- Jun 2022
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Fiction 🖼 the past days I’ve been working on a branch about emptiness. Don’t ask me to explain i don’t grasp it. I’m deeply into it 1500 cards far but still fuzzy. I do know emptiness is empty of inherent existence if you denied that you should make a branch called nihilism 🖼1st pict added 🖼 growing
At some point that's what Nabokov's slip box looked like too.
https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/23/lifestyles-of-the-note-takers-intellectuals-vladimir-nabokov/
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https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vj0blr/decidedly_inessential_share_your_physical_set_up/
An in-depth list of materials someone uses for their zettelkasten.
(Read when there were no comments; potentially useful for revisiting later if there are any.)
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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The slipbox and index cards on which Vladimir Nabokov wrote his novel Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote most of his works including Lolita using index cards in a slip box. He ultimately died in 1977 leaving an unfinished manuscript in note card form for the novel The Original of Laura. Penguin later published the incomplete novel with in 2012 with the subtitle A Novel in Fragments. Unlike most manuscripts written or typewritten on larger paper, this one came in the form of 138 index cards. Penguin's published version recreated these cards in full-color reproductions including the smudges, scribbles, scrawlings, strikeouts, and annotations in English, French, and Russian. Perforated, one could tear the cards out of the book and reorganize in any way they saw fit or even potentially add their own cards to finish the novel that Nabokov couldn't.
Index card on which Nabokov collated notes on ages, heights, and measurements for school aged girls as research for his title character Lolita.
More details at: https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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The term comes from Niklaus Luhmann, a German autodidact and famously prolific academic sociologist. Similar techniques were developed independently by Nabokov and Prisig, among others.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/b566a4/what_is_a_zettelkasten/
Wow. Even in the pinned post on r/Zettelkasten, they propagate the myth by implication that Luhmann invented the Zettelkasten.
They also suggest that Nabokov and Pirsig independently developed similar techniques rather than that it was a commonplace (excuse the pun) pattern in the broader culture.
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www.iemoji.com www.iemoji.com
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The fact that there are three discrete emoji for the - card file box 🗃️ - card index dividers 🗂️ - card index (aka rolodex) 📇
indicate the importance of these older analog tools, even in a more modern digital space.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/comments/vidqg6/new_to_digital_gardens/
There's lots of detail, articles, examples, and exploration documented here: https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Develop knowledge, leave the overthinking to the bubble graph boys (digital notetakers).
🤣
Something I love here about the use of "bubble graph boys" as a pejorative to describe the productivity porn space in digital note taking.
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www.pasadenanow.com www.pasadenanow.com
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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As Lane put it, it's a Personal Information Storage System (PISS).
What a zinger! 😜
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Tiago's book follows the general method of the commonplace book, but relies more heavily on a folder-based method and places far less emphasis and value on having a solid index. There isn't any real focus on linking ideas other than putting some things together in the same folder. His experience with the history of the space in feels like it only goes back to some early Ryan Holiday blog posts. He erroneously credits Luhmann with inventing the zettelkasten and Anne-Laure Le Cunff created digital gardens. He's already retracted these in sketch errata here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/endnotes.
I'll give him at least some credit that there is some reasonable evidence that he actually used his system to write his own book, but the number and depth of his references and experience is exceptionally shallow given the number of years he's been in the space, particularly professionally. He also has some interesting anecdotes and examples of various people including and array of artists and writers which aren't frequently mentioned in the note taking space, so I'll give him points for some diversity of players as well. I'm mostly left with the feeling that he wrote the book because of the general adage that "thought leaders in their space should have a published book in their area to have credibility". Whether or not one can call him a thought leader for "re-inventing" something that Rudolphus Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus firmly ensconced into Western culture about 500 years ago is debatable.
Stylistically, I'd call his prose a bit florid and too often self-help-y. The four letter acronyms become a bit much after a while. It wavers dangerously close to those who are prone to the sirens' call of the #ProductivityPorn space.
If you've read a handful of the big articles in the note taking, tools for thought, digital gardens, zettelkasten space, Ahren's book, or regularly keep up with r/antinet or r/Zettelkasten, chances are that you'll be sorely disappointed and not find much insight. If you have friends that don't need the horsepower of Ahrens or zettelkasten, then it might be a reasonable substitute, but then it could have been half the length for the reader.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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gun rights advocates often push to arm more people, citing prominent examples where a “good guy with a gun” stopped a “bad guy.”
A "good guy with a gun" stopped a "bad guy" on average less than 3% of the time in active shooter situations in 433 events through 2021.
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“It’s direct, indisputable, empirical evidence that this kind of common claim that ‘the only thing that stops a bad guy with the gun is a good guy with the gun’ is wrong,” said Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama, who has studied mass shootings for more than a decade. “It’s demonstrably false, because often they are stopping themselves.”
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Pirkei Avot (Hebrew: פִּרְקֵי אָבוֹת; also transliterated as Pirkei Avoth or Pirkei Avos or Pirke Aboth), which translates to English as Chapters of the Fathers, is a compilation of the ethical teachings and maxims from Rabbinic Jewish tradition.
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hybridpedagogy.org hybridpedagogy.org
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Get a copy of Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection
I can't help but wonder at the direct link here to Amazon with an affiliate link. I won't fault them completely for it, but for a site that is so critical of the ills of educational technology, and care for their students and community, the exposure to surveillance capitalism expressed here seems to go beyond their own pale. I would have expected more care here.
Surely there are other platforms that this volume is available from?
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hybridpedagogy.org hybridpedagogy.org
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https://hybridpedagogy.org/ethical-online-learning/
An interesting perspective on ethical and supportive online learning. More questions and explorations than answers, but then framing is a majority of the battle.
I'm generally in agreement with much of the discussion here.
This was a fabulous piece for "thinking against". Thanks Sean Michael Morris, and Lora Taub.
I definitely got far more out of it by reading and annotating than I ever would in its original keynote presentation version.
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Collegial pedagogy in online learning is about creating conditions for learners to bring their voices fully into the conversations that matter most to them. Conditions that lift up students as agents, as readers of their world, imagining their world as if it could be otherwise.
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Collegial pedagogy, a term introduced by Lissa Soep and Vivian Chávez, describes a dynamic where both teacher and learner stand mutually invested in a shared project, where neither party could complete the work without the other. They need each other to get it right. “Collegiality is a relationship of shared collective responsibility.”
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Best practices will not give these students voices. Best practices will not help them build community. Best practices will not align them with their own agency. You have to do that.
This makes me wonder how one might take a community chat space like the IndieWeb chat and replicate the experience for a classroom or for an entire university? It would require a huge amount of tummeling?
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Most students taking fully online classes are doing so in relative solitude. In fact, they’re counting on you to make not just the ideas in your class, the content the LMS is so content to deliver, synthesize, they’re also counting on you to make their experience of education synthesize.
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We become convinced, because the LMS doesn’t measure for such things, that online there are no pregnant pauses, no under-the-breath chuckling, no eye rolls.
phatic communication is important in the social interaction components of education
How can this be put into edtech?
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granting pedagogical privilege to an edtech that convinces us the pedagogical arc of the universe bends towards analytics, assessment, and grading—these silence student voices by omitting them.
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The old rule, now practically an adage, “Post once, reply twice” is essentially the epitaph for online learning.
This sounds godawful and unproductive.
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Jesse Stommel and I wrote once that, In the room with our students, we can know if they’re engaged and participating, even as each of them participates in his or her own unique fashion. In an online discussion forum, it’s difficult to observe such nuance, and impossible to quantitatively evaluate it.
The answer shouldn't necessarily be to figure out how to quantify the online unseen portions of the learning process.
Similarly how might one assess the end results of things which are non-literate?
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“None of the women and men emerging from our schools in the next decade should expect to lead to purely mechanical, conforming, robotic lives. They must not be resigned to thoughtlessness, passivity, or lassitude if they are to find pathways through the nettles, the swamps, the jungles of our time.” ~ Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination
I appreciate the poetry in this on top of the broader sentiment.
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She had the kind of exacting patience required for video editing.
Beyond this, Gracie also had senses of timing and spatial skills that many also often lack. This is a sort of neurodiversity piece which some are either lifted up or pulled down by within our literacy-focused teaching system.
It may be a skill she's focused on improving, or one which she's naturally gifted and might improve upon to use in a professional career. Focusing on a literacy-only framing for her education is the sort of thing that, instead of amplifying her talents, may have the effect of completely destroying them, and her altogether.
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From the classroom, to the street, to the Internet, Eric’s voice carried, and carried within it the possibility of a kind of education–amplified with digital technologies– that enables other human beings to become conscious, to become responsible, to learn.
Sadly, we seem to have othered orality and cultural practices which don't fit into the Western literate cultural box. This prevents us from moving forward as a society and a diverse culture.
In the 90's rap was culturally appropriated by some because of its perception as "cool" within the culture. Can this coolness be leveraged as a reintroduction of oral methods in our culture without the baggage of the appropriation? Can it be added to enhance the evolving third archive? As a legitimate teaching tool?
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listen deeply to Eric’s story
Beyond Eric's words here, I'm struck by the fact that he's able to do this "feat" orally in a way that I certainly cannot. Perhaps he spent ages slowly building it up and writing it down in a literal fashion, but I suspect that part of it is not and that it is raw oral poetry in a way which requires culture and oral practice that I wholly lack, but wish I had.
How can we better teach this?! Center this.
Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo
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But systems of schooling and educational institutions–and much of online learning– are organized in ways that deny their voices matter. My role is to resist those systems and structures to reclaim the spaces of teaching and learning as voice affirming. Voice amplifying.
Modeling annotation and note taking can allow students to see that their voices matter in conversation with the "greats" of knowledge. We can and should question authority. Even if one's internal voice questions as one reads, that might be enough, but modeling active reading and note taking can better underline and empower these modes of thought.
There are certainly currents within American culture that we can and should question authority.
Sadly some parts of conservative American culture are reverting back to paternalized power structures of "do as I say and not as I do" which leads to hypocrisy and erosion of society.
Education can be used as a means of overcoming this, though it requires preventing the conservative right from eroding this away from the inside by removing books and certain thought from the education process that prevents this. Extreme examples of this are Warren Jeff's control of religion, education, and social life within his Mormon sect.
Link to: - Lawrence Principe examples of the power establishment in Western classical education being questioned. Aristotle wasn't always right. The entire history of Western science is about questioning the status quo. (How can we center this practice not only in science, but within the humanities?)
My evolving definition of active reading now explicitly includes the ideas of annotating the text, having a direct written conversation with it, questioning it, and expanding upon it. I'm not sure I may have included some or all of these in it before. This is what "reading with a pen in hand" (or digital annotation tool) should entail. What other pieces am I missing here which might also be included?
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Maxine Greene for example, begins by writing that “We are convinced that the movement towards educational technology is irreversible and that our obligation as educators is to learn how to deal with it,” but then she turns that resignation into resistance by adding, “how, if you like, to live with it as fully conscious human beings working to enable other human beings to become conscious, to become responsible, to learn.”
If it's true that the movement toward technology is inevitable, how might we deal with it?
Compare this with the solution(s) that nomadic hunter-gatherers had to face when changing from a lifestyle built on movement to one of settling down to a life of agriculture. Instead of attaching their knowledge and memories to their landscape as before, they built structures (like Stonehenge) to form these functions.
Part of moving forward may involve moving back historically to better understand these ideas and methods and regaining them so that we might then reattach them to a digital substrate. How can we leverage the modalities of the digital for art, song, dance, music, and even the voice into digital spaces (if we must?). All digital or only digital certainly isn't the encompassing answer, but if we're going to do it, why not leverage the ability to do this?
As an example, Hypothes.is allows for annotating text to insert photos, emoji, audio (for music and voice), and even video. Videos might include dance and movement related cues that students might recreate physically. These could all be parts of creating digital songlines through digital spaces that students can more easily retrace to store their learnings for easier recall and to build upon in the future.
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Groups in arts education rail against the loss of music, dance, and art in schools and indicate that it's important to a balanced education.
Why has no one embedded these learning tools, for yes they can be just that, into other spaces within classrooms? Indigenous educators over the millennia have done just this in passing on their societal and cultural knowledge. Why have we lost these teaching methods? Why don't we reintroduce them? How can classrooms and the tools within them become mnemonic media to assist both teachers and learners?
Perhaps we need to bring back examples of how to do these things at the higher levels? I've seen excercises in my daughter's grade school classrooms that bring art and manipulatives into the classroom as a base level, but are they being done specifically for these mnemonic reasons?
Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak have been working at creating a mnemonic medium for areas like quantum mechanics relying in part on spaced repetition. Why don't they go further and add in dance, movement, art, and music to aid in the process. This can be particularly useful for creating better neurodiverse outcomes as well. Education should be more multi-modal, more oral, and cease it's unending reliance on only literacy as it's sole tool.
How and where can we create a set of example exercises at various grade levels (similar to rites of knowledge initiation in Indigenous cultures, for lack of specific Western language) that embed all of these methods
Link to: - Ideas in The Extended Brain about movement, space, etc. - Nielsen/Matuschak mnemonic media work
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If the rule of professional academics is “publish or perish,” the rule of online teachers might be “adapt or die.”
Tags
- stacking ammo
- quantification
- read
- symbiosis
- online chat
- power over
- control
- EdTech
- professional development
- edtech
- spoken word poetry
- neurodiversity
- Michael Nielsen
- ethical educational technology
- spatial skills
- battle rap
- Maxine Greene
- patience
- social annotation
- mutual care
- dance
- indigenous knowledge
- participation
- institutional power
- education
- tummeling
- Warren Jeffs
- voice amplifying
- online teaching
- imagination
- quotes
- Eminem
- songlines
- mnemonic media
- nuance
- phatic
- online learning
- arts in education
- movement
- method of loci
- project management
- collegial pedagogy
- definitions
- critical pedagogy
- Indigenous pedagogy
- orality vs. literacy
- poetry
- Lissa Soep
- cultural appropriation
- modality shifts
- rules of thumb
- Western science
- music
- educational substrates
- student voices
- power with
- educational experience
- rap
- resistance
- Vivian Chávez
- orality
- Sean Michael Morris
- social justice
- hypocrisy
- active reading
- open questions
- eudaimonia
- teamwork
- pedagogy
- questioning authority
- thinking against
- Western culture
- third archive
- mutual aid
- chat clients
- Andy Matuschak
- quote
- storytelling
- literacy isn't everything
- art
- Lora Taub-Pervizpour
- sense of timing
- coolness
Annotators
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silviamaggidesign.com silviamaggidesign.com
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blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk
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capitalization (in the case of names and pronouns) superficially empowers what might ultimately be thought of as just another adjective
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www.danah.org www.danah.org
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So, i started researching where the capitalization of said pronoun came from and was quite stunned to find that it was always capitalized because it always appeared as the first word in a sentence, never stuck in the middle. And then, when it started appearing in the middle, it started getting capitalized out of convention and because people worried that it would get lost in script. Of course, "It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case" (journalist Sydney J. Harris).
If it's true that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized instead of the more commonly capitalized "you", does this help to underline some of the self-centeredness show by most of the English speaking West?
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I was always bothered by the fact that the first person singular pronoun is capitalized in english - i always thought it was quite self-righteous.
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Douglas Adams noted, "Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to."
from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Tags
- what's in a name
- linguistics
- capitalization
- danah michele boyd
- Western culture
- pronouns
- Douglas Adams
- self-centeredness
- historical linguistics
- labels
- I
- naming things is hard
- English
- understanding
- capitonyms
- open questions
- self-righteousness
- naming
- capitalization to indicate importance
Annotators
URL
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udlguidelines.cast.org udlguidelines.cast.org
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www.facultyfocus.com www.facultyfocus.com
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A very brief primer on UDL and how Hypothes.is and social annotation might fit within its framework. There seems to be a stronger familiarity with Hypothes.is as a tool and a bit less familiarity with UDL, or perhaps they just didn't bind the two together as tightly as they might have.
I'm definitely curious to look more closely at the UDL framework to see what we might extract from it.
The title features neurodiversity, but doesn't deliver on the promise.
An interesting reframing would be that of social annotation with the idea of modality shifts, particularly for neurodiverse students.
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The third UDL principle is to provide multiple means of expression and action. We find it helpful to think of this as the principle that transcends social annotation: at this point, students use what they’ve learned through engagement with the material to create new knowledge. This kind of work tends to happen outside of the social annotation platform as students create videos, essays, presentations, graphics, and other products that showcase their new knowledge.
I'm not sure I agree here as one can take other annotations from various texts throughout a course and link them together to create new ideas and knowledge within the margins themselves. Of course, at some point the ideas need to escape the margins to potentially take shape with a class wiki, new essays, papers, journal articles or longer pieces.
Use of social annotation across several years of a program this way may help to super-charge students' experiences.
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By asking students to share their annotations openly, we help students to see a wide range of annotation practices, thus demystifying what has often been a private, individual practice.
Teachers can model their own reading and annotating practices for students, but this can be expanded when using social annotation. This will allow students to show each other a wider variety of potential note taking and annotation strategies which help to reinforce the teacher's own modeling. This can be useful modelling of a practice in public which has historically been done privately.
By featuring notes which might be reused for papers or developing later research, teachers can also feature the portions of the note taking process which can be reused for developing new ideas. How might annotations within a text be linked to each other outside of the particular flow of the paper? Might there have been different orderings for the arguments that may have been clearer?
What ideas in the broader class might the ideas within a particular text be linked to? What ideas outside of the class can be linked to those found within the text?
In less experienced groups, teachers might occasionally call out individual annotations in discussion to ask the group for what purposes a student might have annotated specific portions to highlight the various methods and reasons.
What are the list of particular note types here? - Paraphrasing segments to self-test for understanding - Creation of spaced repetition type notes for memorizing definitions and facts - Conversations with the text/original author and expansion of the ideas - Questioning the original text, do we agree/disagree? - Linking ideas from the text into one's broader knowledge base - Highlighting quotes for later reuse - others??
Link to - double-entry journaling in Bruce Ballenger<br /> - types of questions one might ask within a text, Ballenger again
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there is clear evidence that explicitly teaching reading strategies to students improves their overall academic performance, such instruction is often limited to developmental reading or study skills courses (Saxby 2017, 37-38).
Teaching reading strategies to students improves their overall academic performance, but this instruction is often limited to developmental reading or study skills courses.
ref: Saxby, Lori Eggers. “Efficacy of a College Reading Strategy Course: Comparative Study.” Journal of Developmental Education 40, no. 3 (2017): 36-38.
Using Hypothes.is as a tool in a variety of courses can help to teach reading strategies and thereby improve students' overall academic performance.
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Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework
Universal Design for Learning framework https://udlguidelines.cast.org/
Tags
- modelling
- modality shifts
- read
- bookmark
- frameworks
- annotation
- EdTech
- reading strategies
- Center for Applied Special Technology
- Universal Design for Learning
- zettelkasten
- neurodiversity
- note reuse
- note taking
- academic performance
- social annotation
- annotations
- digital pedagogy
- double-entry journaling
- Hypothes.is
- idea links
- pedagogy
Annotators
URL
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www.openbookpublishers.com www.openbookpublishers.com
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We are the leading independent Open Access publisher in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the UK: a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research freely available to readers around the world. All our books are available to read online and download for free, with no Book Processing Charges (BPCs) for authors. We publish monographs and textbooks in all areas, offering the academic excellence of a traditional press combined with the speed, convenience and accessibility of digital publishing. We also publish bespoke Series for Universities and Research Centers and invite libraries to support Open Access publishing by joining our Membership Programme.
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wiki.c2.com wiki.c2.com
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YouArentGonnaNeedIt (often abbreviated YAGNI, or YagNi on this wiki) is an ExtremeProgramming practice which states: "Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them."
Only implement features in code when you actually need them. Never implement features that you anticipate needing, because you aren't gonna need it (YAGNI).
Tags
Annotators
URL
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www.worldcat.org www.worldcat.org
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https://www.worldcat.org/title/curious-researcher-a-guide-to-writing-research-papers/oclc/757689134
In his third edition, he mentions leaning into index cards more in the first edition. Get a copy to see what the differences look like in his prescribed practices. (@2022-06-20)
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www.civicsoftechnology.org www.civicsoftechnology.org
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press.princeton.edu press.princeton.edu
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https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/sherlock-holmes-and-the-history-of-information
If Sherlock Holmes had an excerpting and commonplacing practice, did Arthur Conan Doyle?
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He examines archival documents and prehistoric barrows as expertly as mud splashes and tobacco ash, and files the results of his reading and excerpting systematically in a massive collection of notebooks, which he regularly consults.
Worth pulling out the exact reference, but Anthony Grafton indicates that Sherlock Holmes regularly read and "excerpted systematically into a massive collection of notebooks, which he regularly consults."
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www.civicsoftechnology.org www.civicsoftechnology.org
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Critical Ed Tech Scholars Alliance (CETSA), a grassroots group of educators working in higher ed
Where exactly is this group? They don't seem to have an online presence.
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https://nextdoor.com/for_sale_and_free/aa66e37b-7875-4868-8e5f-22b34b84d9ec
4 drawer metal filing cabinet $25 from Amado Ulloa in North Pasadena Heights In good condition Included keys as well
Not quite 20 gauge vintage, but reasonably nice.
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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grandfathered in
@danallosso, this phrase has a problematic historical past... https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586/the-racial-history-of-the-grandfather-clause
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:33585/
See also Wiki created in combination with this course: https://digitalbookhistory.com/culturesofthebook/Main_Page
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digitalbookhistory.com digitalbookhistory.com
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https://digitalbookhistory.com/culturesofthebook/Main_Page
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> whitney trettien </span> in whitney trettien on Twitter: "Curious about the development of different book technologies? The students in my "Cultures of the Book" seminar last semester made a wiki for you! Each entry is a short essay that uses examples from @upennlib. Open & free to use/remix: https://t.co/XN0C51MLrv" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>06/20/2022 01:10:21</time>)</cite></small>
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www.uopeople.edu www.uopeople.edu
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Mentioned at Hypothes.is Social Learning Summit.
Generally looks legit, though it has faced accusations of being a diploma mill and some balanced sounding reviews of it are not good.
A masters will run about $3-4,000 in fees.
Based in Pasadena, CA
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Local file Local file
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When a few of his friends became interested in thetopic, he took eight minutes to progressively summarize the bestexcerpts before sharing the summarized article with them. The timethat he had spent reading and understanding a complex subject paidoff in time savings for his friends, while also giving them a newinterest to connect over.
To test one's own understanding of a topic one has read about and studied, it can be useful to discuss it or describe one's understanding to friends or colleagues in conversations. This will help you discover where the holes are based on the person's understanding and comprehension of what you've said. Can you fill in all the holes where they have questions? Are their questions your new questions which have exposed holes that need to be filled in your understanding or in the space itself.
I do this regularly in conversations with people. It makes the topics of conversation more varied and interesting and helps out your thinking at the same time. In particular I've been doing this method in Dan Allosso's book club. It's almost like trying on a new idea the way one might try on a piece of clothing to see how it fits or how one likes it for potential purchase. If an idea "fits" then continue refining it and add it to your knowledge base. These conversations also help to better link ideas in my thought space to those of what we're reading. (I wonder if others are doing these same patterns, Dan seems to, but I don't have as good a grasp on this with other participants).
Link to :<br /> - Ahren's idea of writing to expose understanding<br /> - Feynman technique<br /> - Socratic method (this is sort of side or tangential method to this) <- define this better/refine
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Third, sharing our ideas with others introduces a major element ofserendipity
There is lots of serendipity here, particularly when people are willing to either share their knowledge or feel compelled to share it as part of an imagined life "competition" or even low forms of mansplaining, though this last tends to be called this when the ultimate idea isn't serendipitous but potentially so commonly known that there is no insight in the information.
This sort of "public serendipity" or "group serendipity" is nice because it means that much of the work of discovery and connecting ideas is done by others against your own work rather that you sorting/searching through your own more limited realm of work to potentially create it.
Group focused combinatorial creativity can be dramatically more powerful than that done on one's own. This can be part of the major value behind public digital gardens, zettelkasten, etc.
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Third, sharing our ideas with others introduces a major element ofserendipity. When you present an idea to another person, theirreaction is inherently unpredictable. They will often be completelyuninterested in an aspect you think is utterly fascinating; they aren’tnecessarily right or wrong, but you can use that information eitherway. The reverse can also happen. You might think something isobvious, while they find it mind-blowing. That is also usefulinformation. Others might point out aspects of an idea you neverconsidered, suggest looking at sources you never knew existed, orcontribute their own ideas to make it better. All these forms offeedback are ways of drawing on not only your first and SecondBrains, but the brains of others as well.
I like that he touches on one of the important parts of the gardens and streams portion of online digital gardens here, though he doesn't tacitly frame it this way.
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Some digital notes apps allow you to displayonly the images saved in your notes, which is a powerful way ofactivating the more intuitive, visual parts of your brain.
Visual cues one can make in their notes and user interfaces that help to focus or center on these can be useful reminders for what appears in particular notes, especially if visual search is a possibility.
Is this the reason that Gyuri Lajos very frequently cuts and pastes images into his Hypothes.is notes?
Which note taking applications leverage this sort of visual mnemonic device? Evernote did certainly, but other text heavy tools like Obsidian, Logseq, and Roam Research don't. Most feed readers do this well leveraging either featured photos, photos in posts, or photos in OGP.
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First, while using the previous retrieval methods, it is a good ideato keep your focus a little broad. Don’t begin and end your searchwith only the specific folder that matches your criteria.
The area of serendipity becomes much more powerful when one has ideas both directly interlinked, ideas categorized with subject headings or tags, or when one can have affordances like auto-complete.
The method Forte suggests and outlines allows for some serendipity, but not as much as other methods with additional refinements. Serendipity in Forte's method isn't as strong as in others.
In this section he's talking about some of the true "magic of note taking" which is discussed by Luhmann and others.
link to:<br /> Luhmann's writings on serendipity and surprise when using his zettelkasten (Communication with the Slipbox...)<br /> Ahrens mentions of this effect
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How to Resurface and Reuse Your Past Work
Coming back to the beginning of this section. He talks about tags, solely after-the-fact instead of when taking notes on the fly. While it might seem that he would have been using tags as subject headings in a traditional commonplace book, he really isn't. This is a significant departure from the historical method!! It's also ill advised not to be either tagging/categorizing as one goes along to make searching and linking things together dramatically easier.
How has he missed the power of this from the start?! This is really a massive flaw in his method from my perspective, particularly as he quotes John Locke's work on the topic.
Did I maybe miss some of this in earlier sections when he quoted John Locke? Double check, just in case, but this is certainly the section of the book to discuss using these ideas!
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One of my favorite rules of thumb is to “Only start projects that are already 80percent done.” That might seem like a paradox, but committing to finishprojects only when I’ve already done most of the work to capture, organize,and distill the relevant material means I never run the risk of startingsomething I can’t finish.
This same sort of principle is seen in philanthropy circles where the group already has commitments for a large proportion of the end goal before they even announce the campaign.
Is there a rule of thumb for this in philanthropy? 50%? What is it called, ie does it have a specific name?
What relation does it have to the Pareto principle, if any?
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Tags can overcomethis limitation by infusing your Second Brain with connections,making it easier to see cross-disciplinary themes and patterns thatdefy simple categorization.
Forte frames things primarily from a digital perspective so he talks about folders and tags, but seems to wholly forget the grand power of having an subject index. While they're broadly the same, it's as if he's forgoing two thousand years of rhetorical tradition to have something that seems new and innovative, but which are paths that are incredibly well travelled.
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Sometimes you know a project is coming and can startsaving things to a project folder in advance,
no mention of the affordances of being able to cross-link things or even transclude them from an original location (which works for one currently) to another useful location.
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As powerful as search can be, studies5 have found that in manysituations people strongly prefer to navigate their file systemsmanually, scanning for the information they’re looking for. Manualnavigation gives people control over how they navigate, with foldersand file names providing small contextual clues about where to looknext.6
The studies quoted here are in the mid 80s and early 90s before the rise of better and easier UI methods or more powerful search. I'd have to call this conclusion into question.
There's also a big difference in what people know, what people prefer, and what knowledgeable people can do most quickly.
Cross reference this with Dan Russell's research at Google that indicates that very few people know how to use ctrl-f to find or search for things in documents. - https://hyp.is/7a532uxjEeyYfTOctQHvTw/www.youtube.com/channel/UCh6KFtW4a4Ozr81GI1cxaBQ
Relate it to the idea of associative (memory) trails (Memex), songlines, and method of loci in remembering where things are -- our brains are designed to navigate using memory
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knowledge garden
a nod to digital gardens
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Over time, your ability to quickly tap these creative assets andcombine them into something new will make all the difference in yourcareer trajectory, business growth, and even quality of life
I'm curious how he's going to outline this practice as there's been no discussion of linking or cross-linking ideas prior to this point as is done in some instantiations of the zettelkasten methods. (Of course this interlinking is more valuable when it comes specifically to writing output; once can rely on subject headings and search otherwise.)
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Our creativity thrives on examples
This pulls into question our zeal for innovation. Most thought is created and honed against other pre-existing thought.
Some of the fun of note taking is not only rewriting an idea in one's own words for potential understanding, but expanding upon it to extend the ideas, sometimes based on our pre-existing world view and knowledge. The rest is linking this idea into place with our other knowledge and then combining an permuting it with that knowledge to create new knowledge.
This seems to be a building block of the broader idea of "combinatorial creativity".
link to: - Annie Murphy Paul's contention that imitation > innovation - Lee Vinsel's The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most
can imitation lead to innovation?
innovation is the use of combinatorial creativity to make new things... rarely, if ever?, is true innovation made from whole cloth, there is always(?) something used as a base which is extended.
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allyou’re doing is drawing on a growing library of Intermediate Packetsstored in your Second Brain.
Intermediate Packets juxtaposed with Second Brain, it would have been better if he could have given a better analogy than intermediate packets to create some parallelism with Second Brain, alas... lack of creativity?
Notice the importance he's giving to Intermediate Packets by artificially capitalizing it. An indication of attempt to commoditize and sell "note taking" as a product.
link to https://hyp.is/OKlVhPBCEeyX96cojNH8rg/www.danah.org/name.html
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Favorites or bookmarks saved from the web or social media
The majority of content one produces in social media is considered "throw away" material. One puts it in the stream of flotsam and jetsam and sets it free down the river never to be seen or used again. We treat too much of our material and knowledge this way.
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The idea of startinganything from scratch will become foreign to you—why not draw onthe wealth of assets you’ve invested in in the past?
He uses the idea of "wealth" here for notes created in a commonplace instead of "treasure" or storehouse as is the historical tradition, this is an indication of a complete schism between the older traditions and the new.
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eventually you’ll have so many IPs at yourdisposal that you can execute entire projects just by assemblingpreviously created IPs. This is a magical experience that willcompletely change how you view productivity.
another example of the idea of "magical" experience that comes when taking notes. This one isn't about idea creation or even serendipity though, but relates specifically to being "bulk productive".
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Intermediate Packets
example of the creation of a buzz word for something not really quite necessary. It's useful to give names to things, but this is just a synonym for a note, isn't it?
definitely not as developed as "second brain"
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We’ve been taught that it’s important to work “with the end inmind.” We are told that it is our responsibility to deliver outcomes,whether that is a finished product on store shelves, a speechdelivered at an event, or a published technical document.
Example of someone else saying this...
We focus too much on the achievement and the end goal and the work and process doesn't receive its due.
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The myth of the writer sitting down before a completely blankpage, or the artist at a completely blank canvas, is just that—a myth.
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“The greater your ignorance the more verifiably accurate must beyour facts,” she once remarked.
unsourced
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Thus began a lifelong relationship with her commonplace books.Butler would scrape together twenty-five cents to buy small Meadmemo pads, and in those pages she took notes on every aspect ofher life: grocery and clothes shopping lists, last-minute to-dos,wishes and intentions, and calculations of her remaining funds forrent, food, and utilities. She meticulously tracked her daily writinggoals and page counts, lists of her failings and desired personalqualities, her wishes and dreams for the future, and contracts she
would sign with herself each day for how many words she committed to write.
Not really enough evidence for a solid quote here. What was his source?
He cites the following shallowly: <br /> - Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories: Positive Obsession (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), 123–36.<br /> - 2 Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2020).<br /> - 3 Dan Sheehan, “Octavia Butler has finally made the New York Times Best Seller list,” LitHub.com, September 3, 2020, https://lithub.com/octavia- butler-has-finally-made-the-new-york-times-best-seller-list/.<br /> - 4 Butler’s archive has been available to researchers and scholars at the Huntington Library since 2010.
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Verum ipsum factum (“We only know what we make”)—Giambattista Vico, Italian philosopher
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Progressive Summarizatio
why is this being capitalized?? He may think it's that important, but...
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There is one more layer we can add, though
This four layer processing thing is painful and I suspect few are going to spend this much time on so many potential ideas.
Ahren's framing of fleeting notes and permanent notes is quicker and easier.
Also missing is any sort of inherent link to any other ideas or even to a broader index to make it somewhat easier to find/use. Simply filing it into a folder, even an "important" one seems fairly useless and make-work.
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In his book A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, John Lockesimilarly advised
Why footnote this instead of giving it a nod and an actual reference as sententiae?
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I like to think of layer one as the “soil”—an excerpt from a source or my ownthinking (whether as words, drawings, images, or audio) I initially capture intomy notes. They are like the ground on which my understanding will be built.Layer two is “oil,” as in “I’ve struck oil!,” conveniently represented by black,bolded text. Layer three is “gold,” which is even more valuable, and shines inhighlighter yellow in many apps. Layer four is the “gems,” the most rare andilluminating finds that I’ve distilled in my own words as an executive summary.
another example along with CORE and PARA of Forte highlighting four steps. Why didn't he give this one a name? It's a clever analogy and very easy to remember mnemonically from a visual perspective. Why hide it in the footnotes?!
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This holds true for so much of the ideas and inspiration around us.There is a key idea that catches our attention in the moment. We feelenraptured and obsessed with it. It’s difficult to imagine everforgetting the new idea. It’s changed our lives forever! But after a fewhours or days or weeks, it starts to fade from our memory. Soon ourrecollection of that exciting new idea is nothing but a pale shadow ofsomething we once knew, that once intrigued us. Your job as anotetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things youdiscover in such a way that they can survive the journey into thefuture. That way your excitement and enthusiasm for yourknowledge builds over time instead of fading away.
💐
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Our notes are things to use,not just things to collect.
Many people take notes, they just don't know where they're taking them to. It's having a concrete use for them after you've written them down that makes all the difference. At this point, most would say that they do read back over them, but this generally creates a false sense of learning through familiarity. Better would be turning them into spaced repetition flashcards, or linking them to ideas and thoughts already in our field of knowledge to see if and where they fit into our worldview.
link to - research on false feeling of knowledge by re-reading notes in Ahrens
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Quantum Notetaking
really?! now we're selling something wiz bang!
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a short documentary titled Francis Coppola’s Notebook3released in 2001, Coppola explained his process.
I've seen a short snippet of this, but I suspect it's longer and has more depth.
The citation of this documentary here via IMDb.com is just lame. Cite the actual movie and details for finding and watching it please.
Apparently the entirety of the piece is just the 10 minutes I saw.
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“As I was reading the book and makingthese notes and then putting them on the margins obviously themore pens I was using and the more rulers, and the more squigglylines, sort of implied the excitement of the book was higher andhigher, so that the sheer amount of ink on the page would tell melater on this is one of the most important scenes.”
The density of annotations on a text can tell one about where the value and excitement of a work may be hiding.
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“I think it’s important to put your impressions down on the firstreading because those are the initial instincts about what youthought was good or what you didn’t understand or what you thoughtwas bad.”
First gut reactions can be highly valuable and should be noted because it's incredibly difficult to remember what it was like before you knew a thing. It's hard to revisit a thing with beginner's eyes and those reactions can help one to improve and refine a thing.
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Coppola’s strategy for making the complex, multifaceted filmrested on a technique he learned studying theater at HofstraCollege, known as a “prompt book.”
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definitionreminds
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“parallel”;this
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UsingPARA is not just about creating a bunch of folders to put things in. Itis about identifying the structure of your work and life—what you arecommitted to, what you want to change, and where you want to go.
Using the P.A.R.A. method puts incredible focus on immediate projects and productivity toward them. This is a dramatically different focus from the zettelkasten method.
The why's of the systems are dramatically different as well.
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Your efforts to capture content for future use will be tremendouslyeasier and more effective if you know what that content is for.
Within the P.A.R.A. framework it's helpful if you know what your note capture is meant for, but it's wholly against a lot of note taking for things which may simply spark joy. This may be helpful for the work-a-day productivity person, but is painfully out of sync with keeping notes as a means of generating new ideas. Many of these sorts of notes will be hidden away in an archive and thus broadly unusable in the long run.
Sorting ideas into folders is still an older classical way of thinking instead of linking an idea to related things that make it imminently more usable. Cross linked ideas seem wholly more interesting, vibrant and more useable to me.
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We are organizing for actionability
Organize for actionability.
(Applicable only for P.A.R.A.?)
This is interesting for general project management, but potentially not for zettelkasten-type notes. That method has more flexibility that doesn't require this sort of organizational method and actually excels as a result of it.
There is a tension here.
Notes primarily for project-based productivity are different from notes for writing-based output.
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Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, Irecommend organizing them according to where they are going
This is a useful distinction.
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The goal of organizing our knowledge is to move our goalsforward, not get a PhD in notetaking.
HA! Though many do fall into this trap.
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Archives: Things I’ve Completed or Put on Hold
The P.A.R.A. method seems like an admixture of one's projects/to do lists and productivity details and a more traditional commonplace book. Keeping these two somewhat separate mentally may help users with respect to how these folders should be used.
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Resources: Things I Want to Reference in the Future
Resources (of P.A.R.A.) sound specifically like a more traditional commonplace book space.
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By takingthat small extra step of putting a note into a folder (or tagging it*) fora specific project, such as a psychology paper you’re writing or apresentation you’re preparing, you’ll encounter that idea right at themoment it’s most relevant. Not a moment before, and not a momentafter.
But what about the unimagined future projects that may be our most important. Zettelkasten methods cover for this better perhaps?
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It assumes only that you are currently working on acertain set of projects, and that your information should be organizedto support them.
This seems practical, but also means that it isn't necessarily re-usable and may not provide as much serendipity for creating new ideas.
Think about whether or not these are true.
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organizing system PARA,* which stands for the four main categoriesof information in our lives: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.These four categories are universal, encompassing any kind ofinformation, from any source, in any format, for any purpose.*
a project based (pseudo-folder) approach
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our Second Brain isn’t just a tool—it’s an environment. It is agarden of knowledge full of familiar, winding pathways, but alsosecret and secluded corners. Every pathway is a jumping-off point tonew ideas and perspectives. Gardens are natural, but they don’thappen by accident. They require a caretaker to seed the plants, trimthe weeds, and shape the paths winding through them. It’s time forus to put more intention into the digital environments where we nowspend so many of our waking hours.
He's waxing florid again here, this time figuratively and literally.
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the Cathedral Effect.2Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves inpowerfully shapes our thinking
Our surroundings can have a profound effect on our thinking.
Want to read: Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu, “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use,” Journal of Consumer Research 34, no. 2 (2007): 174–86, https://doi.org/10.1086/519146.
This is a whole different area than "thought spaces" but somehow relevant all the same.
cross reference this with Annie Murphy Paul's thinking with built spaces
Did Forte find this source on his own or borrow from Annie Murphy Paul? Likely the later given his reliance on other small bits which overlap.
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Twyla Tharp’s box
Having read Chapter 5 of Tharp's book, I'll say that he does a pretty good job of synopsizing the ten pages, but he really does quote the hell out of her.
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Tharp calls her approach “the box.”
In The Creative Habit, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp has creative inspiration and note taking practice which she calls "the box" in which she organizes “notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me”. She also calls her linking of ideas within her box method "the art of scratching" (chapter 6).
related: combinatorial creativity triangle thinking
[[Twyla Tharp]] [[The Creative Habit]] #books/wanttoread
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Dance might seem like the creative medium that could leastbenefit from “organizing.”
I really appreciate that he's actively using examples from across a variety of domains to indicate the depth and breadth of areas which can benefit from commonplacing and note taking domains.
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Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent andoriginal in your work.—Gustave Flaubert
In addition to this as a standalone quote...
If nothing else, one should keep a commonplace book so that they have a treasure house of nifty quotes to use as chapter openers for the books they might write.
Tags
- Huntington Library
- note taking why
- visualizations
- C.O.D.E.
- sententiae
- future self
- Evernote
- Feynman Technique
- tags
- memory trails
- Gyuri Lajos
- creation
- Gustave Flaubert
- John Locke indexing method
- prompt book
- refinement
- conversations with the text
- conversations between texts
- associative trails
- Pareto principle
- gardens and streams
- ctrl-f
- Memex
- capitonyms
- buzz words
- note taking methods
- imitation > innovation
- productivity
- file navigation
- annotations
- dance
- note taking affordances
- Francis Ford Coppola
- review
- tools for creativity
- mansplaining
- magic of note taking
- Niklas Luhmann
- myths
- indices
- social media
- testing understanding
- transclusion
- quotes
- synthetic associations
- songlines
- triangle thinking
- first reactions
- conversations
- beginners
- search
- understanding
- Hemingway's White Bull
- Socratic method
- associative memory
- fund raising goals
- folders
- fund raising campaigns
- method of loci
- Giambattista Vico
- digital gardens
- project management
- make work
- definitions
- theater
- intermediate packets
- stock and flow
- serendipity
- Octavia Butler
- communication
- gut reactions
- idea links
- subject headings
- documentaries
- organization
- Twyla Tharp
- writing process
- typo
- rules of thumb
- marketing
- examples
- processes
- Cathedral effect
- taxonomies
- intermediaries
- zettelkasten
- innovation
- thought spaces
- metaphors
- oral folders
- open graph protocol
- quantum x
- four letter acronyms
- commonplace books vs. zettelkasten
- philanthropy
- combinatorial creativity
- fashion
- Dan Russell
- diversity
- note reuse
- writing for understanding
- commonplace books
- revision
- John Locke
- focus
- group serendipity
- topical headings
- want to watch
- capitalization
- goals
- art of scratching
- note taking advice
- visual memory
- fleeting notes
- thinking with built spaces
- second brain
- collections of papers
- surprise
- visual cues
- autocomplete
- writing advice
- throw away knowledge
- analogies
- Tiago Forte
- atomic ideas
- thinking
- creativity
- work with the end in mind
- want to read
- note taking
- P.A.R.A.
- art
- actionability
- storehouse
- Hypothes.is
Annotators
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www.lisabanks.com www.lisabanks.com
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https://www.lisabanks.com/bloopers/capitalization-generic-words.htm
the author colloquially calls these errors “blips”...
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By capitalizing words that shouldn’t be, it sounds as if the writer is trying to inflate the importance of those words artificially.
surely there is a name for this assinine practice?
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www.npr.org www.npr.org
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https://www.npr.org/2022/06/18/1106054812/mark-shields-pbs-newshour-commentator-dies
Basic facts, painfully thin...
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He showed his famous sense of humor in a 2006 commentary for NPR's "This I Believe" series, writing: "I admire enormously the candidate able to face defeat with humor and grace. Nobody ever conceded defeat better than Dick Tuck who, upon losing a California state senate primary, said simply, 'The people have spoken ... the bastards.' "
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Some of his happiest moments, he said, were when he worked on political campaigns: “You think you are going to make a difference that’s going to be better for the country, and especially for widows and orphans and people who don’t even know your name and never will know your name. Boy, that’s probably as good as it gets.”
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“In my Irish American Massachusetts family, you were born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic,” Mr. Shields wrote in 2009. “If your luck held out, you were also brought up to be a Boston Red Sox fan.”
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Politics, he maintained, was “a contact sport, a question of accepting an elbow or two,” and losing was “the original American sin.”
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Asked in a 2013 C-SPAN interview which presidents he admired, he cited Gerald R. Ford, a Republican who took office in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Ford, he said, was “the most emotionally healthy.”“Not that the others were basket cases,” he said, but “they get that bug, and as the late and very great Mo Udall, who sought that office, once put it, the only known cure for the presidential virus is embalming fluid.”
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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Tiago is a true pioneer and innovator of our time!
What here is exactly innovative? He's talking about a centuries old idea.
He's just giving you something slightly updated to imitate.
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spencergreenhalgh.com spencergreenhalgh.com
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You can use click on the < button in the top-right of your browser window to read and write comments on this post with Hypothesis. You can read more about how I use this software here.
Spencer's example of user interface below his posts to indicate how readers might comment on his website.
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Social annotation at it's deepest and finest!
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spencergreenhalgh.com spencergreenhalgh.com
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spencergreenhalgh.com spencergreenhalgh.com
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Kiddo was worried about today’s medicine because box described them as “tablets,” and she thought that meant chewing up something shaped and sized roughly like an iPad.
Hilarious!
Happy (early) Father's Day!
(Took me a minute to find the permalink for this by itself since it didn't appear on the "Relationships" archive page.)
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spencergreenhalgh.com spencergreenhalgh.com
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Kiddo was worried about today’s medicine because box described them as “tablets,” and she thought that meant chewing up something shaped and sized roughly like an iPad.
Hilarious!
Happy (early) Father's Day!
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spencergreenhalgh.com spencergreenhalgh.com
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I regularly check in on comments for this website and will generally respond!
@spgreenhalgh, Are you checking for comments manually only?
I've seen a few doing this pattern before:<br /> - https://boffosocko.com/2021/03/25/hypothes-is-as-a-comment-system-receiving-mentions-and-notifications-for-your-website/<br /> - https://boffosocko.com/2020/05/26/55771462/
I use an RSS feed through IFTTT to trigger email notifications to help out and @judell's facet tool can be useful: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=10000&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&wildcard_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fspencergreenhalgh.com%2F*
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Although Hugo works with a number of commenting systems, I’ve chosen to use the social annotation software Hypothesis as the social layer on this website.
https://spencergreenhalgh.com/hypothesis/
Someone else using Hypothes.is as a commenting system in the wild.
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www.goodreads.com www.goodreads.com
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The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most
How does this fit into the broad idea of imitation >> innovation from Annie Murphy Paul?
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level 2ojboal · 2 hr. agoNot quite understanding the value of Locke's method: far as I understand it, rather than having a list of keywords or phrases, Locke's index is instead based on a combination of first letter and vowel. I can understand how that might be useful for the sake of compression, but doesn't that mean you don't have the benefit of "index as list of keywords/phrases" (or did I miss something)?
Locke's method is certainly a compact one and is specifically designed for notebooks of several hundred pages where you're slowly growing the index as you go within a limited and usually predetermined amount of space. If you're using an index card or digital system where space isn't an issue, then that specific method may not be as ideal. Whichever option you ultimately choose, it's certainly incredibly valuable and worthwhile to have an index of some sort.
For those into specifics, here's some detail about creating an index using Hypothes.is data in Obsidian: https://boffosocko.com/2022/05/20/creating-a-commonplace-book-or-zettelkasten-index-from-hypothes-is-tags/ and here's some detail for how I did it for a website built on WordPress: https://boffosocko.com/2021/09/04/an-index-for-my-digital-commonplace-book/
I'm curious to see how others do this in their tool sets, particularly in ways that remove some of the tedium.
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Local file Local file
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22. We may note in passing the archaic nature of the US Supreme Court, whosejudges are named for life like the pope of the Catholic Church and the apostles of theMormon church. However, a pontifical bull of 1970 denied cardinals over eighty yearsold the right to vote in papal elections, which proves that all institutions can be re-formed, even the most venerable ones.
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Unsurprisingly, each system often tries to prevent the princi-ples it holds dear from being changed, and even attempts to make anyeffort to challenge them illegal.
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18. The success of the referendum orga nized by Uber and Lyft to preserve their ex-tremely precarious model in California in 2020 illustrates the limits of an idyllic visionof direct democracy, as well as the need to reconceive a salarial status that makes it pos-sible to reconcile protection and autonomy.
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In France, a wealthyvoter giving 7,500 euros (the current ceiling) to his preferred politicalparty has a right to a tax deduction of 5,000 euros, financed by the restof the taxpayers.
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today’s billionaires would not dare to openly demandrights to vote like the ones Sweden used to have, but they often resortto other methods to arrive at the same ends.
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censitary
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The develop-ment of digital platforms and gig workers paid by the task now con-stitutes as much a redoubtable threat to salarial status as to our liber-ties, and we will be able to fight it only if the public authority regainscontrol of the sector and implements new laws.11
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www.americanyawp.com www.americanyawp.com
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Apparently this is one of the most annotated texts within Hypothes.is. Interestingly, almost none of the annotations on it are public.
Tags
Annotators
URL
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gist.github.com gist.github.com
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The Tampermonkey script adds the embedded webclient of Hypothes.is to any webpage, similar to the Bookmarklet. The main difference is that it is active by default and you do not need to click on the Bookmarklet.
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canvas.ucsc.edu canvas.ucsc.edu
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https://canvas.ucsc.edu/courses/41888?utm_source=learningsummit2022
A small open course from UCSC for learning how to use Hypothes.is.
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web.hypothes.is web.hypothes.is
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https://web.hypothes.is/blog/hypothesis-and-vitalsource-partner-to-expand-social-learning/
Hypothes.is has partnered with VitalSource to allow annotating texts on their Bookshelf product.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxfTVdohSwA
Christine Moskell talks about a professor's final exam design prompting students to go back to annotations and add new commentary (or links to other related knowledge) that they've gained during the length of a course.
Link to:
This is very similar to the sort of sensemaking and interlinking of information that Sönke Ahrens outlines in his book How to Take Smart Notes though his broader note taking thesis goes a few additional steps for more broadly synthesizing ideas into longer papers, articles, theses, and books.
Dr. Moskell also outlined a similar tactic at the [[Hypothesis Social Learning Summit - Spotlight on Social Reading & Social Annotation]] earlier today, though that video may not be accessible for a bit.
Cross reference: https://web.hypothes.is/event/social-learning-summit-spotlight-on-social-reading-social-annotation/
How can we better center and model these educational practices in our pedagogies?
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www.insidehighered.com www.insidehighered.com
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As my colleague Robin Paige likes to say, we are also social beings in a social world. So if we shift things just a bit to think instead about the environments we design and cultivate to help maximize learning, then psychology and sociology are vital for understanding these elements as well.
Because we're "social beings in a social world", we need to think about the psychology and sociology of the environments we design to help improve learning.
Link this to: - Design of spaces like Stonehenge for learning in Indigenous cultures, particularly the "stage", acoustics (recall the ditch), and intimacy of the presentation. - research that children need face-to-face interactions for language acquisition
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Do we need to start offering PhD’s in higher education pedagogy?
this sounds fun...
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Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do
books/wanttoread
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One of my frustrations with the “science of learning” is that to design experiments which have reasonable limits on the variables and can be quantitatively measured results in scenarios that seem divorced from the actual experience of learning.
Is the sample size of learning experiments really large enough to account for the differences in potential neurodiversity?
How well do these do for simple lectures which don't add mnemonic design of some sort? How to peel back the subtle differences in presentation, dynamism, design of material, in contrast to neurodiversities?
What are the list of known differences? How well have they been studied across presenters and modalities?
What about methods which require active modality shifts versus the simple watch and regurgitate model mentioned in watching videos. Do people do actively better if they're forced to take notes that cause modality shifts and sensemaking?
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www.insidehighered.com www.insidehighered.com
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How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching by Joshua R. Eyler #books/wanttoread<br /> Published in March 2018
Mentioned at the [[Hypothesis Social Learning Summit - Spotlight on Social Reading & Social Annotation]] in the chat in the [[Social Annotation Showcase]]
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It will be interesting to see where Eyler takes his scholarship post-COVID. I’ll be curious to learn how Eyler thinks of the intersection of learning science and teaching practices in an environment where face-to-face teaching is no longer the default.
Face-to-face teaching and learning has been the majority default for nearly all of human existence. Obviously it was the case in oral cultures, and the tide has shifted a bit with the onset of literacy. However, with the advent of the Internet and the pressures of COVID-19, lots of learning has broken this mold.
How can the affordances of literacy-only modalities be leveraged for online learning that doesn't include significant fact-to-face interaction? How might the zettelkasten method of understanding, sense-making, note taking, and idea generation be leveraged in this process?
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For college professors, I think the critical contribution of How Humans Learn is that good teaching is constructed, not ordained.
"...good teaching is constructed, not ordained."
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marginalsyllab.us marginalsyllab.us
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pdf.abbyy.com pdf.abbyy.com
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I've used ABBY FineReader (best on Windows) and it was much better at correcting OCR than Adobe Acrobat. —Dana Conard
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laverne.edu laverne.edu
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Real learning cannot happen in a vacuum. Connecting oneself and one’s new ideas with others across classrooms, across the curricula, and into the community build confidence , deepens experience, and maximizes success.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awce_j2myQw
Francis Ford Coppola talks about his notes and notebook on The Godfather.
He went to the Cafe Trieste to work.
Coppola had an Olivetti typewriter. (4:20)
Sections on pitfalls
I didn't need a script cause I could have made the movie just from this notebook.
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www.hollywoodreporter.com www.hollywoodreporter.com
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@remikalir, for the cinephile students...
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Now he’s giving the public a peek into that creative process with The Godfather Notebook (Regan Arts, Nov. 15, $50), an exact reproduction of his original, right down to the handwriting, plus rarely seen photos. A signed $500 limited edition even comes in a replica three-ring binder.
Francis Ford Coppola published an exact reproduction of his original prompt book for The Godfather called The Godfather Notebook (Regan Arts, 2016).
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To organize his thoughts, Coppola made a “prompt book,” a theater trick he learned in college at Hofstra. Into a three-ring binder he stuffed his annotated copy of the novel, scene-by-scene breakdowns, notes on the times and setting, cliches to avoid and casting ideas.
Francis Ford Coppola created and used a prompt book to organize his notes and annotations on Mario Puzo's The Godfather to create the 1972 Paramount blockbuster.
Having learned the stage managers' technique of keeping a prompt book at Hofstra, his contained an annotated copy of the novel with scene-by-scene breakdowns, notes on setting, cliches to avoid, and even casting ideas.
Tags
- stage manager
- reproductions
- read
- notebooks
- The Godfather
- annotations
- prompt book
- Francis Ford Coppola
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Terry Gross interviews Coppola.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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davidpeach.me davidpeach.me
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I owe a big thank you to Chris Aldrich too. As it was his website I came across that inspired me to bring my website back to what I have always wanted it to be. Hopefully, thanks to the indieweb helper plugins I have installed, Chris may just get notified on his website and post a reply back — from his website over to mine using the webmention protocol.
:)
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www.sas.ac.uk www.sas.ac.uk
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The course Marginalia in Books from Christopher Ohge is just crying out to have an annotated syllabus.
Wish I could follow along directly, but there's some excellent reference material hiding in the brief outline of the course.
Perhaps a list of interesting people here too for speaking at https://iannotate.org/ 2022 hiding in here? A session on the history of annotation and marginalia could be cool there.
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Archaeology of Reading project
https://archaeologyofreading.org/
The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.
Perhaps some overlap here with: - Workshop in the History of Material Texts https://pennmaterialtexts.org/about/events/ - Book Traces https://booktraces.org via Andrew Stauffer, et al. - Schoenberg Institute's Coffe with a Codex https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/ (perhaps to a lesser degree)
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Jacqueline Broad (Monash University)
Online
- http://jacquelinebroad.com/
- https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/jacqueline-broad
- https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3095-6770
- https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=bZ0f2BIAAAAJ&hl=en
Short Bio
Jacqueline Broad is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Her area of research expertise is early modern women’s philosophy. She writes on early modern theories of virtue, the ethical and religious foundations of women’s rights, historical conceptions of the self, and connections between feminism and Cartesianism in the seventeenth century.
She has recently become Series Editor for Cambridge University Press’s new Elements series on Women in the History of Philosophy.
Select bibliography
- Jacqueline Broad, ‘Undoing Bayle’s Scepticism: Astell’s Marginalia as Disarmament’, in Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins, edited by Patrick Spedding and Paul Tankard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 61–84.
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Matthew Fay (Institute of English Studies, University of London)
Online
Short Bio
Over the years, Matthew has turned his hand to several disciplines, from high school teaching to theatre directing, before taking the MA in the History of the Book at London University. He is now undertaking research for a PhD on an archive formed by his great-grandfather, Frank Fay (1870-1930), an Irish actor and producer, who collaborated with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory on the plays that were performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Matthew is interested in the provenance of books and theatre history.
Bibliography
- Thesis: ‘The Fay Archive: Towards a Checklist and Copy-specific Analysis of Key Research Items by W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory.’ (in progress)
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Francesca Benatti (Open University)
Online
- https://www.open.ac.uk/people/fb2982
- https://twitter.com/rhymesontheroad
- https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1456-7812
Short Bio
I joined The Open University in 2012 as a member of the Arts Faculty and I am now part of the School of Arts and Humanities and the English and Creative Writing Department. I hold a Laurea in Lettere Moderne from the University of Bologna, as well as an MA in Literature and Publishing and a PhD in English from the National University of Ireland, Galway.
My main role in the Faculty is to promote research in the Digital Humanities as the co-leader of DH_OU, the Digital Humanities at The Open University Research Collaboration (web and Twitter) and of the OOC DTP Digital Humanities training programme.
I am a member of the READ-IT project, the Reading Experience Database, the History of Books and Reading Research Group, the Gender and Otherness in the Humanities (GOTH) Research Centre, the European Romanticism in Association and RÊVE project and the Open Arts Archive.
During 2014-2019 I led the Arts and Humanities in the Digital Age training programme for the CHASE doctoral training partnership. In 2017 I was the Principal Investigator of the A Question of Style project, which was funded by a Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Field Development Grant. In 2016-2019 I was a member of the Executive Committee of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) and of the International Executive Council of centerNet.
Select bibliography
- Understanding the phenomenology of reading through modelling (2021-01-26) Antonini, Alessio; Suárez-Figueroa, Mari Carmen; Adamou, Alessandro; Benatti, Francesca; Vignale, François; Gravier, Guillaume and Lupi, Lucia Semantic Web Journal, 12(2) (pp. 191-217)
- *ing the Written Word: Digital Humanities Methods for Book History (2020) Antonini, Alessio and Benatti, Francesca In : SHARP 2020: Power of the Written Word (11-15 Jul 2020, Amsterdam)
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Recommended preliminary reading Antonini A., Benatti F., Blackburn-Daniels S. ‘On Links To Be: Exercises in Style #2’, 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (July 2020): 13–15. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372923.3404785 Grafton, Anthony. Worlds Made by Words : Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Harvard UP, 2011). Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Yale UP, 2001). –––. Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (Yale UP, 2005). Ohge, Christopher and Steven Olsen-Smith. ‘Computation and Digital Text Analysis at Melville’s Marginalia Online’, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 20.2 (June 2018): 1–16. O’Neill, Helen, Anne Welsh, David A. Smith, Glenn Roe, Melissa Terras, ‘Text mining Mill: Computationally detecting influence in the writings of John Stuart Mill from library records’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36.4 (December 2021): 1013–1029, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab010 Sherman, William. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (U of Pennsylvania P, 2008). Spedding, Patrick and Paul Tankard. Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
An interesting list of readings on annotation.
I'm curious if anyone has an open Zotero bibliography for this area? https://www.zotero.org/search/?p=2&q=annotation&type=group
of which the following look interesting: - https://www.zotero.org/groups/2586310/annotation - https://www.zotero.org/groups/2423071/annotated - https://www.zotero.org/groups/2898045/social_annotation
This reminds me to revisit Zocurelia as well: https://zocurelia.com
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Alessio Antonini (Open University)
- https://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/member/alessio-antonini
- https://www.open.ac.uk/people/apa224
- https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3639-3622
Dr Alessio Antonini is a Research Associate at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), Open University, and a member of KMi's Intelligent Systems and Data Science group. Before joining KMi, he was a post-doc researcher in Urban Computing at the University of Turin, Italy. His research is on Human-Data Interaction (HDI) in applicative context of Civic Technologies, Smart City and Digital Humanities (DH) applications, in which contributed with more than 30 peer-reviewed papers. Transdisciplinary problems emerging from real-life scenarios are the focus of his research, approached through interdisciplinary collaborations, ranging from urban planning, philosophy, law, humanities, history and geography. He has extensive experience in EU and national projects, leading activities and work-packages in 14 projects. With more than ten years of professional practice, he as broad experience in leading R&D projects.
Select bibliography:
- Antonini, A., Benatti, F., Watson, N., King, E. and Gibson, J. (2021) Death and Transmediations: Manuscripts in the Age of Hypertext, HT '21: Proceedings of the 32th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Virtual Event USA
- Vignale, F., Antonini, A. and Gravier, G. (2020) The Reading Experience Ontology (REO): Reusing and Extending CIDOC CRM, Digital Humanities Conference 2020, Ottawa
- Antonini, A. and Brooker, S. (2020) Mediation as Calibration: A Framework for Evaluating the Author/Reader Relation, Proceedings of the 31st ACM HyperText, Orlando, Florida, USA
- Antonini, A. and Benatti, F. (2020) *ing the Written Word: Digital Humanities Methods for Book History, SHARP 2020: Power of the Written Word, Amsterdam
- Antonini, A., (2020) Understanding the phenomenology of reading through modelling Understanding the phenomenology of reading through modelling, pp. (Early Access)
- Vignale, F., Benatti, F. and Antonini, A. (2019) Reading in Europe - Challenge and Case Studies of READ-IT Project, DH2019, Utrecht, Netherland
- Antonini, A., Vignale, F., Guillaume, G. and Brigitte, O. (2019) The Model of Reading: Modelling principles, Definitions, Schema, Alignments
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https://www.sas.ac.uk/events/event/25322
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jeremy Cherfas</span> (email) (<time class='dt-published'>06/16/2022 07:18:14</time>)</cite></small>
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- Frank Fay
- material culture
- John Keates
- Book Traces
- read
- courses on annotation
- Knowledge Media Institute
- annotation
- Workshop in the History of Material Texts
- marginalia
- Monash University
- archaeology
- book history
- reading practices
- annotation history
- bibliographies
- Zotero
- digital humanities
- READ-IT
- Archaeology of Reading
- J. M. Synge
- Mary Astell
- annotated syllabus
- annotations
- Herman Melville
- Zocurelia
- Alsssio Antonini
- IAnno
- Christopher Ohge
- Open University
- Matthew Fay
- want to read
- W. B. Yeates
- Francesca Benatti
- Jacqueline Broad
- Hypothes.is
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catalogue.nli.ie catalogue.nli.ie
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https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000781769
National Library of Ireland has digitised a first edition copy of Ulysses (Alan Clodd copy, number 120)
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jonudell.info jonudell.info
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http://jonudell.info/h/zotero/
This tool reads your Zotero library, finds items imported by URL, looks for associated Hypothesis annotations, and syncs them to Zotero as child notes.
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www.researchgate.net www.researchgate.net
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MemoNote, an annotation-based personal knowledge management tool for teachers
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Mixup Method of Synthetic Idea Generation: Write out 3 sentences from past notes. Write a new sentence made of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd part of each respective sentence. Repeat total of 3 times. Now look at the 3 synthesized lines & ask if wrong or right and why. Clarifies a lot.
—Marshall Kirkpatrick
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Mixup Method of Synthetic Idea Generation: Write out 3 sentences from past notes. Write a new sentence made of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd part of each respective sentence. Repeat total of 3 times. Now look at the 3 synthesized lines & ask if wrong or right and why. Clarifies a lot.
— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) June 14, 2022
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twitter.com twitter.com
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This touched a nerve this week: “thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do” (Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust)
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Local file Local file
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Think about the last time you were the only person in aroom who remembered a salient fact. What did that do for your credibility at thatprecise moment? Memory has that power.
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you label boxes so you knowwhat’s in them; you arrange your clothes according to color. Eventually you reach apoint where you look around and you’re satisfied. There are no loose ends.Everything is in its place, put away or accounted for or easily accessed. The roomexudes order and harmony. When you look around, you’re happy.
Interlinking your ideas can help to create a harmony within your collection. There are no loose ends or lost ideas. There is a place for everything and everything is in its proper place, ready to be used and reused.
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d. She puts the ideas together and tries to broker a deal for theconglomerate to acquire a radio network. At the end, she’s challenged to describehow she came up with the plan for the acquisition. It’s a telling scene. She has justbeen fired. On her way out of the building, with all her files and personal itemspacked in a box (a box just like mine!), she gets a chance to explain her thoughtprocess to the mogul:See? This is Forbes. It’s just your basic article about how you were lookingto expand into broadcasting. Right? Okay now. The same day—I’ll never forgetthis—I’m reading Page Six of the New York Post and there’s this item on BobbyStein, the radio talk show guy who does all those gross jokes about Ethiopiaand the Betty Ford Center. Well, anyway, he’s hosting this charity auction thatnight. Real bluebloods and won’t that be funny? Now I turn the page to Suzywho does the society stuff and there’s this picture of your daughter—see, nicepicture—and she’s helping to organize the charity ball. So I started to think:Trask, Radio, Trask, Radio.... So now here we are.He’s impressed and hires her on the spot. Forget the fairy-tale plot; as ademonstration of how to link A to B and come up with C, Working Girl is a primerin the art of scratching.
The plot twist at the end of Working Girl (Twentieth Century Fox, 1988) turns on Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) explaining her stroke of combinatorial creativity in coming up with a business pitch. Because she had juxtaposed several disparate ideas from the New York Post several pages from each other in a creative way, she got the job and Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver) is left embarrassed because she can't explain how she came up with a complicated combination of ideas.
Is this Tess McGill's zettelkasten in the movie Working Girl?
Tess McGill has slips of newspaper with ideas on them and a physical box to put them in.
slips with ideas+box=zettelkasten
Bonus points because she links her ideas, right?!
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the true value of the box: It contains your inspirations without confiningyour creativity.
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Above all, learn to respect your box’s strange and disorderly ways. As arepository of half-baked inspirations and unformed aids, the box can seem to be ahaphazard tool while you’re filling it. But when you want to go back and make senseof your path, every step is there to be found, and the order emerges if only inhindsight. Your box is proof that you have prepared well. If you want to know howany creative project will turn out, your box’s contents are as good a predictor ofsuccess or failure as anything I know.
Just as Luhmann and others discuss the seeming disorder and potential serendipity of their boxes, Tharp notices this same "strange and disorderly way..." of her box method. She remarks that "order emerges if only in hindsight." She also indicates that the contents of one's box "are as good a predictor of success or failure [of a project] as anything I know."
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All I know for sure is that they are trapped in the box.My solution for them: This isn’t working. Free yourself. Get out of this box. Putit away for another day and start a new box.
Don't get trapped in a particular project. Sometimes variety of projects can be just the medicine the doctor ordered. The zettelkasten method works, in part, because it makes it easier to work on things which inspire you while still knowing that you can slip away for a while, but still come back and find all your prior work there waiting for you. This is particularly useful even if you've forgotten that work.
Link this to examples of Luhmann and Ahren's descriptions of not becoming bored with their zettelkasten.
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The box is not a substitute for creating. The box doesn’t compose or write apoem or create a dance step. The box is the raw index of your preparation. It is therepository of your creative potential, but it is not that potential realized.
Great quote about what a zettelkasten isn't. This is also one of the reasons why I've underlined the amount of work that one must put into the box to get productive material back out the other end.
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No matter what system you use, I recommend having a goal and putting it inwriting. I read once that people who write down their New Year’s resolutions have agreater chance of achieving them than people who don’t. This is the sort of factoidthat is probably apocryphal but, like many urban legends, sounds as though it shouldbe true.
This quote from Twyla Tharp seems like another instantiation of Napoleon Hill's mantra "Think and Grow Rich", but is more concrete and literate: "Write and Grow Rich" (or successful, at least.)
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Sometimes the goal is nothing more than a personal mantra such as “keep itsimple” or “something perfect” or “economy” to remind me of what I was thinkingat the beginning if and when I lose my way. I write it down on a slip of paper and it’sthe first thing that goes into the box.
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The second was “makedance pay for the dancers.” I’ve always been resentful of the fact that some of theso-called elite art forms can’t survive on their own without sponsorship andsubsidies. It bothers me that dance companies around the world are not-for-profitorganizations and that dancers, who are as devoted and disciplined as any NFL orNBA superstar, are at the low end of the entertainment industry’s income scale. Iwanted this Broadway-bound project not only to elevate serious dance in thecommercial arena but also to pay the dancers well. So I wrote my goals for theproject, “tell a story” and “make dance pay,” on two blue index cards and watchedthem float to the bottom of the Joel box.
Given the importance of dance in oral cultures, what, why, and how has dance moved to be one of the seemingly lowest and least well paid art forms in modern society?
How might modern dance regain its teaching and mnemonic status in our culture?
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“My family is Jewish, I grew up inan Italian neighborhood, and every girl who broke my heart was Irish.”
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you should never save for two meetingswhat you can accomplish in one.
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For anyone who reads music, the sketchbooks literally record the progress of hisinvention. He would scribble his rough, unformed ideas in his pocket notebook andthen leave them there, unused, in a state of suspension, but at least captured withpencil on paper. A few months later, in a bigger, more permanent notebook, you canfind him picking up that idea again, but he’s not just copying the musical idea intoanother book. You can see him developing it, tormenting it, improving it in the newnotebook. He might take an original three-note motif and push it to its next stage bydropping one of the notes a half tone and doubling it. Then he’d let the idea sit therefor another six months. It would reappear in a third notebook, again not copied butfurther improved, perhaps inverted this time and ready to be used in a piano sonata.
Beethoven kept a variation of a waste book in that he kept a pocket notebook for quick capture of ideas. Later, instead of copying them over into a permanent place, he'd translate and amplify on the idea in a second notebook. Later on, he might pick up the idea again in a third notebook with further improvements.
By doing this me might also use the initial ideas as building blocks for more than one individual piece. This is very clever, particularly in musical development where various snippets of music might be morphed into various different forms in ways that written ideas generally can't be so used.
This literally allowed him to re-use his "notes" at two different levels (the written ones as well as the musical ones.)
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Beethoven, despite his unruly reputation and wild romantic image, waswell organized. He saved everything in a series of notebooks that were organizedaccording to the level of development of the idea. He had notebooks for rough ideas,notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas,almost as if he was pre-aware of an idea’s early, middle, and late stages.
Beethoven apparently kept organized notebooks for his work. His system was arranged based on the level of finished work, so he had spaces for rough ideas, improved ideas and others for finished ideas.
Source for this?
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I also like the simplicity of a box. There’s a purpose here, and it has a lot to dowith efficiency. A writer with a good storage and retrieval system can write faster.He isn’t spending a lot of time looking things up, scouring his papers, and patrollingother rooms at home wondering where he left that perfect quote. It’s in the box.
A card index can be a massive boon to a writer as a well-indexed one, in particular, will save massive amounts of time which might otherwise be spent searching for quotes or ideas that they know they know, but can't easily recreate.
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I know one magazine editor who hoardsnewspaper and magazine clippings.
Twyla Tharp tells the story of a colleague who is a magazine editor. They keep a pile of clippings of phots, illustrations, and stories in their desk and mine it, often with others, for something that will create story ideas for new work.
This method is highly similar to that of Eminem's "Stacking Ammo" method.
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It’s not the only answer, of course. Maurice Sendak has a room that’s theequivalent of my boxes, a working studio that contains a huge unit with flat pulloutdrawers in which he keeps sketches, reference materials, notes, articles. He works onseveral projects at a time, and he likes to keep the overlapping materials out of sightwhen he’s tackling any one of them. Other people rely on carefully arranged indexcards. The more technological among us put it all on a computer. There’s no singlecorrect system. Anything can work, so long as it lets you store and retrieve yourideas—and never lose them.
Regardless of what sort of physical instantiation one's notes may take, a workable storage option for them is necessary whether it is a simple box, a shelving system, a curiosity cabinet, a flat file, or even an entire room itself.
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Maurice Sendak has a room that’s theequivalent of my boxes, a working studio that contains a huge unit with flat pulloutdrawers in which he keeps sketches, reference materials, notes, articles. He works onseveral projects at a time, and he likes to keep the overlapping materials out of sightwhen he’s tackling any one of them.
In her experience with Maurice Sendak, Twyla Tharp indicates that he has a room that works as the equivalent of her project boxes. His version is a working studio that contains a huge unit with flat pullout drawers where he keeps sketches, reference materials, notes, and articles. His system allows him to keep all the ideas ready at hand, but also easily out of the way so he can focus on a particular idea and project at a time.
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shelving in my work area at home, which holds my audio equipment, hundreds ofmusic CDs, and piles of musical scores, is not mere heavy-gauge industrial shelving;it’s scaffolding equipment, strong enough for painters to stand on when they’reworking on the exterior of a house. In other words, the shelves are built for hardwork. That’s a personal aesthetic choice. I want everything around me, from mydancers to my dances to my shelves, to be strong and built to last
I like cardboard file boxes for a bunch of reasons, all willfully idiosyncratic. The
Twyla Tharp's creative note taking system not only entails notes and ideas in boxes, but extends physically to a heavy-gauge industrial shelving which also holds her other tools for work including her "audio equipment, hundreds of music CDs, and piles of musical scores".
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Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting.
For Twyla Tharp, the most important feature of her project boxes is the fact that they free her from the worry of forgetting her ideas.
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The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this evenwhen I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but Iknow it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constantreminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.
Having a physical note taking system also stands as a physical reminder and representation of one's work and focus. It may be somewhat out of the way on a shelf, but it takes up space in a way that digital files and notes do not. This invites one into using and maintaining it.
Link to - tying a string on one's finger as a reminder - method of loci - orality
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There are separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done. If you want a glimpseinto how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes.
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Everyone hashis or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at OfficeDepot for transferring files.I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as thepiece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance.This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in mystudio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of artthat may have inspired me.
While she keeps more than just slips of paper (or index cards) in it, Twyla Tharp definitely falls into the pattern of creative collection related to the zettelkasten tradition.
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before you can think out of the box, you have tostart with a box
Can it be?! Twyla Tharp has an entire chapter in her book on creativity that covers a variation of the zettelkasten note taking concept!!!
Does the phrase "thinking outside of the box" make a tacit nod to the idea of using a card index (or the German zettelkasten) for note taking, sense making, and thinking?
Tags
- material culture
- zettelkasten design
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- mnemonic dance
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- Billy Joel
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- orality
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- Maurice Sendak
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