Memory Keeper by Craig Sturgeon

Memory Keeper by @clsturgeon (Craig Sturgeon)

Capture and cross-reference your research and conclusions with your research papers and e-books

Memory Keeper enables the user to capture sources and generate source citations, capture evidence from each source, and generate research assertions. Use the assertions to generate conclusions. In the end, you are presenting to the reader conclusions with sound assertions based on evidence from a collection of sources. Users skipping the historical method and drawing conclusions without capturing evidence and assertions are producing a weak narrative.

6 Likes

@clsturgeon this is an excellent creation. Studying such wikis gives us ideas for modifying our own wikis to make it better built. It would be nice if you could add at least one demo tiddler to each category for us to see how it works before we actually download the empty file.

@Mohammad Thanks for sharing this.

It would be great if we could see such creations of other TW users also.

4 Likes

I have uploaded one example:

http://craigsturgeon.com/mk/example/Churchill-Example.html

3 Likes

This is a wonderful piece of work by Craig. It’s quite nicely done. I will be merging what he has done with what I have done already (actually merging mine into his probably since his is way more polished).

3 Likes

@Mohammad Thank you for posting this. @arunnbabu81 and @HistoryBuff Thank you for the kind words.

I’m not sure polished is the correct word—not yet. Thanks also goes out to everyone here that helps others out, like me, gain working knowledge of TW—providing solutions, or providing better solutions to our unpolished work.

1 Like

I believe Memory Keeper is a web App or a Tiddlywiki edition.

the kind of thing i try to make. but instead mine come out as mangled frankensteins. how does it go from default tw to this? i want to use this, but i know i need to mod it to make it work for my data. i also know im going to badly mess up.

would be nice to know it was made…

1 Like

Very nice. I especially enjoy the drop caps!

1 Like

@JenniferS I had started an ebook related to my genealogy work. Since my genealogy research was now in TW I had this wild idea of importing my ebook. If I could I thought I would continue to write the book in TW. The ebook was in ePub format. When I imported the CSS from the ebook it provided a mechanism for all tiddlers to have same formatting. This includes font usage, right paragraph justification and the drop caps—to name a few.

1 Like

Just started using this TW - very nice! Seems like a personal wiki-version of something like Evidentia. I just filled half a large whiteboard trying to wrap my brain around some of the GPS (Genealogy Proof Standard) terminology and workflow.

Thanks for this @clsturgeon !

Good to hear it’s being used. Thanks for the comments. Not sure how GPS compliant it is. The online help remains with too many gaps. I want release build 8 but keep finding more things I want add.

2 Likes

Just found this - thank you for sharing, it looks great! I have long thought TW would be a great base for genealogy notes but I didn’t have the ability to realise something as good as this.

One question: do you have a recommended way of recording sourcing for items stored in Memory Keeper? For example, suppose I have a copy of my 3x great grandfather’s birth certificate. How can I reference that document to indicate it is the source for various facts about him or his parents (e.g. their occupations)?

The way I do this is to create a source record, a Tiddler tagged as a source. In your example I’d also tag it with birthrecord. In edit mode you can pick people, places, events, etc associated (or better said referenced in the source document) with this source. If you have a PDF or image of the document you can include that too. I have an example project file you can review. Here is a link to Winston Churchill’s baptism record in MK. From this you’ll see how it’s done. Hope this helps.

http://craigsturgeon.com/mk/example/Churchill-Example.html#1874-12-27%20-%20Baptism%20Record%20-%20Winston%20Churchill

1 Like

Great thank you! I’ll give that a go.

A minor issue I’ve noticed (or is this a deliberate choice?) is that the “age” in the summary box for living people is blank, even if they have a date of birth recorded. Is there a way I can get this thing to display their current age?

That was deliberate. Likely because MK has no data that reflects a living individual. Just because there is no death record doesn’t mean they are alive. I did not want to see wrong age values for those that had died without a death record. Any suggestions so we can have both?

FYI. There are a couple of bugs in the calculation of the age in the getAge macro that are fixed in the not yet released build 08.

Yeah makes sense, I thought the same thing. Could there just be a “show age” toggle/field on the person tiddler which defaults true when dates of birth and death are both given and false otherwise. The default can then be manually overridden when the user has provided a date of birth and knows/believes the individual is currently living.

I like the idea. Field is ignored if birth and event exist, even if dates are missing. Having a death event without a date would mean the individual passed and date is unknown. I think we should extend your idea to also include a global show age. In this way if death event does not exist and users want the age shown on all individuals it can be done without toggling show age at each person tiddler. Thank you for the feedback.

Another couple of points (please let me know if there’s a more helpful way to record these):

  1. Is there any good way to record births/deaths as events in the lives of other people? So for example the birth of a child or death of a parent may be an important event in the lives of the parents/children, but if the parents are added to the birth event, this creates problems elsewhere. Do we need a “secondary person” field or something for this?

  2. If the filter is used when selecting multiple people from the selector widget, any previous selection is erased, even if the Ctrl key is held. Perhaps one way around this would be for the selected entities to bypass the filter and be displayed in the list rather than being filtered out.

  1. This is resolved in build 8, coming soon. As you have indicated there are events defined that force upon who is selected. Birth, death and burial come to mind. You are only allowed to select those who were born, died or buried. Build 8 has ability to add “event roles” where you associate an individual to an event by also indicating their role in the event.

  2. I’m unable to replicate. The Ctrl key works for me. But you have an idea here that could solve another issue. Or, maybe you are actually having the issue I’m thinking about. The Ctrl key does not work if you have selected items that have been filtered out by the filter/search feature. Having a lock feature with the ability to cache previously selected items would resolve this.

Edit: I should have read your points properly—that is exactly what u said the problem is with point 2. I’ll look at fixing in build 8.