Re: Is outlining the best free form database organization?

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1923

Posted by sub
2004-05-17 08:31:15

An outline is one of the best ways to organize a lengthy writing or one’s thinking, but is it the best way to organize a free form database? I would like to throw this question out for discussion.

This thread is fascinating; a warm personal thanks to all contributors, for all the information and food for thought I’ve collected in a short time.

I’d like to propose a different way to tackle this question; I assume that regardless of our actual professional interest, what we are trying to do when using these information organisation tools, is represent reality in an abstract way.

This process can be inwards-oriented when we are simply collecting information we find interesting, or outwards-oriented when we are initially developing our own ideas; finally, it might be a combination of the two, i.e. when researching a specific subject and interactively building a thesis/theme/premise/story from what we gather about it and the ideas sparked thereof.

Now, if the above holds, then the ‘best’ structured way to go about it is to actually try to copy reality’s structures.

Reality is built around networks and the power law.

Networks are non-hierarchical; as such, TheBrain, Cmap Tools, BrainStorm or a free-form database could provide an adequate model. However, real-world networks follow the power law: certain nodes, i.e. ‘keywords’, are much more popular than the rest. In fact, their popularity is self-replicating; the rich get richer and the popular actors get the best roles, to use the Small World Network paradigm.

(For the fascinating background to all this, I suggest Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s “Linked: The New Science of Networks” and Mark Buchanan’s “Nexus: Small Worlds and the grounbreaking Theory of Networks”, or simply a goggle search of Small World Networks)

Therefore, when are going about researching, we might start with few premises and organise our information in free form; even dropping everything in a directory might do at this stage.

In the long run, it pays to build hierarchies around those nodes/cocepts we find to be more popular (i.e. by indexing our free form collection), in order to be able to easily identify the greater picture; otherwise, things get overwhelming very quickly.

A collection of interlinked Mind Maps, where the maps’ central concepts are the most popular keywords, would probably represent the best informational analogy of the real-world. Given that Mind Maps can be reduced to outlines, a collection of outliner hierarchies would do; however, the top concepts in each outline would not ‘fit’ into a hierarchy themselves.

To see relationships between the top concepts, a non-hierarchical graphical representation tool such as TheBrain or Cmap Tools would be more useful. Nodes then might be outliner files, provided the outliner we use supports internal/external hyperlinks to provide for the least popular relations.

Cheers
/ alx

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