This morning I added a bunch of Substacks to my feed that say they're about the "Great Books" or "Syntopicon" or "Great Conversation". I'm curious how active the conversation is on Substack. It seems like some of these blogs began during COVID and then didn't continue. However, many seem to be ongoing and doing pretty well. There seem to be a variety of approaches. A few appear to be committed equally to religion and to the Great Books. This isn't surprising to me; although I imagine I won't necessarily share their perspectives on faith, I think we may be able to agree on the importance of the Conversation. Others seem to be focused on a combination of business (esp. High Tech) and classical education, which is also interesting. I haven't started any paid subscriptions of these Substacks yet, so hopefully the authors will share enough in their free posts to give me a taste and allow me to decide. My approach is that I give away all my posts for a month, and then keep the archives open for contributors.
Along those lines, I posted a description yesterday of the Obsidian vault I made out of the index to The Syntopicon, which included a video of the graph animation. It's interesting to see a visualization of the ways the ideas connected, in the original formulation from the 1940s. I'll be adding my own notes and connections, so my vault and graph will begin to change. But I think I'll make a "bare" copy of the Hutchins/Adler original version available as a file people can download and play with. Obsidian users can download folders and open them in the app, so I could put this up on Dropbox and give people access to download the data. Maybe this should be a feature for contributors? Let me know if you want a copy, and if you think I should ask for contributions. I'm not sure. On the one hand, it took a lot of hours. On the other, I did it for myself, so I was going to do it anyway. Thoughts?
Which substacks are you referring to in this post?
You might follow the approach that Nick Milo is taking with his Ideaverse for Obsidian -- a free download of a basic structure, and then a Pro version for a subscription fee. [Onboarding - Ideaverse for Obsidian](https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/ideaverse-for-obsidian/onboarding-ideaverse) I would be interested in seeing a linking of your Primary Sources into some greater context; right now, they seem disjointed. What with several topic columns now in MakingHistory, I was wanting some sort of Map of Content (MOC), then I discovered that your Archive menu is essentially that -- it's much easier to peruse it than to click on each of the submenus to see what new content has been added, and to get the overall perspective (although your Home note does that in a more limited way).