Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched to a job where I deal mainly in bound paper documents. I have to say, I forgot how much more awesome paper is than computers. For processing complex documents, there is no technology that matches a big desk strewn with printed documents. It's like having dozens of lightweight flexible high resolution 13" displays. Marking up a piece of paper with post it notes, pencil marks, and highlighter is a tactile experience that even the best styluses simply can't match. The lack of "UI" between you and the annotations helps tremendously with processing and retention.[1]

It's a shame that so few companies are exploring the synergies of paper and digital. I keep trying the livescribe, but the company can't write decent software to save their lives. I want to be able to print a document from my ipad onto dot paper, and have my markup automagically show up in the pdf copy. It can't be hard.

[1] In school, I found the low tech approach of carrying around heavy case books to be the most effective. My pop psychology explanation for this is that computers don't take advantage of our spatial memory. I can go back and visualize myself highlighting something in specific physical book, but on a screen it all just blends together in my memory.

I'm very pro-paper. Flipping back and forth in a book (is there any other way to read a textbook?) is just a much better experience than swiping madly or spamming PgDwn. I feel trapped inside that little rectangle of a viewport, waiting for pixels to change.

>computers don't take advantage of our spatial memory. I can go back and visualize

I still remember the page of my linear algebra textbook that related rowspace, nullspace, transpose. It seemed terribly confusing at the time so I was staring more than reading. I remember the layout on the page, the red lines. I don't recall the exact formula, so it's not magic, but the memory is so unusually sticky I can't help but agree.

>It's a shame that so few companies are exploring the synergies of paper and digital.

If there's a (cheap) way to use a whiteboard and not resort to A) writing down the novel bits, B) taking a picture, I am all ears. Putting the tech in the board is probably too expensive.. perhaps a marker attachment would be more realistic. Once it's digitized, OCR / vector drawings can be tried & improved. I like the idea of the Evernote/Moleskine duo, but I just don't use moleskines like that.

Random tidbit: in the Mad Men-styled issue of TIME (2012?), there was a very good full-page ad on the real benefits of reading/using paper. Might have it somewhere.

http://www.colourtime.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Domtar-...

This one?

Yeah, that's the one. It was an interesting issue.

Is the SMART board what you are looking for? Installed SMART boards are rapidly becoming standard hardware in K12 classrooms.

I don't know how schools afford them, they're pretty expensive. $50 is about my limit for whiteboards.

I definitely agree with you on your spatial memory explanation.

There are so many applications out there trying to come up with new digital ways to record / access information, but almost all of them discard the spatial organization tools we have in physical workflows.

When you are trying to use information in your head (the most important stop in a workflow), you often need to build a lot of organizational structures in order to make the information maximally accessible from memory. Spatial "shuffling" is one of the quickest ways set up informal organizational structure. It makes use of our brains' good memory for spatial locations, compared to our brains' memory for abstract concepts.

In order to use spatial shuffling to organize information, you need to be able to place things freely, and have them stay there. Digital applications so infrequently offer this ability - they do not allow informal organization or spatial organization.

In an application, pieces of information are usually laid out according to a well-defined sorting algorithm. Layout-by-algorithm breaks both your ability to place a piece of information freely, and your ability to find a piece of information by location (because a new piece of information could shift the whole layout according to the sorting algorithm).

Yeah, so all this just points to an opportunity within the ebook realm to create a more refined experience. It does not necessarily mean physical books are superior in any way.

I'll add one to your n - For me, the mental image of where on a page something was, as well as physically, where in the book that page exists helps. I can get something similar from audiobooks by picturing where I was when I heard something (I typically listen to audiobooks when running or driving). E-books are a difficult case.

This is very true — if your scope only encompasses a couple dozen pages' worth of data. If your data is actually desk-able, then that will probably work well because it comes very naturally to most people. But if you have a large dataset (say, 100 pages), my experience is that the computer is going to do a lot better both at retrieval and at processing.

So basically, this is another example of things that are great but don't scale.

I find the opposite. I can handle a couple pages on the computer, but after that I want to print it out and tape it to the wall. It's much easier for me to find relations when looking at everything on the than trying to scroll around on the computer.

I regularly print out large amount of code across dozens of files to mane sense of someone else's mess.

I might have overgeneralized a bit. I feel like things like messy code are a different matter, though, and both kind of suck for those problems. Some kind of computer-assisted visualization† would often be more helpful than either scrolling around or manually drawing lines through 80 sheets of paper, especially as that number grows. Inevitably, retrieval gets to be really prohibitive in the real world.

† Heck, even just stepping through the code in a debugger often helps me make sense of spaghetti faster than anything else, though obviously not by itself.

I think it depends on what you're doing with the documents. My current job involves writing 10-20 page legal memos based on a couple of 30-50 page briefs, and maybe a few hundred pages of supporting cases. I have to get comfortable discussing all the material orally. I print out everything because I find it to really help with recall (particularly verbal recall). On the other hand, if I'm looking for some particular quote I highlighted, its a very slow process to shuffle through dozens of printouts looking for what I highlighted. If I'm trying to sort and categorize my annotations, say by legal issue, dealing with paper highlights is obviously a bit cumbersome.

What I really want is to be able to write on and mark up paper and have it automatically digitized and indexed for sorting and retrieval.

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