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bryanph / GeistMap

An experimental personal knowledge base with a focus on connections
https://geistmap.com
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
446 stars 31 forks source link

Is this still in developement? #184

Open nomatica opened 5 years ago

nomatica commented 5 years ago

Stumbled upon this and was curious if it was still in development

iammeat commented 5 years ago

This article was posted two weeks ago, which is strange. No movement on the project for some time. @bryanph I also noticed the twitter link on that article links to a non-existent user.

That's how I found out about this, and it looks like it has a lot of promise. It'd be really sad if it's dead already.

bryanph commented 5 years ago

TLDR; No, but I'm still working on the problem in another incarnation of this project: https://topictrails.com/

This project started out as an experiment to find new ways to organize research and study material because I was very frustrated with how difficult it is to keep notes and extract quotations and references from source material. Over time my focus has kind of shifted from more of a learning system, where you wish to organize facts that are out there, to a research system where you wish to collect arguments and counter-arguments for the research you conduct. I found that the two are quite different in practice due to the objectiveness of the information you collect in the second.

Therefore I started a new iteration of this project which goes in a slightly different direction. Whilst in Geistmap my focus was on connecting information and facts in a visual graph-like structure, in Topictrails the focus is on extracting information from other sources (such as PDF and web pages) and being able to reference any part of that source, either embedding (fully or partially) it directly in a new document or referencing a certain section. A lot of these things are possible (more or less) today when you combine different tooling but my goal here is to absolutely minimize the amount of friction it takes to do these actions so that it is easy to create habits around them.

When using Geistmap I found myself wanting to reference content within other nodes which was not easy because of the way Geistmap represents its data (as full nodes that you reference). Therefore I decided to go for more of a traditional document-like approach. Just like in Geistmap, you can reference other nodes (documents) in Topictrails but there is more of a focus on creating deep connections to the exact section you wish to reference. As the name "Topictrails" suggests, this means you often end up with a "trail" of references, each reference bringing you to another source document. The goal here is to make this navigation as smooth as possible, solving the difficult problem of referencing external sources and maintaining references in your own writing and research.

@iammeat I have no idea why that article has been reposted but I wrote that article more than 2 years ago. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, I will try and make sure it goes down.

I will try and write a blogpost on this subject so I can reference it in the main README.md.

iammeat commented 5 years ago

Thanks very much for replying in such a detailed fashion, @bryanph.

This lets me understand more about what you were looking for in terms of scope and referencing. I do think that Geistmap still has an extremely strong use-case, as I've been searching for a personal wiki since the early days of ZuluPad that would do what you've almost perfected here. Evernote and other note-taking tools are too linear and don't offer interlinking, and they're getting worse with new features that people just don't want. I mean, Microsoft OneNote is 1.08GB... for a note taking app!

Topictrails seems more of a deep referencing tool, and I can see that many aspects of that would also add value to Geistmap (PDF extraction, etc.).

I would be interested in contributing to the project if you would be open to that, but I don't want to drag it away from your own mindset by doing so. I have forked the project, and I can always submit PRs if you see anything that would fit in with what you see as Geistmap's modus operandi.

bryanph commented 5 years ago

@iammeat Yes the two more or less complement one another indeed. It's just that the subject area is so big that in order to reach any goal I have to narrow down.

You are of course very welcome to fork the project and expand on it as you see fit. If you create PRs I can also take a look at them and if you want to work on it for longer term I can also make you a collaborator on the repository if you wish.