Pliny: A Note Manager

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Pliny is a tool to support widespread established (and non-digital) scholarly research practice. It focuses on the scholarly acts of:

1. reading and reacting to that reading, and
2. developing an interpretation which arises from that reading.

The intent in Pliny is to support the three phases of traditional scholarly research:

1. First, the reading of a great range of source materials, and the addition of annotations or the creation of notes to record ones initial reactions to what one has read.
2. Then, organising notes to find relationships between them. The organising principles for the notes emerge from intensive and extending thinking about the materials and ones reaction to them, and often involve both naming of a concept, and relating it to others. How can the computer help here? Pliny provides a meta-structure that allows the user to use it to develop and express their own structure of concepts and relationships between them.
3. In the end, one makes the result of this work public in the form of a book or an article. Pliny does not, as of yet, have much to help with this, although work is planned to provide facilities especially to support this kind of activity.
4. By storing notes and concepts digitally, Pliny provides for the potential to publish these digitally in some structured format. More work is still needed here, but Pliny currently provides for the the export of materials into a Topic Map format.