Los Angeles is often known for its bustling urban environment, but it also boasts an impressive array of hiking trails that offer breathtaking views, diverse ecosystems, and a chance to escape the city's hustle and bustle.

Hiking Trails in Sedona: Exploring the Red Rock WonderlandSedona, Arizona, is renowned for its stunning red rock formations, vibrant arts scene, and spiritual energy.

Your zettelkasten, having a perfect memory of your "past self" acts as a ratchet so that when you have a new conversation on a particular topic, your "present self" can quickly remember where you left off and not only advance the arguments but leave an associative trail for your "future self" to continue on again later.

Many thoughts and associations occur when you're having conversations with any text, whether it's with something you're reading by another author or your own notes in your zettelkasten or commonplace book. For more conversations on this topic, perhaps thumb through: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27conversations+with+the+text%27

If you view conversations broadly as means of finding and collecting information from external sources and naturally associating them together, perhaps you'll appreciate this quote:

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum (Secker & Warburg)

(Reply to u/u/Plastic-Lettuce-7150 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ae2qf4/communicating_with_a_zettelkasten/)

or as Vannevar Bush might have said, everyone will have their own idiosyncratic associative trails...

This underlies the ideas of songlines and oral mnemonic practices and is related to Vannevar Bush's "associative trails" in As We May Think.

Luhmann, Niklas. “ZK II Zettel 9/8b.” Niklas Luhmann-Archiv, undated. https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8b_V.

Tiago Forte makes a “Hemingway bridge” for his projects

• see zk on trails of interest

traces of your past thoughts feels closely related to Vannevar Bush's associative trails

!!!!

Henry David Thoreau from 1852

I quite like the wording of this sentence.

Just as a trail of pheromones serves the function of a shared external memory for an ant colony, annotations can create a set of associative trails which serve as an external memory for a broader human collective memory. Further songlines and other orality based memory methods form a shared, but individually stored internal collective memory for those who use and practice them.

Vestiges of this human practice can be seen in modern society with the use and spread of cultural memes. People are incredibly good at seeing and recognizing memes and what they communicate and spreading them because they've evolved to function this way since the dawn of humanity.

https://www.kevinmarks.com/memex.html

I got stuck over the weekend, so I totally missed Kevin Marks' memex demo at IndieWebCamp's Create Day, but it is an interesting little UI experiment.

I'll always maintain that Vannevar Bush really harmed the first few generations of web development by not mentioning the word commonplace book in his conceptualization. Marks heals some of this wound by explicitly tying the idea of memex to that of the zettelkasten however. John Borthwick even mentions the idea of "networked commonplace books". [I suspect a little birdie may have nudged this perspective as catnip to grab my attention—a ruse which is highly effective.]

Some of Kevin's conceptualization reminds me a bit of Jerry Michalski's use of The Brain which provides a specific visual branching of ideas based on the links and their positions on the page: the main idea in the center, parent ideas above it, sibling ideas to the right/left and child ideas below it. I don't think it's got the idea of incoming or outgoing links, but having a visual location on the page for incoming links (my own site has incoming ones at the bottom as comments or responses) can be valuable.

I'm also reminded a bit of Kartik Prabhu's experiments with marginalia and webmention on his website which plays around with these ideas as well as their visual placement on the page in different methods.

MIT MediaLab's Fold site (details) was also an interesting sort of UI experiment in this space.

It also seems a bit reminiscent of Kevin Mark's experiments with hovercards in the past as well, which might be an interesting way to do the outgoing links part.

Next up, I'd love to see larger branching visualizations of these sorts of things across multiple sites... Who will show us those "associative trails"?

Another potential framing for what we're all really doing is building digital versions of Indigenous Australian's songlines across the web. Perhaps this may help realize Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's dream for a "third archive"?

A nod to Vannevar Bush's phrase "associative trails" or a throwback to the much older cultural ideas of memory and orality in the vein of songlines?

link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/bMy1FBM8Ee2K_nOEDpfB_A

The studies quoted here are in the mid 80s and early 90s before the rise of better and easier UI methods or more powerful search. I'd have to call this conclusion into question.

There's also a big difference in what people know, what people prefer, and what knowledgeable people can do most quickly.

Cross reference this with Dan Russell's research at Google that indicates that very few people know how to use ctrl-f to find or search for things in documents. - https://hyp.is/7a532uxjEeyYfTOctQHvTw/www.youtube.com/channel/UCh6KFtW4a4Ozr81GI1cxaBQ

Relate it to the idea of associative (memory) trails (Memex), songlines, and method of loci in remembering where things are -- our brains are designed to navigate using memory

imitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

Some may categorize handbooks on note taking within the productivity space as "self-help" or "self-improvement", but still view it as something that happens outside of ones' self. Doesn't improving one's environment as a means of improving things for oneself count as self-improvement?

Marie Kondo's minimalism techniques are all external to the body, but are wholly geared towards creating internal happiness.

Because your external circumstances are important to your internal mental state, external environment and decoration can be considered self-improvement.

Could note taking be considered exbodied cognition? Vannevar Bush framed the Memex as a means of showing associative trails. (Let's be honest, As We May Think used the word trail far too much.)

How does this relate to orality vs. literacy?

Orality requires the immediate mental work for storage while literacy removes some of the work by making the effort external and potentially giving it additional longevity.

While multiple readings of a text in antiquity may have been rarer, due to the cheap proliferation of books, one can more easily "blaze a trail" through their reading to make it easier or quicker to rebuild context on subsequent readings.

Look at history of reading to see which books would have been more likely re-read, particularly outside of one's primary "area" of expertise.

Link to the trails mentioned by Vannevar Bush in As We May Think.

the idea of an "[[associative trail]]" here brings to mind both the ars memorativa and the method of loci as well as--even more specifically--the idea of songlines.

Bush's version is the same thing simply renamed.

<small><cite class='h-cite ht'>↬ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jeremy Dean</span> in Via: ‘What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text’ - The New York Times (<time class='dt-published'>06/09/2021 14:50:00</time>)</cite></small>

What Bush called "associative indexing" is the key idea behind the memex. Any item can immediately select others to which it has been previously linked.

Although Bush envisioned associative trails to be navigable sequences of original content and notes interspersed, what seems to make more sense when viewed through today's technology, is a rich document of notes where the relevant pieces from external documents are transcluded.

It should be easy to surpass the mind's performance in terms of storage capacity as well as lossiness. It might be more difficult to surpass it in terms of the speed and flexibility with which it "follows an associative trail"

Industry blazed a trail, rather physically, across the North. Big oil companies came in, ran tests, drilled wherever they pleased, and left scars on the fragile landscape. Before they could drill though, they had to find out where the oil was and to do so, seismic crews would do a survey of the area using what is called the single line method. “This method required the use of several tracked vehicles in a caravan, setting off blasts and collecting the data from them, and gashing vast stretches of the Arctic landscape” (114). These trails are what Berger is referring to and they are very much still visible today, decades after being created. The seismic testing left an impact on the physical substrate and the vegetation growing on it. The trails “are physical legacies of the ways multinational oil companies, governmental policies, and geological science combined to enroll Arctic nature into global energy economies. To those who know their full history, though, they are also a reminder of how ecological disturbance became a focal point for scientific and Inuit activism in the 1960s and 1970s” (115). As Berger goes on to say, the land itself could be, and was, taken from the native people and they are reminded every day of that when they see these trails.

Annotation drawn from Stuhl, Andrew. Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. For aerial images and more information on seismic trails visit: https://www.fws.gov/refuge/arctic/seismic.html