Tinderbox Training Video - A Action & Export Code Working Session with Art Currim and Bruce Gale
| Level | Intermediate |
| Published Date | never |
| Tags | 4CKMEl, 4Cs of Knowledge Management and Exchange, Action Code, Agent Query, Agents, Attributes, CSV Import, Note-taking, Prototypes, Tinderbox, Writing, aTbRef |
| Video Length | 01:23:54 |
| Video URL | https://youtu.be/-_H8OUvJw9Y |
| Example File | N/A |
| Revision | 1 |
| TBX Version | 8.9 |
| Instructor | Michael Becker |
| Acknowledgements | Art Currim @archurhh, Bruce Gale @bmgphd |
In this lesson, we host a real-time working Tinderbox session with Art Currim, writer, and Bruce Gale, a clinical psychologist.
The inspiration of today’s session was Art’s desire to improve his understanding of Tinderbox and how he can improve his use of it within his research and writing workflow, and Bruce’s desire to find ways to integrate Tinderbox into his practice.
Art explains how he uses Draft, DevonThink, Numbers, OpenDock and other tools to capture his notes and produce his writing.
We discuss how Tinderbox is an exceptional platform for knowledge management, what I often refer to as the 4Cs of knowledge management and exchange (1:32~7:09). In this regard, Art shares with us his views on how Tinderbox specializes on emergent structure:
“I can throw a bunch of notes into it and then I can watch the structure emerged, can watch the form and template and form around a bunch of notes emerge.”
We cover a number of topics in this session:
- Importing notes into TinderBox with a CSV file, Art shows us how he imports his notes via a CSV (see previous lessons on this). He also shows us how he uses a cell in the CSV to specify the prototype he wants the imported notes to adopt (an absolutely wonderful “hack” that I’m going to use from now on). This lesson reinforces the value of massaging your column headers and data before pulling in your CSV. You’ll see in the video how we run into some formatting issues, which we’ll need to debug later to see how we can further massage his source files to improve the import reliability. (9:00~33:45).
- Unique file naming strategies, especially for prototypes (15:54)
- Creating an HTML table template to display notes (33:45~46:50) [Remember: if you want to learn HTML/CSS, check out www.w3schoools.org].
- Capture multiple notes at once in map view, hold the ⌥ key and drag (12:15)
- Using action code, running agents, specifically we discuss searching Tags using .format and .icontains to find keywords. (50:00~1:13:31)
- Apply agent actions to curate notes/populate attributes (1:16:02)
- The anatomy/metaphysics/metacognition—the meaning of attributes— we dig into what a note is and concept of attributes and how they function within TinderBox, and life (1:02:18)
- Creating a configuration note to manage a master search list (1:06:26)
- Using an attribute as a variable to feed into agents (1:03:18)
- Creating a prototype for agents and the use of the code note (53:23)
- Understanding the language of Tinderbox, its syntax (51:16)
As great as this session was, we still have so much more ground to cover. In a future session, I hope we can streamline the CSV important process, and show how the same action code we used in agents can also be easily employed as rules, edicts, links actions. and embedded into export code (more fun for later). I’d also love to learn from Art on the process of original note-taking and get insights from him on how to be a better writer. And finally, I can’t wait to dig into Bruce’s project to leverage Tinderbox to create and manage clinical reports.
There is so much fun to be ahead of us, please keep tuned in.
