(no subject)

[eirias]

I have been hard at work on making a wiki of my prelim reading so that my thoughts can all go in one place, which will be very helpful come exam time. I haven't totally kept it up to date, but the list of things I haven't read really is still much longer than the list of things I have read (*sigh*). Still, they're neat tools, and take much less mucking than an ordinary webpage.

I feel vaguely nerdy, in a Johnny-come-lately way.

Comments

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

"It's like my brain on a page."

Huh - that triggered a memory of an old DaP discussion about what sort of internal representations different people use when considering a topic. I think in words, so this wiki thing looks extraordinarily useful. But I seem to remember that a fair number of folks in that discussion thought in pictures, threads, or other non-verbal means. I wonder what most of them would think of using a wiki in this manner.

Come to think of it, I've seen the idea of a picture/symbol based wiki-like structure before, but only in science fiction. Check out Nancy Kress's Beggars trilogy - Beggars in Spain, Beggars and Choosers, and Beggar's Ride - especially (IIRC) the middle book, which contains such a system.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

IIRC, ukelele is one such non-word thinker.

What do you mean by thinking in "threads"? I first interpreted that in the "mailreader" sense (me? verbal thinker? never ;) ), and my thought was, a wiki sounds kinda perfect for that, actually; even *more* flexible since you can link to anything relevant. In a symbolic way I suppose it still works if you mean the "giant tangled webby goodness" kind of "threads," but such people would have to let words mediate for them.

Come to think of it, I've seen the idea of a picture/symbol based wiki-like structure before, but only in science fiction.

That's a really neat idea, and AFAIK it's totally doable with current wiki technology; I know you can use an image as a wiki link in the particular system I use at xwiki.com. I don't know about image maps, which would make it a really interesting project (e.g. you could have a photo of a person and if you clicked on the ear you'd go to a diagram of the ear, and if you clicked on the middle ear you'd get a close-up of the bones, etc), but it's such an old web trick I'm sure that *someone* has ported it to a wiki syntax.

[kirin]

I have to admit, as I was browsing through the nested topics in your wiki, one of my first thoughts was, "Ok, so where's the graphical topic tree / index / site map so I can see at a glance what all is here?" Guess I must have some visual thinker in me. ;)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been thinking of adding an outline-style bit to my bookmark bar on the side, but haven't gotten around to it.

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

No question that a visual wiki could be done if the images were there. The real catch is getting the images in one's head into digital format in a remotely timely manner.

As for "threads," it's actually a reference to a friend's homegrown role-playing game, in which the concept space of pretty much the entire world is contained in threads, which you can follow or trace back to see the story of a particular object/person/abstract concept, look for connections to other threads, drill down from general to specific and vice versa, etc. The really fun part was wiring one of these directly into reality, at which point you get a copy of the subject of that thread, as it applies to your situation. (How much/little you get was up to the maniacal GM.)

I'm not sure anyone really quite thinks like this. But thinking about it some more, the structure is ideally suited to some sort of hyperlink system. Again, the only catch is getting all of the information into text format.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Props to eirias's memory; I'm not about thinking in words. However, the organization of thoughts in a wiki mirrors my organization, although the representational medium is different.

I've read the first book of that trilogy (I didn't know it was a trilogy!) but it didn't mention anything like this, so it must be in the later book(s). Maybe I will go back to it.