Note takers reading this may appreciate that Mills had a note taking system:

https://hypothes.is/a/Wbm09giuEe2-tH8vp1LziA<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/_7SQkPdFEeunDX9htFmQ8w

This particular note and my notice of it is an interesting case of faint recognition and combinatorial creativity at play. I vaguely recognized Mills' name but was able to quickly find it within my reading notes to discover I'd run across him and his intellectual practice before.

we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.16

1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 9.

I love this quote and it's interesting food for thought.

Framing problems from the perspectives of a single individual versus a majority of people can be a powerful tool.

The idea of the "welfare queen" was possibly too powerful because it singled out an imaginary individual rather than focusing on millions of people with a variety of backgrounds and diversity. Compare this with the fundraisers for impoverished children in Sally Stuther's Christian Children's Fund (aka ChildFund) which, while they show thousands of people in trouble, quite often focus on one individual child. This helps to personalize the plea and the charity actually assigned each donor a particular child they were helping out.

How might this set up be used in reverse to change the perspective and opinions of those who think the "welfare queen" is a real thing instead of a problematic trope?

Holy shit!

What does the full list of available means-tested programs look like?

Open question:<br /> Why is the word "below" used with numbers like "150 percent below the poverty line" when in fact this number indicates near, but above, poverty based on my reading?

Mark Rank and Thomas Hirschl's research based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) using risk assessments using life tables show that nearly 60 percent of Americans between 20 and 75 will live for at least 1 year below the poverty line and 75% of Americans will encounter poverty or near-poverty (defined as 150 percent below the official poverty line).

Cross reference:<br /> Mark R. Rank and Thomas A. Hirschl, “The Likelihood of Experiencing Relative Poverty Across the Life Course,” PLoS One 10 (2015): E01333513.

One of the underlying commonalities about the various myths of poverty is that we tend to "other" those that it effects. The "them" we stigmatize with the ills of poverty really look more like "us", and in fact, they are.

Rather than victim shame and blame those in poverty, we ought to spend more of our time fixing the underlying disease instead of spending the time, effort, energy, and money on attempting to remedy the symptoms (eg. excessive policing, et al.) Not only is it more beneficial, but cheaper in the long run.

Related:<br /> Gladwell, Malcolm. “Million-Dollar Murray.” The New Yorker, February 5, 2006. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/million-dollar-murray (.pdf copy available at https://housingmatterssc.org/million-dollar-murray/)

The authors here do themselves and their public a disservice by repeating the myth up front before trying to dispel it. This may psychologically tend to reinforce it rather than priming the reader to come to believe the opposite.

A better framing might instead be George Lakoff's truth sandwich: present the truth/actuality, then talk about the myth and then repeat the truth again.

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

It can apparently apply to either income inequality or wealth inequality, so it may have slightly different meanings based on this underlying context.

Delve into this question of definition.

qualify

compare with income inequality: https://hypothes.is/a/_JLGuj3HEe2dJFdOJRcvaQ

Did they really mean "tenacious" here or perhaps, given the political climate and perception, "tenuous"?

There is a variety of confounding myths in America which tend to hold us down. These include economic mobility, meritocracy, poverty, and the land of opportunity.

With respect to the "land of opportunity", does positive press of a small number of cases from an earlier generation outweigh the actual experience of the majority?

There was a study on The Blitz in London and England in general in World War II which showed that despite high losses in general, enough people knew one or more who'd lost someone or something to the extreme but that the losses weren't debilitating from a loss perspective and generally served to boost overall morale. Higher losses may have been more demoralizing and harmful, but didn't happen. (Find this source: possibly Malcolm Gladwell??)

Is this sort of psychological effect at play socially and politically in America and thereby confounding our progress?

https://sociology.wustl.edu/people/mark-rank

Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare Washington University in Saint Louis,

https://www.ship.edu/academics/colleges/cas/programs/sociology/sociology_faculty/

Dr. Lawrence Eppard<br /> leeppard@ship.edu<br /> Grove Hall 437<br /> 717-477-1596<br /> Ph.D., University of Florida

Areas of specialization are social stratification and inequalities, poverty and social welfare, racial inequality, culture, sociology of families and social theory.

https://psychology.ucsc.edu/about/people/faculty.php?uid=hbullock

Heather E. Bullock is an American social psychologist. She is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Social Enterprise, and Participatory Governance at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bullock is known for her research on people's beliefs about economic disparities and the consequences of stereotypical beliefs about the poor on public policy. This includes work examining attributions about poverty made by news media, and how such attributions influence public support of welfare policies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_E._Bullock

https://dictionary.apa.org/phonological-loop

The practice of repeating items as a means of attempting to place them into short-term memory is called maintenance rehearsal. Examples of this practice include repeating a new acquaintance's name or perhaps their phone number multiple times as a means of helping to remember it either for the short term or potentially the long term.

Research on the levels-of processing model of memory indicates that maintenance rehearsal is not as effective at promoting long term memory as methods like elaborative rehearsal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRssjvU2d-s

Starts out with some of the personal histories of how both got into the note making space.

This got more interesting for me around the 1:30 hour mark, but I was waiting for the material that would have shown up at the 3 hour mark (which doesn't exist...).

Scott spoke about the myths of zettelkasten. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/urawkd/the_myths_of_zettelkasten/

He also mentions maintenance rehearsal versus elaborative rehearsal. These are both part of spaced repetition. The creation of one's own cards helps play into both forms.

https://www.uclaextension.edu/sciences-math/math-statistics/course/theory-and-applications-continued-fractions-math-x-45150

Mike Miller relayed to me on 2022-09-27 on the first meeting of his class Theory and Applications of Continued Fractions that he met a professor colleague walking on campus who mistakenly thought that he was teaching an 8th grade class on basic fractions for the UCLA math department.

Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Vladimirovich_Gnedenko

He wrote with/worked with Khinchin and Kolmogorov.

Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Khinchin

Khinchin, Aleksandr Yakovlevich. Continued Fractions. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.145.3631.478.b

https://gizmodo.com/justin-long-knows-life-is-short-1849448109

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

ta ra - bye bye

We [the Welsh] are a magic people, constantly doing magic tricks which is why we need to say "ta da" all the time.

https://welearnwelsh.com/blog/weird-welsh-words/

https://welearnwelsh.com/

A fun little website from someone learning/sharing Welsh.

https://english.radio.cz/archaeologists-prague-uncover-ancient-neolithic-structure-8760696

This seems to be the source of other similar articles around the net on science, archaeology, and art sites.

Will need to hunt for primary literature on roundels for more detail.

There's an irony here in that this "cult" may have actually been a cult of teachers and students. Should the broader thesis bear out, we're going to have lots of references to these cults of teachers lingering in the literature....

https://www.livescience.com/neolithic-roundel-structure-prague

Roundels, primarily located in the area around the Czech Republic, enjoyed about 300 years of popularity before disappearing around 4600 BCE.

Sounds like this shares many of the potential features of Stonehenge, stone and timber circles, and menhirs that fit into Lynne Kelly's thesis on mnemonic devices.

Reading and studying it all without any regard to the Indigenous culture. Steve Martin is using Western perspectives to attempt to understand non-Western art which has a different basis.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/steve-martin-indigenous-art-national-arts-club-2180438

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/28/publisher-blocks-access-ebooks-students-faculty-scramble

I still say that students should do their own work on researching and identifying textbooks and not their professors. They should all be optional and never required. This would fix the textbook issue rapidly.

Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Belknap Press, 2014. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674729018

I agree with many that the black and red are overwhelming on many and make the book a bit less approachable. Warm tones and rich wooden boxes would be more welcome. The 8.5x11" filing cabinets just won't fly. I did like some with the drawer frames/pulls, but put a more generic idea in the frame (perhaps "Ideas"?). From the batch so far, some of my favorites are #64 TopHills, #21 & #22 BigPoints, #13, 14 D'Estudio. Unless that pull quote is from Luhmann or maybe Eco or someone internationally famous, save it for the rear cover or maybe one of the inside flaps. There's an interesting and approachable stock photo I've been sitting on that might work for your cover: Brain and ZK via https://www.theispot.com/stock/webb. Should be reasonably licensable and doesn't have a heavy history of use on the web or elsewhere.

https://www.wrexhamafc.co.uk/news/2022/september/statement--domestic--international-streaming/

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/26/texas-attorney-general-ken-paxton-subpoena-abortion-lawsuit/

https://www.wrexhamafc.co.uk/news/2022/september/the-impact-of-welcome-to-wrexham/

https://opportunityinsights.org/

https://www.aei.org/articles/what-malcolm-gladwell-gets-wrong-about-poverty/

What creates "strong families"? It's definitely more than a two-parent household. Economic and social support are highly helpful as well as a myriad of other factors.

Watch the potential for subtle right leaning bias here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute#Political_stance_and_impact

If two-parent families are so important, where is the support for all two-parent families? Where is economic support for these going to magically appear? Is he pushing that agenda?

The arrest and incarceration rates for African-American men is primarily a tax on Black families which tends to split them up and destabilize them appalling rates. Why not mention this as something that could be helped in his argument here?

He seems to be doing a lot of cherry picking.

As he rightly says they "might be", but where are his small scale experiments providing any support for these claims??

School-choice is lovely in major cities that might provide it, though often it's a socio-economic ghetto creator moving privileged white children from their dark skinned neighbors. Why not force better public education and funding by rolling back the strangle hold on economic spending going back to Regan? School-choice is nice, but it continually feels more like a dog whistle for institutional and structural racism.

And don't forget that for the smaller communities that only have one school option things are even much more dire.

This seems to fall back on the trope of "two-parent families are the natural state" when in reality, since the late 80's one's chances are better with a two-parent, two-income family which provides far greater stability. His argument here is conflating multiple complex items, an issue he takes with Gladwell himself.

Why not peel apart this two-parent claim the same way? I suspect he may be nodding to the single-earner two-parent mode, but how prevalent is this in American culture now? What other pieces also underpin this? And is it different by state, by race, by culture, etc.

Cross reference with: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/raj-chettys-american-dream/592804

I should read more of Chetty's primary material here.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/raj-chettys-american-dream/592804/

read in July 2019, but didn't catch the reference.

Gladwell, Malcolm. “Million-Dollar Murray.” The New Yorker, February 5, 2006. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/million-dollar-murray (.pdf copy available at https://housingmatterssc.org/million-dollar-murray/)

https://thevoroscope.com/2022/06/27/sum-total-human-knowledge-4/

https://thevoroscope.com/2022/06/20/sum-total-human-knowledge-3/

https://thevoroscope.com/2022/06/13/sum-total-human-knowledge-2/

https://thevoroscope.com/2022/06/06/sum-total-human-knowledge-1/

https://udcc.org/index.php/site/page?view=subject_coverage

Subject coverage of the UDC.

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

http://www.styluslabs.com/

Write300.app

imposed system or on one’s own non-generalizable system, at least when it comes to the subdivisions.

Heyde makes the suggestion of using one's own classification system yet again and even advises against "having to rely on a stranger's imposed system". Does Luhmann see this advice and follow its general form, but adopting a numbering system ostensibly similar, but potentially more familiar to him from public administration?

In a break from the more traditional subject heading filing system of many commonplacing and zettelkasten methods, in addition to this sort of scheme Heyde also suggests potentially using the Dewey Decimal System for organizing one's knowledge.

While Luhmann doesn't use Dewey's system, he does follow the broader advice which allows creating a dense numbering system though he does use a different numbering scheme.

that the sheetification can also be done based on other principles.

Heyde specifically calls the reader to consider other methods in general and points out the Dewey Decimal Classification system as a possibility. This suggestion also may have prompted Luhmann to do some evolutionary work for his own needs.

What is this??

While Heyde spends a significant amount of time on encouraging one to index and file their ideas under one or more subject headings, he address the objection:

“Doesn’t this neglect the importance of sequentiality, context and development, i.e. doesn’t this completely make away with the well-thought out unity of thoughts that the original author created, when ideas are put on individual sheets, particularly when creating excerpts of longer scientific works?"

He suggests that one file such ideas under the same heading and then numbers them sequentially to keep the original author's intention. This might be useful advice for a classroom setting, but perhaps isn't as useful in other contexts.

But for Luhmann's use case for writing and academic research, this advice may actually be counter productive. While one might occasionally care about another author's train of thought, one is generally focusing on generating their own train of thought. So why not take this advice to advance their own work instead of simply repeating the ideas of another? Take the ideas of others along with your own and chain them together using sequential numbers for your own purposes (publishing)!!

So while taking Heyde's advice and expand upon it for his own uses and purposes, Luhmann is encouraged to chain ideas together and number them. Again he does this numbering in a way such that new ideas can be interspersed as necessary.

related, but not drawn from as I've been thinking about the continuum of taxonomies and subject headings for a while...

On the Spectrum of Topic Headings in note making

Any reasonable note one may take will likely have a hierarchical chain of tags/subject headings/keywords going from the broad to the very specific. One might start out with something broad like "humanities" (as opposed to science), and proceed into "history", "anthropology", "biological anthropology", "evolution", and even more specific. At the bottom of the chain is the specific atomic idea on the card itself. Each of the subject headings helps to situate the idea and provide the context in which it sits, but how useful within a note taking system is having one or more of these tags on it? What about overlaps with other broader subjects (one will note that "evolution" might also sit under "science" / "biology" as well), but that note may have a different tone and perspective than the prior one.

This becomes an interesting problem or issue as one explores ideas in a pre-designed note taking system. As a student just beginning to explore anthropology, one may tag hundreds of notes with anthropology to the point that the meaning of the tag is so diluted that a search of the index becomes useless as there's too much to sort through underneath it. But as one continues their studies in the topic further branches and sub headings will appear to better differentiate the ideas. This process will continue as the space further differentiates. Of course one may continue their research into areas that don't have a specific subject heading until they accumulate enough ideas within that space. (Take for example Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work which is now known under the heading of Behavioral Economics, a subject which broadly didn't exist before their work.) The note taker might also leverage this idea as they tag their own work as specifically as they might so as not to pollute their system as it grows without bound (or at least to the end of their lifetime).

The design of one's note taking system should take these eventualities into account and more easily allow the user to start out broad, but slowly hone in on direct specificity.

Some of this principle of atomicity of ideas and the growth from broad to specific can be seen in Luhmann's zettelkasten (especially ZK II) which starts out fairly broad and branches into the more specific. The index reflects this as well and each index heading ideally points to the most specific sub-card which begins the discussion of that particular topic.

Perhaps it was this narrowing of specificity which encouraged Luhmann to start ZKII after years of building ZKII which had a broader variety of topics?

Heydes Overbearing System

Heyde's method spends almost a full page talking about what to do if one extends a note or writes longer notes. He talks about using larger sheets of paper, carbon copies, folding, dating, clipping, and even stapling.

His method seems to skip the idea of extending a particular card of potentially 2 or more "twins"/"triplets"/"quadruplets" which might then also need to be extended too. Luhmann probably had a logical problem with this as tracking down all the originals and extending them would be incredibly problematic. As a result, he instead opted to put each card behind it's closest similar idea (and number it thus).

If anything, Heyde's described method is one of the most complete of it's day (compare with Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos, Webb, Sertillanges, et al.) He discusses a variety of pros and cons, hints and tips, but he also goes deeper into some of the potential flaws and pitfalls for the practicing academic. As a result, many of the flaws he discusses and their potential work arounds (making multiple carbon copies, extending notes, etc.) add to the bulk of the description of the system and make it seem almost painful and overbearing for the affordances it allows. As a result, those reading it with a small amount of knowledge of similar traditions may have felt that there might be a better or easier system. I suspect that Niklas Luhmann was probably one of these.

It's also likely that due to these potentially increasing complexities in such note taking systems that they became to large and unwieldly for people to see the benefit in using. Combined with the emergence of the computer from this same time forward, it's likely that this time period was the beginning of the end for such analog systems and experimenting with them.

Heyde specifically highlights that planning for one's future search efforts by choosing the right keyword or even multiple keywords "seems to be the biggest complaint about the entire system of the slip box and its merit."

Niklas Luhmann apparently spent some time thinking about this, or perhaps even practicing it, before changing his system so that the issue was no longer a problem. As a result, Luhmann's system is much simpler to use and maintain.

Given his primary use of his slip box for academic research and writing, perhaps his solution was in part motivated by putting the notes and ideas exactly where he would both be able to easily find them, but also exactly where he would need them for creating final products in journal articles and books.

With respect to Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten, it seems he eschewed the Heyde's advice to use subject headings as the Anschrift (address). Instead, much like a physical street address or card card catalog system, he substituted a card address instead. This freed him up from needing to copy cards multiple times to insert them in different places as well as needing to create multiple cards to properly index the ideas and their locations.

Without this subtle change Luhmann's 90,000 card collection could have easily been 4-5 times its size.

As many people used slip boxes in 1930s Germany, publishers sold texts, not as typical books, but as file card collections!

Link to: Suggestion that Scott Scheper publish his book on zettelkasten as a zettelkasten.

often repeated advice, especially in the modern period.

Just like Heyde indicated about the slip box note taking system with respect to traditional notebook based systems in 1931, one of the reasons we still aren't broadly using Heyde's system is that we "do not know any better". This is compounded with the fact that the computer revolution makes information retrieval much easier than it had been before. However there is such an information glut and limitations to search, particularly if it's stored in multiple places, that it may be advisable to go back to some of these older, well-tried methods.

Link to ideas of "single source" of notes as opposed to multiple storage locations as is seen in social media spaces in the 2010-2020s.

Heyde indicates how "valuable notes and chains of thought are" but also points out "how uncontrollable and irretrievable" they are.

This statement is strong evidence along with others in this chapter which may have inspired Niklas Luhmann to invent his iteration of the zettelkasten method of excerpting and making notes.

(link to: Clemens /Heyde and Luhmann timeline: https://hypothes.is/a/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA)

Presumably he may have either heard or seen others talking about or using these general methods either during his undergraduate or law school experiences. Even with some scant experience, this line may have struck him significantly as an organization barrier of earlier methods.

Why have notes strewn about in a box or notebook as Heyde says? Why spend the time indexing everything and then needing to search for it later? Why not take the time to actively place new ideas into one's box as close as possibly to ideas they directly relate to?

But how do we manage this in a findable way? Since we can't index ideas based on tabs in a notebook or even notebook page numbers, we need to have some sort of handle on where ideas are in slips within our box. The development of European card catalog systems had started in the late 1700s, and further refinements of Melvil Dewey as well as standardization had come about by the early to mid 1900s. One could have used the Dewey Decimal System to index their notes using smaller decimals to infinitely intersperse cards on a growing basis.

But Niklas Luhmann had gone to law school and spent time in civil administration. He would have been aware of aktenzeichen file numbers used in German law/court settings and public administration. He seems to have used a simplified version of this sort of filing system as the base of his numbering system. And why not? He would have likely been intimately familiar with its use and application, so why not adopt it or a simplified version of it for his use? Because it's extensible in a a branching tree fashion, one can add an infinite number of cards or files into the midst of a preexisting collection. And isn't this just the function aktenzeichen file numbers served within the German court system? Incidentally these file numbers began use around 1932, but were likely heavily influenced by the Austrian conscription numbers and house numbers of the late 1770s which also influenced library card cataloging numbers, so the whole system comes right back around. (Ref Krajewski here).

(Cross reference/ see: https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA

Other pieces he may have been attempting to get around include the excessive work of additional copying involved in this piece as well as a lot of the additional work of indexing.

One will note that Luhmann's index was much more sparse than without his methods. Often in books, a reader will find a reference or two in an index and then go right to the spot they need and read around it. Luhmann did exactly this in his sequence of cards. An index entry or two would send him to the general local and sifting through a handful of cards would place him in the correct vicinity. This results in a slight increase in time for some searches, but it pays off in massive savings of time of not needing to cross index everything onto cards as one goes, and it also dramatically increases the probability that one will serendipitously review over related cards and potentially generate new insights and links for new ideas going into one's slip box.

An explicit reference in 1931 in a section on note taking to cross links between entries in accounting ledgers. This linking process is a a precursor to larger database processes seen in digital computing.

Were there other earlier references that are this explicit within either note making or accounting contexts? Surely... (See also: Beatrice Webb's scientific note taking)

Just the word "digital" computing defines that there must have been an "analog' computing which preceded it. However we think of digital computing in much broader terms than we may have of the analog process.

Human thinking is heavily influenced by associative links, so it's only natural that we should want to link our notes together on paper as we've done for tens of thousands of years (at least.)

According to Scott Scheper's conversation with Clemens Luhmann, Niklas' son, Niklas Luhmann read Heyde (1931) in 1951. He would have been 24 years old and just out of law school at the University of Freiburg (1946-1949) and starting into a career in public administration in Lüneburg. (It would have been before he went to Harvard in 1961 and before he left the civil service in 1962. (Wikipedia entry for dates here)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/

Good overview article of some of the psychology research behind misinformation in social media spaces including bots, AI, and the effects of cognitive bias.

Probably worth mining the story for the journal articles and collecting/reading them.

Could this be linked to my FUD thesis about decisions based on possibilities rather than realities?

This seems slightly different than the mere-exposure effect that Ahrens (2017) delineated. Are they same/different/related, but contextually different?

Popularity ≠ quality in social media.

early study relating to both culture and memory decay

What does memory decay scale as? Is it different for different levels of "stickiness"?

The upshot of this paper seems to be "information overload alone can explain why fake news can become viral."

Recall that this isn't new:

Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know

The new portions are the acceleration of the issue by social media and the inflammation by artificial intelligence.

In the attention economy, social media is the equivalent of fast food. Just like going out for fine dining or even healthier gourmet cooking at home, we need to make the time and effort to consume higher quality information sources. Books, journal articles, and longer forms of content with more editorial and review which take time and effort to produce are better choices.

In a society consumed with information overload, it is easier for our brains to allow our well evolved cognitive biases to decide not only what to pay attention to, but what to believe.

This sounds like interleaving?

Of course this idea of "learned right" sounds a lot like the problems built into "just". He defines it as meaning "understanding" but there's more he's packing into the word. While his vein example is lovely, the bigger issue is contextualizing everything all the time, which is something that commonly isn't done or even done well over time by educators. This work takes time and effort to help students do this as they're not doing it for themselves until much later in life.

retention is facilitated by acquisition conditions that prompt people to elaborate information in a way that increases the distinctiveness of their memory representations.” (Stein et al. 1984, 522)

Want to read this paper.

Isn't this a major portion of what many mnemotechniques attempt to do? "increase distinctiveness of memory representations"? And didn't he just wholly dismiss the entirety of mnemotechniques as "tricks" a few paragraphs back? (see: https://hypothes.is/a/dwktfDiuEe2sxaePuVIECg)

How can one build or design this into a pedagogical system? How is this potentially related to Andy Matuschak's mnemonic medium research?

Elaboration has been shown to be the most successful learning approach. (See McDaniel and Donnelly 1996) It is a two step process of being able to write about it and to use it in alternate contexts.

How is the Feynman Technique similar to/different from elaboration? It would seem to be missing the second portion.

This is one of the first times I've come across another word for part of the Feynman technique I've been looking for.

He's wholly wrong on this score because he lacks a deeper appreciation for how this works or its value to oral societies. He uses the word "trick" in a disparaging sense with respect to mnemotechniques.

Because Hermann Ebbinghaus' early studies on memory, retrieval, and spaced repetition focused on meaningless random letter combinations that ha no natural associations, he started a field of learning theories that separated the ideas of understanding and learning. Learning is creating connections between ideas we already know (contextualization).

What exactly are Robert Boice and Paul Silvia's methods? How do they differ from the conventional idea of "writing"?

What specifically does she define "writing" to be? What exactly is she writing, and how much? What does her process look like?

One might also consider the idea of active reading and writing notes. I may not "write" daily in the way she means, but my note writing, is cumulative and beneficial in the ways she describes in her list. I might further posit that the amount of work/effort it takes me to do my writing is far more fruitful and productive than her writing.

When I say writing, I mean focused note taking (either excerpting, rephrasing, or original small ideas which can be stitched together later). I don't think this is her same definition.

I'm curious how her process of writing generates new ideas and creativity specifically?

One might analogize the idea of active reading with a pen in hand as a sort of Einsteinian space-time. Many view reading and writing as to separate and distinct practices. What if they're melded together the way Einstein reconceptualized the space time continuum? The writing advice provided by those who write about commonplace books, zettelkasten, and general note taking combines an active reading practice with a focused writing practice that moves one toward not only more output, but higher quality output without the deleterious effects seen in other methods.

This quote sounds a lot like the sort of dogmatic advice that (Luhmann) zettelkasten converts might give. This process works for them, but it may not necessarily work for those who either aren't willing to invest in it, or for whom it just may not work with how their brains operate. Of course this doesn't mean that there isn't value to it for many.

There is little if any research that writing every day has any direct benefits.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_gy9DFtw5U

While it may be slightly more difficult to find larger metal/wood cases for the 4x6 or 5x8 cards, it's a minor nuisance and anyone who wants them will eventually find the right thing for them. Beyond this, choose the card size that feels right to you.

If you don't have an idea of what you need or like, try things out for 10-20 cards and see how it works for you, your handwriting size, and general needs. People have been using 3x5, 4x6, and even larger for hundreds of years without complaining about any major issues. If Carl Linnaeus managed to be okay with 3x5, which he hand cut by the way, I suspect you'll manage too.

Of course I won't mention to the Americans the cleverness of the A6, A5, A4 paper standards which allows you to fold the larger sizes in half to get the exact next smaller size down. Then you might get the benefit of the smaller size as well as the larger which could be folded into your collection of smaller cards, you just have to watch out for accidentally wrapping ("taco-ing") a smaller card inside of a larger one and losing it. I suppose you could hand cut your own 5" x 6" larger cards to do this if you found that you occasionally needed them.

For the pocketbook conscious, 3x5 does have the benefit of lower cost as well as many more options and flexibility than larger sizes.

At least commercial card sizes are now largely standardized, so you don't have deal with changing sizes the way Roland Barthes did over his lifetime.

My personal experience and a long history of so many manuals on the topic saying "cards of the same size" indicates that you assuredly won't have fun mixing different sized slips together. I personally use 3x5" cards in a waste book sense, but my main/permanent collection is in 4x6" format. Sometimes I think I should have done 3 x 5, but it's more like jealousy than regret, particularly when it comes to the potential of a restored fine furniture card catalog. But then again...

Throughout Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts (Utah State University Press, 2006) Joseph Harris presents highlighted sidebar presentations he labels "Intertexts".

They simultaneously serve the functions of footnotes, references, (pseudo-)pull quotes, and conversation with his own text. It's not frequently seen this way, but these intertexts serve the function of presenting his annotations of his own text to model these sorts of annotations and intertextuality which he hopes the reader (student) to be able to perform themselves. He explicitly places them in a visually forward position within the text rather than hiding them in the pages' footnotes or end notes where the audience he is addressing can't possibly miss them. In fact, the reader will be drawn to them above other parts of the text when doing a cursory flip through the book upon picking it up, a fact that underlines their importance in his book's thesis.

This really is a fantastic example of the marriage of form and function as well as modelling behavior.

cc: @remikalir

The traditional U.S. copyright notice that appears in the front of most books ("No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.") is the result of the centuries long intellectual history of ars excerpendi.

Joseph Harris uses a mélange of materials to make his writing including books, papers, magazines, from which he is copying sections out, writing in margins, making notes on index cards and then moving those pieces of text and pieces of paper (the index cards, and possibly Post-it notes) around to create his output.

He doesn't delineate a specific process for his excerpting or note taking practice. How does he organize his notes? Is he just pulling them from piles around him? Is there a sense of organization at all?

Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/9248

Thanks for this! I like the framing and general concept of the book.

It seems like its a good follow on to Dan Allosso's OER text How to Make Notes and Write https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/ or Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes https://amzn.to/3DwJVMz which includes some useful psychology and mental health perspective.

Other similar examples are Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis (MIT, 2015) or Gerald Weinberg's The Fieldstone Method https://amzn.to/3DCf6GA These may be some of what we're all missing.

I'm reminded of Mark Robertson's (@calhistorian) discussion of modeling his note taking practice and output in his classroom using Roam Research. https://hyp.is/QuB5NDa0Ee28hUP7ExvFuw/thatsthenorm.com/mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue/ Perhaps we need more of this?

Early examples of this sort of note taking can also be seen in the religious studies space with Melanchthon's handbook on commonplaces or Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, though missing are the process from notes to writings. https://www.logos.com/grow/jonathan-edwards-organizational-genius/

Other examples of these practices in the wild include @andy_matuschak's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcs4tyey18 and TheNonPoet's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdp0jo2Fe4 Though it may be better for students to see this in areas in which they're interested.

Hypothes.is as a potential means of modeling and allowing students to directly "see" this sort of work as it progresses using public/semi-public annotations may be helpful. Then one can separately model re-arranging them and writing a paper. https://web.hypothes.is/

Reply to: https://twitter.com/BenjaminVanDyne/status/1571171086171095042

https://aldrich.gsumun.ca/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2HegcwDRnU

Makes the argument that note taking is an information system, and if it is, then we can use the research from the corpus of information system (IS) theory to examine how to take better notes.

He looks at the Wang and Wang 2006 research and applies their framework of "complete, meaningful, unambiguous, and correct" dimensions of data quality to example note areas of study notes, project management notes (or to do lists) and recipes.

Looks at dimensions of data quality from Mahanti, 2019.

What is the difference between notes and annotations?

Courtney, Jennifer Pooler. “A Review of Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts.” The Journal of Effective Teaching 7, no. 1 (2007): 74–77.

Review of: Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/9248.

Joseph Harris' text Rewriting: How to do things with texts (2006) sounds like a solid follow on text to the ideas found in Sönke Ahrens (2017) or Dan Allosso (2022).

rewards for fast production (see influencer culture) can also be seen in the broader social media space which doesn't provide space for the depth of potential rhetoric of Harris' five "moves".

I can't help but think about the older practice of writing texts as dialogues.

I quite like the idea of intertexts, which have the feeling of annotating one's own published work with the annotations of others. A sort of reverse annotation. Newspapers and magazines often feature pull quotes to draw in the reader, but why not have them as additional voices annotating one's stories or arguments.

This could certainly be done without repeating the quote twice within the piece.

Some of the popular note taking space is a bit too dogmatic in how the work should be done. Some espouse a handwriting mode only, while others prefer digital methods. We need more space for all of the above.

prone to naming winners and losers, rights and wrongs. You are in or out, hot or not, on the bus or off it. But academics seldom write in an all-or- nothing mode” (p. 26).

Our culture is overly based on the framing of winners or losers and we don't leave any room for things which aren't a zero sum game. (See: Donald J. Trump's framing of his presidency.) We shouldn't approach academic writing or even schooling or pedagogy in general as a zero sum game. We need more space and variety for neurodiversity as teaching to the middle or even to the higher end is going to destroy the entire enterprise.

Politics is not a zero sum game. Even the losers have human rights and deserve the ability to live their lives.

I'm curious if this will be an answer to the question I asked in Call for Model Examples of Zettelkasten Output Processes?

https://www.thatericalper.com/2019/02/23/steve-herman-announced-as-hall-of-fame-inductee-at-2019-canadian-music-broadcast-industry-awards/

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/agency-group-restructures-in-north-america-1419381/

In addition to tracing the roots of the song Bonnie Lass of Fyvie, Iona Fyfe credits her direct source Sam Kelly.

There's an interesting parallel to the knowledge that Cecil Sharp collected the song from Mrs. Combs in Knott County Kentucky in 1908 and the same sorts of citations given by indigenous peoples who often indicate where they learned a piece of knowledge.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps/

https://web.archive.org/web/20080412071219/http://eastgate.com/catalog/Briefcase.html

Eastgate systems used to make a "3x5 Card Briefcase" to capture short notes on the go which could later "be scanned or transcribed to Tinderbox."

Tinderbox was one of the first digital tools to be used in a way very similar to zettelkasten of old, particularly by academics, who are a large portion of their power user base.

Circa late 2011, he's positing Luhmann had 35,000 cards and not 90,000.

Jules Verne used index cards. Joachim Jungius is said to have had 150,000 cards.

https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/zukunft-im-zettelkasten-a-75d23643-0002-0001-0000-000046407320?context=issue

Google translation:

The result was 98 volumes, produced according to a Zettelkasten system (Verne left 25,000 keyword cards), mostly written in the tower at Amiens, the interior of which Verne had decorated like a ship.

Jules Verne had a zettelkasten which he used to write 98 volumes.

Given that he was French we should cross check his name with "fichier boîte".

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/sep/15/eddie-butler-former-wales-rugby-union-captain-and-journalist-dies-aged-65

https://web.archive.org/web/20140707053048/http://www.getfrictionless.com/products/capture-cards-red

Simple index cards, but sold with a purpose in mind: capturing notes!

One is reminded here of waste books and fleeting notes.

Image:<br />

all this, AND...

some comes down to the explanations given and the reasons. In this case, they're scant and the original is in middling English and large chunks of Japanese without any of the "why".

The Noguhchi Filing System is a method developed by Noguchi Yukio, a Japanese economist, that organizes one's projects using envelopes and sorts them based on the frequency upon which you work on them.

Lesser known by whose estimation? Certainly lesser known in America in 2014 (and even now in 2022), but how popular was/is it in Japan or other locations?

This is the first post of what would become the https://zettelkasten.de site/blog dated 2013-06-20.

(This is the first archived version on Archive.org dated 2013-09-16)

I've been spelunking through your posts from roughly the decade from 2005 onward which reference your interest in index cards. Thanks for unearthing and writing about all the great index card material from that time period. Have you kept up with your practices?

I noticed that at least one of your posts had a response by MK (Manfred Kuehn, maintainer of the now defunct Taking Note blog (2007-2018). Was it something you read at the time or kept up with?

Have you been watching the productivity or personal knowledge management space since roughly 2017 where the idea of the Zettelkasten (slip box or card index) has taken off (eg. https://zettelkasten.de/, Sonke Ahren's book How to Take Smart Notes, Obsidian.md, Roam Research, etc.?) I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on them or even what your practice has meant over time.

Thanks again.

Cheers! -CJA

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2014/09/marion-doughertys-index-cards.html

The documentary Casting By (2012) shows casting director Marion Dougherty's 3 x 5" index card collection which she used for casting notes. In particular they show an example card for Dustin Hoffman with his details. In Hoffman's case, his card included the older telephone numbers with exchanges (EN2-6933 or Endicott2 6933), so these cards may have also served a contact purpose similar to more modern rolodexes. Different from them however, Dougherty's also included heights, credits, and other observations relevant to the casting process.

Screen capture from the movie

http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-pda

The original Hipster PDA post? May have been coined before, but this certainly helped to popularize it.

https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news.html

Japanese translation of index card

https://web.archive.org/web/20120122115952/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/10/13/one-pocket-rule/

Noguchi Yukio had a "one pocket rule" which they first described in “「超」整理法 (cho seiri ho)”. The broad idea was to store everything in one place as a means of saving time by not needing to search in multiple repositories for the thing you were hunting for. Despite this advice the Noguchi Filing System didn't take complete advantage of this as one would likely have both a "home" and an "office" system, thus creating two pockets, a problem that exists in an analog world, but which can be mitigated in a digital one.

The one pocket rule can be seen in the IndieWeb principles of owning all your own data on your own website and syndicating out from there. Your single website has the entire store of all your material which makes search much easier. You don't need to recall which platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al.) you posted something on, you can save time and find the thing much more quickly by searching one place.

This principle also applies to zettelkasten and commonplace books (well indexed), which allow you to find the data or information you put into them quickly and easily.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Michael Leddy</span> in Orange Crate Art: Writing and index cards (<time class='dt-published'>09/15/2022 10:38:15</time>)</cite></small>

Elaine Fine is Michael Leddy's wife.

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2005/03/writing-and-index-cards.html

Looser tradition here for using index cards for writing. Comment have some interesting potential examples from circa 2005

source? date? (obviously on/before 2005-09-22)

Any relation to Robert Boice's work on writing every day?

Den analogizes their note taking system to computing on 2010-11-11 8:43 PM.

I didn't see/couldn't find this image in the Life archive, but it was obviously contemporanous to the others

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2009/11/nabokovs-unfinished.html

Nice short review with some cultural touchstones which may have been alluded to in the text, but whose context may be missing in years to come.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060309154747/http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/PRODUCT/Product.asp?Params=Category=17-722|PageID=4035|Level=2-3