Comprehensive overview of existing tools, strategies and thoughts on interacting with your data
TLDR: when I read I try to read actively, which for me mainly involves using various tools to annotate content: highlight and leave notes as I read. I've programmed data providers that parse them and provide nice interface to interact with this data from other tools. My automated scripts use them to render these annotations in human readable and searchable plaintext and generate TODOs/spaced repetition items.
In this post I'm gonna elaborate on all of that and give some motivation, review of these tools (mainly with the focus on open source thus extendable software) and my vision on how they could work in an ideal world. I won't try to convince you that my method of reading and interacting with information is superior for you: it doesn't have to be, and there are people out there more eloquent than me who do that. I assume you want this too and wondering about the practical details.
The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence - in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books.
Since I imagine the question will present itself in some visitors’ minds (a certain amount of distrust of the virtual is inevitable) I’ll head off any doubts: any text you find in any location of the library will be in the same place in perpetuity. We do not simply generate and store books as they are requested - in fact, the storage demands would make that impossible. Every possible permutation of letters is accessible at this very moment in one of the library's books, only awaiting its discovery. We encourage those who find strange concatenations among the variations of letters to write about their discoveries in the forum, so future generations may benefit from their research.
Tausende Gangnam-Style- und Harlem-Shake-Videos auf Youtube sind der Beleg: Remix ist heute ein Massenphänomen. War das 20. Jahrhundert noch geprägt von zentralisierter Kulturproduktion, laden heute Computer, Videohandys und Internet zu kreativer und öffentlicher Interaktion mit Kulturgütern ein.
Viele der erfolgreichsten Videos auf Youtube und Facebook profitieren davon, dass andere NutzerInnen eigene Versionen von ihnen erstellen und so zur Bekanntheit des Originals beitragen. Die Bandbreite reicht dabei von verwackelten Handy-Videos bis hin zu aufwendigen Remixversionen. Sich für die Erstellung von Werken bei Vorhandenem zu bedienen, ist kein neues Phänomen. Der Blogger Malte Welding illustrierte diesen Umstand einmal unter Verweis auf Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, der Bach-Fugen bearbeitete und die den Fugen voranstehenden Präludien mit Eigenkompositionen ersetzte, die für Streicher geeignet waren: „Er remixte Bach. Er mashte ihn, er fledderte die toten Noten und schuf etwas Neues.“
Google maps with only names
Laboratoire de recherche sur l'archivage de nouvelles formes de textes et d'oeuvres hypermédiatiques
Artzilla.org is dedicated to the development of experimental browser software
Devoted to fonts, typefaces and all things typographical.
Publish Yourself Online
Japanese calligraphy
LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain.
Language is a virus from outer space... - William S Burroughs