18,755 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2022
    1. Based on Luhmann's ZKII 9,8.3 (aka The Ghost in the Machine) and various other video and anecdotal sources, his colleagues saw his system and generally didn't care. His influence has primarily only been influential after-the-fact beginning online with mentions by Manfred Kuehn after 2007 with more interest following the Marbach zettelkasten exhibition in 2013 and the launch of zettelkasten.de. You're living amidst his greatest influence on the space, particularly asking this question just two days before Scott Scheper's book Antinet Zettelkasten, focusing on the specifics of Luhmann's method, is set to be released.

      With respect to zettelkasten, I would posit that it was Luhmann himself who was actually standing on the shoulders of other giants which preceded him in these broader traditions including Desiderius Erasmus, Rudolph Agricola, Phillip Melanchthon, Konrad Gessner, John Locke, Ernst Bernheim, Charles Langlois, Charles Seignobos, Antoine Sertillanges, Beatrice Webb, Johannes Heyde, and C. Wright Mills, etc. See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/ for more on the history here.

      While I'm thinking about influence, has anyone named their children after the method yet? Is there a baby named Slip, Zeke, or Luhmann in honor yet? Perhaps this is the week that may have happened? 😉

    1. Duolingo or whatever French and I had this idea well basically what it reminds me of is Stefan's Vig the Austrian

      https://youtu.be/r9idbh-U2kM?t=3544

      Stefan Zweig (reference? his memoir?) apparently suggested that students translate authors as a means of becoming more intimately acquainted with their work. This is similar to restating an author in one's own words as a means of improving one's understanding. It's a lower level of processing that osculates on the idea of having a conversation with a text.

      tk: track this reference down. appropriate context?

    1. For those of you wondering if hcommons on mastodon has taken measures to ward against the sort of meltdown the server had a few weeks ago, there's a update from one of the admins: https://hcommons.social/@kfitz/1094609

      https://hcommons.social/@amisamileanded/109466986626984098

      Apparently sometime within it's first month of existence hcommons.social had a server meltdown of some sort. The admins addressed and hardened their set up.

    1. I couldn’t help noticing that RSS kept turning out to be a great way to move data between cooperating systems. That’s always been true, and I love how this example reminds us that it’s still true.
    2. certain classes of Mastodon page have corresponding RSS feeds, and wondered if the tag pages are members of one such class. Sure enough they are, and https://mastodon.social/tags/introduction.rss is a thing.

      Mastodon has RSS feeds available for tags!

    1. “Goblin mode” has been chosen by the public as the 2022 Oxford word of the year. The term, which refers to “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations”, has become the first word of the year to have been decided by public vote.
    1. This document is a companion to the IIIF Content Search API Specification, Version 2.0. It describes the changes to the API specification made in this major release, including ones that are backwards incompatible with version 1.0, the previous version.
    1. The History of Zettelkasten The Zettelkasten method is a note-taking system developed by German sociologist and philosopher Niklas Luhmann. It involves creating a network of interconnected notes on index cards or in a digital database, allowing for flexible organization and easy access to information. The method has been widely used in academia and can help individuals better organize their thoughts and ideas.

      https://meso.tzyl.nl/2022/12/05/the-history-of-zettelkasten/

      If generated, it almost perfect reflects the public consensus, but does a miserable job of reflecting deeper realities.

    1. [https://a.gup.pe/ Guppe Groups] a group of bot accounts that can be used to aggregate social groups within the [[fediverse]] around a variety of topics like [[crafts]], books, history, philosophy, etc.

    1. https://schopie1.commons.msu.edu/2022/12/05/microblogging_with_mastodon/

      OMG! There is so much to love here about these processes and to see people in the wild experimenting with them and figuring them out.

      Scott, you are not alone! There are lots of us out here doing these things, not only with WordPress but a huge variety of other platforms. There are many ways to syndicate your content depending on where it starts its life.

      In addition to Jim Groom and a huge group of others' work on A Domain of One's Own, there's also a broader coalition of designers, developers, professionals, hobbyists, and people of all strips working on these problems under the name of IndieWeb.

      For some of their specific work you might appreciate the following:<br /> - https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education - https://indieweb.org/A_Domain_of_One%27s_Own - https://indieweb.org/academic_samizdat - https://indieweb.org/WordPress - https://indieweb.org/Category:syndication

      Incidentally, I wrote this for our friend Kathleen Fitzpatrick last week and I can't wait to see what she's come up with over the weekend and the coming weeks. Within the IndieWeb community you'll find people like Ben Werdmuller who created large portions of both WithKnown and Elgg and Aram Zucker-Scharff who helped to create PressForward.

      I'm thrilled to see the work and huge strides that Humanities Commons is making some of these practices come to fruition.

      If you're game, perhaps we ought to plan an upcoming education-related popup event as an IndieWebCamp event to invite more people into this broader conversation?

      If you have questions or need any help in these areas, I'm around, but so are hundreds of friends in the IndieWeb chat: https://chat.indieweb.org.

      I hope we can bring more of these technologies to the masses in better and easier-to-use manners to lower the technical hurdles.

    1. transitions are hard and require a well-thought through strategy to prevent failure, especially if the goal is to be whole ethically.
    2. The myth that this was caused by Craigslist or Google drives me bonkers. Throughout the 80s and 90s, private equity firms and hedge funds gobbled up local news enterprises to extract their real estate. They didn’t give a shit about journalism; they just wanted prime real estate that they could develop. And news organizations had it in the form of buildings in the middle of town. So financiers squeezed the news orgs until there was no money to be squeezed and then they hung them out to dry. There was no configuration in which local news was going to survive, no magical upwards trajectory of revenue based on advertising alone. If it weren’t for Craigslist and Google, the financiers would’ve squeezed these enterprises for a few more years, but the end state was always failure.

      danah boyd posits that journalism in the United States didn't fail as the result of Craigslist or Google, but because of hedge funds and investors acquiring them to strip out their valuable real estate.

    3. Perception of failure can bring about failure, but it doesn’t always.
    4. Musk appears to be betting that the spectacle is worth it. He’s probably correct in thinking that large swaths of the world will not deem his leadership a failure either because they are ideologically aligned with him or they simply don’t care and aren’t seeing any changes to their corner of the Twitterverse.

      How is this sort of bloodsport similar/different to the news media coverage of Donald J. Trump in 2015/2016?

      The similarities over creating engagement within a capitalistic framing along with the need to only garner at least a minimum amount of audience to support the enterprise seem to be at play.

      Compare/contrast this with the NBAs conundrum with the politics of entering the market in China.

    5. Perceptions of failure don’t always lead to shared ideas of how to learn from these lessons.
    6. A lot has changed about our news media ecosystem since 2007. In the United States, it’s hard to overstate how the media is entangled with contemporary partisan politics and ideology. This means that information tends not to flow across partisan divides in coherent ways that enable debate.

      Our media and social media systems have been structured along with the people who use them such that debate is stifled because information doesn't flow coherently across the political partisan divide.

    7. I often think back to MySpace’s downfall. In 2007, I penned a controversial blog post noting a division that was forming as teenagers self-segregated based on race and class in the US, splitting themselves between Facebook and MySpace. A few years later, I noted the role of the news media in this division, highlighting how media coverage about MySpace as scary, dangerous, and full of pedophiles (regardless of empirical evidence) helped make this division possible. The news media played a role in delegitimizing MySpace (aided and abetted by a team at Facebook, which was directly benefiting from this delegitimization work).

      danah boyd argued in two separate pieces that teenagers self-segregated between MySpace and Facebook based on race and class and that the news media coverage of social media created fear, uncertainty, and doubt which fueled the split.

      http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

    8. There are failures that everyone can agree are failures (e.g. the explosion of the Challenger), but most failures are a matter of perception.
    9. engineers will get tired, mistakes will happen, and maintenance will get kicked down the road. Teams need buffer as much as systems do.
    10. Perrow argued that “normal accidents” were nearly inevitable in a complex, tightly coupled system. To resist such an outcome, systems designers needed to have backups and redundancy, safety checks and maintenance.
    11. One interesting concept in organizational sociology is “normal accidents theory.” Studying Three Mile Island, Charles Perrow created a 2x2 grid
    1. Aby Warburg and his son Max Adolph in Warburg's study in Hamburg, 1917. © Warburg Institute, London.

      http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=3986

      Appears to be a row of slip boxes behind Aby Warburg in this photo of his study in Hamburg from 1917.

    1. Dr James Ravenscroft @jamesravey@fosstodon.orgFollowing on from my first week with hypothes.is I decided to integrate my annotations into #Joplin so that I have tighter integration of my literature + permanent notes. I've built a VERY alpha Joplin plugin that auto-imports hypothes.is annotations + tags to joplin by following your user atom feed https://brainsteam.co.uk/2022/12/04/joplin-hypothesis/ #PKM #ToolsForThought #hypothesis
    1. Today my Zettelkasten is 8 month old. When I started note-taking in March 2022, I didn‘t expect a number of nearly 1000 notes in such a short time.

      https://hessen.social/@groepl/109456367157130265

    1. I have 17K followers

      People talk about their huge follower counts on Twitter, but seem to discount the number of bots, inactive accounts, and other cruft that make up that number.

      Most people moving to Mastodon are reporting much more honest, human, and warm engagement on the platform over their experiences on Twitter.

    1. https://micro.blog/posts/search?q=indieweb

      an alternate form for micro.blog search functionality

    1. https://micro.blog/discover/search?q=indieweb

      Micro.blog search functionality uses a url query (example https://micro.blog/discover/search?q=indieweb), but it only includes posts which have been added to the "discovery" section and isn't a site wide search

    1. https://dolphin.town/about/more

      A social media service for dolphins where you can only send messages with the letter "e".

      compare with https://oulipo.social/about which elides the letter e

    1. This generally fits my criteria for submission as an example to https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/12/call-for-model-examples-of-zettelkasten-output-processes/

    2. I no longer remember the name of the 7th grade English teacher (Toms River Intermediate School West, c. 1980–1981) who taught me this method, but if she is out there: thanks!
    3. https://edward-slingerland.medium.com/there-is-only-one-way-to-write-a-book-637535ef5bde

      Example of someone's research, note taking, and writing process using index cards.

      Broadly, this is very similar to the process used by Ryan Holiday, Robert Green, and Victor Margolin.

      While he can't recall the name of the teacher, he credits his 7th grade English teacher (1980-1981) for teaching him the method.


      Edward Slingerland is represented by Brockman Inc.

    4. That sounds challenging, of course, but I find that the writing, at this stage, is actually relatively easy: the card organization has already done most of the work. The cards tell the story, you now just need to (skillfully!) weave them together.

      Anecdotal evidence that the final "writing" portion of a card index process is "relatively easy" as the majority of the work has already been done.

    5. This is the absolute hardest part of the writing process, in my mind. The most exciting, too, because you’re never quite sure where it’s going to end up.

      Anecdotal evidence that categorizing and arranging index cards/ideas for a writing project for subsequent writing is one of the most difficult portions of the process.

      Niklas Luhmann subverted portions of this by pre-linking his ideas together either in threads or an outline form as he went.

    6. Children, who in our post-agricultural age are otherwise pretty useless economically, can actually be usefully employed at this stage. They love cutting things with scissors, and precision is not crucial.

      a nod to having "cards of equal size", but that precision isn't necessarily as crucial as we might suppose.

    7. I’ve also got a vague sense in my head of how they should be organized — that is, what the structure of the book is going to be. This is generally when I write the formal book proposal. I know enough about the topic, now, that I have a good idea of what my central arguments are going to be and how I am going to organize the chapters.

      At what point in the process does one have a conceptualization for the overall outline of what they're writing?

      In cases where it's earlier than others, then heavy linking and organization may not be as necessary.

    8. As my research methods became more and more digital, the ease of pasting quotations and references in this way (instead of copying them by hand) has really speeded things up.

      Example of someone who felt that speeding up their note taking by using digital tools rather than analog ones.

    9. I continued to use this analog method right up through my Ph.D. dissertation and first monograph. After a scare in the early stages of researching my second monograph, when I thought all of my index cards had been lost in a flood, I switched to an electronic version: a Word doc containing a table with four cells that I can type or paste information into (and easily back up).
    10. I have a very specific method for organizing my research and thoughts whenever I’m writing anything longer than a short article. I learned this method from a teacher in middle school, and I cannot imagine how a human being could write a book any other way.

      Example of someone who learned an index card based commonplace book method for note taking and writing.

    1. Edward Slingerland (born May 25, 1968) is a Canadian-American sinologist and philosopher. He is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he also holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Asian Studies. His research interests include early Chinese thought, comparative religion and cognitive science of religion, big data approaches to cultural analysis, cognitive linguistics, digital humanities, and humanities-science integration.
    1. Last night I posted a message to both Mastodon and Twitter saying how great M's support for RSS is. Apparently a lot of people on Masto didn't know about it and the response has been resounding. And the numbers are very lopsided. The piece has been "boosted" (the Masto equiv of RT) 1.1K times, yet I only have 3.7K followers there. Meanwhile on Twitter, where I have 69K followers, it has been RTd just 17 times. My feeling was previously that Mastodon was more alive, it's good to have a number to put behind that.

      http://scripting.com/2022/12/03.html#a152558

      Anecdotal evidence for the slow death of Twitter and higher engagement on Mastodon.

    1. I'm enamored of this idea as well and this is a fascinating example.

      It seems similar to the related (and also difficult-to-name) concept which I've called combinatorial creativity. One of the earliest versions I've seen is that of Raymond Llullus' work with respect to combinatorial mnemonics described in Frances Yates' The Art of Memory (1966). Farnam Street's post is a good start https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/, but I've been collecting other examples: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22combinatorial+creativity%22 and other names for it over time.

      I can't help but wonder what Ericsson's role of deliberate practice would look like with arts as the subject? What motivates long term deliberate practice?

      Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. 1966. Reprint, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Memory-Frances-Yates/dp/0226950018.

      Ericsson, K. Anders, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer. The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review, 1993.

    2. https://www.dalekeiger.net/untitled/

      Dale Keiger is tap dancing his way into a definition for the underlying traits for encouraging and expanding on creativity. There's definitely something here worth pursuing further and giving a specific name to.

      Some it is very akin to the ideas behind combinatorial creativity of working (dancing in Kelly's case) on the mundane with precision and drive and perhaps at least a soupçon of obsessiveness, but openness to the new.

      How can we sharpen this set of ideas to settle on the right list of "ingredients"? Is there a way to hone in on this sort of creation of flow within a certain creative area while simultaneously not getting bored? Is it the small string of creative breakthroughs in the process of practice which open up new avenues and help create the flow to prevent boredom?

      How might relate to Anders Ericsson's work on on deliberate practice or plateau principle coming into play, particularly to prevent boredom to encourage one to continue on with their practice?

      I haven't put my finger on it but there were hints in it from a Yo-Yo Ma ad for Masterclass I saw the other day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbjgHkj-syM)..

    3. “Dr Essai has observed time and again how the finest artists are the ones whose idea of fun is spending hour after hour, day after day doing the same thing over and over and over and over. And then some more. … The essential personality quirk could be described as nothing more than being endlessly fascinated and pleased by the repetitive tasks that make art.”

      This same sort of repetition is seen in the success of salespeople. Can they repetitively make the same (or slowly improving) pitches day after day without getting tired of hearing "no" to eventually the appropriate number of yeses they need to make a living.

    1. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/12/the-ethics-of-syndicating-comments-using-webmentions/

      Not an answer to the dilemma, though I generally take the position of keeping everything unless someone asks me to take it down or that I might know that it's been otherwise deleted. Often I choose not to delete my copy, but simply make it private and only viewable to me.

      On the deadnaming and related issues, it would be interesting to create a webmention mechanism for the h-card portions so that users might update these across networks. To some extent Automattic's Gravatar system does this in a centralized manner, but it would be interesting to see it separately. Certainly not as big an issue as deadnaming, but there's a similar problem on some platforms like Twitter where people will change their display name regularly for either holidays, or lately because they're indicating they'd rather be found on Mastodon or other websites.

      The webmention spec does contain details for both editing/deleting content and resending webmentions to edit and/or remove the original. Ideally this would be more broadly adopted and used in the future to eliminate the need for making these choices by leaving the choice up to the original publisher.

      Beyond this, often on platforms that don't have character limits (Reddit for example), I'll post at the bottom of my syndicated copy of content that it was originally published on my site (along with the permalink) and explicitly state that I aggregate the replies from various locations which also helps to let people know that they might find addition context or conversation at the original post should they be interested. Doing this on Twitter, Mastodon, et al is much harder due to space requirements obviously.

      While most responses I send would fall under fair use for copying, I also have a Creative Commons license on my text in an effort to help others feel more comfortable with having copies of my content on their sites.

      Another ethical layer to this is interactions between sites which both have webmentions enabled. To some extent this creates an implicit bi-directional relationship which says, I'm aware that this sort of communication exists and approve of your parsing and displaying my responses.

      The public norms and ethics in this area will undoubtedly evolve over time, so it's also worth revisiting and re-evaluating the issue over time.

    1. https://werd.io/2022/the-fediverse-and-the-indieweb

      The idea behind this is great, but the hurdles for supporting dozens of publishing specifications can be awfully daunting. Where do we draw the line?

    2. So instead of Publishing on my Own Site and Syndicating Elsewhere, I plan to just Publish and Participate.

      The easiest publishing (syndication) workflow of all.

    1. The trust one must place in the creator of a blocklist is enormous, because the most dangerous failure mode isn’t that it doesn’t block who it says it does, but that it blocks who it says it doesn’t and they just disappear.
    2. Why on earth don’t we have an enormous spam problem?” and my answer to that is: you know, I just don’t know. I guess implementing AP has been too much effort for spammers up until now?

      This lack of spam is very likely indicative of the difficulty of implementing an AP-based platform.

    1. tldr.nettime is an instance for artists, researchers, and activists interested in exploring the intersections of technology, culture, and politics. It has grown out of nettime-l, one of the longest-running mailing lists on the net — in particular, on the 'cultural politics of the internet'.
    1. https://www.downes.ca/post/74564

      Stephen Downes is doing a great job of regular recaps on the shifts in Twitter/Mastodon/Fediverse lately. I either read or saw all these in the last couple of days myself.

    1. I have about fourteen or sixteen weeks to do this, so I'm breaking the course into an "intro" section that covers some basic stuff like affordances, and other insights into how tech functions. There's a section on AI which is nothing but critical appraisals on AI from a variety of areas. And there's a section on Social Media, which is the most well formed section in terms of readings.

      https://zirk.us/@shengokai/109440759945863989

      If the individuals in an environment don't understand or perceive the affordances available to them, can the interactions between them and the environment make it seem as if the environment possesses agency?

      cross reference: James J. Gibson book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966)


      People often indicate that social media "causes" outcomes among groups of people who use it. Eg: Social media (via algorithmic suggestions of fringe content) causes people to become radicalized.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Wp0sLpnMY

      PVA Glue used in bookbinding, but isn't inexpensive.

      • Tacky glue - okay
      • rubber cement - not great
      • elmer's glue - not great, tears esp. for 2 layers
      • Mod podge - pulls nicely and strong
      • mod podge hard shell - cracks, not great
      • PVA Glue - the best of the group

      Recommendations in order: PVA, Tacky Glue, Mod Podge (regular)

      Brush on top edge and do two coats. Don't get it down between sheets.

    1. Even when reading a book,the goal-oriented nature and intention of reading is paramount.6

      61 Mortimer Jerome Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, Rev. and updated ed (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 45.

      I see some of the sense of this footnote, which helps to establish some ethos by calling to mind Adler/Van Doren's classic, but this particular page in their text is really about paying enough attention not to fall asleep and thus doesn't underline Scheper's point as well as references to other portions of their book about goals and active reading.

    2. “I first make a plan of what I am going to write,and then take from the note cabinet what I can use.”60

      source:

      60 Hans-Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 11.

      I rather like the phrase "note cabinet" which isn't used often enough in the zettelkasten space. Something more interesting than filing cabinet which feels like where things are stored to never be seen again versus a note cabinet which is temporary and directed location storage specifically meant for things to actively be reused.

    3. you’ll spend the beginning phases learning by readingbooks in brand new fields and noting down brand new ideas. You’ll mostlybe writing reformulation notes in this phase.

      Yet another new name for a sub-type of notes, here he uses reformulation notes as a shorthand for the old advice to rewrite ideas you find in your own words. This advice is often suggested to accomplish two things: - avoid plagiarism - restatement of ideas in your own words is related to the Feynman Technique and assists one in learning and ensuring they understand the concepts

    4. the Antinet can serve both states. It can assist someone who’s in thegrowth state (without a clear end goal), and it can also assist someone who’sin the contribution state (with a clearly defined book or project).

      This could be clearer and "growth state" and "contribution state" feel like jargon which muddles:

      two of the broad benefits/affordances of having a zettelkasten: - learning and scaffolding knowledge (writing for understanding) - collecting and arranging material for general output

      see also: https://boffosocko.com/2022/04/01/the-zettelkasten-method-of-note-taking-mirrors-most-of-the-levels-of-blooms-taxonomy/

    5. bib notes
    6. you’re doing things the old way,the hard way, the true way.

      note the pathos along with a bit of religious zeal here about the "true way".

    7. “I started my Zettelkasten,because I realized that I had to plan for a life and not for a book.”5

      from Niklas Luhmann, Niklas Luhmann Short Cuts (English Translation), 2002, 22.

    8. People are fascinated with how Luhmann became a book-writing academicresearch machine. The answer? The Antinet.

      He highlights this here because it seems convenient to his thesis about a "true way", but Scheper has also mentioned in other venues that it was Luhmann's tenacity of working at his project that was largely responsible for his output.

      I believe he made that statement in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgMh6iuFbT4

    9. 351

      temporary bookmark,

    10. Jesus Christ, Scott, it’s about time!

      He'd warned about it in the introduction, but here it is, finally on page 341, how to build the thing we've come for. That was apparently a lot of motivation.

    1. https://www.dalekeiger.net/tironean-shorthand/

      Potential links between Tironian shorthand and mnemonics of the 1800s?

    2. It’s juvenile, but the doctor loves the idea that tucked into a corner of a psalter might have been some shorthand for Brother Cadfael — what a dick.

      😇

    3. Thomas Becket brought it back

      Thomas Becket brought back Tironian shorthand after monasteries had stopped using it.

    4. In the Admonitio generalis (General admonition), an important collection of legislation issued in 789, the most famous Carolingian ruler, Charlemagne, implored that schools be established for the learning of not only the Psalms, chant, and grammar, but also notae, or ‘written signs.’
    5. monastic scribes in the Middle Ages who not only employed it, but expanded it to around 14,000 symbols. (!) Most of the documentation dates from the Carolingian dynasty in the 8th and 9th centuries.
    6. No one can say how many symbols Tiro came up with — presumably he wrote it down, but no such key is known to have survived — but successors began adding to it until, according to Isidore of Seville writing around 630 CE, no less than Seneca himself had topped it up to 5,000 symbols.
  2. Nov 2022
    1. https://mxb.dev/blog/the-indieweb-for-everyone/

    2. Generally speaking: The more independence a technology gives you, the higher its barrier for adoption.

      I've previously framed this as a greater range of choices (towards independence) requires more work--both work to narrow down one's choices as well as potentially work to build and maintain..

    1. Likewise, Luhmann probably learned some of his system from someone else. Most of us don't learn the things we do in complete and total isolation. That said, at the end of the day - our writing process is extremely personal.

      reply to u/deafpolygon at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/z5haa9/comment/iy6yowi/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      It's been reported by his son that Luhmann did learn about a method (which either he heavily modified or someone else showed him their modification thereof) from Johannes Erich Heyde. There's sure to be more details on this in Scott Scheper's upcoming book Antinet Zettelkasten.

      see: Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens: zeitgemässe Mittel und Verfahrungsweisen. Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931.

      See: https://hyp.is/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA/www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wryt4t/the_secret_book_luhmann_read_that_taught_him/

    2. Post at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/z5haa9/victor_margolins_zettelkasten_process_for_writing/

      It's not as refined or as compartmentalized as Luhmann's process, but art Historian Victor Margolin broadly outlines his note taking and writing process in reasonable detail in this excellent three minute video. (This may be one of the shortest and best produced encapsulations of these reading/note taking/writing methods I've ever seen.)

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI

      Though he indicates it was a "process [he] developed", it is broadly similar to that of the influential "historical method" laid out by Ernst Bernheim and later Seignobos/Langlois in the late 1800s.

    1. The TTRG (time to reply guy) was getting so fast, that I can’t actually remember the last time I tweeted something helpful like a design or development tip. I just couldn’t be arsed, knowing some dickhead would be around to waste my time with whataboutisms and “will it scale”?
    1. Wayne Gretzky could skate to where he knew the puck would go because not only did he know what the other players were going to do, he knew how the puck played off the boards differently in every NHL arena.
    2. sportswriters used to talk about how Larry Bird could look at a newspaper photograph from any game he’d played as a Boston Celtic and recall where everyone else had been on the court at that moment, knowledge that informed his play every time he brought the ball forward.
    3. Those inherent physical attributes were not what defines star athletes. The great ones, be it Jordan or Ohtani or Messi or Williams, possess superior knowledge, said the neuro. Tom Brady isn’t a great quarterback because he’s big or has a strong arm. Thousands of men are big with strong arms. Brady is great because he knows more about football, and what he has to do to play it better, than anyone else. His brain has an extraordinary store of football knowledge and the ability to process it at lightning speed.
    4. Your observations here ring true to me. They're also supported by similar observations by Malcolm Gladwell in chapters 8 and 9 (I believe) of Miracle and Wonder. There he's got stories of Wilt Chamberlain and Paul Simon which provide additional examples though he's also attributing some of the success to memory and the idea of situational awareness. He quotes his own researcher there who makes some comments on short versus long artistic careers and how they relate to creativity and longevity. See also this "zettel": https://hypothes.is/a/Kd7X4lvPEe250Gvn57Pbdg

      Gladwell, Malcolm, Bruce Hedlam, and Paul Simon. Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon. Audiobook. Pushkin Industries, 2021. https://amzn.to/3ENU32D

    5. James Clear:The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over.
    6. But Dr Essai has observed time and again how the finest artists are the ones whose idea of fun is spending hour after hour, day after day doing the same thing over and over and over and over. And then some more.

      This seems to fit in with Malcolm Gladwell's observation about Paul Simon see: https://hypothes.is/a/Kd7X4lvPEe250Gvn57Pbdg

    1. https://odd.blog/2022/11/06/how-to-add-your-blog-to-mastodon/

    2. Matthew Thomas has created a remote follow tool called apfollow, with source available. This creates a page where you can follow a Mastodon account by entering your own details in a box and it redirects you to your home server to do the follow. Here’s a link to follow my Mastodon.ie account.

      This looks cool.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEXF3JgdHVY

      Fountain pen network

      ink journals for keeping track of pens, ink, and samples

      ink review formats

      swab books

      q-tip swabs

      ink sample vials and tray holders

      a bulb syringe for flushing water through to clean pens is a good idea when doing many at a time

    1. Literature, philosophy, film, music, culture, politics, history, architecture: join the circus of the arts and humanities! For readers, writers, academics or anyone wanting to follow the conversation.
    1. level 2SupremoZanneOp · 3 yr. agowell, there's always an opportunity to make new 88x31 buttons. Now since modern systems are approaching the 8K resolution, we should start making 264x93 buttons, so it's time to scale up the dimensions for modern resolutions.

      HA!

    1. Natalie @natalie@hcommons.social Follow @chrisaldrichoh wow, your website is mind-blowing! i have to check this out in detail. This is what I hope my future (social) media presence is going to look like one day.A question about syndicating your posts: What happens to the syndicated copies of a post after deleting it?.. my ideal would be: I have full control over my contributions. Probably an illusion? November 27, 2022 at 1:59 AM

      https://hcommons.social/@natalie/109415180134582494

    1. I believe Victor Margolin when he says that he developed his own system. That's what I did in the years before people started widely discussing personal knowledge systems online. Nobody taught me how to do it when I was in college. @chrisaldrich repeatedly tries to connect everyone's knowledge practices to an ongoing tradition that stretches back to commonplace books, but he overstates it. There is such a thing as independent development of a personal knowledge system. I know it because I've lived it. It's not so difficult that it requires extraordinary genius.

      Reply to Andy https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/16865#Comment_16865

      Andy, I'll take you at your word. You're right that none of it requires extraordinary genius--though many who seem to exhibit extraordinary genius do have variations of these practices in their lives, and the largest proportion of them either read about them or were explicitly taught them.

      With these patterns and practices being so deeply rooted in our educational systems for so long (not to mention the heavy influences of our orality and evolved thinking apparatus even prior to literacy), it's a bit difficult for many to truly guarantee that they've done these things independently without heavy cultural and societal influence. As a result, it's not a far stretch for people to evolve their own practices to what works for them and then think that they've invented something new. The common person may not be aware of the old ideas of scala naturae or scholasticism, but they certainly feel them in their daily lives. Commonplacing is not much different.

      By analogy, Elon Musk might say he created the Tesla, but it's a far bigger stretch for him to say that he invented a new means of transportation, or a car, or the wheel when we know he's swimming in a culture rife with these items. Humans are historically far better at imitation than innovation. If people truly independently developed systems like these so many times, then in the evolutionary record of these practices we should expect to see more diversity than we do in practice. We might expect to see more innovation than just the plain vanilla adjacent possible. Given Margolin's age, time period, educational background, and areas of expertise, there is statistically very little chance that he hadn't seen or talked about versions of this practice with several dozens of his peers through his lifetime after which he took that tacit knowledge and created his own explicit version which worked for him.

      Historian Keith Thomas talks about some of these traditions which he absorbed himself without having read some of the common advice (see London Review of Books https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary). He also indicates that he slowly evolved to some of the often advised practices like writing only on one side of a slip, though, like many, he completely omits to state the reason why this is good advice. We can all ignore these rich histories, but we'll probably do so at our own peril and at the expense of wasting some of our time to re-evolve the benefits.

      Why are so many here (and in other fora on these topics) showing up regularly to read and talk about their experiences? They're trying to glean some wisdom from the crowds of experimenters to make improvements. In addition to the slow wait for realtime results, I've "cheated" a lot and looked at a much richer historical record of wins and losses to gain more context of our shared intellectual history. I'm reminded of one of Goethe's aphorisms from Maxims and Reflections "Inexperienced people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago."

    1. hcommons.social is a microblogging network supporting scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world.

      https://hcommons.social/about

      The humanities commons has their own mastodon instance now!

    1. If more Americans were like TV Tropes’ users—that is, if they could spot the recurring motifs in purported political plots—might they also be better at separating fact from fiction?

      Perhaps EIP could partner with On the Media to produce a trope consumer handbook for elections, vaccines, and various conspiracy theory areas?

      Cross reference: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/breaking-news-consumers-handbook

    2. Our familiarity with these elements makes the overall story seem plausible, even—or perhaps especially—when facts and evidence are in short supply.

      Storytelling tropes play into our system one heuristics and cognitive biases by riding on the tailcoats of familiar story plotlines we've come to know and trust.

      What are the ways out of this trap? Creating lists of tropes which should trigger our system one reactions to switch into system two thinking patterns? Can we train ourselves away from these types of misinformation?

    3. “pattern language” to describe the show’s plot formulas, which they and ultimately other users would then apply to a variety of programs.

      Tropes are shorthand storytelling methods that rely on a common storytelling grammar or pattern language to quickly relay information to the viewer or listener.

    4. As part of the Election Integrity Partnership, my team at the Stanford Internet Observatory studies online rumors, and how they spread across the internet in real time.
    5. Something similar! Here it is: https://t.co/x1DPx9dm0P

      — Renee DiResta (@noUpside) November 26, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. https://brainsteam.co.uk/2022/11/26/one-week-with-hypothesis/

      I too read a lot of niche papers and feel the emptiness, but because I'm most often writing for myself anyway, its alright. There are times, however, when I see a growing community of people who've left their associative trails behind before I've found a particular page.

      I've used the phrase "digital exhaust" before, but I like the more positive framing of "learning exhaust".

      If you've not found it yet, my own experimentations with the platform can largely be found here: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/

    1. The Storyspace map view has proven to be enormously useful and durable, letting writers express relationships by clustering as well as by linking. Other spatial hypertext systems -- especially VIKI and VKB (Cathy Marshall, then at Xerox PARC and Frank Shipman, Texas A&M) and ART (Kumiyo Nakakoji, NIST) provided inspiration and encouragement as well. The export template mechanism was sketched in a long discussion at Hypertext '98 with Marc and Jocelyn Nanard (Montpellier) and Daniel Schwabe (PUC, Brazil), and the Nanard's brilliant work on MacWeb demonstrated that Tinderbox agents were in fact viable. Elli Mylonas, David Durand, and Steve DeRose motivated the central role of XML. Mitch Kapor's Agenda was an early inspiration, and James Fallows demonstrated, in essays on Agenda and Zoot, that writers could and would use sophisticated agents.

      Inspiration for Tinderbox

    1. Mark: Cathy Marshall at Xerox PARC originally started speaking about information gardening. She developed an early tool that’s the inspiration for the Tinderbox map view, in which you would have boxes but no lines. It was a spatial hypertext system, a system for connecting things by placing them near each other rather than drawing a line between them. Very interesting abstract representational problem, but also it turned out to be tremendously useful.

      Cathy Marshall was an early digital gardener!

    2. Mark: Yeah. And I actually think the Agile revolution in software development is software development catching up to the fact that it’s a writer-ly art. Writers don’t know where they’re going or how they’re going to express it when they start out. Neither, it turns out, does software developers. They can pretend by writing it the first time in a spec language and then coding it and then, checking the specification, then finding out that they’ve written the wrong thing and writing a new specification. That was when I was getting started, the right way to write software.

      Agile software development is akin to the design of the writing process.

    3. All research… All significant research is, in some respects, bottom-up. There is no alternative. And so, the only research that you can do top-down entirely is research for which you already have the solution.

      Research, by design, is a bottom-up process.

    4. One of the first things that was discovered about building complicated technical hypertext is that you don’t know what the structure will be in advance. And as you’re adding information, you know you want to keep the information, but you frequently don’t know what the information you’re adding is. You can’t describe its type or its nature or its importance in advance. You just suspect that it’s going to be pertinent somehow. Or you see a terrific quotation that you know will be great to use, but you don’t know when that quotation will fit or even if it’ll fit in this book, or if you’ll have to save it for something else. Finding ways to say, “I think these two things are related somehow, but I don’t want to commit myself yet as to exactly how,” turns out to be quite an interesting design problem. Hypertext people started out, in fact, by inventing the outliner very early — 1968. And outliners are terrific if you already know the structure of your information space. But hierarchies are not good if you’re just guessing about how things fit together because you tend to build great elaborate structures that turn out to be wrong, and you have to unbuild them, and then you’ve got a terrible pile on your desk.

      Connecting ideas across space and time when you don't know how they'll fully relate in advance is a tough design problem.

      Outliner programs, first developed for computers in 1968, are great if you know the structure of a space in advance, but creating hierarchies by guessing about relationships in advance often turn out wrong or create other problems as one progresses.

    5. Mark: The Japanese hypertext scholar Kumiyo Nakakoji talks about amplified representational talkback, which is a general design phenomenon. An architect, an artist, or a writer puts something on paper and then looks at it. You look at it, and then it seems different from what you had in mind, and you either correct what you’ve written, or you see that what you’ve written is right and correct your bad idea. That kind of representational talkback is fundamental to all sorts of all creative processes, from the sciences to the arts.
    1. Whenever I read about the various ideas, I feel like I do not necessarily belong. Thinking about my practice, I never quite feel that it is deliberate enough.

      https://readwriterespond.com/2022/11/commonplace-book-a-verb-or-a-noun/

      Sometimes the root question is "what to I want to do this for?" Having an underlying reason can be hugely motivating.

      Are you collecting examples of things for students? (seeing examples can be incredibly powerful, especially for defining spaces) for yourself? Are you using them for exploring a particular space? To clarify your thinking/thought process? To think more critically? To write an article, blog, or book? To make videos or other content?

      Your own website is a version of many of these things in itself. You read, you collect, you write, you interlink ideas and expand on them. You're doing it much more naturally than you think.


      I find that having an idea of the broader space, what various practices look like, and use cases for them provides me a lot more flexibility for what may work or not work for my particular use case. I can then pick and choose for what suits me best, knowing that I don't have to spend as much time and effort experimenting to invent a system from scratch but can evolve something pre-existing to suit my current needs best.

      It's like learning to cook. There are thousands of methods (not even counting cuisine specific portions) for cooking a variety of meals. Knowing what these are and their outcomes can be incredibly helpful for creatively coming up with new meals. By analogy students are often only learning to heat water to boil an egg, but with some additional techniques they can bake complicated French pâtissier. Often if you know a handful of cooking methods you can go much further and farther using combinations of techniques and ingredients.

      What I'm looking for in the reading, note taking, and creation space is a baseline version of Peter Hertzmann's 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot combined with Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. Generally cooking is seen as an overly complex and difficult topic, something that is emphasized on most aspirational cooking shows. But cooking schools break the material down into small pieces which makes the processes much easier and more broadly applicable. Once you've got these building blocks mastered, you can be much more creative with what you can create.

      How can we combine these small building blocks of reading and note taking practices for students in the 4th - 8th grades so that they can begin to leverage them in high school and certainly by college? Is there a way to frame them within teaching rhetoric and critical thinking to improve not only learning outcomes, but to improve lifelong learning and thinking?

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Intrigue</span> in intrigue (<time class='dt-published'>08/29/2022 15:00:52</time>)</cite></small>

    2. Victor Margolin's note taking and writing process

      • Collecting materials and bibliographies in files based on categories (for chapters)
      • Reads material, excerpts/note making on 5 x 7" note cards
        • Generally with a title (based on visual in video)
        • excerpts have page number references (much like literature notes, the refinement linking and outlining happens separately later in his mapping and writing processes)
        • filed in a box with tabbed index cards by chapter number with name
        • video indicates that he does write on both sides of cards breaking the usual rule to write only on one side
      • Uses large pad of newsprint (roughly 18" x 24" based on visualization) to map out each chapter in visual form using his cards in a non-linear way. Out of the diagrams and clusters he creates a linear narrative form.
      • Tapes diagrams to wall
      • Writes in text editor on computer as he references the index cards and the visual map.

      "I've developed a way of working to make this huge project of a world history of design manageable."<br /> —Victor Margolin

      Notice here that Victor Margolin doesn't indicate that it was a process that he was taught, but rather "I've developed". Of course he was likely taught or influenced on the method, particularly as a historian, and that what he really means to communicate is that this is how he's evolved that process.

      "I begin with a large amount of information." <br /> —Victor Margolin

      "As I begin to write a story begins to emerge because, in fact, I've already rehearsed this story in several different ways by getting the information for the cards, mapping it out and of course the writing is then the third way of telling the story the one that will ultimately result in the finished chapters."<br /> —Victor Margolin