to be consumed.

You can rip, paint, write, color, move, copy, print and many other things on/to paper.

A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin Documentum, which denotes a "teaching" or "lesson": the verb doceō denotes "to teach". In the past, the word was usually used to denote written proof useful as evidence of a truth or fact. In the Computer Age, "document" usually denotes a primarily textual computer file, including its structure and format, e.g. fonts, colors, and images. Contemporarily, "document" is not defined by its transmission medium, e.g., paper, given the existence of electronic documents. "Documentation" is distinct because it has more denotations than "document".

Documents are also distinguished from "realia", which are three-dimensional objects that would otherwise satisfy the definition of "document" because they memorialize or represent thought; documents are considered more as two-dimensional representations.

While documents can have large varieties of customization, all documents can be shared freely and have the right to do so, creativity can be represented by documents, also. History, events, examples, opinions, etc. all can be expressed in documents.

“document” as in to record; to provide information or support; an official paper or digital file; a piece of evidence, a form of proof.