And of course, even thatβs just the web. What about associations between pages of an ebook and a paragraph of a PDF? Between an email from a colleague and some drawings it reminded me of?
Conversation
Bush also suggested that this web of links wouldnβt just be between othersβ published worksβthat subordinates your own work to othersβ. Your own materials (drawings, drafts, voice recordings, etc) are also stops on the associative βtrail.β
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If you want to arrange your own works relative to a disparate collection of othersβ works, modern OSes offer folders and tags instead of links. In many cases, these are better: many associations form a clique or a tree, not a trail as Bush emphasizes.
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OS-level tags solve a problem Bush observes: that indexing systems usually assume thereβs a βbestβ 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 isnβt 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 arenβt. Itβs not just a theoretical problem: tags/folders are jumbled messes after a couple dozen items. Probably certain files are higher βdegree,β but youβll never know.
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Bush also describes how you could acquire trails from othersβanother notion weβre missing. Othersβ trails could be applied to materials you already have, so you could see a colleagueβs associative structures alongside your own, on the same files.
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Are there any good analyses of the structural reasons why weβre 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 adaptationsβ¦ [fin]
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Neat! I look forward to seeing. That latter point does seem to be true more often than I'd like, unfortunately.
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same. itβs been a great source of disillusionment for me. iβd love to show you and talk about this stuff sometime! i feel like iβve ranted about it so many times but few people have even understood what i meant
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I'd love to see; please do reach out when you're ready to share! πββοΈ
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