(Hopefully this question isn’t too far outside of “coding” and into “using”.) I’ve always had an interest in associative data management, but I’ve never found a tool I love for my use case. What I want to be able to do is catalog and visually explore: • Ideas in some area of research • Sources for those ideas: who has presented them • Chains of reasoning: person A argues that because of ideas X and Y, therefore Z is true • Commentary on those ideas: supporting, refuting, adapting General mind-mapping tools don’t feel structured enough, but coding it from scratch has been intimidating. It feels like this must exist and I must just be bad at finding it. Do any of you have a tool you like for this use?

Can you talk to how this is different from a book? Is the impetuous here to assemble your own, vs find an existing source? In which case, could this be achieved with hypertext? Is there a specific visual/spacial relationship you are seeking to build to represent the linkages, or is your goal to express the linkages?

Great questions, thank you. Yes, the impetus is to use this for personal notes, not a pre-existing source of this information Some form of hypertext (in the general sense) seems likely to be involved, yes. I go back and forth over whether it would be preferable to have a text-document-based representation vs a graphical representation (more like a mind map). Maybe the fact that I haven’t enjoyed mind map tools means that text-document-based would be better. Bidirectional linking is very important, so vanilla HTML would not be enough. But this makes me realize I could probably prototype it in either vanilla HTML or Obsidian. There’s a catch-22 where it’s not motivating for me to start recording a lot of info until I have the tool I want to use, and it’s hard to pick a tool until I have the information recorded 🙂 Maybe there’s a way to cut that knot somehow.

Wicked! Thanks so much for this reply. This sort of smells like a wiki to me — but I hear ya re: wanting the right tool before you go all in taking notes, but not wanting to take notes until you’ve got the “right” tool in place. signed a goblin with 5000+

.txt

files in a git repo

I would suggest that what you want is an assembler for building your custom mind-map. I stay away from most mind-mapping tools because they want you to predict how you are going to lay stuff out according to their ideas of what you want, instead of allowing you to lay stuff out the way you want to. For that kind of reason, I look for tools that let me slap down ideas with no friction, then apply structure afterwards, iteratively. Currently, I use Kinopio, and, before that, Scapple. I use Obsidian to write longer paragraphs, but, it (like most markdown tools) want you to lay things out in a linear manner... [I was originally attracted to Kinopio because it can export to JSON, but it turns out that I haven’t needed this feature yet]

I look for tools that let me slap down ideas with no friction, then apply structure afterwards, iteratively

Nice, that really provides a way out of the catch-22 I mentioned I will try out Kinopio!

[at first I found Kinopio off-putting, but now I use it daily (hourly?). “/” for hyper-linking. Graphical layout, just move “cards” around with the mouse, use connectors between them (you get to define the intended meaning of connectors, I start out with no connectors, then add them as I look things over. In some cases, though, the connectors make immediate sense and I put them in as I dump ideas. There is the option to add colour, change font size (h1, h2), etc. but I tend to use this stuff infrequently (it seems that other people use it more than I do). The Discord and forum are very helpful].

Annotation services maybe are a partial answer? Like https://web.hypothes.is https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone if it was a product.

@Josh Justice Your description overlaps quite a bit with discourse graphs (see e.g. http://joelchan.me/assets/pdf/Discourse_Graphs_for_Augmented_Knowledge_Synthesis_What_and_Why.pdf). Roam claims to support them well, I can't say if that's true as I don't use Roam. I use Emacs with org-roam for general notes and discourse graphs, the latter relying on personal conventions about tags and links. Not perfect, not even good enough, but I haven't found anything better within my requirements (which are mostly local data in a simple and documented format so that I can write my own tools for processing).

@Josh Justice Is underlay.org relevant to your question? It doesn't have any mapping tools etc but it does talk about creating an assertion graph.

@Eli Mellen Are you managing your 5000+

.txt

files using https://git.sr.ht/~eli_oat/moon-maker?

No that’s for project specific stuff. My text notes are mostly git, grep, and memory 😬

Ah, sounds like my setup until a year ago.

Hi Josh! A little late but I believe this might be exactly what you're looking for: http://hypernomicon.org/