My first expt is to try and bring notes from Scrivener for my book project over. I have a folder called "nuggets" that I'm porting manually. Copying smaller fragments to roam and moving larger chunks to a different Scrivener folder. Roam is clearly not for composing long texts.
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This thing needs Hebbian synapses. I'm creating a big pile of chaos here, in large part because most of the organization is latent, in rhymes and associations that don't have strong overlap in vocabulary. Still unlinked-mentions is a sort of ersatz Hebbian synapse mechanism
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Ok I have my first feature request... email-based page creation. And some way to capture tweets and tweet threads in 1 step as pages.
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My dangerous working theory is that if I dump all my unintegrated fragmentary thoughts, discovery notes, and links for book project into Roam, when I work on the chapters of the book, I can search this set of notes or wander the graph to collect up what I need for JIT compilation
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So I can confirm one thing: the tool does encourage you to frictionlessly capture latent connections explicitly. I'm not seeing "new" connections as such, but finding it much easier to capture ones I've already seen cleanly.
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Another thing it is forcing me to do is clean up my foundational definitions to avoid creating redundant pages that will create merge-work later. The merge feature is a powerful forcing function.
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I'm creating a real mess here, but hopefully it will lead to enlightenment soon.
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Hmm... I've reached a point of complexity, where it's actually helpful to create what I called a Dramatis Memetae. Something between an index and a glossary, but with a bit of structure to it.
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I wish a lot of nonfiction books would start with a glossary. Like some pulp fiction (eg Perry Mason novels) begins with dramatis personae like in plays. Dramatis Ideatae? Dramatis Memetae? Someone latinize these.
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Roam looks really nice, but worried about it's youthful stage compared to the more mature Dynalist/Workflowy - are you finding it better than the outlining apps you tried? If so, in which ways?
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