Wednesday, March 27, 2002

A Vannevar moment
Drifting in that space between awake and asleep, I had a vision this morning. I saw the tool I needed to be able to keep track of the chapters I am editing. I saw exactly how each fragment I am moving should be linked to the different positions in the text: where it should go, where it was originally, where it might fit. This way I could easily, from the same document, produce a wide variety of versions of my thesis, and I could pick the one I liked the best. Or the assessors could pick the ones they liked.

As I woke up, I realised I was not the first scholar to think of something like this. I had had a Vannevar moment.

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