I recently blogged a call for interest in Tinderbox applications for keeping track of people -- historical notes, fiction planning, or simply recording family lore.

http://www.markbernstein.org/Dec0801/ATinderboxTaskKeepingTrack.html

I'd love to hear from you if (a) you're interested in this area, (b) you have great ideas of how to do things, or (c) there's something in this area you want to do, but haven't been able to figure out.

Dear Mark,

I read your blog post with interest, as I will be starting a project very soon that allows me to do just that.  In the past I was involved in creating a website (I co-founded AfghanWire.com) which made me think about information architecture and presentation A LOT.

I've recently converted to macs and to Tinderbox and Devonthink etc, so I'm reassessing all my old habits as regards notetaking, website presentation etc etc.

I have several new projects, but all of them require me to keep track of a complex range of key players (and non-key-players) in Afghanistan's political landscape (for a history book I'll be working on alongside my PhD).  I have a feeling Tinderbox offers a long-term solution to a bunch of probems I had this time round (I'm just finishing one book which needs to go to the publisher soon) so I'm sure I'l keep you updated as to how I'm using Tinderbox in my workflow.

Once I'm a little further in, I'll probably send you some examples of the database as perhaps you might have suggestions?  The only think I've been wondering about is whether I could have got Tinderbox to publish the AfghanWire website without paying a web designer lots of money to put something together...  It seems that I could have just used the web-export function.  You can read a bit more about the construction of the website here:

(sorry it won't let me post the link as this is my first message. I'll repost in a sec).

One think I often wonder about, though, is whether it would be possible to integrate tools like i2 Analyst's Notebook or UCINet into Tinderbox.  It's far above my ability to programme and behave on the Mac, but I wondered whether there were possibilities...

Thanks,

Alex

Welcome, Alex Strick van Linschoten!

Afghan politics might well be a paradigmatic example of the task and its challenges.  A fascinating project.

Seems you're getting to exactly the point I was interested in: links.  There doesn't seem to be too much online about links, or in the manual, so I'm not really sure how I can use links to my best advantage.

I have a copy of 'the Tinderbox Way' waiting for me back in London which I'll read when I get back next week, so I'm hoping there are some ideas in there.  Does anyone know any good resources or examples where links are being used?  I suppose it's not really the links I'm interested in, but rather what you can then do with the links as an analytical function...

Thanks for this message.  I'm temporarily away from my Mac until next week so I'll check it out and get back to you in specific about some of the things I mean.  One of the main things I always wondered, though, is whether if I make a link between notes, whether I have to link back to the original note (i.e. what difference does it make whether notes are both linked, or whether one is just linked).  And, depending on what you choose, what does this mean for how you are able to do things later on?

Anyway, as I said I'll get back to you next week.  Thanks.

@Jeff (5 Jan). A default TBX has 11 predefined link 'types' (see here). You can customise these and add your own.  The customisable parts:

• Label name (the default TB link type is special in having label at all).
• Label visibility.
• Link line colou - as seen on Maps.

Here's an example:

Note how the user has added a new link type called 'special' that uses yellow for its link lines.

If you find yourself wanting the same non-default custom additional links in all your TBXs then that's catered for too - look at trying user configuration files.

Having taken the mechanics above onboard I'd see you creating new custom link types for each of the types of relationship you want to establish. Bear in mind the same notes can be linked more than once; using the same link type makes no sense but Amy might both link type 'sister' and 'competitor' to David. Where such multiple (parallel) links exist, in Map view remember that  toggling visibilty (Link Types palette, setting global to all links of selected type) can help keep your view clean.

Currently link creation is user-driven - i.e. manual - TB can't make TB links itself; past discussion indicates this might change in the future (i.e. if some condition were met, then a link might be created/deleted, but as I say that's not in TB at present. On export, codes exist to allow hierarchically links and the like to be created. on export to mark-up.

One other thought.  If you're spinning your wheels, do as others here have done and post a small TBX exemplifying your working environment. By all means sanitise personal data (e.g. names/numbers), but letting others see the sort of data you have will help with making better suggestions as to how TB can be used to improve it.

Another way to capture 'link' data can be in a user attribute.  All David's friends could link to him via an 'associate' link but it might be that you could simply have a Boolean user attribute FriendOfDavid (default- false), ticked in the notes of his friends. In the latter method, to find all David's friends you use an agent to look for $FriendOfDavid=true. You're just 'linking' in a different manner.

I am in fact using it for exactly this, in a more historical setting. It is genealogy of teachers-students, rather than parents-children, but much the same. TBX has been very fruitful for this, and will hopefully be even more so if automatic linking gets implemented, as is being discussed in another thread on this forum.

Another thing that would help a "genealogical" use along would be to have a way to organize, to "cleanup", the notes on a map according to dates entered into a date attribute, such that such visual links between parents-children (teachers-students) is relatively cleanly organized. I don't think this is currently doable (?), but perhaps it is something we might be able to request for using TBX as a genealogy outliner/map-maker?

One approach to Talal's cleanup question would be to set Xpos or Ypos to reflect the note's date, leaving the other map coordinate to indicate a different property (perhaps Name or Latitude).

Incidentally, Tinderbox 4.6 will make this somewhat easier.