https://chat.indieweb.org/2023-01-24#t1674552735818200

https://eveharms.itch.io/stimuwrite<br /> StimuWrite by Eve Harms

Make writing as addictive as social media

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Kieryn Darkwater :vtrain:</span> in "omg so I remembered seeing a #writing app for #ADHD a long time ago that is actually stimulating instead of a massive white space, and I found it again today. I thought I'd try it out and I've been able to get 1600 words done with less pain than starting at a blank google doc. The hearts and stuff as I type is all the serotonins I need for this. It's worth paying for.https://eveharms.itch.io/stimuwrite " - towns.gay on Jan 11, 2023, 04:12 (<time class='dt-published'>01/24/2023 12:35:14</time>)</cite></small>

https://polygloss.app/posts/learning-toki-pona-language-of-good/

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/6Znx6MiMEeu3ljcVBsKNOw We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.

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

link to Toki Pona as a conlang

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/6Znx6MiMEeu3ljcVBsKNOw We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.

Sonia Sotomayor asked herself what new thing did she learn at the end of every day. If she couldn't think of something then she remedied the issue by reading something. (Meltzer2018)

While it's not known if she wrote notes about what she learned, doing so may have allowed her to accumulate a heck of a zettelkasten practice. Many people mistakenly think that they need to be creating dozens of perfect permanent notes for their zettelkasten every day, but in reality, most historical practitioners only made one or two each day. It's the accumulation and links between them that turn them into a more valuable collection over time.

Meltzer, Brad. I Am Sonia Sotomayor. Illustrated edition. New York: Dial Books, 2018.

Notice the naming/productization of this idea: The Compass of Zettelkasten Thinking which Fei-Ling Tseng labels a "method" in the following line.

The comments on the piece seem to underline this.

The general idea is also far from new, so people are obviously ignoring the history of the space as they productize it.

Most only get so far as, what could/should I connect this to and don't get any farther.

Some good questions for mulling over here though.

Not so much origin myth here, but popularization myth…

The Brain in some of its views (see for eg: Jerry Michalski's default brain view) instantiates this sort of directional semantics for ideas.

Note too, that The Brain makes it much easier to help create connections between multiple ideas as a basic functionality.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/yk5ikr/related_contextual_links_footers/

check quote and original source

WTF! 🤣

from: https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15626

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15625

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZklLt80wqg

Looking at three broad ideas with examples of each to follow: - signals - patterns - pattern making, pattern breaking

Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913

Jane Kent for witchcraft

250 years with ~200,000 trial transcripts

Can be viewed as: - storytelling, - history - information process of signals

All the best trials include the words "Covent Garden".

Example: 1163. Emma Smith and Corfe indictment for stealing.

19:45 Norbert Elias. The Civilizing Process. (book)

Prozhito: large-scale archive of Russian (and Soviet) diaries; 1900s - 2000s

How do people understand the act of diary-writing?

Diaries are:

Leo Tolstoy

a convenient way to evaluate the self

Franz Kafka

a means to see, with reassuring clarity [...] the changes which you constantly suffer.

Virginia Woolf'

a kindly blankfaced old confidante

Diary entries in five categories - spirit - routine - literary - material form (talking about the diary itself) - interpersonal (people sharing diaries)

Are there specific periods in which these emerge or how do they fluctuate? How would these change between and over cultures?

The pattern of talking about diaries in this study are relatively stable over the century.

pre-print available of DeDeo's work here

Pattern making, pattern breaking

Individuals, institutions, and innovation in the debates of the French Revolution

• transcripts of debates in the constituent assembly

the idea of revolution through tedium and boredom is fascinating.

speeches broken into combinations of patterns using topic modeling

(what would this look like on commonplace book and zettelkasten corpora?)

emergent patterns from one speech to the next (information theory) question of novelty - hi novelty versus low novelty as predictors of leaders and followers

Robespierre bringing in novel ideas

How do you differentiate Robespierre versus a Muppet (like Animal)? What is the level of following after novelty?

Four parts (2x2 grid) - high novelty, high imitation (novelty with ideas that stick) - high novelty, low imitation (new ideas ignored) - low novelty, high imitation - low novelty, low imitation (discussion killers)

Could one analyze television scripts over time to determine the good/bad, when they'll "jump the shark"?

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15624

Can I use some of these sorts of methods with respect to corpus linguistics over time to better identified calcified words or archaic phrases that stick with the language, but are heavily limited to narrower(ing) contexts?

This is a good example of the fuzzy sorts of boundaries created by adding probabilities to individuals and putting them into (equivalence) classes. They can provide distributions of likelihoods.

This expands on: https://hypothes.is/a/3FVi6JtXEe2Xwp_BIaCv5g

Reframing signal relationships into probability spaces may mean that signal relationships are symmetric.

How far can this be pressed? They'll also likely be reflexive and transitive (though the probability may be smaller here) and thus make an equivalence relation.

How far can we press this idea of equivalence relations here with respect to our work? Presumably it would work to the level of providing at least good general distribution?

A reframing of the idea of a signal within a probability setting.

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/16871

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I42xyz1y410

Meet TA Steph Buongiorno

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15617

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pSGniUOyLc

Digital humanities aka Humanities Analytics

5:54 Simon DeDeo mentioned Alastair McKinnon the philosopher in the 60s did a stylopheric study of Kierkegaard pseudonyms - Kierkegaard's Pseudonyms: A New Hierarchy by Alastair McKinnon https://www.jstor.org/stable/20009297

Tools for supplementing research and scholarship

core audience is Ph.D. students

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15618

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RV99eO_oZU

Foundations & Applications of Humanities Analytics

1.3 About the course

• history of space, genealogy
• science / tools for learning
• examples via guest lecturers

Simon and David indicate that they are not "two cultures" people.

"You can get really far by counting." -Simon DeDeo

Digital humanities is another method of storytelling.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-01-17/how-a-new-film-captured-zora-neale-hurstons-radical-authenticity

Read on 2023-01-22

Interesting...

Link to Robert J. Flaherty

Where does she sit with respect to Robert J. Flaherty and Nanook of the North (1922)? Would she have been aware of his work through Boaz? How is her perspective potentially highly more authentic for such a project given her context?

The "strict conditions" and "every cent" sound a bit oppressive as called out here, though most funders would/should do this sort of thing.

Many people collect notes that they're not sure what to do with or even where to put them. Neuroscience student and researcher Charlotte Fraza keeps her version of these notes in a category of "things that inspire me, but I don't yet know exactly how to use. She feels that compared to the other categories of actionable specific use and sources, this inspiration category is the most interesting to her.

Jan Wagenaar's four leather-bound commonplace books are housed in the Special Collections of the Leiden University Library inventoried as "Adversaria of mixed content."

They contain excerpts in French, English, and Hebrew and are arranged by topical heading.

https://www.radboudrecharge.nl/en/article/your-second-brain-from-the-seventeenth-century

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds90JeVyKiE

Review of variety of Boox e-readers.

• Boox Note 3 - NO (older model)
• Best 7.8" is probably Note Air for $350
• 10" Note Air 2 >> Note Air
• 10" Note Air 2+ is $500 and has a bigger battery and batteries over it's smaller v2
• 13.3" Max Lumi >> Max Lumi2 especially because of price and heavy reflectivity issues with the Lumi 2

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/77941/the-best-way-to-cite-ebooks-currently

To sub-specify an ebook as opposed to a physical book in Zotero, in the Extra section, add a note like Medium: Kindle .mobi.

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/feynmans-darlings-become-brilliant/

Sascha Fast juxtaposes his new notes with his own favorite problems to see if they have any connections with respect to improving on or solving them.

This practice is somewhat similar to Marshall Kirkpatrick's conceptualization of triangle thinking, but rather than being randomly generated with respect to each other, the new things are always generated toward important questions he's actively working on or toward.

This helps to increase the changes of forward progress in specific areas rather than undirected random progress.

This doesn't seem to make sense given the definition of anastrophe which is cited here.

typo?

Gian-Carlo Rota (1997): Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught, Notices of the American Mathematical Society 1, 1997, Vol. 44, pp. 22-25.

anastrophe noun anas·​tro·​phe ə-ˈna-strə-(ˌ)fē : inversion of the usual syntactical order of words for rhetorical effect

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anastrophe

https://fs.blog/feynman-learning-technique/

Published: 2021-02-22T12:59:36+00:00

http://richardcarter.com/sidelines/making-notes-about-my-own-book/

This sounds a bit like the idea of reverse outlines I'd heard about recently but haven't fully looked into yet.

http://richardcarter.com/sidelines/keep-a-writing-journal/

Example of someone getting the crap and worries out so that their writing can begin apace. Its sort of like writers' therapy and closely akin to those who talk about morning pages.

Also similar to teachers of young children who encourage their students to get their "wiggles out" so that they can focus on the classwork at hand.

https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/10fzdm6/do_you_guys_journal_in_your_commonplace_book_too/

http://weird-old-book-finder.glitch.me/

https://www.toptools4learning.com/

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2022

https://wildrye.com/roundup-of-67-tools-for-thought-to-build-your-second-brain/

List of tools for thought apps

https://wildrye.com/tools-for-thought-need-a-purpose/

https://wildrye.com/let-your-notes-dictate-the-purpose-of-your-pkm-system/

How painfully true this may have been in 1899, it's now much worse in 2023!

Specialization of knowledge tends to fit the lifeways of the people who hold and maintain it. Changing lifeways means one must lose one or more domains and begin using or curating different domains of knowledge.

In a global world of specialization, humans who specialize are forced to rely more heavily on the experience and veracity of those around them who have also specialized. One may be able to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, but their knowledge of the state of the art in anthropology or economic policy may be therefore utterly undeveloped. As a result they will need to rely on the knowledge and help of others in maintaining those domains.

This knowledge specialization means that politicians will need to be more open about what they think and say, yet instead politicians seem to be some of the least knowledge about almost anything.

This is just the start of a somewhat well-formed thesis I've developed elsewhere, but not previously written out... more to come...

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10h23fm/wildly_aspirational/

https://www.catholic.org/saints/patron.php

Potential patron saints of note takers, writers, knowledge workers, tools for thought, etc.

• Apothecaries - Cosmas and Damian
• archives - Laurent (Lawrence)
• archivists, librarians, libraries - Catherine of Alexandria, Jerome, Laurent (Lawrence)
• cabinetmakers - Anne, Joseph, Vincent de Paul
• contemplatives, contemplative life - John of the Cross, Mary Magdalene
• Craftworkers - Luke
• Editors John Bosco, Francis de Sales
• enlightenment - Holy Spirit, Our Lady of Good Counsel
• file makers - Theodosius the Cenobriarch
• Information Workers - Archangel Gabriel
• inquisitors - Peter of Verona
• Joiners - Joseph, Thomas, Apostle
• knowledge - Holy Spirit
• Learning - Ambrose, Catherine of Alexandria
• liberal arts - Catherine of Bologna
• linguists - Gotteschalk
• net makers - Peter the Apostle
• Notaries - Luke, Mark, Ivo of Kermartin
• pencil makers - Thomas Aquinas
• Scholars - Bridgid of Ireland, Thomas Aquinas
• scribes - Catherine of Alexandria
• Shorthand writers - Cassian of Imola
• Students - Catherine of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas, Gabriel Possenti
• Students (examinees) - Joseph of Cupertino

https://lobban.org/posts/2023/01/20/oh-hi/

WordPress vs JAMStack observations

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2023-01-20.html

On the Jokerzettel

9/8j Im Zettelkasten ist ein Zettel, der das Argument enthält, das die Behauptungen auf allen anderen Zetteln widerlegt.

Aber dieser Zettel verschwindet, sobald man den Zettelkasten aufzieht.

D.h. er nimmt eine andere Nummer an, verstellt sich und ist dann nicht zu finden.

Ein Joker.

—Niklas Luhmann, ZK II: Zettel 9/8j

Translation:

9/8j In the slip box is a slip containing the argument that refutes the claims on all the other slips. But this slip disappears as soon as you open the slip box. That is, he assumes a different number, disguises himself and then cannot be found. A joker.

Many have asked about the meaning of this jokerzettel over the past several years. Here's my slightly extended interpretation, based on my own practice with thousands of cards, about what Luhmann meant:

Imagine you've spent your life making and collecting notes and ideas and placing them lovingly on index cards. You've made tens of thousands and they're a major part of your daily workflow and support your life's work. They define you and how you think. You agree with Friedrich Nietzsche's concession to Heinrich Köselitz that “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.” Your time is alive with McLuhan's idea that "The medium is the message." or in which his friend John Culkin said, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

Eventually you're going to worry about accidentally throwing your cards away, people stealing or copying them, fires (oh! the fires), floods, or other natural disasters. You don't have the ability to do digital back ups yet. You ask yourself, can I truly trust my spouse not to destroy them?,What about accidents like dropping them all over the floor and needing to reorganize them or worse, the ghost in the machine should rear its head?

You'll fear the worst, but the worst only grows logarithmically in proportion to your collection.

Eventually you pass on opportunities elsewhere because you're worried about moving your ever-growing collection. What if the war should obliterate your work? Maybe you should take them into the war with you, because you can't bear to be apart?

If you grow up at a time when Schrodinger's cat is in the zeitgeist, you're definitely going to have nightmares that what's written on your cards could horrifyingly change every time you look at them. Worse, knowing about the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle, you're deathly afraid that there might be cards, like electrons, which are always changing position in ways you'll never be able to know or predict.

As a systems theorist, you view your own note taking system as a input/output machine. Then you see Claude Shannon's "useless machine" (based on an idea of Marvin Minsky) whose only function is to switch itself off. You become horrified with the idea that the knowledge machine you've painstakingly built and have documented the ways it acts as an independent thought partner may somehow become self-aware and shut itself off!?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa9v8Z7Rac

And worst of all, on top of all this, all your hard work, effort, and untold hours of sweat creating thousands of cards will be wiped away by a potential unknowable single bit of information on a lone, malicious card and your only recourse is suicide, the unfortunate victim of dataism.

Of course, if you somehow manage to overcome the hurdle of suicidal thoughts, and your collection keeps growing without bound, then you're sure to die in a torrential whirlwind avalanche of information and cards, literally done in by information overload.

But, not wishing to admit any of this, much less all of this, you imagine a simple trickster, a joker, something silly. You write it down on yet another card and you file it away into the box, linked only to the card in front of it, the end of a short line of cards with nothing following it, because what could follow it? Put it out of your mind and hope your fears disappear away with it, lost in your box like the jokerzettel you imagined. You do this with a self-assured confidence that this way of making sense of the world works well for you, and you settle back into the methodical work of reading and writing, intent on making your next thousands of cards.

Worry about dropping a tray of slips and needing to reorganize them.

Pirsig, Robert. Lila: An Enquiry into Morals. London: Corgi Books, 1992.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10gnh3u/box_update/

Example of a zettelkasten maintainer (u/A_Dull_Significance) who has shown a photo of their zettelkasten box with the superimposed words "My Baby!" over the box label as a means of indicating how valuable it is to them.

This is a great euphemism for the fun "work" of maintaining a zettelkasten.

via u/A_Dull_Significance at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10gnh3u/box_update/

Example of someone who reports printed photos and even memes in their zettelkasten.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10gn820/the_more_you_read_and_process_the_info_you_gather/

u/Kenwaldek reports at least a short term average of making 1 1/2 cards per day.

This sounds somewhat similar to Mark Robertson's method of "live Roaming" (using Roam Research during his history classes) as a teaching tool on top of other prior methods.

link to: Roland Barthes' card collection for teaching: https://hypothes.is/a/wELPGLhaEeywRnsyCfVmXQ

http://richardcarter.com/sidelines/converting-my-notes-into-a-chapter/

A great example of a breakthrough moment in this example.

http://richardcarter.com/sidelines/converting-my-notes-into-a-chapter/

Brilliant! And fantastic the way he tied the last line back into the earlier unrelated thought...

Because reading, annotating/note taking, and occasional outlining and writing can be broken down into small, concrete building blocks, each part of the process can be done separately and discretely with relatively easy ability to shift from one part of the process to another.

Importantly, one can be working on multiple different high level projects (content production: writing, audio, video, etc.) simultaneously in a way which doesn't break the flow of one's immediate reading. While a particular note within a piece may not come to fruition within a current imagined project, it may spark an idea for a future as yet unimagined project.

Aside: It would seem that Ryan Holiday's descriptions of his process are discrete with respect to each individual project. He's never mentioned using or reusing notes from past projects for current or future projects. He's even gone to the level that he creates custom note cards for his current project which have a title pre-printed on them.

Does this pre-titling help to provide him with more singular focus for his specific workflow? Some who may be prone to being side-tracked or with specific ADHD issues may need or be helped by these visual and workflow cues to stay on task, and as a result be helped by them. For others it may hinder their workflows and creativity.

This process may be different for beginning students or single project writers versus career writers (academics, journalists, fiction and non-fiction writers).

As a concrete example of the above, I personally made a note here about Darwin and Lamarck for a separate interest in evolution which falls outside of my immediate area of interest with respect to note taking and writing output.

Summary of Richard Carter's writing process from notes to product.

I've not seen this explicitly laid out as advice before though in most contexts people's note taking spaces have historically been divorced from their writing spaces for publication because slips and notes are usually kept physically separate from the working spaces or finished parts, but Richard Carter specifically separates the digital spaces in which he takes his notes and then uses them for creating end products. While he could both take notes in Obsidian, his tool of choice for notes, as well as write his finished pieces there, he actively changes contexts to use a different digital app to compose his notes into final pieces.

What affordances does this context shift provide? <br /> - blank slate may encourage reworking and expansion of original notes - is there a blank slate effect and what would it entail? - potentially moves the piece into a longer format space or tool which provides additional writing, formatting or other affordances (which? there don't seem to be any in this case aside from a potential "distraction free mode" which may tend to force one to focus only on the piece at hand rather than the thousands of other pieces (notes) hiding within the app)

What affordances does this remove?<br /> - He's forced to repeat himself (cut & paste / DRY violation)

Is it easier or harder (from a time/effort perspective) to provide citations with such a workflow? Carter does indicate that for him:

Having links to original sources in my outline makes the compilation of references for the chapter far easier than it used to be.

Multiple interesting things going on here with the use of "Micros✽ft W✽rd".

He's simultaneously: - Voldemorting the phrase to some extent so that it doesn't show up easily or at all in digital search. - He's visually marring the phrase to show active dislike of the software and its general use - By using the symbols, he's effectively turning the word into a form of profanity the way many have used the top row of symbols on typewriters to indicate swear words in the 20th century. Examples: sh@t, dmn, he!!, or any set of four symbols like &%^ to generally indicate a "four letter word" as many profane words typically have four letters.

To test out some potential ideas and flow of a particular chapter for which he already had a corpus of notes, Richard Carter created a mindmap outline of some of his ideas. This in combination with testing out further ideas in his writing journal "three weeks later" caused him to make some significant changes in the structure of his chapter.

Richard Carter uses his writing journal practice to "think out loud" to himself. Often, laying out extended arguments helps people to refine and reshape their thinking as they're better able to see potential holes or missing pieces of arguments. It's the same sort of mechanism which is at work in rubber duck debugging of computer code: by explaining a process one is more easily able to see the missing pieces, errors, or problems with the process at hand.

Carter's separate note taking and writing journal practice being used as a thought space or writing workshop of sorts is very similar to the process seen in my preliminary studies of Henry David Thoreau's work in which he kept commonplace books and separate (writing) journals which show evidence of his trying ideas on for size and working them before committing them to his published works.

Despite Darwin being thought of as having discredited Lamarckian inheritance, there are Lamarckian passages in portions of his work.

He's got a collection of ideas around the area with some useful history: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

His practical advice is usually to quit reading about the theory and do the thing. Choose the simplest path and stick with it a while. See what happens. What's useful? What's not? Practice, practice, practice.

Sometimes collecting some sorts of data in one's notes (even, and particularly in digital notes) is not a useful practice as one eventually realizes that they remain unsearched and unused.

One thing which may not come under this heading is the difference in what others say versus what you write yourself, especially as it relates to plagiarism.

As humans we're good at separating things based on categories. The Dewey Decimal System systematically separates mathematics and history into disparate locations, but your zettelkasten shouldn't force this by overthinking categories. Perhaps the overlap of math and history is exactly the interdisciplinary topic you're working toward? If this is the case, just put cards into the slip box closest to their nearest related intellectual neighbor—and by this I mean nearest related to you, not to Melvil Dewey or anyone else. Over time, through growth and branching, ideas will fill in the interstitial spaces and neighboring ideas will slowly percolate and intermix. Your interests will slowly emerge into various bunches of cards in your box. Things you may have thought were important can separate away and end up on sparse branches while other areas flourish.

If you make the (false) choice to separate math and history into different "sections" it will be much harder for them to grow and intertwine in an organic and truly disciplinary way. Universities have done this sort of separation for hundreds of years and as a result, their engineering faculty can be buildings or even entire campuses away from their medical faculty who now want to work together in new interdisciplinary ways. This creates a physical barrier to more efficient and productive innovation and creativity. It's your zettelkasten, so put those ideas right next to each other from the start so they can do the work of serendipity and surprise for you. Do not artificially separate your favorite ideas. Let them mix and mingle and see what comes out of them.

If you feel the need to categorize and separate them in such a surgical fashion, then let your index be the place where this happens. This is what indices are for! Put the locations into the index to create the semantic separation. Math related material gets indexed under "M" and history under "H". Now those ideas can be mixed up in your box, but they're still findable. DO NOT USE OR CONSIDER YOUR NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!! Don't make the fatal mistake of thinking this. The numbers are just that, numbers. They are there solely for you to be able to easily find the geographic location of individual cards quickly or perhaps recreate an order if you remove and mix a bunch for fun or (heaven forfend) accidentally tip your box out onto the floor. Each part has of the system has its job: the numbers allow you to find things where you expect them to be and the index does the work of tracking and separating topics if you need that.

The broader zettelkasten, tools for thought, and creativity community does a terrible job of explaining the "why" portion of what is going on here with respect to Luhmann's set up. Your zettelkasten is a crucible of ideas placed in juxtaposition with each other. Traversing through them and allowing them to collide in interesting and random ways is part of what will create a pre-programmed serendipity, surprise, and combinatorial creativity for your ideas. They help you to become more fruitful, inventive, and creative.

Broadly the same thing is happening with respect to the structure of commonplace books. There one needs to do more work of randomly reading through and revisiting portions to cause the work or serendipity and admixture, but the end results are roughly the same. With the zettelkasten, it's a bit easier for your favorite ideas to accumulate into one place (or neighborhood) for easier growth because you can move them around and juxtapose them as you add them rather than traversing from page 57 in one notebook to page 532 in another.

If you use your numbers as topical or category headings you'll artificially create dreadful neighborhoods for your ideas to live in. You want a diversity of ideas mixing together to create new ideas. To get a sense of this visually, play the game Parable of the Polygons in which one categorizes and separates (or doesn't) triangles and squares. The game created by Vi Hart and Nicky Case based on the research of Thomas Schelling provides a solid example of the sort of statistical mechanics going on with ideas in your zettelkasten when they're categorized rigidly. If you rigidly categorize ideas and separate them, you'll drastically minimize the chance of creating the sort of useful serendipity of intermixed and innovative ideas.

It's much harder to know what happens when you mix anthropology with complexity theory if they're in separate parts of your mental library, but if those are the things that get you going, then definitely put them right next to each other in your slip box. See what happens. If they're interesting and useful, they've got explicit numerical locators and are cross referenced in your index, so they're unlikely to get lost. Be experimental occasionally. Don't put that card on Henry David Thoreau in the section on writers, nature, or Concord, Massachusetts if those aren't interesting to you. Besides everyone has already done that. Instead put him next to your work on innovation and pencils because it's much easier to become a writer, philosopher, and intellectual when your family's successful pencil manufacturing business can pay for you to attend Harvard and your house is always full of writing instruments from a young age. Now you've got something interesting and creative. (And if you must, you can always link the card numerically to the other transcendentalists across the way.)

In case they didn't hear it in the back, I'll shout it again: ACTIVELY WORK AGAINST YOUR NATURAL URGE TO USE YOUR ZETTELKASTEN NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!!

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10fn1vb/i_made_a_script_to_turn_obsidian_files_into_tiny/

Reply to Will at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2490/what-ideas-are-you-wrestling-with-this-week-january-19-2023#latest

There's so much great looking material here, it's almost overwhelming on where to start. I almost feel like I should be reading all this in addition to everything else I've got on my list.

Some of the direction with respect to writing, writing practice, and even your woodworking makes me think you'd appreciate the subtle idea hiding in this old blogpost I ran into in April 2021: https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary.

https://www.kestrelcreek.com/rakusu-rings

https://www.amazon.com/Margins-Pleasures-Reading-Writing/dp/1609457374 In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante – 2022-03-15

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Will Simpson </span> in What ideas are you wrestling with this week? January 19, 2023 — Zettelkasten Forum (<time class='dt-published'>01/19/2023 18:31:33</time>)</cite></small>

reply to IvanFerrero at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1740/anybody-using-this-approach-to-manage-contacts-how#latest

Many of the digital note taking tools that run off of text allow you to add metadata to your basic text files (as YAML headers, inline with a key:: value pair, or via #tags). Many of them have search functionality or use other programmatic means like query blocks, DataView, DataViewJS, etc. for doing queries on your files to get back lists, tables, charts, etc. of the data you're looking for.

The DataView repository has some good examples of how this works with something like Obsidian. Fortunately if you're using simple text files you can usually put them into one or more platforms to get the data and affordances you want out of them individually.

As an example, I have a script block in my daily note in Obsidian for birthdays in my notes that fall on today's date:

```dataview LIST birthday FROM "Lists/People" WHERE birthday.day = date(2023-01-18).day ```

If I put the text birthday:: 1927-12-08 into a note about Niklas Luhmann, his name and birthday would appear in my daily note on his birthday. One can use similar functionality to create tables of books they read with titles, authors, ratings, dates read, etc. or a variety of other data input which parses through your plaintext files. Services like Obsidian, Logseq, et al. are getting better about allowing these types of programmatic searches for users without backgrounds in programming and various communities usually provide help for pre-made little snippets like the one above that one can cut and paste into their notes to get the outputs that they need. Another Obsidian based example that uses text files for tracking academic journal articles can be found at https://nataliekraneiss.com/your-academic-reading-list-in-obsidian/; I'm sure there are similar versions for other text-based platforms.

In pre-digital times, for a manual version of a rolodex like this in paper, one could use different color cards as pseudo-tags (doctors are on yellow cards, family members on blue cards, friends on green cards, etc.) or adding edge notches or even tabs to represent different types of metadata. See for example the edge colored cards in Hawkexpress' Pile of Index Cards: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122

https://press.princeton.edu/series/ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers

This appears like Princeton University Press is publishing sections of someone's commonplace books as stand alone issues per heading where each chapter has a one or more selections (in the original language with new translations).

This almost feels like a version of The Great Books of the Western World watered down for a modern audience?

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/18/1139783203/what-makes-songs-swing-physicists-unravel-jazz-mystery

Spaces in both language, text, and music help to create the texture of what is being communicated (and/or not).

Link to Edward Tufte's latest book in section entitled "Spacing enhances complex meaning, encourages slow, thoughtful reading":

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>KevinMarks</span> in #meta 2023-01-19 (<time class='dt-published'>01/19/2023 11:32:19</time>)</cite></small>

Link to Indigenous astronomy example of negative spaces (like the Great Emu)

https://wptavern.com/classicpress-community-votes-to-re-fork-wordpress

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/

—Brian W. Kernighan, 1974 “UNIX for Beginners” [PDF] as Bell Labs Technical Memorandum 74-1273-18 on 29 October 1974.

For easier editing and reuse of sentences, or even portions of lines of text, one can (and should) write sentences or sentence fragments on their own lines in digital contexts.

This way future edits or the ability to more easily cut and paste will far easier in addition to keeping your version control files simpler and easier to read and visually track your changes. (That is in many version control systems, instead of a change appearing to affect an entire paragraph, it will only show on the single line that was changed thereby making the change easier to see.)

This particular affordance may be a particularly useful one for note takers who expect to regularly reuse their notes in other contexts. Many forms of software (including Tex, LaTeX, and even markdown) will autowrap newlines so that a sentence broken up into clauses on multiple lines will properly wrap back into a proper looking single line when printed. Take care that in many Markdown versions adding two spaces at the end of a line will automatically create a newline in your text.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/plan9-bell-labs/7thEdMan/index.html<br /> Unix Seventh Edition Manual

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Brandon Rhodes</span> in Semantic Linefeeds (<time class='dt-published'>12/27/2022 11:35:19</time>)</cite></small>

https://whalebird.social/en/desktop/contents

Whalebird is a Mastodon, Pleroma, and Misskey client for desktop application

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/marjorie-taylor-greene-congress-georgia-election-background/672229/

panpsychism: the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness.

panexperientialism: The doctrine, related to panpsychism, that all matter is capable of experience.

Could refuting the idea of accumulation without limits (and thus capitalism for capitalism's sake) help give humans more focus on what is useful/valuable?

I'm not sure I like that Graeber waves away the question "why play?" here. I don't think there's an equivalency to the "why life?" question.

It will take some additional thinking to build something up to refute this idea however.

Perhaps play helps to provide social lubrication, communication, and bonding between animals which may help in creating cooperation which improves survival or reproduction?

Neo-Darwinism: a modern version of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, incorporating the findings of genetics.

Was this referenced in the Selfish Gene?

Things working at the level of the gene vs. species...

https://www.dalekeiger.net/just-an-image-and-an-explanation/?ref=the-joggled-mind-newsletter

https://ncase.me/polygons/

An interesting interactive model for segregation here. See also https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-10/an-immersive-game-shows-how-easily-segregation-arises-and-how-we-might-fix-it for press coverage.

https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb

We become what we behold, a game by Nicky Case.

A commentary on news cycles and social media.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160325224838/http://www.nic-las.com/

Suter, Beat. “From Theo Lutz to Netzliteratur. The Development of German-Language Electronic Literature.” Cybertext Yearbook, 2012. https://elmcip.net/critical-writing/theo-lutz-netzliteratur-development-german-language-electronic-literature.

Giannakis, Georgios K., Christoforo Charalambakis, Franco Montanari, and Antonios Rengakos, eds. Studies in Greek Lexicography. Studies in Greek Lexicography. Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes 72. De Gruyter, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110622744.

Skimmed for portions relating to the Bauer zettelkasten

repetition of what appears on their primary web page in early 2023. the .pdf document doesn't appear to exist anymore (it redirects to https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/ddglc/index.html

A digitized version of Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten has been available online since 2015.

Better reference for the Bauer collection than the website due to publishing and peer review.

Katsikadeli, Christina. “Language Contact and Contact Induced Change in the Light of the (Digital) Lexicography of Greek Loanwords in the Non-Indo-European Languages of the Greco-Roman Worlds (Coptic, Hebrew/Aramaic, Syriac).” In Studies in Greek Lexicography, 21–40. Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes 72. Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110622744-003.

Maxfield suggest drawing out a timeline as a possible visual cue for helping to remember dates. He seemingly misses any mention of ars memoria techniques here.

Apparently sharing/comparing notes was reasonable advice in 1910 including the idea of in-class signals for splitting up note taking amongst multiple people.

Compare this to shared notes (Google Docs, Etherpad, etc.) in modern context with multiple people doing simultaneous notes.

Here again he comes close to some of the methods and ideas of having flashcards for spaced repetition, but isn't explicitly aware of the words or techniques. Note that he also doesn't use the word flashcard. When was the word first used?

Rewriting things as flashcards also tends to be a part of the spaced repetition itself.

By cutting the notes up he's specifically decontextualizing them so as to make one's memory be better tested in coming up with the solutions/answers as they are more likely to appear on a test, decontextualized from the original lecture.

The suggestion of visual highlighting making ideas stand out, but without the idea of their location within the notes being a helpful part of the mnemonic technique.

Notice the advice for shorthand here in 1910. When was it a dead technology for students? Certainly by the 1980s when it was less frequently taught in schools.

Even with the ability to do shorthand and get things verbatim, he suggests against it for the sheer volume of material to go over.

Link to/compare with: - https://hypothes.is/a/gqSGbpVaEe2pmiuwPwm8Vw from 1892

"insert-eaves" !!

I've heard of interleaved books, but was unaware of the practice of book shops selling "insert-leaves" being specifically sold for the purpose of inserting notes into books.

Rewriting one's notes soon after they are written will be easier because they are fresher in one's mind and any issues with them can be more easily remedied. There's also the space repetition effect to be had.

Note here that Maxfield suggests the sort of value behind the idea of spaced repetition, but writing in 1910 doesn't have the word or the effect related to it yet.

One should strive to become fluent with their note taking materials and tools to the point that both having them at hand and using them them are as second nature as breathing, walking, or speaking.

When it comes to productivity gains, this one thing can be the most helpful. Have a process; know it intimately enough that it is second nature.

Dramatically important in mathematics, but also in every other area.

ha!

I've been heavily focused on note making while reading to the detriment of the different form of note making for lectures.

Maxfield, Ezra Kempton. “Suggestions for Note Taking.” Delaware College Bulletin 6, no. 4 (December 1910).

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Suggestions_for_Note_Taking/pacaAAAAYAAJ?hl=en

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpvEY-2dSdU

In this episode, I explain the memory system I created in order to expand my memory to new heights. I call it the Sirianni Method and with it, you can learn how to create an intentional photographic memory.

Who the hell is the Sirianni this is named for, himself? (In the comments he mentions that "it's my italian grandpa's last name, I always liked it and a while back started naming things after it)

tl;dr: He's reinvented the wheel, but certainly not the best version of it.

What he's describing isn't remotely related to the idea of a photographic memory, so he's over-hyping the results, which is dreadful. If it were a photographic memory, he wouldn't need the spaced-repetition portion of his practice. While he mentions how he's regularly reviewing his cards he doesn't mention any of the last century+ of research and work on spaced repetition. https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm is a good place to start for some of this.

A lot of what he's doing is based on associative memory, particularly by drawing connections/links to other things he already knows. He's also taking advantage of visual memory by associating his knowledge with a specific picture.

He highlights emotion and memory, but isn't drawing clear connections between his knowledge and any specific emotions that he's tying or associating them to.

"Intentional" seems to be one of the few honest portions of the piece.

Overview of his Sirianni method: pseudo-zettelkasten notes with written links to things he already knows (but without any Luhmann-esque numbering system or explicit links between cards, unless they're hiding in his connections section, which isn't well supported by the video) as well as a mnemonic image and lots of ad hoc spaced repetition.

One would be better off mixing their note taking practice with associative mnemonic methods (method of loci, songlines, memory palaces, sketchnotes, major system, orality, etc.) all well described by Lynne Kelly (amongst hundreds before her who got smaller portions of these practices) in combination with state of the art spaced repetition.

The description of Luhmann's note taking system here is barely passable at best. He certainly didn't invent the system which was based on several hundred years of commonplace book methodology before him. Luhmann also didn't popularize it in any sense (he actually lamented how people were unimpressed by it when he showed them). Popularization was done post-2013 generally by internet hype based on his prolific academic output.

There is nothing new here other than that he thinks he's discovered something new and is repackaging it for the masses with a new name in a flashy video package. There's a long history of hucksters doing this sort of fabulist tale including Kevin Trudeau with Mega Memory in the 1990s and going back to at least the late 1800s with "Professor" Alphonse Loisette and the system he sold for inordinate amounts to the masses including Mark Twain.

Most of these methods have been around for millennia and are all generally useful and well documented though the cultural West has just chosen to forget most of them. A week's worth of research and reading on these topics would have resulted in a much stronger "system" more quickly.

Beyond this, providing a fuller range of specific options and sub-options in these areas so that individuals could pick and choose the specifics which work best for them might have been a better way to go.

Content research: D- Production value: A+

{syndication link](https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10ehrbd/comment/j4u495q/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)

he [Luhmann] popularized method of expanding your memory called the zettelkasten method (04:49)

At least he doesn't go with the invention myth, but it's also false that he was the one who popularized it... others online popularized it.

Levine, Emily J. “Aby Warburg and Weimar Jewish Culture: Navigating Normative Narratives, Counternarratives, and Historical Context.” In The German-Jewish Experience Revisited, edited by Steven E. Aschheim and Vivian Liska, 1st ed., 117–34. Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts 3. De Gruyter, 2015. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbkjwr1.10.

Aschheim, Steven E., and Vivian Liska, eds. The German-Jewish Experience Revisited. Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts 3. De Gruyter, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110367195.

Skimmed for references with respect to Aby Warburg and his zettelkasten.

Apparently Aby Warburg "obsessively kept" notes on antisemitic incidents on the Eastern front in his zettelkasten.

This piece looks at Warburg's Jewish identity as supported or not by the contents of his zettelkasten, thus placing it in the use of zettelkasten or card index as autobiography.

Might one's notes reflect who they were as a means of creating both their identity while alive as well as revealing it once they've passed on? Might the use of historical method provide its own historical method to be taken up on a meta basis after one's death?

https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/24570

Some interesting programming and structured data with relationship to the Gertrud Bauer Zettelkasten Online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_R._Gottschalk

Richter, Tonio Sebastian. “Whatever in the Coptic Language Is Not Greek, Can Wholly Be Considered Ancient Egyptian”: Recent Approaches towards an Integrated View of the Egyptian-Coptic Lexicon.” Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies. Journal de La Société Canadienne Pour Les Études Coptes 9 (2017): 9–32. https://doi.org/10.11588/propylaeumdok.00004673.

Skimmed for the specifics I was looking for with respect to Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten.

This repeats chunks of prior notes from https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/ddglc/bauer-db/index.html, but is a better published/referenceable verion of it than just the web page.

Link to : - https://hypothes.is/a/nrqq3JXqEe2i5TOTRdgmQg - https://hypothes.is/a/uCcDTJXnEe2nZFtz8Aa_LQ

As a complete aside I can't help but wonder if Tami Gottschalk is related to Louis R. Gottschalk, the historian who wrote Understanding history; a primer of historical method?

61 Available online at http://research.uni-leipzig.de/ddglc/bauerindex.html. The Work on this parergon to the lexicographical labors of the DDGLC project was funded by the Gertrud-und Alexander Böhlig-Stiftung. The digitization of the original card index was conducted by temporary collaborators and volunteers in the DDGLC project: Jenny Böttinger, Claudia Gamma, Tami Gottschalk, Josephine Hensel, Katrin John, Mariana Jung, Christina Katsikadeli, and Elen Saif. The IT concept and programming were carried out by Katrin John and Maximilian Moller.

Digitization of Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten was underway in 2017 to put the data into a MySQL database with the intention of offering it as an online user interface sometime in 2017.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Peter Smith</span> in Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>01/17/2023 16:52:31</time>)</cite></small>