19,848 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2022
    1. Technik des Wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens. Eine anleitung, besonders für Studierende, mit Ausführlichem Schriftenverzeichnis by Johannes Erich Heyde( Book )25 editions published between 1933 and 1951 in German and Undetermined and held by 114 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
    2. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens; eine Anleitung, besonders für Studierende by Johannes Erich Heyde( Book )32 editions published between 1931 and 1951 in German and held by 179 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
    1. https://scottscheper.com/letter/36/

      Clemens Luhmann, Niklas' son, has a copy of a book written in German in 1932 and given to his father by Friedrich Rudolf Hohl which ostensibly is where Luhmann learned his zettelkasten technique. It contains a 34 page chapter titled Die Kartei (the Card Index) which has the details.

    1. Heyde, Johannes Erich. 1931. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens. Zeitgemässe Mittelund Verfahrensweisen: Eine Anleitung, besonders für Studierende, 3rd ed. Berlin: Junkerund Dünhaupt.

      A manual on note taking practice that Blair quotes along with Paul Chavigny as being influential in the early 21st century.

    1. Malachy Walsh23 hr agoI'm 75 years old. Unfortunately I rejected the notecard method when it was taught in high school, instead choosing cumbersome notebooks all the way through graduate school...until Richard McKeon at University of Chicago recommended using notecards not only as a record of my reading and other experiences but also as a source of creative and rhetorical invention. This was a mind opening, life changing perspective. His only rule: each card or slip should pose and answer a single question. He recommended organizing all journal entries by one of the following topics: 1. By the so called great ideas in the Syntopticon. 2. By work or business projects, activities and events(I spent my life as an advertising man, juggling many assignments over 30 years, from Frosted Flakes to The Marines to Ford). 3. By great books worthy of Adler's analytical readings. 4. By everyday living topics like family, friends, health, wealth, politics, business, car, house, occasions, etc. This way of working has served me well. I believe a proper book case is half full of books and half full of boxes of notes about those books. Notice that McKeon's advice is not limited to writing and reflecting about the books we read. McKeown also encourages reflection on all areas of experience that are important to us. I guess I have an Aristotelian view that our lives consist of thinking, doing, making, and interacting and that writing offers us a way of connecting our thinking with these other activities. So, the nature, scope, and shape our "note system" should be designed to help us engage successfully in our day to day activities and long term enterprises. How should follow What and Why, connect with Who, and fit with When and Where. Any success I have had in business or personal life I attribute to McKeon's advice.

      Richard McKeon's advice, as relayed by a student, on how to take notes using an index card based practice.

      Does he have a written handbook or advice on his particular method?

    2. The video above gives a brief introduction to Scheper’s method, which he promises will help you create “genius-level work” in your chosen domain.

      But isn't Scheper's Method explicitly that of Niklas Luhmann?!?

    3. Someone posted the video above about the Zettelkasten method of taking notes pioneered by the 20th century German sociologist Niklas Luhmann.

      Pioneered is a dreadful word instead of something having a connotation of putting a cherry on top of a pre-existing practice.

    1. I see connections between ideas more easily following this approach. Plus, the combinations of ideas lead to even more new ideas. It’s great!

      Like many others, the idea of combinatorial creativity and serendipity stemming from the slip box is undersold.

    2. It’s recommended that you summarize the information you want to store in your own words, instead of directly copying the information like you would in a commonplace book.

      recommended by whom? for what purpose?

      Too many of these posts skip the important "why?" question

    1. https://howaboutthis.substack.com/p/the-knowledge-that-wont-fit-inside

      Reasonable overview article with some nice pros/cons.

    2. Below is a two page spread summarizing a Fast Company.com article about the Pennebaker method, as covered in Timothy Wilson’s book Redirect:

      Worth looking into this. The idea of the Pennebaker method goes back to a paper of his in 1986 that details the health benefits (including mental) of expressive writing. Sounds a lot like the underlying idea of morning pages, though that has the connotation of clearing one's head versus health related benefits.

      Compare/contrast the two methods.

      Is there research underpinning morning pages?

      See also: Expressive Writing in Psychological Science https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691617707315<br /> appears to be a recap article of some history and meta studies since his original work.

    3. “Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.” - Robert K. Merton
    1. The real issue with "learning in public" is them emphasis placed on "being an expert," which is *everywhere*. It's a capitalist mindset, convincing people that even as beginners they should consider themselves "experts" bc this is how you get exposure aka how u scale.

      The public online commons, by means of context collapse, allows people to present themselves as experts within an area without actually being experts.

      Some of these "experts" or "gurus" primarily have expertise in communication or promoting themselves or a small piece of a topic about which they know a little more than the average public.

    1. Chris Aldrich 00:02:33 um like oh yeah you know the most familiar to you yeah yeah and and he's yeah that guy is uh brilliant if you want to know the the ins and outs and deep history of note taking note-taking and even Beyond commonplace books going 00:02:47 back to the 15th century yeah

      That guy is brilliant!

      https://youtu.be/YiTHxQrFnxI?t=150

      <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/YiTHxQrFnxI" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
    1. Chris Aldrichs Blog ist sehr gefährlich, denn, wenn man einmal darin zu lesen angefangen hat, dann kommt man so schnell nicht mehr davon los. Ich selbst wurde durch einen bestimmten Beitrag angelockt und ertappe mich jetzt immer wieder dabei, dass ich durch sämtliche Beiträge und Pages seines Blogs stöbere. Er selbst nutzt sein Weblog wie folgt: I use this website as my primary hub for online identity and communication. It’s also my online commonplace book. Schon alleine damit ist geklärt, warum man so viele Dinge dort entdecken kann.  Ich komme auf alle Fälle weiterhin regelmäßig dort vorbei und einen seiner Feeds -- alle wären wohl nicht zu händeln -- habe ich in meinem Reader übernommen.

      https://kuemmerle.name/foren/topic/chris-aldrich#postid-148

      Google Translate:

      Chris Aldrich 's blog is very dangerous because once you start reading it, it's hard to get off. I myself was lured by a certain post and now find myself rummaging through all the posts and pages on his blog.

      He himself uses his weblog as follows:

      I use this website as my primary hub for online identity and communication. It's also my online common place book.

      That alone explains why you can discover so many things there. In any case, I continue to visit there regularly and I have adopted one of his feeds -- all of them would probably not be manageable -- in my reader.

    1. Glad you liked it. That's an example of the "let's let the zettelkasten direct my writing" approach. This is different than the "I have something I'm working on. Let's see if there's anything in the zettelkasten to support/refute it" approach, which I also do. So, I might call one "directive," and the other "supportive." (Although, I'm just making that up).

      Different modes/approaches to writing when using a zettelkasten:<br /> - directive: let the zettelkasten direct the writing project - supportive: one has a particular writing project in mind and uses their zettelkasten collection to support their thinking and writing for that.

      Are there other potential methods in addition to these two?

    2. Hit me up. Happy to show my zettel-based writing, and how my notes translate into published content, both short- and long-form.

      Thanks u/taurusnoises, your spectacular recent video "Using the Zettelkasten (and Obsidian) to Write an Essay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OUn2-h6oVc is about as close to the sort of public example of output creation I had been looking for!

      I'm sure that there are other methods and workflows out there which vary by person, method, and modality (analog/digital) and it would be interesting to see what those practices look like as examples for others to use, follow, and potentially improve upon.

      I particularly appreciate that your visual starting perspective of the graph view in Obsidian fairly closely mimics what an analog zettelkasten user might be doing and seeing within that modality.

      I'm still collecting extant examples and doing some related research, but perhaps I'll have some time later in the year to do some interviews with particular people about how they're actively doing this as you suggested.

      On a tangential note, I'm also piqued by some of the specific ideas you mention in your notes in the video as they relate to some work on orality and memory I've been exploring over the past several years. If you do finish that essay, I'd love to read the finished piece.

      Thanks again for this video!

    1. Littlefeather, who had acted in a few films before her infamous moment, says that the federal government threatened to shut down any talk shows or productions that put her on the air.
    2. A month before the ceremony, the activist organization American Indian Movement had occupied the South Dakota town of Wounded Knee to protest the sustained mistreatment of Native Americans, a standoff that at the time of Littlefeather’s televised appearance at the Oscars was under a U.S. Department of Justice-imposed media blackout.)
    3. She had two promises to keep: not to touch the statuette (Brando’s instructions), and to keep her comments to 60 seconds (an order from show producer Howard Koch, who told Littlefeather minutes before the award presentation that he had security on hand to arrest her if she went past time).

      WTF?! Arrest?

    1. "PDF is where documents go to die. Once something is in PDF, it's like a roach motel for data."

      —Chris Pratley, Microsoft Office's general manager (in TechRadar, 2012)

      obvious bias here on part of Pratley...

      Oddly, even if this were true, I'm not seeing patterns in the wild by which Microsoft products are helping to dramatically accelerate the distribution and easy ability to re-use data within documents. Perhaps its happening within companies or organizations to some extent, but it's not happening within the broader commons of the internet.


      If .pdfs are where information goes to die, then perhaps tools like Hypothes.is are meant to help resurrect that information?

    1. On the Internet there are many collective projects where users interact only by modifying local parts of their shared virtual environment. Wikipedia is an example of this.[17][18] The massive structure of information available in a wiki,[19] or an open source software project such as the FreeBSD kernel[19] could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.[20][21]

      Just as eusocial creatures like termites create pheromone infused mudballs which evolve into pillars, arches, chambers, etc., a single individual can maintain a collection of notes (a commonplace book, a zettelkasten) which contains memetic seeds of ideas (highly interesting to at least themselves). Working with this collection over time and continuing to add to it, modify it, link to it, and expand it will create a complex living community of thoughts and ideas.

      Over time this complexity involves to create new ideas, new structures, new insights.

      Allowing this pattern to move from a single person and note collection to multiple people and multiple collections will tend to compound this effect and accelerate it, particularly with digital tools and modern high speed communication methods.

      (Naturally the key is to prevent outside selfish interests from co-opting this behavior, eg. corporate social media.)

    2. The network of trails functions as a shared external memory for the ant colony.

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

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

    3. Stigmergy (/ˈstɪɡmərdʒi/ STIG-mər-jee) is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions.

      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.

    4. The term "stigmergy" was introduced by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé in 1959 to refer to termite behavior. He defined it as: "Stimulation of workers by the performance they have achieved." It is derived from the Greek words στίγμα stigma "mark, sign" and ἔργον ergon "work, action", and captures the notion that an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs that it and other agents sense and that determine and incite their subsequent actions.[4][5]

      Theraulaz, Guy (1999). "A Brief History of Stigmergy". Artificial Life. 5 (2): 97–116. doi:10.1162/106454699568700. PMID 10633572. S2CID 27679536.

    1. https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/03/55806862/

      https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich<br /> Joined: January 18, 2012<br /> First annotation: 2018-11-29

      Annotations: 10,099 (public and private as of 2022-07-03)

      Date of publication: 2022-07-03<br /> Duration: 3 years, 6 months, 5 days or 1312 days<br /> Average of: ~10099/1,312 = 7.69 annotations per day

      compare: https://hypothes.is/a/26pRxBpQEe2VXK8kiyXtKQ

      I suspect that earlier years were more sparse with higher number of fleeting notes. The past year or two output and quality increased dramatically with more valuable literature notes and more actual near-permanent or actual permanent notes.

    2. I’d be interested in hearing more about the ways oral cultures did their thinking, if you have resources on that handy. Otherwise if you recall your source for that could you pass it on?

      Below are some sources to give you a start on orality. I've arranged them in a suggested watching/reading order with some introductory material before more technical sources which will give you jumping off points for further research.

      • Modern Memory, Ancient Methods. TEDxMelbourne. Melbourne, Australia, 2018. https://www.ted.com/talks/lynne_kelly_modern_memory_ancient_methods.
      • Kelly, Lynne. The Memory Code. Allen & Unwin, 2016.
      • Kelly, Lynne. Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107444973.
      • Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Taylor & Francis, 2007.
      • Parry, Milman, and Adam Parry. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Oxford University Press, 1971.
      • Neale, Margo, and Lynne Kelly. Songlines: The Power and Promise. First Knowledges, 1.0. Thames & Hudson, 2020.
    1. https://web.hypothes.is/blog/100000-annotations/

      https://hypothes.is/users/heatherstaines<br /> Joined: November 11, 2016<br /> Annotations: 1,063 (public as of 2022-08-12)

      Date of publication: 2020-02-07<br /> Duration: 3 yr 3 mo or 1,183 days<br /> Average of: ~100,000/1,183 = 84.53 annotations per day

      These would be closer to the idea of fleeting notes per day and not a more zettelkasten-like permanent note. It does provide at least a magnitude of order level of measurement on practice however.

      Note that it's possible that as a part of the company she has multiple accounts including one with an earlier born by date which would tend to dilute the average.

      The publication is dated 2020-02-07 (which matches publication meta data) and somehow Heather makes an annotation on the post itself (dated 2020-02-02) saying she's already at 105,000 annotations. This could have given a smaller window on a few week's worth of annotations, except for the improbably mismatch in dates.

    1. Scheper, Scott P. Antinet Zettelkasten: The Secret Knowledge Development System Evolved By History’s Greatest Minds. Advanced Reader Copy. Greenlamp, 2022.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. I have it in Kindle version. The book is not bad, but for me there wasn't anything new. Probably because I have already read too much about notetaking and "thinking on paper" -- I have read too much, to be honest, it's becoming an obsession.Also, the book is meant for college students as a handbook on writing. I read only the first 7 chapters on notetaking, the rest of the book was about writing well.Little bit disappointed that the book doesn't have a reference/bibliography section at the end, even though he mentions in the book how important it is to reference your sources.

      I too wished for more sources, especially on some of the great quotes.

      Admittedly, for those who're already eyeball deep in note taking practice, there may not be much new, but for some who are confused or confounded by some of Ahrens' descriptions and presentation, this cuts through some of the details and gets more quickly to the point.

    1. you will never be ridiculous inhelping others— nobody will laugh at you
    2. Mortimer Adler (another independent scholar). “My train of thought greiout of my life just the way a leaf or a branch grows our of a tree.” His thinking and writing occurred as a regular part of his life. In one of his book;Thinking and Working on the Waterfront, he wrote:My writing is'done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fieldswhile waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Now and then I take aday off to “put myself in order." I go through the notes, pick and discard.The residue is usually a few paragraphs. My mind must always have somethingto chew on. I think on man, America, and the world. It is not as pretentiousas it sounds.
    3. Gross, Ronald. The Independent Scholar’s Handbook. Ten Speed Press, 1993. http://archive.org/details/the-independent-scholars-handbook-how-to-turn-your-interest-in-any-subject-into-.

    1. Whitehead once described the mentality of modern science as having beenforged through “the union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equaldevotion to abstract generalization.”
    2. To conclude,

      explicit conclusion of the piece

    3. Furthermore, thisdisparagement and neglect were surely unnecessary. P

      note taking too...

    4. The moral is not to abandon useful tools; rather, it is, first, that one shouldmaintain enough perspective to be able to detect the arrival of that inevitable daywhen the research that can be conducted with these tools is no longer important;
    5. Without wishing to exalt the cult of gentlemanlyamateurism, one must nevertheless recognize that the classical issues have aliveliness and significance that may be lacking in an area of investigation thatis determined by the applicability of certain tools and methods, rather than byproblems that are of intrinsic interest in themselves.
    6. formation is not strictly a matter of langue, but is rather assigned to what hecalled parole, and thus placed outside the scope of linguistics proper;
    7. The death-knell of philosophical grammar was soundedwith the remarkable successes of comparative Indo-European studies, whichsurely rank among the outstanding achievements of nineteenth-century science.
    8. Saussure echoed an important critique of Humbold-tian linguistic theory by the distinguished American linguist William DwightWhitney, who evidently greatly influenced Saussure.
    9. yntagmatic – that is,patterns of literal succession in the stream of speech – or paradigmatic – that is,relations among units that occupy the same position in the stream of speech.
    10. Thegreat Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who at the turn of the century laidthe groundwork for modern structural linguistics, put forth the view that theonly proper methods of linguistic analysis are segmentation and classification.
    11. To use the terminology Wilhelm von Hum-boldt used in the 1830s, the speaker makes infinite use of finite means. Hisgrammar must, then, contain a finite system of rules that generates infinitelymany deep and surface structures, appropriately related. I

      building blocks and arising complexity

    12. such major figures of renaissancegrammar as the Spanish scholar Sanctius. Sanctius, in particular, had developeda theory of ellipsis that had great influence on philosophical grammar.
    13. there is a problem of determining not only what he saidbut also, more importantly, what he meant.
    14. It seems that one of the innovations of the Port-RoyalGrammar of 1660 – the work that initiated the tradition of philosophical gram-mar – was its recognition of the importance of the notion of the phrase as agrammatical unit.
    15. Contemporary scholarship is not in a position to give a definitive assessmentof the achievements of philosophical grammar. The ground-work has not beenlaid for such an assessment, the original work is all but unknown in itself, andmuch of it is almost unobtainable. For example, I have been unable to locate asingle copy, in the United States, of the only critical edition of the Port-RoyalGrammar, produced over a century ago; and although the French original isnow once again available, 3 the one English translation of this important workis apparently to be found only in the British Museum. It is a pity that this workshould have been so totally disregarded, since what little is known about it isintriguing and quite illuminating.

      He's railing against the loss of theory for use over time and translation.

      similar to me and note taking...

    16. A striking example is the so-called rule of Vaugelas,which involves the relation between indefinite articles and relative clauses inFrench.
    17. the Port-RoyalGrammar and Logic,
    18. Leonard Bloom-field gives an account of philosophical grammar in his major work, Language,
    19. This rationalist philosophy of language merged with various other indepen-dent developments in the seventeenth century, leading to the first really signifi-cant general theory of linguistic structure, namely the general point of view that

      Perhaps the most far-reaching contribution of Cartesian philosophy to modern thought was its rejection of the scholastic notion of substantial forms and real qualities, of all those “little images fluttering

      evolution of space...<br /> few references

    20. t is clear that theCartesians understood, as well as Gilbert Ryle and other contemporary criticsunderstand, the difference between providing criteria for intelligent behavior, onthe one hand, and providing an explanation for the possibility of such behavior,on the other;
    21. Huarte postulates a third kind of wit, “by means of which some, withoutart or study, speak such subtle and surprising things, yet true, that were neverbefore seen, heard, or writ, no, nor ever so much as thought of.” The referencehere is to true creativity, an exercise of the creative imagination in ways that gobeyond normal intelligence and may, he felt, involve “a mixture of madness.”
    22. Huarte goes on to distinguish three levels of intelligence. The lowest of theseis the “docile wit,” which satisfies the maxim that he, along with Leibnitz andmany others, wrongly attributes to Aristotle, namely that there is nothing inthe mind that is not simply transmitted to it by the senses. The next higherlevel, normal human intelligence, goes well beyond the empiricist limitation:it is able to “engender within itself, by its own power, the principles on whichknowledge rests.”
    23. Wit (Ingenio) is a generative power.
    24. the writings of the Spanish physician JuanHuarte, who in the late sixteenth century published a widely translated studyon the nature of human intelligence. In the course of his investigations, Huartecame to wonder at the fact that the word for “intelligence,” ingenio, seems tohave the same Latin root as various words meaning “engender” or “generate.”
    25. through the air” to which Descartes referred with derision. With the exorcismof these occult qualities,

      Perhaps the most far-reaching contribution of Cartesian philosophy to modern thought was its rejection of the scholastic notion of substantial forms and real qualities, of all those “little images fluttering

      Aristotle reference? <br /> mnemonics?<br /> What is the context here?

    26. There is nothing at all absurd in theconclusion. It seems to me quite possible that at that particular moment in thedevelopment of Western thought there was the possibility for the birth of a sci-ence of psychology of a sort that still does not exist, a psychology that beginswith the problem of characterizing various systems of human knowledge andbelief, the concepts in terms of which they are organized and the principles thatunderlie them, and that only then turns to the study of how these systems mighthave developed through some combination of innate structure and organism –environment interaction. Such a psychology would contrast rather sharply withthe approach to human intelligence that begins by postulating, on a priorigrounds, certain specific mechanisms that, it is claimed, must be those underly-ing the acquisition of all knowledge and belief. The distinction is one to whichI will return in a subsequent lecture.

      a building block approach?

      Gall's law

    27. Karl Lashley gave a brilliant critique of the prevailingframework of ideas in 1948, arguing that underlying language use – and all orga-nized behavior –
    28. In fact,Descartes argued that the only sure indication that another body possesses ahuman mind, that it is not a mere automaton, is its ability to use language inthe normal way;

      Turing test precursor

      When did Turing pose his test? Year?

    29. Descartesalso arrived, quite early in his investigations, at the conclusion that the studyof mind faces us with a problem of quality of complexity, not merely degreeof complexity. He felt that he had demonstrated that understanding and will,the two fundamental properties of the human mind, involved capacities andprinciples that are not realizable by even the most complex of automata.
    30. seventeenth century, “the century ofgenius,”
    31. What is more, these advances have notnarrowed the gap between what is known and what can be seen to lie beyond thescope of present understanding and technique; rather, each advance has madeit clear that these intellectual horizons are far more remote than was heretoforeimagined.
    32. And this system of linguistic competenceis qualitatively different from anything that can be described in terms of thetaxonomic methods of structural linguistics, the concepts of S-R psychology,or the notions developed within the mathematical theory of communication orthe theory of simple automata.

      What are the atomic building blocks that would allow stimulus-response psychology to show complex behaviors?

    33. For those who sought a moremathematical formulation of the basic processes, there was the newly devel-oped mathematical theory of communication, which, it was widely believed inthe early 1950s, had provided a fundamental concept – the concept of “infor-mation” – that would unify the social and behavioral sciences and permit thedevelopment of a solid and satisfactory mathematical theory of human behav-ior on a probabilistic base.
    34. And just a fewyears later, it was jubilantly discovered that machine translation and automaticabstracting were also just around the corner.

      HA!

    35. Correspondingly, there was a striking decline in studies oflinguistic method in the early 1950s as the most active theoretical minds turnedto the problem of how an essentially closed body of technique could be appliedto some new domain – say, to analysis of connected discourse, or to other cul-tural phenomena beyond language. I arrived at Harvard as a graduate studentshortly after B. F. Skinner had delivered his William James Lectures, later to bepublished in his book Verbal Behavior. Among those active in research in thephilosophy or psychology of language, there was then little doubt that althoughdetails were missing, and although matters could not really be quite that sim-ple, nevertheless a behavioristic framework of the sort Skinner had outlinedwould prove quite adequate to accommodate the full range of language use.

      Are these the groans of a movement from a clockwork world perspective to a complexity based one?

    36. I recall being told by a distinguishedanthropological linguist, in 1953, that he had no intention of working througha vast collection of materials that he had assembled because within a few yearsit would surely be possible to program a computer to construct a grammar froma large corpus of data by the use of techniques that were already fairly wellformalized.

      rose colored glasses...

    37. particular branch of cognitive psychologyknown as linguistics

      Chomsky categorized linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology.

    38. in terms of the new perspectives provided by cybernetics and thecommunication sciences,

      Did Chomsky get onto the cybernetics craze aka "The Bandwagon"?

    39. And in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries, as linguistics, philosophy, and psychologyhave uneasily tried to go their separate ways, the classical problems of languageand mind have inevitably reappeared and have served to link these divergingfields and to give direction and significance to their efforts.

      cross-disciplinary studies are becoming a thing for these areas

    40. What contri-bution can the study of language make to our understanding of human nature?
    41. Much of the material in this lecture is to appear in a chapter entitled “Prob-lems of Explanation in Linguistics” in Explanations in Psychology, edited byR. Borger and F. Cioffi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967), alongwith interesting critical comments by Max Black.

      Linnean-like reuse of materials

      precedents

    42. The experts have the responsibility of making clear the actuallimits of their understanding and of the results they have so far achieved,
    43. A studyof human behavior that is not based on at least a tentative formulation of relevantsystems of knowledge and belief is predestined to triviality and irrelevance.

      behavioral economics? This was probably only a nascent field at the time this was written.

    44. Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791222.

    1. I'm going as an onion johnny this halloween and would like to add some authenticity.

      Will you also be traveling and singing with y fari lwyd? 🐴💀

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y07l5AsWEUs

      I really love something about the phrase "get them [ideas] into a form that students can work with them". There's a nice idea of play and coming to an understanding that I get from it. More teachers should frame their work like this.

    1. level 3sscheper · 2 days agoI did an interview with Luhmann's youngest son, Clemens. He told me he was trying to get his father to switch to using a computer for the last 15 years of his life (Clemens studied computer science in America when he was 16). Luhmann's response: "If it ain't broke, why change?" According to Clemens, Luhmann felt they were distracting and refused to own one. Now... if he were getting started today I'd guess he'd probably use digital (but who knows, he may switch to using analog).
    1. How many cards (both analog and digital) have you created yet? .t3_wjzjaz._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } question.71 votes2129.6%0=zero, I haven't started yet but I'm interested to learn4462.0%1..1000, some cards, I take it easy57.0%1k..10k, I like to imitate Roland Barthes with 12k cards11.4%10k..100k, my idol is Niklas Luhmann with 90k cards

      I'm curious who are the 6 that have been at this and honestly have over 10,000 cards? What timeframe did it take you to produce them? Roland Barthes worked for 37 years to produce his ~12,000.

    1. This is a living document. Ideas or feedback can be contributed through commenting directly using Hypothes.is which will create issues in the Github repo or you can directly create an issue: https://github.com/FAIRIslandProject/Generic-Place-based-Data-Policy/issues

      How awesome is this sort of integration? If one can use annotations to create issues within Github, it should be relatively easy for websites to do similar integrations to allow the use of Hypothes.is as a native commenting system on website pages. The API could be leveraged with appropriate URL wildcard patterns to do this.

      I have heard of a few cases of people using Github issue queues as comments sections for websites, and this dovetails well into that space.

      How might the Webmention spec be leveraged or abstracted to do similar sorts of communication work?

    1. I'm working on my zettelkasten—creating literature notes and permanent notes—for 90 min a day from Monday to Friday but I struggle with my permanent note output. Namely, I manage to complete no more than 3-4 permanent notes per week. By complete I mean notes that are atomic (limited to 1 idea), autonomous (make sense on their own), connected (link to at least 3 other notes), and brief (no more than 300 words).That said, I have two questions:How many permanent notes do you complete per week on average?What are your tips to increase your output?

      reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/wjigq6/how_do_you_increase_your_permanent_note_output

      In addition to all the other good advice from others, it might be worth taking a look at others' production and output from a historical perspective. Luhmann working at his project full time managed to average about 6 cards a day.1 Roland Barthes who had a similar practice for 37 years averaged about 1.3 cards a day.2 Tiago Forte has self-reported that he makes two notes a day, though obviously his isn't the same sort of practice nor has he done it consistently for as long.3 As you request, it would be useful to have some better data about the output of people with long term, consistent use.

      Given even these few, but reasonably solid, data points at just 90 minutes a day, one might think you're maybe too "productive"! I suspect that unless one is an academic working at something consistently nearly full time, most are more likely to be in the 1-3 notes a day average output at best. On a per hour basis Luhmann was close to 0.75 cards while you're at 0.53 cards. Knowing this, perhaps the best advice is to slow down a bit and focus on quality over quantity. This combined with continued consistency will probably serve your enterprise much better in the long run than in focusing on card per hour or card per day productivity.

      Internal idea generation/creation productivity will naturally compound over time as your collection grows and you continue to work with it. This may be a better sort of productivity to focus on in the long term compared with short term raw inputs.

      Another useful tidbit that some neglect is the level of quality and diversity of the reading (or other) inputs you're using. The better the journal articles and books you're reading, the more value and insight you're likely to find and generate more quickly over time.

    1. Luhmann’s slip-box contains about 90,000 notes, which sounds like an incrediblylarge number. But it only means that he wrote six notes a day fromthe day he started to work with his slip-box until he died.

      Should check the dates of start and finish and do the direct math myself, but ostensibly Luhmann averaged six notes a day for the duration of keeping his zettelkasten.

    1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32341607

      Didn't read it all, but the total number of notes, many likely repetitive or repetitive of things elsewhere makes me think that there is a huge diversity of thought within this space and different things work for different people in terms of work and even attention.

      The missing piece is that all of this sits here instead of being better curated and researched to help some forms of quicker consensus. I'm sure there are hundreds of other posts just like this on HN with all the same thoughts over and over again with very little movement forward.

      How can we help to aggregate and refine this sort of knowledge to push the borders for everyone broadly rather than a few here and there?

    2. This is what I observed in hyper productive people: some of them have a unique, novel system of organizing their knowledge, but many of them don't. So, having such a system is probably not that important.

      I see these sorts of statements often, and never taken into account is the diversity of ways of thought, general intelligence, quality of memory, or many other factors that make individuals different as well as their outcomes different.

      Different people are going to use different tools differently and have different outcomes.

    1. Tools are instruments to achieve something, and systems are the organization of such.

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

    2. I stole the title from this Substack post. I cannot put this much better than them: “we’ve chosen to optimize for feelings— to bring the quirks and edges of life back into software. To create something with soul.” Enjoyment is an important component of my day to day. 

      Optimizing for feelings seems to be a broader generational movement (particularly for the progressive movement) in the past decade or more.

      https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/optimizing-for-feelings #wanttoread

    3. In the world of productivity porn, it sounds edgy to say “I use pen and paper.”

      I'm not the only one talking about "productivity porn"....

    4. I also mentioned Zettelkasten many times in this post, but I don’t do that anymore—I just did a 1-month dry run and it felt tiring. Pen and paper just gives me the bare essentials. I can get straight to work and not worry if something is a literature note or a permanent note.

      What is it that was tiring about the practice? Did they do it properly, or was the focus placed on tremendous output driving the feeling of a need for commensurate tremendous input on a daily basis? Most lifetime productive users only made a few cards a day, but I get the feeling that many who start, think they should be creating 20 cards a day and that is definitely a road to burn out. This feeling is compounded by digital tools that make it easier to quickly capture ideas by quoting or cut and pasting, but which don't really facilitate the ownership of ideas (internalization) by the note taker. The work of writing helps to facilitate this. Apparently the framing of literature note vs. permanent note also was a hurdle in the collection of ideas moving toward the filtering down and refining of one's ideas. These naming ideas seem to be a general hurdle for many people, particularly if they're working without particular goals in mind.

      Only practicing zettelkasten for a month is certainly no way to build real insight or to truly begin developing anything useful. Even at two cards a day and a minimum of 500-1000 total cards to see some serendipity and creativity emerge, one would need to be practicing for just over a year to begin seeing interesting results.

    5. Analog tools also allow me to express my intention freely. For example, when using a blank notebook, I can write anywhere: begin from the bottom, on the margins, or intersperse it with quick diagrams or illustrations. On the other hand, note-taking apps usually force me to think line by line. It’s not bad, but it misses out on several affordances that pen and paper provides.

      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.)

    6. I like to think of thoughts as streaming information, so I don’t need to tag and categorize them as we do with batched data. Instead, using time as an index and sticky notes to mark slices of info solves most of my use cases. Graph notebooks like Obsidian think of information as batched data. So you have a set of notes (samples) that you try to aggregate, categorize, and connect. Sure there’s a use case for that: I can’t imagine a company wiki presented as streaming info! But I don’t think it aids me in how I usually think. When thinking with pen and paper, I prefer managing streamed information first, then converting it into batched information later— a blog post, documentation, etc.

      There's an interesting dichotomy between streaming information and batched data here, but it isn't well delineated and doesn't add much to the discussion as a result. Perhaps distilling it down may help? There's a kernel of something useful here, but it isn't immediately apparent.

      Relation to stock and flow or the idea of the garden and the stream?

    7. Sometimes, I find digital apps urging me to integrate with another application or extension: connect to calendar, install this, install that (and sure, it may also be my own damn fault). They force me to get into a “system” rather than focus on what the tool provides. It’s overwhelming. Over-optimization leads to empty work, giving me a feeling of productivity in the absence of output, like quicksand. It hampers me from doing actual work.
    1. I've been using WP as visible part of my zettel, which I keep in Obsidian. The only inconvenience is that I don't know how to make visible backlinks on pages that has links to and from.You can look how it works for yourself. Half of my WP is in Russian the section with books is fully in English. Browse there to see how it all works. Post your thoughts what you think about it.

      I know that a few people have been using the Webmention and the Semantic Linkbacks plugins for WordPress together to show the backlinks in the "comments" section of their posts/pages. Perhaps this may work for your purposes?

      A recent example I've seen someone put together on WordPress that does something similar (though not using Slippy) is https://cyberzettel.com/.

      In a similar vein, though not with WordPress, Kevin Marks mocked up a UI for an incoming/outgoing links in the mode of a Memex that also leverages Webmentions for part of the functionality: https://www.kevinmarks.com/memex.html.

    1. Come back and read these particular texts, but these look interesting with respect to my work on orality, early "religion", secrecy, and information spread:<br /> - Ancient practices removed from their lineage lose their meaning - In spiritual practice, secrecy can be helpful but is not always necessary

      timestamp

    2. For the sake of simplicity, go to Graph Analysis Settings and disable everything but Co-Citations, Jaccard, Adamic Adar, and Label Propogation. I won't spend my time explaining each because you can find those in the net, but these are essentially algorithms that find connections for you. Co-Citations, for example, uses second order links or links of links, which could generate ideas or help you create indexes. It essentially automates looking through the backlinks and local graphs as it generates possible relations for you.
    1. In 1951, Adelbert Ames created the mind-boggling ‘Ames Window’. It’s so effective that even when you know how it works you can’t break the illusion [video from The Curiosity Show: https://t.co/DF82ASFj1a] pic.twitter.com/lm7aoCBxVs

      — Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) August 8, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. https://twitter.com/_35millimetre/status/1556586974928068611

      Turns out the world’s greatest drawing of a frog was done in 1790, by Itō Jakuchu pic.twitter.com/GttSfHA7Kl

      — Charlie (@_35millimetre) August 8, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Makes me want to revisit some of the history of early haiku and frog references. What was the literacy level within Japanese culture at this time? Were there more methods entwining elements of orality and memory into the popular culture?

    1. But commission member Kondratiuk, a heraldic expert who served as a military historian for the National Guard and US Army for more than four decades, said such objections are “a misreading of the heraldry.”“That’s the arm of God protecting the Commonwealth,” he said, referring to the upraised sword. “That symbol has been used in European heraldry for hundreds of years.”He added that the Native figure’s downward-facing arrow indicates “peaceful intent.”“The Native American on there is an homage to the Native Americans,” Kondratiuk said, adding he “voted with the pack” to see what recommendations the commission would produce. As for the motto: “That’s an allusion to the monarch,” he continued. “The Founding Fathers would have been very familiar with that.”

      Example of how older traditions have passed from memory and are now re-read (mis-read) in new contexts.

    2. Latin: “By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.”
    3. Designed by illustrator Edmund Garrett in 1898, the current seal draws on the original seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which featured a Native American man, naked but for some shrubbery about his groin, saying, “Come over and help us.”
    1. https://app.idx.us/en-US/services/credit-management

      Seems a bit ironic just how much data a credit monitoring wants to help monitor your data on the dark web. So many companies have had data breaches, I can only wonder how long it may be before a company like IDX has a breach of their own databases?

      The credit reporting agencies should opt everyone into these sorts of protections automatically given the number of breaches in the past.

    1. Local libraries must be full of index card cabinets. Everything going digital, they might be willing to give them away or sell.

      reply to TurnipMonkey

      They're not as easy to come by as you might think, though they pop up from time to time. Given shipping costs, you're definitely better off finding something locally if you can.

      OCLC started digital shared cataloging in 1971. The peak for pre-printed library catalog cards was in 1985, and they quit printing cards in bulk in 2015 after shipping more than 1.9 billion cards during that time.<sup>[1]</sup>

    2. I have a notifications on the German equivalent to craigslist on Karteikasten, Karteikartenschrank, Karteischrank, Apothekenschrank and the like in a 50km radius around here. Hope one day something comes up that is reasonable priced and small enough to fit the trunk of our little electric car :-)

      https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wjvoqq/if_youre_going_to_cast_some_zettels_you_may_as/

      A list of German words and English equivalents for index card related containers and furniture

      Karteikasten - index box<br /> Karteikartenschrank - index card cabinet<br /> Karteischrank - filing cabinet Apothekenschrank - apothecary cabinet

    3. I just frowned at my cardboard boxes.I’m aiming to build something similar out of wood soon. But I also had an idea to build a bookshelf with drawers incorporated, a row of vertical draws on both sides of the shelf and/or one down the middle. Ideally creating book cubbies between the drawers where I could organize related books next to appropriate zettles. Not sure how attached to that idea I am though, seems like something I will like for the moment and find very novel in the future (pun certainly intended).

      reply to GnauticalGnorman

      Don't frown at cardboard. Everyone starts their journey with a single card and a humble box. Filling up a first box is an accomplishment that gives you time to dream about the box you want to have.

      Of potential interest, the cost of index cards to fill these files will be almost the investment in the box itself. Is this similar to the rule of thumb in the art world that the price of the frame should reflect the investment in the artwork?

    1. https://cyberzettel.com/chris-aldrich-and-his-research-on-digital-public-zettelkasten/

      This looks exciting!

      You've also nudged me to convert my burgeoning broader top level tag of "note taking" into a full fledged category (https://boffosocko.com/category/note-taking/) which shortly will contain not only the material on zettelkasten but commonplace books and other related areas.

      Usually once a tag has more than a couple hundred entries, it's time to convert it to a category. This one was long overdue.

    1. History and Foundations of Information Science

      This series of books focuses on the historical approach or theoretical approach to information science and seeks a broader interpretation of what we consider as information (i.e., information is in the eye of the beholder, be it sets of data, scholarly publications, works of art, material objects, or DNA samples), and an emphasis upon how people access and interact with this information.

      https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/history-and-foundations-information-science

    1. Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath (German: [ˈnɔʏʀaːt]; 10 December 1882 – 22 December 1945) was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. He was also the inventor of the ISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics and an innovator in museum practice. Before he fled his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
    2. Neurath claimed that magic was unfalsifiable and therefore disenchantment could never be complete in a scientific age.[18]
      1. Josephson-Storm, Jason (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 227. ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.
    3. Neurath believed that socio-economic theory and scientific methods could be applied together in contemporary practice.
    4. Quine's book Word and Object (p. 3f) made famous Neurath's analogy which compares the holistic nature of language and consequently scientific verification with the construction of a boat which is already at sea (cf. Ship of Theseus): .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
    5. "Isotype", an acronymic nickname for the project's full title: International System of Typographic Picture Education.[8]
    6. The forerunner of contemporary Infographics, he initially called this the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics.
    1. Historical Hypermedia: An Alternative History of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 and Implications for e-Research. .mp3. Berkeley School of Information Regents’ Lecture. UC Berkeley School of Information, 2010. https://archive.org/details/podcast_uc-berkeley-school-informat_historical-hypermedia-an-alte_1000088371512. archive.org.

      https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/2010/historical-hypermedia-alternative-history-semantic-web-and-web-20-and-implications-e.

      https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/audio/2010-10-20-vandenheuvel_0.mp3

      headshot of Charles van den Heuvel

      Interface as Thing - book on Paul Otlet (not released, though he said he was working on it)

      • W. Boyd Rayward 1994 expert on Otlet
      • Otlet on annotation, visualization, of text
      • TBL married internet and hypertext (ideas have sex)
      • V. Bush As We May Think - crosslinks between microfilms, not in a computer context
      • Ted Nelson 1965, hypermedia

      t=540

      • Michael Buckland book about machine developed by Emanuel Goldberg antecedent to memex
      • Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine: Information, Invention, and Political Forces (New Directions in Information Management) by Michael Buckland (Libraries Unlimited, (March 31, 2006)
      • Otlet and Goldsmith were precursors as well

      four figures in his research: - Patrick Gattis - biologist, architect, diagrams of knowledge, metaphorical use of architecture; classification - Paul Otlet, Brussels born - Wilhelm Ostwalt - nobel prize in chemistry - Otto Neurath, philosophher, designer of isotype

      Paul Otlet

      Otlet was interested in both the physical as well as the intangible aspects of the Mundaneum including as an idea, an institution, method, body of work, building, and as a network.<br /> (#t=1020)

      Early iPhone diagram?!?

      (roughly) armchair to do the things in the web of life (Nelson quote) (get full quote and source for use) (circa 19:30)

      compares Otlet to TBL


      Michael Buckland 1991 <s>internet of things</s> coinage - did I hear this correctly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things lists different coinages

      Turns out it was "information as thing"<br /> See: https://hypothes.is/a/kXIjaBaOEe2MEi8Fav6QsA


      sugane brierre and otlet<br /> "everything can be in a document"<br /> importance of evidence


      The idea of evidence implies a passiveness. For evidence to be useful then, one has to actively do something with it, use it for comparison or analysis with other facts, knowledge, or evidence for it to become useful.


      transformation of sound into writing<br /> movement of pieces at will to create a new combination of facts - combinatorial creativity idea here. (circa 27:30 and again at 29:00)<br /> not just efficiency but improvement and purification of humanity

      put things on system cards and put them into new orders<br /> breaking things down into smaller pieces, whether books or index cards....

      Otlet doesn't use the word interfaces, but makes these with language and annotations that existed at the time. (32:00)

      Otlet created diagrams and images to expand his ideas

      Otlet used octagonal index cards to create extra edges to connect them together by topic. This created more complex trees of knowledge beyond the four sides of standard index cards. (diagram referenced, but not contained in the lecture)

      Otlet is interested in the "materialization of knowledge": how to transfer idea into an object. (How does this related to mnemonic devices for daily use? How does it relate to broader material culture?)

      Otlet inspired by work of Herbert Spencer

      space an time are forms of thought, I hold myself that they are forms of things. (get full quote and source) from spencer influence of Plato's forms here?

      Otlet visualization of information (38:20)

      S. R. Ranganathan may have had these ideas about visualization too

      atomization of knowledge; atomist approach 19th century examples:S. R. Ranganathan, Wilson, Otlet, Richardson, (atomic notes are NOT new either...) (39:40)

      Otlet creates interfaces to the world - time with cyclic representation - space - moving cube along time and space axes as well as levels of detail - comparison to Ted Nelson and zoomable screens even though Ted Nelson didn't have screens, but simulated them in paper - globes

      Katie Berner - semantic web; claims that reporting a scholarly result won't be a paper, but a nugget of information that links to other portions of the network of knowledge.<br /> (so not just one's own system, but the global commons system)

      Mention of Open Annotation (Consortium) Collaboration:<br /> - Jane Hunter, University of Australia Brisbane & Queensland<br /> - Tim Cole, University of Urbana Champaign<br /> - Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory annotations of various media<br /> see:<br /> - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311366469_The_Open_Annotation_Collaboration_A_Data_Model_to_Support_Sharing_and_Interoperability_of_Scholarly_Annotations - http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130205/index.html - http://www.openannotation.org/PhaseIII_Team.html

      trust must be put into the system for it to work

      coloration of the provenance of links goes back to Otlet (~52:00)

      Creativity is the friction of the attention space at the moments when the structural blocks are grinding against one another the hardest. —Randall Collins (1998) The sociology of philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (p.76)

    1. http://cluster.cis.drexel.edu/~cchen/talks/2011/ICSTI_Chen.pdf

      The Nature of Creativity: Mechanism, Measurement, and Analysis<br /> Chaomei Chen, Ph.D.<br /> Editor in Chief, Information Visualization<br /> College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University<br /> June 7‐8, 2011

      Randomly ran across while attempting to source Randall Collins quote from https://hypothes.is/a/8e9hThZ4Ee2hWAcV1j5B9w

    1. used for project management. The logistics for the Gulf War were managed on index cards. Read "Moving Mountains" by Lt. General George Pagonis.

      Example of index cards used for project management.

    1. "OCLC Prints Last Library Catalog Cards.” OCLC, October 1, 2015. 44280170. OCLC News Releases 2015 - US. https://cdm15003.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15003coll6/id/386.

    2. OCLC began automated catalog card production in 1971, when the shared cataloging system first went online. Cardproduction increased to its peak in 1985, when OCLC printed 131 million. At peak production, OCLC routinelyshipped 8 tons of cards each week, or some 4,000 packages. Card production steadily decreased since then asmore and more libraries began replacing their printed cards with electronic catalogs. OCLC has printed more than1.9 billion catalog cards since 1971.
    3. OCLC built the world's first online shared cataloging system in 1971
    4. DUBLIN, Ohio, October 1, 2015 —OCLC printed its last library catalog cards today, officially closing the book onwhat was once a familiar resource for generations of information seekers who now use computer catalogs andonline search engines to access library collections around the world.
    1. https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a19379/a-short-history-of-the-index-card/

      Broad history essay but doesn't dig into the weeds. Feels a lot like a few other essays I've seen of this sort. Content farmish...

    2. The Mundaneum went through a couple of name changes over its 40-year life: it was originally called the International Institute of Bibliography. It was then renamed the Universal Bibliographic Repertory before being dubbed the Mundaneum. Remnants of its card catalog still exist today at theMundaneum museum in Mons, Belgium.
    3. in 1971, the Ohio College Library Center began printing the text onto the index cards for them.

      Librarians either handwrote or typed up their own library card catalog cards until the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) began printing cards for libraries as a service.

    4. Amherst College library described in Colin B. Burke's Information and Intrigue, organized books and cards based on author name. In both cases, the range of books on a shelf was random.

      Information and Intrigue by Colin B. Burke

    1. https://multimediaman.blog/2016/09/30/how-the-index-card-launched-the-information-age/

      A quick overview of the index card and it's role in history from Linnaeus to Dewey to the Mundaneum.

    2. In 1910, Otlet and La Fontaine shifted their attention to the establishment of the Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium. Again with government support, the aim of this institution was to bring together all of the world’s knowledge in a single UDC index. They created the gigantic repository as a service where anyone in the world could submit an inquiry on any topic for a fee.

      Mundaneum as an early prototype of Google Search

    3. After Otlet and La Fontaine received permission from Dewey to modify the DDC, they set about creating the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC).
    4. As described by Otlet, the ambition of the UBR was to build “an inventory of all that has been written at all times, in all languages, and on all subjects.”

      Paul Otlet attempted to index all the worlds' knowledge years before Goggle was conceived.

    5. In 1895, the Belgians Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Henri La Fontaine founded the International Institute of Bibliography (IIB) and began working on something they called the Universal Bibliographic Repertory (UBR), an enormous catalog based on index cards. Funded by the Belgian government, the UBR involved the collection of books, articles, photographs and other documents in order to create a one-of-a-kind international index.
    6. In 1896, Dewey formed a partnership with Herman Hollerith and the Tabulating Machine Company (TMC) to provide the punch cards used for the electro-mechanical counting system of the US government census operations. Dewey’s relationship with Hollerith is significant as TMC would be renamed International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924 and become an important force in the information age and creator of the first relational database.
    7. After thirty years of working with notebooks, Linnaeus began to experiment with a filing system of information recorded on separate sheets of paper.

      Carl Linnaeus used notebooks for thirty years before beginning to experiment with information written on slips of paper.

    8. One year ago this month, the final order of library catalog cards was printed by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) in Dublin, Ohio. On October 2, 2015, The Columbus Dispatch wrote, “Shortly before 3 p.m. Thursday, an era ended. About a dozen people gathered in a basement workroom to watch as a machine printed the final sheets of library catalog cards to be made …”
    1. 132 A6HD FCB24 - card index cabinet (2)* 6 x 4” (A6) 159 (6.2”) 434 (17”)

      4x6" Index card cabinet

      Bisley show room in New York (212) 675-3055

    1. Systematische Anleitung zur Theorie und Praxis der Mnemonik : nebst den Grundlinien zur Geschichte u. Kritik dieser Wissenschaft : mit 3 Kupfertaf. by Johann Christoph Aretin( Book )18 editions published in 1810 in 3 languages and held by 52 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

      Google translation:<br /> Systematic instructions for the theory and practice of mnemonics: together with the basic lines for the history and criticism of this science: with 3 copper plates.

      First published in 1810 in German

      http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n83008343/

    1. Carl Otto Reventlow (1817-1873) and the history of the Major System

      I was delving into the history of mnemonic techniques earlier hunting down some of the origins of the major system and ran across a reference to Reventlow from the late-1800s. He apparently borrowed much of his work from Aime Paris, but helped to popularize a variation of the method in Germany and Prague.

      A sketch with some great references (in German) was already hiding on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Otto_Reventlow

      Bonus points for anyone who can track down a digital edition of his 1843 textbook.

    1. After publishing a textbook on his mnemonic system in 1843,[2] he travelled widely in Germany to popularize it. His most notable lectures were given in Leipzig, but also in Prague. A dictionary that substituted mnemonic terms for numbers[3] and a guideline for the use of mnemotechnics in schools[4] which listed some 3,000 mnemotechnically annotated facts from history and geography courses followed in 1844 and 1846, respectively. The novelty of Otto's "substitution method" was disputed almost immediately,[5][6] his opponents stating it to be just one more derivative of the method proposed by Aimé Paris. However, it received highly favorable reviews as well.[7][8]

      Karl Christian Otto (aka Carl Otto Reventlow) published a textbook on a mnemonic system in 1843 and then travelled to publicize and popularize it including notable lectures in Leipzig and Prague. His system, likely broadly similar to the major system, may have been take from Aimé Paris' method.

      Sources indicate that it was borrowed from Paris, but it received favorable reviews.


      Sources to look into (likely needing translation from German): - Otto, Carl Christian (Pseudonym: Carl Otto Reventlow): Lehrbuch der Mnemotechnik nach einem durchaus neuen auf das Positive aller Disciplinen anwendbaren Systeme. Ed.: J. G. Cotta, Stuttgart und Tübingen 1843; 240 p.<br /> - Reventlow, K. O. Wörterbuch der Mnemotechnik nach eignem Systeme. Ed.: J. G. Cotta, Stuttgart und Tübingen 1844.<br /> - Otto, C. Leitfaden der Mnemotechnik für Schulen. Ed.: J. G. Cotta, Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1846.<br /> - Rauk C. W. Reventlov und die Mnemonik, und die Mnemonik und die Schule. Cottbus 1844.<br /> - Pick E. Mnemonik und ihre Anwendung auf das Studium der Geschichte. Ed.: Steiner'sche Buchhandlung. Winterthur 1848.<br /> - E. M. Oettinger, Karl Otto genannt Reventlow oder die Mnemonik in ihrer höchsten Ausbildung. Leipzig 1845. Charivari, 1847, Ausgabe 222, p. 3546.

    2. Carl Otto Reventlow (actually Karl [Carl] Christian Otto; born 1817 in Store Heddinge (Denmark); died in 1873) became notable as the developer of a mnemonic system.

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

      Carl Otto Reventlow (1817-1873)

      Source used by Edward Pick for some of his history of memory.