papers/keymaps: orality/literacy (Ong) + WASD parallel + refreshed figure

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papers/arxiv-keymaps/keymaps.tex

··· 187 187 188 188 It is also, I will argue, badly designed. The chromatic-staircase keymap has three structural weaknesses. \textbf{First}, the QWERTY letter on each key bears no relation to the note name it produces. \texttt{A} plays C; \texttt{S} plays D; \texttt{D} plays E. A user who has learned the Western seven-note scale gains no purchase on the keymap from that knowledge. \textbf{Second}, the keymap is monohanded by default --- the entire usable range sits on the left side of the keyboard, with the right hand idle. \textbf{Third}, the keymap is illegible without a tutorial: there is no mnemonic, no diagram printed on the physical keys, and no way to derive the mapping from first principles. A keymap that requires a manual is a keymap that has lost its social-software character. 189 189 190 + A useful contrast is the \emph{WASD} convention in PC gaming. WASD has the same structural shape as the chromatic-staircase --- an unowned, unspecified, cross-application user-input convention --- but a different propagation history. Pre-WASD, PC games defaulted to arrow keys (Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, the Quake series through 1997)~\citep{wikipedia_arrow_keys}; intermediate experiments included System Shock's ASDX (1994) and Descent's AZ+QE. Dennis ``Thresh'' Fong, a competitive Quake player, popularized the WASD layout through his self-published configuration guide~\citep{thresh_quake_bible} and won the first nationwide Quake tournament in 1997. Valve's Half-Life shipped WASD as default in 1998, and by the early 2000s the convention had saturated PC games~\citep{fenlon2016wasd}. WASD persists for a reason the DAW chromatic-staircase does not: it is genuinely better than the official default. It frees the right hand for the mouse, sits adjacent to Shift / Space / Ctrl / Tab, and exploits home-row finger placement on a QWERTY keyboard. The structural lesson is that propagation is a function of social mediation \emph{and} fitness: WASD propagated because Fong's pedagogy reached players \emph{and} the mapping won on the merits. The chromatic-staircase propagated through pedagogy alone, despite the merits running the other way. Both cases sit in the same category --- unowned conventions that govern user input across applications. They demonstrate that the category is large enough to span both the well-designed and the badly-designed, the user-validated and the inherited-by-inertia. 191 + 190 192 \section{Notepat: Notes That Name Themselves} 191 193 \label{sec:notepat} 192 194 ··· 213 215 214 216 The corollary catalog of \textsection\ref{sec:corollaries} is, when read through this lens, almost entirely a catalog of notations. Singmaster, Nashville, ABC, IPA, Camelot, fighting-game numpad notation, scientific pitch, the NATO spelling alphabet, knitting abbreviations --- each is a notation derived from a keymap (or input mapping) that allowed the underlying practice to travel as text. The keymap-notation pair is the unit. The keymap supplies the affordance; the notation supplies the propagation surface. 215 217 218 + The structural claim has a deeper diagnostic. Walter Ong's distinction between orality and literacy~\citep{ong1982orality}, building on Havelock's account of the same transition in ancient Greece~\citep{havelock1963preface}, cuts the question cleanly. \emph{Oral} traditions persist through performance, person-to-person transmission, and repeated approximation; they have no canonical text, mutate slightly across instances, and survive because performers keep performing them. \emph{Literate} traditions persist through fixed text, authoritative editions, and exact reproduction; they have specs, canons, and reference implementations. The standard frames of computing scholarship are all literate frames: an open-source license governs a fixed text, a protocol governs a fixed wire format, a format governs a fixed encoding. The DAW chromatic-staircase is a primary-oral keymap --- there is no canonical text, only four implementations that agree by performance. Vim has both an oral substrate (one learns the keymap by watching another developer's screen) and a literate edge (the notation: \texttt{:wq}, \texttt{<C-w>}, \texttt{ciw}). \texttt{notepat} collapses the literate side into the standing literacy of pitch-letter notation: the keymap inherits its written form from a centuries-older literate practice. The oral substrate is the keymap; the notation is the literate fixation; where the latter succeeds, the former gains a body that travels. The orality-literacy axis is the diagnosis of why keymaps escape the open-source/proprietary frame at all: the standard frames are literate frames, but the keymap is at least partly oral, and the absence of a literate fixation in academic and industrial discourse alike is the symptom that gave this paper its motivating question. 219 + 220 + The same orality-literacy axis explains a feature of the keymap literature: there isn't much of one. The PC Gamer history of WASD~\citep{fenlon2016wasd} is the canonical popular-press source on a convention that controls hundreds of millions of hours of gameplay; the equivalent academic literature is essentially empty. That is not because keymaps are unimportant. It is because the existing apparatus of computing scholarship --- specs, RFCs, source-code repositories --- is calibrated for literate artifacts, and a keymap is partly oral. The paper that does not exist is exactly the one this paper argues should. 221 + 216 222 \section{The Corollary Catalog} 217 223 \label{sec:corollaries} 218 224 ··· 235 241 Wicki--Hayden & Wicki (1896) / Hayden (1986) & Music & Concertina + bandoneon community $\rightarrow$ modern MPE controllers \\ 236 242 Bosanquet & Bosanquet (1875) & Music & Microtonal community $\rightarrow$ Lumatone \\ 237 243 DAW chromatic-staircase & \emph{conv.} (Trackers, 1990s) & Music & Cross-DAW pedagogy; user expectation \\ 244 + WASD movement (PC games) & Fong (1996--97); Half-Life (1998) & Games & Competitive-Quake pedagogy $\rightarrow$ Half-Life default $\rightarrow$ industry convention~\citep{fenlon2016wasd,thresh_quake_bible} \\ 238 245 Notepat ``names themselves'' & Scudder (2024) & Music & Cross-implementation contract within Aesthetic Computer \\ 239 246 Plover steno theory & Knight (2010s) & Typing & GitHub + community-forked dictionaries \\ 240 247 Vim keybindings & Joy (1976) $\rightarrow$ Moolenaar (1991) & Editing & ``Vim keybindings everywhere'' lists; macOS Cocoa text fields \\ ··· 285 292 286 293 A keymap is a small declarative table. It is not a binary. It is not a service. It is not a project. The standard frames of computing scholarship cannot see it. And yet keymaps are versioned, named, forked, and demanded across applications --- they are software in every sense that matters. I have argued that they constitute a category, called the category \emph{social software}, traced two lineages that produced it, examined the dominant contemporary case (the DAW chromatic-staircase) and a deliberate intervention against it (\texttt{notepat}'s notes-that-name-themselves), shown that each keymap has a \emph{notation surface} that is often the half of the artifact that actually travels, enumerated a broader catalog of corollaries that are themselves predominantly notations, and read the body of evidence through Lialina's \emph{Turing Complete User} as evidence for her claim that users are programmers in waiting. The disappearance of any single keymap is small. The disappearance of the entire user-authorable layer is the political problem Lialina names. 287 294 288 - The methodological contribution is a unit of analysis: the keymap-and-its-notation as the first-class object of computing scholarship that the binary, the project, the platform, and the format together cannot resolve. The political contribution is a small request: \emph{ship the keymap as a first-class object, and the notation alongside it}. 295 + The methodological contribution is a unit of analysis: the keymap-and-its-notation as the first-class object of computing scholarship that the binary, the project, the platform, and the format together cannot resolve. Read through Ong, the keymap is the partly-oral artifact and the notation is its literate edge --- which is why neither the keymap alone nor the notation alone is enough, and why the standard frames of computing scholarship, calibrated as they are for fully-literate artifacts, miss the category entirely. The political contribution is a small request: \emph{ship the keymap as a first-class object, and the notation alongside it}. 289 296 290 297 \bibliographystyle{plainnat} 291 298 \bibliography{references}

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papers/arxiv-keymaps/references.bib

··· 531 531 note = {Browser-based live-coding visual environment. The Hydra notation (chained transform calls like \texttt{osc(20).rotate(0.5).out()}) propagates through workshop pedagogy, gist sharing, and \url{sketch.hydra.ojack.xyz} examples --- a visuals counterpart to Tidal's audio mini-notation.}, 532 532 } 533 533 534 + % --- ORALITY / LITERACY --- 535 + 536 + @book{ong1982orality, 537 + author = {Ong, Walter J.}, 538 + title = {Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word}, 539 + publisher = {Routledge}, 540 + year = {1982}, 541 + note = {The canonical articulation of the orality--literacy distinction. Oral traditions persist through performance and approximation; literate traditions persist through fixed text and exact reproduction. Used here as the deep diagnostic for why keymaps escape the standard frames of computing scholarship.}, 542 + } 543 + 544 + @book{havelock1963preface, 545 + author = {Havelock, Eric A.}, 546 + title = {Preface to {Plato}}, 547 + publisher = {Harvard University Press}, 548 + year = {1963}, 549 + note = {The transition from oral to literate culture in ancient Greece. Cited here as the predecessor to Ong's framework.}, 550 + } 551 + 552 + % --- WASD: AN UNOWNED CONVENTION IN PC GAMING --- 553 + 554 + @misc{fenlon2016wasd, 555 + author = {Fenlon, Wes}, 556 + title = {How {WASD} Became the Standard {PC} Control Scheme}, 557 + howpublished = {PC Gamer}, 558 + year = {2016}, 559 + note = {The canonical popular-press history of WASD's emergence from competitive Quake culture (Dennis ``Thresh'' Fong, 1996--97), industry adoption via Half-Life (Valve, 1998), and saturation across PC games by the early 2000s. \url{https://www.pcgamer.com/how-wasd-became-the-standard-pc-control-scheme/}.}, 560 + } 561 + 562 + @misc{thresh_quake_bible, 563 + author = {Fong, Dennis ``Thresh''}, 564 + title = {Thresh's {Quake} Bible}, 565 + year = {1997}, 566 + howpublished = {Self-published online guide}, 567 + note = {Competitive-Quake configuration guide that described the WASD layout as an ``inverted T'' and is widely credited as the proximate cause of the convention's spread among players. Original site long-defunct; archived copies circulate via the Internet Archive.}, 568 + } 569 + 570 + @misc{wikipedia_arrow_keys, 571 + author = {{Wikipedia contributors}}, 572 + title = {Arrow Keys}, 573 + howpublished = {Wikipedia}, 574 + year = {2026}, 575 + note = {Tertiary reference summarizing the arrow-key vs.\ WASD transition; cites pre-WASD experiments such as System Shock's ASDX (1994) and Descent's AZ+QE (1995). \url{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_keys}.}, 576 + } 577 + 534 578 % --- ADDITIONAL SISTER-PAPER CITATIONS (for future integration) --- 535 579 % 536 580 % arxiv-url-tradition/references.bib:

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