I want to take a look at these systems.

See Bacon’s letter to Greville examined by Vernon Snow, ‘Francis Bacon’s Advice to Fulke Greville on Research Techniques’, Huntington Library Quarterly 23 (1960), 369–78, at 374

This is similar in tone but for slightly differing reasons to Mortimer J. Adler recommending against loaning one's annotated books to other users. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/6x75DnXBEeyUyEOjgj_zKg)

Modern digital indices have the ability to easily create aliases so that similar or related headings might be concatenated. As an example, I might have four different variations of R. Llull's name in my system or English and Latin versions of names like "excerpting" and "ars excerptendi" which can be mapped to the same endpoints without worrying about the existence of synonyms.

Interesting to note here that he suggests a scratch pad rather than index cards here given his own personal use of index cards.

Mortimer J. Adler's method of annotating a text.

He's primarily giving the author and their ideas all the power and importance here.

There is nothing, so far, about immediate progressive summarization. There's also little about the reuse of one's notes for analysis and future synthesis, which I find surprising.

Earlier in the essay he mentions picking the book up later to refresh one's memory, but there's nothing about linking the ideas from one book to another.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Alexander Wang </span> in Alexander Wang on Twitter: "After discovering the idea of "A Meta-Layer for Notes" (https://t.co/EioyyptzCb), I started to try reading in this way ↓. https://t.co/lOhRyeytXZ" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>01/11/2022 09:15:59</time>)</cite></small>

Sticky notes or Post-It notes create a physical and spatial relationship between the note and its context. This same sort of relationship is recreated by taking notes in Hypothes.is which links the note or idea directly to the part of the web page or document which spurred it. Moving these notes into other platforms (Roam Research, Obsidian, etc.) can be done in a way so as to keep the physical link (using URLs) so that one can quickly and easily revisit the original context if necessary.

This affordance is an incredibly useful one which is generally neglected in the note taking space.

How often in practice is this done though?

There is an interesting difference between artificial intelligence and intelligence automation. Index cards were already doing the second by the early 1940s.

Wall with stickie note sized print outs taped to it. They contain a QR code, presumably linking to the thing they want to read with a Title and author below it.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/maps-of-content

Seneca on Gathering Ideas by Manfred Kuehn on Monday, December 24, 2007 https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/seneca-on-gathering-ideas.html

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021191724/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/seneca-on-gathering-ideas.html

A quick look at how some of the ancient ideas of rhetoric may affect one's note taking and thinking. I love that this is one of his first posts on a blog on note taking. Too many miss this history.r

Cross reference origin in

Seneca (2006) Epistles 66-92. With an English translation by Richard G. Gummere. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 277-285.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Manfred Kuehn</span> in Taking note: "How to take notes like an 'alpha-geek'" (<time class='dt-published'>12/31/2021 21:44:32</time>)</cite></small>

https://tim.blog/2007/12/05/how-to-take-notes-like-an-alpha-geek-plus-my-2600-date-challenge/

Tim Ferriss discuses some of his take on his note taking process. Nothing new or interesting here, though he seems to focus more on to do lists and follow up material for productivity purposes rather than remembering or connecting details after-the-fact and in the long term.

He does outline and highly recommend having an index, but his version has a quirk of number pages as 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5 instead of a more straightforward whole number system. Presumably this save the time and effort of putting a number on each page, though one could just number either the even or odd pages this way if necessary and presume the missing numbers.

Nothing really mind bending here.

Experience shows that the larger the note taking pad, the less forthcoming a potential interviewee will be.

Is this a cultural thing? Is it related to attorneys using large legal pads for taking notes versus journalists using longer, thinner, and smaller notebooks?

Is there evidence of this in journalistic contexts?

https://web.archive.org/web/20081030052305/http://www.solutionwatch.com/368/fifty-ways-to-take-notes/

Mostly an historical list of online tools for note taking.

No discussion of actual functionality or usefulness. Sounds more like for making to do lists and passing notes rather than long term knowledge management and upkeep. Nothing about the benefits of centralizing data in one place.

meh...

What was the form of his system? From where did he learn it? What does it show about the state of the art for his time?

Likely from Aurifondina artium et scientiarum omnium excerpendi solerti, omnibus litterarum amantibus monstrata. worldcat

h/t: https://hyp.is/tz3lBmznEeyvEmOX-B5DxQ/infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2007/11/future-reading-.html

—Bruno Winck

Reminder to look up Roland Claude. I couldn't find his work in the usual spaces in English or French.

Neo Alphasmart by Manfred Keuhn https://web.archive.org/web/20201021190716/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/neo-alphasmart.html

Most digital note taking systems have two major advantages of paper versions:

• It's harder to misplace material unless one's system has major flaws or one accidentally deletes content
• Digital search is far more powerful and efficient than manual search

What we Remember by Manfred Kuehn https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021192005/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/

Dutch psychologist Wilem Wagenaar conducted memory related experiments on recollecting what, where, who, and when for the most interesting experiences of his days. It turned out that the "What?" was most useful followed by where? and who?, but that "when?" was "useless in every instance".

p.116 of Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life's Scarcest Commodity, Marlowe & Company, 2007, New York.

Despite this, timestamps might serve other functions within a note taking system. The might include conceiving of ideas, temporal order of ideas presented, etc.

Given the diversions of modern digital life, perhaps the best way to do one's writing is to do it at the moment of reading the actual references. Often while reading, one isn't as apt to have their attention diverted by the vagaries of life, instead they are focused on the thing at hand. It is while one has this focused attention that they should let their note taking practice while reading take over.

Even if you are distracted, you can at least maintain focus on a single line of text and your thoughts related to it and write them down in either a summary sentence or with a few related ideas which are sparked by the initial idea.

(This note is such an example.)

Then one can start and complete a small idea at a time and then letting them build over time and space, then recollect them to create a piece which then doesn't need to be written and painfully created, but which may only need an outline structure and some final polish and editing.

The most solid basis of a note taking (reading, thinking, and writing) practice is having a central repository from which all material is linked and readily available. Having separate loci, especially digital ones, is a recipe for failure for the lack of the ability to find what you need when you need it.

What exactly would be the ideal group of features in a writer's perfect tool? There are many out there for a variety of axes of production, but does anything cover it all?

Functionality potentially for:

• taking notes
• collecting examples
• memory
  • search or other means of pulling things up at their moment of need
• outlining functionality
• arranging and rearranging material
• spellcheckers
• grammar checkers
• other?

With

• easy of use
• efficiency
• productivity

I want to look at the original German for this sentence, particularly with respect to the translation of the phrase "secondary memory". Is the translation semantic or literal? Might the original German have been a more literal "second brain"?

Compare this to the one or two other examples of this sort of translation from the German.

Ross Ashby's note taking system, also within the field of systems theory, shows the use of an index card set up for bibliographical notes, however in Ashby's case, the primary notes were placed into notebooks and not onto note cards.

Was there an ancestral link within the systems theory community that was spreading these ideas of note taking or were they (more likely) just so ubiquitous in the academic culture that such a link wouldn't have mattered?

(Earlier ancestors like Beatrice Webb may have been a more influential link.)

Given the use case that Niklas Luhmann had, the translation of zettelkasten into English is better read as "index card file" rather than the simpler and more direct translation "slip box".

While it's not often talked about in the recent contexts, there is a long history of using index cards for note taking in the United States and the idea of an index card file was once ubiquitous. There has been such a long span between this former ubiquity and our digital modernity that the idea of a zettelkasten seems like a wondrous new tool, never seen before. As a result, people in within social media, the personal knowledge management space, or the tools for thought space will happily use the phrase zettelkasten as if it is the hottest and newest thing on the planet.

During the 16th century there was a transition in educational centers from using the natural and artificial memories to the methodical use of notebooks and commonplace books as a secondary memory saved by means of writing.

This allows people in some sense to "forget" what they've read and learned and be surprised by it again later. They allow themselves to create liminal memories which may be refreshed and brought to the center later. Perhaps there is also some benefit in this liminal memory for allowing ideas to steep on the periphery before using them. Perhaps combinatorial creativity happens unconsciously?

Cross reference: learning research by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski.

Alberto Cevolini argues that Niklas Luhmann was unaware of the prior tradition of excerpting, however even his complex numbering system shows incredibly high similarity to the numbering system of houses used in 1770 Vienna near the time at which Konrad Gessner delineated his note taking system which also used excerpting.

cross reference Markus Krajewski in Paper Machines, chapter 3, page 28:

By 1777, the government of Lower Austria starts a renewed numbering of houses. “ As many new houses were built after the last conscription which have no number yet, this is also an opportunity for the rectification of the house numbers.” New entries are to be treated as follows: “If for instance three new houses are found between numbers 12 and 13, the first is to be 12a, the second 12b, the third 12c.”

Given this evidence, it's more likely that Luhmann was taught this system, he researched it, or perhaps like the broader ideas, it was floating around so heavily in the culture of his time and place from centuries earlier that it was simply a natural fit. More evidence about the prevalence for street numbering may be needed from his time period to know how common this general numbering system was.

I've been thinking it for a while, but have needed to write it down for ages---particularly from my experiences with older manuscripts.

In an age of print-on-demand and reflowing text, why in goodness' name don't we have the ability to print almost anything we buy and are going to read in any font size and format we like?

Why couldn't I have a presentation copy sized version of The Paris Review?

Why shouldn't I be able to have everything printed on bible-thin pages of paper for savings in thickness?

Why couldn't my textbooks be printed with massively large margins for writing notes into more easily? Why not interleaved with blank pages even? Particularly near the homework problem sections?

Why can't I have more choice in a range of fonts, book sizes, margin sizes, and covers?

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/obsidian-book-club-the-dawn-of-everything

What a great idea!

According to one of his students, Leibniz used his note cabinet both for excerpts that he took from his reading as well as notes an ideas he came up separately from his reading.

Most of the commonplace book tradition consisted of excerpting, but when did note taking practice begin to aggregate de novo notes with commonplaces?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09MT6T4CG

Several things to notice here:

• learning in public
• posting knowledge on a personal website as a means of sharing that knowledge with a broader public
• specifically not hiding the work of reading in notebooks which are unlikely to be read by others.

https://www.amazon.com/10-000-Hours-Journal-Beginner/dp/1926892364

The form of this is a lot like a commonplace book or zettelkasten, but focused on one particular end-goal. Also a little bit like a journal of things read, listened to, watched, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/Indexing-Paper-Create-Indexes-Stuff/dp/1926892267/

This really could be quite useful to those with a paper commonplace book or zettelkasten

https://www.amazon.com/Marginalia-Paper-Very-Margin-Notebook/dp/192689202X/

Marginalia Paper, you know, for annotating your own writing...

A must-have for the Hypothes.is fan who wants to go the hipster route.

https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AProductive+Luddite&s=relevancerank&text=Productive+Luddite&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1

Productive Luddite makes some other interesting custom notebooks...

https://www.myscript.com/

I find something very appealing about this user interface as a way to create a website: https://paperwebsite.com/.

A micropub client that could do this would be fascinating...

This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).

Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond

This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.

This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?

Jeffrey Todd Knight in Bound to read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature examines the works of various writers to dispel the notion of literary texts as static. He shows how the evolution of early print culture helped to foster the idea as interactive and malleable. This at a time when note takers and writers would have been using commonplacing techniques at even smaller scales for creating their own writing thus creating a similar pattern from the smaller scale to the larger scale.

This pattern of small notes building into larger items with rearrangement which is seen in Carl Linnaeus' index card-based notes as well as his longer articles/writings and publication record over time as well.

In the early history of printing, books weren't as we see them now, instead they were issued in loose sheets or with temporary stitching allowing the purchaser or retailer to collect, organize, and bind them. This pattern occurs at a time when one would have been thinking about collecting, writing, and organizing one's notes in a commonplace book or other forms. It is likely a pattern that would have influenced this era of note taking practices, especially among the most literate who were purchasing and using books.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1459547762517688327.html

Anthony Baker experimenting with ideas from Necromant and Eleanor Konik to cross link digital notes with physical paper notes.

I've thought about doing something similar to this with my physical notebooks in the past, though hadn't done block level linking as a means of potentially pulling in and linking pieces in the future.

Often for more important linked things, I'll simply import the physical version into my digital copy at the time of first use/reference, but this could be interesting for large bodies of notes which aren't digital.

https://calmernotes.com/

I like that the underlying idea behind the design here is "calm" as well as attempting to get an 80% solution rather than get-it-all.

Reporter John Dickerson talking about his notebook.

While he doesn't mention it, he's capturing the spirit of the commonplace book and the zettelkasten.

[...] I see my job as basically helping people see and to grab ahold of what's going on.

You can decide to do that the minute you sit down to start writing or you can just do it all the time. And by the time you get to writing you have a notebook full of stuff that can be used.

And it's not just about the thing you're writing about at that moment or the question you're going to ask that has to do with that week's event on Face the Nation on Sunday.

If you've been collecting all week long and wondering why a thing happens or making an observation about something and using that as a piece of color to explain the political process to somebody, then you've been doing your work before you ever sat down to do your work.

<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/169725470?h=778a09c06f&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>

Field Notes: Reporter's Notebook from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

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

An example of someone taking notes in public to model the process. Also an example of the time it takes to make notes.

Has Dan Allosso (@danallosso) done something along these lines as an example on his YouTube channel?

Here's a good example of someone asking if the time it takes to make good reading notes is worth it.

Even early in the history of note taking treatises Jeremias Drexel acknowledges the idea that good note taking, and particularly excerpting, takes work.

Modern students seem to have now lost both the ars memoria as well as the note taking arts which helped supplant it. We really need to be able to regain both of these traditions, but it will obviously take commitment to do the work.

Jeremias Drexel is certainly a writer who complains about the work of the ars memoria, particularly for long term memory and supplants it with writing/note taking.

On Erasmus’s preference for “study, order and care” over places and images, see Erasmus,De ratione studii(1512), quoted in Yates,The Art of Memory,p. 127

What other pedagogues were hostile to memory?

This is another point in the decline of memory traditions from the 1500s onward.

What effect did cheaper books and paper have on this decline?

Keep in mind that Erasmus had written a treatise on commonplacing which was also a point in the history of note taking though Blair doesn't acknowledge his contributions in her list here. Also Agricola and Melanchthon

Religious and national divides were likely very important here as authority from above would have been even more important than in modern time. Related to this is the change in mnemonic traditions due to religious and political mores around the time of Peter Ramus.

references

references to look up

Mortimer J. Adler, eat your heart out.

The first manuals of advice about how to take notes began in the early modern period during the fifteenth century.

Most recently, the emergence of the fact has been attributed to methods of commercial recordkeeping (and double-entry bookkeeping in particular).

Reference to read/look into with respect to accounting and note taking.

Francis Bacon compared one of his notebooks to a merchant's wastebook.

References to the merchant’s two notebooks as a model for student note taking was common among early modern authors, and the notion of the merchant as a model to imitate persisted through changes to new techniques.

Might be interesting to look at this reference to see what she's referring to specifically.

It would be interesting to see how note taking is changing with even newer digital tools like Hypothes.is, Diigo, Twitter, Readwise, etc.

Perhaps the growth of digital gardens in public may be a place for study as well? Though one would need to be wary of the idea of performative note taking as these are often done specifically in public as opposed to private as is more common in the past.

This is still too often the case in the general public as evinced by watching the Obsidian and Roam Research spaces.

Where exactly do we situate note taking? Certainly within the space of rhetoric, but also as Ann M. Blair suggests within the history of reading.

What else? manuscript studies, psychology, others?

What is the date of this manuscript by Abraham Ortelius (1527-98)? It shows the pattern of gluing slips of paper into books.

One's personal notes can be considered a mental fingerprint of one's thoughts and desires.

Francis Bacon preferred commonplaces (quotes under topical headings) to adversaria (summaries) as they were "of far more profit, and use".

Note that other references equate these two types of notes: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/adversaria

Quoted in Vernon F Snow “Ftrancis Bacon's Advice to Fulke Greville on Research Techniques," Huntington Library Quarterly 23, no.4 (1960): 370.

Ann M. Blair categorizes four variations of note taking which she calls the four Ss:

• storing
• sorting
• summarizing
• selecting

(In a modern context, one might also expand this to a fifth and include sharing.)

Written in 2004, this is on the cusp of the growth of blogging and obviously predates the general time frame of social media and the rise of social annotation. Personal notes can now be shared more widely and have much larger publics.

Blair, Ann. 2004. Note taking as an art of transmission. Critical Inquiry 31, no 1: 85-107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/427303

Citable link: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3226475

[[Antonin Sertillanges]]' book ''The Intellectual Life'' is published in 1918 in which he outlines in chapter 7 the broad strokes a version of the zettelkasten method, though writing in French he doesn't use the German name or give the method a specific name.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Antonin |first1=Sertillanges |author-link1= Antonin_Sertillanges |title=The Intellectual Life: Its Sprit, Conditions, Methods |date=1960 |publisher=The Newman Press |location=Westminster, Maryland |translator-last1= Ryan |translator-first1= Mary |translator-link1= |pages=186-198 |edition=fifth printing |language=English}}</ref> The book was published in French, Italian, and English in more than 50 editions over the span of 40 years. In it, Sertillanges recommends taking notes on slips of "strong paper of a uniform size" either self made with a paper cutter or by "special firms that will spare you the trouble, providing slips of every size and color as well as the necessary boxes and accessories." He also recommends a "certain number of tagged slips, guide-cards, so as to number each category visibly after having numbered each slip, in the corner or in the middle." He goes on to suggest creating a catalog or index of subjects with division and subdivisions and recommends the "very ingenious system", the decimal system, for organizing one's research. For the details of this refers the reader to ''Organization of intellectual work: practical recipes for use by students of all faculties and workers'' by {{interlanguage link|Paul Chavigny|fr}}<ref>{{cite book |last1=Chavigny |first1=Paul |title=Organisation du travail intellectuel: recettes pratiques à l'usage des étudiants de toutes les facultés et de tous les travailleurs |date=1918 |publisher=Delagrave |language=French}}</ref>. Sertillanges recommends against the previous patterns seen with commonplace books where one does note taking in books or on slips of paper which might be pasted into books as they don't "easily allow classification" or "readily lend themselves to use at the moment of writing."

So here we have in print (we may need to double check the original French from 1921) an indicator of a note taker recommending using serial numbers on slips before Niklas Luhmann's birth.

Antonin Sertillanges recommends his reader to use a decimal system for organizing their slip box system based on that in L'Organisation du Travail intellectuel, by Dr. Paul Chavigny, Fellow of the Val de Grace, Delagrave, 1918.

This is still solid advice today; advice I have dispensed to others without having seen it written before by others.

So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?

When reading and taking notes, one should have a reason or purpose in mind and endeavor to stick to it. While you're absorbing what the writer has written, allow the unnecessary portions with respect to your goal flow through the sieve of your mind and only catch and annotate the portions which supplement your end goal. Keep and elaborate on these.

A few days after your reading and annotating, go back through your notes with a keen eye toward expanding on those important things to your goal or interests and set aside (or even discard) all the other less interesting pieces.

Naturally there are other pieces which may be important for remembering the shape of the things you read or facts which you've highlighted and want to remember or memorize. Save these things also in a separate space from the bigger ideas you're working on creating. They're useful, but of an entirely different nature than the ideas.

Two broad different types of notes:

• facts to remember
• ideas which can have sex with other ideas

Solid advice for note taking.

This reasoning seems to be missing from writers like Ryan Holiday who just give the advice without the underlying reason why.

This seems to be a common complaint I see of people in the Zettelkasten space. They're constantly asking themselves "Why am I doing this? What good is it?"

Notes allow us to forget, but they're also a foothold for future memorization.

What is the source of Montaigne calling notes "paper memory"?

This whole section looks the most interesting and promising to me: reading, memory, and notes!

I'll likely read these first and at best skim the rest depending on content.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xodo.pdf.reader&hl=en_US&gl=US

https://www.squidnotes.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU7i9lJC-Dk

http://tw5.scholars.tiddlyspot.com/

Some clever UI affordances in this version.

Ideas work best when linked to related ideas.

The fact that there generally aren't courses in high school or college about how to better store and access one's research is a travesty. I feel like there are study skills classes, but they seem to be geared toward strategies and not implemented solutions.

This is definitely the harder part of the practice, but daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews can definitely help.

To start I primarily focused on 3-5 broader sub-topics of things I felt were most important to me and always did those first. This helps to begin aggregating things and making a bigger difference. The rest of my smaller "fleeting" notes I didn't worry so much about and left to either come back to later or just allow them to sit there.

I think Sonke Ahrens' book How to Take Smart Notes was fairly helpful in laying this out.

Incidentally the spaced repetition of review is also good for your memory of the things you find important.

I love this outline/syllabus for creating a commonplace book (as a potential replacement for a term paper).

I'd be curious to see those who are using Hypothes.is as a communal reading tool in coursework utilize this outline (or similar ones) in combination with their annotation practices.

Curating one's annotations and placing them into a commonplace book or zettelkasten would be a fantastic rhetorical exercise to extend the value of one's notes and ideas.

https://systemcrafters.cc/build-a-second-brain-in-emacs/getting-started-with-org-roam/

Matthew Cheney has a slightly different method of annotating books. He marks the pages/sections, but then revisits them afterwards to add notes.

However one does this, a lot of the power is in actually revisiting one's notes and thoughts and doing two things, reviewing them, extending them, and saving them for later use and review.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfXE6VCBo3k

This boils down to distilling one's notes down to something smaller.

The word "niche" here provides a window into how much of our cultural history we've really lost.

https://fs.blog/2013/11/taking-notes-while-reading/

Interesting but not useful to me as it's too basic within my current system. I like that he encourages people to go back over their notes and cross link them.

https://fs.blog/2021/07/mathematicians-lament/

What if we taught art and music the way we do mathematics? All theory and drudgery without any excitement or exploration?

What textbooks out there take math from the perspective of exploration?

• Inventional geometry does

Certainly Gauss, Euler, and other "greats" explored mathematics this way? Why shouldn't we?

This same problem of teaching math is also one we ignore when it comes to things like note taking, commonplacing, and even memory, but even there we don't even delve into the theory at all.

How can we better reframe mathematics education?

I can see creating an analogy that equates math with art and music. Perhaps something like Arthur Eddington's quote:

Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories–

distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody.

I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody and not with the first three. —Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (1882-1944), a British astronomer, physicist, and mathematician in The Nature of the Physical World, 1927

https://fs.blog/2021/08/remember-books/

A solid overview of how to read. Not as long or as in-depth as Mortimer J. Adler, but hits all of the high points in an absorbable manner.

Definitely worth re-reading...

This is an incredibly important part of the process for absorbing, creating links, and remembering one's notes. A sad pity that it's a single sentence in its own paragraph.

This should have been underlined.

Or by all of the above... Library card catalogues did all three, but most digital systems will effectuate all of them as well.

The so-called Richard Feynman technique, n'cest pas?

From whom did he crib it? Did he credit them, or was it just distilled into part of the culture?

This is also similar to the rubber duck method of debugging a program in some sense.

Most Medieval manuscripts specifically left wide columns of space to encourage readers to mark up their texts.

cross reference: Medieval notepads - Khan Academy

<small>Detail, London, British Library, Harley MS 3487 (13th century)—[source](http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=16790)</small>

More solid advice. Seems basic because it is.

Solid advice. Advice I've given before.

Pick a system, use it, refine it. Don't over-engineer it. You'll find that many parts of it you'll never reuse.

Spark:

Some people think and endeavor to read a book once and take such great notes that they'll never have to read it again. They're fooling themselves if they think they can do this. The context of what's in the book compared to the context of what they already know is ever-changing. The new you that re-reads a book years or months later will notice new and different things. Make new and interesting connections. Much like Heraclitus's river, we ourselves are ever-changing, and our changing contexts will allow us to get different things from what we're reading on subsequent visits.

Often forgotten in the reading and learning processes is creating connections between our new content and what we already know. This is some of the power behind the basic idea in zettelkasten of creating links between knowledge.

Before beginning this piece I'm reminded to note some advice given to me by Rick Kurtzman at Creative Artists Agency (CAA) on reading scripts: If you're not going to act on having read (a script), then why bother having read it in the first place?

He meant to make notes, write coverage, create writer lists for rewriting, producer lists for selling, director list for directing, casting lists. One should tell people about the (good) things one read. Make your reading produce something.

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/medieval-notepads

Students used offcuts (or scraps) of parchment for writing notes on in class.

Evolution of footnotes

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/the-medieval-desktop

Images of Medieval reading practices generally pictured pens along with books. In the rare cases where pens were not included, the desks pictured were messy and thus covered up the pens involved.

I can't wait to read Media and the Mind: Art, Science and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)!

I see some bits on annotation hiding in here that may be of interest to @RemiKalir and @anterobot.

If you need some additional eyeballs on it prior to publication, I'm happy to mark it up in exchange for the early look.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis</span> in 📑 How to remember more of what you read | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>08/20/2021 12:31:59</time>)</cite></small>

https://collect.readwriterespond.com/how-to-remember-more-of-what-you-read/

Some useful looking links here. Thanks Aaron.

I've been digging deeper and deeper into some of the topics and sub-topics.

The biggest problem I've seen thus far is a lot of wanna-be experts and influencers (especially within the Roam Research space) touching on the very surface of problem. I've seen more interesting and serious people within the Obsidian community sharing their personal practices and finding pieces of that useful.

The second issue may be that different things work somewhat differently for different people, none of whom are using the same tools or even general systems. Not all of them have the same end goals either. Part of the key is finding something useful that works for you or modifying something slowly over time to get it to work for you.

At the end of the day your website holds the true answer: read, write, respond (along with the implied "repeat" at the end).

One of the best and most thorough prescriptions I've seen is Sönke Ahrens' book which he's written after several years of using and researching a few particular systems.

I've been finding some useful tidbits from my own experience and research into the history of note taking and commonplace book traditions. The memory portion intrigues me a lot as well as I've done quite a lot of research into historical methods of mnemonics and memory traditions. Naturally the ancient Greeks had most of this all down within the topic of rhetoric, but culturally we seem to have unbundled and lost a lot of our own traditions with changes in our educational system over time.

https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2018/06/29/a-starttofinish-literature.html

Great overview of a literature review with some useful looking links to more specifics on note taking methods.

Most of the newer note taking tools like Roam Research, Obsidian, etc. were not available or out when she wrote this. I'm curious how these may have changed or modified her perspective versus some of the other catch-as-catch-can methods with pen/paper/index cards/digital apps?

https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2019/04/01/dissertating-in-the.html

A description of some of Kimiberly Hirsh's workflow in keeping a public research notebook (or commonplace book).

I'd be curious to know what type of readership and response she's gotten from this work in the past. For some it'll bet it's possibly too niche for a lot of direct feedback, but some pieces may be more interesting than others.

Did it help her organize her thoughts and reuse the material later on?

How To Do Sketchnoting (Even If You "Can't Draw"!)

a lesson with Emily Mills of the Sketchnote Academy

video

Types of Sketchnotes

• Lecture based
• Experience based

Skills for sketchnotes

• Listening
  • looking for ideas, high level
• Writing
• Drawing

Pairing images and words together to be dynamic and memorable.

One doesn't need to be the greatest artist to do sketchnotes.

memorable >> masterpiece recognizable >> realistic big ideas >> nitty gritty

Basic drawing

Seven building blocks for drawing

• dot
• straight line
• crooked line
• curvy line
• circle
• triangle
• square

Rules

• The fewer elements, the easier
• Rearrange rotate, reorient shapes

People

• standard stick person
• A person
• oval person
• star person

Containers and connectors

Boxes are boring, so add frames or more interesting Use containers to separate information that is different from the rest or to highlight.

• boxes
• frames
• nails/thumbtacks
• star "pow" outline
• box with a shadow

Tell people where to read next

• Create a really clear header
• help people with connectors (dotted lines, arrows, numbering)

Start out small first as it's more intimidating to use bigger formats

Tools

• Sketchone marker (thin point ink, pigment or permanent and not water-based, otherwise bleedover in coloring)
• Tombow dual brush markers for color
  • two grey tones, one lighter and one darker
  • small handful of colors (red, blue, yellow, green)

How to Sketchnote

• Step 1: Header
• Step 2: Layout (top to bottom/left to right is usually more intuitive) Pre-plan this. Think about connectors.
• Step 3: Consistency
  • headers, characters, size of writing,
• Step 4: Refine
  • check spelling
  • whiteout for mess ups (gellyroll white gel pen)
  • ensure connectors are obvious
• Step 5: Guiding shapes (to help flow of information on page)
  • stippling
  • cloud outlines
  • lines in the negative space (also creates contrast)
• Step 6: Coloring in
  • greys first, dark then light
  • highlighting connectors
  • shadows on boxes, ribbons, connectors
  • color should be more of a highlight than a background filler (it's not a coloring book)

Higher contrast notes are better

Resources

• 👉🏻 Find Emily (and her awesome resources!) at https://www.emilyamills.com
• 👉🏻 The Sketchnote Academy free course: https://www.sketchnoteacademy.com
• 👉🏻 The Art of Visual Note taking by Emily Mills

Anecdotal mention here of someone using sketchnotes or doodling as a mnemonic device.

Sketchnotes could be a means of implementing visual method of loci in one's note taking. Like creating a faux memory palace. Also somewhat similar, expecially in the case of the leaf doodle mentioned above, to the idea of drolleries, but in this case, they're not taking advantage of the memory's greater capacity of imagination to make things even more memorable for long term retention.

Sketchnotes by Chad Moore and Chris Wilson

https://vi.to/hubs/microcamp/pages/chad-moore-and-chris-wilson?v=chad-moore-and-chris-wilson&discussion=hidden&sidebar=hidden

Sketchnotes are ideas not art.

Squiggle birds - take squiggles and give them beaks, eyes, and bird feet. (Idea apparently from Austin Kleon.)

How you might take notes if you'd never been told how to.

• There is no particular app or platform that is the "right" one.

Common elements:

• Headlines and sub headlines are common
  • Elegant text / fancy text
• Icons
• containers - ways of holding information together
  • this can be explicit or via white space
• flow of information (arrows)
• arrangements or layouts of how information is displayed
  • top to bottom, circles, columns, stream of flow of ideas
• people
  • emotions, perhaps using emoji-like faces
• shadows, highlights

Icons

Simple can be better. Complexity may make understanding more difficult.

Examples

A few they pulled off of the web

Sketchnote Selfie

Goal: Create an info rich portrait with character. Portrait, name, info, location, passions, hobbies, interests, social usernames, now section, etc.

https://mentalpivot.com/more-solutions-for-taking-podcast-notes-a-survey-of-the-apps/

Nothing much better here, but interesting to see that a handful of apps at least support something.

https://mentalpivot.com/solutions-for-taking-notes-when-listening-to-podcasts/

I definitely need a better way of doing this myself. Not a fan of paying $5/month for NoteCast. Airr is iOS only.

Sharing the link from the app with timecode seems the best, but it would be nice to have the transcription piece as well.

https://chromeunboxed.com/cursive-google-app-chrome-os-hp-x2-11/

https://hellotimking.com/2020/05/bear-a-three-year-journey/

http://www.connectedtext.com/manfred.php

A nice essay about note taking in general, the author's long history using many methods including index cards and a variety of digital versions. Ultimately he settled on a private desktop wiki called ConnectedText.

He talks about Luhmann's zettelkasten and some of the pros/cons as well as things that can be left out when implemented in a digital version like ConnectedText.

He's reasonably connected to the tradition of note taking, though doesn't seem to be as steeped in the Renaissance traditions of commonplace books specifically.

on the purpose of taking notes, annotating one's reading, or commonplacing

highlight is a quote from

C. Wright Mills' profound "Appendix: On Intellectual Craftsmanship," as found in his book on The Sociological Imagination.[16]

This is also related to the ideas of invention as well as the analogy of the bee in relation to commonplaces. Link this to the bee analogy of Seneca the Younger and Macrobius in Saturnalia.

Some thoughts about leaving space in new notebooks, especially for one's future self:

• contact information in front in case of loss
• space for a future table of contents to come
• space for page numbers and dates
• space in the back for house keeping, indices, etc.

http://www.notesaboutnotes.com/Notes/FrontMatter.html

Just noticed that Mark Bernstein, the writer of Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas, has page about commonplace books on his site, which he wrote with his note taking cum digital gardening tool Tinderbox.

Apparently interleaving blank sheets into texts was a more common practice than I had known! I've seen it in the context of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) using the practice to take notes in his Bible, but not in others.

What form did Carl Linnaeus' erasable writing tablet take?

The two questions addressed in this article.