Knowledge Paths
18 Dec. 2007
Oh, man. I found this excellent e-mail to Litza as I was cleaning out my Inbox the other day (to put the direness of my need to clean my Inbox into perspective, the conversation below is about 2 years old). I'm still really obsessed with this idea although it kind of fell by the wayside. On a positive note, I think a lot of other stuff that's floated across my desk the last couple of years gives me a few more words to explain it with and possible actually do it at some point.
Litza: What do you mean exactly by the web interface "allowing the presentation of multiple sources at once on the screen"? Can you give me an example where this is done? Do you mean data sources? I like the idea of showing full paths -- do you mean "downstream" paths (where the user can go) or "upstream" (where the user came from) paths? That offers some interesting possibilities and challenges.
Alexis: Well, right now, to follow a link to related information, you have to actually leave the site, or open something in a new tab. Why not click on a link and have a window on the same page appear, so you can look at things simultaneously? I mean, that's how people see connections between ideas. I don't think it's done anywhere else yet, although there are some people trying, in various ways, to create systems that do this (like Ted Nelson). I guess you could create a whole new system to do it, but you could also do it on the Net as is, using existing technologies as "complex" as CSS (kludgy as that would be).
Note: this idea is something I was trying to get at in a comment on the NYPL Labs site just a mere month ago. The screen should be a workspace, not merely a reader. In some ways 2.0 has made this much more of a reality, but rarely do interfaces allow us to manipulate the information itself - we simply play with the design of things. There are a few exceptions to this, mashups being a good example thats really starting to explode a lot more.
As far as the concept of a workspace, it is totally unnecessary but I would love to implement the above using touch screens instead of mice.
(...continued) As for paths, I am referring not to where users have been (although that is okay), but rather how ideas are connected. Kind of like a flowchart. And each part of the flowchart is a link to something about that, and when you click it it opens in the window you are looking at, and you can still see the path and the new data next to any other windows you have open. If you are talkin about, I don't know, text mining, you might want information on Natural Language Processing, spiders, mapping, neurology, XML and Java and show how they are connected, and let users look at all of them together. Not the best example, but it works for the time. And then if they want to get really excited about the XML angle, you could have a finer path to go into more detail about XML, with its pros and cons and history and examples and technical specs.
Note: I finally have a succinct word for what the fuck I am talking about here. I want users to be able to actually curate their own libraries.
(...continued) On a grander scale, what about a system where everyone could create these sort of thought-paths, and you could access anyone else's thought-path on a topic and pull the actual thought-paths into your site to supplement/expand your own? Like maybe you are good at broad overviews of things (text mining), but the finer details of XML are not your forte - just find someone who is an expert, and pull their thought path to your site for those that want to follow that particular thread.
Note: The curated subjects are modular and reusable, probably by using XML.