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📚 User Manual
Your complete guide to capturing, exploring, and connecting memories in your personal knowledge graph
Rooms of Memory is your personal memory palace—a digital space where every room represents a significant place, time, or experience in your life. Unlike traditional note-taking apps, Rooms of Memory creates a living, breathing network of your memories that grows more valuable over time.
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Memory Rooms
Each room represents a meaningful space—your childhood home, university dorm, first apartment, or any place that holds memories. Rooms connect people, institutions, events, and time periods.
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Knowledge Graph
Watch your memories form an interconnected web. See how people, places, and events relate across different periods of your life through an interactive visual network.
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Memory Fragments
Capture fleeting thoughts, detailed recollections, or random associations. These fragments become the building blocks of your personal history.
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Visual Whiteboards
Sketch memories, create mind maps, or draw room layouts. Visual memories often capture what words cannot express.
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The Philosophy: Every room in your life has shaped who you are. By mapping these spaces and their connections, you create a unique autobiography that reveals patterns, relationships, and insights about your personal journey.
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Create Your Account
Register with your email and choose a display name. Your memories are private and secure—only you can see them.
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Start with a Meaningful Room
Begin with a place that holds strong memories—perhaps your childhood bedroom, family kitchen, or first office. This becomes your anchor point.
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Add Context
Include the address, time period (year range), people who were there, and institutions connected to that space.
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Capture Memory Fragments
Add specific memories, stories, or feelings associated with that room. These can be as detailed or brief as you like.
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Explore Connections
Use the Graph view to see how your rooms connect through shared people, time periods, or locations. Watch your memory network grow!
The Capture view is your creative workspace for building new memory rooms. It's designed to feel natural and flowing, like telling a story to a close friend.
🎯 Smart Suggestions
As you type, the system suggests people, institutions, and events from your existing rooms. This creates natural connections and saves time.
Key Fields Explained:
- Title: Give your room a memorable name ("Mom's Kitchen", "College Dorm Room 237", "First Apartment")
- Description: Paint the scene—what did it look like, feel like, sound like?
- Address: Physical location helps connect rooms geographically
- Year Range: When did this room exist in your life? Be as specific or broad as needed
- People: Who shared this space with you? Family, friends, roommates, colleagues
- Institutions: Schools, companies, organizations connected to this room
- Events: Significant happenings in this space—parties, meetings, quiet moments
- Sentiment: How did this room make you feel? Cozy, stressful, exciting, peaceful?
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Writing Tip: Don't worry about perfection. Start with what you remember clearly and add details later. Memories often surface in fragments—that's perfectly normal and valuable.
The Explore view helps you navigate your growing collection of memory rooms. Whether you're looking for something specific or just browsing, this view adapts to how you think about your memories.
Search Capabilities:
- Text Search: Find rooms by title, description, or memory fragments
- Year Filtering: Browse by time periods—see your 20s, teenage years, or any decade
- Quick Actions: Open, edit, or create whiteboards directly from the list
🎲 Serendipitous Discovery
Sometimes the best memories are the ones you weren't looking for. The Explore view is designed to surface forgotten rooms and unexpected connections.
The Graph view is where Rooms of Memory truly shines. It transforms your individual rooms into a living network that reveals the hidden connections in your life story.
Understanding the Visual Language:
- 🏠 Rooms (Green Rectangles): Your memory spaces—the heart of your network
- 👥 People (Blue Circles): Individuals who appear across multiple rooms
- 🏛️ Institutions (Green Circles): Organizations that connect different life phases
- 📅 Decades (Gold Circles): Time periods that cluster related memories
- 📍 Addresses (Red Circles): Geographic locations that anchor your spaces
🎛️ Context Controls
Use the filter sliders to adjust what you see. Want to focus on people connections? Turn up the People weight. Interested in geographic clustering? Boost the Addresses setting.
Interactive Features:
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Click to Focus
Click any node to see its details and related connections in the side panel.
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Navigate with Dropdowns
Use the "Go to room..." or "Go to person..." dropdowns for quick navigation to specific nodes.
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Adjust the Physics
Toggle physics on/off to freeze the layout or let it continue evolving.
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Control Complexity
Use the edge limit slider to show more or fewer connections based on what you want to explore.
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Discovery Tip: Look for surprising connections—that friend from high school who also appears in your first job room, or how multiple significant spaces cluster around the same time period.
Rooms are living documents that can grow and change as your memories develop. You might remember new details, meet people who were there, or gain new perspectives on old spaces.
Room Actions:
- Edit Mode: Update any field, add or remove people, change date ranges
- Add Fragments: Capture new memories associated with the room
- Create Whiteboards: Add visual elements—sketches, maps, or diagrams
- View Whiteboards: Click thumbnails in the graph detail panel to view full-size images
💫 Memory Fragments
These are the gems of your rooms—specific moments, conversations, feelings, or observations. They can be a single sentence or a detailed story. The more fragments you add, the richer your room becomes.
Some memories are best expressed through drawings, sketches, or diagrams. Whiteboards let you add this visual layer to your rooms.
Whiteboard Features:
- Drawing Tools: Pen, highlighter, shapes, text, and sticky notes
- Colors & Sizes: Multiple colors and brush sizes for detailed work
- Save & Export: Your drawings are automatically saved as images
- Room Integration: Whiteboards appear as thumbnails in both room views and the graph detail panel
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Creative Ideas: Sketch room layouts, draw family trees, create timeline diagrams, map out social connections, or just doodle memories that words can't capture.
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Start Small, Grow Naturally
Begin with 3-5 important rooms. Don't try to capture everything at once. Let your memory palace grow organically over time.
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Think Connections
When adding people or institutions, consider how they might connect to other rooms. These connections become powerful discovery tools.
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Include Time Ranges
Even approximate dates help create temporal connections. "Early 2000s" or "Around age 25" is better than no time context.
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Capture Feelings
The sentiment field isn't just nice to have—emotional context often triggers stronger memory recall and connections.
Memory Triggers to Explore:
- Childhood Homes: Bedrooms, family rooms, kitchens—spaces that shaped your early years
- Educational Spaces: Classrooms, dorm rooms, libraries, study spots
- Work Environments: Offices, cubicles, meeting rooms, first job spaces
- Social Hubs: Friends' houses, bars, clubs, gathering places
- Transition Spaces: First apartments, temporary housing, places you lived briefly but intensely
- Creative Spaces: Studios, workshops, corners where you made things
- Sanctuary Spaces: Places of comfort, reflection, or escape
🎯 The Ultimate Goal
Rooms of Memory isn't just about nostalgia—it's about understanding your story. As your network grows, you'll see patterns: how certain people influenced your journey, how places shaped your choices, and how your past connects to your present in surprising ways.
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Ready to Begin? Your memory palace awaits. Start with one room that brings a smile to your face, and let your story unfold from there.