Anthropologist
On the principle that I should write only when I feel like it, I didn’t think I would write today. Too much family, too many mini-crises of my own and others’ making, and too much sludge work to do. But, I was re-reading Friction for class. It’s so good, and the opening gave me some inspiration. I’m sure I’ll revise it a lot, but it’s the start of an idea.
Reading is central to writing.
I knew that, you did to. But, sometimes we forget.
Today, I worked on coding a section for the introduction to Makeshift. It was about 3,000 words, very disorganized, repetitive, and in need of cutting and more focus.
I followed the process John McPhee described in Draft No. 4:
Structur exploded my notes. It read the codes by which each note was given a destination or destinations (including the dustbin). It created and named as many new Kedit files as there were codes, and, of course, it preserved intact the original set. In my first I.B.M. computer, Structur took about four minutes to sift and separate fifty thousand words. My first computer cost five thousand dollars. I called it a five-thousand-dollar pair of scissors (John McPhee, Draft No. 4, “Chapter Structure”).
I wrote a script six months ago that extracts coded text from a folder of text files.
I’ve been using the script for months now. It splits a text file into small chunks, based on codes I added. It’s almost a manual process—not too much thought. I coded 3,000 words, split them into 10 files, put them in order, and started revising them. Much easier.
When I ran out of steam, I posted structur.py to GitHub. It’s the first script I’ve ever posted publicly. Perhaps someone will find it useful.
Structur is a simple, Python-based command-line tool to help extract and organize coded text from research notes.
I’ve been using it for a year now, from the Finder. It’s useful to find the structure of longer pieces of text.
I was inspired by John McPhee’s writing process, which he describes in Draft No. 4.
Structur exploded my notes. It read the codes by which each note was given a destination or destinations (including the dustbin). It created and named as many new Kedit files as there were codes, and, of course, it preserved intact the original set. In my first I.B.M. computer, Structur took about four minutes to sift and separate fifty thousand words. My first computer cost five thousand dollars. I called it a five-thousand-dollar pair of scissors.
Structur is my take on what McPhee describes.
It is available on GitHub.
Cite as:
Tubb, Daniel. Structur.py. GitHub, 2024. https://github.com/dtubb/structur.
An update on progress today. First, it’s Saturday. It took some effort to get started. Weekend. But as soon as I got going, it’s been steady. Nice. Moving around the document in a bit of a flow state. Picking away at different pieces, listening to Belle and Sebastian. Why write on the weekend? Why not take a break? I know where I am going, and I am not willing to give up the momentum every week.
What did I do? I picked away at the front matter. I adjusted the title and edited a blurb (371 words). Mostly, I edited a piece on makeshift (571 words). Then, I stuck into some notes riffing for the next section, on the epigraph I want to use from Pablo Neruda, which unexpectedly is a way to get into writing about the Orkney Islands, where I was first exposed to Latin America.
This will allow me to get into a bit of an autobiography that I wrote years ago about how I ended up working in Colombia. However, it’s 3,000 words and ought to be about 1,000.
I’m not sure digressing to Scotland and autobiography makes sense, but I read somewhere “Don’t be afraid to digress.”
But, since the book is about tools and a tool we all use to write is a computer, getting to Scotland for a little will let me spend time on my first computer, and learning how to write. It would beep at every spelling error, and had a wonderful pixelated font, not unlike the one I am writing on now.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been drafting in Tinderbox my book Makeshift using the fantastic Departure Mono font. It is a monospaced pixel font, reminiscent of the fonts I used to learn to type on in the 1990s command-line interfaces and that graphical user interface of the Atari ST, which I learned to write on. It’s a glorious, free font. Kudos to its creator Helena Zhang.
I’m a long time user of Tinderbox from Eastgate Systems. A Mac app, that is a Swiss Army knife for notes.
This summer, once again, I’m working on the book. I have hundreds (or more) of pages of notes. Now is a good time to find some order in my madness. For that, I really like Tinderbox’s brand new Gaudi view.
The Tinderbox Gaudí View — the first novel hypertext view in years — tessellates the idea plane to keep more notes in sight. Tinderbox continuously adapts the shape and placement of each note to give each a fair share of the available space, while avoiding unwanted distraction. Gaudí view is especially good for brainstorming and conferences!
It is great for brainstorming, for bringing notes that are related together by dragging them while the other notes slide smoothly out of the way, and for lingering and attending and playing with and getting a feel for the notes.
The thousands of new badges, via SF Symbols, are just really nice to have as well.
For example, this is a sample of the outline of the book.
Update July 22 at 1:50 pm.
I learn from Mark Anderson’s wonderful TBRef that with a force expression in the Guadi view control at the top, it’s easy to get related notes to come together.
$Tags==$Tags(that)
Notes with related tags, are drawn together. Super useful.
My short article with Harrison Dressler “In Praise of Laziness” just came out in the Socialist Project. All the good stuff, I think, would be fair to credit to Harrison. Any glaring errors, I’ll take credit for.
I’m working on a piece of writing today. I often write in markup, and enjoy the multi-column view of Markup 2. But, editing in multi-column view is a different story. The Mac has excellent apps to work with text. I use Highland 2, BBedit, and Tinderbox. Each brilliant, in their own way. None of them support multi-column editing.
Do any apps on the Mac?
It is possible to create a Word file that does this. (e.g. Make a custom page size to fit your screen, adjust the margins, add columns, adjust the font, etc.) It is far from elegant, however. You have to do it again, for each file.
With so many full screen Mac and iOS text editors that work with markdown, do none of them support editing text in a multi-column mode?
If so, send me an email. If not, and you write one, I’d love test it.
Aïka is five months old. A border collie, and new to our family. Rambunctious. Fast. She loves her walks. This morning, I took her for a run. We went slow, but it was quickly clear that running with a puppy forces one’s attention to her rhythms, her pace, and her speed. I took my full presence and attention. Feeling the leash, plating it, never letting it tighten because we got out of rhythm. Quickening as she did. Slowing with her. I’m sure she made my run better.
I’ve been a long-time user of Eastgate Systems’ Tinderbox. At least since 2010, when I first bought a copy to do fieldwork. It’s a tool that I keep coming back to, even if I leave from time to time. Every time I come back, I am impressed, once again, by its steady, evolutionary, sometimes revolutionary improvements. Mark Bernstein has created a brilliant, powerful piece of software for knowledge workers. I think it’s criminally underused by anthropologists. But, that’s for another post. I’ve long thought of it as a Swiss army knife for notes. But that doesn’t really do justice to the software. Do check [Tinderbox] out.
For now, I just wanted to call attention to one of the little changes made over time that Mark has worked into Tinderbox, which make things just nicer.
Between the version I was using, and what I upgraded to yesterday, a small change, is that it is now possible to make the left-hand pane (map/outline/etc any arbitrary width. Before, there was a minimum size. It’s a change that perhaps most users will probably never notice.
But, I write books. And, often, when I am in the thick of writing, I want to make the text pane on the right as big as possible, and make the left hand pane as narrow as possible. This wasn’t possible to do to quite as narrow as I wanted before. It now is. Thank you, Mark. Just one more of the steady refinements that makes Tinderbox indispensable.
