Monday September 20, 2021; 7:59 AM EDT
- I've tried the new automated tweet-to-outline feature (still, I believe, evolving) in the web-based Drummer outliner, so far so good. Integrating this feature with the Bookmark outline, which is a kind of index outline, to some degree--this seems like it will open up new writing-organizing-revising work habits that promise to help explode the limitations of timeline-only composing schemes and solo-document-type composing schemes. I've been wanting to be able to bust open those two narrow spaces for some time now, or to cross back and forth at will. There are traces in old web posts that others have wished for this even longer than I have.#
- The beta work on these features has made me interested in a term that maybe I've made up, not sure, or maybe it's old news for others, not sure. Here goes... We all know the value of an index at the back of a book. Seems like there is a process that creates an index or index-like entity, and there is the process of using an index or index-like entity. I'm calling both of those, for the moment, by one term: index process.#
- (An actual index is just one possible manifestation of index process, then. Where index process paused or came to rest at a certain time on a certain day.)#
- The bookmark outline reaches (kind of like an index) into other outlines, including timeline-based ones, and establishes a composing space that can use or refer to those timeline spaces as much or as little as the writer wishes. Hyperlinks partake of a portion of the index process or function, too, yes? Tagging crosses the borders of a single outline or a single document in an index-like way. Tagging that presents itself in an editable space, such as in a wiki (mused upon in discussion somewhere this summer), would break things open in a new way. #
- This will seem vague or inexact but here goes. Thanks to these new kinds of tools:#
- Index becomes index process becomes hybrid index process/composing-revising-publishing space.#
- The human brain has these hybrid process powers already, but now the screen seems to be gaining them as well, or maybe it's more accurate to say adding them to the already formidable powers of text.#