When I first read As We May Think* as a teenager, I was astonished by how much it predicted of the computer age in 1945—but recently I’ve been feeling wistful about some pieces it predicts which never came to pass. [thread] *https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ …
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OS-level tags solve a problem Bush observes: that indexing systems usually assume there’s a “best” categorization of an item, but they often have many associations. You want many-to-many. But tagging a 100-page PDF or a 100-comp PSD isn’t very helpful. Memex links are page-level!
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But tags and folders are just sets. The structure is unordered, but your associations usually aren’t. It’s not just a theoretical problem: tags/folders are jumbled messes after a couple dozen items. Probably certain files are higher “degree,” but you’ll never know.
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Bush also describes how you could acquire trails from others—another notion we’re missing. Others’ trails could be applied to materials you already have, so you could see a colleague’s associative structures alongside your own, on the same files.
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Are there any good analyses of the structural reasons why we’re here and not there? Key problems with associative linking as attempted in past large-scale systems, etc? Other interesting attempts besides Xanadu? LiquidText is neat; fun to imagine OS-level adaptations… [fin]
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End of conversation
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The way I see cliques is as ‘unordered’ trails: you can walk them in any order, still the trail keeps the things together. Also trees can be composed by multiple trails which forks along the way. I believe trails can be fundamental building blocks of all these structures.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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