Example: Text from a pyramid outline

This is the topmost outline that is part of the pyramid of outlines in the Sprawling Places hypertext. Each line links to a second-level outline. There are some third-level outlines but not in every case.

  1. How can we improve the new but often unsatisfying places that surround us today?

  2. We should approach issues about places today starting from the basic conditions that make an area of space into a place.

  3. Contemporary places are often accused of being commodified, and other similar totalizing criticisms.

  4. There is no cure for the modern sense of exile, but qualities of places today that are often taken as negative may enable positive achievements.

  5. Our contemporary places show new kinds of unity.

  6. A better way to evaluate contemporary places is according to their degree of complexity.

  7. Themed places threaten to oversimplify our lives, but they can be lived in more complex ways.

  8. Suburban sprawl can be made more livable by both revealing and increasing its complexity.

  9. New discontinuous places show new modes of unity and linkage.

  10. The conditions that make our places possible also give us room for a more spacious inhabitation that takes advantage of those very qualities of contemporary places that occasion so much criticism.

This is an outline from the second level of the pyramid, expanding the emphasized line in the outline above. Each line links to a node in the corresponding tangle of texts.

  1. Themed places are often condemned as prime examples of contemporary perversions of true place dwelling.

  2. If we use more precise language to describe them, we can discern both positive and negative aspects in themed places.

  3. What a theme is

    1. a normative grammatical unity

    2. self-presented as self-presented

    3. self-presented as different from the everyday

  4. What a theme is not

  5. Types of themed places

    1. Mono- and multi-themed places

    2. Themes that are already established

    3. Themes that are self-establishing

    4. Themes in varying degrees

  6. All places are liable to being themed, because openness to being themed is inherent in the very conditions that make an area a place.

  7. Criteria for evaluating themed places

  8. Themed places and the question of authenticity.

  9. Theming tends to oversimplify places. That simplification should be resisted.

  10. That resistance can be based on our doubled inhabitation of themed places.

  11. We should not abolish themes; we should make them show themselves as expressly within their more complex context.

There is a map of the expository nodes that are linked from this sub-outline .