#data curation

Interview with Librarians on 'Rescuing Public Datasets the U.S. Gov't Deletes": 

there are still some kinks to work out, but that's for next week. organisation systems are living, ongoing projects -like cleaning your house or decorating a room, I'm never going to be "done" organising.

if there's something I must credit tiago forte's book with, is that it's made me think about my life in terms of information flows. I have information sources (email clients, twitter, books, AO3, podcasts, etc) and information "sinks" -not in the sense of information being destroyed, but in the sense that I have discovered that I have "places" where I consume information. the places that I have discovered thus far are:

my RSS reader (I use feedly. please, somebody make a better reader than feedly)

my kindle

the "reader" function in the firefox browser

my logseq

my chosen filesystem

I think that it's obvious why I see an RSS reader and a kindle as information sinks, but it's a little bit less obvious why a notetaking program like logseq or a filesystem "consume" information. it's because I often have little bits of information (tweets, pictures, screenshots of a conversation, a book that I may want to read but can't yet) that I want to keep. like, I don't know if there are people who simply let all of their files live in the downloads folder, but personally, I need to "process" the files in some way in order to do anything useful with them.

usually this simply involves moving them from "downloads" to a different directory, but sometimes I also need to take notes on them (if they are a book, or a fanfic, or an academic paper), or maybe I want to add the new snippet to the existing collection of snippets about a topic, and I may have to string all of them together in some coherent order. so that's why I think my notetaking program and my filesystem are information sinks.

I think that finding my information sources and information sinks in my life can really help me write more and be more creative in general, because a thing I've noticed is that when the information travels fast and smoothly from my sources to my sink, the faster I read it and the easiest it is for me to actually work on it and use this new information in my life.

I did end up using my entire workday to clean up my research graph ^__^U

on the left, how the graph looked after I cleaned the first 100-ish pages (it didn't occur to me to make a screenshot right at the beginning). on the right, how the graph looks now, with "just" 504 pages. the graph isn't showing all of them however, since I have hidden several of them for the purpose of making the graph clearer.

in total I must have deleted between 250-300 pages. I have also made new pages, so in the end it's still just above 500.

the "slush pile" is one of the new pages. now whenever I import a paper with zotero, it gets automatically tagged as "slush pile", and I'm meant to periodically check the papers on that tag and either tag it with a project (if I think it'll be useful) or just delete it entirely.

Bayangkan sebuah model AI yang tampak percaya diri. Ia memantau pasar saham, membaca jutaan artikel, dan mengeksekusi strategi “rasional”. Lalu sesuatu yang aneh terjadi: setiap kali ada berita peluncuran roket SpaceX, model itu tiba-tiba menjual saham teknologi—seakan percaya bahwa roket di langit adalah firasat buruk untuk kinerja pasar. Tidak ada aturan seperti itu di manual, tidak ada baris…

logseq is an opensource notetaking program similar to obsidian. it has pages arranged in a graph structure, and you just write whatever you want on them. it supports markdown formatting, you can add pictures, and even reference another page (or a part of a page). you can also make tags and tag pages.

so when I play ttrpg I like to make a tag like "ttrpg/currentGame" and put my character's information and anything relevant to the game under that tag. but when the game ends, now those pages live forever on the graph, which is incredibly inconvenient if you consider that I synchronize the entire program's files on most of my devices.

logseq has no convenient way of archiving "outdated" pages (unless you want to delete them entirely). I can go to the directory that stores the pages' files and put them somewhere else, but the files (such as pictures) embedded in the pages are stored in a different directory, and it would be a pain to go looking around for them in there. and any pages that referenced the pages you removed have unexplainable dead links now.

this problem has been bothering me (and a couple of a my friends) for a bit, but now that I've decided that I want to keep my work and personal notes separate, making a tool to export all of my pages tagged with "work" out of my current graph while preserving the embedded files and page links is the most convenient way forward. if I do the export well enough those pages should be able to be added seamlessly to my new, work-only graph.

whenever I write a post -for example, about chatgpt- I put two kinds of tags on it:

tags like "ai", "gen ai" and "chatgpt", which I put in the post just to help it reach more people than just my followers. I don't keep track of these tags and they may vary from post to post, so I consider them to be "non-canonical".

in addition to those tags, I (try to) always put a "canonical" tag related to the topic of the post. the one that I chose for anything related to ai is "artificial intelligence".

the purpose of canonical tags is purely archivistic, so I try to ensure that they're distinctive and consistent. listing all of them in a page not only helps other people navigate the blog, it also keeps me from tagging a bunch of related posts with similar but slightly different tags.