No. 08 · Study
Structure that accrues
Nothing is declared a hub in advance. A thing becomes central because other things keep pointing at it, and the same picture, a core and its periphery, repeats at every scale.
Most systems for organising information ask for the structure first: the categories, the fields, the types. Then the material is fitted into them, and whatever does not fit is lost or forced.
The direction here runs the other way. A thing starts with only what identifies it. Structure is added when use asks for it, and what becomes central is whatever keeps being referred to. Privilege, in this sense, is acquired and accrued, not granted by a schema.
Links arrive one at a time, from bookmarks, pastes and captured pages. Nothing is declared about them.
Step through an invented collection of links. The addresses are made up. The first two steps resemble what the link bank draws today; the third is the intended direction.
A core, and what hangs around it
The picture is radial: a thing at the centre and the things that bear on it on rings around it, nearest the most bound. A site is a core and its links its periphery; the bank is a core that the sites ring. Look more closely and some of one site’s links turn out to be something in particular, exhibitions say, and that periphery becomes a core of its own.
The centre is a frame of reference, not a ranking. Any thing at the edge of one picture can be the centre of the next. A graph is used here as a way to see relations before they are given names, not as a decision that they must have them.
Where it stands
Exists
- A link bank that keeps every address exactly as it arrived, from bookmark files, pastes and captured pages, and never rewrites it.
- Each address cleaned and grouped by site, and drawn radially, with sites as cores and their links around them.
Not yet, or not decided
- The recursion, where part of a periphery becomes a core of its own. It is drawn here as an intention.
- Names for the groupings that emerge. Labels and categories are held back until use shows which are worth having.
- A general way to say that two things seem connected before saying how.