ThinkSpace

My workspace for research, thinking and writing

Transparency label: human-only
Author: Alec Fearon

ThinkSpace is a digital workspace containing a toolkit for research, thinking, writing and other work. again. It has four integrated elements.

Ideaverse holds knowledge. It is where I write notes about my research and thinking, where I work on documents associated with the programmes and projects through which I organise my work, and where I store the ready-access reference material I have collected.

Peka is my personal knowledge assistant. It helps me carry out research, search my knowledge base and find connections within it, and think through ideas in support of my work. It provides me with editorial support and keeps my notes in good order. Peka has a suite of customised instructions and skills tailored to my needs. It is based on a modular architecture so that, in principle, any AI can be embedded within it. The present arrangement uses Claude Code and (to keep the way open for European AI sovereignty) makes provision for Mistral to sit alongside Claude.

Peka brings valuable software engineering expertise to ThinkSpace. One small example: when we found a fault in a piece of software used in ThinkSpace, 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.

A semantic search engine, which Peka and I built together, enables Peka to search Ideaverse for me when required. It finds notes by what they mean rather than by the words they contain; a great help when we are looking for information about an idea or for connections amongst ideas. Also, the search engine supports many of the jobs I have delegated to Peka for the governance and maintenance of ThinkSpace.

My library, organised into collections of individual notebooks, is provided by Gemini Notebook. I have not yet thought through how these notebooks will be arranged, but my first collection holds a set where each notebook is focused on the writing and other forms of output of one person whose thinking I value. Notebook enables me to research within each collection, to create mind maps and infographics from it, to generate audio and video overviews, and to produce learning aids such as flash cards and quizzes. Also, it provides an easy reference service: when did such and such happen; who said this; what reason did so-and-so give for something?

Notebook is served by Google's AI: Gemini. I customise Gemini's instructions within each notebook so that it has the persona of an archivist, tailored to the specific nature of that notebook's content.

I will be using Peka to bring some information from the library directly into Ideaverse. This will include indexes of library content so that Peka and I will know what is in the library, and clippings on topics or subjects of particular interest which can be categorised in multiple ways within Ideaverse to make connections with my own thinking.

Some material from Ideaverse will be copied into Notebook to produce artefacts based on my own work, such as infographics, mind maps and the like.