Hi all,

I'm new to TBX-- have made a couple small investigations, and it's already very useful. Now, I'm trying to figure out how to use it to solve a very tough nut. Any hints, and pointers to appropriate tutorials, screencasts, or whatever, much appreciated. I do have the tinderbox tutorial files, but don't really know what to do with them.

OK, here's the project: I'm working on a book (a comic book, actually) about how various radio shows craft narrative. I'm talking to up to 8 or 10 shows/producers, some for 30 or 40 hours, some for more like 1 hour. There's an obvious approach to the material, which is chronological. touch on each of the stages of work, and talk about how they fit into the overall narrative project. It's got drama, a ticking clock, the kind of stuff you want to move the story. But it seems to me the book will be more powerful if there's a way to organize it ALSO via thematic concerns, i.e. the role of "voice" in radio narrative.

To reorganize solely on that basis, however, could sap the book of narrative drive. So I'm trying to figure out how to organize notes derived from interviews and research that have complex layers of information: the who/what show part, the what stage of the process part, the what thematic point does this make part, the how does this connect to other shows' way of working part...and then figure out how to look at it in different ways, foregrounding one element or another, and then organizing info based on that.

I've found and tried the Mark A clarify on "note reviewer" http://shoantel.clarify-it.com/d/tc2qag, and I'm thinking of duplicating that tag idea with other criteria: show title, staff members, etc. Although typing that, I'm thinking, shouldn't they all be tags?

Another specific question: as I derive scenes from interviews, I'm tempted to make notes that are children of the raw interview transcription, and figure out some way to have them automatically take on the same staff, date, show, etc. But then I can't move this stuff around on the map, because it'll be nested. And also, can't figure out the action language for the OnAdd box: $Staff= ???. If I do figure this out, and then later move the note, will it retain those attributes?

Anyway...as I said, newbie. Sorry to ask so many questions at once. If there's anything out there to point me in the right direction, please post.

thanks.

Oh man, Mark, you're too fast! I just edited my first post while you were writing back.

Yes, thanks, I'm THAT Jessica Abel! Very flattered. And yes, I'm working on an expanded, much much longer version of/successor to, Radio: an Illustrated Guide. Phoebe uses TBX? Very cool. She's such a smart thinker. I might call her to get her take.

Anyway, the specific bit I added, which contains more of an actual question, is this:

"Another specific question: as I derive scenes from interviews, I'm tempted to make notes that are children of the raw interview transcription, and figure out some way to have them automatically take on the same staff, date, show, etc. But then I can't move this stuff around on the map, because it'll be nested. And also, can't figure out the action language for the OnAdd box: $Staff= ???. If I do figure this out, and then later move the note, will it retain those attributes? "

I have done the make-piles-on-a-map thing, and it's great. Totally helped me nail a series of blog posts. But I'm at a loss as to how to even bring notes into TBX this time--there's so much material, I don't know where to start. Thus looking at structural things that might help me suck notes out of the reams and reams of semi-transcribed, um, STUFF I have. I will read McPhee's article. Haven't yet. I have to take a break on this anyway. I'm going cross-eyed!

thanks--

Jessica

I've found Tinderbox a great tool for extracting and organizing ideas from longish unstructured transcripts so I thought I'd chime in here with some ideas that have worked for me. (I'm a user without a technical background.)

Quote:

One easy approach I've used is to add as many user attributes as needed, say $Staff and $Show. Open the note that contains the raw interview transcription, make $Staff and $Show key attributes, and fill in the values that all the future children notes should have for those attributes.  Then in the OnAdd Action box of that (transcription) note, put:

  $Staff|=$Staff(parent);$Show|=$Show(parent)

Then whenever a new child note is created, or a note created elsewhere is moved into that container, Tinderbox will add the values it finds in the parent (transcription) note to the new child note if the child note does not already have values there (just change the |= to = if you want Tinderbox to always overwrite any existing values that might happen to be there).

Quote:

Yes, indeed. You can leave the notes where they are and work with them there as Mark A illustrates. You can also move them and they'll keep the values... unless you don't want them to keep the values, in which case you can easily change them with other actions.

Those who prefer more visual and spacial cues and like everything on one big flat map, and have enough screen space, can also just link newly created individual notes to a transcription "source" note and start organizing things that way. Tinderbox provides ways to pull the values from a source into the user attributes of individual notes linked to it, if that is needed later at some point.

Couple of other thoughts:

The Explode feature is really handy for breaking up long transcripts into more manageable chunks and extracting themes and ideas from them.

And if some interviews are in audio or video form, Tinderbox can easily link (via a small AppleScript) to specific time spots within an audio or video.

I like the notion of working simultaneously on map and outline. I think that may help.

Great idea, too re: using explode, and linking to time codes. Sumner: do you have a script you use to do that?

I'm still deeply in the weeds on this, but it's so great to have this forum to turn to!

Thanks!

And if one doesn't like the iTunes library for taming video/audio sources in sprawling projects, here's a way Tinderbox can work with QuickTime Player.