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pcdb - [pcdb] story as organizing metaphor

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Subject: Permaculture Database

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  • From: Paul Cereghino <paul.cereghino@comcast.net>
  • To: pcdb <pcdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [pcdb] story as organizing metaphor
  • Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 20:49:15 -0700

STORY AS ORGANIZING METAPHOR

When I'm teaching I often use storyline metaphors. Characters are the dynamic elements of the system, the system architects. The setting is everything from latitude down to microtopography and everything in between, and is ruled by the big interactive mess of hydrology-soils and disturbance regime. Now there is grey area... some characters are so regular in their habit that they start to be part of the setting.. distrubance regime, the scythe, seasonal water maniuplations. At some scale of smallness (at around the earthworm) characters fade into setting. This is related to both our bias in observing large things, but it is also real... At some scale we are simply unable to control or predict beyond general terms... we dump organic matter on the surface or drag a blade at 12", and then watch the microcosmos reorganize into a new kind of 'soil' in response. I am happy to allow some to try organize this microscale into a coherent design process, but I am dubious.

So can we or should we divide setting from character for the purposes of data structure? (I say yes).
If not we need to somehow cleave setting into [objects], and although I subscribe to the philosophy of complexity, I don't know how to model it accurately in a publically generated dataset.




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