Brain-dump of thinking about automatic ethnographies when you're doing all your work in this environment *** Automatic progress imaging Capture whole workspaces. Capture papers and book references automatically per-day. Allow highlighting specific sections for even more granular references. Capture sketches & drawings as they happen so you can watch timelapses. Organization of your space (e.g. computer on the left? coffee?) See across projects to see how your work habits changed. See tools in use. Recognize them too. Paper, pens, rulers, robots Was your favorite coffee mug on the table. See not just the curated bibliography, but the time-sliced bibliography of which references were open as you worked out each piece of the project. Timeline view, so you can scrub back through the history of all this like a film reel Portable chronometer, so you could walk into the library and see the whole bibliography, or spin the clock back. Some books might persist for the whole project, some might have been brief skims. Remember external context that the work was done in. E.g. capturing: * NY Times front page * Your calendar that day * Photos from your camera roll that day * Who you talked to on the phone * Track time of day and hours spent * Quantified self type stuff, if you’re interested in why your productivity was high or low * How much sleep you got that night/that week * Did you meditate * Did you exercise *** Automatic journaling Recognize your journal, so if you want to make running meta commentary you can just write it down. Classify those as "journal entries" so you can filter solely for journal entries and see things through that lens. Same with sketches, etc. *** Decomposition Taking software apart to scavenge parts and repurpose them Then see history of components through the lens of the projects they migrated through Thinking of concrete examples where I’ve used recomposition heavily (as a dominant modality): Music composition Remixed songs via extracting: Melodies, chord progressions, sample collections, synth patches, effect configurations, effect chains, custom-built instruments, unused vocal tracks. Similar for shaders; Shadertoy is great example of "software mulching". Indeed is the norm in Shadertoy and how many techniques are developed.