Re: Use for Outliners?

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 210

Posted by mlsmith
1999-08-23 21:45:41

I think that one of the reasons that I have a fixation on outliners is that they were part of a particularly challenging period of intellectual activity. I was working on a major research project in Peru. Tons of interviews and reading notes, parallel chronologies, stray ideas and other stuff were just piling up and I had no easy way to get a handle on them. (I was a journalist so I was not able to fall back on a particular academic methodology.) Then I discovered PC Outline. I just started working on an outline. When one branch became sufficiently “leafy,” I could prune and plant it on its own to develop into a theme outline, an article or a book outline. Eventually, the most pressing ideas would be transferred over to a word processor (in those days, WordStar) and I would sweat bullets to get them into shape, but the groundwork was laid by PC Outline.

Now the whole research angle with outliners appeals to me because the outline could probably be paired with hyperlinks to notes, document drafts and reference material—or the WWW, for that matter. Brainstorming at its best.

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