Itās not advanced at all!!!
- I use one and test some external software for Research Notes (Foam in VSC, Obsidian and Joplin)
- I use Network Graph Software for analyzing and visualizing of my data and research
- I use a Reference Manager Software for Sources, since there is no realt source management in Gramps
- I use a timeline software to create timelines for more than people.
- I use a Foxit PhantomPDF for PDFs and LibreOffice and MS Office in addition to Zettlr and Scrivener for what they are useful for.
- I use GIS software for Maps
- I use Freeplane for Mindmaps.
- I used Twine for manually creating some graphs, until I started with Obsidian and later Foam.
Both VSC and Obsidian have extentions/plugins for Mermaid, Graphviz, Zotero and a lot of other useful tools.
How difficult can it be to understand that having a interchangeable format with CSL based Reference Manager would benefit Gramps as a research tool?
When that alone will open the possibility to use 20-30 other research tools and publishing platforms that support CSL.
How difficult can it be to understand that usage of GIS software to create advanced maps is a great feature?
Or that analyzing You database in Gephi, Cytoscape or Constellation will give you possibilities to find relations and connections you canāt find easily in Gramps or in a table formatted list.
How difficult can it be to understand that having Research Notes and Logs in a Text Based format that support links between different Notes and that support links to images and PDFās and web pages, and where you also can add citations, benefit researchers and Gramps users.
My workflow is simple, my resent project include a few hundred or sow Crew lists for steamers sailing on America in the period 1922 to 1925/30 and Newspaper lists for arrival and departure of approx. 100 Norwegian ships and to find all the available Crew lists for those ships, and link the different occurrence of Crew members to a research log for that person, and the same for all the ships.
to be able to analyze all this information Gramps is useless, because it do not show links/relations between different objects, only direct relations between object other than people can be displayed.
Therefore I use network graph for that, with feature to set color, names, different icons for different types etc.
To be able to see that two people with different spellings of a name, or 8 people with the same surname served on the same ship in a period of time, can give clue to wrong name written for a seaman and that it actually can be the same person.
IT also give the change of finding out if two records of persons on different ships with the same name can be the same person, based on time and the Ports a ship visited.
A timeline will give more detail of this types of findings.
The same can be done for passenger lists, or any other type of list where you have multiple hits on people, but do not know if they actually are different people or one and the same.
A network graph can show if two people with the same name was at different places in a period, and a timeline can show if there could be possible that one person could move to another place in the given period.
i.e. two names for seamen, on two different ships, same birth year, one in record from Oslo, the other in Boston, if the timespan is less than 28 days, it has to be two different peopleā¦
And when you have 50, 60 or maybe 300 of this records, doing this manually is near impossible.
So since Gramps doesnāt support export to graphml, I have started to use Foam, and Obsidian with the JUGGL plugin (it can save graphs for unstructured and structured data (Notes and Tables) to cytoscape.json, that format can be imported to cytoscape if the JUGGL graph lack some feature.
All this Sources is saved with metadata in Zotero, and with CSL plugins for those software I can add Citations and Bibliography and add those to my graph, so I also see where the information comes from.
I can use a plugin in Zotero to export all my Notes to Markdown, including any annotations in PDF files, with both link to the zotero item the Note belong to and any other type of links and wikilinks.
The Graph will automatically show me any links and nodes that have links to the same objects, and it will show me all categories (tags, keywords, etc) that I have configured, with different colors or shapes, if I need to group those together, i can just import the graph to cytoscape, and easily do that there, or I can create clusters for different types of information based on the YAML frontmatter variables I use.
I can easily see where there are links between multiple people based on journeys, documents, places, or other people without using hours in a table view. In Gramps it will not be possible to find those type of connections.
My technical workflow today is to export a XML from Gramps with the information I have, import it to Excel with Power Query, Create a mapping to tables for the different Gramps objects.
Run a vba script that creates two new tables, one with Nodes (objects) and one with Edges (Links, Citations and Relations between any object in Gramps), save those two tables to CSV, then create a Markdown Note for each line in the original tables, where each Column are used as a Variable Name in YAML in addition to other formats of structured/unstructured Note text. The Script also create the wikilinks from selected columns and save each Note to a given sub folder in my research log storage.
Problem with this, even though I copy a Bibliography string from Zotero to Gramps, is that the sources is not consistent, so I must manually control all the old sources and citations, because it can be that I have made a change in one program and forgot to do the same change in the other.
This script also creates a link with full path that I want to be able to export to Gramps as a media link, by updating the XML file and import it back to Gramps.
Problem is that I need to do this work (not the scripts, they can I just run) every single time I want to include some data.
IF, Gramps supported interchangeable formats like graphml (or similar), RDF/OWL JSON-LD and CSL JSON, I could have exported the data from Gramps, combined that in Cytoscape with the other data I have, analyzed it, and imported the updated result back to Gramps.
The Research Notes is my choice of workflow, I find the Notes feature in Gramps to limited, and way to difficult to keep updated and sorted, specially because i use a lot of links in them and have no way of displaying those links graphically.
I do not expect Gramps to automatically and magically import those Notes to the correct objects in Gramps.
THE FINAL OBECTIVE is to make Gramps able to interchange data with other research software, nothing else, and provide more powerful features without bloating Gramps, the āfilterāāsystem is CPU heavy enoughā¦
Multicore, multithread support, including multithread read/write to the database, would be another great feature, but that no one seems to understand, reducing an advanced filter run by divided by 6 or 12 for larger databases (100K plus objects), would be a lot of minutes saved.
And then we have the Main and Sub Eventsā¦
The minute you want to do more than ājustā lineage-linked research, there is a lot of features that is needed, and Gramps has the potential of being a great multi use research tool, not just āyet another genealogy software for Linux, that āsupportā MAC and Windows toā, support for interchangeable formats that is commonly used in historical research (this include a serious interchangeable Reference Format, Events for Places, and Main-/Sub-Events. with those 3 extra features, Gramps is a research tool, not only a registration software for genealogy data.