[Tb] Use of Tinderbox by Historians

> [...]
> As an academic historian, my idea is to use among other things Tinderbox to
> replace both Mindmanager which I used for mind-mapping and Filemaker which I
> used for storing my research notes.

Mindmanager is not available for Macintosh, true?

>
> I would therefore have three questions.
>
> 1. I wondered if there are around other historians or social scientists who
> are currently using Tinderbox for their research.

If none pop up here on the mailinglist, look at the "made with Tinderbox"
sites on eastgate.com or the links on

http://www.lee-phillips.org/info/Macintosh/Tinderbox.html

>
> 2. Using Tinderbox for mind mapping seems simple but is it possible to
> include pictures and illustrations ?

You can include pictures in notes, but the Tinderbox document's size
becomes enormous. I just tried it again to confirm that this is
still a problem in the current version: a Tinderbox document consisting
of a single note and a 28k picture used up 653k of disk space! This is
due to the way that pictures are serialized in Tinderbox's xml file.

So you don't want to include pictures directly in your notes, but you
can make file links from notes to any file on your disk, including
pictures. Also, you can attach an AppleScript to a note and have it
execute automatically when the note opens; the script can open pictures,
for example.

> 3. Am I right in thinking that Tinderbox can suitably replace a simple
> database designed on Filemaker.

Probably, I would think, unless the database does calculations or something
else that Tinderbox can't do. You can use the attributes of notes kind of
like fields in a database, and agents can be used for queries. A Tinderbox
document is a kind of database, with the added richness of a visual
layout that lets you use spatial memory to interact with your data. The
hypertext, prototyping, outlining, etc. aspects of the program go far
beyond any database product, as you know. I've tried out several
"mind mapping" type programs as well, and it seems to me that none
of them do the essential things that Tinderbox does, including non-trivial
html export.

I think what I'm trying to say with this rambling is that Tinderbox
offers far more than even a combination of a mind-mapping program
with Filemaker. That being said, if you really need a real database,
you should install one of the high-performance free databases available
for OS X, such as mysql, but such a thing is not necessary for storing
the research notes of a single scholar.
Received on Wed Aug 25 20:41:06 2004