Tinderbox / content visualization software for windows?

Posted by Amontillado
Aug 28, 2018 at 01:08 PM

Paul J. Miller wrote:
>I don’t know what it is about ConnectedText which lends itself to the
>data communicating with the user but this is my experience. See
>https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes for a better
>explanation of this phenomenon than I could possibly give.

That essay about slip boxes is pretty interesting. I started down the path of structuring my brain drippings with Writers Blocks, and graduated from there to more fluid methods. One thing I’ve learned is that exposition, whether fiction or not, is a linear exercise that lends itself to hierarchical structure. An outline is like a list of goals and subgoals. What I’m going to say and its subunits, in the order I’m going to achieve the milestones.

Notes are different, best viewed as a navigable rat’s nest, with heavy emphasis on the navigation.

I was blown away by The Brain, basically by two things. The jump thoughts which were more important to me than the parent-child-sibling hierarchy, and the plex view, which was like a limited context with escape routes. It fits me and my vulnerability to context switching and doorway effect.

The Brain lost some nodes for me once, probably due to Java trouble (and kudos to The Brain for getting away from Java). Along the way I moved over to Mac systems, and discovered DevonThink.

DevonThink is wonderful, but at first it seemed like losing the jump thought/plex view was a personal tragedy.

Now, though, I think of tags as my jump links, and there is a bit more to them than that.

When I add a tag to a note, I try not to think of making a tag that describes an attribute of the note as much as I think about how the tag will relate to other, future, notes that will get the tag. A tag, then, reveals what The Brain would have shown as a collection of jump thoughts. A second tag on the same note reveals something The Brain doesn’t have, a second collection of jump thoughts.

Having a hierarchy of tags lets me adjust the focus of which thoughts I want to jump to, and discovering I could replicate a tag was a great revelation. Now notes about Bad Bart could fit under Mass Murderers for his taste for blood, and under needlepoint for his cross stitch passions.

Anyway, it’s good to think about how logic is formed as well as what logical discoveries we can make. Efficient study is names, dates, places, and epistemology.

When I realized tags could fill in for jump thoughts, DevonThink became more useful. Realizing that The Brain organizes as two hierarchies, parent-child-sibling and jump relations, led me to think of tags as forming multiple hierarchies. Replication serves in a similar capacity to The Brain’s adept use of circular references when you want them.

In other words, I suppose, anything used for information management is more useful with some thought as to how to organize.

The slip box article was nice.