Tinderbox Presentation Demo
Late in the second day of WebZine, I ended up doing an impromptu demo of Tinderbox as a tool for crafting a quick, interactive presentation.
It's an interesting task. Irina Slutsky wanted to present an exploration of the patterns of connection in New Orleans between the Blackwater mercenaries, various front organizations, and the GOP power structure. The point she wanted to make was that organizers need to track the facts and connections and present the data -- that too much rhetoric and too few facts had too often weakened the left. But, in a moving story like this, new connections are emerging all the time -- which made the chart she was drawing on scrap cardboard a bit of a mess. And, because the didn't know in advance where all the links would go, PowerPoint turned out to be intractable.
Why do this in Tinderbox instead of a graphics or presentation program?
- Tinderbox makes it very easy to move things around, and to add new notes and new links
- Tinderbox also lets you store support information -- sources, annotation, original data, contact information -- inside the notes. After all, it a tool for notes.
The downside is that you don't have a huge repertory of shapes and arrows and assorted chartjunk. But that might not be a downside at all, since we're discovering structure and writing things down, not making glossy slides.