121 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2023
  2. Oct 2023
    1. Jacobs, Alan. “The Garden and the Stream.” Digital magazine. The New Atlantis (blog), May 4, 2018. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/text-patterns/the-garden-and-stream.

    2. Let’s look at some of the attributes of the memex. Your machine is a library not a publication device. You have copies of documents is there that you control directly, that you can annotate, change, add links to, summarize, and this is because the memex is a tool to think with, not a tool to publish with.

      Alan Jacobs argues that the Memex is not a tool to publish with and is thus fundamentally different from the World Wide Web.

      Did Vannevar Bush suggest the Memex for writing or potentially publishing? [Open question to check] Would it have been presumed to have been for publishing if he suggests that it was for annotating, changing, linking and summarizing? Aren't these actions tantamount to publishing, even if they're just for oneself?

      Wouldn't academics have built the one functionality in as a precursor to the other?

    3. “A tool to think with, not a tool to publish with” — this seems to me essential. I feel that I spend a lot of time trying to think with tools meant for publishing.
  3. Aug 2023
      • for: history - hyperlink, history - Vannevar Bush, history - Ted Nelson, history - Doug Engelbart
    1. Back in 1945, there was this guy, Vannevar Bush. He was working for the US government, and one of the ideas that he put forth was, 00:01:35 "Wow, humans are creating so much information, and we can't keep track of all the books that we've read or the connections between important ideas." And he had this idea called the "memex," where you could put together a personal library of all of the books and articles that you have access to. And that idea of connecting sources captured people's imaginations.
      • for: memex, Vannevar Bush, Indyweb, Ted Nelson
  4. May 2023
    1. Stephen Davies, Javier Velez-Morales, & Roger King (2005), "Building the memex sixty years later: trends and directions in personal knowledge bases", Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. The Wikipedia article on personal knowledge bases (PKBs) is basically a summary of the technical report. The report defined personal knowledge base systems, described their benefits, reviewed relevant fields of research, and compared systems in terms of several aspects of their data models: structural framework, knowledge elements, schema, and the role of transclusion. This report is the most comprehensive publication I've read that compares PKB systems according to their key features.
    1. On devient « utilisateur » de sa propre mémoire par l’extériorisation d’une fonction cognitive dans la machine. L’artificialité des indexations rigides des anciens classements va être dépassée par le recours à la capacité associative du cerveau humain
    1. Fortschritt GmbH: Karteien kö nnen alles! (“ Card indexes can do anything!” , Zeitschriftfü r Organisation und moderne Betriebsfü hrung 3 (23):6 (1929))

      The 1929 desk in this image isn't too far from a physical instantiation of Vannevar Bush's Memex which didn't appear until 1939 (1945 published).

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    Annotators

    1. “Consider a future device …  in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”
  5. Apr 2023
    1. l Memex es un dispositivo en el que se almacenan todo tipo de textos, registros, libros y comunicaciones, que puede ser mecanizado de forma que puede ser consultado con extrema velocidad y flexibilidad. Para la consulta de un artículo, el usuario construye una red de caminos asociados, de acuerdo con su interés, a través de todos los materiales de la biblioteca de forma que pueda cambiar la configuración cuando lo desee; se constituyen senderos de lectura, enlazando los artículos disponibles, y se puede modificar esa configuración cuando se quiera.

      se asimila el memex con el manejo y disposicion del cerebro e incluso el memex fue concebido como herramienta para estudiar el propio celebro.

    1. Vanevar Bush (1890-1974)

      Es conocido por el papel político que tuvo en el desarrollo de la bomba atómica y por su idea Memex, por el cual podemos considerarlo el padre del concepto "hipertexto". El Memex fue un proyecto que no se llegó a llevar a cabo; pero más adelante en 1989, fue precursor de la World Wide Web.

  6. Mar 2023
    1. Es conocido por el papel político que tuvo en el desarrollo de la bomba atómica y por su idea Memex, por el cual podemos considerarlo el padre del concepto "hipertexto". El Memex fue un proyecto que no se llegó a llevar a cabo; pero más adelante en 1989, fue precursor de la World Wide Web.

      Es conocido por el papel político que tuvo en el desarrollo de la bomba atómica y por su idea Memex, por el cual podemos considerarlo el padre del concepto "hipertexto". El Memex fue un proyecto que no se llegó a llevar a cabo; pero más adelante en 1989, fue precursor de la World Wide Web. La verdad el creo una gran herramienta para elaborar conceptos de hipertexto y que hoy en día (aunque se considere cosa del pasado) se siga usando.

    1. There's some interesting comparison to the ideas here and the long term state-of-the-art in information management, particularly in business and library settings which Bush wholly ignores.

      Most fascinatingly Bush "coins" memex here, but prior art for the Memindex as a similar product in the office/business productivity space easily goes back to 1906 and was popular to and through at least the early 1950s.

      For details on this, see:

      https://boffosocko.com/2023/03/09/the-memindex-method-an-early-precursor-of-the-memex-hipster-pda-43-folders-gtd-basb-and-bullet-journal-systems/

    1. Memindex

      Let YOUR MIND GO FREE Do not tax your brain trying to re- member. Get the MEMINDEX HABIT and you can FORGET WITH IMPUNITY. An ideal reminder and handy system for keeping all memoranda where they will appear at the right time. Saves time, money, opportunity. A brain saver. No other device answers its purpose. A Great Help for Busy Men, Used and recommended by Bankers, Man- ufacturers, Salesmen, Lawyers, Doctors, Merchants, Insurance Men, Architects, Ed- ucators, Contractors, Railway Managers Engineers, Ministers, etc., all over the world. Order now and get ready to Begin the New Year Right. Rest of '06 free with each outfit. Express prepaid on receipt of price. Personal checks accepted

      Also a valuable card index for desk use. Dated cards from tray are carried in the handy pocket case, 2 to 4 weeks at a time. To-day's card always at the front. No leaves to turn. Helps you to PLAN YOUR WORK WORK YOUR PLAN ACCOMPLISH MORE You need it. Three years' sales show that most all business and professional men need it. GET IT NOW. WILSON MEMINDEX CO. 93 Mills St., Rochester, N. Y.

      Interesting that the use of the portmanteau memindex (as memory + index) for a card index being used to supplement one's memory. It can't go unnoticed that the Wilson Memindex Co. was manufacturing and selling these as early as 1906, several decades before Vannevar Bush's use of the word Memex which seems derivative and removes more of the traces of index from the root.

      Note the use of card sizes 2 3/4 x 4 1/2" and 3 x 5 1/2" for this system.

  7. Feb 2023
    1. “Consider a future device …  in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”
      • The explorations of a system that could
      • record our learning trail in life
        • personal individual synthesis
        • new knowledge gained by social learning:
          • from direct, synchronous, real-time interaction with another live other human being
          • from indirect, asynchronous, non-real-time interaction with cultural artefacts produced by another
      • Bush famously named cc this the "memex"
  8. Dec 2022
    1. Xememex is a tool for building tools for collecting, curating and composing fragments of information.

      https://xememex.com/

      Appears to be a TiddlyWiki farm, possibly for collaborative work?

  9. Nov 2022
    1. Page recommended by @wfinck. Seems @karlicoss is the author. This project seems similar to what I've been trying to do with Hypothes.is, Obsidian, Anki, Zotero, and PowerToys Run but goes beyond the scope of my endeavors to just quickly access whatever resource comes to mind (without creating duplicates). The things that Promnesia adds beyond my PKM stack is the following: - prioritize new info - keeping track of which device things were read and how long

  10. Sep 2022
    1. Artykuł przedstawia podłoże rozwoju metod rozpoznawania dokumentów oraz wyszukiwania informacji do 1939 roku, czyli do momentu, w którym Vannevar Bush napisał artykuł „As We May Think”, opublikowane potem w 1945 roku.

      Artykuł przekonuje do tego, że pomysł Busha nie był ani tak oryginalny, ani tak rewolucyjny, jak się go przedstawia. Autor przedstawia także stanowiska innych badaczy czy wynalazców, którzy mieli zarzuty względem projektu Memeksu.

      Autor skupia się przede wszystkim na osobie Emanuela Goldberga i jego wynalazku wyszukiwarki mikrofilmów. Przedstawia także powody, które spowodowały, że jego wynalazek był pomijany i zapomniany.

    1. Artykuł przedstawia historię idei Memeksu, autorstwa Vannevara Busha. Autor przedstawia także informacje na temat różnych wydań jego tekstu na ten temat.

      W tekście znajdują się także informacje na temat maszyny Rapid Selector, autorstwa Ralpha R. Shawa, powstałej na tym, co pisał Emmanuel Goldberg, który z kolei inspirował się pracą Busha.

  11. Aug 2022
    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20220810205211/https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/gpt-3

      Blogged a few first associations at https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/08/communicating-with-gpt-3/ . Prompt design for narrative research may be a useful experience here. 'Interviewing' GPT-3 a Luhmann-style conversation with a system? Can we ditch our notes for GPT-3? GPT-3 as interface to the internet. Fascinatiing essay, need to explore.

    1. I've been using WP as visible part of my zettel, which I keep in Obsidian. The only inconvenience is that I don't know how to make visible backlinks on pages that has links to and from.You can look how it works for yourself. Half of my WP is in Russian the section with books is fully in English. Browse there to see how it all works. Post your thoughts what you think about it.

      I know that a few people have been using the Webmention and the Semantic Linkbacks plugins for WordPress together to show the backlinks in the "comments" section of their posts/pages. Perhaps this may work for your purposes?

      A recent example I've seen someone put together on WordPress that does something similar (though not using Slippy) is https://cyberzettel.com/.

      In a similar vein, though not with WordPress, Kevin Marks mocked up a UI for an incoming/outgoing links in the mode of a Memex that also leverages Webmentions for part of the functionality: https://www.kevinmarks.com/memex.html.

    1. Historical Hypermedia: An Alternative History of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 and Implications for e-Research. .mp3. Berkeley School of Information Regents’ Lecture. UC Berkeley School of Information, 2010. https://archive.org/details/podcast_uc-berkeley-school-informat_historical-hypermedia-an-alte_1000088371512. archive.org.

      https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/2010/historical-hypermedia-alternative-history-semantic-web-and-web-20-and-implications-e.

      https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/audio/2010-10-20-vandenheuvel_0.mp3

      headshot of Charles van den Heuvel

      Interface as Thing - book on Paul Otlet (not released, though he said he was working on it)

      • W. Boyd Rayward 1994 expert on Otlet
      • Otlet on annotation, visualization, of text
      • TBL married internet and hypertext (ideas have sex)
      • V. Bush As We May Think - crosslinks between microfilms, not in a computer context
      • Ted Nelson 1965, hypermedia

      t=540

      • Michael Buckland book about machine developed by Emanuel Goldberg antecedent to memex
      • Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine: Information, Invention, and Political Forces (New Directions in Information Management) by Michael Buckland (Libraries Unlimited, (March 31, 2006)
      • Otlet and Goldsmith were precursors as well

      four figures in his research: - Patrick Gattis - biologist, architect, diagrams of knowledge, metaphorical use of architecture; classification - Paul Otlet, Brussels born - Wilhelm Ostwalt - nobel prize in chemistry - Otto Neurath, philosophher, designer of isotype

      Paul Otlet

      Otlet was interested in both the physical as well as the intangible aspects of the Mundaneum including as an idea, an institution, method, body of work, building, and as a network.<br /> (#t=1020)

      Early iPhone diagram?!?

      (roughly) armchair to do the things in the web of life (Nelson quote) (get full quote and source for use) (circa 19:30)

      compares Otlet to TBL


      Michael Buckland 1991 <s>internet of things</s> coinage - did I hear this correctly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things lists different coinages

      Turns out it was "information as thing"<br /> See: https://hypothes.is/a/kXIjaBaOEe2MEi8Fav6QsA


      sugane brierre and otlet<br /> "everything can be in a document"<br /> importance of evidence


      The idea of evidence implies a passiveness. For evidence to be useful then, one has to actively do something with it, use it for comparison or analysis with other facts, knowledge, or evidence for it to become useful.


      transformation of sound into writing<br /> movement of pieces at will to create a new combination of facts - combinatorial creativity idea here. (circa 27:30 and again at 29:00)<br /> not just efficiency but improvement and purification of humanity

      put things on system cards and put them into new orders<br /> breaking things down into smaller pieces, whether books or index cards....

      Otlet doesn't use the word interfaces, but makes these with language and annotations that existed at the time. (32:00)

      Otlet created diagrams and images to expand his ideas

      Otlet used octagonal index cards to create extra edges to connect them together by topic. This created more complex trees of knowledge beyond the four sides of standard index cards. (diagram referenced, but not contained in the lecture)

      Otlet is interested in the "materialization of knowledge": how to transfer idea into an object. (How does this related to mnemonic devices for daily use? How does it relate to broader material culture?)

      Otlet inspired by work of Herbert Spencer

      space an time are forms of thought, I hold myself that they are forms of things. (get full quote and source) from spencer influence of Plato's forms here?

      Otlet visualization of information (38:20)

      S. R. Ranganathan may have had these ideas about visualization too

      atomization of knowledge; atomist approach 19th century examples:S. R. Ranganathan, Wilson, Otlet, Richardson, (atomic notes are NOT new either...) (39:40)

      Otlet creates interfaces to the world - time with cyclic representation - space - moving cube along time and space axes as well as levels of detail - comparison to Ted Nelson and zoomable screens even though Ted Nelson didn't have screens, but simulated them in paper - globes

      Katie Berner - semantic web; claims that reporting a scholarly result won't be a paper, but a nugget of information that links to other portions of the network of knowledge.<br /> (so not just one's own system, but the global commons system)

      Mention of Open Annotation (Consortium) Collaboration:<br /> - Jane Hunter, University of Australia Brisbane & Queensland<br /> - Tim Cole, University of Urbana Champaign<br /> - Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory annotations of various media<br /> see:<br /> - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311366469_The_Open_Annotation_Collaboration_A_Data_Model_to_Support_Sharing_and_Interoperability_of_Scholarly_Annotations - http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130205/index.html - http://www.openannotation.org/PhaseIII_Team.html

      trust must be put into the system for it to work

      coloration of the provenance of links goes back to Otlet (~52:00)

      Creativity is the friction of the attention space at the moments when the structural blocks are grinding against one another the hardest. —Randall Collins (1998) The sociology of philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (p.76)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  12. Jul 2022
    1. A Solid Social Knowledge GraphBy networked these second brains together via the Fediverse, the MyHub.ai toolkit creates a distributed Social Knowledge Graph for each Hub Editor.

    2. Your Hub’s CMS: a Thinking Management System for writersEach Hub’s content management system (CMS) is actually a “Thinking Management System”: a thinking tool based on a Personal Knowledge Graph (PKG) which is custom-designed to support thinking and writing.

  13. Jun 2022
    1. Ps) I am trying to post daily content like this on LinkedIn using my Slip-Box as the content generator (the same is posted on Twitter, but LinkedIn is easier to read), so if you want to see more like this, feel free to look me up on LinkedIn or Twitter.

      Explicit example of someone using a zettelkasten to develop ideas and create content for distribution online and within social media.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vgtyuf/mastery_requires_theory_application_of_theory_is/

    1. As powerful as search can be, studies5 have found that in manysituations people strongly prefer to navigate their file systemsmanually, scanning for the information they’re looking for. Manualnavigation gives people control over how they navigate, with foldersand file names providing small contextual clues about where to looknext.6

      The studies quoted here are in the mid 80s and early 90s before the rise of better and easier UI methods or more powerful search. I'd have to call this conclusion into question.

      There's also a big difference in what people know, what people prefer, and what knowledgeable people can do most quickly.

      Cross reference this with Dan Russell's research at Google that indicates that very few people know how to use ctrl-f to find or search for things in documents. - https://hyp.is/7a532uxjEeyYfTOctQHvTw/www.youtube.com/channel/UCh6KFtW4a4Ozr81GI1cxaBQ

      Relate it to the idea of associative (memory) trails (Memex), songlines, and method of loci in remembering where things are -- our brains are designed to navigate using memory

  14. May 2022
    1. Thus, the sensitive seismographer of avant-garde develop-ments, Walter Benjamin, logically conceived of this scenario in 1928, of communicationwith card indices rather than books: “And even today, as the current scientific methodteaches us, the book is an archaic intermediate between two different card indexsystems. For everything substantial is found in the slip box of the researcher who wroteit and the scholar who studies in it, assimilated into its own card index.” 47
      1. Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstra ß e, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1928/1981), 98 – 140, at 103.

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

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

  15. Apr 2022
    1. Much of Barthes’ intellectual and pedagogical work was producedusing his cards, not just his published texts. For example, Barthes’Collège de France seminar on the topic of the Neutral, thepenultimate course he would take prior to his death, consisted offour bundles of about 800 cards on which was recorded everythingfrom ‘bibliographic indications, some summaries, notes, andprojects on abandoned figures’ (Clerc, 2005: xxi-xxii).

      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.

    1. Starting in the Renaissance notes weretreated less as temporary tools than as long-term ones, worthy of considerableinvestment of time and effort, of being saved for reuse and in some cases sharedwith others (collaborators in a project or one’s colleagues or heirs). Collections ofnotes were valued as treasuries or storehouses in which to accumulate informa-tion even if they did not serve an immediate purpose. This stockpiling approachto note-taking also required greater attention to organization and finding devicessince the precise uses to which the notes might be put were not clear from theoutset and the scale of accumulation hampered memorization.

      Summary tk


      Modern note taking has seen a reversion to pre-Renaissance practices in which they're much more temporary tools. Relatively few students take notes with an aim for reusing them past their immediate classroom settings or current term of study.

      The revitalization of the idea of the zettelkasten in the late 2010s seems to be helping to reverse this idea. However, there aren't enough online versions of these sorts of notes which allow them to be used with other publics or even to be used and shared with other collaborators. There are some growing spaces seen in the social media note taking space like the anagora.org or the digital gardens space where this seems to have some potential to take off. There's also a small community on Hypothes.is which seems to be practicing this as well, though direct links between various collections of notes is not commonplace.

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

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

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

    1. The vision of mem ex as a personal workstation was a powerful force in shaping the development of personal computers, our work on hypertext (Shneiderman and Kearsley, 1989), and the emergence of the World-Wide Web (Berners-Lee, 1993).

      In 1998, Ben Shneiderman acknowledged the influence of Vannevar Bush's vision of the memex on his work on hypertext.

    2. In looking to the future, we might again transform society by building genexes -- generators of excellence. Such inspirati onal environments would empower personal and collaborative creativity by enabling users to: - collect information from an existing domain of knowledge, - create innovations using advanced tools, - consult with peers or mentors in the field, and then - disseminate the results widely.

      This is a dreadful definition of the neologism genex. Had it been used previously in other locations so as to be common even within a small community? Is this the first use?

      It obviously didn't catch on at the time.

    1. ste aparato consiste en bases planas con una superficie translúcida que es capaz de encontrar a alta velocidad, información almacenada en una base de datos. En una de las superficies el usuario escribe palabras o dibujos clave que seguirían estándares universales, y en la otra superficie se reflejaría la biblioteca o base de datos

      Si bien fueron los planos o la descripción del mecanismo se resalta la importancia que tiene este para las bases de datos actuales y la forma en como se crean anotaciones en el mismo, permitiendo a todo quien la use ser el autor.

  17. Feb 2022
  18. Jan 2022
    1. Bush 1939 Warning: Biblio formatting not applied. BushVannevar. Mechanization and the Record. Vannevar Bush Papers. Box 138, Speech Article Book File. Washington D.C. Library of Congress. 1939.

      Original paper that became The Atlantic article As We May Think (1945).

    1. The essay is most famous for its description of a hypothetical information-retrieval system, the Memex, a kind of mechanical Evernote, in which a person's every "book, record, or communication" was microfilmed and cataloged.

      It really kills me that there's so much hero worship of all this, particularly given the information processing power of index card systems at the time. I don't really think it took such a leap to image automating such a system given the technological bent of the time.

      Of course actually doing it is another thing, but conceptualizing the idea at the time would have be de rigueur.

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

      Cory Doctorow calls his blog and its archives his "outboard brain".

    2. My composition is greatly aided both 20 years' worth of mnemonic slurry of semi-remembered posts and the ability to search memex.craphound.com (the site where I've mirrored all my Boing Boing posts) easily. A huge, searchable database of decades of thoughts really simplifies the process of synthesis.

      Cory Doctorow's commonplace makes it easier to search, quote, and reuse in his process of synthesis.

  19. Dec 2021
  20. Nov 2021
    1. Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.

      This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).

      Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond

      This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.

      This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?

  21. Sep 2021
  22. Aug 2021
  23. Jul 2021
    1. Dafür spricht das Credo des Literaten Walter Benjamin: Und heute schon ist das Buch, wie die aktuelle wissenschaftliche Produktionsweise lehrt, eine veraltete Vermittlung zwischen zwei verschiedenen Kartotheksystemen. Denn alles Wesentliche findet sich im Zettelkasten des Forschers, der's verfaßte, und der Gelehrte, der darin studiert, assimiliert es seiner eigenen Kartothek.

      The credo of the writer Walter Benjamin speaks for this:

      And today, as the current scientific method of production teaches, the book is an outdated mediation between two different card index systems. Because everything essential is to be found in the slip box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar who studies it assimilates it in his own card index.

      Here's an early instantiation of thoughts being put down into data which can be copied from one card to the next as a means of creation.

      A similar idea was held in the commonplace book tradition, in general, but this feels much more specific in the lead up to the idea of the Memex.

  24. Jun 2021
    1. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

      His definition of a Memex is simply a mechanized (or what we would now call digitized) commonplace book, which has a long history in the literature of knowledge management.


      I'll note here that he's somehow still stuck on the mechanical engineering idea of mechanized. Despite the fact that he was the advisor to Claude Shannon, father of the digital revolution, he is still thinking in terms of mechanical pipes, levers, and fluids. He literally had Shannon building a computer out of pipes and fluid while he was a student at MIT.

  25. May 2021
    1. Whether or not digital gardens should follow any standards is an interesting question.

      What features/functionality should a digital garden have? Is there a canonical list yet?

      I wish more supported Webmention to enable the Memex dream...

    1. Keeping your garden on the open web also sets you up to take part in the future of gardening. At the moment our gardens are rather solo affairs. We haven't figure out how to make them multi-player. But there's an enthusiastic community of developers and designers trying to fix that. It's hard to say what kind of libraries, frameworks, and design patterns might emerge out of that effort, but it certainly isn't going to happen behind a Medium paywall.

      There are a few of us using Webmention for this. Similarly there are some running open wikis or experiments like Flancian's agora.

    1. The other thing that would be fascinating would be to open up these personal libraries to the external world. That would be a lovely combination of old-fashioned book-based wisdom, advanced semantic search technology, and the personality-driven filters that we've come to enjoy in the blogosphere. I can imagine someone sitting down to write an article about complexity theory and the web, and saying, "I bet Johnson's got some good material on this in his 'library.'" (You wouldn't be able to pull down the entire database, just query it, so there wouldn't be any potential for intellectual property abuse.) I can imagine saying to myself: "I have to write this essay on taxonomies, so I'd better sift through Weinberger's library, and that chapter about power laws won't be complete without a visit to Shirky's database."

      He's got a nice conceptualization here of a networked version of commonplace books for search and creation for one's own commonplace book.

    1. “If only I had channels in my head,” Lichtenberg had fantasized, “so as to promote domestic trade between the stockpiles of my thought! But alas, there they lie by the hundreds without being of use to one another.”

      A fascinating quote in the history of the commonplace book on it's way to becoming the Memex.

  26. Apr 2021
    1. Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/promnesia/

      Promnesia is a browser extension for Chrome/Firefox (including Firefox for Android!) which serves as a web surfing copilot, enhancing your browsing history and web exploration experience.

      TLDR: it lets you explore your browsing history in context: where you encountered it, in chat, on Twitter, on Reddit, or just in one of the text files on your computer. This is unlike most modern browsers, where you can only see when you visited the link.

      I've been doing something a bit like this manually and it looks a lot like the sort of UI examples I've been collecting at https://boffosocko.com/2019/06/29/social-reading-user-interface-for-discovery/

  27. Mar 2021
  28. Feb 2021
    1. Чтобы не быть голословным, приведу несколько примеров обработки, которой лично мне не хватает. В форме запросов на поиск с пояснением. Что я писал про обработку исключений за последние 5 лет? Предполагается, что в экзокортексе есть все мои посты из всех источников, как-минимум, проиндексированные для полнотекстового поиска.Какие научные лаборатории занимаются интересующей меня темой? Ладно, это не мой запрос, а Юлин. Предполагается, что в экзокортексе доступны pdf с её коллекцией статей, с автоматически выделенными из них упоминаниями учреждений, авторов и тематики.В каких обсуждениях участвовали одновременно я и указанный человек?Что я читал про указанного человека за последние несколько лет? Предполагается, что в экзокортекс попадает история моего браузера и автоматически размечается аналогично статьям.Какая информация имеется у меня на темы, близкие к теме «управление информацией»?Что нового произошло в мире за последние дни? 

      .

    1. 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?

    1. The RECALL Augmenting Memory architecture. It can, for example, help users restore context before their next conference or class. The student, walking to a lecture, could be primed with a summary of it through his smart glasses, surfacing relevant information. The description of the "Memory vault" in this architecture exhibits a high similarity to Vannevar Bush's Memex.

      It's these deep learning breakthroughs that now make a lot of these memex and semantic web technologies accesssible. This is a note I also referenced in the SWTs whitepaper for Cortex. Great to see Moritz and RemNote picking up on this change as well.

  29. Jan 2021
    1. Annotation is the process of adding a layer of personal (with a potential for sharing) metadata on top of existing content such as highlights, notes, anchors etc.
    2. Examples of exobrains 'Everything I know' wiki by Nikita Voloboev xxiivv by Devine Lu Linvega h0p3's Wiki Braindump by Jethro Kuan 'One Hundred Ideas for Computing' repository by Sam Squire more wiki examples from Nikita Voloboev
    3. Human brains seem to be best for generating new ideas. I want to learn more, think faster, distract less, interact and visualize, effortlessly remember everything; not memorize and do routine information processing, which computers seem better at.
    4. Extended mind is the idea that your mind isn't limited by your physical body, but augmented by external means. Paper notes & diaries, data in your computer/phone/cloud – all these things contribute to your cognitive process, thinking and help you navigate the landscape of ideas.
  30. Oct 2020
    1. So most people say this is the original vision of the web.

      I look it and say, it's just another version of the commonplace book!

    2. these abilities – to link, annotate, change, summarize, copy, and share — these are the verbs of gardening.
    3. Your machine is a library not a publication device. You have copies of documents is there that you control directly, that you can annotate, change, add links to, summarize, and this is because the memex is a tool to think with, not a tool to publish with.

      I can't help but think about Raymond Lull's combinatorial rings which he used as a thinking tool. Or Giordano Bruno's revision of Lull's tools as described in De Umbris Idearum. Given their knowledge of the art of memory stemming from rhetoric in combination with his combinatorial tool, he was essentially sitting on top of an early form of a memex.

      I also can't help but think about Kicks Condor's Fraidyc.at reader tool that pulls in wiki content from TiddlyWikis and which have the potential to also make wikis publishing tools as well.

  31. Sep 2020
    1. While the pioneers of digital computing understood that machines would soon accelerate human capabilities by doing massive calculations, Bush continued to be occupied with extending, through replication, human mental experience.  [Nyce 1991, 124]

      Ironic that adaptation was part of the memex and yet it did not adapt to the emerging field of digital computing.

    2. In all versions of the Memex essay, the machine was to serve as a personal memory support. It was not a public database in the sense of the modern Internet: it was first and foremost a private device. It provided for each person to add their own marginal notes and comments, recording reactions to and trails from others' texts, and adding selected information and the trails of others by “dropping” them into their archive via an electro-optical scanning device. In the later adaptive Memex, these trails fade out if not used, and “if much in use, the trails become emphasized”  [Bush 1970, 191] as the web adjusts its shape mechanically to the thoughts of the individual who uses it.

      A personal memex must first and foremost be personal. No cloud based system can claim to be a memex because it loses the personal / private aspect.

    3. So Memex was first and foremost an extension of human memory and the associative movements that the mind makes through information: a mechanical analogue to an already mechanical model of memory. Bush transferred this idea into information management; Memex was distinct from traditional forms of indexing not so much in its mechanism or content, but in the way it organised information based on association. The design did not spring from the ether, however; the first Memex design incorporates the technical architecture of the Rapid Selector and the methodology of the Analyzer — the machines Bush was assembling at the time.

      How much further would Bush have gone if he had known about graph theory? He is describing a graph database with nodes and edges and a graphical model itself is the key to the memex.

    4. Solutions were suggested (among them slowing down the machine, and checking abstracts before they were used) [Burke 1991, 154], but none of these were particularly effective, and a working machine wasn’t ready until the fall of 1943. At one stage, because of an emergency problem with Japanese codes, it was rushed to Washington — but because it was so unreliable, it went straight back into storage. So many parts were pulled out that the machine was never again operable [Burke 1991, 158]. In 1998, the Selector made Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media List, consigned forever to a lineage of failed technologies. Microfilm did not behave the way Bush and his team wanted it to. It had its own material limits, and these didn’t support speed of access.

      People often get stuck on specific implementation details that are specific to their time, place, and context. Why didn't Bush consider other storage mechanisms?

  32. Jun 2020
    1. But tagging, alone, is still not good enough. Even our many tags become useless if/when their meaning changes (in our minds) by the time we go retrieve the data they point to. This could be years after we tagged something. Somehow, whether manually or automatically, we need agents and tools to help us keep our tags updated and relevant.

      search engines usually can surface that faster (less cognitive load than recalling what and where you store something) than you retrieve it in your second brain (abundance info, do can always retrieve from external source in a JIT fashion)

    1. Just as journalists should be able to write about anything they want, comedians should be able to do the same and tell jokes about anything they please

      where's the line though? every output generates a feedback loop with the hivemind, turning into input to ourselves with our cracking, overwhelmed, filters

      it's unrealistic to wish everyone to see jokes are jokes, to rely on journalists to generate unbiased facts, and politicians as self serving leeches, err that's my bias speaking

  33. Dec 2019
    1. One need arose quite commonly as trains of thought would develop on a growing series of note cards. There was no convenient way to link these cards together so that the train of thought could later be recalled by extracting the ordered series of notecards. An associative-trail scheme similar to that out lined by Bush for his Memex could conceivably be implemented with these cards to meet this need and add a valuable new symbol-structuring process to the system.
    2. An example of this general sort of thing was given by Bush where he points out that the file index can be called to view at the push of a button, which implicitly provides greater capability to work within more sophisticated and complex indexing systems
    3. The associative trails whose establishment and use within the files he describes at some length provide a beautiful example of a new capability in symbol structuring that derives from new artifact-process capability, and that provides new ways to develop and portray concept structures. Any file is a symbol structure whose purpose is to represent a variety of concepts and concept structures in a way that makes them maximally available and useful to the needs of the human's mental-structure development—within the limits imposed by the capability of the artifacts and human for jointly executing processes of symbol-structure manipulation.
  34. Feb 2019
  35. Dec 2018
    1. Any given book_ of his library /_and presumably other textual material, such as notes/ can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf

      This passage in Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" may be the first mention of what we now think of as digital annotation. The passage in the original article is slighly different... you can see it here.

  36. Aug 2018
  37. Jul 2017
  38. Feb 2017
    1. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together.
    1. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book.

      I love this idea of pastiche at the core of the memex.

  39. Jun 2016
    1. produce schema-aware writing tools that everyone can use to add new documents to a nascent semantic web

      That dream does live on. Since Vannevar’s 1945 article on the Memex, we’ve been dreaming of such tools. Our current tools are quite far from that dream.

  40. Apr 2016
  41. Feb 2014
    1. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

      The essential feature of the memex is its ability of association; tying two items together.

    2. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article

      The first reference to Wikipedia?! :)