Thunderdell and BusySponge

Would you like a bibliographic system that was a simple and powerful complement to the way you take notes? The Thunderdell scripts are intended to make sure the important task of engaging a text is not hindered by bibliographic constraints. Using the power of the FreeMind (0.7) mindmap application you can quickly tag and outline a source and trivially indicate annotations, paraphrases, and excerpts with simple keyboard shortcuts; you can outline, link to Web resources, and include images and tables -- really, anything you can do with a mindmap and HTML. The underlying data is accessible XML and Thunderdell transforms this into the open biblatex bibliographic format (an update to the BibTeX standard).

Thunderdell is written in Python and requires some familiarity if only to specify the location of your root mindmap. My system is an Ubuntu machine, but I believe it could be made to work on any platform as all dependencies (including lxml and httplib2) are cross-platform. The scripts are available at this repository.

The command-line BusySponge micro-blogger and Web scraper is also included and can be used to populate your mindmap with bibliographic data about Web resources.

(Thunderdell is the name of the "simple and powerful" giant from Jack and the Beanstalk who would declare "Fee-fi-fo-fum." What I used to call "FreeMind Extract" is is just a collection of tersely named scripts, such as"fe.py". BusySponge is just that, a way to quickly capture, log, and annotate things on the Web.)

Features

Thunderdell's underlying and export data are both in open formats.

It takes advantage of powerful mindmap functionality:

• one has a complete outline/map of texts,
• with figures, images, tables, links to sites, etc.;
• one can easily organize texts by topic or in separate mindmap files.

Bibliographic maps are searchable from the command-line or via the Web. Results of queries include the appropriate citation with year and page number.

Using

Usage: fe [options] FILE.mm

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -a, --abstract        include abstracts in bibtex2html output
  -b, --bibtex          emit bibtex fields rather than biblatex
  -c, --chase           chase links between MMs
  -l, --long_url        use long URLs
  -o, --online_urls_only
                        emit URLs for online resources only
  -p, --pretty          pretty print
  -q QUERY, --query=QUERY
                        query the mindmaps
  -s BST, --style=BST   use bibtex stylesheet (default: apalike)
  -t, --tests           run tests
  -w, --web             emit bibtex, convert to HTML, launch browser

Thunderdell relies upon a particular patterns.xml and certain conventions in the mind-map to create biblatex.

• Authors are green and bound to F3.
• Titles are navy blue and bound to F4.
• Excerpts are blue and bound to F5.
• Annotations are purple and bound to F6.
• Abstracts are gray and bound to F7.
• Citations are magenta and bound to F8.
• My comments are left black, or F1

A citation node looks like "y=2000 p=Basic Books a=New York, NY".

The resulting biblatex will look like:

@book{Lessig2000col, 
   annotation = {A seminal work that identifies the authority of software code}, 
   author = {Lessig, Lawrence}, 
   shorttitle = {Code}, 
   title = {{Code:} {And} Other Laws of Cyberspace}, , 
   year = {2000}, 
   address = {New York, NY}, 
   publisher = {Basic Books}, 
}

The Scripts

The repository includes these utilities (download at the right most "get source" tab):

• be.py: extract a MM from a bibtex file (dependent on bibstuff)
• b.py BusySponge
• de.py: extract a MM from a dictated text file
• fe.py: extract bibliographic data from bibliographic MM. Can make use of bibtex2html
• ff.py: fix the case of titles of a bibliographic MM
• te.py: parse inconsistently formatted textual bibliographies into bibliographic MM (e.g., from syllabi, cb2Bib is cool too)

Constraints

Requires some familiarity with Python.

I'm still using the 0.7 version of FreeMind, newer versions have slightly different XML, which could easily be accomodated.

Unlike many bibliographic tools, it does not query on-line databases, but one can use such tools (e.g., tellico or refworks) to query and generate bibtex bibliographies and then use be.py to convert them to a mindmap.