planning a paper

The paper that I’m currently working on is giving me a moment of “gee I wish Goby was built-out enough to use for this”, so I’m going to record the use-case so I can keep it in mind when I’m in the weeds of working on the interface later on:

I have just gotten finished reading a collection of texts by different authors. The exercise has left me feeling ready to generate a list of “themes” which serve several purposes:

  • they allow me to find patterns between the texts: different ways in which the same idea or problem is being articulated, and which I could use my paper to compare
  • they allow me to group passages and quotes that I can draw upon while writing, some of which belong to multiple themes. This gives me an impetus to revisit each text as well.
  • they can be related with one another, so I have a more holistic view of my topic and how different lines of argument support one another
  • they can be related back to the authors, so I can get a sense of how their worldviews stand in relation to one another

This is a mapping task too complex to be done, at least in a conveniently and orderly fashion, using a simple tagging or mind-mapping tool.


Ironically the subject of the paper is in part the idea that you can’t perfectly crystallize ideas in representative logical relations, as I seem to be advocating here. But I have never seen Goby as a project of accurately representing reality; rather, the act of ordering ideas and assets in this way is a pathway, a “disposable ladder” if you will, to greater and clearer understanding.

dev log

Making Goby dev notes channel and realizing it would be useful to be able to enter bugs and future features with fields for task type, screenshots, front end v. back end, and what other entries it depends on.