What sort of database?

I'm particularly interested in tools that can be used to easily combine images and text on the same page, and that can link them back to sources inside or outside the tool.

Some kind of meta-analysis tool would be useful too, a way to see a network graph of how pages relate to each other, how links propagate through the graph, how many nodes a link traverses from it's root, etc.

ends with a list of incredible resources

That's a great list, but it appears to me mostly information sources rather than tools for managing and analyzing information.

I may not be recognizing the tools though, if anyone could point out specific items to focus on, that would be great.

That's pretty much what I'm doing. Reading and studying stuff is of course necessary and unavoidable, but as the collection of information grows I'm finding that I keep 'rediscovering' stuff in my own collection, and that it's kind of tedious to annotate things with references in other articles, and to follow those references.

I'm hoping maybe there are some rich-text type tools kind of like One Note or EverNote that are well-suited to this kind of data management.

Also, tons of word pads.

This is what I'm struggling with. It feels like there should be a lower-resistance tool along the like of Evernote and OneNote, but with some simple analysis tools built in. Things like Evernote's web-clipper tool make data extraction and citing pretty easy, but it starts getting really messy when you have layered lot of your own analysis, links, and notes about additional ideas to investigate.

I kind of am curious what you are looking to map/research/connect.

It's nothing really ground-breaking as far as actual content, if I'm honest about it I'm not really very perceptive about seeing potential connections when doing research (although the link to a list of potential sources here may help me with that).

What I tend to focus on is information quality. For example, when someone here does a big wall-of-text dump with links (I love that!) I grab a copy and start tearing it down to double-check claims and isolate the various facts and inferences, and I try to put some kind of reliability guesstimate on each fact and then track how things chain together. I apply a kind of Bayesian weighting to chains so that when I start getting into third- and forth- generation inferences the reliability guesstimate is really low. When that happens you have to go back and see if you can find evidence for the low-reliability facts to bring them up, or maybe quit chasing that lead.

I write this stuff down because evidently my memory is pretty shit compared to some people who do this (years ago I had a couple of cop friends who just fucking amazed me with the way they could soak up information and recall it in the field. One guy was a god-damned wizard with face recognition, a couple of times we were driving somewhere and he'd whip the car into a parking spot and call his on-duty buddies to report the location of some gang member he spotted and recognized from some information earlier in the week. Half the time I don't even recognize my coworkers if I see them at the grocery store instead of the office).

A few times my notes have become such a mess that I just have to toss the whole thing out, which sucks. That's why I'm looking for other people's methods, my way is such a shit-show that I can't reliably get more than a few levels deep before everything is so hard to find that it's too much work.

I'm a software developer, so I'm familiar with common software development management techniques. It seems like it would be difficult to do knowledge analysis with that general tool set. Can you describe how you would use a tool like that to, for example, produce and explore a graph of links between wiki nodes?

Then I would create probably use python

Ok, I see. I could make that work, but I'm hoping to find some good tools that I don't have to develop myself. Partly because I would like to focus on working on the knowledge, not on developing/debugging my own tools, but also because I'm hoping that existing tools will introduce me to some well-developed practices for managing information in this way.

What do you consider to be 'research'?

Most conspiracy 'researchers' genuinely believe that watching conspiracy YouTube videos is 'research'.

That's a great question. To me there are a few parts to it. I start with watching/reding other people's ideas, then when I see one that looks interesting or is related to something I'm already working with, a make a copy and start breaking it down and trying to verify and annotate various pieces to see how much of it seems like bullshit, I wrote some about that here.

Some things are absolutely loaded with bullshit, like the flat Earth stuff. In that area some content producers are clearly just having fun misleading gullible people, and some others have genuine questions. There are other theories, like the pedogate/pizzagate stuff, where it's a big mix, some of it is bring-your-boots-deep bullshit, and some of it is why-aren't-these-people-already-in-jail level, with plenty of in-between material.

I won't discuss that here because that's not the information I'm after in this topic.

I am of course aware that there being a lot of people putting out BS/misinformation on a given subject should not be interpreted as evidence for or against that subject. Deliberate misinformation can have many uses, and identifying it and guessing at the motivations of it's source is tricky and error-prone. Avoiding those errors is part of what I'm working on.

Yes, as an example of a topic where some people put out a lot of deliberate BS that's it's useful to have tools to analyze, not as a topic I want to discuss directly.

You call it shame, I call it focus.