Josiah, I wrote my two recent "speaches" directly into the Google group web interface. I'm collecting them (in the first instance) by using a new gmail account to sign into the group. I decided to separate my TW related activities from everything else that comes into my gmail account.
I decided to do this after reading the post on problem solving [1] and following the link to the Thomas' TW [2]. I liked the mix of ideas -- Borges, TRIZ -- and the context. I wanted to add to a hypertext by responding to the forum post directly and evoking ideas from the wiki in a more ambiguous way with a thought of filling in the gaps later. I was also thinking of TiddlyWiki's identity from a very literal starting point: a non-linear personal web notebook [2] especially the "non-linear" bit. The SiteSubtitle or TiddlyWiki.com has constant for may years and I made a speculative leap: the people who use TW want to use a non-linear personal web notebook. At very least they are not put off by the text. I felt liberated by realising this and started to write something in a more experimental way, one which links to my new gmail account for a project I started just Before Lockdown (BL) -- The Cuckoo and Caddisfly). I chose the name Cuckoo and Caddisfly for a response to a call for artists to propose a structure in a woodland garden. I read Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" on night in the period I was paying attention into the brief. A "secluded house" is mentioned in the text, and the location for the proposed artwork was once part of an estate connected to secluded house. The brief emphasised "spirit of place" in garden design and asked for consideration of the garden designer and his client. Non-linear thinking (and texts - is it best to treat them both as the same thing?) can be seen "fork" in a garden path. James Russell's -- the garden designer in question -- original intention was to surprise people walking though an English woodland in spring by a bright optimistic signal that spring was on its way: a flowering rhododendron. Once a wow -- and still pleasant to look at -- the plant now has a network of sentiments attached to it and these seemed to come it mind. If the plant were a Tiddler in a TiddlyWiki I imagine there would be [[links]] to other tiddlers and there would be tags. I got thinking about non-linearity in tags, hierarchies and missing tags in hypertext. How could garden design evoke such a thought? I thought of the mis-match between the accessibility and complexity associated with walking round a garden compared to reading Borges. A few years ago I visited a garden explicitly designed with complex ideas at its core. The Garden of Cosmic Speculation brings idea from physics and the history of ideas into a post-modern context (one co-creator wrote books on post-modern architecture). It struck me that the wiki - hypertext - garden metaphor could work both ways, at the same time. In TiddlyWiki we have "missing links" and "orphans" but we don't have a way of tracking hierarchies of tags. We can have a tiddler supported by multiple tags and some of those tags might be intended to mark position in a hierarchy. Jumping from a tiddler to a tag and then to another tag is a more difficult navigation than following the same number of links. Going up and down the ladder of abstraction only makes sense when there are small visible steps. I was thinking of situations, mechanisms and behaviors to make hyper-textual leaps up the ladders of abstraction and then along a few forked paths. And the other way, trying to trace a way down to solid ground from a far out thought. In my Cuckoo and Caddisfly system I brought many concepts together under a new-to-me concept. I stumbled across the extended phenotype concept, the cuckoo and caddisfly feature in explanations of it. The garden in the brief holds Tai Chi classes in the walled garden zone. I thought of moving meditations in a garden, martial arts where pretending to be insects and birds are acceptable behaviours. Would it be similarly acceptable to think and dream in a garden with a mind charged with ideas from modern science and literature or would it be viewed as too strange, obscure and ... pretentious!? Here, on this thread and the "problem solving thread" I decided to experiment with using a context to develop my own ideas. Its a bit like a cuckoo laying an egg in a next that doesn't belong to her, but also like a caddisfly larva which uses material found in its river-bed surroundings to build its home [4]. I thought I'd build a hypertext from within some boundaries starting with two forum posts and the links from them. Forum posts and links to examples of TiddlyWikis form a set of hypertexts within the TW community setting. I was thinking the forum posts I made could be starting points, I'd then bring the text I wrote into a TW. The highest level tag can be seen as those made under the cuckoo and caddisfly gmail account, then there is plain text with links and then -- hopefully -- a TW that fills in the gaps. I am conscious that in other context posts like this would be way off topic, and I wouldn't normally make them in TW. But I took the idea that users are by definition non-linear friendly and there may be some value to readers. I am most grateful for the TiddlyVerse for sparking my imagination. Like many folk round the world I've not been getting out much recently... perhaps I've completely lost it! [[peace]] Alex [1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlywiki/tTUKcHOObE0/VsWxm65eBgAJ [2] http://thomasteepe-archiv.de/ [3] https://tiddlywiki.com/#%24%3A%2FSiteSubtitle [4] https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/07/hubert-duprat-caddisflies/ On Thursday, 18 June 2020 01:02:42 UTC+1, TiddlyTweeter wrote: > > Alex > > I hope you are collecting your "speeches" somewhere! :-) ... by the > neatness & footnotes I'm assuming you wrote this in a wiki? Yes? > > Best wishes > Josiah > > On Wednesday, 17 June 2020 22:53:44 UTC+2, Alex Hough wrote: >> >> Tony said something on the thread that Thomas started to share his TW on >> the subject of problem solving: "its molding clay for the mind"[1]. I think >> these type of user are the ones Birthe identifies as the "many that we know >> nothing about." >> >> Looking back into the history of of TiddlyWiki there have been some >> serious and high profile computer scientists such as Joe Armstrong. In his >> talkwith Jeremy "Intertwingling the Tiddlywiki with Erlang" [3] he >> starts by talking about Ted Nelson a pioneer of hypertext which Jeremy >> picks up on later in the talk. >> >> Steve Schneider has used TW to teach hyper-textual and interactive >> writing. DesignWriteStudio [4] is a freely available resource built using a >> TiddlyWiki to help explore hyper-text and interactive texts. An early >> example of his work using TiddlyWiki is "Companion to Web Campaigning >> Kirsten >> A. Foot & Steven M. Schneider MIT Press, 2006" [5]. There is a paper on >> TiddlyWiki being used as an interactive note pad to help teach science. [6] >> >> Joe Armstrong talks about "all in oneness" and from reading his GitHub >> hosted TW he likes the fact that TW is a Quine ("a curiosity of computer >> science", says Jeremy in the talk), putting it at the top of list [7]. >> >> I imagine that "those who we know nothing about" may include those who >> have come to TW with previous interests in the fundamentals of hypertext >> writing, computer science and research in general like Joe and Steve. >> >> There's a long list of professional / expert developers with a passion >> for open source development. Eric Schulman is without doubt the longest >> standing example here. The developers coming and going over the years tend >> not to be those following the to the latest fads and trends, perhaps >> because TW is not a technology which lends itself to commercialisation in >> the same way as being a master of a particularly in demand framework. I >> think many developers don't get TW, but those who do seem to be those with >> a deep understanding and application of the elegance of design. >> >> There is at least three doctors: Saq, Rizwan, Abraham. A missionary (Dave >> Gifford) and a Mohhmaed chemical engineer. These people have become highly >> proficient TW developers. Saq talks about learning to code using TiddlyWiki >> in the recent Hangout [8]. There are some more hangouts planned -- >> currently on hold (get well soon Jeremy!) -- but they are something >> TiddlyWiki fan like myself are quite excited about. >> >> >> I think the best way of finding out about the users of TW is probably to >> start using TW and explore the eco-system. Because TW is an off line >> technology without data collection by design, I think traditional methods >> of analysis might not work so well. The community is small enough to get to >> know regular contributors and the issues they try to solve. >> >> >> >> Alex >> >> >> >> >> [1] http://thomasteepe-archiv.de/ >> [2] >> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/tiddlywiki/tTUKcHOObE0/VsWxm65eBgAJ >> [3] >> https://www.softwaretalks.io/v/6705/joe-armstrong-and-jeremy-ruston-intertwingling-the-tiddlywiki-with-erlang-code-mesh-ldn-18 >> [4] http://designwritestudio.com/ >> [5] >> https://web.archive.org/web/20061103082226/http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/0262062585/WebCampaigningDigitalSupplement.html#%5B%5BWelcome%20to%20the%20Web%20Campaigning%20Digital%20Supplement%5D%5D >> [6] >> http://people.sunyit.edu/~krieseg/IDT590/Scrapbook/data/20111205115236/4-ithet-2006.pdf >> [7] https://joearms.github.io/#Index >> [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvnqgfvohfM >> >> On Wednesday, 17 June 2020 19:13:05 UTC+1, Birthe C wrote: >>> >>> How would we know? Maybe the people here guess some numbers, but in >>> reality TiddlyWiki is used by many that we know nothing about. >>> >>> >>> Birthe >>> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/bfd080d6-a457-44fa-9f1a-32b7d7f251cfo%40googlegroups.com.
