Publication Format Experiment.
Setting up a songline in publication Format. Was it successful?
Intention was to use medium.com’s publication format as metaphorical songline landscape containing my stark poetry stories.
Experimental result Good Idea…But.., Didn’t work.
My Experiment.
Created publication called “Starkers”, Home for stories written in stark poetry, Minimum words maximum meaning, Another experiment in writing style.
Set to work with great enthusiasm, Wrote 3 stories, All seemed well, Worked on Pub’s feature pages, Looked good.
Each Story metaphor for songline site, Act of reading each story became metaphor for elder’s curated performance of songline ritual.
Publication’s list of pinned stories represented order walked between songline sites, Feature pages facilitated presentation and separation of multiple songlines.
Didn’t Work for Me.
My background, My learning and engineering career steeped in literate society and technology.
On other hand, Australian Aboriginal songlines created and embedded in oral society steeped in tribal culture within lived-in landscape for over 65000 years, World’s longest and greatest application of memory training with long term successful practice.
Inherent richness of Songline and practice did not work within publication experiment, Could be argued that physical arrangement of publication worked to limited extent.
Most important songline feature of oral traditional knowledge management and context was missing, Putting it bluntly my publication was just empty shell, Deleted publication and kept my poems.
My Stories are part of my imagination and experiences, I write them for enjoyment and pleasure of sharing with medium friends.
Few More Thoughts.
Songlines with their inherent intense memory training have strict controls to ensure fidelity and accuracy for passing down Aboriginal cultural inheritance, Songlines stable across geological time scales.
Literate society and rapid advances in technology communications social change and now climate change focuses on disseminating knowledge on nature of change and means of adapting to change, Literate knowledge management is all about rapid dissemination and immediate feedback, Now with multimedia and AI applications modern management moves into different realms.
My Take Home Thoughts.
When faced with cultural differences between literate and societies based on oral traditions care must be taken when considering memory and knowledge management techniques.
Specifically how and why do different cultures manage both explicit and tacit knowledge? What are their knowledge objectives?
My experiment motivated by curiosity helped enrich my understanding of knowledge and ideation, Decided against pursuing songline structures using publication but felt experiment supported by decade of research helped deepen understanding of cause and effect in complex system analysis.
Blessed be.