February 26, 2020
MarkBernstein.org
 

Link Apprentice Again

Thirty years ago (!) I wrote a little paper about a tool for suggesting new links for a hypertext. I’d started the paper expecting to show that then-current techniques couldn't do a decent job, but the code worked surprisingly well. I’ve revisited similar things from time to time — notably in Twig, but also in the Tinderbox Get Info ▸ Similar Notes pane.

I’ve had an opportunity to revisit the link apprentice today, and to test its performance I tried it out on this weblog’s working file (3,478 notes, half a million words). Some similar notes to The Cactus League include:

That’s interesting, though perhaps not very useful. Let’s try The Art Of Escapist Cooking:

Some top choices for last month’s post arguing that “In social media, we actually encounter monsters”, we get

One of the related notes to this note — appearing as I write, is John McPhee’s Draft No. 4. That’s interesting, too, though some other suggestions are mysterious. Jo Walton’s Farthing? An old piece of Tinderbox fan mail? Still, not bad for an afternoon.