The idea is for “knowledge blocks” to be able to be more granular. Instead of a monolithic document with everything in it, which pushes towards a hierarchical viewpoint, more granular addressing of knowledge blocks through individual files allows data to have one-to-many relationships with related ideas.
I agree this might require a function in DT to view items together, e.g. similar to Scrivener’s “scrivenings” view, which shows selected documents together and allows editing as though they’re the same document.
The idea is for “knowledge blocks” to be able to be more granular. Instead of a monolithic document with everything in it, which pushes towards a hierarchical viewpoint, more granular addressing of knowledge blocks through individual files allows data to have one-to-many relationships with related ideas.
Bearing in mind, this is one philosophical viewpoint, not necessarily the only one.
Of course! That’s why I’m adding it to the discourse, making the request with others for it to be considered alongside the existing hierarchical viewpoint.
See this annotation not only as a content-wise document, but as a free space to encapsulate links to other “knowledge blocks” - individual files. It may be a linear list of links, it may be a complex hierarchical text with links in a wiki style, or some “freehand creative sketch”, connecting your “granules” in this or that way, whatever you want. What am I missing?
Let’s say I use the annotation document to copy in select quotes from a Web Archive and write my own summary of an article—let’s take for example a nice, long, informative essay like this one at Aeon. As I go through the essay, the annotations file starts to get quite extensive with many disparate ideas referenced, each heading in its own direction. For example, the linked essay includes pithy quotes on migration, cinema, painting, art criticism, how art changes through its depiction in secondary media, and home.
Once I’ve made this monolithic annotations file, how then to link directly to each of these disparate ideas from other relevant articles, essays, notes or annotations? I can only link to the entire annotation file.
Excellent writing finds connections between disparate ideas. To dig deeper on them in my research often means to digress from the original topic at hand. The linked essay is ostensibly biographical piece about a seminal moment in art criticism; but if I want to dig deeply into for e.g. the links between cinema and migration, I will end up with many articles and “chunks of knowledge” that have little to do with biography or art criticism. Being able to parse out individual blocks of knowledge into addressable pieces makes it possible to link these disparate ideas.
IMHO
If you want to catch all this “multi-directionness” in its full, I’d recommend to use an outliner software. I personally prefer Omni Outliner, where you can recreate as many structures and “sense webs” as you want, all with quotes you need and backlinks to the original text (for automatic backlinks you’ll need a little script). There are many ways to do it: you may create many OO files and write links to them in annotation file (in list, in text, …), you can make one OO file with backlinks, you can make the annotation a resume with the links to OO exact topics. You can build many-to-many connections, where your essay original will be connected to many OO thematic files (links in annotation file) and every OO file will be connected to many according essay files.
The other way - is to make a PDF and use its annotations as a quoting tool with description to each quote
You may also consider a wikilinks editing feature of DT3
I’m using the WikiLinks option for now, and it works quite well. The main limitation being the “addressability” of sections within a document. I’d be fine with working with many, smaller text files - but DT3 would need another view that allows viewing and seeing multiple selected files in aggregate.
I’ve tried OO. It’s fine for quick outlines, even extensive ones but it’s still a fundamentally one-document-oriented hierarchical concept. The only thing that gets close to how memory works for me is Roam… but I much prefer DT as a secure, stable, user-oriented knowledge management system. Roam could disappear tomorrow or have a breach and then all our notes would be out in the wild… Given that I’m a documentary filmmaker I can’t trust cloud-based SaaS for notes and research unless they have an e2e encryption philosophy.
To me DT3 is the state of the art of knowledge management. It just needs a few little nudges towards making networked thinking as easy and useful as the (amazing) hierarchical techniques currently are. Being able to address chunks of knowledge in some way would allow all the rest of the power of DT to work this way
For me, being able to address individual knowledge chunks is the starting point, either through better “small documents acting as one” support or being able to link within a document (to headings say, or to paragraphs as Roam does)
Transclusion would amplify that ability. Then you can transclude just the relevant piece of information - inserting/quoting/transcluding a paragraph or code snippet and not the whole document
Note: File transclusion is possible in MultiMarkdown 6 but it is not specifically supported in DEVONthink. Perhaps in the future, but Development would have to assess this further, especially as DEVONthink is not a Markdown-only ecosystem.
I just had an “aha” moment, posted over in another thread (link below). But basically… if DT were to support both anchor tags in x-callback URLs and transclusion, it would create a powerful and standards-based solution for the networked-knowledge workflow. Both already a part of the MMD6 spec, and DT3 already supports anchor tags in MMD links—just not between documents. It could be a big win with a tweak to already-existing functionality.