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"As We May Type": Authoring Tools as "Machines for New Thought."

10/16/2013

On October 16, 2013 writer and computer programmer Paul Ford published in MIT Technology Review an article entitled, "As We May Type." The subheading of this article, the title of which undoubtedly alluded to Vanevar Bush's famous paper, As We May Think, was "New outliners and authoring tools are machines for new thoughts." This article discussed the issue of how new outlining and writing tools impact the human creative writing process. From this I quote a couple of paragraphs:

"Outlines are a kind of mental tree. Say level 1 is a line of text. Then level 1.1 would be subordinate to 1, and 1.1.1 subordinate to 1.1; 1.2, like 1.1, is subordinate to the first line. And so forth. Of course, outlines existed before software. (The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein composed an entire book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as an outline.)

"But with an outlining program, you don’t need a clumsy numbering system, because the computer does the bookkeeping for you. You can build hierarchies, ideas branching off ideas, with words like leaves. You can hide parts of outlines as you’re working, to keep the document manageable. And on a computer, any element can be exported to another program for another use. Items can become sections in a PhD thesis—or slides in a presentation, or blog posts. Or you could take your outline tree and drop it inside another outline, building a forest."

 

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