Books as maps! "Today the book is already… an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index." —Walter Benjamin
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(In Reflections, p. 78; via Noah Wardrip-Fruin's interesting foreword to Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect in The New Media Reader)
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The odd thing about this framing is that the book doesn't really perform the mediation! It's a sort of serialization of the card box of the researcher who wrote it. The reader has to "come to terms with the author" and then "bring the author to terms" to map to their own.
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Also of course this framing, taking too seriously, ignores the role of narrative—a common issue with hypertext-dreamer interpretations of this kind of comment. Prose is not just a structured sequence of claim-atoms!
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Replying to
I love this! The reduction of thinking to just the formal nodes has been a major pitfall of argument mapping tools IMO, as far back as the original IBIS.
Related:
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Replying to @bod0ng @JoelChan86 and @ProfMattFox
Hey can I play too? :-)
I’m intrigued that @houshuang has also connected Roam and Issue/Argument Mapping networkedthought.substack.com/p/can-we-agree
Could these deeply hypertextual notetaking tools provide the missing narrative richness that I reflect on in this piece?… simon.buckinghamshum.net/2020/11/the-fu
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One of my more (currently unarticulated) hot takes is that there’s something about human cognition that makes narrative central to reasoning. And you can’t really escape from it.
To rational reasoning, but not intuition. Intuition is right hemisphere and thus nonverbal.
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Yes, the human mind is looking to form abstractions from experience. The are two kinds of experience, direct and vicarious. Narrative is vicarious experience: broader and less risky.
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It's a great shortcut for storing life-relevant symbolism in memory, because it automatically suggests roles, beginnings, endings, and trajectory