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Building a modern Memex Andrew Louis (@hyfen) https://hyfen.net/memex

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History

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History in tech: var foo = 'bar'; let foo = 'bar';

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History (ancient): $(document).ready(function(){ $('#header').addClass('foo') .css('color', 'red') .fadeIn('slow');

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History (pre-): Click Me

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History! (The kind with lots of black and white photos)

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1930s

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Vannevar Bush

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1940s

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“We are being buried under our own product.”

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“As We May Think” Essay published July 1945

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“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do.

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The Memex

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“A memex is a device in which an individual stores all their books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”

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“The human brain files by association. The Memex could do this mechanically”

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Number of memexes produced: 0

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☹

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I am an information pack rat. A little about me:

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Overwhelming amounts of personal data to save! ☹

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Talk to a therapist Talk to a therapist The solution: Build a Memex

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Building a Memex

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Gathering data: • Reading and browsing from browser history, ebook reader, twitter, RSS reader • Digital consumptions like photos viewed, videos watched, music/podcasts listened to • Location history from phone • Messaging and social interactions • Journalling, personal photography, notes

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Data details: • data from 1995-present organized as a graph • 6M activities (things I’ve done) • 5M entities (people, places, thoughts, messages, etc) • 17M relationships linking everything together

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Live demo time! "

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The nitty gritty

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Fancy graph database • Postgres. • That’s it! • one Nodes table; one Relationships table • database handles graph traversals, fulltext search, geospatial queries, JSON data, and more.

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Querying verb:listened provider:spotify involved:( represents:song creators:( “Aretha Franklin” ) )

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API • a single endpoint for querying • a single endpoint for importing data (write-only access with de- duping system)

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Desktop app Importers Interface API

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Why ?

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Where’s this project going?

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my Memex as a weird art project

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before i regret it u don't know how many regret i have about school. dunno. might regret it do you regret how you used your year i think i'll really regret the chinstrap later in no regret usually i regret it cancelled. with some regret i have to warn you tha day. not that there's regrets about how things went quick before you get regrets maybe she even regrets it in some way but ag t i just hope i won't regret it later why regret? your two feet. won't regret it. respect. i sincerely regret having stressed her ou

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my Memex as long- running experiment

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And open source soon! You should sign up for my newsletter: https://hyfen.net/memex

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Now back to the story of the first Memex

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The Memex was weird!

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The Memex was weird for its form factor

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This was a computer from the 1930s:

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http://trevor.smith.name/memex/

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The Memex was weird for the problem it solved

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The Memex was weird for the technologies it used (or didn’t use)

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Extrasensory perception, crystals, and mind-control. Oh my!

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The Memex was weird for how it was published

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The Memex was weird for its form factor for the problem it solved for the technologies it used for how it was published

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The Memex was weird because for the creator, Vannevar Bush, this was just one of many side projects

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Memex as an “image of potentiality” — Linda Smith (1981)

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Side projects Make them weird! Make them experimental!

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Using my own weird side project

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Thanks!

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Questions? I have a newsletter! Subscribe if you want to get project updates or be notified when a beta version becomes available: https://hyfen.net/memex Andrew Louis (@hyfen)