- I had the pleasure of talking with Andy Sylvester yesterday about tools for thought for Episode 3 of his new podcast, Thinking about Tools for Thought. Below, I'll drop in some notes of the main things I had on my mind as we talked. (The recording session took place before I was able to think through the ideas for my tagging post below, so that feature currently developing in Dave Winer's Drummer work is not mentioned.)#
- Brief notes on my portion of the episode#
- My goal is paying attention to the specificity of somebody else’s language#
- Looking for ways to slow down, practices and tools that help me return to the specific language of others#
- Google Docs for certain kinds of collaboration#
- Microsoft Word for documents that will live primarily on paper#
- Dave Winer outliner projects: Fargo, Little Outliner, Little Outliner 2 for ease of reorganizing, re-contextualizing and reconsidering, at speed#
- Now in beta: Dave Winer’s Drummer, with outlining more tightly woven into web publishing, with new aspects of the software still emerging#
- Ease of juxtaposing bits of language: illustrate and test one against the other, trying to know more as a result#
- Bookmarks feature of Drummer for saving posts out of the chronological stream and quickly placing them in the context of related ideas#
- [Post-recording session insight from the week’s blogging: tagging not into a read-only page but into a read-and-write page ups the ante quite a bit for tracking thoughts over time, building something more extended]#
- Not just recovering an old post but having tools and building social spaces together that might help us refine our thinking and make us into a coherent group that might do something in the world#
- Vicki Hearne helps me understand communication as the building of a social and civic space#
- The power of a live outline available to collaborators#
- Different degrees of contact with other people’s language—just gets better and better as a shared and sharable space#
- The first tagged mention of the word Drummer, from 7/28, that pops up through the link in yesterday's Scripting News post talks about tagging as a form of indexing that might lead to opportunities for writing built on the tagged passages. Yesterday's post is much more explicit about one way that could work: to send those tagged passages (the tag word and some surrounding prose--the vital context) into a composing space, such as a wiki. That's very exciting... #
- I'll put it this way: our social media tools--Twitter, Facebook--have next to no interest in writers organizing their content and organizing people through conversation about content, which for the moment I am thinking of as the same thing. They treat human beings as if we are all going to live forever, and so have no need to spend today wisely, to write sentences that matter, to build connections between ideas and with others right now. Connections, who cares? As Scarlett O'Hara says at the end of Gone with the Wind, "After all, tomorrow is another day."#
- Tagging and its sibling concordance are aimed at pattern work, at reorganizing for new uses. Having the landing page for a key word with its living contexts be a place not just for reading but also for further pattern-making and writing is dynamite. #
- Here is brief video showing how concordance software operates to 1) help readers or writers spot patterns in a large body of content and 2) locate and preview examples of terms in context even when the writer or reader has forgotten their existence. I'm guessing this is a more muscular, more resource-greedy relative of tagging, but with one advantage: you can find patterns that past-you didn't imagine future-you was going to want to find (and therefore didn't document via tagging).#
- The big thing here for me, though, is the difference between tagged content showing up in a read-only space vs. showing up in a read-and-write space.#
- "Thinking about ways of organizing content, organizing people, makes that clearer to me. "#
- I jotted that at the end of yesterday's comment about what Twitter fails to offer. As I typed the words "organizing content, organizing people," I realized that I've started thinking of those two things as one thing. Ever since I found Vicki Hearne's formulation the other day, I find it more useful to seek the power of organizing information in the power of organizing people, and vice versa. They make less sense apart than they do together.#
I've been trying to look at everything lately as a matter of organization. When a praying mantis showed up on the kitchen window yesterday, I looked over maybe once an hour as it made its way down the side of the house. I realized that I was able to perceive only a little of how this strange little alien's world was organized.
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When a society loses track of the health of its food ...
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“I never understand anything until I have written about it.�� Supposedly Horace Walpole (1717-1797) wrote that, but Google can't help me pin down where he might have done so. Frankly, it doesn't sound to me like a sentence written in the eighteenth century. But it may be a useful hyperbole.
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"One can’t learn to write well unless one reads,"
observes Brian Broome in an WPost op-ed about young adults taking a good look around at their world once they've gone off to college. His memoir about "issues regarding masculinity and Blackness, from the perspective of someone who was never really any good at it" is called
Punch Me Up to the Gods.
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I spoke too slowly in a podcast recording session yesterday. (Self-knowledge--there's never enough to go around.)
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