Tinderbox
Tinderbox
12/20/2010 20:10
Summer's ending
08/23/2010 22:24
So the summer is about over. Another week and a half, and school will be starting. That means there’ll be a few more people around campus. But really, I’ll still be spending most of my time reading. So how did I do this summer? Pretty well. Got a bunch of research done. Went places and took pictures of documents, that means. Still need to read the majority of them and fit them together into a story. And an interpretation.
And I read a lot of books and articles. My big list is starting to look a little brighter. Light colors are good in this map -- they mean I’ve read the book (blue) or article (gray). I’ve still got a way to go, but in some of the core themes, I’ve done quite a bit of major reading. So far, so good...
And I read a lot of books and articles. My big list is starting to look a little brighter. Light colors are good in this map -- they mean I’ve read the book (blue) or article (gray). I’ve still got a way to go, but in some of the core themes, I’ve done quite a bit of major reading. So far, so good...
Getting to know Tinderbox
05/01/2010 08:30
Looking at the first few minutes of a presentation Mark Bernstein made at the Boston weekend event, I was struck by a couple of things. First, by what Tinderbox doesn’t want to be: powerpoint or mindmap (which is good, because there's something creepy about productivity tools that claim to be based on a profound insight into cognition supplied by pop psychology). Second, by the idea of incremental refinement, which is what Tinderbox does want to be a tool for.
That’s a fancy way of saying that a lot of the time, you’re working with information before you know what it means. I’m hoping to use Tinderbox along with Endnote as a way to store and organize things I’m working on, with an eventual goal of outputting information in the form of Comprehensive Exams, a dissertation, and a book. I'm not expecting spontaneous combustion, but I am hoping for flames.
(This is a rough map of books that appear in more than one bibliography of the core books I’ve looked at so far. I had to do this manually, but I assume once I understand the app., I'll find there's a cool agent that will do this for me. I feel like I'm in Hiro's office in Snow Crash. As I accumulate more books, I’ll hopefully begin to see patterns. I’ve already discovered some interesting things about who uses the same background texts and who doesn’t...)
I like the idea of knowing what went into a book, and where it fits in the “lineage” of a particular field. Rural History will probably draw from a couple of related fields. Ag. History and Enviro. are the obvious ones, but there will probably be books from Labor History, Political, and even general history that I’ll want to include. Everybody’s talked about the populists and progressives, for example. I’ll want to include things like Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R., which is a mainstream text. But wanting to include (or at least look at) a wide range of titles has resulted in an Endnote file that already includes 421 titles. So I need some way of thinking about these that helps me actually work my way through them!
(This is a timeline of major historians. It’s interesting, when in their lives they published the books I’m reading)
For the general US History reading list, I was trying to figure out who were the big names? People I need to be familiar with, in order to be credible. Some names were familiar, but others not so much. Looking at them on a timeline helped me a bit. One of my fellow students at UMass uses Beedocs Timeline to map out the events he’s working with -- I noticed there’s some info from the Boston event on exporting to timelines.
(This is a list of the letters I’ve transcribed or paraphrased so far. Interesting how they fall in time -- can’t see that when they’re just a set of files in a folder)
For the primary data, I haven’t done that much yet. But I was surprised to find out how my documents were distributed in time, which I didn’t know until I moved them around on the screen. I’m working with the surviving subset of a series of apparently daily letters written from one brother to another. It’s helpful to see that in some months (like November 1845), I have a lot of letters, while for other months I have none. I’ll be able to see when the writer was obsessing about money, and when he was worried about their railroad lawsuit, etc. And -- most importantly -- I should be able to find anything I need, rather than wondering where it was I saw that info...
That’s a fancy way of saying that a lot of the time, you’re working with information before you know what it means. I’m hoping to use Tinderbox along with Endnote as a way to store and organize things I’m working on, with an eventual goal of outputting information in the form of Comprehensive Exams, a dissertation, and a book. I'm not expecting spontaneous combustion, but I am hoping for flames.
(This is a rough map of books that appear in more than one bibliography of the core books I’ve looked at so far. I had to do this manually, but I assume once I understand the app., I'll find there's a cool agent that will do this for me. I feel like I'm in Hiro's office in Snow Crash. As I accumulate more books, I’ll hopefully begin to see patterns. I’ve already discovered some interesting things about who uses the same background texts and who doesn’t...)
I like the idea of knowing what went into a book, and where it fits in the “lineage” of a particular field. Rural History will probably draw from a couple of related fields. Ag. History and Enviro. are the obvious ones, but there will probably be books from Labor History, Political, and even general history that I’ll want to include. Everybody’s talked about the populists and progressives, for example. I’ll want to include things like Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R., which is a mainstream text. But wanting to include (or at least look at) a wide range of titles has resulted in an Endnote file that already includes 421 titles. So I need some way of thinking about these that helps me actually work my way through them!
(This is a timeline of major historians. It’s interesting, when in their lives they published the books I’m reading)
For the general US History reading list, I was trying to figure out who were the big names? People I need to be familiar with, in order to be credible. Some names were familiar, but others not so much. Looking at them on a timeline helped me a bit. One of my fellow students at UMass uses Beedocs Timeline to map out the events he’s working with -- I noticed there’s some info from the Boston event on exporting to timelines.
(This is a list of the letters I’ve transcribed or paraphrased so far. Interesting how they fall in time -- can’t see that when they’re just a set of files in a folder)
For the primary data, I haven’t done that much yet. But I was surprised to find out how my documents were distributed in time, which I didn’t know until I moved them around on the screen. I’m working with the surviving subset of a series of apparently daily letters written from one brother to another. It’s helpful to see that in some months (like November 1845), I have a lot of letters, while for other months I have none. I’ll be able to see when the writer was obsessing about money, and when he was worried about their railroad lawsuit, etc. And -- most importantly -- I should be able to find anything I need, rather than wondering where it was I saw that info...
