Has Tiddler replaced paragraph? Is a tiddler is an information block?
From Tiago Forte
Information blocks replaced paragraphs as the fundamental unit of meaning and presentation. Unstructured information was “clustered” into information blocks with clear labels, which were linked together and further refined in the writing process.
Horn and his collaborators[1, 2] identified 40 types of information blocks that could be categorized as one of seven types:
Procedure
Process
Concept
Structure
Classification
Principle
Fact
These types were standardized across all kinds of topics and projects. Research by Horn and others indicated that about 80% of virtually any subject matter could be classified using this system. It was found that by chunking a body of information in this way early on in a project, there were tremendous benefits at every subsequent stage.
but I don’t see much value in “enforcing” the terms we “the TW community” don’t know, onto the TW project.
I think it can be beneficial to use “what they have learned” (as described in the book) and try to apply it to TiddlyWiki docs. …
The details
You did mention Rober E. Horn. … The only book that could be easily accessed was: Information mapping for learning and reference [A] … Which comes up with 8 “Types of Maps”, in a different order. page 129
Concepts
Structures
Processes
Procedures
Classifications
Decisions
Facts
Proofs
So the categories listed in the original are different than those quoted.
You mentioned and quoted Tiago Forte. … So the categories shown are probably derived from the original paper and adjusted to their specific usecase. … Do you have a reference for the quoted categories in the OP?
At page 126 of [A]
THE INFORMATION MAP METHOD
Introduction
We said earlier that our research related primarily to the
specific product tested, the sets and probability book. …
Which was a mathematical book. …
So they did create a “learning” and “reference” book based on the “types of information” they had already identified. They made studies to proof and iterate on their findings.
… So related to tiddlywiki.com imo forcing that structure on TW without everyone knowing the underlaying concepts will not work. …
Never the less it seems to be interesting. I’m pretty sure, that we can find the proposed information types (about 60 in [A]) in the TW docs.
I’m sure we may be able to map most of our tags to the block types mentioned in [A]. … It seems Tiago Forte has reduced to number to 40. But the reference is missing.
40 types of information blocks??? I clearly have some reading to do! Thanks for the refs!
No. In the context of the material text contained in a paragraph, “paragraph” conveys no meaning, and adds nothing. In The Sense of Style, Pinker argues that there is no such thing as a paragraph, there are only paragraph breaks. Taking that view, tiddlers are clearly not “paragraphs”.
Obviously, yes, though that would imply slicing and dicing the text to suit the taxonomy implied by the categories (tags). Not sure I’d want to work that way. In fact, I’m certain I don’t want to work that way. Although, I can imagine (dream about) a future AI doing that after I’d written my text.
@pmario Thanks for the deeper analysis. Interesting, indeed.
Coming from the perspective of Knowledge and Information management I have long felt one key to PKM and using TiddlyWiki for it, is to capture information and knowledge. As we build a personal database we stand to benefit greatly from the interlinks, searchability, categorisation etc… of our collected information and knowledge. However for this dream to be a reality we need to make sure;
“keep”, We do not loose any obvious information
“add” If we see or know something about information make sure we capture that knowledge
These seem obvious but they are easily neglected and diminish what we can do or learn from our knowledge base. When we paste a bock of text into a tiddler we can choose if we keep, lose or add additional information, excise part and name it, tag the tiddler or set some fields. In this case we are applying metadata to our pieces, the tiddlers.
However we may want to keep a larger slab of information together in a single tiddler.
At first I was thinking, inside a tiddler, let us lean on the concepts of semantic eg heading hierarchies, or html tags that wrap content and when that is insufficient adding or keeping information about our subject by maintaining a semantic structure.
However I have discovered then defined HTML tags eg section/artical etc… are more about presentation than knowledge.
I was very excited to discover HTML permits the use of arbitrary tags and realised we can name our own
So now I am of the opinion what a wiki user can adopt a set of tags to define content according to a standard they want to implement. Once used we have added information to our content we can then make use of programmatically.
That is, we maintain or add information within a tiddler by using “html tags” to wrap content they apply to;
For example for each of these;
For example here I indicate a concept? a fact
! What is Lorem Ipsum?
<concept>**Lorem Ipsum** is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. </concept><fact>It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages</fact>, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
If we take this approach we could develop lists and searches that target a particular “logical tag”, extract and convert to tiddlers, place one along side another and allow metadata to be applied to these “subsections”.
Hopefully my intention and the potential benefits is clear to those reading this reply?
If someone has done the work to classify knowledge then perhaps we use it to clasify our wikis?
Would this be the aforementioned “Information blocks”?
I think paragraph chunk is a logical unit in which to divide tiddlers. In a TiddlyWiki context this may be referred to as “the smallest semantically meaningful chunk of text”. The question then becomes how do you associate your chunk of text within the context of your entire wiki? This is not always obvious, although certain trends tend to emerge. Should you use hard links or tags or both? The more you associate a text chunk within other existing tiddlers, the more developed the context becomes. Then the relationship begins to develop and perhaps the chunk’s place in a context you may not have thought of.
