ZIBALDONE
ZIBALDONE — a research notebook in the shape of a map. Named for the Zibaldone di pensieri, the "heap of mixed things" Giacomo Leopardi kept for fifteen years: a commonplace book that never pretended to be anything else. Note cards on an endless table, gathered into lists and boards; conversations transcribed beside them, so a line can be lifted out as a card that remembers where it was said; and threads — written paths through the cards — that publish straight to this wiki.
Everything is plain Markdown in the folder: one file per card, list, source or thread. No database, no lock-in, and it syncs with Dropbox like everything else.
What it does
- Capture — one line in the bar, press return, and it lands in the Inbox. Paste a list and every line becomes its own card.
- The map — drag cards anywhere; pan, pinch or ⌘-scroll to zoom, fit to see it all. Double-click empty space for a new card, double-click a card to edit it. Cards in someone else's voice are drawn in a different colour from my own.
- Lists and boards — dashed regions that hold cards together and carry their own why; drag one and its cards come along, tidy lays them out. A board is a list with a photo of a real pin-board behind it.
- Media — drop images, video, audio, PDFs or 3D models (GLB, USDZ) onto the map; each becomes a card that opens in a viewer with a caption.
- Sources — an interview, a talk, a voice memo. Paste a transcript or attach the recording and have it transcribed (Whisper via fal.ai, speakers kept apart). Select a phrase, or press + beside a line, to harvest it as a card; click a timestamp to hear it said.
- Summaries — Claude can summarize a source, an image or a PDF: a short overview, key points, open questions — and never anything invented.
- Find — dims every card that doesn't match; return flies to the first one that does.
- From before — three cards older than two days, offered back at random, so old notes keep resurfacing.
- Threads — collect cards by clicking them in order, then write a paragraph for each; the path is drawn across the map. Read it as prose, copy it, or publish to wiki — the thread and its media become a real page here, with thumbs, models and sound in wiki notation.
How it runs
A tiny Node server with no dependencies (zibaldone-server.mjs, port 4007) — double-click Zibaldone.command and it opens in the browser. It answers only this Mac, and the fal.ai and Claude keys stay in the home folder, never in the page.
Begun 2026-09-28 during the first Serpentine Future Art Ecosystems intensive, as a way to catalogue research; moved into TROY and named on 2026-10-15. Lives in TROY/ZIBALDONE — local only, not deployed.