Spacebook: a facebook for space

I follow the work of Mark Changizi on vision. Previously I mentioned one of his early papers on this subject, “Harnessing vision for computation” .

One of the applications of computing with space  could be to SHARE THE SPATIAL EXPERIENCE ON THE WEB.

Background. When I was writing the paper on the problem of computing with space, I stumbled upon this article by Mark in Psychology Today

The Problem With the Web and E-Books Is That There’s No Space for Them

The title says a lot. I was intrigued by the following passage

“My personal library serves as extension of my brain. I may have read all my books, but I don’t remember most of the information. What I remember is where in my library my knowledge sits, and I can look it up when I need it. But I can only look it up because my books are geographically arranged in a fixed spatial organization, with visual landmarks. I need to take the integral of an arctangent? Then I need my Table of Integrals book, and that’s in the left bookshelf, upper middle, adjacent to the large, colorful Intro Calculus book.”

So I posted the following comment:  Is your library my library?

“Good point, but you have converted a lot of time into understanding, exploring and using the space of your library. To me the brain-spatial interface of your library is largely incomprehensible. I have to spend time in order to reconstruct it in my head.

Then, your excellent suggestion may give somebody the idea to do a “facebook” for our personal libraries. How to share spatial competences, that is a question!”

In the section 2.7 (“Spacebook”) of the paper on computing with space I mention this as an intriguing application of this type of computing (the name itself was suggested by Mark Changizi after I sent him a first version of the paper).

What more?Again from browsing Mark Changizi site, I learned that in fact this problem of non-spatiality (say) of e-books has measurable effects. Indeed, see this article by Maia Szalavitz

Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?

Nice! But in order to do a spacebook we need first to understand the primitives of space (as represented in the human brain) and then how to “port” them by using the web.

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