connecting the dots

While it's useful to break down ideas into fine-grained units, [[collecting the dots]], you have to connect them back together again to make sense of them. A collection of dots isn't much use (although just navigating around them can be fun).

After connecting the dots, I kind of think you need to colour the picture in, and then hang it on the wall for others to see.

Knowledge is not an accumulation of facts, nor is it even a set of facts and their relations. Facts are only rendered meaningful within narratives, and the single-page document is a format very conducive to narrative structure.

– Open Transclude

People often get carried away when they discover the original vision of [[hypertext]], which involves a network of documents, portions of which are “[[transcluded]]” (included via hypertext) into one another. The implication is that readers could follow any reference and see the source material—and granted, this would be transformative. However, there’s a limit to the effectiveness of the knowledge network as a reading experience. “Hypertext books,” online books which are made up of an abundance of interlinked HTML pages, are mostly unpopular.

– Open Transclude

[[Pattern recognition]].