If these are the types of things that are interesting, you might also try a shared bibliography that a handful of readers/researchers share and contribute to: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought

Many people treat their blogging practice as an experimental thought space. They try out new ideas, explore a small space, attempt to come to understanding, connect new ideas to their existing ideas.

Ton Zylstra coins/uses the phrase "metablogging" to think about his blogging practice as an evolving thought space.

How can we better distill down these sorts of longer ideas and use them to create more collisions between ideas to create new an innovative ideas? What forms might this take?

The personal zettelkasten is a more concentrated form of this and blogging is certainly within the space as are the somewhat more nascent digital gardens. What would some intermediary "idea crucible" between these forms look like in public that has a simple but compelling interface. How much storytelling and contextualization is needed or not needed to make such points?

Is there a better space for progressive summarization here so that an idea can be more fully laid out and explored? Then once the actual structure is built, the scaffolding can be pulled down and only the idea remains.

Reminiscences of scaffolding can be helpful for creating context.

Consider the pyramids of Giza and the need to reverse engineer how they were built. Once the scaffolding has been taken down and history forgets the methods, it's not always obvious what the original context for objects were, how they were made, what they were used for. Progressive summarization may potentially fall prey to these effects as well.

How might we create a "contextual medium" which is more permanently attached to ideas or objects to help prevent context collapse?

How would this be applied in reverse to better understand sites like Stonehenge or the hundreds of other stone circles, wood circles, and standing stones we see throughout history.

https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines

I think this phrase describing the Colonel will be important throughout the novel. I do we write code to trace this collocation "wicked Colonel"?

I think that "superstition" is a keyword in The Moonstone. How do I write code to track each sentence/phrase in which "superstition" appears?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s4xx_muNcs

Don't recommend unless you have 100 hours to follow up on everything here that goes beyond the surface.

Be aware that this is a gateway for what I'm sure is a relatively sophisticated sales funnel.

Motivational and a great start, but I wonder how many followed up on these techniques and methods, internalized them and used them every day? I've not read his book, but I suspect it's got the usual mnemonic methods that go back millennia. And yet, these things are still not commonplace. People just don't seem to want to put in the work.

As a result, they become a sales tool with a get rich quick (get smart quick) hook/scheme. Great for Kwik's pocketbook, but what about actual outcomes for the hundreds who attended or the 34.6k people who've watched this video so far?

These methods need to be instilled in youth as it's rare for adults to bother.

Acronyms for remembering things are alright, but not incredibly effective as most people will have issues remembering the acronym itself much less what the letters stand for.

There seems to be an over-fondness for acronyms for people selling systems like this. (See also Tiago Forte as another example.)

Indyweb could be a good option for coordination layer.

Indyweb / SRG / Global Boundaries combination for the large scale transformation and coordination framework.

Two questions to answer:

1. out of all the conceivable societal systems possible, which are suited to a community? This is not one size fits all.

This requires careful consideration. There cannot be complete autonomy, as lack of standards will make things very challenging for any inter-community cooperation.

Cosmolocal framework (https://clreader.net) as well as Indyweb Interpersonal computing could mediate discussion between different community nodes and emerge common ground

Third Proposition:

The superorganism's efforts to learn, decide and adapt can be interpreted as being driven by its intrinsic pupose.

This is aligned to the Indyweb philosophy of a system architecture that promotes conversation, knowledge at the edge and high efficacy collective learning.

Living beings,and groups of living beings are processes and not (static) things - a perspective aligned with SRG and Indyweb. The process quality of being a living human INTERbeing quickly becomes apparent after one starts using the Interpersonal Indyweb computing ecosystem. In particular, the Indyhub allows the Indyvidual to consolidate all their digital and virtual interactions in one place, which allows for the first time, the ability to witness one's own individual learning on a granular level and literally see the process of your own individual learning in realtime.

Would you like to speed up the performance of your product?

With innovative and fast electric equipment, designers and engineers can speed up the product. Not only this, you need a high speed PCB run faster.

Read the blog further to understand the rules and challenges of high-speed PCB design.

It's worth introspecting on why any given person might hesitate to feel that they can commit. This is almost always comes down to "maintainability"—websites are, like many computer-based endeavors, thought of as projects that have to be maintained. This is a failure of the native Web formats to appreciably make inroads as a viable alternative to traditional document formats like PDF and Word's .doc/.docx (or even the ODF black sheep). Many people involved with Web tech have difficulty themselves conceptualizing Web documents in these terms, which is unfortunate.

If you can be confident that you can, today, bang out something in LibreOffice, optionally export to PDF, and then dump the result at a stable URL, then you should feel similarly confident about HTML. Too many people have mental guardrails preventing them from grappling with the relevant tech in this way.

Julius Reizen in reviewing over Umberto Eco's index card system in How to Write a Thesis, defines his own "insurance card" as one which contains "hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry". These he would keep together so that they don't otherwise get lost in the variety of other locations one might keep them

These might be akin to Ahrens' "fleeting notes" but are ones which may not easily or even immediately be converted in to "permanent notes" for one's zettelkasten. However, given their mission critical importance, they may be some of the most important cards in one's repository.

link this to - idea of centralizing one's note taking practice to a single location

Is this idea in Eco's book and Reizen is the one that gives it a name since some of the other categories have names? (examples: bibliographic index cards, reading index cards (aka literature notes), cards for themes, author index cards, quote index cards, idea index cards, connection cards). Were these "officially" named and categorized by Eco?

May be worthwhile to create a grid of these naming systems and uses amongst some of the broader note taking methods. Where are they similar, where do they differ?

Multi-search tools that have full access to multiple trusted data stores (ostensibly personal ones across notebooks, hard drives, social media services, etc.) could potentially solve the problem of needing to remember where you noted something.

Currently, in the social media space especially, this is not a realized service.

Interesting problem. Why is the CTL not seen as an "arm of shared governance" in these cases? Or at least a venue of it?

Fascinating to see what "neutral" means here. There's the "non-evaluative"/"non-supervisory" sense, where "neutrality" is essentially with respect to office politics, and the "not advancing an argument" sense, which in the strictest sense seems almost impossible to reconcile with any kind of developmental work.

The trending topics on Twitter can be used as a form of juxtaposition of random ideas which could be brought together to make new and interesting things.

Here's but one example of someone practicing just this:

Y’all, imagine Spielberg’s Sailor Moon pic.twitter.com/xZ1DEsbLTy

— Matty Illustration (@MN_illustration) June 30, 2022

cc: https://twitter.com/marshallk

https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines

Compass Points, a routine for examining propositions.

via https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Compass%20Points_0.pdf

• E- excited
• W- worrisome
• N - need to know
• S - stance or suggestion for moving forward

These could be used as a simple set of rules for thumb for evaluating and expanding on ideas in note taking or social annotation settings.

Compare these with the suggestions of Tiago Forte in his book Building a Second Brain. Which is better? More comprehensive? Are there any ideas missing in a broader conceptualization? Is there a better acronymization or analogy for such a technique?

Based on surveys, readers indicate that two important parts of textual navigation are sense of control and serendipity.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Electronic_journal_literature.html?id=YSFlAAAAMAAJ

How does the control over a book frame how we read? What does "power over" a book look like compared to "power with"?

What are the tools for thought affordances that paper books provide over digital books and vice versa?

I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it.

This entire chapter thus far (to the end of this section at minimum) sounds like it would have been better motivating material.

It also has a more touchy-feely and less concrete nature which puts in the self-help category and not so much in the tools for thought space.

The broad audiences for this book.

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

Dan Charnas, Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2016)

mise-en-place is an example of a means of thinking externally with one's environment

link to - similar ideas in Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind

The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

<small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.

This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work

Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

--

It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.

Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.

I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

Tiago Forte frames the creative process in the framing of divergence (brainstorming) and convergence (connecting ideas, editing, refining) which emerged out of the Stanford Design School and popularized by IDEO in the 1980s and 1990s.

But this is just what the more refined practices of maintaining a zettelkasten entail. It's the creation of profligate divergence forced by promiscuously following one's interests and collecting ideas along the way interspersed with active and pointed connection of ideas slowly creating convergence of these ideas over time. The ultimate act of creation finally becomes simple as pulling one's favorite idea of many out of the box (along with all the things connected to it) and editing out any unnecessary pieces and then smoothing the whole into something cohesive.

This is far less taxing than sculpting marble where one needs to start with an idea of where one is going and then needs the actual skill to get there. Doing this well requires thousands of hours of practice at the skill, working with smaller models, and eventually (hopefully) arriving at art. It's much easier if one has the broad shapes of the entirety of Rodin, Michelangelo, and Donatello's works in their repository and they can simply pull out one that feels interesting and polish it up a bit. Some of the time necessary for work and practice are still there, but the ultimate results are closer to guaranteed art in one domain than the other.

Commonplacing or slipboxing allows us to take the ability to imitate, which humans are exceptionally good at (Annie Murphy Paul, link tk), and combine those imitations in a way to actively explore and then create new innovative ideas.

Commonplacing can be thought of as lifelong and consistent practice of brainstorming where one captures all the ideas for later use.

Link to - practice makes perfect

To test one's own understanding of a topic one has read about and studied, it can be useful to discuss it or describe one's understanding to friends or colleagues in conversations. This will help you discover where the holes are based on the person's understanding and comprehension of what you've said. Can you fill in all the holes where they have questions? Are their questions your new questions which have exposed holes that need to be filled in your understanding or in the space itself.

I do this regularly in conversations with people. It makes the topics of conversation more varied and interesting and helps out your thinking at the same time. In particular I've been doing this method in Dan Allosso's book club. It's almost like trying on a new idea the way one might try on a piece of clothing to see how it fits or how one likes it for potential purchase. If an idea "fits" then continue refining it and add it to your knowledge base. These conversations also help to better link ideas in my thought space to those of what we're reading. (I wonder if others are doing these same patterns, Dan seems to, but I don't have as good a grasp on this with other participants).

Link to :<br /> - Ahren's idea of writing to expose understanding<br /> - Feynman technique<br /> - Socratic method (this is sort of side or tangential method to this) <- define this better/refine

In The Creative Habit, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp has creative inspiration and note taking practice which she calls "the box" in which she organizes “notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me”. She also calls her linking of ideas within her box method "the art of scratching" (chapter 6).

related: combinatorial creativity triangle thinking

[[Twyla Tharp]] [[The Creative Habit]] #books/wanttoread

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/tool-for-thought.html

Note the title "Tool for Thought" here. It does come five years after Howard Rheingold's book of a similar name.

The slipbox and index cards on which Vladimir Nabokov wrote his novel Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote most of his works including Lolita using index cards in a slip box. He ultimately died in 1977 leaving an unfinished manuscript in note card form for the novel The Original of Laura. Penguin later published the incomplete novel with in 2012 with the subtitle A Novel in Fragments. Unlike most manuscripts written or typewritten on larger paper, this one came in the form of 138 index cards. Penguin's published version recreated these cards in full-color reproductions including the smudges, scribbles, scrawlings, strikeouts, and annotations in English, French, and Russian. Perforated, one could tear the cards out of the book and reorganize in any way they saw fit or even potentially add their own cards to finish the novel that Nabokov couldn't.

Index card on which Nabokov collated notes on ages, heights, and measurements for school aged girls as research for his title character Lolita.

More details at: https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html

Tiago's book follows the general method of the commonplace book, but relies more heavily on a folder-based method and places far less emphasis and value on having a solid index. There isn't any real focus on linking ideas other than putting some things together in the same folder. His experience with the history of the space in feels like it only goes back to some early Ryan Holiday blog posts. He erroneously credits Luhmann with inventing the zettelkasten and Anne-Laure Le Cunff created digital gardens. He's already retracted these in sketch errata here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/endnotes.

I'll give him at least some credit that there is some reasonable evidence that he actually used his system to write his own book, but the number and depth of his references and experience is exceptionally shallow given the number of years he's been in the space, particularly professionally. He also has some interesting anecdotes and examples of various people including and array of artists and writers which aren't frequently mentioned in the note taking space, so I'll give him points for some diversity of players as well. I'm mostly left with the feeling that he wrote the book because of the general adage that "thought leaders in their space should have a published book in their area to have credibility". Whether or not one can call him a thought leader for "re-inventing" something that Rudolphus Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus firmly ensconced into Western culture about 500 years ago is debatable.

Stylistically, I'd call his prose a bit florid and too often self-help-y. The four letter acronyms become a bit much after a while. It wavers dangerously close to those who are prone to the sirens' call of the #ProductivityPorn space.

If you've read a handful of the big articles in the note taking, tools for thought, digital gardens, zettelkasten space, Ahren's book, or regularly keep up with r/antinet or r/Zettelkasten, chances are that you'll be sorely disappointed and not find much insight. If you have friends that don't need the horsepower of Ahrens or zettelkasten, then it might be a reasonable substitute, but then it could have been half the length for the reader.

https://udlguidelines.cast.org/

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/bringing-theories-to-practice-universal-design-principles-and-the-use-of-social-annotation-to-support-neurodivergent-students/

A very brief primer on UDL and how Hypothes.is and social annotation might fit within its framework. There seems to be a stronger familiarity with Hypothes.is as a tool and a bit less familiarity with UDL, or perhaps they just didn't bind the two together as tightly as they might have.

I'm definitely curious to look more closely at the UDL framework to see what we might extract from it.

The title features neurodiversity, but doesn't deliver on the promise.

An interesting reframing would be that of social annotation with the idea of modality shifts, particularly for neurodiverse students.

Universal Design for Learning framework https://udlguidelines.cast.org/

Interlinking your ideas can help to create a harmony within your collection. There are no loose ends or lost ideas. There is a place for everything and everything is in its proper place, ready to be used and reused.

Great quote about what a zettelkasten isn't. This is also one of the reasons why I've underlined the amount of work that one must put into the box to get productive material back out the other end.

In her experience with Maurice Sendak, Twyla Tharp indicates that he has a room that works as the equivalent of her project boxes. His version is a working studio that contains a huge unit with flat pullout drawers where he keeps sketches, reference materials, notes, and articles. His system allows him to keep all the ideas ready at hand, but also easily out of the way so he can focus on a particular idea and project at a time.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/note-cards?s=r

Outline of one of Dan's experiments writing a handbook about reading, thinking, and writing. He's taking a zettelkasten-like approach, but doing it as a stand-alone project with little indexing and crosslinking of ideas or creating card addresses.

This sounds more akin to the processes of Vladimir Nabokov and Ryan Holiday/Robert Greene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6OmqXCsYt8

It's often said that, 'The hand is the visible part of our brain.'

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soroban

This page is excellent for an example of HTML being an adequate substitute for traditional office formats.

There are researchers looking at the amount of fossil fuel energy required for the transition. One research group is MIT: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/does-concrete-needed-build-renewable-energy-negate-good

Other researchers have estimated fossil fuel budgets that need to be reserved for building the initial renewable energy production infrastructure for the transition.

Research is nonlinear. A recent breakthrough might circularize cement industry:

‘If Cambridge Electric Cement lives up to the promise it has shown in early laboratory trials, it could be a turning point in the journey to a safe future climate. Combining steel and cement recycling in a single process powered by renewable electricity, this could secure the supply of the basic materials of construction to support the infrastructure of a zero emissions world and to enable economic development where it is most needed.’ http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/cambridge-engineers-invent-world-s-first-zero-emissions-cement

https://thebrain.com/

Initially came across this via Jerry Michalski who has an extensive personal mind map of over 24 years (as of fall 2021).

https://thrivingonoverload.com/episodes/

This podcast looks interesting and relevant to the tools for thought space.

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".

For many tools and apps payment for privacy is becoming the norm.

Examples: - Kumu.io - Github for private repos - ...

pros: - helps to encourage putting things into the commons

cons: - Normalizes the idea of payment for privacy which can be a toxic tool.

discuss...

This wording seems quite profound.

It means that by creating a personification of our tools, we can more easily communicate with them.

Do people personify their computers? I remember in the late 80s and early 90s computer workstations, especially in university settings, having personified names.

Link this to the personification of rocks w.r.t. talking rocks and oral traditions.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/KosdVt1qEeykU2dTuVZT3Q

1. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, Zweiter Teil, II. Ethische Methodenlehre, 1st Section, §50: “He is the midwife of his thoughts,” on the teacher-student relationship.

1. Heinrich von Kleist, “Ü ber die allm ä hliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Zweiter Band, ed. Helmut Sembdner (M ü nchen: dtv, 1805/2001), 319 – 324, at 319.
2. Ibid., 320.

in 1805 Heinrich von Kleist noted that one can use conversation with another person, even when that person is silent, to come up with solutions or ideas they may not have done on their own.

This phenomena is borne out in modern practices like the so-called "rubber duck debugging", where a programmer can talk to any imagined listener, often framed as a rubber duck sitting on their desk, and talk through the problem in their code. Invariably, talking through all the steps of the problem will often result in the person realizing what the problem is and allow them to fix it.

This method of verbal "conversation" obviously was a tool which indigenous oral cultures frequently used despite the fact that they didn't have literacy as a tool to fall back on.

Luhmann indicates that aspiring academics came to visit to see his card collection in potentially planning their own.

1. Ralf Klassen, “Bezaubernde Jeannie oder Liebe ist nur ein Zeitvertreib,” in Wir Fernsehkinder. Eine Generation ohne Programm, ed. Walter Wüllenweber (Berlin: Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, 1994), 81 – 97, at 84.

The transition of energy and other critical provisioning systems requires inclusive debate so that a harmonized trajectory can be selected that mitigates against stranded assets. The risk of non-inclusive debate is the possibility of many fragmented approaches competing against each other and wasting precious time and resources. Furthermore, system maintenance of antiquated hyperthreat supporting systems as pointed out in Boulton's other research. System maintenance is a good explanatory concept that can help make sense of much of the incumbent financial, energy and government actors to preserve the hyperthreat out of survival motives.

A template for a compass for guiding energy trajectories is provided in Van Zyl-Bulitta et al. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333254683_A_compass_to_guide_through_the_myriad_of_sustainable_energy_transition_options_across_the_global_North_South_divide which can also be a model for other provisioning systems.

One way to affect the creative state is to promote a global campaign to encourage eco-civilizationally and social justice minded women to enter into local political leadership roles. Recent research shows that such system level change can result in far greater impact than ineffective individual scale change.

Does the system really do each of these? Writing things down for our future selves is the thing that makes ideas concrete, not the system itself. Most notebooks don't reveal new associations, we actively have to do that ourselves via memory or through active search and linking within the system itself. The system may help, but it doesn't automatically create associations nor reveal them. By keeping our ideas in one place they do incubate to some extent, but isn't the real incubation taking place in a diffuse way in our minds to come out later?

Arrangement and organization definitely have their place and can be helpful. However they may also tend to become too rigid to the point that one's thinking begins to lack creativity and invention. Where is the space for the Llullist arts of combinatorial thought here?

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.

Active reading to the extreme!

What a clever innovation building on the ideas of the art of memory and Raymond Llull's combinatoric arts!

Does this hit all of the areas of Bloom's Taxonomy? I suspect that it does.

How could it be tied more directly into an active reading, annotating, and note taking practice?

Saving the entire story for context, but primarily for this Marshall McLuhan-esque quote:

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

I want to know the source of the quote.

I like how Dr. Pacheco-Vega outlines some of his research process here.

Sharing it on Twitter is great, and so is storing a copy on his website. I do worry that it looks like the tweets are embedded via a simple URL method and not done individually, which means that if Twitter goes down or disappears, so does all of his work. Better would be to do a full blockquote embed method, so that if Twitter disappears he's got the text at least. Images would also need to be saved separately.

This is where I think Glitch goes wrong. Why such a focus on apps (and esp. pushing the same practices and overcomplicated architecture as people on GitHub trying to emulate the trendiest devops shovelware)?

"Web" is a red herring here. Make the Web more accessible for app creation, sure, but what about making it more accessible (and therefore simpler) for sharing simple stuff (like documents comprising the written word), too? Glitch doesn't do well at this at all. It feels less like a place for the uninitiated and more like a place for the cool kids who are already slinging/pushing Modern Best Practices hang out—not unlike societal elites who feign to tether themself to the mast of helping the downtrodden but really use the whole charade as machine for converting attention into prestige and personal wealth. Their prices, for example, reflect that. Where's the "give us, like 20 bucks a year and we'll give you better alternative to emailing Microsoft Office documents around (that isn't Google Sheets)" plan?

Target Questions: 1. Why is there a second modernity? 2. What is second modernity? 3. How does the second modernity relate to Medellin?

Outline: Your own heading, subheadings, lists of examples, evidence, your own thinking

1-4 Second Modernity [Time for a Second Modernity] [Defining Second Modernity]

“…they found that the ‘repture’ theorized in the literature of postmodernism was more a response to the systemetic and sometimes dramatic failures of ‘high modernism’ …” (1)

What are the failures of post-modernism and high modernism? It seems that architecture proposed temporary solutions that did not consider long-term issues.

“… there is a growing recognition that widespread disillusionment with ‘the modern project’— the strategies for carrying out the ambitions of modernism – stops short of displacing the underlying ambitions for a more universal human progress.” (2)

The ‘modern project’ or ‘modernity’ addresses immediate issues rather than foreseeing, resolving, adapting to long-term issues in architecture and the world.

5-9 Second Modernity [Reflexive Modernism]

“The common sense understanding of reflexivity comes from its root ‘reflex’ meaning an action performed in response to a stimulus without conscious thought.” (5)

“… their design and construction should be subjected to intense scrutiny and their ongoing operation should be subject to reflexive mechanism of course correction including systems of checks and balances.” (5)

“…research at the intersection of architecture, reflexivity, and informality has so far proven more effective at generating such questions than providing satisfactory responses.” (7)

What is reflexivity? Reflexive architecture is architecture that perhaps responds to previous “modernities” and issues (political, economic, global etc.)

9-13 Medellin, Colombia [Library Parks]

“To make Medellin a city of ‘the most educated’ citizens in the nation, Fajardo’s team invited the demobilized soldiers to enroll in short-term informal educational and business development programs based in a series of community centers.” (9)

“In contrast, Fajardo and his architect’s have earned the right to speak of design as a ‘vehicle’ for conveying basic human dignity or as a ‘catalyst’ for deep social transformation.” (12)

Library Parks were created in response to the education issues after the war. Library Parks can be classified as second modernity or reflexive modernity as Library Parks take issues in Medellin, such as education, and responds to them by creating possible solutions.

Takeaway:

High modernity and post-modernism provided temporary solutions that did not allow for adaptability and resiliency. Reflexive modernism and second modernity are a proposition to create long-term solutions and adaptability to old issues left behind from high modernity and post-modernism.

Benefits of using shea butter for skin & face - reduce dark marks, stretch marks and fine lines. Our organic whipped shea butter is deeply moisturising and rich in vitamins A and E. Order now!

Might Hypothes.is also be included with this list? Though it could go a bit further toward packaging and making it more easily available to self-hosters.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>@phonetonote </span> in scott on Twitter: "tools for thought will continue to work better if we make them interoperable. to continue on this journey, please join the discussion on github — https://t.co/kpOF0gAgqO and a thank you to @davewiner for getting this project (and a few others :) ) off the ground" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>05/12/2022 21:13:19</time>)</cite></small>

"I'd want to learn a lot from Professor Zimmerman so that I may obtain as much information as possible and use it in reality. It's not about the work."

"To summarize, I am prepared to conquer all hurdles in my path to achieving the career of my dreams so that I may contribute to my society. I am a firm believer in the concept of dreams coming true."

"Specifically, when one of my classmates stated how he was struggling with the concept and another one of my classmates took the initiative to clarify it, I realized that that individual possibilities vary greatly among students."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20YRjDAeAE0

https://www.edvo.com/

Beta app for note taking/productivity.

https://heptabase.com/

A visual note-taking tool for learning complex topics. (YC W22)

This is a fine sentiment, but a networked version of wikilinks is bound to cause conflicts in folksonomies and issues with sourcing and verifiability. The potential for context collapse is potentially too great to have these scale for this type of knowledge production. One would need to have trusted groups to create usefulness. Search at scale for these is likely to be at issue as well.

Are the affordances beyond the local scale really any better than current web technologies? What about the potential effects on the commons?

https://www.athensresearch.org/

I've got Athens in my list of apps somewhere already...

What are the differences in the affordances of handwritten notes versus digital notes? Worth making a complete list.

Step 1. Listen for User Input

<input type="text" id="my-input" />

let input = document.querySelector('#my-input'); input.addEventListener('keyup', function (e) { console.log('Value:', input.value); })

Step2: Debounce Event Handler Function

let input = document.getElementById('my-input'); let timeout = null;

input.addEventListener('keyup', function(e) { clearTimeout(timeout);

timeout = setTimeout(function() { console.llog('Input Value:', textInput.value); }, 1000); })

It's not nearly as timeless as a person might have themselves believe, though. (That's the "predilection" for certain technologies and doing things in a certain way creeping in and exerting its influence over what should otherwise be clear and sober unbiased thought.)

There's basically one timeless API, and that means written procedures capable of being carried out by a human if/when everything else inevitably fails. The best format that we have for conveying the content comprising those procedures are the formats native to the Web browser—esp. HTML. Really. Nothing else even comes close. (NB: pixel-perfect reproduction à la PDF is out of scope, and PDF makes a bunch of tradeoffs to try to achieve that kind of fidelity which turns out to make it unsuitable/unacceptable in a way that HTML is not, if you're being honest with your criteria, which is something that most people who advocate for PDF's benefits are not—usually having deceived even themselves.)

Given that Web browsers also expose a programming environment, the next logical step involves making sure these procedures are written to exploit that environment as a means of automation—for doing the drudge work in the here and now (i.e., in the meantime, when things haven't yet fallen apart).

One's note taking is not only a conversation with the text or even the original author, it is also a conversation you're having with your future self. This feature is accelerated when one cross links ideas within their note box with each other and revisits them at regular intervals.

Example of someone who uses Roam Research and talks about the prevalence of using it as a "conversation with your future self."

This is very similar to the same patterns that can be seen in the commonplace book tradition, and even in the blogosphere (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), or IndieWeb which often recommends writing on your own website to document how you did things for your future self.

is flexible, but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.

Nabokov on his system of writing.

Vladimir Nabokov's general writing method consisted of composing his material on index cards so that he could shuffle them as he worked as he didn't write in consecutive order. He rewrote and edited cards many times and when the work was completed with the cards in their final order, Nabokov dictated them to his wife Vera who would type them up in triplicate.

http://boffosockobooks.com/books/authors/henry-james-korn/the-pontoon-manifesto/

link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/peuV1MBBEeyz03uCkPkBqA

Semantic Scholar is a digital tool created by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington in 2015. It's corpus is publicly available for search and is used by other tools including Connected Papers.

https://openknowledgemaps.org/

Open Knowledge maps is a visual literature search tool that is based on keywords rather than on a paper's title, author, or DOI. The service was founded in 2015 by Peter Kraker, a former scholarly communication researcher at Graz University of Technology.

https://www.connectedpapers.com/

https://twitter.com/ConnectedPapers

Something about the name Connected Papers reminds me of the same sort of linking name that Manfred Kuehn gave to his note taking software ConnectedText.

Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices- ACIP. (n.d.). Retrieved April 27, 2022, from https://video.ibm.com/channel/VWBXKBR8af4

https://www.thunknotes.com/

People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.

This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.

I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).

Learning has been shown to be linked to engagement with peers in social situations over guidance from faculty mentors.

Cross reference: David F. Feldon et al., “Postdocs’ Lab Engagement Predicts Trajectories of PhD Students’ Skill Development,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (October 2019): 20910–16

Are there areas where this is not the case? Are there areas where this is more the case than not?

Is it our evolution as social animals that has heightened this effect? How could this be shown? (Link this to prior note about social evolution.)

Is it the ability to scaffold out questions and answers and find their way by slowly building up experience with each other that facilitates this effect?

Could this effect be seen in annotating texts as well? If one's annotations become a conversation with the author, is there a learning benefit even when the author can't respond? By trying out writing about one's understanding of a text and seeing where the gaps are and then revisiting the text to fill them in, do we gain this same sort of peer engagement? How can we encourage students to ask questions to the author and/or themselves in the margins? How can we encourage them to further think about and explore these questions? Answer these questions over time?

A key part of the solution is not just writing the annotations down in the first place, but keeping them, reviewing over them, linking them together, revisiting them and slowly providing answers and building solutions for both themselves and, by writing them down, hopefully for others as well.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/aVetvME-Eey28u-vkmJ1Hg

By providing students solid examples of work that is expected of them they can more easily imitate the examples which frees up cognitive bandwidth so that they can focus their time and attention on creating their own content related to particular assignments.

American children aren't encouraged to as attentive imitators as their foreign counterparts and this can effect their learning processes.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/barthess-hand

Interesting use of a card index as a diary.

Cross reference: Review of Mourning Diaries: Wallowing in Grief Over Maman by Dwight Garner, New York Times, Oct. 14, 2010 https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/books/15book.html

Hill and Wang published Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes on October 12, 2010. It is a collection of 330 entries which he wrote following the death of his mother Henriette in 1977.

Kristina Budelis indicates that she saw them in person and reproduced four of them as index card-like notes in The New Yorker (September 2010).

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey, UK: 29 October 2021, Office for National Statistics

Most writing systems and forms force a beginning and an end, they force a particular structure that is both finite and limiting. The card index (zettelkasten) may have a beginning—there's always a first note or card, but it never has to have an end unless one's ownership is so absolute it ends with the life of its author. There are an ever-increasing number of ways to order a card index, though some try to get around this to create some artificial stability by numbering or specifically ordering their cards. New ideas can be accepted into the index at a multitude of places and are always internally mobile and re-orderable.

link to Luhmann's works on describing this sort of rhizomatic behavior of his zettelkasten

Within a network model framing for a zettelkasten, one might define thinking as traversing a graph of idea nodes in a particular order. Alternately it might also include randomly juxtaposing cards and creating links between ones which have similarities. Which of these modes of thinking has a higher order? Which creates more value? Which requires more work?

Resisting syntagmatic closure

Ideas placed into a card file or zettelkasten resist syntagmatic closure. Even well-formed structures in a card file can accept, expand, and integrate new ideas.

Is a zettelkasten ever done?

Bonniot quoted in Michel Leiris, La Règle du jeu (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 1658.

Stéphane Mallarmé's son in law Dr. Bonniot indicates that "Mallarmé, as we know, used to jot down his first ideas, the first outlines of his work on eighths of half-sheets of school notebook size—notes he would keep in big wooden boxes of China tea.”

Given that Mallarmé lived from 1842 to 1898, his life predated the general rise and mass manufacture of the index card, but like many of his generation and several before, he relied on self-made note tools like standard sized sheets of paper cut in eighths which he kept in somewhat standard sized boxes.

I published them as an appendix in the Pléiade edition of La Règle du jeu (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), pp. 1155–1265

Michael Leiris wrote La Règle du jeu on 399 cards which he kept in a box.

The simple card index can serve a number of functions including as an archive, a mnemonic device, a teacher, an organizational tool, a composition device, a creativity engine, and an authorship tool.

Rowan Wilken admits that Cornelia Vismann's use of files for transmission, storage, cancellation, manipulation, and destruction are remarkable, but that the key feature of the card index as a file type is its use for creative production.

Does the fact that Barthes uses a card index in his composition and organization influence the overall theme of his final works which could be described as "non-totalizable fragments"?

Barthes used his card index as an organizational tool as well as a problem-solving tool.

Louis-Jean Calvet explains that in writing Michelet, Barthes used his notes on index cards to try out various combinations of cards to both organize them as well as "to find correspondences between them."

In an interview with Le Monde in 1973, Barthes indicated that while his note taking practice was somewhat akin to that of a commonplace book where one might collect interesting passages, or quotations, he was also specifically writing down ideas which came to him, but doing so in "in the rhythm of a sentence, so that from that moment on, things are already taking on an existence as writing." This indicates that he's already preparing for future publications in which he might use those very ideas and putting them into a more finished form than most might think of when considering shorter fleeting notes used simply as a reminder. By having the work already done, he can easily put his own ideas directly into longer works.

Was there any evidence that his notes were crosslinked or indexed in a way so that he could more rapidly rearrange his ideas and pre-written thoughts to more easily copy them into longer articles or books?

'Memory crutch' implies a physical human failing that needs assistance rather than a phrase like aide-mémoire that doesn't draw that same attention.

In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.

Given this and the easy portability of index cards, should we instead of recommending notebooks, laptops, or systems like Cornell notes, recommend students take notes directly on their note cards and revise them from there? The physicality of the medium may also have other benefits in terms of touch, smell, use of colors on them, etc. for memory and easy regular use. They could also be used physically for spaced repetition relatively quickly.

Teachers using their index cards of notes physically in class or in discussions has the benefit of modeling the sort of note taking behaviors we might ask of our students. Imagine a classroom that has access to a teacher's public notes (electronic perhaps) which could be searched and cross linked by the students in real-time. This would also allow students to go beyond the immediate topic at hand, but see how that topic may dovetail with the teachers' other research work and interests. This also gives greater meaning to introductory coursework to allow students to see how it underpins other related and advanced intellectual endeavors and invites the student into those spaces as well. This sort of practice could bring to bear the full weight of the literacy space which we center in Western culture, for compare this with the primarily oral interactions that most teachers have with students. It's only in a small subset of suggested or required readings that students can use for leveraging the knowledge of their teachers while all the remainder of the interactions focus on conversation with the instructor and questions that they might put to them. With access to a teacher's card index, they would have so much more as they might also query that separately without making demands of time and attention to their professors. Even if answers aren't immediately forthcoming from the file, then there might at least be bibliographic entries that could be useful.

I recently had the experience of asking a colleague for some basic references about the history and culture of the ancient Near East. Knowing that he had some significant expertise in the space, it would have been easier to query his proverbial card index for the lived experience and references than to bother him with the burden of doing work to pull them up.

What sorts of digital systems could help to center these practices? Hypothes.is quickly comes to mind, though many teachers and even students will prefer to keep their notes private and not public where they're searchable.

Another potential pathway here are systems like FedWiki or anagora.org which provide shared and interlinked note spaces. Have any educators attempted to use these for coursework? The closest I've seen recently are public groups using shared Roam Research or Obsidian-based collections for book clubs.

Barthes kept his system to a 'strict format' of cards which were one quarter the size of his usual sheet of writing paper, though he did adjust the size over time as paper sizes standardized within Europe. Hollier indicates that the collection had considerable 'interior mobility' and the cards were constantly reordered with use. Barthes also apparently frequently annotated and altered his notes on cards, so they were also changing with use over time.

Did he make his own cards or purchase them? The sizing of his paper with respect to his cards might indicate that he made his own as it would have been relatively easy to fold his own paper in half twice and cut it up.

Were his cards numbered or marked so as to be able to put them into some sort of standard order? There's a mention of 'interior mobility' and if this was the case were they just floating around internally or were they somehow indexed and tethered (linked) together?

The fact that they were regularly used, revise, and easily reordered means that they could definitely have been used to elicit creativity in the same manner as Raymond Llull's combinatorial art, though done externally rather than within one's own mind.

This comment makes the classic mistake of mixing up the universal quantifier ("for all X") and the existential quantifier ("there exists [at least one] X"), when (although neither are used), the only thing implied is the latter.

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

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

What the average teen is like doesn't compromise Stallman's position. If one "gamer" (is that a taxonomic class?) follows through, then that's perfectly in line with Stallman's mission and the previously avowed position that "Saying No to unjust computing even once is help".

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/saying-no-even-once.html

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

To a great extent, Hypothes.is has such a small footprint of users (in comparison to massive platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that it's never been a performative platform for me. As a design choice they have specifically kept their social media functionalities very sparse, so one also doesn't generally encounter the toxic elements that are rampant in other locations. This helps immensely. I might likely change my tune if it were ever to hit larger scales or experienced the Eternal September effect.

Beyond this, I mostly endeavor to write things for later re-use. As a result I'm trying to write as clearly as possible in full sentences and explain things as best I can so that my future self doesn't need to do heavy work or lifting to recreate the context or do heavy editing. Writing notes in public and knowing that others might read these ideas does hold my feet to the fire in this respect. Half-formed thoughts are often shaky and unclear both to me and to others and really do no one any good. In personal experience they also tend not to be revisited and revised or revised as well as I would have done the first time around (in public or otherwise).

Occasionally I'll be in a rush reading something and not have time for more detailed notes in which case I'll do my best to get the broad gist knowing that later in the day or at least within the week, I'll revisit the notes in my own spaces and heavily elaborate on them. I've been endeavoring to stay away from this bad habit though as it's just kicking the can down the road and not getting the work done that I ultimately want to have. Usually when I'm being fast/lazy, my notes will revert to highlighting and tagging sections of material that are straightforward facts that I'll only be reframing into my own words at a later date for reuse. If it's an original though or comment or link to something important, I'll go all in and put in the actual work right now. Doing it later has generally been a recipe for disaster in my experience.

There have been a few instances where a half-formed thought does get seen and called out. Or it's a thought which I have significantly more personal context for and that is only reflected in the body of my other notes, but isn't apparent in the public version. Usually these provide some additional insight which I hadn't had that makes the overall enterprise more interesting. Here's a recent example, albeit on a private document, but which I think still has enough context to be reasonably clear: https://hypothes.is/a/vmmw4KPmEeyvf7NWphRiMw

There may also be infrequent articles online which are heavily annotated and which I'm excerpting ideas to be reused later. In these cases I may highlight and rewrite them in my own words for later use in a piece, but I'll make them private or put them in a private group as they don't add any value to the original article or potential conversation though they do add significant value to my collection as "literature notes" for immediate reuse somewhere in the future. On broadly unannotated documents, I'll leave these literature notes public as a means of modeling the practice for others, though without the suggestion of how they would be (re-)used for.

All this being said, I will very rarely annotate things privately or in a private group if they're of a very sensitive cultural nature or personal in manner. My current set up with Hypothesidian still allows me to import these notes into Obsidian with my API key. In practice these tend to be incredibly rare for me and may only occur a handful of times in a year.

Generally my intention is that ultimately all of my notes get published in something in a final form somewhere, so I'm really only frontloading the work into the notes now to make the writing/editing process easier later.