I really wish there was better flashcard and annotation/marginalia software out there! It’s kinda weird to me how limited the options seem to be for both. While plenty of things perform the core functionality, I haven’t seen as many interesting experiments with it as I have with, say, outliners.
While writing this post, I developed a vague suspicion that there’s something in-between Annotator and Flashcard that could be pretty valuable if someone actually implemented it. This seems as good a place as any to describe it. (And if someone has already done it, or wants to do it, cool!)
Annotators and Flashcards are both often tracking an underlying dictionary-ish data-type, and a lot of flashcards seem to originate from textbooks. I have a suspicion that there should exist a good standardized-format notetaker that goes something like… this?
TextCards: 3 linked items
A bounded section of highlighted textbook (Any size, from a section to entire chapter. Sometimes discontinuous.)
An index-card laconic description (or answer)
A title (or question)
Sometimes, it could be used to pose standard quiz-questions (the highlighted section is just the part of the book the quiz came from, the title is the question, the description is an answer). But where it might really shine is in “Summarize Chapter X” questions; it encourages you to write along as you read the text, and if you miss something on a quiz, you can click right to the sections you were originally summarizing.
When rendered as marginalia, the small titles (until click) should make that experience more tolerable for frequent-margin-users. (Marginalia asyncing with the page seems like a really common problem, otherwise.)
For convenience, adding something that swipes all of the questions from a highlighted section of the text to form the front end of flashcards (that you then answer) seems pretty nice. For well-formatted answer-sections, you might even be able to get it to pair the two (but you’d probably need to highlight where to look). Additionally, it wouldn’t be that hard for it to track which chapter’s questions you’re doing poorly on -and therefore what chapters you should re-read- if it knows where in the book you swiped them from. Bonus points if you can sort and cross-link notes by title, folder, tags, overlapping highlights, and/or order in text.
Presumably this is usually harder than I think it should be, because PDFs are just awful (I’ve dragged tables from PDFs before; I feel so sorry for Tabula!). But HTML books and ebooks don’t have that problem, and often simulate a textbook-like structure.
TextCards
I really wish there was better flashcard and annotation/marginalia software out there! It’s kinda weird to me how limited the options seem to be for both. While plenty of things perform the core functionality, I haven’t seen as many interesting experiments with it as I have with, say, outliners.
While writing this post, I developed a vague suspicion that there’s something in-between Annotator and Flashcard that could be pretty valuable if someone actually implemented it. This seems as good a place as any to describe it. (And if someone has already done it, or wants to do it, cool!)
Annotators and Flashcards are both often tracking an underlying dictionary-ish data-type, and a lot of flashcards seem to originate from textbooks. I have a suspicion that there should exist a good standardized-format notetaker that goes something like… this?
TextCards: 3 linked items
A bounded section of highlighted textbook (Any size, from a section to entire chapter. Sometimes discontinuous.)
An index-card laconic description (or answer)
A title (or question)
Sometimes, it could be used to pose standard quiz-questions (the highlighted section is just the part of the book the quiz came from, the title is the question, the description is an answer). But where it might really shine is in “Summarize Chapter X” questions; it encourages you to write along as you read the text, and if you miss something on a quiz, you can click right to the sections you were originally summarizing.
When rendered as marginalia, the small titles (until click) should make that experience more tolerable for frequent-margin-users. (Marginalia asyncing with the page seems like a really common problem, otherwise.)
For convenience, adding something that swipes all of the questions from a highlighted section of the text to form the front end of flashcards (that you then answer) seems pretty nice. For well-formatted answer-sections, you might even be able to get it to pair the two (but you’d probably need to highlight where to look). Additionally, it wouldn’t be that hard for it to track which chapter’s questions you’re doing poorly on -and therefore what chapters you should re-read- if it knows where in the book you swiped them from. Bonus points if you can sort and cross-link notes by title, folder, tags, overlapping highlights, and/or order in text.
Presumably this is usually harder than I think it should be, because PDFs are just awful (I’ve dragged tables from PDFs before; I feel so sorry for Tabula!). But HTML books and ebooks don’t have that problem, and often simulate a textbook-like structure.