HN user
A product development and problem-solving workshop [1] for middle school kids. It involves storytelling and hands-on exercises around ideation and solution development, culminating in creating prototypes. I developed it to teach my children and their friends how to think about problems and create solutions. Am continuing it refine it, including offering it to different age groups.
I explored tools to export/interchange PDF to HTML in the KnowledgeGarden app, but the results were not optimal, suffering from non-standard layout and poor typesetting of equations. Publishers of scholarly articles generate web pages of papers, but they're not replicas of PDF files.
Re. self-contained HTML (and slightly off-topic), look at TiddlyWiki, which contains data/code/layout all in one interactive, local or hosted HTML. Extensibility, plugins, and community of contributors are some key highlights, among others.
Capturing and visualizing research knowledge is personally an exciting space. I feel that deep reading and absorbing content continues to be challenging, due to the ever-increasing amount of published research, rudimentary reading apps (Google PDF reader finally addressing issue with easily looking up references), and due to somewhat disconnected tools for reading and note-taking. Similar to the readers piggy-backing on the PDFjs library, I've developed an app that helps me capture and organize personal research knowledge [1]. Additionally, visualizations and customizable contexts for notes help to recall and link information.
I built on top of the in-browser PDF document-reading app to help me curate, visualize, and recall personal knowledge as I read and annotate research papers; the app extracts data from documents such as URLs and references and makes it readily available to view or download - https://www.knowledgegarden.io
Thanks for the nice references. When I read documents, I look to organize and link information in a way that helps me recall its context. Another realization is that papers are often read with different 'hats' - as a reader, as a reviewer, or as a writer. To help my own process I built a document-reading that helps me curate, visualize, and recall personal knowledge as I read and annotate research papers; the app also extracts data from documents such as URLs and references - https://www.knowledgegarden.io
The approaches for information organization versus info retrieval are often different. For example, we mostly read content based on whatever fixed structure it's in, be it a blog post or a scientific article. Note-taking tends to follow that structure. But we retrieve and consume the information in a non-linear, context-driven search.
Putting everything in a rigid hierarchical oder has some benefits, namely familiarityto the author, but incurs the cost of organizing the material and the mental context switch from the task at hand.
I've been researching ways to make information tagging and visual search easy and effective - at the source - in the narrow case of reading scholarly documents [1]. The goal is to avoid a prescribed organization format in favor of contextual tagging, visualization for personal analytics, and linking of concepts afterwards, in a way that reduces distraction from reading and understanding.
Nice idea and interesting space. I tried 'show counts by type_1 ordered by occurrences' and it showed a bar chart, as expected. But 'show statistical distributions' or 'show something surprising about the data' gave the response 'Vizly does not yet support this chart type.' Note that some of the standard tools like Tableau or Observable show basic charts over columns out-of-box after loading a dataset, so the default tabular view could be augmented. I'm aware of at least one mature-looking tool in this space [1] and an interesting thesis [2]. Best wishes with building it out!
[1] https://datachat.ai/ [2] Iris Agent - https://youtu.be/3VZZbKoXDVM
Happy Friday! I have built a document-reading app to help me curate, visualize, and recall my knowledge as I read and annotate research papers - https://www.KnowledgeGarden.io
The app also extracts data from documents, such as urls, keywords, and references, and generates a downloadable pdf report with annotations and extracted data.
This is really nice - the simplicity of the interface and ability to read papers without sacrificing the readability of math equations is awesome. Congrats on publishing it. Do you mind sharing how you convert from pdf to html (if at all)? I'm building a tool for reading, curating, and visualizing personal knowledge [1]. Apps like yours and others mentioned in this thread are nice ways to discover papers and address blind spots during literature reviews.
Provenance, as a concept and specification, is well established in digital domain, as described by W3C's PROV specification https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-overview/ Ability to trace, audit, and reproduce artifacts or processes are some applications of provenance that align with needs for explainability in data analytics and data science/AI (XAI).
Thanks for sharing! I was also curious if you apply your paper-pen markup style to digital content. Btw, is there a way to send private/direct messages here on HN? thanks.
Neat! interesting to see your context management system. Thanks for sharing your notes. I like to sketch ideas, so use pencil so that I can erase and refine. Curious, how do you manage information from digital content, e.g., notes from reading technical/research articles or blog posts?
Using a multi colored pen has helped me mark important information and add my personal context. For example, during meetings or brainstorming I'll mark up information using different colors (red- to do, green- new idea, pencil- plain, sequential notes). I found a good one that has all the colors I need and a mechanical pencil [1]. There is overhead of thinking which color to use, but the value of having the context later is much more.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Zebra-Clip-Multi-Functional-Barrel-B4...
Nicely done! Thanks for sharing. I've been using Tiddlywiki over TiddlyDesktop (used on Win and Mac Os) and it suffices most of my needs (except drag-n-drop images and web scraping). TW's extendable macro and plugin environment is awesome. It works great off of cloud drives. Curious to know what others feel about TW. KNote's note 'card' interface resembles TW. Thanks.