3,941 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2021
    1. 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.

    1. Scott Sampson has argued that we should subjectify nature rather than objectifying it. People are a part of nature and integral to it. We are not separate from it and we are assuredly not above it.

      Can the injection of multi-disciplinary research and areas like big history help us to see the bigger picture? How have indigenous and oral cultures managed to do so much better than us at this? Is it the way we've done science in the past? Is it our political structures?

    1. 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.

    1. 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

    1. 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...

    1. ☞(excerpts) Beal, Peter. Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology: 1450 to 2000.Oxford, GB: OUP Oxford, 2007. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 19 December 2016.☞Lesser, Zachary and Peter Stallybrass. “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays.” Shakespeare Quarterly, (2008), 371–420.☞Smyth, Adam. “Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen Traits.” Women and Writing, c.1340-c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture. Manuscript Culture in the British Isles. Eds. Lawrence-Mathers, A. and Hardman, P. Rochester, U.S.: Boydell and Brewer, 90-110.☞Summers, David. “—the proverb is something musty: The Commonplace and Epistemic Crisis in Hamlet.”Hamlet Studies 20.1-2(1998): 9-34.

      sources to add to my reading list, if not already there

  2. Aug 2021
    1. Helping Hands on the Medieval Page

      👈

      As I'm thinking about this, I can't help but think that Hypothes.is, if only for fun, ought to add a manicule functionality to their annotation product.

      I totally want to be able to highlight portions of my reading with an octopus manicule!

      I can see their new tagline now:

      Helping hands on the digital page.

      image of an octopus drawn in a book margin with the legs stretching so as to indicate an important passage of several lines

      I'm off to draw some octopi...

    1. For several examples of how commonplacing gave rise to filing systems during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,see Malcolm, ‘Thomas Harrison and his “Ark of Studies”’.
    2. The impactof such practices upon eighteenth-century visual and material culture is recounted in te Heesen, The World in a Box.

      This reference appears to show some of the historical link between the method of loci in rhetoric with that of commonplacing ideas within books. The fact that the word box may suggest some relational link between commonplacing and zettelkasten.

    3. West, Theatres and Encyclopaedias, ch. 2; Garberson ‘Libraries, Memory and the Spaceof Knowledge’. For a multicultural introduction to the architectural imagery of early modern memory practices, seeSpence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.
    4. In recent decades there have been a number of stud-ies that have shown how humanist approaches to commonplacing not only evolved in tandemwith attempts to coherently arrange naturaliain studioli, wunderkammernand museums, butalso facilitated the conceptual development of natural history. Key works that led up to this rein-terpretation were Walter Ong’s work on Ramus, Frances Yates’s history of the art of memory,Tony Grafton’s defence of humanistic textual practices and, crucially, Paolo Rossi’s argumentthat Francis Bacon used topical logic to organize his lists and tables.7Once the topical box wasopened, a number of seminal studies on commonplacing natural knowledge followed. Keyentries in this canon are works written by Ann Blair, Ann Moss, Jonathan Spence and HowardHotson.8

      Lots of references to add or read here.

    1. Media and the Mind: Art, Science and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 550 pp + 60 figures.

      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.

    1. https://hedgeschool.substack.com/p/finding-the-greatest-thinking-partner

      He almost gets there and highlights some useful pieces for why have a zettelkasten, but I think he's missing some of the ultimate power in the end. I become a bit lost at the end because he's not clear about the intent and the final product. What becomes his final set of permanent notes from his reading in this case. What exactly is he linking to that already exists in his slip box?

      I'm lost with his logic and I know what I'm doing. I can only wonder what others make of it?

      Did you follow what he's finally created here in this last piece @mrkrndvs?

    1. https://hedgeschool.substack.com/p/the-vulnerable-author

      This piece isn't as interesting or as substantive as its predecessor.

      I feel like he's missing an important part of some of the great ideas he came up with in his fleeting notes. Where do those go? What will become of them. I'm quite curious to see how he ends up tying this all together. If he can't do it properly then I have a feeling he's missing the boat on the point of some of this.

    1. https://indieweb.org/2012/Positive_Arguments

      It would be fun to revisit this. I'm not sure how much we can expand on the why portions, but looking closer at and thinking about expanding the how would be useful.

    1. https://nooshu.com/blog/2021/05/12/weve-spotted-something-on-your-scan/

      The waiting and not knowing is one of the worst parts. Even reading updates into August is difficult. I was hoping that the surgery would have taken place already.

      Hoping the best for you and your family Matt.

    1. 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.

    1. Aaron linkt in zijn blogpost aan meer bronnen die ik zeker eens verder wil onderzoeken voor mijn eigen Frankopedia.

      I love that Frank calls his personal wiki / digital garden / online commonplace book "Frankopedia".

      I should come up with a more clever name for mine.

    1. Due to the paucity of research and significant heterogeneity in studies, definitive conclusions about the effects of these micronutrients on HRV cannot be made at this time. However, there is accumulating evidence suggesting deficiencies in vitamins D and B-12 are associated with reduced HRV, and zinc supplementation during pregnancy can have positive effects on HRV in offspring up until the age of 5 y.

      Odd they don't mention vitamin E or other antioxidants. They do cite that placebo-controlled vitamin E study in diabetics. I ought to see what other important information they've left out of the abstract.

    1. 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?

    1. 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?

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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

    1. http://www.rossashby.info/origins.html

      This page looks like a zettelkasten card embedded into a commonplace book.He's cross linking ideas using page numbers. I wonder if he's also got headings as well?

    1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/adversaria

      Note the use of adversaria also as a book of accounts. This is intriguing and gives a historical linguistic link to the idea of waste books being used in the commonplace tradition. When was this secondary use of adversaria used?

    1. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-05-08-reagan-notes-book-brinkley_n.htm

      An article indicating that President Ronald Reagan kept a commonplace book throughout his life. He maintained it on index cards, often with as many as 10 entries per card. The article doesn't seem to indicate that there was any particular organization, index, or taxonomy involved.

      It's now housed at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA.

    1. Unlike traditional journaling or commonplacing, my pocket notebooks don’t have any set format, and mostly amount to a collection of short lists, reminders, and random stream-of-consciousness jottings. These notebooks essentially serve the same purpose as scratch paper, only I have all of my random musings gathered together in one place as opposed to scattered around my desk on post-its and the backs of old grocery lists.

      This is an example in the wild of someone using pocket notebooks as waste books. Though in this case they weren't actively moving pieces into a more permanent commonplace.

      https://www.gentlemanstationer.com/blog/2020/7/31/personal-journaling-setup-part-3-revisiting-pocket-notebooks

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loci_communes_(Pseudo-Maximus)

      Interesting to see the garden metaphor here in the translated Arabic title. Ties it into the idea of florilegium and a tie into the modern idea of the "digital garden".

      An Arabic translation, entitled Kitāb al-rawḍa (Book of the Garden), was made by ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Faḍl al-Anṭākī in the 11th century.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomnemata

      See definition of hypomnema.

      May be useful to look at some of these literary works to compare/contrast them against commonplace books and their general use in early writings.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomnema

      Hypomnema (Greek. ὑπόμνημα, plural ὑπομνήματα, hypomnemata), also spelled hupomnema, is a Greek word with several translations into English including a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, an anecdotal record, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms.

      Compare and contrast the idea of this with the concept of the commonplace book. There's also a tie in with the idea of memory, particularly for meditation.

      There's also the idea here of keeping a note of something to be fixed or remedied and which needs follow up or reflection.

    1. I'm going to need some significant time delving into and mining this treasure trove of references.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album_(Ancient_Rome)

      Historical precursor of the idea of the modern album (photograph as well as musical), which also bears some resemblance to the commonplace book.

    1. " Havens' inclusive approach and argument for a broad definition of the commonplace book responds to previous scholarship whose scope has been restricted to documents that fit classical theories of the commonplace. In Havens' view, this exclusivity obscures much of the actual history and personal practices of compilers of commonplaces, particularly because it focuses on Renaissance humanist compilations that were made for print.

      I take this more inclusive approach to note taking as well.

    1. Review: Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought by Ann Moss

      Author(s): Terence Cave

      Review by: Terence Cave

      Source: Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Summer 1997), pp. 337-340

      Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.337

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. https://awarm.space/fast/standard-ebooks

      Always fun to see people trying some of the same experiments I've done. A few interesting tidbits here to refine some of the process perhaps?

    1. U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet, "Optimizing for Engagement: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology on Internet Platforms," 25 June 2019, www.commerce.senate.gov/2019/6/optimizing-for-engagement-understanding-the-use-of-persuasive-technology-on-internet-platforms.

      Perhaps we need plurality in the areas for which social data are aggregated?

      What if we didn't optimize for engagement, but optimized for privacy, security, or other axes in the space?

    2. Francis Fukuyama et al., Middleware for Dominant Digital Platforms: A Technological Solution to a Threat to Democracy, Stanford Cyber Policy Center, 3, https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/cpc-middleware_ff_v2.pdf.
  3. Jul 2021
    1. https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/07/21/a-virtuous-cycle-for-analytics/

      Some basic data patterns and questions occur in almost any business setting and having a toolset to handle them efficiently for both the end users and the programmers is an incredibly important function.

      Too often I see businesses that don't own their own data or their contracting out the programming portion (or both).

    1. https://medium.com/@benenewton/my-obsidian-daily-note-template-a4bdab53dc62

      General overview of a someone's daily note template which uses the Templater plugin and the Tasks plugin.

      Includes a link to a gist for those who'd like to copy the format or extend it for themselves.

    1. u/MushroomPuddle17 days agoGetting started with a commonplace notebook as someone who isn't creative? .t3_ojhwrb ._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; } Hello everyone!I've known about commonplace books for years and always feel a surge of inspiration when I see them but I'm really not creative. I don't know what I'd ever write in one? I don't ever really have any grand ideas or plans. I don't seem to have conversations or read things that necessarily inspire me. I just live a very regular life where nothing really sticks out to me as important. I've tried bullet journals before and had the same issue.Does anyone have any suggestions? I'd really appreciate it.

      I'm not sure what you mean by your use of the word "creative". I'm worried that you've seen too many photos of decorative and frilly commonplace books on Instagram and Pinterest. I tend to call most of those "productivity porn" as their users spend hours decorating and not enough collecting and expanding their thoughts, which is really their primary use and value. Usually whatever time they think they're "saving" in having a cpb, they're wasting in decorating it. (Though if decorating is your thing, then have at it...) My commonplace is a (boring to others) location of mostly walls of text. It is chock full of creative ideas, thoughts, and questions though. If you're having trouble with a place to start, try creating a (free) Hypothes.is account and highlighting/annotating everything you read online. (Here's what mine looks like: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich, you'll notice that it could be considered a form of searchable digital commonplace book all by itself.) Then once a day/week/month, take the best of the quotes, ideas, highlights, and your notes, replies, questions and put them into your physical or digital commonplace. Build on them, cross link them, expand on them over time. Do some research to start answering any of the questions you came up with. By starting with annotating things you're personally interested in, you'll soon have a collection of things that become highly valuable and useful to you. After a few weeks you'll start seeing something and likely see a change in the way you're reading, writing, and even thinking.

      reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/ojhwrb/getting_started_with_a_commonplace_notebook_as/

    1. Highfive Notebook indexing method

      A clever method for creating an index or tracking system in a bound notebook by creating an index and then marking the edge of the page for related pages.

      Could also be used for tracking one's mood or other similar taxonomic items.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>u/mor-leidr </span> in Has anyone used this indexing system? Curious what you think : commonplacebook (<time class='dt-published'>07/30/2021 12:29:53</time>)</cite></small>

    1. https://kfitz.info/23-july-2021-0951/

      There's something interesting here with respect to relationships and desiring-to-have and wanting-to-be. Something we may miss in our daily interactions, but worth thinking about in our loves, crushes, etc.

    1. https://forum.obsidian.md/t/epub-support/1403

      Some interesting resources here, though none currently suit workflows I'm keen to support yet. There is a reference to FuturePress' epub.js which could be intriguing, though even here, I'm more likely to stick with Hypothes.is for annotating and note taking to keep context.

    1. https://dev.to/tmhall99/beyond-taking-notes-or-how-i-joined-the-roamcult-22k3

      Lots of resources on the topic to start down a rabbit hole, but no clear outline or thesis of what is going on or why it's useful. At best a list of potentially useful links for getting started.

    1. The term 'lemma' comes from the practice in Greco-Roman antiquity of using the word to refer to the headwords of marginal glosses in scholia; for this reason, the Ancient Greek plural form is sometimes used, namely lemmata (Greek λῆμμα, pl. λήμματα).

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

      No mention here of the use of headwords within the commonplace book tradition.

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>John Pavlus </span> in Melanie Mitchell Trains AI to Think With Analogies | Quanta Magazine (<time class='dt-published'>07/24/2021 17:19:52</time>)</cite></small>

    1. https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/writing-a-life

      Jacobs suggests taking the idea of "walking a mile in another's shoes" to a higher level. He takes Herman Hesse's idea in The Glass Bead Game of the Castalian community's writing a Life in which people write an autobiography about seeing themselves placed in other times/places in history.

      Similar examples he includes:

      • Flannery O'Connor's story "Revelation" in which a woman chooses being remade as "white trash" or a Black woman.
      • Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin (1961)
      • White Like Me, a Saturday Night Live skit featuring Eddie Murphy
      • Soul Sister by Grace Halsell
      • Rachel Dolezal passing as black because she felt it was her identity
      • John Rawls' "veil of ignorance"

      Jacob suggests this could be a useful exercise for people to attempt, particularly as a senior exercise for university students.