I can’t help you with LLMs, but I hope I can still offer some useful feedback.
- On which page of which book is the story of the psychological study in the mid-1900s with the some kind of animal that sacrificed its children to save itself? (Real example… I have been looking for this one for ages!)
- The book Loonshots describes two main types of innovations. Name and define them, then list other models of innovation that are described in the books in my library. Compare and contrast them.
- I am looking for a quote in one of the books in my library that pertains to the definition of narcissism being the inability to metabolize shame relationally. What is the quote, and on which page of which book can I find it?
Unless I am missing something (wouldn’t that be wonderful!), I assume that this level of interaction with content is not available (yet?) in DT3.
DEVONthink can’t actively process and present material like #2, but #1 & #3 seem well within bounds of normal search. Maybe the interface of a chatbot conversation is more accessible to you, but it sounds like you could gain a lot from better use of DEVONthink’s advanced search features and a deeper understanding of query construction. Search prefixes, operators and wildcards are pretty powerful when combined.
I think the PDF text content would be enough, but it’s naturally easier if you have additional metadata to query and if you have annotations and/or notes.
I get the appeal of interrogating a pile of documents like you describe. But two things come to my mind:
- I think you learn more—and remember it better—by engaging with material youself rather than having it regurgitated to you. (I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, but I can’t think of a better word than “regurgitate”.)
- Who knows when this will be possible, if at all… Be that online (without extreme costs) or locally. My impression is that working this way with large amounts of PDFs still seems quite distant. In the meantime you might be better off adjusting your workflow.
For #1 and #3, it would be quick if you had these quotes as separate documents. You can easily embed a direct link to the location in the PDF. Even better with some keywords/tags for search. For example, #1: psychology
, study
, subject-animal
, child
; #3: definition
, narcissism
, shame
, relations
.
For #2, if you export a relevant quote every time you come across a model of innovation in your reading, they will be easy to search and work with (tags like: model
, innovation
seem useful). You could replicate them all to a group, or create an overview note where you wikilink to all the different quotes.
Of course this doesn’t help you retroactively, but I think it’s worth considering if you could improve your workflow here.