projects / reading infrastructure · 2019–present
Zhira
Zhira, Shona for “path(s)”, is a versioned context pipeline over a reading corpus of Kindle highlights and notes.
What this is
Zhira is Shona for “path(s)”. Kindle highlights extraction and organisation were solved by Nota and the CLI; what was left was retrieval - how to find the passage half-remembered, the connection between two books read four years apart, or the common strands in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned and Obliquity.
Zhira is a versioned context pipeline: source data changes, and the system produces a new, checksummed artifact you can diff, verify, and serve, to a person or to a model with citations back to the book and location.
Where it currently is
Early build. What exists today:
- a fresh-ingest pipeline - parse, canonicalise, merge, index, atomic promote;
- sync classification, detecting added, changed, and deleted records against a prior artifact by source checksum;
- a
doctorcommand that validates the manifest and re-verifies recorded checksums; - BM25 search over an SQLite FTS5 index.
Dense and hybrid retrieval, cited answers, and the MCP server that exposes the corpus to agents are planned.