creating a guilding database

["Nick Routledge" <fellowservant@yahoo.com>]

Several remarks from Toby particularly caught my attention. First, his
suggestion that we ponder "features" as a defining concern in design
direction struck me as sensible. Second:



>   Or are there so few

> >guilds--maybe only a couple of dozen?-- that a

> simple listing would suffice?



My sense is is that a huge brake on guilding work is that the very
structure of conventional media (such as print) is "at war" with the type
of descriptive structures actually needed to explore and propagate wisdom
around "topics of interconnectness" such as guilds. Take this remark from
hypertext theorist George Landow:



"many who write on hypertext...argue that we must abandon conceptual 

systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierachy, and linearity 

and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and 

networks. Almost all parties to this paradigm shift, which marks a 

revolution in human thought, see electronic writing as a direct response 

to the strengths and weaknesses of the printed book." 



Does that sound like a permie speaking, or wot? More on that theme at:



http://www.scribble.com/world3/meme1/conn6.html



Or, as Kevin Kelly, ex-editor of WIRED and the Whole Earth Review, puts
it:



As Brian Eno, the musician, wrote of Bolter's work, "[Bolter's thesis] 

is that the way we organize our writing space is the way we come to 

organize our thoughts, and in time becomes the way which we think the
world itself must be organized."



Hypertextual databases address this organizational wrinkle rather
elegantly - quite simply, the very structure of the web (an interconnected
reality) makes it possible to describe an interconnected archetype (such
as guilds) where print _literally_ cannot. Put another way, a web-based
guilding db could actually provide the trigger for a guilding revolution,
whereas I sense a simple listing won't.



Finally, Toby's remark about:



> >-Analog guilds that mimic natural plant

> communities.



is perhaps a key concern. Given the fact that in designing a hypertextual
guilding database we are fundamentally designing a marriage of structure
and meaning that _describes by imitating_ the dynamics of life, there's
absolutely no reason why, if designed well, the analog (or archetypal)
dimension to this db may well prove one of its most powerful features.
What's more, there's every reason, for example, why a db description of a
plant community may not only suggest analogs for designs of other plant
communities using completely different plants, but that the analogs may
well be wholly translatable to the work of others than the permie
community: to the work of those studying fungi, animals, indeed to the
work of "social physicians," for example,  exploring relationships in
human communities. (Some months ago I ran a google search on plant guilds
and up popped a piece on "the return of social guilds" by an Islamic
theologian.) Get the drift?



So, my sense is that if we can keep one eye on the archetypal angle, then
the strength of a guilding db may well be that it provides an influence
that reaches far, far beyond plant communities. Our strength, of course,
is that we have Nature's integrity as a model to drop "Gaian mind" into
the grand db mix.



Having said that, I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag.



Mississippi is gorgeous.



n.

www.foodnotlawns.com