Wednesday September 1, 2021; 12:10 PM EDT
- 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.#