Needed: Capture concepts during note taking

#1

I’m taking some university classes and need a way to quickly capture subject concepts during the note taking.

The concepts are complex and their meanings are gradually revealed over several occasions; in other words, a concept doesn’t merely have a definition, as defined (or not!) mid-text in some tiddler, but it also has added notes spread out, mid-text, in other arbitrary tiddlers that treat other matters.

Thus, it must be super simple during the note-taking to mark out which words are concepts and what snips that belong to that concept.

Post-note-taking it should be simple to list/aggregate the concepts and all their associated notes.

Further, whatever “demarcation” is used to make a word(s) into a “concept label” or marks out some textual segment to be “concept content” should be elegant; Ideally, in view mode, a “concept label” is seen as a regular tiddler link, and “concept content” has no visibile marking at all (or perhaps it is highlighted when hovering it).

I think this could be a killer app for students.

I’d love to hear suggestions on how to implement this.

Thanks!

#2

Maybe someone could re-visit the dynanote plugin, which I don’t recall where it is at the moment because I don’t have a note tracking system :wink:

It would let you highlight text and add notations. I think those notations were in their own tiddlers to be located again later. And different notations could have different colours. If not, that would be the elegant version.

#3

Thanks Mark. As I’m now very quickly taking a peek - for the n’th time! - at the Dynanote plugin, I’m getting the uneasy feeling I’ve had before: I don’t quite understand what it does or even what it is supposed to do. This time I have a real use case so I have a proper opportunity to actually test it - but I’d be very (positively) surprised if it is actually usable during note taking, as is critical for me, not post note-taking.

#4

The only way for me to take “real time” notes is using streams.

You need to prepare your wiki and your keyboard shortcuts, to fit your needs. You should be familiar with them, when you need them. With a little bit of training you should be fast enough, to use it during your lessons.

I use a title naming schema like this: <<stream-root-title>>/<<now "[UTC]YYYY-0MM-0DD-0hh:0mm:0ss-XXX">>, for better readability.

#5

C’mon - this doesn’t have anything to do with what I ask about in the OP.

#6

Maybe give concept tiddlers a quick, unique prefix like @c then use editcomptext (sic?) to add a link to it in the other notes? And have a viewtemplate in concept tiddlers showing backlinks?

1 Like
#7

Actually, I was going to make the same suggestion. If you use Streams for your quick notes, they’re already pre-chunked. And if you link to every [[concept]] where it comes up, you can later use a $list with [[concept]backlinks[]] (or [<currentTiddler>backlinks[]]) to aggregate all your notes on a topic — manually or with a ViewTemplate that gets automatically applied to any tiddler whose title is linked in a streams node.

I’d also recommend using either a custom Streams prefix or a tag that gets automatically applied to each new note, just for ease of future filtering. If you don’t like backlinks, you could accomplish something similar by modifying the Streams node editor to allow on-the-fly tagging… but IMO (having tried similar things in the past), it’s usually quicker just to add a link.

#8

Concepts are, well conceptual and may vary as to interpretation. Reading the original post I see @twMat’s idea goes quite deep, and not nessasarily so easy to implement, especialy from the view template but I have some ideas there.

  • Select a concept (tiddler) and select, copy and past content into the concept tiddler including either the tiddler from which the copy occured, or use search against the whole wiki for that text to see where it is mentioned (from the concept tiddlers view template,

An almost working solution out of the box

Lets say we want to do it from the editor, we could use my favorite editor Toolbar tool the ctrl-L. Lets say we are reviewing our text and see a phrase or word within the text that belongs to a concept we are thinking about. Just select that text and use ctrl-L and type the concept name (or select it as you search for the concept tiddler) and hit enter. The link will generated containing the text as the pretty text [[this is the text relating to the lists concept|lists]] You can then use backlinks to find all tiddlers where the concept was indicated, or make a more advanced parser the retrives the text inside [[ ]] but ending |conceptname]] eg |lists]]

  • The issue is when the selected text contains wiki text.
    • However we could use macros or transclusions or excise that appends to the concept tiddler.
  • Fairly recently was asking if there were a way to enhance backlinks to returh the pretty link title, or create a new operator.
#9

Hmm… maybe I owe @pmario an apology, and the two of you a thank you. I did not yet try the streams approach to my problem but with your description I can see how it might work. What I didn’t initially understand was the critical bit that:

… if you link to every [[concept]] where it comes up, you can later use a $list with [[concept]backlinks[]] (or [<currentTiddler>backlinks[]]) to aggregate all your notes on a topic

I should add an interesting realization to this, apropos the “elegance” that I request in my OP:

As noted, I want the “view mode” text to not be cluttered with whatever enables the collection of the concept notes. By using the link itself as a basis for collecting (as opposed to some other marker), we can use [[|concept]] - i.e a pretty link without a pretty argument - to hide the marker.

Thank you @pmario and @etardiff , I’ll now properly investigate if Streams does work as for my issue.

1 Like
#10

This is more along my first thoughts on this. It would also require some end marker though, both for @c spaced labels and @c its related notes, and then some proper regexing to filter out the encapsulated bits (not unlike what I do in the Cherrypicker plugin, which is pretty close to what I’m after with this but lacks a few aspects)

#11

Thank you. Yes, as you note there are some bits to it that are problematic such as allowing wikitext in the selected text. One overall difficulty is that, as noted, I as the note taker must not be forced to deal with these matters during the note taking. And, ideally, if there is any post-work to be done at all, it should be to aggregate what is marked out (e.g by “creating the very concept tiddler itself”), not to have to re-visit the notes to clean up their formatting or what they contain for it to work.

#12

FWIW My usual workflow for something like this, if I am picturing it correctly, is to set up ahead of time a “new concept tiddler” button in the sidebar, and both a “new concept tiddler here” button and a “new associated here” button in the viewtoolbar.

And I would set up a viewtemplate tiddler, or two, to show concepts related to this tiddler and show associated notes for this tiddler.

So in the moment of taking the class and adding notes, all you are doing is clicking “new” buttons and adding the content. Afterwards, all you may need to do is reorder the items or re-title them.

#13

Mat, I would be very keen to help you, as its also the kind of thing I would need available doing classes or perhaps when writing. Keep in mind if you are mostly typing notes, perhaps adding bullet points and headings in class, your text should be failrly clean, so my aformentioned technique may still be practical.

I suppose some unwritten requirements may be if a mouse is available?

A little brainstorm;

With some previouse work I did use a Browser based highlighter that allowed colors to be used and it remembered what you highlighted on the page while taking a copy of the selection and storing it. Of course a lot of people have made use of tiddlyclip in the past.

I also made an editor toolbar button that allowed you to wrap content in the editor in arbitary html tags eg stream of conciousness <conceptname>This is what you selected</conceptname> more text. If you are fast on the keyboard you could type it <c1>your text</c> perhaps even with autoclose in an editor.

  • Such html tags can be used to parse and extract that content, apply CSS, or even hide content. Designed correctly you can have multiple entries.

If you are familular with the application of CSS classes to wiki text you could use the .classname method to existing wikitext symbols eg;

* something
*.con1 something that relates to concept.
* Another item
  • One could then have automation to parse the text to find where .con1 or as I have done in the past first render the tiddler and parse the resulting html.

One approach I have used is to excise text into tiddlers with long titles, actualy allowing a tiddler title to even be a paragraph, using this method you need only indicate the concept it relates to, the freelinks plugin recognises it, although the markup within it is limited. A Macro version could overcome some of this.

I will continue to think about it.