Some of the lighter and more passive (and common) forms of reading, highlighting, underlining sentences and hoping to understand or even remember the content and contexts is far less valuable than active reading, progressive summarization, comparing and contrasting, and extracting smart or permanent notes from one's texts.

An active reader is always thinking, writing, and annotating. The notes from this process can and could easily be used to facilitate writing and generating new material showing new contexts and new modes of thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jFDzgHZOEk

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Remi Kalir</span> in Video: how i ANNOTATE my books // tips on annotating for beginners (DocDrop) (<time class='dt-published'>01/19/2022 20:47:29</time>)</cite></small>

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)

These three are all essentially the same thing, just providing differing levels of overall value to Adler somehow. Is there really so much value in highlighting one's highlights?

Perhaps better would be to rewrite the sections one is highlighting in their own words to provide a stronger signal that one truly understands the concepts one has read.

An incredibly short, but dense essay on annotating books, but one which doesn't go into the same sort of detail as he gets in his book length treatment in How to Read a Book.

Missing here is the social aspect of annotating a book. In fact, he actively recommends against loaning one's annotated books for fear of losing the details and value in them.

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.

—Mortimer J. Adler

Killjoy!

-Mortimer J. Adler

https://annotations.lindylearn.io/

What a great UI for annotations on Hypothes.is and Hacker News.

I wonder if this is pulling data from the public Hypothesis API? What triggers inclusion into the lists?

<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>

Using Hypothes.is as an annotation layer for internal company notes in a private space could be an interesting way for easing on-boarding.

In some sense, this is a little bit of what the annotated syllabus is doing for students at the beginning of a course (in addition to helping to onboard them to the idea of social annotation at the same time.)

Annotations on Post-It Notes are a form of augmented reality.

Using a completely blank page as the start of any creative endeavor is a miserable choice for writing. Start with some other object and annotate either on it or next to it. Look at something else as a base. Starting with blank nothing is a recipe for loneliness and disaster. So-called distraction free writing tools are the worst.

Didn't Ernest Hemmingway analogize staring at a blank page like facing a white bull? There is a litany of quotes about writers facing the blank page.

Why not, instead, use the advice of ancient rhetors by starting with the best? Become a bee and collect the best materials for your honey first. If we don't look to them, then perhaps follow the lesson taught by Benjamin Franklin on writing or the same lesson repeated in the movie Finding Forrester. Start with someone else's work and rewrite that until you find your own words. This is what makes writing while annotating so easy and simple. You've got a nice tapestry of textures to begin your work.

Giving birth to something fully formed as if from the head of Zeus is a fallacy. It only works for the gods.

This is exciting!

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1390636720501231621.html

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://nowcomment.com/

In a category of tool like Hypothes.is. Worth checking out for UI and functionality.

https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.edutopia.org/article/social-annotation-digital-age

a teaser article for social annotation. only scratches the surface.

I've not seen it argued elsewhere (yet), but I would make a case that the majority of drolleries weren't so much comment on themes in text as that they were loci placed into the books at either intervals or in particular locations as part of the practice of the art of memory. They act as signposts to which the reader can more easily memorize portions of books by attaching the ideas on those pages to the dramatic and absurd images painted into them as suggested by Rhetorica ad Herennium (https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL403/1954/volume.xml).

Cross reference: The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates (University of Chicago, 1966).for the historical practice of memory in the West, though she doesn't mention drolleries at all.

cc: @remikalir

"Adv." (standing for adversaria) is a shelfmark in the Cambridge University Library that is used for books which contain marginal annotations.

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.

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?

https://commonplace.knowledgefutures.org/pub/zzy5f6bn/release/1

The parallel structure here reminds me of the book The Social Life of Information which is surely related to this idea in a subtle way. I wonder if they cited it in their bibliography? I wonder if it influenced this sentence?

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

Ipsa annotātiō potestas est.

(Annotation is power.)

The tools for thought crowd should all be reading Kalir and Garcia's book Annotation.

https://commonplace.knowledgefutures.org/pub/8rxyd1le/release/1

Hot take 🔥

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f86L7vgHUW9wSLNNSunhjmtxtg6KlCOVpHGKbqUzW-Y/edit#gid=0

Hypothes.is Historical Survey of Annotation Efforts

I do dislike the running headers of digital copies of books as most annotation tools want to capture those headers in the annotation.

It would be nice if they were marked up in an Aria-like method so that annotation software would semantically know to ignore them.

It would be quite nice if a digital reader would allow actual writing in the margins, or even overlaying the text itself and then allowing the looking at the two separately.

I do quite like the infinite annotation space that Hypothes.is gives me on a laptop. I wish there were UI for it on a Kindle in a more usable and forgiving way. The digital keyboard on Kindle Paperwhite is miserable. I've noticed that I generally prefer reading and annotating on desktop in a browser now for general ease-of-use.

Also, I don't see enough use of mise en abyme. This is a good one.

In Western art history, mise en abyme (French pronunciation: ​[miz ɑ̃n‿abim]; also mise en abîme) is a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence. In film theory and literary theory, it refers to the technique of inserting a story within a story. The term is derived from heraldry and literally means "placed into abyss". It was first appropriated for modern criticism by the French author André Gide.

Aside from reading words to put ideas into my brain, one of the reasons I like to read digital words is that the bigger value proposition for me is an easier method to add annotations to what I'm reading and then to be able to manipulate those notes after-the-fact. I've transcended books and the manual methods of note taking. Until I come up with a better word for it, digital commonplacing seems to be a useful shorthand for this new pattern of reading.

I love that he's not only externalized his thoughts from the book as annotations/notes and then synthesized them into a longer essay, but he's further expanded and externalized them by thinking about how to put them to use!

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.

This reminds me that books should have massively larger margins for writing notes.

https://jrdingwall.ca/blogwall/25-years-of-ed-tech-blogs/

JR writes about some of his journey into blogging.

I appreciate some of the last part about the 9x9x25 blogs. For JR it seems like some smaller prompts got him into more regular writing.

He mentions Stephen Downes regular workflow as well. I think mine is fairly similar to Stephen's. To some extent, I write much more on my own website now than I ever had before. This is because I post a lot more frequently to my own site, in part because it's just so easy to do. I'll bookmark things or post about what I've recently read or watched. My short commentary on some of these is just that, short commentary. But occasionally I discover, depending on the subject, that those short notes and bookmark posts will spring into something bigger or larger. Sometimes it's a handful of small posts over a few days or weeks that ultimately inspires the longer thing. The key seems to be to write something.

Perhaps a snowball analogy will work. I take a tiny snowball and give it a proverbial roll. Sometimes it sits there and other times it rolls down the hill and turns into a much larger snowball. Other times I get a group of them and build a full snowman.

Of course lately a lot of my writing starts, like this did, as an annotation (using Hypothes.is) to something I was reading. It then posts to my website with some context and we're off to the races.

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>

Some people consider annotations to be a conversation with the author. But you're also having a conversation with yourself and your own thoughts. (Cross reference Niklas Luhmann's having a conversation with himself via his notes.)

Further, there are platforms like Hypothes.is or social platforms like Twitter where you can move the conversation out of the page and engage with others. However, for this Hypothes.is has more power because it keeps the conversation linked to the original text and the original context (which I'll explicitly translate here as "with the text") to underline the point.

cf:

cum (Latin) : with

textus (Latin) : tissue, web, texture, fabric, connection, language

contextus (Latin) : context, connection, coherence, connexion, coherency, text

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/the-medieval-origins-of-the-modern-footnote

Evolution of footnotes

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/getting-personal-in-the-margins

Professionally designed, drawn, and painted manicules may be an indicator that the reader knew a text well prior to commissioning a copy of a manuscript being made.

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.

Here's an example of a blogger using the idea of writing a blog as being in conversation with himself.

It obviously doesn't predate Niklas Luhmann's conversation with slip boxes, but the general tenor is certainly similar in form and function.

The idea of taking notes here as a conversation both with onesself as well as the author is essentially the old idea of making annotations in the margins of a book.

He's repackaging it in the framing of a zettelkasten, but it's the same sort of conversation that @remikalir talks about, though in that case Remi is usually talking about class-wide group conversations with a text.

Cross-reference this with Luhmann's paper Communicating with Slip-boxes which is a portion of the story from the zettelkasten perspective.

Certainly someone in the commonplace or annotation traditions mentioned the idea of a conversation? Either with themselves, with the author, or with the text itself? Was this ever tacitly acknowledged before Luhmann?

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]

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.

Stumbled back upon this article almost a year and change later. Great to see that I'm at least consistent in what I would highlight. ;)

I like the differentiation that Jared has made here on his homepage with categories for "fast" and "slow".

It's reminiscent of the system 1 (fast) and system2 (slow) ideas behind Kahneman and Tversky's work in behavioral economics. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow)

It's also interesting in light of this tweet which came up recently:

I very much miss the back and forth with blog posts responding to blog posts, a slow moving argument where we had time to think.

— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) August 22, 2017

Because the Tweet was shared out of context several years later, someone (accidentally?) replied to it as if it were contemporaneous. When called out for not watching the date of the post, their reply was "you do slow web your way…" #

This gets one thinking. Perhaps it would help more people's contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating?). Sometimes the length of a response is an indicator of the thought put into it, thought not always as there's also the oft-quoted aphorism: "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter".

The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for "fast" posting which can often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.

What if there were posting UIs (or micropub clients) that would hold onto your responses for a few hours, days, or even a week and then remind you about them after that time had past to see if they were still worth posting? This is a feature based on Abraham Lincoln's idea of a "hot letter" or angry letter, which he advised people to write often, but never send.

Where is the social media service for hot posts that save all your vituperation, but don't show them to anyone? Or which maybe posts them anonymously?

The opposite of some of this are the partially baked or even fully thought out posts that one hears about anecdotally, but which the authors say they felt weren't finish and thus didn't publish them. Wouldn't it be better to hit publish on these than those nasty quick replies? How can we create UI for this?

I saw a sitcom a few years ago where a girl admonished her friend (an oblivious boy) for liking really old Instagram posts of a girl he was interested in. She said that deep-liking old photos was an obvious and overt sign of flirting.

If this is the case then there's obviously a social standard of sorts for this, so why not hold your tongue in the meanwhile, and come up with something more thought out to send your digital love to someone instead of providing a (knee-)jerk reaction?

Of course now I can't help but think of the annotations I've been making in my copy of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. Do you suppose that Lucretius knows I'm in love?

A Chrome extension for doing time-stamped notes on YouTube.

Highlight & share the best moments from podcasts

This could be interesting for annotating and sharing data from podcasting. Sadly nothing for Android yet.

via https://youtu.be/wB89lJs5A3s?t=8126

How much more active can it be than also actively annotating and note taking?

This is one of the first (existing) annotations in Western culture. One must be careful however as the context of the rest is missing.

What techniques might we use to help rebuild the context? What would Bart Ehrman's text suggest?

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

Testing out the OCR functionality of docdrop.org.

I'm noticing that the pdf fingerprint of this text somehow matches that of other texts as there are a lot of non-related annotations on this page.

Is docdrop doing something squirrelly with the fingerprint @dwhly?

I'm particularly interested here in the idea of interleaved books for additional marginalia. Thanks for the details!

An aspect that's missing from the overall discussion here is that of the commonplace book. Edwards' Miscellanies is a classic example of the Western note taking and idea collecting tradition of commonplace books.

While the name for his system is unique, his note taking method was assuredly not. The bigger idea goes back to ancient Greece and Rome with Aristotle and Cicero and continues up to the modern day.

From roughly 900-1300 theologians and preachers also had a sub-genre of this category called florilegia. In the Christian religious tradition Philip Melanchthon has one of the more influential works on the system: De locis communibus ratio (1539).

You might appreciate this article on some of the tradition: https://blog.cph.org/study/systematic-theology-and-apologetics/why-are-so-many-great-lutheran-books-called-commonplaces-or-loci

You'll find Edwards' and your indexing system bears a striking resemblance to that of philosopher John Locke, (yes that Locke!): https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685

Copies of print and digital editions of Jonathan Edwards' blank Bible are available.

• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Bible-Works-Jonathan-Edwards/dp/0300109318/
• Online: http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9zZWxlY3QucGw/d2plby4yMw==

Apparently one can buy modern copies of interleaved bibles as well: https://www.amazon.com/Interleaved-Journal-Hardcover-Letter-Comfort/dp/078524316X/

Video review of an interleaved bible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6EAu3nB1vk

What other books can be found in interleaved editions? Ayn Rand perhaps?

If one is serious about annotating a text, then consider making a "blank Bible" version of it.

Jonathan Edwards apparently received bible as a gift. It had a copy of the text of the bible which interspersed blank pages between every page of text thereby allowing massive amounts of space for marginalia!

Best Bible Note-Taking System: Jonathan Edwards's Miscellanies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqq-4-LiFVs

Overview of Jonathan Edwards Miscellanies system along with a a few wide-margin bibles. Everhard apparently hasn't heard of the commonplace concept, though I do notice that someone mentions the zettelkasten system in the comments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6EAu3nB1vk

Mingling with the author has a pleasant ring to it. Better than a "conversation with the text"? Definitely has a nicer warmth.

He could have replace plane with something warmer as well.

This is related in a way with the way [[Niklas Luhmann]] spoke about communicating with his [[Zettelkasten]] as means of collaborating. (See: http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes)

There is definitely an art to writing interesting marginalia however. Perhaps something that requires practice?

Sam Anderson's would be intriguing I'm sure. Dick Macksey's marvelous. Anderson provides the example of people wanting books from [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]] earlier in the piece.

I can only contrast this with some of the crazy minutiae an pedantry I've seen on Hypothes.is which makes me think that it's surely an art form.

I suspect some of it is that I'm missing the personal context with a particular person---a sense of continuity. Things get even worse when it's a piece annotated by a class which can create a cacophony of annotations. I see far too many "me too" annotations floating around in the margins that don't add anything to the conversation. (Hopefully I'm not guilty of this sin myself, but really, even my public annotations are a conversation between me and a piece and are only for my own benefit.)

The dream of us all...

An interesting critique on criticism.

This could be an interesting service to set up and run.

I wonder if I could set up a private Hypothes.is group and actually charge a club rate to members for doing such a thing?

I love the idea of this but implementation, particularly open implementation seems nearly impossible.

Even getting digital commonplaces to align and register is tough enough much less doing multi-modal registration with the locations that books might live.

I do remember a scholarly platform at Harvard that was trying to build something like this for academics. It was quite beautiful, but never really got out of the gate.

A decade on, I'm sorry to say that it has some useful features, but doesn't have a very usable UI or any worthwhile discovery. Lack of broad use and support prevents it from being as useful as it might.

I can't really follow the annotations of anyone I might like to and finding any at all can be a bear.

Goofy as this physical version sounds, I could imagine a digital overlay version that could go along with digital books in much the same way that Google Maps has digital overlays.

The problem lies with registration and location of words to do the overlay properly. The UI would also be a major bear.

Hypothes.is has really done a spectacular job in their version, the only issue is that it requires doing it all in a browser and isn't easily usable in any e-readers.

Books represent a dichotomy in being both intensely private and intensely social at the same time.

Are there other objects that have this property?

Books also have the quality of providing people with identities.

Annotation can be creative and fun. Doing it not only increases one's engagement with a text, but it helps to create flow in one's work.

Annotating books provides a way of creating modality shifts from the original form into others, and this is likely one of the reasons that it's an effective thinking, learning, and study tool.

sentiment from “How to Read a Book.”

Pull out the original quote of this.

Note also that [[Mortimer J. Adler]] is saying this in a time period where books are far cheaper than in the past. An author from a few generations prior would have indicated that the quotes and marginalia should have gone in one's commonplace book.

[[Perusall]] for social reading

Slides for the presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1O0ZL_Nr_vC31KoAfobKrTPbr8u552UPSwTAf45vmZqc/edit#slide=id.ge1fc7921ea_0_0

I can't wait to catch I Annotate 2021 starting tomorrow morning.

Syndicated to:

• website
• Twitter

Science in the Classroom

Annotated research papers and accompanying teaching materials

Referenced at I Annotate 2021.

Thousands of old library books bear fascinating traces of the past. Readers wrote in their books, and left pictures, letters, flowers, locks of hair, and other things between their pages. We need your help identifying them in the stacks of academic libraries. Together we can find out more about what books were and how they were used by their original owners, while also proving the value of maintaining rich print collections in our libraries.

A cool looking website focused around curating an interesting collection of books.

Mentioned by Nate Angell at I Annotate 2021.

An awesome looking annotation tool that dovetails with Zotero to invite students and readers into texts with annotations.

Demonstrated by Axel Dürkop at the Social Hour: Annotate This Party With Annotation Show-and-Tell

Note taking/annotation tool discussed on day two of I Annotate 2021.

I feel like I may have just stumbled on a back alley book club on design.

It's digital books+Hypothes.is+Fight Club...

The rules of Back Alley Book Club:

1. We don't talk about Back Alley Book Club.
2. We don't talk about Back Alley Book Club.

...

1. If this is your first night at Back Alley Book Club, you have to annotate.

Return to this project in July 2021 to see it in action.

In addition to looking in the margins, one must also look at contemporaneous copies of both printed and privately held (or collected) commonplace books to cast a wider net on these practices.

aka drolleries

Write and cite, research and re-search, and never get lost in Databyss. Welcome to your new word processor.

Ran across this in the closing party session of IAnno21.

Mentioned by Lysandra Cook at I Annotate 2021

Personalized license plates could be thought of as a way to annotate one's car.

This is a phenomenal way to do a look back at a year in reading. I'll have to consider how to pull it off for myself this year.

My own intellectual vibrations are ensconced into the annotations I make as I read.

I'm curious how this habit will change my thinking over time.

Computer and phone notifications can be insidious. I've personally turned most of them off.

I also find that reading and annotating with Hypothes.is has helped me to have more focus while reading---even despite the short turnoffs to cogitate a bit, write a bit, and then return.

Lynne Kelly's observation that oral cultures revised useful knowledge into their memories appears to me to be a simple precursor to annotation and the idea of the scientific method all in one...

There is, however, an exceptionally long tradition of moving one's annotations out of the margins and into more expansive spaces like commonplace books, zettelkasten, wikis, Memex, and digital gardens...

This cultural thinking pattern also isn't confined by literacy either. Dr. Lynne Kelly attests the idea of the storage of ideas and their subsequent potential revision in oral cultures in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. One may have lost the ability to track the original ideas in time, but the (useful) oral "annotations" were aggregated into cultural knowledge over time.

Extracting .pdf annotations using [[Zotfile]]

Go to Settings > Advanced > Config Editor and then filtering by pdfExtraction.

The end section on templates was rushed and make take some more time to properly configure Zotfile and the notes exports to get what I want.

Karl Marx's annotations? I'm in!

This may be the sort of thing that @remikalir may appreciate as well.

Doing this specifically prevents the non-mnemotechniques group from adding their own visual loci in the form of annotations, drolleries, etc.

Early versions of annotations. Sad to realize that most of them likely perished.

Interesting to think of this problem of note taking actually coining the phrase "scrap heap".

Fascinating to see that practices like folding page corners and marking texts are far from new.

One of the flaws of using Digital Mappa for projects like this appears to be that it acts more as a viewer (as a result of it's original use with maps) than as something for text. As a result, when looking at various pages, the URL of the page and it's attendant resources doesn't change, so one can't link to particular resources within the work, nor can one easily use digital tools (Hypothes.is for example), to anchor and annotate portions of the text.

Manifold – Building an Open Source Publishing Platform

Zach Davis and Matthew Gold

Re-watching after the conference.

Manifold

Use case of showing the process of making the book. The book as a start to finish project rather than just the end product.

They built the platform while eating their own cooking (or at least doing so with nearby communities).

Use for this as bookclubs. Embedable audio and video possibilities.

Use case where people have put journals on the platform and they've grown to add meta data and features to work for that.

They're allowing people to pull in social media pieces into the platform as well. Perhaps an opportunity to use Webmentions?

They support epub.

It can pull in Gutenberg texts.

Jim Groom talks about the idea of almost using Manifold as an LMS in and of itself. Centering the text as the thing around which we're gathering.

CUNY Editions of standard e-books with additional resources.Critical editions.

Using simple tools like Google Docs and then ingest them into Manifold using a YAML file.

TEI, LaTeX formats and strategies for pulling them in. (Are these actually supported? It wasn't clear.)

Reclaim Cloud has a container that will run Manifold.

Zach is a big believer in UX and design as the core of their product.

This is a fun and curious bit of UI here relating to Hypothes.is. There's an icon/button with a link to open the via interface and it auto updates with each additional annotation.

I'd like to look into how they implemented it and potentially add it as a social sort of feature to my own site.

Some of the future of the book may be taking new technologies and looking back at books.

I wonder if the technology that was employed here could be productized and turned into an app or platform to allow this sort of visual display for more (all?) books?

This looks like the sort of project that @judell @dwhly @remikalir and the Hypothes.is team may appreciate, if nothing else but for the user interface set up and interactions.

I'll have to spin up a copy shortly to take a look under the hood.

Truer words may have never been said.

If the margins aren't done properly, where is one to put the marginalia?

This looks interesting.

Ht Jeremy Cherfas

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Remi Kalir & Jeremy Dean</span> in Web Annotation as Conversation and Interruption (<time class='dt-published'>03/15/2021 00:21:05</time>)</cite></small>

In the attached YouTube video Dan talks through his post as usual, but he has the added bonus here of showing a split screen of his annotated copy of the book with his Obsidian notebook open. We then see a real time transcription of his note taking process of moving from scant highlights in the book to more fleshed out thoughts and notes in his notebook. We also see him cross referencing various materials for alternate definitions and resources.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HBL-c_nXXQ

This highlighted portion sounds deep, but what the hell does it really mean? I feel like I'm missing some context.

Somewhat more interesting is the notice here that it's such a heavily highlighted passage. I love that Dan pays attention to these bits much as I do.

I've run into this issue myself in a few public instances. I look at my annotations as my own "conversation" with a document. Given this, I usually flip the switch to hide all the annotations on the page and annotate for myself. Afterwards I'll then turn the annotation view back on and see and potentially interact with others if I choose.