How-to

Routes and walks

A graph has no beginning. A route gives it one — an ordered path through a lens, with your own words in the gaps between stops.

What a route is for

A graph can be entered anywhere, which is exactly what makes it good for thinking and useless for explaining. “Here is my lens on Watergate, look at all of it” is not an explanation.

A route is the linear pass through the non-linear thing: this node, then this one, then this one, and here is why each follows the last. Three uses it turns out to be good for:

Explaining your lens to someone else, including a future you who has forgotten it.
Rehearsing an argument — walking it is how you find out that step four does not follow from step three.
Re-entering your own work after a month away, without having to remember where the thread started.

Build one

Open the Routes panel for the lens and start a new route. Give it a title, and a description if the title is not enough.

Then click nodes in the order you want them visited. That order is the route — there is no separate step where you arrange them afterwards, because the order you clicked is almost always the order you meant.

The transition notes are the point

Each stop can carry a transition note: what leads into it. The stops themselves are already in the graph — anyone can read them without you. The note is the connective tissue, and it exists nowhere else.

Write the note as the sentence you would say out loud between two slides. “Which is why the tapes mattered more than the break-in” does more work than a summary of the node you are about to arrive at, because the reader is about to read that node themselves.

Walk one

Pick a route and walk it. Each stop opens in turn, the camera follows to the node on the graph, and the transition note appears before the node it introduces.

The camera following matters more than it sounds: you are watching the path being drawn across the structure, so you keep the map while getting the argument. That is the thing neither a document nor a bare graph can do.

Walking a route does notsettle draft nodes. A stop's panel is open for a moment as you pass through, and travelling through a node is not reading it — which is deliberate, because otherwise one walk could clear a hundred unread drafts. Some of my nodes are grey.

Weathering

Paths you actually walk wear in. Segments that get traversed repeatedly are drawn more strongly over time, so the parts of your lens you keep returning to become visible as trails across it.

It is a record of use, not a score. Nothing is lost by not walking, there is nothing to keep up, and a trail fading is not a reprimand — it is just a route you stopped needing. The reason to have it is that where you have been is genuinely information about your own work, and you would otherwise have no way to see it.

Editing and deleting

Edit changes the title, the description, the stops and their notes. Reordering is re-clicking.
Deleting a route deletes the route. The nodes it visited are untouched — a route is a reading of a lens, never a container for it.

Routes and sharing

A visitor to a shared lens can walk its routes, which is usually the best thing to hand someone: it is the difference between showing a person your notes and showing them what you think.

What they see obeys the same rules as everything else — restricted nodes stay yours, in a route as anywhere else. Sharing a lens.

Lenses, nodes and links — why the graph has no natural order to begin with.
Sharing a lens — handing a route to somebody.