Adornments
A big topic at Tinderbox Weekend Chicago turned out to be adornments.
I remember when spatial hypertext and hypertext maps were pretty much lab curiosities, but now we need to talk about how to use them effectively to get work done, and to do it right now.
Kathryn Cramer will be talking about information and serious blogging at Tinderbox Weekend Boston, sent along this screen shot from a new Tinderbox project.
She's studying some apparently-interlocking organizations and connections. It's a classical journalism problem: who is connected, and how are they involved? The key point is that this is not a presentation or a visual explanation -- it's a working document that emerged naturally in the course of an afternoon. Cramer isn't (yet) explaining this to you with charts and diagrams, she's just organizing her notes, but this sort of malleable map lets her express tenative and imprecise relationships as they seem to emerge from the evidence.