43 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
  2. May 2023
    1. Map of Content Vizualized (VMOC)

      a start of thinking on the space of converging written and visual thinking, but not as advanced as even Raymond Llull or indigenous ways of knowing which more naturally merge these modes of thinking.

      Western though is just missing so much... sigh

  3. Nov 2022
    1. The novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler said he avoided reading books written by someone who didn’t “take the pains” to write out the words. (It used to be common for writers to dictate into a recorder then have an assistant transcribe those words.) “You have to have that mechanical resistance,” Chandler wrote in a 1949 letter to actor/writer Alex Barris. “When you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.”
  4. Aug 2022
  5. Jun 2022
    1. Marshall’s method for connecting which he calls Triangle Thinking (26:41)

      Marshall Kirkpatrick describes a method of taking three ostensibly random ideas and attempting to view each from the others' perspectives as a way to create new ideas by linking them together.

      This method is quite similar to that of Raymond Llull as described in Frances Yate's The Art of Memory (UChicago Press, 1966), though there Llull was memorizing and combinatorially permuting 20 or more ideas at a time. It's also quite similar to the sort of meditative practice found in the lectio divina, though there ideas are generally limited to religious ones for contemplation.

      https://content.blubrry.com/thrivingonoverload/THRIVING_013_Marshall_Kirkpatrick.mp3#t=1559,1745

      Other examples: - https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=%22combinatorial+creativity%22 - https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=%22Llullan%20combinatorial%20arts%22

  6. May 2022
    1. People in the Renaissance broke texts into fragments and used these to assemble and connect. It was, perhaps, the original remix culture and ultimate foundation of creativity.

      I'm wondering if I'm going to see signs of Raymond Lull's ideas here?

    1. Finally, and as fundamentally as there is a numerical memory and a dia-lectical memory, there is a geometry of memory too. Almost every monas-tic mnemotechnical scheme—ladders, roses, buildings, maps—was based ongeometrical figures: squares, rectangles, triangles, circles, and complex refor-mations of these, including three-dimensional structures

      She doesn't mention it, but they're not only placing things in order for potential memory purposes, but they're also placing an order on their world as well.

      Ladders and steps were frequently used to create an order of beings as in the scala naturae or the Great Chain of Being.

      Some of this is also seen in Ramon Lull's Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Mind, 1305 (Ars Magna)

    1. the Llullian combinatory was not really different: by rotating and re-rotating wheels, the user always got the same combinations. One who had mastered this complicated mechanism would have nothing new to learn, despite the astonishing number of possible combinations. This machine was designed to

      repeat the known rather than to explore the unknown; therefore, it functioned as an engine of redundancy rather than as an engine of variety. 53

      1. This distinction is drawn from Blair, Too Much to Know, 236, who uses it with respect to early modern reference books.

      I'm not sure that I agree with this as the number of combinations can quickly become incredibly large.

    2. n modern terms, we could say that the Llullian art had been designed to function as a type of search engine. As Llull himself admitted at the beginning of his Ars brevis, the purpose of the mechanism was to provide the user with the opportunity to have a prompt answer to any question, provided that the user knew the meaning of the word used for the query.51 This definition could describe Google as well.

      I've long been contemplating the modern-day equivalents of the Llullian combinatorial arts and the relationship to Google's search engine is an interesting one.

      I've always said that knowing the name of the thing you're searching for (especially in technical settings) will aid you immeasurably in finding it. For example, if you're searching for content management systems and don't know that as their name or even the name of an example, you're unlikely to be very successful.

    3. . 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?

    4. In §§ 4–5, I examine the socio-evolutionary circumstances under which a closed combinatory, such as the one triggered by the Llullian art, was replaced by an open-ended combinatory, such as the one triggered by a card index based on removable entries. In early modernity, improvement in abstraction compelled scholars to abandon the idea that the order of knowledge should mirror the order of nature. This development also implied giving up the use of space as a type of externalization and as the main rule for checking consis-tency.

      F*ck! I've been scooped!

      Apparently I'm not the only one who has noticed this, though I notice that he doesn't cite Frances A. Yates, which would have certainly been the place for having come up with this historical background (at least that's where I found it.)


      The Llullian arts can be more easily practiced with ideas placed on moveable index cards than they might be with ideas stored in one's own memory. Thus the index card as a tool significantly decreases the overhead and provides an easier user interface for permuting one's ideas and combining them. This decrease in mental work appearing at a time of information overload also puts specific pressure on the older use of the art of memory to put it out of fashion.

    1. I suspect that rather than being totally dreary, this transcribing step can also be a creative step, and I will see patterns of thought, generate new ideas…

      On the value of revising and revisiting notes. Similar to Raymond Llull's combinatorial creativity, but in a different form which doesn't require memory the same way.

    1. The aim of these books wasn’t regurgitation but rather combinatorial creativity. People were encouraged to improvise on themes and topics. Gathering raw material alone — in this case, information — is not enough. We must transform it into something new. It is in this light that Seneca advised copying the bee and Einstein advised combinatorial play.

      I was really hoping for so much more in this essay on the combinatorial creativity, espcially since the author threw the idea into the title. The real meat must be in the two linked articles about Seneca and Einstein.

      There is a slight mention of combinatorics in the justaposition of pieces within one's commonplace book, and a mention that these books may date back to the 12th century where they were probably more influenced by the combinatoric creativity of Raymond Lull. It's still an open question for me just how far back the idea of commonplaces goes as well as how far back Lull's combinatoric pieces go...

    1. Experienced practitioners [...] don't have to plod step by step through such a listing of concepts and questions. When they encounter a set of ideas or engage in debate, they can speed through the familiar relationships and spot at a glance the concepts that haven't been taken into account and the questions that haven't been asked. When they work out their own arguments or ideas, they can look at each point from a galaxy of different perspectives that might never come to mind without the help of the combinatorial system and the mental training it provides. Like the Lullian adepts of the Renaissance, they supplemented the natural capacities of their minds with the systematic practices of the combinatorial art. This, in turn, the art of memory seeks to do with the natural capacities of the human memory.  De Umbris Idearum, 'Working Bruno's Magic', p. 164
    1. 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.

    1. You need to put in the effort to create a note only once,and then you can just mix and match and try out differentcombinations until something clicks

      the echoes of Raymundus Llull here, but without any reference... le sigh

    2. If you’ve ever played the word-tile game Scrabble, you know thebest way to come up with new words is to mix up the letters indifferent combinations until a word jumps out at you

      Strategies for playing Scrabble are similar to those of Raymond Llull's combinatorial arts.

      I've done this with other games as well...

    1. The last element in his file system was an index, from which hewould refer to one or two notes that would serve as a kind of entrypoint into a line of thought or topic.

      Indices are certainly an old construct. One of the oldest structured examples in the note taking space is that of John Locke who detailed it in Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as A New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706).

      Previously commonplace books had been structured with headwords done alphabetically. This meant starting with a preconceived structure and leaving blank or empty space ahead of time without prior knowledge of what would fill it or how long that might take. By turning that system on its head, one could fill a notebook from front to back with a specific index of the headwords at the end. Then one didn't need to do the same amount of pre-planning or gymnastics over time with respect to where to put their notes.

      This idea combined with that of Konrad Gessner's design for being able to re-arrange slips of paper (which later became index cards based on an idea by Carl Linnaeus), gives us an awful lot of freedom and flexibility in almost any note taking system.


      Building blocks of the note taking system

      • atomic ideas
      • written on (re-arrangeable) slips, cards, or hypertext spaces
      • cross linked with each other
      • cross linked with an index
      • cross linked with references

      are there others? should they be broken up differently?


      Godfathers of Notetaking

      • Aristotle, Cicero (commonplaces)
      • Seneca the Younger (collecting and reusing)
      • Raymond Llull (combinatorial rearrangements)
      • Konrad Gessner (storage for re-arrangeable slips)
      • John Locke (indices)
      • Carl Linnaeus (index cards)
    1. This art of method was understood by Ramus and Ramists as its own efficacious art of memory. InScholae in liberales artes, Ramus is explicit about his disdain for the visual mnemonic rules suggested byclassical sources.“The art of memory,”he counters,“consists entirely in division and composition. If weseek then an art which will divide and compose things, we shall find the art of memory”(qtd. in Yates 233).Ramus thus enfolds the fourth canon into his methodical framework, linking memorization of content withits“division and composition,”that is, with its organization.

      Arrangement and organization definitely have their place and can be helpful. However they may also tend to become too rigid to the point that one's thinking begins to lack creativity and invention. Where is the space for the Llullist arts of combinatorial thought here?

    1. Moving beyond its role merely as a storehouse, generative aspects of the memory arts were highlighted by scholars like Raymond Llull. He designed mnemonic charts for considering all angles of an issue so as to arrive at otherwise unthought-of possibilities [Kircher, 1669]. This medieval system, consisting of diagrams and accompanying letters for easier exposition, was revived by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher [FIGURES 5 and 6].

      Raymond Llull's combinatoric art of memory was revived by Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher.

      want to read:

      Kircher, Athanasius, Artis Magnae Sciendi (Amsterdam, 1669).

    2. Active reading to the extreme!

      What a clever innovation building on the ideas of the art of memory and Raymond Llull's combinatoric arts!

      Does this hit all of the areas of Bloom's Taxonomy? I suspect that it does.

      How could it be tied more directly into an active reading, annotating, and note taking practice?

    1. In the case ofLévi-Strauss, meanwhile, the card index continued to serve inimportant ways as a ‘memory crutch’, albeit with a key differencefrom previous uses of the index as an aide-memoire. In Lévi-Strauss’case, what the fallibility of memory takes away, the card index givesback via the workings of chance. As he explains in an interview withDidier Erebon:I get by when I work by accumulating notes – a bitabout everything, ideas captured on the fly,summaries of what I have read, references,quotations... And when I want to start a project, Ipull a packet of notes out of their pigeonhole anddeal them out like a deck of cards. This kind ofoperation, where chance plays a role, helps merevive my failing memory. (Cited in Krapp, 2006:361)For Krapp, the crucial point here is that, through his use of indexcards, Lévi-Strauss ‘seems to allow that the notes may either restorememory – or else restore the possibilities of contingency which givesthinking a chance under the conditions of modernity’ (2006: 361).

      Claude Lévi-Strauss had a note taking practice in which he accumulated notes of ideas on the fly, summaries of what he read, references, and quotations. He kept them on cards which he would keep in a pigeonhole. When planning a project, he would pull them out and use them to "revive [his] failing memory."


      Questions: - Did his system have any internal linkages? - How big was his system? (Manageable, unmanageable?) - Was it only used for memory, or was it also used for creativity? - Did the combinatorial reshufflings of his cards provide inspiration a la the Llullan arts?


      Link this to the ideas of Raymond Llull's combinatorial arts.

    1. For the combinatorial logics used to make book catalogues at this time, see Garberson, ‘Libraries, Memory and theSpace of Knowledge’. See also Chapter 8, ‘The Library Catalogue’, in W. Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins ofthe Research University (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

      What influence, if any, would the ideas of Raymond Llull have had here?

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    Annotators

    1. In explaining his approach, Luhmann emphasized, with the first stepsof computer technology in mind, the benefits of the principle of “multiple storage”: in the card index itserves to provide different avenues of accessing a topic or concept since the respective notes may be filedin different places and different contexts. Conversely, embedding a topic in various contexts gives rise todifferent lines of information by means of opening up different realms of comparison in each case due tothe fact that a note is an information only in a web of other notes. Furthermore it was Luhmann’s intentionto “avoid premature systematization and closure and maintain openness toward the future.”11 His way oforganizing the collection allows for it to continuously adapt to the evolution of his thinking and his overalltheory which as well is not conceptualized in a hierarchical manner but rather in a cybernetical way inwhich every term or theoretical concept is dependent on the other.

      While he's couching it in the computer science milieu of his day, this is not dissimilar to the Llullan combinatorial arts.

  7. Apr 2022
    1. it starts with 00:32:31 this one kind of thing called single finger and these are all just variations or practice styles [Music] 00:32:45 and then octave double stop skills [Music] and you know just down the list but you know these things are all developed 00:32:59 through the practice the daily practice but then once once they've been developed then i can just plug them into songs and and create so that's just i'm really excited about this form like the fiddle wrong is because

      Jason Kleinberg takes basic tunes and then has a list of variations of practice styles which he runs through with each one (eg. single-finger, octave double stops scale, old-time, polkafy, blues, etc.) and he plays those tunes in these modified styles not only to practice, but to take these "musical conversations" and translate them into his own words. This is a clever way of generating new music and potentially even new styles by mixing those which have come before. To a great sense, he's having a musical conversation with prior composers and musicians in the same way that an annotator will have a conversation in the margins with an author. It's also an example of the sort of combinatorial creativity suggested by Raymond Llull's work.

    1. As for Duchamp, his early interest in Roussel was probably revived by the stunningdisclosure that most of his narratives, and among them the cult novel Impressionsd’Afrique (1910), had been generated from puns reminiscent of LHOOQ.

      L.H.O.O.Q. is a Marcel Duchamp readymade artwork conceived in 1919. The work consists of a cheap postcard reproduction of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa (the found object or objet trouvé), "improved" by Duchamp with the addition of a penciled in moustache and a goatee with the title drawn in large capital letters underneath.

      L.H.O.O.Q. is a pun whose letters pronounced one at a time in French sound like "Elle a chaud au cul". This translates variously as "She is hot in the arse" or "She has a hot ass". "Avoir chaud au cul" is a vulgar expression implying that a woman has sexual restlessness. Duchamp, in an interview, gave a loose translation of L.H.O.O.Q. as "there is fire down below". (Schwarz 203)


      link: https://hyp.is/GPVO4sA6EeyYiZdqyfGJSA/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.H.O.O.Q.

  8. Mar 2022
    1. Raymond Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems, a collection of 10 14-line sonnets with each page cut into 14 strips to allow readers to arrange them into a astonishing number of variations; Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood, a novel composed entirely of questions; and Geoff Ryman’s 253, which was originally published on the web in the form of a collection of hypertext links.
  9. Jan 2022
  10. Dec 2021
    1. The slip box provides combinatorial possibilities which were never planned, never preconceived, or conceived in this way.

      This is a reframing of some of Raymond Llull's work into the zettelkasten context.

  11. Sep 2021
    1. Offloading can be far more complex, however, and doesn’t necessarily involve language. For example, “when we use our hands to move objects around, we offload the task of visualizing new configurations onto the world itself, where those configurations take tangible shape before our eyes” (243-244).

      This is one of the key benefits over the use of index cards in moving toward a zettelkasten from the traditional commonplace book tradition. Rearranging one's ideas in a separate space.

      Raymond Llull attempted to do this within his memory in the 12th century, but there are easier ways of doing this now.

    1. https://piperhaywood.com/lullabies/

      Some great lullabies listed here. A few I'm definitely not a fan of, but with other versions, perhaps they've improved?

      In some alternate universe someone is using the word lullabies to describe the work of Raymond Llull...

  12. Jul 2021
    1. Feature Idea: Chaos Monkey for PKM

      This idea is a bit on the extreme side, but it does suggest that having a multi-card comparison view in a PKM system would be useful.

      Drawing on Raymond Llull's combitorial memory system from the 12th century and a bit of Herman Ebbinghaus' spaced repetition (though this is also seen in earlier non-literate cultures), one could present two (or more) random atomic notes together as a way of juxtaposing disparate ideas from one's notes.

      The spaced repetition of the cards would be helpful for one's long term memory of the ideas, but it could also have the secondary effect of nudging one to potentially find links or connections between the two ideas and help to spur creativity for the generation of new hybrid ideas or connection to other current ideas based on a person's changed context.

      I've thought about this in the past (most likely while reading Frances Yates' Art of Memory), but don't think I've bothered to write it down (or it's hiding in untranscribed marginalia).

  13. May 2021
  14. gordonbrander.com gordonbrander.com
    1. There are rumors Pascal wrote the Pensées on notecards, and pinned these cards to a wall, connecting related thoughts with yarn. An early example of hypertext?

      This certainly fits into the broad general ideas surrounding note taking, commonplace books, and zettelkasten as tools for thought. People generally seemed to have used relatively similar methods but shoehorned them into the available tools they had at the time.

      This also, incidentally isn't too far off from how indigenous peoples the world over have used memory techniques (memory palaces, songlines, etc.) to hold together and pollinate their own thinking.

      Raymond Llull took things a step further with his combinatoric methods, though I've yet to see anyone attempting that in the area of digital gardens.

  15. Feb 2021
    1. What you see on this page is, in a very real sense, textual play: the recombining of words into new forms and associations that their original creators never dreamed of.

      What if we add in a dose of Llull's combinatorial thought to the idea of a search engine? What if the search engine can remember the top 50 categories in my personal commonplace book and show overlapping searches of those terms? What if it's even more combinatorial and randomly chooses overlaps from any words in my commonplace? Is that more or less valuable as an idea generator?

      Is it more fruitful to randomly work on various entries every day in an effort to tie them into our other thoughts?

    2. But all of this magic was predicated on one thing: that the words could be copied, re-arranged, put to surprising new uses in surprising new contexts. By stitching together passages written by multiple authors, without their explicit permission or consultation, some new awareness could take shape.

      Remixing content can be an important tool. Is there a direct relation to the ideas of Raymond Llull hidden between here and there?

    1. According to the historian Robert Darnton, this led to a very particular structuring of knowledge: commonplace users "broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebook." It was a mixture of fragmented order and disorder that anticipated a particular form of scientific investigation and organisation of information.

      Might be an interesting source to read.

      Also feels in form a bit like the combinatorial method of Raymond Llull, but without as much mixing.

  16. Apr 2018
    1. n fact, some women preferred a Whitetherapist, feeling that would ensure that their private sufferingwould remain private in their closely-knit West Indiancommunity, and would provide an “outside” perspective

      This preferance for white women therapists in this exact respect can actually be harmdul. because a white woman is not truly what she needs to talk to. also sarah has been looking for solace in a white people, she doesn't need an outside perspective, what she needs is someone who actually understands her.

      this reaching for white people is what caused her confusion in the first place. Her desire for whiteness while being black- or rather her refusal to ackowledge the power/strength/beauty of her blackness is what kills her.

      At once she states that she bludgeoned her father with a black mask/head. this is a metaphor that she was so hurt that her father chose the white life that she'd rather have him die as a black beast than to see him live as black man married to a white woman. so she killed him in an ugly portrayal of blackness- to justify her desire to be affiliated with white people. She doesn't want to claim her father or ackowledge her hypocrisy.

      In fact, we can read her boyfriend as her therapist. he's white, jewish, and seems to find amusement in her lies, hatred, and body. this amusement of problems is because he's so far detached from the situation he can't provide any empathy and understanding to her actions and much less read into her obvious cries for help.

      read more into the need for black ppl to see black therapists*

    2. when socializing with friends, the womenavoided discussing their problems

      when talking to raymond sarah started the conversation with her problems. he was p much the only person she talked to. "quote from book"***

  17. Mar 2017
    1. Raymond Yakaleya, speaking at Norman Wells:

      On the north side of the Mackenzie Rivers in the Northwest territories of Canada, lies Norman Wells. There is a northern research station at Norman Wells. Next to the research station lies Imperial Oils, oil production facility. Raymond Yakeleya is a film director who has taken the stories of families who were forced out of their homes by Imperial Oils. Raymond Yakeleya spoke at Norman Wells on August 9th, 19575. Raymond Yakeleya was speaking on behalf of his people, the Dene people, and their opinions regarding the proposed pipeline. On this day, he expressed, how after all of the words said against the pipeline at this conference, what he is really hoping for is that the government will start to trust his people. The goal is to work as equals, to work without creating further division and separation between the people. For his people they don’t want to feel as outcasts and they don’t want to feel ashamed of who they are. They don’t want to have outsiders decide their futures anymore, they want to be able to decide their own futures, they know more about their land and should be treated as equals and not as less. He expresses that the Indian people are not fighting the white people for money but instead are fighting for their lives. The Dene people do not care about the money the pipeline will make but instead they want to know what benefit it will have for their people. They believe the pipeline will be harmful to the environment and they don’t want the pipeline to be forced upon them.

      Proceedings at Community Hearing. Proceedings of Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, Norman Wells, NWT. Vol. 21. Burnaby, BC: Allwest Reporting Ltd, 2003. 1-148. Accessed March 5, 2017. http://www.pwnhc.ca/extras/berger/report/NT%20Norman%20Wells%20Berger%20V21.pdf.

  18. Apr 2016
    1. one of the annotations is simply a link to a Google search for a phrase that’s been used.

      Glad this was mentioned. To the Eric Raymonds of this world, such a response sounds “perfectly legitimate”. But it’s precisely what can differentiate communities and make one more welcoming than the other. Case in point: Arduino-related forums, in contrast with the Raspberry Pi community. Was looking for information about building a device to track knee movement. Noticed that “goniometer” was the technical term for that kind of device, measuring an angle (say, in physiotherapy). Ended up on this page, where someone had asked a legitimate question about Arduino and goniometers. First, the question:

      Trying to make a goniometer using imu (gy-85). Hoe do I aquire data from the imu using the arduino? How do I code the data acquisition? Are there any tutorials avaible online? Thanks =)

      Maybe it wouldn’t pass the Raymond test for “smart questions”, but it’s easy to understand and a straight answer could help others (e.g., me).

      Now, the answer:

      For me, google found 87,000,000 hits for gy-85. I wonder why it failed for you.

      Wow. Just, wow.

      Then, on the key part of the question (the goniometer):

      No idea what that is or why I should have to google it for you.

      While this one aborted Q&A is enough to put somebody off Arduino forever, it’s just an example among many. Like Stack Overflow, Quora, and geek hideouts, Arduino-related forums are filled with these kinds of snarky comments about #LMGTFY.

      Contrast this with the Raspberry Pi. Liz Upton said it best in a recent interview (ca. 25:30):

      People find it difficult to remember that sometimes when somebody comes along… and appears to be “not thinking very hard”, it could well be because they’re ten years old.

      And we understand (from the context and such) that it’s about appearance (not about “not thinking clearly”). It’s also not really about age.

      So, imagine this scenario. You’re teacher a class, seminar, workshop… Someone asks a question about using data from a device to make it into a goniometer. What’s the most appropriate strategy? Sure, you might ask the person to look for some of that information online. But there are ways to do so which are much more effective than the offputting ’tude behind #LMGTFY. Assuming they do search for that kind of information, you might want to help them dig through the massive results to find something usable, which is a remarkably difficult task which is misunderstood by someone who answer questions about goniometers without knowing the least thing about them.

      The situation also applies to the notion that a question which has already been asked isn’t a legitimate question. A teacher adopting this notion would probably have a very difficult time teaching anyone who’s not in extremely narrow a field. (Those teachers do exist, but they complain bitterly about their job.)

      Further, the same logic applies to the pedantry of correcting others. Despite the fact that English-speakers’ language ideology allows for a lot of non-normative speech, the kind of online #WordRage which leads to the creation of “language police” bots is more than a mere annoyance. Notice the name of this Twitter account (and the profile of the account which “liked” this tweet).

      Lots of insight from @BiellaColeman on people who do things “for the lulz”. Her work is becoming increasingly relevant to thoughtful dialogue on annotations.