10,000 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
    1. The first thing to do is to take that four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes that you’ll need to turn the story into a novel. And the easiest way to make that list is . . . with a spreadsheet.

      Of course spreadsheets are databases of information and one can easily and profitably put all these details into index cards which are just as easy (maybe even easier) to move around

    2. If you believe in the Three-Act structure, then the first disaster corresponds to the end of Act 1. The second disaster is the mid-point of Act 2. The third disaster is the end of Act 2, and forces Act 3 which wraps things up. It is OK to have the first disaster be caused by external circumstances, but I think that the second and third disasters should be caused by the protagonist’s attempts to “fix things”. Things just get worse and worse.

      Interesting and specific advice about the source of disasters in act two...

    1. For context, I don't use a traditional Zettelkasten system. It's more of a commonplace book/notecard system similar to Ryan HolidayI recently transitioned to a digital system and have been using Logseq, which I enjoy. It's made organizing my notes and ideas much easier, but I've noticed that I spend a lot of time on organizing my notesSince most of my reading is on Kindle, my process involves reading and highlighting as I read, then exporting those highlights to Markdown and making a page in Logseq. Then I tag every individual highlightThis usually isn't too bad if a book/research article has 20-30 highlights, but, for example, I recently had a book with over 150 highlights, and I spent about half an hour tagging each oneI started wondering if it's overkill to tag each highlight since it can be so time consuming. The advantage is that if I'm looking for passages about a certain idea/topic, I can find it specifically rather than having to go through the whole bookI was also thinking I could just have a set of tags for each book/article that capture what contexts I'd want to find the information in. This would save time, but I'd spend a little more time digging through each document looking for specificsCurious to hear your thoughts, appreciate any suggestions

      reply to m_t_rv_s__n/ at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/164n6qg/is_this_overkill/

      First, your system is historically far more traditional than Luhmann's more specific practice. See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/

      If you're taking all the notes/highlights from a particular book and keeping them in a single file, then it may be far quicker and more productive to do some high level tagging on the entire book/file itself and then relying on and using basic text search to find particular passages you might use at a later date.

      Spending time reviewing over all of your notes and tagging/indexing them individually may be beneficial for some basic review work. But this should be balanced out with your long term needs. If your area is "sociology", for example, and you tag every single idea related to the topic of sociology with #sociology, then it will cease to have any value you to you when you search for it and find thousands of disconnected notes you will need to sift through. Compare this with Luhmann's ZK which only had a few index entries under "sociology". A better long term productive practice, and one which Luhmann used, is indexing one or two key words when he started in a new area and then "tagging" each new idea in that branch or train of though with links to other neighboring ideas. If you forget a particular note, you can search your index for a keyword and know you'll find that idea you need somewhere nearby. Scanning through the neighborhood of notes you find will provide a useful reminder of what you'd been working on and allow you to continue your work in that space or link new things as appropriate.

      If it helps to reframe the long term scaling problem of over-tagging, think of a link from one idea to another as the most specific tag you can put on an idea. To put this important idea into context, if you do a Google search for "tagging" you'll find 240,000,000 results! If you do a search for the entirety of the first sentence in this paragraph, you'll likely only find one very good and very specific result, and the things which are linked to it are going to have tremendous specific value to you by comparison.

      Perhaps the better portions of your time while reviewing notes would be taking the 150 highlights and finding the three to five most important, useful, and (importantly) reusable ones to write out in your own words and begin expanding upon and linking? These are the excerpts you'll want to spend more time on and tag/index for future use rather than the other hundreds. Over time, you may eventually realize that the hundreds are far less useful than the handful (in management spaces this philosophy is known as the Pareto principle), so spending a lot of make work time on them is less beneficial for whatever end goals you may have. (The make work portions are often the number one reason I see people abandoning these practices because they feel overwhelmed working on raw administrivia instead of building something useful and interesting to themselves.) Naturally though, you'll still have those hundreds sitting around in a file if you need to search, review, or use them. You won't have lost them by not working on them, but more importantly you'll have gained loads of extra time to work on the more important pieces. You should notice that the time you save and the value you create will compound over time.

      And as ever, play around with these to see if they work for you and your specific needs. Some may be good and others bad—it will depend on your needs and your goals. Practice, experiment, have fun.

      Meme image from Office Space featuring a crowd of office employees standing in front of a banner on the wall that reads: Is this Good for the Zettelkasten?

    1. Comedian Phyllis Diller had “gag file,” which is now housed at The Smithsonian: Phyllis Diller’s groundbreaking career as a stand-up comic spanned almost 50 years. Throughout her career she used a gag file to organize her material. Diller’s gag file consists of a steel cabinet with 48 drawers (along with a 3 drawer expansion) containing over 52,000 3-by-5 inch index cards, each holding a typewritten joke or gag.

      A Zettelkasten for jokes!

    1. In the end, I numbered and scanned 52,569 individual note cards from the Phyllis Diller gag file.

      Hanna BredenbeckCorp numbered and scanned 52,569 index cards from Phyllis Diller's gag file. Prior to this archival effort most estimates for the numbers of cards were in the 40-50,000 range.

      Spanning the 1960s to the 1990s roughly. The index was donated in 2003, so there were certainly no

      Exact dating on the cards may give a better range, particularly if the text can be searched or if there's a database that can be sorted by date.

      Via https://hypothes.is/a/UbW8nERrEe6xjEseEEEy1w we can use the rough dates: 1955-2002 which are the bookends of her career.

      This gives us a rough estimate of:<br /> 2002-1955 = 48 years (inclusive) or 17,520 days (at 365 days per year ignoring leap years)

      52,569/17520 days gives 3.000513698630137 or almost exactly 3 cards (jokes) per day.

      Going further if she was getting 12 laughs (jokes) per minute (her record, see: https://hypothes.is/a/MTLukkRpEe635oPT5lr7qg), then if continuously told, it would have taken her 52,569 jokes/12 jokes/minute = 4,380.75 minutes = 73.0125 hours or 3.0421875 days to tell every joke in her file.

    2. The main thing I learned while reading through Phyllis Diller's jokes is that comedy has changed a lot since she started her career in the mid-1950s. Her comedy is focused on short one-liners that get laughs in quick succession, while today's comedy is more story-driven. Although a lot of her jokes are very time-bound due to their content, it was interesting to get a glimpse of what was happening at the time a joke was written. Each joke card has a date on it, and the cards span the 1960s to the 1990s. The topic of the jokes told a lot about what people were worried about or focused on at the time the joke was written, whether it was the inflation or student protests of the 1970s, a celebrity's many marriages, or gossip about the president at the time. While, like any comedian, some of her jokes fall flat, I appreciated Diller's hard work in meticulously recording, testing, and filing each joke in the gag file, along with her ability to make a joke about almost any topic.

      evidence of comedy shift from 50s/60s of one liners to more story-based comedy of the 2000s onward. Some of this may come about through idea links or story links as seen in some of Diller's paperclipped cards (see https://hypothes.is/a/W9Wz-EXsEe6nZxew_8BUCg).

    3. Another surprise was the amount of notecards that are associated with one another. While some cards contain a short one-line joke, other jokes span several cards. These collections of cards had originally been paper-clipped together, but at some point in the life of the gag file the paper clips were removed. This removal was great in terms of preservation because paper clips tend to rust and cause damage to the surface to which they have been attached. But the removal also made it difficult to decipher which cards were originally associated with one another. I was able to use the bend marks on cards as well as rust marks from where a paper clip used to be to record which joke cards were most likely originally paper-clipped together. This association is important to note because some individual cards only hold a portion of a longer joke and therefore do not make sense independently.

      While most of the jokes in Phyllis Diller's gag file were individual, stand-alone cards, the archivist who scanned them noted that there was a surprising number of cards that were associated with one another. (jokerfolgezettel, anyone?) She was able to distinguish jokes which spanned several cards by either their paperclips (when extant), or physical markings (rust/paper bending) which indicated prior paperclipping or other association which had long since been removed.

    4. This joke card has a comic clipped from a newspaper glued to it. During the digitization process, the index card was put in a clear Mylar sleeve to prevent the comic, with its brittle glue, from being damaged or separated from the card.

      The potential separation of newspaper clippings from index cards and their attendant annotations/meta data (due to aging of glue) can be a potential source of note loss when creating a physical card index.

    5. While most of the joke cards are simply index cards with a joke typed on, others are more complicated. Some cards have strips of paper glued to them with longer jokes on those papers. Some cards have entire letter-size sheets of paper containing long jokes stapled to the cards. Some cards have comic strips, cut from the newspaper, glued to the cards. Other cards are not even cards but are just pieces of printer paper with jokes scribbled on them. These irregular cards were not stable enough to be sent through the feed scanner and had to be scanned one-by-one using a flatbed scanner, which slowed my progress.

      Not only a short description of the broad standard form of cards in Phyllis Diller's gag file, but also an enumeration of some of the non-standard cards, many of which are specified because of the issues which they presented in scanning/digitizing for transcription.

    6. I started my project by writing a small number, in pencil, on the back of each card. The numbers are used to keep track of the original drawer in which the card was located, as well as the card's position within that drawer. For example, the card numbered 15-0837 would be the 837th card in Drawer 15.

      The numbers which appear in pencil on the verso of Phyllis Diller's index cards were those added by archivist Hanna BredenbeckCorp prior to scanning them for transcription.

    1. Oliar, Dotan; Sprigman, Christopher (2008). "There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy". Virginia Law Review. 94 (8): 1848. JSTOR 25470605. Retrieved September 16, 2020. There is also evidence in the [Diller archive…at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.] file suggesting that Diller appropriated from other sources [apart from self-creation or using her writing team], including newspaper comic strips and comedy books. For example, a number of Diller's jokes about her dysfunctional marriage to her fictional husband 'Fang' appear to have been inspired by a comic strip, 'The Lockhorns,' that Diller followed obsessively over the course of nearly a decade. The Diller joke files contain hundreds of 'Lockhorns' panels cut out of newspapers and mounted on index cards.
    1. Even the alphabetized categories evoke a laugh: "Science, Seasons, Secretary, Senile, Sex, Sex Symbols, Sex Harassment, Shoes, Shopping..." "Food Gripes, Foreign (incidents & personalities), Foundations (bra & underwear), Fractured Speech, Freeways, Friends, Frugality, Frustrations, Funerals, Funny Names..."

      Topical headings in Phyllis Diller's gag file

    1. Bowers remembers arriving at Diller’s home in 2006 to arrange for the donation. “She was the most organized donor I’d ever met.” “She had a rack of her costumes that she wished to donate. Each costume came with a plastic bag attached to it and inside the bag, she had carefully included not only the props—her cigarette holder, the head-dress, the gloves, the shoes—but also a photograph of her wearing the entire ensemble. She was better at curation than I was,” Bowers jokes.

      Curator Dwight Blocker Bowers on Phyllis Diller's organization.

    2. each typed on an index card and filed under such prophetic taglines as “Science, Seasons, Secretary, Senile, Sex, Sex Symbols, Sex Harassment, Shoes, Shopping…” and “Food Gripes, Foreign (incidents & personalities), Foundations (bra & underwear), Fractured Speech, Freeways, Friends, Frugality, Frustrations, Funerals, Funny Names…”

      Some of the topical headings in Phyllis Diller's gag file

    1. https://collections.si.edu/search/detail/ead_component:sova-sia-fa13-194-refidd1e6139?q=phyllis+diller+gag+file&record=12&hlterm=phyllis%2Bdiller%2Bgag%2Bfile

      Phyllis Diller Joke File, 2010

      In addition to her larger indexed gag file, it appears that Phyllis Diller donated a separate joke file (box 6 of 8) to the National Museum of American History which contains archival materials and has been restricted for 15 years until 2027-01-01.

      ARCHIVAL REPOSITORY: Smithsonian Institution Archives EDAN-URL: ead_component:sova-sia-fa13-194-refidd1e6139

    1. https://collections.si.edu/search/record/edanmdm:nmah_1218385

      Phyllis Diller's gag file appears to have been made of 16 standard three-drawer beige Steelmaster (Art Steel Company, Inc.) index card files which were stacked in two columns and enclosed in a matching beige external frame which was mounted on casters. Having overflowed the 48 available drawers, there was an additional 3-drawer file added on top as an expansion.

      The Smithsonian dates the files from 1962 to 1994, but perhaps the digitized version can be searched by date to determine the actual earliest and latest dates on included cards as most had at least a month and a year.

    1. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/courcon1.asp

      Medieval Sourcebook: Robert de Courçon: Statutes for the University of Paris, 1215 The basic course was in the arts. Of the other faculties theology was best represented at Paris, law at Bologna, and medicine at Salerno. Robert de Courçon's statutes lay down the course in arts and enumerate the books to be studied. Students were expect to be able to teach as well as learn.

    1. This is a way to make check lists that are more useful. You only fill the box when your all the way done with the task, when you are about half way done you fill the box half way. I learnedabout this from Adam Savage in his book, "Every Tool is a Hammer". He learned about it when he worked at Industrial Light & Magic.Does it have an official name? (screen shots from his book)

      Adam Savage's book Every Tool is a Hammer shows a checklist which has square bullets which can be partially filled in to show the level of completion. He learned the method when working at Industrial Light & Magic.

      via u/AZORIAN_K129 at https://www.reddit.com/r/NoteTaking/comments/15zgbvr/does_this_technique_have_a_name/

    1. Diesen organizistischen Überlegungen über das ge-schichtliche Werden, das einem »verborgenen Plan«(Menke-Glückert) folgt, ordnete Warburg einen weiterenZettel zu, auf dem er sich eine Stelle aus Ernst Bern-heims Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode notiert, inder auf Wilhelm Wundt verwiesen wird, der darlegt, soexzerpiert Warburg, »daß historische AllgemeinvorgängeAnwendungen allgemeiner psychologischer Prinzipiensind, wie z. B. die Reaktion eine Anwendung des Principsder Kontrastverstärkung« ist.362

      Warburg definitely read Bernheim's Lehrbuch!!! He excerpted it! Though based on the footnote in the text, it may appear that his quotation was from the 1908 edition of Bernheim.

      Machine translation of the German:

      Warburg assigned another piece of paper to these organicistic considerations about historical development, which follows a »hidden plan« (Menke-Glückert), on which he noted a passage from Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der Historischen Method in which Wilhelm Wundt is referred to, who explains, as Warburg excerpts, »that historical general processes are applications of general psychological principles, such as e.g. B. the reaction is an application of the principle of "contrast enhancement".

      362 Z. 0 02/0 0 0411. Warburg zitier t Wundt, Logik. Eine Untersuchung der Principien der Erkenntnis und der Methode wissenschaf tlicher Forschung, Stuttgar t 1895, Bd. II/2, S. 413, aus Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie. Mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hilfsmit tel zum Studium der Geschichte, Leipzig 1908, S. 60 f.

      Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/Th2g4kVoEe6OSV9qNo31rQ

    2. Wer Warburgs Zettelkasten folgt, folgt ihm bei seinenGedankengängen; vom Bankenwesen in Florenz, der mit-telalterlichen Handelsgesellschaft, dem Herausbilden vonIndividualität, der rastlosen Berufsarbeit der Calvinistenund der reformierten Form der Askese bis zu Warburgseigener Herkunft aus alter jüdischer Bankiersfamilie.378Der Zettelkasten ist Warburgs Ariadnefaden durch seinelabyrinthische Bibliothek wie sein labyrinthisches Denken:vom Werwolf zur Geschichtsauffassung. Ein Gedanke,eine Idee oder ein neuer Begriff entstehen nicht in einergeradlinigen Progression, sondern in einem Prozess desHin- und Herbewegens von Idee-Einheiten und Querver-weisen, der so lange andauert, bis sich neue Schnittstel-len und Knotenpunkte gebildet haben.

      machine translation:

      Anyone who follows Warburg's list of notes is following his train of thought; from the banking system in Florence, medieval commercial society, the development of individuality, the restless professional work of the Calvinists and the reformed form of asceticism to Warburg's own origins in an old Jewish banking family. 378 The Zettelkasten is Warburg's Ariadne thread through his labyrinthine library and his labyrinthine thinking: from werewolf to history. A thought, an idea or a new concept does not emerge in a linear progression, but in a process of moving idea units and cross-references back and forth, which lasts until new interfaces and nodes have formed.

    3. Methodenstreit mischten sich zahlreichenamhafte Historiker und andere Geisteswissenschaftlerein. Warburg leistete keinen direkten publizistischen Bei-trag, nahm jedoch, wie der Zettelkasten belegt, als passi-ver Beobachter intensiv an der Debatte teil.359

      Karl Lamprecht was one of Warburg's first teachers in Bonn and Warburg had a section in his zettelkasten dedicated to him. While Warburg wasn't part of the broader public debate on Lamprecht's Methodenstreit (methodological dispute), his notes indicate that he took an active stance on thinking about it.

      Consult footnote for more:

      59 Vgl. Roger Chickering, »The Lamprecht Controversy«, in: Historiker- kontroversen, hrsg. von Hartmut Lehmann, Göttingen 20 0 0, S. 15 – 29

    4. Ernst Bernheim,

      Aby Warburg's (1866-1929) zettelkasten had references to Ernst Bernheim (1850-1942). Likelihood of his having read Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (1889) as potential inspiration for his own zettelkasten?

      When did Warburg start his zettelkasten?

      According to Wikipedia, Warburg began his study of art history, history and archaeology in Bonn in 1886. He finished his thesis in 1892, so he may have had access to Bernheim's work on historical method. I'll note that Bernheim taught history at the University of Göttingen and at the University of Bonn after 1875, so they may have overlapped and even known each other. We'll need more direct evidence to establish this connection and a specific passing of zettelkasten tradition, though it may well have been in the "air" at that time.

    5. Wichtiger jedochist die Ordnung, in der die Zettel innerhalb des Kastenszueinander stehen. Man kann davon ausgehen, dass diesenie unverändert blieb, sondern dass Warburg diese Ord-nung ständiger Revision und Veränderung unterzog.348 DieRegisterkarten verliehen so der flüssigen Beweglichkeitdes Sammelsuriums einen gewissen Halt.

      Steiner considers the order and position of Warburg's notes within his boxes and assumes that they were not meant to be static, but would have been easily reordered, revised, and changed according to Warburg's needs. He describes them as a hodgepodge with a liquid mobility which are granted some form of stability afforded by the internal tabs.

    6. Auf manchen Zet-teln hat er einzelne Gedanken festgehalten oder Stich-wörter, Exzerpte aus Büchern und kurze kritische Bemer-kungen gesammelt, ebenso diagrammatische Schematagezeichnet, die ihm zur Übersicht eines kategorialen oderbegrifflichen Zusammenhangs dienen.

      Warburgs slips hold not only his own thoughts along with collections of keywords, but excerpts from books, critical remarks, and diagrams that provide overviews of ideas and their connections.

    7. Die Bücher waren undsind noch heute zum Teil nach seinem Prinzip der »gutenNachbarschaft« geordnet und folgten ausdrücklich seinensubjektiven Forschungsinteressen.

      Warburg's zettelkasten does not appear to be a simple bibliographic classification system according to Steiner. He indicates that the books in Warburg's library are arranged according to Warburg's idea of »guten Nachbarschaft« or "good neighborliness" whereby they followed his subjective interests an ordering that is reflected in the labels of his note boxes and various tabs which subsection notes within them.

    8. In seinem Privathaus in derHamburger Heilwigstraße 114, direkt neben der 1926eröffneten K.B.W. standen die Zettelkästen auch immerdort, wo Warburg sie gerade brauchte. Eine Fotografieseines Schreibtisches zeigt einige der Kästen auf demdrehbaren Büchergestell, wo sie rechter Hand griffbereitzur Verfügung standen; eine andere Aufnahme zeigteinige Kästen aufgereiht auf einer Fensterbank linkerHand vom Schreibtisch.

      Warburg kept zettelkasten both at his library as well as at his private home. A photograph from his home shows boxes ready to hand on the right side side of his desk and another shows boxes lined up on the left hand side.

    1. Lamprecht's ambitious Deutsche Geschichte (13 vols., 1891-1908) on the whole trajectory of German history sparked a famous Methodenstreit (methodological dispute) within Germany's academic history establishment, especially Max Weber, who habitually referred to Lamprecht as a mere dilettante. Lamprecht came under criticism from scholars of legal and constitutional history like Friedrich Meinecke and Georg von Below for his lack of methodological rigor and inattention to important political trends and ideologies. As a result, Lamprecht and his students were marginalized by German academia, and interdisciplinary social history remained something of a taboo among German historians for much of the twentieth century.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Lamprecht

    1. I'm not convinced that a Luhmann-style ZK is the right note-making method for school notes. Though, I'd be fine having my mind changed.

      reply to u/taurusnoises and u/Leander_znsnsj at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/162os2q/how_can_i_use_zettelkasten_as_a_high_school/

      I'm generally in the same boat as u/taurusnoises and don't think that a Luhmann-artig ZK is necessarily the right way to go—particularly at the lower levels.

      I would suggest that if interested students look closely at the overall set up, they'll find that the literature note portion is almost identical to that of the Cornell note-taking method. The primary differences between them are placing more emphasis on follow-up and review, forcing yourself to answer questions, and doing spaced repetition. (Of course, naturally, there's nothing wrong with doing all your Cornell Notes on index cards despite every version I've ever seen recommending sheets of paper!)

      If you do ultimately choose to go with the expanded zettelkasten workflow, I would recommend you spend more time focusing on your own thoughts on the facts and ideas as they relate to the the Cornell portion. Focus more on the area of your major (or particular interests if you're still unsure of your major) in which you're most likely to need to create writing or other particular outputs. One or two good main cards a day with a full class load is a solid start.

      Keep in mind that as you enter new areas, you will likely make lots of basic, factual, low level notes while you're learning. Don't worry about this (and don't ignore it either) as working with these ideas will help you to scaffold your knowledge and understand it better. You may not have lots of high quality main notes which will usually come as you get deeper into the nuances of your subject. You should still expect to find and generate insights though and these may be highly valuable as you need to execute projects or write papers.

      Good luck!

    1. This beige metal cabinet is Phyllis Diller’s gag file, a categorized archive of the jokes Diller used in her stand-up comedy routines throughout her half-century long career. A small three drawer expansion of the gag file is also in NMAH’s collection (Catalog Number 2003.0289.01.02). The 48 drawers of the gag file, along with the 3 drawer expansion, contain a total of 52,569 3-by-5 inch index cards, each holding a typewritten joke or gag.

      52,569 3x5" index cards!

    1. Although Diller generated a lot of her own material, she elicited some gags from other writers. One of her top contributors was Mary MacBride, a Wisconsin housewife with five children. A joke obtained from another writer includes the contributor’s name on the index card with the gag.

      Not all of the jokes in Phyllis Diller's collection were written by her. Many include comic strips she collected as well as jokes written by others and sent in to her.

      One of the biggest contributors to her collection of jokes was Wisconsin housewife Mary MacBride, the mother of five children. Jokes contributed by others include their names on the individual cards.

    1. Numbers on Cards The curatorial and collections teams are trying to learn more about the appearance of "No. #" on cards. Please transcribe this number on a separate line underneath the Date line, above the Joke line.

      Some of the cards in Phyllis Diller's gag file were numbered, but the curatorial and collections team at the Smithsonian didn't have enough data to determine what these were or what they meant at the time of transcription.

    2. In addition to Phyllis Diller’s gag file, the Division of Culture and the Arts at the National Museum of American History holds costumes, props, television scripts, photographs, books, and audio recordings illustrating Diller’s diverse career that spanned almost half of a century.

      Brief description of items donated to the Smithsonian by Phyllis Diller.

    1. on Aug. 12, the National Museum of American History is giving the artifact pristine treatment.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight"Have You Heard the One . . . ? The Phyllis Diller Gag File" is an exhibition of the beige cabinet in the quiet Albert H. Small Documents Gallery.

      The National Museum of American History debuted Phyllis Diller's gag file on August 12, 2011 in the Albert H. Small Documents Gallery in an exhibition entitled "Have you Hard the One...? The Phyllis Diller Gag File."

      see also: press release https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/national-museum-american-history-showcases-life-and-laughs-phyllis-diller

    1. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2839019692842995

      00:06:19 segment Laughter in the Vaults from “Famous Donors.” Stories from the Vaults, September 2007. Season 1, Episode 1. The Smithsonian Channel. https://www.smithsonianchannel.com/episodes/1wyzyg/stories-from-the-vaults-famous-donors-season-1-ep-1.

      1955 Diller was a suburban housewife with 5 children. Her first stage appearance was at 37 years old at Purple Onion Night Club in San Francisco, CA, and her last show was in 2002 at 84 years old.

      Broadway costume from Hello Dolly

      Phyllis Diller points to her card index in the video and calls it her "gag file". Curator Dwight Bowers called it her "joke file".

      Tom Canavagh, actor/comedian<br /> Dwight Blocker Bowers, curator at Smithsonian

    1. Most of the gags, written from the 1960s to the 1980s, are just like that—one per card. But a few that are more involved sometimes take a few cards to tell.

      Most of Phyllis Diller's gag files are written one joke to a card, but some have multiple jokes and some even span multiple cards.

      (Note this is a secondary source and can/should be verified against the digital files.)

    2. But when Diller’s jokes came up for transcription last week, “they are going like gangbusters,” says Meghan Ferriter, project coordinator. “I think we actually gained about 115 new volunteers in one day.”

      Meghan Ferriter, a project coordinator at the Smithsonian Institution, claimed that the transcription of Phyllis Diller's gag file helped the Smithsonian Transcription Center gain 115 volunteers in a single day.

    3. They were typed and meticulously filed into 48 drawers of a large, beige Steelmaster cabinet on wheels that she donated, along with a few of her wilder getups and wigs to the Smithsonian in 2003—less than a decade before her death in 2012 at 95.

      Phyllis Diller donated her gag file consisting of 51 drawers of Steelmaster card index files (on wheels) along with various dresses, costumes, and wigs to the Smithsonian Institution in 2003.

      Note that this source indicates 48 drawers, which is the primary collection/cabinet, but there is also an additional 3 drawer addition which is often pictured, but apparently not counted here). Compare the actual listing: https://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?q=phyllis+diller+gag+file

    1. SIMON: That's Heidi Rotbart, Phyllis Diller's longtime friend and producer. That gag file, as Phyllis Diller called it, is a piece of history, a hefty taupe filing cabinet filled with 53,000 alphabetized jokes.

      Phyllis Diller called her card index a "gag file".

      (It would be nice to have separate confirmation of this as it's a journalist ostensibly quoting a second party.)

    1. Three weeks and 52,569 jokes later, the job was completed.

      While many sources seem to indicate that Phyllis Diller had approximately 52,000 index cards with jokes, the ultimate tally after the completion of transcription for the Smithsonian Institution seems to have been 52,569 cards.

      While the Los Angeles times lists this as the number of jokes, it's far more likely to be the number of cards as some cards I've seen have multiple jokes.

    1. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is theproblem.” So declared Ronald Reagan as he launched hisadministration in January 1981,

      Was this the end of government by the people? Government by the corporations had been building up for a long time, and this may have been the fulcrum at which things changed.

      Something ironic in a president saying this about the institution which he's running. Almost too meta. And naturally could be said about his own way of running the government.

    1. Indigenous cultures can "see" dark constellations (example: the Australian emu in the sky) which are defined empty spaces which are explicitly visible.

      Using this concept, one could think of or use blank index cards in a zettelkasten or even the empty (negative) spaces between cards as "dark ideas" (potential ideas which need to be thought of and filled in).

      Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/FlqusEN1Ee6XEr_9StPUlA

    2. Here’s a child node. It could be a comment on the thought -- an aside, a critique, whatever. It could be something which goes under the heading.

      Lone child nodes cry out for siblings.

      When I was in middle school a teacher told me only to put a sub-bullet point in an outline only if it wasn't an orphan (if you had one sub-point it should have at least one sibling, otherwise don't include it). This was miserable advice because it ended trains of thought which might otherwise grow into something.

      On the other hand it could be better framed that if you have only one child, you should brainstorm to come up with others.

    3. I could continue a thread anywhere, rather than always picking it up at the end. I could sketch out where I expected things to go, with an outline, rather than keeping all the points I wanted to hit in my head as I wrote. If I got stuck on something, I could write about how I was stuck nested underneath whatever paragraph I was currently writing, but then collapse the meta-thoughts to be invisible later -- so the overall narrative doesn’t feel interrupted.

      Notes about what you don't know (open questions), empty outline slots, red links as [[wikilinks]], and other "holes" in tools for thought provide a bookmark for where one may have quit exploring, but are an explicit breadcrumb for picking up that line of thought and continuing it at a future time.

      Linear writing in one's notebooks, books they're reading, and other places doesn't always provide an explicit space which invites the reader or writer to fill them in. One has to train themselves to annotate in the margins to have a conversation with the text. Until one sees these empty spaces as inviting spaces they can be invisible to the eye.

    4. I mentioned that I knew I liked Zettelkasten within the first 30 minutes. I think it might be important that when I sat down to try it, I had an idea I was excited to work on. It wasn’t a nice solid mathematical idea -- it was a fuzzy idea, one which had been burning in the back of my brain for a week or so, waiting to be born. It filled the fractal branches of a zettelkasten nicely, expanding in every direction.

      abramdemski suggests starting with an idea you're interested in working on and fleshing out when you start your zettelkasten. This harkens back to Montessori teaching philosophies.

    5. In fact, it might be good if you make your first cards messy and unimportant, just to make sure you don’t feel like everything has to be nicely organized and highly significant.

      Making things messy from the start as advice for getting started.

      I've seen this before in other settings, particularly in starting new notebooks. Some have suggested scrawling on the first page to get over the idea of perfection in a virgin notebook. I also think I've seen Ton Ziijlstra mention that his dad would ding every new car to get over the new feeling and fear of damaging it. Get the damage out of the way so you can just move on.

      The fact that a notebook is damaged, messy, or used for the smallest things may be one of the benefits of a wastebook. It averts the internal need some may find for perfection in their nice notebooks or work materials.

    6. Ideally, the tree would perfectly reflect some kind of conceptual hierarchy; but in practice, card 11c might turn out to be the primary thing, with card 11 just serving as a historical record of what seeded the idea.

      The numbering doesn't matter! (especially as much as people may want it to)

      Zettelkasten grow their hierarchies from the bottom-up rather than from the top-down. It's easy to create a hierarchy from the top-down when you know the entire space to begin with, but when you're just exploring and discovering the space, this is impossible, but is build-able if one doesn't get too caught up in perfection from the start.

    7. The essence of the Zettelkasten approach is the use of repeated decimal points, as in “22.3.14” -- cards addressed 2.1, 2.2, 2.2.1 and so on are all thought of as “underneath” the card numbered 2, just as in the familiar subsection-numbering system found in many books and papers. This allows us to insert cards anywhere we want, rather than only at the end, which allows related ideas to be placed near each other much more easily. A card sitting “underneath” another can loosely be thought of as a comment, or a contituation, or an associated thought.

      He's cleverly noticed that many books and articles use a decimal outlining scheme already, so why not leverage that here.

    8. Writing on small cards forces certain habits which would be good even for larger paper, but which I didn’t consider until the small cards made them necessary. It forces ideas to be broken up into simple pieces, which helps to clarify them. Breaking up ideas forces you to link them together explicitly, rather than relying on the linear structure of a notebook to link together chains of thought.

      A statement of the common "one idea per card" (or per note). He doesn't state it, but links to an article whose title is "One Thought Per Note".

      Who else has use this or similar phrasing in the historical record? - Beatrice Webb certainly came pretty close. - Others?

    9. When I was learning to write in my teens, it seemed to me that paper was a prison. Four walls, right? And the ideas were constantly trying to escape. What is a parenthesis but an idea trying to escape? What is a footnote but an idea that tried -- that jumped off the cliff? Because paper enforces single sequence -- and there’s no room for digression -- it imposes a particular kind of order in the very nature of the structure.-- Ted Nelson, demonstration of Xanadu space

      quote ostensibly from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA

    10. Another source on note-taking which I recommend highly is Lion Kimbro’s How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think (html, pdf). This is about a completely different system of note-taking, with different goals. However, it contains a wealth of inspiring ideas about note-taking systems, including valuable tips for the raw physical aspects of keeping paper notes. I recommend reading this interview with Lion Kimbro as a “teaser” for the book -- he mentions some things which he didn’t in the actual book, and it serves somewhat as “the missing introduction” to the book.
    11. However, I strongly recommend trying out Zettelkasten on actual note-cards, even if you end up implementing it on a computer. There’s something good about the note-card version that I don’t fully understand.

      Another advising to use the analog method for learning even if one is going to switch to a digital zettelkasten.

      He uses the word "good" here while others may have potentially used the word "magic", but writing in a space that values critical thinking, he would have been taken to task for having done so. In any case he's not able to put his finger on the inherent value of analog over digital.

    12. However, I honestly didn’t think Zettelkasten sounded like a good idea before I tried it. It only took me about 30 minutes of working with the cards to decide that it was really good.

      I've seen people describing how many cards they think they need before the method is useful, but this is the first time I've seen someone use a timeframe to describe useful effects.

    13. Early this year, Conor White-Sullivan introduced me to the Zettelkasten method of note-taking.

      This article was likely a big boost to the general idea of zettelkasten in the modern zeitgeist.

      Note the use of the phrase "Zettelkasten method of note-taking" which would have helped to distinguish it from other methods and thus helping the phrase Zettelkasten method stick where previously it had a more generic non-name.

    1. The slip box needs a number of years in order to reach critical mass. Until then, it functions as a mere container from which we can retrieve what we put in. This changes with its growth in size and complexity.

      Niklas Luhmann indicates that it may take a number of years to reach critical mass. This may be different for everyone based on the number of ideas they place into it and the amount of work they do in creating connections.

      Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki, has indicated that he thinks it takes roughly 500 pages in a wiki for the value to begin emerging.†

      How many notes and what level of links/complexity is a good minimal threshold for one to be able to see interesting and useful results?


      † Quote in FedWiki session on 2021-12-29

    1. Journalist John Dickerson [https://twitter.com/jdickerson/status/1458036871531937798 indicates] that he uses [[Instagram]] as a commonplace: https://www.instagram.com/jfdlibrary/ where he keeps a collection of photo "cards" with quotes from famous people rather than photos. He also keeps collections there of photos of notes from scraps of paper as well as photos of [[annotation]]s he makes in books.

      syndication links: https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/16118vy/john_dickersons_digital_commonplace/

    1. light-enables-creation

      This looks like the sort of structure note I might often make as I am a day or two into a literature review for a new area. It definitely helps to scaffold new ideas and identify specific areas which I may want to delve into more specifically. It's definitely been useful for me to begin linking things into other portions of my ZK to find areas of overlap with these new areas, so it's great to see you doing that with your Prometheus note already.

      Coming from the science area you may want to look at cells or animals with autofluorescence or areas like green fluorescent protein (GFP) if that is of interest in the area of creatures which produce their own light.

    1. Imagine the younger generation studying great books andlearning the liberal arts. Imagine an adult population con-tinuing to turn to the same sources of strength, inspiration,and communication. We could talk to one another then. Weshould be even better specialists than we are today because wecould understand the history of our specialty and its relationto all the others. We would be better citizens and better men.We might turn out to be the nucleus of the world community.

      Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

      Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

    2. The mathematical specialist, for example, canget further faster into the great mathematicians than a readerwho is without his specialized training. With the help ofgreat books, specialized knowledge can radiate out into agenuine interfiltration of common learning and common life.

      Here Hutchins is again prefiguring C.P. Snow's "two cultures". He makes the argument that by having a shared base of knowledge and culture in our society's past history of knowledge (and especially early scientists and mathematicians), everyone, despite their individual interests and specializations, can be an active participant in a broader human conversation.

    3. The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

      The commons as a social glue

      Perhaps there's a framing of "the commons" as a larger entity from which we not only draw, but to which we contribute and in which we participate that glues us all together.

      Link under: https://hypothes.is/a/mEgAiEIFEe6trVPf7HjFhQ

    4. The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

      We need some common culture to bind humanity together. Hutchins makes the argument that the Great Conversation can help to effectuate this binding through shared culture and knowledge.

      Perhaps he is even more right in the 2000s than he was in the 1950s?

    5. I should like to add that specialization, instead of makingthe Great Conversation irrelevant, makes it more pertinentthan ever. Specialization makes it harder to carry on anykind of conversation; but this calls for greater effort, not theabandonment of the attempt.

      The dramatic increase in economic specialization of humanity driven by the Industrial Revolution has many benefits to societies, but it also has detrimental effects when the core knowledge and shared base of the society is lost.

      Certainly individuals have a greater reliance on specialists for future outcomes (think about the specialization of areas like climate science which can have destructive outcomes on all of humanity or public health outcomes with respect to vaccines and specialized health care delivery), but they also need to have a common base of knowledge/culture and the ability to think critically for themselves to be able to effect necessary changes, particularly when the pace of those changes is more rapid than humans have generally been evolved to accept them.

    6. The revolt against the classical dissectors and drillmasterswas justified. So was the new interest in experimental science.The revolt against liberal education was not justified. Neitherwas the belief that the method of experimental science couldreplace the methods of history, philosophy, and the arts.

      These various shifts in culture and perspective were concurrent with the shift in education from the formal to the progressive.

      See also Education: A Short Introduction

    7. In general the professors of the humanities and the socialsciences and history, fascinated by the marvels of experi-mental natural science, were overpowered by the idea thatsimilar marvels could be produced in their own fields by theuse of the same methods. They also seemed convinced thatany results obtained in these fields by any other methods werenot worth achieving. This automatically ruled out writerspreviously thought great who had had the misfortune to livebefore the method of empirical natural science had reachedits present predominance and who had never thought ofapplying it to problems and subject matters outside the rangeof empirical natural science.

      Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

      One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

    8. Behind these tariff walls the professors who hadmany of the great writers and much of the liberal arts intheir charge contentedly sat, oblivious of the fact that theywere depriving the rising generation of an important part oftheir cultural heritage and the training needed to understandit, and oblivious also of the fact that they were deprivingthemselves of the reason for their existence.

      It can be easy to deprive a generation of important pieces of their cultural heritage by omitting any focus on it.

      • shiboleth
      • philology
      • disinterest
      • overwhelm

      Compare the loss of classical education and cultural heritage by "internal decay" as described by Hutchins in the early 1900s and the forced loss of cultural heritage of Indigenous Americans by the U.S. Government in roughly the same period by re-education and stamping out Indigenous language.

      Certainly one was loss through lack of exposure, but the other was outright erasure due to the natures of orality and literacy.

    9. Why did this education disappear? It was the education ofthe Founding Fathers. It held sway until fifty years ago. Nowit is almost gone. I attribute this phenomenon to two factors,internal decay and external confusion.

      Hutchins attributes the loss of classical education to both internal decay and external confusion, but I would suggest that some of the shift was also the need for industrialization and expanded access.

    10. We and the Japanesethought, in the i86o's, how wonderful it would be if thisresult could be achieved. We and they fixed our minds on theeconomic development of Japan and modified the educationalsystem of that country on "American lines" to promote thiseconomic development. So the rich got richer, the poor gotpoorer, the powerful got more bellicose; and Japan becamea menace to the world and to itself.

      Writing in 1951, Hutchins is writing too close to the time period of post World War II to have a better view of this topic. He's fashioned far too simple a story as a result.

      There was a lack of critical thinking and over-reliance on top down approval which was harmful in the Japanese story of this time period though.

    11. Undoubtedly the first task of the statesman in such countriesis to raise the standard of living to such a point that thepeople may be freed from economic slavery and given thetime to get the education appropriate to free men.

      A bulk of America was stuck in a form of economic slavery in the 1950s. See description of rural Texans in Robert Caro's LBJ biography for additional context --- washing/scrubbing, carrying water, farming, etc. without electricity in comparison to their fellow Americans who did have it.

      In the 21st century there is a different form of economic slavery imposed by working to live and a culture of consumption and living on overextended credit.

      Consider also the comedic story of the capitalist and the rural fisherman and the ways they chose to live their lives.

    12. If leisure and political power requirethis education, everybody in America now requires it, andeverybody where democracy and industrialization penetratewill ultimately require it. If the people are not capable ofacquiring this education, they should be deprived of politicalpower and probably of leisure. Their uneducated politicalpower is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrad-ing and will be dangerous. If the people are incapable ofachieving the education that responsible democratic citizen-ship demands, then democracy is doomed, Aristotle rightlycondemned the mass of mankind to natural slavery, and thesooner we set about reversing the trend toward democracythe better it will be for the world.

      This is an extreme statement which bundles together a lot without direct evidence.

      Written in an era in which there was a lot of pro-Democracy and anti-Communist discussion, Hutchins is making an almost religious statement here which binds education and democracy in the ways in which the Catholic church bound education and religion in scholasticism. While scholasticism may have had benefits, it also caused a variety of ills which took centuries to unwind into the Enlightenment.

      Why can't we separate education from democracy? Can't education of this sort live in other polities? Hasn't it? Does critical education necessarily lead to democracy?

      What does the explorable solution space of admixtures of critical reasoning and education look like with respect to various forms of government? Could a well-educated population thrive under collectivism or socialism?

      The definition of "natural slavery" here is contingent and requires lots of context, particularly of the ways in which Aristotle used it versus our current understanding of chattel slavery.

    13. Whatever work there is should have as much meaning aspossible. Wherever possible, workmen should be artists; theirwork should be the application of knowledge or science andknown and enjoyed by them as such. They should, if possi-ble, know what they are doing, why what they are doing hasthe results it has, why they are doing it, and what constitutesthe goodness of the things produced. They should understandwhat happens to what they produce, why it happens in thatway, and how to improve what happens. They should under-stand their relations to others co-operating in a given process,the relation of that process to other processes, the pattern of-them all as constituting the economy of the nation, and thebearing of the economy on the social, moral, and politicallife of the nation and the world. Work would be humanizedif understanding of all these kinds were in it and around it.

      Is this the same sort of shift in work noticed by Barak Obama in his four part documentary series Working: What We Do All Day which aired on Netflix in 2023?

      Politicians should focus here especially.

    14. Democracy and Education was written before the assemblyline had achieved its dominant position in the industrialworld and before mechanization had depopulated the farmsof America.

      Interesting history and possible solutions.

      Dewey on the humanization of work front running the dramatic changes of and in work in an industrial age?


      Note here the potential coupling of democracy and education as dovetailing ideas rather than separate ideas which can be used simultaneously. We should take care here not to end up with potential baggage that could result in society and culture the way scholasticism combined education and religion in the middle ages onward.

    15. Is it not a fact that we are now so wrapped up in ourown occupations and the special interests of our own oc-cupational groups that we are almost at the pretyrannicalstage described by Vico, the stage where everybody is soconcerned with his own special interests that nobody looks

      after the common good?

      Vico? Giambattista Vico?

    16. I doubtthat, if it were possible to arouse real interest in cowmanshipand its various contexts "and to train up a generation of ac-complished cowboys through the educational system, itwould be in the public interest to dedicate the educationalsystem to this purpose.

      note use of "train up" which now seems more like British English usage in 2023

    17. Inthe educational system generally the actual conditions ofpractice cannot be successfully imitated; and the pupil is notcommitted to the occupation.Since the pupil is not committed to the occupation, theproposition that the occupations that are to be studied arethose which are indicated by the needs and interests of thepupil at the time is alarming.

      There is a subtle definition of the word "committed" here.

    1. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Montfort, eds. The New Media Reader. MIT Press, 2002. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262232272/the-new-media-reader/.

      Detlef Stern (@t73fde@mastodon.social) (accessed:: 2023-08-23 12:55:47)

      Eines der wunderbarsten Bücher, die ich in letzter Zeit studierte: "The New Media Reader". Sowohl inhaltlich (grundlegende Texte von 1940-1994, Borges, Bush, Turing, Nelson, Kay, Goldberg, Engelbart, ... Berners-Lee), als auch von der Liebe zum herausgeberischem Detail (papierne Links, Druckqualität, ...). Nicht nur für #pkm und #zettelkasten Fanatiker ein Muss. Man sieht gut, welchen Weg wir mit Computern noch vor uns haben. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262232272/the-new-media-reader/

    1. Quoting the academics Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Pinker suggests approaching writing as if you were pointing something in the environment out to another person – something that she would notice for herself, if only she knew where to look. Imagine directing someone's gaze across a valley, to a specific house on the other side. "You should pretend," writes Pinker, "that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing." He calls this the "joint attention" strategy.

      Good writing is pointing out the interesting things you see to others. It's pre-literate, and even pre-oral.