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I'm enjoying the comments on the Mac thread below, and I thank everybody for their input.
I'm still pretty curious about DevonThink, as the notion of making a "personal encyclopedia" in an open database system is highly appealing. This is a notion that has been of special interest recently, because I have begun the process of digitizing my entire index card file.
This was a project that I've long wanted to undertake, but I've always balked at the sheer amount of data entry that the project will require. I'm only doing it now because the July 3rd hard drive crash forced my hand—in that crash, I lost the Word document that served as the cross-referenced index to the card file, and I figured that if I had to go through the long process of recreating a cross-reference anyway, I might as well put in the extra effort to make a full-text version in a proper database. The advantages of having a full-text digital version are obvious: being able to use the processing power of a computer to filter and shuffle the thousands of cards I have on file will be super-fun, and if I get a version up-and-running on a laptop the entire card file will essentially become portable.
Not to mention reproducible, and thus able to be given away / traded / shared. In Caterina's July 5 post on DevonThink, she talks about how appealing it would be to browse through someone else's database; she goes so far as to suggest that it's a pleasure she'd be willing to pay for / subscribe to. The pleasure of weblogs is, to some degree, the pleasure of reading through someone else's notes, but if you read someone's weblog regularly, it mostly works as a linear process, whereas a database works with multiple points of entry and multiple avenues of potential investigation. The beauty of a weblog is that the entries are arranged in a chronological superstructure (of the sort that I've written about before); the beauty of a database is that the entries are equidistant from one another, and can be endlessly rearranged into different configurations requested by their user. (Half the fun of ITunes is shuffling around the songs in the Library.)
So why aren't more people putting up their notes as Access files for one another to download? Or offering them on the subscription model (each month, receive a "booster pack" of new notes.) Is this happening in a different subculture (say, the subculture of people who trade recipes)? If not, why not?
"And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index."
Related: Umberto Eco's fears about a future in which "[w]e could end up with competing encyclopaedias, some of them completely wild." Eco doesn't like it, but (as I've said before) such a future doesn't seem bad to me at all.
Monday, July 26, 2004
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