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In this week's episode, hosts Ryan Baxter and Mark Ambrogio interview John (Jack) Kausch, who recently completed his PhD in Library and Information Science, formally graduating in June.

In his research, Jack looks at past attempts to establish a universal language, as a way of communicating knowledge and ideas across linguistic and cultural divides. Attempts to establish a universal language can be said to go back to ancient Egypt and continued with Francis Bacon and the quest for a "perfect language."

Using Real Language Character ontology, Jack built, in his dissertation, a knowledge organization system which is a work of art intended to provoke questions concerning our assumptions about the cross-linguistic universality of knowledge, and also demonstrate expanded potentials for information retrieval in the era of machine learning.

You can find the web-art implementation of Jack's work here: https://realcharacterlanguage.world

*The episode title is a reference to John Wilkins' famous 1668 essay "An Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language."

Recorded on Tuesday, July 14, 2026
Produced by Bruno Mesquita
Theme song provided by FreeBeats.io (Produced by WhiteHot)