This reminds me of a piece Stephen Johnson once wrote for the New York Times called "Tool for Thought", which described his process using DEVONthink software.

This reminds me of a piece Stephen Johnson once wrote for the New York Times called "Tool for Thought", which described his process using DEVONthink software. (https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/tool-for-thought.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/tool-for-tho...) "The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me[...]Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head -- I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection -- and I'd select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me." That process eventually turned into a startup around 2010 I helped found in NYC. Good times.