751 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2022
    1. Dr James Ravenscroft @jamesravey@fosstodon.orgFollowing on from my first week with hypothes.is I decided to integrate my annotations into #Joplin so that I have tighter integration of my literature + permanent notes. I've built a VERY alpha Joplin plugin that auto-imports hypothes.is annotations + tags to joplin by following your user atom feed https://brainsteam.co.uk/2022/12/04/joplin-hypothesis/ #PKM #ToolsForThought #hypothesis
    1. I continued to use this analog method right up through my Ph.D. dissertation and first monograph. After a scare in the early stages of researching my second monograph, when I thought all of my index cards had been lost in a flood, I switched to an electronic version: a Word doc containing a table with four cells that I can type or paste information into (and easily back up).
  2. Nov 2022
    1. Natalie @natalie@hcommons.social Follow @chrisaldrichoh wow, your website is mind-blowing! i have to check this out in detail. This is what I hope my future (social) media presence is going to look like one day.A question about syndicating your posts: What happens to the syndicated copies of a post after deleting it?.. my ideal would be: I have full control over my contributions. Probably an illusion? November 27, 2022 at 1:59 AM

      https://hcommons.social/@natalie/109415180134582494

    1. One of the first things that was discovered about building complicated technical hypertext is that you don’t know what the structure will be in advance. And as you’re adding information, you know you want to keep the information, but you frequently don’t know what the information you’re adding is. You can’t describe its type or its nature or its importance in advance. You just suspect that it’s going to be pertinent somehow. Or you see a terrific quotation that you know will be great to use, but you don’t know when that quotation will fit or even if it’ll fit in this book, or if you’ll have to save it for something else. Finding ways to say, “I think these two things are related somehow, but I don’t want to commit myself yet as to exactly how,” turns out to be quite an interesting design problem. Hypertext people started out, in fact, by inventing the outliner very early — 1968. And outliners are terrific if you already know the structure of your information space. But hierarchies are not good if you’re just guessing about how things fit together because you tend to build great elaborate structures that turn out to be wrong, and you have to unbuild them, and then you’ve got a terrible pile on your desk.

      Connecting ideas across space and time when you don't know how they'll fully relate in advance is a tough design problem.

      Outliner programs, first developed for computers in 1968, are great if you know the structure of a space in advance, but creating hierarchies by guessing about relationships in advance often turn out wrong or create other problems as one progresses.

    1. What would a secure Federated PMK / archive network backed by a minimal blockchain look like?

      Possibly like Holochain (which is distinct from the blockchain architecture). Blockchain only seems helpful if you need all of the following: - a database - immutability - distributed data - decentralized & totally trustless - append only - cryptographically secure assurance

      Confer Brandon Enright's provocative talk "Blockchain is Bullshit" for an elaboration of these features. The first 10 or so minutes is mostly uninsightful trolling, so the link takes one to his argument about the key features of blockchain.

      AFAICT, Holochain eases the feature of "decentralized", although Laurie Voss suggests that it's better to think of Bitcoin & Ethereum as "distributed" (in both the structure & control).

      In Voss' taxonomy, I suspect that Holochain's structure would be "distributed" (ie, "No total point of failure, all nodes work on shared goal") and control would be "federated" (ie, "Limited set of shared rules, multiple overlapping/conflicting rules below")

    1. My highlights are littered with notes to self and action items - it's not all pure knowledge.

      this is a good example of the personal side of note taking that isn't always outwardly seen

      each person's notes will be personal to them

    1. I'm pretty much done thinking about "tools for thought". It quickly becomes an infinity of navel gazing and a complete waste of time. It's an easy topic for budding "influencers" because you don't actually need to know anything. All they need is to spend some time with a new bit of software and tell people how they should use it and the next thing you know they're selling an online course via their budding YouTube channel.

      scathing, but broadly true...

    1. If you want it to automatically check/fix lint errors like this, I would recommend setting up https://github.com/gabyx/githooks in your dev environment. We have a pre-commit hook that automatically runs rubocop for any changed files whenever you try to do a commit. I find it helpful anyway. (Nick prefers a VS Code extension that actually runs it every time he saves a file, which is oftener than I prefer but works for him.)
  3. Oct 2022
    1. now we need a much needed and truer history of zetelcaston and thankfully Chris aldricks is the person to provide us that

      We need a much needed and truer history of zettelkasten and thankfully Chris Aldrich is the person to provide us that. Stop reading all those other zettelkasten articles until you have a broader understanding of the historical perspective of where all this came from. I can't tell you how much I learned. There was more I didn't know than I did know by a... and it wasn't even close. So thank you Chris. You definitely need to read The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten.<br /> —Nick Milo, Linking Your Thinking, 2022-10-26,

    1. Each user and each expert has incentives to work separately toward theconstruction of such a Garden. The users get to find answers, and expertscan rid themselves of commonly asked questions.

      This may help me with my own research needs to crowdsource peer review and create "living peer reviews."

    2. Several important considerations behind Answer Garden include:

      This feels entirely different from modern organizational memory aids like Almanac (https://almanac.io/)!

    3. ngineerschose not to go to the channel of the highest quality for technical informa-tion, but rather to go to the channel of highest accessibility (i.e., lowestpsychological cost). Allen [1977] argued that the psychological cost was inthe potential lack of reciprocity between giving and obtaining informationand in the status implications of admitting ignorance.

      My last company had a page in their wiki with acronyms and downloadable Excel spreadsheets!

    4. information technology can support organizational memory in twoways, either by making recorded knowledge retrievable or by makingindividuals with knowledge accessible

      I tried to do this in my last role as a lab manager and we have a PhD student spreadsheet I added variables to for this specific purpose.

      Check it out here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10qMAJjYc7fTGLLSmvrD7pk8v1KeHJYLC47JMBvqxG8A/edit?usp=sharing

    5. n other words, wewant to minimize the upstream costs of an organizational memory mecha-nism and make the downstream payoffs clear

      Just avoid Jira!

    1. Our argument issimply that for working, learning, and innovating to thrive collectively depends onlinking these three, in theory and in practice, more closely, more realistically, andmore reflectively than is generally the case at present.

      iSchools can do this. There are individuals studying all three at UMD's iSchool. But that knowledge is largely theoretical or contextualized to particular research programs. It's innert, and not practiced (only preached).

  4. cosma.graphlab.fr cosma.graphlab.fr
    1. https://cosma.graphlab.fr/<br /> https://cosma.graphlab.fr/en/

      When did this come out?

      Appears to be a visualization tool for knowledge work. They recommend it for use with Zettlr, but it looks like it would work with other text based tools. Point it at markdown files to create graphs apparently.

      This looks like the sort of standards based tool that would allow greater flexibility when using various data stores that we talk about in Friends of the Link.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Arthur Perret </span> in And you, what are you doing? (<time class='dt-published'>08/31/2022 02:40:03</time>)</cite></small>

      @flancian

    1. Examining the cards, it becomes clear that the index constitutes not a mythic totalhistory but a specific set of facts and data that piqued Deutsch’s interest and whichreflected his personal research priorities (see Figure 2).

      Zettelkasten, if nothing else, are a close reflection of the interests of the author who collected them.

      link: Ahrens mentions this

    1. En cas de non-respect de la Loi, la Commission d’accès à l’information pourra imposer des sanctionsimportantes, qui pourraient s’élever jusqu’à 25 M$ ou à 4 % du chiffre d’affaires mondial. Cette sanctionsera proportionnelle, notamment, à la gravité du manquement et à la capacité de payer de l’entreprise.ENTREPRISES
  5. Sep 2022
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2HegcwDRnU

      Makes the argument that note taking is an information system, and if it is, then we can use the research from the corpus of information system (IS) theory to examine how to take better notes.

      He looks at the Wang and Wang 2006 research and applies their framework of "complete, meaningful, unambiguous, and correct" dimensions of data quality to example note areas of study notes, project management notes (or to do lists) and recipes.

      Looks at dimensions of data quality from Mahanti, 2019.


      What is the difference between notes and annotations?

    1. wissenschaft

      roughly translated as the systematic pursuit of knowledge, learning, and scholarship (especially in contrast with application).

      It was roughly similar to our current "science" but retains a broader meaning which includes the humanities.

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

    1. Sometimes it will be enoughto have analysed the text mentally : it is not alwaysnecessary to put down in black and white the wholecontents of a document ; in such cases we simplyenter the points of which we intend to make use.But against the ever-present danger oi substitutingone's personal impressions for the text there is onlyone real safeguard ; it should be made an invariablerule never on any account to make an extract froma document, or a partial analysis of it, without

      having first made a comprehensive analysis of it mentally, if not on paper.

    1. Yolanda Gibb: How a mindset of Ambidextrous Creativity can get you generating AND exploiting your ideas?

      https://lu.ma/poo355tg

      Ambidextrous creativity is having a balance between exploration and subsequent exploitation of those explorations.

      Small companies and individuals are good at exploration, but often less good at exploitation.

      Triple loop learning<br /> this would visually form a spiral (versus overlap)<br /> - Single loop learning: doing things right (correcting mistakes)<br /> - double loop learning: doing the right things (causality)<br /> - triple loop learning: why these systems and processes (learning to learn)

      Assets<br /> Relational capital * Structural capital - pkm is part of this<br /> there's value in a well structured PKM for a particualr thing as it's been used and tested over time; this is one of the issues with LYT or Second Brain (PARA, et al.) how well-tested are these? How well designed?<br /> * Structural capital is the part that stays at the office when all the people have gone home * Human Capital

      Eleanor Konik

      4 Es of cognition<br /> * embodied * embedded * enacted * extended<br /> by way of extra-cranial processes

      see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7250653/

      Yolanda Gibb's book<br /> Entrepreneurship, Neurodiversity & Gender: Exploring Opportunities for Enterprise and Self-employment As Pathways to Fulfilling Lives https://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurship-Neurodiversity-Gender-Opportunities-Self-employment/dp/1800430582

      Tools: - Ryyan - for literature searches - NVIVO - Obsidian - many others including getting out into one's environment

      NVIVO<br /> https://www.qsrinternational.com/nvivo-qualitative-data-analysis-software/home

      a software program used for qualitative and mixed-methods research. Specifically, it is used for the analysis of unstructured text, audio, video, and image data, including (but not limited to) interviews, focus groups, surveys, social media, and journal articles.

      Ryyan<br /> https://www.rayyan.ai/<br /> for organizing, managing, and accelerating collaborative literature reviews

    1. https://twitter.com/Extended_Brain/status/1563703042125340680

      Replying to @DannyHatcher. 1. Competition among apps makes them add unnecessary bells and whistles. 2. Trying to be all: GTD, ZK, Sticky Notes, proj mgmt, collaboration, workflow 3. Plugins are good for developers, bad for users https://t.co/4fbQ2nwdYd

      — Extended Brain (@Extended_Brain) August 28, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Part two sounds a lot like zettelkasten overreach https://boffosocko.com/2022/02/05/zettelkasten-overreach/

      Part one is similar to the issue competing software companies have in attempting to check all the boxes on a supposed list of features without thinking about what their tool is used for in practice. (Isn't there a name for this specific phenomenon besides "mission creep"?)

    1. diario personal, pudiéramos asimilarlo a lo que en el 2trabajo de investigacion se llama “cuaderno de notas",el cual \\\es una herramienta en donde en forma cronoldgica se vaanotando todo lo que se hace,asi como los hechos que tienencierta significacion: de donde salen aquellos documentos quevamos recogiendo y que parece importante guardarlos.

      Diario personal... en el que se va contando lo que se hace de forma cronológica.

  6. Aug 2022
    1. Update now that I'm three years in to my PhD program and am about to start on my lit reviews and dissertation research... Holy Forking Shirtballs, am I glad I started my ZK back in 2020!!! * I cannot tell you how often I've used it to write my course papers. * I cannot tell you how often I've had it open during class discussions to back up my points. * I cannot tell you how lazy I've gotten with some of my entries (copying and pasting text instead of reworking it into my own words), and how much I wish I had taken the time to translate those entries for myself.
    1. When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husband’s last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-five—the Russian novelist’s only surviving heir, and translator of many of his books—has wrestled for three decades with the decision of whether to honor his father’s wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

      Nabokov's wishes were that his heirs burn the index cards on which he had handwritten the beginning of his unfinished novel The Original of Laura. His wife Vera, not able to destroy her husband's work, couldn't do it, so the decision fell to their son Dimitri. Having translated many of his father's works previously, Dimitri Nabokov ultimately allowed Penguin the right to publish the unfinished novel.

    1. I was doing some random searches for older material on zettelkasten in German and came across this.

      Apparently I've come across this before in a similar context: https://hypothes.is/a/CsgyjAXQEeyMfoN7zLcs0w

      The description now makes me want to read it all the more!

      This is a book about a box that contained the world. The box was the Picture Academy for the Young, a popular encyclopedia in pictures invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in eighteenth-century Germany. Children were expected to cut out the pictures from the Academy, glue them onto cards, and arrange those cards in ordered compartments—the whole world filed in a box of images.

      As Anke te Heesen demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order. The box, and its images from nature, myth, and biblical history, were intended to teach children how to collect, store, and order knowledge. te Heesen compares the Academy with other aspects of Enlightenment material culture, such as commercial warehouses and natural history cabinets, to show how the kinds of collecting and ordering practices taught by the Academy shaped both the developing middle class in Germany and Enlightenment thought. The World in a Box, illustrated with a multitude of images of and from Stoy's Academy, offers a glimpse into a time when it was believed that knowledge could be contained and controlled.

      Given the portions about knowledge and control, it might also be of interest to @remikalir wrt his coming book.

    1. The bibliography should be placed nextafter the ta&e of contents, because the instructor alwayswishes to examine it before reading the text of the essay.

      Surprising! particularly since they traditionally come at the end.

      Though for teaching purposes, I can definitely see a professor wanting it up front. I also frequently skim through bibliographies before starting reading works now, though I didn't do this in the past. Reading a bibliography first is an excellent way to establish common context with an author however.

    1. Chris Aldrich 00:02:33 um like oh yeah you know the most familiar to you yeah yeah and and he's yeah that guy is uh brilliant if you want to know the the ins and outs and deep history of note taking note-taking and even Beyond commonplace books going 00:02:47 back to the 15th century yeah

      That guy is brilliant!

      https://youtu.be/YiTHxQrFnxI?t=150

      <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/YiTHxQrFnxI" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
    1. Chris Aldrichs Blog ist sehr gefährlich, denn, wenn man einmal darin zu lesen angefangen hat, dann kommt man so schnell nicht mehr davon los. Ich selbst wurde durch einen bestimmten Beitrag angelockt und ertappe mich jetzt immer wieder dabei, dass ich durch sämtliche Beiträge und Pages seines Blogs stöbere. Er selbst nutzt sein Weblog wie folgt: I use this website as my primary hub for online identity and communication. It’s also my online commonplace book. Schon alleine damit ist geklärt, warum man so viele Dinge dort entdecken kann.  Ich komme auf alle Fälle weiterhin regelmäßig dort vorbei und einen seiner Feeds -- alle wären wohl nicht zu händeln -- habe ich in meinem Reader übernommen.

      https://kuemmerle.name/foren/topic/chris-aldrich#postid-148

      Google Translate:

      Chris Aldrich 's blog is very dangerous because once you start reading it, it's hard to get off. I myself was lured by a certain post and now find myself rummaging through all the posts and pages on his blog.

      He himself uses his weblog as follows:

      I use this website as my primary hub for online identity and communication. It's also my online common place book.

      That alone explains why you can discover so many things there. In any case, I continue to visit there regularly and I have adopted one of his feeds -- all of them would probably not be manageable -- in my reader.

    1. The way you begin writing notes, observations, and ideas may not resemble the final form of the output you want to create. And the ideas, interpretations, and themes on which you end up concentrating may also not be what you had originally anticipated. Don’t worry about that. Stay open to discovery.

      Note-making is not perfection

      Keep in mind that the notes are not the final output…they are a means to the final output. Polishing will come later.

      This makes me wonder about the email conversation I had with Dan Whaley about my use of Hypothesis. He notes that my annotations were like personal notemaking rather than conversational between community members (as I presume others are using Hypothesis to do). These annotations are feeding into my PKM tool, but I said I wasn’t opposed to conversations springing up from them. (In fact, when that has happened, that has been quite useful.) But I wonder if that is putting pressure on me to make these notes more perfect than if I made them private to only feed into my PKM.

    1. The daily cadence of a DNP frames the system as a kind of personal diary. Which we may not necessarily want in a personal knowledge base.

      This sounds similar to my criticism of zettelkasten overreach.

      See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/02/05/zettelkasten-overreach/

    1. https://www.kevinmarks.com/memex.html

      I got stuck over the weekend, so I totally missed Kevin Marks' memex demo at IndieWebCamp's Create Day, but it is an interesting little UI experiment.

      I'll always maintain that Vannevar Bush really harmed the first few generations of web development by not mentioning the word commonplace book in his conceptualization. Marks heals some of this wound by explicitly tying the idea of memex to that of the zettelkasten however. John Borthwick even mentions the idea of "networked commonplace books". [I suspect a little birdie may have nudged this perspective as catnip to grab my attention—a ruse which is highly effective.]

      Some of Kevin's conceptualization reminds me a bit of Jerry Michalski's use of The Brain which provides a specific visual branching of ideas based on the links and their positions on the page: the main idea in the center, parent ideas above it, sibling ideas to the right/left and child ideas below it. I don't think it's got the idea of incoming or outgoing links, but having a visual location on the page for incoming links (my own site has incoming ones at the bottom as comments or responses) can be valuable.

      I'm also reminded a bit of Kartik Prabhu's experiments with marginalia and webmention on his website which plays around with these ideas as well as their visual placement on the page in different methods.

      MIT MediaLab's Fold site (details) was also an interesting sort of UI experiment in this space.

      It also seems a bit reminiscent of Kevin Mark's experiments with hovercards in the past as well, which might be an interesting way to do the outgoing links part.

      Next up, I'd love to see larger branching visualizations of these sorts of things across multiple sites... Who will show us those "associative trails"?

      Another potential framing for what we're all really doing is building digital versions of Indigenous Australian's songlines across the web. Perhaps this may help realize Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's dream for a "third archive"?

    1. I like to imagine all the thoughts and ideas I’vecollected in my system of notes as a forest. I imagine itas three-dimensional, because the trains of thought I’vebeen working on for some time look like trees, withbranches of argument, point, and counterpoint andleaves of source-based evidence. Actually, the forest isfour-dimensional, because it changes over time, growingas I add more to it. A piece of output I make using thisforest of thoughts is like a path through the woods. It’sa one-dimensional narrative or interpretation that startsat one point, moves in a line or an arc (sometimes azig-zag) through the woods, touching some but not allof the trees and leaves. I like this imagery, because itsuggests there are many ways to move through the forest.
  7. Jul 2022
    1. https://archive.org/details/britannica_propaedia/mode/2up

      The one-volume Propædia is the first of three parts of the 15th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, the other two being the 12-volume Micropædia and the 17-volume Macropædia. The Propædia is intended as a topical organization of the Britannica's contents, complementary to the alphabetical organization of the other two parts. Introduced in 1974 with the 15th edition, the Propædia and Micropædia were intended to replace the Index of the 14th edition; however, after widespread criticism, the Britannica restored the Index as a two-volume set in 1985. ==The core of the Propædia is its Outline of Knowledge, which seeks to provide a logical framework for all human knowledge==; however, the Propædia also has several appendices listing the staff members, advisors and contributors to all three parts of the Britannica.

      link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/ISNt8BBPEe2oTse1NiJv4w

    1. Because I wanted to make use of a unified version of the overall universe of knowledge as a structural framework, I ended up using the Outline of Knowledge (OoK) in the Propædia volume that was part of Encyclopedia Britannica 15th edition, first published 1974, the final version of which (2010) is archived at -- where else? -- the Internet Archive.

      The Outline of Knowledge appears in the Propædia volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is similar to various olther classification systems like the Dewey Decimal system or the Universal Decimal Classification.

    1. “blank slates”
    2. The excitement over PKM has spilled over into blogs,YouTube channels, online courses, and books. Like otherproductivity hacks of the past (The One Minute Manager,Getting Things Done, etc.), techniques such as “LinkingYour Thinking”, “Writing Smart Notes”, or “Building aSecond Brain” contain a lot of useful ideas and havesometimes launched careers for their authors.

      a.k.a. productivity porn

    1. https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit

      Sébastien Dubois selling an Obsidian Starter Kit for €19.99 on Gumroad.

      Looks like it's got lots of support and description of many of the big buzz words in the personal knowledge management space. Not sure how it would work with everything and the kitchen sink thrown in.

      found via https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalKnowledgeMgmt/comments/w8dw94/obsidian_starter_kit/

    1. If we can rightly identify the seeds (or spores) we will know what type of conditions they will thrive in. In similar ways, some people need different care, handling and environment to thrive. Perhaps with the right conditions, they too can make contributions to the world in small but meaningful ways – and who can truly judge the true magnitude of something?

      Conditions of care are individual

      There will be a range of environmental and supportive measures…perhaps even smoothing like a bell curve distribution with people that thrive in conditions on the long tails on the long tails (or need long tails of support to thrive).

    1. Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity. Get started with searx by using one of the Searx-instances. If you don’t trust anyone, you can set up your own, see Installation.

      https://searx.github.io/searx/

      Mentioned by Taylor Jadin.

    1. Mander, R., Salomon, G. and Wong, Y. A PileMetaphor for Supporting Casual Organisationof Information. Proceedings of Human Factorsin Computing Systems CHI’92, pp 627-634,1992.

      The quote from this paper references Mander 1992:

      It seems that knowledge workers use physical space, such as desks or floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use [12].

      leads me to believe that the original paper has information which supports office workers using their physical environments as thinking and memory spaces much as indigenous peoples have for their knowledge management systems using orality and memory.

    2. Kidd, Alison. “The Marks Are on the Knowledge Worker.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 186–91. CHI ’94. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 1994. https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191740.

    1. never open the browser without knowing where it's going and i never get caught up in that stupid trick where you know you start going to so you don't need to and you forget why you're on the internet

      Deep inter-app linking to combat unfocused app activation

  8. Jun 2022
    1. We've yet to see note-taking platforms meaningfully add AI affordances into their systems, but there are hints at how they could in other platforms.

      A promising project is Paul Bricman's Conceptarium.

    2. None of the automations I've suggested above are impractically complex or technologically impossible.

      Exactly. For most apps, they're simply your classical macros.

    1. The reason these apps are great for such a broad range of use cases is they give users really strong data structures to work within.

      Inside the very specific realm of personal knowledge bases, TiddlyWiki is the killer app when it comes to using blocks and having structured, translatable data behind them.

    1. personal knowledge management (#PKM),#SecondBrain, #BASB, or #toolsforthought. Share your toptakeaways from this book or anything else you’ve realized ordiscovered

      smart marketing for those who may be more naïve...

    2. That is why building a Second Brain is a journey of personalgrowth. As your information environment changes, the way yourmind operates starts to be transformed.

      This also happens with the techniques of orality, but from an entirely different perspective. Again, these methods are totally invisible even to an expert on productivity and personal knowledge management.

      Not even a mention here of the ancient Greeks bemoaning the invention of literacy as papering over valuable memory.

    3. You might have arrived at this book because you heard about thisnew field called personal knowledge management, or maybe whenyou were trying to find guidance in how to use a cool new notetakingapp. Maybe you were drawn in by the promise of new techniques forenhancing your productivity, or perhaps it was the allure of asystematic approach to creativity.

      The broad audiences for this book.

      This may have been better place in the introduction to draw these people in.

    1. I have wasted my life.

      Well...OK, this is the gut punch. From my own personal experience on my farm, I feel the same. This morning I saw a a pair of juvenile greater blue herons flying across the creek and then gone. We have at least three nesting pairs of herons on our farm down by the same creek. I feel a wildly inappropriate sense of having helped this brand new mated pair of herons come into being. And then I feel that nothing else in my academic life compares to that. I, too, have wasted my life. It is not a reasonable line of argument. It is a gut feelilng as Wright lays the earlier observational truth upon us. Who can stand in the wake of nature's creative force? Pan always wins.

      And the other side of that line is one that says, "It is my life to 'waste'. What you call waste is all of the glorioius connection. A culture that does not value this simple idleness, that condemns it, that is the waste.

    1. I owe a big thank you to Chris Aldrich too. As it was his website I came across that inspired me to bring my website back to what I have always wanted it to be. Hopefully, thanks to the indieweb helper plugins I have installed, Chris may just get notified on his website and post a reply back — from his website over to mine using the webmention protocol.

      :)

    1. https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/32f9fc36-6963-9ee0-9b44-a89112919e29/attachments/6492d41a-73b2-20d8-b145-3283598c612b

      A fantastic example of an extensive mind map from Jerry Michalski using The Brain.

      There are lots of interesting links and resources, but on the whole

      How many of the nodes actually have specific notes, explicit ideas, annotations, or excerpts within them?

      Without these, it's an interesting map and provides some broad context, but removes local specific context of who Jerry is and how he explicitly thinks. One can review the overarching parts to extract what his biases may be based on availability heuristics, but in areas of conflicting ideas which have relatively equal numbers of links within a particular area, one may not be able to discern arguments from each other.

      Still a fascinating start and something not commonly seen in the broader literature.

      I'll also note that even in a small sample of one video call with Jerry sharing his screen while we talked about a broad sub-topic it's interesting to see his prior contexts as we conversed. I've only ever had similar experiences with Bill Seitz who regularly drops links to his wiki pages in this sort of way or Kevin Marks (usually in text chat contexts and less frequently in video calls/conversations) who drops links to his extensive blogging history which also serves to add his prior thoughts and contextualizations.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G60o31ay_D0

      Maintaining multiple blogs or websites for each topic one is interested in can be exhausting.

      Example: Dan Allosso indicates that he's gotten overwhelmed at keeping things "everywhere" rather than in one place. (~4:40)

  9. May 2022
    1. Informationbecomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—only when weput it to use. You gain confidence in what you know only when youknow that it works. Until you do, it’s just a theory.

      motivational...

    2. Remembering, Connecting, Creating: The Three Stages ofPersonal Knowledge Management
    3. This isn’t the same notetaking you learned in school

      Most people weren't taught positive or even useful note taking skills in school, and this is a massive problem in a knowledge-based and knowledge privileged society.

    4. the lessons you will find within thesepages are built on timeless and unchanging principles

      The ideas behind knowledge management are largely timeless, but they are far from unchanging. They have evolved slowly over 2000+ years until we broadly threw many of them away in the early 20th century.

      One only need read a few pages of Ann M. Blair's Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age to see some of the changes and shifts within the space from the 1400s on.

    1. in my experience it has its head has a similar pattern to what henry ford did to the automobile 01:20:31 industry so before him it was basically like a few people built one car at a time and he basically broke up the process so you had like i don't know how many but 01:20:43 like dozens people a dozen people and each individual had just one one motion to do and the industrialization specialization right yeah and the the result was that 01:20:56 each individual didn't know anything and all the knowledge was in the process and my suspicion is that the promise of the settle custom that the paper 01:21:08 just write themselves it's like a very prominent process a promise around the telecast method lead to the to the thinking that you basically reduce your 01:21:20 the need for yourself and all the intelligence all the proficiency is put into a system and you have something doing for you and you treat yourself more like a like a 01:21:33 worker on a an assembly line just being and having all just a simple a simple motion that you have to do and then the end product will be 01:21:45 but will be very complex and very sophisticated because the intelligence is embedded in the process

      Sascha Fast analogizes the writing process using a zettelkasten to Henry Ford's assembly line for building cars. Each worker on the assembly line has a limited bit of knowledge for their individual part of the process, but most of the knowledge and value is built into the overarching process itself. This makes the overall system quicker and more efficient.

      Similarly with note taking, each individual portion of the process is simple and self-contained, but it allows the writer to create a much more creative and complex piece in the end. Here an individual can accomplish all of the individual steps in a self-contained way while focusing on individual steps without becoming lost in the subsequent steps which would otherwise require a tremendous additional amount of energy.

    1. A seguito della procedura avviata tra la Biblioteca Braidense e gli eredi di Umberto Eco nel 2018, con la registrazione del provvedimento da parte della Corte dei Conti si è concluso infatti in questi giorni l’iter, iniziato nel 2017, di acquisizione della Biblioteca di libri antichi denominata “Bibliotheca semiologica curiosa, lunatica, magica et pneumatica” formata da Umberto Eco nel corso della sua attività di bibliofilo. La collezione antica, che conta circa 1.200 edizioni anteriori al Novecento, un patrimonio che comprende 36 incunaboli e 380 volumi stampati tra il XVI e il XIX secolo sarà custodita dalla Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense di Milano, la Biblioteca Statale che ne garantirà la conservazione, la valorizzazione e la fruizione a studenti e studiosi. Un comitato scientifico formato da cinque membri, di cui due nominati dagli Eredi Eco e due dal Mibact, si occuperà di stabilire le modalità di conservazione anche al fine di garantirne l’unitarietà della consultazione digitale.

      Following the death of Umberto Eco, La Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan acquired a portion of his collection of books called the “Bibliotheca semiologica curious, lunatic, magical and pneumatic”. The collection comprised about 1,200 antique book including 36 incunabula and 380 volumes printed between the 16th and 19th centuries.

      https://bibliotecabraidense.org/la-biblioteca-braidense-acquisisce-la-biblioteca-di-libri-antichi-di-umberto-eco/

    1. the underprivileged are priced out of the dental-treatment system yet perversely held responsible for their dental condition.

      How does this happen?

      Is it the idea of "personal responsibility" and "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" philosophy combined with lack of any actual support and/or education?

      There has to be a better phrase or word to define the perverse sort of philosophy espoused by many in the Republican party about this sort of "personal responsibility".

      It feels somewhat akin to the idea of privatize profits and socialize the losses. The social loss is definitely one that is pushed off onto the individual, but who's profiting? Is it really so expensive to fix this problem? Isn't the loss to society and public health akin to the Million Dollar Murray problem?

      Wouldn't each individual's responsibility be better tied to the collective good as well as their own outcomes? How can the two be bound together to improve outcomes for everyone all around?

    1. https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/

      The PKM space has gotten crazy, but mostly through bad practice, lack of history, and hype. There are a few valid points I see mirrored here, but on the whole this piece is broadly off base due to a lack of proper experience, practice and study. I definitely would recommend he take a paid course to fix the issue, but delve more deeply into recommended historical practices.

    2. But the current discourse has gotten out of hand.

      The current discourse around personal knowledge management is out of hand, but not necessarily for all the reasons stated here. There are many issues and we have a lot of history and practice to recover. We also have lost sight of the "why are we doing this?" question before jumping into some of these practices with both feet.

    3. Apps and courses that help you make these pretty pictures are not helping you to advance your knowledge or to write increasingly insightful works.

      Based on my preliminary reading of Tiago Forte's forthcoming book, this seems broadly true.

    4. That people show off these illegible globs in public only makes sense from a signaling perspective: They are saying, “look at how many nodes I have in my brain, amazing nodes, I have so many nodes that a peon such as yourself can’t even guess what’s going on here!”

      I have tongue-in-cheek posted a massive graph indicating that it was only a "few days work" to see what sort of reaction it would get. No one batted an eyelash, which makes me think that too many are "collectors" and aren't actually building something or using their system correctly.

      There is a dearth of solid examples of these systems online for people to look at and evaluate critically. This is killing the space slowly.

    5. The single most widely shared marketing image for Roam Research

      This useless knowledge graph is one of the worst parts about Roam Research. It is bad UI and wholly unusable.

    6. Many writers have devised lots of little systems, and the fact that everyone into PKM mentions this one guy supports my argument. What percentage of history's greatest and most prolific writers did not use a Zettelkasten? More than 99%, probably. Luhmann is an exception that proves the rule.

      There is a heavy availability heuristic at play here. Most people in the recent/modern PKM space are enamored with the idea of zettelkasten and no one (or very few) have delved in more deeply to the history to uncover more than Luhmann. There definitely are many, many more. If we expand the circle to include looser forms like the commonplace book then we find that nearly every major thinker since the Renaissance kept some sort of note taking system and it's highly likely that their work was heavily influenced by their notes, notebooks, and commonplace books.

      Hell, Newton invented the calculus in his waste book, a form of pre-commonplace book from which he apparently never got his temporary notes out into a more personal permanent form.

      A short trip to even the scant references on the Wikipedia pages for commonplace book and zettelkasten will reveal a fraction of the extant examples.

    7. All you have to do is take cute little notes all the time, and the hard work is magically done for you!

      This sounds clever, but it belies the amount of work that can go into such systems on the font end instead of on the back end. It also sounds as if the author hasn't used such a system to even a low level of critical mass to begin discovering any serendipity or finding any insight in their links.

    8. Everyone is overloaded with information thanks to the digital revolution, so—the PKM people tell us—we need new software and systems to survive and thrive.

      Information overload goes back much further in history than the digital revolution. I might argue that information managers have tamed large portions of the beast already and we've forgotten many of the methods and as a result we're now either reinventing or rediscovering them as we transfer them to the digital space.

    1. For example, Campbell talks about personal cyberinfrastructures when he suggests providing students with hosting space and their own domain as soon as they start their studies: Suppose that when students matriculate, they are assigned their own web servers […] As part of the first-year orientation, each student would pick a domain name […] students would build out their digital presences in an environment made of the medium of the web itself. […] In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure— one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career—and beyond. (Campbell, 2013, p. 101–102)

      Giving a student their own cyberinfrastructures, a set of digital tools, is not too dissimilar from encouraging them to bring tools like notebooks, paper, index cards, pens, and paper in the early 20th century or slate and chalk generations earlier.

      Having the best tools for the job and showing them how to use them is paramount in education. Too often we take our tools for thought for granted in the education space. Students aren't actively taught to use their pens and paper, their voices, their memories, or their digital technologies in the ways that they had been in the past. In the past decade we've focused more on digital technologies, in part, because the teachers were learning to use them in tandem with their students, but this isn't the case with note taking methods like commonplacing, card indexes (or zettelkasten). Some of these methods have been taken for granted to such an extent that some of them are no longer commonplace within education.


      I'll quickly note that they don't seem to have a reference to Campbell in their list. (oops!) Presumably they're referencing Gardner Campbell, though his concept here seems to date to 2009 and was mentioned heavily in the ds106 community.

    1. Individuals who harbor germline pathogenic variants in DICER1 (MIM #601200) have an increased risk for a variety of benign and malignant tumors.

      Gene name: DICER1 PMID: 31952842 HGNCID: none found Inheritance pattern: autosomal dominant Disease entity: cervical embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma and ovarian sex-cord stromal tumors Mutation: Germline Zygosity: heterozygous Variant: none found Family info: personal or family history of ovarian sex-cord stromal tumor Case: 64 females aged 2 to 72 years; non-Hispanic white families CasePresentingHPOs: benign/malignant tumors CasePreviousTesting: physical examination, hormone testing, pelvic ultrasound gnomAD: N/A mutation type: germline pathogenic variation

  10. Apr 2022
    1. hear.

      This entire stanza (VII) could be a work of art by itself. The speaker's description of the ever-changing wind, personifying it in a truly fantastic and vivid manner, is incredible. It is almost as if I were in his place, watching the wind blow and feeling its rush on my skin.

    2. Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.

      I, for one, would bee incredibly honored to make a friend who can say something like this about me.

    1. To read through my life, even as an incomplete picture, fits the permanence I’m envisioning for the site.

      If one thinks of a personal website as a performance, what is really being performed by the author?

      Links and cross links, well done, within a website can provide a garden of forking paths by which a particular reader might explore a blog despite the fact that there is often a chronological time order imposed upon it.

      Link this to the idea of using a zettelkasten as a biography of a writer, but one with thousands of crisscrossing links.

    1. Every work of art can be read, according to Eco, in three distinct ways: the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical.

      Umberto Eco indicates that every work of art can be read in one of three ways: - moral, - allegorical - anagogical

      Compare this to early Christianities which had various different readings of the scriptures.

      Relate this also to the idea of Heraclitus and the not stepping into the same river twice as a viewer can view a work multiple times in different physical and personal contexts which will change their mood and interpretation of the work.

    1. 3. Who are you annotating with? Learning usually needs a certain degree of protection, a safe space. Groups can provide that, but public space often less so. In Hypothes.is who are you annotating with? Everybody? Specific groups of learners? Just yourself and one or two others? All of that, depending on the text you’re annotating? How granular is your control over the sharing with groups, so that you can choose your level of learning safety?

      This is a great question and I ask it frequently with many different answers.

      I've not seen specific numbers, but I suspect that the majority of Hypothes.is users are annotating in small private groups/classes using their learning management system (LMS) integrations through their university. As a result, using it and hoping for a big social experience is going to be discouraging for most.

      Of course this doesn't mean that no one is out there. After all, here you are following my RSS feed of annotations and asking these questions!

      I'd say that 95+% or more of my annotations are ultimately for my own learning and ends. If others stumble upon them and find them interesting, then great! But I'm not really here for them.

      As more people have begun using Hypothes.is over the past few years I have slowly but surely run into people hiding in the margins of texts and quietly interacted with them and begun to know some of them. Often they're also on Twitter or have their own websites too which only adds to the social glue. It has been one of the slowest social media experiences I've ever had (even in comparison to old school blogging where discovery is much higher in general use). There has been a small uptick (anecdotally) in Hypothes.is use by some in the note taking application space (Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq, etc.), so I've seen some of them from time to time.

      I can only think of one time in the last five or so years in which I happened to be "in a text" and a total stranger was coincidentally reading and annotating at the same time. There have been a few times I've specifically been in a shared text with a small group annotating simultaneously. Other than this it's all been asynchronous experiences.

      There are a few people working at some of the social side of Hypothes.is if you're searching for it, though even their Hypothes.is presences may seem as sparse as your own at present @tonz.

      Some examples:

      @peterhagen Has built an alternate interface for the main Hypothes.is feed that adds some additional discovery dimensions you might find interesting. It highlights some frequent annotators and provide a more visual feed of what's happening on the public Hypothes.is timeline as well as data from HackerNews.

      @flancian maintains anagora.org, which is like a planet of wikis and related applications, where he keeps a list of annotations on Hypothes.is by members of the collective at https://anagora.org/latest

      @tomcritchlow has experimented with using Hypothes.is as a "traditional" comments section on his personal website.

      @remikalir has a nice little tool https://crowdlaaers.org/ for looking at documents with lots of annotations.

      Right now, I'm also in an Obsidian-based book club run by Dan Allosso in which some of us are actively annotating the two books using Hypothes.is and dovetailing some of this with activity in a shared Obsidian vault. see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/24/55803196/. While there is a small private group for our annotations a few of us are still annotating the books in public. Perhaps if I had a group of people who were heavily interested in keeping a group going on a regular basis, I might find the value in it, but until then public is better and I'm more likely to come across and see more of what's happening out there.

      I've got a collection of odd Hypothes.is related quirks, off label use cases, and experiments: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/ including a list of those I frequently follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

      Like good annotations and notes, you've got to put some work into finding the social portion what's happening in this fun little space. My best recommendation to find your "tribe" is to do some targeted tag searches in their search box to see who's annotating things in which you're interested.

    1. t his death the great Italian humanist AngeloPoliziano (1454–94), for example, left many volumes of notes and papers. Thesewere rapidly dispersed among students and peers, who variously wished to own,read, or publish them, under Poliziano’s name but sometimes also without attrib-uting them. Today dozens of volumes of Poliziano’s manuscripts are scatteredacross many European libraries, and an important manuscript of his Miscel-lanea was rediscovered as recently as a few decades ago
    2. Victor Hugo was the first author to bequeath his papers to the Bibliothèque nationale;see Espagne (1998), 217; Grésillon (2000).
    3. Pliny’s abundant reading and note-taking in one of his nephew’s letters (which I discuss in more detail below).
    4. The earliest survivingauthor’s manuscripts date from late eleventh- century Italy and include somemanuscripts of Petrarch from the fourteenth century, but large collections ofpapers by scholars first survive from the fifteenth century and in increasing num-bers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
    5. The study of personal papers was pioneered by a school of literary criticism (“ge-netic criticism”) that focused on famous authors of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies who often deposited their papers in national libraries.
    1. Personalized examples are very resistant to interference and can greatly reduce your learning time

      Creating links to one's own personal context can help one to both learn and retain new material.

    2. In the example below you will save time if you use a personal reference rather than trying to paint a picture that would aptly illustrate the question

      More closely associating new ideas to one's own personal life helps to create and expand the context of the learning to what one already knows.

      Within the context of Bloom's Taxonomy, doing this shows that one understands and is already applying and even doing a bit of creating, at least internally.


      Should 'understanding' come before 'remembering' in Bloom's taxonomy? That seems more logical to me.


      Bloom's Taxonomy mirrors the zettelkasten method

      (Recall Bloom's Taxonomy: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create)

      One needs to be able to generally understand an idea(s) to be able to write it down clearly in one's own words. Regular work within a zettelkasten helps to reinforce memory of ideas for understanding and retention. Applying the knowledge to other situations happens almost naturally with the combinatorial creativity that occurs within a zettelkasten. Analysis is heavily encouraged as one takes new information and links it to prior knowledge and ideas; this is also concurrent with the application of knowledge. Being able to compare and contrast two ideas on separate cards is also part of the analysis portions of Bloom's taxonomy which also leads into the evaluation phase. Finally, one of the most important reasons for keeping a zettelkasten is to use it to generate or create new ideas and thoughts and then write them down in articles, books, or other media in a clear and justified manner.

    3. One of the most effective ways of enhancing memories is to provide them with a link to your personal life.

      Personalizing ideas using existing memories is a method of brining new knowledge into one's own personal context and making them easier to remember.

      link this to: - the pedagogical idea of context shifting as a means of learning - cards about reframing ideas into one's own words when taking notes

      There is a solid group of cards around these areas of learning.


      Random thought: Personal learning networks put one into a regular milieu of people who are talking and thinking about topics of interest to the learner. Regular discussions with these people helps one's associative memory by tying the ideas into this context of people with relation to the same topic. Humans are exceedingly good at knowing and responding to social relationships and within a personal learning network, these ties help to create context on an interpersonal level, but also provide scaffolding for the ideas and learning that one hopes to do. These features will tend to reinforce each other over time.

      On the flip side of the coin there is anecdotal evidence of friends taking courses together because of their personal relationships rather than their interest in the particular topics.

  11. Mar 2022
    1. We’re building a knowledge base, so if one writer collects information for an article, their research is made available to the other writers in the collective. 

      How does one equitably and logically build a communally shared knowledge base for a for-profit space?

      How might a communal zettelkasten work? A solid index for creating links between pieces is incredibly important here, but who does this work? How is it valued?

    1. because increasingly search and credibility skills or social skills to help their friends build personal trust networks to determine good information scientific information scholarly 00:09:36 information health related information information related to your social needs like where am I going to go on vacation where am I going to go on Friday night but I think that we're going to be able to improve the internet experience for 00:09:49 everybody and the capital investment and teaching people searching credibility skills crap detection skills is miniscule compared to the cost of building servers and and and creating 00:10:03 all of the physical infrastructure that the Internet requires

      personal trust networks - a part of personal learning networks? the internal and the external benefit are no longer seperatable - one always comes together with the other

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTSEr0cRJY8

      Starts out with four and a half minutes of anti-crypto and Web3 material. Presumably most of her audience is in the web3 space.

      http://youvegotkat.neocities.org

      Neocities: http://neocities.org

      The Yesterweb: http://yesterweb.org

      Marginalia Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

      It [the IndieWeb] is so so queer. Like it's super gay, super trans, super good.

      The indie web also questions tech solutionism which often attempts to solve human problems by removing the human element. But easily the most remarkable and powerful thing about the internet is the ability it has to connect us with one another.

    1. I also maintain a public Zettelkasten (others use the similar terms digital garden or second brain), in which I keep thoughts about everything under the sun. You can visit it to virtually “pick my brain” about some topic without bothering me, or to explore what I’m currently working on.

      Soren Bjornstad has a public zettelkasten which is in the vein of a traditional one though he indicates that others might call it a digital garden or second brain. This shows the conflation of many of these terms.

      What truly differentiates digital gardens from wikis and zettelkasten?

  12. Feb 2022
    1. https://brainbaking.com/post/2021/10/are-digital-gardens-blogs/

      We definitely need better definitions of digital gardens (public or otherwise) to delineate them from blogs, zettelkasten, wikis, social media, and other forms of information exchange.

      Wouter Groeneveld describes some of his thoughts here.

      Link to notes from https://collect.readwriterespond.com/are-digital-gardens-blogs/

    2. Public digital gardens are overrated. They are very hard to navigate. Time and time again, I get lost in the jungle of mystical links, in the check-ins drowned in the bookmarks and the quotes. Fancy IndieWeb sites that boast 5 separate RSS feeds to “help” navigate the labyrinth do not make it better. I’ve tried following multiple interesting people that pump loads and loads of seemingly cool looking stuff into their site. It always ends in confusion. Yes, sometimes I discover a link to another published article (external to the garden, by the way!) that is interesting. As admiring as the garden is, the things they grow there are almost always puzzling.

      Wouter Groeneveld here is mixing up a digital garden and a blog with social media enhancements. I personally wouldn't expect a digital garden to necessarily have features like checkins, bookmarks, etc. Ideally it would be a mix of of a zettelkasten with atomic ideas and notes and a wiki structure with somewhat longer articles and ideas strung together.

      From this definition, my personal website definitely isn't a "digital garden" but a blog with a variety of social media features built in. Looking at some smaller subsets of my website, one might consider it to be a digital garden.

      An additional piece of digital gardening also has to do with actually tending the garden, which I generally don't do in my website the way I do in my Obsidian vault. My vault is more like a digital garden which has many streams of data coming into it and being regularly tended.

      This is another example of the broader space of these ideas being mixed together in a hodgepodge without clear definitions of what each are.

    1. These study guides, which neglect everything before a writingassignment is given, are a little bit like financial advisors who discusshow 65-year-olds can save for retirement. At this point you would bebetter off curbing your enthusiasm (which is exactly what one of themost often sold study guides in Germany recommends: first, loweryour expectations on quality and insight).

      A side benefit of a growing set of notes as an academic is that one has a visible repository of knowledge and ideas as well as fascinating questions which, while they may reveal how much one doesn't know, it will make it apparent how much one does know and thereby mitigate one's feelings of imposter syndrome.

    1. Highlighting would be a crude form of knowledge telling. Knowledge transforming involves interpretation on the part of the content producer.

      Scholars who study writing differentiate between knowledge telling and knowledge transforming.

      Highlighting can be seen as a weak form of knowledge telling. It's a low level indicator that an idea is important, but doesn't even go so far as the reader strengthening the concept by restating the idea in their own words similar to the Feynman technique.

      One could go steps further by not only restating it but transforming it and linking it into one's larger body of knowledge or extending into other contexts.

  13. Jan 2022
    1. A Mental Squeeze Point is when your unsorted knowledge becomes so messy it overwhelms and discourages you. Either you are equipped with frameworks to overcome the squeeze point, or you are discouraged and possibly abandon your project.

      Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/BuMcAnr4EeyxO-PwNBfPrg (Dan Allosso's analogy about the Kuiper Belt)

    1. To learn—A rather obvious one, but I wanted to challenge myself again.

      I love that Johannes Klingbiel highlights having his own place on the Internet as a means to learn. While I suspect that part of the idea here is to learn about the web and programming, it's also important to have a place you can more easily look over and review as well as build out on as one learns. This dovetails in part with his third reason to have his own website: "to build". It's much harder to build out a learning space on platforms like Medium and Twitter. It's not as easy to revisit those articles and notes as those platforms aren't custom built for those sorts of learning affordances.

      Building your own website for learning makes it by definition a learning management system. The difference between my idea of a learning management system here and the more corporate LMSes (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) is that you can change and modify the playground as you go. While your own personal LMS may also be a container for holding knowledge, it is a container for building and expanding knowledge. Corporate LMSes aren't good at these last two things, but are built toward making it easier for a course facilitator to grade material.

      We definitely need more small personal learning management systems. (pLMS, anyone? I like the idea of the small "p" to highlight the value of these being small.) Even better if they have social components like some of the IndieWeb building blocks that make it easier for one to build a personal learning network and interact with others' LMSes on the web. I see some of this happening in the Digital Gardens space and with people learning and sharing in public.

      [[Flancian]]'s Anagora.org is a good example of this type of public learning space that is taking the individual efforts of public learners and active thinkers and knitting their efforts together to facilitate a whole that is bigger than the sum of it's pieces.

    1. https://www.goedel.io/p/tools-for-thought-but-not-for-search

      Searching for two ingredients in an effort to find a recipe that will allow their use should be de rigueur in a personal knowledge manager, sadly it doesn't appear to be the case.


      This sort of simple search not working in these tools is just silly.

      They should be able to search across blocks, pages, and even provide graph views to help in this process. Where are all the overlaps of these words within one's database?

    1. Michael Ashcroft@m_ashcroft

      Having a solid reason for "why" when beginning a personal knowledge management system is important.

    1. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1477714767854850049.html

      original thread: https://twitter.com/garwboy/status/1478003120483577859?s=20

      This takes a part Johann Hari's Guardian article Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen, but it does so mostly from a story/narrative perspective. Burnett is taking the story as a science article (it was labeled "psychology") when it's really more of a personal experience story with some nods to science.

      Sadly the story works more on the emotional side than the scientific side. It would be nice to have a more straightforward review of some of the actual science literature with some of the pros/cons laid out to make a better decision.

  14. Dec 2021
    1. “Any large room looks wrong without the appropriate number of people in it,” Mr. Byers writes. “An unused living room looks empty. An empty ballroom is absolutely creepy; it looks as if it is waiting desperately for something to happen. A library, on the other hand, is delightful when full but still especially attractive when empty.”

      on the coziness of libraries

    1. Simultaneously, there was a revival of the old art of excerpting and the use of commonplace books. Yet, the latter were perceived no longer as memory aids but as true secondary memo-ries. Scholars, in turn, became increasingly aware that to address the informa-tion overload produced by printing, the best solution was to train a card index instead of their own individual consciousness.

      Another reason for the downfall of older Western memory traditions is the increased emphasis and focus on the use of commonplaces and commonplace books in the late 1400s onward.

      Cross reference the popularity of manuals by Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon.

    2. In short, the core hypothesis that I would like to explore is that there is nothing particularly surprising in the contemporary use of a card index as a surprise generator. Indeed, the question should be instead: how it is possible to explain the evolutionary improbability of the social use of ‘machines’ as secondary memories for knowledge management and reproduc-tion?

      The key question Alberto Cevolini is exploring here.

    3. The main hypothesis is that in the use of a card index as a surprise generator, there is nothing particularly surpris-ing if one considers the evolution of knowledge management in early modern Europe.

      This is what I have been arguing all along as I've been doing my research as well.

    1. Even more important is that all this isn’t about the software. It is about the system you set up. Some software nudges you, sometimes even pushes you, towards system design decisions. Take Wikis as an example. Most of them have two different modes: The reading mode. The editing mode. The reading mode is the default. But most of the time you should create, edit and re-edit the content. This default, this separation of reading and editing, is a small but significant barrier on producing content. You will behave differently. This is one reason I don’t like wikis for knowledge work. They are clumsy and work better for different purposes.

      Most wikis have a user interface problem between their read and edit modes. Switching between the two creates additional and unnecessary friction for placing content and new information into them.

  15. aworkinglibrary.com aworkinglibrary.com
    1. I began this site in 2008 in an effort to bring some structure to a long held habit: taking notes about the books I read in a seemingly endless number of notebooks, which then piled up, never to be opened again. I thought a website would make that habit more fruitful and fun, serving as a reference, something the notebooks never did. It did that handily, and more, including making space for me to write and think about adjacent things. More than a dozen years later and this site has become the place where I think, often but not exclusively about books—but then books are a means of listening to the thoughts of others so that you can hear your own thoughts more clearly. Contributions have waxed and waned over the years as life got busy, but I never stopped reading, and I always come back.

      Several things to notice here:

      • learning in public
      • posting knowledge on a personal website as a means of sharing that knowledge with a broader public
      • specifically not hiding the work of reading in notebooks which are unlikely to be read by others.
  16. Nov 2021
    1. when I browse from someone’s blog over to their Substack it feels like going from a sweet little neighborhood into a staid corporate park. A little piece of joy dies in me when that happens because it’s another reminder of the corporatization of the web.

      --Ray

    1. collaboration within a community of people: diverse perspectives, active engagement

      Similar ideas here: Stephen Downes (2015). Design Elements in a Personal Learning Environment. Invited talk, Guadalajara, Mexico. https://www.slideshare.net/Downes/design-elements-in-a-personal-learning-environment-52303224

      What makes an 'online course' different to an 'online learning community'?

    2. a system that lets people compose structure

      We all think in different ways, so a good system for learning should enable every learner to structure their learning environment uniquely.

    1. Looking for a property?

      Do you want to buy property in India? Are you looking for best-in-class residential and commercial properties for sale in Delhi NCR, Lucknow, Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore, Gurgaon, and Noida? Well, you have landed in the correct place.

    1. In both instances, people used these unregulated forms of “justice” to pursue personal grudges or gain professional advantage.

      Rather than provide actual justice, unregulated extrajudicial bodies can be (and are often) used to pursue personal grudges or gain profession advantages.

    1. In racist minds, white people can’t just be people like we are. Black people can’t just be ourselves, like they are.

      Return to this for an op ed

  17. Oct 2021
    1. A new idea acts retrospectively; a torch throws its light behind as well as before. Materials that were laid aside take on a new aspect when they are classified by means of an idea. Then everything within us is reborn and animated with a new life. But for that to happen, the paths of light must be open, our thoughts must be in order and linked consecutively one with another.
    2. Among the works of St. Thomas there is a letter to a certain Brother John, in which are enumerated Sixteen Precepts for Acquiring the Treasure of Knowledge.t Th

      Reference to read.

      They are given in Latin and English, with a commentary, in a lecture by Fr. Victor White, O.P., published by Black- friars, Oxford, December 1944: St. Thomas Aquinas, De Modo Studendi, price 6d.

    1. Today, countries, municipalities and NGOs are the entities that supposedly take care of common goods, but their capacity to do so is very limited due to their centralized structure. They are limited by the relative ineffectiveness of centralized constructs — in sense-making, scalable action, engagement and alignment of interests, and more severely, by the personal interests of the people steering them, which often override their interest to take care for the benefit of the community they are in charge of steering. Indeed, neglecting such common goods is one of the biggest problems of humanity in almost every possible domain and circle we can think of.

      Pith articulation of the central problem of central, hierarchical human governance systems.

    1. All of which can help with getting a grip on your personal knowledge mastery (pkm).

      Example of someone in the wild using PKM as Personal Knowledge Mastery instead of the more common Personal Knowledge Management.

    1. A retrospective of 50 years as a human being on planet Earth.

      The Art of Noticing

      This is a compilation of articles that I had written as a way to process the changes I was observing in the world and, consequently, in myself as a reaction to the events. I have come to think of this process as the art of noticing. This process is in contrast to the expectation that I should be a productive member of society, a target market, and a passive audience for charismatic leaders: celebrities, billionaires, and politicians.

      • Social: fame
      • Economic: wealth
      • Political: power

      An Agent of Change

      To become an agent of change is to recognize that we are not separate, we are not individuals, we are not cogs in a machine. We are complex and diverse. We are designers. We are a creative, collective, self-organizing, learning community.

      We are in a process of becoming—a being journey:

      • Personal resilience
      • Social influence
      • Economic capacity
      • Political agency
      • Ecological harmony

      This is how we shift from an attention economy to an intention economy. Rather than being oriented toward the failures of the past, the uncertainty of the present, or the worries of the future, in a constant state of anxiety, stress, and fear, we are shifting our consciousness to manifest our intention through perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body). We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

      We are the builders collective.

      We are one.

  18. Sep 2021
    1. The willingness to trade other peoples' fundamental rights for preferential tax treatment fits neatly into all three of these, as does the delusion that somehow this can be resolved with sufficient "personal responsibility."

      We know enough about psychology and behavioral economics to know that "personal responsibility" is not going to save us.

      This is in even higher relief when we see laws applied in unclosed systems or where other loopholes exist to help the privileged. Frank Wilhot's idea sums things up fairly well:

      "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

    1. When patients are asked how their sleep problems started, they’ll typically mention some “stressful event or a big change in their life as a thing that sort of got them off track,” Martin said.

      This happens to me when before a big flight. big test. or even a big night. I cant sleep a wink.

    1. Lock up!

      She likes to command people

    2. "I only rent rooms to boys from Harvard or Tech!"

      Bases judgement on reputation

    3. I am happy to warm Mrs. Croft's soup in the evenings," I suggested. "It is no trouble."

      He got used to living with her.

    4. commanded

      The landlady‘s behaviour

    5. "I only rent rooms to boys from Harvard or Tech!

      Reveals about her Charakter That she is a very strict woman

    6. "It was very kind of you!"

      Sympathy points from Mrs. Croft

    7. past—but when I learned of her death I was stricken, so

      Shows how strong the bond between him and mrs. Croft was

    8. Say 'Splendid

      The ritual of the narrator and Mrs. Croft

    1. Th

      Personal connection: smokers/former smokers using vapes to help them quit cigarettes would lose the benefit of healthier option if there is a ban.

  19. Aug 2021
    1. The foregoing studies suggest two strands of commonplacing circa 1700. The first was thecollection of authoritative knowledge, usually in the form of quotations. The second was thecollection of personal or natural knowledge, with Francis Bacon’s lists, desiderata and apho-risms serving as early examples. While Moss has shown that the first strand was losing popular-ity by the 1680s, recent scholarship has shown that the second retained momentum through theeighteenth century,9especially in scientific dictionaries,10instructional cards,11catalogues,12

      loose-leaf manuscripts,13syllabi14and, most especially, notebooks.15

      There are two strands of commonplacing around 1700: one is the traditional collection of authoritative knowledge while the second was an emergent collection of more personal knowledge and exploration.

  20. Jul 2021
    1. whereas now, they know that user@domain.com was subscribed to xyz.net at some point and is unsubscribing. Information is gold. Replace user@domain with abcd@senate and xyz.net with warezxxx.net and you've got tabloid gold.
    1. 中低端3.0顯示卡插到 2.0主機板上 沒什麼問題!PCI-E是一個序列介面標準,分1.0,2.0,3.0每個版本之間的區別只是頻寬不同,也就是速度差異,他們向下相容,也就是3.0相容2.0相容1.0後面的X16的意思是16個通道,因為他是序列匯流排,所以顯示的就是多少倍。現行的有X1 X4 X8 X16比較常見,從效能影響來說,如果你的是PCI-E 2.0 X16的介面那麼頻寬已經足以滿足現在的顯示卡使用了,所以基本沒有效能損失,如果是中低端的顯示卡PCI-E 1.0 X16都不會有任何效能損失。最新的主機板都是PCI-E 3.0的了,但是其實根本用不上,除非發燒級雙核心顯示卡才會用到如此高的頻寬。現在PCI-E 3.0 / 2.0的顯示卡 插到主機板的 PCI-E 3.0 X16 或 PCI-E 2.0 X16插槽上, 基本上看不出有什麼影響,效能影響微乎其微,除了那些最頂級的顯示卡以外。反倒是假如 把顯示卡插入了主機板的 PCI-E 2.0 X4 插槽的話,顯示卡效能會降低20%左右。所以顯示卡是2.0 還是3.0 這個無所謂,關鍵還是主機板是 X16倍速、還是X4倍速。
    1. On the difference for writing for one's self and for others. Of course there's also the need to be able to re-decifer one's notes again in the future. It may be best to keep more detailed for your future self as if you're writing for the public.

      I like the idea of distance in "communication space" which comes up in the comments. This is related to context collapse and shared contexts which are often too-important in our communication with regard to being understood in the far future.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Matthias Melcher</span> in Commonplace Book | x28's new Blog (<time class='dt-published'>07/06/2021 11:13:34</time>)</cite></small>