Goranson on Outliners: Part 22

The latest chapter of Ted Goranson's masterful study of outliners is now on line. Of particular interest in this column is a peek Goranson provides at another project he's undertaking:

But the third project that involves something like blogging is the one—the big kahuna—I usually use to put the ATPO power outliners through their paces. I’m doing a study of movies. I have a huge amount of background information for this study, everything from film clips to notes. Everything. And it really is huge and extremely structured. In fact, the resulting structure is the very point of the study, which in short is how to categorize film narrative. The report will be an incrementally created online book, which is hardwired to Tinderbox.

All this research moves around among my test outliners (and other applications). I budget no fewer than four hours and often six a day to produce an entry in my "blog” of sorts, regular comments for ordinary readers on specific movies I watch. Each day I receive many feedback e-mails on these comments, all of which I store and many which I use later.

It is an enormous undertaking, and one that depends on the ability of deep manual and automated structure. Smart folders and lots of ways of assigning metadata are useful for this. Each new tool teaches me something else about organization.