Browsing tags in Storyspace

[dominiquerenauld]

Hi! Between two doctoral thesis writing sessions very tough to handle, I let myself go to try to write something airy in the style of a novel and use Tinderbox Map view to visualize my on-the-fly ideas. And I must say that I find extremely useful the attribute browser for gathering my tags and visualizing them as if I had a box full of index-cards. And I was wondering: did I miss something I didn’t read yet or is there a way to use the Attribute Browser or something similar in Storyspace to review tags?

What if Arno Schmidt had been able to use the Attribute Browser?

Arno Schmidt, oeuvre bordée d’or

[MarianneL]

This is an intriguing idea. I’d love to be able to browse an index-card view of attributes like tags. Did you get an answer or find a solution?

Thank you for your very helpful videos, btw!

[dominiquerenauld]

Thanks for your encouragement! Storyspace is such a mythical tool to me. I don’t use it for the moment. Instead of it, I’ve created a Tinderbox file that I launch with an Alfred shortcut. It’s my literary notebook. I write down on it every piece of on-the-fly idea that comes. And I regularly review my Attribute Browser in order to freely associate around the several tags I’ve already entered. This is a screenshot of one of my projects:

[mwra]

At present, Storyspace can view Attribute Browser tabs in a TBX file, but it can’t create new ones - you need to use Tinderbox for that. In fact I’ve opened a TBX with Attribute Browser, Timeline and Treemap tabs and all seem to function - in that they display OK in Storyspace v3.2

Storyspace only offers the ability to create 3 types of view: Map, Chart and Outline.

[MarianneL]

Thank you for your thoughtful replies, Dominique and Mark.

You encourage me, Dominique, to use the Attribute Browser on a more habitual basis, and adopt the habit you describe of reviewing Tags more regularly. (I’d read James Fallows’ very interesting post on how he uses that browser, and filed it away. Partly (mostly!) I need to do the cognitive work, which has to do with my habit and not with Tinderbox, of corralling my messy pile of keywords: and develop a truly controlled (tag) vocabulary (borrowed from Andrew Abbott’s useful Digital Paper, which I think I learned about here.)

It’s very helpful to see how you and others use Tinderbox, and how you work with and process various data. Merci.