I picked up a copy of it in April and have made it through the introduction and first chapter. He’s a professor writing from the perspective of a rhetorician and is generally extending some of the academic research started by Frances Yates. I’ll write more as I have time, but I’m in the midst of a few dozen books at the moment. I wish I could focus on this and one or two others.

I’ll note that for those interested, it’s likely based on a shorter journal article that the same author wrote in 2017 with a similar title: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07350198.2017.1281691 A little digging around should uncover a free copy of it. If you’re desperate, I have a digital copy he emailed me a while back.

I'm particularly interested here in the idea of interleaved books for additional marginalia. Thanks for the details!

An aspect that's missing from the overall discussion here is that of the commonplace book. Edwards' Miscellanies is a classic example of the Western note taking and idea collecting tradition of commonplace books.

While the name for his system is unique, his note taking method was assuredly not. The bigger idea goes back to ancient Greece and Rome with Aristotle and Cicero and continues up to the modern day.

From roughly 900-1300 theologians and preachers also had a sub-genre of this category called florilegia. In the Christian religious tradition Philip Melanchthon has one of the more influential works on the system: De locis communibus ratio (1539).

You might appreciate this article on some of the tradition: https://blog.cph.org/study/systematic-theology-and-apologetics/why-are-so-many-great-lutheran-books-called-commonplaces-or-loci

You'll find Edwards' and your indexing system bears a striking resemblance to that of philosopher John Locke, (yes that Locke!): https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685

Some of the value of notes being done and readable in public means that one typically puts a bit more effort into them at the start. This can make them much more useful and valuable later on. It also means that they usually have more substance and context for use by others in collaboration or other reuses.

Short notes are often called fleeting notes which may or may not be processed into something more substantive. The ones that do become more substantive can more easily be reused in other future settings.

Sonke Ahrens' book How to Take Smart Notes is one of the better arguments for the why and how of note taking.

@ladyhope It is weird. It's also something that the IndieWeb community has been working on fixing. There is a class of social feed readers (using Microsub, and including micro.blog) that allows one to subscribe and read, but also allows one to reply inline and post to their own websites (which could then also syndicate to social media sites). indieweb.org/social_re... has some examples, including several you could dovetail with your WordPress site.

Syndication: https://micro.blog/chrisaldrich/11655781

I often find that doing the work in public ups the quality and effort I put into the thing because I know there's at least the off-hand chance that someone else might read it.

Generally this means a better contextualized product for myself when I come back to revisit it later, even if no one else saw it. Without it, sometimes my personal scribbles don't hold up when I revisit them, and I can't tell what I had originally intended because I didn't flesh out the idea enough.

Or alternately write about it on your own site and send a webmention. :)

This is badass James!

Reply to Nick Milo:

Ward Cunningham may have been using a similar UI prior to it for other projects, but he unveiled the Smallest Federated Wiki at IndieWeb Camp 2011 in late June: https://indieweb.org/2011/Smallest_Federated_Wiki. I don't have a receipt to prove it, but I have to suspect that Andy's version was certainly influenced by Cunningham's work.

Mike Caulfield, subsequent author of the influential The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral, Iterated on the Smallest Federated Wiki and created a WordPress-based plugin shortly thereafter called Wikity that used some of the card-based UI that Obsidian comes with out of the box.

Both had some early influence on the UI-based research that the IndieWeb space has done since. For those interested, there's also a sub-group within it focusing on digital gardens, commonplace books, Zettelkasten, etc. that can be found here: https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book

I worry about this often myself. We have bobcats, coyotes, and bears frequently in our neighborhood. Good to hear everyone came out alright.

Place names and songlines together reminds me of a great BBC segment "Disappearing Welsh Names" I saw recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLQ6XlG0MQ4

It highlights by analogy the value of indigenous culture, knowledge, and creativity which the survival of songlines also provides us with. (It also saddens me because it starkly reminds me of all the knowledge and languages we've lost already.)

I've been learning Welsh since the pandemic started and just a few simple words of Welsh has given me a far greater appreciation of places in the UK and what they mean. It's helped not only to expand my vocabulary, but increased my creativity in creating local songlines. It's also made it much easier to learn to say and remember the town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

<table> <thead><tr> <th>Cymraeg</th> <th>Meaning</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Aber</td> <td>Where one river flows into another body of water (example: Aberystwyth)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ban, Bannau</td> <td>Peak(s), beacon(s)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Bron</td> <td>Breast of a hill</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Bryn</td> <td>Hill</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Caer</td> <td>Fort</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Cas</td> <td>Castle</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Crug</td> <td>Hill, tump</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Cwm</td> <td>Valley</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Derw, Deri</td> <td>Oaks</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Dinas</td> <td>Hill-fort</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Dyffryn</td> <td>Valley, vale</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ffin</td> <td>Border, boundary</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Isaf</td> <td>Lower, lowest</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Llan</td> <td>Church, church land (often followed by the name of the saint to whom the church was dedicated, eg, Llangatwg - a place with a church dedicated to St Catwg)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Morfa</td> <td>Salt-marsh</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Nant</td> <td>Brook, dingle</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Pont</td> <td>Bridge</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Porth</td> <td>Gate</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Rhos</td> <td>Moor</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Tyle</td> <td>Hill-side, ascent</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Uchaf</td> <td>Upper, highest</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ystrad</td> <td>Vale</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

It also uncovers quirks of place names like Breedon on the Hill which translates from Brythonic, Saxon, and Modern English to "Hill Hill on the Hill" and crystalizes, as if in amber, the fact that Brythonic, Saxon, and English speakers all conjoined for a time on a hill in England. Similarly there's also Barnack Hills in England which translates from old Celtic (barr), Scottish Gaelic (cnoc) and English as "flat topped hill hill hills". It's almost hillarious.

Perhaps you could memorize all the constellations and potentially see if they could serve as double duty?

I've found The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H.A Rey (yes, the creator of Curious George) to be a comprehensive list with a tremendous number of pictures, charts, useful stories, mythology, etc. for memorizing all the major constellations and many of the common star names and related data. It's ostensibly aimed at a novice audience, but one might also think he was targeting the mnemonists among us as well.

Should it help in your researching image formation, the phenomenon you mentioned is called pareidolia.

Did blogging die off because the tools changed? Everyone had their own space on the internet and the internet itself was the medium which opened up the conversation. I could use WordPress while someone else might have been on Blogger, Moveable Type, Live Journal, TypePad, or something they made in HTML themselves.

Now it's all siloed off into tinier spaces where content is trapped for eyeballs and engagement and there's not nearly as much space for expression. Some of the conversation is broken up into 280 character expressions on Twitter, some on Instagram, and now people are aggregating content inside Substack. Substack at least has a feed I can subscribe to and a free form box to add a reply.

I appreciate Jeff's comment about the flywheel of social media. We're definitely going to need something like that to help power the resurgence of the blogosphere. I also like to think of it in the framing of "thought spaces" where the idea of a blog is to give yourself enough space to form a coherent idea and make an actual argument. Doing that is much harder to do on a microblog where the responses are also similarly limited. It just feels so rude to post 250 words in reply to a sentence or two that probably needed more space to express itself too.

I suspect that if we want a real resurgence of thought and discourse online, we're going to need some new tools to do it. As Friedrich Nietzsche famously conceded to his friend Heinrich Köselitz “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.”

It would help if we could get back to the bare metal of the internet in which to freely operate again. Substack at least feels close to that, though it could be much better.

Can we have a conversational medium that isn't constrained by a handful of corporate silos that don't allow conversation across boundaries? Can we improve the problems of context collapse we're seeing in social media?

I'd like to think that some of the building blocks the IndieWeb movement has built might help guide the way. I love their idea of Webmention notifications that allow one site to mention another regardless of the platforms on which they're built. Their Micropub posting tools abstract away the writing and posting experience to allow you to pick and choose your favorite editor. They've got multiple social reader tools to let you follow the people and content you're interested in and reply to things directly in the reader. I presented a small proof of concept at a recent education conference, for those who'd like to see what that experience looks like today.

Perhaps if more platforms opened up to these ideas and tools, we might be able to return, but with a lot more freedom and flexibility than we had in the nostalgic blogosphere?

Yet, we'll still be facing the human work of interacting and working together. There are now several magnitudes of order more people online than there were in the privileged days of the blogosphere. We're still going to need to solve for that. Perhaps if everyone reads and writes from their own home on the web, they're less likely to desecrate their neighbor's blog because it sticks to their own identity?

There's lots of work to be done certainly, but perhaps we'll get there by expanding things, opening them up, and giving ourselves some more space to communicate?

They certainly could. I've seen the author haunting the IndieWeb chat in the past and they've mentioned that crawling and saving data can tend to be a bit on the expensive side, so they're trying to do more targeted search/save when they can. Perhaps as the project matures, it will add these sorts of functionalities.

I'm game for either, though I've already got a copy of the Wu text which I've started reading since our prior meeting....

I really need to delve back into some of the plugins and test out using them more frequently. The workspace one I tried briefly when it first came out, but it had a few problems for me which are now likely fixed.

I'm using it to do both of these things and definitely find it more useful for the knowledge base work. I've never used Simplenote heavily, but it's definitely more focused on your use case Colin.

For the quick notes scratchpad idea, I've been relying on Markor and syncing the results from my phone to my Obsidian data store to get those notes into my notebook more easily. Often when I'm at my desktop I may move those notes to other more appropriate places to keep track of them. Hopefully Obsidian's mobile version (in beta) will make this portion easier.

Why not both?

Great recap of an awesome time Isabelle! Thanks for all your hard work to make it so seamless!

Thanks for all your hard work Meredith! The conference went so well and in large part it's down to your work which hasn't gone unnoticed.

What a fantastic set of accomplishments! Thank you for hosting such a spectacular space for all of us to hang out in.

There may be a bit of a path forward here that some might consider using that has some fantastic flexibility.

There is a WordPress plugin called Micropub (which needs to be used in conjunction with the IndieAuth plugin for authentication to their CMS account) that will allow students to log into various writing/posting applications.

These are usually slimmed down interfaces that don't provide the panoply of editing options that the Gutenberg interface or Classic editor metabox interfaces do. Quill is a good example of this and has a Medium.com like interface. iA Writer is a solid markdown editor that has this functionality as well (though I think it only works on iOS presently).

Students can write and then post from these, but still have the option to revisit within the built in editors to add any additional bells and whistles they might like if they're so inclined.

This system is a bit like SPLOTs, but has a broader surface area and flexibility. I'll also mention that many of the Micropub clients are open source, so if one were inclined they could build their own custom posting interface specific to their exact needs. Even further, other CMSes like Known, Drupal, etc. either support this web specification out of the box or with plugins, so if you built a custom interface it could work just as well with other platforms that aren't just WordPress. This means that in a class where different students have chosen a variety of ways to set up their Domains, they can be exposed to a broader variety of editing tools or if the teacher chooses, they could be given a single editing interface that is exactly the same for everyone despite using different platforms.

For those who'd like to delve further, I did a WordPress-focused crash course session on the idea a while back:

Micropub and WordPress: Custom Posting Applications at WordCamp Santa Clarita 2019 (slides)

Michael Beckwith, this is genius. Long live blogrolls!

But let's be honest, they're a sort of discovery method that is also built into other social platforms: Twitter lists,Twitter follow lists, Facebook lists, etc. Most now have AI using these lists to suggest who you ought to follow next. When will WordPress get that plugin?

My issue is that in a bigger social space, we need full pages for these sorts of data rather than the small sidebar widgets of yore.

This was the last serious conversation I remember seeing about the old Link Manager: https://twitter.com/rboren/status/1019275363522895874

So who besides Michael has a blogroll now? Mine's at https://boffosocko.com/about/following/. Where's yours?!

I'd done that and even did a stand alone view of just that calendar without any luck. I'd even tried deleting and re-adding last night.

I just deleted the calendar and tried it again from scratch. It seems to be working now, so perhaps it was a cache issue somewhere between the site software and Google Calendar? Maybe a glitch on the edge of having no events in the subscribed calendar and several events in there now?

I love this idea. I have a fairly extensive personal commonplace book and collect and archive tons of material, but really should delve more deeply into the topic. I'd be particularly interested in the taxonomies portions you've outlined.

This sounds like a lot of fun and is a bit reminiscent to me to some of the material in the Domain of One’s Own (#DoOO) space. In particular I’m thinking of a Domains Camp from a few years back which may have some related materials: https://extend-bank.ecampusontario.ca/type/domain-camp/.

Based on experience with Pingbacks, the Webmention specification requires the sending site to have a mentioning URL on a publicly available web page. This requirement by itself cuts down significantly on spam as it increases the cost of sending it. (Pingbacks/Trackbacks didn't have this requirement so it was easy to programmatically spew spam in all directions.) In addition to this, there's no requirement to show the received Webmention, so there's less benefit to some spammers in these cases.

Many people who do receive and display them have separate mechanisms to moderate them before display, which also tends to minimize spam. Other sites that support Webmentions also dovetail with anti-spam services like Akismet which can help filter out spam out as well.

And this is all without anyone adding the Vouch extension to the Webmention spec.

Keep in mind that webmention.io is just a third party service to allow sites to use and leverage Webmention notifications without needing to write any code. Many major CMSes like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, et al. either support the spec out of the box or with plugins/modules. Each of these can also leverage anti-spam methods they have available separately. As an example of this, the WordPress plugin has an allow list for automatically approving webmentions from sites one regularly communicates with.

The idea of Webmentions has been around for almost a decade, and the spec has been a W3C recommendation since 2017. Only one suspected case of Webmention spam has been reported in the wild in that time. I'd conservatively estimate that with 10,000+ independent websites sending/receiving over 2 million Webmentions in the past several years, it's not a bad start. For more details, ideas, and brainstorming for your potential use-cases see also: https://indieweb.org/spam

Hypothes.is has both RSS and Atom Feeds. So the IFTTT “if” is a new item in your feed which creates a text post in some appropriate storage account. I use OneDrive as the “that” target, but I’m sure you could potentially use others with some experimentation. If you have something that only saves as .txt files, that’s fine, you can simply rename them as .md files for your vault later.

I’ve described some of this before at https://boffosocko.com/2020/08/29/a-note-taking-problem-and-a-proposed-solution/ for those interested in further details.

Hopefully this helps (until someone has a more automated version).

You may upload and annotate local files using the "docdrop" service, which works for many kinds of files, word docs, exce & epub. They are all converted to PDF or CSV.

These are pieces which the IndieWeb should endeavor to experiment in and attempt to fix. Though I will admit that pieces of the IndieWeb layers on top of platforms like WordPress can help to mitigate some context collapse and aggregate social interactions better. (eg: reply context and POSSE)

My general heirarchy is that bookmarks are things I want to come back to (and usually read) later, reads are things that I've read, like are things I've read and want to send appreciation for, and replies are things that usually are both read, liked, and needed even a bit more.

Here's more on how I've thought about it before: https://boffosocko.com/2018/03/10/thoughts-on-linkblogs-bookmarks-reads-likes-favorites-follows-and-related-links/

Perhaps this is a part of where the definition changes for me to blur the difference between the two modalities (wikis vs. blogs). If a wiki is held as public, yet still personal and any changes to it are done by a fork and edit by a third party with a webmention back to the original, then the barrier can be removed. If one can use a webmention notification from the branch back to the original so that the new knowledge can either be aggregated or not at the first party's discretion. This allows the ideas and potentially growing voice of atomicules of information to grow and spread.

This gives a bit of the best of the both worlds. There can be multiple minds and models working, but the information can still be shared and aggregated over time. This may also expand creativity as there isn't necessarily one canonical source, but many.

Thus a personal wiki and blog combination can use small atoms of information in a wiki-like style to slowly build up a set of facts where a longer blog-like article then becomes a crystallization of a specific voice's synthesis and analysis of those underlying facts.

If the wiki chunks are copyable and sharable then different people may synthesize different ideas. Additionally by reshuffling the various pieces, the author of a particular blog article may rewrite or revise their original thinking with additional smaller wiki-like pieces to come to an alternate or expanded conclusion.

Thinking of a wiki as something that has to be voiceless and communal may be the biggest wall between the two modalities. If there were a larger community of personal wikis that were interlinked then these barriers might be broken down.

Additionally, this is more like what the OER community may be looking for. There are very concrete topics like calculus, as an example, but there can certainly be dozens of approaches to the topic in as many or more voices to suit the needs of particular learners. In fact there are many calculus textbooks geared toward different audiences: biologists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, social sciences, etc. The underlying ideas may all be incredibly similar but could be remixed in different and creative ways.

This has apparently become a relatively popular culture story as I've also heard references to this story on two different radio shows this week.

I agree with Joseph, as this statement follows a clear presentation of a thesis, starting with a qualification, "Although much of...", and continuing with a claim/reason to investigate, "it is possible to identify..."