For a while, I've been struggling with a way to accomplish the equivalent of HTML anchor links between Tinderbox notes. If I have a large document and I want to link to a particular paragraph from a particular paragraph, I thought, I can't do it. I was disappointed with Tinderbox's lack of a key hypertext feature.

Then I figured it out. It might, of course, be a kluge, but I think not. See, I was deceived by the idea of link direction. I forgot my database experience. How do you do a many-many link in a relational database? You need intermediate data.

Now, if I want to directly link two bits of text that are part of two notes, I first highlight the text. Then I hit the *, which links to a new note from the highlighted text. Then, I highlight the link text from the second note and link it to the new, third note I just created.

Voila! It takes an extra step to traverse between texts, which might be annoying, but then it might not. It actually seems like an elegant way to deal with it. This way, complex means aren't needed to set where the anchor points to. The basic link works perfectly well, since we can backtrack links in Tinderbox. The extra note also gives us a place to include a detailed explanation of the link.

I have used this numerous times in my draft of the comparison between Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Since I have the full text of Heart of Darkness in the Tinderbox file, I can use this to directly link my citations to the text. I can also use this to demonstrate the argument flow within a single note, linking parts of the main text to other parts of the main text.

These links don't have to be one-way either. Their topology can become complex. If I cite an idea in several places, I can have this jumping-off note be pointed to from all over the place.

The trick is direction. Rather than having the central note point to other notes, all the cross-references point inward to this central linking note. If you want to link to a specific spot in a note, think backwards. This way we encode the location in the document where the reference is made.

Brilliant. I doubt Eastgate did this by accident.