Our experience entering the Hatfield Clan has been tedious and error prone. But the manual work has brought to mind improvements to the Graph plugin that would enable multiple distributed drag and drop workflows.
Hatfield-McCoy Feud Graphed describes drag and drop features we will assume have been implemented here.
# Sites
We will develop a large graph as separate sites each addressing a portion or aspect of the whole that can stand alone with modest overlap in pages.
The Hatfield and McCoy clans are separate sites.
The clans share some nodes through intermarriage.
The Hatfield-McCoy feud is a third site about killings.
The killings share some nodes through murder.
# Inventory
We develop a large graph as a population of uniquely named nodes following a schema that will likely admit late additions with low probability of conflict. These are entered once as a page of links to corresponding pages.
The clan schema includes people and marriages.
The feud schema includes killings and trials.
# Population
We create pages for nodes from a template that includes a default synopsis and singleton Graph containing HERE. These will be linked by drag and drop as described subsequently.
Hover details such as dates and places are entered by editing the synopsis as pages are created.
The remainder of the page and auxiliary pages remain available for storytelling as one does in wiki.
The clan inventory is transcribed from wikipedia in breadth-first order simplifying population and linking.
# Linking
We connect the graph fragments present on each page by dragging page flags from related pages. A partial ordering of the inventory has these pages likely created in a convenient sequence for this gesture.
We enlarge the graph fragments by finding important paths through the network and merging waypoint Graph plugins by drag and drop. This continues until all page relevant context is visible and accessible.
Should a graph merge produce an overly complicated Graph plugin the result can be simplified by removing less important links or reverting the merge.
A template might suggest segregating links in order to simply individual renderings. Patterns, for example, often distinguish upward and downward links. Markup ordering might be sufficient to capture this distinction but separate graphs could carry separate IDs that could be of downstream use distinguishing link types.
# Affordance
We might find it convenient to include in the template links to pages most useful during construction.
A link to the inventory will give us ready access to the next pages to populate and link. The lineup could grow quite large but still easily navigated or discarded by clicking the inventory page flag.
A link to a graph Transporter page will give us a more beautifully rendered view of the work in progress and allow adjustments to pages close at hand.