Concept: visually connecting tiddlers to stuff

#1

Imagine a rather narrow story river on the left side. And to the right of the story river there is some image showing, say, a geographical map or a car or , or a T-shirt for that matter, and then…

…or visually connecting tids to tids? Two parallel story rivers where there exist relations between the tids in the left river with those on the right. Scrolling either river so there is a “match” between a seen left tiddler and a right one, will be visually pointed out. (Left river lists faces of kids, right river lists dishes. Point out favourite dishes. Or allergies.)

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#2

A quick look at the video makes me think this could also be used, beyond image-based links, for deep commentary on a text.

For feedback in teaching, sometimes my commentary is much longer than the snippet I’m commenting on. Being able to scroll through feedback with connective lines to highlighted words/phrases/sentences would be helpful! (I currently handle this by having a palette of pastel colors with which I highlight student text, and my comment on each bit is highlighted in corresponding color. But sometimes this gets messy — say, when issues overlap, and I resort to funky underlining styles or some other text-decoration trick so that my comment can be visually connected to the original.)

I can’t help but think, prompted by recent work by @Scott_Sauyet, of how generations-worth of rabbinical commentary (midrashim) on the Talmud collect around the text. A similar kind of connective visual might be helpful for interpretive and critical commentary on any sacred and classical texts.

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#3

Right! Comments that must not be visible all the time or they would clutter.

BTW, I think I can do that but not with those beautiful lines; I recently found a TW plugin by someone in the community, which I’m not sure is public (yet) so I don’t want to link to it, that senses which tiddler is active in the viewport and gives the title of that tiddler as an accessible variable. Let’s call the variable viewportTiddler…so there can be a fixed div that shows comments depending on which tiddler is currently in viewport - I’ve tested this and it works! But what I didn’t try if it is possible two wrap snips inside the tiddlers text like so

<div class="comment1">Lorem ipsum</div>

and then when the tiddler “comment1” is scrolled into view, there is a

<style>
.{{viewportTiddler}} {background:yellow}
</style>

(I’m simplifying - the variable needs an acceptable format to be a class name, etc.)

Of course, this is not practical for quick annotations to something though.

#4

Quick is a matter of degree… Stored snippets, buttons with pre-configured actions, and other tools can be worthwhile to streamline a process, if it’s part of someone’s regular workflow. The system of highlighting that I currently use was quite cumbersome to start with, but has gradually become a bit less so as I develop more scaffolding for the patterns I’m using.

#5

But to “do” something with the text in TW, one has to open the tiddler. And then, there’s the aspect that the code therein doesn’t quite look like what you saw that you wanted to annotate (not wysiwyg). And the particular thing I proposed includes wrapping snips in divs that specify a class name. Hard to make quick, me thinks.
…but I do think AI will change everything :wink:

#6

I’m not sure whether this is true, or whether it’s a significant hurdle when it is true.

We often make edit-fields available in view mode, and drag-drop tools that allow meaningful interventions without digging into a tiddler’s source code.

At any rate, my excitement about your graphic, above, is compatible with having separate tiddlers for things that “attach” to the central image (as you imagined), but surely equally compatible with having multiple fields, or various complex transclusions, displayed as focus shifts downward through the central “exhibit” to which these comments are connected.

#7

Insta-thought for whatever reason:

Project Xanadu.

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#8

Great video! I absolutely love it!

Obviously, it has little to do with the OP here but, fittingly, the more to do with TW itself. Even if I experience his frustration with TW sometimes; paper is still superor for quickly jotting down things, not to mention jotting down things on top of other things (e.g underlining or circling stuff) or showing illustrations.

#9

See, for me, everything (absolutely everything) is deeply intertwingled, and separated by one degree of separation from everything else. Good luck figuring how anything reminds me of any other thing.

Big fan of Ted Nelson. Man, if that brain had RCA jacks so we could plug him into a TV and see what all is going on in there …

#10

I think a more practical design is to connect stuff to tiddler.

Use design like trandional single note app like Evernote: Folder menu sidebar, and a single note editor, but on the right side there is a story river. And you can drag tiddlers from the story river to the note you are editing.

I have thought of this desigh years ago at 2015, and tried to write one with reactjs, but I abadon it at that time. I think TiddlyWiki’s layout mechanism allows me to achieve this again.

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#11

That would certainly be very useful, but it would miss out being able to connect to things within the tiddler. And it would certainly be useful to be able to connect arrows to tiddlerlinks. ("…now, click on that link")

That’d be cool :grinning:

#12

Perhaps diverging from your original idea I can imaging two stories, in one we open a target tiddler, the target tiddler if it contains related tiddlers then open them in the Right hand story.

  • The related tiddlers could be those transuded like @Charlie_Veniot’s Project Xanadu
  • Change tiddlers in the left story, the related tiddlers change.

I can envisage how to do this already.

#13

Whoa, that is not my project.

Credit where credit is due, that is Ted Nelson’s project.

#14

Of course, but you linked to it and I mentioned you mentioned it.

#15

Yeah, but “Charlie Veniot’s Project Xanadu”, although a convenient shorthand, can be way too easily misconstrued as a project belonging to me.

I don’t want people thinking it is my puppy (however awesome that puppy) when it isn’t mine (especially when the master of that puppy is somebody I admire.)

#16

Also there is a PR Feat: allow link to section mark by linonetwo · Pull Request #7744 · TiddlyWiki/TiddlyWiki5 · GitHub to make it possible to make lines to section, but seems Jeremy don’t have time to review it again.