14 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2024
    1. 39:00 Vanevar Bush misses out on a whole swath of history regarding commonplace books and indexing. In As We May Think he presents these older methods to the computer. "Why not imitate?" Aldrich says, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel (or thinking you are doing so).

  2. Jan 2024
    1. ZK II note 9/8b 9/8b On the general structure of memories, see Ashby 1967, p. 103 . It is then important that you do not have to rely on a huge number of point-by-point accesses , but rather that you can rely on relationships between notes, i.e. references , that make more available at once than you would with a search impulse or with one thought - has fixation in mind.

      This underlies the ideas of songlines and oral mnemonic practices and is related to Vannevar Bush's "associative trails" in As We May Think.

      Luhmann, Niklas. “ZK II Zettel 9/8b.” Niklas Luhmann-Archiv, undated. https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8b_V.

  3. Aug 2023
    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. Mar 2023
    1. Durante años, los inventos han ampliado los poderes físicos de las personas en lugar de los poderes de su mente. Argumenta que están a la mano los instrumentos que, si se desarrollan adecuadamente, darán a la sociedad acceso y dominio sobre el conocimiento heredado de las épocas. La perfección de estos instrumentos pacíficos, sugiere, debería ser el primer objetivo de nuestros científicos.

      Esto es buenísimo para la innovación de nuevos inventos que pueden beneficiar la humanidad por medio de la imaginación del ser humano pero creo se debe ser limitado debido a la gran imaginación que contiene el ser humano pero dicha imaginación se puede crear ideas buenas, malas y desechables.

    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/

  5. Feb 2023
  6. Oct 2022
    1. In another fashion, Bush described a ‘memory index’ that would work ‘as wemay think’, by which, cryptically, he meant not artificial intelligence but the capabilityto retrace the paths of the reader’s thought process.

      I quite like the wording of this sentence.

  7. Aug 2022
    1. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.
  8. May 2022
    1. You may find this book in the “self-improvement” category, but in adeeper sense it is the opposite of self-improvement. It is aboutoptimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to you

      imitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

      Some may categorize handbooks on note taking within the productivity space as "self-help" or "self-improvement", but still view it as something that happens outside of ones' self. Doesn't improving one's environment as a means of improving things for oneself count as self-improvement?

      Marie Kondo's minimalism techniques are all external to the body, but are wholly geared towards creating internal happiness.

      Because your external circumstances are important to your internal mental state, external environment and decoration can be considered self-improvement.


      Could note taking be considered exbodied cognition? Vannevar Bush framed the Memex as a means of showing associative trails. (Let's be honest, As We May Think used the word trail far too much.)

      How does this relate to orality vs. literacy?

      Orality requires the immediate mental work for storage while literacy removes some of the work by making the effort external and potentially giving it additional longevity.

  9. 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).

  10. Oct 2020
    1. He highlights the Memex’s killer feature of associative linking and how trails of links have never been implemented in the way the Memex envisioned: It is associative indexing though, that is the essential feature of the memex, “the process of tying two items together is the important thing.” Bush describes a hypertext like mechanism at this point, but most interesting from my perspective is his emphasis on a trail as a fundamental unit — something we largely seem to have lost today. […] Documents and links we have aplenty. But where are our trails?
  11. Sep 2018
    1. I’m going to assume most people in the room here have read Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay As We May Think. If you haven’t read it yet, you need to.

      I seem to run across references to this every couple of months. Interestingly it is never in relation to information theory or Claude Shannon references which I somehow what I most closely relate it to.