[Design] Chandler usage inquiry

[Mimi Yin]

Forwarding message from Nathan Bauer about use cases for Chandler  
involving organizing and keeping track of Research. Will forward the  
rest of the thread separately.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Nathan Bauer" <n9bauer at gmail.com>
> Date: March 8, 2006 8:29:33 PM PST
> To: mimi at osafoundation.org
> Subject: chandler usage inquiry
>
> Dear Mimi,
>
> I have been an interested spectator on the development of Chandler for
> quite some time now.  I'm very excited about both the potential of the
> application itself and the open process by which it is being
> developed.  While I do look forward to all the calendar-specific
> functionality on the immediate horizon, this is not my primary
> interest in Chandler.  I'm an academic (in philosophy), and I'm very
> intrigued by Chandler's potential to organize my research in new and
> more complex ways.  I've compiled some examples of the sort of thing I
> have in mind.  From my perspective, I'm interested in knowing (a) if
> this is the sort of thing Chandler might eventually manage; and (b)
> when I can expect this to be functional.  I also thought that, from
> your perspective, it might be useful to have in mind some use cases
> that are a bit different from those I've been reading about.
>
> I was tempted to just submit my examples directly to the design list,
> but I am worried that this will just be a distraction from the
> calendar-centric focus of the next few releases.  As a compromise, I
> thought I would send it to you to see what you think of it.  If you
> think it useful, do with it what you will.  If not, feel free to
> ignore it.
>
> The examples follow.
>
> Research-centric use cases for Chandler
>
> My main hope for Chandler is to use it to manage my notes and
> quotations.  Over the years, I've compiled a large collection of
> philosophical quotations that I use in my research.  I also have a
> large number of my own notes, ranging from brief comments on
> quotations to longer free-standing passages.  All of these are
> currently distributed in various files, making it difficult to find
> the one I want (or even to remember which ones I have).  I would like
> to use Chandler to organize these notes and quotations in various ways
> via labels (or collections or whatever the appropriate term is).  Here
> is some of what I have in mind.
>
> (1) Manage quotation references
> For quotations, it would be useful to label or tag them with
> bibliographic information (author, book title, page reference, etc.).
> Using labels for this information would allow me to avoid repeatedly
> typing this information, and would also allow me to organize my
> quotations by source (for instance, if I wanted to see all of my
> quotations from a particular chapter of a book.  Eventually, I could
> imagine someone developing a parcel that would turn Chandler into a
> fairly full-featured bibliographic manager, but I could get by with
> something much simpler.  I'm picturing a hierarchical arrangement of
> labels (Author > Book > Chapter > etc.)
>
> (2) Organize by topic
> I would like to use labels to organize my notes and quotations in
> multiple ways.  For instance, a single note or quotation might be
> linked to various topics and, thus, indirectly to various other notes
> and quotations.
>
> (3) See these organizational relationships
> (a) When I have a particular note open, I would like to be able to see
> all of the topics that it belongs to
> (b) When I'm looking at a topic (label), I'd like to see all of the
> notes and quotations that fall under it.
> (c) I'd like to be able to organize the topics (labels) themselves,
> according to various, potentially overlapping hierarchies and to be
> able to see these topic relationships.  One example might be something
> like:
> Philosopher > Area of philosophy > General issue > More specific issue
>
> I understand that there is some resistance to this sort of
> hierarchical method of classifying data.  I'm all for auto-generated
> collections, where these are applicable, but I do think there remains
> a place for more hierarchical organizations as well.  These
> organizational relationships are, after all, themselves an important
> kind of information.
>
> I hope this gives you an idea of some of the ways in which I hope to
> use Chandler.  None of this strikes me as being particularly
> complicated, but I confess that I've only played around a little with
> the current release and I don't yet understand Chandler's collections
> model well enough to see if it will do the sorts of things I have in
> mind.
>
> Best,
> Nathan
>
> --
> http://www.originalpositions.org

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