The 1945 Memex design also introduced the concept of "trails", a concept derived from work in neuronal storage-retrieval networks at the time, which was a method of connecting information by linking units together in a networked manner, similar to hypertext paths. The process of making trails was called "trailblazing", and was based on a mechanical provision "whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another", just as though these items were being "gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book"
Bush went so far as to suggest that in the future, there would be professional trailblazers who took pleasure in creating useful paths through the common record in such a fashion.
— http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/2/1/000015/000015.html
Various other links worth checking out:
Reference material and prior art is an important part of research and design work — and since research and design is what I now spend most of my time on, it's important to me to deal with all the different snippets I keep on collecting. I use two online platforms for storing things for later: Pinterest where my main visual references end up, and Pinboard for links to articles and interesting websites. I also take a lot of screenshots and store them all, permanently, in a folder on my hard drive.
In my experience, fractal nesting as a spatial navigation metaphor (folders) fails because fracticality thwarts orientation. Hard to hold a mental map of more than one level of depth. Works great as a contextual navigation metaphor though (links).
— Gordon Brander - https://twitter.com/gordonbrander/status/1320100221976678400
After this was working, the last thing missing was making connections between blocks.
Here the biggest inspiration was how vimperator (and similar plugins) handle opening links: you first hit f
which adds little tooltips around all the links with few letters, and type those letters to open the link.
I used similar mechanism for connecting blocks: you first hover over the input or output, hit c
, and then type matching letter to add that link.
First one, inbox.md
, is where the most interesting links end up, together with my random thoughts, waiting for a weekly review. I mainly append to that file through iOS shortcut. I can quickly share a twitter link, or jot a quick note in drafts.
id
to name the notes, I prefer human-readable ones, even if that means I sometimes have to fix broken linksThe main premise is there though — notes are short, they usually contain one idea, even if I can't name it yet (this also leads to interesting note titles, like spreadsheets might be a wrong model, or understanding requires effort). Notes are interlinked through direct links, and automatic backlinks (via muninn
cli tooling). If I have a bunch of notes which seem related in some way, I create index note to collect them together, enforcing a specific point of view. Single note can be in multiple different indexes that way (connections are usually better than taxonomies).
I edit my thoughts in vim, which allows me to easily view multiple notes at once, and with addition of muninn-vim
, to explore backlinks.
Typical thinking session looks similar to this: