Most of the texts that I read a generation ago for my degrees are viewable still as a couple of shelves of books in my study. But more and more of our reading is online, invisible, evanescent. Instapaper and Delicious can help – but how do I keep track of what I read and what I know? I’m interested in finding ways to organise and visualise what I’m thinking.
I’m also interested in what happens when, as seems inevitable, our outboard brains start being shared. Do I want my idiosyncratic associations made public? By somehow reifying those connections, do I ossify them? What kind of thinking does this represent?
I use DevonThink (a large anything goes database for OS X with a user-interface somewhat like gmail or Mail.app or your large email/file system manager of choice), but am dissatisfied with the current commenting structure. Objects comment on objects, but I’m not sure how to attach this link structure within DevonThink for best effect.
I’m pretty certain that there are some associations I don’t want left hanging out in public in the brain outside my brain. Personally, anything I’m happy to share is an utterance to me, and annotations aren’t uttered!
I’d be interested in this topic – hearing more – discussing.