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And of course, even that’s 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?
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Bush also suggested that this web of links wouldn’t just be between others’ published worksβ€”that subordinates your own work to others’. Your own materials (drawings, drafts, voice recordings, etc) are also stops on the associative β€œtrail.”
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If you want to arrange your own works relative to a disparate collection of others’ 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 there’s a β€œbest” 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 β€œdegree,” but you’ll never know.
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Bush also describes how you could acquire trails from othersβ€”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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i’m working on a personal system for this designed for writers, inspired by bush and the promise of hypertext as for structural reasons β€” designers don’t seem to do their reading πŸ“–
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same. it’s been a great source of disillusionment for me. i’d love to show you and talk about this stuff sometime! i feel like i’ve ranted about it so many times but few people have even understood what i meant
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me: "i need a tool that supports organizing and understanding research" every everything bucket ever: "i have folders, tags AND SEARCH"
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