Semantic Werks

As a researcher, I’m constantly coming across new ideas, techniques, cool findings, and the like. A common example is listening to a talk and making notes on the speaker’s remarks. As an aside, I’ve always wondered what is done with these notes. Often I’ve written numerous comments on things someone has said, but I nearly never find myself returning to those notes. I’m not sure if this means I’m a poor researcher, or if the entire exercise is pointless (although perhaps the act of writing things down helps with memory storage).

At any rate, there are notes I do return to, brainstorming exercises, drafts of research strategies, lists, and so on, none of which I feel is particularly worth sharing online (top-secret plans to rule the world!).

I had at one time a large notebook containing my notes and doodles, but these I find nearly impossible to search unless one is very disciplined about titles and dates. And for me, I rarely need the free-form capability of paper (although it is freeing).

My tool of choice so far has been TiddlyWiki, a personal wiki that does a good job ‘getting out of the way’ and letting my brilliance shine through (right). It has simple formatting rules, hyperlinks, etc., and I’ve used it extensively to date. A few things bother me about it, though. One is that the formatting language is so peculiar… it is similar to Textile, but different enough from my other two wikis — Mediawiki and Trac — that I constantly confuse how to make links. I would like an editor that is more WYSIWYG. Tiddlywiki is cross-platform, but since it is just a file, I still need to use Subversion to manage the file.

The Tomboy application on Gnome is a note-taking app that is WYSIWYG, and has hyperlink capability. It also exports to HTML if you need this. I’m just exploring it for my purposes. Since I use Ubuntu exclusively at work and home, the file format isn’t so crucial anymore. It has better list formatting, a crude hierarchy using notebooks, but no tagging, which is a pain. The big hurdle for me was getting my old notes (there are hundreds) into its format. Sadly, while there is a nice Gnome API, the programming task exceeded my interests. Tomboy also is more challenging to sync than just using Subversion (which I appreciate not everyone uses — why not!).

Another tool I’ve looked at is Google Notebook, but this one requires web access, which isn’t always guaranteed (just today my work connection went down, and after a few hours of fiddling, it turned out someone kicked out a cable in the server room - which affected only me). I think I’m just getting a little tired of Google products. More importantly, it’s not as simple to create wiki links, which I kinda like for the ability to let the brain flow.

At times I’ve used concept maps to graphically explore topics, which is great, but I’ve found I never return to these maps — they get outdated quickly. Similar to concept maps are mindmaps, which are a form of tool-supported brainstorming, but again, while neat for a few tries, doesn’t seem to scale well. I hated the idea that everything has to link to everything else. Is my brain too non-linear for mindmapping? That’s a scary thought.

In the end, I’ve stuck with Tiddlywiki, even though the interface isn’t super-slick. It’s got my stuff in its own format, so migration somewhere else will be a pain. That said, I’m planning to buy a Mac at some point, so there might be some slick Mac tools that I’m unfamiliar with … any ideas?

It occurs to me that I’m much more tied to Firefox than I am to my operating system .. these I change regularly, but I’ve been using Firefox since it was Phoenix and Mozilla.