https://www.amazon.com/Vaughn-Cube-Multiplication-Petersons/dp/0768941776

Dean Vaughn has apparently renamed the method of loci as a commodity to be able to market a method for memorizing the multiplication tables.

Ha, I've been here before...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/109r830/who_else_is_pretty_much_avoiding_the_digital_zk/

movie tickets as stores of memory

There's an irony here in that this "cult" may have actually been a cult of teachers and students. Should the broader thesis bear out, we're going to have lots of references to these cults of teachers lingering in the literature....

https://www.livescience.com/neolithic-roundel-structure-prague

Sounds like this shares many of the potential features of Stonehenge, stone and timber circles, and menhirs that fit into Lynne Kelly's thesis on mnemonic devices.

https://www.luannudell.com/

via Jon Udell

Perhaps an artist to commission for constructing interesting mnemonic devices?

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

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

• wrote bibliography on law
• book: Something on Bibliography #wanttoread
• universal decimal classification system
• mundaneum
• Le Corbusier - architect worked with Otlet for building for Mundaneum; See: https://socks-studio.com/2019/05/05/the-shape-of-knowledge-the-mundaneum-by-paul-otlet-and-henri-la-fontaine/

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)

This is an example about preparation for going into a conference (or battle, which is suggested by this particular conference's topic). The work provides a primer for what is about to happen and can be analogized to ancients taking the ark of the covenant into battle before them. It serves as a cultural talisman representing what they're fighting for, but it also likely served as a mnemonic device for their actual battle strategies and plans from the time. They take it with them as a physical review reminder and device.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547390915689566211.html via https://twitter.com/nicolas_gatien/status/1547390946156969984

Nicolas, I broadly agree with you that many of these factors of reading and writing for understanding and retention are at play and the research in memory and spaced repetition underlines a lot of this. However in practice, one needs to be revisiting and actively using their notes for some particular project to remember them better. The card search may help to create both visual and physical paths that assist in memory too.

Reliance solely on a physical zettelkasten however may not be enough without active use over time, particularly for the majority of users. It's unlikely that all or even many may undertake this long term practice. Saying that this is either the "best", "optimum", or "only" way would be disingenuous to the diversity of learners and thinkers.

Those who want to add additional strength to these effects might also use mnemonic methods from indigenous cultures that rely on primary orality. These could include color, images, doodles (drolleries anyone?), or other associative methods, many of which could be easily built into an (antinet) zettelkasten. Lynne Kelly's work in this area can be highly illuminating. For pure practical application and diversity of potential methods, I recommend her book Memory Craft https://amzn.to/3zdqqGp, but she's got much more academic and in depth work that is highly illustrative.

With this background on orality and memory in mind we might all broadly view wood and stone circles (Stonehenge), menhir, standing stones, songlines, and other mnemonic devices in the archaeological and sociological records as zettelkasten which one keeps entirely in their memory rather than writing them down. We might also consider, based on this and the historical record concerning Druids and their association with trees that the trees served a zettelkasten-like function for those ancient societies. This continues to extend to lots of other cultural and societal practices throughout history. Knowledge from Duane Hamacher et al's book The First Astronomers and Karlie Noone and Krystal De Napoli's Astronomy: Sky Country will underline these theories and practices in modern indigenous settings.

Example of someone in the wild using their body as a locus for attaching memories temporarily so that they can recall ideas for making note of later.

Walter and Julia are examining a glass paperweight in George Orwell's 1984 without having context of what it is or for what it was used.

This is the same sort of context collapse caused by distance in time and memory that archaeologists face when examining found objects.

How does one pull out the meaning from such distant objects in an exegetical way? How can we more reliably rebuild or recreate lost contexts?

Link to: - Stonehenge is a mnemonic device - mnemonic devices in archaeological contexts (Neolithic carved stone balls

Some forms of orality-based methods and practices can be viewed as a method of "reading" physical objects.

Ideograms are an evolution on the spectrum from orality to literacy.

It seems odd to be pulling these sorts of insight out my prior experiences and reading while reading something so wholly "other". But isn't this just what "myths" in oral cultures actually accomplish? We link particular ideas to pieces of story, song, art, and dance so that they may be remembered. In this case Orwell's glass paperweight has now become a sort of "talking rock" for me. Certainly it isn't done in any sort of sense that Orwell would have expected, presumed, or even intended.

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?

https://twitter.com/glasspetalsmoke/status/1397196870913515520

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.

Has media studies looked at primary orality and the ideas of space repetition, art, dance, and mnemonics as base layers of media by which cultures created networks of knowledge and culture that they might use to select, store, process, copy, and pass along their knowledge?

Stages of annotation in the medieval period

When is Hypothes.is going to branch out into the business of professional readers to add aids to texts?! :)

Link this to the professional summary industry that reads books and summarizes them for busy executives

Link this to the annotations studied by Owen Gingerich in The Book Nobody Read.

Last night while watching a video related to The First Astronomers, I came across a clip in which Australian elder Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson indicates that indigenous dendroglyphs (markings on trees) or petroglyphs (markings on stone in the stony territories) are the libraries of the Indigenous peoples who always relate (associate) their stories from the markings back up to the sky (stars, constellations).

These markings remind me of some of those found on carved stone balls in neolithic European contexts described by Dr. @LynneKelly in The Memory Code and Memory Craft and carvings on coolamon in Knowledge and Power.

Using the broad idea of the lukasa and abstract designs, I recently bought a small scale version of the Aberlemno Pictish Cross as a small manual/portable memory palace, which is also an artwork that I can hang on the wall, to use to associate memories to the designs and animals which are delineated in 18 broad areas on the sculpture. (Part of me wonders if the communities around these crosses used them for mnemonic purposes as well?)

Is anyone else using abstract designs or artwork like this for their memory practice?

Anyone know of other clever decorative artworks one could use and display in their homes/offices for these purposes?

For those interested in the archeological research on dendroglyphs in Australia: - The Western Yalanji dendroglyph: The life and death of an Aboriginal carved tree - Review: The Dendroglyphs or ‘Carved Trees’ of New South Wales by Robert Etheridge (Content warning: historical erasure of Indigenous culture)

2 Kings 23:14 indicates that King Josiah cut down the Asherah poles as a monotheistic reform in the second half of the 7th century BCE.

Could these have have been in circles? Could they have been used as mnemonic devices?

link this to the idea of the standing stone found at Khirbet Qeiyafa.

Link this to my Ark of Covenant example.

Link to Stonehenge and other henge examples as well as other timber circles.

Silvia Ferrara analogizes the quipu to a three-dimensional "script".

The best reference for this and a broad perspective of Bruno with respect to memory is Frances A. Yates' The Art of Memory (University of Chicago, 1966). She covers Bruno and the seals fairly extensively in Chapter XI.

Intentional gestures can be used as mnemonic devices as the movement can be associated with things we wish to remember.

There are two potential axes for gestures: spontaneous and intentional. Intentional gestures include examples like sign language, memetic pantomimes, and dance or related animal mimicry gestures used by indigenous cultures for communicating the movement and behavior of animals.

Intentional gestures can also be specifically designed for pedagogical purposes as well as for mnemonic purposes.

cross reference to Lynne Kelly example about movement/gesture in indigenous cultures.

movement and gesture as a mnemonic device

Engel calls his system the Caper Star because the "spirited leaps of imagination" are required to help the student on their quest.

Alexander de Villedieu's Latin grammer Doctrinale from the 12th century was the standard work on the subject. Its 2,000 lines of doggerel were used as a mnemonic device because they were easier to remember. Famed publisher Aldus Manutius was appalled at their crude nature when he reprinted the book in 1501.

Mnemonic (mental) storehouses (thesaurus) and written archives are functionally equivalent and serve to store and retrieve information. Their primary difference is in the effort put into how one applies their attention to them. The former requires more mental effort into storing information into the location and then recalling it.

In the case of archives with subject indices, they require less mental effort and visually serve a potential store of variety and ease of creating additional links between bits of knowledge.

Example in literature of wampum being described as wealth existing for political purposes.

J.R.R. Tolkien indicated that Welsh fairy tales "had bright color but no sense". Perhaps this is because they served a cultural and mnemonic purpose and not necessarily a storytelling one.

1:00 minute mark

I'm seeing a larger growing pattern of people who are using Hypothes.is as a means of pulling their notes into their digital notebooks. Here Andy Matuschak is doing it to create spaced repetition cards for mnemonic purposes, a use case I haven't seen much of in the Hypothes.is space.

The fact that many are using Readwise (a paid monthly subscription) to do so is unfortunate. We definitely need more open source/free methods for doing this.

The Hypothesidian plugin for Obsidian is one of the few direct products I've seen in the space so far.

Most of this knowledge pattern I've seen has been in the tools for thought space and not within educational spaces, thought there is some overlap which will create the necessary bleed-through.

Services like IFTTT might also be a potential solution, but outputs from RSS and ATOM strip out data like tags which are highly useful. Perhaps a custom IFTTT integration? Though this opens up the issue of yet another middleman service for collecting rents.

Source: https://twitter.com/withorbit/status/1474575944429957125

I've been having a really good time this week writing prompts as inline annotations on web books. pic.twitter.com/gCvpTAsjt1

— Orbit (@withorbit) December 25, 2021

Definitely worth keeping in mind, even for my own work. Providing an evidential structure for claims will be paramount.

Is there a well-named cognitive bias for the human tendency to see everything as nails when one has a hammer in their hand?

1. DeBoer 2001

Warren R DeBoer. 2001. ‘Of dice and women: gambling and exchange in Native North America.’ Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 8 (3): 215–68.

Might it be possible that these women were actually gambling information relating to their "gathering" or other cultural practices? By playing games with each other and with nearby groups of people, they would have been regularly practicing their knowledge through repetition.

How might we provide evidence for this? Read the DeBoer reference for potential clues.

1. On ‘dream economies’ among the Iroquois see Graeber 2001: 145–9. David Graeber. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

These dreams and vision quests sound suspiciously familiar to Australian indigenous peoples' "dreaming" and could be incredibly similar to much larger and longer songlines in North American cultures.

David Wengrow 2010b. ‘The voyages of Europa: ritual and trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, c.2300–1850 .’ In William A. Parkinson and Michael L. Galaty (eds), Archaic State Interaction: The Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, pp. 141–60.

Read this for potential evidence for the mnemonic devices for information trade theory.

There is certainly social lubrication of visiting people from time to time which can help and advance societies, but this regular visiting can also be seen as a means of reinforcing one's oral cultural history through spaced repetition.

It can be seen as "trade" but in a way that anthropologists have generally ignored for lack of imagination for what may have been actually happening.

hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. To an outsider, it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen.

Not to negate the underlying mechanism discussed here, but there's also a high likelihood that this "trade" was in information attached to these objects being used as mnemonic devices.

Read further into the anthropology of these items, their names and histories.

Is it also possible that these items may have served the purpose of mnemonic devices as a means of transporting (otherwise invisible) information from one area or culture to another?

Can we build evidence for this from the archaeological record?

Relate this to the idea of expanding the traditional "land, labor, capital" theory of economics to include "information" as a basic building block

See my prior annotation https://hypothes.is/a/cLF2CmNhEeys9IOh50XdFA for a means of imagining another way these precious objects may have been used.

Il Principe, a dwarf with elaborate headdress made out of small seashells.

What if this were a mnemonic device used to encode cultural knowledge which only this person had possession of? Burying it with him would make sense as it wouldn't have the same sort of intrinsic value to his friends or relatives who would either have had their own or potentially passed them down.

This would particularly have been the case if he was younger and hadn't had the time to have an apprentice or been able to pass the knowledge on otherwise.

From a "royal burial" perspective, it would have been a highly valuable grave good because of the information attached to it and not because of the time and effort or beauty it possessed.

Pursue this train of thought further...

Humans in general have a seven second window of self-consciousness. (What is the reference for this? Double check it.) The exception is when one is in conversation with someone else, and then people have much longer spans of self-consciousness.

I'm left to wonder if this is a useful fact for writing in the margins in books or into one's notebook, commonplace book, or zettelkasten? By having a conversation with yourself, or more specifically with the imaginary author you're annotating or if you prefer to frame it as a conversation with your zettelkasten, one expands their self-consciousness for much longer periods of time? What benefit does this have for the individual? What benefit for humanity in aggregate?

Is it this fact or just coincidence that much early philosophy was done as dialectic?

From an orality perspective, this makes it much more useful to talk to one's surroundings or objects like rocks. Did mnemonic techniques help give rise to our ability to be more self-conscious as a species? Is it like a muscle that we've been slowly and evolutionarily exercising for 250,000 years?

This is a good example of the default "ancestor worship" and "rituals" label on archeological finds of ancient peoples

What is the actual basis for assigning these labels? Is there any real evidence or is it just become the default in the literature.

Personally I'm building evidence towards a more comprehensive thesis for what these practices may have been used for.

Note to self: Watch out closely in this section. One of the other things happening at this time is the lifeway of moving from a mobile society to a sedentary one and this may have had dramatic influence on their orality and memory, particularly as they developed new technology for being sedentary: namely Stonehenge itself as a mnemonic library of sorts as argued by Lynne Kelly.

https://www.archaeology.org/issues/339-1905/trenches/7567-trenches-england-folkton-drums-stonehenge-measurement

The diameter of the Folkton Drums and the Lavant Drum seem to be based on the "long foot" (1.056 ft) discovered by Andrew Chamberlain and Mike Parker Pearson. The drums ratios are 1:7:8:9 to the long foot respective (the Lavant Drum last).

What was the origin of the stone used to manufacture these? Do the designs on the drums have a potential mnemonic use for the builders which may have used them as measuring devices?

These are held by the British Museum: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1893-1228-15

Their round nature may have made them easy to roll out measurements. the grooved "tops" may have allowed them to roll on wooden beams of some sort.

What relationship, if any, is the bone pin that was found with them?

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Alison Fisk </span> in "The Folkton Drums. Three cylinders carved from chalk about 5,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period. Decorated with geometric designs and stylised faces. Discovered, along with a bone pin, in a child’s round barrow (burial) in Yorkshire in 1889. #FindsFriday #Archaeology https://t.co/6IyUTN9bCt" (<time class='dt-published'>12/11/2021 09:11:48</time>)</cite></small>

Mnemonic devices. It’s also a way of communicating. In an oral sense we use them as code. It started when we were texting. LOL means laugh out loud. WTF you probably already know what that means. But we also use them for studying. Please excuse my dear aunt sally. Or PEMDAS A tool in math to go through long problem in algebra. They also use this as a career driven world. And it’s also cod talking to friends or gossiping. For instance she what is a real see you next Tuesday. Or she was a Karen.

I've not seen it argued elsewhere (yet), but I would make a case that the majority of drolleries weren't so much comment on themes in text as that they were loci placed into the books at either intervals or in particular locations as part of the practice of the art of memory. They act as signposts to which the reader can more easily memorize portions of books by attaching the ideas on those pages to the dramatic and absurd images painted into them as suggested by Rhetorica ad Herennium (https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL403/1954/volume.xml).

Cross reference: The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates (University of Chicago, 1966).for the historical practice of memory in the West, though she doesn't mention drolleries at all.

cc: @remikalir

I'm also reasonably certain that cup marks reflect memory locations as well. Is there a way to prove it though?

The idea that there's research indicating they mark pathways sounds fascinating. I'd love to know the journal source for this.

Mentioned at Coffee With a Codex on 2021-11-01 with an example on the closing pages of LJS 418, which isn't very clear/good, and another in MS Codex 1248, which is in a tiny manuscript, but very clear and lovely.

Interesting to see these examples of mnemonic devices referenced here.

One could certainly add standing stones, stone circles, etc. to the list.

Given their focus on dates and calendars, what other evidence of mnemonic traditions might we draw from a culture that was likely near the transition from oral to written transmission?

Would they have had standing stones, stone circles, handheld mnemonic devices?

https://youtu.be/qYsMtroVLeA?t=62

Faces become a mnemonic for attaching information to our social circles. These tie into trust, friendship, and context.

I wonder if we can find a direct link to the manicule and the use of the hand as a mnemonic device?

Far beyond this, they're most likely used as mnemonic devices to associate the important information with a more memorable image for storing in one's memory palace.

Anecdotal mention here of someone using sketchnotes or doodling as a mnemonic device.

Sketchnotes could be a means of implementing visual method of loci in one's note taking. Like creating a faux memory palace. Also somewhat similar, expecially in the case of the leaf doodle mentioned above, to the idea of drolleries, but in this case, they're not taking advantage of the memory's greater capacity of imagination to make things even more memorable for long term retention.

Journal article: https://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-abstract/65/1/1/133085/Toward-the-Decipherment-of-a-Set-of-Mid-Colonial

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/khipus-inca-empire-harvard-university-colonialism

Student shows correlation between string colors and names as well as tie location to social status.

And for renaissance scholars, this quote may be the reason that drolleries are so widespread in illuminated manuscripts.

Doing this specifically prevents the non-mnemotechniques group from adding their own visual loci in the form of annotations, drolleries, etc.

Color also adds creativity and additional loci to one's pages which also can help to make them more memorable.

Many people report this phenomenon, though I've never particularly experienced it.

As I think back on this a few minutes later, I'm reminded that many of these sorts of abstract art forms are found not only in totems, but are seen in neolithic stone balls, European neolithic decorative art, or could have been used to decorate lukasa memory boards).

This may make them more valuable within a system for using these individual art pieces as memory devices.