- Nov 2024
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austinkleon.com austinkleon.com
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He even kept “indexes to indexes,” as Robert D. Richardson describes in his wonderful biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire: Indexing was a crucial method for Emerson because it allowed him to write first and organize later and because it gave him easy access to the enormous mass of specific materials in his ever-increasing pile of notebooks… Emerson spent a good deal of time methodically copying and recopying journal material, indexing, alphabetizing indexes, and eventually making indexes of indexes. When he came to write a lecture, he would work through his indexes, making a list of possible passages. He then assembled, ordered, and reordered these into the talk or lecture.
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- Aug 2022
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www.heise.de www.heise.de
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als deren Meister sich sein Zeitgenosse Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785) erwies. Die Verzettelungstechnik des schwäbischen Juristen und Schriftstellers ist ein nachdrücklicher Beleg dafür, wie man allein durch Umadressierung aus den Exzerpten alter Bücher neue machen kann. Seine auf über 500 Titel veranschlagte Publikationsliste hätte Moser nach eigenem Bekunden ohne das von ihm geschaffene Hilfsmittel nicht bewerkstelligen können. Moser war auch einer der ersten Theoretiker des Zettelkastens. Unter der Überschrift "Meine Art, Materialien zu künfftigen Schrifften zu sammlen" hat er selbst die Algorithmen beschrieben, mit deren Hilfe er seine "Zettelkästgen" füllte.
the master of which his contemporary Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785) proved to be. The technique used by the Swabian lawyer and writer to scramble is emphatic evidence of how you can turn excerpts from old books into new ones just by re-addressing them. According to his own admission, Moser would not have been able to manage his publication list, which is estimated at over 500 titles, without the aid he had created. Moser was also one of the first theorists of the card box. Under the heading "My way of collecting materials for future writings", he himself described the algorithms with which he filled his "card boxes".
Johann Jacob Moser was a commonplace book keeper who referenced his system as a means of inventio. He wrote about how he collected material for future writing and described the ways in which he filled his "card boxes".
I'm curious what his exact method was and if it could be called an early precursor of the zettelkasten?
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- Jul 2022
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x28newblog.wordpress.com x28newblog.wordpress.com
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https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pruning-for-output/
In response to my call for zettelkasten output examples, Matthias Melcher comes up to the border of what I was looking for but doesn't cover the actual output portion.
He focuses instead about some of the processing and the pruning portions, but not use for actual content creation. Is this because he doesn't actively use his notes for the creation portion? Or does he use his branching tree space as recollections of notes, perhaps to create outlines for creation?
Note specifically that he doesn't mention any sort of surprise or serendipity with respect to linking ideas nor is there any mention of "inventio" portions of the process.
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- May 2022
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suggested by Gessner for bibliographical units on slips of paper in subject or alphabetical order, for the generation of new texts through recombination.
This sort of recombination is also seen in the work of Raymond Llull, though there he did it in a specific combinatorial way and implemented it in his memory rather than on paper.
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. That memory is based on order, and that order is a synonym for memory, were not novel ideas. According to Aristotle (De mem. et rem. ii, 452a 15), memory would be impossible without two requisites: the availability of a starting point and order.
I'll have to read Aristotle's De mem. et rem., but this looks like it's heavily influenced by the the method of loci which encodes things based on location which forces order.
Raymond Llull's ideas about combinations precluded order however. What could be done by removing order from the equation? Particularly for the idea of inventio?
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- Apr 2022
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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, as a key historical technology ofinvention. I intend this last term in the precise sense in which Derrida(1989) understands it, that is, as an oscillation between theperformative and the constative, with the former working to disruptitself (the performative) and the latter (the constative) – or whatmight be termed the unsettling operation of invention.
Derrida's definition of invention
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- Feb 2022
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Local file Local file
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As proper note-taking is rarely taught or discussed, it is no wonderthat almost every guide on writing recommends to start withbrainstorming. If you haven’t written along the way, the brain isindeed the only place to turn to. On its own, it is not such a greatchoice: it is neither objective nor reliable – two quite importantaspects in academic or nonfiction writing.
Brainstorming can be a miserable way to start a creative process. Without a pre-existing source of ideas (one's own notes) it can be the only place to start, but it suffers from being unreliable and having no objectivity. It is tremendously difficult to plumb the depths of one's memory for great ideas, questions, or interesting places to start an endeavor, but if you've been collecting these for ages, it becomes much easier to span a space and see tangential spaces.
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he idea that nobody ever startsfrom scratch suddenly becomes very concrete. If we take it seriouslyand work accordingly, we literally never have to start from scratchagain.
Proper note taking provides one with a permanent fount of interesting and exciting ideas to work on.
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Notes build up while you think, read, understand and generateideas, because you have to have a pen in your hand if you want tothink, read, understand and generate ideas properly anyway
An active reader is always thinking, writing, and annotating. The notes from this process can and could easily be used to facilitate writing and generating new material showing new contexts and new modes of thought.
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By adding these links between notes, Luhmann was able to addthe same note to different contexts.
By crosslinking one's notes in a hypertext-like manner one is able to give them many different contexts. This linking and context shifting is a solid method for helping one's ideas to have sex with each other as a means of generating new ideas.
Is there a relationship between this idea of context shifting and modality shifting? Are these just examples of building blocks for tools of thought? Are they sifts on different axes? When might they be though of as the same? Compare and contrast this further.
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a system is neededto keep track of the ever-increasing pool of information, which allowsone to combine different ideas in an intelligent way with the aim ofgenerating new ideas.
The point of good tools of thought is to allow one to keep track of the ever increasing flood of information that also allows them to juxtapose or combine ideas in novel and interesting ways. Further, this should provide them with a means of generating and then improving upon their new ideas.
Tags
- combinatorial creativity
- building blocks
- rhetoric
- context shifts
- inventio
- note taking
- note taking methods
- commonplace books
- annotations
- tools for thought
- modality shifts
- associative memory
- creativity
- tabula rasa
- brainstorming
- Llullan combinatorial arts
- hypertext
- links
- zettelkasten
- value creation
- complexity
- active reading
Annotators
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- Jan 2022
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words.jamoe.org words.jamoe.org
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Its design allows you to jump between moving fast and slow through your notes and has the benefits of active recall built-in, making your memories stickier.
This method also presupposes that one is taking notes solely for memorizing facts and helping to support basic understanding.
What about for analysis, comparison, synthesis, generation of entirely new ideas?
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Jean Paul invented a similar system and called it Witz. Like Tesauro, Jean Paul considered that the matter was to cede a prearranged ge-ography of places where everything had its own seat but was also compelled to remain in its own seat without possible deviation. The dismantlement of this architecture was required to change the rhetorical invention--that is, the retrieval of what is already known but has been forgotten--into an invention in the modern, scientific sense of the term.73 Also similar to Tesauro, accord-ing to Jean Paul, such an invention or discovery could occur only through the jumbled recording of notes taken from readings (or, from personal reflections) and retrievable by means of a subject index. By searching and recombining, the compiler would have put into practice the chance principle on which the whole knowledge storage mechanism was based; he would have likely discov-ered similarities and connections between remote items that he would have otherwise overlooked.
73 Cf. Götz Müller, Jean Pauls Exzerpte (Würzburg, 1988), 321–22
I'm not quite sure I understand what the mechanism of this is specifically. Revisit it later. Sounds like it's using the set up the system not only to discover the adjacent possible but the remote improbable.
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pluralistic.net pluralistic.net
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My composition is greatly aided both 20 years' worth of mnemonic slurry of semi-remembered posts and the ability to search memex.craphound.com (the site where I've mirrored all my Boing Boing posts) easily. A huge, searchable database of decades of thoughts really simplifies the process of synthesis.
Cory Doctorow's commonplace makes it easier to search, quote, and reuse in his process of synthesis.
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takingnotenow.blogspot.com takingnotenow.blogspot.com
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https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html
Manfred Kuehn looks at Karl Kraus' criticism of the idea of a zettelkasten as a tool which can be misused.
Of course this begs the question of what one is using their index card catalog for? Are you using it as a rhetorical thinking and creation device or simply a second memory?
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- Dec 2021
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www.goodreads.com www.goodreads.com
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“One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing it for a year, you go away and you have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, then you are in trouble!” ― Roald Dahl
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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Medium, a writing app that is also a publishing platform and a social-media network, represents the logical extreme of this vertical integration.
Julian Lucas indicates that tools like Microsoft Word, WordStar, WordPerfect, and Google Docs, are writing tools which ultimately result into the vertical integration of Medium. The mistake here is that while they are certain tools and one can write into them and use them for editing, they are all probably best thought of as tools in the chain of moving toward publishing with Medium being the example that allows one to present their work as well as a distribution mechanism with a cheery on top.
What she is not focusing enough (any?) attention on is the creation processes at the start. How does one come up with an interesting idea? How does one do the research? How does one collect ideas moving toward some teleological endpoint? Tools that address these ideas of invention and creation are the real writing tools that writers so elusively search out.
Far better to look at note taking tools or tools like Hypothes.is that go to the roots of the creation process. Tools that can take fleeting ideas and collect them. Tools that can take those collections and interlink them. Tools that allow for combinatorial juxtaposition and rearrangement. Tools that allow outlining.
It is only after this that one may use a tool like Microsoft Word to do the final arrangement, editing, and polish before sending it off to a publisher.
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The tools of writing have seldom been designed with writers in mind.
Perhaps its just that modern writers have been so long divorced from the ideas of classical rhetoric that they're making the process so much harder than it needs to be. Do writers know what they really need in the first place? Perhaps they've been putting the cart before the horse for too long.
Rethinking one's writing process to start at the moment of reading and annotation is possibly a far better method for composition? Then instead of needing to do the work of coming up with an idea and then researching toward one's idea and then creating something de novo, one can delve into one's notes of things they know have previously been of interest to them. By already being of interest or answering questions they've previously asked themselves and had interest in pursuing, they might make the load of work more evenly spread across their lives rather than designing a massive mountain of a problem first and then attempting to scale it after the fact.
By building the mountain from the start, it then isn't a problem to be solved, just a vista from which to stand and survey the area.
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blogs.orient.ox.ac.uk blogs.orient.ox.ac.uk
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Finally, a complete work, such as the Guhyasamāja Tantra, or a commentary upon it, is called a ‘macroform’. The way such literary constructions are put together resembles an ‘anthological’ model: tradents select existing lemmata and microforms and re-anthologise them to make new wholes.
Macroforms are the literary constructions which we might consider anthologies composed of smaller building blocks of lemmata and microforms. These smaller forms are rhetorically built up into larger forms to make "new" literary works or commentaries on prior works.
These can be compared to Western rhetorical traditions going back to Seneca the Younger in Epistulae morales
"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, 'pack close the flowering honey | And swell their cells with nectar sweet.' "
He's essentially saying, read the best, take their thoughts and ideas, consume them, make them your own."
Generations later in ~430 CE, Macrobius in his Saturnalia repeated the same idea and even analogy (he assuredly read Seneca, though he obviously didn't acknowledge him):
"You should not count it a fault if I shall set out the borrowings from a miscellaneous reading in the authors' own words... sometimes set out plainly in my own words and sometimes faithfully recorded in the actual words of the old writers... We ought in some sort to imitate bees; and just as they, in their wandering to and fro, sip the flowers, then arrange their spoil and distribute it among the honeycombs, and transform the various juices to a single flavor by some mixing with them a property of their own being, so I too shall put into writing all that I have acquired in the varied course of my reading... For not only does arrangement help the memory, but the actual process of arrangement, accompanied by a kind of mental fermentation which serves to season the whole, blends the diverse extracts to make a single flavor; with the result that, even if the sources are evident, what we get in the end is still something clearly different from those known sources."
(cross reference: https://hyp.is/mCsl9voQEeuP3t8jNOyAvw/maggieappleton.com/echo-narcissus)
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Much is also recycled, within a literary culture that normatively envisions contributors as tradents rather than innovators: in other words, the person producing a text sees himself as passing on existing knowledge, rather than creating new knowledge from nothing (I will elaborate further on the term tradent below).
Tradents in Tibetan religious literature often copied unattributed texts forward and backward in time without attribution. They often weren't inventing new material, but copying it forward.
This seems incredibly similar to the traditions of oral cultures as explored by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the work on orality which was followed up by Walter Ong and others. Examples include the poets known as Homer in the Greek Tradition and the guslars of Yugoslavia.
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- Nov 2021
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site.pennpress.org site.pennpress.org
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Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.
This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).
Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond
This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.
This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?
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- Oct 2021
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The creative faculty largely depends on the wis- dom and controlled activity of the memory.
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- Aug 2021
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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I should perhaps also note that I try, whenever possible, not to collect raw quotes or information simply copied from the Internet or from books, but to write excerpts or summaries in my own words on the basis of my reading. Luhmann called this "reformulating writing" and argued that such an approach is most important for one's own intellectual life. But this idea is not a new discovery Luhmann made. In fact, the idea that excerpts should be used to keep on's research goes back to at least the Renaissance when people first began to make extensive excerpts on paper.
This is also related to the ideas of invention as well as the analogy of the bee in relation to commonplaces. Link this to the bee analogy of Seneca the Younger and Macrobius in Saturnalia.
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Local file Local file
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readers did not merely read for extractiblewisdom but also retained an interest in the work as a whole.
I'll note that I'm often reading for the inventio. It's not always what one can extract, but what interesting ideas that might be sparked anew.
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- Jul 2021
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Over time, Carlin formalized that system: paper scraps with words or phrases would each receive a category, usually noted in a different color at the top of the paper, and then periodically those scraps would be gathered into plastic bags by category, and then those bags would go into file folders. Though he would later begin using a computer to keep track of those ideas, the basic principle of find-ability remained. “That’s how he built this collection of independent ideas that he was able to cross-reference and start to build larger routines from,” Heftel explains.
George Carlin's process of collecting and collating his material. His plastic bags by category were similar to the concept of waste books to quickly collect information (similar to the idea of fleeting notes). He later placed them into file folders (an iteration on the Zettelkasten using file folders of papers instead of index cards).
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Now that they are part of comedy history, it can be hard to imagine George Carlin’s most famous routines as anything but finished products. Whether the infamous “Seven Words” from his album Class Clown (released exactly 45 years ago Friday) or the monologues from his hosting of the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live (which returns for its 43rd season this Saturday), these routines can seem to have sprung fully formed from his mind. But there’s plenty of physical evidence to the contrary.
It's rarely ever the case (my cognitive bias statement), that anything springs fully formed from the mind.
Generally there's an infrastructure, a system, a method by which ideas or physical things are aggregated, accumulated, and edited into existence.
When seeing them well done, they appear magical because we don't see the work or the process. We will often call them genius, when in reality, they're the result of long hard work.
Take the Pyramids of Giza. They look large and magesterial---and likely moreso in their non-degraded form. But is it so mystical how they may have been built if we were to see the structure and scaffolding that likely went into constructing them?
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austinkleon.com austinkleon.com
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In some sense, this very blog is a system for me to find out what I have: I take material from my notebooks and turn it into blog posts, and the posts become tags, which become book chapters, etc.
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I read that Brian Eno does something similar: he makes a tremendous amount of music, and then hits shuffle when he’s answering email, etc., and whatever catches his ear, he investigates.
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Chris Ballew, aka Caspar Babypants, aka the lead singer and songwriter for The Presidents of the United States of America, says he dumps all his raw song ideas into an iTunes playlist and then puts it on shuffle while he’s washing dishes.
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- Jun 2021
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asaobinoue.blogspot.com asaobinoue.blogspot.com
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There will still be general guidelines for assignments in order for them to count as complete labor. These are simple things like: How much time you spend on a task, whether you followed the labor instructions, and how many words you produce or read.
I'm glad to see that reading makes an appearance here, if only a nodding one. Reading and subsequently annotating and thinking about my reading takes up a significant portion of time and labor which goes into my ultimate writing. Reading and annotating is the underlying bedrock for my rhetorical inventio process. Where would I be without it?
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- Sep 2018
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www-jstor-org.proxy.library.georgetown.edu www-jstor-org.proxy.library.georgetown.edu
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™invention∫
Invention.
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- Sep 2016
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www.chronicle.com www.chronicle.com
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This is well worth dwelling over, wallowing in, arguing for and against and neither.
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