1,408 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2021
    1. When it comes to publishing, I think the publishing platform of choice is determined by other questions, such as where are my ideas going to make the most impact, where can I make the most money, what banner can I publish under that will lend me the most credibility. 

      What about publishing in a place that could make one's ideas dramatically better? If Roam or competitiors had page to page discussions (think short notes/status updates on Twitter, but without the extra "crap"), then one would come for the ideas and the conversation, but in a format that's meant for improving and elevating one's thoughts and ideas.

      This may not appeal to Harry and Mary Beercan, but it would cater to a large enough group to make things worthwhile.

    2. The only problem is, I’ve seen a lot of “public Roams” but I never enjoy the reading experience. Non-linear “digital gardens” of notes are of immense usefulness, but only so long as the individual nodes provide quality linear reading experiences. And it’s not impossible to do so in Roam, but I’ve rarely seen it. 

      This is an important point and is generally true.

      But it's also why I like the idea of linking Roam or similar tools to Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is puts some of the conversation into other documents which are linear, but allow side conversations which could be moved into one's public/private notebooks.

      Similarly, longer articles within a digital garden could be this more linear space where conversations occur and continue to hone ideas.

    3. In other words, Roam could be the thing the scientist uses for fun to organize their book notes, or they could also be the thing that same scientist uses at work to collaborate with colleagues on discovering new truths, paid for by their employer.

      But why can't it do both?

      Because it's on the same platform, they could allow people to make their notes public and shareable. They could add Webmention support so that one notebook could talk to another!

      C'mon people!!? Don't you remember the dream of the Memex?

    4. This is what I mean when I say Roam “increases the expected value of my notes.” Now that I’m using Roam, I’m confident my notes will remain useful long into the future, so I’ve increased the quality and quantity of the notes I take.

      Well interlinked notes increases their future expected value which in turn gives one more reason to not only take more notes, but to take better notes.

    5. In most note-taking apps, you jot something down quickly and only use it a few times before losing track of it.

      This is a major problem of most note taking applications. Having the ability to inter-link one's notes in ways that allow one to revisit, revise, and rearrange them is incredibly valuable.

    6. Personal todo lists don’t depend on others using the same system (no network effects)

      They don't unless you're building a wiki or commonplace book that can interact with those of others. (Roam research isn't doing this---yet, but they should.) Ideally small building block pieces will allow it to dovetail with other systems that could potentially do the same thing.

    1. Bookmark This Selection What I would like from the bookmark feature in the browser is the ability to not only bookmark the full page but be able to select a piece of the page that is reflected in the bookmark, be through the normal menu as we have seen above or through the contextual menu of the browser.

      Sounds kind of like they're wishing for Hypothes.is?

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>KevinMarks</span> in #indieweb 2021-02-15 (<time class='dt-published'>02/14/2021 17:38:55</time>)</cite></small>

    2. I know there’s lots of advice out there about considering your audience when you write, but when it comes to my personal site, I’d find that crippling. It would be one more admonishment from the inner critic whispering “no one’s interested in that”, “you have nothing new to add to this topic”, and “you’re not quailified to write about this.” If I’m writing for myself, then it’s easier to have fewer inhibitions. By treating everything as a scrappy note-to-self, I can avoid agonising about quality control …although I still spend far too long trying to come up with titles for posts.

      Many people anecdotally have said that they find it difficult to either write on their sites or actually hit publish when they're done. This is great advice for getting over that.

    3. I have a section of my site called “notes” but the truth is that every single thing I post on here—whether it’s a link, a blog post, or anything else—is really a “note to self.”
    1. A fascinating and thoughtful article. One of the best things I've read in a month.

    2. You cannot measure the health of journalism simply by looking at the number of editors and reporters on the payroll of newspapers. There are undoubtedly going to be fewer of them. The question is whether that loss is going to be offset by the tremendous increase in textual productivity we get from a connected web. Presuming, of course, that we don’t replace that web with glass boxes.

      The value of journalism must take account of the increase in textual productivity gained by the interconnected Internet and not solely by the number of editors, reporters, and size or number of newspapers.

      Of course we also need to account for the signal to noise ratio created by the masses of people who can say anything they like, which can also be compounded by the algorithmic feed of social platforms that give preference to the extremes and content that increases engagement (a measure which doesn't take into account the intrinsic value of the things which are shared.)

      How can we measure and prefer the content with more intrinsic value? Similar to the idea of fast food and healthier food? How can we help people to know the difference between the types of information they're consuming.

    3. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson. And yet we are, deliberately, trying to crawl back into the glass box.

      Technology is providing us with the ability to build the most amazing commonplace books, thought spaces, and thinking machines, but somehow we're ignoring the power they have.

    4. the frozen nature of the text seem more like a feature than a bug, something they’ve deliberated chosen, rather than a flaw that they didn’t have time to correct.

      The thoughtfulness and design of of Hypothes.is is incredibly valuable to me specifically because it dramatically increases my textual productivity in combination with my digital commonplace book.

      Connect this to the Jeremy Dean's idea of it helping to facilitate a conversation with texts. Nate Angell had a specific quote of it somewhere, but it might also reside in this document: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14682753.2017.1362168

    5. Now, it may well be true that Apple, and The Times, and The Journal intend to add extensive tools that encourage the textual productivity of their apps. If that happens, I will be delighted. The iPad is only about two weeks old, after all, and it famously took Apple two years to introduce copy-and-paste to the iPhone OS.

      By not providing the ability to select text, copy it, or share it, some digital applications are dramatically lowering the textual productivity of their content.

    6. The overall increase in textual productivity may be the single most important fact about the Web’s growth over the past fifteen years. Think about it this way: let’s say it’s 1995, and you are cultivating a page of “hot links” to interesting discoveries on the Web. You find an article about a Columbia journalism lecture and you link to it on your page. The information value you have created is useful exclusively to two groups: people interested in journalism who happen to visit your page, and the people maintaining the Columbia page, who benefit from the increased traffic. Fast forward to 2010, and you check-in at Foursquare for this lecture tonight, and tweet a link to a description of the talk. What happens to that information? For starters, it goes out to friends of yours, and into your twitter feed, and into Google’s index. The geo-data embedded in the link alerts local businesses who can offer your promotions through foursquare; the link to the talk helps Google build its index of the web, which then attracts advertisers interested in your location or the topic of journalism itself. Because that tiny little snippet of information is free to make new connections, by checking in here you are helping your friends figure out what to do tonight; you’re helping the Journalism school in promoting this venue; you’re helping the bar across Broadway attract more customers, you’re helping Google organize the web; you’re helping people searching google for information about journalism; you’re helping journalism schools advertising on Google to attract new students. Not bad for 140 characters.

      A fantastic example of the value of networked thought based solely on the ability of everyone's commonplace books to talk to each other.

    7. Ecologists talk about the “productivity” of an ecosystem, which is a measure of how effectively the ecosystem converts the energy and nutrients coming into the system into biological growth. A productive ecosystem, like a rainforest, sustains more life per unit of energy than an unproductive ecosystem, like a desert. We need a comparable yardstick for information systems, a measure of a system’s ability to extract value from a given unit of information. Call it, in this example: textual productivity. By creating fluid networks of words, by creating those digital-age commonplaces, we increase the textual productivity of the system.

      Definition: textual productivity

      A measure of how much additional knowledge is generated by a system of ideas and thoughts interacting with each other.

    8. Along the right side of the page, we have short snippets of text written by five advertisers, mostly journalism schools as it happens, though they are in a silent competition with other snippets of text created by other advertisers bidding to be on this page.

      Reframing:

      SEO is really just various commonplace books competing to be the most important zettels in the world for particular taxonomies.

    9. What you see on this page is, in a very real sense, textual play: the recombining of words into new forms and associations that their original creators never dreamed of.

      What if we add in a dose of Llull's combinatorial thought to the idea of a search engine? What if the search engine can remember the top 50 categories in my personal commonplace book and show overlapping searches of those terms? What if it's even more combinatorial and randomly chooses overlaps from any words in my commonplace? Is that more or less valuable as an idea generator?

      Is it more fruitful to randomly work on various entries every day in an effort to tie them into our other thoughts?

    10. What I want to suggest to you is that, in some improbable way, this page is as much of an heir to the structure of a commonplace book as the most avant-garde textual collage. Who is the “author” of this page? There are, in all likelihood, thousands of them. It has been constructed, algorithmically, by remixing small snippets of text from diverse sources, with diverse goals, and transformed into something categorically different and genuinely valuable. In the center column, we have short snippets of text written by ten individuals or groups, though of course, Google reports that it has 32 million more snippets to survey if we want to keep clicking. The selection of these initial ten links is itself dependant on millions of other snippets of text that link to these and other journalism-related pages on the Web.

      Google search is just an algorithmic search version of John Locke's commonplace book index iterated across millions of individual commonplace books.

    11. The idea of a purely linear text is a myth; readers stitch together meanings in much more complex ways than we have traditionally imagined; the true text is more of a network than a single, fixed document.

      The internet isn't a new invention, it's just a more fixed version of the melange of text, ideas, and thought networks that have existed over human existence.

      First there was just the memory and indigenous peoples all over the world creating vast memory palaces to interconnect their thoughts. (cross reference the idea of ancients thinking much the way we do now from the fist episode or so of Literature and History)

      Then we invite writing and texts which help us in terms of greater storage without the work or relying solely on memory. This reaches it's pinnacle in the commonplace book and the ideas of Llull's combinatorial thought.

      Finally we've built the Internet which interconnects so much more.

      But now we need to go back and revisit the commonplace book and memory techniques to tie them altogether. Perhaps Lynne Kelly's concept of The Third Archive is what we should perfect next until another new instantiation comes to augment the system.

    12. Since the heyday of the commonplace book, there have been a few isolated attempts to turn these textual remixes into a finished product, into a standalone work of collage. The most famous is probably Jefferson’s bible, his controversial “remix” of the New Testament. There’s also Walter Benjamin’s unfinished, and ultimately unpublishable Passagenwerk, or “Arcades Project,” his rumination on the early shopping malls of Paris built out of photos, quotes, and aphoristic musings. Just this year, David Shields published a book, Reality Hunger, built out of quotes from a wide variety of sources. And of course, there are parallel works in music, painting, and architecture that are constructed out of “quotes” lifted from original sources and remixed in imaginative ways.

      Interesting examples of remixed work.

    13. When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA, I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. i. if in the space marked E. i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.

      I must do some research into Niklas Luhmann to see if he was aware of Locke's work or the broader idea of commonplace books in general as it seems pretty obvious that his refinesments on their systems brought him to his conceptualization of the zettelkasten.

    14. The great minds of the period — Milton, Bacon, Locke — were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”
    15. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing.

      Written in 2010, this may be one of the first mentions I've seen that relates blogging and websites to commonplace books.

    16. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>The Public Domain Review</span> in John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685) (<time class='dt-published'>02/13/2021 14:10:02</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Commonplacing was like quilting: it produced pictures, some more beautiful than others, but each of them interesting in its own way. The assembled texts reveal patterns of culture: the segments that went into it, the stitching that connected them, the tears that pulled them apart, and the common cloth of which they were composed.

      A nice little analogy here.

    2. That point warrants pondering, because the history of reading has become one of the most vital fields of research in the humanities; yet it consists for the most part of case studies, which do not fit into a general pattern. Instead of sharing a common view of long-term trends, historians of reading tend to treat their subject as a moving target driven by the interplay of binary opposites: reading by turning the leaves of a codex as opposed to reading by unrolling a volumen, reading printed texts in contrast to reading manuscripts, silent reading as distinct from reading aloud, reading alone rather than reading in groups, reading extensively by racing through different kinds of material vs. reading intensively by perusing a few books many times. Now that the research has shifted to commonplace books, we may add segmental vs. sequential reading to the list.

      This paragraph is a good overview of areas of research into reading.

    3. Only fifteen of the thirty-seven commonplace books were written in his hand. He might have dictated the others to a secretary, but the nature of his authorship, if it existed, remains a matter of conjecture. A great deal of guesswork also must go into the interpretation of the entries in his own hand, because none of them are dated. Unlike the notes of Harvey, they consist of endless excerpts, which cannot be connected with anything that was happening in the world of politics.

      I find myself wondering what this study of his commonplace books would look like if it were digitized and cross-linked? Sadly the lack of dates on the posts would prevent some knowledge from being captured, but what would the broader corpus look like?

      Consider the broader digital humanities perspective of this. Something akin to corpus linguistics, but at the level of view of what a single person reads, thinks, and reacts to over the course of their own lifetime.

      How much of a person could be recreated from such a collection?

    4. Foucault probably offers the most helpful theoretical approach. His “archaeology of knowledge” suggests a way to study texts as sites that bear the marks of epistemological activity, and it has the advantage of doing justice to the social dimension of thought.

    5. He is right, I think, to treat commonplace books as sites to be mined for information about how people thought in a culture based on different assumptions from our own.

      This is an interesting take, and particularly because the writers may not have expected their commonplace books to be read or studied.

      My particular version may be slightly more suspect. While I keep one, it's digital and more public facing. Therefore there is the chance that people (though I suspect a vanishingly small number) may read my words and be influenced by them. Generally however, I feel like 99.9999% of the time I'm writing just to have a conversation with myself and the expectation that it will make me better.

    6. But help can be had from a study of some similar material by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton.3 They published a dazzlingly original analysis of the marginalia of Gabriel Harvey, a lawyer and secretary to the Earl of Leicester in Elizabethan England. Harvey read and reread a 1555 edition of Livy’s History of Rome over a period of twenty-two years, leaving behind a trail of annotations, which often can be linked to contemporary events. In fact, he filled the margins with so many allusions and cross-references that they turned into a kind of palimpsest or a commonplace book within a book.

      Annotations so heavy in a book that it becomes a commonplace book within a book is an interesting take.

    7. Why pause over this arcane, forgotten book? Because it shows how an archaic genre could be used to impose order on experience in modern times. Commonplace books served far more effectively in this manner several centuries earlier, when they were standard tools of readers. By studying them, historians and literary scholars have come closer to understanding reading, both as a specific cultural practice and as a general way of construing the world. But it is a tricky business, especially when the researcher moves from questions about who readers were and what they read to the problems of how they made sense of books.

      To some extent, this same thing will very likely be done with social media in 50 or 100 years' time.

    8. Trousers should shiver on the shoe but not break. —Arnold Bennett’s tailor

      A gentleman: superficially perhaps, a man who never looks as if he’d just had his hair cut.

      No gentleman can be without three copies of a book; one for show (and this he will probably keep at his country house), another for use, and a third at the service of his friends. —Richard Heber

      Some great examples from Geoffrey Madan's notebooks

    9. The best example of a twentieth-century commonplace book is Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, published in 1981.
    10. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities.

      Overview of reading patterns by early modern Englishmen.

    11. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>The Public Domain Review</span> in John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685) (<time class='dt-published'>02/13/2021 14:10:02</time>)</cite></small>

    1. According to the historian Robert Darnton, this led to a very particular structuring of knowledge: commonplace users "broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebook." It was a mixture of fragmented order and disorder that anticipated a particular form of scientific investigation and organisation of information.

      Might be an interesting source to read.

      Also feels in form a bit like the combinatorial method of Raymond Llull, but without as much mixing.

    2. Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706)

      I hadn't known about the earlier French version of John Locke's book.

    3. The English physician and philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was all too aware of the grip of amnesia and the shortness of memory. In his seminal Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) he wrote of his rival Blaise Pascal, who he named as the “prodigy of parts”, who “forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought.” Locke, in reaction, attempted to simulate Pascal’s "hyperthymesia", not in the mind, but upon the page: through the construction of a system of "commonplacing", as a form of what Swift called “supplemental memory”.

      Interesting use of hyperthymesia here. Also Swift using the concept of "supplemental memory" giving at least a historical mile marker of the state of mnemotechy which may have been known at the time.

    4. In "A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet" from 1721, Jonathan Swift remarked that a commonplace book is something that “a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that great wits have short memories”.
    1. Short overview of John Locke's commonplace book method. Nothing I haven't seen before sadly.

      And probably not a method I would personally use unless I was thinking about paper solutions.

    1. Mostly an advertisement for their other materials, but a reasonable overview particularly with

      4 Benefits of Keeping a Commonplace Book

      • To remember what inspired you
      • To save hours on research.
      • To find unexpected connections.
      • To focus your future reading.
    2. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>J. D. Biersdorfer</span> in Create a Digital Commonplace Book - The New York Times (<time class='dt-published'>02/13/2021 12:20:08</time>)</cite></small>

    1. This article has lots of examples of commonplace books and talks about a few of the older online methods for collecting and keeping them.

      It doesn't touch on any of the newer applications with backlink UI like Roam Research, Obsidian, Foam, etc.

      And as Kimberly Hirsh indicated, it doesn't include keeping one on your own website where you can truly keep it for yourself.

    2. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Kimberly Hirsh</span> in Kimberly Hirsh (<time class='dt-published'>02/13/2021 05:48:31</time>)</cite></small>

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>J. D. Biersdorfer</span> in Create a Digital Commonplace Book - The New York Times (<time class='dt-published'>02/13/2021 12:20:08</time>)</cite></small>

  2. Jan 2021
    1. A page from the commonplace book of William Stukeley, with a sketch plan of standing stones at Avebury, southern England.

      a nice example of a commonplace book by an archaeologist

    Tags

    Annotators

  3. Dec 2020
    1. In both cases – speech and writing – the materiality of language undergoes a transformation (to audible sounds or written signs) which in turn produces a mental shift.

      There's surely a link between this and the idea of thought spaces in the blogosphere or the idea of a commonplace book/digital garden/wiki.

    1. Hugh makes the Ark, allegorically, a prefiguration of the Church(para. 6), using an exegetical commonplace going back at least to St. Ambrose
    1. The credibility bookcase, with its towering, idiosyncratic array of worn volumes, is itself an affectation. The expert could choose to speak in front of his art prints or his television or his blank white walls, but he chooses to be framed by his books. It is the most insidious of aesthetic trends: one that masquerades as pure intellectual exercise.
  4. Nov 2020
  5. Oct 2020
    1. Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., sends personalized URLs to customers with a list of handpicked recommendations.

      Perhaps if they went the step further to set up domains for their customers, they could ostensibly use them not only as book blogs, but also to replace their social media habits?

      An IndieWeb friendly platform run by your local bookseller might be out of their wheelhouse, but it could potentially help solve their proximal problem while also solving one of society's problems all while helping to build community.

    1. The students in Raphael Folsom’s Spanish Borderlands course read primary sources on a weekly basis. Rather than taking notes on 3×5 index cards as we did when I was a kid, the students take the same type of note in the Drupal system. They fill out some basic bibliographic information about the source, write a short summary of the source, and then take a note about an interesting facet of the text.

      I've been trying this sort of thing out with a TiddlyWiki for a while and have got a reasonable sort of workflow for doing it. The key is to reduce the overhead so that one can quickly take notes in a manner that interlinks them and makes it seem worthwhile to come back to them to review and potentially reorganize them. Doing this practice in public has a lot of value as well. I'll have to come back and look at some of how this was built at a later time.

    1. Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

      Alright, I think I may now have things set to use an IFTTT applet to take my Hypothes.is feed and dump it into a file on OneDrive.

      The tiny amount of clean up to the resultant file isn't bad. In fact, a bit of it is actually good as it can count as a version of spaced repetition towards better recall of my notes.

      The one thing I'll potentially miss is the tags, which Hypothes.is doesn't include in their feeds (tucked into the body would be fine), but I suppose I could add them as internal wiki links directly if I wanted.

      I suspect that other storage services that work with IFTTT should work as well.

      Details in a blogpost soon...

      Testing cross-linking:

      See Also:

      • [[Obsidian]]
      • [[Hypothes.is]]
      • [[note taking]]
      • [[zettlekasten]]
      • [[commonplace books]]
      • [[productivity]]

      hat tip to Hypothesis, for such a generally wonderful user interface for making annotating, highlighting, bookmarking, and replying to web pages so easy!

    1. This is a reasonable synopsis for why to keep a zettlekasten or commonplace book and how to use it to create new material. It fits roughly in line with my overall experience in doing these things.

    2. This principle requires us to expand our definition of “publication” beyond the usual narrow sense. Few people will ever publish their work in an academic journal or even on a blog. But everything that we write down and share with someone else counts: notes we share with a friend, homework we submit to a professor, emails we write to our colleagues, and presentations we deliver to clients all count as knowledge made public.

      This idea underlies the reason why one might want to have a public online commonplace book or digital garden.

    1. The second article is from Tom Critchlow titled Building a Digital Garden. What I really like about Tom's piece is his discussion of the idea of "non-performative blogging" in your personal space on the web.I love this idea. Instead of "content marketing" we can use our websites to get back to what made the web awesome while also creating better resources for ourselves and our users.

      There's a nice kernel of an idea here that one's website should be built and made (useful) for ones self first and only secondarily for others. This is what makes it a "personal" website.

    1. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me happy about the IndieWeb!

      One person tinkers around with an idea and posts about how they did it. Someone else sees it and thinks it's cool and wants it for themselves. They then modify it for their system, maybe with some changes or even improvements, and post the details on their site.

      They've both syndicated copies to IndieWeb news or to the IndieWeb wiki, so that in the future, others looking for that sort of UI research or examples can find them and potentially modify them for their own personal use.

      And the cycle begins anew...

    1. Although I’ve already got a blog (you’re reading it!), I decided not to mirror my book reviews here. I post normal content so infrequently that anyone who wanted to read the blog but wasn’t interested in book reviews would be inundated with content they didn’t want. In the end, I spun up an additional WordPress instance on my web space (something that my host, Krystal Hosting, makes very easy to do) to keep the reviews completely isolated from everything else.

      This seems to be a frequent excuse for people to spin up yet another website rather than attempting to tackle the UI subscription problem.

      Social readers would be well advised to think about this problem so people could have a single website with multiple types/kinds of content.

      Platforms should better delineate how to allow publishers and readers to more easily extract the posts that they're interested in following.

  6. app.getpocket.com app.getpocket.com
    1. The main thing that dissuaded him, he says, is that “I wouldn’t want to sell a book to a philistine, which is what every bookseller has to do.”
    1. I want to extract a reusable piece out of it in a way that it can be connected to many different things eventually. I want to make a home page for this idea or fact. My hub for thinking about this.

      And isn't this just the point of tools like commonplace books and zettelkasten?

    1. Catch up by reading my last post of digital streams, campfires and gardens.

      I immediately thought of a post from Mike Caulfield (Hapgood). Interesting to see that Tom has already read and referenced it in his prior post.

    1. How do you manage information flows? If anyone is using a personal wiki-style long term information tool I’d love to hear from you!

      I've got a handful of interesting things bookmarked here: https://boffosocko.com/tag/wikis/ which includes a rabbit hole of a request similar to your own.

    1. The complementary principle to dividing isgathering and collecting. Eachnew composition can also be conceived as a place into which culled and rec-ollected matters are gathered. The very concept of reading in Latin is basedonthenotionof‘‘gathering,’’Latinlegere, ‘‘to read’’ having as its root mean-ing ‘‘to collect up, to gather by picking, plucking, and the like.’’ The Greekverblegōhad a similar range of meaning, from ‘‘to lay’’ something down or‘‘to lay asleep’’ to ‘‘to lay [things] in order,’’ hence ‘‘to gather, pick up,’’ ‘‘torelate,’’ ‘‘to speak purposefully.’’ The name of one venerable and essential typeof ancient and medieval encyclopedia puns on these closely allied verbs: theflorilegium, ‘‘flower-culling’’ (with a pun on ‘‘flower-reading’’), a collection ofsayings, maxims, and stories collected from past works, sometimes quotedexactly (though in mnemonically brief segments), but often just summarized.The best known of these through much of the Middle Ages was ValeriusMaximus’sDicta et facta memorabilia(early first century..), but there aremany other examples. Indeed, the premodern encyclopedia itself is a sort ofmemory-book, the flowers of (one’s extensive) reading gathered up in someorderly arrangement for the purpose of quick, secure recollection in connec-tion with making a new composition. After all, this is one essential purposeof encyclopedias even today.

      This seems awfully close to the sort of "digital gardens" I've been reading about recently. They obviously are not a new idea.

      For example see: https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners

    2. Gardens were also popular, the medieval sort of garden,with orderly beds of medicinal plants and fruit trees separated by grass andsurrounded by a wall. Undoubtedly, gardens became popular with monasticand later writers because of the Song of Songs, a preeminent text for mysticalmeditation. Various other Biblical structures were often used too: the Taber-nacle described in Exodus; the Temple described in  Kings; the Jerusalemcitadel envisioned by Ezekiel and often conflated with the Heavenly City ofthe Apocalypse. We now would never think to organize an encyclopedia ofknowledge on the plan of Noah’s Ark, but for a clerical audience to whomthis text was as familiar as the order of the alphabet is to us—why not? It is asimple (if large), clearly arranged (if imaginary) composition site, containingmany useful compartments with a straightforward route among them, a sortof foundational map to use in arranging your materials (orresin Latin) as yougather them into the location of your new composition from the networksof your experiences, including of course all your experiences of books, music,and other arts. Thus, in the course of an ideal medieval education, in addi-tion to acquiring a great many segments of scriptural and classical texts, onealso would acquire an extensive repertoire of image-schemes in which to putthem, both ‘‘to lay them away’’ and ‘‘to collect them’’ in new arrangementson later occasions.

      Again, another reference to gardens with respect to memorizing information. There's a direct correlation to some of the sorts of thinking tools many are using to create digital gardens or personal wikis. These ideas aren't new! Our predecessors were simply using different structures to store and remember them. Their tools were different, but their goals and general methods were ultimately the same.

    3. Re-collection is not passive, but rather an activity involvinghuman will and thought; it is often defined as a form of reasoning. One mayconveniently think of this activity in spatial terms, as if memories have beenstored in a variety of places and must be called together in a common placewhere we can become aware of them, where we can ‘‘see’’ them again andknow them in the present.

      I don't use it frequently (enough perhaps), but TiddlyWiki has the ability to open multiple cards (tiddlers) in one view (using a permalink) as a means of giving disparate small pieces of thought a commonplace. Very few other note taking systems do this without relying on a taxonomy mechanism.

    1. Twenty Stories Bookmobile, which left L.A. traffic for Providence, Rhode Island, in 2018

      This makes me think that a mobile bookstore a la the traditional LA roach coach with a well painted/decorated exterior could be a cool thing.

      I'm reminded of a used bookstore pop-up I saw recently at the Santa Anita Mall prior to the holidays. Booksellers were traditionally itinerant mongers anyway. Perhaps this could be a more solid model, especially for the lunchtime business crowds.

    1. Now all information belongs to a single category, and it all pours through a single channel.

      If this is true, then I desperately want to know how I can manage to feed books through this channel too. I'd often prefer to read those...

    1. To have, but maybe not to read. Like Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” seems to have been an “event” book that many buyers didn’t stick with; an analysis of Kindle highlights suggested that the typical reader got through only around 26 of its 700 pages. Still, Piketty was undaunted.

      Interesting use of digital highlights--determining how "read" a particular book is.

    1. “In his influential De Copia (1512),” writes Professor Richard Yeo, “Erasmus advised that an abundant stock of quotations and maxims from classical texts be entered under various loci (places) to assist free-flowing oratory.” Arranged under ‘Heads’ and recorded as ‘common-places’ (loci communes), these commonplace books could be consulted for speeches and written compositions designed for various situations — in the law court, at ceremonial occasions, or in the dedication of a book to a patron. Typical headings included the classical topics of honour, virtue, beauty, friendship, and Christian ones such as God, Creation, faith, hope, or the names of the virtues and vices.
    2. Neither ought anything to be collected whilst you are busied in reading; if by taking the pen in hand the thread of your reading be broken off, for that will make the reading both tedious and unpleasant.

      This is incredibly important for me, though in a more technology friendly age, I've got tools like Hypothes.is for quickly highlighting and annotating pages and can then later collect them into my commonplace book as notes to work with and manage after-the-fact.

    1. Interestingly, I’ve found that Kindle is useful in this respect. I buy Kindle versions of books that I need for work, and highlight passages and bookmark pages as I go. And when I’ve finished the software obligingly has a collection of all the passages I’ve highlighted.

      John, you should spend a minute or two to learn about Hypothes.is (https://web.hypothes.is/) as an online tool for doing this. It's a free account or you can self-host the software yourself if you like. There are also functionalities to have public, private, or group annotations. I often pull my own annotations to my personal website similar to your own Memex and publish them there (example: https://boffosocko.com/kind/annotation/)

      Syndicated copy: https://boffosocko.com/2020/05/21/55771248/)

    1. Fifty-Two Stories Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 14, 2020 by Anton Chekhov (Author), Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)
  7. Sep 2020
    1. Now, if I notice a moment in a past Are.na conversation that highlights the topic, I add it to the topic's channel. Now the text block sits in the middle of a Venn diagram — both part of a chat log and part of a curated selection from conversations I have.

      This sounds a lot like a zettelkasten and the way it branches, it's just being done between multiple people and the zettelkasten instead of just one person.

    1. Writing in the margins has always been an essential activity for students.

      I never really got into the habit of writing in the margins of books, it was something that never really occurred to me. While I am still hesitant to write in the margins of physical books, doing so digitally does appeal. Something I am starting to get more into, now that I'm on the journey to getting my Arts and Humanities degree.

  8. eclass.srv.ualberta.ca eclass.srv.ualberta.ca
    1. Gary Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without “re-story-ation.”

      This is an example of allusion- Robin Kimmerer is referencing Gary Nabhan's literature known as "Food from the Radical Center" without directly naming the text. This book relates how we eat with stories of collaboration, calling on each of us to restore the nation's capacity to feed and nourish. This is a connection to the message behind "Skywoman Falling."

    1. I have read a heap of books in my time; I am a scholar in my own way

      Betteredege's self-description as a alternative type of scholar is so amusing. What kind of a scholar is this? Of Robinson Crusoe, certainly. At the same time, there's almost a defiant insistence that he is not superstitious. What is he trying to disprove here?

  9. Aug 2020
    1. “The idea of a ‘blog’ needs to get over itself,” wrote Joel Hooks in a post titled Stop Giving af and Start Writing More. “Everybody is treating writing as a ‘content marketing strategy’ and using it to ‘build a personal brand’ which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.” It is almost as if he had reached down into my soul and figured out why I no longer had the vigor I once had for sharing on my personal blog. For far too long, I was trying to brand myself. Posts became few and far between. I still shared a short note, aside, once in a while, but much of what I shared was for others rather than myself.

      For many, social media took over their "streams" of thoughts and ideas to the point that they forgot to sit, reflect, and write something longer (polished or not).

      Personal websites used for yourself first is a powerful idea for collecting, thinking, and creating.

      Getting away from "branding" is a great idea. Too many personal sites are used for this dreadful thing. I'd much rather see the edge ideas and what they flower into.

    2. Despite having something that worked sort of like a blog, I maintained various resources and links of other neat ideas I found around the web. It was a digital garden that I tended, occasionally plucking weeds and planting new ideas that may someday blossom into something more.

      The idea of a thought space hiding in here....

    3. My blog posts were merely random thoughts — bits and pieces of my life.
  10. Jul 2020
  11. May 2020
    1. “Extraordinary Commonplaces,” Robert Darnton
    2. Early compilations involved various combinations of four crucial operations: storing, sorting, selecting, and summarizing, which I think of as the four S’s of text management. We too store, sort, select, and summarize information, but now we rely not only on human memory, manuscript, and print, as in earlier centuries, but also on computer chips, search functions, data mining, and Wikipedia, along with other electronic techniques.
  12. Apr 2020
    1. About LibriVox LibriVox Objective To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. Our Fundamental Principles Librivox is a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project Librivox donates its recordings to the public domain Librivox is powered by volunteers Librivox maintains a loose and open structure Librivox welcomes all volunteers from across the globe, in all languages
    1. Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.
    1. The future of eBooks is not in the production of digital photocopies you can read by the pool. The future of eBooks lies in re-imagining the book as an open, easily accessible, immersive experience; a connected community of discovery. Scott Abel The Content Wrangler
    1. Regarding a Hunter S. Thompson book. The reviews on Amazon. One review said to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas first before this one inquiry mentions. So noted.

    1. David could be a terror when you got it wrong, but when you got it right—when you wrote something that made him smile—he’d make you feel like you’d hung the moon. I can remember coming to his office after closing a piece on day laborers and him looking at me and saying, “I was just talking about how fucking great your piece was this week.” I was a kid who had never felt like he’d done anything great for anyone. And it was only when working for David that I came to understand that I might actually be “good” (to say nothing of great) at anything. Part of that realization wasn’t just in what David said about my own work, but where he set the bar. David would bring in writers from Vanity Fair to hold workshops with the staff. He’d introduce me to journalists who were doing incredible work. He’d clip articles from the New Yorker or Esquire and leave them on my desk with a note attached: “This is the level of work I expect of you.”
  13. Mar 2020
    1. Pedro’s book “The Master Algorithm” takes readers on a journey through the five dominant paradigms of machine learning research on a quest for the master  algorithm. Along the way, Pedro wanted to abstract away from the mechanics so that a broad audience, from the CXO to the consumer, can understand how machine learning is shaping our lives

      "The Master Algorithm" book seems to be too abstract in such a case; however, it covers the following 5 paradigms:

      • Rule based learning (Decision trees, Random Forests, etc)
      • Connectivism (neural networks, etc)
      • Bayesian (Naive Bayes, Bayesian Networks, Probabilistic Graphical Models)
      • Analogy (KNN & SVMs)
      • Unsupervised Learning (Clustering, dimensionality reduction, etc)
  14. Feb 2020
    1. Okay this is absolutely blowing up my timeline in the last 24 hrs so I'm gonna bite— *Now brainstorming: 100 opinions on books & reading* (1 like = 1 opinion. Max 100. RT if you'd like some hot takes about antilibraries, bookstores, reading habits & more!)

      Just finished reading this. Some interesting tidbits hiding in it.

  15. Jan 2020
    1. you will find better treatise for all individual topics covered; for example:- What we understand about the brain is essentially covered by Tim Urban in his article "Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future" in, I might add, more entertaining manner. Alternatively, for a much more in-depth look, look at the book "Principles of Neural Design"- The short time Oliveira spends on superintelligence is better covered by Bostrom in his book "Superintelligence", which Oliveira references- What an algorithm is and what can be computed is better covered by "What algorithms want"- The "common sense" aspect of AI is better covered by "Common Sense, the Turing Test and the Quest for Real AI"- On the title promise, how science is "redefining humanity", the Digital Mind is relatively light on, aside from broadly listing topics that we need to think about like ownership and rights. For a (much) further-taken discussion on this, look at Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus, for example.
    1. a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
  16. Dec 2019
    1. Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the author of payment. I think most of the filesharing community feels that the record industry is a vestigal organ that will slowly fall off and die – I don’t know to what extent that feeling would extend to publishing houses since they are to some extent a different animal. In the end, I think that regular people will never feel very guilty “stealing” from a faceless corporation, or to a lesser extent, a multi-millionaire like King.
    2. I assume they are primarily produced by individuals like me – bibliophiles who want to share their favorite books with others. They likely own hundreds of books, and when asked what their favorite book is look at you like you are crazy before rattling of 10-15 authors, and then emailing you later with several more. The next time you see them, they have a bag of 5-10 books for you to borrow.
    3. Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore – a download does not translate to a lost sale.
    4. With digital copies, it is more difficult to assign cost. The initial file costs x dollars to create, but you can make a million copies of that file for no cost. Therefore, it is hard to assign a specific value to a digital copy of a work except as it relates to lost sales.
    5. I do not pretend that uploading or downloading unpurchased electronic books is morally correct, but I do think it is more of a grey area than some of your readers may.
    1. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference is a 2010 book by Cordelia Fine, written to debunk the idea that men and women are hardwired with different interests. The author criticizes claimed evidence of the existence of innate biological differences between men and women's minds as being faulty and exaggerated, and while taking a position of agnosticism with respect to inherent differences relating to interest/skill in 'understanding the world' versus 'understanding people', reviews literature demonstrating how cultural and societal beliefs contribute to sex differences.
    1. Green has built up a stable, useful relationship with the software, mostly opening it to scribble down interesting lines that occur to him, or that are spoken to him, to use later on in his writing.
  17. Nov 2019
    1. In the case of library users, there is a strong tie between technology and library use. For instance, the technology-rich profiles of Information Omnivores might suggest that their gadgets could provide all the media and data they could possibly need—yet they still patronize libraries at high levels.

      I thought this particular detail was rather illuminating. A common belief is that technology will eventually make the library obsolete. Yet, the correlation between high technology use and high library use runs counter to this belief. It is stated later, on page 3, that the highest engagement groups share a love for books, traditional paper books. They also have the highest technology use. To me, this suggests that the library should not disregard, even in the day-and-age of smartphones, their book collection. This is still the primary draw to the library for their high engagement groups and even to medium engagement groups like the Print Traditionalists. I think this is an encouraging note; people still like books and people still like to get books from the library, despite having pocket computers. But, librarians can't disregard technology either. After reading this study, I think the appropriate way for librarians to understand technology is not as a hostile take-over, but similar to how the people of this study found it to be. Technology is an "add on," a supplement to information resources. The library should provide access to books AND a wide array of relevant digital and technology resources.

    1. A personal blog is an online journal, your day to day thoughts published on the web rather than in (or in addition to) a physical notebook. It is an unfinished story, a scratch pad, an outboard brain; and while there are highlights it is more the journey that's the important aspect.

      Colin nibbles around the edges of defining a digital public commonplace book and even the idea of "though spaces" though without tacitly using either phrase.

    1. From this page:

      AUPresses thinks more readers should be aware of the work they’re doing. That’s why during the organization’s annual University Press Week, it launched a reading list it’s calling READ. THINK. ACT., a list of 75 peer-reviewed books designed to help non-academic readers understand the world and work to make it a better place.

  18. Oct 2019
  19. Sep 2019
    1. Goodreads is nearly useless for finding recommendations

      I believe that the point of Goodreads—since Amazon bought the site—is lost here.

      The point of Goodreads is to make people buy books from Amazon. They're capitalists. They don't care about the common good, or about making people find books that they can truly benefit from.

    1. From quill and ink, to the printing press and book formatting, to digital applications and platforms, annotation is - and always has been - tightly coupled to the technologies of the day.

      This makes me wonder at annotations in scrolls (and how pointers may have worked) prior to the invention and proliferation of codices as a literary form.

  20. Aug 2019
    1. Research. As zero-textbook-cost degrees are implemented across the country, research could be conducted to analyze the impact of degree establishment on student access and success, as well as on faculty pedagogical practice. Metrics related to access and success might include credit loads, withdrawal rates, persistence rates, pass rates, and actual cost savings.

      Zero-textbook cost degrees is still a long way off as far as India goes. Our students are now extremely proficient in the use of the internet and open sources. However, compared to open access resources use of standardised textbooks in traditionnal classrooms is definitely better as teachers has a personal connect with the student. This is particularly necessary as students are becoming victims of PUBG and other such addctive games leading to either suicide or other behavioural problems. We do not need a plethora of zombie students in our schools and colleges!

    1. Following his abdication in 2004, Norodom Sihanouk, the former King of Cambodia, began to share his remarks in a rather creative way. Sihanouk established a website which, despite his passing in 2012, remains updated and well-organized to this day.7http://norodomsihanouk.info The archive includes selections of Sihanouk’s personal correspondences, handwritten recipes, musical compositions, and film commentary. It also includes many annotated newspaper and magazine articles.

      This sounds to me like a version of a commonplace book, but given the date, likely one of the first explicitly done online.

  21. Jul 2019
    1. Kahle has been critical of Google's book digitization, especially of Google's exclusivity in restricting other search engines' digital access to the books they archive. In a 2011 talk Kahle described Google's 'snippet' feature as a means of tip-toeing around copyright issues, and expressed his frustration with the lack of a decent loaning system for digital materials. He said the digital transition has moved from local control to central control, non-profit to for-profit, diverse to homogeneous, and from "ruled by law" to "ruled by contract". Kahle stated that even public-domain material published before 1923, and not bound by copyright law, is still bound by Google's contracts and requires permission to be distributed or copied. Kahle reasoned that this trend has emerged for a number of reasons: distribution of information favoring centralization, the economic cost of digitizing books, the issue of library staff without the technical knowledge to build these services, and the decision of the administrators to outsource information services
    1. The position of machine products in the civilized scheme of consumption serves to point out the nature of the relation which subsists between the canon of conspicuous waste and the code of proprieties in consumption. Neither in matters of art and taste proper, nor as regards the current sense of the serviceability of goods, does this canon act as a principle of innovation or initiative. It does not go into the future as a creative principle which makes innovations and adds new items of consumption and new elements of cost. The principle in question is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a positive law. It is a regulative rather than a creative principle. It very rarely initiates or originates any usage or custom directly. Its action is selective only. Conspicuous wastefulness does not directly afford ground for variation and growth, but conformity to its requirements is a condition to the survival of such innovations as may be made on other grounds. In whatever way usages and customs and methods of expenditure arise, they are all subject to the selective action of this norm of reputability; and the degree in which they conform to its requirements is a test of their fitness to survive in the competition with other similar usages and customs.
    1. To understand what has happened, we only need to look at the history of writing and printing to note two very different consequences (a) the first, a vast change over the last 450 years in how the physical and social worlds are dealt with via the inventions of modern science and governance, and (b) that most people who read at all still mostly read fiction, self-help and religion books, and cookbooks, etc.* (all topics that would be familiar to any cave-person).
    1. Europe’s oldest intact book has been discovered after being closed inside a hermit monk’s coffin for over 400 years. It will go on display at the British Library as part of an exhibition featuring prized manuscripts like the Lindisfarne Gospels and Beowulf. The show is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see how medieval Anglo-Saxons depicted their own culture through early writings.

      Excited that I got to see the exhibition!

  22. May 2019
  23. Apr 2019
    1. NCERT books are the best and popular resources for the students who are serious about their career and studies and willing to prepare for the entry level exams. It is the most demand able and easiest way to improve your progress.

      NCERT Books is the must recommended books for Civil Services Examination Preparation!

    1. technology companies have made it work that way. Ebook stores from Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Barnes and Noble all follow broadly the same rules. You’re buying a licence to read, not a licence to own.

      Bear in mind that this "ownership" is common practice with Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and other ones as well.

      It's not this way with non-DRM books, that you can download, and reuse as with physical books.

    2. There’s bad news for users of Microsoft’s eBook store: the company is closing it down, and, with it, any books bought through the service will no longer be readable.To soften the blow, the company has promised to refund any customers who bought books through the store (a clue that there may not have been that many of them, hence the closure. Microsoft did not offer further comment).

      How about this for posterity and owning what you buy?

  24. Mar 2019
  25. Feb 2019
  26. Jan 2019
    1. Isaacson pointed out that more than 7,000 pages from Da Vinci’s notebooks survived to today–a stretch of 500 years. He asked how many of our tweets and Facebook posts will survive even 50 years. Paper, it turns out, is a durable medium of information storage.
  27. Dec 2018
    1. "The blog serves as a kind of steam valve for me," he says. "I put stuff out there that I'm forming an opinion about, and another blogger starts arguing with me and giving me feedback, and I haven't even finished what I was posting!"

      An early written incarnation of the idea of blogs as "thought spaces".

    1. Margaret Atwood

      Atwood is definitely one of my favorite authors. I do love The Handmaid's Tale and the MaddAddam trilogy, but my favorites of hers are where she explores women and their relationships with each other, namely The Robber Bride and Cat's Eye. Her Stone Mattress short story collection is incredible as well.

  28. Nov 2018
    1. The main thing that dissuaded him, he says, is that “I wouldn’t want to sell a book to a philistine, which is what every bookseller has to do.”
    2. Jean Prévost’s “La Première Partie des Subtiles et Plaisantes Inventions,” the earliest known important conjuring book, printed in Lyons in 1584.
  29. app.getpocket.com app.getpocket.com
    1. Jean Prévost’s “La Première Partie des Subtiles et Plaisantes Inventions,” the earliest known important conjuring book, printed in Lyons in 1584.
    1. Nigel Travis, who is the Executive Chairman of the Board for Dunkin’ Brands. He has an exercise that he calls “define your demise” (he describes this in his book, The Challenge Culture: Why the Most Successful Organizations Run on Pushback).

      Important to define why and how the company could fail. Provides insight into weaknesses and how to overcome some of them.

      Book is by Chairman of the board for Dunkin' brands.

  30. Oct 2018
    1. I uncovered the miracle of the bright cross, as I found it in books

      Cynewulf—and we—also discover the cross, thru books

  31. Sep 2018
    1. Classics Book Club

      If you are interested in reading Classic books you can join r/ClassicsBookClub on reddit where we will be hosting groups reads and discussions.

  32. Sep 2017
  33. Aug 2017
    1. without downloading or reading them.

      This is cool but the "reading of them" is the more radical proposition.

    2. Many of the university’s holdings “were invisible to the world,” Coleman says. Google’s involvement promised to change that.

      An important point for those who might immediately dismiss anything Google-related.

    3. “It’s hard to imagine going through a day doing the work we academics do without touching something that wouldn’t be there without Google Book Search,”

      But this is a statement that would align with Somer's lament above, no?

    4. a persistent cultural challenge: how to balance copyright and fair use and keep everybody—authors, publishers, scholars, librarians—satisfied. That work still lies ahead.

      I'll be very interested to see how this gets negotiated moving forward.

  34. Jul 2017
    1. Avid lovers of books and nature, they conspired to marry the two in a vast library woven into the Western landscape — a literary refuge where patrons could spend the night among the books, attend lectures and maybe catch a trout.

      Sounds cool, and I don't even like the outdoors...

  35. Jun 2017
    1. literature became data

      Doesn't this obfuscate the process? Literature became digital. Digital enables a wide range of futther activity to take place on top of literature, including, perhaps, it's datafication.

  36. Apr 2017
  37. Mar 2017
    1. Furthermore, the results could focus on drawing the user into the virtual app space (immersive) or could use the portable nature of tablet to extend the experience into the physical space inhabited by the user (something I have called ’emersive’). Generative (emersive) Books that project coloured ambient light and/or audio into a darkened space Generative (immersive) Books that display abstracted video/audio from cameras/microphone, collaged or augmented with pre-designed content Books that contain location specific content from the internet combined with pre-authored/designed content

      Estas líneas y las siguientes definen un conjunto interesante de posibilidades para las publicaciones digitales. ¿Cómo podemos hacerles Bootstrap desde lo que ya tenemos? (ejp: Grafoscopio y el Data Week).

  38. Feb 2017
    1. English professors, because literature provided teachable content, something to write about other limn oneself or arbitrarily chosen subjects in which the teacher was not an expert.

      Side note: would the Great Books theory include books of composition instruction like Strunk & White's Elements of Style or any of the books Nathaniel passed out on Thursday?

    1. but this edu-cation did not include classical learning, literacy in Greek and Latin, or formal training in rhetoric, except in a few elite schools for boys destined for the univer-sity

      I do wonder what the reasoning was for this (I mean, besides the blatant "women and the lower class are too stupid to understand our Great Books and/or will lead lives that do not require a 'polite' education"). We've already read arguments that the "polite" education supposedly improved the virtues as well as the mind, right? Wouldn't all of society benefit if women and the lower class were virtuous, as much as possible?

  39. Jan 2017
    1. But allow him to acquire experience in those objects, his feeling becomes more exact and nice: He not only perceives the beauties and defects of each part, but marks the distinguishing species of each quality, and assigns it suitable praise or blame.

      Sounds a lot like the Great Books theory–simple exposure to good art will yield a good critic.

  40. Oct 2016
    1. Books mentioned throughout this comment thread. Add your suggestions! - de Mesquita and Smith's The Dictator's Handbook - Machiavelli's The Prince - Sun Tzu's the Art of War - Saul Alinski's Rules for Radicals - David Nickle's Eutopia - Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (as per a previous CGPGrey video) - Erica Chenoweth's Why civil resistance works
  41. Sep 2016
    1. The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope an4 I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it sl6wly into many pieces, watching them . .. . I dance in the wind, watchiμg the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking tovyard the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me. ]

      Reading this last paragraph, it seems that not even David knows what will happen next in his life. The idea of having hope that something positive will happen in his life now. Or Giovanni won't be executed is weighing him down because even he knows that isn't realistic. Since the ending is so ambiguous I personally took David tearing the envelope Jacques sent him slowly as him trying to start over, but when he threw it in the wind as he was walking away the wind blows it back to him. Making me believe that even though he wants to start over and forget what has happened he won't be able to move forward because something in his past will keep bringing him down. I also believe that the reason why Baldwin made the ending so ambiguous is because during that time maybe he didn’t know what to do next or how to move on. It was said that Giovanni’s room was based off of actual events that happened to Baldwin before he starting writing this book. Baldwin was in a love affair with a man named Lucien Happersberger who ended up marrying a women and that’s why the book is dedicated to Lucien.

      I tagged an article where Baldwin talks about Giovanni's Room and what it means to him as well as a very short clip of an interview with Baldwin.

  42. May 2016
    1. "Historic trove of documents discovered in city attic," Herald.ie (2016-05-16) http://www.herald.ie/news/historic-trove-of-documents-discovered-in-city-attic-34707155.html

      The four missing volumes of Prisoner Books listing the arrests of more than 30,000 people between 1905 and 1918 include the "crimes" of labour leaders Jim Larkin (seditious conspiracy), James Connolly (incitement to crime), revolutionary Maud Gonne MacBride (defence of the realm), and suffragette Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington (glass-breaking with other suffragettes).

    2. "Thousands of files containing details of prisoners arrested during 1913 Lockout, Easter Rising published online," RTÉ Six-One News (2016-05-11) [flash video]

      http://www.rte.ie/news/player/2016/0511/20986024-thousands-of-files-containing-details-of-prisoners-arrested-during-1913-lockout-easter-rising-published-online/

      RTÉ Six-One News report on the restoration of DMP Prisoners Books to the Garda Museum and Archives, and launch of the four digitised volumes of Dublin Metropolitan Police prisoner books from the Irish revolutionary period.

    3. "UCD Library Cultural Heritage: Launch of the Dublin Metropolitan Police Prisoners Books." Flickr (2015-05-11)

      Flickr album of photographs from the SPITU-sponsored launch of the digital DMP Prisoners Books at Liberty Hall, Dublin.

    4. "SIPTU presents historic DMP files to Garda and to UCD online library" (2016-05-11) http://www.siptu.ie/media/pressreleases2016/featurednews/fullstory_19808_en.html

      SIPTU presented ‘Prisoners Books’ concerning over 30,000 people arrested by the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) between 1905 and 1918 to the Garda Síochána at a ceremony in Liberty Hall, Dublin, this morning (11th May).

    5. PULSE, 1916. http://www.broadsheet.ie/2016/05/11/fingers-on-the-pulse-of-1916/

      The Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) Prisoners Books for 1905-1908 and 1911-1918 are amongst the most valuable new documents to come to light on the revolutionary decade.

      They include important information on social and political life in the capital during the last years of the Union, from the period of widespread anticipation of Home Rule, to the advent of the 1913 Lockout, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the Easter Rising and its aftermath in 1916, and including the conscription crisis of 1918.

      They will also be invaluable to those interested in criminology, genealogy, and family history.

      The collection comprises of four large leather bound, double ledger volumes containing hand written entries that record the details of daily charge sheets issued by DMP members to offenders or alleged offenders.

      Each volume contains the name, age, address, occupation, alleged offence and, in most cases, outcome of cases involving over 30,000 people arrested by the DMP.

      Each volume also contains an index of prisoners with references to the pages containing details of the charge. The information in these volumes serves, therefore, to provide new perspectives on life in Dublin during a time of war and revolution.

    6. Dublin Metropolitan Police's Prisoners Books released," Irish Geneology News (2016-05-12) http://www.irishgenealogynews.com/2016/05/dublin-metropolitan-polices-prisoners.html

      Launched yesterday at Liberty Hall, these records date from Ireland's revolutionary era and include all manner of crimes listed in register pages headed 'Prisoners charged with offences involving dishonesty'. ...

    7. "Dublin Metropolitan Police Prisoner Books 1905-1918," The British GENES blog (2016-05-12) http://britishgenes.blogspot.ie/2016/05/dublin-metropolitan-police-prisoner.html

      University College Dublin's Digital Library (http://digital.ucd.ie) has just uploaded digitised editions of four Dublin Metropolitan Police prisoners books from 1905-1908, and 1911-1918, at http://digital.ucd.ie/view/ucdlib:43945.

    8. "Historic police records showing Connolly and Larkin arrests found in skip," Irish Independent (2016-05-11) http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/historic-police-records-showing-connolly-and-larkin-arrests-found-in-skip-34707471.html

      The four missing volumes of 'Prisoner Books' listing the arrests of more than 30,000 people between 1905 and 1918 include the "crimes" of labour leaders Jim Larkin (seditious conspiracy), James Connolly (incitement to crime), revolutionary Maud Gonne MacBride (defence of the realm) and suffragette Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, (glass-breaking with other suffragettes).

    9. "Records of 1916 Rising arrests published online," Irish Examiner (2016-05-12)

      Reports containing details of 30,000 arrests by the Dublin Metropolitan Police more than 100 years ago have been published online, writes Dan Buckley.

      They contain details of prisoners during the Lockout of 1913, the outbreak of the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising.

  43. Apr 2016
  44. Mar 2016
    1. The original source of Alfred E. Neuman's face was probably a poster for a popular 1894 stage comedy called The New Boy.

  45. Jan 2016
    1. Top 30 books ranked by total number of links to Amazon in Hacker News comments "The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think" by Matthew Yglesias Publisher: Simon & Schuster Click for details"The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win" by Steven Gary Blank Publisher: Cafepress.com Click for details"Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition" by Thomas H. Cormen Publisher: The MIT Press Click for details"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition" by Robert B. Cialdini Publisher: Harper Business Click for details"Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (Second Edition)" by Visit Amazon's Tom DeMarco Page Publisher: Dorset House Publishing Company, Incorporated Click for details"Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold Publisher: Microsoft Press Click for details"Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers Publisher: Prentice Hall Click for details"Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" by Harvey Silverglate Publisher: Encounter Books Click for details"JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford Publisher: O'Reilly Media Click for details"The Little Schemer - 4th Edition" by Daniel P. Friedman Publisher: The MIT Press Click for details"The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It" by Michael E. Gerber Publisher: HarperCollins Click for details"Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" by David D. Burns Publisher: Harper Click for details"Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications" by Toby Segaran Publisher: O'Reilly Media Click for details"The Non-Designer's Design Book (3rd Edition)" by Robin Williams Publisher: Peachpit Press Click for details"The C Programming Language" by Brian W. Kernighan Publisher: Prentice Hall Click for details"The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman Publisher: Basic Books Click for details"Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions" by Gayle Laakmann McDowell Publisher: CareerCup Click for details"What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought" by Keith E. Stanovich Publisher: Yale University Press Click for details"On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction" by William Zinsser Publisher: Harper Perennial Click for details"Darwin's Theorem" by TJ Radcliffe Publisher: Siduri Press Click for details"Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning Series)" by Liping Ma Publisher: Routledge Click for details"Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition" by Steve Krug Publisher: New Riders Click for details"Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets" by Peter van der Linden Publisher: Prentice Hall Click for details"Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by Robert C. Martin Publisher: Prentice Hall Click for details"The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" by Noam Nisan Publisher: The MIT Press Click for details"Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition" by Steve McConnell Publisher: Microsoft Press Click for details"The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" by Marc Levinson Publisher: Princeton University Press Click for details"Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Developer Best Practices)" by Steve McConnell Publisher: Microsoft Press Click for details"Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Click for details"Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty" by David Kadavy Publisher: Wiley Click for details

      Top 30 books ranked by total number of links to Amazon in Hacker News comments

  46. Oct 2015
  47. Sep 2015
    1. ibrary to easily add annotation functionality to any webpage. Annotations can

      This is a test. Library

    1. to prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.

      The Declaration of Independence impacted the United States in more ways than one, Jefferson makes clear when he states "to prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world;" he is referring to the reign of the King of Great Britain who has brought injuries and tyranny over the states. He wants his people to realize the corruption and wrongdoings that the king has caused. Jefferson is essentially saying that people should be uncorrupt in this new world and man should strive to preserve the pureness of this country keeping it from falsehood and injustice. It sparked my attention when I came across a newspaper titled "The North Briton" written by J. Wilkes and others which contained very similar diction and ideals of society during that time period. Wilkes is criticizing King George III for his speech in favor of the Treaty of Paris ending the Seven Year’s War; he states “Articles 15 is for having corrupted the sacred fountain of truth and put falsehoods into the mouth of Majesty, in several speeches made in parliament.” Wilkes is trying to uncover the king’s corruption and bring to light that he is lying to his people which ties closely to Jefferson’s actions and morals of being uncorrupt. Most people carried similar beliefs in the United States during the 18th century, it is very possible that the Wilkes could have been from Jefferson's era carrying the same ideals and values as him due to similar style of writing, choice of diction, and beliefs.

    1. let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.

      The Declaration of Independence impacted the United States in more ways than one, Jefferson makes clear that essentially people should be uncorrupt in this new world and man should strive to preserve the pureness of this country and keep from falsehood and lies. It sparked my attention when I came across a monthly chronologer titled "The Gentleman's and London magazine" that contained very similar diction and ideals of society during that time period. It is noticed that humans are habitual creatures and mimic their peers within their society creating a universal diction within that community. Most people carried similar beliefs in the United States during the 18th century since most citizens were of Christian faith it is very possible that the writers of the "Gentleman's and London Magazine" could have been from Jefferson's era having the same ideals and values as him due to similar style of writing and choice of diction.

    1. Should you wish to learn more about the language, I am happy to recommend the following titles: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke JavaScript Patterns by Stoyan Stefanov Writing Maintainable JavaScript by Nicholas Zakas JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
  48. Jul 2015
    1. Sec. 15-7. - Injuring or defacing library property. Whoever willfully injures or defaces any book, newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, manuscript, or other property belonging to the city library by writing, marking, tearing, breaking, or otherwise mutilating shall be fined as provided in section 1-8. (Code 1964, amended, § 19.19(A)) Cross reference— Damage to public property, § 17-26. State Law reference— Criminal mischief, V.A.P.C. § 28.03; reckless damage of property, § 28.04.
  49. Mar 2015