Re-organising already written materials

Hello, I am new to Tinderbox. I have written a dissertation which I would now like to re-organise in multiple ways to publish separately. Any tips for how to start such a project?

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A terrific question! Reorganizing and repurposing are some of the most beneficial uses I’ve found for Tinderbox, and we don’t discuss them a lot.

What’s your dissertation about?

As a first thought: don’t be reluctant to start out by getting your hands on the material itself — both the dissertation and any proposals, side-projects, or publications along the way that you have ready to hand. You’ll want to break this up into small, topical notes, and organize them informally: one key here is to have focussed chunks that are small enough to move around.

Avoid the temptation to sort everything at once into an elaborate hierarchy; group related things together.

Avoid the impulse to automate everything. It’s not a bad thing to get your hands on the information again.

Finally, I’m guessing you’re an academic, or academically-inclined. If so, you’re probably using a reference database like Bookends or Zotero. If not, you want to do that, and get it cleaned up. You’ll get years and years of benefit from getting it organized now, and it will also help keep your Tinderbox stuff connected to its sources.

Thank you that is so helpful. I will follow your advice and start by putting the material into the smallest chunks
I am definitely academically inclined. I am a psychotherapist and my work is on inter generational trauma lodged in the body.

You may also find our videos really helpful. These will help you organize your notes, e.g. with prototypes and attributes. Prepare them for publication, etc. As you go through the process, please do ask questions to the forum as this will help with prioritizing future videos. Also, Tinderbox can really be helpful with linking and mapping notes, e.g. constructs to to models and latent variables.

Looking forward to exploring this with you.

I do a ton of re-organization of notes. For me the key lies in utilizing attributes - they’re a low-cost way of re-seeing structure, as well as organizing groups on the fly. Combined with QuickStamps, it’s the best way to stretch your notes this way and that, looking for patterns.

Happy to elucidate if needed.

Thanks Art, I have started playing with attributes. Will see how I go.

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Cool - also note you can set up simple Agents to automagically group notes with like attributes.