Tie down initial visualization model for CoThink

[treora]

Tie down initial visualization model for CoThink

[Treora]

The essence of the desired interface could perhaps vaguely be described as a multi-document browser that allows creation of links between the displayed items.

Some prior art by related projects:
Memex interpretation
Xanadu demo
Jerry's Brain
And possibly Incoma and similarly Rhizi/Wikinets

[benkelaar]

The more I think about it, the more I really feel like we need two kinds of views. An idea view and a "story" view. Essentially, all ideas and links between ideas lead to stories, whether that is a movie, a song, a product, a campaign, everything has a story. Stories are essentially nothing but ideas linked in a certain way. I think it would be amazing if in "idea view" we could dynamically easily link ideas in a multi-dimensional Jerry's brain kind of approach but then you could select like an "idea path" and say -> This is a story, from which a blogpost or storyboard or songtext or presentation or whatever could then be partially generated and poured into a view that's more like Xanadu. This would then of course not be a fully flowing story but anything you add could be connecting ideas connecting the two available ideas.

In essence the "story" view does not add anything to the functionality of CoThink, except that it makes "idea-paths" easily human-parseable which I think is a very valuable and maybe essential thing to have.

[Treora]

Similar thoughts discussed in Hypothes.is: hypothesis/vision#14

I have more thoughts about this but don't have them ready in story form. A few thoughts that pop up:

• A sequence of items is a special case of a subgraph, and possibly a more generic and powerful feature would be the ability to refer to subgraphs. A subgraph of ideas can constitute a 'story'.
• I'm not sure if you would need to treat these 'stories' separately from other items, as the story could just be another item itself, able to be included in other stories.
• I think automatic generation of stories would not be fruitful anytime soon. However, manually creating and connecting graphs and stories seems interesting.
• A somewhat intuitive approach would be to see your idea as creating two 'layers': the front layer is just the normal human-readable textual (or video,...) stories as we know them. The thing we add is the layer that behind each story connects pieces of the story with nodes in a graph.

[benkelaar]

Layers was exactly what I was thinking.

I was indeed also thinking of a story as a subgraph of items which of course also works both ways. If you can determine the subgraph underlying any story out there you can plug it into CoThink directly.
And as you say, the way that subgraph is a story is also a single idea/item connecting that entire subgraph.

However, the most important point I want to make is that there needs to be a way to "export" ideas, conclusions, subgraphs, whatever to other humans, because I think doing CoThink purely for CoThink is not something most other people will see the use of. CoThink is to connect the ideas, but those connected ideas are always in order to achieve something, something I referred to as a "story". It's not a special item for CoThink, but it is special for a user of CoThink and as such we may want to treat it differently.

Perhaps the specialness is just "An item that has an analog/human-parseable/classical view of some of its links (Which form a subgraph?)"