Large manuscript revision using Tinderbox

Tinderbox Tasks
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I am asking for advice about the possible use of Tinderbox in a large scale manuscript revision.

  1. The manuscript consists of 11 chapters totaling just over 400 pp.
  2. It is heavily footnoted.
  3. I want to bring it up to date with the most current secondary literature. This involves new/revised text and additional references.
  4. Most importantly, I want to be able to see/compare original text with my revisions.

Is there a way Tinderbox can be useful in this exercise. Or should one bite the bullet and build a process with Word (Ugh)? Would welcome thoughts.

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I would use Scrivener. It is what it is designed for.

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

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Based on my experience, there is no straightforward way to bring a whole chapter into Tinderbox, preserving the footnotes, edit the chapter, or even derive a revised chapter, and then neatly export something with footnotes. One of the main challenges is that Tinderbox does not make use of footnotes in a way that allows ready export to Word. There may be some workaround using Markdown and Pandoc to arrive at a Word file, but I should be unsure that this would work well.

What you are describing is not unlike a translation in which one begins with a source text and derives a parallel, translated text. This can be done in Tinderbox with a bit of finesse and in my experience it is worth the effort. (I am to document my experience for the forum at some point.) It is only worth the effort if you need to pore over the two texts in order to establish a clear relationship between the two AND you want to record that relationship. In my case, I broke the chapter down into pages, created a folder with that page number, and had two notes inside: one for the source text and one for the derived text. Tinderbox shines where you can link notes to the source or derived texts that record new thinking, new sources, etc. In my case, I had linked notes to record translation choices; linked notes on the interpretation of the text; and linked notes that would become footnotes. I exported my text to Word when I was done and then manually inserted the footnotes from the text of the linked footnote notes.

If I were only going to update sources and references, I doubt I would use Tinderbox. If I were also going to re-write a good deal of the text, I would consider Tinderbox.

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I would not use Tinderbox for writing, but would use it for managing notes about the manuscript as you go through the revision and reference updates.

Scrivener – yes.

Also, do a test run with Pages, which is a cleaner environment for composition.

And, having done many similar-sized manuscripts with Word, I have to say it is more robust than any of the above, despite the reputation.

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If you have Scrivener, I’d certainly try in that. I stopped using as the export was complex and poorly described†. Scrivener was, after all, designed for long-from writing.

Tinderbox can produce very sophisticated documents (see @satikusala’s workflow). But, from a standing start it takes a bit of set-up and commitment. Then again, that is right for tools of this type. Pick your methods and tools to implement it and once done, it is a powerful and bespoke.

Word, I’d agree @PaulWalters’ point that it is overlooked. If you know Word well it might be worth considering. However, it is yesterdays tech with several problems for writing long-form:

  • as WYSIWG, you are always working through weird render/style issues and these get in the way of writing
  • using multiple/nested lists have been problematic at scale since the '90s and AFICT rthat issue has never been fixed. When lists/auto-numbering, etc. go bad in large docs, it can be a start-over to get all working again.

I note to your point about there being a lot of references and footnotes. These need to be checked and either updated or replaced with the result correctly linked back to the text. Same for the footnotes.

Don’t completely overlook Overleaf. On the face of it, it is ‘just’ online LaTeX—not everyone’s first choice. But, Overleaf now has a ‘rich text’ editor mode (i.e. so not looking at raw LaTeX markup in the text) and I believe can now export to HTML or Word—noting that the export phase really ends with a format the next person in the chain.

Publisher’s staff are not generally (i.e. not everyone) noted for their software skills or for using up-to-date software. You might be using all the new tools but your publisher likely last learned about text editing in the 90s and likely still uses a copy of Word from that era as it is “easier for all” (i.e. for them): this can create challenges when submitting manuscripts. These issues are annoying and inconvenient, but unless one owns the end of the process need to be considered: few of us are free to say “I did my bit, the rest is somebody else’s problem”.

In summary, I think there are 3 phases to consider:

  • Ingest of the existing manuscript. How is ‘hidden’ data like the references captured in editable form?
  • Work/review. Does your chosen tool allow you to (a) do the tasks you need and (b) do so in a style where you feel comfortable and in control. Doing review in a tool against whom one is fighting is an unwanted extra layer of pain.
  • Output. If, having done all the work, you can’t export in the format needed for the next stage/next use of the work, then you’ve yet more work to do.

Just addressing one of these can be self-defeating.

†. OK, you could say the same for Tinderbox. :rofl: (Hopefully aTbRef nerfs some of that).

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I think Tinderbox is most attractive here if you anticipate a structural edit.

Absent that, I think I’d perform the revisions in the text processor you (or your publisher) prefer, but I’d keep notes on the process in Tinderbox. As you work, you’re bound to see future opportunities:

OK: I need to cite Cockett here. But I ought to remember that Cockett is also very pertinent to that section, later on, where I discuss late influences.

And you’re also likely to see issues to which you will want to return another day.

I needed to cite Cockett and Sigmund, and I’ve done that. But really, this paragraph is now hemmed about with qualifications and cautions. Maybe it needs to be two paragraphs? Or should I move the prevarications into a long footnote? It’s getting late: better to leave this to a day when I can start fresh.

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A missing part here, given citations (references) are in play is to consider where/how your reference manager † might help. I think that dovetails with @eastgate’s sage advice to be keeping notes as you go—in Tinderbox or wherever. In the same vein, we might note that Cockett is very pertinent but do we have the reference info for correctly citing Cockett? Doing such referencing entirely in output-format typeset form is tiresome and prone to error, especially as the number of references rises. Your 400pp of manuscript might have hundreds of references to add/check. Whether, per the final style the citations are made in-text or via footnotes is moot, you’ll still need the citation info.

†. If you don’t have a Reference Manager (RM) app, it’s never to late to start for this sort of work. Bookends is popular amongst the Tinderbox community, and has integration for Tinderbox, Scrivener and MS Word. But there are plenty of such RM apps (‘other brands are available’). Looking for a free RM app? Consider Zotero. All RMs have their quirks (a bit like text editors) so different apps fit different folks, and not simply over issues like price.

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Absolutely!!! I wrote my entire doctoral dissertation in TBX. I’m writing the 11th edition of my Mobile Marketing Essentials textbook in it. And, I write all my client reports with it. The templates I’ve devised, along with the footnote work that @mwra has built, along with bespoke attributes/action code/templates and some other artisintal tools to meet your personal needs, could most certainly handle the job.

If you’d like, let’s schedule a call, and I could propose some ideas for you. My Tinderbox 101 course should help, but you might also want/need some bespoke support beyond the community collaboration. I’d be happy to help

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Scrivener might work, but people lose all the value of attributes, customer templating, and the reusability of their atomic elements and hypertexting/transclusion insights.

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I agree. I think TBX would also be more attractive if you’re thinking beyond this project and you want to leverage the material for future work. I have several strategies I could share along these lines.

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David, you’re right in one way, i.e., when you first bring the chapter in TBX will not automatically parse everything out for you. This is the case because it has no way of interpreting what it is you’d want to do. Writing parsing stamps to facilitate the parsing is a straightforward process. Moreover, using other tools, like Obsidian, as an interim step can be extremely helpful, as Obsidaian will automatically transcode links into markdown, which you can then easily pull into Internbox manually or through watch folders.

In addition, there are several ways to handle the reading of citations.

I’d need to see the original text, but is suspect all is imminently doable.

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I have no idea what this means! Nor do I know if it is true … :grinning:

Tinderbox is capable of doing all sorts of things, but sometimes simple solutions are the best. There is a risk of spending a lot of time learning the program rather than doing the actual work. Scrivener has its complexities, but it is the simpler solution for this task. It also has some features that may be useful for rearranging material, like split screen, so you have different views of the same material side by side.

I wrote my PhD thesis using Scrivener in tandem with Bookends. Because I am a fussy writer and like to agonise over the flow of one sentence to another, I found Scrivenings mode to be a godsend. I could have every single sentence as a separate entity and move them around very easily until I got the flow that I wanted. Not everybody would want to do this, but it is one of the main reasons why I would not write a longer piece in Tinderbox. Sure, Tinderbox has many tools and features, but it does not have the features that I would want for this particular task. In short, I’m not sure I need "the reusability of ... atomic elements and hypertexting/transclusion insights" for revising a book – though I confess I’m still not sure what those are!

And Michael, I can only admire your turbocharged enthusiasm. Long may it continue!

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Precisely. I have huge admiration for Tinderbox as a tool (I’ve probably spent far more money on it over the last 15 years than any other software I’ve ever owned :smile:) but for the specific task in the OP, Scrivener is a much better fit than Tinderbox, as it has built-in features for dealing with and revising an existing Word document in exactly the three stages @mwra suggests: Ingest, work/review, output.

@wajakob: It’s too complicated a topic to detail in a post, but essentially you can import the original word document into the Scrivener project and have it automatically split it into its constituent chapters, sections, subsections etc, each of which can have its own metadata (status, keywords, custom fields), and each of which can either be viewed singly, or combined into an editable ‘virtual’ document on the fly (for example, to see all the sections dealing with a specific topic in one go, even if they’re not consecutive in the outline).

Your footnotes will be imported correctly and be converted to the Scrivener equivalent.

You can take snapshots of each document in the outline separately to compare and roll-back changes you make, and you can have both the original and your new version side-by-side in the editor (and can have an arbitrary number of other documents open at the same time for reference).

Each document can have individual reference links to other internal or external documents, as well as links that are globally relevant: when you click on these links their contents are immediately visible without leaving your text. Incorporating any new research document into the project is trivial. You have a direct link between your document and your Reference Manager – basically, you press cmd-y in your text, which opens, say, Bookends. You select the reference in Bookends, press cmd-y again and the citation is inserted into your text, in the format you choose.

Depending on how complex your final document is, compiling it back to Word can be as simple as pressing a button and choosing a default compilation format, but it’s also flexible enough to incorporate complex needs, such as integration with Latex, and that is inevitably more complicated to achieve. But many academics use Scrivener for exactly this sort of process and will be happy to give advice on the relevant forum.

Doing much of this may be possible in Tinderbox, but for much of it you’d be devising your own solutions to fit your specific needs – that is after all what Tinderbox is, a toolbox in which you’ll build your solution.

It’s feasible, but it will be an awful lot simpler in a tool which is designed to do this specific job. That doesn’t mean that Tinderbox wouldn’t be very useful in thinking about the task and taking notes on it, as @eastgate suggests, but the eventual revision and compilation will be much simpler in Scrivener.

If you’ve not already got a version of Scrivener, then they have a 30 day, no restrictions trial.

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I think I can elucidate here. There actually is some similarity here between Tinderbox and Scrivener. An early USP of Scrivener, a tool designed for writing(as opposed to office/word-processing) was the cork-board, where elements of the document could be moved and thus re-order the narrative. The underlying structure at work is the document outline that, in another Scrivener USP, can be viewed as a single editable text. Of course, Tinderbox has an outline view too, although the interaction style is slightly different.

So what are ‘atomic’ elements? Here, the outline (in both apps) is a useful reference. The Tinderbox note or the Scrivener outline item is this atomic element. Moving the element affects the document’s eventual output narrative (due to element outline order). In Scrivener, the relationship is tighter as it is designed for long-form text productions. Tinderbox’s hypertextual route’s mean the assemblage of an output is more flexible—though the latter is not a better/worse comparison (as it is comparing apples and pears). Of the two Tinderbox is more flexible if you need that extra flexibility. I suspect Humanities work does fine in either tool, but the more the subject matter moves to Sciences/tech, Tinderbox’s additional flexibility‡ may offer extra. Even then, don’t overlook subject matter or personal style of writing.

The real clear blue water lies between the likes of Tinderbox and Scrivener compared to 20th century work processors (word etc.) whose WYSIWYG approach inherently binds the view to the output render. So, where a section of text is in the document is where it remains until you cut/paste it to a different position. As a document grows longer, this becomes an impediment to easy overview/review—at least without external [sic] notes. For some the latter may suffice: deep knowledge of tool A may outweigh limited knowledge of a better tool B—unless one is open to learning a new tool. In truth, many of us are not up for that challenge: the better we know A, the more work learning B will seem. The tipping point is normally A’s inability to do something B can do.

Back to ‘atomicity’, I think both Scrivener and Tinderbox have this, with Tinderbox’s (for reasons mentioned) being much more flexible. Both apps take some configuration for your personal output goal. If you have both apps and prefer one, you’re fine. If you only have Tinderbox, I’d suggest you don’t need Scrivener unless you have a very Scrivener-related feature requirement.

FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and a resistance to non-trivial tool learning is there in us all and tends to silently creep into these discussions. To the person with (only) a hammer, using (only) a screwdriver can seem a hilariously improbable approach and vice-versa. Learning a whole bunch of new stuff to to better something we can do pretty much OK can seem like wasted effort, and so on…

I’d re-iterate that for any writing/review work involving references and formal citation work, then your choice Reference Manager (or not—you do have an RM tool, right?) is as important as that of your writing tool.

†. In part, I think Scrivener’s composite outline view feeds into the genesis of Tinderbox’s text pane view for multiple view pane selections. Tinderbox’s is not read/write, but (IIRC) Scrivener’s view doesn’t work off ad hoc outline selections (edit: my memory is at fault). However, app feature wars is not the point here. Rather, it is the opposite. I wish illuminate bridges between similar aspects of the apps as often users have both and what is done where is closely attuned to both task at hand and personal style. All too easily do we get lost in brand choice and forget what led us to our quest.

‡. True to its hypertext heritage, Tinderbox’s export’s support for ‘includes’, e.g. ^^include()^^, allows an assemblage of content that does not have to follow a strict outline. There is no better/worse here. Some folk need this, others can make more sophisticated output from their outline. still, horses for courses.

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I recently completed a 300 page book project with Scrivener, which is unbeatable when it comes to managing very large amounts of text and resources. But, alongside my Scrivener file, I used Tinderbox to keep my specifications up to date. I wanted to get an idea of ​​how many times I had edited and then proofread my manuscript.

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Dear Mark,

I was really pulling Michael Becker’s leg! (Not too hard, I hope!)

I think in his enthusiasm he has compressed some ideas that maybe could do with being expressed differently. It is not “atomic elements” that is problematic here, but rather the reusability of them, whatever that means, and I wonder why it might be perceived that such reusability is not possible in Scrivener. Similarly, we all know what hypertext and transclusion are, but what are “hypertexting/transclusion insights”? I’m a psychologist and psychotherapist, so I’m fascinated by the idea that hypertext and transclusion might have insights :grinning: . I know I (occasionally) have insights myself, and I’m pretty sure I had some while I was using Scrivener, so I’m not sure it is software-related.

I hope nobody takes the above too seriously!!

Cheers, Martin.

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Faulty memory, I’m afraid Mark. It does.

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@MartinBoycott-Brown

:rofl: I wrote a presentation in an academic study day several years ago. I asked the following question: Can a computer application support a clinical writing work? and, at that time, I really thought it was possible to have insights about clinical interviews using… Tinderbox and Map View. At least, that’s what I carefully supposed. There would be a lot to say about it. :face_with_spiral_eyes:

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Thanks for that, it’s a good while since I did anything of scale in Scrivener.

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@dominiquerenauld I wrote a presentation in an academic study day several years ago. I asked the following question: Can a computer application support a clinical writing work?

@MartinBoycott-Brown I’m a psychologist and psychotherapist, so I’m fascinated by the idea that hypertext and transclusion might have insights :grinning: .

This is a very interesting area, one on which I’m doing a certain amount of reading right now.

On the one hand, it’s silly to think of a notebook or Post-It Note “thinking”. Yet, we have the very convincing argument of “The Extended Mind”, which suggest that it’s actually quite difficult to distinguish memory from systematic note-taking:

Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. J. (1998). The Extended Mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7-19. doi:10.1093/analys/58.1.7; MacFarquhar, L. (2018) The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark. The New Yorker, March 26, 2018.

This gets tied up with some remarkable side issues. Nakokoji’s “Amplified Representational Talkback” can seem a vague and new-age concept in isolation, but set it beside the mathematical (and linguistic!) breakthroughs that accompanied the invention of written numbers (as a device to prevent accounting fraud, in Uruk, about 3200 BCE). The invention of natural numbers seems necessarily tried to the externality of writing. There is then the question of note-taking in animals (e.g. ants) and the whole question of animal cognition.

Ackerman, Jennifer. (2024). What an owl knows : the new science of the world’s most enigmatic birds. Penguin Books.

It is also worth recalling here the fundamental premise of hypertext: that the juxtaposition of two distinct, even unrelated, things that is created by the link can give rise to a third idea that is contained neither in the first nor the second. Uruk and owls are in dialogue, even if there were no owls at Uruk.

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