What is Distroid?

Distroid is a digital catalogue and knowledge graph curating, mining, and expanding access to content (primarily grey literature) from the forefront of innovation, technology, governance, and science ("the frontier"), primarily through newsletters and digital tools.

Problem

Fragmented Information Landscape Grey literature from the frontier is fragmented. Grey literature is published and stored on many different platforms and in various multimedia formats, which inhibits knowledge seekers from discovering, applying, and connecting ideas.

Solution

Unified Digital Catalogue and Knowledge Graph Representation Organize grey literature from many diverse, high-quality information sources into a unified digital catalogue, and represent as a knowledge graph describing entities such as, authors, content, publications, idea machines, concepts, and more, and how these entities relate to each other.

The digital catalogue and knowledge graph will be accessible to knowledge seekers through searchable web-interfaces, APIs, email newsletters, and data visualizations (e.g., network visualizations, analytics dashboards).

Work-to-date

Our project has produced several key outputs that contribute to connecting everyone to knowledge and ideas. These outputs include:

1. Distroid Digest: a Substack newsletter for a weekly digest of curated content from the frontier, including research, news, tools, and more, available at: https://distroid.substack.com/;
2. Distroid Spotlight: a Substack newsletter, planned to start at the end of this year, spotlighting people and projects working at the frontier, available at: https://distroid.substack.com/;
3. Distroid Vocabulary: a Substack newsletter, planned to start at the end of this year, expanding the reach of emerging language from the frontier, available at: https://distroid.substack.com/;
4. Distroid Commons: a searchable web-interface demo for searching and filtering for content curated in the digital catalogue, including collections for DAOs, Tools for Thought, Web3, and Platform Cooperativism, available at: https://distroid.ledgerback.xyz/;
5. Publications Directory: a directory of publications (i.e., media outlets) publishing high quality content at the frontier, available at: https://distroid.ledgerback.xyz/;
6. Distroid News Content Network Visualization: early work on a network visualization of news content curated in the digital catalogue, showing the connections between authors, content, and publications, available at: https://codepen.io/ledgerback/pen/jOdyYzQ; and
7. Early findings from the Distroid Database for Issues 28 - 38: a publication of early findings and visualizations from exploring and analyzing content and associated metadata from items curated in Distroid Issues 28 - 38, available at: https://ledgerback.pubpub.org/pub/3ztmsk4k.

Note: Our current outputs are a work-in-progress.

Use-cases

The digital catalogue and knowledge graph can serve the following use-cases:

1. data analysis and visualization,
2. create personal collections,
3. recommend content based on various filters,
4. fill metadata gaps,
5. create and apply metrics on content from the digital catalogue,
6. monitor content-related events (e.g., Twitter mentions), and
7. finding grey literature to support research and education efforts.

Target Audience

This project primarily benefits four groups:

1. researchers and the public: Distroid is an invaluable resource to save time finding grey literature to support research and educational efforts;
2. businesses: Distroid enables businesses to create new tools and innovate using the digital catalogue and knowledge graph as a resource;
3. authors and publishers: Distroid increases the visibility of authors and publishers by driving traffic to their websites and promoting their content in our newsletters; and
4. educators: Distroid assists educators in incorporating grey literature from emerging topics at the frontier into their syllabi.

Mentions

You can find tweets discussing Distroid here:

1. This was an excellent list of resources - many tabs opened. Great job @CAdjovu & thanks for including our guide!
2. This is an incredible research digest (blockchain people)
3. Cool newsletter, subscribed.

Goals

Through Distroid, we hope to achieve the following outcomes:

1. save people time in finding grey literature from the frontier;
2. make grey literature discoverable, accessible, and connected;
3. resolve information asymmetry issues between, academia, industry, and society by providing a common knowledgebase for dialogue and debate on discoveries, technologies, and cultures from the frontier; and
4. connect developers of new ideas with those who can make use of those ideas.