Search books and save quotes

bbardsley commented 1 year ago

Project description

I have a particular way of organizing information that I find to be very effective for learning. I believe that grouping information together allows for faster comprehension. Whenever I want to learn about a topic, I browse through all the books on my PC, by searching for specific word that I'm interested in. If I come across any interesting or relevant sentences, I save them as a quote. Up to this point I use the program Recoll to search through all of my books, where I copy and paste interesting quotes to a markdown file named by the search term.

Note that this is very different from just reading books and hoping you'll remember everything you read. Books can be long and tedious, and some chapters are just better than others. I don't care about all the fillers, I care about the essence, and by searching through all of my books with a particular search term, I'm able to find the essence very quickly.

Although this method has been successful for me, I would like to be able to use it on my phone as well. My idea is to create an app that functions a bit like the search feature on Twitter. For example, if I search for "artificial intelligence," I would like to see a list of blocks with sentences containing that search term. Clicking on a block would show me the surrounding passages (and preferably I would like to be able to scroll through the book with the search term highlighted).

Again back to the list of blocks with sentences. Suppose I found an interesting quote. Then I would like bookmark or save the quote, labeled by a specific tag (such as "artificial intelligence"). Again, in the Twitter analogy, one would "like" a Tweet and find it again in a list of "likes". To find the interesting quotes again in my hypothetical app, I would like to go to a list of tags, click the tag (in the example "artificial intelligence") and presto, here one find the interesting quotes again.

As an extra, it would be nice to label the quote by the type of information. This can be definition, analysis, fact/study, event. One could then color code the quotes by a little bar on the left with a color corresponding to the label.

I would like to emphasize that I don't want to search within a specific book. I want to search in all of my books. In the Twitter analogy, I'm not interesting what person X has to say about topic Y. No, I'm interested in what all the people I follow have to say about topic Y. Unfortunately, Twitter does not have to tagging feature I talked about, but books are more interesting than Tweets anyway.

Creating an app like this would be a dream come true for me, but I don't have much programming experience nor time to learn it. If anyone is interested in collaborating on a project like this, I would be happy to work together.

If such an app already exists, I'm also happy to learn about it.

Relevant Technology

I guess, a smartphone and an Android developer kit. Again, not much programming experience on my side. I have many ideas though :P

Complexity and required time

Complexity

[ ] Beginner - This project requires no or little prior knowledge of the technolog(y|ies) specified to contribute to the project
[ ] Intermediate - The user should have some prior knowledge of the technolog(y|ies) to the point where they know how to use it, but not necessarily all the nooks and crannies of the technology
[x] Advanced - The project requires the user to have a good understanding of all components of the project to contribute

Required time (ETA)

[ ] Little work - A couple of days
[x] Medium work - A week or two
[ ] Much work - The project will take more than a couple of weeks and serious planning is required

open-source-ideas / ideas