Wanted: personal dictionary

August 2, 2008 6:24 PM

I'm looking for a piece of software, either for my Mac or online: I'm a philosophy major, and there's a huge number of thinkers, schools of thought, and concepts to manage in the area. What I want, ideally, is something that holds terms and definitions and allows me to drag them into categories (i.e. a page for poststructuralist writers.) Tags are better than hierarchies because I want each term to appear in several areas. I'm sure something exists but I don't know what to call it to do a good search. (I already use Evernote for notes and it might roughly work, although I really want something more focused and lightweight.)

(I hope this is different enough from this other question, which is pretty far from what I want.)

posted by poorlydrawnplato to computers & internet (6 comments total)

evernote (for windows) or basket (for linux) could handle the job rather well. microsoft's onenote would also be an option. all three support tagging.
posted by limon at 6:40 PM on August 2

Well, you could try something like a private wordpress account. Make one "blog" post for each thinker and each significant theory, then annotate with tags 'till your heart's content. It doesn't have the drag and drop functionality (does it?) but setting up tags and sorting the posts in lots of different ways are both trivially easy.
posted by oddman at 7:16 PM on August 2

Ide Knot might be what you're looking for.
posted by aint broke at 7:20 PM on August 2

I don't suppose you have a windows VM on your Mac?

Personal Knowbase is EXACTLY what you want, but sadly it's PC only. I saw it recommended once here before- I now use it for the massive piles of notes associated with my screenplays, as well as code snippets and such for work. it's fantastic.
posted by drjimmy11 at 7:24 PM on August 2

Take a look at Freemind, it might work for you.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:31 PM on August 2

aint broke, Idea Knot is exactly what I was looking for. I love Ask MeFi.
posted by poorlydrawnplato at 8:02 PM on August 2