It's time for a conscious effort to make my blog more lively and frequently-posted-to. It seems like there's a little bit of that going around, and I don't want to end up losing the thoughts going on over the summer. That's meaning number 1 of 're-mediating the blog'

I've been reading "Tools for Thought" by Howard Rheingold lately. It's been great fun for focused intellectual history, and set me into a mood of making many connections. One of the big ones was, happily enough, to a television program that, now that I think about it, had a profound impact on me during my teenage years, "Connections", the documentary series by James Burke on intellectual, technological, and scientific history.

In particular, there is discussion early in "Tools for Thought" about symbolic logic. The really fun part was that I was taking margin-notes, especially using "cf." in the margin to make a note of comparison. "cf." has always struck me as one of the most powerful margin-note tools because it makes a darn good guess at finding a hidden, sneaky, and delightful connection (!) between ideas, but one that needs to be worked out much more than the margin can handle, as Fermat knew only too well!

When I taught first-year composition, I always concentrated a lot on the good reading habits that go along with good writing habits, and making use of the margin to make cf.'s was at the top of the list. It see it as giving students a little free space to make a good guess, play with an insight, and come back to it to tease it out and see if it walks.

That margin is a powerful thing, and I think an instance in which traditional text still has the edge on electronic texts. After all, the margin had a couple hundred years to develop as a writing space, and it has succeeded awefully well. The margin has been one of my most helpful tools for thought for a long time (so long that, in general, I can't read without a pencil in my hand the way many people can't speak if their hands are tied!). Given the fluidity of text available when it's electronic, I see a lot of room to explore and strategize about the online possibilities.

More connections--Periodically I've talked with Martha and Gardner about ideas of bringing the content from other web pages, especially blogs, into the space of another web site. If you've been clicking on the blue linkish things, and if the scripts really are working, you see where this is going. I'm working on making a way to capture some of the margin-power of making connections come to light in a way that gets at the richness of medieval manuscript margins.

There's clearly a lot different between this and the margin of a text I'm reading. For starters, I'm in effect writing the margin of my own text, not someone else's. And what I have (hopefully) working right now isn't especially writer-friendly--the xml datafile I'm using to store the connections is handwritten, and I'm kludging it together by hard-coding the span elements in this blog post. Future step is to work out a happier user interface for it.

Other future steps include making my scripts less ugly (as always), learning about Drupal modules so it can actually be integrated in the Drupal system (right now it's separate), and adding the variety of marginalia. "CF" I think of as the core, most basic unit of marginalia. But I can see usefullness in separating out a "gloss" (so I'm a medievalist, that's a good thing), a "seeAlso", a "HUH?", maybe even a "Get it?". In a small scale, say a class, with a shared database, I have an inkling that it could enrich online thinking a lot.

Chances are, the only part of this that won't be completely changed in the near future is its name. I can't resist calling it "marjinn", at least for now.