- Aug 2024
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www.edvo.com www.edvo.com
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Beta app for note taking/productivity.
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- May 2024
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github.com github.com
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This plugin provides 2 customViews for navigating a zettelkasten using Luhmann-style IDs and key word indexes.
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- Apr 2024
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Laptops are ideal forwhen I research and write at the sametime, or when I work on several storiesat once, going back and forth amongwindows. But for everything else, Iseek a departure from my primaryworld. It’s a different type of writing,so I need a different tool.
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globe.engineer globe.engineerGlobe.1
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https://globe.engineer/
Found by JM
Github https://github.com/Globe-Engineer -> Ivan Yevenko https://www.linkedin.com/in/iyevenko/
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- Mar 2024
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theinformed.life theinformed.life
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By having a longer historical view, it actually tends to extend our time horizons in both directions. So, by thinking more about the past, it sets us up to think more about a long-term future and to challenge ourselves to think more expansively and ambitiously about what might come by having the sense of a wider aperture to think about rather than just thinking about the here and now or what’s coming out in the next cycle.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Many GTDers have fallen for The Toolbox Fallacy.
highlights link to this video: https://youtu.be/sz4YqwH_6D0
via https://www.reddit.com/r/gtd/comments/1b984sc/fellow_gtders_which_tools_do_you_use_to_track/
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theinformed.life theinformed.life
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when I finish reading an article, I'm excited to go to Tinderbox and play with what I've just learned. And that is just rare. Normally that sort of work is is tedium and it doesn't feel that way.
not all tools are fun and each may be different for different people
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- Feb 2024
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Make sense of your messy world. Kumu makes it easy to organize complex data into relationship maps that are beautiful to look at and a pleasure to use.
tagline:
The art of mapping is to create a context in which others can think.
Tool mentioned on [[2022-06-02]] by Jerry Michalski during [[Friends of the Link]] meeting.
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www.neh.gov www.neh.gov
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Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.
McCullough, David. “David McCullough Interview with NEH Chairman Bruce Cole.” Humanities 23, no. 4 (August 2002). https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/david-mccullough-biography.
Compare with: https://hypothes.is/a/yEFMHoCkEeyl34fItJe__w (Luhmann on thinking/writing in Sonke Ahrens)
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- Jan 2024
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https://vimeo.com/905326134/0a2a7388eb
While ostensibly about apps for note taking, Dan Allosso gives a good thumbnail sketch of his background.
Fascinatingly he feels he needs to justify doing videos on note taking process as a historian, which is a platform from which many note taking and research process (and historiography) related books have stemmed. (ie, historically, Dan has a better platform for doing this than most in the tools for thought space.)
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Hiya - I'm just curious about how people use Obsidian in academia. I guess you could say I'm looking for examples of what it's used for (e.g. to take short notes or to link ideas) and in what kind of systems may guide people's vaults (e.g. Zettelkasten). I'm also just keen on connecting with other PhD candidates through these blogs. No one at my uni that I know of is currently using Obsidian for academic work
Reply to Couscous at https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/722584061087842365/1197392837952684052
A quick survey of currently active academics, teachers, and researchers who are blogging about note taking practices and zettelkasten-based methods.
Individuals
Dan Allosso is a history professor at Bemidji State University who has used Obsidian in his courses in the past. He frequently writes about related topics on his Substack channels. One can also find related videos about reading, writing, and research process as well as zettelkasten on his YouTube channel. In addition to this, Dan has a book on note taking and writing which focuses on using a card index or zettelkasten centric process.
Shawn Graham has both a blog as well as a prior course on the history of the internet using Obsidian. In the course materials he has compiled significant details and suggestions for setting up an Obsidian vault for students interested in using the tool.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick has a significant blog which covers a variety of topics centered around her work and research. Her current course Peculiar Genres of Academic Writing (2024) focuses on writing, note taking (including Zettelkasten) and encourages students to try out Obsidian, which she's been using herself. A syllabus for an earlier version of the course includes some big name bloggers in academia whose sites might serve as examples of academic writing in the public. The syllabus also includes a section on being an academic blogger and creating platform as a public intellectual.
Morganeua is a Ph.D. candidate who has a fairly popular YouTube channel on note taking within the academic setting (broadly using Obsidian, though she does touch on other tools from time to time).
Chris Aldrich is independent research who does work at the intersection of intellectual history and note taking methods and practices. He's got an active website along with a large collection of note taking, zettelkasten, commonplace books, and sense-making related articles. His practice is a hybrid one using both analog and digital methods including Obsidian and Hypothes.is.
Bob Doto is a teacher and independent researcher who focuses on Luhmann-artig zettelkasten practice and writing. He uses Obsidian and also operates a private Discord server focused on general Zettelkasten practice.
Manfred Kuehn, a professor of philosophy at Boston University, had an influential blog on note taking practices and culture from 2007 to 2018 on Blogspot. While he's taken the site down, the majority of his work there can be found on the Internet Archive.
Andy Matuschak is an independent researcher who is working at the intersection of learning, knowledge management, reading and related topics. He's got a Patreon, YouTube Channel and a public wiki.
Broader community-based efforts
Here are some tool-specific as well as tool-agnostic web-based fora, chat rooms, etc. which are focused on academic-related note taking and will have a variety of people to follow and interact with.
Obsidian runs a large and diverse Discord server. In addition to many others, they have channels for #Academia and #Academic-tools as well as #Knowledge-management and #zettelkasten.
Tinderbox hosts regular meetups (see their forum for details on upcoming events and how to join). While their events are often product-focused (ways to use it, Q&A, etc.), frequently they've got invited speakers who talk about their work, processes, and methods of working. Past recorded sessions can be found on YouTube. While this is tool-specific, much of what is discussed in their meetups can broadly be applied to any tool set. Because Tinderbox has been around since the early 00s and heavily focused on academic use, the majority of participants in the community are highly tech literate academics whose age skews to the over 40 set.
A variety of Zettelkasten practitioners including several current and retired academicians using a variety of platforms can be found at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/.
Boris Mann and others held Tools for Thought meetups which had been regularly held through 2023. They may have some interesting archived material for perusal on both theory, practice, and a wide variety of tools.
Others?
I've tried to quickly tip out my own zettelkasten on this topic with a focus on larger repositories of active publicly available web-based material. Surely there is a much wider variety of people and resources not listed here, but it should be a reasonable primer for beginners. Feel free to reply with additional suggestions and resources of which you may be aware.
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Local file Local file
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This is why choosing an external system that forces us todeliberate practice and confronts us as much as possible with ourlack of understanding or not-yet-learned information is such a smartmove.
Choosing an external system for knowledge keeping and production forces the learner into a deliberate practice and confronts them with their lack of understanding. This is a large part of the underlying value not only of the zettelkasten, but of the use of a commonplace book which Benjamin Franklin was getting at when recommending that one "read with a pen in your hand". The external system also creates a modality shift from reading to writing by way of thinking which further underlines the value.
What other building blocks are present in addition to: - modality shift - deliberate practice - confrontation of lack of understanding
Are there other systems that do all of these as well as others simultaneously?
link to Franklin quote: https://hypothes.is/a/HZeDKI3YEeyj9GcNWKX4iA
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- Dec 2023
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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I don't use private personal wikis, so my interpretation is: Zettelkasten is the private work space, personal wiki is a form of publication. Maybe not polished for publishing, but edited and redacted where needed, so I can trust that I can be stupid in my Zettelkasten without anyone noticing.
reply to ctietze at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/15201/#Comment_15201
I can be stupid in my [private] Zettelkasten without anyone noticing.
I too have a private space exactly for this purpose. On the other hand, writing and publishing in public spaces forces me to do some additional thinking/polishing work that I might not otherwise, and that often provides some spectacular results as well as useful feedback for improvement over time.
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- Nov 2023
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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myboogieboard.com myboogieboard.com
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https://myboogieboard.com/<br /> A groups of portable writing boards with an associated app.
A sleeker version of Rocketbook notebooks, but with only one "page". A modern day version of the wax tablet.
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etherpad.org etherpad.orgEtherpad1
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A collaborative online editor
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Protolyst <br /> https://protolyst.org/
- Freemium model
- Focus on group collaboration over individual use
You can export Pages in your workspace as PDFs with more export formats to be added in the future (I did see one other snippet that indicated .csv format export, but it doesn't appear to have .md support to dovetail with all the other tools which use this as a baseline)
Found ᔥDr. Maddy in the description from Want a Simplified Zettelkasten? For Beginners
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Good tools for thought should be more than just substitutions for tools or methods one had before.
In fact, any tool or technology, if valuable, should allow for the leverage of extension and transformation, otherwise is it really a tool?
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Do digital note taking tools extend the ranges of affordances versus their analog counterparts with respect to the SAMR model?
On the augmentation front, they allow one to capture things faster, but may do so at the loss of understanding due to the lack of active learning (versus passive as the tool may be robbing them of the interaction with the material).
There may be some workflow modification, but it's modest at best. Is it measurably better?
I'm unaware of anyone talking about technological redefinition of digital note taking affordances, though some of the surface level AI-related things may emerge here.
In some sense, I still think that the ease of remapping and rearranging/linking/relinking/outlining ideas in digital spaces doesn't exist, so digital note taking tools aren't doing very well even at the root substitution level.
I suspect that some people weren't exposed to the general process of good note taking and their subsequent use for linking, developing, and then creating and as a result of learning this, they're attributing their advances to the digital nature of their tools rather than the original analog process which was always there and isn't necessarily improved measurably by the digital modality.
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- Oct 2023
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www.thenewatlantis.com www.thenewatlantis.com
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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.
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Links are made by readers as well as writers. A stunning thing that we forget, but the link here is not part of the author’s intent, but of the reader’s analysis. The majority of links in the memex are made by readers, not writers. On the world wide web of course, only an author gets to determine links. And links inside the document say that there can only be one set of associations for the document, at least going forward.
So much to unpack here...
What is the full list of types of links?
There are (associative) links created by the author (of an HTML document) as well as associative (and sometimes unwritten) mental links which may be suggested by either the context of a piece and the author's memory.
There are the links made by the reader as they think or actively analyze the piece they're reading. They may make these explicit in their own note taking or even more strongly explicit with tools like Hypothes.is which make these links visible to others.
tacit/explicit<br /> suggested mentally / directly written or made<br /> made by writer / made by reader<br /> others?
lay these out in a grid by type, creator, modality (paper, online, written/spoken and read/heard, other)
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Links are associative. This is a huge deal. Links are there not only as a quick way to get to source material. They aren’t a way to say, hey here’s the interesting thing of the day. They remind you of the questions you need to ask, of the connections that aren’t immediately evident.
links can be used for search
links remind you of questions you need to ask
links can suggest other future potential links of which one isn't yet aware or which haven't fully manifested, this is some of the "magic" of the zettelkasten—it creates easy potential for future links not yet manifest.
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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?
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“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.
Which tools for thought and tools for publishing overlap? Which diverge?
Overlap: Obsidian<br /> card indexes<br /> Microsoft Excel
Publishing Only<br /> Microsoft word
Thinking Only: <br /> ...
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“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.
Tags
- Alan Jacobs
- implicit memory
- zettelkasten
- tools for thought
- Memex
- read
- quotes
- memex vs. World Wide Web
- types of notes
- links
- digital gardens
- associative memory
- gardens and streams
- tools for thought affordances
- idea links
- card index for writing
- tools for publishing
- zettelkasten affordances
- Future Trends Forum 2023-10-19
- types of links
Annotators
URL
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www.ted.com www.ted.com
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Boroditsky, Lera. How Language Shapes the Way We Think. Streaming Video. TED | TEDWomen 2017, 2017. https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think.
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If you don’t have a setup, there are many times when you get theinspiration, the idea, but you have no tools, no place to put ittogether. And the idea just sits there and festers. Over time, it will goaway. You didn’t fulfill it—and that’s just a heartache.
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It’s crucial to have a setup, so that, at any givenmoment, when you get an idea, you have the place and the tools tomake it happen.
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- Sep 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Starting a blog .t3_16v8tfq._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } Hey everyone- I’m still trying to wrap my head on how to organize this.I have my antinet growing and I want to start a blog with the use of one of my notes as a springboard.Do I9 votesWork on the blog and store the index cards after the note that I’m drawing inspiration fromCreate a new blog section in my antinet and place them thereStore them in wherever and create an hub note that points to them
reply to u/RobThomasBouchard at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/16v8tfq/starting_a_blog/
The answer is:<br /> D: Start a "blog" where you post your notes as status updates and interlink them a bit. When you've got enough, you organize them into a mini thesis and write a longer article/blog post about it.
Examples: - https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22thought%20spaces%22 and - https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book#The_IndieWeb_site_as_a_Commonplace_book
tl;dr: Use your website like a public, online zettelkasten. 🕸️🗃️
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delong.typepad.com delong.typepad.com
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The ability toretain the child's view of the world, with at the same time amature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremelyrare-and a person who has these qualities is likely to be ableto contribute something really important to our thinking.
Curiosity as a tool for thought.
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subconscious.substack.com subconscious.substack.com
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www.jerrysbrain.com www.jerrysbrain.com
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Creating a "signpost user interface" can help to uncover directions to take in digital contexts as out of sight is out of mind. Having things sit in your way within one's note taking workflow can remind them to either link things, or move in particular directions for discovering new avenues of thought.
Example: it would be interesting if Jerry's The Brain would have links directly to material in Flancian's Agora to remind him to search or find relevant material there. This could help with combinatorial creativity with inputs from others, though it needs to be narrow so as not to result in rabbit holes which draw away attention.
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(Separate from https://www.napkin.one/)
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jhiblog.org jhiblog.org
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Helbig, Daniela K. “Ruminant Machines: A Twentieth-Century Episode in the Material History of Ideas.” JHI Blog (blog), April 17, 2019. https://jhiblog.org/2019/04/17/ruminant-machines-a-twentieth-century-episode-in-the-material-history-of-ideas/.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
- Aug 2023
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remikalir.com remikalir.com
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Whereas ChatGPT may be a bullshitter, Claude can be a co-reader whose output specifically references and works to make “meaning” in response to another author’s words.
"Reading with an artificial intelligence" seems like a fascinating way to participate in the Great Conversation.
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Nonetheless, Claude is first AI tool that has really made me pause and think. Because, I’ve got to admit, Claude is a useful tool to think with—especially if I’m thinking about, and then writing about, another text.
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textfx.withgoogle.com textfx.withgoogle.comTextFX1
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www.lesswrong.com www.lesswrong.com
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Here’s a child node. It could be a comment on the thought -- an aside, a critique, whatever. It could be something which goes under the heading.
Lone child nodes cry out for siblings.
When I was in middle school a teacher told me only to put a sub-bullet point in an outline only if it wasn't an orphan (if you had one sub-point it should have at least one sibling, otherwise don't include it). This was miserable advice because it ended trains of thought which might otherwise grow into something.
On the other hand it could be better framed that if you have only one child, you should brainstorm to come up with others.
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I could continue a thread anywhere, rather than always picking it up at the end. I could sketch out where I expected things to go, with an outline, rather than keeping all the points I wanted to hit in my head as I wrote. If I got stuck on something, I could write about how I was stuck nested underneath whatever paragraph I was currently writing, but then collapse the meta-thoughts to be invisible later -- so the overall narrative doesn’t feel interrupted.
Notes about what you don't know (open questions), empty outline slots, red links as [[wikilinks]], and other "holes" in tools for thought provide a bookmark for where one may have quit exploring, but are an explicit breadcrumb for picking up that line of thought and continuing it at a future time.
Linear writing in one's notebooks, books they're reading, and other places doesn't always provide an explicit space which invites the reader or writer to fill them in. One has to train themselves to annotate in the margins to have a conversation with the text. Until one sees these empty spaces as inviting spaces they can be invisible to the eye.
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When I was learning to write in my teens, it seemed to me that paper was a prison. Four walls, right? And the ideas were constantly trying to escape. What is a parenthesis but an idea trying to escape? What is a footnote but an idea that tried -- that jumped off the cliff? Because paper enforces single sequence -- and there’s no room for digression -- it imposes a particular kind of order in the very nature of the structure.-- Ted Nelson, demonstration of Xanadu space
quote ostensibly from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA
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ᔥ[[abramdemski]] in The Zettelkasten Method (accessed:: 2023-08-25 10:12:42)
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- Jul 2023
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www.instagram.com www.instagram.com
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When you run out of ideas and desperate, try thinking “opposite” like Fosbury.
Worth adding to the list of oblique strategies...
related to methods of proof: direct proofs by day, contradiction by night
Changing methods of approach to problems
via khimtan at https://www.instagram.com/p/CpkJHCfJnyW/
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- Jun 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Today, you either thrive on that word processor model or you don’t. I really don’t, which is why I’ve invested effort, as you have, in researching previous writing workflows, older than the all-conquering PC of the late 1980s and early 90s. At the same time, new writing tools are challenging the established Microsoft way, but in doing so are drawing attention to the fact that each app locks the user into a particular set of assumptions about the drafting and publishing process.
via u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/149knhj/comment/jobi9ro/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 on 2023-06-15
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adjacentpossible.substack.com adjacentpossible.substack.com
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Project Tailwind by Steven Johnson
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- May 2023
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get.mem.ai get.mem.ai
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I've had this on a list for ages, but never put into my digital notes...
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xtiles.app xtiles.app
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https://xtiles.app/6249b3f811d8db0dcd173512
Fascinating to see an xTiles page named "competitive analysis", but an interesting example of "eating their own dogfood" to make it.
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Introducing BOOX Tab Ultra C: Let the Colors Help You Work Better
They're primarily touting one of the few e-ink tablets that does color (beginning in 2023), but it's fascinating to see the Boox marketing department using this video to sell the idea of color on a screen as a tool for thought this way.
It's subtle and something we take for granted, so they have a point, but somehow odd none the less, perhaps because of its ubiquity.
Let the colors help you think, organize, and work better.
Let the colors help you work better.
Colors inspire
Tags
Annotators
URL
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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How To Use The ACE Framework This Week
ACE Framework - Add - Connect - Express
yet another acronym
hmmm... because... as a tool for building/developing thoughts
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Commonplacing, florilegia, anthologies, miscellanies, zettelkasten are such a fascinating tradition. They make a lovely ratchet for thinking.
Commonplacing, florilegia, anthologies, miscellanies, zettelkasten are a ratchet for thinking.
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- Apr 2023
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www.thedailybeast.com www.thedailybeast.com
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Musician John Mayer, too, describes his typewriter as more of an emotional companion than a logistical tool. He laments writing lyrics with the judgemental “red squiggly line” of spell check, which he says stops the creative process because he feels compelled to fix the error, and turning to a typewriter which “doesn’t judge you, it just goes, ‘right away, sir, right away’.”
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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My biggest realization recently is to do whatever the opposite of atomicity is.
Too many go too deep into the idea of "atomic notes" without either questioning or realizing their use case. What is your purpose in having atomic notes? Most writing about them online talk about the theoretical without addressing the underlying "why".
They're great for capturing things on the go and having the ability to re-arrange and reuse them into much larger works. Often once you've used them a few times, they're less useful, specially for the average person. (Of course it's another matter if you're an academic researcher, they're probably your bread and butter.) For the beekeepers of the world who need some quick tidbits which they use frequently, then keeping them in a larger outlined document or file is really more than enough. Of course, if you're creating some longer book-length treatise on beekeeping, then it can be incredibly helpful to have them at atomic length.
There's a spectrum from the small atomic note to the longer length file (or even book). Ask yourself, "what's your goal in having one or the other, or something in between?" They're tools, choose the best one for your needs.
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- Mar 2023
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.comYouTube1
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Hypothesis Animated Intro, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCkm0lL-6lc.
This was an early animation for Hypothes.is as a tool. It was on one of their early homepages and is (still) a pretty good encapsulation of what they do and who they are as a tool for thought.
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blog.degruyter.com blog.degruyter.com
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“Normally, a dictionary just tells you what words mean – and of course we do that – but the scale of the project gives us the space and opportunity to say what we’re not sure of too,” he said. “This is important because it leaves the door open for further scholarship and it gives the reader choices rather than dictating to them what to think. The dictionary can be a catalyst for more research and this is what makes the dictionary a living thing.”
We need more scholarship which leaves open thinking spaces for future scholars.
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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Auch die Korrektur einer Textstelle ist in der Datenbank sofort global wirksam. Im Zettelarchiv dagegen ist es kaum zu leisten, alle alphabetisch einsortierten Kopien eines bestimmten Zettels zur Korrektur wieder aufzufinden.
Correcting a text within a digital archive or database allows the change to propagate to all portions of the collection compared with a physical card index which has the hurdle of multiple storage and requires manual changes on all of the associated copies.
This sort of affordance can be seen in more modern note taking tools like Obsidian which does this sort of work with global search and replace of double bracketed words which change everywhere in the collection.
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archive.org archive.org
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Wigent, William David, Burton David William Housel, and Edward Harry Gilman. Modern Filing and How to File: A Textbook on Office System. Rochester, N.Y.: Yawman & Erbe Mfg. Co., 1916. http://archive.org/details/modernfilingate02compgoog.
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dl.acm.org dl.acm.org
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Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–23. FAccT ’21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.
Would the argument here for stochastic parrots also potentially apply to or could it be abstracted to Markov monkeys?
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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GPT and other large language models are aesthetic instruments rather than epistemological ones. Imagine a weird, unholy synthesizer whose buttons sample textual information, style, and semantics. Such a thing is compelling not because it offers answers in the form of text, but because it makes it possible to play text—all the text, almost—like an instrument.
ChatGPT as an instrument that allows one to play text like an instrument.
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biblioracle.substack.com biblioracle.substack.com
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one of the things I value about writing, is the act of writing itself. It is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind, the same way a vigorous hike through the woods can put me in touch with my body.
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hosting Jeffersonian dinners
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www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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Little Machines in Your Zettelkasten<br /> by Sascha Fast
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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In their 1986 book, Thinking in Time, Ernest May and Richard Neustadt showed how bad analogies have led to poor foreign-policy decisions
Bad analogies can lead to poor decisions.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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how did you teach yourself zettelkasten? .t3_11ay28d._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/laystitcher at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11ay28d/how_did_you_teach_yourself_zettelkasten/
Roughly in order: - Sixth grade social studies class assignment that used a "traditional" index card-based note taking system. - Years of annotating books - Years of blogging - Havens, Earle. Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2001. - Locke, John, 1632-1704. A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. 1685. Reprint, London, 1706. https://archive.org/details/gu_newmethodmaki00lock/mode/2up. - Erasmus, Desiderius. Literary and Educational Writings, 1 and 2. Edited by Craig R. Thompson. Vol. 23 & 24. Collected Works of Erasmus. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1978. https://utorontopress.com/9781487520731/collected-works-of-erasmus. - Kuehn, Manfred. Taking Note, A blog on the nature of note-taking. December 2007 - December 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181224085859/http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/ - Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017. - Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. - Webb, Beatrice Potter. Appendix C of My Apprenticeship. First Edition. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926. - Schmidt, Johannes F. K. “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity.” Sociologica 12, no. 1 (July 26, 2018): 53–60. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/8350. - Hollier, Denis. “Notes (On the Index Card).” October 112, no. Spring (2005): 35–44. - Wilken, Rowan. “The Card Index as Creativity Machine.” Culture Machine 11 (2010): 7–30. - Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know. - Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines. - Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout.
And many, many others as I'm a student of intellectual history.... If you want to go spelunking on some of my public notes, perhaps this is an interesting place to start: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22note+taking%22 I also keep a reasonable public bibliography on this and related areas: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought
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- Feb 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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sometimes I’m afraid I’m more fighting the tools than doing research. Sometimes it seems to me there’s too much friction, and not the productive kind.
relation to Note taking problem and proposed solution?
This seems to be a common reality and/or fear.
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vimeo.com vimeo.com
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We tend to think in terms of our tools.<br /> ᔥ Christian Tietze in Eco's 'How to Write a Thesis' Available in English at 2015-03-17<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:26:16)
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Bruno Latour showed us how to think with the things of the world | Aeon Essays<br /> by Stephen Muecke
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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If you treat a metaphor as a second order perception (first order perception = senses) you can create Pseudo-Synesthesia which may increase divergent thinking.
Mull on this...
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dl.acm.org dl.acm.org
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Döring, Tanja, and Steffi Beckhaus. “The Card Box at Hand: Exploring the Potentials of a Paper-Based Tangible Interface for Education and Research in Art History.” In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, 87–90. TEI ’07. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1145/1226969.1226986.
This looks fascinating with respect to note taking and subsequent arranging, outlining, and use of notes in human computer interaction space for creating usable user interfaces.
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www.deepdwn.com www.deepdwn.com
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Markdown editor and organizer for Windows, Mac and Linux
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Local file Local file
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he research skills that Eco teaches areperhaps even more relevant today. Eco’s system demandscritical thinking, resourcefulness, creativity, attention todetail, and academic pride and humility; these are preciselythe skills that aid students overwhelmed by the ever-grow-ing demands made on their time and resources, and confusedby the seemingly endless torrents of information availableto them.
In addition to "critical thinking, resourcefulness, creativity, attention to detail, and academic pride and humility", the ability to use a note card-based research system like Umberto Eco's is the key to overcoming information overload.
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He understood that the writing of a thesis forcedmany students outside of their cultural comfort zone, andthat if the shock was too sudden or strong, they would giveup.
The writing of a thesis is a shock to many specifically because information overload has not only gotten worse, but because the underlying historical method of doing so has either been removed from the educational equation or so heavily watered down that students don't think to use it.
When I think and write about "note taking" I'm doing it in a subtly different way and method than how it seems to be used in common parlance. Most seem to use it solely for information extraction and as a memory crutch which they may or may not revisit to memorize or use and then throw away. I do it for some of these reasons, but my practice goes far beyond this for generating new ideas, mixing up ideas creatively, and for writing. Note reuse seems to be the thing missing from the equation. It also coincidentally was the reason I quit taking notes in college.
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wordcraft-writers-workshop.appspot.com wordcraft-writers-workshop.appspot.com
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If I were going to use an AI, I'd want to plugin and give massive priority to my commonplace book and personal notes followed by the materials I've read, watched, and listened to secondarily.
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In addition to specific operations such as rewriting, there are also controls for elaboration and continutation. The user can even ask Wordcraft to perform arbitrary tasks, such as "describe the gold earring" or "tell me why the dog was trying to climb the tree", a control we call freeform prompting. And, because sometimes knowing what to ask is the hardest part, the user can ask Wordcraft to generate these freeform prompts and then use them to generate text. We've also integrated a chatbot feature into the app to enable unstructured conversation about the story being written. This way, Wordcraft becomes both an editor and creative partner for the writer, opening up new and exciting creative workflows.
The interface of Wordcraft sounds like some of that interface that note takers and thinkers in the tools for thought space would appreciate in their
Rather than pairing it with artificial intelligence and prompts for specific writing tasks, one might pair tools for though interfaces with specific thinking tasks related to elaboration and continuation. Examples of these might be gleaned from lists like Project Zero's thinking routines: https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines
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In addition to specific operations such as rewriting, there are also controls for elaboration and continutation. The user can even ask Wordcraft to perform arbitrary tasks, such as "describe the gold earring" or "tell me why the dog was trying to climb the tree", a control we call freeform prompting. And, because sometimes knowing what to ask is the hardest part, the user can ask Wordcraft to generate these freeform prompts and then use them to generate text. We've also integrated a chatbot feature into the app to enable unstructured conversation about the story being written. This way, Wordcraft becomes both an editor and creative partner for the writer, opening up new and exciting creative workflows.
The sense of writing partner here is similar to that mentioned by Niklas Luhmann in Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account (1981), though in his case his writing partner was a carefully constructed database archive of his past notes.
see: Luhmann, Niklas. “Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen: Ein Erfahrungsbericht.” In Öffentliche Meinung und sozialer Wandel / Public Opinion and Social Change, edited by Horst Baier, Hans Mathias Kepplinger, and Kurt Reumann, 222–28. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1981. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-87749-9_19.<br /> translation at https://web.archive.org/web/20150825031821/http://scriptogr.am/kuehnm.
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- creative writing
- digital amanuensis
- user interface
- combinatorial creativity
- tools for thought
- elaboration
- creativity techniques
- Wordcraft
- freeform prompting
- text editors
- writing partners
- creativity catalysts
- creativity
- Niklas Luhmann
- chatbots
- card index for writing
- continuation
- artificial intelligence for writing
- tools for creativity
- Project Zero
- card index for creativity
- writing process
- thinking routines
- artificial intelligence
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zettels.info zettels.info
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https://zettels.info/en/int/default.asp
A digital note taking product
ᔥ[[Frank Berzbach]] in Künstliche Intelligenz aus Holz - sciencegarden - Magazin für junge Forschung at 2002-06-30<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-10 06:59:08)<br /> where he referred to it as "A free online Zettelkasten by Joachim Richter"
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web.hypothes.is web.hypothes.is
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What are the differences and affordances in moving from cadavre exquis to Eno/Schmidt's Oblique Strategies to ChatGPT?
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www.complexityexplorer.org www.complexityexplorer.org
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If the jargon points to a coherent phenomenon, it can be very useful.
When jargon or argot points to "coherent phenomenon" or provides a taxonomic purpose, it can be useful beyond its alternate function of gatekeeping areas of thought.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I agree.After thinking about it for a bit, a common symbol for "the present card/note" is the one I'm most wanting.For the other stuff, I'm thinking:The squigly arrow symbol in latex is probably enough to do fuzziness. Then it could be squigly arrow to the current card or squigly arrow to not symbol current card. And for pen and paper, just use the biochem flat arrow with a squigly body for "somewhat contradicts" or is in tension with.
reply to stjeromeslibido at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10qw4l5/comment/j6x52ce/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Luhmann often used the shorthand of red numbers to indicate a link to nearby card in the current branch/stem, which Scott Scheper calls "stemlinks" in Antinet Zettelkasten (2022) p234. So, for example, on card ZKII 9/8 there is a red "1" which indicates the branching card ZKII 9/8,1. Scott uses a more computer science oriented notation of "/1" to indicate this as if he were traversing up or down a folder structure. Since there isn't really a (useful) idea of a root or home folder, and one wouldn't often want to refer to their zettelkasten itself, one might consider using the solidus "/" to indicate the current card? I personally do this, but not very frequently, though I might do it more often with respect to indicating argumentation within and among other cards.
Some languages have location/proximity identifiers or markers (similar to here/there/over there). I'll sometimes use the Japanese markers (ko-so-a-do) as shorthand to provide rough approximation of idea relationships particularly when I have open questions. (example: kore, sore, are, dore -> this one, that one, that one over there, which one?) Many ideas are marked あ to indicate "just out of reach" or "needs additional thought". When ideas are adjacent or nearby, but by happenstance are relatively far away within my ZK (with respect to physical card distance in the box) they'll be pre-pended like こ/510/4b/3 (aka "ko"/510/4b/3).
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- Jan 2023
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Attendee at Tools for Thought Rocks event https://lu.ma/2u5f7ky0
Interested in homoiconic spreadsheets. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9uZlEqUQw0
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I attended this live this morning from 9:20 - 10:45 AM
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polygloss.app polygloss.app
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The words toki pona can be translated as “the language of good”. Its purpose is to help its speakers simplify their thoughts, focus on basic things, immediate surroundings, and induce positive thoughts. According to the wikipedia page of Toki Pona, this means the language and its purpose are in accordance with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which says that a language influences the way a person thinks and behaves.
Link to https://hypothes.is/a/6Znx6MiMEeu3ljcVBsKNOw We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis /səˌpɪər ˈwɔːrf/, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
link to Toki Pona as a conlang
Link to https://hypothes.is/a/6Znx6MiMEeu3ljcVBsKNOw We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.
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www.toptools4learning.com www.toptools4learning.com
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https://www.toptools4learning.com/
Top 100 Tools for Learning 2022
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https://wildrye.com/roundup-of-67-tools-for-thought-to-build-your-second-brain/
List of tools for thought apps
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www.catholic.org www.catholic.org
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https://www.catholic.org/saints/patron.php
Potential patron saints of note takers, writers, knowledge workers, tools for thought, etc.
- Apothecaries - Cosmas and Damian
- archives - Laurent (Lawrence)
- archivists, librarians, libraries - Catherine of Alexandria, Jerome, Laurent (Lawrence)
- cabinetmakers - Anne, Joseph, Vincent de Paul
- contemplatives, contemplative life - John of the Cross, Mary Magdalene
- Craftworkers - Luke
- Editors John Bosco, Francis de Sales
- enlightenment - Holy Spirit, Our Lady of Good Counsel
- file makers - Theodosius the Cenobriarch
- Information Workers - Archangel Gabriel
- inquisitors - Peter of Verona
- Joiners - Joseph, Thomas, Apostle
- knowledge - Holy Spirit
- Learning - Ambrose, Catherine of Alexandria
- liberal arts - Catherine of Bologna
- linguists - Gotteschalk
- net makers - Peter the Apostle
- Notaries - Luke, Mark, Ivo of Kermartin
- pencil makers - Thomas Aquinas
- Scholars - Bridgid of Ireland, Thomas Aquinas
- scribes - Catherine of Alexandria
- Shorthand writers - Cassian of Imola
- Students - Catherine of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas, Gabriel Possenti
- Students (examinees) - Joseph of Cupertino
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notes.andymatuschak.org notes.andymatuschak.org
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Here I’ve summarized Christian Tietze’s process, which I’m presently adopting / adapting:
Andy is Adapting the approach of zettelkasten writer Christian Tietze
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You need to take a step back and form a picture of the overall structure of the ideas. Concretely, you might do that by clustering your scraps into piles and observing the structure that emerges. Or you might sketch a mind map or a visual outline.
Andy suggests taking a step back and clustering annotations into piles or using a mind map or visualisations to identify common themes.
I wonder if this is a bit overkill for the number of notes I tend to take or a sign that I'm not taking enough notes?
What tools are out there that could integrate with my stack and help me do this.
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Tobeuseful,thenotestakenatmedicallecturesshouldbeasummaryonly;noattempt shouldbemadetotakeaverbatimreport
Verbatim notes are not the goal.
The idea of note taking as a means of sensemaking and understanding is underlined in an 1892 article in a shorthand magazine whose general purpose was to encourage shorthand and increasing one's writing speed, often to create verbatim records:
To be useful, the notes taken at medical lectures should be a summary only; no attempt should be made to take a verbatim report.
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debugger.medium.com debugger.medium.com
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www.cambridge.org www.cambridge.org
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Record keeping using small clay ‘tokens’ was present in the Near Eastern Neolithic in the tenth millennium bc, these objects widespread and abundant by the sixth millennium bc, and by the fourth millennium bc it is clear they were functioning, perhaps as generalized elements for simple counting tasks recording time, resources and the like, albeit among other functions that did not have a mnemonic function (Bennison-Chapman Reference Bennison-Chapman2018, 240).
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https://tressel.xyz/
Tressel, a paid tool roughly like Readwise.io
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microformats.org microformats.org
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Reminder to revisit this to write a related essay
Wiki is better than email http://microformats.org/wiki/wiki-better-than-email
See also: https://www.gwern.net/Backstop#internet-community-design
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escapingflatland.substack.com escapingflatland.substack.com
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Over time, they have been expanded and organized: it is the scaffolding of our conversation, left behind as a structure to think in.
"they" = "notes"
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treeverse.app treeverse.app
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https://treeverse.app/
Treeverse is a tool for visualizing and navigating Twitter conversation threads.<br /> It is available as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.
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wiki.rel8.dev wiki.rel8.dev
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https://wiki.rel8.dev/tools_for_thinking_podcast
see also: https://www.betaworks.com/media
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dice.camp dice.camp
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After Ahrens' book I see an awful lot of people talking about "processing" books. There are too many assumptions about what this can mean and this hides many levels of inherent work involved in analyzing and synthesizing knowledge. I would suggest that we're better off talking about reading them, annotating, excerpting, and thinking about them, or maybe writing about and combining them with other knowledge than "processing" them.
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- Dec 2022
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win-vector.com win-vector.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>John Mount</span> in Good Stationery as a Tool of Thought | MZLabs (<time class='dt-published'>11/30/2022 13:11:31</time>)</cite></small>
Read 2022-12-31
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mochi.cards mochi.cards
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https://mochi.cards
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Fernando Borretti</span> in Unbundling Tools for Thought (<time class='dt-published'>12/29/2022 15:59:17</time>)</cite></small>
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borretti.me borretti.me
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https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought
He covers much of what I observe in the zettelkasten overreach article.
Missing is any discussion of exactly what problem he's trying to solve other than perhaps, I want to solve them all and have a personal log of everything I've ever done.
Perhaps worth reviewing again to pull out specifics, but I just don't have the bandwidth today.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Lateral thinking is a manner of solving problems using an indirect and creative approach via reasoning that is not immediately obvious.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word alea, meaning "dice") is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.
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adjacentpossible.substack.com adjacentpossible.substack.com
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https://adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/designing-a-workflow-for-thinking
Quick preface of Steven Johnson's forthcoming series of essays on thinking strategies.
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So I’ve started a routine where every few years, I block out a couple of days to sit down and review all my idea tools—and other rituals of how I structure my creative thinking— to see if there's something that can be improved upon.
As a strategy for avoiding shiny object syndrome, one can make a routine of making a "creative inventory" of one's tools.
There is generally a high switching cost, so tools need to be an order of magnitude more useful, beneficial, or even fun to make it worthwhile.
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johnmount.github.io johnmount.github.io
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Increasing your use of tools without increasing your exposure to distractions is a great way to increase your abilities and get a lot more done.
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archive.nytimes.com archive.nytimes.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>John Mount</span> in Good Stationery as a Tool of Thought | MZLabs (<time class='dt-published'>11/30/2022 13:11:31</time>)</cite></small>
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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I think one of the the things that 00:00:27 really separates us from the high primates is that we're tool builders and I read a a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet the Condor used 00:00:41 the least energy to move a kilometer and humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list it was not not too proud of a showing for the crown of 00:00:53 creation so that didn't look so good but then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle or human on a bicycle 00:01:07 blew the Condor away completely off the top of the charts and that's what a computer is to me what a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with and it's the 00:01:19 equivalent of a bicycle for our minds
Cleaned up quote:
I think one of the [the] things that really separates us from the high primates is that [uh] we're tool builders. And I read a [uh] study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The Condor used the least energy to move a kilometer and [uh] humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. It was not [not] too proud of a showing for the crown of creation. So [uh] that didn't look so good, but then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle or human on a bicycle blew the Condor away—completely off the top of the charts and that's what a computer is to me. [uh] What a computer is to me is: it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.<br /> —Steve Jobs in Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress. Documentary. Krainin Productions, 1990.
Snippet from full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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For example I had a few notes on principles of modern cryptography that came in handy when I had to write a paper about a related topic for my studies. But these cases were rare at best, most of these notes were never looked at again.
The one shining moment in the whole essay and they don't seem to realize where the benefit or use actually was. They finally had a reason to have taken notes and the ideas shone here. But they've written off the tools because they didn't understand when to use them.
Hammers are cool, but unless you're a professional carpenter, you don't carry it around all the time and use it constantly to hammer things. The same is true of note taking as a tool. You might use it regularly if you're a writer or an academic perhaps, but for hourly use in your day-to-day? Almost definitely not.
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