This "commonplace book" is a collection of personally chosen quotations. This is not really a "quotations" site like so many on the web. Rather, it is words I save as I read. I give an accurate citation whenever I can.

ZK II: Zettel 9/8j 9/8j Im Zettelkasten ist ein Zettel, der dasArgument enthält, das die Behauptungenauf allen anderen Zetteln widerlegt. Aber dieser Zettel verschwindet, sobald manden Zettelkasten aufzieht. D.h. er nimmt eine andere Nummer an,verstellt sich und ist dann nicht zu finden. Ein Joker.

The singular written work is a brute force attack, not a bureaucratic spider web. It is preciously rare—always has been and always will be. The ability to create singular written works is mostly impervious to education and technical supplementation; it is overwhelmingly what we used to call gifted or God-given and today call either genetic or inspired.

Amanda CAARSON I've been a web developer since 1999, and I've been on the indieweb since 2015. This site is a commonplace book for all my online activity and will eventually be a home for archives of all of my online content.

Does anyone know of someone's public Zettelkasten somewhere on the internet? I am trying to write literature notes and permanent notes, and am trying to refine my own system but do not really think I am doing things all too well. I have read a decent amount of content on how one should write literature and permanent notes, but I think I am at the point where reading through someone else's Zettelkasten to get inspiration for how I create my own would be useful. However, I cannot find a good specific Zettelkasten one. I saw on github a list of digital gardens but most did not seemed geared towards the Zettelkasten approach, and the only one I saw that fit the bill was in Spanish...

I have just over 1000 notes, going back over 10yrs. Style has changed significantly over time. Only 300-400 are “wiki style”. Started digital daily notes about 2 yrs ago - before that was on paper.

in reality pretty much everyone out there has some messiness in their graph and that's okay

using rome as a almost a tool to convey information to your future self

Why public? There is something about making your posts available to the rest of the world that holds your feet to the fire and makes you commit. I’ve tried dozens of times to keep a private ongoing digital notebook in Evernote, Devonthink, Roam, and Obsidian, but they never stick. But making my notes available to the world in my digital garden keeps me coming back and updating it daily.

Writing and publishing forces you to solidify and clarify your thoughts.

There is, however, one thing to learn from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery.

YOU should write blogs.Even if nobody reads them, you should write them. It's become pretty clear to me that blogging is a source of both innovation and clarity. I have many of my best ideas and insights while blogging. Struggling to express things that you're thinking or feeling helps you understand them better.

Blogging is my way of pulling together into a coherent form all the stray thoughts rolling around in my mind. Writing helps me sift the good thoughts from all the bad and fit them all together in a logical pattern.

One of the most interesting aspects to blogging is discourse - the idea that in order to write something you must think about it with a critical eye and that this process actually helps you clarify your thinking around it.

I was fortunate enough to see—and now share with you—a handful of these diaries from 1977 in their original, hand-written form. (A collection of more than three hundred entries, entitled “Mourning Diary,” will be published by Hill and Wang next month.)

The originator of the Zettelkasten method, sociologist Niklas Luhmann, averaged six note cards per day.

Among natural historians, Ulisse Al-drovandi (1522–1605) left more than 400 volumes of manuscripts that attest tohis efforts at collecting and sorting a vast abundance of information. Historiansand antiquarians, like the French nobleman Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), also amassed abundant notes.50

rom the abundant notes of Joseph Justus Scaliger(1540–1609) a few dozen volumes of notes.

For the leading Frenchhumanist Guillaume Budé (1468–1540), seven volumes of notes are extant, justa fraction of his original output, replete with color- coded inks and marginal sym-bols that remain unexplained;

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

“Adversaria” was an actor’s term for reading notes, which highlighted the factthat reading notes stood in relationship to another text (without any connota-tion of that relationship being adversarial).45

An alternative kind of note-taking was encouraged in the late Middle Agesamong members of new lay spiritual movements, such as the Brethren of theCommon Life (fl. 1380s–1500s). Their rapiaria combined personal notes andspiritual reflections with readings copied from devotional texts.

the scholastic theologian Godfrey of Fontaines (be-fore 1250–after 1305) left a collection of excerpts and summaries from his readingthat could readily be considered a collection of notes

Another papyrus, recovered in Toura, Egypt, contains notes taken on apolemical work by the church father Origen (185–254), including both faithfulexcerpts of varying lengths and notes made by abridgment from his AgainstCelsus.1

We have, forexample, some notes and drafts of treatises by the Epicurean philosopher Philo-demus (110–40 BCE) preserved under seventy feet of volcanic ash at Hercula-neum.

Printing made books affordable to greater numbers than before, as various humanist observers noted, whether they felt this was for the better (Andrea de Bussi, Ludovico Carbone) or for the worse (e.g., Hieronymo Squarcia- fico).17

Rely on emotional states If you can illustrate your items with examples that are vivid or even shocking, you are likely to enhance retrieval (as long as you do not overuse same tools and fall victim of interference!). Your items may assume bizarre form; however, as long as they are produced for your private consumption, the end justifies the means. Use objects that evoke very specific and strong emotions: love, sex, war, your late relative, object of your infatuation, Linda Tripp, Nelson Mandela, etc. It is well known that emotional states can facilitate recall; however, you should make sure that you are not deprived of the said emotional clues at the moment when you need to retrieve a given memory in a real-life situation

When I lived in Austin, I updated it regularly as I read at my desk; in Brooklyn, where I had no room for a desk, I would take photos of passages in library books and transcribe them later in a coffee shop. These days I live semi-nomadically, without a fixed address, and I email myself lines. Every few months I sift through them and copy the ones that still resonate into my book.

maybe i need to explain that i changed the way i write in rome a little bit 01:23:42 because i um use the blocks as um individual notes so that 01:23:55 the page can become what in the traditional center cast might be a note sequence and if two notes are directly related i might just add another block 01:24:07 because you still have the granularity with the block references um a question would become part of that note sequence and 01:24:19 [Music] they are just a part of the writing itself so i don't have a special question page 01:24:33 i have a lot of questions within the ongoing dialogues and sometimes 01:24:44 um there are the ones that turn into a project and um so they are on top of my mind and um they 01:24:59 might move into the uh shortcut section because i just want to jump right back into that the next day 01:25:13 but there is no sophisticated system to deal with questions they are just part of it

i knew that that this is that might be different but no i of course you you don't connect it 00:27:44 that much with your own book it's more about that you see the idea and the idea is lumens idea and you're trying to describe it as good as possible

Raymond Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems, a collection of 10 14-line sonnets with each page cut into 14 strips to allow readers to arrange them into a astonishing number of variations; Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood, a novel composed entirely of questions; and Geoff Ryman’s 253, which was originally published on the web in the form of a collection of hypertext links.

One of those books was B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, which Wildgust says he has used “to demonstrate how a ‘book’ can also be a box with unbound pages.” According to Wildgust, Johnson borrowed the idea from Turkish-born writer Marc Saporta’s 1962 experimental novel Composition No. I, which was printed as a collection of 150 unbound, single-sided pages that can be read in any order.

Sarah Scannell’s murder board. It takes up nearly an entire wall of her San Francisco apartment: 100 pages with torn edges, painstakingly taped up with blue painter’s tape in a pattern that only makes sense to Scannell. Maybe you’ve even watched it evolve—at first the pages were connected with white string, but Scannell has since adopted a more user-friendly color-coding scheme involving sticky index tabs.

"Josiah smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles and covered the sites with human bones" (2 Kings 23:14, New International Version)

Peter Eseli of Mabuiag Island (known locally as Mabuyag)in the western Torres Strait began writing down traditional knowledgein the Kala Lagau Ya language in the early twentieth century. By1939, Eseli had amassed a 77-page manuscript, complete withdrawings, songs and genealogies as well as a wealth of starknowledge, some of which is included in this book. He continuedadding to it until his death in 1958. His manuscript was latertranslated into English.

The First Astronomers challenges commonly held views thatIndigenous ways of knowing do not contain science.

These ways of knowinghave inherent value and are leading Western scientists to betterunderstand celestial phenomena and the history and heritage thisconstitutes for all people.

The constellations’ positions in the night sky on significant dates, such as solstices and equinoxes, are mirrored in the alignments of the main structures at the compound, he found. Steles were “carefully placed within the temenos to mark the rising, zenith, or setting of the stars over the horizon,” he writes.

Beyond the log, I’m still trying to find the best mix between a traditional personal "knowledge base" in the form of a text file wiki versus a zettelkasten (wikipedia.org) versus this website.

They get harder to read the longer I wait to transcribe them.

Also, interacting with my phone while I’m supposed to be engaging with other people (especially my own children) is very uncool. But nobody bats an eye when I take a written note. Or if they do, it often starts a conversation rather than ending it.

Genex: A generator of excellence The four foundational beliefs lead to a model of creativity with four phases and therefore four categories of tools. I hope this framework (Table 1) aids designers in building genexes that will enable creative individuals in many domains to: - collect information from an existing domain of knowledge, - create innovations using advanced tools, - consult with peers or mentors in the field, and then - disseminate the results widely.

The Inca are most often remembered not for what they had but for what they didn’t have: the wheel, iron, a written language.

Students learning about geology for the first time can also benefit from usinggesture.

it is called the zettelkasten method and this was originally used by nicholas lumen in the 1960s

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.

Like computers, the human brain also builds up garbage that needs to be recycled, because memory space is finite, not infinite.

Some content from this blog has been copied over to TiddlySpace so I can farm it for ideas and such.

Something about Scrivener elicits a lot of strong feelings from people who have used it, both positive and negative. It has a growing community of writers who swear by it, and a parallel community that is tired of hearing all the Scrivener-heads raving about their magic tool.

I would consider my Read Write Respond site as a ‘blog’, but agree with you that my Collect site is not really a blog. In some respects I would be happy enough to make it private is it is primarily my own secret garden with the gate left open. This is why I curate my monthly newsletter. It is a habit which I find forces me to look back through all the noise. I think this creates a clearer narrative to pick through than my multitude of links.

a novel from 1794-95, titled "Life of Quintus Fixlein, pulled from 15 zettelkasten". German :)

I used to use Roam for lots of things: a daily diary, book notes, keeping track of lists like my todo list, and taking meeting notes.Today, this is my stack:Daily Diary / paper notebookBook Notes / split between Roam and MuseTo-do List / ThingsMeeting Notes / Apple Notes

After some time though, reality started to sink in. ‘I am not really going back through all of these notes as often as I thought I would.’

It turns out that I am rarely in a position, while writing or thinking, where I want to glance through lots of old notes as a way to figure out what to say or do. Mostly that feels like sifting through stale garbage. 

If I clicked through the labyrinth growing on my computer I could discover grottos and dusty corners I had already forgotten about.

We also know that theaverage length of TV soundbites has steadily declined over the lastseveral decades (Fehrmann, 2011). During the U.S. presidentialelection in 1968, the average soundbite — that is, any footage of acandidate speaking uninterrupted — was still a little more than 40seconds, but that had fallen to less than 10 seconds at the end of the80s (Hallin 1994) and 7.8 seconds in 2000 (Lichter, 2001). The lastelection has certainly not reversed the trend. Whether that meansthat the media adjust to our decreasing attention span or is causingthe trend is not easy to say.[17]

Reading with a pen in the hand, for example, forces, us to thinkabout what we read and check upon our understanding. It is thesimplest test: We tend to think we understand what we read – untilwe try to rewrite it in our own words. By doing this, we not only get abetter sense of our ability to understand, but also increase our abilityto clearly and concisely express our understanding – which in returnhelps to grasp ideas more quickly. If we try to fool ourselves hereand write down incomprehensible words, we will detect it in the nextstep when we try to turn our literature notes into permanent notesand try to connect them with others.

The third way I interact with my notes is a mechanism I’ve engineered whereby they are slowly presented to me randomly, and on a steady drip, every day.I’ve created a system so random notes appear every time I open a browser tabI like the idea of being presented and re-presented with my notations of things that were interesting to me at some point, but that in many cases I had forgotten about. The effect of surprise creates interesting and productive new connections in my brain.

That ‘taste’ is a very personal thing, and I don’t think I can really explain it. But I’m pretty sure it means that, for me, note-taking is a very long-term, gradual process of finding my way towards something; I just can’t quite articulate what that something is.

Transferring my notes from notebooks into nvALT is a process that I always enjoy. When I fill up a physical notebook, I'll go through it, acting as a sort of loose, first filter for the material I’ve accumulated. I’ll cross out a few things that are obviously garbage, but most of my notes make the cut, and I transcribe them into nvALT.When that’s done, I throw away the notebook.

I describe myself as a ‘media inventor’, which I know sounds like a strange label. To me, it means that a lot of my work – not really my novels, but almost everything else – involves inventing a format or container at the same time that I’m writing or imagining what goes into it.

Hypehouses were a development that made middle-aged people feel even older. The idea of random people living together to make TikTok videos sounds like hell on earth. And it turns out to be pretty much hell on earth.

Now, he promises “the most ambitious journalism experiment in decades.”

Ahren’s book and ideas are not his original creation, but based on the method of Niklas Luhman referred to as the Zettelkasten. I see various references to Luhman’s ideas lately and predict this will become “a thing” in education.

Scientific Notation

In the more recent decades, of course, personal collation of this sort is well supported by digital tools – early blog platforms, Delicious, Tumblr, Pinterest, and so on – and we toyed briefly with the idea of something as a shared digital experience or app.

An access token is expired, revoked, malformed, or invalid for other reasons.

This may be because it is known that no level of authentication is sufficient (for instance because of an IP blacklist), but it may be because the user is already authenticated and does not have authority.

Any interaction with the card index is differently informative not simply because the query is different but also because the variety is recursively reproduced and dependent on the past.

Even finding terms totranslate concepts like ‘lord’, ‘commandment’ or ‘obedience’ intoindigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining theunderlying theological concepts, well-nigh impossible.

Wendat society was not ‘economically egalitarian’ in that sense.However, there was a difference between what we’d considereconomic resources – like land, which was owned by families,worked by women, and whose products were largely disposed of bywomen’s collectives – and the kind of ‘wealth’ being referred to here,such as wampum (a word applied to strings and belts of beads,manufactured from the shells of Long Island’s quahog clam) or othertreasures, which largely existed for political purposes.

Michael Ashcroft@m_ashcroft

Reflecting upon Robert Darnton's comment, perhaps my personal reading and writing style is more representative of the seventeenth century than the twentieth or twenty-first.  Throughout my career in the antiquarian book trade, which began in the 1960s, I found myself moving between subjects in the course of a day as I catalogued various books in stock, read about other books for sale, or discussed the different interests of clients.  With access to the Internet in the 1990s it was, of course, possible to follow-up more efficiently on diverse topics with Internet searches and hyperlinks.  The way that HistoryofInformation.com is written, as a series of reading and research notes connected by links and indexed in a database, may be viewed to a certain extent as analogous to the method of maintaining and indexing commonplace books described by Locke.

Tiny Brain Fans

I go through my old posts every day. I know that much – most? – of them are not for the ages. But some of them are good. Some, I think, are great. They define who I am. They're my outboard brain.

First and foremost, I do it for me. The memex I've created by thinking about and then describing every interesting thing I've encountered is hugely important for how I understand the world. It's the raw material of every novel, article, story and speech I write.

Scholars well grounded in this regime, like Isaac Casaubon, spun tough, efficient webs of notes around the texts of their books and in their notebooks—hundreds of Casaubon’s books survive—and used them to retrieve information about everything from the religion of Greek tragedy to Jewish burial practices.

DoS a federal agency, then charge for access

Pratt persuaded tribal elders and chiefs that the reason the "Washichu" (Lakota word for white man, loosely translates to Takes the Fat) had been able to take their land was that the Indians were uneducated. He said that the Natives were disadvantaged by being unable to speak and write English and, if they had that knowledge, they might have been able to protect themselves.

In 1657, the fi rst practitioner of nonhierarchical indexing, Joachim Jungius (born 1585), dies in Hamburg after compiling approximately 150,000 slips of papers with accumulated knowledge, bound and sorted according to the most minute details and building blocks and without registers or indexes, let alone reference systems. 3

Dominicus Nanus did in the Polyanthea

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.

In May, a young reporter, Emily Wilder, was fired from her new job at the Associated Press in Arizona after a series of conservative publications and politicians publicized Facebook posts critical of Israel that she had written while in college. Like so many before her, she was not told precisely why she was fired, or which company rules her old posts had violated.

This spring, Braden Ellis, a student at Cypress College in California, shared a class Zoom recording of his professor’s response when Ellis defended portrayals of police as heroes. Ellis said he did this in order to expose a purported bias against conservative viewpoints on campus. Even though the recording by itself does not prove the existence of long-standing bias, the professor—a Muslim woman who said on the recording that she did not trust the police—became the focus of a Fox News segment, a social-media storm, and death threats. So did other professors at the college. So did administrators. After a few days, the professor was removed from her teaching assignments, pending investigation.

In March, Sandra Sellers, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, was caught on camera speaking to another professor about some underperforming Black students in her class. There is no way to know from the recording alone whether her comments represented racist bias or genuine concern for her students. Not that it mattered to Georgetown—she was fired within days of the recording’s becoming public. Nor could one know what David Batson, the colleague she was talking to on the recording, really thought either. Nevertheless, he was placed on administrative leave because he seemed, vaguely, to be politely agreeing with her. He quickly resigned.

After Alexi McCammond was named editor in chief of Teen Vogue, people discovered and recirculated on Instagram old anti-Asian and homophobic tweets she had written a decade earlier, while still a teenager.

Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact thatlaws had to be passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates thestrength of that tendency. In 1661 a law was passed in Virginia that “in caseany English servant shall run away in company of any Negroes” he would haveto give special service for extra years to the master of the runaway Negro. In1691, Virginia provided for the banishment of any “white man or woman beingfree who shall intermarry with a negro, mulatoo, or Indian man or woman bondor free.”

Since Penn invested in the PAS, a number of urban universities have replicated the neighborhood school model in their revitalization strate-gies. For instance, Johns Hopkins University is a major contributor to the recently opened Henderson-Hopkins School, a K-8 public school and the centerpiece of EBDI’s efforts to stabilize East Baltimore. The school rep-resents one of the first major investments in the community in decades, providing early childhood education services and community spaces, in addition to the K-8 curriculum. Other universities have established K-12 partnerships, directing fiscal and human capital toward specific schools or public school districts. For example, Syracuse University is one of several partners involved in the “Say Yes to Education Syracuse” initia-tive, an effort that connects local partners to a national nonprofit founda-tion (Say Yes to Education) to provide year-round support to the Syracuse City School District students.

Since 1998, Penn has invested $165 million in University City development proj-ects, including a neighborhood grocery store, movie theater, restaurants, and a hotel; in doing so, the university has leveraged more than $700 million in private capital (Division of Facilities and Real Estate Services, University of Pennsylvania 2012). These projects contribute more than 400,000 square feet of retail space to the neighborhood with occupancy rates consistently outpac-ing Center City rates between 2003 and 2010.

Essentially a scrap book in which to keep ideas, stories, notes, experiments, explanations, random thoughts and jokes.

Mine is a 21st century commonplace book, no more and no less. No other purpose. Just a voice, a collection, a series of letters to whom they may concern. What more do you want? I have started a new blog because I want to recapture that simple purpose.

Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication.