Embedded Files
MediaStillery
MediaStillery (aka Media Distillery) is my longrunning project since 2012 exploring how I, or anyone, might use common tools to more mindfully, effectively manage what you read, watch, and listen to.
You might want to do this for various reasons, such as to:
enjoy better stuff
get and share good recommendations
reclaim your attention, and counteract overwhelm
progress on long-term reading/watching/learning goals
be better informed about work or personal interests
research, study, or to develop writing and projects
Basically, I explore: a) how can I or others decide what media do you most value and want to give attention to, and b) how can you shape practices, habits, tools for better directing your attention accordingly?
To build on the metaphor of "media diet", the idea is that today we have big needs,to shift away from irrelevant, diversionary, manipulating, even toxic media, and conversely we have new means to live in an unprecedentedly nourishing, healthy, and delightful mediascape if we wish. This reforming may be increasingly crucial to live healthily, and to succeed or thrive educationally, socially, vocationally, even spiritually.
Contents
1) Article / Project doc: "MediaStillery: projects to improve media discovery, gathering, use, tracking, sorting, and sharing"
1) Article / Project doc: "MediaStillery: projects to improve media discovery, gathering, use, tracking, sorting, and sharing"
Main article and project document, in Google Docs, with background and references, updated regularly as I try and learn new things. Click here to open, or (on desktop/laptop) see in box below
2) MediaStill: my total media collector spreadsheet
2) MediaStill: my total media collector spreadsheet
(to see spreadsheet, click here. On desktop/laptop, you should be able to see a preview of it below).
This spreadsheet gathers, mostly automatically, listings for most media items I note, gather, acquire, or read/watch. It covers many media types, including Web and other digital articles, research literature, print books and articles, e-books, online videos, and movies/television.
It grew out of a hack I implemented years ago to automatically update an online Google Sheets spreadsheet whenever I added an item to my Google Drive folder of digital reading material.
How that works:
I regularly save digital files of reading material, for various purposes, in this folder.
when I save files there, I name them in a standardized way so that the filename generally contains author, year, title, identifier, etc.
whenever a new items is saved there, a script is triggered (via IFTTT.com) that writes the filename to a new line at the end of this spreadsheet.
periodically I look through the file, organize it, and push new and/or newly prioritized items to the top, by using this move-row-to-top script.
this displays all print books, and some ebooks, papers/articles/essays, in my "Reading list" collection on the LibraryThing personal library catalog platform. It is sorted by the priority level, i.e. queue position, that I've assigned them. This was an earlier part / version of what I've now combined into MediaStill spreadsheet along with other media.
[see also,my full catalog, listing the ~5000 books I've currently or formerly owned, or read, and the 2,000 I presently own].
4) A note on reading devices for digital texts
4) A note on reading devices for digital texts
I feel like I've long crucially lacked a suitable way to read materials like this, that works well for me. What I want is:
a portable device with a larger screen, something like 6x8 or 8x10"
probably reflective e-ink rather than LED-type projective display
with some way to note/highlight text and keep this associated with the document, and
set up so I can easily pick up and turn on and have access to a automatically sync-ed list of materials like the one below.
The reMarkable Paper Tablet is perhaps the closest thing I've seen to this.
5) Archive of materials saved from online to Pocket platform
5) Archive of materials saved from online to Pocket platform
for much of my media gathering, I use the "save it for later" app/platform Pocket, which provides an easy way to save items in many contexts, e.g. by right-clicking or long-pressing links online, or by pasting a URL into the app. Items saved there can also be
I've done this consistently with almost all items noted or read since 2014, accumulating 10,000s of items. Periodically I've done large-scale analysis or processing on this, for example:
to estimate what percentage of saved items did I actually read (fairly steadily, about 60%)
what was the distribution of media sources?
to harvest subsets which appear to be research papers, and/or PDFs
6) Podcasts
6) Podcasts
I follow 150+ podcasts, which I regularly re-prioritize and from which select episodes of interest to put into a listening queue.
I think that the podcast realm has actually developed some of the best general 'reading' tools/practices in use today. Taking the example of the podcast apps I use, PocketCast (since 2016?) and Podurama (testing this starting 2024), they implement an easy but quite customizable and sophisticated reading flow, where you can subscribe and sort and organize many podcast subscriptions, listen to all or filtered set or just selected episodes, and anytime reorder your listening queue, including with a "move to top" feature.
[update: I did some hacking to implement buttons for easy "move to top" and "move to bottom" capability in my digital files spreadsheet. This is great for prioritizing one's library!
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse