Discourse patterns synching fractal thickets

we can posit a series
of levels of significance
for database synching

least significant would be synching
the values of attributes
for particular instances

(each instance gets
a record or a row
each attribute
a field or a column)

then slightly more significant
the addition or subtraction
of whole row-record-instances

then adding or editing
attribute-field-columns
that apply to all record-row-instances

and finally
whole new database/speadsheet/tables
with new systems of attribute-field-columns
appropriate to a whole new
object type

and in object-oriented systems
these objects are associated too
with methods

but more generally we might rename
'methods' as 'story skeletons'

each object type participating
in a usual range of stories

object-creation stories
object-change stories
object-spawning-new-objects stories
object-destruction stories

and a whole universe of
object-relationships-to-other-object-types stories
most conveniently sorted
into a local copy of the object hierarchy
(ie a fractal thicket)

 
 
 
 
 
.

Discourse patterns synching spreadsheets now

two rhetoric books i'm finding useful:

"a theory of discourse" (kinneavy 1971)
"patterns for a purpose" (clouse 2003)

the latter proposes eight basic essay-patterns
(and i'm now substituting
spreadsheets for
yesterday's databases
so we can 'synch'
rules/formulae too)

1. description (database dump without chrnological sorting)
   
2. narration (ditto with chronological sorting)
   
3. exemplification (generalised rule/formula with descriptive or narrative examples)
   
4. process analysis (synching rules/formulae for future applications)
   
5. comparison-contrast (explicitly synching two spreadsheet regions)
   
6. cause-and-effect analysis (synching rules/formulae for past applications)
   
7. classification and division (synching the vocabulary for descriptions of ranges)
   
8. definition (synching a single vocabulary concept)
   

kinneavy tries to survey
rhetorical patterns at every level

some micropatterns (cf recent post Discourse as lists):

(short, long) eg synopsis/abstract followed by fleshed-out presentation

(long, short) eg summary at end

(parts, whole) eg (A, B, +, A+B)

(whole, parts) usually short-whole followed by longer-parts

(not-A, B) standard debate micropattern

(A, not-A) fair and balanced

(zoom-out, zoom-in) eg panorama with gradual increase in detail

(zoom-in, zoom-out) novels usually grab you via a closeup they only gradually contextualise

(hook, line) general attention-grabbing

(light, heavy) lead with a joke

(aux, main, aux) eg webpages where bodytext is surrounded by html-junk

(metadata, data) incl eg (date, title, byline)

(abstract, concrete) or (general, particular)

(old, new) cf (not-A, B)

(A?B) exploring uncertain relationship

(claim, proof)

(try, try, succeed)

 
 
 
 
 
.

Discourse as database-synchronisation patterns

oldfashioned
database report generators
could easily turn each database record
into a lump of lo-tech prose

[marge simpson] is [married] with [three] children,
lives in [springfield]
and has [blue] hair.

by the ai complementarity principle
an equally lo-tech
natural-language-comprehension program
could turn this prose
back into database-ese

and some unknown percentage
of real natural language in the wild
must be no more complicated than this
if we could just exhaustively compile
the necessary hidden databases

but of course
much more often
than full database dumps
we feed each other
synchronisation updates

what important recent changes
might the other
not yet have registered

and the whole discipline of rhetoric
might just be footnotes
on how this synchronisation can be achieved

 
 
 
 
 
.

Ulysses in and outdoors

only two episodes of ulysses
take place entirely outdoors

proteus (3) and
nausikaa (13)

both on sandymount strand
one suggesting stephen wanks
the other portraying how bloom does

only one episode takes place
entirely indoors

penelope (18)
suggesting how molly wanks

the rest move between
in and outdoors

but all
surely significantly
end outdoors

except ithaca (17)

01-oooooooooiiiiiioooooo
02-iiiiiiiiiiio
03-oooooooooooooo
 
04-iiooooiiiiiiioiio
05-oiooooooiiiioio
06-iiiiiiiiiiiiioooiooooooooooo
07-oiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiioooo
08-ooooooooooooooooooioiiiiiiiioooo
 
09-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiio
10-oooioioiioiiioooiioooooooooooioooooo
 
11-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiioooo
12-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiioooo
13-oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
14-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiooiio
 
15-ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
ooooooooooooooooooooooo
 
16-ooooooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiooooo
17-ooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiioooooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
18-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
 
 
 
 
.

Pop Music Theory Geek Blog?

i'd like to see a blog
by someone who really knows music theory
who listens to current pop
and describes its effects
in technical jargon

but maybe i'm naive

.

The key to Ulysses... is Finnegans Wake?

in designing
the riddles of ulysses
i think joyce relied on
a fiendish corollary
to conan doyle's 1890 dictum

only those who've studied ulysses
closely enough to eliminate the impossible
will dare to acknowledge
its improbable truths

so take the following
with a grain of saltpeter:

16 june 1904 was the historical date
of the general slocum disaster
termed in ulysses a beanfeast
at which 1021 attendees died in a fire

so when
on 10 march 1923
joyce drafted the first vignette of fw
dating it internally as
"after that same barbecue beanfeast was all over"
we may suspect we're still
at #7 eccles
with ROC = Bloom-the-dreamer
and Boylan and Stephen the "all of them gone"
and ROC's heeltapping perambulation
equated to Bloom's own
in the last half of Ithaca

but if ROC is Bloom
then Tristan and Isolde
can only be Bannon and Milly
putting Bloom's condom to use
the following day

so then
could Patrick's eventual socking
of Berkeley
be a hidden explanation
of Stephen's wounded hand
after the altercation with Mulligan
between Oxen and Circe?

Mulligan might naturally have told Stephen
about Milly and the condom
or about Bloom's gluepot

but could Stephen have been so offended
as to strike Mulligan in Bloom's defense?

and if Berkeley is Mulligan
and Patrick is Stephen
then is holy St Kevin
Stephen as well
rather than the awol-in-ulysses Stannie/Shaun?

.

Warum ich so weise bin

I often complain to interviewers that 'weblog' is the least interesting of my many neologisms. Here's a sampling of others:

1. meta-expressive (1974) = inauthentic, expressing an image rather than a reality
   
   
2. noofog (1974) the stupefying side of the noosphere-- pressure to conform making us blind (cf negative intelligence, below)
   
   
3. ron riddles (1975-friv) riddles where the answer is a portmanteau of two phrases eg 'TS Eliot Ness' (Who wrote 'Sweeney among the Untouchables'?) or 'The arm and hammer throw' (What's the intensest sport at the leper olympics?)
   
   
4. priorating (no date) rating by priority
   
   
6. [Greek letter phi], [Greek letter psi] (no date) philosophy, psychology (abbreviations)
   
   
7. junk-food vegetarian (1977?) no meat in soda or potato chips
   
   
8. filters, speeds, and scales (1978) three exercises for deepening understanding of any given phenomenon-- picture the world as pitch black except where the phenomenon supplies a bit of colored light (this directly led to the tree-of-life/worldtree visualisation); picture the phenomenon at microscopic scale, at macroscopic scale, slowed down and speeded up
   
   
9. literary indications (1978) images from novels or other literature that capture some nuance of human behavior, i used to save these on index cards that i then sorted and re-sorted
   
   
10. cybernetic psychology, robot wisdom (1979) a scientific methodology that builds from literary indications (qv) to computer simulations of realistic human behavior
    
    
11. appublication (1979) making public
    
    
13. pyschology, spychology (1979-friv) bad psychology, good psychology
    
    
14. antimath (1979) a simple notation system for story-skeletons, based on comic strip conventions [more]
    
    
15. cx. (no date) contrast (cf 'cf')
    
    
16. lifelines (1984?) a cross between antimath and feynman diagrams, evolved into worldtree model [more]
    
    
17. friv (1985) frivolous
    
    
18. romantic psychology (1988) narrowly, the scientific study of romantic love; broadly, the complement of cognitive psychology [Solace]
    
    
19. storycycle (1988?) compilation of literary indications into a (usually) cyclical monomyth [more]
    
    
20. fractal-thicket indexing, semantic topology (1991) a generalisation of antimath that builds complex content by repeatedly creating 'cross-products' of any simple hierarchy with itself [more]
    
    
21. usual stories (1992) a way to defuse AI's 'frame problem' by considering any content-node to imply the full usual storycycle of that content-item [more]
    
    
22. task-savvy applications (1993) applications with enough a.i. to guess what you're trying to do [more]
    
    
23. confabulating arranger (1994) a model for interactive fiction in which the past is created backwards [more]
    
    
24. alt.music.alternative.female (1994) newsgroup [newgroup]
    
    
25. misery pizza, misery burritos, etc (1994?) ersatz entrees using lowest-possible-cost ingredients: white bread, ketchup, american cheese food, pork'n'beans, etc
    
    
26. the responsible party (1995) semifictitious 'conservative left' political party
    
    
27. naive witness (1995) heuristic visualisation of unprejudiced guy-in-the-street [more]
    
    
28. chase-down design (1995) writing webpages so they start by cutting-to-the-chase [more]
    
    
29. parent test (1995) judging political candidates (etc) by whether you'd want them as parents [more]
    
    
30. static a.i. (1995) knowledge representation [more]
    
    
31. skeptical correctness (1995) jumping to conclusions based on 'scientific' prejudices [cite]
    
    
32. self-knowledge horizon (1995) what alan watts called 'the taboo on knowing who we are' [more]
    
    
33. AI complementarity principle (1995) the idea that an expert system capable of understanding a domain should equally be able to generate a simulation (or a vision sytem to generate an image) [more]
    
    
34. pork'n'beans vegetarian (1995?) it's not enough pork to bother paying double for the vegetarian beans
    
    
35. w3* (1996) trick for distinguishing search keywords from ordinary words [more]
    
    
36. full-disclosure capitalism (1996) capitalism might not be so bad if businesses were fully transparent [more]
    
    
37. negative intelligence (1996) internet phenomenon where bad ideas drive out good [more]
    
    
38. philosophy lab (1996) the idea that philosophical ideas could theoretically be tested in an advanced computer simulation of human behavior [more]
    
    
39. propanoia (1996-friv) the unfounded fear that a Usenet newsgroup's messages don't propagate to your site [cite]
    
    
40. pride cycle (1997) the storycycle/monomyth behind Finnegans Wake-- hero sins, falls, rises via conformity or experiment [passim]
    
    
41. hypertext lab (1997) the notion that web-design theorists ought to use their sites to experiment with new design ideas [more]
    
    
42. elvis index (1997) search-engine popularity ranking normalised to standard term 'elvis' [more]
    
    
43. weblog (1997) a log of interesting web readings in reverse chronological order
    
    
44. ?* (1997?) uncertain. eg '?x' is short for 'x (?)' (after Herring)
    
    
46. gotcha-links (1998?) web links that without warning entrap you in (eg) slow-launching helper apps like Acrobat [more] a special case that throws you out of your surf history is the ejection seat
    
    
56. e-communication, e-video, e-audio, s-text, h-text, h-audio, h-video, p-text, p-video, p-audio (1998) electronic/spoken/handwritten/printed communication/audio/video/text [more]
    
    
57. new game (1998) an approach to finnegans wake via close reading of manuscripts in the order they were written [more]
    
    
58. liquid page (1998) later and more widely called 'liquid html' [more]
    
    
59. xhtml (1998) my original proposal was better than what They ended up with [more]
    
    
60. project-proposers anonymous (1998) 12-step group for people who have better ideas than follow-thru [more]
    
    
61. nuppies (1999?) compulsive one-uppers [cite]
    
    
62. iq infinity (1999?) heuristic for studying joyce-- that he knew everything
    
    
63. en-passant linking (1999) web links that can only be detected by (eg) blue underlined text [more]
    
    
64. one-layer web design (1999) making portals that flatten out all web resources so they're a single click away, by linking every useful subpage of a site, not just the main page [more]
    
    
65. resource pages (1999) sifting thru all web resources on a given topic and linking all the best ones in an organised way (search engines should someday do this automatically) [more]
    
    
66. mournography (1999) orgies of exploitative sentimentality after tragedies [cite]
    
    
67. first-cut parser (1999) document-parser that finds a likeliest interpretation for each segment of a text [more]
    
    
68. stripped-grapes web-design (2000?) tables of contents (etc) that link to subpages with no description but the page-title [more]
    
    
69. url-hacking (2000) studying the structure of complex urls so you can customise them [more]
    
    
70. content-centered web design (2000) web-design that foregrounds the content rather than the design (eg avoiding sidebars and other distractions) [more]
    
    
71. text buttons (2000) a design philosophy that tries to minimise hard-to-read blue underlined linktext by isolating the link at the end of text, with a single word description, usually of its document type [more]
    
    
72. hyperbolic linking (2000) topically closer pages should have more links on a given page [more]
    
    
73. phat (2000) high-bandwidth (of webpages)
    
    
74. information density (2001) eg 'faqs' are high density [more]
    
    
75. text-blocks and separators (2001) alternative to uptight 'hierarchies of containers' model of text [more]
    
    
76. minoan illuminati (2001) mostly tongue-in-cheek reconstruction of Bronze Age Crete, emphasizing their remarkable disdain for giant ego-monuments [more]
    
    
77. jumpbar (2001) a row of offsite links at the top of a blog (or any page) so you can quickly jump elsewhere if there's nothing new there [more]
    
    
78. mindwrestling (2001) ESP-based power-struggles [more]
    
    
79. content stubs (2001) interface elements that can be expanded to reveal more content/choices (eg menus) [more]
    
    
80. contemplation-factor (2001) how many calories does it take to contemplate something [more]
    
    
81. html-junk (2002) webpage cruft [post]
    
    
82. ToC-footers (2002) putting site-links at end of (one-column) document [more] rediscovered 2007 [blog]
    
    
83. the Necessary Web (2002) just the faqs, sort of [more] [more]
    
    
84. W3C secession (2002) top-down amateur a.i. has got us on the wrong track entirely, time to start over [more]
    
    
85. the pragmatic web (2002) semantic web optimised for relevant content [more]
    
    
86. action hypertext (2002) web-authoring tools should accommodate dynamically evolving pages [more]
    
    
87. the Joyce police (2002) cruising joyce-sites for errors and issuing citations [more]
    
    
88. EWRs (2003) epiphanies-while-reading [less]
    
    
89. etymogeny (2003) a way of sorting words/concepts according to when the nervous system became capable of dealing with them [more]
    
    
90. page memory (2003) the universal ability to recall where on the two-page spread an interesting bit occured [thread]
    
    
91. v* (2003) very (eg vshort, varcane, vfriv)
    
    
94. Philosophy Markup Language, History-of-Science Markup Language, Rhetorical Markup Language (2003) what they sound like [more]
    
    
95. goldfarb's conjecture (2003) the illusion that text styling should be associated with semantic markup [more]
    
    
96. grand metasynthesis (2004) aka The Singularity, but with an eye to the sorts of problems that will actually have to be solved along the way [more]
    
    
97. crystal tags (2005) hypothetical elaboration of nntp (network news transfer protocol, ie usenet/netnews/newsgroups/DejaNews/GoogleGroups) to replace email, blogs, and newsfeeds [more]
    
    
98. view-scaling (2005) optimally fitting the view of any object to the allocated space [more]
    
    
99. hoaxtop (2005) negroponte's olpc (a cellphone designed by the proverbial committee) [more]
    
    
100. Gg* (2005) Google (eg GgW = GoogleWeb, GgI = GgImages, GgN = GgNews, etc)
     
     
101. I'm-an-idiot day (2005) confess a weakness on the 13th of every month? [more]
     
     
102. weather giant (2006) visualisation of height of weather-phenomena via imaginary giant [more]
     
     
103. zipless blogging (2006) effortless blogging, interface-wise [more]
     
     
104. yahoo zodiac (2006) a more-or-less disciplined theoretical visualisation of a web ontology [more]
     
     
105. radial ontology (2006) any visualisation of an ontology that puts the root (of the 'tree') at the center [more]
     
     
106. heraldic barcodes (2006) schematic icons that encapsulate a lot of metadata for easy human scanning [more]
     
     
107. OS avatar (2006) inevitable interface feature where your OS tracks your current state [more]
     
     
108. self-conscious computing (2006) building debuggers' TRACE function into hard- and software at deepest level [more]
     
     
109. radio goggles (2006) visualisation experiment intended to explore why radio reception is so unpredictable [more]
     
     
110. pluripedia (2006) an evolution of wikipedia where multiple versions of each article are ranked according to your circle of trusted referees [more]
     
     
111. mini-blogs (2006) a 'view' that should be available on all web2.0 sites, allowing you to publish your own edition of the site's ongoing content, and to subscribe to others' miniblogs [more]
     
     
112. Glass earworms (2006) insane atonal earworms [more]
     
     
113. Polti vocabularies (2006) catalogs of (eg) plot skeletons [more]
     
     
114. worldtree (2007) was 'tree of life' (2005) 3D-worldlines visualisation of unique tree of life on Earth [intro]
     
     
115. discourse patterns (2007) a pattern language for rhetoric [more]
     
     
116. jLo notation (2007) shortening a two-word phrase by appending the lowercase initial of the first word to the capitalised last word
     
     
117. wBu (2007) GWBush = Pere wBu, wBu Roi (apologies to aJarry)
     
     
118. floaters (2007) blog-posts postdated so they stay at the top
     
     
119. meretocracy (2007) government by the most meretricious
     
     
120. tag portals (pending) the idea that any site with tagging should encourage taggers to create a portal-page for each tag, that gives an overview of everything the tagger thinks is important about that tag
     
     
121. net scouts (pending) incentive program for net.illiterate adults via 'merit badges'
     
     
122. Smithee dreams (pending) dreams with abysmal 'production values' eg plot holes, lousy special effects
     
     
123. dissipedia (pending) a wikipedia of links to negative criticism of ideas/people/etc
     
     
124. hypodata (pending) eg footnotes (cx metadata)
     
     
125. hypertext mashup language (pending) inevitable evolution where web markup allows multiple pages to be customised and/or combined
     
     
126. chronogram (pending) a graph with time as the Y axis (flowing up) and space as the X
     
     
127. .5* (pending) semi- (eg '.5friv' = semifriv)
     
     
128. pagestream (pending) eg your browser history, or your linkblog, or a page of search-engine results
     
     

.

Orthography (1st draft)

[i realised i wasn't sure
how to pronounce 'bow' (of a boat)
and then started collecting
similar difficulties

then this morning i sat down
with a rhyming dictionary
and threw this together

i'm sort of looking for a collaborator
who's good at this sort of thing
massaging it into presentable form
is probably more work than i want to bother with...]




you can row from the bow
shoot a bow in a row
sow a field for a mow
mow the field for a sow

catch a bass, play a bass
fill a vase or a vase

slough a skin in a slough
sough a sough to a clough
get chafed, get chaffed
play naughts, play draughts

go aft if they coughed
or laughed in the loft
or calfed in the trough of a drought

the cachet of your sachet
as a cache for your cash
if your crotchet is crochet
you can sashay or curvet
play croquet, eat croquettes
or ragout for a sou
rendezvous when you're through
throw debris from the quay
a bouquet from a sleigh
or an agape for Leigh

you can lead or be led
plead or be pled
read or be read
or knead bread instead

wear a boot on your foot
for the roots on your route
tout rout or toot
clout drought or knout

you might brood as you stood
by the puddle of blood
marriage for a villain
in a village with a murrain
or the college yclept Magdalene

and a hearse for Sanders Peirce
with skeins and skeins of crepe de chine
anodyne in your demesne
if you deign to gnaw the chine
impoliteness to repine

fraught by a sleight
double aughts unrequited
naughty knots unindicted

say hey, eh
heigh-ho, beau
ay-ay, guy

[...]

.

01-23 April 2007 links

'ciclovia' = bikepath (Spanish) (dTongue)
Neocons' declines tallied (Economist via vBoat)
Authorised DarthVader giant helium balloon (pic w/site via tHow)
aGopnik on kAmis (NYer-long)
Dorothy Parker on Aimee Semple McPherson (NYer-1928)
Fabric simulation (Java via mshook)
Long time no Riverbend (blog-no-update)
Nikki Giovanni vs Cho Seung-hui (iSteve)
I'd hit it... (Sinfest-vfriv)
Graph of declining computation-costs (flickr via iGreed)
Bjork's latest video(s) (2 yTubes)
Music-performance biz as con-game (eAard-arcane w/links)
Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business (Onion)
'powwow bunny' = native-american groupie (dTongue)
Backgrounder on Nokia 770 Linux tablet (long via dy)
New NYRB (toc)
One of these is false (oDevrwhr)
PBS/Moyers special on pre-Iraq disinfo (E&P via dy)
Dell snubs Vista (ZdNet via iGreed)
TAL trashed (Onion)
Mellow linkblog (cMonk)
"I've become a running joke" (oDoffice)
No rides in St. Patrick's Cathedral (oDinny)
Kate Beckinsale is new Barbarella (UK-no-pix via Fim)
VirginiaTech killer's one-act play (8of10pg via Sam)
Israel/Palestine sim (gSutra via Waxy)
2005 interview w/Calvin&Hobbes' Watterson (short via Steve)
Google tests categories for search results (Blgscoped)
'Matthew effect' = rich get richer (iGreed w/links)
New TomWolfe on hedgefundmanagerculture (looong via iGreed)
Cellphones blamed for bee die-off (UkInd via Sam)
Brazilian chanteuse Ceu (NPR w/RealAud)
'Pokemon test' = standard for Wikipedia 'fan-cruft' (Wiki via tHow)
'manu militari' = wanking (dTongue)
I [skull] LA (tee via Fim)
250k US bullets per Iraqi killed (UkInd-CD via Sam)
Residential-treehouse movement (IHT-3pg w/pic via dTongue)
GgMaps map-view adds 2.5D buildings (GgOS)
Javascript 6502 trainer (whee via Waxy)
More toon snark (cCrmdgn)
"All I pray for is a gay son" (oDoffice)
"I found them dancing around in a little circle for some drunk guy" (oDevrwhr)
'wilfing' = what-was-i-looking-for surfing (dTongue)
BSOs = 'bright shiny objects' (dTongue)
"A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder" (1992-abstract via dy)
Dappled light (ET-pix)
Cosmetics ROI theory (iSteve)
"Bless you." "You don't know me!" (oDinny)
Discouraging stats on dieting (Med via dy)
WaPo rewrites history on the fly (Xym w/links)
Review of "I Am a Strange Loop" (tBray)
New NYRB (toc)
Roller-coaster pov for viewing graphs (GgV-4min)
Bloomies to NyPost: Your readers are our shoplifters (GgW)
1910 ?encyclopedia on 12M index cards (Kircher via Sam)
GoogleEarth for deep space (Flash via vBoat)
Nifty trick for graphing polynomials (arcane via mshook)
GoogleMaps now customizable (ORA via Waxy)
Water-misuse stats (iGreed w/link)
'Overton window' = political-spectrum con-game (Wiki via eAard)
'to seagull' = to slipstream (dTongue)
Realworld Cheney sightgag (yTube-20sec via Steve)
'playdar' = gaydar for swingers (dTongue)
Ruth Rendell resources (recent project)
Radial ontology visualised (pic w/pdf-links)
Recycle your soul (Sinfest)
The alcoholic Easter bunny (oDinny)
Loooong profile of Wolfowitz (NYer)

[older]

A, B, +, A+B

the trick
when approaching the human sciences
is to discover combinatorial primitives
that generate (any) rich semantics
before they explode

and the tragicomedy
of pomo frenchy 'theory'
is that combinatorial explosions
are embraced as a virtue
so semantic primitives are
actively disparaged

so as we explore
discourse as lists
we need to tiptoe over
eggshell minefields
trusting primitives as steppingstones

and one such
primitive discourse-list
is the counterintuitively heterogeneous
A, B, +, A+B

because most story sequences
involve changing relationships
among compositions of simpler elements

and recounting relationships
stereotypically requires accounting first
for those simpler elements (A, B)
and then too
perhaps
for the the relationship '+' itself
(more often omitted as obvious)

and only then finally
the combination A+B

less stereotypically
these list-steps
can be freely permuted
(cf transformational grammar
and mathematical commutation)

as when Gravity's Rainbow
opens with Pirate (B)
followed by Pirate spying on Slothrop (B+A)
followed by Slothrop (B)
and perhaps spying-in-general (+)

but if our goal
semantic-web-like
is to tease out each text's
semantic understructure
we have to acknowledge every text's
infinite annotatability

A has an infinitely detailed
backstory timeline
debated finitely
within a subtimeline
of the Great Conversation

along with every topic
that might shed light on A

with our current author X
(with her own infinitely detailed
timeline backstory)
writing in style S
(with its own timeline backstory)
using words W (with their own etymological histories)

X possessing a finite knowledge
of the Great Conversation about A

identifying gaps in that knowledge
being a primary priority
of Conversational followups




and (A B + A+B)
is promiscuously associative as well
(A B + A+B C * C*A+B)
so imposing strict hierarchies
of stereotyped primitive lists
is probably beside the point

.

Discourse as lists

i never cared for
sgml/xml/xhtml's insistence on
text as strict hierarchies
of containers

especially when
entirely notional
paragraphs
are granted positions of
(undeserved) honor
in those hierarchies

but lately i've been pondering
the ordering principles
(alphabetical chronological best-first etc)
by which we sequence
textbites

broadly generalising the narrow concept
of list
until suddenly the prospect
of text
discourse
as hierarchies of
lists within lists

has become attractive




formatting styles, of course
are vastly irrelevant here
(a list can be just
two words
unpunctuated)

the emphasis should instead be on
ordering principles
and set-membership principles

lists offering choices
lists exhausting domains
lists sampling subsets
lists specifying procedural steps
lists structuring arguments

lists arbitrarily
prefixing and postfixing
auxiliary text materials
like headers and footers
and sidebars

.