Work Plan

A place for the detailed description of how we are going to construct our memex machine.

Memex-Building Cycle

Research Cycle

Building Trails

At first, all publication are converted into chain of minimal information units (MIU); ideally, these units should be paragraphs, in practice—pages). MIUs are sequentially connected with each other and can be read in their natural order. The graph below gives a visual representation of such organization: a, b, c, …, and h are publications, where numbers indicate MIU sequences.

When we have such a structure, we can apply different analytical methods and connect MIUs that exhibit some measure of similarity. As a result, we may get a very different graph reresentation of connections. Some MIUs get connected into long chains; others—into clusters; yet others float completely disconnected. These are the new connections that we would want to explore in order to find new connections in the information that we study. These are Vannevar Bush’s trails.

As we work our way through these trails, we discover that some are not particularly interesting, others are dead ends, but some are illuminating. We want to annotate and preserve them for later. Red lines indicate those vetted trails. These are Niklas Luhmann’s Folgezettel.