19,850 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2023
    1. GTD on Paper Index Cards. Experimental Encounters, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vww7JLcrJl4.

    2. Love this general set up. The months (12) and days (31) tabs broadly are similar to a 43 folders set up as well. I've written a bit about the history of similar productivity systems which are based in index cards for those exploring/experimenting with various methods and potential outcomes: https://boffosocko.com/2023/03/09/the-memindex-method-an-early-precursor-of-the-memex-hipster-pda-43-folders-gtd-basb-and-bullet-journal-systems/

    3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vww7JLcrJl4

      8:05 - 16:20 GTD - Capture - Clarify - What is it? - Is it actionable? What is the action? - Is it a project? - Batching - Reflect - Review over lists/calendars daily/weekly - Engage


      17:30 They use the phrase "atomic" paper based index cards, so they've been infected by the idea of "atomic notes" from somewhere, though it seems as if he's pitching that he's "invented" his card system as if from scratch.


      19:45 He mentions potentially using both sides of the card, against the usual (long term) advice.

      20:00 Analogizes his cards as ballerinas which work together, but each have their own personalities and function within the ballet

      He's using a leather cover for Moleskine pocket notebook and Manufactum A7 index cards, as well as a box

      Sections of his box: - to erase - inbox - next actions - projects (3 categories of projects) - someday - to delegate - tickler (by month and by day; 12 months and 31 days) - blank cards

      Mentions erasing cards as he finishes them rather than archiving them.

      Inspiration by How to Take Smart Notes by Ahrens

      Recommends one item per card to make things easier and more actionable; also improves focus versus having a longer list. (28:00)

      Portability

      Sustainable (he erases)

      High quality textile experience

      The ability to shift between associative modes and sequential modes seems to work well with such a system.

      They distinguish between atomic notes and "stellar" notes. Stellar being longer lists or more dense notes/outlines/etc.

      Project cards<br /> titles and project numbers (for reference) Project numbers in the top right with a P and/or M below it for<br /> - P for paper<br /> - M for email data<br /> - D for digital files which helps him find reference materials

      Weekly review with all cards out on the table

      Expansion pack includes: - action - calendar - waiting

      Search was quick and easy, but had to carry his box back and forth to work.

      Stopping doing it because he was losing the history (by erasing it). Moving to notebook and he likes fountain pens. He likes the calendar portion in his notebook.

      He tried it out for the sake of experiment.

      In the paper world things are more present and "in your face" versus digital formats where things can disappear.

  2. Aug 2023
    1. Cuthbertson, Anthony. “Musician Uses Algorithm to Generate Every Possible Melody to Prevent Copyright Lawsuits.” The Independent, February 28, 2020, sec. Tech. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/music-copyright-algorithm-lawsuit-damien-riehl-a9364536.html.

    2. the number of possible melodies is finite and therefore liable to patterns being repeated unintentionally.
    3. Working with programmer Noah Rubin, Damien Riehl built software capable of generating 300,000 melodies each second, creating a catalogue of 68 billion 8-note melodies.
    4. At what point do we have the computing power to create the machine of "Shakespearean monkeys at typewriters" that generates all available combinations of text to end copyright of text? Compare with Melody/Music: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/music-cop

    1. Kalir, Remi H. “Playing with Claude.” Academic blog. Remi Kalir (blog), August 25, 2023. https://remikalir.com/blog/playing-with-claude/.

    2. Whereas ChatGPT may be a bullshitter, Claude can be a co-reader whose output specifically references and works to make “meaning” in response to another author’s words.

      "Reading with an artificial intelligence" seems like a fascinating way to participate in the Great Conversation.

    3. Nonetheless, Claude is first AI tool that has really made me pause and think. Because, I’ve got to admit, Claude is a useful tool to think with—especially if I’m thinking about, and then writing about, another text.
    1. Mills, Anna, Maha Bali, and Lance Eaton. “How Do We Respond to Generative AI in Education? Open Educational Practices Give Us a Framework for an Ongoing Process.” Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching 6, no. 1 (June 11, 2023): 16–30. https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2023.6.1.34.

      Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:bb16e6f65a326e4089ed46b15987c1e7

      Search: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3Abb16e6f65a326e4089ed46b15987c1e7

    2. As Catherine Cronin (2017, p. 2) has explained,“Open educational practices (OEP) is a broad descriptor ofpractices that include the creation, use, and reuse of openeducational resources (OER) as well as open pedagogies andopen sharing of teaching practices.”
    3. ignoring AI altogether–not because they don’t wantto navigate it but because it all feels too much or cyclicalenough that something else in another two years will upendeverything again

      Might generative AI worries follow the track of the MOOC scare? (Many felt that creating courseware was going to put educators out of business...)

    4. For many, generative AI takesa pair of scissors and cuts apart that web. And that canfeel like having to start from scratch as a professional.

      How exactly? Give us an example? Otherwise not very clear.

    5. T9 (text prediction):generative AI::handgun:machine gun

      Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/n6wXvkeNEe6DOFexaCD-Qg

    6. Some may not realize it yet, but the shift in technology represented by ChatGPT is just another small evolution in the chain of predictive text with the realms of information theory and corpus linguistics.

      Claude Shannon's work along with Warren Weaver's introduction in The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948), shows some of the predictive structure of written communication. This is potentially better underlined for the non-mathematician in John R. Pierce's book An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (1961) in which discusses how one can do a basic analysis of written English to discover that "e" is the most prolific letter or to predict which letters are more likely to come after other letters. The mathematical structures have interesting consequences like the fact that crossword puzzles are only possible because of the repetitive nature of the English language or that one can use the editor's notation "TK" (usually meaning facts or date To Come) in writing their papers to make it easy to find missing information prior to publication because the statistical existence of the letter combination T followed by K is exceptionally rare and the only appearances of it in long documents are almost assuredly areas which need to be double checked for data or accuracy.

      Cell phone manufacturers took advantage of the lower levels of this mathematical predictability to create T9 predictive text in early mobile phone technology. This functionality is still used in current cell phones to help speed up our texting abilities. The difference between then and now is that almost everyone takes the predictive magic for granted.

      As anyone with "fat fingers" can attest, your phone doesn't always type out exactly what you mean which can result in autocorrect mistakes (see: DYAC (Damn You AutoCorrect)) of varying levels of frustration or hilarity. This means that when texting, one needs to carefully double check their work before sending their text or social media posts or risk sending their messages to Grand Master Flash instead of Grandma.

      The evolution in technology effected by larger amounts of storage, faster processing speeds, and more text to study means that we've gone beyond the level of predicting a single word or two ahead of what you intend to text, but now we're predicting whole sentences and even paragraphs which make sense within a context. ChatGPT means that one can generate whole sections of text which will likely make some sense.

      Sadly, as we know from our T9 experience, this massive jump in predictability doesn't mean that ChatGPT or other predictive artificial intelligence tools are "magically" correct! In fact, quite often they're wrong or will predict nonsense, a phenomenon known as AI hallucination. Just as with T9, we need to take even more time and effort to not only spell check the outputs from the machine, but now we may need to check for the appropriateness of style as well as factual substance!

      The bigger near-term problem is one of human understanding and human communication. While the machine may appear to magically communicate (often on our behalf if we're publishing it's words under our names), is it relaying actual meaning? Is the other person reading these words understanding what was meant to have been communicated? Do the words create knowledge? Insight?

      We need to recall that Claude Shannon specifically carved semantics and meaning out of the picture in the second paragraph of his seminal paper:

      Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

      So far ChatGPT seems to be accomplishing magic by solving a small part of an engineering problem by being able to explore the adjacent possible. It is far from solving the human semantic problem much less the un-adjacent possibilities (potentially representing wisdom or insight), and we need to take care to be aware of that portion of the unsolved problem. Generative AIs are also just choosing weighted probabilities and spitting out something which is prone to seem possible, but they're not optimizing for which of many potential probabilities is the "best" or the "correct" one. For that, we still need our humanity and faculties for decision making.


      Shannon, Claude E. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 1948.

      Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press, 1949.

      Pierce, John Robinson. An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. Second, Revised. Dover Books on Mathematics. 1961. Reprint, Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, Inc., 1980. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Theory-Symbols-Mathematics/dp/0486240614.

      Shannon, Claude Elwood. “The Bandwagon.” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2, no. 1 (March 1956): 3. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774.


      We may also need to explore The Bandwagon, an early effect which Shannon noticed and commented upon. Everyone seems to be piling on the AI bandwagon right now...

    7. Our first response to educational shocks should be to checkin with our values.
    8. “The college essay isdead” in The Atlantic by Stephen Marche (2022)
    9. 5 Rs” of OER (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix,Redistribute)

      One day, "Request update" or "Revision control" will appear on this list too... https://boffosocko.com/2018/08/30/the-sixth-r-of-open-educational-resources-oer/

    10. Thus far, we see 125 comments tagged ChatGPTedu(https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3AChatGPTedu), thoughthere are likely many more not tagged.
    1. Personally I often used #type/sketchnote and #type/question. But I will spend a little time and effort to build up an improved architecture for tagging.

      reply to Edmund at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/18550/#Comment_18550

      @Edmund since I don't do such a thing myself, I'm curious what sort of affordance your #type/NoteName tagging provides you with (especially if you're using more than just those two)? Do you use them regularly for search or filtering, and if so for what reason? How does it help?

      To me it look likes extra metadata/work, but without a lot of direct long term value in exchange. Does doing this for long periods of time provide you with outsized emergent value of some sort that's not easy to see from the start?

    1. In finance, the greater fool theory suggests that one can sometimes make money through the purchase of overvalued assets — items with a purchase price drastically exceeding the intrinsic value — if those assets can later be resold at an even higher price.
    1. In computing, the robustness principle is a design guideline for software that states: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". It is often reworded as: "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept". The principle is also known as Postel's law, after Jon Postel, who used the wording in an early specification of TCP.

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

      Robustness principle: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

    1. Old web demo I made of sociologist Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten with automatic reference and back reference indices (don't visit on mobile data, it's a data-heavy app 16MiB) .t3_16562do._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      via u/epilys at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16562do/old_web_demo_i_made_of_sociologist_niklas/

      https://epilys.github.io/bibliothecula/web-demo/zettel.html

      I wrote this one as a weekend project for fun back in 2021. It was supposed to be a demo for this article that gives a way to use a database software (called sqlite) to create a Zettelkasten:

      https://epilys.github.io/bibliothecula/notekeeping.html

    1. Purple is a small suite of quickly hacked tools inspired by Doug Engelbart's attempt to bootstrap the addressing features of his Augment system onto HTML pages. Its purpose is simple: produce HTML documents that can be addressed at the paragraph level. It does this by automatically creating name anchors with static and hierarchical addresses at the beginning of each text node, and by displaying these addresses as links at the end of each text node.    1A  (02)

      Purple is a suite of tools from 2001 that allow one to create numbered addresses/anchors at the paragraph level of a digital document.


      Link: Dave Winer's site still has support for purple numbers.

    1. As late as 1884 the four hundred American institutions of higher education had about twenty full-time teachers of history.”

      second hand quote from History: Professional Scholarship in America<br /> John Higham, 1965

    1. https://www.lochby.com/collections/frontpage/products/venture-pouch<br /> Lochby Venture Pouch<br /> $44.00

      Acquired one of these in early 2023 on sale?

      several internal sections including for pens. <br /> will easily fit a handful or so of 4 x 6" index cards for quick travel

    1. Hipster PDA phone case .t3_jjlkh3._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } Advice neededAre there nany phone cases that can store some index cards (and preferably a pen)? I need one because I often forget to bring my Hipster PDA, while I almost never forget to bring my phone.

      reply to u/smaczek at https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooks/comments/jjlkh3/hipster_pda_phone_case/

      If you or others are still looking, I've been using an A6 Flatty case which easily fits several dozen 4x6" index cards along with my phone and a pen. It's probably a better hand carry (esp. with a pen inside), but will fit into my back pocket. Details:

      https://boffosocko.com/2023/04/20/review-of-king-jim-a6-size-horizontal-flatty-works-case-5460/

      Alternately, I've looked at Rickshaw Bags' Traveler's Notebook case for this as well: https://www.rickshawbags.com/travelers-notebook-case

    1. Question: fiction and non-fiction .t3_164ob1y._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      For those that do both fiction and non-fiction work in their zettelkasten, do you consider the portion dedicated to fiction a "department" or a "compartment" within it? or perhaps something altogether different?

    1. The Snowflake Method is more specific, but broadly similar to those who build out plot using index cards.

      As examples, see Dustin Lance Black and Benjamin Rowland.

      Link to - https://hypothes.is/a/043JIlv5Ee2_eMf1TTV7ig - https://hypothes.is/a/ibFMareUEe2bqSdWdE046g

    2. Ingermanson, Randy. “The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel.” Advanced Fiction Writing, circa 2013. https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/.

      Designing writing in ever more specific and increasing levels. Start with a logline, then a paragraph, then acts, etc.

      Roughly the advice I've given many over the years based on screenplay development experience, but with a clever name based on the Koch snowflake.

    3. you only have to solve a limited set of problems, and so you can write relatively fast.
    4. If there’s no conflict, you’ll know it here and you should either add conflict or scrub the scene.
    5. A spreadsheet is ideal, because you can see the whole storyline at a glance, and it’s easy to move scenes around to reorder things.

      Similarly for an index card-based outline.

      see also: https://hypothes.is/a/kdyvykazEe6z3Ruv2sAgqg

    6. The first thing to do is to take that four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes that you’ll need to turn the story into a novel. And the easiest way to make that list is . . . with a spreadsheet.

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

    7. Take as much time as you need to do this, because you’re just saving time downstream.

      this=character development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      A Zettelkasten for jokes!

    1. BredenbeckCorp, Hanna. “Up Close and Personal with Phyllis Diller’s Gag File.” National Museum of American History (blog), March 1, 2017. https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/close-and-personal-phyllis-dillers-gag-file.

    2. Hanna BredenbeckCorp is a project assistant in the Division of Culture and the Arts.
    3. In the end, I numbered and scanned 52,569 individual note cards from the Phyllis Diller gag file.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    4. other jokes did not land because I did not know the movie star or celebrity referenced.
    5. The main thing I learned while reading through Phyllis Diller's jokes is that comedy has changed a lot since she started her career in the mid-1950s. Her comedy is focused on short one-liners that get laughs in quick succession, while today's comedy is more story-driven. Although a lot of her jokes are very time-bound due to their content, it was interesting to get a glimpse of what was happening at the time a joke was written. Each joke card has a date on it, and the cards span the 1960s to the 1990s. The topic of the jokes told a lot about what people were worried about or focused on at the time the joke was written, whether it was the inflation or student protests of the 1970s, a celebrity's many marriages, or gossip about the president at the time. While, like any comedian, some of her jokes fall flat, I appreciated Diller's hard work in meticulously recording, testing, and filing each joke in the gag file, along with her ability to make a joke about almost any topic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1. Oliar, Dotan; Sprigman, Christopher (2008). "There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy". Virginia Law Review. 94 (8): 1848. JSTOR 25470605. Retrieved September 16, 2020. There is also evidence in the [Diller archive…at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.] file suggesting that Diller appropriated from other sources [apart from self-creation or using her writing team], including newspaper comic strips and comedy books. For example, a number of Diller's jokes about her dysfunctional marriage to her fictional husband 'Fang' appear to have been inspired by a comic strip, 'The Lockhorns,' that Diller followed obsessively over the course of nearly a decade. The Diller joke files contain hundreds of 'Lockhorns' panels cut out of newspapers and mounted on index cards.
    1. Edwards, Owen. “Comic Phyllis Diller’s Cabinet Keeps the Jokes Coming.” Smithsonian Magazine (blog), March 2007. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/comic-phyllis-dillers-cabinet-keeps-the-jokes-coming-147794613/.

    2. Fang, her onstage pet-name for her husband, Sherwood.

      "Fang" was the onstage pet-name Phyllis Diller used for her husband Sherwood.

    3. Diller says that she always let the audience do the editing of her material for her. If people didn't laugh, or get it right away, the joke didn't survive. "You never blame the audience," she says. Thus, her advice to aspiring comics: "Go out and try it, and if you find out from the audience that you're not funny, quit."
    4. "The [joke] file is like a tree," says Diller. "Leaves drop off, and new leaves are added—the new stuff pushes out the old." Along with this cache—Diller refers to it as "my life in one-liners"
    5. There was a time, she once quipped, when she had worked for an editor "who was so mean that he used to eat thumbtacks for breakfast with skimmed water."
    6. Even the alphabetized categories evoke a laugh: "Science, Seasons, Secretary, Senile, Sex, Sex Symbols, Sex Harassment, Shoes, Shopping..." "Food Gripes, Foreign (incidents & personalities), Foundations (bra & underwear), Fractured Speech, Freeways, Friends, Frugality, Frustrations, Funerals, Funny Names..."

      Topical headings in Phyllis Diller's gag file

    7. a steel filing cabinet of safe-like dimensions

      Owen Edwards in 2007 compared Phyllis Diller's gag file to a safe.

    1. Py-Lieberman, Beth. “Comic Phyllis Diller, the Betty Friedan of Comedy, Dies at 95.” Online magazine. Smithsonian Magazine (blog), August 20, 2012. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/comic-phyllis-diller-the-betty-friedan-of-comedy-dies-at-95-28360980/.

    2. “I think the most important thing I can say about Phyllis Diller,” says Bowers, “is that she was like Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique. Just like Friedan, Phyllis Diller chronicled the daily lives of woman. But she did it with laughs.”
    3. Bowers remembers arriving at Diller’s home in 2006 to arrange for the donation. “She was the most organized donor I’d ever met.” “She had a rack of her costumes that she wished to donate. Each costume came with a plastic bag attached to it and inside the bag, she had carefully included not only the props—her cigarette holder, the head-dress, the gloves, the shoes—but also a photograph of her wearing the entire ensemble. She was better at curation than I was,” Bowers jokes.

      Curator Dwight Blocker Bowers on Phyllis Diller's organization.

    4. “The file is like a tree,” Diller told the magazine’s Owen Edwards in 2007. “Leaves drop off, and new leaves are added—the new stuff pushes out the old.”

      Phyllis Diller analogizing her index card file to a tree.

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

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

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

      Phyllis Diller Joke File, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Machine translation of the German:

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

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

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

    2. Steiner, Benjamin. “Aby Warburgs Zettelkasten Nr. 2 ‘Geschichtsauffassung.’” In Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie, edited by Heike Gfrereis and Ellen Strittmatter, 154–61. Marbacher Kataloge 66. Marbach am Neckar, 2013. https://www.academia.edu/8637204/Aby_Warburgs_Zettelkasten_Nr_2_Geschichtsauffassung_.

    3. Z E T T E L K A S T E N N R . 2

      example photos of some of Aby Warburg's zettels, kasten, and a photo of his desk space at home with zettelkasten to one side.

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

      machine translation:

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

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

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

      Consult footnote for more:

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

    6. Ernst Bernheim,

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

      When did Warburg start his zettelkasten?

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

    7. »Werwolf«

      Warburg had an incongruous seeming section of his zettelkasten relating to the idea of "Werewolf" which was tied into a variety of other ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    12. Für seine Arbeit wichtige Zettelsamm

      Warburg had note cases especially designed for travelling with him around Europe as he did research and lectured.

    13. ine Reihe von schießlich über hundertmit buntem Japanpapier überzogene Zettelkästen.

      Warburg's zettelkasten consisted of more than 100 boxes decorated in colorful Japanese paper.

    1. Lamprecht's ambitious Deutsche Geschichte (13 vols., 1891-1908) on the whole trajectory of German history sparked a famous Methodenstreit (methodological dispute) within Germany's academic history establishment, especially Max Weber, who habitually referred to Lamprecht as a mere dilettante. Lamprecht came under criticism from scholars of legal and constitutional history like Friedrich Meinecke and Georg von Below for his lack of methodological rigor and inattention to important political trends and ideologies. As a result, Lamprecht and his students were marginalized by German academia, and interdisciplinary social history remained something of a taboo among German historians for much of the twentieth century.
    1. I'm not convinced that a Luhmann-style ZK is the right note-making method for school notes. Though, I'd be fine having my mind changed.

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

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

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

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

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

      Good luck!

    1. These index cards are organized alphabetically by subject ranging from accessories to world affairs and covering almost everything in between.

      Phyllis Diller's gag file was arranged alphabetically by subject and ranged from "accessories" to "world affairs".

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

      52,569 3x5" index cards!

    3. Equal rights for the sexes will be reached only when totally unqualified women occupy high positions of power. —Phyllis Diller, May 1979, gag file under Women's Liberation

      From the Phyllis Diller gag file at https://transcription.si.edu/project/8547<br /> via https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1218385#

    1. Other comedians have maintained their material in joke files, among them Bob Hope, whose file is in the collections at the Library of Congress.
    2. Although Diller generated a lot of her own material, she elicited some gags from other writers. One of her top contributors was Mary MacBride, a Wisconsin housewife with five children. A joke obtained from another writer includes the contributor’s name on the index card with the gag.

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

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

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

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

    2. The digitization of Phyllis Diller’s index card collection was generously supported by Mike Wilkins and Sheila Duignan.
    3. In addition to Phyllis Diller’s gag file, the Division of Culture and the Arts at the National Museum of American History holds costumes, props, television scripts, photographs, books, and audio recordings illustrating Diller’s diverse career that spanned almost half of a century.

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

    4. 48 drawers (along with a 3 drawer expansion)

      Finally a source that indicates the full 51 drawers of Diller's gag file.

    1. Jacqueline Trescott in The Washington Post [Phyllis Diller’s joke file becomes a Smithsonian exhibit] (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/phyllis-dillers-joke-file-at-the-smithsonian/2011/07/27/gIQAZ0dXjI_story.html)<br /> (accessed:: 2023-08-26 04:59:59)

    2. Diller debuted at the famed Purple Onion in 1955.
    3. on Aug. 12, the National Museum of American History is giving the artifact pristine treatment.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight"Have You Heard the One . . . ? The Phyllis Diller Gag File" is an exhibition of the beige cabinet in the quiet Albert H. Small Documents Gallery.

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

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

    4. Diller typed her jokes on index cards and filled 48 file drawers.

      Repetition of the number 48 for the file drawers in the Phyllis Diller gag file despite photos which show the main file and an additional section with 3 drawers on top.

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

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

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

      Broadway costume from Hello Dolly

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

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

    1. 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/.

    2. 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.)

    3. 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.

    4. Partial photo of Phyllis Diller's gag file at the Smithsonian with a small three drawer file on top along with two of her record albums and a bronze bust of her head

    5. Close up of a card index file with a drawer pulled out. A label on the top reads Phyllis Diller while the contents slot reads Words of Wisdom, Writer's Ideas, Phyllis - Bad Luck Phyllis - Career

    6. 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.

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

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

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

    1. “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.

    2. 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....

    3. Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people seem bright until they speak.
    4. an imaginary husband she called Fang.

      Phyllis Diller had an imaginary husband she called "Fang".

    5. 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.)

    6. 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.

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. 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?

    5. The joke file is a snapshot of American history.”

      quote by Hanna BredenbeckCorp, of Smithsonian on Phyllis Diller's gag file

    6. “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.

    7. 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?

    8. “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.
    9. 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.

    10. Heidi Rotbart, owner of Heidi Rotbart Management who in the 1980s became Diller’s traveling secretary,
    11. In 1958, she made her television debut opposite Groucho Marx on the game show, “You Bet Your Life.”
    1. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is theproblem.” So declared Ronald Reagan as he launched hisadministration in January 1981,

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

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

    1. 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]