# My ideal research/annotation tool


I was reading a bit about different innovative text editors on Mac
today. Of course, I have known about [TextMate](http://macromates.com/)
for a long time, and although it mainly changes the way programmers do
work, some of the plugins are also useful for for example television
script writers. Now I came across a bunch of different text
editors/writing tools that aim to help people who write texts, whether
literary or academic. This blogpost for example, I am writing in
[WriteRoom](http://hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom), a simple text
editor that blanks out the screen and displays nothing but your text in
green on black in the middle of the screen - no blinking MSN, no GMail
notifier or anything else flashy to distract you.

There’s also
[Scrivener](http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html), which I
just tried out, and which seems promising. It let’s you easily organize
text into discrete chunks, and then reorganize them at will, and has a
lot of other nifty features which could very well change the way you
write, both academic and literary. It’s refreshing to see people trying
to rethink how we use computers to author - rethinking the metaphores
that we use. The idea of a blank paper in front of us (think MS Word
style) which has been taken up by almost all text editors is intuitive -
but also limiting in a way that is unnecessary on a computer.

However, when cooking I thought up what for me would be the perfect
research / authoring tool. I constantly read a ton of information, both
web pages, pdfs, and more seldom - .doc or .odt files. Sometimes what I
am reading is directly related to what I am researching right now, but
just as often it is something I just came across while looking for
something else, that I still found interesting and wanted to skim
through. Or I might just be browsing, reading articles linked from some
of my favorite blogs.

My tool would let me view all these media types - odt/doc, pdf, html and
maybe even rss (or just integrate with Google Reader, Flickr etc). It
would let me very intuitively and easily mark up all the different files
- I could easily either click somewhere in the pdf/html/doc/odt and
insert a comment, or select a few lines and attach a comment to them, or
just highlight some lines. Kind of like track changes in Word, but
here’s the thing: I would be able to very easily extract a list of all
my marked up text from a given PDF, with page numbers etc.

I could tag documents (regardless of type - it’s all information), and
all the documents I ever entered into the system would be stored and
fully full-text searchable. In addition, it would archive meta data:
Which URL this PDF was downloaded from, what the URL was immediately
before I downloaded it (ie. usually the “abstract page” etc), and it
would even understand
[DOI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier)s and
common archive formats to be able to automatically extract full citation
information and attach that to the files.

So when writing an essay, and remembering that I read something about
the banking crisis in Russia a few months ago, and that there was a
particularly salient paragraph, I’d be able to very easily find that
text back, and drag the paragraph over into my text - which would be
automatically footnoted with a citation in an appropriate format. Or I
could ask to search all my comments for a given text, and have all the
text pieces that had been marked up with that comment extracted and
displayed together (properly cited).

Perhaps something similar to this is possible today, using different
tools and plugins, but I don’t think there is a simple an elegant way of
doing it.

And before I close, one thing that I have been wanting for a long time
is a plugin for WordPress which let’s you quickly and easily search for
CC licensed pictures, and then let’s you insert them easily into your
blog, adding proper citation information below. I try to use
illustrations to spruce up my longer blog entries, but first I have to
find a picture, then insert a link to it, then flip back and copy the
username, add a “Thanks to xxx for the username”, select xxx, add link,
copy the link, etc… All this should be automated (of course, people
using a CC-0 might help this - but I don’t mind giving attribution to
people, just when it slows me down a lot).

Stian