what do you all use for research tools? I've seen github issues/repos, googling, wikis, bookmarks, etc. I feel like one of the major problems in researching stuff like this is how scattered information and experiments are across papers, the web, this slack (lol) and am trying to work through how to improve the situation. pros and cons? both for discussion and as a kind of collaborative library of sorts (if that makes sense)

Text files under version control 🙂 Basically an old-fashioned research notebook. Key is to get super detailed. I record URLs, google search terms, cross-links observed of what paper links to what, etc.

how are you recording crosslinks? filenames? quotes?

Yeah, I have a poor man's linking scheme because my system predates Markdown. But you could just use Markdown with local filesystem links. I also just throw in words as 'tags', to ensure that a file pops up when I search for some term.

ahh so this is like with grep or is there a thin layer like nvalt over it?

Pretty much just

grep

.

Zim is pretty good https://zim-wiki.org/ -- otherwise there's Notion.so

@Garth Goldwater thanks for the pointer to nvALT! https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt

I've banged on notion a whole lot and it's definitely cool, but I haven't managed to figure out how to get a really general form of transclusion working. plus I feel like the collaboration features are more suited for documents that are "owned" by a single person rather than a more decentralized model. these are both princess-and-the-pea level problems for me (tremendously irritating to me but probably unreasonable and not noticed by others) and might just require a more advanced use of it

I use hypothes.is a lot.

I'm hoping @Tudor Girba’s GToolkit can become my personal wiki of the future. It has the best transclusion features I've seen to date in terms of a working implementation.

We are indeed not far from that possibility 🙂

I just recently found out about: https://www.zotero.org/

I obsess about this a lot, and right now I’m doing a lot of saving of PDFs (including archiving web content as link-preserving PDFs) and plain text file notes. I’d love some tools that made it easy to semantically link my notes with the Kindle book, PDF, or website that they relate to, but right now I haven’t found anything that I trust to be easily usable 10 years from now. I’ll definitely have to investigate GToolkit now.

Funding structure details for worldbrain.io: section 4 of https://medium.com/@WorldBrain/where-we-are-heading-with-worldbrain-65f244f540b8

@Joe Trellick Please let me know if you need a tour of GToolkit.

@Tudor Girba do a screencast with a wiki focus. May well be your killer app or gateway drug.

memex looks really cool!

Thanks @Tudor Girba, I hope to have a bit more time to poke at things next month

One way to build Wikis with GToolkit with no extra code is to make each Wiki page a Pharo class, with the text in the class comment. Then use class annotations as links. Since the pages are then considered to be source code by Pharo tools, you get version control (via Iceberg, Pharo's git interface) for free. Much of the GToolkit documentation is actually written this way, so just get GToolkit and look at the tutorials to see how this works in practice. I have been playing with computational wikis in Pharo/GToolkit recently (see https://github.com/activepapers/activepapers-pharo for the details). That took some extra code because I wanted groups of Wiki pages with a shared code basis. One Pharo class is then a package of code, data, and Wiki pages.