Wondering whether, for fun, we ought to be doing a close listening instead of a close reading of Home.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/books/review/hearing-homers-song-milman-parry-robert-kanigel.html

Short overview of Parry's biography. One could do better reading the Wikipedia article.

Are there possibly any physical artifacts in physical archaeology that may fit into the structure of the thesis made by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies?

What would we be looking for? Small mnemonic devices? Menhir? Standing stones? Wooden or stone circles? Other examples of extended ekphrasis similar to that of the shield of Achilles?

cf: Expanding Ekphrasis to the Broader Field of Mnemotechny: or How the Shield of Achilles Relates to a Towel, Car, and Water Buffalo

Interesting to note this shift in narrative style. How can one interpret this from the perspective of orality versus literacy?

How can these modern translations and related translations be compared and contrasted to the original passage of the stories in their original bardic traditions?

Cross reference the orality work of Milman Parry, et al.

However from examples in oral cultures we know that there are other mnemonic traditions which allow the preservation of knowledge.

cross-reference: Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power

The sorting function is also done by mental links from one space to another similar to the method of loci in Western culture. cross reference the idea of songlines

pyrus scroll and the sheet of parchment.

Which others is she missing from a mnemonics perspective? I'm impressed that she indicates the khipu, but there are certainly other indigenous methods from oral cultures.

In many areas of human life including education and business, we limit ourselves too heavily by too exclusively promoting and preferring brain-bound thinking. If we could begin to re-center our external thinking as many oral and indigenous cultures have, we might be able to go further and farther.

Given their focus on dates and calendars, what other evidence of mnemonic traditions might we draw from a culture that was likely near the transition from oral to written transmission?

Would they have had standing stones, stone circles, handheld mnemonic devices?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/studying-whistled-languages-180978484/

Campaigner for Native American rights.

Set up Bureau of American Ethnology.

Recommended setting up reservations for indigenous people in America.

Recorded tribal oral histories.

Recruited Cyrus Thomas who proved that the moundbuilder race hadn't existed, but they were erected by ancestors of modern Native Americans.

Early writing systems used thousands of symbols and were thus incredibly complex and required heavy memorization. This may have been easier with earlier mnemonic systems in oral (pre-literate societies), but would have still required work.

The innovation of a smaller alphabetic set would have dramatically decreased the cognitive load of massive memorization and made it easier for people to become literate at scale.

You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way. —Niklas Luhmann

(Source of the original??)

This is interesting, but is also ignorant of oral traditions which had means of addressing it.

I feel like Western culture has lost so much of our memory traditions that this trite story, which I've seen often repeated, doesn't have the weight it should.

Why can't we simultaneously have the old system AND the new? Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale touch on this in their coinage of the third archive in Songlines.

Lynne Kelly's observation that oral cultures revised useful knowledge into their memories appears to me to be a simple precursor to annotation and the idea of the scientific method all in one...

Again, Dr. Lynne Kelly discusses this sort of process in non-Western and primarily oral cultures as well. Songlines has some interesting discussion of this in the Australian aboriginal cultures.

There is, however, an exceptionally long tradition of moving one's annotations out of the margins and into more expansive spaces like commonplace books, zettelkasten, wikis, Memex, and digital gardens...

This cultural thinking pattern also isn't confined by literacy either. Dr. Lynne Kelly attests the idea of the storage of ideas and their subsequent potential revision in oral cultures in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. One may have lost the ability to track the original ideas in time, but the (useful) oral "annotations" were aggregated into cultural knowledge over time.

An overview of Milman Parry's life, work, and some of his impact on Homeric studies and orality as media.

Lack of literacy definitely does not mean lack of culture.

Reminder to self: I've got a strong suspicion that the Hebrew bible was transmitted orally for generations prior to being written down in a similar manner. I need to collect some additional evidence to build this case. The arc of the covenant is a first potential piece of evidence.

In both older and current cultures we see stories, songs, poetry, and a variety of knowledge passed down orally. Some of these, like Homer, were eventually written out and passed down using the written word. Texts, once extant, were generally passed around by copying out or mass printing, but generally were not memorized and passed along via orality or memory techniques. Obviously there are examples of people memorizing large portions of text personally, but this has generally not been the major mode of passing knowledge from one generation to the next.

Dr. Lynne Kelly's text book Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015) does a solid job of covering some of the techniques in the archaeological and even contemporary records on this score.

We have modern anthropologists attesting the oral methods you describe from several peoples around the world. Kelly's book, based on her Ph.D. thesis, does a good job of summarizing many of these. She and Dr. Margo Neale also recently published Songlines: The Power and Promise (Thames & Hudson, 2020) which covers current Australian Aboriginal tribes which use these oral techniques for knowledge transmission as well. The techniques do vary from culture to culture, but on the whole they tend to share many features.

As others have mentioned, Walter Ong's work, and the book Orality and Literacy (Routledge, 1982) in particular, will provide some additional context.

On your question of practicality, I'd recommend Kelly's book Memory Craft which currently outlines the broadest number of mnemotechniques out there and provides some advice about which methods are best/better for particular applications. Following this, if necessary, you might focus in on the methods you're interested in most and hone in on other texts, audiobooks, or posts here in the forum.

Everyone's abilities and needs are slightly different, so experiment a bit to see what appeals to and/or works best for you.

I'm noticing no mention here of double entry book keeping or the accountant's idea of waste books.

There's also no mention of orality or memory methods either.

I'd love to have a list of these and some of their similarities. What would oral cultures have done? How would/did they manage their overflow of information, besides overwriting the new/improved and forgetting the old/unuseful?

It looks to me like Andy and Michael are grasping at recreating with modern technology and tools what many (most? all?) indigenous cultures around the world used to ritually learn and memorize their culture's knowledge. Mnemonics, spaced repetition, graded initiation, orality, dance, and song were all used as a cohesive whole to do this.

The best introduction to many of these methods and their pedagogic uses is best described by Lynne Kelly's book Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture.

If they take her ideas as a basis and then layer on their own thinking, I think they'll get much further much quicker. Based on my reading of their work thus far, they're limiting themselves.

And this is almost just what we see in modern religion concerning the bible.　Even though it's written down, people read the words and change their original meaning and intent to make them relevant to their modern lives rather than the older historical context in which they were originally created.

Oh! This is fascinating. Perhaps some interesting tidbits for my growing theory about the borders of orality and literacy could be hiding in some of her research?

What would Ong say about this??

I think Ong would take issue with the notion that there is no "material difference" between speaking and writing. Writing is a "technology" so to speak, and thus presents itself differently than mere thought through speaking. One can go back and edit writing, whereas orality is not so easily done.

Ong talks about this on Orality and Literacy--if an idea is written down, it is understood as being more "real" than ideas that are spoken. I wonder how this translates into digital communication?

I have never been able to reconcile this with Ong's approach, that even writing involves sounding words out in your head. The text here is making it out that Derrida's only using it as an example, that both are equally at a remove, which, fair enough, but I'm not seeing how writing has primacy over speech. Bail me out here, y'all.

Point raised by Fr. Ong in The Presence of the Word "With the appearance of what we have called the sound-sight split in Latin, that stream of the language which developed into the modern romance vernaculars remained in use in the home, but the other stream known as Learned Latin, which moved only in artificially controlled channels through the male world of the schools was no longer anyone's mother tongue, in a quite literal sense." There was an active language-world for women in ancient Rome, but its one that was not recorded, and is now lost to time.

Now this is a fascinating possibility, texting for some is an almost direct oral crossover from speech where you hit enter "everytime you would have taken a breath"