I seem to be going down a rabbit hole prompted by Josie Gibson’s invitation to present to the Catalyst-FX Network.  We settled on the title “A Peek “Under-the-hood” of the Complex Systems Frameworks Collection”, and now I am trawling through my list or presentations to create an archive.  I’m hoping to put together a story which speaks to the emergence of the collection.

This “trawling through my archives” has turned into a rabbit hole as I try to create a single archive of pdf files.  The list I generated from the CV system has 400 presentations since 1985, and the further back I go the harder it is to find them. I am up to 92 found so far.  I can skip all the stuff about CIHR, but the systems thinking in these presentations goes back to the early 2000’s.

The idea I have is to put these pdf files into an AI and interrogate them for the flow of ideas. My test run with the first 65 presentation gave me the following headers for the progression of ideas:

• The spark: recognizing the limits of reductionism (1987-2000)
• Gathering the building blocks (2014-2020)
• From presentations to a “Textbook” (2022-2023)
• The visual transformation and Launch (2024-present)

The gap from 2000-2014 is a big one, but the experiment tells me the archive will be a rich source of data.  I tested again with the prompt “This is a reasonable overview.  Now I want you to dig deeper and trace the individual concepts that were talked about and then landed in the collection.”  The results are not worth copying here but with more effort on the prompts, the story should emerge, but I’ve got to complete building the archive first 😜.