Juniper Notebook

To coax more frequent updates out of myself I have decided to post some regular updates framing my progress in terms of Campbell's Hero's Journey (1). It's a fun way to frame an otherwise thankless solo battle to produce something great.

Imagine the lone researcher pouring over books and papers trying to find the secret insight everyone else has missed. They know it's there, just waiting to be discovered. This is my hero, because their search for the truth is a dogged devotion to humanity transcending our circumstances in the face of great opposing forces, and through great personal sacrifice they fight for years to unearth a crystal amulet of truth, knowledge, insight and hope. I simply want to give them aid in their journey. I can't find it for them but I can give them some of the tools they will need along the way. Their adventure was and still is my call to adventure, to face my own daunting journey, to overcome many obstacles including exhaustion, failure, false victories, a loss of faith and ultimately, I pray, overcoming my limitations to fulfill the call and return home satisfied in my success.

1: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/writing-101-what-is-the-heros-journey#17-steps-of-the-heros-journey

After many false starts I decided late last year to finally buckle down and actually finish something. Something that I can charge for, something that people actually want to use. In the past I have dropped projects because I lost interest or was not sufficiently engaged with the challenges the product addressed. This time I am working on something I really enjoy and care about and it addresses a problem-space that is deep and broad.

This project is purely about making my ideal research tool become a reality. I want to have a place to collect and organize all my various strains of thought. A place to easily save anything I find interesting and place it in the context of these various areas of interest. My dream would be to throw all my books and every link I find interesting into this thing and just have conversations with it. Barring that I think I can get to something that provides similar value. So what are the key functions of this tool?

First, there is the process of curating and cultivating a collection of resources. This is the basis of a Juniper Notebook, the corpus. Adding documents can take place in the app, via browser extension or via a simple email to notes@junipernotebook.com or our sms number.

Once there is a set of documents to work with there are some basic things that make sense to do. Links can be turned into reader friendly documents and are archived for posterity.
Everything can be made searchable, collections and feeds can be published, annotations can be added, highlights to salient sections can be marked, citations and links to other documents in your corpus can be made.

That's a great start but there are other things that can be done to understand a large set of documents. Because a corpus can become very large we need the ability to distill salient information without having to personally read every word. Furthermore we need the ability to identify what documents are worth more of our limited time than others. To that end Named Entity Recognition is used to find people, places and events. These can become an overlay of connectivity between different documents and sources. Furthermore a social network, timeline and map of these entities can all be generated automatically.

Entities can be very powerful but are also very sparse relative to the density of a text leaving a lot of context out of the picture. What we need is a detailed map of the landscape of ideas captured in the our corpus of documents. This is where some of the most cutting edge unsupervised machine learning techniques come into play so that we can literally draw a map of how all the sources relate to one another.

With all of these features and all of the technical requirements they pose I hope to have a minimally functional beta with collections, and search available in the next few months. If any of this sounds interesting please sign up for the beta program at https://junipernotebook.com