Zettelkasten Forum


Fragnet: Meaningful fragment of a network

I am a bit of a space buff and I've been reading some books the Space Shuttle. In one of them* the author discussed the management system for understanding how all the pieces of the spacecraft interconnected and interacted. This network is obviously too big to understand, so the system designers worked with a concept of "fragnets", fragments of the network which captured a meaningful subnet.

Sometimes having a term for something allows for seeing it existing places. Perhaps it can help you see a new perspective :smile:

Kinda related to my earlier post on heterarchies.

* T. A. Heppenheimer, History of the space shuttle: Development of the Space Shuttle, vol. 2. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002.

Comments

  • This reminds me a lot of software engineering/programming/software architecture, and the direction from which I came to the Zettelkasten Method. There's a lot of useful stuff 'hidden' in these practical disciplines that writers can make use of, I think.

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • edited May 2021

    @henrikenggaard said:
    I am a bit of a space buff and I've been reading some books the Space Shuttle. In one of them the author discussed the management system for understanding how all the pieces of the spacecraft interconnected and interacted. This network is obviously too big to understand, so the system designers worked with a concept of "fragnets", fragments of the network which captured a meaningful subnet.

    </word geek>

    Fragnet is a word with interesting characteristics. It is a portmanteau - a combination of two words creating a new word combining the concepts of the two words.

    fragment + network = fragnet = a meaningful subnet

    • zetttelkasten + astronaut = zettelnaut (a knowledge explorer)
    • haunting + technology = hauntology (hat tip to @Phil)
    • hungry + angry = hangry
    • etymology (words) + philia = etymophilia (lover of words)
    • ecology + the implication of suiside = ecocide
    • ecocology + precarity = ecoprecarity

    If you look, portmanteaus are everywhere. Probably making English harder to learn than it should be. But these are such magisterial words. Combining words and ideas in new and novel ways is compatible with the zettelkasten way.

    As you can see, I collect portmanteau.

    <word geek/>

    Will Simpson
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