31 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2023
    1. In 1807, he started writing a dictionary, which he called, boldly, An American Dictionary of the English Language. He wanted it to be comprehensive, authoritative. Think of that: a man sits down, aiming to capture his language whole.

      Johnson's dictionary is much like this article describes too.

      Perhaps we need more dictionaries with singular voices rather than dictionaries made by committee?

    2. John McPhee — one the great American writers of nonfiction, almost peerless as a prose stylist — once wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his process called “Draft #4.” He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that’s left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings.

      I quite like the idea of this Draft #4 concept.

  2. Jun 2023
  3. Feb 2023
    1. NOW I SAY, "OKAY, THIS IS DONE." I READ IT. IT FEELS LIKE A MOVIE. AND I'M GONNA PUT IT IN THE BOX. AND I'M GONNA PUT IT IN THE BOX IN THIS ORDER, AND THIS IS THE ORDER THAT I'M GONNA WRITE IT IN IN MY FIRST DRAFT. OVER THE NEXT NUMBER OF WEEKS, I START WRITING. WHAT I'VE BEEN DOING, I'VE BEEN SEEING THE SCENES IN MY HEAD FOR SO LONG AT THIS POINT THAT IT'S ALMOST LIKE JUST REGURGITATION. LIKE, I'M JUST GETTING OUT. AND I CALL IT MY VOMIT DRAFT. #

      Dustin Lance Black's "vomit draft" is similar to Mozart's peeing his music out like a cow. His method is also similar to Victor Margolin who's gone over the material several times by the time he's finally writing out his draft.

  4. May 2022
    1. "I didn't fully understand it at the time, but throughout my time as a freshman at Boston College I've realized that I have the power to alter myself for the better and broaden my perspective on life. For most of my high school experience, I was holding to antiquated thoughts that had an impact on the majority of my daily interactions. Throughout my life, growing up as a single child has affected the way am in social interactions. This was evident in high school class discussions, as I did not yet have the confidence to be talkative and participate even up until the spring term of my senior year."

    2. "Specifically, when one of my classmates stated how he was struggling with the concept and another one of my classmates took the initiative to clarify it, I realized that that individual possibilities vary greatly among students."

    1. The justices held their final arguments of the current term on Wednesday. The court has set a series of sessions over the next two months to release rulings in its still-unresolved cases, including the Mississippi abortion case.

      It's very likely that the decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization would have been released late in the typical cycle. The leak of this document prior to the midterm elections may have some profound effects on the election cycle.

    2. No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending.
  5. Feb 2022
    1. When you read widely, your brain is exposed to different ways in which a sentence or paragraph is written. There are patterns in the use of nouns, pronouns, verbs and other parts of speech; there are patterns in syntax and in sentence variation; and there are patterns in sound devices, such as alliteration and assonance. You can annotate these with different symbols or colors, and develop understanding as patterns emerge, and style emerges from patterns. To read like a writer, you need to annotate like one, too.

      I haven't seen very much in the area of annotating directly as a means of learning to write. This is related to the idea of note taking for creating content for a zettelkasten, but the focus of such a different collection is for creating a writing style.

      Similar to boxing the boring words (see Draft #4; http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary), one should edit with an eye toward the overall style of a particular piece.


      Annotating structures and patterns in books is an interesting exercise to evaluate an author's style as a means of potentially subsuming, modifying, or learning other styles.

    1. We need to getour thoughts on paper first and improve them there, where we canlook at them. Especially complex ideas are difficult to turn into alinear text in the head alone. If we try to please the critical readerinstantly, our workflow would come to a standstill. We tend to callextremely slow writers, who always try to write as if for print,perfectionists. Even though it sounds like praise for extremeprofessionalism, it is not: A real professional would wait until it wastime for proofreading, so he or she can focus on one thing at a time.While proofreading requires more focused attention, finding the rightwords during writing requires much more floating attention.

      Proofreading while rewriting, structuring, or doing the thinking or creative parts of writing is a form of bikeshedding. It is easy to focus on the small and picayune fixes when writing, but this distracts from the more important parts of the work which really need one's attention to be successful.

      Get your ideas down on paper and only afterwards work on proofreading at the end. Switching contexts from thinking and creativity to spelling, small bits of grammar, and typography can be taxing from the perspective of trying to multi-task.


      Link: Draft #4 and using Webster's 1913 dictionary for choosing better words/verbiage as a discrete step within the rewrite.


      Linked to above: Are there other dictionaries, thesauruses, books of quotations, or individual commonplace books, waste books that can serve as resources for finding better words, phrases, or phrasing when writing? Imagine searching through Thoreau's commonplace book for finding interesting turns of phrase. Naturally searching through one's own commonplace book is a great place to start, if you're saving those sorts of things, especially from fiction.

      Link this to Robin Sloan's AI talk and using artificial intelligence and corpuses of literature to generate writing.

  6. Jan 2022
    1. https://vimeo.com/232545219

      from: Eyeo Conference 2017

      Description

      Robin Sloan at Eyeo 2017 | Writing with the Machine | Language models built with recurrent neural networks are advancing the state of the art on what feels like a weekly basis; off-the-shelf code is capable of astonishing mimicry and composition. What happens, though, when we take those models off the command line and put them into an interactive writing environment? In this talk Robin presents demos of several tools, including one presented here for the first time. He discusses motivations and process, shares some technical tips, proposes a course for the future — and along the way, write at least one short story together with the audience: all of us, and the machine.

      Notes

      Robin created a corpus using If Magazine and Galaxy Magazine from the Internet Archive and used it as a writing tool. He talks about using a few other models for generating text.

      Some of the idea here is reminiscent of the way John McPhee used the 1913 Webster Dictionary for finding words (or le mot juste) for his work, as tangentially suggested in Draft #4 in The New Yorker (2013-04-22)

      Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/t2a9_pTQEeuNSDf16lq3qw and https://hypothes.is/a/vUG82pTOEeu6Z99lBsrRrg from https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary


      Croatian acapella singing: klapa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sciwtWcfdH4


      Writing using the adjacent possible.


      Corpus building as an art [~37:00]

      Forgetting what one trained their model on and then seeing the unexpected come out of it. This is similar to Luhmann's use of the zettelkasten as a serendipitous writing partner.

      Open questions

      How might we use information theory to do this more easily?

      What does a person or machine's "hand" look like in the long term with these tools?

      Can we use corpus linguistics in reverse for this?

      What sources would you use to train your model?

      References:

      • Andrej Karpathy. 2015. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks"
      • Samuel R. Bowman, Luke Vilnis, Oriol Vinyals, et al. "Generating sentences from a continuous space." 2015. arXiv: 1511.06349
      • Stanislau Semeniuta, Aliaksei Severyn, and Erhardt Barth. 2017. "A Hybrid Convolutional Variational Autoencoder for Text generation." arXiv:1702.02390
      • Soroush Mehri, et al. 2017. "SampleRNN: An Unconditional End-to-End Neural Audio Generation Model." arXiv:1612.07837 applies neural networks to sound and sound production
  7. Oct 2021
    1. UBC

      Update for UNE?

    2. Formative Assessment

      Could this not also incorporate students' derivation of rubrics from their interpretation of the Learning Goals?

    3. Socretes

      Socrates

    4. ONLINE

      There are a few interpretations of flippedness, aren't there. The one I see pushed is where teacher's make online material, EddieWoo style, for people to go through in their own time, then discuss in class (teacher needs to 'teach' twice!)

    1. Revisit Guiding Questions

      Should this section also highlight 'does the learner need YAP (yet another password)?"

    2. called

      using a technology such as

    3. In terms of digital technologies, any website can do the same

      It can do much, much more than paper and I think this should be mentioned here. It almost sounds like an apology for websites. Have you read Papert's idea (in 'Mindstorms') that paper is the reason why we do Maths like we do now – rote, exemplar then practise, often without context or meaning, rather than "play" with Maths to get a better understanding, and to demonstrate an understanding

    4. it’s what we as educators can do with the technology

      Students too. Often they will come up with way different methods or approaches. The sort where a teacher goes 'huh, that's pretty cool'

    1. The diagram below shows the change in Learning Management System (LMS) market share over the 20+ years. For this type of technology, this is usually large scale, requiring a large budget, so the number of tools available are quite limited. If the project is of a smaller scale, there may be many more options, because fewer people use them. In the case of smaller-scale projects, sometimes the support requirements are fewer, and the ease of use is higher, so there are many more options of different tools that do the same thing

      I don't grok this. Surely the bigger the budget the more features, but the slower moving as the instal base is larger and support is needed more? I may have misinterpreted your meaning behind "tools" here. Not sure what that refers to. Does it mean that the bigger, the less flexible hence give out a smaller number of generic tools and you bend your workflow to suit? (cf smaller - we can make that happen for you!)

  8. Oct 2020
    1. How To Write This Poem

      begin here …with TIME

      where words

      are layered with text

      where the pen

      etches into screen …

      then go here …

      (https://www.vialogues.com/vialogues/play/61205)

      … only to leap from one place

      to another,

      where my mind goes

      I hardly every know,

      only that it ventures forward …

      (https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/How-to-Read-a-Poem-by-me--A9AH3OSbHZqKqxia0PQOSa1~Ag-pHyO4XNCl1aIq4KoX22Be)

      … heard by hearts,​​

      and scattered stars,

      ​​where I see the sky fall,​​

      you find the debris …

      our thoughts.

      (https://nowcomment.com/documents/234044)

      Might we be permitted them?

      The dragonfly

      rarely yields her ground

      to the critics among

      us.

    2. Kevin's Response

      How To Write This Poem

      begin here …with TIME

      where words

      are layered with text

      where the pen

      etches into screen …

      then go here … https://www.vialogues.com/vialogues/play/61205

      ... only to leap from one place to another, where my mind goes I hardly every know, only that it ventures forward ...

      https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/How-to-Read-a-Poem-by-me--A9AH3OSbHZqKqxia0PQOSa1~Ag-pHyO4XNCl1aIq4KoX22Be

      … heard by hearts, ​​and scattered stars, ​​where I see the sky fall, ​​you find the debris …. ​​https://nowcomment.com/documents/234044

      Your thoughts?

  9. Dec 2019
    1. Elizabeth

      Elizabeth was also the name of Percy Shelley's mother. Mary changed the character's name from Myrtella to Elizabeth in the manuscript, unless this change was one of Percy's suggested changes. In Greek and Roman mythology, the flower myrtle was sacred to the goddess Venus (Aphrodite) and symbolized love.

  10. Feb 2018
    1. National League Expansion

      The National League added two teams in 1993, the Colorado Rockies and the Florida (now Miami) Marlins. Although the CBA provided detailed procedures for how Major League players would be procured for these new teams, the inevitable impact on minor league structure was not considered or clearly articulated.

  11. Sep 2017
  12. spring2018.robinwharton.net spring2018.robinwharton.net
    1. The significance of basic materials created within a certain cultural structure is vital to the advancement of the traditions and ideals of the cultures. In both "Mohegan Wood-Splint Basket" and "Mark Their Words: Medieval Bookmarks" two incredibly overlooked yet culturally significant material usage objects are observed. It's the simplest of items, the ones that are rooted in the daily routine of the people, that have the most stories to tell.

      The woven baskets (and other materialistic cultural items such as bookmarks) should not be considered and analyzed as texts according to the Mohegan Wood-splint Basket chapter, and therefore not be treated as such. In general, doing so would result in missing some of the most critical components of the reason they exist or what they truly symbolize. There is no true author, there is no audience, and there are no literary devices to analyze.

      Rather than analyzing the literal contexts of the materials, one has to make meaning of each three dimensional detail and why it is there. For example, in the case of the Mohegan basket, the lining contains scraps of newspaper from 1817, which gives an accurate time period of when it was made. The same can be said about the found item type of bookmark during Medieval times. For example, a leaf used as a bookmark can tell you that the person had been reading outside, and you can even go as far as to find out what type of tree the leaf was from, and draw conclusions based upon that.

      There may exist some opinions that stake the claim that typical items that were used in the general lives of individuals are not as important as written primary source documents. Although it is true that written documents are more likely to contain confirmed specific details, they sadly cannot provide a true visual perception of the writer's life. Materials are far more tangible and physical to provide a deeper look and the historical aspects of a culture that cannot be represented on text.

      Culture analysis does not have to solely focus on written media. Looking past the surface of materialistic culture is also as vital to the development of ideas of how a certain community lived in the past.

  13. Dec 2016
    1. The Viet Nam era draft card is also known by its legal description, the status card. The draft card was an aspect of the Selective Service Act, the federal legislation that legalized the conscription of eligible males into the American armed services during the Viet Nam war (1962–1973).

      Vietnam Card Burning (PRIMARY PICTURES)

  14. Jan 2016