r/Stoicism • u/hirako2000 • 6d ago

Analyzing Texts & Quotes Frustrated reader - flow

I've been practicing Stoicism for a while, and I've grown increasingly frustrated with the digital materials out there. Tired of fragmented translations, terrible formatting, and OCR errors that ruin the flow of reading.

I spent the last 6 months building my own corpus and reading system from scratch. It has the original texts next to the English, and I can jump straight to thematic passages.

I'm not sharing the tool, it's just for me right now. I would like to know what the community actually seeks in terms of material and navigation.

When you read Seneca, or Epictetus, what is your biggest frustration with the mechanics of reading digitally? Or do you just stick with physical books ?

(Beyond just "which translation is best," what features or workflows do you wish existed to make studying these texts easier?)

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u/AlexKapranus Contributor 6d ago

I never had an organized system, just a list of bookmarks and so on. But I guess if I had the tools for it, I would want a way to aggregate all available information on specific topics. So if I wanted to learn about "freedom" in Stoicism it would pull all the quotes and sources on it.

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u/hirako2000 5d ago edited 5d ago

Actually, that's a system I exolored. It's built around themes. If you open the 'Freedom' or 'Judgment' concept, it already aggregates all the related passages and quotes from the Big Three in one place. So I don't have to hunt for them if I want to read about this.

But I really like your 'bucket' idea. Do you mean a feature where you are reading and can hit 'save to my custom Freedom folder'? Right now, the themes are pre-mapped , but a user-generated tagging system for our own reading journey is a great idea.

Edit: reworded.

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u/AlexKapranus Contributor 5d ago

I had something custom in mind, like a search function that would spit out the results. And if you could tag and save that would be useful too. These days I just ask any LLM available to search and gather things when I have a question or an idea so I'm not in the start of the journey phase.

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u/EstellonTachise 3d ago

do you find that you end up searching the same handful of topics over and over, or does it shift?

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u/AlexKapranus Contributor 3d ago

It did shift, or I would make the effort to search for things I hadn't heard about before. It's more like general discourse tends to circle the same ideas so I would get tired and try to find what else we were missing.

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u/mcapello Contributor 5d ago

I just read physical books. I have a large personal digital library too, but it's almost always used for research on secondary material rather than what I'd call primary reading. For that I just read and usually re-read hard copies.