If we put ourselves in the perspective of using memex not only as a browsing database but also as a tool for analysing our searches, it would be really useful to be able to add (and search with) tags to the annotations. Is this planned?
This is already possible: If you are in the dashboard/sidebar and use “tag filter” in the view “notes” you can see all annotations tagged this way.
See: http://recordit.co/08U5CIGANJ
Is that what you mean?
1 Like
I misspoke. I did not mean the sentences to which I added a note but only the highlighted sentences. Unless I am mistaken, in this case there is no possibility to add a tag.
So you mean to add a tag to the highlight and the note’s text separately?
Exactly. This would allow you to separate tags for highlights (text quote) and note (idea, question, référence) or page tags (metadata like subject, projects, etc).
ok. Quite a specific request. I need to understand a bit more on the background to it.
In what cases would you like to separate those? What would be the exact use case and what would it enable you to do? What would it enable you to do that you can’t do now?
So let’s take an example. As a researcher, I am often (all the time) led to read press articles and scientific papers. When I read these articles online, I create a note for the page with information (tags) that can be considered as metadata of my working process: Author, Project, Language, etc). Then I read the document and highlight the most relevant passages. If I do this on hundreds of documents and I start to want to search for highlighted texts to be able to quote them, I am forced to search for them by the tags of the whole document. However, some of the highlighted texts are related to specific topics for which I would like to be able to put more analytical “tags”. If the article I’m reading is about building a house, the highlighted texts could have tags like “wood”, “balcony”, “financing”, “floors”, “materials”, etc. I’d like to be able to put more analytical tags. If I do this on dozens of documents, I could then filter my highlighted texts according to those tags. This would be very handy for analyzing a group of documents related to research done for a given project.
But maybe it is indeed a very specific use.
It’s actually already possible now, I think. Just with one extra step which would be nice to get rid of.
You have a passage of text you want just to highlight and tag (without a note). You select the text and here you have to go for Annotate instead of Highlight. Memex highlights the text and prompts you take a note. You write no note, just click Save. And now you can add tag to the simple highlight.
The extra step is there after Annotate when you can write a note or click save BUT you cannot directly add the tag. If you could directly add the tag and save (without writing a note), that’s what you want, I guess.
I’m also sometimes using Memex like this, just now with going with the (little) extra step.
One more thing I discovered now: if I have two separate pieces of text, both with short notes and different tags - if I filter by tag1 in the Dashboard, I see what I expect: higlight, note, tag. If I filter by tag2, same thing. But if I filter by tag1 AND tag2, I get (from this one page) higlight, note, tag1 + highlight, note. I.e. I don’t see tag2 where I would expect it.
Not that it bothers me, just I guess it’s not how it is intended.
1 Like
Update: that’s dumb (from me) but only now I discovered you actually can directly add both a note and a tag without the extra step I mention above. You just need to click the label icon next to the bookmarking heart icon.
1 Like