patterns in academic research

A lot of academic research, both in the sciences and the humanities,
involves pattern-detection and visualization in some symbol system.
Analysis can be viewed as strategies for pattern detection and synthesis
as strategies for pattern creation. Visualization enters at all stages of
the process.

Building on what I said earlier about modeling relationships in Tinderbox,
a pattern can be viewed as a repeated relationship or as a web of
relationships.

This is where discussions of links, attribute/agent sets, and map views
become crucial to the academic research process: their use impacts the
ability to discover, explore, manipulate, and present patterns from
different points of view and different levels of detail.

This is why I hope this group of Tinderbox users interested in exploring
serious academic research use of Tinderbox will not only investigate
specific examples of how people do it - or might do it - but also, in the
spirit of academic inquiry, will investigate the underlying concepts,
issues, and tradeoffs that will help build more flexible, powerful, and
robust systems.

Rosemary
Received on Thu Jan 5 15:58:44 2006