"Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged, people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled."
Lovely and true...could become popular if it wasn't so hard to say. BTW If "intertwine" suggests threads and "mingled" suggests particulate matter, what sort of stuff gets intertwingled? Felt? XML? Vinaigrette?
The quote is from Ted Nelson, coiner of the term "hypertext". Here's an interesting Wired article on him, and his (in)famous project Xanadu. Here's a quick overview of the Xanadu model you might want to look at first. It's hypertext, but more complex than the version we employ on the web. Most notably it allows for unbreakable two way links (although blogs are getting the two way link thing with Movable Type's Trackback feature,) as well as building a copyright royalty mechanism into the foundation of the system.
I'm not having much luck saying more. Information is intertwingled, but XML fails (to the extent it does fail) by not recognizing this. XML is strictly hierarchical. This is useful for some things (inventories of airplane parts, say) but it isn't very good with messy real world data.
Jorn Barger's writings on why the semantic web won't ever happen would be useful here. He's talking about the same problem really. You could make an XML schema for, like I said, something like airplane parts. But try to make a schema to describe your circle of friends and the hierarchical approach quickly breaks down. Data doesn't line up so neatly. Definitions and meaning don't always flow in one direction from the root node down.
Instead, this fuzzy type of data (the real interesting data; the human oriented data) is intertwingled. It can't be conceptualized easily as a tree because there is no way to put one concept at a higher level of priority than another. Instead, Nelson imagined a "web" of connections to describe the relation of such intertwingled data. Meaning flows in all directions, not just top down.
Nelson strongly criticises the present WWW because of the brittle one way links. This makes it, I think, basically hierarchical in his mind, and ill suited for bringing out the n-way connection between things.
Or something like that. Very interesting stuff. And the question of why he failed (again, to the extent that he did fail) is very instructive to people imagining vast networked software projects.
Here's a Jorn Barger page that is sort of similar to what I'm trying to say. But there is more to be found there also. No time now for hunting...
Absolutely, & works on account of the profound solidity of the meanings of twine & mingle & single. "Word-meaning partakes of the natural complexity of language: the explanation of meanings is, rightly, an ordering of them for their better understanding, but not a simplification. Definitional simplification simplifies out of the linguistic body of meanings actual large quantities
of meaning." (Laura (Riding) Jackson,Rational Meaning, 225). Hell, my whole raison d'etre is little more than a plea for people to stop pretending that hierarchies,categories & sequences can possibly supersede any human meaning. Mirage Detroit, anyone?
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- jim 5-01-2003 7:24 pm
Lovely and true...could become popular if it wasn't so hard to say. BTW If "intertwine" suggests threads and "mingled" suggests particulate matter, what sort of stuff gets intertwingled? Felt? XML? Vinaigrette?
- bruno 5-01-2003 9:24 pm
The quote is from Ted Nelson, coiner of the term "hypertext". Here's an interesting Wired article on him, and his (in)famous project Xanadu. Here's a quick overview of the Xanadu model you might want to look at first. It's hypertext, but more complex than the version we employ on the web. Most notably it allows for unbreakable two way links (although blogs are getting the two way link thing with Movable Type's Trackback feature,) as well as building a copyright royalty mechanism into the foundation of the system.
I'm not having much luck saying more. Information is intertwingled, but XML fails (to the extent it does fail) by not recognizing this. XML is strictly hierarchical. This is useful for some things (inventories of airplane parts, say) but it isn't very good with messy real world data.
Jorn Barger's writings on why the semantic web won't ever happen would be useful here. He's talking about the same problem really. You could make an XML schema for, like I said, something like airplane parts. But try to make a schema to describe your circle of friends and the hierarchical approach quickly breaks down. Data doesn't line up so neatly. Definitions and meaning don't always flow in one direction from the root node down.
Instead, this fuzzy type of data (the real interesting data; the human oriented data) is intertwingled. It can't be conceptualized easily as a tree because there is no way to put one concept at a higher level of priority than another. Instead, Nelson imagined a "web" of connections to describe the relation of such intertwingled data. Meaning flows in all directions, not just top down.
Nelson strongly criticises the present WWW because of the brittle one way links. This makes it, I think, basically hierarchical in his mind, and ill suited for bringing out the n-way connection between things.
Or something like that. Very interesting stuff. And the question of why he failed (again, to the extent that he did fail) is very instructive to people imagining vast networked software projects.
- jim 5-01-2003 10:08 pm
Here's a Jorn Barger page that is sort of similar to what I'm trying to say. But there is more to be found there also. No time now for hunting...
- jim 5-01-2003 10:16 pm
Absolutely, & works on account of the profound solidity of the meanings of twine & mingle & single. "Word-meaning partakes of the natural complexity of language: the explanation of meanings is, rightly, an ordering of them for their better understanding, but not a simplification. Definitional simplification simplifies out of the linguistic body of meanings actual large quantities of meaning." (Laura (Riding) Jackson,Rational Meaning, 225). Hell, my whole raison d'etre is little more than a plea for people to stop pretending that hierarchies,categories & sequences can possibly supersede any human meaning. Mirage Detroit, anyone?
- frank 5-01-2003 10:28 pm