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CRPA1.8 beta testing
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Posted by TonyJ
Aug 26, 2011 at 10:33 PM
I really need to focus on making more and better use of the software that I already have data in so I won’t be testing your software. Still, I always enjoy checking out the various information managers.
There’s been a lot of discussion over the last few years at the Personal Brain forums on a suggestion from the users called views, which is where parts of the network would appear or disappear according to filters on the tags, link type or thought type. None of the developers have ever commented on whether they’re planning to implement this feature or not. Be that as it may, your program with its different sheets is a nice implementation of this idea.
Some of the users at the PB forums have pointed out that removing nodes in a group based on their type, or on the type of their links can easily leave islands of disconnected thoughts. True, but that’s not a problem with CRPA because you have a list nearby with all the nodes. For PB it’s an issue because if you only navigate with a visualization that occupies a virtual space much larger than your screen you don’t really know what’s there and what isn’t. Creating a sheet, a sort of new level, and then deciding what goes there individually makes a lot more intuitive sense now that I’ve seen your demos. Perhaps a little more time consuming and that could be a problem if someone had a project with thousands of notes, but I like it.
Very interesting program. I hope you’re successful with it.
Posted by Ron C. de Weijze
Aug 27, 2011 at 09:54 AM
Thanks for checking out CRPA anyway Tony. I don’t know if you could export your data from other software to try it out in another context, but CRPA does allow import, via Excel as described here http://crpa.co/html/notes_and_sheets_from_outside_.htm.
Views can develop and overlap, especially in the mind of a single user. In groups this makes sense when it applies to a repository that everybody agrees upon, such as the software itself. That may be why PB is a bit sluggish implementing it.
Sheets can be instantly filled, starting from any note that you find using the search engine, and then “expand” it. If a note is used in many sheets, it will expand into all notes on all sheets re-using that one note.
Success is not an easy find these days. Hopefully I can extend my philosophy a bit, that contains it.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 28, 2011 at 12:25 PM
TonyJ wrote:
>that’s not a problem with CRPA because you have a list nearby with all the nodes. For PB
>it’s an issue because if you only navigate with a visualization that occupies a
>virtual space much larger than your screen you don’t really know what’s there and what
>isn’t. Creating a sheet, a sort of new level, and then deciding what goes there
>individually makes a lot more intuitive sense now that I’ve seen your demos. Perhaps a
>little more time consuming and that could be a problem if someone had a project with
>thousands of notes, but I like it.
I think that CRPA’s core concept is good common sense: collecting is one activity, organising is another. Interestingly, I haven’t found many applications that support me in this approach (Brainstorm is by far my preferred). Perhaps, as Oscar Wilde apparently pointed out, common sense is anything but common.
My own suggestion for CRPA concerns Tony’s last sentence above. Indeed, I would like to be able to do some kind of ‘pre-organisation’ of notes, via folders or tags. When working on a complex topic, or several interlinked topics, this would be quite useful.
Posted by Ron C. de Weijze
Aug 29, 2011 at 09:22 AM
Hello Alexander, my thoughts have often gone over ideas of ‘pre-organizing’ the notes, such as what I would call ‘templates’ for different kinds of logic that notes may be ordered by: lists, syllogisms, checklists, options etc. However, I believe that ICT has taught us how we should always ‘normalize’ our knowledge and basically use the E-R model (entity-relationship) for our knowledge, information and data. What I understand constructive recollection to be, is literally re-collecting notes from the past all the time, see how they are related, apply better logic if possible and add notes when needed. So I have hundreds of sheets, recollecting my notes, and every time my understanding changes, I create a new sheet and only carry over what I need. The ‘pre-organization’, as I understand it, would be essential for the talk-back expert-system that can be created instantly from the current network, that I mentioned earlier (answering Daly), for the system to decide what to do when nodes get complex. I really want to develop a module like that. It is my top priority.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 1, 2011 at 06:50 PM
Sounds fascinating, but I was thinking along rather simpler lines: already notes can be sorted chronologically or alphabetically, so I assume you saw some usefulness to these orders. What if notes could also be filtered, say, by their content. So, for example, I could filter all notes with the word ‘dream’; even though the context of the use of the word may differ, the filtered notes would still provide a good starting point for my exploration of the term.
Since CRPA is also aimed at academics and lawyers, I see this kind of pre-organising as quite useful in their development of a paper or case.
Ron C. de Weijze wrote:
>What I understand constructive recollection to be, is literally re-collecting
>notes from the past all the time, see how they are related, apply better logic if
>possible and add notes when needed. So I have hundreds of sheets, recollecting my
>notes, and every time my understanding changes, I create a new sheet and only carry
>over what I need. The ‘pre-organization’, as I understand it, would be essential for
>the talk-back expert-system that can be created instantly from the current network,
>that I mentioned earlier (answering Daly), for the system to decide what to do when
>nodes get complex. I really want to develop a module like that. It is my top priority.