Bob et al. Bob, I am still to follow up on your references and material, and will shortly. But before they influence me too much, but before they do some thoughts on "contexts and complexity".
Personally I have spent most of my life not shying away from complex systems or problems, but jumping in their deep end. Capturing and manipulating data, knowledge and information often allows a continuing process of capture, abstraction - analysis and synthesis, but it can always start as complex as the systems we are looking at, the fact is some system are inherently complex and others look so, but have hidden simplicities, and some hidden complexities. Research demonstrates humans can juggle approximately 7 concepts in our short term working memory, in part one of the reasons we are so good at abstractions, because we can build representations of knowledge, Information and ideas including virtual or working ones into representations for use in our cognitive workspace. Once you can manipulate 7 appropriate abstract representations (of anything) at a time your capacity to address even more complex challenges grows, however is is still finite. The freedom of tiddlywiki lets us construct complex knowledge networks. But it also sometimes results in a cognitive load that is hard to digest. We need to use TiddlyWiki to help us capture and discover relationships and it can do this as well as the information structures we create in it. I think of tiddlywiki as plasticine for the mind, allowing us to model almost anything on it. The problem with contexts is there are possibly more potential contexts than there are nodes in any knowledge network. As a result we are often shifting contexts, views from different angles, as we explore our little universes we build. Once again we can quickly build universes in where we can face excessive cognitive load and find it hard again to draw hidden meanings from our universe. Fortunately the tools we can build in TiddlyWiki to "knowledge manage, the knowledge" help us in creating and solidifying connections, abstracting, summarising etc... However I believe this is the brute force approach, and in many cases it is the only approach. In a way it is a iterative application, of what I call "Okam's Electric Shaver" as opposed to the razor, because it uses "e-tools" or software. I believe this brute force approach is the source of most of human discovery especially in science, but in all disciplines. So you may ask if I call this the brute force approach do I thing there are less brutish approaches? Yes I do. Human evolution could not fit many things into our conscious cognitive processes, and anyway they were needed for other important things. Thus the human has both intellectual and even physical systems that aid in negotiating a complex varying world, with almost infinite details and contexts. We are not so conscious of them. We often see the use of metaphor in language exposing these subsystems, references to flavour and colour, or just "watch the ball", or remembering a face are all tapping systems that, lay to the side of our brute force conative tools. They have being honed by evolution over many millennia to do extra ordinary things which we are barely aware of. In the case of icons and pointers, and touch interfaces you can see how we extend into these domains to aid increasing the bandwidth between our minds and our devices. This is still a very rich vein to mine. Do you know about track memory?, first seen in horses and discovered in Humans this is a somewhat subconscious system we use to learn how to get somewhere or remember from where we came. On it small scale it helps us look ahead but tells us where to step, without looking at our feet, Especially needed by horses because they rarely see their back feet. At the larger scales it Guided Australian Aboriginals around millions of square kilometres of country, or helps me tell you where a new place is, relative to the places you know. Surprisingly complex paths can be remembered in only one transition of that path and the return is immediately possible. I am into bush walking, and surprise myself when I take a path I took once decades ago and I remember points, landmarks and rocks, I only saw once, and had not thought of again (to my knowledge), sometimes even "down to a few particular steps". Much of this knowledge only returns in the *context* in which it was laid down, often the last few meters. I propose we need to find ways to represent knowledge and information such that we can tap into other skills we have, in addition to those of the brute force cognition. Track memory seems to have context as part of its makeup, and can deal with large amounts of information. Perhaps we need to extend our metaphor of "Navigation" into a tool that can help us navigate knowledge? After all much came to Einstein when he imagined navigating his way, by sitting on a light beam. Tones/Anthony Muscio On Monday, 30 November 2020 at 14:31:12 UTC+11 [email protected] wrote: > Charlie, > > very interesting project and something along the lines I have been > thinking about for many years. I started by extending a data dictionary > model to cater for knowledge objects (my PhD dissertation) which lead very > quickly into how to describe the various complex objects involved and their > relationships to each other, with the user and with the application(s). > This led into how to explain what is going on in a knowledge based system > and in turn this required the addition of much more content than required > for the application itself, content of many formats to provide reliable > explanations of the application processing, the 'thinking'. > > Over the past decade, I have been focussing on oral history as a mechanism > for capturing the type of background information and the use of Toulmin > argument structures for representing the various relationships. We have > been working of publishing interviews with eminent visual artists from > Australia and South Korea using a simple topic map to provide the > navigation structure intra and inter interviews (http://cultconv.com). > > There is a great book, Mapping Hypertext, which details immediately the > issue with writing a hypertext style book (the book is written as a > hypertext). You very quickly become 'lost in hyperspace' and lose the > narrative. > > Throughout all of my research career, the issue that continually crops up > is context. I think this is the crucial component to keep things > understandable. Yet no agreed understanding of context exists yet we all > use it, manipulate it, etc. > > You can find most of my publications on https://www.researchgate.net > > bobj > > On Sunday, 29 November 2020 at 14:49:11 UTC+11 Charlie Veniot wrote: > >> Project: ORM-ish à la TiddlyWiki >> <https://intertwingularityslicendice.neocities.org/CJ_ORM.htm> >> >> I've just posted a blog entry about the project and how it really touches >> upon a very long list of my all-time favourite things: My new and >> ultimate intertwingularity project >> <https://www.intertwingularityslicendice.ca/2020/11/my-new-and-ultimate-intertwingularity.html> >> >> There are many links in that blog to a whole bunch of interesting (well, >> wildly interesting to me...) articles in that blog entry. >> >> Project status: I've been really busy experimenting with "forms" >> (widgets) for entering information, and am in the process of dividing the >> "coded fact" field into multiple fields. It will take me a while to get >> that done and tested well enough before uploading to my website. >> >> >> -- 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/53987ecd-4d22-4b13-8577-2ac467eff929n%40googlegroups.com.
