I love the idea here of analogizing the abstract nature of category theory in math with the abstract nature of metaphor in writing!

Good job Dale Keiger!

https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2021/winter/emily-riehl-category-theory/

original source?

creative mathematics versus computational or calculational mathematics...

we need more of the creative in early education

partial quote from Emily Riehl

How does one concretely define "inside" and "outside"? This definition is part of the missing space between the intuition and the mathematical proof.

Too many non-mathematicians view numbers as solid, concrete things which are meant to make definite sense and quite often their only experience with it is just that. Add two numbers up and always get the same thing. Calculate something in physics with an equation and get an exact, "true" answer. But somehow to be an actual mathematician, one must not see it as a "solid area" (using these words in their non-mathematical senses), but a wholly abstract field of abstraction built upon abstraction. While each abstraction has a sense of "trueness", it will need to be abstracted over and over while still maintaining that sense of "trueness". For many, this is close to being impossible because of the sense of solidity and gravity given to early mathematics.

How can we add more exploration for younger students?

http://www.hoppersofficefurniture.com/index.cfm?bxxe=1&Fuseaction=ProductHome&SearchWords=&CategoryID=25&ProductID=573

Has carried used metal card index files in the past for $295

reply to u/ManuelRodriguez331 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15ehcy5/why_is_the_index_card_half_full/

There has been debate about the length of notes on slips since the invention of slips and it shows no signs of coming to broad consensus other than everyone will have their personal opinion.

If you feel that A6 is is too big then go down a step in size to A7. One of the benefits of the DIN A standard is that you can take the next larger card size and fold it exactly in half to have the next size smaller. This makes it easier to scale up the size of your cards if you prefer most of them to be smaller to save space, just take care not to allow larger folded cards to "taco" smaller cards in a way they're likely to get lost. If you really needed more space, you could easily use an A1 or A2 and fold it down to fit inside of your collection! (Sadly 4x6 and 3x5 cards don't have this affordance.)

Fortunately there are a variety of available sizes, so you can choose what works best for yourself. Historically some chose large 5x8", 6x9", or even larger "slips". Some have also used different sizes for different functions. For example some use 3x5 for bibliographic cards and 4x6 for day-to-day ideas. I've seen stacked wooden card catalog furniture that had space for 3x5, 4x6, and 8.5x11 in separate drawers within the same cabinet. Some manufacturers even made their furniture modular to make this sort of mixed use even easier.

One of the broadly used pieces of advice that does go back centuries is to use "cards of the same size" (within a particular use case). This consensus is arrived at to help users from losing smaller cards between larger/taller cards. Cards of varying sizes, even small ones, are also much more difficult to sort through. Slight of hand magicians will be aware of the fact that shaving small fractions of length off of playing cards is an easy way of not only marking them, but of executing a variety of clever shuffling illusions as well as finding some of them very quickly by feel behind the back. Analog zettelkasten users will only discover that smaller, shorter cards are nearly guaranteed to become lost among the taller cards. It's for this reason that I would never recommend one to mix 4x6, A6, or even the very closely cut Exacompta Bristol cards, which are neither 4x6 nor A6!

I once took digital notes and printed them on paper and then cut them up to fit the size of the individual notes to save on space and paper. I can report that doing this was a painfully miserable experience and positively would NOT recommend doing this for smaller projects much less lifelong ones. Perhaps this could be the sort of chaos someone out there might actually manage to thrive within, but I suspect it would be a very rare individual.

As for digital spacing, you may win out a bit here for "saving" paper space, but you're also still spending on storage costs in electronic formatting which historically doesn't have the longevity of physical formats. Digital also doesn't offer the ease of use of laying cards out on a desktop and very quickly reordering them for subsequent uses.

There are always tradeoffs, one just need be aware of them to guide choices for either how they want to work or how they might work best.

Personally, I use 4x6" cards because I often write longer paragraphs on them. Through experimentation I found that I would end up using two or more 3x5 cards more often than I would have had mostly blank 4x6 cards and used that to help drive my choice. I also find myself revisiting old cards and adding to them (short follow ups, links to other cards, or other metadata) and 3x5 wouldn't allow that as easily.

As ever, YMMV...

See also: [[note lengths]] and/or [[note size]].

In the documentary California Typewriter (Gravitas Pictures, 2016) musician John Mayer mentions that he's never lost a typed version of his notes, while digital versions of his work essentially remain out of sight and thus out of mind or else they risk digital erasure by means of either data loss, formatting changes, or other damage.

Mayer also mentions that he loves typewriters for their ability to easily get out stream of consciousness thinking which is a mode of creativity he prefers for writing lyrics.

Historian and author David McCullough prefers a manual typewriter over computers with keyboards specifically because it forces him to slow down and take his time.

Ref: @Nichol2016 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5966990/

reply to u/Efficient_Earth_8773 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15fjb97/does_anyone_has_its_zettelkasten_in_google_docs/

Experimenting can be interesting. I've tried using spreadsheet software like Google Sheets or Excel which can be simple and useful methods that don't lose significant functionality. I did separate sheets for zettels, sources, and the index. Each zettel had it's own row with with a number, title, contents, and a link to a source as well as the index.

Google Docs might be reasonably doable, but the linking portion may be one of the more difficult affordances to accomplish easily or in a very user-centric fashion. It is doable though: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/45893?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop, and one might even mix Google Docs with Google Sheets? I could see Sheets being useful for creating an index and or sources while Docs could be used for individual notes as well. It's all about affordances and ease of use. Text is a major portion of having and maintaining a zettelkasten, so by this logic anything that will allow that could potentially be used as a zettelkasten. However, it helps to think about how one will use it in practice on a day-to-day basis. How hard will it be to create links? Search it? How hard will it be when you've got thousands of "slips"? How much time will these things take as it scales up in size?

A paper-based example: One of the reasons that many pen and paper users only write on one side of their index cards is that it saves the time of needing to take cards out and check if they do or don't have writing on the back or remembering where something is when it was written on the back of a card. It's a lot easier to tip through your collection if they're written only on the front. If you use an alternate application/software what will all these daily functions look like compounded over time? Does the software make things simpler and easier or will it make them be more difficult or take more time? And is that difficulty and time useful or not to your particular practice? Historian and author David McCullough prefers a manual typewriter over computers with keyboards specifically because it forces him to slow down and take his time. Another affordance to consider is how much or little work one may need to put into using it from a linking (or not) perspective. Using paper forces one to create a minimum of at least one link (made by the simple fact of filing it next to another) while other methods like Obsidian allow you to too easily take notes and place them into an infinitely growing pile of orphaned notes. Is it then more work to create discrete links later when you've lost the context and threads of potential arguments you might make? Will your specific method help you to regularly review through old notes? How hard will it be to mix things up for creativity's sake? How easy/difficult will it be to use your notes for writing/creating new material, if you intend to use it for that?

Think about how and why you'd want to use it and which affordances you really want/need. Then the only way to tell is to try it out for a bit and see how one likes/doesn't like a particular method and whether or not it helps to motivate you in your work. If you don't like the look of an application and it makes you not want to use it regularly, that obviously is a deal breaker. One might also think about how difficult/easy import/export might be if they intend to hop from one application to another. Finally, switching applications every few months can be self-defeating, so beware of this potential downfall as you make what will eventually need to be your ultimate choice. Beware of shiny object syndrome or software that ceases updating in just a few years without easy export.

https://www.cross.com/cr_en_us/at0452-22

Purchased as a gift on 2023-07-31

Uses standard Cross refills like Medium Ballpoint Refill #8513.

There's something interesting and unique going on in Mark Sample's use of the N+7 dictionary replacement of Hacking the Academy which still makes broad sense from a grammatical and semantic sense. What levels of transformation would one have to do within a language to loose all semblance of meaning? What do these sorts of transformations, deformations, or deformances indicate about linguistics and semantic meaning within a language?

How far must change go before it is incomprehensible?

Sample, Mark. “Notes towards a Deformed Humanities.” Academic blog. SampleReality (blog), May 2, 2012. https://samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/.

How might one use quirky algorithms in interestingly destructive or even generative ways to combinatorially create new things?

I'm reminded of Jeremy Mayer's work of deconstruction old, non-functioning typewriters to create sculptures.

Intriguing that he uses the word "scraps" here which plays directly into the practice of the zettelkasten within the ars excerpendi!

related: Library carpentries

Isn't this the sort of analysis that William Gladstone did on Homer, or Milman Parry subsequently? Hasn't the practice of ars excerpendi always been a form of deformance? Excerpt, mix, remix, repeat...

How far can one deform a text, subject, topic, and come up with something useful?

reply to u/IvanCyb at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/15eljnf/how_do_you_refer_from_and_to_multiple_sources/

Usually if I find a quote somewhere, I'll try to track down the original source, check the context and excerpt it from the original. If it's something mission critical, I might note that it was excerpted and used in other sources and whether it was well excerpted for their case or not. Sometimes, quoting can also help to make a solid case about the influence a work had and notes on that can be a useful thing. If I make multiple notes about the same sort of idea, that's fine, though I typically try to file them all next to each other for easy consultation and comparison, if necessary. As an example, I have quotes from multiple sources about note taking indicating that one should only write on one side of a(n index) card. Some quote earlier sources, some state it without attribution, some say they've learned to do so over time and with experience. Some give reasons why and some don't. The only way to track these practices over time is to note them all together for comparing and contrasting. It wasn't until I'd seen the third mention that I realized the practice was an interesting/important one and worth tracking, so I had to go back and dig up the originals which I had written briefly on their bibliographic cards with page numbers, so it made things easier to create main cards out of them. Because they're all stored together, there's only one index entry for them (for the first one), under "note taking" with the subheading "write only on one side". Alternately I might have made a single note card about the idea of the practice and created a list with pointers of those who used it (or didn't) and links to the sources where I originally found them. Do what makes most sense for you for tracking based on your own situation and needs. You may also find that these things happen frequently when doing literature reviews and things are repeated often within a field. Sometimes it's helpful to figure out who said a thing first and whether or not others are repeating/quoting them or coming to the same conclusion on their own. Is it a solid conclusion? What is the evidence or lack thereof? The only way to know is to start keeping track of these patterns in your reading and notes. Where and how you choose to track it in your zettelkasten is up to you. Sometimes it may be in brief notes with the original source, sometimes in a "hub note", and still others broken out into primary cards collected together.

reply to u/TheVoroscope at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/va2s09/comment/jtwqhd7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

u/TheVoroscope, the only things I've seen on it are the original and what you've written. I suspect anything current will be quite niche and would require searching in the areas of academic journal articles or at the level of graduate studies within the library sciences where you might find something. Simon Winchester had a section on the rise and downfall of the Encyclopedia Britannica in his most recent book Knowing What We Know (2023) which has a brief mention of the Propædia, but it was broadly described as a $32 million dollar bomb that ended the Encyclopedia. I would suspect that the last printings in 2010 and 2012 were probably the last more as a result of the rise of internet usage than they were the form and function of the Propædia itself though.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/historiography

Michael Dirda keeps a version of a commonplace book.

It's particularly difficult to find inscribed or rare books with odd quirks in an online marketplace where one can't hold a book and browse through it in person.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/07/27/rules-for-reading-dirda/

Margin Shopping suggestions?

I've browsed through dozens of publishers who reprint translations of popular classics to find ones that have good broad margins to more easily be able to annotate in them. I've often considered self-publishing nice hardcover copies of out of copyright versions so that I could make nice wide margins or even interleave the books so that every other page was blank for taking notes.

Notes on some publishers I've been contemplating:

• The Folio Society seems to have some of the widest margins, but at a steep cost and a more limited selection.
• Heritage Press has some good margins, but they're out of business and can be more expensive
• Library of America has some of the larger mass-market hard cover margins with excellent quality, though their offerings are American writers only.
• Penguin Classics seem to have some of the best margin widths for inexpensive paperbacks and has one of the widest offerings.
• Norton Critical editions usually have reasonable paperback margins with excellent additional editorial for reasonable prices.

Does anyone who marks up their books have particular publishers they like best for their ample margins, preferably in hard cover at a reasonable prices?

Other than reprinting things myself, what other options are there for physical books? (For digital books, I often rely on my Kindle or I use Hypothes.is which offers endless margins digitally.)

syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15clwfd/margin_shopping_suggestions/

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

Good overview of the method and details for how to implement.

Possibly the king of the one page zettelkasten descriptions.

https://www.magneticmemorymethod.com/zettelkasten/

I'd found this page through general search and then a few days later someone from Metivier's "team" (an SEO hire likely) emailed me to link to it from a random zk page on my own site (not a great one).

Metivier seems to have come to ZK from the PKM space (via a podcast I listened to perhaps?). This page isn't horrible, but seems to benefit greatly from details I've added to the Wikipedia page over the past few years.

http://sonic.net/~rteeter/greatbks.html

https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/graduate/masters-eastern-classics/reading-lists

https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2012-06-15/jack-daniels-tennessee-whiskey-from-south-wales

Chapter 4, Section 1

Does Winchester hold up William Howard Russell as a personal hero? There isn't very much criticism of him here in this section. Keep in mind that Winchester was a war correspondent and journalist from the United Kingdom himself, so this may go toward his own particular stripe of journalistic coverage.

Which journalism schools taught "without fear or favor"? When?

Even in William Howard Russell's day, the Prince of Wales kept some dodgy company.

dudgeon<br /> noun; plural noun: dudgeons<br /> a feeling of offense or deep resentment.

William Howard Russell was one of the first foreign war correspondents. He was particularly known for his coverage of the 1850's Crimean War; his descriptions of the wounded there urged the arrival of Florence Nightingale.

Quote from Evelyn Waugh's satire Scoop from section on Wenlock Jakes "creating" a revolution.

Story of William Boot and description of Wenlock Jakes who "made" (up) news.

Is there really such a thing as a "Shenandoah beard" in the annals of fashion?

Does he actually touch on the idea of "modern magic" explicitly? He talks about modern technology, but does he frame it as "magic"?

Winchester, Simon. Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, 2023. https://www.harperacademic.com/book/9780063142886/knowing-what-we-know.

https://www.gooeycenterbakery.com/

2023-03-01 Met Christopher Federici, owner of Gooey Center Bakery. He swears by King Arthur flour.

reply to IvanCyb at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1587onp/comment/jt8zbu4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 Asking broadly about indexing methods in zettelkasten

When you begin you'll find yourself creating lots of index entries to start, in part because you have none, but you'll find with time that you need to do less and less because index entries already exist for most of what you would add. More importantly most of the entries you might consider duplicating are likely to be very near cards that already have those index entries.

As an example if you have twenty cards on cultural anthropology, the first one will be indexed with "cultural anthropology" to give you a pointer of where to start. Then when you need to add a new card to that section, you'll look up "cultural anthropology" and skim through what you've got to find the closest related card and place it. You likely won't need to create a new index entry for it at all.

But for argument's sake, let's say you intend to do some work at the intersection of "cultural anthropology" and "writing" and this card is also about "writing". Then you might want to add an index entry for "writing" from which you'll branch off in the future. This will tend to keep your index very sparse. As an example you can look at Niklas Luhmann's digitized collection to notice that he spent his career in the area of "sociology" but there are only just a few pointers from his index into his collection under that keyword. If he had tagged every single card related to "sociology" as "sociology" in his index, the index entry for it would have been wholly unusable in just a few months. Broadly speaking his entire zettelkasten is about sociology, so you need to delve a few layers in and see which subtopics, sub-subtopics, sub-sub-subtopics, etc. exist. As you go deeper into specific topics you'll notice that you branch down and out into more specific subareas as you begin to cover all the bases within that topic. If you like, for fun, you can see this happening in my digital zettelkasten on the topic of "zettelkasten" at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22zettelkasten%22. The tool only shows the top 50 tags for that subject in the side bar, but you can slowly dig down into subtopics to see what they look like and a bit of how they begin to overlap.

Incidentally, this is one of the problems with those who tag everything with top level topic headings in digital contexts—you do a search for something important and find so much that it becomes a useless task to try to sift through it all. As a result, users need better tools to give them the ability to do more fine-grained searching, filtering, and methods of discovery.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bulletjournal/comments/14qu116/bullet_journals_for_six_hours/

bullet journals for six hours<br/> —u/FirstOpalize

I'm just wrapping up a year of maintaining my bullet journal practice using index cards instead of the more popular notebook form factor. It's heavily inspired by the century+ old Memindex method.

AMA

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

Syndication Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/bulletjournal/comments/15av66m/a_year_of_bullet_journaling_on_index_cards/

reply to u/AndreSanch at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/158gy35/im_using_latex_to_create_my_zettel_notes/

This sort of thing has certainly been done before by many. Be careful of going overboard.

If you don't already have a list of most of the common LaTeX math symbols, here's a good starter list, but make sure that your assigned meaning to them from an argumentation perspective is either "standard" or you've written it down for later use/memory. (There's nothing worse than a 10 year old note whose symbols you no longer remember.)

If you haven't done a course in philosophy or logic (something along the lines of Elements of Logic), then that may also help you in terms of many of the common uses/meanings, though there are a variety of meanings to various symbols through time, so take care.

Scribes and scholars over time have used a variety of symbols and annotations to mean various things, some of which were standardized in various contexts. For more on this take a look at some of Evina Stein's work and research on historic texts. Some of this might include:

Steinová, Evina. “Nota and Require. The Oldest Western Annotation Symbols and Their Dissemination in the Early Middle Ages.” Scribes and the Presentation of Texts (from Antiquity to c. 1550). Proceedings of the 20th Colloquium of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine, 2021, 473–89. https://doi.org/10.1484/M.BIB-EB.5.124987.<br /> ———. Notam Superponere Studui: The Use of Annotation Symbols in the Early Middle Ages. Brepols, 2019.<br /> Steinova, Evina. “Technical Signs in Early Medieval Manuscripts Copied in Irish Minuscule.” In The Annotated Book in the Early Middle Ages: Practices of Reading and Writing, edited by M. J. Teeuwen and I. Van Renswoude, 37–85. Brepols, 2017.

For those interested in scratching the surface of some possibilities and history, I might recommend:

Scheinerman, Edward R. Mathematical Notation: A Guide for Engineers and Scientists. CreateSpace, 2011.

Your note about Forte, while cute and clever doesn't necessarily mean that he's an old man, however, so take care about your propositions and what you draw from them or else your system won't hold up for long.

reply to u/SnooPandas3432 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/158tzk7/zettelkasten_on_a_ring_binder_with_looseleaf_paper/

She didn't specify a particular dimension, but I recall that Beatrice Webb used larger sheets of paper than traditional index-card sized slips in her practice and likely filed them into something akin to hanging files in a filing cabinet.

For students, I might suggest using the larger sheets/3-ring binder to make Cornell notes for coursework and then later distilling down one or two of the best ideas from a lecture or related readings into index card form for filing away over time. You could then have a repository of bigger formatted literature notes from books/lectures with more space and still have all the benefits of a more traditional card-based zettelkasten for creativity and writing. You could then have the benefit of questions for spaced repetition for quizzes/tests, while still keeping bigger ideas for writing papers or future research needs.

If one "tweets" on Twitter, will one then be "eX-iting" posts on X? I think it's a perfect time to eXit the entire platform. #IndieWeb

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/23/23804629/twitters-rebrand-to-x-may-actually-be-happening-soon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5XqqylBW7M

Building up Christopher Nolan's IMAX 70mm version of Oppenheimer.

IMAX splices use zigzag cuts in the film to create more surface length to tape the film ends together.

Christopher Nolan now holds the record for the longest IMAX film ever made. IMAX needed to extend the length of their platters to accommodate his prints of Oppenheimer for release in 2023.

https://blog.ayjay.org/unanswered-questions/

The index-card based notes pictured in this post certainly makes me think that Alan Jacobs has the sort of note taking/commonplace book sort of practice I thought he would.

https://badw.de/die-akademie/presse/pressemitteilungen/pm-einzelartikel/detail/open-access-der-thesaurus-linguae-latinae-ist-online.html

Flow, Christian. “Philological Observation.” Modern Intellectual History 19, no. 1 (March 2022): 187–216. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244320000396.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/abs/philological-observation/FA83E1612322D784F3ADE3895CCE9D4D

https://www.history.msstate.edu/directory/cf1258

Christian Flow has studied three attempts to create a comprehensive lexicon of Latinity.

The TLL would be one, what did the other two look like? When were they?

Coleman, Kathleen M. “Im Weinberg der Lexicographie.” Akademie Aktuell, February 2019. https://badw.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Files/BADW/Akademie_Aktuell/AA_2_2019/AA1901_46_Forsch_Coleman_Lay03.pdf.

https://badw.de/die-akademie/presse/videos/video-detail/detail/aus-unserer-forschung-der-thesaurus-linguae-latinae

Also on YouTube??? I think I've seen a version of this elsewhere.

Flow, Christian. 125 Jahre Thesaurus linguae Latinae - Vortrag. Mp3. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2019. https://badw.de/die-akademie/presse/podcast/podcast-details/detail/125-jahre-thesaurus-linguae-latinae-vortrag.html.

Quinn, Annalisa. “Latin Dictionary’s Journey: A to Zythum in 125 Years (and Counting).” The New York Times, November 30, 2019, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/arts/latin-dictionary.html.

The TLL was originally funded by the German state, but became an internationally funded project following World War II. In 2019 it had a 1.25 million euro budget primarily supported by German taxpayers as well as several other international partners and underwriters.

The name Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) appears in the guestbook of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae when he came to consult the dictionary projects research on the word "populus" (masses, people).

By late 2019, the TLL was up to the letter 'R'.

https://www.publishepp.com/

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading

https://www.thetypewriterman.co.uk/index.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1_RKu-ESCY

Lots of controversy over this music video this past week or so.

In addition to some of the double entendre meanings of "we take care of our own", I'm most appalled about the tacit support of the mythology that small towns are "good" and large cities are "bad" (or otherwise scary, crime-ridden, or dangerous).

What are the crime statistics per capita about the safety of small versus large?

Availability bias of violence and crime in the big cities are overly sampled by most media (newspapers, radio, and television). This video plays heavily into this bias.

There's also an opposing availability bias going on with respect to the positive aspects of small communities "taking care of their own" when in general, from an institutional perspective small towns are patently not taking care of each other or when they do its very selective and/or in-crowd based rather than across the board.

Note also that all the news clips and chyrons are from Fox News in this piece.

Alternately where are the musicians singing about and focusing on the positive aspects of cities and their cultures.

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/267138849330608/?ref=search&referral_code=null&referral_story_type=post&tracking=browse_serp%3Ac002e23e-c5a5-4234-bde1-736359c183b7

$1,200 for 60 drawer library card catalog in wood. No brand listed. $20/drawer.

Sold, but for unknown amount in July 2023.

looked like a single piece though may have been two sections of 6 x 5 with a three pull writing section on a small pedestal and a top.

https://tllpod.podbean.com/e/oscvlvm-panciera/

There were three types of named kisses in Roman culture generally: one for family, one for wives, and one for mistresses. (see basium, savium)

One Emperor outlawed daily kissing (greetings) likely because of a facial disease for which kissing would have increased the spread.

-culum is a Latin diminutive ending, thus os (mouth) + culum (little) = small mouth or kiss

see also: //publikationen.badw.de/de/thesaurus/lemmata#63769

https://graham.uchicago.edu/programs-courses/basic-program

England: From the Fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest. Streaming Video. Vol. 30140. The Great Courses. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, LLC, 2022. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/england-from-the-fall-of-rome-to-the-norman-conquest. https://www.wondrium.com/england-from-the-fall-of-rome-to-the-norman-conquest.

Paxton, Jennifer. England: From the Fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest. The Great Courses: Books. First. The Great Courses 30140. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2022.

reply to u/posh-and-repressed at https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/15218d5/overloaded_with_notes/

Overwhelm of notes always reminds me of this note taking story from 1908: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/24/death-by-zettelkasten/ If you've not sorted them, tagged/categorized them or other, then search is really your only recourse. One of the benefits of Luhmann's particular structure is that it nudged him to read and review through older cards as he worked and filed new ones. Those with commonplace books would have occasionally picked up their notebooks and paged through them from time to time. Digital methods like Obsidian don't always do a good job of allowing or even forcing this review work on the user, so you may want to look at synthetic means like one of the random note plugins. Otherwise don't worry too much. Fix your tagging/categorizing/indexing now so that things slowly improve in the future. (I'm sitting on a pile of over 50K notes without the worry of overwhelm, primarily as I've managed to figure out how to rely on my index and search.)

Robert Hutchins, former dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929), president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago, closes his preface to his grand project with Mortimer J. Adler by giving pride of place to Adler's Syntopicon. It touches on the unreasonable value of building and maintaining a zettelkasten:

But I would do less than justice to Mr. Adler's achievement if I left the matter there. The Syntopicon is, in addition to all this, and in addition to being a monument to the industry, devotion, and intelligence of Mr. Adler and his staff, a step forward in the thought of the West. It indicates where we are: where the agreements and disagreements lie; where the problems are; where the work has to be done. It thus helps to keep us from wasting our time through misunderstanding and points to the issues that must be attacked. When the history of the intellectual life of this century is written, the Syntopicon will be regarded as one of the landmarks in it. —Robert M. Hutchins, p xxvi The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. 1952.

Adler's Syntopicon has been briefly discussed in the forum.zettelkasten.de space before. However it isn't just an index compiled into two books which were volumes 2 and 3 of The Great Books of the Western World, it's physically a topically indexed card index or a grand zettelkasten surveying Western culture. Its value to readers and users is immeasurable and it stands as a fascinating example of what a well-constructed card index might allow one to do even when they don't have their own yet. For those who have only seen the Syntopicon in book form, you might better appreciate pictures of it in slipbox form prior to being published as two books covering 2,428 pages:

Two page spread of Life Magazine article with the title "The 102 Great Ideas" featuring a photo of 26 people behind 102 card index boxes with categorized topical labels from "Angel" to "Will".

Mortimer J. Adler holding a pipe in his left hand and mouth posing in front of dozens of boxes of index cards with topic headwords including "law", "love", "life", "sin", "art", "democracy", "citizen", "fate", etc.

Adler spoke of practicing syntopical reading, but anyone who compiles their own card index (in either analog or digital form) will realize the ultimate value in creating their own syntopical writing or what Robert Hutchins calls participating in "The Great Conversation" across twenty-five centuries of documented human communication. Adler's version may not have had the internal structure of Luhmann's zettelkasten, but it definitely served similar sorts of purposes for those who worked on it and published from it.

References

• LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.
• Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. Edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

syndication link: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2623/mortimer-j-adlers-syntopicon-a-topically-arranged-collaborative-slipbox/

https://obsidian.md/blog/free-your-notes/

https://obsidian.md/plugins?id=obsidian-importer

For those who are Obsidian users, earlier today they released a plugin for converting/importing one's Evernote notes as markdown files: https://obsidian.md/plugins?id=obsidian-importer

See also: https://obsidian.md/blog/free-your-notes/

Those who don't use Obsidian might consider using it temporarily to convert their files to markdown (.md) format for use in other programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Benton_(politician)

p xxvi

Hutchins closes his preface to his grand project with Mortimer J. Adler by giving pride of place to Adler's Syntopicon.

Adler's Syntopicon isn't just an index compiled into two books which were volumes 2 and 3 of The Great Books of the Western World, it's physically a topically indexed card index of data (a grand zettelkasten surveying Western culture if you will). It's value to readers and users is immeasurable and it stands as a fascinating example of what a well-constructed card index might allow one to do even when they don't have their own yet.

Adler spoke of practicing syntopical reading, but anyone who compiles their own card index (in either analog or digital form) will realize the ultimate value in creating their own syntopical writing or what Robert Hutchins calls participating in "The Great Conversation" across twenty-five centuries of documented human communication.

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/WF4THtUNEe2dZTdlQCbmXw

The way Hutchins presents the idea of "Adler's achievement" here seems to indicate that Hutchins didn't have a direct hand in compiling or working on it directly.

This is the first footnote of the work—a simple pointer for learning how the Syntopicon works. Because of the value of the Syntopicon, whose two volumes follow this one, this is a nice little bit of pedagogy here leading up to the Syntopicon's value.

p. xxiv

Hutchins seems to indicate that the "vicious specialization of scholarship" is in part to blame for the emergence of the "two cultures" delineated by C. P. Snow later in the decade.

The idea of the two cultures had been brewing for a bit...

1952 variation of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures thesis (1959).

See also earlier comment on p xxi: https://hypothes.is/a/2BGWXiIAEe6WZyd5bbGl3g

Does it really?!? When the conversation omits so many perspectives and points of view for lack of diversity, it's also going to be missing quite a lot that one may not anticipate either. It's also likely to go down some blind alleys that may not be as beneficial too.

There are 443 works by 74 authors in the Great Books of the Western World. All of them are printed in their entirety except for Aquinas, Kepler and Fourier.

One of the primary goals of The Great Books, was to make some of the (especially ancient writers) more accessible to modern audiences with respect to ready availability of their works which were otherwise much more expensive.

This certainly says something about both publishing and reading practices of the early 20th century.

The idea of the Lindy effect is subtly hiding here. Presumably it also existed before.

It's often seen in how historians can or can't easily evaluate the impact of recent historical figures without the appropriate amount of additional evaluation with respect to passing time.

Broadly the entirety of the documented existence of mankind...

Robert Hutchins takes sole responsibility for the final decision on the selection for the books which appear in The Great Books of the Western World series.

One wonders what sort of advice he may have sought out or received with respect to a much broader diversity of topics and writers with respect to his own time. I reminded a bit of the article The 102 Great Ideas (Life, 1948) which highlights a more progressive stance with respect to women and feminism in the examples used.

See: LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. Https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.

amplifying, modifying, contradicting...

what other means of argumentation/conversation could one enumerate here with respect to a greater conversation?

How specifically does the author define "The Great Conversation"?

Note that it is consistently capitalized throughout the book to give it greater importance.

It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.

Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.

As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.

How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?

Two of the driving reasons behind the Great Books project were improvement of both education and democracy.

The democracy portion was likely prompted by the second Red Scare from ~1947-1957 which had profound effects on America. Published in 1952, this series would have considered it closely and it's interesting they included Marx in the thinkers at the end of the series.

disappearance [of education] as an...

there's also disappearance of context of what has gone before

A great admission to make upfront in such a massive endeavor which one hopes to shape the future.

What does this mean for ars excerpendi writ large? Particularly when it may apply to hundreds of thousands?

Things have not improved measurably since the 1950s apparently. The drumbeat has only gotten worse.

How would Robert Hutchins view the new millennium?

Apparently every age feels like they're moving into the abyss, even when they're making great strides.

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/622/syntopicon

Some in the ZK space have looked at the Syntopicon, but they primarily see the finished book product and don't seem to be aware of the slip-based portion of the project.

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

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/search/?keyword=loeb+classical+library

Blackwell's seems to have Loeb Classical Library titles on perma-sale and includes shipping to the United States, so perhaps one of the least expensive means of collecting them.

https://thegreatestbooks.org/

https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list

I her spare time, she also appears to enjoy trolling the local Glendale school system as an intolerant goon who has issues with diversity, equity, and inclusion. https://www.therealjordanhenry.com/team

reply to u/gate18 at https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/14ve4gi/is_there_any_app_like_obsidian_for_visual_art/

Aby Warburg had a significant physical card-based zettelkasten he used for his visual research in the early 1900s. Perhaps you'd find some interesting inspiration by looking at his methods?

https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/archive/archive-collections/verkn%C3%BCpfungszwang-exhibition/mnemosyne-materials

reply to u/ihaveascone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14v2ohz/converting_commonplace_books/

Don't convert unless you absolutely need to, it will be a lot of soul-crushing make work. Since some of your practice already looks like Ross Ashby's system, why not just continue what you've been doing all along and start a physical index card-based index for your commonplaces? (As opposed to a more classical Lockian index.) As you browse your commonplaces create index cards for topics you find and write down the associated book/page numbers. Over time you'll more quickly make your commonplace books more valuable while still continuing on as you always have without skipping much a beat or attempting to convert over your entire system. Alternately you could do a paper notebook with a digital index too. I came across https://www.indxd.ink, a digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional). It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears. This could potentially be used by those who have analog commonplace/zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.

reply to u/peaberryxo at https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooks/comments/14to50w/how_do_you_use_pocket_sized_notebooks/

I generally carry one all the time and use it as a convenient "waste book". I quickly collect fleeting ideas or notes throughout the day so I don't forget the tidbits that are important. When I'm back at my desk or at the end of the day/week, I will transfer things into my calendar/planner, my primary to do list, copy out more fleshed out ideas or quotes into my commonplace book or add particular ideas and sources to my zettelkasten. It's really there for quick convenience and nothing more. If it's important it always goes somewhere else.

Morson, Gary Saul. “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature.” Commentary Magazine, July 1, 2010. https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/.

You have to love the reference to perversion of Pevear's name in the title! Wonder how they'd translate this into Russian...

Part of literature is the Great Conversation, which often turns on the ability for writers to be understood and appreciated, often in translation. Gary Saul Morson takes P&V to task for their Russian translations which often focus on the incredibly specific nuances of direct translation, but which simultaneously lose the beauty and sense of literature. He says, "[...] readers typically turn to translations not to hear about culinary ephemera but to read literature."

Remnick, David. “The Translation Wars.” The New Yorker, October 30, 2005. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars.

Some authors who have written about translations.

Some useful numbers from 2005 on classic book sales of particular titles.

Initial print fun of the P/V translation of Anna Karenina was 32,000 copies which the publisher hoped would push other translations to the margins. Then Oprah picked it up for her book club... and the publisher ordered another printing of 800,000 copies.

Pevear talking about Chekhov.

quote from Richard Pevear

epigones is a lovely little word...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/155257403398

An Underwood & Underwood cabinet for storing stereoview (or stereograph) photos. Could potentially repurposed as a zettelkasten cabinet as the slip sizes should generally be compatible.

https://welovetranslations.com/2022/01/10/whats-the-best-translation-of-the-brothers-karamazov/

https://scription.typepad.com/

Patrick Ng seems to be the inventor of a chronodex visual planning system. His website has half yearly printable planner inserts for Midori's Traveler's Notebooks.

One of his downloadable templates reads:

Chronodex ideas and notations are copyrighted, it is free for personal use, please contact Patrick Ng (patrickng@mac.com) for commercial usage.

Examples of chronodex layouts on his website show his uses which also seem to include some sketchnoting usage as well.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832721946110.html?gatewayAdapt=gloMsite2usaPcglo2usa4itemAdapt

A 12 and a 24 hour variation

via https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooks/comments/1nrtcm/anyone_else_using_scription_chronodex/

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/timeline-brass-hand-account-seal-with_1600086782499.html

http://jolarsenburnett.blogspot.com/2012/01/patrick-ngs-chromodex-diary-system.html

She indicates she has an Adobe file, but I see no immediate evidence of it. Apparently waiting on permission from Patrick Ng?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/annettechung/11451796944/in/pool-1804503@N25/

Jo Larsen Burnett has a variation of Patrick Ng's chronodex: http://jolarsenburnett.blogspot.com/2012/01/patrick-ngs-chromodex-diary-system.html

https://www.flickr.com/photos/moleskineart/7029712939

https://www.ebay.com/p/1154231946

https://www.amazon.com/Correct-C-121DF-Card-Business-Single/dp/B008324IPA

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/194730263

Hawk Sugano used a Correct Indexcard Dock (C-153DF) box for some of his index card practice.

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