Chris and Bill have a back-and-forth going about tools for summarizing
and refactoring, specifically the purple suite-of-tools that Chris
uses. The discussion started with a post that Eric made: (01)
http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/yak/2003-12/msg00219.html (02)
and is worth breaking into a separate thread. Hence, this message. (03)
I think Chris said it best when he said that summarization is a human
activity: (04)
http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/yak/2003-12/msg00223.html#nid08 (05)
The only tool you need to summarize is language. That said, the suite
of tools that we use -- and the philosophy we try to evangelize --
encourages traceability. That is, summaries are linked to the
information they are summarizing. The ability to trace the flow of
ideas is extremely valuable. (06)
In _Literary Machines_, Ted Nelson explains that version control is
essentially a series of documents that transcludes pieces of earlier
versions of the document. I think this is a powerful way of looking
at things. This very e-mail is the synopsis of ideas captured in
previous documents and discussions. Making those relationships
explicit is valuable in and of itself. (07)
Knowledge is often contained in chunks more granular than an entire
document. If we want useful traceability, we need to be able to link
more granularly than an entire document. That, simply stated, is the
value of purple numbers. (08)
-Eugene (09)
--
Was I helpful? Let others know. (010)
http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=eekim&p=EnablingOnlineCommunities (011)
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This message is archived at: (012)
http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=yak&i=20031215225045.GB31143@douge.blueoxen.net (013)
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