- Aug 2023
-
www.smithsonianmag.com www.smithsonianmag.com
-
Catlin, Roger. “How Many Volunteers Does It Take to Transcribe Phyllis Diller’s 53,000 Jokes?” Smithsonian Magazine, March 6, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-many-volunteers-does-take-transcribe-phyllis-dillers-jokes-180962384/.
-
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.)
-
Most of the gags, written from the 1960s to the 1980s
As a preliminary indication, most of Phyllis Diller's index cards were written from the 1960s to the 1980s.
-
-
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/94/95/9495cde8-9a8a-4473-b96e-a22ba8ff7b0d/et201028667web.jpg)
-
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.
-
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
-
-
www.npr.org www.npr.org
-
“Phyllis Diller’s File Of 53,000 Jokes.” Weekend Edition Saturday. NPR, March 11, 2017. https://www.npr.org/2017/03/11/519807672/phyllis-diller-s-file-of-53-000-jokes.
-
DILLER: And, you know, of course they always say to Californians that we don't have seasons. Of course, that is not true. We have fire, flood, mud and drought.
Was this originally hers? I've used a variation of it for decades myself....
-
Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people seem bright until they speak.
-
an imaginary husband she called Fang.
Phyllis Diller had an imaginary husband she called "Fang".
-
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.)
-
HEIDI ROTBART: She would write a joke on a piece of paper, and her assistants would type them up on 3-by-5 cards and then place them in the joke file.
Diller's manager indicated that she wrote jokes on paper and had her assistants type them up on 3 x 5" index cards.
-
-
www.latimes.com www.latimes.com
-
Liebenson, Donald. “Classic Hollywood: Remembering Phyllis Diller (and 52,569 of Her Jokes) at the Smithsonian.” Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2017, sec. Television. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-ca-st-phyllis-diller-smithsonian-20170512-story.html.
-
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.
-
Three weeks and 52,569 jokes later, the job was completed.
It took three weeks of volunteer effort for transcribers to convert the 52,569 index cards of jokes in Phyllis Diller's gag file into digitized text.
-
The Smithsonian seems to consistently refer to Phyllis Diller's card index of jokes as a "gag file", but what did Diller herself call it?
-
The joke file is a snapshot of American history.”
quote by Hanna BredenbeckCorp, of Smithsonian on Phyllis Diller's gag file
-
“I admire her ability for organization too. My jokes are still mostly in my head. She got hers on paper in alphabetical order.
Quote from Roseanne Barr on Phyllis Diller's card index gag file.
-
Later, she’s was doing jokes about racism, like, ‘The word bigot is a contraction for big idiot.’”
Joke quoted from Phyllis Diller's card index.
Actual origin?
-
“I really admired that she had everything so organized on catalog cards,” she said.
- Susan Wever, a retired librarian from Indianapolis, on Phyllis Diller's card index of jokes.
-
Hanna BredenbeckCorp, project assistant for the museum, was impressed. “It took me four months to scan all the joke cards,” she said with a laugh.
It took four months for Hanna BredenbeckCorp, a project assistant for the Smithsonian Institution, to scan all of Phyllis Diller's joke cards for subsequent transcription and creation of a searchable digital database.
-
Heidi Rotbart, owner of Heidi Rotbart Management who in the 1980s became Diller’s traveling secretary,
-
In 1958, she made her television debut opposite Groucho Marx on the game show, “You Bet Your Life.”
Tags
- quotes
- scanning
- Phyllis Diller's gag file
- wordnik
- digitized note collections
- card index as historical object
- archival materials
- You Bet Your Life
- 1958
- card index as autobiography
- material culture
- transcriptions
- card index for comedy
- Groucho Marx
- bigots
- citizen transcriptions
- Roseanne Barr
- gag files
- crowdsourcing
- organization
- comedy
- references
- hw-bigot
- comedy writing
- portmanteau
- talent managers
- television debuts
- Phyllis Diller
- Smithsonian Institution
- Heidi Rotbart
- read
Annotators
URL
-
-
textfx.withgoogle.com textfx.withgoogle.comTextFX1
-
er.educause.edu er.educause.edu
-
A Generative AI Primer on 2023-08-15 by Brian Basgen
ᔥGeoff Corb in LinkedIn update (accessed:: 2023-08-26 01:34:45)
-
-
en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
-
-
Phillips also was partly responsible for the design of the Republican "Southern Strategy" of the 1970s and 1980s.
Was there a heavy racist tinge to his version of Southern Strategy? Religious?
-
-
Local file Local file
-
“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.
-
Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.
-
Most Americans know that before becoming a politician Reaganwas an actor, but fewer are aware that Reagan’s flagging screencareer was revived by a job with the General Electric Corporation(GE). Reagan hosted the popular television show General ElectricTheater, where each week his voice and face reached into tens ofmillions of homes, promoting didactic stories of individualism andfree enterprise. At the same time, he traveled across the country onbehalf of GE—visiting factories, making speeches at schools, anddoing the dinner circuit in communities where GE had a presence—promoting the corporation’s stridently individualist antiunion andantigovernment vision.
From a philosophical viewpoint, Reagan grew up in Dixon, Illinois a small town (surrounded by farmland) in North West-ish Illinois roughly on the border of the political borders of what Colin Woodard calls The Midlands and Greater Appalachia. He seems to have been a Midlander for the first half of his life, but obviously had an easy time moving to a more Greater Appalachia viewpoint when working for GE.
-
-
en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
-
The phrase "Rule 34" was coined from an August 13, 2003 webcomic captioned, "Rule #34 There is porn of it. No exceptions." The comic was drawn by TangoStari (Peter Morley-Souter) to depict his shock at seeing Calvin and Hobbes parody porn.[1][2]
-
-
www.dtsheffler.com www.dtsheffler.com
-
https://www.dtsheffler.com/blog/2015-08-05-one-thought-per-note/ archive version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220124223433/https://www.dtsheffler.com/blog/2015-08-05-one-thought-per-note/
ᔥ[[abramdemski]] in The Zettelkasten Method (accessed:: 2023-08-25 12:00:07)
-
-
www.dtsheffler.com www.dtsheffler.com
-
https://www.dtsheffler.com/blog/2014-07-21-two-goals-of-note-taking/ archive version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220528093415/https://www.dtsheffler.com/blog/2014-07-21-two-goals-of-note-taking/
ᔥ[[abramdemski]] in The Zettelkasten Method (accessed:: 2023-08-25 12:00:07)
-
-
www.lesswrong.com www.lesswrong.com
-
Texts are patient conversationalists always waiting for you to write your side of the conversation into the margin before they continue on with their side of the conversation. Sadly, too many readers (students especially) don't realize that there's a conversation going on.
Link to:<br /> - https://hypothes.is/a/bBwyhkN3Ee6nQNPI5xmSnQ - https://hypothes.is/a/GvRApkN3Ee6LbBPqqX-A5Q
-
Margins in books and on paper are blank spaces for "dark ideas" asking to be filled in while "reading with a pen in hand" so that the reader can have a conversation with the text.
Link to https://hypothes.is/a/GvRApkN3Ee6LbBPqqX-A5Q on dark ideas
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I replace the metal rings (which I find harder to work with) with plastic rings.
Some users find that plastic book rings are easier to use than metal ones.
-
I use the Staples index-cards-on-a-ring which put all the cards on a single ring, and protect them with plastic covers.
Rather than using card index boxes, abramdemski prefers using book rings to hold his cards together in batches.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
one early reader of this write-up decided to use half 3x5 cards, so that they’d fit in mtg deck boxes.
First reference I've seen for someone suggesting using half size 3 x 5" index cards so that they could use commercially available Magic: The Gathering (MTG) boxes.
Oxford and possibly other manufacturers already make 1/2 size 3 x 5" index cards.
-
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
-
others have reported large productivity boosts from the technique as well.
Which others? where?
To my knowledge there weren't many (any?) examples floating around in 2019.
-
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.
-
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.
-
hi-tec-c coleto especially recommended
nice recommendation here :)
-
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.
-
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.
-
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1
A somewhat early, comprehensive one page description of the zettelkasten method from September 2019.
Tags
- quotes
- tools for thought
- child nodes
- reading with a pen in hand
- negative space
- book rings
- perfectionists
- trees
- hierarchies
- note taking advice
- emu in the sky
- invisibility
- annotations
- bullet points
- prisons
- zettelkasten
- conversation partners
- perfection is the enemy of progress
- academic publishing
- messiness
- atomic notes
- dark constellations
- Workflowy
- 3 x 5" index cards
- Lion Kimbro
- writing advice
- conversations with the text
- empty spaces
- red links
- margins
- recommendations
- thought spaces
- zettelkasten critical mass
- The Great Conversation
- zettelkasten pedagogy
- Dewey Decimal System
- prompts
- building blocks
- Magic: The Gathering (MTG)
- one idea per card
- analog vs. digital
- outliners
- dark ideas
- messiness for productivity
- preciousness
- productivity paralysis
- bottom-up vs. top-down
- magic of note taking
- zettelkasten method
- outlining
- blank page
- plastic vs. metal
- zettelkasten boxes
- idea links
- card index for productivity
- tools for thought affordances
- productivity
- Ted Nelson
- tree branching
- wastebooks
- critical thinking
- zettelkasten method one pager
- this is why we can't have nice things
- 2.5 x 3" index cards
- Montessori philosophy
- Pilot Hi-Tec C
Annotators
URL
-
-
www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
-
Using Magic: The Gathering boxes for younger children and teenagers might be a more palatable way to introduce the zettelkasten method of note taking to them, particularly when it's a game in which they have a pre-existing interest.
-
-
-
-
ᔥ[[abramdemski]] in The Zettelkasten Method (accessed:: 2023-08-25 10:12:42)
-
-
www.lesswrong.com www.lesswrong.com
-
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T382CLwAjsy3fmecf/how-to-take-smart-notes-ahrens-2017
ᔥ[[abramdemski]] in The Zettelkasten Method (accessed:: 2023-08-25 10:12:42)
-
-
luhmann.surge.sh luhmann.surge.sh
-
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
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
https://www.reddit.com/r/Arno_Schmidt/comments/1267heb/arno_schmidt_compulsively_wrote_and_hoarded/
Lots of great anecdotal mentions here which should be tracked down for more authority.
-
-
www.scientificamerican.com www.scientificamerican.com
-
Timmy Broderick in Evidence Undermines ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ Claims In Scientific American at 2023-08-24 (accessed:: 2023-08-25 09:26:00)
-
The researchers did observe a change in their referral population in recent years, however. More kids assigned female at birth have been transitioning in recent years than those assigned male at birth. Many studies have captured this difference—including the 2018 survey proposing ROGD—but experts are unsure of its cause.
-
A recent analysis of 10 Canadian medical centers in the Journal of Pediatrics found that 98.3 percent of young people seeking gender-affirming care had realized more than a year prior that they may have been transgender.
-
Almost 40 percent of transgender youth experience homelessness or housing instability, according to a 2022 report from the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides crisis support for young LGBTQ+ people.
-
The participants in both the 2018 and the retracted 2023 studies were recruited from online communities that were explicitly critical about many aspects of gender-affirming care for transgender kids.
-
As legislation targeting trans people has reached an all-time high in the U.S., ROGD’s alleged social contagion has been invoked by lawmakers in states such as Missouri, Utah and Arkansas to justify banning or restricting gender-affirming care for young people.
Tags
- misinformation
- transitioning (sexual identity)
- social contagion
- female vs. male
- Trevor Project
- confirmation bias
- gender affirming care
- gender nonconforming
- homelessness
- LGBTQIA+
- transgender
- gender dysphoria
- psychology
- peer pressure
- gender incongruence
- fear mongering
- mental health
- public health
- rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)
- nonbinary
- read
Annotators
URL
-
-
hopkinsathome.vhx.tv hopkinsathome.vhx.tv
-
Indigenous Storytelling: Our Smallest Warriors, Our Strongest Medicine. Hopkins at Home. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2021. Indigenous Storytelling: Our Smallest Warriors, Our Strongest Medicine. Hopkins at Home. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2021. https://hopkinsathome.vhx.tv/humanities/videos/indigenous-storytelling. .
-
Storytelling functions as a tool to heal from and protect against historical trauma and ongoing challenges Indigenous communities experience. "It is medicine." —Beltran & Begun, 2013 (quoted in @Okeefe2021 video at 10:41)
Basic knowledge and understanding for me, but nice to have a source for it in particular.
-
-
ips-dc.org ips-dc.org
-
REPORT: Executive Excess 2023 - Institute for Policy Studies by Sarah Anderson in August 2023
see article about this report at https://hypothes.is/a/D6qzfENbEe6qDg8H-IEo6g
-
-
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
-
Lauren Aratani in CEOs of top 100 ‘low-wage’ US firms earn $601 for every $1 by worker, report finds at 2023-08-24 (accessed:: 2023-08-25 08:20:02)
-
The bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 included a 1% excise tax on stock buybacks, making them more expensive for companies to do.
-
-
www.instagram.com www.instagram.com
-
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/
-
-
forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
-
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.
-
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
Dan Allosso in Retrenchment, Day 22 at 2023-08-24 (accessed:: 2023-08-24 08:54:05)
-
-
www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
-
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266338818001
Gaylord Bros. 30 drawer library card catalog listed for several months/several times, and finally sold 2023-07-24 for $999.99 (with only one bid) in Whitier California.
$33.33 per drawer
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
-
www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
-
https://www.ebay.com/itm/256167582615
60 drawer library card catalog listed for $1,400 in late May 2023 Sold on 2023-08-11 for best offer (under $1,400)
Likely the same listing on Facebook for $1,100 at https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/271076511951674/
likely went for around $18/drawer
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
-
www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
-
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266379648695
Globe Wernicke card catalog, 6 drawers listed for $250 in July 2023 is $42 per drawer
-
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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?
-
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.
-
Do science, technology, industrialization, and specializa-tion render the Great Conversation irrelevant?
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The object appears to be to keep the child off the labormarket and to detain him in comparatively sanitary surround-ings until we are ready to have him go to work.
ouch!
-
Adam Smith stated the case long ago: "A man withoutthe proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man, is, ifpossible, more contemptible than even a coward, and seemsto be mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part ofthe character of human nature."
This seems apropos to the situation in which I view Donald J. Trump.
-
Even before mechanization had gone as far as it has now,one factor prevented vocational training, or any other formof ad hoc instruction, from accomplishing what was expectedof it, and that factor was the mobility of the Americanpopulation. This was a mobility of every kind —in space, inoccupation, and in economic position.
-
The industrial worker now has twentyhours of free time a week that his grandfather did not have.
Where does this wealth ultimately go in the long run? Not to the worker, but primarily to the corporation competing against them for the added value.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
This set of books is offered not merely as an object uponwhich leisure may be expended, but also as a means to thehumanization of work through understanding.16
Purpose of the Great Books of the Western World
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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
-
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.
-
A pro-gram of social reform cannot be achieved through the educa-tional system unless it is one that the society is prepared toaccept. The educational system is the society's attempt toperpetuate itself and its own ideals.
Current day book banners (2022-2023) wouldn't agree here.
-
He believed in his own conception ofliberal education for all and looked upon any kind of trainingdirected to learning a trade, solely to make a living at it, asnarrowing and illiberal.
definitions: illiberal
-
Dewey's chief reason for this recommendation is found inhis psychology of learning. "An occupation is a continuousactivity having a purpose. Education through occupations con-sequently combines within itself more of the factors condu-cive to learning than any other method. It calls instincts andhabits into play; it is a foe to passive receptivity. It has anend in view; results are to be accomplished. Hence it appealsto thought; it demands that an idea of an end be steadilymaintained, so that activity must be progressive, leadingfrom one stage to another; observation and ingenuity are re-quired at each stage to overcome obstacles and to discoverand readjust means of execution.
Purpose for the work involved or purpose for the worker? Does it show a shift to living to work or working to live here?
-
Dewey was first of all a social reformer.
-
The chief exponent of the view that times have changedand that our conception of the best education must changewith them is that most misunderstood of all philosophers ofeducation, John Dewey.
Hutchins indicates that John Dewey was misunderstood as a philosopher of education.
-
This Western devotion to the liberal arts and liberal educa-tion must have been largely responsible for the emergence ofdemocracy as an ideal.
Graeber and Wengrow seem to indicate otherwise.
-
The educa-tional ideas of John Locke, for example, which were directedto the preparation of the pupil to fit conveniently into the so-cial and economic environment in which he found himself,made no impression on Locke's contemporaries.
"The educational ideas of John Locke" -- but where they actually his ideas though?
See: Graeber & Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything.
-
The lib-eral artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, andthink.
Uncommon use of "liberal artist" as one who uses or practices the liberal arts.
-
Sir RichardLivingstone said: "We are tied down, all our days and forthe greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That iswhere contact with great thinkers, great literature helps.
What is the original context of this quote? Which meaning of "the commonplace" does he mean? The generic or the commonplace book?
Tags
- trust
- sociology of education
- economic development
- resurgence of the humanities
- specialization
- education policy
- mobility of location
- indigenous knowledge
- John Dewey
- social cohesion
- living to work
- John Locke
- commitment
- the commons
- shared culture
- Robert Maynard Hutchins
- social reforms
- liberal arts
- humanism
- combinatorial creativity
- industrialization
- Democracy
- open questions
- indigenous cultures
- human nature
- The Great Conversation
- Indigenous pedagogy
- Great Books of the Western World
- human resources
- two cultures
- erasure
- death of the humanities
- legislating thought
- Adam Smith
- understanding
- social mobility
- the commons as social glue
- economic specialization
- Giambattista Vico
- definitions
- hw-illiberal
- natural slavery
- classical education
- analogies
- Japanese culture
- standard of living
- economic mobility
- illiberal
- rapid changes
- Japanese menace
- interdisciplinary studies
- intellect
- toxic capitalism
- scientism
- book bans
- legislating behavior
- quotes
- World War II
- mobility problems
- training
- orality vs. literacy
- chattel slavery
- cultural erasure
- eudaimonia
- scholasticism
- working to live
- knowledge specialization
- Donald J. Trump
- free time
- education why
- Barak Obama
- economic slavery
- Great Books
- Mortimer J. Adler
- slavery
- Industrial Revolution
- Richard Livingstone
- education
- philosophy of education
- Democracy and Education
- progressive education
- democracy
- wordnik
- humanities
- evolution
- economics
- interdisciplinary research
- occupations
- child labor
- David Graeber
- liberal artists
- commonplace books
- David Wengrow
- humanizing work
- formal education
- Indigenous languages
- work life balance
- separation of concerns
- cultural heritage
- words
- the Enlightenment
Annotators
-
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
Dan Allosso in Retrenchment, Day 21 at 2023-08-23<br /> (accessed:: 2023-08-23 12:50:42)
-
-
highlightpoetry.com highlightpoetry.com
-
www.edelweiss.plus www.edelweiss.plus
-
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Nippoldt (Illustrated by) FRONTLIST October 10, 2023 FRONTLIST | October 10, 2023 9781524879761, 1524879762 Hardcover $45.00 USD, $60.00 CAD Fiction / Classics
https://www.edelweiss.plus/#sku=1524879762&page=1
This looks like a fascinating illustrated edition from Andrews McMeel Publishing.
-
-
mitpress.mit.edu mitpress.mit.edu
-
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/
-
-
www.oliverburkeman.com www.oliverburkeman.com
-
https://www.oliverburkeman.com/onwriting
Oliver Burkerman, of Four Thousand Weeks fame, is testing out zettelkasten based on Ahrens' book.
-
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.
-
-
-
Zettelkasten in one or several language(s)? .t3_15wo3f2._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
As long as you know and understand what you're writing, use as many languages as you or your zettelkasten wants or needs.
I'm often working with ideas from other languages and cultures which have no direct translations into English, so I use those native words interspersed with English. Sometimes I don't have words in any language and make up a shorthand phrase in English until I can come up with a better word. Often I'll collect examples of the same "foreign" words in multiple contexts to tease out their contextual meanings as was comprehensively done with large group zettelkasten like the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache. I also frequently use mathematical symbols, equations, and other scientific notations, graphs, drawings, color, etc. to make my meanings clear.
I've also worked with historical figures who have had names in multiple languages over the centuries and cross index them in a variety of different languages based on context. As an example, I've got at least 11 different variations of names for Ramon Llull in almost as many languages and variations of transliterations. I try to keep each one in its original context, but link them in my index.
There are certainly zettelkasten out there written in four and more languages as suited the needs of their users. S.D. Goitein certainly used Hebrew, English, German, Arabic, Aramaic in his and may have likely had other languages (Yiddish, Coptic, Egyptian?) interspersed to lesser extents. Adolph Erman certainly used Egyptian hieroglyphs along with German in his. It can easily be argued that their zettelkasten and work required multiple languages.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180627163317im_/https://aaew.bbaw.de/wbhome/Broschuere/abb08.jpg A example zettelkasten slip showing a passage of text from the victory stele of Sesostris III at the Nubian fortress of Semna. The handwriting is that of Adolf Erman, who had "already struggled with the text as a high school student".
At the end of the day, they're your notes, so write them as you like.
-
-
-
Thanks Sascha for an excellent primer on the internal machinations of our favorite machines beyond the usual focus on the storage/memory and indexing portions of the process.
Said another way, a zettelkasten is part of a formal logic machine/process. Or alternately, as Markus Krajewski aptly demonstrates in Paper Machines (MIT Press, 2011), they are early analog storage devices in which the thinking and logic operations are done cerebrally (by way of direct analogy to brain and hand:manually) and subsequently noted down which thereby makes them computers.
Just as mathematicians try to break down and define discrete primitives or building blocks upon which they can then perform operations to come up with new results, one tries to find and develop the most interesting "atomic notes" from various sources which they can place into their zettelkasten in hopes of operating on them (usually by juxtaposition, negation, union, etc.) to derive, find, and prove new insights. If done well, these newly discovered ideas can be put back into the machine as inputs to create additional newer and more complex outputs continuously. While the complexity of Lie Algebras is glorious and seems magical, it obviously helps to first understand the base level logic before one builds up to it. The same holds true of zettelkasten.
Now if I could only get the
printfportion to work the way I want... -
category theory + zettelkasten... hmmm... feels a bit like Leibniz chasing a universal language
what is a zettelkasten monad?
-
Might we coin "zettelkastenly" as a function of (box) composed with (manually+cerebrally)?
hand:manually::brain:cerebrally::box:zettelkastenly
I would use the LaTeX \boxtimes symbol for this composition I think....
-
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/reading-is-searching/
Not a bad piece, but likely obvious for those with any work in formal logic or mathematics. For those without it who are working in nascent zettelkasten, a good introduction.
-
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
have had several of them before. But I'll also be working on the bigger picture, and I'll report on that
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
I want to start studying zettelkasten, advise books, video, courses, articles, web pages, please!
Zettelkasten advice:
- Have a goal in mind
- Really... have a goal. Write it down.
- Practice at it, a lot
- When stuck, read some of the bits below
- Practice, practice, practice.
Here are a list of some of the strongest books which focus on the topic or cover things from various interesting perspectives: - Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017. - Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/. (Specifically the first half of the book.) - Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957. http://archive.org/details/modernreseracher0000unse. - Bernstein, Mark. Tinderbox: The Tinderbox Way. 3rd ed. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, Inc., 2017. http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/TinderboxWay/index.html. - Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis. - Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout. - Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062. - Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. (Especially chapter seven). - Weinberg, Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005.
Read one (or two) and then dive in and actually practice (and practice and practice some more) things for a while.
For some of the smaller subtleties which aren't covered in books, try one of the two following collections for individual bits of advice and insight: - https://writing.bobdoto.computer/zettelkasten/ - https://zettelkasten.de/posts/ - https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/
-
-
kilcullenbridge.blogspot.com kilcullenbridge.blogspot.com
-
-
scrambledgregs.com scrambledgregs.com
-
https://scrambledgregs.com/fucked-up-shit/sssttteeellllllaaaaaaa/
The sub mention of the other woman was likely Amanda Cavallacci, Myrna Jacoby's assistant in the early 2000s.
-
-
drive.google.com drive.google.com
-
meatballwiki.org meatballwiki.org
-
http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/InterWiki
InterWiki is the idea of having one unified Wiki system distributed across many servers.
-
-
friendsofdarwin.com friendsofdarwin.com
-
www.erinroseglass.com www.erinroseglass.com
-
bilge.world bilge.world
-
https://bilge.world/text-fuck
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
-
github.com github.com
-
patrickrhone.com patrickrhone.com
-
-
lifehacker.com lifehacker.com
-
Jerry Seinfeld used a calendar and crossed off days on which he wrote as a productivity tool. After marking off a few days with "x"s his goal was to not break the chain of work.
-
-
www.attorneyatwork.com www.attorneyatwork.com
-
https://www.attorneyatwork.com/analog-attorney-5-best-index-cards/
Article about general usefulness of index cards written by a lawyer and for them, though not specific to them as a subgroup.
Makes not of Nock's Dot-Dash cards which were apparently 3 x 5" dash gridded cards similar to Midori's grid notebooks. The website for the company is no longer active. Archived site: https://web.archive.org/web/20171007102414/https://nockco.com/paper/dotdash-3-x-5-note-cards
-
magic of index cards
-
-
-
https://jamesclear.com/ivy-lee
Ivy Lee method: Write down a list of six items to do. Prioritize them and do them sequentially in order until complete. Rinse and repeat.
-
-
jamesclear.com jamesclear.com
-
https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus
Eliminate the inessential.
-
-
www.printables.com www.printables.com
-
https://www.printables.com/model/558873-zettelkasten-index-boxes-slip-box
Someone has designed a DIY printer project for making your own stackable zettelkasten boxes.
See post at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15wkuel/zettelkasten_index_boxes_slip_box_make_your_own/
-
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13nmcym/i_read_the_top_ten_zettelkasten_articles_on/
A list of some popular one-pagers on the Zettelkasten Method.
Read contemporaneously in May 2023
-
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
An interesting example of academic administrative bloat discussed here.
-
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
Allosso, Dan. “Kuhn’s Paradigms.” Substack newsletter. MakingHistory (blog), August 17, 2023. https://danallosso.substack.com/p/kuhns-paradigms.
-
Science must find for every effect a single cause. The historian is rarely faced with the same requirement.Historians have the advantage of being able to live with explanatory ambiguity that would be unacceptable in science.
-
These revolutions appear invisible in the history of science, Kuhn explained, because each successive generation learns science through the lens of the current paradigm.
As a result of Kuhn's scientific revolutions perspective, historians of science will need to uncover the frameworks and lenses by which prior generations saw the world to be able to see the world the same way. This will allow them to better piece together histories
How is this related to the ways that experts don't appreciate their own knowledge when trying to teach newcomers their subjects? What is the word/phrase for this effect?
-
Kuhn provided examples of major and minor revolutions, showing that the strict falsifiability suggested in Karl Popper’s theory does not play a role.
-
Periods of normal science are interrupted when anomalies between observations and the expectations suggested by the paradigm begin to demonstrate the paradigm’s weakness.
Lego theory of science.
Individual bricks are facts which can be assembled in a variety of ways, each of which is a particular paradigm. Ultimately, the optimal structure is one which dovetails with the neighborhoods of structures around them while each having the best minimized structure of it's own.
With only handfuls of individual facts, it can be difficult to build them up into an interesting or useful structure to start. Doing this may help to discover other facts. As these are added, one may reshape the overall structure of the theory as the puzzle begins to reveal itself and allow the theorist the ability to best structure an overall theory which minimizes itself and allows dovetailing with other external theories. All the theories then eventually form their own pieces which can then be pieced together for the next structural level up.
See also Simon Singh, Thomas Kuhn, topology.
-
Kuhn denied that scientific development progresses by a series of “successive increments” that add to the accumulation of facts making up current knowledge like bricks building a wall.
This feels like the sort of flavor of historical method of Ernst Bernheim mixed with Gerald Weinberg's Fieldstone Method.
-
Thomas Kuhn applied the concept of the paradigm to describe the progress of scientific thought over time. The idea generated interest and discussion across a number of fields in addition to the history of science, eclipsing to some extent Kuhn’s original focus.
Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was directed to scientific thought over time, but he was aware of it potentially being applied, potentially improperly, to other areas. As a result, he narrowed down his definitions and made his assumptions more explicit.
This sort of misapplication can be seen in Social Darwinism, the uncertainty principle, relativity, and memes.
It also happened with Claude Shannon's information theory which resulted in his publication of The Bandwagon (IEEE, 1956).
Tags
- Simon Singh
- Gerald Weinberg
- evolution
- context collapse
- bandwagon effect
- Claude Shannon
- paradigms
- punctuated equilibrium
- read
- Fieldstone method
- Ernst Bernheim
- Thomas Kuhn
- falsifiability
- historical method
- LEGO
- frame of reference
- history of science
- Karl Popper
- paradigm shifts
- effects
- philosophy of science
- ambiguity
Annotators
URL
-
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
www.thenation.com www.thenation.com
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-14
If done solely from a business perspective, the administration ought to be looking very closely on what their "product" actually is and the quality of what they're directly selling and to whom. It sounds like they ought to re-evaluate their priorities and might benefit from reading The Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin Ginsberg. Is it worthwhile to get a bulk discount and buy a couple hundred copies to send to the deans and senior administration?
-
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-11
Modern day issues of town and gown.
-
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-8
What is it that colleges are actually selling that they can so easily cut faculty over staff?
-
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
-
BookmarkTypes and uses of PKM
Almost every well known writer/composer/creative throughout history had some sort of note taking or knowledge system of one sort or another (florilegium, commonplace books, notebooks, diaries, journals, zettelkasten, waste books, mnemonic techniques, etc.), which would put them into your "active" category. I think you'd be hard put to come up with evidence of a "sudden" emergence of an "active" PKM system beyond the choice of individual users to actively do something with their collections or not.
If you want to go more distant than Eminem, try looking closely at Ramon Llull's practice in the 11th century, or Homer in the c. 8th century BCE. Or to go much, much farther back, there's solid evidence that indigenous peoples in Australia had what you call both passive and active PKM systems as far back as 65,000 years ago. These are still in use today. Naturally these were not written, but used what anthropologists call orality. (See Walter Ong, Milman Parry, Lynne Kelly, Margo Neale, Duane Hamacher, et al.)
-
-
forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
-
BookmarkZettelkasten for historical research?
@pgrhowarth @MartinBB @tevka and other historians (and sociologists, anthropologists, humanists, etc.) who want to delve into some of the ideas of historical method, zettelkasten, note taking, intellectual craftsmanship outside of Luhmann's version, I've compiled a list of various primary sources who have written on a variety of related methods throughout the past few hundred years: https://www.zotero.org/chrisaldrich/tags/note%20taking%20methods/items/KTZXN3EV/item-list
Historians in particular have used indexing their notes as a means of creating analog databases for individual facts outside of their other writing/compiling practices. Thus a mixture of methods may suit your working needs.
To help frame it one might also consult the following: * Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary. * Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.
I've got a relatively short overview of some of these methods and examples of users at https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/.
-
-
-
75000 Zettel,
Context:
Damit hatte der 84-jährige Mommsen ein Projekt initiiert, an dem Profanwie Kirchenhistoriker in Deutschland auch noch lange nach seinem Tode arbeiteten und das gute Fortschritte machte: Al s Jülicher, der nach dem Tode Seecks 1921 die alleinige Leitung übernahm, auf Grund seines Augenleidens 1929 von seinen Verpflichtungen entbunden wurde, Ubergab er der Kommission etwa 75000 Zettel, deren Systematisierung allerdings nicht zum Abschluß kam74. Von einer Veröffentlichung des Materials sah man ab, da «weder der Zustand des Manuskripts noch die inzwischen völlig veränderte wissenschaftliche Lage es gestatteten, die Prosopographie zum Druck zubringen75».
Nachdem nur einige Zettelkästen im Zweiten Weltkrieg verloren gegangen waren, wurde 1951 ein Teil der Materialien leihweise dem von A.H.M. Jones, John Morris und H.-I. Marrou in Cambridge und Paris begründeten Unternehmen, das sich zum Ziel gesetzt hatte, eine weltliche und eine kirchliche Prosopographie der Spätantike zu erarbeiten, zur Verfügung gestellt76. Während wir heute aus technischen und organisatorischen Gründen mit zweiverschiedenen Prosopographien -einer weltlichen und einer kirchlichen- zu arbeiten haben, die beide noch nicht abgeschlossen sind, hatte Mommsen die Nützlichkeit, ja die Notwendigkeit einer spätantiken Prosopographie erkannt, die weltliche und kirchliche Würdenträger gemeinsam erschließt und aufführt.
- Ibid.: Schreiben H. LlETZMANNs vom 6.10.1936.
- Weder die Prosopography oflhe Later Roman Empire (= PLRE) noch die Prosopographie chretienne du Bas-Empire erwähnen diesen Sachverhalt; während in PLRE I (hrsg. v. A.H.M. JONES, J.R. MARTINDALE, J. MORRIS), Cambridge 1971, V zu lesen ist: «The project of a prosopographical dictionary of the Later Roman Empire was originated by Theodor Mommsen but... it failed of fruition, largely through the Intervention of the two World Wars. The bulky archives representing the work of many German seholars lay in Berlin during the second war when they were damaged and in part destroyed, together with essential records, during an Allied bombing raid. Consequently when the prqject was taken up in England after the war, the work had to be restarted from the very beginning. The present volume therefore represents the first stage of fulfilment of Mommsen's original project», heißt es im ersten Band der Prosopographie chretienne: A. MANDOUZE (Hrsg.), Prosopographie de l'Afrique chretienne (303-533), Paris 1982, 7: «On sait qu'ä la fin du siecle dernier, sur l'initiative de Th. Mommsen et d'Ad. Harnack, l'Academie des Sciences de Berlin avait commence' ä preparer un vaste dictionnaire prosopographique du Bas-Empire. Sans doute concu de facon trop ambitieuse, victime aussi des sequelles de la Premiere Guerre mondiale, ce projet fut definitivement abandonne" en 1933»; cf. hierzu auch H. CHANTRAINE, Ein neues Hilfsmittel zur Erforschung der Spätantike: Die Prosopographie chretienne du Bas-Empire, in: Francia 11, 1984,697ff., v.a. 697f.
Machine translation:
The 84-year-old Mommsen had thus initiated a project on which both profane and church historians in Germany continued to work long after his death and which made good progress: Al s Jülicher, who took over the sole management after Seeck's death in 1921 due to his eye problems in 1929 was relieved of his obligations, he handed over around 75,000 slips of paper to the Commission, the systematisation of which, however, was not completed ^74. The material was not published because "neither the condition of the manuscript nor the scientific situation, which had meanwhile completely changed, allowed the prosopography to be printed^75".
After only a few card boxes had been lost in World War II, some of the materials were loaned to A.H.M. Jones, John Morris and H.-I. Marrou in Cambridge and Paris, which had set itself the goal of developing a secular and an ecclesiastical prosopography of late antiquity. While today, for technical and organizational reasons, we have to work with two different prosopographies - one secular and one ecclesiastical - both of which have not yet been completed, Mommsen recognized the usefulness, indeed the necessity, of a late antique prosopography that explores secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries together and performs.
- Ibid.: Letter from H. LlETZMANN dated October 6, 1936.
- Neither the Prosopography oflhe Later Roman Empire (= PLRE) nor the Prosopographie chretienne du Bas-Empire mention this fact; while in PLRE I (ed. by A.H.M. JONES, J.R. MARTINDALE, J. MORRIS), Cambridge 1971, V one can read: «The project of a prosopographical dictionary of the Later Roman Empire was originated by Theodor Mommsen but... it failed of fruition, largely through the Intervention of the two World Wars. The bulky archives representing the work of many German scholars lay in Berlin during the second war when they were damaged and in part destroyed, together with essential records, during an Allied bombing raid. Consequently when the project was taken up in England after the war, the work had to be restarted from the very beginning. The present volume therefore represents the first stage of fulfillment of Mommsen's original project," says the first volume of the Prosopographie chretienne: A. MANDOUZE (ed.), Prosopographie de l'Afrique chretienne (303-533), Paris 1982, 7: "On said qu'a la fin du siecle dernier, sur l'initiative de Th. Mommsen et d'Ad. Harnack, l'Academie des Sciences de Berlin avait commence' a preparer un vaste dictionnaire prosopographique du Bas-Empire. Sans doute concu de facon trop ambitieuse, victime aussi des sequelles de la Premiere Guerre mondiale, ce projet fut definitivement abandonne" en 1933"; cf. on this also H. CHANTRAINE, A new tool for researching the Late antiquity: The prosopography chretienne du Bas-Empire, in: Francia 11, 1984, 697ff., especially 697f.
This would seem to indicate that Theodor Mommsen potentially had a zettelkasten which he was using to compile his work, but there is some ambiguity here that the slips and boxes may have been those of scholars who came after him and were working on his notes and systematizing them for future publication. Perhaps they were Mommsen's and others were arranging them for potential publication as they only had subject heading orderings, which would have been the most likely mode of the day (versus a more Luhmann-artig ordering.)
syndication link: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2649/theodor-mommsens-zettelkasten/
-
Rebenich, Stefan. “Theodor Mommsen and the Relationship of Age History and Patristic (Theodor Mommsen und das Verhältnis von Alter Geschichte und Patristik).” In Patristique et antiquité tardive en Allemagne et en France de 1870 à 1930 : Influences et échanges: Actes du colloque franco-allemand de Chantilly (25-27 octobre 1991), edited by Jacques Fontaine, R. Herzog, and Karla Pollmann, 131–54. Paris: Brepols, 1993. https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/46/1/Rebenich_Mommsen_1993.pdf.
-
-
en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Rome_(Mommsen)
What was Mommsen's historical method?
-
-
www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
-
9 Drawer library card catalog sold for $299 or $33/drawer<br /> Sold circa August 2023
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
-
www.studyebooks.com www.studyebooks.com
-
https://www.studyebooks.com/2023/07/harvard-classics-pdf.html
Downloadable .zip from Archive.org with full collection.<br /> https://archive.org/compress/Harvard-Classics/formats=TEXT%20PDF&file=/Harvard-Classics.zip
-
-
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
-
-
Raymond Carver collection I read: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
-
Notewise, whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.
-
-
jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
-
Jillian HessAug 7AuthorI make my own journals too! I found it totally elevated my note-taking experience.
Jillian Hess makes her own journals as a means of elevating her note-taking experience.
-
The American Philosopher Eric Hoffer was a great quotation collector. he has boxes and boxes of them all typed up on index cards. I began doing it after reading his biography where before they were scattered everywhere.
Eric Hoffer apparently had a collection of quotes which he kept on index cards in boxes.
Potentially mentioned in one of his biographies. Possibly:<br /> - American Iconoclast: The Life and Times of Eric Hoffer by Tom Shachtman https://www.amazon.com/American-Iconoclast-Life-Times-Hoffer/dp/1933435380<br /> - Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher by Tom Bethell https://www.amazon.com/Eric-Hoffer-Longshoreman-Philosopher-Institution/dp/0817914153
-
-
-
jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
Zettelkasten for Normies: What Normies Really Need to Know .t3_15sqiq2._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/SunghoYahng at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15sqiq2/zettelkasten_for_normies_what_normies_really_need/
u/SunghoYahng, some of your article sounds like a pared down digital version of a commonplace book which allows for links, so it fits into the older zettelkasten tradition, just not into the more Luhmann-artig version on which this subreddit is generally more focused. Perhaps yours is closer to a digital version of the analog commonplace using index cards that Billy Oppenheimer describes having learned from Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene?
Often people focus too much on Luhmann's prodigious output and then immediately imply or say you should adopt his very specific system without describing what his system did or why it worked so well for him and his particular needs. Very few focus on what it is that they want to accomplish and how they might use his system or the thousands of variations on it throughout history to come to those goals as quickly and easily as they can.
You commit a version of this sin in your opening lines:
The content about Zettelkasten is mostly too long and practically useless. The purpose of this text is to write only what normies really need to know.
Who are these so-called "normies" and what specifically are they trying to accomplish? You don't define either of them, and possibly worse do it in a negative framing. The system you're describing might be a great one, but for whom? What do you expect them to use it for? What will they get out of it?
Many people talk about the "magic" of a zettelkasten and then wave their hands at some version of a workflow of what they think it is or what they think it should be. Perhaps what we all really need is a list of potential affordances that different methods allow and how one might leverage those affordances. How might they be mixed and matched? Then users can decide what outcomes they wish to have (writing, thinking, aggregation, bookmarking, collecting, creativity, artificial memory, serendipity, productivity, wiki, spaced repetition, learning, time wasting, etc., etc.) and which affordances are necessary within their workflow/system to effectuate those specific goals? Finally they can pick and choose a specific version of a methodology/workflow and either an analog substrate (index cards, notebooks, memory palace, etc.) or digital tool/application (Obsidian, Roam Research, The Archive, etc.) to save it all in. Of course once you've chosen that analog or digital tool, does it actually have the affordances you want or need in actual practice? Are they easy to use? Practical? Do they save you time? Are they simple or over-engineered? What happens when they scale to a year of regular use or even a lifetime?
As a simple example, many writers would love a seriously good outliner functionality in their system to pull out the materials they want to work with and then appropriately order them for a potential final written output. In practice, index cards on a big table are fantastic for this process while most (all?) current digital tools are miserable at it. And of course once you've gotten the outline you like in an analog space you have to type it all out to print/publish in a final form, something which the digital affordance of cut and paste would make much simpler. Who wouldn't love a tool that could give you all of these affordances, presuming you needed them?
While we're on outlining, very few talk about the ease-of-use that some professional outliners like Dave Winer's Drummer or Little Outliner have versus some of the more text-editing focused tools like Obsidian which are generally poor as outliners (if you could even call them that) in comparison.
If you're interested in folgezettel and outlining, you might appreciate some subtleties in Bob's piece: https://writing.bobdoto.computer/folgezettel-is-not-an-outline-luhmanns-playful-appreciation-of-disfunction/
cross reference https://hypothes.is/a/OhcWSjxyEe6V8DP9P6WNQQ
-
-
sunghoyahng.substack.com sunghoyahng.substack.com
-
www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
-
Now, award-winning poet Nicole Sealey revisits the investigation in a book that redacts the report, an act of erasure that reimagines the original text as it strips it away. While the full document is visible in the background—weighing heavily on the language Sealey has preserved—it gives shape and disturbing context to what remains.
-
-
alexandrianpl.org alexandrianpl.org
-
https://alexandrianpl.org/comfort-cabinet/
A library has repurposed their library card catalogs as a comfort cabinet to provide their community with necessities like toothbrushes, combs, band aids, socks, etc.
-
-
cognitive-surplus.com cognitive-surplus.com
-
archive.org archive.org
-
https://archive.org/details/pentagonpapersde00beac/page/n1/mode/2up
Daniel Ellsberg's personal copy of the Pentagon Papers with handwritten annotations.
Full Daniel Ellsberg collection of scanned documents from his home: https://archive.org/details/danielellsberg?tab=collection
-
-
quoteinvestigator.com quoteinvestigator.com
-
Was Ronald Reagan's shift in politics an example of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” (Upton Sinclair)? (see also: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/)
Link to https://hypothes.is/a/Kft7kDOrEe6TQKcW-dREwQ in The Big Myth on Regan's shift in political views while working for General Electric.
-
Upton Sinclair ran for Governor of California in the 1930s, and the coverage he received from newspapers was unsympathetic. Yet, in 1934 some California papers published installments from his forthcoming book about the ill-fated campaign titled “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked”. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:[1] 1934 December 11, Oakland Tribune, I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked by Upton Sinclair, Quote Page 19, Column 3, Oakland, California. (Newspapers_com) I used to say to our audiences: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
via https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
Some underlying tension for the question of identity/misinformation and personal politics vis-a-vis work and one's identity generated via work.
-
-
www.google.com www.google.com
-
"in his youth he was full of vim and vigor"
vim<br /> 2023 definition: energy; enthusiasm
vim is rarely ever seen outside of the context of the phrase "vim and vigor" and seems to be a calcified word within this phrase.
vigor<br /> 2023 definition: physical strength and good health
-
"in his youth he was full of vim and vigor"
Do calcified words eventually cease to have any definition over time? That is they have a stand alone definition, then a definition within their calcified phrase, then they cease to have any stand alone definition at all though they continue existence only in those calcified phrases.
-
-
www.nerosnotes.co.uk www.nerosnotes.co.uk
-
https://www.nerosnotes.co.uk/collections/foglietto
Looks sort of similar to Ugmonk's offerings...
-
-
www.linkingyourthinking.com www.linkingyourthinking.com
-
-
reasonabledeviations.com reasonabledeviations.com
-
https://reasonabledeviations.com/2022/04/18/molecular-notes-part-1/
Maybe come back to read this???
-
-
latin.packhum.org latin.packhum.org
-
This website contains essentially all Latin literary texts written before A.D. 200, as well as some texts selected from later antiquity.
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
-
stephanus.tlg.uci.edu stephanus.tlg.uci.edu
-
en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
-
-
His most well-known work was the Thesaurus graecae linguae, which was printed in five volumes. The basis of Greek lexicology, no thesaurus would rival that of Estienne's for three hundred years.
-
