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- A bit strange to see an article anbout this not mentioning Quintilian (ca. 35 - ca. 96), who wrote the most famous rhetoric textbook of Antiquity (if not of all time): "Institutio Oratoria". An English translation is for example vailable here: https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/stasis/2017/honeycutt/quin...
- I can't think of a very good answer, but these books come to mind and may possibly be useful:
Aristotle, Rhetoric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric_(Aristotle)
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutio_Oratoria
I guess there are more modern books on the subject :-) Those two are fascinating though. And "Playing Devils Advocate" reminds me of:
Eric Berne, Games People Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)
Also I've read books about informal logic that cover different domains of writing, speech, etc.
- "The man who can really play his part as a citizen, who is fit for the management of public and private business, and who can guide cities by his counsels, establish them by his laws, and amend them by his judicial decisions, is assuredly no other than the orator... My aim, then, is the education of the perfect orator. The first essential for such a one is that he should be a good man, and consequently we demand of him not merely the possession of exceptional gifts of speech, but of all the excellences of character as well."
— Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (Book 1, Preface, 9–10)
- The first few episodes of "Vikings" owed a lot to Ahmad ibn Fadlan, but I think the use of source material went steadily downhill from there. "Roma Sub Rosa" correlated well with my classes for the first few books, but I don't know how they've held up in light of any more recent scholarship.
Chirologia/Chironomia are more oriented to hand gestures rather than whole body, but they might have some clues. Roman orators had a set of stock poses (the memes of the day?), so maybe Cicero actually said something about shoulder shrugging in the "delivery" part of De Inventione? It's certainly a gesture that would have read well in the back rows, had they used it.
EDIT: maybe also somewhere in Quintilian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutio_Oratoria
- An important mnemonic technique that visual programming languages can exploit is called the "Method of Loci" or "Memory Palace":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
>The method of loci (loci being Latin for "places") is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. The method of loci is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, or mind palace technique. This method is a mnemonic device adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises (in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De Oratore, and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria). Many memory contest champions report using this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22090159
>The Method of Loci is an ancient technique that used to be taught for thousands of years as a standard part of a classical eduction, way back when people needed to remember things before the invention of smartphones and printing presses. But in the middle ages it was banned for being immoral! Apparently, some bad apples were abusing the Method of Loci to remember "immoral" things they shouldn't be thinking about, using "fabulous" images they shouldn't be imagining.
https://www.guildsomm.com/4cb697f52c/discussion_forums/f/gen...
>>Remember to use physical objects in these palaces since they have easily imaginable traits; when you are dealing with more abstract or untranslatable ideas it is best to convert them into objects based on the way the words sound, so Valmur becomes Val Kilmer, Les Preuses becomes purses, etc. Additionally, you don’t need to be concerned with reality when making these memory palaces. The more slapstick, unique and vivid they are, the easier they will stick. Raunchy imagery always works well, to the point where some religious orders in the middle ages banned the practice because it was deemed immoral.
>Memory Palace techniques have been known as the Mind Palace, Method of Loci, and Memory Journey, Art of Memory, Ars Memorativa, Memorative Art, Mnemotechnics, Architectural Mnemonic, Graphical Mnemonic, and Textual Mnemonic.
Eric Krokos, Catherine Plaisant, and Amitabh Varshney published an interesting paper about memory palaces in virtual reality, called "Virtual memory palaces: immersion aids recall" in Virtual Reality volume 23, pages 1–15 (2019).
https://obj.umiacs.umd.edu/virtual_reality_study/10.1007-s10...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22093072
>I visualize and remember code that way. For me, it's hard to forget somewhere I've been, even if I only imagined being there.
>Each function is a little building like an office or a shop, which has a sign out front telling what services or products it sells, and contains everything inside you need to solve some kind of problem or produce some kind of product or service (where equipment in the room is like references to other objects and functions and imported libraries).
>You're standing behind the front counter, just about to receive a customer though the front entrance door with the parameters you need for one particular instance of that problem.
>You go into the back room, solve the problem, then deliver the results out the exit door at the back of the building (or through any of the other earlier emergency exits, if you had to exit prematurely or throw an error and run away).
>The front/back flow is a metaphor for the top/bottom flow of control through a function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman_diag...
>>A Nassi–Shneiderman diagram (NSD) in computer programming is a graphical design representation for structured programming. This type of diagram was developed in 1972 by Isaac Nassi and Ben Shneiderman who were both graduate students at Stony Brook University. These diagrams are also called structograms, as they show a program's structures.
>If you squint you can see the example Nassi-Shneiderman diagram in that article as a map of a building, with its front at the top, and exit at the bottom.
>You can have internal hallways and rooms for branches and loops, like a Nassi-Shneiderman diagram. The "Sub to Determine Wiki-Article" room is like the front entrance lobby of a theater where buy your ticket. The "Select Favourite Genre" room is like the stage of The Price is Right, and you get to pick what's behind door #1 (History), #2 (Science), or # (Geography), or else choose Other. They each have one or two rooms behind them with your rewards, and then they all finally exit out to the same back stage loading dock, where you take your wonderful prize (or consolation donkey) home.
Ben explained that "Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams have peaked out a couple of decades ago, but there were a huge success story for a 15-minute invention, with hundreds of software tools, dozens of textbooks, and 1000+ papers based on them."
He has a funny story about the incredibly harsh rejection letter he received when he and Ike Nassi submitted their first paper about "Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams" to Communications of the ACM in 1972, that should serve as an "inspiration for anyone whose new ideas are rejected by some respected authorities".
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/members/bshneiderman/nsd/rejectio...
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/members/bshneiderman/nsd/rejectio...
>Our submission of the structured flowcharts to the Communications of the ACM was quickly rejected, on October 4, 1972, by the Programming Languages Editor David Gries of Cornell University. He included a single anonymous reference letter which is on paper that has a Cornell University watermark. I assume Gries gave our paper to one of his colleagues (you can play the guessing game too), who wrote the most brutal rejection letter I have ever gotten.
>The reviewer wrote: "I feel that the best thing the authors could do is collect all copies of this technical report and burn them, before anybody reads them." As graduate students, this stinging rejection shocked us, but we kept getting enthusiastic responses from people around us. We sent the paper to the unrefereed ACM SIGPLAN Notices, where it was published in August 1973. It didn't take long for others to produce extensions, software tools, and applications of structured flowcharts.
>The next problem was theft of the idea. I had sent a draft to respected colleagues, and soon others published slight variations. One of these respected colleagues was Ned Chapin, who greatly troubled us by publishing what he called 'Chapin Charts.' A friend of mine sent me his published paper with a note encouraging me to sue. For several years I feared that Chapin's reputation and his frequent professional seminars would wind up leaving the idea tied to his name, but as the decades passed, the ending has proved to be a happy one. We called the idea 'structured flowcharts, but they are widely known as Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams.
>Another problem was the appearances of patents for variations on our idea, but these have not limited the widespread recognition we have gotten over the years.
>I wish every graduate student or young inventor would have the pleasure of seeing his/her ideas spread so far and influence the work of so many people. I also hope that the story of the bold rejection of our novel idea and its eventual international success, is an inspiration for anyone whose new ideas are rejected by some respected authorities.
More about Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/members/bshneiderman/nsd/
https://wiki.c2.com/?NassiShneidermanDiagrams
More about Ben Shneiderman:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370099
- Great idea, I totally get it! Your graphics are beautiful, and the layering and gridding look helpful.
It reminds me of some experimental user interfaces with pie menus I designed for creating and editing memory palaces: "iLoci" on the iPhone for notes and pictures and links and web browser integration in 2008, and "MediaGraph" on Unity3D for organizing and playing music in 2012, both of which I hope will inspire you for ideas to implement (like pie menus, and kissing!) or ways to explain what you've already created.
A memory map editor can not only benefit from pie menus for editing and changing properties (like simultaneously picking a font with direction, and pulling out the font size with distance, for example), but it's also a great way for users to create their own custom bi-directionally gesture navigable pie menus by dragging and dropping and "kissing" islands together against each other to create and break links (like bridges between islands). (See the gesture navigation example at the end of the MediaGraph demo, and imagine that on an iPad or phone!)
I think your crisp clean abstract graphical style would go nicely with something like Simon Schneegans' designs for Gnome-Pie, Coral-Menu, and Trace-Menu:
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1#ed08
Some HN posts (updated with updated links):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12982329
I wrote an iPhone app called "iLoci" [1] that was based on the Method of Loci [2], which had a gestural interface that let you construct and navigate your own networks of locations by dragging rooms around and "kissing" them together to connect and disconnect them. Another way to think of it is as a pie menu editor.
Later I elaborated on the idea in a Unity prototype called MediaGraph [3], which lets you arrange your music in an editable gesture navigable map.
[1] iPhone app iLoci by Don Hopkins @ Mobile Dev Camp:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ddG3jWF98
A talk about iLoci, an iPhone app and server based on the Method of Loci for constructing a Memory Palace, by Don Hopkins, presented at Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam.
Illustrated transcript:
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/iphone-app-iloci-by-don-hopki...
[2] Method of Loci: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
[3] MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus Prototype developed for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc
This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and cellular automata.
It uses one kind of nested hierarchical pie menu to build and edit another kind of geographic networked pie menu.
Discussion of the pie menus:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7262849
Pie menus frame this kind of interaction as pop-up menus, which provide a "self revealing gestural user interface". The menu pops up and leads you through the possible selections. That feedback trains you to rehearse the gestures. Soon you begin to make the gesture without looking at the menu, then wait for the menu feedback to confirm you're doing the right thing. Finally you gain enough skill and confidence through "muscle memory" to make the gestures quickly without even looking at the screen or requiring any feedback.
It's best if the menus can provide real time in-world feedback, like applying the effect of the interaction immediately as the menu is tracking. That makes it feel more like immersive "direct manipulation" than indirect "menu selection". It's important that pie menus support "reselection", which makes them much more forgiving and differentiates them from traditional blind gesture recognition, so you at any time during tracking you can change the selection to any item you desire.
Pie menus completely saturate the entire possible gesture space with usable and accessible commands: there is no such thing as a syntax error, and you can always correct any gesture to select what you want, no matter how bad it started out, or cancel the menu, by moving around to the desired item or back to the center to cancel.
Handwriting and gesture recognition does not have this property, and it can be quite frustrating because you can't correct or cancel mistakes, and dangerous because mistakes can be misinterpreted as the wrong command. Most gestures are syntax errors. Blind gesture recognition doesn't have a good way to prompt and train you with the possible gestures, which only cover a tiny fraction of the possible gesture space. All the rest of the space of possible gestures is wasted, and interpreted as a syntax error (or worse, misinterpreted as the wrong gesture), instead of enabling the user to correct mistakes and reselect different gestures.
Even "fuzzy matching" of gestures trades off gestural precision with making it even harder to cancel or correct a gesture, without accidentally being misinterpreted as the wrong gesture. That's not the kind of an interface you would want to use in a mission critical application such as a car or airplane.
Another way to reframe the gestural, self revealing and reselectable qualities of pie menus is as navigation through a map, as opposed to climbing up a hierarchical menu tree. Instead of laboriously climbing up a tree of submenus, you simply navigate around a map of "sibmenus" -- sibling menus that you can easily move back and forth between by moving in opposite directions.
This demo of an iPhone app I developed called "iLoci" demonstrates the idea, enabling users to create their own memorable maps of "locations" instead of "menus", which they can edit by dragging around, that are related to each other by two-way reversible links. It exploits the "Method of Loci," an ancient memorization technique from the time before iPhones when people had to use their own brains to remember things, in order to leverage your spatial navigation memory and make it easy to learn your way around. http://vimeo.com/2419009
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
"The Method of loci (plural of Latin locus for place or location), also called the memory palace, is a mnemonic device introduced in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises (in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De Oratore, and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria). In basic terms, it is a method of memory enhancement which uses visualization to organize and recall information. Many memory contest champions claim to use this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words. These champions’ successes have little to do with brain structure or intelligence, but more to do with their technique of using regions of their brain that have to do with spatial learning."
I like the idea of moving away from hierarchal menu navigation, towards spatial map navigation. It elegantly addresses the problem of personalized user created menus, by making linking and unlinking locations as easy as dragging and dropping objects around and bumping them together to connect and disconnect them. (Compare that to the complexity of a tree or outline editor, which doesn't make the directions explicit.) And it eliminates the need to a special command to move back up in the menu hierarchy, by guaranteeing that every navigation is obviously reversible by moving in the opposite direction. I believe maps are a lot more natural and easier for people to remember than hierarchies, and the interface naturally exploits "mouse ahead" (or "swipe ahead") and is obviously self revealing.
Here is another video demonstrating a prototype exploring this interface that I developed in Unity3D for Will Wright. It shows both an "iLoci" map editing interface, as well as traditional pop-up pie menus using "pull-out" distance parameters with real time in-world feedback to preview the effect of the selection (plus it also has cellular automata, at Will's request!):
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