TextData

Save what you know. Find what you don't.

TextData is a social platform for collaboratively creating, sharing, and learning from wiki-style communities. Use our website or Chrome browser extension to create or join communities, make submissions to these communities, and share these communities with the world (or keep them to yourself).

Then, using everything that you and your collaborators have saved along with the communities that you have followed, we'll help you find old information, ask and answer questions, and get interesting recommendations.

Get Started Download Extension View on Github

What does TextData Provide?

Below, we describe how TextData helps you create, save, and find online information.

Form Communities

A community is where you save and organize information. A community consists of any number of users, and is generally created for a specific topic or goal.

Create Communities

Make one for private personal archives, for class notes, for working on a class project, or for thoughts on interesting articles.

Join Communities

Joining a community lets you view everything in the community and make submissions to that community.

Share and Follow Communities

Making a community public lets others follow it, vote on content, and search the content.

Create and Save Information

Create markdown-style notes and save them to any of your communities.

Optionally Add an External URL

Adding a Source URL will link your notes to an external webpage. Use this to take notes with respect to something online (e.g., a lecture video).

Add a Title and Description

The title should briefly describe the note's purpose, and the description can be whatever you like. In the description, you can also link other submissions to create wiki-style connections among submissions in a community.

Submit from Anywhere

You can create submission from the website and from the Chrome browser extension.

Find Information

Search, view recommendations, ask questions, and more from the content submitted to your communities.

Search and Browse Your Communities

The submissions to your joined communities are searchable using the search bar on the website or in the extension.

Get Recommendations

View your recommendation feed on the homepage or open the extension on a webpage to see contextual recommendations. Open the extension with highlighted text to see submissions tailored to your selected context.

Interact in Context

Use the extension to ask questions in context, summarize selected text, and drive curiosity with automatically generated questions.

Interact with and Visualize Submissions

Visit a submission's TextData-specific page to read, reply, visualize, share.

Edit, Delete, Share

You can edit a submission, add or remove it from a community, delete it entirely, or provide feedback.

Make Submission with Mention

Explicitly mentioning a submission in another submission will create a directed edge between the two.

Visualize

See all of the connections among any set of submissions.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I report a bug, give a suggestion, or discuss a concern?

Please use the "Feedback" link in the footer or email Kevin Ros at [email protected]

What should I do if the highlight doesn’t register?

For some pages, your highlighted text will not be captured by the extension. You can tell that this is the case when the “Highlighted text” area doesn’t display any text. If you want to save the highlighted text in the context or ask a question about the highlighted text, then first copy-paste it into the field right below the highlighted text display.

How can I submit a specific PDF page?

You can add a fragment in the URL. For example, if you would like to submit page 9 of this PDF, you can add “#page=9” to the end of the URL in the address bar. That results in this link. Once you do this, you can open the extension, and it will pull the URL with the fragment for a submission.

What should I do for specific YouTube video times?

If you want to make a submission at a specific time, you can change the webpage URL to include the video time (right click video → copy URL at current time → paste into address bar). Once you do this, you can open the extension, and it will pull the URL with the fragment for a submission.

What should I do for Coursera videos?

You can highlight the transcript and open the extension, and it should register the highlighted text.

Ready to try out our extension?

Download for Free