Getting Things Done with Index Cards<br /> by Jazz DiMauro

referenced in Lifehacker article as early as 2005

Note the use of envelopes for separation. Did this predate the Noguchi Filing System, inspired by it or wholly separate?

I'm curious what benefit, if any, you get out of the YYYYMMDDhhmm title format other than a simple date ordered listing of files?

During the coronavirus pandemic, many vendors facing inflation began to pass along the 3% (or more) credit card processing fees to their customers. Previously many credit card companies would penalize vendors for doing this (and possibly cut them off). This fee was considered "the cost of doing business".

Some vendors prior to the pandemic would provide cash discounts on large orders because they could circumvent these fees.

Does this affect (harm) inflation? Is it a form of Gresham's law at play here? What effect does this have on credit card companies? Are they so integral to the system that it doesn't affect them, but instead the customers using their legal tender?

How does this book speak with respect to Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire?

What screenwriting books recommend note cards for drafting/outlining? Do any go beyond the general outlining advice?

What is the overlap of this sort of writing practice with comedians who had a practice of writing jokes on index cards? (Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Diller, etc.?

Not sure I completely follow the logic of the debate between Sascha and taurusnoises (Bob Doto) here. I'll have to look closer.

Perhaps mapping out the 1-1 distinctions between the digital and the analog here would be helpful. What structures would be needed to make them 1-1?

Do folgezettel in combination with an index help to prevent over-indexing behaviors? Or the scaling problem of categorization in a personal knowledge management space?

Where do subject headings within a zettelkasten dovetail with the index? Where do they help relieve the idea of heavy indexing or tagging? How are the neighborhoods of ideas involved in keeping a sense of closeness while still allowing density of ideas and information?

Having digital search views into small portions of neighborhoods like gxabbo suggested can be a fantastic affordance. see: https://hypothes.is/a/W2vqGLYxEe2qredYNyNu1A

For example, consider an anthropology student who intends to spend a lifetime in the subject and its many sub-areas. If they begin smartly tagging things with anthropology as they start, eventually the value of the category, any tags, or ideas within their index will eventually grow without bound to the point that the meaning or value as a search affordance within their zettelkasten (digital or analog) will be utterly useless. Let's say they fix part of the issue by sub-categorizing pieces into cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, etc. This problem is fine while they're in undergraduate or graduate school for a bit, but eventually as they specialize, these areas too will become overwhelming in terms of search and the search results. This problem can continue ad-infinitum for areas and sub areas. So how can one solve it?

Is a living and concatenating index the solution? The index can have anthropology with sub-areas listed with pointers to the beginnings of threads of thought in these areas which will eventually create neighborhoods of these related ideas.

The solution is far easier when the ideas are done top-down after-the-fact like in the Dewey Decimal System when the broad areas are preknown and pre-delineated. But in a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten, things grow from the bottom up and thus present different difficulties from a scaling up perspective.

How do we classify first, second, and third order effects which emerge out of the complexity of a zettelkasten? - Sparse indexing can be a useful long term affordance in the second or third order space. - Combinatorial creativity and ideas of serendipity emerge out of at least the third order. - Using ZK for writing is a second order affordance - Storage is a first order affordance - Memory is a first order affordance (related to storage) - Productivity is a second+ order (because solely spending the time to save and store ideas is a drag at the first order and doesn't show value until retrieval at a later date). - Poor organization can be non-affordance or deterrent which results in a scrap heap - lack of a reason why can be a non-affordance or deterrence as well - cross reference this list and continue on with other pieces and affordances

Did many of them defect or perhaps just die from the conditions?

I've done something like this when I think a particular reference(s) can answer a question related to a train of thought. But I keep cards of unread sources at the front of my sources section so that it's easier to pull it out frequently to prioritize and decide what I should be reading or working on next. These will then have links to the open questions I've noted, so that I can go back to those sections either as I'm reading/writing or to add those ideas into the appropriate folgezettel. These sorts of small amounts of work documented briefly can add up quickly over time. Source cards with indications of multiple open questions that might be answered is sometimes a good measure of desire to read, though other factors can also be at play.

That to-read pile of bibliographic source notes (a mini antilibrary) is akin to walking into a party and surveying a room. I may be aware of some of the people I haven't met yet and the conversations we might have, but if there are interesting questions I know I want to ask of specific ones or conversations I already know I want to have, it can be more productive to visit those first.

This sort of practice has been particularly helpful for times when I want to double check someone's sources or an original context, but don't have the time to do it immediately, don't want to break another extended train of thought, have to wait on materials, or may have to make a trip to consult physical materials that are singular or rare. For quick consultative reading, this can be a boon when I know I don't want or need to read an entire work, but skimming a chapter or a few pages for a close reading of a particular passage. I'll often keep a pile of these sorts of sources at hand so that I can make a short trip to a library, pick them up, find what I need and move on without having to recreate large portions of context to get the thing done because I've already laid most of the groundwork.

Though other sources like the CBS News article look like 3 x 5" index cards, John Hunt indicates that Ronald Reagan used 4 x 6" inch cards for his notes.

One of Ronald Reagan's Index cards with four bullet-pointed one-liners has the annotation "(over)" written on the bottom which indicates that he wrote on both sides of his cards.

If he was keeping these in clear plastic sheets in a binder, this would have been easy to see the opposite sides.

Were all of his cards double-sided? This particular example seems to be a list of one liners which may have been used in the same speech (or timeframe) and thus served solely as a reminder of the jokes to be told.

What makes note taking exciting?

• serendipity
• surprise
• creativity

women and gender roles.

If my perception of mythology and orality is correct, can we look at Indigenous stories, myth, and knowledge and draw parallels from their knowledge about women and gender to similar stories in the Western canon which have lost linkage to their narratives? What would this show us potentially about Western mythology and gender studies?

Where does the learning portion of education morph into research? Where is the dividing line?

Exactly how much space would be saved writing on standard paper versus index cards in a collection as large as Luhmann's?

Eugenia Triantafyllou is talking about crutches for creativity and inspiration, but seems to miss the value of collecting interesting tidbits along the road of life that one can use later. Instead, the emphasis here becomes one of relying on an artificial intelligence doing it for you at the "hit of a button". If this is the case, then why not just let the artificial intelligence do all the work for you?

This is the area where the cultural loss of mnemonics used in orality or even the simple commonplace book will make us easier prey for (over-)reliance on technology.

Is serendipity really serendipity if it's programmed for you?

google translate:

So if you raise such a wooden life partner, you will get more and more interesting answers to your questions after a few years...

I love the idea of rearing a zettelkasten as a "wooden life partner".

What are the differences and affordances in moving from cadavre exquis to Eno/Schmidt's Oblique Strategies to ChatGPT?

One of the problems in approaching quantum gravity is the choice for how to best represent it mathematically. Most of quantum mechanics is algebraic in nature but gravity has a geometry component which is important. (restatement)

This is similar to the early 20th century problem of how to best represent quantum mechanics: as differential equations or using group theory/Lie algebras?

This prompts the question: what other potential representations might also work?

Could it be better understood/represented using Algebraic geometry or algebraic topology as perspectives?

[handwritten notes from 2023-02-02]

This question calls to mind that I haven't seen the word consilience in this space at all. Search pulls up only one post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zg80qc/comprehensible_texts_productivity_and_again/

Where does consilience sit with respect to the use of a zettelkasten?

Example of someone (u/HerrRey) who defines zettelkasten as "concept oriented, atomic notes that are linked to each other", but who doesn't use or exclude "IDs or the folgezettel method". Interestingly they feel like they're not getting the "big picture" of their work.

Is there an affordance in these missing pieces that prevents them from seeing the big picture because of what they're missing? Is it just neurodiversity? Are they not creating outputs which connect the small to the big, and thus missing it that way?

What makes for good work in the humanities?

What are the connections between zettelkasten and conceptual maps?

How are they different/similar to Tony Buzan's mind maps?

In the fraternity and other social spaces, how does one correct for a "bad first date", a botched meeting, or a lone bad day? Does statistical thermodynamics as a model provide clues? How would rank be determined here in an unbiased way? What about individual chemical affinities and how chemical interactions change and/or bias the samples?

Useful ranks versus unuseful ranks... list them. What factors separate them and why?

For ranks to provide useful outcomes, they must be visible and their underlying factors should be transparent.

If the theory in Colin Woodard's American Nations is applicable here, where would these pirates/proto-democratic practitioners have gotten their ideals from to have infected the larger group? What did their social networks look like such that they evolved this way? Was there some common source (written/oral) that they may have used 20-50 years earlier that created their own generation?

Goethe's Maxims and Reflections represents a commonplace book of sorts.

Who numbered the maxims though? Was it Goethe or someone after him?

(stray note on a slip of paper dated 2022-10-27)

Given the breaks with conventional understandings, is there underlying evidence to support them? We should watch out for the indication of these conventional understandings, his indication of breaks, and the evidence.

What sort of influence did these sorts of philosophy have on educational practices of their day and how do they reflect on our current educational milieu?

Was the Enlightenment a false dream of liberation which has really unleashed an unspeakable cruelty upon the world?

Homework problems are pedagogical devices and many (most) authors place them in the text near where they would be profitably be done. They also provide a useful break in the text to prompt more novice students to actually perform them at the end of a section.

More advanced students, however, should have caught on eventually at the need to work out examples for themselves which are presented in a textbook, but they should also be seeking out additional problems where ever they appear in the text, not to mention seeing out any outside additional problems, making up their own, and exploring any additional questions these pose.

In mathematics textbooks this working of problems, expanding on them and seeking out new ones is often a large part of what is lurking behind the sometimes nebulous sounding idea of "mathematical sophistication". The rest of that equation typically includes experience with the various methods and means of proofs and some basic background in logic.

Classes are to abstract data types as _ are to ___.

Most only get so far as, what could/should I connect this to and don't get any farther.

Some good questions for mulling over here though.

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15625

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZklLt80wqg

Looking at three broad ideas with examples of each to follow: - signals - patterns - pattern making, pattern breaking

Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913

Jane Kent for witchcraft

250 years with ~200,000 trial transcripts

Can be viewed as: - storytelling, - history - information process of signals

All the best trials include the words "Covent Garden".

Example: 1163. Emma Smith and Corfe indictment for stealing.

19:45 Norbert Elias. The Civilizing Process. (book)

Prozhito: large-scale archive of Russian (and Soviet) diaries; 1900s - 2000s

How do people understand the act of diary-writing?

Diaries are:

Leo Tolstoy

a convenient way to evaluate the self

Franz Kafka

a means to see, with reassuring clarity [...] the changes which you constantly suffer.

Virginia Woolf'

a kindly blankfaced old confidante

Diary entries in five categories - spirit - routine - literary - material form (talking about the diary itself) - interpersonal (people sharing diaries)

Are there specific periods in which these emerge or how do they fluctuate? How would these change between and over cultures?

The pattern of talking about diaries in this study are relatively stable over the century.

pre-print available of DeDeo's work here

Pattern making, pattern breaking

Individuals, institutions, and innovation in the debates of the French Revolution

• transcripts of debates in the constituent assembly

the idea of revolution through tedium and boredom is fascinating.

speeches broken into combinations of patterns using topic modeling

(what would this look like on commonplace book and zettelkasten corpora?)

emergent patterns from one speech to the next (information theory) question of novelty - hi novelty versus low novelty as predictors of leaders and followers

Robespierre bringing in novel ideas

How do you differentiate Robespierre versus a Muppet (like Animal)? What is the level of following after novelty?

Four parts (2x2 grid) - high novelty, high imitation (novelty with ideas that stick) - high novelty, low imitation (new ideas ignored) - low novelty, high imitation - low novelty, low imitation (discussion killers)

Could one analyze television scripts over time to determine the good/bad, when they'll "jump the shark"?

Can I use some of these sorts of methods with respect to corpus linguistics over time to better identified calcified words or archaic phrases that stick with the language, but are heavily limited to narrower(ing) contexts?

I've not seen this explicitly laid out as advice before though in most contexts people's note taking spaces have historically been divorced from their writing spaces for publication because slips and notes are usually kept physically separate from the working spaces or finished parts, but Richard Carter specifically separates the digital spaces in which he takes his notes and then uses them for creating end products. While he could both take notes in Obsidian, his tool of choice for notes, as well as write his finished pieces there, he actively changes contexts to use a different digital app to compose his notes into final pieces.

What affordances does this context shift provide? <br /> - blank slate may encourage reworking and expansion of original notes - is there a blank slate effect and what would it entail? - potentially moves the piece into a longer format space or tool which provides additional writing, formatting or other affordances (which? there don't seem to be any in this case aside from a potential "distraction free mode" which may tend to force one to focus only on the piece at hand rather than the thousands of other pieces (notes) hiding within the app)

What affordances does this remove?<br /> - He's forced to repeat himself (cut & paste / DRY violation)

Is it easier or harder (from a time/effort perspective) to provide citations with such a workflow? Carter does indicate that for him:

Having links to original sources in my outline makes the compilation of references for the chapter far easier than it used to be.

Are animals inherently subordinate? Why or why not? (Because this phrase seems silly to input)

Is this why we have more art that alludes to space than the deep sea? If so, why are we more willing to travel via sea rather than space?

Here again he comes close to some of the methods and ideas of having flashcards for spaced repetition, but isn't explicitly aware of the words or techniques. Note that he also doesn't use the word flashcard. When was the word first used?

Rewriting things as flashcards also tends to be a part of the spaced repetition itself.

By cutting the notes up he's specifically decontextualizing them so as to make one's memory be better tested in coming up with the solutions/answers as they are more likely to appear on a test, decontextualized from the original lecture.

I'm not sure I like that Graeber waves away the question "why play?" here. I don't think there's an equivalency to the "why life?" question.

It will take some additional thinking to build something up to refute this idea however.

Apparently Aby Warburg "obsessively kept" notes on antisemitic incidents on the Eastern front in his zettelkasten.

This piece looks at Warburg's Jewish identity as supported or not by the contents of his zettelkasten, thus placing it in the use of zettelkasten or card index as autobiography.

Might one's notes reflect who they were as a means of creating both their identity while alive as well as revealing it once they've passed on? Might the use of historical method provide its own historical method to be taken up on a meta basis after one's death?

As a complete aside I can't help but wonder if Tami Gottschalk is related to Louis R. Gottschalk, the historian who wrote Understanding history; a primer of historical method?

Arthur introduces the topic of Robert Pirsig and slips into the GTD conversation on 2004-05-19.

Was this a precursor link to the Pile of Index Cards in 2006?

Note that there doesn't seem to be any discussion of any of the methods with respect to direct knowledge management until the very end in which arthur returns almost four months later to describe a 4 x 6" card index with various topics he's using for filing away his knowledge on cards. He's essentially recreated the index card based commonplace book suggested by Robert Pirsig in Lila.

What was the nature of the hierarchical structure of Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten?

Some of the structure may be understandable by the nature of the digital database.

Given the regular seasonality of most animal rutting and parturition, how is it that the human animal evolved to have a more year-round mating season?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIfH-iSGa5M

2021-05-12

Dr. Hanan Harif started out as a Geniza scholar but is now a biographer of Shlomo Dov Goitein.

In the 1920s Goitein published his only play Pulcellina about a Jewish woman who was burned at the stake in France in 1171.

Had a friendship with Levi Billig (1897-1936)

You know very well the verse on Tabari that says: 'You wrote history with such zeal that you have become history yourself.' Although in your modesty you would deny it, we suggest that his couplet applies to yourself as well." —Norman Stillman to S.D. Goitein in letter dated 1977-07-20

Norman Stillman was a student of Goitein.

What has Hanan Harif written on Goitein? Any material on his Geniza research and his note cards? He addressed some note card material in the Q&A, but nothing direct or specific.

Goitein's Mediterranean Society project was from 1967-1988 with the last volume published three years after his death. The entirety of the project was undertaken at University of Pennsylvania.

The India Book, India Traders was published in 2007 (posthumously) as a collaboration with M.A. Friedman.

Goitein wrote My Life as a Scholar in 1970, which may have some methodological clues about his work and his card index.

He also left his diaries to the National Library of Israel as well and these may also have some clues.

His bibliography is somewhere around 800 publications according to Harif, including his magnum opus.

Harif shows a small card index at 1:15:20 of one of Goitein's collaborators (and later rival) Professor Eliasto (unsure of this name, can't find direct reference?). Harif indicates that the boxes are in the archives where he's at (https://www.nli.org.il/en/discover/archives/archives-list ? though I don't see a reasonable name/materials there, so perhaps it's at his home at Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

Goitein's zettelkasten is comprised of about 20,000 3 x 5" index cards and 7,000 5 x 8" index cards.

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/TEiQ5H1rEe2_Amfzi4XXmg

While not directly confirmed (yet), due to the seeming correspondence of the number of cards and their corpus descriptions, it's likely that the 20,000 3 x 5" cards were his notes covering individual topics while the 7,000 5 x 8" cards were his notes and descriptions of a single fragment from the Cairo Geniza.

Goitein broke the frequent admonishment of many note takers to "write only on one side" of his cards.

Oded Zinger doesn't mention how many of his 27,000 index cards are double-sided, but one might presume that it is a large proportion.

How many were written on both sides?

Since Khirbet Qeiyafa is radiocarbon dated to the end of the 11th and beginning of the 10th century BCE in a location where the biblical tradition situates the battle between David and Goliath, how might its excavation contribute to our knowledge of this time period and these events?

Humphreys, James E. Introduction to Lie Algebras and Representation Theory. Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 9.0. Springer, 1972. is one of the first Springer texts in my collection which has a Luhmann-esque sort of numbering system in its table of contents. Surely there must be earlier others though?

Questions to ask to a domain expert from a completely new field to you

What exactly were the standards created for copying manuscripts by Cassiodorus at the scriptorium at Vivarium?

I came to this page after reading the "About the Author (The Second Right Answer)" page of Roger von Oech's "A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative" which was mentioned by Kevin Bowers in his discussion with John Vervaeke titled "Principles & Methods for Achieving a Flow State | Voices w/ Vervaeke | John Vervaeke & Kevin Bowers".

von Oech stated that

I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the twentieth century German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the last man to know everything. From him, I learned that it's good to be a generalist, and that looking at the Big Picture helps to keep you flexible.

This was a surprising reference since Bowers stated that the book was written for helping entrepreneurs become more creative; the book seems more widely applicable based on the examples and exercises given in the first 20 pages.

Cassirer appears to bridge between the continental and analytic traditions in philosophy. Cassirer's touching on mathematics, aesthetics, and ethics reminds me of - John Vervaeke's work - ie, the process of relevance realization and his neo platonic, transformational reading of ancient texts - Forrest Landry work - ie, his magnum opus "An Immanent Metaphysics" which he purports to be pointing to a foundation between ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Recently, IDM (Immanent Domain Metaphysics) made more sense to me when I attempted to translat the 3 axioms and 3 modalities into language from category theory

The following seem important and related somehow: 1. the symbolic process 2. the process of abstraction 3. the process of representation

Maybe these are related to the means by which one can can transcend their current self? ie, is it through particular symbolic practices that one can more easily shed one identity and acquire another?

Also, are 1., 2., and 3. different aspects of the same thing/event?

I've now seen a handful of (all online) sources quote a 17th Century origin for similar note taking methods. What exactly are they referring to specifically? What are these sources? None seem to be footnoted.

My main purpose here is to suggest ways we can apply these 'components' to what we have for learners already or to suggest ways the components can completely supplant the older paths. For example, there is a suggestion that we can change layers of management and have a better system. My question will be this: How?

🤔

How is this sort of bloodsport similar/different to the news media coverage of Donald J. Trump in 2015/2016?

The similarities over creating engagement within a capitalistic framing along with the need to only garner at least a minimum amount of audience to support the enterprise seem to be at play.

Compare/contrast this with the NBAs conundrum with the politics of entering the market in China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

Seems to be a variety of different definitions in various areas. How do they differ, how are they the same?

Missing highlight from preceding page:

A property \( P \) is effectively decidible if and only if there is an algorithm (a finite set of instructions for a deterministic computation) ...

Isn't this related to the idea of left & right adjoints in category theory? iirc, there was something about the "canonical construction" of something X being the best solution to a particular problem Y (which had another framing like, "Problem Y is the most difficult problem for which X is a solution")

Different thought: the Curry-Howard-Lambek correspondance connects intuitionistic logic, typed lambda calculus, and cartesian closed categories.

Storytelling tropes play into our system one heuristics and cognitive biases by riding on the tailcoats of familiar story plotlines we've come to know and trust.

What are the ways out of this trap? Creating lists of tropes which should trigger our system one reactions to switch into system two thinking patterns? Can we train ourselves away from these types of misinformation?

Perhaps we might more profitably undermine misinformation by dismantling the underlying tropes the underpin them?

How might we ground Oblique Strategies in research-based outcomes?

http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/meaningless.pdf Paper that argues cluster time series subsequences is "meaningless". tl;dr: radically different distributions end up converging to translations of basic sine or trig functions. Wonder if constructing a simplicial complex does anything?

Note that one researcher changed the algorithm to produce potentially meaningful results

What sorts of prompts or questions could teachers and learners use on a regular basis, similar to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies, to improve their learning environments, creativity, and learning outcomes?

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s204/client/snv?noteGuid=5b7828b7-c4f9-4242-b62f-788eeb44c76e&noteKey=34f69bfeebbb6bca&sn=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernote.com%2Fshard%2Fs204%2Fsh%2F5b7828b7-c4f9-4242-b62f-788eeb44c76e%2F34f69bfeebbb6bca&title=Powerful%252C%2Bnon-judgmental%2Bquestions

Powerful, non-judgmental questions

• If you had to guess, what would have to be true for you to...?
• If you did know...
• (on tangent) ...and how does that relate to you?
• What's not allowing you to...?
• What prevents you from asking…?
• Do you want to go into this?
• What's your criteria for saying yes?
• What would have you say yes?
• What are the things we're lacking?
• What's the scary question that you're not asking?
• What are the qualities you want for [being, action, process, etc.]?
• How would you behave if you were the best in the world at what you do?

I'm starting a list of powerful, non-judgmental questions for coaching or just relationships in general. Here's the starting batch https://t.co/ktsYVxkQna pic.twitter.com/Dq1zQnWqAS

— Tiago Forte (@fortelabs) January 15, 2019

These questions and similar ones (work this out) could be interesting prompts to be included on a syllabus or as starts for an annotated syllabus. (eg: What do you want to get out of this class? What do you already know about these areas? How can we expand on what you know? What would you like to explore?, etc.)

How does idea density influence the rate of creativity?

What are the thermodynamics of creativity? I've probably got enough material for a significant book chapter if not perhaps a book on this topic.

May need a more public friendly name. Burning Creativity?

When did the definition of a so-called "conventional job" emerge? Presumably after the start of the industrial revolution when people began moving from traditional crafts, home work, farm work, and other general subsistence work.

What defines a non-conventional job? Does it subsume caring work? What does David Graeber have to say about this in Bullshit Jobs?

Testing if Google Chrome can make annotations on this Auto Hotkey documentation page.

It (and Brave) can't make highlights or annotations for some reason. The prompt doesn't appear when text is highlighted, why is this? Is there a way to force the prompt to appear?

This is a post I made on the Slack public channel asking about whether or not Hypothes.is indexes replies. A tech support membered confirmed this is true.

However, Obsidian's Hypothes.is plugin does pull replies. It should be noted that default settings don't capture updates to the annotations or tags.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Amsler

Apparently follow my blog. :)

Makes me wonder how we might better process and semantically parse peoples' personal notes, particularly when they're atomic and cross-linked?

Elliptical curves are also use in Ed25519 which are purportedly more robust to side channel attacks. Could there been some useful insight from Wiles and the modularity theorem?

Konik cites Raccoon Nation on PBS which indicates that a racoon's most heightened sense is it's sense of touch, a sense which is increased when the hands are wet or under water.

Is this tied into the popular stories of raccoons which presumably like to "wash their food?" Is it really their sense of touch and affordances which come from that that presses this impression?

Did Rousseau have an influence on Maria Montessori? Where was the origin of her philosophy?

This broadly applies to both oral and literate societies.

Desire, ability, and need are all tough measures however... each one losing a portion of the population along the way.

How can we maintain high proportions across all these variables?

A note taking practice is almost always an evolving process with a variety of different pressures and variables in how it takes form.

List out these variables and pressures.

Oppenheimer doesn't keep track of specific cards (he didn't discuss how he files them, other than loosely together, potentially for specific projects) and finds that this creates a greater amount of surprise for him when searching for ideas within his system.

Missing here is any sort of topic or subject headings.... double check this as it's a key to most systems.

Increasing the quantity and quality of ideas and materials one has at their disposal when one desires to create something new is one of the reasons for having a note taking system.

memory, learning, sense making, improving understanding, improved creativity, and others are also at play... any others? we should have a comprehensive list eventually.

In Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, Malcolm Gladwell comments on the prodigious memories of both Paul Simon with respect to sounds and Lebron James with respect to basketball game play.

Where these sorts of situational memories built and exercised over time or were they natural gifts? Or perhaps natural gifts that were also finely tuned over time?

What is this editor's actual name?

My first guess is "Tools for Thought", but that can't be right. 🤣

US : broiler exports as a % of total production : 1.5% to 15%+

what is the same ratio for India / China

https://catalog.huntington.org/record=b1792186

Is it possible that this miscellany collection is of a zettelkasten nature?

Found via a search of the Huntington Library for Frederic L. Paxson's zettelkasten

that he used it little in later years. His author-title entries usually went into the main file, after the appropriate subject index cards.

This is a curious pattern and not often seen. Apparently it was Paxson's practice to place his author-title entries into his main file following the related subject index cards instead of in a completely separate bibliographical file. He did apparently have one comprised of six scantily filled drawers which he kept in his coat closet, but it was little used in his later years.

What benefits might this relay? It certainly more directly relates the sources closer in physical proximity within one's collection to the notes to which they relate. This might be of particular beneficial use in a topical system where all of one's notes relating to a particular subject are close physically rather than being linked or cross referenced as they were in Luhmann's example.

A particular color of cards may help in this regard to more easily find these sources.

Also keep in mind that Paxson's system was topical-chronological, so there may also be reasons for doing this that fit into his chronological scheme. Was he filing them in sections so that the publication dates of the sources fit into this scheme as well? This may take direct review to better known and understand his practice.

Was sectionalism discussed or mentioned in Colin Woodard's American Nations (2011) as part of an underlying piece of his thesis about American history? It seems applicable.

How did we shift from inter-related subjects and "one knowledge" of rhetoric in the Middle Ages to such strict departmentalization in the academy to only now be moving back toward multi-disciplinary research?

Émile: or On Education was so popular that it was rented out by the hour for additional profit instead of being sold outright. [summary]

When did book rental in education spaces become a business model? What has it looked like historically?

Just as the ideas of liberty and freedom were gifted to us by Indigenous North Americans as is shown by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, is it possible that the same sorts of ideas but within the educational sphere were being transmitted by Indigenous intellectuals to Europe in the same way? Is Rousseau's 18th century book Emile, or On Education of this sort?

What other sorts of philosophies invaded Western thought at this time?

What would schooling look like if it had been historically developed as child-centered rather than subject-centered.

Gary Thomas posits that it's our cleverness which birthed education. Isn't it more likely our extreme ability to mimic others which is more likely from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective?

Were early peoples really "teaching" each other how to make primitive hand axes? Or did we first start out by closely mimicking our neighbors?

For her online book clubs, Maggie Delano defines four broad types of notes as a template for users to have a common language: - terms - propositions (arguments, claims) - questions - sources (references which support the above three types)

I'm fairly sure in a separate context, I've heard that these were broadly lifted from her reading of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a book. (reference? an early session of Dan Allosso's Obsidian Book club?)

These become the backbone of breaking down a book and using them to have a conversation with the author.

Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, classifies creativity in three ways: interpolation, extrapolation, and "true invention". He defines the first two traditionally, but gives a more vague description of the third. What exactly is "true invention"?

How can one invent without any catalyst at all? How can one invent outside of a problem's solution space? outside of the adjacent possible? Does this truly exist? Or doesn't it based on definition.

Just as predictive means may be used on the level of letters, words, and even whole sentences within information theory at the level of specific languages, does early orality sophistication in children help them to become predictive readers at earlier ages?

How could one go about testing this, particularly in a broad, neurodiverse group?

What effect might this have on the learning process of purely oral cultures?

Questons

Index cards for commonplacing?

I know that Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday have talked about their commonplace methods using index cards before, and Mortimer J. Adler et al. used index cards with commonplacing methods in their Great Books/Syntopicon project, but is anyone else using this method? Where or from whom did you learn/hear about using index cards? What benefits do you feel you're getting over a journal or notebook-based method? Mortimer J. Adler smoking a pipe amidst a sea of index cards in boxes with 102 topic labels (examples: Law, World, Love, Life, Being, Sin, Art, Citizen, Change, etc.)

Max Raisin indicated that Gotthard Deutsch read several events with dates out of a little notebook during lectures. Was this really a notebook or possibly a small stack/deck of index cards? The could certainly be easily mistaken....

Check these references

From where did Deutsch learn his zettelkasten method? And when? Bernheim's influential Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (1889) was published long after Deutsch entered seminary in October 1876 and 9 years before he received his Ph.D. in history in1881.

One must potentially posit that the zettelkasten method was being passed along in (at least history circles) long before Bernheim's publication.

I'm hoping that Lustig isn't referring to zettelkasten when he says "novel methods", as they weren't novel, even at that time. Deutsch certainly wasn't the first to have comprehensive encyclopedic visions, as Zettelkasten practitioner Konrad Gessner preceded him by several centuries.

I'm starting to severely question Lustig's familiarity with these particular traditions....

Where does this fit with respect to the zettelkasten tradition and Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos?

Given the time period (1859-1921), what was the potential influence, if any, on Deutsch and his methods by historical methods writers and the evolution of the science of history by Ernst Bernheim or Seignobos/Langlois from that same period?

Curious how Deutsch's 70,000 facts would be middling compared to Luhmann's 90,000? - How many years did Deutsch maintain and collect his version?<br /> - How many publications did he contribute to? - Was his also used for teaching?

Otlet didn't create his collection alone did he? Wasn't it a massive group effort?

Check into Gershom Scholem's collection and use. I've not come across his work in this space.

From his bibliography, it appears that Deutsch was a prolific writer and teacher, so how will Lustig (or others he mentions) make the case that his card index was useless "chips from his workshop"? Certainly he used them in writing his books, articles, and newspaper articles? He also was listed as a significant contributor to an encyclopedia as well.

It'd be interesting to look at the record to see if he taught with them the way Roland Barthes was known to have done.

Who is the father of the method of historical understanding?

https://academic.oup.com/book/9329/chapter-abstract/156108952?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Does Droysen cover any note taking or academic research methods the way Bernheim or Langlois and Seignobos did?

https://forums.nanowrimo.org/t/linking-up-zettelkasten-or-card-index-method-writers/433719

Looking for writers who are using an index card-based, Zettelkasten (German translation: slip box), or fichier boîte method for writing. Both traditional methods in the vein of Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Ende, Anne Lamott, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, or Robert Pirsig as well as Niklas Luhmann-esque methods (perhaps better for non-fiction) are fine.

Commonplace book practitioners are also welcome.

How many index cards will it take you to get to 50,000 words? (Reminder: It’s easier to write a few sentences or an index card at a time than focusing on thousands of words a day…)

Breakthroughs in problem solving and basic research often come from recognizing the significance of overlooked information.

How is this additional information gleaned in these cases? Through combinatorial creativity, chance, other? Can methods for pushing these sorts of additional information be created in the problem solving process?

Thesis to bear out (only tangentially related to this particular text):

Part of the reason that index card files didn't catch on, especially in America, was that they didn't have a solid/concrete name by which they went. The generic term card index subsumed so much in relation to library card catalogues or rolodexes which had very specific functions and individualized names. Other cultures had more descriptive names like zettelkasten or fichier boîte which, while potentially bland within their languages, had more specific names for what they were.