Let’s Play: Piggydb Knowledge Creation #3 – “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway

This is the third installment of Let’s Play Knowledge Creation with Piggydb.

This time I found an application that makes it amazingly easy to collect passages from a book. It is Amazon Kindle, and its Web service ‘Your Highlights’ has freed me from the tiresome work of manually typing underlined passages in paper books.

With Kindle, you just highlight passages that you find interesting,

then the passages will show up on the ‘Your Highlights’ web page.

Another interesting feature of Kindle is that during reading on Kindle you can see the highlights other readers have made. It might be disturbing when you want to simply enjoy reading, but when you are looking for interesting passages, other readers’ highlights would be inspiring material to think about.

The book featured in this installment is “The Old Man and the Sea”:

a famous classic novel by Ernest Hemingway, available on Kindle at the cost of only about a dollar.

It appears to be difficult to select passages from novels than the kinds of books selected in the previous installments. That might be because you should understand a novel as a whole when you read it, so it would be probable that a passage can’t be understood by itself.

On the other hand, novelists use simile, other figurative language (#14) and symbolism (#19). They don’t tend to describe things directly but in a more abstract way, which means these concepts are relatively easy to connect to passages from other sources in wider context. I think it’s important for creativity.

Here is the passages that interest me in “The Old Man and the Sea”:

– http://piggydb.jp/example/fragment.htm?id=40
– http://piggydb.jp/example/d/40 (Document View)

This time, I found a connection between two books for the first time in this project. If you browse through the fragments tagged ‘endurance’, you will find interesting similarity among the passages by the two authors: Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami. Interestingly and unexpectedly, Murakami mentioned Ernest Hemingway in the fragment #25.