Idea Explorer - an extension exclusively for The Archive.

Will

Idea Explorer Poetry of Zettelkasting

This will be a video introducing an extension for The Archive. Designed for The Archive with plain text with wikilinks in mind. My ideas for this script are modeled after the public musings of Soren Bjornstad. The Idea Explorer is an idea that can help surface interesting relationships by looking at age, modification times, word count, and the prevalence of incoming and outgoing links. And more relevance can be "fished out of the idea pond" in the future.

This requires The Archive, Keyboard Maestro, and Python 3.9+.
Get Idea Explorer via GitHub

Prior Poetry of Zettelkasting Videos

• Proximity Search in The Archive surfaces rich link candidates when creating new notes — Zettelkasten Forum
• Surfing Structure Notes — Zettelkasten Forum
• Using your ZK to write
• Plain text alternative to Scrivener's "Scrivenings" and its ability to rearrange and order files? — Zettelkasten Forum
• File-based Transclusion Comes to The Archive!
• How to tie the title with the note's idea
• Mentions Script & Automated Draft Structure Notes
• Insert a templated new note, titled based on a selection.
• Two-window workflow keeps the target in focus
• Help with Printing/Exporting Zettels from the Archive — Zettelkasten Forum
  -Video example of essay factoring into my zettelkasten-

Will

Think of the Idea Explorer as a way to look at note sequences. Sequences that develop an idea. With that in mind, I've added a couple of features. More are in the works. Do you have any ideas for features? Have you tried this out?

Note the multiple tabs in the Idea Explorer.
Tag Map and Subatomic.

The titles are links to the note directly. Both the Idea Explorer and The Archive can be open side by side. Select the title in the Idea Explorer, and it will populate The Archive's editor window.

The 'Tag Map' tab shows all the tags from all the linked notes in the sequence and counts them by putting the number in the ( ) after the tag. This points to the most popular tag in the series and the notes that contain it. In this case, it's #pedagogy(4)

The 'Subatomic' tab shows the one-line summary of each note in the sequence.

ctietze

@Will this looks so interesting, and I haven't yet wrapped my head around this, but I just wanted to take the time to applaud your efforts to implement this! 👏 (I haven't been silent on this because I was dis-interested, but because it looks like it needs more time to take in -- but of course you can't see the silent awe of a reader, so here's to breaking the silence!)

I'll have to install and experience your KM macros myself to get a feeling for what this can do with my notes.

Will

@ctietze, thank you for your comments.
I'm using this as a way to look into idea sequences. A textual graph view with 'more better' data than just this is connected to this. I'm attempting to figure out what is essential about a connection. My motivation for developing this springs from all the discussions about various graph views available here, here, here, here, and elsewhere on the forums.

I got to thinking that The Archive is a plain text-based app, and it seems counter-ethical to try and view an idea thread graphically. I thought, "Can I find a way to explore an idea sequence in a rich textual way, showing how it is connected in various ways?" After thinking about this for a while, I decided to 'just start.' This is where things have led so far.

I think this is like the shitty first drafts of a story. Programming is, in some ways, like writing an essay. You've got to start somewhere. The initial drafts are not worthy of my initial aspirations for this project, but they serve as a starting point so I can receive valuable feedback and move forward.

• I'm working with the garage doors up.
• This needs to be sped up, and execution takes up to 5 seconds of user time.
• I need to learn about unit testing. This is probably too customized to my ZK and not generally configured for other users. It probably requires too much user customization/fiddling with the code. This will limit the potential user.
• I have some ideas for configuring the chrome with a modern look.
• I'd love to figure out a way to do this without Keyboard Maestro.
• This may become redundant once user scripting is baked into The Archive.

Amontillado

What a nice project!

GeoEng51

@Will Checking out your Idea Explorer, but while I do, I'm also enjoying Patagonia's "Treeline". Thanks for (indirectly) sharing this topic / idea!

Will

@GeoEng51 said:
I'm enjoying Patagonia's "Treeline." Thanks for (indirectly) sharing this topic/idea!

Isn't this video excellent? I've been practicing my onboarding of videos lately, and this one created a note called "Trees" with a current link weight of 20!