Alan:

Actually Blisssymbolics (or Semantography) is the work of Charles Bliss, an Australian when he did his work.

>From the Australian National Library at: http://www.nla.gov.au/ms/findaids/3884.html
Charles Kasiel Blitz was born to Jewish parents in Austria in 1897. After graduating in Chemical Engineering from Vienna Technical University in 1922, Bliss became chief of patents in a large electrical firm. He fled from Nazi occupation during World War II, making his way via England to Shanghai where he lived until travelling to Australia in 1946. While in England, he officially changed his surname to Bliss.

His big work was Blissymbolics, 2ed (1965), published in Australia, but there were others. There are a number of references on the web to Blissymbolics and Semantography which is used in the US and Canada for teaching handicapped students.

I haven't run into Bruner, at least that I remember. Did he work with Blissymbolics or does he have another system? have any references?

(I maintain a minor interest in Semantography  from my long time interest in notations. I collect examples & books about 'other' ways people write, where 'other' means non-language based. While Semantography IS language based, it caught my interest. I've been trying to buy a copy of Blissymbolics, 2ed (1965), or a rumored 3rd edition from 1978. They are kind of difficult to find!)

Dave


At 17:27 -0800 2/17/01, Alan Kay wrote:
>On icons --
>
>One of the big misunderstandings about icons is that they are supposed to mean something. But this is a very tough area, and hasn't worked out well, especially for actions. Look at "Blissymbolics" for an interesting attempt from Germany in the 60s.
>     We put them in because, for most people, they are more memorable and searchable. Take a look at classic experiments by Haber, et. al. about most people's visual memories, e.g., how long does it take when clicking channels into the middle of a movie to recognize that you've seen it before some time (maybe 20 years ago). How long does it take to find the elephant from a wall of 100 randomly placed animals as compared to words in the same places? (Ans. Most people can find the picture 4 times faster.) A very interesting side factlet is that if you simple draw a rectangular boundary around the 100 words, the search is speeded up by a factor of 2 (you have "iconized" them).
>
>So the basic idea was to have them be, not meaningful per se, but memorable and findable.  Putting labels below them is a good idea. Having more than a few hundren in a visual field doesn't work very well (so all works better for kid sized UIs, which is where the ideas came from).
>
>The other part about Bruner's investigations into the "iconic" had to do with configurations. Images in a visual field are always in relation to each other, so e.g. a map can be much easier to deal with for routes than lists of city pairs.
>    It turns out that most sonic things are also configurational, and follow many of the same rules for memory, etc., that images do. Musicians in the crowd who are also into math may have noticed that harmony is quite like geometry (especially of the direct demonstration type). Bach particularly loved to show (mostly the player, it's harder to pick up as a listener) the equivalent of congruences and other similarities of structure. As an organist, it is amazing the lengths he was able to go to here without compromising the musical quality of the works to the outside listeners....
-- 
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David N. Smith
IBM T J Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY
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