He says this, but his advice on how to use them is too scant and/or flawed. Where are they held? How are they indexed? How are they linked so that finding and using them in the future? (especially, other than rote memory or the need to have vague memory and the ability to search for them in the future?)

For Twyla Tharp, the most important feature of her project boxes is the fact that they free her from the worry of forgetting her ideas.

One's note taking is not only a conversation with the text or even the original author, it is also a conversation you're having with your future self. This feature is accelerated when one cross links ideas within their note box with each other and revisits them at regular intervals.

Example of someone who uses Roam Research and talks about the prevalence of using it as a "conversation with your future self."

This is very similar to the same patterns that can be seen in the commonplace book tradition, and even in the blogosphere (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), or IndieWeb which often recommends writing on your own website to document how you did things for your future self.

Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

How much history is covered here?

Will mnemotechniques be covered here? Spaced repetition? Note taking methods in the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions?

While placing our ideas into external memory devices like notebooks or zettelkasten may allow us to forget them, mnemotechniques allow us to perform a similar task, but provides us hooks upon which they might be hung by means of association with other ideas. These hooks and association can be reactivated at later times when the ideas may be needed.

The zettelkasten allows us to do multiple things. It encourages us to clarify our ideas by writing them down, we extend them by linking them to other contexts, we actively write towards a multitude of interesting goals, by writing, we can forget the original ideas which we can later serendipitously re-link to new concepts.

Previous historical examples of note taking ended up in large scrap heaps that provided value only to their creators, who had at least some knowledge of their context. Those who inherited them found them relatively useless because they required vast amounts of work to make useful. Linking notes and cross referencing or indexing them with subject headings and links to their sources can go a long way to immeasurably increase their value both to the initial user, who may forget these things, but also to subsequent users. The small amounts of work required upfront when making one's notes will pay off immeasurably in the long term.

Link this to the specific examples in Paper Machines (chapter 2) just before the time of Vincentius Placcius.

Note that this article is a revised and shortened form of a chapter in Cevolini's Forgetting Machines. I'm tempted to just read that instead...

The Lost Arts of Memory by Daniel J. Boorstin The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1984 104-113

Pedagogical cultrues:

• cultures taught orally
• cultures taught to remember
• cultures taught to learn by rote
• cultures taught to forget

Is there a (linear) progression? How do they differ? How are they they same? Is there a 1-1 process that allows them to be equivalence classes?

During the 16th century there was a transition in educational centers from using the natural and artificial memories to the methodical use of notebooks and commonplace books as a secondary memory saved by means of writing.

This allows people in some sense to "forget" what they've read and learned and be surprised by it again later. They allow themselves to create liminal memories which may be refreshed and brought to the center later. Perhaps there is also some benefit in this liminal memory for allowing ideas to steep on the periphery before using them. Perhaps combinatorial creativity happens unconsciously?

Cross reference: learning research by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski.

Possibly worth reading for some of my research?

Fazio, L., Hong, M. K., & Dias, N. (2020). Debunking rumors around the French election: The memorability and effectiveness of misinformation debunks [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6mjbz

Brashier, N. M., & Schacter, D. L. (2020). Aging in an Era of Fake News. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 0963721420915872. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420915872

Yuan, L. (2020, May 27). Amnesia Nation: Why China Has Forgotten Its Coronavirus Outbreak. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/business/china-coronavirus-amnesia.html

Robert Penn Warren: "When one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten."

Yeah, if the memory is maintained. I can't even keep my iTunes library from disintegrating. If your hard drive crashes, you lose it all, unless it's backed up, in which case you're creating copies that too will differ and degrade.

This passage evoked Lyotard's The Differend.

This seems like kind of a big slippage (between forgetting & repression), imho.