Broadly the zettelkasten tradition grew out of commonplacing in the 1500s, in part, because it was easier to arrange and re-arrange one's thoughts on cards for potential reuse in outlining and writing. Most zettelkasten are just index card-based forms of commonplaces, though some following Niklas Luhmann's model have a higher level of internal links, connections, and structure.

I wrote a bit about some of these traditions (especially online ones) a while back at: https://boffosocko.com/2021/07/03/differentiating-online-variations-of-the-commonplace-book-digital-gardens-wikis-zettlekasten-waste-books-florilegia-and-second-brains/

Goutor mentions that the innovation of photocopying, while potentially useful in some cases, isn't a replacement for actual reading and proper note taking. (p30) These same sorts of affordances and problems might be similar in the newer digital/online realm for people who rely on either whole scale copy/pasting or highlight capturing of texts, but who don't do the actual work of reading, processing, and creating good notes.

Some of the benefits like portability, ease of access, ability to work with delicate primary materials, better facsimiles of things like maps or tables, etc. are still true.

As is common in the tradition of the zettelkasten, Goutor advises "that each note-card should contain only one item of information, whether a quotation, a summary, or anything else". (p28) He ascribes this requirement to his earlier need for clarity. (cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/SfWFwENIEe2KfGMbR5n7Qg)

He indicates that while it may seem wasteful to have only one item on each card that the savings in time, efficiency in handling, classification, and retrieval will more than compensate for the small waste.

This sort of small local waste being compensated for by a larger global savings and efficiency can be seen in the design of the shipping container industry as discussed in Mark Levinson's The Box (Princeton University Press, 2008). Was this the exact sort of efficiency mentioned by Ahrens'? (Compare at https://hypothes.is/a/t4i32IXoEeyF2n9jQxu6BA)

Jacques Goutor defines content notes as those that "are drawn in one way or another from the actual contents of the sources." He considers them the most important part of note taking as "they will eventually constitute the pieces of the mosaic." (p20)

He further breaks this type down into generally self-explanatory "quote notes" and "summary notes". (p20) He does advise that one writes out careful summaries so that one needn't do additional future work of writing notes on one's own notes. While he doesn't state it directly, the presumption in his presentation is that a well written summary can be directly used in one's future written project.

Compare this type of note to others like evergreen or permanent notes.

Surely by "files" he means his written notes and ideas which he has filed away?

Thus articles and books are agglomerations of ideas within notes (or perhaps one's retained memory, as best as that might be done) which are then broken off from them and released to a wider readership.

It would seem that most of the large swaths of rural poverty in America are those with historical roots of slavery, colonization, and exploitation. These include: the Deep South and Mississippi Delta region where slavery, share cropping, and cotton plantations abounded; Appalachia (esp. West Virginia and Kentucky) where the coal mining industry disappeared; Texas-Mexico border where the Latinx populations have long been exploited; the Southwest and Northern Plains (including Alaska) with Native Americans who live on reservations after having been exploited, dealt with broken treaties and general decimation of their people and communities; central corridor of California with high numbers of exploited immigrant farm laborers.

we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.16

1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 9.

I love this quote and it's interesting food for thought.

Framing problems from the perspectives of a single individual versus a majority of people can be a powerful tool.

The idea of the "welfare queen" was possibly too powerful because it singled out an imaginary individual rather than focusing on millions of people with a variety of backgrounds and diversity. Compare this with the fundraisers for impoverished children in Sally Stuther's Christian Children's Fund (aka ChildFund) which, while they show thousands of people in trouble, quite often focus on one individual child. This helps to personalize the plea and the charity actually assigned each donor a particular child they were helping out.

How might this set up be used in reverse to change the perspective and opinions of those who think the "welfare queen" is a real thing instead of a problematic trope?

An explicit reference in 1931 in a section on note taking to cross links between entries in accounting ledgers. This linking process is a a precursor to larger database processes seen in digital computing.

Were there other earlier references that are this explicit within either note making or accounting contexts? Surely... (See also: Beatrice Webb's scientific note taking)

Just the word "digital" computing defines that there must have been an "analog' computing which preceded it. However we think of digital computing in much broader terms than we may have of the analog process.

Human thinking is heavily influenced by associative links, so it's only natural that we should want to link our notes together on paper as we've done for tens of thousands of years (at least.)

https://web.archive.org/web/20120122115952/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/10/13/one-pocket-rule/

Noguchi Yukio had a "one pocket rule" which they first described in “「超」整理法 (cho seiri ho)”. The broad idea was to store everything in one place as a means of saving time by not needing to search in multiple repositories for the thing you were hunting for. Despite this advice the Noguchi Filing System didn't take complete advantage of this as one would likely have both a "home" and an "office" system, thus creating two pockets, a problem that exists in an analog world, but which can be mitigated in a digital one.

The one pocket rule can be seen in the IndieWeb principles of owning all your own data on your own website and syndicating out from there. Your single website has the entire store of all your material which makes search much easier. You don't need to recall which platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al.) you posted something on, you can save time and find the thing much more quickly by searching one place.

This principle also applies to zettelkasten and commonplace books (well indexed), which allow you to find the data or information you put into them quickly and easily.

reassurance of lack of possibility for run-time shenanigans

Here's some justification for the prior statement on equity, but it comes after instead of before. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/SHEFJjM6Ee2Gru-y0d_1lg)

While there is some foundation to the claim given, it would need more support. The sage on the stage may be becoming outmoded with other potential models, but removing it altogether does remove some pieces which may help to support neurodiverse learners who work better via oral transmission rather than using literate modes (eg. dyslexia).

Who is to say that it's "just" sage on the stage lecturing and regurgitation? Why couldn't these same analytical practices be aimed at lectures, interviews, or other oral modes of presentation which will occur during thesis research? (Think anthropology and sociology research which may have much more significant oral aspects.)

Certainly some of these methods can create new levels of agency on the part of the learner/researcher. Has anyone designed experiments to measure this sort of agency growth?

What results do Brown et al show exactly? How do they dovetail with the citations and material in Ahrens2017 on these topics?

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=3301452

Ahrens, doesn't provide a full citation of Brown, but does quote it for the same broad purpose (see: https://hypothes.is/a/8ewTno3pEeydaHscXVaIzw) specifically with respect to the idea that highlighting doesn't help in the learning process, yet students still actively do it.

A zettelkasten may require more duplication of effort than a notebook based system in terms of copying.

It's likely that the attempt to be lazy about copying was what encouraged Luhmann to use his particular system the way he did.

A zettelkasten or slip box approach was commonplace, at least by historians, (excuse the pun) by 1898.

Given the context as mentioned in the opening that this books is for a broader public audience, the idea that this sort of method extends beyond just historians and even the humanities is very likely.

https://www.kpcc.org/show/airtalk/2022-08-31/californias-legislative-session-ends-tonight-what-bills-are-on-the-chopping-block-as-time-winds-down

Audio: https://traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/acc8cc57-ff7c-44c5-9bd6-ab0900fbdc43/39d4b39e-aa2d-40b1-bc07-ab2201235e43/fc58c5dd-b403-4747-a66c-af02013eab18/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=f9e7dcf5-d162-4723-b710-ab2201235e4c

Want to relisten to this. Caught the very end on interventions and it sounded very much like teaching "orality" rather than teaching literacy.

Perhaps teaching orality first helps to frame literacy? even acknowledging it could help certainly...

Cross reference LAist series: https://laist.com/news/education/dyslexia-california-teacher-preparation-training-structured-literacy

In general w small things the presumption is that they're stand alone. Small things can have meaningfull settings around them, which make a small things contribute to compounding impact. [[Compound interest van implementatie en adoptie 20210216134309]] waar exponentieel effect in emergentie besloten ligt.

We have that. It's the Web platform. The hard part is getting people to admit this, and then getting them to actually stop acting counter to these interests. Sometimes that involves getting them to admit that their preferred software stack (and their devotion to it) is the problem, and it's not going to just fix itself.

See also: Lorie and the UVC

What scholar is being referenced here as using larger slips and suggesting others do likewise?

https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/710585052769157141/990296615053049926

rose colored glasses...

Definitely a paragraph aimed at the student in the manner of a syllabus, but also an interesting tidbit on the potential evolution of writing forms over time.

How does language over time change with respect to the types and styles of writing forms, particularly when they're prescribed or generally standardized over time? How do these same standards evolve over time and change things at the level of the larger pictures?

of course this also depends on the overall quality of the work and not just the length...

Example: ant pheromone paths

Within ants, there can be a path left for others to follow, but what about natural paths in our environment that influence us to take them because of the idea of the "path of least resistence" or the effects of having paved cow paths.

Similarly being lead by "the company that you keep".

relathionship to research on hanging out with fat people tending to make one fatter.

Feels like there's more here if we delve a bit deeper...

affordance of location on a page in analog pen/paper versus digital line by line in note taking

I did sort of like the idea of creating information anywhere on the page within OneNote, but it didn't make things easy to draw or link pieces on the same page in interesting ways (or at least I don't remember that as a thing.)

Direct source?

This could be interesting with respect to what it says to me about seeing things within one's mind's eye with respect to orality.

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

https://vimeo.com/729407073

MakingKnowledge: Scott Scheper from Dan Allosso on Vimeo.

Various names Luhmann gives to the effects seen in his slip box: - ghost in the box - second mind - alter ego - communication partner

These are tangential ideas and words which lead up to the serendipity of combinatorial creativity, but aren't quite there.

The work of writing things down or transforming them into pictures, diagrams, song, art, other creates a context shift in the material which requires greater engagement within the brain and may help to improve understanding.

Compare/contrast the ideas of context shifting with desirable difficulty.

Note that this use of "context shifting" (within the pedagogy space) is dramatically different to that used by people like Cal Newport and others (within the productivity space).

This might also include other forms of art including song and dance.

Link this to: - choreography notation (@remikalir's sister in ballet) - Caleb Deschanel's cinematography notation which he likened to musical notation

I love the distinction here between "taking notes" and "making notes". Too many focus on the "taking notes" portion and never get to the making part of the equation.

Has talking without thinking become worse with the advent of literacy and writing?

Talking, like writing, is also a form of thinking, but without a lot of work it doesn't have the instantaneous "memory" built into the process.

"Let's talk this out..."

Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/5Ct1LJqTEeyewcuZMx620Q<br /> - https://hypothes.is/a/xvqbambjEey2CKNBjNDhFg

I'll push back on this a bit. I suspect that even though one might create multiple links to digital notes in all directions like this, it really doesn't happen happen at scale like this in practice.

I'd be willing to guess that very few people in the digital space are linking their ideas to more than two or three others. In fact, I suspect that if you looked at many digital ZKs you'd find a lot of orphaned notes floating around.

Separately, even in the analog space, the two links (down or forward) isn't always correct either. I cross link all over the place. The one constant benefit of the analog is that you're generally required to create at least one link because you have to place the card somewhere, and this isn't the case in most digital contexts/tools.

I'd posit that it's a lot of work to link a new idea into your system once much less in multiple places. Generally the more ideas you can link/cross-link it to, the more likely you'll run across it in the future and have potential to reuse it. I'd also suggest that the more links it's got, the better you'll "own" it. These addition links will also allow you to better compare/contrast various ideas by juxtaposing them in the future.

Theorem: more (good/great) links = more complexity which yields more "life", serendipity, and surprise to be found in your slip box for future use.

Another of the abounding examples of people thinking that writing and literacy are the first technology of thinking.

It's a reasonable assumption that with the rise of digital contexts and the ease of cut and paste that people excerpting or quoting material are more likely to excerpt and quote longer passages because it is now easier to do.

Has anyone done research on showing that this is the case?

It's odd that a historian would have to say this about history... it's definitely not mythology that we're creating here.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547390915689566211.html via https://twitter.com/nicolas_gatien/status/1547390946156969984

Nicolas, I broadly agree with you that many of these factors of reading and writing for understanding and retention are at play and the research in memory and spaced repetition underlines a lot of this. However in practice, one needs to be revisiting and actively using their notes for some particular project to remember them better. The card search may help to create both visual and physical paths that assist in memory too.

Reliance solely on a physical zettelkasten however may not be enough without active use over time, particularly for the majority of users. It's unlikely that all or even many may undertake this long term practice. Saying that this is either the "best", "optimum", or "only" way would be disingenuous to the diversity of learners and thinkers.

Those who want to add additional strength to these effects might also use mnemonic methods from indigenous cultures that rely on primary orality. These could include color, images, doodles (drolleries anyone?), or other associative methods, many of which could be easily built into an (antinet) zettelkasten. Lynne Kelly's work in this area can be highly illuminating. For pure practical application and diversity of potential methods, I recommend her book Memory Craft https://amzn.to/3zdqqGp, but she's got much more academic and in depth work that is highly illustrative.

With this background on orality and memory in mind we might all broadly view wood and stone circles (Stonehenge), menhir, standing stones, songlines, and other mnemonic devices in the archaeological and sociological records as zettelkasten which one keeps entirely in their memory rather than writing them down. We might also consider, based on this and the historical record concerning Druids and their association with trees that the trees served a zettelkasten-like function for those ancient societies. This continues to extend to lots of other cultural and societal practices throughout history. Knowledge from Duane Hamacher et al's book The First Astronomers and Karlie Noone and Krystal De Napoli's Astronomy: Sky Country will underline these theories and practices in modern indigenous settings.

@2:10

They didn't publish the code. They published the algorithm. And they prided themselves on—the computer scientists at the time—of describing the algorithm, not GitHubbing the code. These days we don't—we GitHub the code. You want the algorithm? Here's the code.

This is not always reliable. There are some non-highly-mathematical things that you'd prefer to have the algorithm explained rather than slog through the code, which is probably adulterated with hacks for e.g. platform gotchas, etc.

There is a better way, though, which is to publish a high-level description of the workings as runnable code that you can simulate in a Web browser. Too many people have misconceptions about the stability of the Web browser as a platform for simulations, however. We need to work on this.

Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.

This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.

Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

Worth taking a look at the various affordances of folders vs. links vs. tags.

Some of these functionalities may be highly dependent on the particular tool in question and what affordances the tool allows for these ideas.

Has anyone done this comprehensively across a number of tools other than threads in fora like reddit, zettelkasten.de, etc.?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/vofakc/folders_vs_links_vs_tags/

Walter and Julia are examining a glass paperweight in George Orwell's 1984 without having context of what it is or for what it was used.

This is the same sort of context collapse caused by distance in time and memory that archaeologists face when examining found objects.

How does one pull out the meaning from such distant objects in an exegetical way? How can we more reliably rebuild or recreate lost contexts?

Link to: - Stonehenge is a mnemonic device - mnemonic devices in archaeological contexts (Neolithic carved stone balls

Some forms of orality-based methods and practices can be viewed as a method of "reading" physical objects.

Ideograms are an evolution on the spectrum from orality to literacy.

It seems odd to be pulling these sorts of insight out my prior experiences and reading while reading something so wholly "other". But isn't this just what "myths" in oral cultures actually accomplish? We link particular ideas to pieces of story, song, art, and dance so that they may be remembered. In this case Orwell's glass paperweight has now become a sort of "talking rock" for me. Certainly it isn't done in any sort of sense that Orwell would have expected, presumed, or even intended.

Take extreme care how you may conflate and differentiate (or don't) the ideas of "information" and "knowledge". Also keep in mind that the mathematical/physics definition of information is wholly divorced from any semantic meanings it may have for a variety of receivers which can have dramatically different contexts which compound things.

It's very possible that the meaning you draw from it is an eisegetical one to the meaning which Eco assigns it.

How might we design better digital reading interfaces that take advantage of a wider range of modes of thinking and reading?

Certainly adding audio to the text helps to bring in benefits of orality, but what other axes are there besides the obvious spatial benefits?

Just as there are deficits like dyslexia in the literate world, are there those who have similar deficits relating to location in the oral world? What do these look like? What are they called specifically?

There are definitely memory deficits withing cognitive neuropsychology. Is there a comprehensive list one could look at?

Some people aren't as good at spatial orientation as others. Women are stereotyped as being less good at direction and direction finding.

How does location affect our reading? Is it similar to methods of location and memory within oral traditions?

They're annotating this article in Scientific American: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens

What is preferable? I feel like we should start with the well-being of the whole and individuate from there; technosocial urbanism emphasizes applying tech to social issues, but why don't we set the bone before providing a crutch?

an impedance mismatch, between what the Web is (infrastructure for building information services that follow the reference desk model—request a document, and the librarian will come back with it) versus what many Web developers want to be (traditional app developers—specifically, self-styled product designers with near 100% autonomy and creative control over the "experience")—and therefore what they want the Web browser to be (the vehicle that makes that possible, with as little effort as possible on the end of the designer–developer)

This also happens with the techniques of orality, but from an entirely different perspective. Again, these methods are totally invisible even to an expert on productivity and personal knowledge management.

Not even a mention here of the ancient Greeks bemoaning the invention of literacy as papering over valuable memory.

A lot of this is geared toward the work of re-contextualizing one's work and projects.

Why do all this extra work instead of frontloading it? Here again is an example of more work in comparison to zettelkasten...

This idea doesn't appear in Steven Johnson's book itself, but only in this quirky little BoingBoing piece, so I'll give Forte credit for using his reading and notes from this piece to create a larger thesis here.

I'm not really a fan of this broader archipelago of ideas as it puts the work much later in the process. For those not doing it upfront by linking ideas as they go, it's the only reasonable strategy left for leveraging one's notes.

The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

<small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.

This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work

Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

--

It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.

Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.

I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

I'm curious how he's going to outline this practice as there's been no discussion of linking or cross-linking ideas prior to this point as is done in some instantiations of the zettelkasten methods. (Of course this interlinking is more valuable when it comes specifically to writing output; once can rely on subject headings and search otherwise.)

Using the P.A.R.A. method puts incredible focus on immediate projects and productivity toward them. This is a dramatically different focus from the zettelkasten method.

The why's of the systems are dramatically different as well.

Organize for actionability.

(Applicable only for P.A.R.A.?)

This is interesting for general project management, but potentially not for zettelkasten-type notes. That method has more flexibility that doesn't require this sort of organizational method and actually excels as a result of it.

There is a tension here.

Notes primarily for project-based productivity are different from notes for writing-based output.

Holiday's system is roughly similar to the idea of a commonplace book, just kept and maintained on index cards instead of a notebook. He also seems to advocate for keeping separate boxes for each project which I find to be odd advice, though it's also roughly the same advice suggested by Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit and Tiago Forte's recent book Building a Second Brain which provides a framing that seems geared more toward broader productivity rather than either the commonplacing or zettelkasten traditions.

I suspect that if you're not linking discrete ideas, you'll get far more value out of your system by practicing profligate indexing terms on your discrete ideas. Two topical/subject headings on an individual idea seems horrifically limiting much less on an entire article and even worse on a whole book. Fewer index topics is easier to get away with in a digital system which allows search across your corpus, but can be painfully limiting in a pen/paper system.

Most paperbound commonplaces index topics against page numbers, but it's not clear to me how you're numbering (or not) your system to be able to more easily cross reference your notes with an index. Looking at Luhmann's index as an example (https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V) might be illustrative so you can follow along, but if you're not using his numbering system or linking your cards/ideas, then you could simply use consecutive numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, ..., 92000, 92001, ... on your cards to index against to easily find the cards you're after. It almost sounds to me that with your current filing system, you'd have to duplicate your cards to be able to file them under more than one topic. This obviously isn't ideal.

One starts education with where the student is. But mustn't we also inventory what tools and attitudes the student brings? What tools beyond basic literacy do they have? (Usually we presume literacy, but rarely go beyond this and the lack of literacy is too often viewed as failure, particularly as students get older.) Do they have motion, orality, song, visualization, memory? How can we focus on also utilizing these tools and modalities for learning.

Link to the idea that Donald Trump, a person who managed to function as a business owner and president of the United States, was less than literate, yet still managed to function in modern life as an example. In fact, perhaps his focus on oral modes of communication, and the blurrable lines in oral communicative meaning (see [[technobabble]]) was a major strength in his communication style as a means of rising to power?

Just as the populace has lost non-literacy based learning and teaching techniques so that we now consider the illiterate dumb, stupid, or lesser than, Western culture has done this en masse for entire populations and cultures.

Even well-meaning educators in the edtech space that are trying to now center care and well-being are completely missing this piece of the picture. There are much older and specifically non-literate teaching methods that we have lost in our educational toolbelts that would seem wholly odd and out of place in a modern college classroom. How can we center these "missing tools" as educational technology in a modern age? How might we frame Indigenous pedagogical methods as part of the emerging third archive?

Link to: - educational article by Tyson Yunkaporta about medical school songlines - Scott Young article "You should pay for Tutors"

aside on serendipity

As I was writing this note I had a toaster pop up notification in my email client with the arrival of an email by Scott Young with the title "You should pay for Tutors" which prompted me to add a link to this note. It reminds me of a related idea that Indigenous cultures likely used information and knowledge transfer as a means of payment (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power). I have commented previously on the serendipity of things like auto correct or sparks of ideas while reading as a means of interlinking knowledge, but I don't recall experiencing this sort of serendipity leading to combinatorial creativity as a means of linking ideas,

Sadly, we seem to have othered orality and cultural practices which don't fit into the Western literate cultural box. This prevents us from moving forward as a society and a diverse culture.

In the 90's rap was culturally appropriated by some because of its perception as "cool" within the culture. Can this coolness be leveraged as a reintroduction of oral methods in our culture without the baggage of the appropriation? Can it be added to enhance the evolving third archive? As a legitimate teaching tool?

Beyond Eric's words here, I'm struck by the fact that he's able to do this "feat" orally in a way that I certainly cannot. Perhaps he spent ages slowly building it up and writing it down in a literal fashion, but I suspect that part of it is not and that it is raw oral poetry in a way which requires culture and oral practice that I wholly lack, but wish I had.

How can we better teach this?! Center this.

Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo

Face-to-face teaching and learning has been the majority default for nearly all of human existence. Obviously it was the case in oral cultures, and the tide has shifted a bit with the onset of literacy. However, with the advent of the Internet and the pressures of COVID-19, lots of learning has broken this mold.

How can the affordances of literacy-only modalities be leveraged for online learning that doesn't include significant fact-to-face interaction? How might the zettelkasten method of understanding, sense-making, note taking, and idea generation be leveraged in this process?

https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1414053242120646656

Based on some beyond the average knowledge of Indigenous cultures, I'm reading some additional context into this statement that is unlikely to be seen or understood by those with Western-only cultural backgrounds who view things from an ownership and capitalistic perspective.

There's a stronger sense of identity and ownership of language and knowledge within oral traditions than can be understood by Westerners who didn't grow up with it.

He obviously feels like we're stealing from him all over again. We need better rules and shared definitions between Indigenous peoples and non before embarking on these sorts of projects.

Oral cultures treat information dramatically different than literate cultures, and particularly Western literate cultures within capitalism-based economies.

Fun fact: the amount of time between 2010—the year Dahl mentions here—and ES2015—aka ES6, where modules appeared—is less than the amount of time between ES2015 and today. And yet people act like modules are new (or worse, just over the horizon, but still not here). It's a people problem.

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/patrick-henry-virginia-ratifying-convention-va/

While gerrymandering isn't brought up explicitly here, the underlying principles are railed against heavily.

Some interesting things applicable to the rise of Donald J. Trump hiding in here.

Interesting to read this in its historical context versus our present context. So much can be read into his words from our current context, while others can extract dramatically different views--particularly by Constitutional originalists.

GitLab is planning to onboard VS Code web IDE

1. Heinrich von Kleist, “Ü ber die allm ä hliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Zweiter Band, ed. Helmut Sembdner (M ü nchen: dtv, 1805/2001), 319 – 324, at 319.
2. Ibid., 320.

in 1805 Heinrich von Kleist noted that one can use conversation with another person, even when that person is silent, to come up with solutions or ideas they may not have done on their own.

This phenomena is borne out in modern practices like the so-called "rubber duck debugging", where a programmer can talk to any imagined listener, often framed as a rubber duck sitting on their desk, and talk through the problem in their code. Invariably, talking through all the steps of the problem will often result in the person realizing what the problem is and allow them to fix it.

This method of verbal "conversation" obviously was a tool which indigenous oral cultures frequently used despite the fact that they didn't have literacy as a tool to fall back on.

things that might have done some good lose all their goodness.”198 The overabundance of bad books drowned out even any good bits that might be present among them.

And we now say these same sorts of things about the internet and social media.

Keeping a manual zettelkasten using pen/pencil and paper may be beneficial to some as it will tend to remove the easy functionality of cut and paste in the digital space and force the user to think a bit more deeply about what they're working on and expand on it. Those with paper zettelkasten aren't as likely to spend time collecting simple facts as a result of this. This will make the content going into the system much more solid and reusable in the future.

List of some affordance of digital note taking over handwriting: * search * sharing * backups (copies) * editing * linking (automatic?) * syncing to multiple spaces for ease of use

Definite bias for literacy here.

Based on Tiago Forte's definition of a second brain the primary distinction from a commonplace book is solely that it is digital.

Note here that he explicitly defines a second brain as being private. Historically commonplace books were private affairs though there are examples of them being shared from person to person as well as examples that have been printed.

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.

Could be interesting to look at this from the dual perspective of eisegesis vs. exegesis.

https://lifehacker.com/which-epaper-tablet-is-best-for-digital-notes-1848859314

Historical note taking practices can tell us many things aside from just the ways in which textual information was managed. They can also tell us about how people lived, how they thought, how they used memory and writing and how these things were understood culturally.

We do however need to be careful in how we interpret these documents historically. We need to attempt to view them exegetically and not eisegetically. We also need to be careful to look at them from a "large world" perspective and not presume that small things had large and heavy influence on things to come in the future.

Based on this definition of a "note", one must wonder if my public notes here on Hypothes.is are then not notes as they are tacitly circulated publicly from the first use. However they are still specifically and distinctly preparatory towards some future finished work, I just haven't yet decided which ultimate work in which they'll appear.

Example that every new technology will have its proponents and its detractors.

link to Plato/Socrates on the use of writing as a replacement for speaking and memory.

Does this count? https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/20/55799844/

In part because of modalities of studying the brain using methods like fMRI where the images are of an individual's head, we focus too much and too exclusively on single brains bound to individuals rather than on brains working in concert.

Greater flexibilities in tools and methods should help do studies of humans working in concert.

Link this to the anecdote:

I recall a radiology test within a medical school setting in which students were asked to diagnose an x-ray of a human patient's skull. Most either guessed small hairline fractures in the skull or that there was nothing wrong with the patient.

Can you diagnose the patient?

Almost all the students failed the question, and worse felt like idiots when the answer was revealed: the patient must be dead because the spinal column and the rest of the body are not attached. Compare:

"Social encoding advantage" is what psychologists refer to as the phenomenon of people remembering social information more accurately than other types.

Reference to read: “social encoding advantage”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), 284.

It's likely that the social acts of learning and information exchange in oral societies had an additional stickiness over and beyond the additional mnemonic methods they would have used as a base.

The Western cultural tradition doesn't value the social coding advantage because it "excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect" (Paul, 2021). Instead it provides advantage and status to the individual thinking on their own. We greatly prefer the idea of the "lone genius" toiling on their own, when this is hardly ever the case. Our availability bias often leads us to believe it is the case because we can pull out so many famous examples, though in almost all cases these geniuses were riding on the shoulders of giants.

Reference to read: remember social information more accurately: Jason P. Mitchell, C. Neil Macrae, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 24 (May 2004): 4912–17

Reference to read: the brain stores social information: Jason P. Mitchell et al., “Thinking About Others: The Neural Substrates of Social Cognition,” in Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People, ed. Karen T. Litfin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 63–82.

Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".

Explore this area more deeply.

Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?

How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?

What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?

What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?

What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?

total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?

(((Howard Forman))) on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved 16 August 2021, from https://twitter.com/thehowie/status/1408430486955888642

ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: ‘RT @FassnachtMartin: #Vaccination-#campaign #GER vs. FRA🇫🇷 // Let me put it this way: We can learn A LOT from France… https://t.co/SgR1B7qj…’ / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved 16 August 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1412452204297048070

Derek Thompson on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved 16 August 2021, from https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1383388938916618244

VS Code terminal is not as efficient on Linux

Power over Ethernet (PoE vs PoE+ vs PoE++) makes money Power over Ethernet (PoE) is a network technology that allows us to deliver both data and power over a single standard Ethernet cable. So we can use network cables like Cat5/Cat5e/Cat6/Cat6a cables to provide data connections and power to a Wifi access point, IP camera, VoIP phone, PoE lighting or any other device.

Are there other methods of encouraging context shifts that don't include note taking (or literacy-based) solutions? What would an orality focused method look like? How might we include those methods in our practices?

Distraction has been shown to be an issue with regard to digital note taking. Adding time limits to work has been shown to mitigate this form of problem.

Not all research shows that handwritten note taking is better than digital.

Compare and contrast the results in Dynarski,2017 and that of Artz, Johnson, Robson, & Taengnoi, 2017. What does Holland, 2017 say on the matter?

Students who take notes by hand learn more than those who do so on a laptop.

Exactly how were these studies laid out? What sorts of revision and follow up were followed in each case? Was it truly an apples to apples comparison?

Even in the western tradition, the earliest methods of mnemonics tied ideas to locations, from whence we get the ideas of loci communes (in Latin) and thence commonplaces and commonplace books. The idea of loci communes was koinos topos in Greek from whence we have derived the word 'topic'.

Was this a carryover from other local oral traditions or a new innovation? Given the prevalence of very similar Indigenous methods around the world, it was assuredly not an innovation. Perhaps it was a rediscovery after the loss of some of these traditions locally in societies that were less reliant on orality and moving towards more reliance on literacy for their memories.

an inversion of how black people lack liberty in the past in the present, black people have the power to report white people to the police, and white people can be prosecuted

contained over a thousand star names. Rāwairi passed the manuscript to his grandson, Timi Rāwairi. In 1995, Timi’s own grandson asked him about Matariki, a celebration that kicks off the Māori new year, heralded by the dawn rising of the Pleiades star cluster. Timi went to a cupboard, pulled out the manuscript and handed it to his grandson, Rangi Mātāmua.

Was it partially coincidence that this knowledge was written down and passed on within the family or because of the primacy of the knowledge within the culture that helped to save in spanning from orality into literacy?

What other examples might exist along these lines to provide evidence for the passing of knowledge at the border of orality and literacy?

Link this to ideas about the border of orality and literacy in Welsh and Irish.

Developed by Elders Dr. Albert Marshall and Murdina Marshall, the Mi'kmaw word Etuaptmunk describes the concept of "Two-Eyed Seeing". It is based on the lived experience of Indigenous peoples who have the ability to see the world from both the Western and Indigenous perspectives with one eye on the strengths of each practice.

The idea behind Etuaptmunk is designed and geared toward Western thinkers who place additional value on the eyes and literacy. Perhaps a second analogy of "Two-Eared Hearing" might better center the orality techniques for the smaller number of people with lived experiences coming from the other direction?

These ideas seem somewhat similar to that of the third culture kid.

No one has listened to Indigenous peoples when they say that they have science. The major boundary in hearing in this case is that Indigenous peoples rely on orality where as Western people rely more heavily on literacy. This barrier has obviously been a major gap between these cultures.

Perhaps there's a clever dig here that she uses the phrase "on paper" here because most indigenous cultures have done these things orally!

quote from Dr. Annette S. Lee