✎ michka:project_definition [the libarynth]

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====Collection Phase====

===Paper Notebooks===

I have been offered this Transiency in June 2012, and wrote down any inspiring topic I may want to address during this period until the actual start of the Transiency, in November 2013.

As I do not have smartphone, I use old style **paper notebooks** to write down burning questions/comments/ideas, references and field notes. I write down stuff almost everyday, on quite many different topics. Therefore, I decided to ease the browsing process by adding up small **tags** into brackets to whatever I was writing down. Here are some tag examples:

* **[REF]** is used for litterary and online references
  * **[LMK]** is used for Landmark Papers
  * **[PROJ]** is used for projects I would like to implement in the future
  * **[FUT]** is used for mid-term to long-term ideas of what I may like to do as a profession in the future.
  * **[ADR]** is mainly used when I travel for addresses I would like to remember, like nice coffee places, or spots to watch beautiful landscapes.
  * **[GDS]** is used to record transient magical moments I would like to remember over the long term.
  * **[FoAM2013]** was used to record any Transiency-related content.

One major phase of the project definition process was therefore to browse the eight notebooks I filled since June 2012 to gather any [FoAM2013]-labeled content.

===Numerical Content===

When doing online search, I directly used the computer to write down inspirationnal material regarding the Transiency. In my "numerical & online notebooks", I had:

* **Web bookmarks** into the bookmark management tool [[http://diigo.com|Diigo]] under the label "FoAM2013"
  * As I did not use my personal computer at work, I also had to process **E-mails** with links grouped under the label "FoAM2013"
  * A **text document** called "FoAM 2013" for random non-links stuff like keywords and direct references to activities or Metabolhomics processes
  * A **folder** called "FoAM 2013" filled up with PDFs to read, images, and other stuff.

All this material was classified together with the Paper Notebooks material.

====Classification Phase====

===Post-it Classification Phase===

Some of this content was outdated, so I decided to operate a **first filtering step** at the root level, and gathered onto post-its only the topics which still seemed relevant to address in November 2013. This induced lack of traceability, as I have no direct access to the whole set of topics I would have liked to adress during this Transiency. However, it lightened the amount of material to sort, which was already representing much more than the amount I would be able to work on within a year.

I started by just **accumulating post-its in a unordered way** during one browsing day. Ordering seems easier when you reached a kind of critical mass.

From this critical mass emerged a first classification in three **categories**:
  - **Practices**: a set of activities I want to learn or practice during this year.
  - **Metabolhomics**: elements regarding the DIY upcycled bio-based self-sufficient habitat I plan to map and prototype this year.
  - **Language**: a set of keywords describing the approach, methods and activities performed during this Transiency.

More details about the **sorting algorithm** which helped me sort this into categories are available [[http://transiency-diary.tumblr.com/post/73420206199/iterative-ideas-sorting-algorithm|here]].

After more days of notebook content gathering, a bigger amount of post-its allowed to **define sub-categories** to the first basic classification scheme. Some categories where restructured when balance in the content would change with the growing number of post-its.

As more post-its were added to the wall, **further sub-categories** where created, some **specific contents** were highlighted by being put on post-its with different colors. The final result of the post-it classification looked like the following picture - where you can only see the classification of the Metabolhomics category.

Post-its have mainly been used as precursors of mindmaps. Post-its are quite handy because they - theoretically - can be re-positionned several times and still stick to the surface. When dealing with large amounts of content to classify, I think that post-its are handy for three reasons:
  - You get physical with your ideas
  - You are able to do and undo classification schemes in very intuitive and quick way
  - You can keep an holoptic view more easily with a big wall than with a small screen

However, as you do not want to archive your wall forever with the right classification, I have then switched to mindmaps.

===Mindmaps===

Thanks to the freeware version of [[http://www.xmind.net/|XMind]], I obtained compact and readable mindmaps out of my quickly-handwritten-and-unsticky-anymore-post-its.

====TODO====

> Processing language: essential key words and essential anti-key words.
> Getting physical TD link

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