I'm a fan of narrative as a way to persuasively convey ideas. Here, I'm taking notes on my attempts to create wikis with multiple "trails" that share pages, a part of Vannevar Bush's original idea that hasn't played out that well.
Note: by "narrative," I mean a non-fiction narrative. I'd use "argument," except I don't want to drag in connotations of "having an argument" (that is: having a fight).
See also Narrative Action and Narrative Structure𓇯.
claims
1. Human beings like narratives and are persuaded by them. (I will not here address "Should they?" or "isn't it bad to use cognitive biases in persuasion?" It is what it is.)
2. Narratives have a linear, story-like structure that people have come to expect. Digging into a pile of not-connected chunks-o-text is research, a different thing. Out of scope here.
3. Hypertext complicates things. In a way that can be good: readers can understand more by following links, and – especially – should find it easy to get answers to questions that pop up in their mind as they read. But it's bad if the affordances of hypertext encourage authors to get lazy. Like: substituting linking to a page for explaining a core idea **in the reader's present context**.
hopes
I personally want this of wiki trails:
1. They should have all the properties of good narrative (list forthcoming of the properties I care about - things like throughline, foreshadowing, callbacks, etc.). The main point is that the reader's experience should be of a conventional argument/narrative, *not* of the need to search through a corpus to form an opinion.
2. Some narrative will be the first one created. Later narratives should *not* read as weird assemblages of previously written pages connected to new pages. From the reader's perspective, that's *research*, which is a different thing. A reader who guesses which of two trails was written first should get it wrong about half the time.
3. Creating a new narrative should not require too much tweaking of already-existing pages. The existence of a previous narrative should facilitate the creation of a new narrative, not complicate it.
support
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