https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo63098990.html Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind by Ayelet Even-Ezra

Mentioned during Tinderbox Meetup: https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tagging-meetup-saturday-august-7/4841

They apparently discussed the book last week. (May be able to find the video of the discussion)

https://usefulcharts.com/

See also their book:

Timeline of World History by Matt Baker (Editor), John Andrews (Editor)<br /> October 20, 2020<br /> https://www.amazon.com/Timeline-World-History-Matt-Baker/dp/1645174174/

Mentioned by Mathew Lowry at [[Friends of the Link 2022-07-28]]; he's got the world history map on the wall of his office

Another of the abounding examples of people thinking that writing and literacy are the first technology of thinking.

Niklas Luhmann cites Langlois and Seignobos' Introduction to the Study of History (1898) at least once, so there's evidence that he read at least a portion of the book which outlines some portions of note taking practice that resemble portions of his zettelkasten method.

Beatrice Webb's note taking system here shows indications of being actively used as a database system!

Lima, Manuel. The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, 2014. https://papress.com/products/the-book-of-trees-visualizing-branches-of-knowledge.

This is an interesting article. It gives a historical perspective on a societal pattern in which technological changes lead to changes in architecture, which in turn changes how families and communities and societies changes.

The one thing they seem to have overlooked is the existence of a room called a "study". It was a thing, and now, perhaps, the "home office" will become the modern study.

General purpose of the text.

Langlois, Charles Victor, and Charles Seignobos. Introduction to the Study of History. Translated by George Godfrey Berry. First. New York: Henry Holt and company, 1898. http://archive.org/details/cu31924027810286.

Suggested by footnote in Beatrice Webb's My Apprenticeship.

Bernheim, Ernst. Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie: mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hilfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte. Leipzig : Duncker & Humblot, 1908. http://archive.org/details/lehrbuchderhist03berngoog.

Title translation: Textbook of the historical method and the philosophy of history : with reference to the most important sources and aids for the study of history

A copy of the original 1889 copy can be found at https://digital.ub.uni-leipzig.de/mirador/index.php

Je nach der Beschaffenheit des Themas und des Materials wird es oft praktisch sein, von sachlicher Ordnung abzusehen und nur die äußerlich chronologische anzuwenden. Gerade dann ist es von größtem Wert, die Eintragungen auf lose Blätter zu machen, damit man dieselben nach den verschiedenen Gesichtspunkten der Zusammengehörigkeit zeitweilig umordnen und dann wieder in die Grundordoung zurücklegen kann. Um die einzelnen Notizen leicht auffinden zu können, ist es ratsam, die Daten oder Schlagwörter oben darüberzuschreiben; und die Blätter oder Zettel müssen von nicht zu dünnem Papier sein, damit man sie schnell durchblättern kann.

Soweit es sich um Abschriften ganzer Akten oder Nachrichten handelt, bedarf es keiner besonderen Erörterungen. Doch solche völlige Abschriften wird man nur machen, wo es sich um archivalische Quellen oder entlegenere Drucke handelt, die man nicht so leicht wieder erreichen kann. Im übrigen wird man sich mit Auszügen und Notizen begnügen, welche entweder das aus den Quellen ausheben, was für das Thema in Betracht kommt, oder nur im allgemeinen auf die Quellenstellen hinweisen. Im ersteren Falle kommt es darauf an, das Brauchbare und Wichtige scharf zu erkennen und präzis zu notieren; im letzteren Falle muß die Hindeutung wenigstens derart präzisiert sein, daß man beim späteren Durchsehen der Notizen gleich ersieht, was in der betreffenden Quellenstelle zu erwarten ist, und daß die Identität der Notiz mit dem Inhalt der Quellenstelle nicht zweifelhaft sein kann; bei Urkunden erfordert letzteres besondere Sorgfalt, da nicht selten über den-selben (tegenstand zur selben Zeit mehrere ähnliche Dokumente ausgestellt worden sind: man tut daher gut, die Identität jedes Stückes durch Aufnotierung des Anfanges und Schlusses (Incipit und Explicit) sicherzustellen, wobei zu bemerken ist, daf hier als Anfang und Schluß nicht die formelhaften Teile, die sogenannten Protokolle, welche eben als feststehende Formeln nicht für die einzelne Urkunde unterscheidend sind, gelten, sondern daß man Anfang und Schluß des individuellen Textes notiert, eine Art der Bezeichnung, die allgemein bei den päpstlichen Bullen angewandt wird, indem man von der Bulle Unam sanctam oder Ausculta fili usw. spricht.

Google translation:

Depending on the nature of the subject and the material, it will often be practical to dispense with factual order and use only the outwardly chronological one. It is precisely then that it is of the greatest value to make the entries on loose sheets of paper, so that they can be temporarily rearranged according to the various aspects of belonging together and then put back into the basic order. In order to be able to easily find the individual notes, it is advisable to write the dates or keywords above them; and the sheets or slips of paper must be of paper that is not too thin so that they can be leafed through quickly.

As far as copies of entire files or messages are concerned, no special discussion is required. But such complete copies will only be made from archival sources or more remote prints that cannot easily be accessed again. For the rest, one will be content with excerpts and notes, which either extract from the sources what comes into consideration for the subject, or only refer to the sources in general. In the first case it is important to clearly recognize what is useful and important and to write it down precisely; in the latter case, the indication must at least be specified in such a way that, when looking through the notes later, one can immediately see what is to be expected in the relevant source and that the identity of the note with the content of the source cannot be in doubt; for certificates the latter requires special care, as it is not uncommon for same (te, several similar documents existed at the same time have been issued: one does therefore well, the identity of each piece by notating the beginning and end (Incipit and explicit), noting that here as beginning and end not the formulaic parts that so-called protocols, which are simply fixed formulas are not distinctive for the individual document, apply, but that one sees the beginning and end of the individual text noted, a form of designation commonly applied to the papal bulls, speaking of the bull Unam sanctam or Ausculta fili, etc.

Continuing on in his advice on note taking, Bernheim tells us that notes on loose sheets of paper (presumably in contrast with the bound pages of a commonplace book or other types of notebooks), "can be temporarily rearranged according to the various aspects of belonging together and then put back into the basic order". He recommends giving them dates (presumably to be able to put them back into their temporal order), as well as keywords. He also suggest that "the sheets or slips of paper must be of paper that is not too thin so that they can be leafed through quickly." (translated from German)

Note that he doesn't specify the exact size of the paper (at least not in this general section) other than to specify either "die Blätter oder Zettel" (sheets or slips) . Other practices may be more indicative of the paper size he may have had in mind. Are his own papers extant? Might those have an indication of his own personal practice as it may have differed from his published advice?

Cumulative cultural learning seems to be stuck in its own recursive loop- the developers of the old paradigm become the old "guard", resistant to any change that will disrupt their change. Paradigm shifts are resisted tooth and nail.

It's odd that a historian would have to say this about history... it's definitely not mythology that we're creating here.

Zinn, Howard. A Young People’s History of the United States. Seven Stories, 2009. https://www.sevenstories.com/books/2852-a-young-people-s-history-of-the-united-states.

Mechanical philosophy and vitalism were popular and co-existed on a non-mutually exclusive spectrum in the seventeenth century.

Mechanical philosophy is a philosophy of nature which arose broadly in the 17th century and sought to explain all natural phenomenon in terms of matter and motion without relying on "action at a distance" or the idea of a cause and effect that occurred without any physical contact or direct motivation.

René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Marin Mersenne all held mechanistic viewpoints.

See also: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_philosophy

Link to: - spooky action at a distance (quantum mechanics)

Medieval culture had imbued its perspective of the natural world with a variety of emblematic associations. Plants and animals were not simply specimens or organisms in the world but were emblematic representations of ideas which were also associated with them.

example: peacock / pride

Did this perspective draw from some of the older possibly pagan forms of orality and mnemonics? Or were the potential associations simply natural ones which (re-?)grew either historically or as the result of the use of the art of memory from antiquity?

Pliny's work had been the standard text for natural history since antiquity. The early humanist movement including critiques by Ermolao Barbaro and Niccolò Leoniceno in the mid 1400s began to erode his stature in the area. Interestingly however, it wasn't new discoveries or science that was displacing Pliny so much as comparison of Pliny with even earlier Greek texts.

Ancient statuary wasn't white as we often see now in museums, but was brightly colored. Statuary that was outside would have been sun bleached over time as well as subject to other weathering to mute or entirely remove color.

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/12/1109995973/we-know-greek-statues-werent-white-now-you-can-see-them-in-color

I shall always love you, StarPterano. NEVER DIE.

https://soranews24.com/2022/07/10/japanese-bookstore-dares-to-be-different-with-common-sense-fix-to-weird-industry-hassle/

Apparently many Japanese bookstores sort and arrange their books by Publisher rather than by author name!

While this may make some esthetic sense on behalf of publishers in a commercial space, it isn't necessarily easy for customers to find books this way.

what he has learned in systematic education, that is, concepts, ideas and theories, rather than the man who puts to work manual skill or muscle, ” [5]. 5. Drucker, P. F. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices, Harper & Row; New York, 1973.

Influential management consultant, educator, and author Peter Drucker helped to popularize the concept of the "knowledge worker" by way of his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices (Harper & Row, 1973).

Who/where is the origin of the neologism/idea of "knowledge worker"?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/kv7wtq/ecos_zk_notes/

Interesting take from way back.

Title: Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.

Ronald Wright is the author of the 2004 "A Short History of Progress" and popularized the term "Progress Trap" in the Martin Scroses 2011 documentary based on Wright's book, called "Surviving Progress". Earlier Reesarcher's such as Dan O'Leary investigated this idea in earlier works such as "Escaping the Progress Trap http://www.progresstrap.org/content/escaping-progress-trap-book

Lois Weber<br /> - First woman accepted to Motion Picture Director's Association, precursor of Director's Guild<br /> - First directors committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences<br /> - Mayor of Universal City<br /> - One of the highest paid and most influential directors in Hollywood of her day<br /> - one of first directors to form her own production company

See also: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Weber

Where are My Children?, Universal's top film of 1916, written and directed by their top director Lois Weber, discussed abortion and birth control. It was added to the National Film Registry in 1993.

See also - Stamp, Shelley. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood. University of California Press, May 2015. ISBN 9780520284463

Watched this last night

https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/episodes/dream-factory

https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la

This is a stunningly excellent little series! It started auto streaming last night after I watched PBS News Hour and I watched it in the background all evening.

I'd seen at least one episode previously, but definitely worth re-watching in its entirety. So much history hiding around us...

Something interesting here about a "gossipy collaboration" of an address book that crystallized a "sexual memory...told by spaces".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodge-podge

How is this broadly related to the intellectual history of commonplace books, zettelkasten, and other note taking matters.

I recall an idea of a Hodge-podge book from my youth, but these may have been published children's activity books for fun rather than collecting tidbits as in something closer to a scrapbook.

Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo - Thought about this randomly while editing notes for [[Forte2022]]

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:33585/

See also Wiki created in combination with this course: https://digitalbookhistory.com/culturesofthebook/Main_Page

https://digitalbookhistory.com/culturesofthebook/Main_Page

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> whitney trettien </span> in whitney trettien on Twitter: "Curious about the development of different book technologies? The students in my "Cultures of the Book" seminar last semester made a wiki for you! Each entry is a short essay that uses examples from @upennlib. Open & free to use/remix: https://t.co/XN0C51MLrv" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>06/20/2022 01:10:21</time>)</cite></small>

http://www.americanyawp.com/

Apparently this is one of the most annotated texts within Hypothes.is. Interestingly, almost none of the annotations on it are public.

The course Marginalia in Books from Christopher Ohge is just crying out to have an annotated syllabus.

Wish I could follow along directly, but there's some excellent reference material hiding in the brief outline of the course.

Perhaps a list of interesting people here too for speaking at https://iannotate.org/ 2022 hiding in here? A session on the history of annotation and marginalia could be cool there.

https://archaeologyofreading.org/

The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.

Perhaps some overlap here with: - Workshop in the History of Material Texts https://pennmaterialtexts.org/about/events/ - Book Traces https://booktraces.org via Andrew Stauffer, et al. - Schoenberg Institute's Coffe with a Codex https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/ (perhaps to a lesser degree)

Even the long running (2013) zettelkasten.de website credits Niklas Luhmann as being the "original creator" of the zettelkasten.

sigh

We really need to track down the origin of linking one idea to another. Obviously writers, and especially novelists, would have had some sort of at least linear order in their writing due to narrative needs in using such a system. What does this tradition look like on the non-fiction side?

Certainly some of the puzzle stems from the commonplace book tradition, but this is more likely to have relied on natural memory as well as searching and finding via index methods.

Perhaps looking more closely at Hans Blumenberg's instantiation would be more helpful. Similarly looking at the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and his predecessors like Marcel Mauss may provide at least an attack on this problem.

My working hypothesis is that given the history of the Viennese numbering system, it may have stemmed from the late 1700s and this certainly wasn't an innovation by Luhmann.

link to: https://hyp.is/hLy7NNtqEeuWQIP1UDkM6g/web.archive.org/web/20130916081433/https://christiantietze.de/posts/2013/06/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/ for evidence of start of zettelkasten.de

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/19-1392/192957/20210920133840569_19-1392%20bsac%20Historians.pdf

https://www.bunkhistory.org/

Biological evolution works on relatively long time scales. Cultural evolution works on very short time scales. If we do not seriously listen to the lessons of history that teach valuable social norms, then we don't learn from history and history repeats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/second-amendment-slavery-james-madison.html

Prior to the Bill of Rights, only four of the thirteen state Constitutions had a provision for a right to bear arms.

When talking about "disciplined armies", "defense", and "militias" at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in 1788, Patrick Henry explicitly says that the United States is not in danger from European powers:

Some minds are agitated by foreign alarms. Happily for us, there is no real danger from Europe; that country is engaged in more arduous business: from that quarter there is no cause of fear: you may sleep in safety forever for them.

https://twitter.com/augmented_CI

The words "beyond", "hierarchical", and "archaic" are all designed to marginalize prior thought and tools which all work, and are likely upon which this broader idea is built. This is a potentially toxic means of creating "power over" this prior art rather than a more open spirit of "power with".

Professor Carl Bogus: Carl T. Bogus, “Was Slavery a Factor in the Second Amendment?” The New York Times, May 24, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/second-amendment-slavery-james-madison.html

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002107670/historian-uncovers-the-racist-roots-of-the-2nd-amendment

Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1002107670 Audio: <audio src="">

<audio controls> <source src="https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2021/06/20210602_fa_01.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"> <br />

Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio. Here is a link to the audio instead.

</audio>

Early culture on the internet: "white, male, American, and vaguely libertarian"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/

Fascinating...

This sounds a bit like Australian political culture is facing the same sort of issues that are being see in the United States with respect to ideas like critical race theory. Groups are protesting parts of history and culture that they don't understand instead spending some time learning about them.

Hugh of St. Victor wrote Didascalicon, a text about what topics should be learned and why. In it, he outlined seven mechanical arts (or technologies) in analogy with the seven liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium) as ways to repair the weaknesses inherit in humanity.

These seven mechanical arts he defines are: - fabric making - armament - commerce - agriculture - hunting - medicine - theatrics

Hugh of St. Victor's description of the mechanical art of commerce here is fascinating. He says "reconciles nations, calms wars, strengthens peace, and turns the private good of individuals into a benefit for all" (doublcheck the original quotation, context, and source). This sounds eerily familiar to the common statement in the United States about trade and commerce.

Link this to the quote from Albie Duncan in The West Wing (season 5?) about trade.

Other places where this sentiment occurs?

Is Hugh of St. Victor the first in history to state this sentiment?

Historians need to be cautious not to take a whiggist and teleological view of historical events. They should be careful to place events into their appropriate context to be able to evaluate them accurately.

The West, in particular, has a tendency to discount cultural contexts and view human history as always bending toward improvement when this is not the case.

link to Dawn of Everything notes

"Scientist" is a neologism coined in 1834, by William Whewell and was originally meant tongue-in-cheek.

Who coined the word "scientist" in 1834? :: William Whewell

Science needs to be seen and understood in its appropriate historical context. Modern culture (and even scientists themselves) often forget the profound impact of theological, philosophical, social, political, and economic factors on how science develops and how we perceive it.

Principe, Lawrence M. (2013, July 8). History of Science: Antiquity to 1700 (Vol. 1200) [.mp3]. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/history-of-science-antiquity-to-1700

1. Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstra ß e, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1928/1981), 98 – 140, at 103.

Does Walter Benjamin prefigure the idea of card indexes conversing with themselves in a communicative method similar to that of Vannevar Bush's Memex?

This definitely sounds like the sort of digital garden inter-communication afforded by the Anagora as suggested by @Flancian.

https://scolarcardiff.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/birthday-book/

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

Found looking for information about the tradition of birthday books.

Understanding the history of inequality and how changes in institutional structures in legal, social, fiscal educational, and electoral systems have encouraged change toward equality, we might continue to change and modify these to ensure even greater equality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq66X9f-zgc

This sentiment is very similar to one in a recent lecture series I'd started listening to: The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida #.

Lawrence Cahoone specifically pointed out that he would be highlighting the revolutionary (and also consequently the most famous) writers because they were the ones over history that created the most change in their field of thought.

How does the novel and the different manage to break through?

How does this relate to the broad thesis of Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?

The comment Wengrow makes about "remarking on [an anarchist's] politics" as a means of attacking their ideas is quite similar to the sort of attacks that are commonly made on women. When female politicians make relevant remarks and points, mainstream culture goes to standbys about their voice or appearance: "She's 'shrill'", or "She doesn't look very good in that dress." They attack anything but the idea itself.

https://hardhistoriesjhu.substack.com/p/a-ritual-of-remembrance-on-the-jhu

Dr. Martha S. Jones reflects on the recent Ritual of Remembrance at the Homewood Museum at Johns Hopkins University.

Given the root word for museum, I'm reminded that the mother of the nine muses was Mnemosyne ("Memory"). I'm glad that there's a re-memory held there for those who history has conspired to erase.

Indices are certainly an old construct. One of the oldest structured examples in the note taking space is that of John Locke who detailed it in Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as A New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706).

Previously commonplace books had been structured with headwords done alphabetically. This meant starting with a preconceived structure and leaving blank or empty space ahead of time without prior knowledge of what would fill it or how long that might take. By turning that system on its head, one could fill a notebook from front to back with a specific index of the headwords at the end. Then one didn't need to do the same amount of pre-planning or gymnastics over time with respect to where to put their notes.

This idea combined with that of Konrad Gessner's design for being able to re-arrange slips of paper (which later became index cards based on an idea by Carl Linnaeus), gives us an awful lot of freedom and flexibility in almost any note taking system.

Building blocks of the note taking system

• atomic ideas
• written on (re-arrangeable) slips, cards, or hypertext spaces
• cross linked with each other
• cross linked with an index
• cross linked with references

are there others? should they be broken up differently?

Godfathers of Notetaking

• Aristotle, Cicero (commonplaces)
• Seneca the Younger (collecting and reusing)
• Raymond Llull (combinatorial rearrangements)
• Konrad Gessner (storage for re-arrangeable slips)
• John Locke (indices)
• Carl Linnaeus (index cards)

F*ck! I've been scooped!

Apparently I'm not the only one who has noticed this, though I notice that he doesn't cite Frances A. Yates, which would have certainly been the place for having come up with this historical background (at least that's where I found it.)

The Llullian arts can be more easily practiced with ideas placed on moveable index cards than they might be with ideas stored in one's own memory. Thus the index card as a tool significantly decreases the overhead and provides an easier user interface for permuting one's ideas and combining them. This decrease in mental work appearing at a time of information overload also puts specific pressure on the older use of the art of memory to put it out of fashion.

Adam smith on the effect of competition of wagers & capitalists as beneficial for the increase of wealth.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/05/16/ben-franklin-abortion-math-textbook/

some good references at the bottom

https://theconversation.com/abortion-has-been-common-in-the-us-since-the-18th-century-and-debate-over-it-started-soon-after-182496

by Treva B. Lindsey, Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Treva B. Lindsey </span> in Abortion has been common in the US since the 18th century -- and debate over it started soon after (<time class='dt-published'>05/18/2022 12:10:32</time>)</cite></small>

some interesting looking references at the bottom

Interwoven history between Arpanet and BBS networks

There is some truth to this statement. The necessary protocol underpinnings were from the Arpanet part of the pair, but the social pieces were derived from BBS interconnections via dialup protocols like UUCP. Is there an evolutionary link between UUCP and NNTP?

In the calls for loosely linked independent social networks to replace the large, global private social networks, there are echos of loosely connected BBS networks.

Related site with content based on this article: https://history.uconn.edu/taking-the-trade/#

https://currentpub.com/2022/05/06/is-abortion-deeply-rooted-in-american-history/

A meta post with a brief synopsis and links to several other related articles and resources.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has written in a leaked draft opinion of Dobs v. Jackson Women's Health that "The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation's history and traditions."

However, historians have shown that in fact it was so deeply rooted in in early America that Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the country actively inserted medical advice about abortion into a widely read and popular primer on math and reading.

Holy god in fuck...

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.

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.

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.

This is all too correct. Sadly the older methods for writing, note taking, thinking, and memory have fallen by the wayside, so most literate moderns don't have the tradition most of (elite educated) Western culture has had for the past 2000+ years. The long tradition of commonplace books and their related versions including waste books, florilegium, sudelbücher, scholia, glossae, notebooks, anthologies, sylvae, table books, vade mecum, memoranda books, diaries, miscellanies, pocket books, thesauruses, etc. underlines your thesis well. The Zettelkasten, exactly like almost all of these others, is simply an iteration of the commonplace book instantiated into index card form. One of the reasons that Umberto Eco's advice on writing seems so similar to the zettelkasten method is that he was a medievalist scholar who was aware of these long traditions of writing, note taking, and memory and leveraged these for himself, though likely in a slightly different manner. Would anyone suggest that he didn't have a voluminous output or an outsized impact on society and culture? If one really wants to go crazy on the idea of backlinks and the ideas of creativity and invention, perhaps they ought to brush up on their Catalan and read some Ramon Llull? He was an 11th century philosopher and polymath who spent a lot of time not only memorizing much of his personal knowledge, but who invented combinatorial creative methods for juxtaposing his volumes of information to actively create new ideas. I guarantee no backlinking system held a match to his associative methods. Now if someone wanted to mix some mysticism into the fray, then perhaps there might be a competition... Many who are now writing so positively about Zettelkasten or backlinks are doing so in much the same way that humanist scholars like Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, and Philip Melanchthon did when writing about and re-popularizing commonplace books in the 1500s. The primary difference being that the chance that they leave as lasting a legacy is much smaller. Worse many of them are crediting Luhmann for the actual invention of the Zettelkasten when his is but one instantiation on a long evolution of many note taking devices over literal millennia. I'm still waiting for folks to spend more time talking about Carl Linnaeus' revolutionary invention and use of the index card. Or John Locke's system for creating a new indexing system for commonplace books. Generally we don't talk about these innovations because their users spent more of their time using their systems to get other more important things done for their legacies. In the end, the message seems clear, anyone can be incredibly productive; most of it boils down to having some sort of system of reading, thinking, note taking, and new production and sticking with it for a while. Have a system; use your system; evolve it slowly to work well for you and the way you think and work.

Stemming from British history, but often applied in other areas including the history of science, whig history is a historiography that presents history as a path from an oppressive, backward, and wretched past to a glorious present. The term was coined by British Historian Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It stems from the British Whig party that advocated for the power of Parliament as opposed to the Tories who favored the power of the King.

It would seem to be an unfortunate twist of fate for indigenous science and knowledge that it was almost completely dismissed when the West began to dominate indigenous cultures during the Enlightenment which was still heavily imbued with the influence of scholasticism. Had religion not played such a heavy role in science, we may have had more respect and patience to see and understand the value of indigenous ways of knowing.

Link this to notes from The Dawn of Everything.

Modern celebrations of the Mari Lwyd which haven't had easy access to a horse skull to decorate have used a flat-pack cardboard version of a skull designed by David Pitt.

side-effect of progressive summarisation

Historical note taking practices can tell us many things aside from just the ways in which textual information was managed. They can also tell us about how people lived, how they thought, how they used memory and writing and how these things were understood culturally.

We do however need to be careful in how we interpret these documents historically. We need to attempt to view them exegetically and not eisegetically. We also need to be careful to look at them from a "large world" perspective and not presume that small things had large and heavy influence on things to come in the future.

Note here the presumed freedom to pick and choose based on interest and judgement. Who's judgement really? Book banning and religious battles would call to question which people got to exercise their own judgement.

Prior to the flourishing of reference materials, Peter Abelard (1079-1142) had articulated the idea of "the multitude and diversity of authoritative opinion" to be found in available material. How was one to decide which authority to believe in a time before the scientific method?

link to https://hypothes.is/a/oMSaKLb2EeyXOE_0Yh1Chw

Interesting that Vincent of Beauvais indicates that there were discrepancies between the authors, but leaves it up to the reader to decide for themself.

What would the reader do in these cases in a culture before the scientific method and the coming scientific revolutions? Does this statement prefigure the beginning of a cultural shift?

Are there other examples of (earlier) writers encouraging the the comparison of two different excerpts from "expert" or authoritative sources to determine which should have precedence?

What other methods would have encouraged this sort of behavior?

The first biblical concordance was completed in 1247.

When was the first biblical concordance completed? :: 1247 (anorak)

While there are ancient compilations by writers including Pliny, Diogenes Laertius, and Stobaeus, many authors in the Renaissance credited Aulus Gellius as the founder of the genre.

Leaf numbering was seen in the Middle Ages, but printing in the Renaissance greatly increased the number of books with page numbers.

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As experimental psychology was being pushed to evolve into new science through development of experimentation, observation, appliance of external stimuli and reaction of the psyche; the results produced equate to the ones in other scientific fields. The importance of having psychology be a natural science is to understand how an individual's psychology functions in response to the stimuli. Experimentation would allow better understanding of conscious beings. The experiments discussed provide value to adapting psychology as an experimental science that would benefit students and provide equality to psychology in comparison to a field like chemistry.

ReconfigBehSci [@SciBeh]. ‘RT @firefoxx66: The @nextstrain Http://CoVariants.Org Focal Build for 21K (B.1.1.529) Is Now Live. Http://Nextstrain.Org/Groups/Neherlab/Ncov/21K As Previously…’. Tweet. Twitter, 26 November 2021. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1464265981220560901.

How is it biased?

Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".

Explore this area more deeply.

Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?

How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?

What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?

What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?

What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?

total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?

Ed Yong. (2021, February 9). The incomparable @sarahzhang is still ruling the vaccine beat; here’s her latest on what vaccines, variants, and herd immunity. Https://t.co/np7viqRU1T [Tweet]. @edyong209. https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/1359234289448189952

Adam Kucharski. (2021, March 24). This is an interesting perspective on Taiwan (& glad it mentions data/privacy), although I’d like to see more references to what local officials were actually saying about approach in real-time, rather than what UK-based researchers later say it was: Https://t.co/FDu0mQoISh 1/ [Tweet]. @AdamJKucharski. https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1374638777814167555