Readwise Alternative: InfraNodus AI Knowledge Graph

If you like reading, you probably know about Readwise: a tool that exports your Amazon Kindle highlights and helps you periodically review them, so that you can retain the reading material better. They also provide memory cards through an app and a daily email, which prompt you to fill out a missing term in a randomly chosen quote to help memory recall. 

However, this approach is based on memorization, so it doesn't help generate new ideas. That's why we created a Readwise alternative: InfraNodus AI knowledge graph browser extension, which helps you get much more from your book highlights and quotes.

The whole point of reading is not only thinking about the material but also getting inspired by it to connect ideas in a new way or to come up with your own. Readwise is great for keeping others' ideas in mind, but not so good for generating your own. 

Here is where InfraNodus can be very useful. Using the InfraNodus browser extension, you can open your Amazon Kindle highlights page and visualize all the quotes you selected as a knowledge graph: a network of ideas. Using this graph, you can get a very quick overview of the main topics inside the book. Its most powerful feature, however, is the ability to detect the gaps between those topics and ideas using the structural holes in the knowledge graph's structure.

It then uses the built-in GPT-4 AI to generate interesting questions that would bridge this gap, which you can address yourself. Thinking about any book in this proactive manner, asking the questions that can potentially generate new relations between the ideas that are presented in a book is a much better way to take those ideas further and to create something from them. Maybe you're just thinking about a certain topic and want some inspiration. Maybe you're writing a book. Maybe you're coming up with a new product or exploring a better way to live. In any case, InfraNodus will address you with a question, which you can then use to think about the material in the book further and generate your own ideas on top. 

Instead of getting the statements that just ask you to fill in the gaps, you get the questions that ask you to actively think about the material and to take it one step further. 

Here is how you can do this, step by step:

1. Install the InfraNodus Browser Extension

The easiest way to use the app is to install the InfraNodus browser extension. You can then pin in at your browser's toolbar or use the overlay button to activate it once you're viewing your Amazon highlights.

2. Open Your Amazon Kindle Highlights

You can do so by logging on to Amazon's online web reader, which is usually located at https://read.amazon.com/notebook

Then select the book that you'd like to analyze. In our case, we will be analyzing a book called "Medical nemesis: expropriation of health" by Ivan Illich.

Click the extension's `activate` button and you'll see a graph visualization of the main ideas contained in your highlights. Expand the graph and click "topics" to see which clusters of topics they comprise:

An alternative view that can be generated by the extension is a list of topics and gaps detected in your highlights, which you can use to get straight to generating interesting research questions in relation to the material:

3. Review the Main Ideas using the Knowledge Graph and AI

Use the built-in AI to generate a summary and topical reviews of the main ideas contained in your Amazon Kindle highlights. For instance, for these particular book the main ideas are:

- medical, nemesis, health, practice, critical science

along with the main topics:

[7]: Health Care
[3]: Pain Management
[5]: Disease Control 
[8]: Medical Nemesis 

We quickly understand that the quotes we selected from the book are on the questions of health care and pain management for controlling disease and health practices, but with an interesting take on it, which the author calls "medical nemesis".

We can generate an AI summary that will take the main ideas in the graph (and in the quotes) into account, telling us what "medical nemesis" is: the critique of the medicalization of society and the resulting reduction of self-care and communal care.  

Now, that is a very good overview of the main ideas that we found interesting enough to highlight in the book. We would not be able to get it so quickly using Readwise, because it doesn't provide such a comprehensive idea of the relations and clusters of topics contained in a book.

The most interesting part, however, is identifying the gaps in those ideas and developing them further. 

4. Generate New Ideas using the Structural Gaps in Your Highlights

If we click on Gaps and then AI: Question, InfraNodus will identify a gap in our highlights and use the built-in GPT-4 AI to generate a research question that would bridge this gap in an interesting way. This means using the existing ideas from the book but proposing a question to link them in a different way or to fill in the gaps where they still exist. 

In this case, InfraNodus proposes us to think of how the perception of pain and death shifts as we transition from personal care and self-medication to delegating these tasks to the industrial medical complex. This is, actually, one of the existential question that the book asks and that is a very interesting direction to think about when reading this book. 

We can actually use the built-in AI to see how the book itself answers these questions or think about our own understanding of these effects and how we perceive them in ourselves and everyday life.

Video Tutorial and Demo of the InfraNodus Readwise Extension