Managing Book Quotes

[Manish Mohandas]

Dear all

I am relatively new to TiddlyWiki with no knowledge of coding. :)

I have a query on collating the quotes that I take note of. For each book I read, I have separate tiddlers named after the book. While I type out a relevant quote from each book in the respective tiddler, what is the best way to access them all in one place for future reference. I dont find adding a tag of 'Quotes' to each tiddler helpful. This just gives me the list of all the Book Tiddlers...

Thank you all in advance.

Regards

Manish

[springer]

Manish,

I just replied in the other thread. But I'll recap briefly here, for folks coming across this thread: the best approach is probably to have one excerpt per tiddler, and put only the quoted passage itself in the body of the tiddler. Then use fields as needed for the metadata attached to each excerpt, and a tag such as "quote" or "excerpt" if you like. 

If you use the lovely Shiraz plugin, you can then also set up a tiddler for the book (or for the author, etc.) that filters exactly those tiddlers that have the field values you need, and which displays columns for the metadata you care about (caption, page, notes, etc.). One great thing about these dynamic tables is that you can see the whole list/table of excerpts *and* effortlessly drop-down to see the details of any one excerpt as needed.

Feel free to follow up!

-Springer

[springer]

Manish, I've just added a mock-up of how I would have begun organizing my quotes, if I had been working natively in TiddlyWiki from the beginning:

https://springerspandrel.github.io/tw/ethicsatwes.html#excerpt%20overview

At some point, I'd like to convert my teaching projects over so that excerpts have their own tiddlers in this way; it's the right way to go.

For this mockup, I haven't added fancy css or custom ViewTemplate settings. But the most important thing is data structure, and having confidence that you're setting up an approach that you can build upon without regrets. 

Last tip: be aware that some tempting field names — especially "title" "text" and "source" should be *avoided* for holding your bibliographic metadata, because TW5 is already using those field-names to track aspects of your tiddlers. For a list of those "already taken" field names, see here: https://tiddlywiki.com/#TiddlerFields

-Springer

[springer]

Here's some tips: https://springerspandrel.github.io/tw/biblio-demo.html

[odin...@gmail.com]

Hi Springer!

I saw you added something to $:/core/ui/ViewTemplate/body to display any notes that an except may have. You can also get the same result by copy-pasting the bit of code to a new tiddler tagged  $:/tags/ViewTemplate. If you add the field list-after with  $:/core/ui/ViewTemplate/body as its content, it will display it at the end of your tiddlers. This way you don't have to modify shadow tiddlers, which makes upgrading TiddlyWiki versions easier as you don't have to manually adjust any changes to your changed shadow tiddlers. 

Op maandag 30 november 2020 om 22:38:11 UTC+1 schreef springer:

[springer]

@Odin: excellent!  Thanks for the reminder — it is indeed better to steer away from tinkering with shadow tiddlers, and your nudge is timely given our imminent upgrade!

@Manish: I've now put a chunk more work into the demo site for biblio excerpts. No doubt others would have somewhat different advice, but I've tried to walk the tightrope of being accessible to TW newbies while also steering toward structure-building habits that will help a quotes-oriented TW file scale well as it grows and evolves.

-Springer

[Manish Mohandas]

@Springer: Thanks a lot. I have a lot to read up and work on now :) Will get back if I reach a roadblock.

Also I've noticed that you have made specific tiddlers for each excerpt, right? That could also be an option for me to consider instead of keeping them as part of the book tiddler.

[springer]

Manish: Indeed, having a "specific tiddler for each excerpt" is at the very core of what I'm recommending at that demo site. 

Then each book tiddler uses filtered-list magic (what TW specializes in) to give you access to all of the quotes that come from that book. :)

And yet those same quotes are not "stuck" within that book tiddler. They can easily be selected, sorted, shuffled, and served up in lots of other arrangements as well. 

-Springer