Just when I realized that my category system here wasn’t working well, i.e., switching from REALTY? to NONFICTION to hold the personal posts and now deciding to reverse that move, I find this in Landow’s book:
As Ted Nelson, one of (Vannevar) Bush’s most prominent disciples, points out, "there is nothing wrong with categorization. it is, however, by its nature transient; category systems have a half-life, and categorizations begin to look fairly stupid after a few years… (p. 10)
Why this post alone caused me some hesitation; would it be better put in NEW MEDIA? LITERATURE? And what about the Interactive Fiction, such as Nick Montfort’s Book and Volume that I’m into now; is that Literature (sure), Hyperfiction (sort of), New Media, or in its own category of IF? The Watchmaker is new media but literature as well.
Bush, a pioneer of hypertext, realized that not only was it highly inefficient to do research as the years and information piled up, the simple fact was that it was done in a way that sounded good–alphabetical, numerical or chronological–but that in fact was not following the normal pattern of human thinking: organization by association. Obviously, if I was searching for the word "story" I wouldn’t continue my search by next trying stoic or stove; I’d think of fiction, book, tale, etc.
What’s cool about about the study of hypertext and new media is being able to see it not as some outrageous new concept, but to understand how it came about by the processes that we go through every day in some small way.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology