Flowchart (Wordhole)

This is an entry for 'Flowchart' for the Wordhole Glossary.

Definitions

Example of a flowchart from Georges Perec's The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise

• A diagram of the sequence of movements or actions of people or things involved in a complex system or activity. (From Oxford Languages)
• '[A flowchart] consists of a certain number of propositions that can take either yes or no for an answer, each answer having certain consequences. The concatenation of causes and effects and the choice of answers are represented by arrows that are the only syntactic connectors between the propositions. In brief, it is a tree structure, a network, a labyrinth, and the “reader” chooses ONE route among all the possible routes, the totality of possible routes being presented SIMULTANEOUSLY on the flowchart.' (From Mainframe Experimentalism, chapter 2)

Application (as used by us)

Flowcharts have been used to present different questions about archives, see pad of 2023-10-10.

Application (other contexts)

Georges Perec used flowcharts to present his seemingly algorithmic radio play 'The Art of Asking your Boss for a Raise'

Mentioned in

Mainframe Experimentalism, chapter 2

In context

'A flowchart [...] shows simultaneously all the steps and the order of their recursion in a set of instructions. It also contains within it all the possible moves allowed by the algorithm.' (From Mainframe Experimentalism, chapter 2)

Images and links

The Art of Asking your Boss for a Raise

See also

George Perec, Graphviz