4.2: A File Structure for The Complex, The Changing and the Indeterminate 论文

摘要

ions and categories. Human ideas, science, scholarship and language are constantly collapsing and unfolding. Any field, and the corpus of all fields, is a bundle of relationships subject to all kinds of twists, inversions, involutions and rearrangement: these changes are frequent but unpredictable. Recall that computers, once a branch of mathematics, are now their own field (but the development of fluid logic indicates a possible merger with the art of wind instruments). Social relations, psycholinguistics and psychonomics are new fields, even though they rest on no special discoveries; political economy, natural history and social ethics are gone. Within a given area, too, the subheadings of importance are in constant flux. In the social sciences, for instance, the topic headings of the nineteen-thirties now sound quaint. While the disappearance and up-ending of categories and subjects may be erratic, it never stops; and the meaning of this for information retrieval should be clear. Last week’s categories, perhaps last night’s field, may be gone today. To the extent that information retrieval is concerned with seeking true or ideal or permanent codes and categories—and even the most sophisticated “role indicator” syntaxes are a form of this endeavor—to this extent, information retrieval seems to me to be fundamentally mistaken. The categories are chimerical (or temporal) and our categorization systems must evolve as they do. Information systems must have built in the capacity to accept the new categorization systems as they evolve from, or outside, the framework of the old. Not just the new material, but the capacity for new arrangements and indefinite rearrangements of the old, must be possible. In this light, the ELF, indefinitely revisible and unperturbed by changes in overall structural relations, offers some promise. There is, then, a general rationale. I believe that such a system as the ELF actually ties in better than anything previously used with the actual processes by which thought is progressively organized, whether into stories or hypertext or library categories. Thus it may help integrate, for human understanding, bodies of material so diversely connected that they could not be untangled by the unaided mind. For both logistic and psychological reasons it should be an important adjunct to imaginative, integrating and creative enterprises. It is useful where relationships are unclear; where contingencies and tasks are undefined and unpredictable; where the structures or final outcome it must represent are not yet fully known; where we do not know the file’s ultimate arrangement; where we do not know what parts of the file are most important; or where things are in permanent and unpredictable flux. Perhaps this includes more places than we *****The sense of “hyper-” used here connotes extension and generality; cf. “hyperspace.” The criterion for this prefix is the inability of these objects to be comprised sensibly into linear media, like the text string, or even media of somewhat higher complexity. The ELF is a hyperfile. theNEWMEDIAREADER 11. A File Structure for the Complex...