Amanuensis

What is Amanuensis?

Amanuensis is a Chrome extension that facilitates taking notes on phrases you find as you browse the web. It captures the phrase, its context — the surrounding text — the time you recorded it, the URL, and any tags and notes, either on the phrase generally or particular citations. You can link notes together, edit them, merge them, search for them, export them, or import them.

what Amanuensis looks like in use — Amanuensis in use. The square on the right depending from the little yellow figure is a note taken in Amanuensis regarding the text highlighted in purple. You can see at the top that Amanuensis has five tags. The first, the note, is active. The others are the dictionary, the spaced-repetition quiz, tags, and configuration.

In principal, you can use Amanuensis to take any sort of note. It was designed, however, with language learning in mind. Every time you make a note in Amanuensis you cue up a question in two spaced-repetition flashcard quizzes, à la Anki. A quiz from form (“lemma”) to meaning (“gloss”) and a quiz from meaning to form. You can take these quizzes daily or on whatever schedule suits you. They will drum into your memory the facts you annotate with notes.

Use

This is the general pattern of use:

You're reading an article on something that interests you. You find a phrase of particular interest. If you're using Amanuensis to learn a language, it's an unfamiliar phrase or idiom. If you're using it as a research tool, it's a fact, observation, or data point. You highlight the phrase and click the Amanuensis icon or press ctrl-shift-A to start a note.If you are studying a language, you will need some other source to provide definitions, part of speech, etc. I find wiktionary is a great resource. It provides you considerably more and more trustworthy information than you get from Google Translate, for instance. You add relevant information, perhaps some tags. You look for similar or related notes and link them. You save it.

Later, you wish to continue with an article. Say it's the last article. You click the icon or press ctrl-shift-A and open Amanuensis. You search, sorting for the most recently updated note. You click on the first note, then click on the URL. This takes you to the page, highlighting the phrase. You click on the search tab and see a list of all the notes you took on the page. You resume reading the article and taking notes.

Once a day, more or less, you quiz yourself on your notes. About a fifth of the quiz are new notes selected randomly from among those you've recently created. The rest are review.

Philosophy

When people learn languages in a classroom, most context is removed. Words are learned in lists and are taught when the textbook or professor deems best, not when the student is interested. But learning facts unconnected to your interests is frustrating and inefficient. If you don't already want to know the answer, the answer doesn't sink in.

The idea with Amanuensis is that you find something which is inherently interesting to you and you try to read it. When you come across unfamiliar words, you will be more likely to remember them, because you want to know what they mean.

When you come across the words again, and look them up again, as one does, you will be reminded of the last context in which you saw the word. The words will all hang together in a web of meaning and association.

As you go, you record connections between words, write down hypotheses or questions to look up later, and add information. The more connections you make among words and between words and ideas, the more easily you will remember them. One thing will remind you of another. The whole web holds when individual unconnected facts would have fallen away.

Caveats

I have not tested Amanuensis on a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew.

I have not attempted to internationalize Amanuensis, ironically. That's work that seems vast and un-fun, and the thing that has driven development up to this point has been the fun. Just writing this documentation is arduous enough. It's difficult to imagine writing different versions for different languages and inserting an i18n layer into the code and so forth.

There is just one person writing and maintaining this code. Though I use Amanuensis daily, there are corners, such as the importing and exporting functionality, that are neglected.

Future

I have written Amanuensis because it is the language learning tool I want. I am sharing it because, having written it, it costs me nothing to do so.

It is free. It will remain free. I have no plans to make money off of it.

However, for the same reason, I cannot guarantee it will be supported and developed forever. I will keep working on it as long as I have use for it. Since I love learning languages, I will keep at it for decades, as long as I keep my health. But Amanuensis has a bus number of one. If support drops off, something bad has happened. Still, I imagine it will keep working, just without additional bells and whistles.

Installation

To install Amanuensis, you have two options:

Chrome Web Store

Go to Amanuensis's page in the Chrome Web Store and click the "Add to Chrome" button.

You will likely want to "pin" the extension so it is available whenever you happen to be looking at a web page.

For some reason, when installed from the Chrome Store the app sometimes gets assigned command-shift-A as its keyboard trigger rather than the control-shift-A. The former conflicts with a keyboard shortcut already present in Chrome. To fix this, type "Chrome://extensions/shortcuts" in the address bar. Find Amanuensis, and reset the key combination. This note may help.

Install from source

Amanuensis is open source. If you are feeling adventurous you can clone the repository, run the compile script, and load the unpacked extension into Chrome.

The respository is at https://github.com/dfhoughton/amanuensis-2.Why "amanuensis-2"? Because there was an earlier version of this extension that worked with an earlier version of the Chrome extension spec. That version reached end of life and the extension died. This is a thorough rewrite. It is somewhat less ambitious but uses more modern tech.

To run the build script, you must have installed node. Then, in a terminal, cd to the install directory and run npm run release-build (or npm run build if you want to set breakpoints and inspect human-readable code).This is, in fact, how I work on Amanuensis. Then go to Window > Extensions, click the “Load unpacked” button, and select the dist directory, which will have the output of the build scripts in it.

Non-Chrome Versions

I realize not everyone can or wants to use Chrome. I intend to make Firefox and Safari versions at some point. It is a question of the extent to which their APIs differ from Chrome's and figure out how those extension stores work.

Amuensis's Bits and Pieces

Design Constraints

Amanuensis, like many extensions, lives in a little box in the top right corner of the screen. It needs to stay out of the way of the text you're reading, so everything needs to be compact, minimal, abbreviated. We do what we can with tooltips and icons with familiar meanings, but if we had more real estate on the screen we would have made other choices.

Note

Notes are the basic unit of Amanuensis. Their creation is its central purpose. They collect information about citations. When you highlight a bit of text and invoke Amanuensis, it begins a new note for you.

The various parts of a note are enumerated in the figure.

lemma

A note's lemma is the canonical form of its various citations. If you are using Amanuensis to study English, you would probably consider the lemma of cats, cat's, and cat to be cat.

save icon

Click this to save the note. When you begin a note by highlighting some text and opening Amanuensis, it is not yet saved. If any part of the note is unsaved, the save icon will be enabled. If it is disabled — gray — there is nothing to save.I considered autosaving notes — every time you make any edit it is saved, perhaps after a short debounce period, maybe 400 milliseconds, so you aren't saving after every keypress. It is easy to start notes accidentally, though. You have something highlighted on the page. You forget about it. You open Amanuensis. Amanuensis begins an unwanted note. If you're autosaving, you now have to delete this. If you only autosave after the first save, that's complicated and hence fragile, and you need the save button anyway. So I implemented Amanuensis such that you have to save notes explicitly.

In addition to the save icon there is a key sequence you can use to save a note: ctrl-shift-S. This may not work in all operating systems. I have developed this code in OS X, where this key sequence is available.

language

Amanuensis uses a Chrome API to guess the language of a particular citation from its content and context. There are many more languages than Google attempts to recognize, however, and it is not always correct in its guess. The language Google guesses is represented as a "locale", a two-letter identifier. You can see the locale for Finnish, "fi", as a blue badge overlay on the language selector in the figure.

To use this guess, you must specify in the configuration tab which languages you are interested in. Amanuensis will attempt to map Google's guess onto these languages. The language selector allows you to edit this guess when Amanuensis gets it wrong.

gloss

This is where you write things that are true for all uses of the phrase. Typically, this is the phrase's definition.

The gloss should be short, like the word gloss itself. It is used in quizzes. Long notes make for ugly flip cards. Save rambling for the elaboration.

elaboration

The elaboration is for things that don't fit in the note. Etymologies, interesting quirks, analogies to other languages — these belong in the elaboration.

The flashcards in the quizzes contain the lemma and language on one side and the gloss and tags on the other. Any elaboration is excluded.

a tag with its tooltip — A tag with its tooltip

links

Links connect one note to another. In the example shown in the figure, the motivation for linking the two notes was that they both contain vallat. You might link notes because they are synonyms or antonyms, or for any reason whatsoever.In the first version of Amanuensis, links were were categorized — synonyms, antonyms, etc. This was cumbersome and didn't work well for non-symmetric relations. In a part-whole relation, for instance, you needed to specify which side was the whole and which the part. In this iteration I dropped all that complexity. I figure these are your own notes. You'll remember how two related phrases are related.

Clicking on a link takes you to the note linked.

Links are always bidirectional. If you link a to b, b will also be linked to a.

The mechanism for creating these links is within the dictionary. You will find each dictionary entry has a link icon — the figure. This looks like a link in a chain. If you click it, you will create a link to the current note, the note currently displayed in the note tab.

citations

Every note has at least one citation. A citation is a use of the note's lemma in context. Quite likely until you have been using Amanuensis for some time each note will have just the one citation. If you have a memory like a steel trap, you will only ever have the one. But if you have an ordinary memory, or you find many interesting citations, this number will grow.

If you have more than one citation, as in the figure, you may pick a “canonical” one to display by default when browsing notes. You may also delete citations. You cannot delete the last citation.

You only have these options for the currently displayed citation. Click on another to display it. (5) in the figure is a non-selected citation. For non-selected citations only the form, any note for that citation, and the date it was recorded are displayed.

citation context

The citation context is shown for the displayed citation. Its parts are enumerated in the figure. These are the title (8), the date the citation was recorded (9), the URL (10), and the phrase itself and its surrounding text (11).

The title, date, and URL are displayed in abbreviation. If you hover over them their full content will appear in a tooltip. In the case of the date, this tooltip shows the time of day that the citation was recorded.

If you click on the URL, Chrome will navigate to this page, where it will attempt to highlight the phrase cited and bring it into view. If the page has changed since you recorded the citation, highighting the original phrase in its original context may not be possible.

If visiting a citation involves changing the domain of the current tab, Amanuensis will likely close. This is a limitation of its being a Chrome extension. If you reopen Amanuensis at this point, it will open to the citations on page tab, which will allow you to find the note you are interested in and continue from where you were when Amanuensis closed.

the similarity search tool

Whenever you create a note, Amanuensis will add the form cited to those it can link directly to a particular note. These links appear in red in the citation. In a language like Finnish, however, in which words may have dozens of forms, you may have a note for a particular word but no citation for its form. The similarity search tool helps you find notes in these cases.

The tool has two states: active and inactive. The inactive state is portrayed in the note figure. It is the small gray magnifying glass labeled (12). If you click this icon, the tool becomes active. The icon will turn blue as shown in the tool figure, and the cursor will turn into a magnifying glass when it is over a word in the citation which is not already a link to another note.

If you click on a word with the magnifying glass, you will switch to the dictionary tab in similarity search mode with the phrase preloaded as the term searched for.

citation note

Each citation has its own note in which you can record anything interesting about the particular citation. This is (13) in the figure.

citation tags

Every citation also may have its own tags. This is (14) in the figure.

keeping track of peculiarities of a specific citation — Using citation note and tags to keep track of unanswered questions.

I often use the citation note and tags to keep track of puzzles to solve later. See the figure. Here I have added my “?” tag to the citation to mark it as something about which I have an unanswered question. I can click on the tag to search for all unanswered questions, or I can search for this tag in the dictionary tab.

Dictionary

The dictionary is where one may browse notes. As shown in the figure, there are three manners in which one may browse the dictionary (1): ad hoc search, by similarity to the current citation, and by page (URL). Every manner of search has a form to receive the search parameters (2). Changing these parameters will cause Amanuensis to execute a new search. Every search results in zero or more notes (3).

a search result — A search result: 1) lemma; 2) gloss; 3) locale; 4) merge; 5) link; 6) delete

Each note in the search results (the figure) is in turn represented by its lemma (1), its gloss (2), its language (3), and some actions one may take: merge the note with the current note — the note currently displayed in the note tab — (4), link the note to the current note (5), or delete the note (6). The more destructive of these actions, merging and deletion, require confirmation and, in the case of merging, possible editing to complete.

If you click on a note in the dictionary, this will take you to the note tab, where the note will be displayed. It is now the current note, the note to which other notes displayed in the dictionary may be merged or linked.

the free search form — The free search form: 1) lemma; 2) any text; 3) tags; 4) whole word; 5) fuzzy match; 6) case-insensitive; 7) sort order; 8) clear form

free-form search

The search tab labeled simply "search" is the most flexible, and consequently the most complex. See the figure.

There are two areas that allow you to search text: the lemma area and the free text area. The first searches only lemmas. The second searches lemmas, glosses, citations — the phrases themselves and the context before and after — and citation notes.

Both text searches allow you to specify whether it is a whole word search (5 in the figure), whether it is a fuzzy search (6), and whether it is case-insensitive (7).

A "whole word" search is a search where the first and last letters in the search field should be the first and last letters in words matched.

A "fuzzy" search is one where letters may intervene between characters matched. A fuzzy search for era would also match terra and tertiary, because in all three words the letters e, r, and a occur in that order.

A "case-insensitive" search will match letters regardless of their case. A case-insensitive search for cat would match CAT. A case-insensitive fuzzy search for cat would match A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Tag searches look for notes where a particular tag occurs in the note's lemma or citation tags.

Language searches search for notes with particular locales.

search result sorting options — Search result sorting options. The one pointed out with an arrow will find the note you last edited.

By default the search results are sorted by lemma. Sometimes it helps to apply a different sort order. This is the purpose of the icon showing three horizontal bars of descending size (the figure). I frequently use the last sort order, by time of last update descending, to find where I left off when last using Amanuensis.

similar phrase

The same phrase may have different forms — cat and cats, for example. It may appear as part of another word — cat and catfish. To facilitate linking a note to related notes, or to merge different citations into the same note, Amanuensis has the similar phrase search (the figure).

When you highlight some text and invoke Amanuensis, it creates a provisional note and searches for similar notes within the language inferred by Chrome. This facilitates merging the citation highlighted with an existing note immediately. The search is over all lemmas and citations. Because of this pattern of use, the similar phrase search form has only two fields: lemma and language.

dropdown that shows the string similarity metric — The string similarity metric dropdown.

Amanuensis must apply a string similarity metric to do a phrase similarity search. Because words can be similar in different ways, Amanuensis provides four metrics (the figure). They are

Jaro-Winkler: Jaro-Winkler prioritizes changes at the beginning of the word. Jaro-Winkler will find cat more similar to cats than scat. Because most languages prefer suffixes to prefixes for inflectional changes like the -s that marks cats as plural, Jaro-Winkler is generally a pretty good default. There are languages, though, like the Bantu languages, that use inflectional prefixes — watu is the plural of mtu, “person” in Swahili. For these, see reverse Jaro-Winkler.
longest common substring: If you're dealing with compounds or phrases, not inflection, you want to prioritize phrases that embed other phrases. For these, longest common substring is your friend.
Levenshtein: The Levenshtein algorithm measures the number of edits required to convert one phrase into another. The beginning and end don't have particular importance. Similar sequences don't have particular importance. Levenshtein tends to consider words of similar length to be more similar because more edits are required to add or subtract letters to change a phrase's length. The Levenshtein similarity metric is probably the least useful, but it may turn up easily confused words.
reverse Jaro-Winkler: Reverse Jaro-Winkler is just Jaro-Winkler applied backwards. It considers changes at the end of the words more important. It will find scat to be more similar to cat than cats. This similarity metric may be useful for Bantu languages that use inflectional prefixes. It is also useful for finding words with similar suffixes.

Each of the metrics is marked with a distinctive color so you can see what metric is in use when the dropdown is not open.

One could in principle rank all notes for their similarity to a given phrase. In practice, however, there is little value in looking too far down the list. For this reason, the maximum number of results displayed in a similarity search is configurable.

form for searching for notes at a given URL — To search for the citations on a page, you search by URL.

citations on page

The form to find citations on a given page is the simplest (the figure). The "page" in this case is just the URL, so the only field in the search form contains a URL. The search performed is a search for notes which have some citation whose URL starts with the string in the search form. This means you can use this form to search for all citations on a particular site, not just a particular page.

Spaced-repetition Quiz

The idea behind spaced repetition is that one can learn a concept most efficiently when one reviews it when one is about to forget it. If you can catch the memory at the moment of disintegration and reconstitute it — if you repeat it after allowing a certain space for it to fade — you can rebuild it stronger without unnecessary drills.

Trials bear this theory out. The remaining problem, then, is predicting when a memory will fade — how much space one should allow before repetition.

Disclaimer: I have not made a deep study of this problem. Rather, I observed how Anki seemed to be doing it, mixed this with what seemed sensible to me, and called it good. If you want a more state-of-the-art spaced-repetition quiz, I liked Anki. There are other options. My aim in writing Amanuensis was to make a note-taking app, not a flashcard app. That being said, I'm quite pleased with Amanuensis's hacked together spaced-repetition quiz.

The general procedure

Amanuensis presents its spaced-repetition quiz as a stack of flashcards. You see a card. You try to guess what is on the other side. Then you click the card. The card flips, revealing its back, and you rate your performance.

Quizzes consist of some number of new cards, cards you've never seen in a quiz, and whichever old cards may have come due for another go. The new cards are a random subset of those available. All the scheduled old cards are in the stack. If you skip a day, the next day you will see all the cards that were due the first day plus any others that have come due, so they will pile up a bit if you don't do the quiz regularly.

The challenge side of the card

The challenge side of the card (challenge figure) is the side presenting a challenge to which you are meant to provide the answer. In the case of a lemma quiz, the challenge is the lemma; the answer is the gloss. In the case of a gloss quiz, the challenge is the gloss; the answer is the lemma.

The challenge side presents the challenge and enough context to disambiguate similar cards. For the lemma, this is the locale. See (6) in challenge figure. For the gloss, this is the tags. See (2) in response figure.

If this is the first time you've been presented this challenge, it is "new" and marked with a green dot. See (5) in challenge figure.

Below the challenge information is presented about the quiz and your progress. The number of new and old cards in the quiz is shown; see (7) in challenge figure. Your success so far is presented as a series of icons and counts; see (8). A progress bar shows how far you have gotten in the quiz; see (9).

The answer side of the card

the answer side of a spaced-repetition quiz card — 1) the answer; 2) the tags; 3) "show again in this quiz"; 4) "show again tomorrow"; 5) bad, okay, and good outcomes; 6) "graduate" this card

The answer side of the card (response figure) is the side that provides the answer to the challenge presented on the first side seen. In the case of a lemma quiz, this is the gloss side. In the case of a gloss quiz, this is the lemma side.

In addition to the answer to the challenge, the answer side presents further contextual information you should master, chiefly the tags.

Bellow the answer to the challenge there is a row of six icons; see 3 – 6 in response figure. You choose and click one of these icons to rate how well you rose to the challenge and schedule its next appearance in the spaced-repetition quiz. These icons are presented in order of rating, worst to best.

The red counterclockwise circular arrow, (3) in response figure, means "show again in this quiz". If you click it, the challenge will show up again after all the other challenges at the end of the quiz on this same day.

The gray arrow arching clockwise to the right, (4) in response figure, means "show again tomorrow".

The various circular face icons, (5) in response figure, means roughly "bad", "okay", "good". The text below them indicates how long it will be until you see this particular challenge again in the quiz if you click them.

Finally, the green graduation cap, (6) in response figure, means "I dub myself a master of this challenge". If you click this, the challenge will never show up in the quiz again.

NOTE: If you click the happy face enough times in a row, Amanuensis will offer a modal suggesting you have mastered this challenge and should graduate. You can graduate and eliminate the card, or simply schedule it again. When you are on the point of "auto-graduating" the smiling icon will be green instead of black. See auto-graduate-threshold.

After you have rated your performance on the current challenge, the next challenge will be presented to you.

Strategy

There is some strategy to how you choose the self-evaluation icon. You are playing against your own failing memory. The scheduling algorithm tries to predict how quickly you will forget, but you have some notion yourself. You can use this to your advantage.

If you fail a challenge after a long series of successes, the sad icon may schedule its next appearance too far into the future. I often click the "tomorrow" icon in this case. Facing the challenge when my last failure is fresh in my mind helps me get back on track. Otherwise I find myself failing again for the same reason, remembering the same mistaken train of thought that led me to answer incorrectly the last time.

I use the "again in this quiz" icon more sparingly, but it serves a similar function: let me experience one success and overwrite my mistake before moving on.

I live in Vermont, where it snows a lot. In the winter the town sends a sidewalk plough to clear the sidewalks. The plough throws snow to the side when it can. When it is passing a sidewalk or driveway it throws the snow ahead of itself. This is fine so long as it sometimes gets a chance to cast the snow out of its way. A spaced-repetition quiz works like this sidewalk plough, except it only ever throws the snow forward. The quiz doesn't mind, but you may, as every day the ratio of old to new words grows. Graduate cards when you can so that you aren't facing the entire dictionary every day. If you find the pile you face too overwhelming, you should either tune down the number of new cards you face or tune down the memory challenge, so your sequences of success grow longer and you can graduate faster. See the quiz configuration options.

Configuration

Amanuensis does not yet have many configurable parameters. Those that there are, together with some database actions, can be found on the configuration tab (the figure).

Dictionary

Configuration parameters for the dictionary tab.

max similar phrases

In a similarity search you are unlikely to find any interesting similar phrases after the first few notes, so rather than display all the notes in the dictionary for the given language sorted by similarity Amanuensis just shows the few most similar ones. This parameter controls how many are shown.

Quiz

Configuration parameters for the quiz tab.

auto-graduate threshold

If you always get the answer to a challenge, you probably should stop facing that challenge so you can spend your time on other things. Amanuensis keeps track of how many times you've rated your response to a challenge as good. If you pass this number, it will suggest you "graduate" the challenge the next time you click the smiling icon.

memory challenge

When you click one of the face icons to rate your response to the quiz challenge, Amanuensis reschedules the challenge for some future date based on your self-evaluation. By default the scheduling is based on what I found experimenting with Anki. If you find you are getting too many challenges right you may wish to tune the scheduling up; if you get too many wrong, you may wish to tune it down. Use this slider for that purpose.

Database

Amanuensis saves all its data on your machine in a database. It doesn't call home to a central server. It doesn't store data in the cloud.

This design provides simplicity and privacy. It also potentially locks you into one device and prevents sharing notes with others. The database actions provide some workarounds if you want a bit of both worlds.

clear

The clear action — (5) in the figure — allows you to reset Amanuensis to "factory settings". Once done one cannot restore the database unless you've exported the data, so a confirmation modal will intervene and ask whether you really mean to do this before your data is erased forever.

export

The export database action — (6) in the figure — dumps the entire contents of your Amanuensis database into a JSON file.

Having exported your database to a file, you can now save a backup copy, install Amanuensis on another machine and restore your database there, or share your notes with someone else.

If you want to use your notes for some other purpose, you can write a script in some programming language that will parse the exported JSON allow you to manipulate, transform, or extract it.

import

The import database action — (7) in the figure — allows you to add the notes exported from a different instance of Amanuensis into your current one.

The import process takes some pains to import notes without clobbering existing notes. This may result in duplicate notes and tags requiring merging or deletion.

Languages

You do not need to use Amanuensis to study languages. You can use it simply as a note taking tool. Amanuensis begins configured to use only one language, the "unknown" language — (2) in the figure. You do not need to configure it further. If you create a note, it will begin and remain assigned to the unkown language.

If you do wish to study a particular language you need to tell Amanuensis which languages you wish to study so that it can attempt to categorize your notes correctly. This will ensure that similar phrases are sought only within the correct language and that only those tags appropriate to the language are offered.

To add a language, click the add-language icon — (1) in the figure. This will open a modal where you can select a language with an ISO-639-1 language code. At this time, Amanuensis does not provide a mechanism to add a language which lacks an ISO-639-1 code. There are many languages that lack such a code — Yinjibarndi, for example, or Sumerian. Amanuensis does not yet provide a means to add these for study. If I am made aware of a demand for this, this may hasten my adding it. I may add it regardless of whether anyone demands it. I simply have not yet.

When you create a note, Chrome uses the phrase selected and the surrounding text to guess its language. It may guess wrong, or be unable to identify the language at all, assigning it the unknown language. You can correct this using the language picker widget — (3) in the figure. Amanuensis will record this discrepancy and use it to improve its language assignment for subsequent notes. In (3) in the figure you can see an instance of this: 4 notes on Finnish were guessed by Chrome to contain Estonian (et); one was guessed to containg Swedish (sv).

Acknowledgements

Though so far I'm the only person who has committed code to Amanuensis, others have helped bring it to its current state and deserve acknowledgement

Martha Edwards

Martha coached me through some confusion as I was learning React while writing this code.

Dedication

Amanuensis, like most of my projects, is dedicated to my son Jude, who died on February 1st, 2023. He was a better programmer and a better, kinder, more interesting person than me. I was looking forward to being surprised and amazed by him as he went out into the world. He shared repositories in github under the name TurkeyMcMac.

Oofla the Gloofoo

In elementary school, Jude wrote the story of Oofla the Gloofoo (the figure). He did this to amuse himself and his friends and siblings. Each day they would gather around to watch the latest installment unspool as he wrote. On the last page of the exercise book there was an "about the author" section — some lines for text and a box for a picture. As was his way — Jude never spoke about himself — Jude omitted the text. For a picture he provided an image of Oofla. So I have always thought of Oofla as an avatar of Jude. Because I wish he were still around, I used Oofla as Amanuensis's logo. Amanuensis is still around if Jude isn't.

We love you and miss you, Jude.

What is Amanuensis?

Use

Philosophy

Caveats

Future

Installation

Chrome Web Store

Install from source

Non-Chrome Versions

Amuensis's Bits and Pieces

Design Constraints

Note

lemma

save icon

language

gloss

elaboration

tags

links

citations

citation context

the similarity search tool

citation note

citation tags

Dictionary

free-form search

similar phrase

citations on page

Spaced-repetition Quiz

The general procedure

The challenge side of the card

The answer side of the card

Strategy

Tags

tag locales

Configuration

Dictionary

max similar phrases

Quiz

auto-graduate threshold

memory challenge

Database

clear

export

import

Languages

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Oofla the Gloofoo