ThinkSpace

My workspace for research, thinking and writing

Transparency label: AI-assisted
Author: Alec Fearon
This piece was drafted collaboratively. Alec set the brief and the reader in mind; Peka produced the draft text. Alec reviewed it and edited the wording himself.

ThinkSpace provides me with a toolkit for research, thinking and writing. Everything goes into it: notes, references, drafts, family history, correspondence and the pieces I publish here. Every note can link to any other, so an idea from an old file resurfaces the moment it becomes useful again.

Three things make it work. Obsidian, the note-taking software underneath it, stores the files and the links between them. A semantic search engine, which Peka and I built together, finds notes by what they mean rather than by the words they contain, so a question about an old idea still gets an answer. And Peka itself, an AI assistant working inside the whole arrangement, drafts, edits, checks facts and keeps the place in order, always to my instruction.

One small example: when a piece of publishing software started failing on my site, Peka traced the fault through the plugin's own code, wrote up the evidence and helped me see it through to a fix with the developer who maintains it. The full account is in Liaison, Leverage and Learning. The part of ThinkSpace I write myself holds 1,325 notes today, and it grows most days.