- Jan 2023
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This independent confirmation ofthe testimonythat Dr Gowers has personally borne to the helpfulness ofPhonography in his professional career, is peculiarlyvaluable, because there are still some able men in themedical world who discourage the practice of note- takingby students . Professor Struthers, for instance, is reportedto have said before the General Medical Council that" the student takes his notes, puts his book in his pocket,and walks out, knowing no more about the subject than amere reporter would do."
There's an interesting parallel between this example and that of the character of Socrates in Plato with respect to writing and memory.
Some take notes to increase understanding, while others might suggest that note taking decreases understanding. The answer to remedying the discrepancy is in using the proper process.
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- Dec 2022
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even Socrates himself, we learnby way of his followers, derided the emerging popularity of taking physicalnotes.
I recall portions about Socrates deriding "writing" as a mode of expression, but I don't recall specific sections on note taking. What is Ann Blair's referent for this?
The "emerging popularity of taking physical notes" seems not to be in evidence with only one exemplar of a student who lost their notes within the Blair text.
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- Sep 2022
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Oftentimes they even refered to one another.
An explicit reference in 1931 in a section on note taking to cross links between entries in accounting ledgers. This linking process is a a precursor to larger database processes seen in digital computing.
Were there other earlier references that are this explicit within either note making or accounting contexts? Surely... (See also: Beatrice Webb's scientific note taking)
Just the word "digital" computing defines that there must have been an "analog' computing which preceded it. However we think of digital computing in much broader terms than we may have of the analog process.
Human thinking is heavily influenced by associative links, so it's only natural that we should want to link our notes together on paper as we've done for tens of thousands of years (at least.)
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There is a still more barbarous method, whichneed not receive more than passing mention. Thisis simply to register documents in the memorywithout taking written notes. This method hasbeen used. Historians endowed with excellentmemories, and lazy to boot, have indulged thiswhim, with the result that their quotations andreferences are mostly inexact. The human memoryis a delicate piece of registering apparatus, but it isso little an instrument of precision that such pre-sumption is inexcusable.
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- Jun 2022
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To Kendrick Lamar, note-taking is like time-travel. By writing down key words, Kendrick can remember emotions that would otherwise be lost to the entropy of memory.
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- Apr 2022
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Theories of note-taking can tell us about how memory and writingwere understood, and practices of note-taking, about the tools that proved mostuseful in managing textual information in early modern Europe.
Historical note taking practices can tell us many things aside from just the ways in which textual information was managed. They can also tell us about how people lived, how they thought, how they used memory and writing and how these things were understood culturally.
We do however need to be careful in how we interpret these documents historically. We need to attempt to view them exegetically and not eisegetically. We also need to be careful to look at them from a "large world" perspective and not presume that small things had large and heavy influence on things to come in the future.
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