Extending Tinderbox for Textual Analysis
Friday, June 19, 2009 at 8:47AM Tinderbox is developed and marketed by Eastgate Systems as "The Tool for Notes". It is a notetaking tool, an outliner, a content management system, (and more), with a flexible and extensible attribute system that gives its users power approaching a personal database management system.
In this note, I'll first introduce how I use Tinderbox, and then describe a functional extension to Tinderbox that would add significant value to anyone who closely studies extant texts, such as:
- linguistic analysis
- literary criticism
- law
- biblical studies.
The metaphors by which I use Tinderbox
What attracts me to Tinderbox, as a knowledge worker in general, is the ability to seamlessly combine visual-analytic, data-analytic and textual-analytic modes of representation together with programmatic facilities to enable searching and large-scale data manipulation.
The basic metaphors for Tinderbox are:
1. Tinderbox as a database.
2. Tinderbox as a semantic-network.
3. Tinderbox as an outliner.
4. Tinderbox as simple UI-builder (workflow mechanism).
My primary metaphor is Tinderbox-as-a-database: Tinderbox Notes are Records; the Prototype as Type (Table); the Agent as both a Query and Data Manipulation Language.
Once data has been assembled in a database-like fashion. I seek to structure the data through analysis. This type of analysis seeks to classify like-with-like. Sometimes I use attributes (usually boolean or set attributes) applied with stamps. When I'm being informal, I use colors. When I'm tentative, and not yet ready for over classification, I switch into map view and use spatial and visual cues to arrange the data and record 'observations'. Relations between various pieces of data are signified through links.
Once the data has proceeded a certain way, I use agents to pull out groupings for further analysis. Observations, hypotheses, etc. become new notes.
When the research is nearing write-up, I assemble existing notes, create new ones, and generally use Tinderbox as a standard outliner.
As an aside, I also use Tinderbox as a simple workflow-driven UI-builder. For example, I have an "application" that presents me with a text to study each day. It's implemented by me scheduling in the texts for the next month, by date. Each day, I open the Tinderbox document, it shows me the text for the day---highlighted in yellow. When I've recorded my observations in the note, the note turns black; excepting one day per week in which it turns gray.
The desired metaphor - Tinderbox for Textual Study
The new metaphor I'd like to add is that of Tinderbox as a tool for textual study.
In this metaphor, we have the following components:
1. A Text. The text that informs our study. This is like the contents of a Tinderbox note, excepting that the words are not "ours": they are the topics of our study. Also, there is often a need for referencing particular features in this text: page and line numbers in legal texts; line numbers in poetry; verses in biblical study. Multiple texts comprise a corpus.
2. A Textspan. A Textspan consists of a span of a target Text, i.e. a point at which the span begins, and a point at which it ends. Textspans are like current Tinderbox notes, with the additional property of their referencing a span in a Text. Applying a Textspan to a Text enables some unique visual properties: e.g., one could use a Textspan to cause the spanned text to appear as a different color, or to have an underline, or a double or triple underline, to have a straight vs wavy underline, etc. Textspans inherit from Textspan prototypes just like Notes inherit from Note prototypes. In a map-type view, a Textspan can be represented as the span-across-the-text and as a callout to the "note body" (like Microsoft Word 2003 comments).
When you open the note for the Textspan, at the top of the note, you see the underlying text which comprises the Textspan. Should other Textspans exist within the current span, they are visible. Thus you can recursively navigate Textspans, allowing the linguistic notion of Rank to be implied.
3. An overlay. The Text, and any Textspan, has the notion of an overlay. A Textspan belongs to an overlay. I can switch-on or switch-off overlays. (Some overlays may be useful when semi-transparent.) I can use agents to gather textspans into overlays. Using overlays, I can execute multiple studies on the one text. For example, one overlay could contain my generic structure analysis; another contain my grammatical analysis; and a third my cohesion analysis. Then I can arbitrarily switch them on-and-off, or adjust transparency, to see how my multiple analyses inform each other.
4. A concordance. A concordance is like an agent, excepting that it searches Texts, and generates not aliases, but Textspans. The output of a concordance is list of Textspans (not a list of aliases of Textspans). The Textspans produced by a concordance can, optionally, be manually adjusted as to their beginning and ending.
These concepts would significantly enhance Tinderbox's utility for domains involving textual analysis.
Updates:
1 July, 2009. Affordance Critique extends this discussion with additional detail.
Reader Comments (220)
Loryn: I couldn't agree more. This would be a fantastic addition to Tinderbox and greatly enhance my ability to use it in my law practice.
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