Forum Posts Feed
The outlining newcomers
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 14, 2021 at 02:21 PM
Indeed, though what may not be findable are the relationships between that stuff—and this is often times as important as the stuff itself.
Luhmann wrote:
>My feeling is that this is
>“good enough.” Even though some workflows might be broken, it is all
>plain text and you can search and find stuff.
Posted by MadaboutDana
May 15, 2021 at 10:33 AM
This is an important point. But leaving the relationships between stuff to a single app is, I increasingly think, a self-limiting strategy.
Increasingly, I’m looking at ways of creating my main data repositories in the file system, then using powerful and highly flexible search engines to tie it all together. I’ve been experimenting with FoxTrot Pro (on Mac) for a while now, and I find that research using the latter is much faster and more efficient than using any number of clever, attractive, but ultimately limited information management apps. There are, of course, any number of powerful desktop search engines available for Windows – more than for Mac, in fact.
Having said that: to manage the results of what you ferret out in FoxTrot Pro, you do need some kind of information management app… ;-)
And this is what’s interesting about info management – how many “layers of correlation” you need will depend on the ultimate purpose of your research. For single projects, a couple of layers will be enough (a search tool will usually allow you to save “smart” searches, which are sufficient for one-off projects). For a complex project, you will need many more layers of correlation. This will usually exceed the capabilities of a search engine, no matter how sophisticated it is, because information management = information structuring, which is almost always matricial (regardless of the human mind’s fondness for hierarchical structures).
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
Indeed, though what may not be findable are the relationships between
>that stuff—and this is often times as important as the stuff itself.
>
>Luhmann wrote:
>>My feeling is that this is
>>“good enough.” Even though some workflows might be broken, it is all
>>plain text and you can search and find stuff.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 15, 2021 at 10:43 AM
This conversation may be going over my head, so if I’m stating something completely off-base apologies up front.
But when Dave Winer was talking about silos, I took him to mean that most of the applications he’s refering to encourage links to notes internal to the app and not to the world outside the app. I don’t use Roam or Obsidian much (though, of course, I’ve tried them), so I don’t even know if that is true or not. But if it is, he may have a point (again, only if I interpreted him correctly). Dave has always been about creating wider networks of knowledge.
Steve
Posted by Franz Grieser
May 15, 2021 at 08:45 PM
@Stephen:
Roam is a silo, Obsidian isn’t.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 16, 2021 at 02:59 PM
Thanks Steve, re-reading Dave’s post it seems clear that you interpretation is right, though the point is made towards the end of his text.
I can’t think of any information management software—whether discussed here or not—which does not reference the outside world, even in the form of simple URLs. Of course Dave is talking about open APIs and the like, which would allow one to leverage information structures already developed by others.
For me such a information management world would be ideal, and would take learning and knowledge management many times forward. That said, I believe that it’s as much an issue of technology as it is of culture.
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>But when Dave Winer was talking about silos, I took him to mean that
>most of the applications he’s refering to encourage links to notes
>internal to the app and not to the world outside the app. [..]
>Dave has always been about creating wider networks of knowledge.