#sigint A research assistant to help with online searches. This plugin was created to assist in Soviet history research and early US overflights of the Soviet Union, (ostensibly to gather information, particularly signals/electronic information), therefore the name SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) was chosen.

Far from being bound to just history research, you can use sigint for all of your online thought-keeping needs.

One of the chief goals of sigint is to be as unobtrusive as possible. The workflow outlined below is designed to keep you focused on your research, and allow you to save information as part of the course of that research. Once you reach a point to stop and analyze your information, sigint also provides the tools to help you collate and view your data.

##Follow the trail In doing research, it is oftentimes problematic to trace the source of a document, a note, an anecdote, or a bit of information after some time has passed. With sigint, you can create a project, and keep track of your research thread, from inception to closure. You can also create tags to keep track of your current progress.

##Context Many times, links are woven in as part of a surrounding text, like so. Long after that link has been bookmarked or written down, it is easy to forget why you saved that link or what you downloaded from it. sigint will allow you to save the surrounding text of a link, the date and time, the referring page (if one exists), and other information as part of your thread.

Similarly, tabs can be used as to-do lists, resulting in dozens or hundreds of open tabs. Sigint will help save your tabs, links, and research to reduce your browser load.

##Getting Started ###Installation First, install the add-on. This can be done by installing the the signed .xpi file on the "Releases" link of the main page of the repository, or by cloning this repository and building it out, using the Firefox jpm utility. Please follow the 'Prerequisites' section of the link, and install the nodejs jpm utility.

Once you've installed jpm, and cloned/downloaded the repository, run the jpm utility in the cloned/extracted directory, and run jpm xpi. This will create a .xpi file for you to point the Firefox Add-on page to.

###Create a topic Once the add-on is installed, you can begin to track a topic of your research. Press ctrl-shift-o (or command-shift-o on a Mac), and enter in a topic. From here, all of your links will be saved under this topic, until you change the topic. Pressing ctrl-shift-o will let you see your current topic; pressing ctrl-shift-o again will bring up a dialog to change it to a different one, depending on your research at the moment.

You can also add an optional description to your topic, which may be useful in recording your thoughts, or noting a starting point in your research (i.e. you're reading one site or paper, which triggers an idea, and kick-starts your search for this topic; you may want to record that thought pattern here). The whole idea of sigint is to preserve as much information surrounding your research as possible, including where your topics came from.

Note! Do not be afraid to change your topic often; in fact, it is highly encouraged. Think of your topic as a Ctrl-S (Save) on a (Libre)Office document. Don't be afraid of being stuck on one monolithic topic - you can always return to your current one, but don't worry about branching out.

To view currently saved topics and their descriptions, press ctrl-alt-h.

###Capturing a link To save a link, press ctrl-alt, and mouse left-click on the link at the same time. This will preserve the link, and its metadata (date/time, referring page, current page, link href attribute, and surrounding text).

###Capturing text In addition to saving links, you can also save highlighted text. First, left-click with your mouse and drag over some text in a page. With your left-mouse button still pressed, hold the 's' key.

###Semantic Links (linking separate bits of information together) At times, you may navigate away from your current thread, only to realize a page you find yourself on is related to a previous one. You can create a 'semantic link' at this point. To do so, press ctrl-shift-b, which will bring you to a Semantic Link page. Once here, find a previous page you wish to associate with, from a list of active tabs (you may either use the drop-down, or the search bar provided in the drop-down). There is also a 'Fetch Text' button, which will allow you to visit the previous page, and select relevant text to save with your semantic link. Once you select a previous tab, a semantic link will be created between your current page, and a previous one. This is indicated by a dotted line in the graph.

###Capturing information Sometimes, when performing one of the above actions to capture information, a warning pop-up may arise. This simply means that some information was not present in the link or text; for example, you may start a topic, and directly navigate to a new page, with no 'referral' page (i.e., you did not arrive on that page via a link)). In this case, the 'referral' link metadata is not populated, and the warning arises. This is not a problem normally, and can be viewed in the Link Overview page to make sure the relevant data was captured. Similarly, you may click on an image-link, and some data may not be populated as well. Be sure to verify what you need in the Link Overview page.

###The badge Once you've successfully "meta-clicked" a link, highlighted/clicked/'s' some text, or created a semantic link, the red badge on the add-on button will increment by one. If the badge does not increment by one, it means the add-on did not successfully register the click event; please try again in this case.

###Viewing saved information To view your saved links and highlights, press ctrl-shift-l, which will bring up a list of links and highlights that you have saved to date under a given topic. From here, click on any one of the links to view its metadata, as well as edit it. You can also add notes in this new edit page to add context or thoughts to any particular link. At the current time, notes are also useful for recording if any files were downloaded from a particular link. To view new information, please press ctrl-shift-l again after a new link has been saved.

###Viewing a graph of your topic research A graph of your data is also available when you press ctrl-shift-g. This will bring up a d3.js generated graph, which highlights a directional path that your research has taken you.