v2: Interactive Text Platform Spec

[Firgrep]

This is a sketch of a big feature we'd like to implement sometime in the future. Likely it won't be on the table until the course platform is live and working, but it's good to plan early and maybe start prototyping.

Feature spec

What we'd like is an interactive text reader/platform where a user can:

• click on a text (from a potential library of texts) or the translation of a text
• navigate around by sections, pages (following original text paging, if possible), etc.
• click on a sentence and view a panel that opens with a range of resources attached to that one sentence
• the panel would itself include a categorized list of items:
  • direct citations of that sentence across the literature
  • commentaries, papers, etc. relevant to that sentence
  • curated links to sPhil encyclopaedia
  • notes (published) by other users on the platform
  • notes from oneself on that passage (public or private)
• the panel could itself open another text which could replicate the process of opening a sentence with its own panel, that way users can look at different texts at once and compare
• write their own notes about that sentence and choose to make them public to other users (users should be able to have multiple notes about that one sentence).

Database

Ideally SQL. We already use a cockroachDB which can scale as needed. Given there will be many relations involved, it also makes sense to use SQL.

Models

This we need to figure out. First, should each book be regarded in its own right or as the "particular" of a "universal" book: say there are many versions of the Science of Logic, do we want to keep track of them in terms of a "master" Science of Logic that works like an index or let each book simply be the book that it is and just make relations between them without a master index?

Then each book needs to be broken down somehow, conserving the sections of each book and deciding on what is the smallest unit - the sentence?