Hypertext

Transclusion, Sovereignty, and Psychosomatic Overhead

My central concern was to create a publishing system with universal quotability by transclusion, a concept I saw as vital

Ted Nelson. Possiplex, p258. 

I like it [transclusion] as a concept but it can’t work in reality, in my mind, unless it’s on a very small system.

Frode Hegland

That’s fair. I think transclusion is doable when the percepts are highly constrained. Intelligently representing context (and allowing intuitive viewing of the same content across multiple contexts) is I believe one of the core design challenges for the field of Cybersemics (extended sensemaking). Transclusion/contextuality is core to em’s view and data model. 

I also like being able to ’take’ and ‘own’ something and not have it change on me later, though we will have to figure out how to make information make us aware that it’s been updated.

Frode Hegland

Yes, I believe that sovereignty of mental models is critical to maintain coherency. I use sovereignty over ownership because the latter is too easily confused with the concept of property. 

In order to integrate external modifications to one’s mental model, one has to go through an active (psychological) integration process. This is quite foreign to the automatic transformation/isomorphisms that are used in math/computing and require no psychosomatic overhead. 

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