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tag bundlers: galfridus glass

smartipants: timbray

while compiling my neologisms list
i occasionally came across ideas
that had completely faded from my thinking

one of which
'action hypertext'
i'm happy to resuscitate

the w3c paradigm for the semantic web
is approximately beehive-like
every webpage a hierarchy of containers
to be filled in by worker-drones
presumed to know in advance
exactly what they want to say
and how it fits into the rest of the web/site

but action hypertext is the opposite of this
each author an indeterminate jackson-pollock splatterer

each new webpage starting from scratch
with no clear idea where it's coming from
or where it's going
rather
freeform blocks of text
with freeform styles of separation between them

textblocks accumulating
more or less intentionally
in the course of never-finished web exploration

visits to un/familiar sites
search patterns un/successful
articles read skimmed skipped bookmarked
links saved shared discussed updated

so each of these web-actions
can be seen as an item in an ongoing stream
that should be archived
and re-traceable

and all the usual choices
for dealing with the results of these web-actions:

forget it, shred it
save it, share it, debate it
add it to your to-read list
subscribe to its feed
set a tickler-alarm for it
announce it to the world
link it from related pages of your own
etc etc etc

all these usual choices
should be offered in a standard
dispose-palette
that action-authors habitually consider
when dismissing any action-result

 
 
 
 
 
.

since no organism has perfect understanding
the most important part of spreadsheet synching
is the accommodation of anomalies

messages theat defy existing conventions
exceptions to aristotle
jumping out of the normal rules of the game

to ignore them could be suicide

so evolution must have made provision
for responding without thinking

comprehansion =0
importance = ?infinity

so harold bloom makes 'strangeness'
his primary criterion of canonicity
(or better
enduring rereadable irreducible
strangeness)

there are more things under heaven
stranger than we can imagine

now in the early 21st century
this fringe attracts the transgressive
taboo kinky sex
insane drug psychosis
occult magick mystical
violence sadism intimidation
extrasensory extraterrestrial
satanic
conspiracy

david lynch, x-files

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

john casey frames his
1989 national book award winner
'spartina' as the struggle of a
poor unhappy but ethical rhode island local
(dick pierce)
to purloin the secret of happiness from
the happy but unethical wealthy tourists
disgnated early in the book
as the 'players' (unethical)
vs the non-players

his mata-hari accomplice
is a welthy tomboy
who's attempting to jump ships
from tourist to local
(inspired partly by her admiration for pierce)
by playfully taking the job of game warden

early in their affair casey writes
"He watched her laugh get the better of her,
and he felt a current of pleasure
he'd never thought of looking for."

on one level this metaphor
echoes pierce's expertise in finding fish
by understanding sea currents

but at a higher level it echoes
the highest task of the novelist:
to reveal unexpected currents of human motivation

in the synchronising-spreadsheets metaphor
this is the highest level

pierce is trying to reverse-engineer
the hidden formula
that makes players happy

while casey offers all readers
a chance to synchronise
to that same formula
via pierce's process of search

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

at our current primitive level
of electronic database evolution
synching has to obsess on timestamps
so as to avoid clobbering
newer values with older

implying a discourse pattern/
data format like
(topic, olddate, oldvalue, newdate, newvalue, comments)

but in human communication
everything else is normally subsumed
into (newvalue)
with even the topic
cited as obliquely as possible

fast bright hip slangy
as opposed to
dull literal prosaic discursive

for discourse is first of all
a status display
omitting everything 'beneath' you




alternatively
real human discourse
is almost entirely
trivial to the point of irrelevance

tom vs katie
britney's shaved head
sports and weather after this

because discourse is secondarily
just a social glue
like apes' grooming

with silences correspondingly awkward
ideally filled with
anything effervescent
style before content
eg even tall tales




on the Net
we can subscribe
to newsfeeds on topics we choose
from sources we choose
(someday) at levels of detail we choose

conventionally blogged in reverse order
so we don't have to keep explicit track
of the last item read
in each feed




humans also routinely
sin against truth
preferring prejudicial
'target values'
to actual values
consequently ignored

 
 
 
 
 
.

we can posit a series
of levels of significance
for database synching

least significant would be synching
the values of attributes
for particular instances

(each instance gets
a record or a row
each attribute
a field or a column)

then slightly more significant
the addition or subtraction
of whole row-record-instances

then adding or editing
attribute-field-columns
that apply to all record-row-instances

and finally
whole new database/speadsheet/tables
with new systems of attribute-field-columns
appropriate to a whole new
object type

and in object-oriented systems
these objects are associated too
with methods

but more generally we might rename
'methods' as 'story skeletons'

each object type participating
in a usual range of stories

object-creation stories
object-change stories
object-spawning-new-objects stories
object-destruction stories

and a whole universe of
object-relationships-to-other-object-types stories
most conveniently sorted
into a local copy of the object hierarchy
(ie a fractal thicket)

 
 
 
 
 
.

two rhetoric books i'm finding useful:

"a theory of discourse" (kinneavy 1971)
"patterns for a purpose" (clouse 2003)

the latter proposes eight basic essay-patterns
(and i'm now substituting
spreadsheets for
yesterday's databases
so we can 'synch'
rules/formulae too)

1. description (database dump without chrnological sorting)
   
2. narration (ditto with chronological sorting)
   
3. exemplification (generalised rule/formula with descriptive or narrative examples)
   
4. process analysis (synching rules/formulae for future applications)
   
5. comparison-contrast (explicitly synching two spreadsheet regions)
   
6. cause-and-effect analysis (synching rules/formulae for past applications)
   
7. classification and division (synching the vocabulary for descriptions of ranges)
   
8. definition (synching a single vocabulary concept)
   

kinneavy tries to survey
rhetorical patterns at every level

some micropatterns (cf recent post Discourse as lists):

(short, long) eg synopsis/abstract followed by fleshed-out presentation

(long, short) eg summary at end

(parts, whole) eg (A, B, +, A+B)

(whole, parts) usually short-whole followed by longer-parts

(not-A, B) standard debate micropattern

(A, not-A) fair and balanced

(zoom-out, zoom-in) eg panorama with gradual increase in detail

(zoom-in, zoom-out) novels usually grab you via a closeup they only gradually contextualise

(hook, line) general attention-grabbing

(light, heavy) lead with a joke

(aux, main, aux) eg webpages where bodytext is surrounded by html-junk

(metadata, data) incl eg (date, title, byline)

(abstract, concrete) or (general, particular)

(old, new) cf (not-A, B)

(A?B) exploring uncertain relationship

(claim, proof)

(try, try, succeed)

 
 
 
 
 
.

oldfashioned
database report generators
could easily turn each database record
into a lump of lo-tech prose

[marge simpson] is [married] with [three] children,
lives in [springfield]
and has [blue] hair.

by the ai complementarity principle
an equally lo-tech
natural-language-comprehension program
could turn this prose
back into database-ese

and some unknown percentage
of real natural language in the wild
must be no more complicated than this
if we could just exhaustively compile
the necessary hidden databases

but of course
much more often
than full database dumps
we feed each other
synchronisation updates

what important recent changes
might the other
not yet have registered

and the whole discipline of rhetoric
might just be footnotes
on how this synchronisation can be achieved

 
 
 
 
 
.