Mark Bernstein
YaBB Administrator
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designer of Tinderbox
Posts: 2871
Eastgate Systems, Inc.
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Stepping back from the mechanics, let's think a bit about how we want to use these notes, and what that suggests for how we want to divide the texts and manipulate them. Let's take two examples from two fields.
Suppose we are studying medical care in the Tudor era by exploring the account books William Cecil/Lord Burghley during the months of his last illness. We have a list of expenditures with some annotation; so much to an apothecary, so much to a grocer, so much to an upholsterer At the outset, it's mostly a jumble. But every line once made sense: everything that was bought was bought for a reason. So, we want to keep everything, and maintain sequence and metadata for everything. But we also want to break things down by individual transaction, explore repeated transactions with the same vendors, or for the same things, or for things that turn out to be related. Explode is our friend here, and we're bound to use maps (for informal clustering) and agents (for more formal groups) as our analysis proceeds.
Alternatively, suppose we have been reading everything we can find on the policy intentions of Nero, starting with Gibbon and proceeding through to the most recent studies. Our interest is not so much in history -- what happened -- as in historiography -- the ways in which "Nero" has been used by political and intellectual movements in the recent past. Here, we've got thousands of pages of reading. But much of it is not very much to the point. Our need is not to marshall all the available evidence; rather, we need insight and we need telling examples, chosen from a great array of evidence. Here, we don't really need or want to Explode; instead, we're probably better off copying specific passages that seem useful and adding commentary or metadata.
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