Content Dynamics

“But ‘glory’ doesn't mean ‘a nice knockdown argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

There are some related quotes and ideas in Words Are Not Reality and Do Words Control Thought?.

Fortunately for you, by “content dynamics” I mean exactly what you'd expect: the dynamics of content. Since the dynamics of a system are the characteristic ways in which it changes, and since content, in this context, is the bodies of the essays, content dynamics is the study of what sort of things tend to happen when you're trying to write a bunch of interrelated essays.

Although the two are related, content dynamics is not quite the same thing as site dynamics. According to the above, site dynamics should be (and is) the study of how a site changes, but for my purposes it is mostly a guarantee of behavior—a contract with the user, if you will. Thus, apart from the fact that the site is made up of more than just the essay content, the two dynamics are different in that the site dynamics are constraints I've imposed, whereas the content dynamics are natural behaviors I've observed.