Is there a way to create several links simultaneously?

Q & A - getting started with Tinderbox
22

It is for this very reason I use Pandoc. I can keep citations in the reference manger and pull them into TBX export, including PowerPoints.

23

That is unclear at this time, @eastgate will surprise us, but he has said that he is working on some new views. What these are is unclear.

The number are outline orders. He has a manual process of changing outline order in mapview.

The attributes help with looking at the data through different views, e.g. timeline, attribute browser, treemap, etc. These different views give you a different perspective. Attributes also help with and support linking associations, color, flag, and badge automation. They can also help with agents and refined find.

In my technology adoption research, I was able to zero in and find that there are generally 150 constructs common to the 30+ technology adoption theories developed since the 1950s. Without attributes, map view, linking, can other views, I would have never discovered this.

24

Philosophy isn’t my strong point, but let’s have a shot. I’m going to look at aspects of structuralism and its sequelae, just sketching things here to point at some possibilities.

  • Chronology: When did people live? When did they work? It’s easy, for example, the think Sartre significantly predates LĂ©vi-Strauss, because Sartre’s peak of media adulation came first. But that’s not really right!

  • Geography: People move around. LĂ©vi-Strauss, in his New York years, lived in the same apartment building as Claude Shannon. (They only met in later years). Again, that’s worth knowing.

  • Coding: Let’s suppose you have a bunch of notes on your readings of L’ĂȘtre et le nĂ©ant and Tristes Tropiques. You might well want to flag thematic or topical observations concerning, say, race and ethnicity in each. This kind of qualitative analysis is important to lots of social science work.

  • Metadata: in your reading of secondary sources, you’re going to want to capture information about each source. This is best done in attributes rather than relying on free text — not only because it’s less ambiguous, but also because the system reminds you what you ought to remember to jot down. (Was that early biography in Widener? Or did you find it in the British Library? This is trivial to jot down at the time — you can easily automate it — but always a pain in the neck when it’s a query in your galleys.

  • Speculative Tags: You might often want to review some passages with an eye to an inchoate idea you have in mind. Was there a stylistic break in LĂ©vi-Strauss’s writing after the war? Did his use of metaphor change after 1943? You might spend a day or two, marking up notes that lend support for your hypothesis. Perhaps it doesn’t quite pan out: you still have the notations (and perhaps some agents), and might take it up later with more success.

4 Likes
25

I don’t think that for me it is like that — “can’t see it, it doesn’t exist”. It is just more detailed visual map can be more helpful in case of difficult theme
 Your example was about topic which as I understand you know at least quite well already.

I believe you, but without clear example it is hard to really grasp


@eastgate
Thank you very much for such good example! I understand it speculatively. But it would be really very helpful to have actual Tinderbox file with such kind of research, not necessarily philosophical. Maybe you have some which you can share or part of it? Maybe about hypertext but with all mentioned here (not just that elegant but very concise one)? I think that many people can much better grasp such non-trivial approaches when they have an actual example. I guess it is alike learning how to code.

26

I don’t like to do too much of this, because there’s no benefit in everyone’s emulating my personal quirks. (I know that fortunes have been made encouraging that, but I don’t think it’s beneficial to the field.)

But I’ll cast around and see what I can find.

2 Likes
27

If that proves hard as, for understandable reasons–real docs are personal/private, another approach is to make a document with some of the source material you use and with note(s) explaining what your hope to find or are struggling to synthesis. It’s not that folk won’t help, but faking ‘real’ data is hard (speaking from experience) and making a sharable doc by removing/altering data is—again from experience—even more work.

I realise starting with just some data form a person with the problem (not least, data from their domain of work) we than have a common reference that can both act as a tutorial and can end up as an example.

Aside, a further problem with example docs is they date faster than imagined as the app is changing subtly (for the better!) all the time. Back in v5 days I used to maintain a demo set of >70 docs/TB-based tutorials but keeping them in a state were I could just give them to someone became spare time I didn’t have. So starting fresh is good: tackle the correct domain with today’s tool and thinking. It also allows choice to be flagged up. My earlier point about different visual thinkers/learners is in that vein. Rather than be told “do it this way” it can be useful to know there are alternates—going to the same outcome—one of which might suit you better. The work feels much more smooth if the process aligns with one’s own style of work.

Maps are particularly prone to causing confusion. Am I making a ‘picture’ (for myself or others), where the ‘look’ of the map is part of imparting clarity/understanding. Or am I just thinking onto a plastic space deliberately so that am not shackled to the tyranny of a linear narrative/outline before such is clear/needed. Or am I 
 etc.?

28

I completely agree with you; real use cases and case studies are incredibly valuable. I have a great appreciation for all those that have shared their examples, their code, and have helped solve problems. This community is amazing and I’d not be able to produce what I do for work today without it.

There is the reality, however, when it comes to producing use cases, case studies, and examples, one that it is often not discussed, that I’d like to point out.

The production of quality use cases, case studies, and examples is VERY expensive. They take time and thought to produce. If they’ve been built for real work, they’re probably confidential or have a commercial value (not just in terms of the content but also all the structure and appearance code) that is best not given way for free. Strip away the confidential and commercially viable content and code and document all the edge cases and abstractions that need to be considered (which, BTW, takes even more time as relevant synthetic content needs to be produced and the abstractions are often not conscious or documented at the time they were first producted) and you’re left with illustrative examples.

To quantify the above assertion, just looking at the time part, in my experience, every 30 minutes of a reasonably constructed recording takes 2~3 hours to make, depending on the complexity. To actually produce the knowledge to be able to create the recording could take anywhere from weeks and months for simple approaches or, in the case of some advanced approaches, years.

So, in summary, examples, no matter how simple they appear on the surface are not that simple and have a real cost.

1 Like
29

Amen!

30

Thank you very much! It would be very helpful.

I completely understand personal/private issues, but not all maps have such elements. I can share quite a big chunk of my Tinderbox file. But I definitely don’t want somebody spending their time and doing some work for me. Also, I don’t have clear objectives right now about what I want to find or synthesis. I’m just making map to better grasp material with thought that as I will add new parts, maybe in the future I will have some idea about specific analysis of it.

It doesn’t matter, any example using all mentioned above applied in context of some research, which better be some humanities study rather than analysis of some technical data for commercial purposes.

Yes, of course. I understand that completely. That’s why I ask for some finished map which already contains all of that. Not all maps have personal or confidential information.

31

Here’s the map view from the Tinderbox planning document for the Tinderbox 5 ➛ 6 transition, which entailed what amounted to a port to a new operating system.

image
image2786×2055 1.35 MB

3 Likes
32

Thank you very much! Any additional example from you is useful. But this is another image and highly technical stuff for commercial use. In such case it is much easier to get a clear picture of how to implement attributes, agents and so forth
 Anyway, thank you again for all of your clarification and work!

33

Hey there, I have a request. Let’s work from the other direction, start with one of your source files rather than another’s example. Perhaps you can share with us an example of the type of work you’re trying to generate insights from. Any chance you can create a map view the notes, like them, and then discuss how the map you’re looking at is not helping you elicit insights? Perhaps if we can the type of notes work working with, e.g., concepts, people, events, theories, constructs, etc., that can help the community provide you with more relevant advice.

34

Thank you very much for wanting to help! As I said I can share some chunk. But this is very specific also
 It is map dedicated for better understanding of one highly specific philosophical study (about universals in main schools of tibetan buddhism) based on one particular book. And it is full of tibetan script. Right now I don’t have particular goal except maybe connecting it in future to other projects like that. So maybe I can try to implement some of those points which @eastgate mentioned in post above. But I don’t know how because I don’t know what will be useful in the future. Perhaps I can set dates of lives and places of some key persons, but I doubt it will be really helpful in this case.

35

A natural and valid concern. At the some time it will be sheer luck if someone else’s work will help if you don’t know what you want.

So, a different approach. It’s more conceptual at start but might save lots of start-over work. In your domain:

  • What are the primary sources, and how digitally accessible are they? There is a difference between copy/pasting (or even live-linking to) a web page as opposed to making notes on a parchment manuscript (or from the East, bamboo pages, etc.).
  • Does your work involve ‘close reading’? In some Humanities, analysis and review can pivot on very fine-grained annotations, where source’s phrase or even a word may the granularity of your notes.
  • into what sort of further description do your notes feed? Is the value in the annotations, or the latter input to further writing?

So, you can start consideration from both ends. “What is my raw material?” and “How will I use the insights of my annotation?”. The latter can help you take existing work in your domain, your or other people’s, and ask how might we best get from the source to the output scholarship (book, journal, blog, whatever). That stage may give you insights as to how your comment notes and sources and what additional metadata—information about the information—you need to gather.

Not does everything need to be done at once. You might collect 10-20 pieces of metadata (attribute values!) about a source, but you don’t necessarily want to start each new note with an enormous empty table even before you’ve recorded your thoughts textually. Plus, some of the data you’ll generate needs the presence of other notes to be possible to make it.

The pre-digital way of this would be to write notes on paper and abstract to written tables (or abstract in the mind). To do that now is to write into the $Text of a note. But if your ability to interrogate that text ends up as lots of .contains() queries, it is a bit like driving a sports car in first gear. Sure, you can get to your destination, but it could be faster and it look/sounds ugly.

I do think the notion of serendipity can be over-played, especially in the notion of increasing/promoting it. It does happen, but probably less fast than the rate at which we get better at a game by just plying it instead of thing how we might play it (practice normally improves performance). A view in Tinderbox is how you see the data in the file. What you can see in the view is limited by what is in the file. this is why other people’s maps are generally, in my experience, less instructive than hoped. Some are pleasing to the eye, but their real value is in what they show and often that is hard to see without the maps author there to explain.

Hopefully the above may help move you past the log-jam of wanting to see ‘the’ map that explains everything (depressingly the answer is a gnomic ‘42’). Instead, knowing what you notes need to capture will help reveal what to capture and what to visualise en route to your goal.

1 Like
36

Sounds terribly interesting.

37

I wonder if moving to a new, more descriptive topic, might be worthwhile. I believe we have some other forum regulars who’d be interested.

38

It is always pdf which can be copy-pasted, but on most excerpts I write down my own thought-process to better grasp and/or add some additional thoughts.

Yes, it is close reading.

Value is in annotations. Actually, I do it to aid my translation. To deepen understanding of what I translate. And it is basically an infinite process.

I tried to introduce attributes as I said, for example marking whether thoughts in note belong to nominalism or realism in western philosophy and some other attributes like that, but I still didn’t use it in further process to find something and so forth. Most of the time I really just search with find because I remember a term or concept name to which I want return in some situations. Or I just visually remember part of the map where it must be, which is also what I like about maps.

That’s good :slight_smile: But I forgot to tell that majority of notes written in russian with just quotations in english and tibetan.

1 Like
39

The language doesn’t matter much. Tinderbox’s text engine is Unicode compliant. As long as you and your readers understand the relevant text in whatever script, that is fine.

One wrinkle in the above is that when you write in a default text space, so the " key is auto-converted† to “ or ” on an English-language OS system‡ but « and » on a French language OS. This can se problematic if typing in Swedish on a Mac whose OS is set to German. But, such auto-formatting should not affect pasted-in content, e.hg. Cyrillic script from your sources.

Given that you are annotating via close reading§ it is probably personal choice whether you copy source passages into a note('s $Text) or simply link the annotation notes to the source PDF either via a File-type attribute link or as a link to something like a DEVONthink record or Bookends or Zotero, etc. You will notice that some storage/referencing apps create pseudo-URLs‖ allowing you to link to your source document stored/indexed in some other app.

How much text you use—all, some or none—from the source document is personal annotation choice. Thus you might choose to make a note as a proxy for the source text with a URL-type attribute holding a link to the source in DEVONthink or such. Or, you might make such a note and put the (relevant) source text there. Or, you may simply choose to put a closer source text excerpt at the top of your annotation notes. As you’ll see there are lots of possible styles of cross-referencing. Your own choice will likely reflect your work style and, degree of use of tech like reference managers, and how comfortable you are with making links to other materials.

Structurally, you may choose to put everything in one container (and thus all on the same map), or you might make all annotations about a single source artefact child notes of a note quoting (and/or linking to) that source.The Map view (the default in a new TBX document) is great for thinking/exploration, but if you need to export information, you may find you need to adopt an outline structure. Fear not, you don’t have to do this all at once.

You may also find that, compared to hand-written annotations, using other note attributes—be they built-in (system), or user—may be useful in capturing relevant metadata. for instance:

  • dates
  • people referred to
  • other works
  • concepts (i.e.e tags/keywords)
  • etc.

The neat thing about Tinderbox is you don’t need to the later before you start - the app is very supportive of adding that extra structure as you go. At worst you’ll need to go and back fill new attributes for pre-existing notes but that’s no great chore.

If you know you will search on a word/phrase but don’t know to what strand of annotation it belongs, then why not just try using the built-in Tags attribute? Such use makes it much easier to leverage powerful tools like Attribute Browser view.

But if you just want to write on the map and use it like one enormous manuscript, that’s OK too!

†. See Smart Quotes.

‡. For clarity the is the language settings in the macOS in use. Tinderbox uses the host OS’ conventions for quotes, number segment markers, date formats, etc.

§. This is a technique less common outside the humanities: see Close reading - Wikipedia for those unfamiliar with it.

‖. Some apps generate web-style links that work (only within your Mac) to open a resource with an app. For example, such a link from Bookends might look like this: bookends://sonnysoftware.com/179164.

1 Like
40

I mentioned this in context of sending my Tinderbox file here.

I usually paste an excerpt from the source in the beginning of the note and write my thoughts below. Linking is for correlated concepts.

As I said, I tried tags and some custom attributes. Also experimented shortly with attribute browser but didn’t still found it useful for now. I think mostly it is because I need to see connections between notes on the map (see context in which it is placed), not just all notes under some tag or attribute. Although I understand that it can be handy in some situations.
Again here is this problem of lack of clear example of usage of all that powerful features in context of some real project (their interplay and synergy) not just separate explanation or demonstration of particular features (not to underestimate yours, @eastgate and @satikusala wonderful and extremely useful explanations).

41

Personally, I do not it this way, as this pollutes the separation of concepts. I create 1 note with the source material and then I’ll create a child not to the source material to summarize my thoughts or thinking. I will then have prototypes and attributes on both the source material and my review material so that I can tag the notes. The child note will be linked to the source material either by an actual line and link type or by associated attributes, e.g., I may have an attribute $Soruce [as a set], so when I do an OnAdd to the Source all child notes get the value $Source=$Name(parent), or $Source=$ID(parent). This way, if I have move my review material around I can always associate it back to the source.

Do it this way also enables me to do multiple review notes that are easily managed for one source note. I can also associate my review notes with multiple source notes if desired.

I do this for lots fo reasons, but primarily to follow the path of atomization. By doing this, later, I can run an agent that says “give me only my source material,” or give me source material related to this value in that attribute and all review material that is similarly related. I can then also use export code to put source material and review material, along with their attribute values, in any layout/structure I want, e.g., linear table, side-by-side table, outline structure, a map, a timeline, etc.