The most valuable work one can do in note taking is creating active links from one piece of knowledge to another, particularly if they're both surprising.

Anecdotally I do see a lot of people putting all of their work into collecting notes, and none of it rephrasing things into their own words to improve understanding or linking ideas together to create new ideas. The latter are both far superior to the former.

Your notes shouldn't be a place to collect what you already know.

What a god-awful reference for Claude Shannon. Obviously he found it in his reading through serendipity and didn't bother chasing down the original quote for publication...

Four broad criteria for collecting notes: - Is it surprising? - Is it useful? - Is it personal? - Does it inspire me?

Forte places these in the exact reverse order, but I would prefer to place them in order of importance to me, based on experience. I don't use the inspiration portion as often, but it may be more valuable for fiction writers, artists, and other creatives.

Collecting everything in your notes, especially in digital realms where saving is phenomenally easier and nearly automatic, is a fatal flaw in note taking.

The value of any given piece of content is not evenly distributed. Different people will get different things out of any particular piece. This is why the "holy grail" of universal note taking or excerpting will fail at mass scale.

Similarly, many non-fiction books also print their small handful of insights on their jacket covers, so one needn't necessarily read the entire book to get the gist of what it will present.

This is also generally an administrative problem in this space. People spend ages tinkering with their tools and not enough time using them for what the tools are meant for.

LEGO is both singular and plural, n'cest pas?

https://sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/4-types-of-power/#comment-122967

Given your area, if you haven't found it yet, you might appreciate going a generation further back in your references with: Mary P. Follett. Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, ed. by E. M. Fox and L. Urwick (London: Pitman Publishing, 1940). She had some interesting work in organization theory you might appreciate. Wikipedia can give you a quick overview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Parker_Follett#Organizational_theory

I've seen definitions of the others before but not "power within".

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1531349578229895170.html

How do we solve for toxic masculinity at scale?

Is there "recruitment" and how can we stop that piece?

https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/blog/article/865/

Re: Junior Atlas of Indigenous Australia

This sounds a bit like Australian political culture is facing the same sort of issues that are being see in the United States with respect to ideas like critical race theory. Groups are protesting parts of history and culture that they don't understand instead spending some time learning about them.

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/the-influence/2022/05/28/jimi-bani

Myths and Legends of Torres Strait #WantToRead

https://uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/soziologie/forschung/luhmann-archiv/

© Alexander Kluge/ Universität Bielefeld*

https://blogs.uni-bielefeld.de/blog/soziologie/entry/luhmanns_zettelkasten_online_edition_des2

Collecting ideas and creating links between them in a zettelkasten can seemingly solve this problem with "little" work. :)

Feynman’s approach encouraged him to follow his interests wherever they might lead. He posed questions and constantly

Creating strong and clever connections between disparate areas of knowledge can appear to others to be a flash of genius, in part because they didn't have the prior knowledges nor did they put in the work of collecting, remembering, or juxtaposition.

This method may be one of the primary (only) underpinnings supporting the lone genius myth. This is particularly the case when the underlying ideas were not ones fully developed by the originator. As an example if Einstein had fully developed the ideas of space and time by himself and then put the two together as spacetime, then he's independently built two separate layers, but in reality, he's cleverly juxtaposed two broadly pre-existing ideas and combined them in an intriguing new framing to come up with something new. Because he did this a few times over his life, he's viewed as an even bigger genius, but when we think about what he's done and how, is it really genius or simply an underlying method that may have shaken out anyway by means of statistical thermodynamics of people thinking, reading, communicating, and writing?

Are there other techniques that also masquerade as genius like this, or is this one of the few/only?

Link this to Feynman's mention that his writing is the actual thinking that appears on the pages of his notes. "It's the actual thinking."

Forte cleverly combines a story about Feynman from Genius with a quote about Feynman's 12 favorite problems from a piece by Rota. Did they both appear in Gleick's Genius together and Forte quoted them separately, or did he actively use his commonplace to do the juxtaposition for him and thus create a nice juxtaposition himself or was it Gleick's juxtaposition?

The answer will reveal whether Forte is actively using his system for creative and productive work or if the practice is Gleick's.

For someone like Feynman who worked in areas beyond theoretical physics, tacitly practicing the Llullan combinatorial arts will allow them to apply their knowledge in a more cross-disciplinary way.

But why apply this sort of thinking to just one person? Abstract it up a few levels. What if multiple people can apply this technique simultaneously?

Currently it's happening in academic circles with people collaborating across disciplines, but it's more likely happening by oral transmission by holding conversations about the work at hand and combinatorial brainstorming being the engine. What if they were keeping a collective zettelkasten to encourage their work? This presents the issue of the histories of separate knowledge bases and potential context collapse. They still need to have some sort of intervening interface (typically personal presence for memory/reference) to encourage it as search may not be as useful or much more time consuming.

How might anagora.org act as a potential model for brining these ideas into fruition?

link directly to portions of https://hypothes.is/a/GZ5kkuAyEeyfDx9azj0VAw

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a

Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts (Boston: Birkhäuser Boston, 1997), 202.

Richard Feynman indicated in an interview that he kept a dozen of his favorite problems at the top of his mind. As he encountered new results and tricks, he tried applying them to those problems in hopes of either solving them or in coming up with new ideas. Over time by random but combinatorial chance, solutions or ideas would present themselves as ideas were juxtaposed.

One would suspect that Feynman hadn't actually read Raymond Llull, but this technique sounds very similar to the Llullan combinatorial arts from centuries earlier, albeit in a much more simplified form.

Can we find evidence of Feynman having read or interacted with Llull? Was it independently created or was he influenced?

I had an example of this on 2022-05-28 in Dan Allosso's book club on Equality in the closing minutes where a bit of inspiration hit me to combine the ideas of memes, evolution, and Indigenous knowledge and storytelling to our current political situation. Several of them are problems and ideas I've been working with over years or months, and they came together all at once to present a surprising and useful new combination. #examples

Link this also to the idea of diffuse thinking as a means of solving problems. One can combine the idea of diffuse thinking with combinatorial creativity to super-charge one's problem solving and idea generation capacity this way. What would one call this combination? It definitely needs a name. Llullan combinatorial diffusion, perhaps? To some extent Llull was doing this already as part of his practice, it's just that he didn't know or write explicitly about the diffuse thinking portion (to my knowledge), though this doesn't mean that he wasn't the beneficiary of it in actual practice, particularly when it's known that many of his time practiced lectio divina and meditated on their ideas. Alternately meditating on ideas and then "walking away" from them will by force cause diffuse thinking to be triggered.

Are there people for whom diffuse thinking doesn't work from a physiological perspective? What type of neurodiversity does this cause?

Knowledge increases (exponentially?) in value with connections to other ideas.

Points here for a Cesar Hidalgo reference.

Nice list of custom names for area specific commonplaces.

Actor and comedian Jerry Seinfeld, arguably the most influential comedian of his generation, wrote in his book Is This Anything?:

Whenever I came up with a funny bit, whether it happened on a stage, in a conversation or working it out on my preferred canvas, the big yellow legal pad, I kept it in one of those old- school accordion folders . . . A lot of people I’ve talked to

link to other comedian practices: This one is most similar to George Carlin perhaps, though not as zany. Also similar to Adam Sandler, though he uses spiral bound notebooks.

In an interview about how she wrote the smash hit “Blank Space,”3 Swift says, “I’ll be going about my daily life and I’ll think, ‘Wow, so we only have two real options in relationships—it’s going to be forever or it’s going to go down in flames,’ so I’ll jot that down in my notes . . . I’ll come up with a line that I think is clever like ‘Darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream’ and I just pick them and

NME, “Taylor Swift—How I Wrote My Massive Hit ‘Blank Space,’ ”NME.com, October 9, 2015, YouTube video, 3:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bYUDY4lmls

link to Eminem and "stacking ammo"

I'd far rather have citations on note taking practice than citations on basic knowledge about Taylor Swift from Wikipedia. What the hell?!

Clever use of this quote. How can you do anything but love it?

motivational...

Immediate knowledge capture by highlighting, annotating, or other means when taking notes can help to decrease cognitive load. This is similar to other productivity methods like quick logging within a bullet journal system, writing morning pages, or Getting Things Done (GTD). By putting everything down in one place, you can free your mind of the constant need to remember dozens of things. This frees up your working memory to decrease stress as you know you've captured the basic idea for future filtering, sorting, and work at a later date.

Though it may lead down the road to the collector's fallacy, one should note down, annotate, or highlight the things that resonate with them. Similar to Marie Kondo's concept in home organization, one ought to find ideas that "spark joy" or move them internally. These have a reasonable ability to be reused or turned into something with a bit of coaxing and work. Collect now to be able to filter later.

Sources of information overload: emails social media updates/notifications proliferation of browser tabs

Forte misses this last one

A nice hallmark of writing self-help books: indicating that you're going to reveal an ancient secret that no one knows...

While he wants to think that CODE is a modern approach, is it really? I'm reasonably sure that most of these steps have been carried out by commonplacers for several hundred years. le sigh...

Are self-help books with sentences that highlight the fact that one is already practicing the described/prescribed method really necessary?

Perhaps speaking about the process and making the steps discrete to assist people in actually "touching all the bases" will help them score their homeruns.

I'm sort of surprised that Forte hasn't trademarked this "method". Immediately on it's face it looks a lot like the general steps of note taking for a zettelkasten, or let's be honest, almost any note taking method. Nice to see that he's reminding people to do some distillation and expression using their notes however as this is where most people lose the thread.

the echoes of Raymundus Llull here, but without any reference... le sigh

Strategies for playing Scrabble are similar to those of Raymond Llull's combinatorial arts.

I've done this with other games as well...

I've been collecting some feedback on folks who've introduced this to students. I'm curious how your experiment ultimately went? Did they take to it? Do you feel like some are still using or even experimenting with the methods?

Quote from the Commonly Asked Questions (and Answers) on https://marshallmcluhan.com/common-questions/ with answers written by Dr. Eric McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan's eldest son.

Since there is no Maritime law in Liechtenstein, Nicolas Reithner, Hannes Mähr, and Mario Frick, the attorneys who wrote this book, left most of the pages blank indicating in bold in the front matter:

Please use the remaining pages of this work as a notebook.

Source

This is by far the funniest law book out there pic.twitter.com/zWYOAsMIOM

— Nicole A. Rizza (JD Era) 🏳️‍⚧️ (@NicoleARizza) May 25, 2022

Hugh of St. Victor wrote Didascalicon, a text about what topics should be learned and why. In it, he outlined seven mechanical arts (or technologies) in analogy with the seven liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium) as ways to repair the weaknesses inherit in humanity.

These seven mechanical arts he defines are: - fabric making - armament - commerce - agriculture - hunting - medicine - theatrics

Hugh of St. Victor's description of the mechanical art of commerce here is fascinating. He says "reconciles nations, calms wars, strengthens peace, and turns the private good of individuals into a benefit for all" (doublcheck the original quotation, context, and source). This sounds eerily familiar to the common statement in the United States about trade and commerce.

Link this to the quote from Albie Duncan in The West Wing (season 5?) about trade.

Other places where this sentiment occurs?

Is Hugh of St. Victor the first in history to state this sentiment?

Some interesting tidbits here. Painful to read in translation. I wonder how clear it would be in the original? Sometimes it seems to drift into the magical and mystical rather than staying rooted in the simple physical world. This rehashes many of the ideas he's had in other places.

I'm not sure how this all really relates to the overarching space of the overall book however.

Some excellent questions that nudge one into an "orthodox" zettelkasten practice.

1. Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstra ß e, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1928/1981), 98 – 140, at 103.

Does Walter Benjamin prefigure the idea of card indexes conversing with themselves in a communicative method similar to that of Vannevar Bush's Memex?

This definitely sounds like the sort of digital garden inter-communication afforded by the Anagora as suggested by @Flancian.

This wording seems quite profound.

It means that by creating a personification of our tools, we can more easily communicate with them.

Do people personify their computers? I remember in the late 80s and early 90s computer workstations, especially in university settings, having personified names.

Link this to the personification of rocks w.r.t. talking rocks and oral traditions.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/KosdVt1qEeykU2dTuVZT3Q

1. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, Zweiter Teil, II. Ethische Methodenlehre, 1st Section, §50: “He is the midwife of his thoughts,” on the teacher-student relationship.

1. Heinrich von Kleist, “Ü ber die allm ä hliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Zweiter Band, ed. Helmut Sembdner (M ü nchen: dtv, 1805/2001), 319 – 324, at 319.
2. Ibid., 320.

in 1805 Heinrich von Kleist noted that one can use conversation with another person, even when that person is silent, to come up with solutions or ideas they may not have done on their own.

This phenomena is borne out in modern practices like the so-called "rubber duck debugging", where a programmer can talk to any imagined listener, often framed as a rubber duck sitting on their desk, and talk through the problem in their code. Invariably, talking through all the steps of the problem will often result in the person realizing what the problem is and allow them to fix it.

This method of verbal "conversation" obviously was a tool which indigenous oral cultures frequently used despite the fact that they didn't have literacy as a tool to fall back on.

A referent to Hegel's note taking system.

Interesting that Markus Krajewski continually refers to Luhmann's zettelkasten as Bielefeld 1951ff.

1. Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft , 82f.

1. Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft , 82.

Hegel's slip box was in a handy enough luggage format that he was able to easily take it with him on journeys or on moves.

1. Amid his wandering, he always kept these incunabula of his education. They lie partly in portfolios, partly in cases, on the backs of which a label was glued for orientation. Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben , 12.

1. Luhmann, Archimedes und wir , 145.

Luhmann indicated that his note taking system made it difficult for him to be a linear thinker. Instead he felt that each chapter he wrote "must reappear in every other."

This seems quite similar to Carl Linnaeus' work which he regularly recycled into future works.

For Luhmann's time, the librarian recommendation for substrate was either cardboard or strong paper as the carrier for information, but he eschewed this recommendation in favor of plain typewriter paper because it took up less space. This came at the cost of deterioration of many of his cards through regular use however.

Luhmann's zettelkasten collection of cards was in octavo format, aka DIN A5 (148mm x 210mm or 5.8" x 8.3").

Luhmann indicates that aspiring academics came to visit to see his card collection in potentially planning their own.

1. Ralf Klassen, “Bezaubernde Jeannie oder Liebe ist nur ein Zeitvertreib,” in Wir Fernsehkinder. Eine Generation ohne Programm, ed. Walter Wüllenweber (Berlin: Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, 1994), 81 – 97, at 84.

Niklas Luhmann created his slip box in 1951 after the model of Hegel rather than using the method of loose sheets into portfolios as Goethe had done.

1. See Ernst Robert Curtius, “ Goethes Aktenf ü hrung,” in Kritische Essays zur europäischen Literatur (Bern: Francke, 1954), 57 – 69.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832)

"To be sure, one will initially produce mostly waste." -Niklas Luhmann

How true!!! I see many people with this initial problem and not an insignificant few give up entirely because of this.

Markus Krajewski indicates here that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) kept a zettelkasten, though from the sound of it, his sheets, organized by head words have more of a ring of commonplace book.

Bookmark for Notes from "Paper as Passion"

Dig up this reference. English version?

Starting here...

Brine, Kevin R., Ellen Gruber Garvey, Lisa M. Gitelman, Steven J. Jackson, Virginia Jackson, Markus Krajewski, Mary Poovey, et al. “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron. Edited by Lisa M. Gitelman. Infrastructures. MIT Press, 2013. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/raw-data-oxymoron.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/movies/ray-liotta-dead.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/judith-jones-dead.html

As an editorial assistant at Doubleday in Paris, Judith Jones rescued the diary of Anne Frank from a pile of rejects in 1950. She proceeded to persuade a superior to publish the diary in the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob%27s_your_uncle

I've been hearing this phrase more lately. Today was the third or fourth time in about two weeks.

Related to talking rocks (for me), but also completely opposite to talking and thinking rocks altogether.

https://guides.lib.ku.edu/medieval-and-early-modern-manuscripts/resources-introduction

There's a tremendously long history here. Some related words and areas of intellectual history to study here for examples include "florilegia", "commonplace books", and even "miscellanies".

Philip Melanchthon wrote several handbooks on the topic and had some useful historical examples including one of the most influential: De locis communibus ratio (Augsberg, 1593). You might appreciate this article on some of the tradition: https://blog.cph.org/study/systematic-theology-and-apologetics/why-are-so-many-great-lutheran-books-called-commonplaces-or-loci

• Philip Melanchthon, Institutiones rhetoricae. Wittenberg [1536].
• Philip Melanchthon, Rhetorices elementa. Lyon, 1537.

Jonathan Edwards had a significant version which he called his Miscellanies though his was written in book form, though it can now also be found digitized online at http://edwards.yale.edu/research/misc-index.

http://voyagela.com/interview/meet-victoria-kray-victory-astrology-publishing-central-la-hollywood/

Website: www.VICTORYASTROLOGY.COM<br /> Phone: 323-632-3217<br /> Email: victoriakray@gmail.com<br /> Instagram: VICTORYASTROLOGY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X8gaMGQNsA

Using direct links to things within Obsidian can be powerful. It's also very useful when using other tools in conjunction with Obsidian.

Seems like many of the tips and automations from outside of Obsidian here are Apple iOS specific.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H37-WGztu-A

Nothing new. Overreliance on Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen's work?

He has an outliner approach and uses trees/branches framing.

Crosslink notes from https://docdrop.org/video/H37-WGztu-A/

I'm always struck here that no one in these spaces mentions the idea of modality shifts as a thing of value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMNSUs6ffnE

Nothing new here...

I did like the way she framed CI and CD in a feedback loop.

https://github.com/ansh/bionic-reading

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/uv995v/bionic_reading_seems_great_but_patent_is_a_bummer/

This is reminiscent of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) reading method which became popular for a while a few years back, got squashed by patent claims, and then has slowly been coming back as the method was reported in the early 1970s.

https://wptavern.com/open-source-initiative-launches-news-blog-on-wordpress

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sarahemerson/seth-green-bored-ape-stolen-tv-show

https://scolarcardiff.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/birthday-book/

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

Found looking for information about the tradition of birthday books.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdp0jo2Fe4

https://huffduffer.com/psnS6M

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-washington-post-reinventing-online-comments/

see also: http://coralproject.net/

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/05/reader-comments-on-news-sites-we-want-to-hear-what-your-publication-does/

I'm curious if any publications have experimented with the W3C webmention spec for notifications as a means of handling comments? Coming out of the IndieWeb movement, Webmention allows people to post replies to online stories on their own websites (potentially where they're less like to spew bile and hatred in public) and send notifications to the article that they've mentioned them. The receiving web page (an article, for example) can then choose to show all or even a portion of the response in the page's comments section). Other types of interaction beyond comments can also be supported here including receiving "likes", "bookmarks", "reads" (indicating that someone actually read the article), etc. There are also tools like Brid.gy which bootstrap Webmention onto social media sites like Twitter to make them send notifications to an article which might have been mentioned in social spaces. I've seen many personal sites supporting this and one or two small publications supporting it, but I'm as yet unaware of larger newspapers or magazines doing so.

The Seattle Times turns off comments on stories about race, immigration, and crime because as their executive editor Michelle Matassa Flores says, "People can't behave on any story that has to do with race."

https://www.oldtrestle.com/product-page/theory-gin-002

Theory Gin 002 is a gin experiment influenced by whispers of the East. It borrows five-spice powder and black tea from the Yunnan province, emboldening traditional botanicals in the bottle. With a second infusion, green tea marks its unique color and palette. Theory Gin 002 is the second in a series of gin experiments.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/19/23126349/glitch-fastly-acquired-coding-anil-dash-fog-creek

https://badge.design/

This looks like the sort of tool that @cogdog or the DS106 crowd would appreciate.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>gRegor Love</span> in David Shanske was awarded the First Time Eating an Ear of Corn at Homebrew Website Club badge on May 18, 2022. Context: pretty self-explanatory. :) When David said it was the first time he had eaten an ear of corn at Homebrew Website Club, I said I would make the badge for him. I used https://badge.design/ to throw this together. — gRegorLove.com (<time class='dt-published'>05/23/2022 00:38:31</time>)</cite></small>

An early example of the verbification of Steven Pinker's name. Here it indicates the view of predominantly privileged men to argue that because the direction of history has been so positive, that those without power shouldn't complain.

I've also heard it used to generally mean a preponderance of evidence on a topic, as seen in Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature, but still not necessarily convincingly prove one's thesis.

https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2011/between-the-lines-the-social-life-of-marginalia1

Danzico, Liz. “Between the Lines: The Social Life of Marginalia.” Interactions 18, no. 3 (May 2011): 12–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/1962438.1962443.

A short synopsis article about marginalia with some simple questions. She's read a fair amount in the space from the 2010s given references, but little I hadn't encountered before. The Robin Sloan tidbit was interesting as well as the etymology of marginalia, though these will need better references.

How cool would it be if we could aggregate old commonplace books to create indicators of how often older books were not only read, but which annotations resonated with their readers during subsequent periods of history and overlay them in some visual way? Something like a historical version of Amazon Kindle's indicators that a certain number of readers have highlighted a particular sentence of a book.

1. Marshall, C.C. Collection-level analysis tools for books online. Proc. of the 2008 ACM Workshop on Research Advances in Large Digital Book Repositories. (Napa Valley, CA, Oct. 26–30) ACM, New York, 2008.

Cathy Marshall has found that students evaluated their textbooks prior to purchasing based on the annotations within them.

Blackwood Magazine most likely introduced the term marginalia in 1819. Edgar Allen Poe popularized the term with some of his published material entitled Marginalia.

What other (popular) published examples of marginalia exist?

Source for the Blackwood Magazine assertion?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bell_(publisher)

John Bell created an early and influential font which omitted the long s in English.

reference: Barker, Hannah. "Bell, John". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/2014.

https://indexhistory.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/boswells-commonplace-book-and-lockes-index/

James Boswell had a commonplace book in which he created index pages not only similar to John Locke's method, but he actually copied out a passage from Locke about how to draw it up. Beyond this there were only a few pages of the volume that were actively used.

Reference: Folger M.a.6

https://github.com/fossmo/awesome-zettelkasten

A curated list of zettelkasten resources

https://github.com/users/spatialresearch/projects/1/views/1

An active reader finishes an author's book by writing in its margins.

Scott, I'll spend some more in-depth time with it shortly, but in a quick skim of topics I pleasantly notice a few citations of my own work. Perhaps I've done a poor job communicating about wikis, but from what I've seen from your work thus far I take much the same view of zettelkasten as you do. Somehow though I find that you're quoting me in opposition to your views? While you're broadly distinguishing against the well-known Wikipedia, and rightly so, I also broadly consider (unpublished) and include examples of small personal wikis and those within Ward Cunningham's FedWiki space, though I don't focus on them in that particular piece. In broad generalities most of these smaller wikis are closer to the commonplace and zettelkasten traditions, though as you point out they have some structural functional differences. You also quote me as someone in "information theory" in a way that that indicates context collapse. Note that my distinctions and work in information theory relate primarily to theoretical areas in electrical engineering, physics, complexity theory, and mathematics as it relates to Claude Shannon's work. It very specifically does not relate to my more humanities focused work within intellectual history, note taking, commonplaces, rhetoric, orality, or memory. In these areas, I'm better read than most, but have no professional title(s). Can't wait to read the entire piece more thoroughly...

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/ul5g8j/how_hard_are_medievalrenaissance_welsh_texts_for/

https://www.hjkeen.net/halqn/index.htm

https://www.hjkeen.net/halqn/index.htm

A great example of an online commonplace book prominently featuring quotes with an index featuring authors, titles, categories, and even translators. Even more interesting, it looks like it's hand built using a large table.

Sascha Fast analogizes the writing process using a zettelkasten to Henry Ford's assembly line for building cars. Each worker on the assembly line has a limited bit of knowledge for their individual part of the process, but most of the knowledge and value is built into the overarching process itself. This makes the overall system quicker and more efficient.

Similarly with note taking, each individual portion of the process is simple and self-contained, but it allows the writer to create a much more creative and complex piece in the end. Here an individual can accomplish all of the individual steps in a self-contained way while focusing on individual steps without becoming lost in the subsequent steps which would otherwise require a tremendous additional amount of energy.

Niklas Luhmann used his zettelkasten to develop an organic theory to understand an organic subject in an autopoetic way.

Where has Scott gotten the phrase "memory castle" which he repeats many times here?

Jordan Peterson apparently has described using a memory palace (castle?) he used with 12 spaces for writing his book (presumably 12 Rules for life?).

Piketty indicates that Ernest Labrousse, Adeline Daumard, and Simon Kuznets carried out their economic and historical research almost exclusively by hand using file cards.

Are their notes still extant? What did their systems look like? From whom did they learn them?

Understanding the history of inequality and how changes in institutional structures in legal, social, fiscal educational, and electoral systems have encouraged change toward equality, we might continue to change and modify these to ensure even greater equality.

Nice that Piketty is giving a nod to intersectionality.

Tables and Illustrations for A Brief History of Equality available here: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/supplementary/a-brief-history-of-equality/

This PDF of tables and illustrations is being made available as a supplement to the audio book format of Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality as published by Harvard University Press, 2022.

At the end of the 18th century, John Bell (1745–1831), an English publisher published notebooks with the title Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke. The notebooks commonly included 550 pages, of which eight pages included instructions on John Locke's indexing method.

Link to: - Didn't Erasmus Darwin use one of these?!

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2022-05-20.html

https://www.openculture.com/2017/03/watch-umberto-eco-walk-through-his-immense-private-library.html

The video here is an excerpt of this longer piece which includes credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq66X9f-zgc

[Syndication link](https://www.openculture.com/2017/03/watch-umberto-eco-walk-through-his-immense-private-library.html#comment-3249414]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq66X9f-zgc

https://www.italofile.com/umberto-eco-library/

Umberto Eco amassed approximately 30,000 books over his lifetime.

Makes me wonder how many Richard Macksey accumulated?

Following the death of Umberto Eco, La Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan acquired a portion of his collection of books called the “Bibliotheca semiologica curious, lunatic, magical and pneumatic”. The collection comprised about 1,200 antique book including 36 incunabula and 380 volumes printed between the 16th and 19th centuries.

https://bibliotecabraidense.org/la-biblioteca-braidense-acquisisce-la-biblioteca-di-libri-antichi-di-umberto-eco/

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/business/office-covid-preference-wristband.html

But hey China! If you care, it's just a few hours of work you could do yourself!

This sort of virtue signalling is abominable unless they told the Secret Service and had the offending data removed from Venmo prior to publishing.

Here's a link to the penultimate draft (not for citation): https://www.academia.edu/46814693/The_Signaling_Function_of_Sharing_Fake_Stories

This broad thesis sounds to me like something I've read before, perhaps in George Lakoff about people signaling group membership or perhaps people with respect to their voting tendencies. The question isn't who should I vote for specifically, but who would someone like me (ie. who would my group, my tribe) vote for?

This sort of phenomena is likely easier to see/show in sports fans who will tell blatant untruths or delude themselves about the teams of which they are fans.The team winning at all costs will cause them to put on blinders.

A particular recent example of something like this with relation to what might otherwise be a logical business decision is seen in incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy nixing the idea of building in Philadelphia due to his own NFL fandom https://www.phillyvoice.com/amazon-hq2-philly-eagles-giants-rivalry-andy-jassy-jeff-bezos-amazon-unbound/

Why would someone make a potential multi-million dollar decision over their sports preference?

Ahrens uses the phrase permanent notes and never uses the words evergreen notes. Evergreen notes stems from Andy Matuschak's reading of Ahrens, likely with a side reference to the idea of evergreen articles which is a closely related commonplace idea in journalism.

The difference between the permanent(evergreen) and fleeting comes from where one chooses to put the actual work into their system. One can collect thousands of fleeting notes in their system, but it's more likely that it will eventually collapse on itself and do the author no good. Better is to put as much work in up front to get to a good permanent note that is reusable in potentially many contexts.

Much of this stems back at least as far as Vincentius Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization (1689) where he offers a contemporary set of instructions on excerpting knowledge from books as well as a history of the subject of note taking. In the book, he warns specifically against the practice exhibited by Joachim Jungius (1585-1657) who left behind approximately 150,000 slips (or scraps) of paper (zettels). Because there was no index to it or links between the notes Jungius' collection was ostensibly useless following his death. His scraps were literally a "scrap heap".

"arks of study" being used as early data chests or stores is a fascinating conceptualization

Our written records have increased incalculably because our living memory doesn't serve us or our society or culture the way it previously did in pre-literate times. The erasure of cruelties and tyrrany is all to easy when we rely only on literacy, particularly when book banning and erasure can easily become the norm.

—Abigail Adams, March 1776, in a letter to her husband John Adams serving in the Continental Congress

especially:

all men would be tyrants if they could.

This sentiment is very similar to one in a recent lecture series I'd started listening to: The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida #.

Lawrence Cahoone specifically pointed out that he would be highlighting the revolutionary (and also consequently the most famous) writers because they were the ones over history that created the most change in their field of thought.

How does the novel and the different manage to break through?

How does this relate to the broad thesis of Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?

The comment Wengrow makes about "remarking on [an anarchist's] politics" as a means of attacking their ideas is quite similar to the sort of attacks that are commonly made on women. When female politicians make relevant remarks and points, mainstream culture goes to standbys about their voice or appearance: "She's 'shrill'", or "She doesn't look very good in that dress." They attack anything but the idea itself.

Enlightenment-era salons were led by women facilitators, but they have largely been marginalized since for their contributions.

(reference?)

Perhaps summarizing Graeber and Wengrow too much here, but..

The Enlightenment came to us courtesy of discussions with Indigenous Peoples from the Americas.

More effects of the clock (technology) on mankind.

It also ushered in the idea within physics of a clockwork universe that slowly ticks away. Also the idea of a clockwork man (robot), etc.

Saving the entire story for context, but primarily for this Marshall McLuhan-esque quote:

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

I want to know the source of the quote.

We should also take into account his age, his failing eyesight, his mental state, etc. It may not have just been his typewriter.

Explore this idea....

What does it look like quantitatively?

Nice to see the taxi driver study pop up here.

Maguire EA, Valentine ER, Wilding JM, Kapur N. Routes to remembering: The brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience. 2003;6(1):90–5. pmid:12483214 https://doi.org/10.1038/nn988

I've thought this before, and sees like I've possibly read, though not captured it. Is there any solid proof of this fact?

Rat studies of mazes show this sort of spacial memory, but are there similar learned studies in lower animals? C. elegans, drosophila, slime molds, etc.?

things that might have done some good lose all their goodness.”198 The overabundance of bad books drowned out even any good bits that might be present among them.

And we now say these same sorts of things about the internet and social media.