Gilmore, William J. Reading Becomes Necessity of Life: Material Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Becomes-Necessity-Life-1780-1835/dp/0870497685

ᔥ[[Dan Allosso]] in Darwin's Grandfather

Will indicates there's a passage in Latin hiding in here about note taking and memory/meditation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/17pitv9/when_does_annotating_books_become_a_distraction/

This entire thread is a fascinating sample look at the state of annotation with respect to reading practices.

via https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/17pitv9/comment/k86tusz/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Some of the missing piece here is knowing a method for extracting and subsequently building. Without the recipe in hand, it's difficult to bake a complex cake.

Not mentioned here as something which may be missing, but which Adler & Van Doren identify as strength and ability to read at multiple levels including inspectionally, analytically, and ultimately syntopically.

To some extent, the knowledge of the method for excerpting and arranging will ultimately allow the interested lifelong learner the ability to read syntopically even if it isn't the sort of targeted exercise it might be within creating a thesis.

Is it really incumbent on the author to translate every word he's using with respect to the language in which he's writing. He's already doing us a service by translating the Hebrew. Are modern readers somehow with out a dictionary? I might believe they've not been classically educated to capture all the allusions, but the dictionary portion is a simple fix that is difficult to call him out on from a critical perspective, especially in a publication like "Law & Liberty" whose audience is specifically the liberally educated!?!

Example of the repetition of the body text of an article immediately after it as a featured pull quote to draw the attention of the skimming reader to the importance of the portion of the passage.

reply to u/IamOkei at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5s6aek/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

u/IamOkei, I know you've got a significant enough practice that not much of what I might suggest may be helpful beyond your own extension of what you've got and how it is or isn't working for you. Perhaps chatting with a zettelkasten therapist may be helpful? Does anyone have "Zettelkasten Whisperer" on a business card yet?! More seriously, I occasionally dump some of my problems and issues into a notebook, unpublished on my blog, or even into a section of my own zettelkasten, which I never index or reconsult, as a helpful practice. Others like Henry David Thoreau have done something like this and there's a common related practice of writing "Morning Pages" that you can explore. My own version is somewhat similar to the idea of rubber duck debugging but focuses on my own work. You might try doing something like this in one of Bob Doto's cohorts or by way of private consulting sessions. Another free version of this could be found by participating in Will's regular weekly posts/threads "Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week" at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/. It's always a welcoming and constructive space. There are also some public and private (I won't out them) Discords where some of the practiced hands chat and commiserate with each other. Even the Obsidian PKM/Zettelkasten Discord channels aren't very Obsidian/digital-focused that you couldn't participate as an analog practitioner. I've even found that participating in book clubs related to some of my interests can be quite helpful in talking out ideas before writing them down. There are certainly options for working out and extending your own practice.

Beyond this, and without knowing more of your specific issues, I can only offer some broad thoughts which expand on some of the earlier discussion above.

I recommend stripping away Scheper's religious fervor, some of which he seems to have thrown over lately along with the idea of a permanent note or "main card" (something I think is a grave mistake), and trying something closer to Luhmann's idea of ZKII.

An alternate method, especially if you like a nice notebook or a particular fountain pen, might be to take all of your basic literature/fleeting notes along with the bibliographic data in a notebook and then just use your analog index cards/slips to make your permanent notes and your index.

Ultimately it's all a lot of the same process, though it may come down to what you want to call it and your broad philosophy. If you're anti-antinet, definitely quit using the verbiage for the framing there and lean toward the words used by Ahrens, Dan Allosso, Gerald Weinberg, Mark Bernstein, Umberto Eco, Beatrice Webb, Jacques Barzun & Henry Graff, or any of the dozens of others or even make up your own. Goodness knows we need a lot more names and categories for types of notes—just like we all need another one page blog post about how the Zettelkasten method works by someone who's been at it for a week. Maybe someone will bring all these authors to terms one day?

Generally once you know what sorts of ideas you're most interested in, you take fewer big notes on administrivia and focus more of your note taking towards your own personal goals and desires. (Taking notes to learn a subject are certainly game, but often they serve little purpose after-the-fact.) You can also focus less on note taking within your entertainment reading (usually a waste) and focusing more heavily on richer material (books and journal articles) that is "above you" in Adler's framing. You might make hundreds of highlights and annotations in a particular book, but only get two or three serious ideas and notes out of it ultimately. Focus on this and leave the rest. If you're aware of the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule, then spend the majority of your time on the grander permanent notes (10-20%), and a lot less time worrying about the all the rest (the 80-90%).

In the example above relating to Marx, you can breeze through some low level introductory material for context, but nothing is going to beat reading Marx himself a few times. The notes you make on his text will have tremendously more value than the ones you took on the low level context. A corollary to this is that you're highly unlikely to earn a Ph.D. or discover massive insight by reading and taking note posts on Twitter, Medium, or Substack (except possibly unless your work is on the cultural anthropology of those platforms).

A lot of the zettelkasten spaces focus heavily on the note taking part of the process and not enough on the quality of what you're reading and how you're reading it. This portion is possibly more valuable than the note taking piece, but the two should be hand-in-glove and work toward something.

I suspect that most people who have 1000 notes know which five or ten are the most important to where they're going and how they're growing. Focus on those and your "conversations with texts" relating to those. The rest is either low level context for where you're headed or either pure noise/digital exhaust.

If you think of ideas as incunables, which notes will be worth of putting on your tombstone? In other words: What are your "tombstone notes"? (See what I did there? I came up with another name for a type of note, a sin for which I'm certainly going to spend a lot of time in zettelkasten purgatory.)

reply to Admirable_Discount75 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5nzic6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

If you've not come across it before you'll likely find Adler & Van Doren (1972) for reading a useful place to start, especially their idea of syntopical reading. Umberto Eco (2015) is also a good supplement to a lot of the internet-based and Ahrensian ZK material. After those try Mills.

Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated ed. edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011. https://amzn.to/45IjBcV. (audiobook available; or a video synopsis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rizr8bb0c)

Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.

Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.

​

Should it help, I often find that audiobook versions of books or coursework sources like The Great Courses (often free at local libraries, through Hoopla, or other sources), or the highest quality material from YouTube/podcasts listened to at 1.5 - 2x speed while you're walking/commuting can give you quick overviews and/or inspectional reads at a relatively low time cost. Short reminder notes/keywords (to search) while listening can then allow you to do fast searches of the actual texts and/or course guidebooks for excerpting and note making afterwards. Highly selective use of the audiobook bookmarking features let you relisten to short portions as necessary.

As an example, one could do a quick crash course/overview of something like Marx and Communism over a week by quickly listening to all or parts of:

• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-rise-of-communism-from-marx-to-lenin
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/communism-in-power-from-stalin-to-mao
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/legacies-of-great-economists
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/modern-intellectual-tradition-from-descartes-to-derrida

These in combination with sources like Oxford's: Very Short Introduction series book on Marx (which usually have good bibliographies) would allow you to quickly expand into more specialized "handbooks" (Oxford, Cambridge, Routledge, Sage) on the subject of Marx and from there into even more technical literature and journal articles. Obviously the deeper you go, the slower things may become depending on the depth you're looking to go.

Manuscript tagging

Human-readable

Appropriate

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/our-journey-day-68

Characteristics

Characteristics

Characteristics

Characteristics

Every book, while holding the same words, will be different based on the context and needs of the individual reader.

The first several rules of reading a book analytically follow the same process of writing a book as suggested in the snowflake method.

Solitary reading [is] was almost as much a vice as solitary drinking. —Mortimer J. Adler, in Part 11: Activating Poetry and Plays

What comes out of alternately reading theological books with understanding and compassion and then switching to raw logic?

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/james-l-mursell/

See: Mursell, James L. “The Defeat of the Schools.” The Atlantic, March 1939. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95dec/chilearn/murde.htm.

———. “The Reform of the Schools.” The Atlantic, December 1, 1939. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1939/12/the-reform-of-the-schools/654746/.

How do historical method and philosophical method compare? contrast?

Were they tied to similar traditions? co-evolve? evolve separately?

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/barbell-method-reading/

https://matthew-van-der-hoorn.notion.site/matthew-van-der-hoorn/Book-Reading-bc745728387b4369b5b63739292c9ce7

van der Hoorn's suggestions for reading

Sometimes one reads for raw information and background details that one can excerpt or use--things which an author may use to support their own arguments, but which the reader doesn't care about at all.

Jack Kerouac followed the general advice of Mortimer J. Adler to write notes into the endpapers of his books as evidenced by the endpapers of Volume IV of the 7th Year Course of The Great Books Foundation series with which Adler was closely associated.

Gould, Jessica. “Teachers College, Columbia U. Dissolves Program behind Literacy Curriculum Used in NYC Public Schools.” Gothamist, September 8, 2023. https://gothamist.com/news/columbia-university-dissolves-program-behind-literacy-curriculum-used-in-nyc-public-schools.

The Teachers College of Columbia University has shut down the Lucy Calkins Units of Study literacy program.

Missing from the story is more emphasis on not only the social costs, which they touch on, but the tremendous financial (sunk) cost to the system by not only adopting it but enriching Calkins and the institution (in a position of trust) which benefitted from having sold it.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/eicbpgSKEe6vc0fPdIm05w

"Reading with an artificial intelligence" seems like a fascinating way to participate in the Great Conversation.

Additional .pdf copy of this journal article with Hypothes.is annotations available by downloading: https://journals.sfu.ca/jalt/index.php/jalt/article/download/843/597

A surprisingly positive take on scrum and where it could be useful

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/books/review/the-author-of-squirrel-seeks-chipmunk-would-like-to-go-back-in-time-and-collect-kindling-for-flannery-oconnor.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/07/27/rules-for-reading-dirda/

One of the primary goals of The Great Books, was to make some of the (especially ancient writers) more accessible to modern audiences with respect to ready availability of their works which were otherwise much more expensive.

This certainly says something about both publishing and reading practices of the early 20th century.

reply to u/Nil205 at https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/14li1ri/cpb_vs_reading_notes/

I have a similar and differently formed, but still simple system compared to most here. Rather than a traditional commonplace book, I keep all my notes on index cards. I keep all my reading notes for a particular book on a series of index cards that I staple together with a citation card for the book and then file them by author and title.

When I'm done, I'll excerpt the most important parts each individual note (highlight/annotation) and expand on them on its own index card which I file away and index. In your case you might equivalently have a reading notebook where you might keep a section of notes as you read a book and then excerpt the most important or salient parts into your main commonplace. Some may prefer, especially if they own the book in question, to annotate (put their reading notes into) the book directly and then excerpt either as they go or at the end when they're done and can frame their ideas with a broader knowledge of the area in question. Sometimes at later dates you may realize you read something useful which you don't find in your commonplace book, but you can find the gist of it in your reading notes which you can reference, refresh your memory, and then excerpt into your commonplace.

For more on my sort of card index or zettelkasten (German: slip box) practice you might take a look at one or more of the following which explain the broad generalities:

• Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.
• 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.
• Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/.
• Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout.
• Tietze, Christian. “Getting Started: Zettelkasten Method.” Blog/forum. Zettelkasten, 2015. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/.

If it's useful/inspiring as an example, Ross Ashby had a lifelong series of notebooks, much like a commonplace, and a separate card index where he cross-indexed all of his ideas to make them more easily searchable, findable, and cross referenceable. You can see digitized versions of the journals and index online which you can explore at http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index.html.

Since this is yet another piece of journalism that covers a set of cases before the courts with citing the cases in question by name, here they are: - Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard - Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina

6 part playbook from Alamo

embedded MCs

Report from 2022 WCET workshop

Interesting data to collect. Relates to the Equity report from Credential Engine: https://credentialengine.org/credential-transparency/equity/

Columbia University Teachers College education professor Lucy Calkins, a leader of the "balanced literacy" teaching philosophy in reading, has been influential in how millions of children have been learning to read for decades.

E-books have caused the missions of many libraries to shift away from institutions that provide democratic access to a preserved culture.

from Patricia Highsmith's diaries

this seems similar to Ralph Waldo Emmerson's journals/commonplaces where he collected interesting phrases for use in his writing. Here she's explicitly stating her desire to do this for her writing work.

The "Alone, in the quite." quote seems to mirror her appreciation and stated desire to be alone at home in the 1978 Good Afternoon interview.

Johnson, Dirk. “Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins.” The New York Times, February 21, 2011, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/books/21margin.html.

suggested by The Margins of Marginalia by Tom Peters, ALA TechSource on 2011-05-02

This is a fascinating bit of reading practice.

A book can't only be about the text, it has to be about the reader's interaction with it and thoughts about it. Without these, the object has no value.

Annotations are the traces left behind of how one valued a book as they read and interacted with it.

The Margins of Marginalia by Tom Peters, ALA TechSource on 2011-05-02

Peters talks about his own reading practices and his annotation habits throughout his life. There's some discussion of the oncoming annotation functionality in the digital space in 2011.

readum.com no longer resolves in 2023. It was apparently a annotation tool in 2011...

How I annotate books as a PhD student (simple and efficient)

She's definitely not morally against writing in her books, but there are so many highlights and underlining that it's almost useless.

She read the book four times because she didn't take good enough notes on it the first three times.

Bruno Latour's Down to Earth

Tools: - sticky tags (reusable) - purple for things that draw attention - yellow/green referencing sources, often in bibliography - pink/orange - extremely important - highlighter - Post It notes with longer thoughts she's likely to forget, but also for writing summaries in her own words

Interesting to see another Bruno Latour reference hiding in a note taking context. See https://hypothes.is/a/EbNKbLIaEe27q0dhRVXUGQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5PDWfWli54

Recommended Resource:

I recommend adding this doctoral research article on developing open education practices (OEP) in British Columbia, Canada. The scholarly article is released by Open University, a U.K. higher education institution that promotes open education.

Paskevicius, M. & Irvine, V. (2019). Open Education and Learning Design: Open Pedagogy in Praxis. Open University, 2019(1). DOI: 10.5334/jime.51

A relevant excerpt from the article reveals the study results that show OEP enhances student learning:

"Furthermore, participants reflected on how inviting learners to work in the open increased the level of risk and/or potential reward and thereby motivated greater investment in the work. This was articulated by Patricia who suggested “the stakes might feel higher when someone is creating something that’s going to be open and accessible by a wider community” as well as Alice who stated “students will write differently, you know, if they know it’s not just going to their professor.” The practice of encouraging learners to share their work was perceived by Olivia to “add more value to their work,” by showing learners the work they do at university can “have an audience beyond their professors.”"

Dr Essai’s life checklists: No. 1, Reading Strategies

Fast, Sascha. “Field Report #5: How I Prepare Reading and Processing Effective Notetaking by Fiona McPherson.” Zettelkasten Method (blog), March 29, 2022. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/field-report-5-reading-processing-effective-notetaking-mcpherson/.

Perhaps there is a model for reading and note taking/writing with respect to both learning and creating new knowledge that follows an inverse mapping in a way similar to that seen in Galois theory?

Explore this a bit to see what falls out.

For some research the book form is just not conducive to the most productive work. Both the experiences of Beatrice Webb (My Apprenticeship, Appendix C) and Adolph Erman (on Wb) show that database forms for sorting, filtering, and comparing have been highly productive and provide a wealth of information which simply couldn't be done otherwise.

// in other words - mortality salience alone is counter-productive - it triggers psychological defense strategies. - it must be accompanied by expressions of gratitude to be effective and transformative

// abstract - summary - Rationalist approaches to environmental problems such as climate change - apply an information deficit model, - assuming that if people understand what needs to be done they will act rationally. - However, applying a knowledge deficit hypothesis often fails to recognize unconscious motivations revealed by: - social psychology, - cognitive science, - behavioral economics.

• Applying ecosystems science, data collection, economic incentives, and public education are necessary for solving problems such as climate change, but they are not sufficient.
• Climate change discourse makes us aware of our mortality
• This prompts consumerism as a social psychological defensive strategy,
• which is counterproductive to pro-environmental behavior.
• Studies in terror management theory, applied to the study of ritual and ecological conscience formation,
• suggest that ritual expressions of giving thanks can have significant social psychological effects in relation to overconsumption driving climate change.
• Primary data gathering informing this work included participant observation and interviews with contemporary Heathens in Canada from 2018–2019.

Amazon removing titles from Kindle Unlimited due to ebook piracy issues<br /> by Sovan Mandal

Read at Tue 2023-02-28 6:50 AM

reply to u/m_t_rv_s__n at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11bxjms/am_i_taking_too_long_to_finish_notes/

Some of it depends on what you're reading for and what you're trying to get out of the reading. On a recent 26 page journal article, I spent several hours over a couple of days (months apart) reading and taking notes in a relatively thorough fashion. I spent another hour or so refining them further and filing them and another 15 minutes noting out references for follow up. It was in an area I'm generally very familiar with, so it wasn't difficult or dense, but has lots of material I specifically know I'll be using in the near future for some very specific writing. Because I know it's something of specific interest to me and several overlapping projects, I had a much deeper "conversation with the text" than I otherwise might have.

Because it was done digitally, you can see the actual highlights and annotations and even check the timestamps if you like (you'll have to click through individual notes to get these timestamps): https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Aurn%3Ax-pdf%3A6053dd751da0fa870cad9a71a28882ba Some of it is basic data I'll use for a variety of purposes on several already well-defined projects. A few are for more slowly developing projects further out on the horizon. It's relatively easy to see the 10 or 15 permanent notes that I'll pull out of this group of about 74 notes. Since writing them, I've already referenced two of the more fleeting notes/highlights by searching for related tags on other reading which look like they may actually develop further.

Had this been something less targeted to my specific area, say for a master's level course of general interest, I'd probably have spent far less time on it and likely not gone over about 15 or so notes. Sometimes for these, I'll just read the abstract and conclusions and scan the references. Reading lots of these in your area of interest gives you some idea of the space and types of questions you might be asking. As you hone in on a thesis, you'll begin asking more and more questions and delve more deeply into material, and if something you read in the past becomes more specific to your project then you'll likely go back to re-read it at a deeper level, but you'll still have your prior work at your fingertips as a potential guide.

Once you know what your particular thesis is going to be your reading becomes more dense and targeted. Some things you'll read several times and go through with fine-toothed combs while others you'll skim to get the gist/context and only excerpt small specific pieces which you need and then move on.

(If you need it, remember that you only need one or two good permanent notes per day to make some serious progress.)

I've done something like this when I think a particular reference(s) can answer a question related to a train of thought. But I keep cards of unread sources at the front of my sources section so that it's easier to pull it out frequently to prioritize and decide what I should be reading or working on next. These will then have links to the open questions I've noted, so that I can go back to those sections either as I'm reading/writing or to add those ideas into the appropriate folgezettel. These sorts of small amounts of work documented briefly can add up quickly over time. Source cards with indications of multiple open questions that might be answered is sometimes a good measure of desire to read, though other factors can also be at play.

That to-read pile of bibliographic source notes (a mini antilibrary) is akin to walking into a party and surveying a room. I may be aware of some of the people I haven't met yet and the conversations we might have, but if there are interesting questions I know I want to ask of specific ones or conversations I already know I want to have, it can be more productive to visit those first.

This sort of practice has been particularly helpful for times when I want to double check someone's sources or an original context, but don't have the time to do it immediately, don't want to break another extended train of thought, have to wait on materials, or may have to make a trip to consult physical materials that are singular or rare. For quick consultative reading, this can be a boon when I know I don't want or need to read an entire work, but skimming a chapter or a few pages for a close reading of a particular passage. I'll often keep a pile of these sorts of sources at hand so that I can make a short trip to a library, pick them up, find what I need and move on without having to recreate large portions of context to get the thing done because I've already laid most of the groundwork.

reply https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/16622/#Comment_16622

Adler has an excellent primer on this subject that covers a lot of the basics in reasonable depth: - Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1940. (https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-courses/how-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf)

Marking books can be useful not only to the original reader, but future academics and historians studying material culture (eg: https://apps.lib.umich.edu/online-exhibits/exhibits/show/marks-in-books), and as @GeoEng51 indicates they might be shared by friends, family, romantic interests, or even perhaps all of the above (see: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2017/4/mrs-custers-tennyson).

For those interested in annotation marks and symbols (like @ctietze's "bolt" ↯) I outlined a few ideas this last month at: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10qw4l5/comment/j6vxn6a/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Mrs. Custer’s Tennyson April 2017<br /> by William Logan

reply to u/m_t_rv_s__n at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/112k929/how_long_do_you_spend_in_a_single_notetaking/

Quite often my sessions can be in small 5-10 minute blocks doing one or more individual tasks that compose reading, writing, or filing/linking things together. Usually I don't go over a couple of hours without at least a small break or two.

Like Luhmann “I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.” Incidentally by "easy" here, I think Luhmann also includes the ideas of fun, interesting, pleasurable, and (Csikszentmihalyi's) flow.

For my lowest level reading I'll only quickly log what I've read along with a few index terms and a short note or two, if at all. For deeper analytical reading (as defined by Adler & van Doren) those sessions are more intense and I aim to have a direct "conversation with the text". Notes made there can sometimes be 2 - 10 minutes in length. I can often average about 50 annotations in a given day of which maybe 2 or 3 will be longer, fileable zettels. Most of my notes start as digital public annotations which one can view at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich if they like. On the topic of notes per day, I have a collection for that, some of which is given as a synopsis with some caveats here: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten/#Notes%20per%20day%20comparison.

Pre-internet, pre-television, pre-telephone, and pre-radio, proliferation of cultural practices more closely resembled generational genetic adaptations than the viral spread we are used to witnessing with proliferation today. And because our practices are responses to the world around us, the changes in the world leads to changes in the practices. In the case of St. Patrick's Day, casual observation reveals that the meaning of the celebration has been a moving target for centuries, and that What we recognize, Why we recognize, and How we recognize have all been evolving and somewhat decentralized elements of cultural practice. (For example, recognition of discrimination endured by Irish-American immigrants figures prominently in today's practices even though the holiday was already hundreds of years old when the first of these people crossed the Atlantic.]

This idea is closely related to "talking rocks" and seems a very apt parallel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

Incremental reading is spaced parallel reading of multiple sources with note taking and spaced repetition.

It's not far from how I read and take notes myself, though I place less emphasis on the spaced repetition piece as I tend to run across things naturally within my note collection anyway.

One of the major potential benefits of incremental reading (not mentioned in the Wikipedia article; is it in Wozniak's work?) is the increase of combinatorial creativity created by mixing a variety of topics simultaneously.

There is also likely a useful diffuse thinking effect happening between reading sessions.

—u/IamOkei https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10qpphw/given_that_you_do_analog_notemaking_do_you/

link to John Water's quote: https://hypothes.is/a/E6wDpPfVEey88SclTBoJPQ

https://polygloss.app/posts/how-to-learn-languages-through-reading/

!- interpretation of citizenship : from perspective of common good - common good as the flourishing of the nexus of recognitional practices in a society.

!- comment : salience of citizenship and common good - it's important to educate the public on what it means to be a citizen from the perspective of our empowering role in creating the society we want to live in

https://debugger.medium.com/a-search-engine-that-finds-you-weird-old-books-3a74fbb5f3d4

Weird Old Book Finder: http://weird-old-book-finder.glitch.me/

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.

https://dice.camp/@brennenreece/109622279965144935

example of someone "processing" a book and doing so in the context of having read Ahrens

Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and surely other researchers must often "read against the grain" which historian Keith Thomas defines as reading a text, not so much for what the author was explicitly trying to directly communicate to the reader, but for the small tidbits that the author through the text "incidentally or unintentionally reveals."

https://english.elpais.com/culture/2022-11-15/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-medieval-sex-but-were-afraid-to-ask.html

https://readwriterespond.com/2022/11/commonplace-book-a-verb-or-a-noun/

Sometimes the root question is "what to I want to do this for?" Having an underlying reason can be hugely motivating.

Are you collecting examples of things for students? (seeing examples can be incredibly powerful, especially for defining spaces) for yourself? Are you using them for exploring a particular space? To clarify your thinking/thought process? To think more critically? To write an article, blog, or book? To make videos or other content?

Your own website is a version of many of these things in itself. You read, you collect, you write, you interlink ideas and expand on them. You're doing it much more naturally than you think.

I find that having an idea of the broader space, what various practices look like, and use cases for them provides me a lot more flexibility for what may work or not work for my particular use case. I can then pick and choose for what suits me best, knowing that I don't have to spend as much time and effort experimenting to invent a system from scratch but can evolve something pre-existing to suit my current needs best.

It's like learning to cook. There are thousands of methods (not even counting cuisine specific portions) for cooking a variety of meals. Knowing what these are and their outcomes can be incredibly helpful for creatively coming up with new meals. By analogy students are often only learning to heat water to boil an egg, but with some additional techniques they can bake complicated French pâtissier. Often if you know a handful of cooking methods you can go much further and farther using combinations of techniques and ingredients.

What I'm looking for in the reading, note taking, and creation space is a baseline version of Peter Hertzmann's 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot combined with Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. Generally cooking is seen as an overly complex and difficult topic, something that is emphasized on most aspirational cooking shows. But cooking schools break the material down into small pieces which makes the processes much easier and more broadly applicable. Once you've got these building blocks mastered, you can be much more creative with what you can create.

How can we combine these small building blocks of reading and note taking practices for students in the 4th - 8th grades so that they can begin to leverage them in high school and certainly by college? Is there a way to frame them within teaching rhetoric and critical thinking to improve not only learning outcomes, but to improve lifelong learning and thinking?

This reminds me of the purpose of reading at CAA. If you tell no one about it, then it wasn't worth the effort. What new did you learn and how did you pass that on to improve your friends, colleagues, and society?

also includes opening oneself up to open questions one might either ask themselves or those which the author proposes.

https://library.harvard.edu/collections/reading-harvard-views-readers-readership-and-reading-history

Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History<br /> Exploring the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard's libraries.

3/ Champion your competition’s work<br><br>With his reading list email, on podcasts, in his bookstore, Ryan promotes other books more than his own.<br><br>When asked, he’ll say:<br><br>“Authors think they’re competing with other authors. They’re not. They’re competing with people not reading.”

— Billy Oppenheimer (@bpoppenheimer) August 24, 2022

source?

Where is the origin of this reading analogy?

For her online book clubs, Maggie Delano defines four broad types of notes as a template for users to have a common language: - terms - propositions (arguments, claims) - questions - sources (references which support the above three types)

I'm fairly sure in a separate context, I've heard that these were broadly lifted from her reading of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a book. (reference? an early session of Dan Allosso's Obsidian Book club?)

These become the backbone of breaking down a book and using them to have a conversation with the author.

https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/help/read

via

Inspired by @cicatriz's Fractal Inquiry and SuperMemo's Incremental Reading, I imported into @RoamResearch a paper I was very impressed (but also overwhelmed) by a few years ago: The Knowledge‐Learning‐Instruction Framework by @koedinger et al. pic.twitter.com/oeJzyjPGbk

— Stian Håklev (@houshuang) December 16, 2020

Did this approach have a categorical name?

There are three goals of most reading: education, information, and understanding.

Are there others we're missing here?

Historically the vast majority of zettelkasten didn't have the sort of structure and design of Luhmann's, though with indexing they certainly create a network of notes and excerpts. These examples are just subsets or excerpts of someone's reading of these books and surely anyone else reading any book is going to have a unique set of notes on them. These sets were specifically honed and curated for a particular purpose.

The interesting pattern here is that someone is selling a subset of their work/notes as a set of cards rather than as a book. Doing this allows different sorts of reading and uses than a "traditional" book would.

I'm curious what other sort of experimental things people might come up with? The "novel" Cain's Jawbone, for example, could be considered a "Zettelkasten mystery" or "Zettelkasten puzzle". There's also the subset of cards from Roland Barthes' fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten), which was published posthumously as Mourning Diary.

In the attention economy, social media is the equivalent of fast food. Just like going out for fine dining or even healthier gourmet cooking at home, we need to make the time and effort to consume higher quality information sources. Books, journal articles, and longer forms of content with more editorial and review which take time and effort to produce are better choices.

Courtney, Jennifer Pooler. “A Review of Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts.” The Journal of Effective Teaching 7, no. 1 (2007): 74–77.

Review of: Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/9248.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060309154747/http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/PRODUCT/Product.asp?Params=Category=17-722|PageID=4035|Level=2-3