Idea Mine

Idea Mining is a process in which we extract out of a text, video, or other piece of media an important or (from our own personal perspective) an interesting concept.

This is not the same as summarising an idea. Rather it is an act of projective imagination, in which we look to find a nugget, or inspirational thought within the text. Something we may "use" later and in some other context.

In practice this means writing a short description of the idea in your own words and giving it a Title – that is create a new Wiki Page where you describe the idea in your own words.

The end result of this process is to turn longer texts and complex arguments into a series of smaller chunks that we can recombine in many ways.

In the process these chunks have been structured in a way which makes them more useful to other people, as well as the a Future You. The ideas are more suitable to be recombined, and to flow from person to person. We might call these newly structured ideas Memes, Concepts or Ideas.