The Reading List Behind MindCap

For a long time my reading list lived in a single Obsidian note—forty-odd entries piling up faster than I could tend to them. Today it got its own page on the site, and that feels right. The literature isn’t a footnote to MindCap. It’s the ground the whole thing is built on, so it should be somewhere you can actually walk around in.

The spine of the list is curiosity research. Loewenstein’s information-gap theory, Berlyne’s early work on novelty and arousal, Kidd and Hayden on the neuroscience of wanting to know—and then Pirolli and Card’s information foraging, which reframes a person clicking through a feed as an animal following a scent trail. Read those back to back and a feed stops looking like entertainment and starts looking like a foraging environment, one you can actually measure.

That’s the bridge to the rest of the list. Knowledge graphs and ontology—the W3C primers, the Protégé pizza tutorial everyone cuts their teeth on—then storytelling and visualization, then the software-engineering books that keep me honest while I build. MindCap is a permission-first behavioral knowledge graph for feed-mediated attention, and every one of those words traces back to something on this page. The curiosity papers tell me what attention is. The knowledge-graph work tells me how to represent it. The rest is craft.

It’s a working document, not a finished one—it will keep growing as the three-paper arc takes shape. If you want to see what I’m reading while I build, it’s all here: the bibliography. Come tell me what I’m missing.