What is Prose?
- status: braindump
- last updated: 2019-11-01
- Got some inspiration while reading this article by Kevin Kelly about books and thinking about what prose is. One thing it inherently is is linear.
- By "prose" I don't mean "as opposed to poetry", I mean "as opposed to a pile of post-it notes", or "as opposed to your twitter feed"
- Multimedia prose is still prose in this sense.
- ie text with stuff embedded
- (stuff = images, tweets, threads, videos, polls, flashcards, &+++)
- because there's still a clear order in which to read it
- also most poems are basically prose in the sense I'm using it here
- (although something with a repeating refrain could be understood as a nonlinear piece of text!)
- which is then making me think of musical notation, repeat signs, and da capo
- Here's an interesting meta-piece:
- I find myself wanting to add the "ie text with stuff embedded" as a parenthetical after "multimedia prose"
- but that becomes so long it ruins the clarity of the simple sentence "Multimedia prose is still prose in this sense."
- which then makes me want a feature that lets me insert a caret or something ^ and have the parenthetical float outside the linear flow of the text
- tooltip-notes (like WBW & meaningness) kind of achieve this role, but it's annoying to have to actually do the hover, so in practice people often don't do it
- So this is part of what is powerful about a thread structure. It occupies an amazing space between pure prose (100% linear) and fucking graphs that are a mess and really hard to navigate.
- ie it has a default linearity to it, meaning you're still sharing a coherent train of thought
- but then also because everything is nodular
- individual links in that chain can be reused in other thought-trains later
- this reusability is what comes from the magic of the embed/QT, which by default a messy-ass graph doesn't have either
- replies/comments can branch off from specific nodes
- Then, there are multiple ways to relate prose & nonlinearity.
- ONE is the wikipedia model. Hypertext books like meaningness are other examples. Here, there is long-form prose, just like a book or newsletter, except individual words can be linked to other long-form prose items. Some deeplinking is possible via section headings.
- TWO is the google docs model. There is one linear flow of prose, and ALSO there's commentary on the side. This commentary can tag people or even assign some edit to someone.
- THREE is the twitter model. Replies & embeds (both other tweets as QTs and media like youtube) allow short-form prose to compose a series of nodes. Importantly, the reification* of threading means that this isn't just a crazy graph.
- (aside: better word than reification? affordance? function, groove, default, weight... I'm trying to point at how by replying tweets together, they kind of stick as a thread)
- the tweets don't change order... I can link to a thread and know that it'll continue to be the thread that it is
- the point is, that I can make a thread and say "follow these thoughts from start to end" and then nothing can interrupt that thread. people can comment on any node in the thread, but that doesn't break the flow
- this breaks down, however, because sometimes A makes a thread and B makes a sort of thread-of-replies but then if A replies to the first message in B's thread, then it breaks the flow of what B was saying in the main view (because A owns the thread) and there's no way to get it back. This makes it really hard to clearly see what's happening in dialogues.
- ideas for ways to improve this (all of these could be implemented poorly)
- give the Reply UI a threading feature and make those subthreads uninterruptible (ie owned by their creator)
- whenever someone replies to themselves, treat that differently than dialogue
- value order-of-reply somewhat more than thread ownership
- ~ when there are replies, show the avatars & first lines of those replies under the main tweet
- see how many total replies are under a given
- FOUR: tables, eg like I have my blog posts in airtable.
- not sure how this relates exactly but it feels important
- actually, maybe even a better example than my blog posts is the harvesting models/incidents etc table that benj & I worked on summer '16
- FIVE: progressive summarization. A cool UI to try would be one where you can actually collapse-away the different layers
- eg in this image, being able to hide what's not highlighted; to somehow more densely interlink the summary & remix with the original
- I think roam allows much more interlinked summaries & remixes
- in a twitter context, you could imagine this as the ability to flag tweets and then collapse thread thread to only the flagged tweets visible
- you can already do this just by pulling them out, but it's kind of a hack
- fortunately, it's not as bad as before, since twitter redesigned the app in such a way that quoted tweets are no longer truncated
- oh shit! this is actually kind of how workflowy works!
- it doesn't do ProgSum and its collapsing isn't like sublime where you can instantly collapse to a certain level
- but it does have the ability to type something that reads linearly like prose and yet also can be collapsed to view its structure
- SIX: choose your own adventure
- largely is a thing with fiction, but the format can be (and surely has been) adapted for nonfiction, as a kind of flowchart
- example, the intro pages to The Guru Papers or The Passionate Mind Revisited, which describe where you might want to start in the book, depending on what you are looking for
- books have a tiny bit of nonlinearity
- in the form of the table of contents and the index. and footnotes
- but these are all terribly implemented!
- kindle footnotes/endnotes should use a zoom gesture or something and should shoot up as a modal atop the page, not jump me to the fucking end of the fucking book like it's made of fucking paper and needs to be stored at the end to be kept out of the fucking way)
- @Metamitya notes: knovigator would do this
- "it would open a footnote as its own first-class citizen"
- this seems pretty great to me
- "all of these tools continue to be constrained by physical metaphors/skeumorphisms" - Qiaochu
- Other stuff
- Probably relevant but I haven't read it yet
- Definitely relevant:
- Hypermedia and the Singularity by Marc Stiegler
- Quote
- > When I was learning to write in my teens, it seemed to me that paper was a prison. Four walls, right? And the ideas were constantly trying to escape. What is a parenthesis but an idea trying to escape? What is a footnote but an idea that tried -- that jumped off the cliff? Because paper enforces single sequence -- and there’s no room for digression -- it imposes a particular kind of order in the very nature of the structure.-- Ted Nelson, demonstration of Xanadu space
- (from LW post about Zettelkasten)
- Remark from David Chapman
- Read this really great ribbonfarm article about hyperlinks that totally connects with the What Is Prose thing
- I have a twitter thread about better ebook readers
- example parenthetical
4 linked references
★ Redesigning Twitter
- See also What is Prose?
Designing a Convergence feature for Twitter
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