Ancient Greek Picture Flashcards in Anki

I completed a set of 500 ancient Greek picture flashcards just in time for the beginning of Briercrest's third intensive Greek semester. The cards are designed to help create a direct link between Greek words and their meaning. On one side of each card is an image:

On the other side is the lexical form of the Greek word along with additional information about the word:

The top line notes the chapter in which the word appears in our course textbook and identifies the word's semantic domain category (τάξις), in this case πάθος, ἦθος. The bottom line provides details about the word's grammatical form, beginning with its part of speech (μέρος λόγου), in this case ῥῆμα. Verbs are classified into their ancient Greek verbal pattern (συζυγία), e.g., βαρύτονα δ'. Principal parts are also included for about 100 verbs.

The format for nouns is similar. Here, for instance, is an ἄμαξα: 

On the back of the card, the bottom line informs you that the word is a feminine noun in the first declension declined with η, and that the genitive singular form is ἁμάξης: 

There is no English on the cards because our goal is reading fluency in Greek. Bypassing English wherever possible and avoiding the habit of mentally translating as one reads speeds up the reading (and language learning) process.

The 500 words include classroom vocabulary, common semantic domains such as animals, fruits and vegetables — θρίδαξ anyone? — as well as words that appear in the Italian version of Ἀθήναζε, our main textbook. 

My colleague, Wes Olmstead, is responsible for coming up with authentic ancient Greek ways of categorizing Greek grammatical forms, for carefully tagging the grammatical information that appears on the back of the cards, and for compiling an initial list of words for our students to learn. 

My job was to find useable images that suit the words, to set up the mail merge process, and to produce the finished product:

Printing, cutting, and sorting multiple sets of 500 cards is a bit of a massive undertaking (even with the whole family involved), so I was relieved to find that — thanks to my work with Hebrew picture flashcards earlier this summer — the process of importing the Excel file and images into a digital version of the flashcards went smoothly:

Anki's spaced-repetition flashcard app has several advantages to printed cards, not least of which is the ability to make them freely available online.

• The full set of cards is too large for Anki's free hosting service, but I have uploaded a sample, which should appear presently. Try searching for "Ancient Greek Picture Flashcards." 
• The full decks, Briercrest Ἀθήναζε and Briercrest Ἀθήναζε Reversed, are hosted on my Google Drive account. You can download them here. 
• See this post for more information about Anki, and basic instructions about installing and using the decks: https://gervatoshav.blogspot.com/2023/06/using-anki-to-review-biblical-hebrew.html 

Production notes:

• Most of the images are from Vecteezy (with a Pro license).
• The font on the cards is GFS Neohellenic. 

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND

Comments and feedback are welcome.

Using Anki to Review Biblical Hebrew and Ancient Greek Picture Flashcards

Anki is one of the most well-known and possibly the best available spaced repetition flashcard apps. It is free, it is powerful ... and it can be complicated to use. What follows is a brief set of instructions to help you get up and running with the app, and with a deck of Biblical Hebrew or Ancient Greek picture flashcards:

(1) Download, install, and load the computer version of Anki at https://apps.ankiweb.net/:

(2) Download the Biblical Hebrew Picture Flashcards or the Ancient Greek Picture Flashcard shared decks:

(a) Biblical Hebrew Picture Flashcards: For the Biblical Hebrew Picture Flashcards, click on "Get Shared" at the bottom of the main Anki screen:

This will take you to Ankiweb (https://ankiweb.net/), the free web-based version of the app, and Anki's repository of free shared decks. The first time you use Ankiweb you will need to create an account by clicking "signup" in the top right corner:

Once you have registered, click on "Get Shared Decks":

Search for "Biblical Hebrew Picture Flashcards" (or anything else you like). Scroll down to the bottom of the screen, and download the Flashcard deck(s):

(b) Ancient Greek Picture Flashcards: The Ancient Greek Picture Flashcard decks are too large for Anki's free hosting service, so you will need to download the files directly from my Google Drive account. You can do that here: https://tinyurl.com/yc2db6z6.   

(3) Back in the Anki computer program, click on "Import File" at the bottom right of the screen:

Navigate to your "download" folder and select the appropriate Anki deck file.

(4) Optional: Review Flashcards on the go with Ankidroid or Ankimobile

If you have not already done so in step 3, go to Ankiweb (https://ankiweb.net/), the free web-based version of the app, and create an account by clicking "signup" in the top right corner.

Now you can Sync your decks to Ankiweb, and then, if you like, install and review flashcards on-the-go with the free Android Ankidroid app or the not free iOS Ankimobile app. (Note: There are many knock-off apps that use the Anki name. My advice is to stick with Ankidroid or Ankimobile.)

(5) Begin to take advantage of Anki's spaced-repetition system: By default Anki selects 20 cards from each deck to learn or review each day. The system is designed to bring up cards that you have trouble with for review more often than cards you know well. For more information, see the manual or this handy tutorial. The system works automatically. All you need to do is click on the deck and then click on "Study Now":

(6) Learn to Cram: Unfortunately, Anki tries to force everyone into the same review system. I don't question the effectiveness of the spaced-repetition formula, but sometimes — for example, when you are studying for a quiz on words in chapter 4 or all Piel verbs in chapters 8-10 or all Greek verbs for days 5-7 — you need to cram. The next two videos demonstrate two ways of selecting specific chapters or tagged cards for review. (The videos use the Hebrew decks, but the same steps apply to Greek):

Video 1: Using Custom Study to review a single chapter or category:

Video 2: Using Custom Study and Browse to review multiple categories:

For more information on creating custom filtered decks, see the Anki Manual or this Anking YouTube video. For more on Anki deck organization, take a look at this Traverse.link post. I also found this Reddit post on Anki search syntax to be helpful.

Biblical Hebrew Picture Flashcards in Anki

Update: See links to the corrected Flashcard files below.

Last summer I made a set of 270 Biblical Hebrew picture flashcards for our introductory Hebrew students:

The images help create a direct link between Hebrew words and their meaning. There is no English on the cards because our goal is reading fluency in Hebrew. Bypassing English wherever possible — and avoiding the habit of mentally translating as one reads — speeds up the reading (and language learning) process. 

The cards are designed to be accessible to beginners and still useful to more advanced students. Students who have learned the alphabet can practice reading words they have already been introduced to in class, and ignore the smaller print around the borders of the cards. Some cards appear twice, first in the participle / qotel form (the normal Biblical Hebrew way of conveying present time):

After the qatal / perfect form has been introduced in class, the same picture can be reintroduced with the standard dictionary form and more grammatical information in small print:

In the top right corner, we learn that the word is a verb (פֹּעַל) that occurs in the Qal Binyan (קַל) and belongs to a class of weak verbs with an aleph in the first root letter (פ׳א). 

The bottom right corner draws on the method Randall Buth uses in his 500 Friends Hebrew word list to indicate succinctly what the verb looks like in a variety of verb patterns. (If you have studied Hebrew, you will see what I mean.)

The bottom left corner classifies the word in one of several semantic domains—in this case, food (מַאֲכָל). 

The cards can, of course, be sorted and reviewed in categories (e.g., all words in the piel Binyan or all words in a particular semantic domain).

 

Noun cards are similar:

In the top right corner we learn that the word is a feminine (נְקֵבָה) noun (שֵׁם עֶצֶם). The bottom right corner provides singular and plural absolute and construct noun forms.

Now that the school year is over, I have had time to complete a digital version of the flashcards for use in Anki's spaced repetition flashcard app. Here is an example:

The back looks like this:

Among other benefits, the digital version makes it far easier to sort and review specific kinds of cards. The digital version also makes it possible for me to share the cards freely online. You can download them here:

Biblical Hebrew Picture Flashcards 

Biblical Hebrew Picture Flashcards (Reversed)  

Update: This post now links to a corrected version of the Anki Flashcard files. (Due to an error in my Excel spreadsheet, the tags on the original card decks were misaligned; the image filenames have also been simplified in this version.)

In this follow-up post I provide a brief set of instructions for those who are new to Anki: https://gervatoshav.blogspot.com/2023/06/using-anki-to-review-biblical-hebrew.html

Free "Productivity" Apps

Memorion - My quest to re-acquire Aramaic this year began inauspiciously with a frustrating and time-consuming review of Android flashcard apps. What I wanted, I realized, was a mobile version of my friend Ken M. Penner's powerful, but now very dated, Flash! Pro XP Windows Program, along with the elegant algorithm that I used to study Hebrew and German in grad school. Spaced-repetition flashcard apps, such as Anki, are now very common, but they require you to trust their "scientific" algorithm and conform your learning style to their arbitrary requirements. I finally settled on Memorion. Although it does not let you adjust the algorithm, it reviews words more frequently than most of the other spaced-repetition alternatives I tried, and it has lots of other helpful, powerful and flexible features.

Duolingo -  Speaking of languages, I started using Duolingo last year to refresh my German and Modern Hebrew. Aramaic has supplanted modern languages for the moment, but I look forward to returning to Duolingo presently. It's a fun, low-pressure approach to language-learning, and it works. Best of all, kids like it too. The Duolingo leaderboard has me at 13,570 XP, but that is mostly the result of s.'s work on French.

LeadTools OCR - As a workaround for a copier that does not generate searchable scanned PDF's, I use the Windows 10 LeadTools OCR app. It requires a few extra steps, but works well. Alas, it is still the case that I make digital copies of essays faster than I read them.

Podcast / Audiobooks at speed - I now enjoy a 20-minute workout at the beginning and end of each day as I ride across Cambridge to and from the Tyndale House library. The exercise is nice, and so is the concentrated "reading" time. (Welcome to the 21st-century, d. miller.) I enjoyed Mike Duncan's "History of Rome" podcast, and am now about half-way through the audible version of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age--a tome outside my field of study that I would probably never get around to if it were not for the daily commute. Pro-tip: You can read faster by increasing play-back speed. Your brain adjusts. I actually suspect I pay better attention to the book, though not necessarily to my surroundings, at a faster rate of speed. HT: Luke Johnson, who usually "reads" audiobooks at 3x speed.  (I've settled in at 1.75 - 2x.)

I could go on. As I've commented before, everyone should be using Zotero. I've switched from Mischief to Microsoft's new Whiteboard app for quick, hand-written notes. And if efficient time management was only a matter of finding the right time-tracking software, I'd be set. (I use Toggl.)

The Historical Journal and University of Cambridge - Faculty of History Zotero Styles

In my capacity as "private secretary" to a PhD student in the faculty of history at the University of Cambridge, I put together a couple Zotero styles that may be of wider interest.

The Historical Journal style updates an earlier version put together by Julian Onions.

The University of Cambridge - Faculty of History style basically adds a bibliography to The Historical Journal style. It should correspond more-or-less to the examples on the Faculty of History website here.

Both Zotero styles can be downloaded into Zotero from the Zotero Style Repository. Click on the following links to go directly there:

The Historical Journal

University of Cambridge - Faculty of History

P.S. If you are not already using Zotero for academic work, you should. Here's how Zotero describes itself:

Zotero is a free, open-source research tool that helps you collect, organize, and analyze research and share it in a variety of ways. Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software — the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references — and the best aspects of modern software and web applications, such as the ability to organize, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero interacts seamlessly with online resources: when it senses you are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, it can automatically extract and save complete bibliographic references. Zotero effortlessly transmits information to and from other web services and applications, and it runs both as a web service and offline on your personal devices.

On Killing Trees

While I admire those who can deliver brilliant lectures or lead class discussion without any written aids, I don't aspire to their example. The presence or absence of notes is, in my view, no sure sign of teaching effectiveness. Notes are not an instructor's training wheels to be abandoned when a teacher can ride without them. Nor need they be a constraint.
Depending on how many times I have taught the course, the notes become more of a prop than a constant reference, a security blanket, if you will, that gives me freedom to innovate and be present in class, focused on reaching and engaging my students without being distracted by the fear of losing my place or missing something crucial.

My usual practice has been to print off a new set of notes before each class, and to mark them up lightly as part of my final class prep. If I have taught the course before, I glance at my marginal annotations from the previous iteration before finalizing the latest version.

Inevitably, end-of-term haste means that the new binder of notes gets added to the old. Over time the paper adds up. As I cleaned my office this summer, the detritus of more than a decade's worth of teaching filled a recycle bin and led to a glut of empty binders.



The experience was motivation enough to look around for alternatives. If I had $700 USD to spare, I would be inclined to abandon paper altogether and switch over to Sony's newest Digital Paper solution, where "writing and drawing feel as natural as on real paper":

The only downside to the Sony DPT-RP1 is the price tag. Since money does not grow on trees, I expect to stick with real paper for the time being.

Back up your data!

Source

My computer suffered a catastrophic failure last weekend, and is now in process of being replaced. Because it was one of those fantastic light-weight "tablets that can replace your laptop," it is impossible to remove the hard disk to recover its contents (without destroying the computer)--and my last backup was 3 weeks before the crash.

I knew, of course, that I should back up regularly and that my usual practice of periodic back-ups wasn't sufficient. I also had the sense that another back-up was past due. But since there were no signs of imminent collapse, I didn't get to it in time.

On the positive side, I only lost one (very productive) day from the notes I was taking in Zotero, and only 3 weeks of everything else. And it wasn't the worst time to lose data: It wasn't mid-semester and I wasn't in the thick of drafting an essay.

Still, one week later, I am still trying to remember, record, and retrace my steps as well as I can, and it will be some time before a permanent replacement will be in hand and ready for work.

Lesson learned, I hope. In future, my computer will be set to back up automatically to an external hard drive, and/or to my institution's server, and/or to the cloud. I recommend you do the same.

Richard Foster on the triviality of productivity apps (more or less)

Source

I have been making my way through Richard Foster's classic Celebration of Discipline. Our library only has a copy of the original 1978 edition, so a lot of the illustrations are now rather quaint in their datedness. The advice is solid, however.

On the discipline of simplicity:

"[R]efuse to be propagandized by the custodians of modern gadgetry. Timesaving devices almost never save time. ... Most gadgets are built to break down and wear out and so complicate our lives rather than enhance them. ... Propagandists try to convince us that because the newest model of this or that has a new feature (trinket?) we must sell the old one and buy the new one. Sewing machines have new stitches, tape recorders have new buttons, encyclopedias have new indexes. Such media dogma needs to be carefully scrutinized. Often 'new' features are only a way of inducing us to buy what we do not need. Probably that refrigerator will serve us quite well for the rest of our lives even without the automatic ice maker and rainbow colors." (80)

 On a related note, Foster advises this antidote to triviality:

"Four times a year withdraw for three to four hours for the purpose of reorienting your life goals. This can easily be done in one evening. Stay late at your office or do it at home or find a quiet corner in a public library. Reevaluate your goals and objectives in life. What do you want to have accomplished one year from now? Ten years from now? Our tendency is highly to overestimate what we can accomplish in one year and highly underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years." (94).

Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).

Greek Fonts, Free "Productivity" Apps, and Other Trivialities

Fonts

I recently went looking for recommendations on the “nicest Greek font,” stating my own preference for Gentium. Of the 3 responses to my query on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook, two commended SBL Greek, the other mentioned Cardo, a font created by David J. Parry. The results are not surprising: I suspect SBL Greek and Cardo are the two main alternatives to Gentium in use today by the small percentage of the world's population that thinks about polytonic Greek Unicode fonts. In the image below, I present the same text in all three fonts, along with GFS Elpis, which Mark Hoffman mentioned a few years ago, and I quite like:

These are all excellent Greek fonts. I expect there is nothing to complain about from a technical perspective, and I suppose one’s aesthetic judgement comes down to personal preference rather than any intrinsic merit. A couple comments:

•  Cardo is my font of choice for PowerPoint presentations: As Mark Hoffman explains, Cardo is "kind of a 'big' font (the characters are wider than usual and have a high x-height), so it works well in projection." 
•  A lot of people, including Mark, prefer SBL Greek for other uses, but I find it too curvy to my taste, especially when paired with a standard English font such as Times New Roman. I took another look, but came away still preferring Gentium. (Gentium has been upgraded to Gentium Plus. My only hesitation with the Plus version is the wider line-spacing.)

OliveTree for Windows

OliveTree has just come out with a major upgrade that radically improves their free app on the Windows platform. OliveTree is not (yet) in the same league with the big 3 Bible software programs (Accordance, Bibleworks, and Logos), but over the last few years I have gradually acquired morphologically-tagged copies of BHS, the LXX and NA28, including critical apparatuses, for OliveTree, as well as a few other secondary resources. Here's why: (1) OliveTree works and displays original-language texts beautifully on just about every platform. (I originally got into OliveTree because it was the only app that displayed Hebrew and Greek well on my Blackberry Playbook.*) (2) OliveTree regularly offers 50%-off sales that literally can't be beat. There is one on now. So if you want access to morphologically-tagged original-language texts on your phone or tablet, you should check out OliveTree. (You can also perform morphological searches on some platforms, at least.) If the text of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament is all you want, free versions are also available (here and here).

*An exception is the latest update for Android, which does not (yet) work well at all on my older Android device. Fortunately, an earlier version that works (but doesn't display the BHS or LXX critical apparatus) is still available.

Mischief

If you have a pen-enabled touch-screen Windows or Mac device, and you have ever wanted to be able to brainstorm on an infinite (and scaleable) canvas, you should try the free version of Mischief:

Note: The scaleable, prezi-like infinite canvas, is very different from OneNote and, if I recall, Scapple, which start you in the top left quadrant. Since I am no artist, the only thing missing, from my perspective, is the ability to enter text. HT: Surface Blog

Productivity Software: Time tracking and cloud encryption

Technical post alert: I had another "productivity software" episode this weekend, as I tried to find a (free) way to backup my work on Onedrive securely, and cast about for a (free) alternative to the time-tracking software I have been using. Details about my (failed) attempts follow, in case anyone else has wondered about the same things:

(1)  Time-tracking software: I started looking for a way to track the time I spend on various projects last fall, mostly to find out where my time was going and to try to be more efficient. I have since become addicted to the process, even though I rarely go back and analyse the data.

In the fall, I settled on Grindstone 3. The program is very powerful and fairly intuitive to use; I like it a lot--except that it is a resource hog: My tiny computer fan comes on for no reason, I check task manager, and find that Grinstone is using 10% of my CPU, when all it is supposed to be doing--as far as I can tell--is running a timer in the background. When I emailed Grindstone to report on the problem, they recommended Grindstone 2, but I can't get version 2 to work on my Windows 8 computer, which runs a newer version of Net Framework.

Long story short: I looked at a lot of different options, and decided to give Eclipse Manager another go. Eclipse Manager is a nicely designed Windows 8 app, not as powerful as Grindstone, and you have to pay a little something for reports, but it barely registers in Task Manager when it is running in the background. Current plan: Try Eclipse Manager again as my primary timer, and possibly enter the details into Grindstone periodically as a more permanent log of hours, especially for projects that are currently underway. Other Suggestions are welcome.

(2) Cloud encryption: Microsoft is giving away oodles of OneDrive cloud storage these days, and I have been tempted by the idea of using my free space to backup my data in the cloud, if not sync everything the way Windows 8 wants me to. Trouble is, I haven't been able to convince myself that it is a good idea to put my private data online where it could be stolen or spied upon by Big Brother--even if my private data amounts to class notes and useless drafts of writing projects. Still.

So I looked at encryption options. I installed Boxcryptor, and read about alternatives like ncrypted, vivo, and credeon. As far as I can tell, every option stores a copy of the encrypted files on your local hard drive before syncing it to your cloud storage, and my hard drive isn't big enough to handle two copies of my data. (Here is someone else with the same question.) Unless there is another alternative, I will need to purchase an external hard drive or a large Micro SD card and then move my OneDrive to the extra storage to make this work. Again, other suggestions are welcome.

Zotero Notes

I recently found out two Zotero tips that will save me a lot of time:

1. To correct capitalization when an entry is imported from, say, Worldcat or Amazon, right click on the title, select "Transform Text" and then "Title Case." HT: Mark Sample.
2. To keep Zotero from automatically capitalizing German titles in footnotes and bibliographies as if they are English titles, enter "de" under "Language." (For French titles, enter "fr," etc.) HT: Zotero.
3. Update: A bonus tip: To disable English spell-checking so that foreign-language words aren't highlighted, follow these steps.

To find out more about Zotero and why everyone should use it as their Bibliography manager, see Zotero's home page. My earlier blog posts on Zotero are here.

Modifying Zotero Citation (CSL) Styles

Technical post alert: Making minor changes to Zotero citation styles is quite simple once you have done it a few times if you are familiar with basic xml coding. My problem is that I typically only need to modify a style once every three years or so, and by the time I return to it I have forgotten how it is done. So, for my reference (primarily), here is how I did it this time:

1. In Zotero standalone, go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced, and click on Open CSL Editor under the General tab.
2. Select a reference from your Zotero library and the citation style you wish to modify. The formatted reference will display in the bottom half of the screen with the xml in the top.
3. Make changes to the style sheet. (I found what I wanted to use by checking a few different styles and cutting and pasting from one to the other. To find the right bit of code, I copied the whole xml file to Word so that I could use Word's search features.)
4. Follow the instructions in this step-by-step guide to change the id and name of the file so that you don't copy over a standard style. 
5. Validate the xml file following the instructions here.
6. Select the xml file, paste it into Notepad, and save it as a text file for reference.
7. Save the style as a csl file by clicking "Save As" "All" and make the extension csl. 
8. Install the csl file by following the instructions here.

Two helpful resources:

• CSL Language Specification
• Writing CSL: Features and Best Practices

This time around I modified the Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition in two ways: (1) to remove final punctuation (non-standard, but my preference), drawing on Adam Smith's directions here (search for "layout suffix" and change layout suffix="."> to <layout suffix=""> under the notes section near the end of the file); and (2) to allow abbreviations in journal titles in the notes (see the general directions here; I ended up copying the relevant section of the SBL style). My modified style is available here.

Now back to the writing that Zotero is supposed to help me with.

Using VUE as a free-form text editor - A Windows alternative to Scapple

Update (18 July): It turns out that OneNote already does what I wanted VUE and Freeplane to do. Oops. Back to my FreePlane & OneNote combination; still waiting for Scapple...

In my last post I said that I had settled on Freeplane as a stop-gap measure until Scapple becomes available for Windows. This afternoon I switched to VUE because Freeplane is just not up to the job. 

Like Freeplane, VUE is a free open-source program, but it is geared toward concept mapping instead of mind-mapping (see here and here for a comparison). I might care about the difference eventually, but right now I am looking for something that neither program was designed for, but that VUE allows me to do: to type text anywhere on a limitless canvas and then move the bits and pieces around as I puzzle out the order in which my thoughts should go together. Freeplane supports multiple nodes, but it doesn't let you move them around; VUE supports text boxes that you can move around. The export options in VUE aren't great, but it does the job for now. Here is what I was working on this afternoon:

Samir Kurdi had this to say about an earlier version of VUE:

VUE offers a good balance between complexity and ease of use, and between offering the simple building blocks needed to create mind maps of all kinds, on the one hand, and sophisticated tagging, analytical, and presentation tools on the other.

Now back to the job that VUE is supposed to be helping me complete!

Scapple, Freeplane & Mind-Mapping Software for Pack Rat Thinkers

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I had a productivity software episode a couple weeks ago, brought on by disappointment that Scapple is not available for Windows (yet). You see, I draft most everything I write--including this blog post--on scrap paper before entering it on the dreadfully blank, linear, and permanently ephemeral screen. As my thoughts don't come out in sequence, and I'm always afraid I'll lose something important, I end up brainstorming all over the page (like this).

Among the several disadvantages of this pack rat writing style are that I write slowly, my internal hamster tends to fall off its wheel when I run out of room on the page, and I eventually have to enter the bits and pieces worth saving into permanent storage on my computer. (I also go through a lot of scrap paper. I once accidentally printed 400 pp. from a colleague's book manuscript, which kept me supplied for a while. Since that stock ran out, I've taken to dumpster diving recycle bins around the school.)

Sometimes fountain pen and paper aren't good enough. Sometimes I want to keep my random thoughts in the more-or-less random form in which they emerge. I also wondered about saving time by brainstorming on screen rather than on paper. Enter Scapple:

"Scapple is an easy-to-use tool for getting ideas down as quickly as possible and making connections between them. It isn’t exactly mind-mapping software—it’s more like a freeform text editor that allows you to make notes anywhere on the page and to connect them using straight dotted lines or arrows. If you’ve ever scribbled down ideas all over a piece of paper and drawn lines between related thoughts, then you already know what Scapple does."

Alas, Scapple is not currently available for Windows, so I looked around for alternatives. The short answer is that there are none. After reading about Blumind, TheBrain, and connectedtext, and trying xmind, Freemind, Coggle, CompendiumNG, I settled on Freeplane as a workable stop-gap with VUE as a runner-up [Update: I've switched to VUE; see below]:

Freeplane is a free, open source, powerful mind-mapping program that allows you--somewhat awkwardly--to click and type in different areas of the "page" (which, as far as I can tell, is limitless). [Update: Freeplane doesn't really work for unconnected notes because, as far as I can tell, you can't move text around freely. If you are stuck with Windows and it is a free-form text editor you are looking for, try VUE. (See this post for more detail.)] If  Perhaps because it is a mind-mapping program geared toward brainstorming related thoughts, it has not eliminated my perpetual need for scrap paper when I am working on a writing project, but I have begun to use it to store stray thoughts, and it works quite well for that purpose. One neat feature, which sets it apart from Vue, is that you can copy your mind-map and paste it into OneNote as an outline.

Give it a whirl!