- Oct 2022
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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His best known publication is his essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," the ideas of which formed the frontier thesis. He argued that the moving western frontier exerted a strong influence on American democracy and the American character from the colonial era until 1890.
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.
Historian Keith Thomas talks about his methods of note taking and work as a historian. A method which falls into the tradition of commonplacing and zettelkasten, though his was in note taking and excerpting onto slips which he kept in envelopes instead of notebooks or a card index.
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It is only too easy to misapply excerpted passages by taking them out of their original context. Ideally, I should have followed the technique, recommended as long ago as 1615 by the learned Jesuit Francesco Sacchini, of always making two sets of notes, one to be sliced up and filed, the other to be kept in its original form.
Francesco Sacchini advised in 1615 that one should make two sets of notes: one to be cut up and filed, and the other kept in it's original form so as to keep the full context of the original author's context.
This is broadly one of the values of note taking in Hypothes.is. One can take broader excerpts of an authors' works as well as maintain links for fuller context to reconsult, but still have the shorter excerpts as well as one's own notes.
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‘What tho’ his head be empty, provided his common-place book be full?’ sneered Jonathan Swift.
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For without a clear conceptual plan, an accumulation of excerpts, what Milton called ‘a paroxysm of citations’, can rapidly become a substitute for thought.
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I feel sympathy for Robert Southey, whose excerpts from his voracious reading were posthumously published in four volumes as Southey’s Common-Place Book. He confessed in 1822 that,Like those persons who frequent sales, and fill their houses with useless purchases, because they may want them some time or other; so am I for ever making collections, and storing up materials which may not come into use till the Greek Calends. And this I have been doing for five-and-twenty years! It is true that I draw daily upon my hoards, and should be poor without them; but in prudence I ought now to be working up these materials rather than adding to so much dead stock.
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In his essay ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’, appended to his The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills reassuringly remarks that ‘the way in which these categories change, some being dropped and others being added, is an index of your intellectual progress ... As you rearrange a filing system, you often find that you are, as it were, loosening your imagination.’
One's notes are an index of their intellectual progress. In sorting through and re-arranging them one "loosens their imagination".
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As Francis Bacon warned long ago, ‘One man’s notes will little profit another.’
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The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him. An unforgettable description of Acton’s Shropshire study after his death in 1902 was given by Sir Charles Oman. There were shelves and shelves of books, many of them with pencilled notes in the margin. ‘There were pigeonholed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift.’ And there were piles of unopened parcels of books, which kept arriving, even after his death. ‘For years apparently he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that had been written, and to work their results into his vast thesis.’ ‘I never saw a sight,’ Oman writes, ‘that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.’
Lord Acton read widely and collected notes which he kept in pigeonholed desks and cabinets with thousands of compartments. Sadly he died in 1902 without having written anything using them, and being only made sense of by the compiler were broadly useless.
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It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written.
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As Beatrice Webb rightly said, the very process of shuffling notes can be intellectually fertile.
Keith Thomas indicates that through his personal experience that Beatrice Webb was right in saying that "shuffling notes can be intellectually fertile."
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Unfortunately, such diverse topics as literacy, numeracy, gestures, jokes, sexual morality, personal cleanliness or the treatment of animals, though central to my concerns, are hard to pursue systematically. They can’t be investigated in a single archive or repository of information. Progress depends on building up a picture from a mass of casual and unpredictable references accumulated over a long period. That makes them unsuitable subjects for a doctoral thesis, which has to be completed in a few years. But they are just the thing for a lifetime’s reading. So when I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics. Even so, I find that, as my interests change, I have to go back to sources I read long ago, with my new preoccupations in mind.
For a variety of topics and interests there are not archives of information that can be consulted or referenced. As a result one must slowly, but methodically collect this sort of information over a lifetime to be able to analyze it and build theses.
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Periodically, I file them away in old envelopes, devoting a separate envelope to each topic.
Filing notes away in envelopes, while keeping them safely collected together, puts them both out of site and out of mind. It may also take longer to retrieve them and make them less accessible to use and reuse.
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another long forgotten manual for students, History and Historical Research (1928) by C.G. Crump of the Public Record Office: ‘Never make a note for future use in such a form ... that even you yourself will not know what it means, when you come across it some months later.’
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Filing is a tedious activity and bundles of unsorted notes accumulate. Some of them get loose and blow around the house, turning up months later under a carpet or a cushion. A few of my most valued envelopes have disappeared altogether. I strongly suspect that they fell into the large basket at the side of my desk full of the waste paper with which they are only too easily confused.
Relying on cut up slips of paper rather than the standard cards of equal size, Keith Thomas has relayed that his slips often "get loose and blow around the house, turning up months later under a carpet or cushion."
He also suspects that some of his notes have accidentally been thrown away by falling off his desk and into the nearby waste basket which camouflages his notes amongst similar looking trash.
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When I go to libraries or archives, I make notes in a continuous form on sheets of paper, entering the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the length of the passage transcribed. These sliced-up pieces of paper pile up on the floor. Periodically, I file them away in old envelopes, devoting a separate envelope to each topic. Along with them go newspaper cuttings, lists of relevant books and articles yet to be read, and notes on anything else which might be helpful when it comes to thinking about the topic more analytically. If the notes on a particular topic are especially voluminous, I put them in a box file or a cardboard container or a drawer in a desk. I also keep an index of the topics on which I have an envelope or a file. The envelopes run into thousands.
Historian Keith Thomas describes his note taking method which is similar to older zettelkasten methods, though he uses larger sheets of paper rather than index cards and files them away in topic-based envelopes.
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Since Anatole France’s description in Penguin Island of the scholar drowned by an avalanche of his own index cards, it has been hard to take them seriously.
In Penguin Island, Anatole France describes a scholar drowned by an avalanche of their own index cards!
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When I did, though, I was reassured to see that, in a slipshod sort of way, I had arrived at something vaguely approximating to their prescriptions. En route I had made all the obvious beginner’s mistakes.
Keith Thomas wasn't taught, nor did he read (until much too late), methods on note taking, but still managed to puzzle out most of the specifics for his note taking practice in his historical work, or at least everything but taking notes on note cards instead of on sheets of paper.
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In his delightful autobiography, Memories Migrating, the late John Burrow records his perplexities when this injunction was conveyed to him by his graduate supervisor, George Kitson Clark: ‘I brooded on this. What was a fact? And what made it one fact? Surely most facts were compound. How would I know when I had reached bedrock, the ultimate, unsplittable atomic fact?’
Historian John Burrow brooded over the definition of the atomicity of an idea in his autobiography Memories Migrating (2009).
Individual facts link together into small networks to create context for each other.
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Before the Xerox machine, this was a labour-intensive counsel of perfection; and it is no wonder that many of the great 19th-century historians employed professional copyists.
According to Keith Thomas, "many of the great 19th-century historians employed professional copyists" as a means of keeping up with filing copies of their note slips under multiple subject headings.
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If a passage is interesting from several different points of view, then it should be copied out several times on different slips.
I don't recall Langlois and Seignobos suggesting copying things several times over. Double check this point, particularly with respect to the transference to Luhmann.
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In his book on The Footnote, Anthony Grafton quotes a letter by the great Swiss historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt, reporting that he had just cut up his notes on Vasari’s Lives into 700 little slips and rearranged them to be glued into a book, organised by topic.
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As the historian Thomas Fuller remarked, ‘A commonplace book contains many notions in garrison, whence the owner may draw out an army into the field on competent warning.’
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I have always been impressed by those academics who can sit impassively through a complex lecture by some visiting luminary without finding it necessary to make a single note, even a furtive one on the back of an envelope. They’d lose face, no doubt, if they were seen copying it all down, like a first-year undergraduate.
In academia, the act of not taking notes can act as an external signal of superiority or even indifference.
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John Aubrey tells us that Hobbes ‘always carried a note booke in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entred it into his booke, or otherwise he might have lost it. He had drawn the designe of the book into chapters, etc., so he knew whereabout it would come in.’
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Another help to the memory is the pocketbook in which to enter stray thoughts and observations: what the Elizabethans called ‘tablets’.
Elizabethans called pocketbooks or small notebooks "tablets."
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The pencilled dots in the margin of many books in the Codrington Library at All Souls are certain evidence that A.L. Rowse was there before you.
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But historians still make newspaper cuttings. At breakfast, I often take a pair of scissors to the LRB, the TLS or the New York Review of Books.
HIstorian Keith Thomas indicated in 2010 that he still regularly took scissors to his newspapers and magazines to excerpt material from them.
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Christopher Hill, used to pencil on the back endpaper of his books a list of the pages and topics which had caught his attention. He rubbed out his notes if he sold the book, but not always very thoroughly, so one can usually recognise a volume which belonged to him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hill_(historian)
Christopher Hill's practice of creating indices of topics of interest to him in the end papers of his books is similar to that of Mortimer J. Adler who attested this practice as well.
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J.H. Plumb once showed me a set of Swift’s works given him by G.M. Trevelyan; it had originally belonged to Macaulay, who had drawn a line all the way down the margin of every page as he read it, no doubt committing the whole to memory.
A line in the margin doesn't fit with any mnemotechniques I'm aware of, so it's more likely a method to indicate what he had read, and up to what point. Likely not an indicator of storage to memory.
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Newton used to turn down the corners of the pages of his books so that they pointed to the exact passage he wished to recall.
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According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students’ were marked through, ‘with little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to remembrance’.
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Macaulay claimed that his memory was good enough to enable him to write out the whole of Paradise Lost. But when preparing his History of England, he made extensive notes in a multitude of pocketbooks of every shape and colour.
By what method did Macaulay memorize Paradise Lost?
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In his splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had no “method”, only an omnium gatherum of materials culled from more or less everywhere.’
How does a medievalist reference "omnium gatherum" without an explicit mention of even florilegia which generally translates as "gatherings of flowers" as their method?!
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It never helps historians to say too much about their working methods. For just as the conjuror’s magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be written.
Except that, seemingly, many historians have written and published about just this very topic!
People often talk about the "magic of note taking", but it's not frequent that they frame the methods as magician's secrets.
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Annotators
URL
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www.propublica.org www.propublica.org
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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reply (unsent)<br /> I appreciate where you're coming from, and it's an excellent thought experiment. However, knowing that there was a clear older prior zettelkasten tradition for several hundred years prior to Luhmann which also included a number of mathematician practitioners including not only Leibnitz but also Newton, who incidentally invented his version of calculus in his waste book (also a part of that tradition). (See also: https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/notebooks?sort=date&order=desc).
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influenced Maturo and Varela's work on biological autopoesis.
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His social theory, developed over thirty years, owes a massive intellectual debt to the work of the English philosopher and mathematician George Spencer-Brown. Spencer-Brown's work of algebraic locic, Laws of Form (1969), was a minor cult hit in the 1970s
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idiotlamborghini.com idiotlamborghini.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>u/United_Syllabub515 </span> in Metacognitive Note-Taking For Creativity : Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>10/29/2022 21:57:47</time>)</cite></small>
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www.goodreads.com www.goodreads.com
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“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” ― Lao Tse
original source??
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dictionary.apa.org dictionary.apa.org
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elaboration n. 1. the process of interpreting or embellishing information to be remembered or of relating it to other material already known and in memory. The levels-of-processing model of memory holds that the level of elaboration applied to information as it is processed affects both the length of time that it can be retained in memory and the ease with which it can be retrieved.
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dictionary.apa.org dictionary.apa.org
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dictionary.apa.org dictionary.apa.org
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sagescienta.substack.com sagescienta.substack.com
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https://sagescienta.substack.com/p/cognitive-load-theory?sd=pf
introductory article with some interesting looking references
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www.engadget.com www.engadget.com
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https://www.engadget.com/amazon-attrition-leadership-ctsmd-201800110.html?src=rss
Amazon tracking their hourly workers and not their middle management's efficiency.
Originally read on Tue [[2022-10-18]] 1:25 PM
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www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
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Running Twitter is more complicated than you think.
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The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.
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the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway.
Twitter's primary asset is not their technology, but their addicted user base.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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now we need a much needed and truer history of zetelcaston and thankfully Chris aldricks is the person to provide us that
We need a much needed and truer history of zettelkasten and thankfully Chris Aldrich is the person to provide us that. Stop reading all those other zettelkasten articles until you have a broader understanding of the historical perspective of where all this came from. I can't tell you how much I learned. There was more I didn't know than I did know by a... and it wasn't even close. So thank you Chris. You definitely need to read The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten.<br /> —Nick Milo, Linking Your Thinking, 2022-10-26,
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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His topics include the rhetoric and impact of culture wars in American political life and the relationship between politics and culture in the United States.
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Local file Local file
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Chavigny, Paul Marie Victor. Organisation Du Travail Intellectuel, Recettes Pratiques à l’usage Des Étudiants de Toutes Les Facultés et de Tous Les Travailleurs. Paris: Delagrave, 1918. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011209555
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drummer.this.how drummer.this.how
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http://drummer.this.how/AndySylvester99/Andy_Zettelkasten.opml
Andy Sylvester's experiment in building a digital zettelkasten using OPML and tagging. Curious to see how it grows and particularly whether or not it will scale with this sort of UI? On first blush, the first issue I see as a reader is a need for a stronger and immediate form of search.
RSS feeds out should make for a more interesting UI for subscribing and watching the inputs though.
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oldschool.scripting.com oldschool.scripting.com
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gabz.blog gabz.blog
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https://gabz.blog/2022/10/27/what-about-them.html
Why do people not have strong note taking practices or desire to do so? - Some of it may come down to lack of a practice (or model) to follow - some don't have a clearly stated need for why they're doing it in the first place - some spread their notes out over many tools and applications which prevents a quorum of power building up in one place, thus defeating a lot of the purpose. (This is why having all of one's notes in one place is so important as a rule.) - This particular post is a good example of this cardinal sin. - Lack of easy search defeats the ability to extract value back out of having made the notes in the first place. - Note repositories aren't always all of the value proposition. Often the fact of the work that went into making a note to learn and understand ideas is all of the value for a reasonable portion of notes.
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fieldnotesbrand.com fieldnotesbrand.com
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https://fieldnotesbrand.com/from-seed
Some interesting history of notebooks in America.
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www.indxd.ink www.indxd.inkIndxd1
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https://www.indxd.ink/
A digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional).
It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears.
This could potentially be used by those who have analog zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>sgtstretch </span> in @Gaby @pimoore so a good friend of mine makes [INDXD](https://www.indxd.ink/) which is for indexing analog notebooks and being able to find things. I don't personally use it, but I know @patrickrhone has written about it before. (<time class='dt-published'>10/27/2022 17:59:32</time>)</cite></small>
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micro.blog micro.blog
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https://micro.blog/pimoore/13567345
some interesting perspectives on note taking apps and note taking in general
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writing.bobdoto.computer writing.bobdoto.computer
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The question often asked: "What happens when you want to add a new note between notes 1/1 and 1/1a?"
Thoughts on Zettelkasten numbering systems
I've seen variations of the beginner Zettelkasten question:
"What happens when you want to add a new note between notes 1/1 and 1/1a?"
asked at least a dozen times in the Reddit fora related to note taking and zettelkasten, on zettelkasten.de, or in other places across the web.
Dense Sets
From a mathematical perspective, these numbering or alpha-numeric systems are, by both intent and design, underpinned by the mathematical idea of dense sets. In the areas of topology and real analysis, one considers a set dense when one can choose a point as close as one likes to any other point. For both library cataloging systems and numbering schemes for ideas in Zettelkasten this means that you can always juxtapose one topic or idea in between any other two.
Part of the beauty of Melvil Dewey's original Dewey Decimal System is that regardless of how many new topics and subtopics one wants to add to their system, one can always fit another new topic between existing ones ad infinitum.
Going back to the motivating question above, the equivalent question mathematically is "what number is between 0.11 and 0.111?" (Here we've converted the artificial "number" "a" to a 1 and removed the punctuation, which doesn't create any issues and may help clarify the orderings a bit.) The answer is that there is an infinite number of numbers between these!
This is much more explicit by writing these numbers as:<br /> 0.110<br /> 0.111
Naturally 0.1101 is between them (along with an infinity of others), so one could start here as a means of inserting ideas this way if they liked. One either needs to count up sequentially (0, 1, 2, 3, ...) or add additional place values.
Decimal numbering systems in practice
The problem most people face is that they're not thinking of these numbers as decimals, but as natural numbers or integers (or broadly numbers without any decimal portions). Though of course in the realm of real numbers, numbers above 0 are dense as well, but require the use of their decimal portions to remain so.
The tough question is: what sorts of semantic meanings one might attach to their adding of additional place values or their alphabetical characters? This meaning can vary from person to person and system to system, so I won't delve into it here.
One may find it useful to logically chunk these numbers into groups of three as is often done using commas, periods, slashes, dashes, spaces, or other punctuation. This doesn't need to mean anything in particular, but may help to make one's numbers more easily readable as well as usable for filing new ideas. Sometimes these indicators can be confusing in discussion, so if ever in doubt, simply remove them and the general principles mentioned here should still hold.
Depending on one's note taking system, however, when putting cards into some semblance of a logical sort-able order (perhaps within a folder for example), the system may choke on additional characters beyond the standard period to designate a decimal number. For example: within Obsidian, if you have a "zettelkasten" folder with lots of numbered and named files within it, you'll want to give each number the maximum number of decimal places so that when doing an alphabetic sort within the folder, all of the numbered ideas are properly sorted. As an example if you give one file the name "0.510 Mathematics", another "0.514 Topology" and a third "0.5141 Dense Sets" they may not sort properly unless you give the first two decimal expansions to the ten-thousands place at a minimum. If you changed them to "0.5100 Mathematics" and "0.5140 Topology, then you're in good shape and the folder will alphabetically sort as you'd expect. Similarly some systems may or may not do well with including alphabetic characters mixed in with numbers.
If using chunked groups of three numbers, one might consider using the number 0.110.001 as the next level of idea between them and then continuing from there. This may help to spread some of the ideas out as surely one may have yet another idea to wedge in between 0.110.000 and 0.110.001?
One can naturally choose almost any any (decimal) number, so long as it it somewhat "near" the original behind which one places it. By going out further in the decimal expansion, one can always place any idea between two others and know that there will be a number that it can be given that will "work".
Generally within numbers as we use them for mathematics, 0.100000001 is technically "closer" by distance measurement to 0.1 than 0.11, (and by quite a bit!) but somehow when using numbers for zettelkasten purposes, we tend to want to not consider them as decimals, as the Dewey Decimal System does. We also have the tendency to want to keep our numbers as short as possible when writing, so it seems more "natural" to follow 0.11 with 0.111, as it seems like we're "counting up" rather than "counting down".
Another subtlety that one sees in numbering systems is the proper or improper use of the whole numbers in front of the decimal portions. For example, in Niklas Luhmann's system, he has a section of cards that start with 3.XXXX which are close to a section numbered 35.YYYY. This may seem a bit confusing, but he's doing a bit of mental gymnastics to artificially keep his numbers smaller. What he really means is 3000.XXX and 3500.YYY respectively, he's just truncating the extra zeros. Alternately in a fully "decimal system" one would write these as 0.3000.XXXX and 0.3500.YYYY, where we've added additional periods to the numbers to make them easier to read. Using our original example in an analog system, the user may have been using foreshortened indicators for their system and by writing 1/1a, they may have really meant something of the form 001.001/00a, but were making the number shorter in a logical manner (at least to them).
The close observer may have seen Scott Scheper adopt the slightly longer numbers in the thousands (like 3500.YYYY) as a means of remedying some of the numbering confusion many have when looking at Luhmann's system.
Those who build their systems on top of existing ones like the Dewey Decimal Classification, or the Universal Decimal Classification may wish to keep those broad categories with three to four decimal places at the start and then add their own idea number underneath those levels.
As an example, we can use the numbering for Finsler geometry from the Dewey Decimal Classification wikipedia page shown as:
``` 500 Natural sciences and mathematics
510 Mathematics 516 Geometry 516.3 Analytic geometries 516.37 Metric differential geometries 516.375 Finsler geometry```
So in our zettelkasten, we might add our first card on the topic of Finsler geometry as "516.375.001 Definition of Finsler geometry" and continue from there with some interesting theorems and proofs on those topics.
Of course, while this is something one can do doesn't mean that one should do it. Going too far down the rabbit holes of "official" forms of classification this way can be a massive time wasting exercise as in most private systems, you're never going to be comparing your individual ideas with the private zettelkasten of others and in practice the sort of standardizing work for classification this way is utterly useless. Beyond this, most personal zettelkasten are unique and idiosyncratic to the user, so for example, my math section labeled 510 may have a lot more overlap with history, anthropology, and sociology hiding within it compared with others who may have all of their mathematics hiding amidst their social sciences section starting with the number 300. One of the benefits of Luhmann's numbering scheme, at least for him, is that it allowed his system to be much more interdisciplinary than using a more complicated Dewey Decimal oriented system which may have dictated moving some of his systems theory work out of his politics area where it may have made more sense to him in addition to being more productive on a personal level.
Of course if you're using the older sort of commonplacing zettelkasten system that was widely in use before Luhmann's variation, then perhaps using a Dewey-based system may be helpful to you?
A Touch of History
As both a mathematician working in the early days of real analysis and a librarian, some of these loose ideas may have occurred tangentially to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716), though I'm currently unaware of any specific instances within his work. One must note, however, that some of the earliest work within library card catalogs as we know and use them today stemmed from 1770s Austria where governmental conscription needs overlapped with card cataloging systems (Krajewski, 2011). It's here that the beginnings of these sorts of numbering systems begin to come into use well before Melvil Dewey's later work which became much more broadly adopted.
The German "file number" (aktenzeichen) is a unique identification of a file, commonly used in their court system and predecessors as well as file numbers in public administration since at least 1934. We know Niklas Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, when he obtained a law degree, before beginning a career in Lüneburg's public administration where he stayed in civil service until 1962. Given this fact, it's very likely that Luhmann had in-depth experience with these sorts of file numbers as location identifiers for files and documents. As a result it's reasonably likely that a simplified version of these were at least part of the inspiration for his own numbering system. † ‡
Your own practice
At the end of the day, the numbering system you choose needs to work for you within the system you're using (analog, digital, other). I would generally recommend against using someone else's numbering system unless it completely makes sense to you and you're able to quickly and simply add cards to your system with out the extra work and cognitive dissonance about what number you should give it. The more you simplify these small things, the easier and happier you'll be with your set up in the end.
References
Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines.
Munkres, James R. Topology. 2nd ed. 1975. Reprint, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1999.
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supabase.com supabase.com
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Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative. Start your project with a Postgres database, Authentication, instant APIs, Edge Functions, Realtime subscriptions, and Storage.
Found as presumably it's being used by https://www.explainpaper.com/ with improper configurations
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List of past videos Nick Milo has made with regard to note taking, thinking, Obsidian, etc.
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benwerd.substack.com benwerd.substack.com
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Given your talents, if you've not explored some of the experimental fiction side of things (like Mark Bernstein's hypertext fiction http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Fiction.html, Robin Sloan's fish http://www.robinsloan.com/fish/ or Writing with the Machine https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/, or a variety of others https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22experimental+fiction%22), perhaps it may be fun and allow you to use some of your technology based-background at the same time?
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Congratulations (I guess?) on finding my semi-secret Substack: a place away from my main site to discuss my journey from technologist (a pompous term that really just means I do computers) to writer (a pompous term that really just means I do computers but now it’s art).
This quote is art... :)
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www.robinsloan.com www.robinsloan.com
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https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/
Related work leading up to this video: https://vimeo.com/232545219
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www.explainpaper.com www.explainpaper.com
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Another in a growing line of research tools for processing and making sense of research literature including Research Rabbit, Connected Papers, Semantic Scholar, etc.
Functionality includes the ability to highlight sections of research papers with natural language processing to explain what those sections mean. There's also a "chat" that allows you to ask questions about the paper which will attempt to return reasonable answers, which is an artificial intelligence sort of means of having an artificial "conversation with the text".
cc: @dwhly @remikalir @jeremydean
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvxbl7Iwep4
Lots of levels here to pull apart, but this should be particularly interesting to novices.
Modes of note taking: * note taking for raw information * note taking (or writing) for understanding * note taking for relationships of and between knowledge * note taking for creating proficiency * note taking for productivity
Sung takes the viewpoint that linear note taking isn't as effective as mind mapping and drawing out relationships; in part this is why handwriting is more effective means of note taking compared to typing, particularly as most note taking apps force one into a linear pathway that doesn't mirror the affordances available within handwriting.
This video is definitely more about note taking than note making.
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www.cs.upc.edu www.cs.upc.edu
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Noy, Natalya F, and Deborah L McGuinness. “Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology,” 2001, 25.
suggested via:
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>New @tana_inc folks seem hungry for in-depth books on ontologies & schemas.<br>Initial reaction was... books are overkill? There's not much to know? Just google it? But then tried googling. And it is *noisy* and poorly curated out there.<br><br>A few recommendations:
— Maggie Appleton (@Mappletons) October 21, 2022
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Much like the way the Obsidian journal plugin counts words within one's daily journal page, this app counts zettels within a folder to help encourage one to maintain some level of output.
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Creating a ZK Don't Break the Chain Calendar in Obsidian
For those interested in the research on the "Write Every Day" mantra:
Sword, Helen. “‘Write Every Day!’: A Mantra Dismantled.” International Journal for Academic Development 21, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 312–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2016.1210153.
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www.goodreads.com www.goodreads.com
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Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago.<br /> — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Maxims and Reflections)
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI3yiPA6npA
Generally interesting and useful, but is broadly an extended advertisement for JetPens products.
Transparent sticky notes allow one to take notes on them, but the text is still visible through the paper.
One can use separate pages to write notes and then use washi tape to tape the notes to the page in a hinge-like fashion similar to selectively interleaving one's books.
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ead.nb.admin.ch ead.nb.admin.ch
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https://ead.nb.admin.ch/html/comment_0.html
The layout and format of this online archive is highly reminiscent of a digital zettelkasten and could even be used as a user interface for implementing one. It has a nice alpha-numeric form.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-petition.html
The paradigm stayed constant for the professor while it changed for the students coming into the program. Chaos ensued.
There will be longer term effects of this in 10-20 years when these students are physicians.
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Today, the people in politics who most often invoke the name of Jesus for their political causes tend to be the most merciless and judgmental, the most consumed by rage and fear and vengeance. They hate their enemies, and they seem to want to make more of them. They claim allegiance to the truth and yet they have embraced, even unwittingly, lies. They have inverted biblical ethics in the name of biblical ethics.
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Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma, a scholar of Christian nationalism, and himself a person of the Christian faith
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Digitize your notes: Step by Step Using Neo Smart Pen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otj3x_9h2RM
Nothing brilliant. the Neo Smart Pen looks like a direct competitor to Livescribe with Anoto paper
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Workflow for capturing and processing online content for use in a Zettlekasten
reply to https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/ye3bvk/workflow_for_capturing_and_processing_online/
While it's possible that some set of tools will work best for you and potentially be more "fun" than other combinations, the upper limit you'll find on efficiency and productivity in this area is limited.
As a result, I'd recommend looking at the quality of the material you're putting into your stream as potentially the best means of improvement at your disposal. The quality of your ideas and thought will increase if you're reading and conversing with the highest quality sources you can get your hands on. Well-researched, long form material (books, journal articles) will have likely done a lot of the filtering and heavy work for you, so use those as input when you can.
Unless you're a sociologist or cultural anthropologist looking for examples of behaviors and material in social media, it may not be the best place to turn. Before I open social media apps I remind myself of note #1267 from Goethe's slipbox (Maxims and Reflections): "Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago."
Similarly, upon hearing the words "firehose", "drowning", or "information overload", I'm reminded that, presuming you'd even want to make the effort, there's only one way to eat a whale: one bite at a time.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Handwriting + Zettelkasten
I've used Livescribe pens/paper for note taking (including with audio) before, and they've got OCR software to digital workflows. Or for the paper motivated, one could use their larger post it notes and just stick them to index cards as a substrate for your physical ZK with digitally searchable back ups? Now that I've thought about it and written this out, I may have to try it to see if it's better than my prior handwritten/digital experiments.
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I have been using Apple notes, but began to wonder if I could find an app that supports zettelkasten in digital handwritten form. The closest thing I found is CardNotes however it is underdeveloped imo, and maybe dead?
Someone looking for handwriting apps that allow one to use handwriting in digital contexts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/ydwl32/handwriting_zettelkasten/
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https://www.reddit.com/r/nanowrimo/comments/3rmjb9/how_long_does_it_take_you_to_write_1000_words/
a quick skim of this page indicates that most people average about 1,000 words per hour of writing when writing for NaNoWriMo
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www.saysomethingin.com www.saysomethingin.com
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webseitz.fluxent.com webseitz.fluxent.com
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http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/DesigningGoodPageNames
Designing good page names
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twitter.com twitter.com
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<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Watch out for the Welsh football team if they have @michaelsheen giving the motivational speech. @Cymru pic.twitter.com/TF96lpDzXx
— A League of Their Own (@ALOTO) September 9, 2022
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nation.cymru nation.cymru
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https://nation.cymru/news/rob-mcelhenney-learning-welsh-and-can-sing-hen-wlad-fy-nhadau-perfectly/
hilarious!
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Very nice to differentiate between core notes (notes that we have worked a lot on) and peripheral notes.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Very nice to differentiate between core notes (notes that we have worked a lot on) and peripheral notes.
— Bianca Pereira | PKM Coach and Researcher (@bianca_oli_per) October 24, 2022Coming from the Strange New Worlds Plugin, Bianca Pereira defines core notes (those worked on and thus likely of more value) versus peripheral notes.
Core notes have a similar connotation to so-called permanent notes while peripheral notes have connection to fleeting notes, though peripheral notes would seem to have a higher connotation of value than fleeting notes.
Some of this is similar to my commonplacing practice and collection versus my more focused Luhmann-esque zettelkasten practice.
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apps.apple.com apps.apple.com
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CardNotes - Zettelkasten Notes 4+ Linkable Handwritten Notes HANG FONG TSE
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tuprd-my.sharepoint.com tuprd-my.sharepoint.com
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For everything there is a season, and atime for every matter under heaven:² a time to be born, and a time to die;a time to plant, and a time to pluck upwhat is planted;³ a time to kill, and a time to heal;a time to break down, and a time to buildup;⁴ a time to weep, and a time to laugh;a time to mourn, and a time to dance;⁵ a time to throw away stones, and a timeto gather stones together;
The writers of the Bible were ostensibly as interested as modern day productivity gurus, bloggers, and influencers in some of the basic principles of productivity.
(Originally scribbled on 2022-10-23)
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https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ge4efpkxh985s8eszbb9dr2e/
Simple user interface example of highlighting and annotations on an article in Readwise Reader.
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New in Reader: Share your annotated documents publicly .t3_xrc7b7._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } AnnouncementsWe just shipped a v1 of a sharing feature inside Reader that enables you to make a public version of an article you read and annotated.
Readwise announced on 2022-09-29, that they've shipped the ability to use their feed reader product to share public versions of one's read and annotated articles.
https://www.reddit.com/r/readwise/comments/xrc7b7/new_in_reader_share_your_annotated_documents/
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imgflip.com imgflip.com
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The Rules of Zettelkasten Club
- Read
- Take notes
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twitter.com twitter.com
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TweetSee new TweetsConversationSamuele Onelia @SamueleOneliaI added a new note to my #Zettelkasten after a month of inactivity. It still remains my favorite kind of mental therapy.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>I added a new note to my #Zettelkasten after a month of inactivity.<br><br>It still remains my favorite kind of mental therapy. <br><br>BTW this is the note (from the book: Effortless) 👇 pic.twitter.com/QF2Uy3W3T6
— Samuele Onelia 😺 (@SamueleOnelia) October 24, 2022
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www.creativelive.com www.creativelive.com
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For Tim, the practice is managed by routine.“My quota for writing is two crappy pages a day,” he explains. Those two pages help him get started, matter what other commitments he is meeting that day. And even if they’re bad, they’re at least done.The idea is to set goals that are “easily winnable” so you don’t panic when one day passes and you don’t make that goal, because you always know you can easily pick back up the next day.“If I don’t write my two pages I don’t panic and go into the spiral.”
Tim Ferris has a routine for writing and has indicated "My quota for writing is two crappy pages a day." and "If I don't write my two pages, I don't panic and go into the spiral."
(summary); possibly worth watching video for verifying quotes and pulling out additional practices.
Note that this piece seems to indicate that his writing practice includes an idea of doing "morning pages", but this implication is likely false as Ferriss likely isn't doing this, but writing toward productive goals rather than to "clear his mental space" as is usually implied by morning pages.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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One of W.G. Sebald’s masterpieces, The Rings of Saturn, an indescribable blend of fact and fiction, contains a section about one of his academic colleagues whose office was piled high with notes about Gustav Flaubert.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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What would you suggest instead if my goal is taking notes on various topics in order to remember them? (no output needed)
reply to dhXcol https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/yc35nl/comment/itlmjbn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
You might appreciate the pre-Luhmann zettelkasten (or commonplace book traditions) which could serve this purpose, and most of the applications that you can use for ZK will work for these purposes if you're not an index card person. Some differentiation and pointers here: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/
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www.gutenberg.org www.gutenberg.org
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Les murs du cabinet de travail, le plancher, le plafond même portaient des liasses débordantes, des cartons démesurément gonflés, des boîtes où se pressait une multitude innombrable de fiches, et je contemplai avec une admiration mêlée de terreur les cataractes de l'érudition prêtes à se rompre. —Maître, fis-je d'une voix émue, j'ai recours à votre bonté et à votre savoir, tous deux inépuisables. Ne consentiriez-vous pas à me guider dans mes recherches ardues sur les origines de l'art pingouin? —Monsieur, me répondit le maître, je possède tout l'art, vous m'entendez, tout l'art sur fiches classées alphabétiquement et par ordre de matières. Je me fais un devoir de mettre à votre disposition ce qui s'y rapporte aux Pingouins. Montez à cette échelle et tirez cette boîte que vous voyez là-haut. Vous y trouverez tout ce dont vous avez besoin. J'obéis en tremblant. Mais à peine avais-je ouvert la fatale boîte que des fiches bleues s'en échappèrent et, glissant entre mes doigts, commencèrent à pleuvoir. Presque aussitôt, par sympathie, les boîtes voisines s'ouvrirent et il en coula des ruisseaux de fiches roses, vertes et blanches, et de proche en proche, de toutes les boîtes les fiches diversement colorées se répandirent en murmurant comme, en avril, les cascades sur le flanc des montagnes. En une minute elles couvrirent le plancher d'une couche épaisse de papier. Jaillissant de leurs inépuisables réservoirs avec un mugissement sans cesse grossi, elles précipitaient de seconde en seconde leur chute torrentielle. Baigné jusqu'aux genoux, Fulgence Tapir, d'un nez attentif, observait le cataclysme; il en reconnut la cause et pâlit d'épouvante. —Que d'art! s'écria-t-il. Je l'appelai, je me penchai pour l'aider à gravir l'échelle qui pliait sous l'averse. Il était trop tard. Maintenant, accablé, désespéré, lamentable, ayant perdu sa calotte de velours et ses lunettes d'or, il opposait en vain ses bras courts au flot qui lui montait jusqu'aux aisselles. Soudain une trombe effroyable de fiches s'éleva, l'enveloppant d'un tourbillon gigantesque. Je vis durant l'espace d'une seconde dans le gouffre le crâne poli du savant et ses petites mains grasses, puis l'abîme se referma, et le déluge se répandit sur le silence et l'immobilité. Menacé moi-même d'être englouti avec mon échelle, je m'enfuis à travers le plus haut carreau de la croisée.
France, Anatole. L’Île Des Pingouins. Project Gutenberg 8524. 1908. Reprint, Project Gutenberg, 2005. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8524/pg8524.html
Death by Zettelkasten!!
(Coming soon to a theater near you...)
In the preface to the novel Penguin Island (L'Île des Pingouins. Calmann-Lévy, 1908) by Nobel prize laureate Anatole France, a scholar is drowned by an avalanche of index cards which formed a gigantic whirlpool streaming out of his card index (Zettelkasten).
Link to: Historian Keith Thomas has indicated that he finds it hard to take using index cards for excerpting and research seriously as a result of reading this passage in the satire Penguin Island.<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/rKAvtlQCEe2jtzP3LmPlsA
Translation via: France, Anatole. Penguin Island. Translated by Arthur William Evans. 8th ed. 1908. Reprint, New York, NY, USA: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Penguin_Island/6UpWAvkPQaEC?hl=en&gbpv=0
Small changes in the translation by me, comprising only adding the word "index" in front of the occurrences of card to better represent the historical idea of fiches used by scholars in the late 1800s and early 1900s, are indicated in brackets.
The walls of the study, the floor, and even the ceiling were loaded with overflowing bundles, paste board boxes swollen beyond measure, boxes in which were compressed an innumerable multitude of small [index] cards covered with writing. I beheld in admiration mingled with terror the cataracts of erudition that threatened to burst forth.
“Master,” said I in feeling tones, “I throw myself upon your kindness and your knowledge, both of which are inexhaustible. Would you consent to guide me in my arduous researches into the origins of Penguin art?"
“Sir," answered the Master, “I possess all art, you understand me, all art, on [index] cards classed alphabetically and in order of subjects. I consider it my duty to place at your disposal all that relates to the Penguins. Get on that ladder and take out that box you see above. You will find in it everything you require.”
I tremblingly obeyed. But scarcely had I opened the fatal box than some blue [index] cards escaped from it, and slipping through my fingers, began to rain down.
Almost immediately, acting in sympathy, the neighbouring boxes opened, and there flowed streams of pink, green, and white [index] cards, and by degrees, from all the boxes, differently coloured [index] cards were poured out murmuring like a waterfall on a mountain-side in April. In a minute they covered the floor with a thick layer of paper. Issuing from their in exhaustible reservoirs with a roar that continually grew in force, each second increased the vehemence of their torrential fall. Swamped up to the knees in cards, Fulgence Tapir observed the cataclysm with attentive nose. He recognised its cause and grew pale with fright.
“ What a mass of art! ” he exclaimed.
I called to him and leaned forward to help him mount the ladder which bent under the shower. It was too late. Overwhelmed, desperate, pitiable, his velvet smoking-cap and his gold-mounted spectacles having fallen from him, he vainly opposed his short arms to the flood which had now mounted to his arm-pits . Suddenly a terrible spurt of [index] cards arose and enveloped him in a gigantic whirlpool. During the space of a second I could see in the gulf the shining skull and little fat hands of the scholar; then it closed up and the deluge kept on pouring over what was silence and immobility. In dread lest I in my turn should be swallowed up ladder and all I made my escape through the topmost pane of the window.
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richardcarter.com richardcarter.com
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www.scotthyoung.com www.scotthyoung.com
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Bryan Caplan has made a spirited defense of school as signaling in his book, The Case Against Education. He argues that what is taught in school isn’t particularly useful on the job. Instead, schooling provides a mechanism for figuring out who has the talent, ambition and obedience to learn on the job successfully.
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Having an MIT degree is probably more valuable than having an MIT education.
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boffosocko.com boffosocko.com
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As an example, in The Crown season 1 episode 4 “Act of God” (Netflix, 2016) there is a scene portraying former British Prime Minister Clement Atlee in his office in which he is prominently bookended in the background by two four drawer card indexes: one 3 x 5″ and the other 4 x 6″.
This example comes directly from my notes: https://hypothes.is/a/Cz7e_lHKEe2Qv79IbEgmNw
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If you give a title to your notes, "claim notes" are simply notes with a verb. They invite you to say: "Prove it!" - "The positive impact of PKM" (not a claim) - "PKM has a positive impact in improving writer's block" (claim) A small change with positive mindset consequences
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>If you give a title to your notes, "claim notes" are simply notes with a verb.<br><br>They invite you to say: "Prove it!"<br><br>- "The positive impact of PKM" (not a claim)<br>- "PKM has a positive impact in improving writer's block" (claim)<br><br>A small change with positive mindset consequences
— Bianca Pereira | PKM Coach and Researcher (@bianca_oli_per) October 6, 2022Bianca Pereira coins the ideas of "concept notes" versus "claim notes". Claim notes are framings similar to the theorem or claim portion of the mathematical framing of definition/theorem(claim)/proof. This set up provides the driving impetus of most of mathematics. One defines objects about which one then advances claims for which proofs are provided to make them theorems.
Framing one's notes as claims invites one to provide supporting proof for them to determine how strong they may or may not be. Otherwise, ideas may just state concepts which are far less interesting or active. What is one to do with them? They require more active work to advance or improve upon in more passive framings.
link to: - Maggie Delano's reading framing: https://hypothes.is/a/4xBvpE2TEe2ZmWfoCX_HyQ
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Zettelkasten in the office of Clement Atlee, former Prime Minister of UK, in The Crown S1E4 "Act of God" (Netflix, 2016)
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https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/ur5xjv/handwritten_cards_to_a_digital_back_up_workflow/
For those who keep a physical pen and paper system who either want to be a bit on the hybrid side, or just have a digital backup "just in case", I thought I'd share a workflow that I outlined back in December that works reasonably well. (Backups or emergency plans for one's notes are important as evidenced by poet Jean Paul's admonition to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812: "In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first.") It's framed as posting to a website/digital garden, but it works just as well for many of the digital text platforms one might have or consider. For those on other platforms (like iOS) there are some useful suggestions in the comments section. Handwriting My Website (or Zettelkasten) with a Digital Amanuensis
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twitter.com twitter.com
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I'm sure fedwiki influenced me, but for whatever reason it wasn't top of mind—I was really thinking about the 2011-era Tweetie for iPad.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>I'm sure fedwiki influenced me, but for whatever reason it wasn't top of mind—I was really thinking about the 2011-era Tweetie for iPad.
— Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) September 9, 2022While FedWiki's design may have influenced the card like design of Andy Matuschak's online notes, his inspiration for it was the 2011-era Tweetie app for iPad.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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TiddlyWiki's philosophy now is that the purpose of recording and organising information is so that it can be used again. To maximise the possibilities for reuse, write or slice information into the smallest semantically meaningful units, and weave them together into narratives.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>TiddlyWiki's philosophy now is that the purpose of recording and organising information is so that it can be used again.<br><br>To maximise the possibilities for reuse, write or slice information into the smallest semantically meaningful units, and weave them together into narratives.
— TiddlyWiki (@TiddlyWiki) September 20, 2022 -
The first demo of TidlyWiki from 2004 took the ideas of wiki and applied them to fragments rather than entire pages. The hypothesis was that it would be easier to write in small interlinked chunks that could be gradually massaged into a linear narrative
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>The first demo of TidlyWiki from 2004 took the ideas of wiki and applied them to fragments rather than entire pages. The hypothesis was that it would be easier to write in small interlinked chunks that could be gradually massaged into a linear narrativehttps://t.co/v2v6dyL3Oy pic.twitter.com/MJO7tyopr2
— TiddlyWiki (@TiddlyWiki) September 20, 2022 -
TiddlyWiki was inspired by @WardCunningham's glorious idea of wiki – more than anything by the way that wiki makes linking be part of the punctuation of writing.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>TiddlyWiki was inspired by @WardCunningham's glorious idea of wiki – more than anything by the way that wiki makes linking be part of the punctuation of writing. https://t.co/pLPfYcCJY2
— TiddlyWiki (@TiddlyWiki) September 20, 2022
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best that deep study invites you to gather in like a harvest, and to store up as the wealth of life.
Like centuries of rhetors before him, he's using ideas and metaphors of harvest, treasure, and wealth to describe note taking.
Why have these passed out of popular Western thought since the 1920-1960s when this book was popular?
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Be ready, as soon as you have read or heard the thing, to repeat it exactly in as far as you want to fix it in your memory. If it is a book, do not leave it without being able to sum it up and to estimate its value. Ta
Sounds much like the Feynman technique and is quite similar to the advice of Sonke Ahrens.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I can't quite grasp this concept, although it seems interesting for my specific case. Isn't the index box supposed to be organized by alphabetical order? How can personal notes be placed right in such an order?
los2pollos reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y5un81/comment/it667sq/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
There are a wide variety of methods of organizing and sorting one's note cards including by topic (usually alphabetical), by date, by idea, by author, by title, etc.
If you're using it as a diary, you'd probably keep that subsection in order by date written, and then potentially have it cross indexed by subject if those things were important to you.
If you kept other information like mood, health, activities, exercise, glasses of water per day (for example) on them, you could resort and re-order them by those data as well if you liked. And naturally, this ability to resort/reorder one's notes has been one of the greatest features and affordances to these systems historically.
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Memorization is not about a language, rather about a feeling you have about information. In other words, how deep it resonates with your life. In this sense, I was also exploring the idea that having an Antinet Zettelkasten is almost like having a "diary", not for your personal feelings or emotions, rather for exploring the way in which your entire mind and heart work together over the years in which we discover the world. For me, exploring subjects and studying is an internal discovery.
in reply to los2pollos<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y5un81/comment/it4jy3c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
You're not the only one to think of a card index as diary. Roland Barthes practiced this as well. His biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call it his fichierjournal.
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Bilingual Antinet?
There's research to support that thinking in a non-native language has benefits for your thought processes and decision making. E.g.: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/thinking-foreign-language-helps-economic-decision-making
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natto.dev natto.dev
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https://natto.dev/invite/nHQEKx_T
Demo page for Tools for Thought Rocks!
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www.val.town www.val.townval town1
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https://www.val.town/
Val Town is a collaborative notebook for APIs
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app.fermat.ws app.fermat.ws
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www.supermind.design www.supermind.design
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https://www.supermind.design/database
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www.scrintal.com www.scrintal.com
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Registered 2022-09-07
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www.npr.org www.npr.org
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Perhaps in addition to reparations, we should be taking a closer look at poverty in general. We need to raise up the poorest among us. This will ease the political issue of whites who feel like they're being (unfairly) left behind. It should be a multi-racial effort.
We need to have a second Resonstruction.
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G.I. Bill, which was theoretically open to everyone, including to women, but that very few Black people could take advantage of because most colleges wouldn't admit them.
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www.cs.cmu.edu www.cs.cmu.edu
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You are all computer scientists. You know what FINITE AUTOMATA can do. You know what TURING MACHINES can do. For example, Finite Automata can add but not multiply. Turing Machines can compute any computable function. Turing machines are incredibly more powerful than Finite Automata. Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil. Think about it. It tells you something about the power of writing. Without writing, you are reduced to a finite automaton. With writing you have the extraordinary power of a Turing machine.
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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It wasn’t zealous in that we were told exactly what to read and what to think about the books, but it was conveyed to us that certain books really did matter and that you were involved in some rearguard action for the profound human values in these books. This was conveyed very powerfully—that the way to learn how to live and to live properly was to read English literature—and it worked for me. I was taught close, attentive reading, and to ironize the ambitions of grand theory. I was educated to believe that A.E. Housman was more interesting than Hegel, and I do.
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I don’t know what that knowing was a knowing about.
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He also reads between consultations, whenever he can. As he puts it, “I need to hear other voices.”
There's some irony in a therapist saying that he needs to "hear other voices".
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Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe. So when I write something and it sounds good, I leave it in, usually, to see what it sounds like to someone else. To somebody else it might sound awful or brash, but I want to be able to have the courage of my brashness. I don’t leave things in that I know to be terrible, or that I don’t, as it were, find interesting—I don’t do that—but if there’s a doubt about it and it sounds interesting, I’ll leave it in. And I want to be free to do that, because that’s why I write. When I write, things occur to me. It’s a way of thinking. But you can perform your thinking instead of just thinking it.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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if you're thinking without 00:03:26 writing chances are you're fooling yourself we're only
If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking. —Leslie Lamport.“Thinking Above the Code.” Lecture presented at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft Research, July 15, 2014. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/leslie-lamport-thinking-code/. Timestamp: 03:26
Link to:<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/rvisgFDXEe2s-SuJJGw3cA<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/yEFMHoCkEeyl34fItJe__w
Note that the spoken quote is different from the written quote.
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www.microsoft.com www.microsoft.com
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Lamport, Leslie. “Thinking Above the Code.” Lecture presented at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft Research, July 15, 2014. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/leslie-lamport-thinking-code/.
Presentation slides presumably available at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/leslie_lamport.pdf
see also: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/code-bugs-programming-why-we-need-specs/
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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In the words of the cartoonist Dick Guindon:Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.
https://www.wired.com/2013/01/code-bugs-programming-why-we-need-specs/
apparently quoted from Guindon: Michigan So Far<br /> see: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3403680-guindon-michigan-so-far#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWriting%20is%20nature's%20way%20of,how%20sloppy%20your%20thinking%20is.%E2%80%9D
Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/yEFMHoCkEeyl34fItJe__w along with the commentary there. This quote is another example of this fallacy.
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www.denizcemonduygu.com www.denizcemonduygu.com
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https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/browse/
History of Philosophy: Summarized & Visualized
This could be thought of as a form of digital, single-project zettelkasten dedicated to philosophy. It's got people, sources, and ideas which are cross linked in a Luhmann-sense (without numbering) though not in a topical index-sense. Interestingly it has not only a spatial interface and shows spatial relationships between people and ideas over time using a timeline, but it also indicates—using colored links—the ideas of disagreement/contrast/refutation and agreement/similarity/expansion.
What other (digital) tools of thought provide these sorts of visualization affordances?
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read%E2%80%93eval%E2%80%93print_loop
aliases: interactive toplevel, language shell
read-eval-print loop (REPL)
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Pol Baladas https://batou.xyz<br /> Fermat<br /> https://fermat.ws/<br /> https://app.fermat.ws/
I'm a [[TiddlyWiki Maximalist]]. —Boris Mann
Paul Shen https://twitter.com/_paulshen<br /> Natto<br /> https://natto.dev
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natto.dev natto.dev
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Natto https://natto.dev<br /> built by Paul Shen https://twitter.com/_paulshen
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I am less worried about natural disaster than my own negligence. I take the cards with me too much. I am not stationary in my office and so to use the cards I am taking them. I am afraid they will lost or destroyed. I have started to scan into apple notes. I will see how that goes. It is easy and might be a great overall solution.
episcopal-orthodox reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y77414/comment/isyqc7b/
As long as you're not using flimsy, standard paper for your slips like Luhmann (they deteriorate too rapidly with repeated use), you can frame your carrying them around more positively by thinking that use over time creates a lovely patina to your words and ideas. The value of this far outweighs the fear of loss, at least for me. And if you're still concerned, there's always the option that you could use ars memoria to memorize all of your cards and meditate on them combinatorially using Llullan wheels the way Raymond Llull originally did. 🛞🗃️🚀🤩
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Worried about paper cards being lost or destroyed .t3_y77414._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } I am loving using paper index cards. I am, however, worried that something could happen to the cards and I could lose years of work. I did not have this work when my notes were all online. are there any apps that you are using to make a digital copy of the notes? Ideally, I would love to have a digital mirror, but I am not willing to do 2x the work.
u/LBHO https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y77414/worried_about_paper_cards_being_lost_or_destroyed/
As a firm believer in the programming principle of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), I can appreciate the desire not to do the work twice.
Note card loss and destruction is definitely a thing folks have worried about. The easiest thing may be to spend a minute or two every day and make quick photo back ups of your cards as you make them. Then if things are lost, you'll have a back up from which you can likely find OCR (optical character recognition) software to pull your notes from to recreate them if necessary. I've outlined some details I've used in the past. Incidentally, opening a photo in Google Docs will automatically do a pretty reasonable OCR on it.
I know some have written about bringing old notes into their (new) zettelkasten practice, and the general advice here has been to only pull in new things as needed or as heavily interested to ease the cognitive load of thinking you need to do everything at once. If you did lose everything and had to restore from back up, I suspect this would probably be the best advice for proceeding as well.
Historically many have worried about loss, but the only actual example of loss I've run across is that of Hans Blumenberg whose zettelkasten from the early 1940s was lost during the war, but he continued apace in another dating from 1947 accumulating over 30,000 cards at the rate of about 1.5 per day over 50 some odd years.
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Local file Local file
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Sayers, Dorothy L. The Lost Tools of Learning. E. T. Heron, 1948.
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For the sole true end of educationis simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whateverinstruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
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We have lostthe tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, thechisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, wehave merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task andno more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no manever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.”
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disport itself happily in its new and extended Quadrivium withoutpassing through the Trivium. But the scholastic tradition, though broken andmaimed, still lingered in the public schools and universities:
Is it possible that with the flowering of the storehouse of knowledge and the rise of information overload following Gutenberg's moveable type, we became overly enamored with Sayers' subject-based Quadrivium that we forgot to focus on the basics of the Trivium?
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For the tools of learning are the same, in any and everysubject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get themastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effortexpended by the person who has not the tools at his command.
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Rhetoric should be taken at aboutfourteen, the first category of pupil should study Grammar from about nineto eleven, and Dialectic from twelve to fourteen;
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for as Dialectic will have shown all branches oflearning to be inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to show that all knowledgeis one.
How did we shift from inter-related subjects and "one knowledge" of rhetoric in the Middle Ages to such strict departmentalization in the academy to only now be moving back toward multi-disciplinary research?
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hildren sit in judgment on their masters;
All children sit in judgment on their masters;
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It will doubtless be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert Ageto browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them perfectlyintolerable. My answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow;and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalised togood purpose as allowed to run away into the sands.
HA!
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At this stage, it does not matter nearly so muchthat these things should be fully understood as that they should be knownand remembered. Remember, it is material that we are collecting.
Perhaps the collector's fallacy may turn out to be useful in this broader argument?
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The modern tendency is totry and force rational explanations on a child’s mind at too early an age
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The grammar of History should consist, I think, of dates, events, anecdotes,and personalities. A set of dates to which one can peg all later historicalknowledge is of enormous help later on in establishing the perspective ofhistory. It does not greatly matter which dates: those of the Kings of Englandwill do very nicely, provided they are accompanied by pictures of costume,architecture, and all “every-day things,” so that the mere mention of a datecalls up a strong visual presentment of the whole period.
She seems to be encouraging the association of dates with easily visualized images, but is she doing so with the knowledge of the art of memory?
I suspect not, but we could look for other evidence here.
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Trivium adapts itself with a singularappropriateness to these three ages: Grammar to the Poll-parrot, Dialectic tothe Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic Age.
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We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone theschool leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachersslave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes aburden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largelyfrustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absencecan only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
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We will endow them with exceptionally docile parents;
Hilarious that she sees "exceptionally docile parents" as a necessary condition for educational reform!
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the idea of playing Shakespeare’splays as he wrote them, and not in the “modernised” versions of Cibber andGarrick, which once seemed to be the latest thing in theatrical progress.
Is she mistaken here? Wasn't it Garrick who rewrote/modernized Shakespeare and Cibber, his rival, who deplored him for it?
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Distinguo
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By teaching them all to read, we have left them atthe mercy of the printed word.
Knowing how to read without the associated apparatus of the trivium, leaves people open to believing just about anything. You can read words, but knowing what to do with those words, endow them with meaning, and reason with them. (summarization)
Oral cultures with knowledge systems engrained into them would likely have included trivium-esque structures to allow their users to not only better remember to to better think and argue.
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The proper subject of theargument is thus seen to be the distinction between location and extensionin space; the matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be thenature of angels
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A glib speaker in the Brains Trust onceentertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helplessrage) by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to knowhow many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, Ihope, that it never was a “matter of faith”; it was simply a debating exercise,whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material,and if so, did they occupy space?
The question "how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle" was an argumentation exercise, and not the sort of frippery we imagine it to be today.
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Whether they were in themselves any more hackneyed and trivialthan the usual subjects set nowadays for “essay-writing” I should not like tosay: we may ourselves grow a little weary of “A Day in My Holidays,” “WhatI should Like to Do when I Leave School,” and all the rest of it.
Poking a little bit of fun at essays like "What I did on my summer vacation"...
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modern education concentrates onteaching subjects, leaving the method of thinking, arguing, and expressingone’s conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along;
Compared to classical education, modern education concentrates on teaching only "subject" areas and relying on one to osmose the methods for thinking, arguing, and properly expressing one's ideas as they proceed, if in fact they do at all.
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Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic andDisputation.
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If not, his teacher and his fellow-pupils, trained alongthe same lines, would be quick to point out where he was wrong; for it wasthey whom he had to seek to persuade.
Surely Sayers would be appalled by the current state of political argument... The "Sunday Shows" are full of talking points and all of the wrong sorts of "rhetoric" without much, if any basis in fact.
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Thewhole of the Trivium was in fact intended to teach the pupil the proper use ofthe tools of learning, before he began to apply them to “subjects” at all
The point of putting the Trivium in front of the Quadrivium is that the student is first taught the use of the "tools of learning" before they are then taught how to apply them to broad subjects as a means of learning how to learn.
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Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—a defect traceablethrough all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—)that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we faillamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learneverything, except the art of learning.
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Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere andnoticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or howoften, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply thathe was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which he hasalready defined them?
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Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curiousinability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular questionwhich interests them?
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laudator temporis acti
laudator temporis acti translates as "a praiser of times past"
Calls to mind:
Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod quaerit et inventis miser abstinet ac timet uti, vel quod res omnis timide gelideque ministrat, dilator, spe longus, iners avidusque futuri, difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti se puero, castigator censorque minorum. —Horace's Ars Poetica (line 173)
Many ills encompass an old man, whether because he seeks gain, and then miserably holds aloof from his store and fears to use it, or because, in all that he does, he lacks fire and courage, is dilatory and slow to form hopes, is sluggish and greedy of a longer life, peevish, surly, given to praising the days he spent as a boy, and to reproving and condemning the young. (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough)
In Horace's version he's talking about a old curmudgeon and the phrase often has a pejorative tinge. It generally is used to mean someone who defends earlier periods of history ("the good old days") usually prior to their own lives and which they haven't directly experienced, as better than the present.
Compare this with the sentiment behind Donald J. Trump's "Make America Great Again". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again
The end of the passage also has historical precedent and hints of "You kids get off my lawn!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_kids_get_off_my_lawn!
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laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com
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Laudator Temporis Acti
https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/
Michael Gilleland is an antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon.
The title of the blog and Gilleland's calling himself a curmudgeon calls to mind Horace...
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latin.stackexchange.com latin.stackexchange.com
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[T.S.] Eliot stood—as he once famously said of himself—for conservatism in politics, classicism in literature, and Catholicism, or rather Anglo-Catholicism, in religion. He looked back into the past, the mediaeval past, as a confirmed laudator temporis acti and in the mediaeval past he looked back not only to John Donne among the metaphysical poets, nor only to William Shakespeare among the Elizabethan dramatists, but before them to the great Dante among Italian poets and behind Dante, though not so obviously, to St. Thomas Aquinas among the scholastic theologians. (From "T.S. Eliot's Metaphysics" by Peter Milward, Culture and Civilization 2009.)
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app.sane.fyi app.sane.fyiSane1
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Ida JosefiinaInfopunk. Into pdfs, information systems that support intentional thinking, cyborgs, and the future of humanity. This thought space is an introduction to me and my work.
https://app.sane.fyi/space/ida-ida-josefiina-75044
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Émile flew offthe shelves in 18th-century Paris. In fact, booksellers found it more profitable torent it out by the hour than to sell it. Ultimately the excitement got too much forthe authorities and Émile was banned in Paris and burned in Geneva
Émile: or On Education was so popular that it was rented out by the hour for additional profit instead of being sold outright. [summary]
When did book rental in education spaces become a business model? What has it looked like historically?
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Rousseau’sheretical view was that anything which was outside children’s experience wouldbe meaningless to them, much as Plato, Comenius, and others had warned. Hisinsights had condensed principally out of the prevailing intellectual atmosphereat the time—empiricism, explicated by philosophers such as John Locke. We’lllook at Locke and Rousseau in more detail in Chapter 2.
Just as the ideas of liberty and freedom were gifted to us by Indigenous North Americans as is shown by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, is it possible that the same sorts of ideas but within the educational sphere were being transmitted by Indigenous intellectuals to Europe in the same way? Is Rousseau's 18th century book Emile, or On Education of this sort?
What other sorts of philosophies invaded Western thought at this time?
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who shockedthe world with Émile: or On Education ([1762] 1993).
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile, or On Education. Translated by Alan Bloom. 1762. Reprint, Basic Books, 1979. https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/jean-jacques-rousseau/emile/9780465019311/
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Czech teacherComenius (1592–1670). He championed universal education, which hepromoted in his Didactica magna, arguing for the commonality of education—itwas for everyone, including, shockingly, females.
Comenius championed not only lifelong learning in Didactica magna, but he also argued for educating females, something not commonplace in the 17th century.
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‘Nothing should be taught to theyoung...unless it is not only permitted, but actually demanded by their age andmental strength.’
—Comenius (1592-1670) in Didactica magna
This is broadly similar to the spirit of much of Indigenous pedagogy, particularly in societies in which staged oral learning was a privilege.
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William Petty, a doctor in Cromwell’s army in 1647, noted that ‘...we seechildren do delight in drums, pipes, fiddles, guns made of elder sticks, andbellowes noses, piped keys, etc., painting flags and ensigns with elder-berriesand corn poppy, making ships with paper, and setting even nut-shells aswimming, handling the tools of workmen as soon as they turn their backs, andtrying to work themselves’ (reported in the Harleian Miscellany, 1810).
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Elizabeth I’s tutor, Roger Ascham (1515–68), promotedlearning-by-doing in The Scholemaster: ‘Bring not up your children in learningby compulsion and feare,’ he said, ‘but by playing and pleasure.’
Tags
- textbooks
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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A friend of mine, well versed in all sorts of PKM and stuff, was convinced the ZK was beneficial, but took a long time before you started seeing benefits. My experience was completely different. I think I had about 5 permanent cards established when I made my first jump to a new idea... I don't know if the idea is any good at this moment, but I got a chill up my spine when I did it. I have more cards now, and have had a few more "new thoughts" that I would not have had otherwise. Don't put it off.
The zettelkasten can be a useful educational substrate for thinking in as few as five cards.
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www.dla-marbach.de www.dla-marbach.de
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"In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first," instructed the poet Jean Paul to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812.
Writer Jean Paul on the importance of his Zettelkasten.
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www.dla-marbach.de www.dla-marbach.de
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»Bei Feuer sind die schwarzeingebundnen Exzerpten zuerst zu retten«, wies der Dichter Jean Paul seine Frau vor Antritt einer Reise im Jahr 1812 an.
"In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first," the poet Jean Paul instructed his wife before setting out on a journey in 1812.
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ryanholiday.net ryanholiday.net
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What if something happened to your box? My house recently got robbed and I was so fucking terrified that someone took it, you have no idea. Thankfully they didn’t. I am actually thinking of using TaskRabbit to have someone create a digital backup. In the meantime, these boxes are what I’m running back into a fire for to pull out (in fact, I sometimes keep them in a fireproof safe).
His collection is incredibly important to him. He states this in a way that's highly reminiscent of Jean Paul.
"In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first." —instructions from Jean Paul to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812 #
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Local file Local file
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Helbig, Daniela K. “Life without Toothache: Hans Blumenberg’s Zettelkasten and History of Science as Theoretical Attitude.” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 1 (2019): 91–112. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2019.0005
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A historical perspective on the sciencesbrings into view controversies, and some beliefs and methodological con-victions that retrospectively turn out to be false—among Blumenberg’scharacteristically colorful picks are Augustine writing that “the stars werecreated for the consolation of people obliged to be active at night,” and“Linnaeus’s opinion that the song of the birds at the first light of morningwas instituted as consolation for the insomnia of the old.”84
something poetic about these examples even if they're poor science...
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His favorite example to illustrate thecontingency of this process is Nicholas of Cusa’s spoon-maker (the corre-sponding note card would have been struck through in red many times). In1450, he draws his self-esteem from his technical creation, the carved-woodspoon. The spoon is a genuinely creative product in that it does not have aprecedent in nature—but making the spoon is a creative process only inimitation of divine creativity.
Another level of creativity above and beyond Demis Hassabis' three levels of creativity is that of divine creativity (or creativity ex nihilo). Perhaps Hassabis' poorly defined third type might aspire to this divine creativity in the limit?
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In “collaboration with his Zettelkasten,”61 Blumenberg worked to por-tray these tensions between different and changing historical meanings ofscientific inquiry.
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Blumenberg quotes GeorgChristoph Lichtenberg’s reaction to William Herschel’s 1781 discovery ofUranus: “Inventing an unfailing means against toothache, curing itinstantly, would be well worth as much and more than discovering anotherplanet.”
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