Creating links to one's own personal context can help one to both learn and retain new material.

More closely associating new ideas to one's own personal life helps to create and expand the context of the learning to what one already knows.

Within the context of Bloom's Taxonomy, doing this shows that one understands and is already applying and even doing a bit of creating, at least internally.

Should 'understanding' come before 'remembering' in Bloom's taxonomy? That seems more logical to me.

Bloom's Taxonomy mirrors the zettelkasten method

(Recall Bloom's Taxonomy: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create)

One needs to be able to generally understand an idea(s) to be able to write it down clearly in one's own words. Regular work within a zettelkasten helps to reinforce memory of ideas for understanding and retention. Applying the knowledge to other situations happens almost naturally with the combinatorial creativity that occurs within a zettelkasten. Analysis is heavily encouraged as one takes new information and links it to prior knowledge and ideas; this is also concurrent with the application of knowledge. Being able to compare and contrast two ideas on separate cards is also part of the analysis portions of Bloom's taxonomy which also leads into the evaluation phase. Finally, one of the most important reasons for keeping a zettelkasten is to use it to generate or create new ideas and thoughts and then write them down in articles, books, or other media in a clear and justified manner.

Personalizing ideas using existing memories is a method of brining new knowledge into one's own personal context and making them easier to remember.

link this to: - the pedagogical idea of context shifting as a means of learning - cards about reframing ideas into one's own words when taking notes

There is a solid group of cards around these areas of learning.

Random thought: Personal learning networks put one into a regular milieu of people who are talking and thinking about topics of interest to the learner. Regular discussions with these people helps one's associative memory by tying the ideas into this context of people with relation to the same topic. Humans are exceedingly good at knowing and responding to social relationships and within a personal learning network, these ties help to create context on an interpersonal level, but also provide scaffolding for the ideas and learning that one hopes to do. These features will tend to reinforce each other over time.

On the flip side of the coin there is anecdotal evidence of friends taking courses together because of their personal relationships rather than their interest in the particular topics.

For overall understanding and creating new writing output from it, the immediate focus shouldn't be about revealing new information or simple facts so much as it's about being able to place that new information into your own context. Once this has been done then the focus can shift to later being able to potentially use that new knowledge and understanding in other novel and enlightening contexts to create new insights.

It's important to be able to understand an idea within it's given text fully, but good readers are able to take the idea and place it into other contexts, to extend it, connect it to ideas beyond the text, and ask additional questions that the original author may not have considered or even thought possible.

Overall scientific credibility: 'very low' according to the scientists who analyzed this article.

Find more details in Climate Feedback's analysis

Stephen Krashen's Theory of Input indicates that language learning is most successful when learners are presented with interesting and comprehensible material in low-anxiety situations.

https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1490344071126294528

maps != graphs

what are the building blocks at operation with respect to these?

what pieces of context are built up and how do they add information to become more complex?

https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/4407/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>lbcollister</span> in Hypothesis (<time class='dt-published'>02/15/2022 23:20:04</time>)</cite></small>

https://hyp.is/92U6ZBGGEei7GnNNsuV4Uw/www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/

See also: https://hyp.is/92U6ZBGGEei7GnNNsuV4Uw/www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine/

Successful problem solving requires having the ability to adaptively and flexibly focus one's attention with respect to the demands of the work. Having a toolbelt of potential methods and combinatorially working through them can be incredibly helpful and we too often forget to explicitly think about doing or how to do that.

This is particularly important in mathematics where students forget to look over at their toolbox of methods. What are the different means of proof? Some mathematicians will use direct proof during the day and indirect forms of proof at night. Look for examples and counter-examples. Why not look at a problem from disparate areas of mathematical thought? If topology isn't revealing any results, why not look at an algebraic or combinatoric approach?

How can you put a problem into a different context and leverage that to your benefit?

(Gadamer 2004).

All intellectual endeavors start from a preexisting set of ideas. These can then be built upon to create new concepts which then influence the original starting point and may continue ever expanding with further thought.

Ahrens argues that most writing advice goes against the idea of the hermeneutic circle and pretends as if the writer is starting with a blank page. This can prefigure some of the stress and difficulty Ernest Hemingway spoke of when he compared writing to "facing the white bull which is paper with no words on it."

While it can be convenient to think of the idea of tabula rasa, in practice it really doesn't exist. As a result the zettelkasten more readily shows its value in the writing process.

Integrate this into the definition of permanent notes.

Fleeting notes are context collapse (context apocalypse?) just waiting to happen.

The important part of permanent notes are generating your own ideas and connecting (linking them densely) into your note system. The linking part is important and can be the part that most using digital systems forget to do. In paper zettelkasten, one was forced to create the first link by placing the note into the system for the first time. This can specifically be seen in Niklas Luhmann's example where a note became a new area of its own or, far more likely, it was linked to prior ideas.

By linking the idea to others within the system, it becomes more likely that the idea can have additional multiple contexts where it might be used and improve the fact that context shifts will prove more insight in the future.

Additional links to subject headings, tags, categories, or other forms of taxonomy will also help to make sure the note isn't lost completely into the system. Links to the bibliographical references within the system are helpful as well, especially for later citation. Keep in mind that these categories and reference links aren't nearly as valuable as the other primary idea links.

One can surely collect ideas and facts into their system, but these aren't as important or as interesting as one's own ideas and the things that are sparked and generated by them.

Asking questions in permanent notes can be valuable as they can become the context for new research, projects, and writing. Open questions can be incredibly valuable for one's thinking and explorations.

Literature notes could also be considered progressive summaries of what one has read. They are also a form of practicing the Feynman technique where one explains what one knows as a means of embracing an idea and better understanding it.

By crosslinking one's notes in a hypertext-like manner one is able to give them many different contexts. This linking and context shifting is a solid method for helping one's ideas to have sex with each other as a means of generating new ideas.

Is there a relationship between this idea of context shifting and modality shifting? Are these just examples of building blocks for tools of thought? Are they sifts on different axes? When might they be though of as the same? Compare and contrast this further.

Historically, the knitting patterns of sweaters were used to help identify drowned men

The hermeneutic circle is the idea that understanding a text in whole is underpinned by understanding its constituent parts and understanding the individual parts is underpinned by understanding the whole thereby making a circle of understanding. This understanding of a text is going to be heavily influenced by a text's cultural, historical, literary, and other contexts.

Scholars who study writing differentiate between knowledge telling and knowledge transforming.

Highlighting can be seen as a weak form of knowledge telling. It's a low level indicator that an idea is important, but doesn't even go so far as the reader strengthening the concept by restating the idea in their own words similar to the Feynman technique.

One could go steps further by not only restating it but transforming it and linking it into one's larger body of knowledge or extending into other contexts.

Evershed, N. (n.d.). The simple numbers every government should use to fight anti-vaccine misinformation. The Guardian. Retrieved January 30, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/ng-interactive/2022/jan/28/the-simple-numbers-every-government-should-use-to-fight-anti-vaccine-misinformation

Remembering and being able to more quickly recall prior contexts allows our thinking to build momentum.

By their nature, numbers can create an air of objectivity which doesn't really exist and may be hidden by the cultural context one is working within. Be careful not to create an over-reliance on numbers. Particularly in social and political situations this reliance on numbers and related statistics can create dramatically increased bias and discrimination. Numbers may create a part of the picture, but what is being left out or not measured? Do the numbers you have with respect to your area really tell the whole story?

Differential susceptibility is a technical term used to describe the ways that different people and different groups have different responses to technology even on the same platform. Similar versions of it can be applied to other areas outside of technology, which is but one target. Other areas include differential well-being and mental health.

It could also be applied to drug addiction as some are more susceptible to becoming addicted to nicotine than others. Which parts of this might be nature, nurture, culture, etc.

While it may be important that there are no privileged positions, hierarchies, or immediate structures within Luhmann's (or others') zettelkasten, this belies the value of making (even by force) at least one link from each new note to the other notes. This helps begin to create the valuable interconnections of the system which are crucial for later use. Without this "linking hierarchy" one is left with just a pile of notes which will need the aforementioned additional work and context.

Is progress necessarily teleological? What differentiates it from simple change? What is the measure(s) that indicates progress?

One's present context is always going to dictate whether or not an innovation should be considered progress.

Nast, C. (2022, January 15). Do the Omicron Numbers Mean What We Think They Mean? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/do-the-omicron-numbers-mean-what-we-think-they-mean

In a valuable article, Lorraine Daston, ‘Perché i fatti sono brevi?’, Quaderni storici 108 (2001), 745–70, esp. 756–59, noted that a clear analogy exists between these features and the art of excerpting.

Can one trick oneself into forced context collapse with relation to the material one is reading in such a way so as to force surprise and the creation of new ideas by then re-contextualizing them into one's system of notes?

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)

It is likely a good broad generality that from a historical perspective, those looking at people from the past do so by considering them simply an earlier version of ourselves.

This sort of isocultural cognitive bias is something to be very cognizant of particularly in cases without extensive context as it is likely to cause massive context collapse.

Rebuilding one's earlier context and switching between apps are tremendous sinks of time and energy when writing, thinking, and creating.

It's better to get as much done as possible in the present so as not to need to do all the work over again later.

This also ignores the context of a writing space that is optimized for the reading, thinking and writing process.

Digital contexts often bring in a raft of other problems and issues that may provide too much.

Interesting to see this same sort of contextual background here as in TiddlyWiki which calls the space a "river". TiddlyWiki does this in a vertical scrolling space where as Federated Wiki does it horizontally.

Continuing on the analogy between addresses for zettels/index cards and for people, the differing contexts for cards and ideas is similar to the multiple different publics in which people operate (home, work, school, church, etc.)

Having these multiple publics creates a variety of cross links within various networks for people which makes their internal knowledge and relationships more valuable.

As societies grow the number of potential interconnections grows as well. Compounding things the society doesn't grow as a homogeneous whole but smaller sub-groups appear creating new and different publics for each member of the society. This is sure to create a much larger and much more complex system. Perhaps it's part of the beneficial piece of the human limit of memory of inter-personal connections (the Dunbar number) means that instead of spending time linearly with those physically closest to us, we travel further out into other spheres and by doing so, we dramatically increase the complexity of our societies.

Does this level of complexity change for oral societies in pre-agrarian contexts?

What would this look like mathematically and combinatorially? How does this effect the size and complexity of the system?

How can we connect this to Stuart Kauffman's ideas on complexity? (Picking up a single thread creates a network by itself...)

The simplification required to make models and study systems can be a useful tool, but one constantly needs to go back to the actual system to make sure that future predictions and work actually fit the real world system.

Too often social theorists make assumptions which aren't supported in real life and this can be a painfully dangerous practice, especially when those assumptions are built upon in ways that put those theories out on a proverbial creaking limb.

This idea is related to the bias that Charles Mathewes points out about how we treat writers as still living or as if they never lived. see: https://hypothes.is/a/VTU2lFvZEeyiJ2tN76i4sA

exist as paragons, specimens, sock-puppets or playthings of some inexorable law of history.

This is similar to a problem that Charles Mathewes has pointed out about history and historical writing: Too often we act as if the writer never died and also we forget that the writer ever lived in the real world.

Peoples' context matters.

Cross reference: Lecture 1 of [[[The City of God (Books that Matter)]]

A video analyzing John William Waterhouse's 1888 painting, The Lady of Shalott, giving historical background of the painting and how its influenced by Tennyson's poem. Video

Camelot is mythical city in Great Britain. Its a central symbol in many Tennyson poem's especially The Lady of Shalott. The following link gives information about Camelot and its context in literature. Camelot

In part 1 of The Lady of Shalott, Tennyson takes time to establish the setting of the poem. He describes a castle tower on an island called Shalott, located in a river. Along the river there are beautiful willow trees and small sail boats which travel down the river towards the city of Camelot. In the tower, there is a mysterious lady that no one has ever seen, The Lady of Shalott.

There's a subtle sense of repetition here. She frames the result of the meeting in two different cultures: a Western-centric one and an Indigenous one. The Western result is a "scar", but it's retranslated into "echoes of our stories" from the indigenous perspective.

The Western word "ceremony" is certainly not the best word for describing these traditions. It has too much baggage and hidden meaning with religious overtones. It's a close-enough word to convey some meaning to those who don't have the cultural background to understand the underlying orality and memory culture. It is one of those words that gets "lost in translation" because of the dramatic differences in culture and contextual collapse.

Most Western-based anthropology presumes a Western idea of "religion" and impinges it upon oral cultures. I would maintain that what we would call their "religion" is really an oral-based mnemonic tradition that creates the power of their culture through knowledge. The West mistakes this for superstitious religious practices, but primarily because we can't see (or have never been shown) the larger structures behind what is going on. Our hubris and lack of respect (the evils of the scala naturae) has prevented us from listening and gaining entrance to this knowledge.

I think that the archaeological ideas of cultish practices or ritual and religion are all more likely better viewed as oral practices of mnemonic tradition. To see this more easily compare the Western idea of the memory palace with the Australian indigenous idea of songline.

When context keeps the meaning clear. What the authors talking about. He’s having a clear message. So people understand what is going on. But sometimes the message can be unclear. And people can take it the wrong way. Communication is complicated especially when you are talking to somebody through text. I think it is easier to talk to somebody face-to-face or on the phone or in a zoom meeting. That is a clear message to me. The messages that I can’t translate. Or mostly text, but sometimes to understand what is going on I would have to ask them multiple questions to get the clear answer.Context of everything and we take it for granted.

Cancel culture and modern mob justice are possible as the result of volumes of more detail and data as well as large doses of context collapse.

In some cases, it's probably justified to help level the playing field for those in power who are practicing hypocrisy, but in others, it's simply a lack of context by broader society who have kneejerk reactions which have the ability to be "remembered" by broader society with search engines.

How might Google allow the right to forget to serve as a means of restorative justice?

Hoffman, R., Mueller, S., Klein, G., & Litman, J. (2021). Measuring Trust in the XAI Context. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/e3kv9

‘Error in judgement’: CBC Edmonton regrets mannequin’s use in COVID-19 news report | National Post. (n.d.). Retrieved October 15, 2021, from https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/error-in-judgement-cbc-edmonton-regrets-mannequins-use-in-covid-19-news-report?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1634226060-1

Had I known about Hypothesis at the time of my collaboration with Ilaria Forte, I likely would have suggested this as a tool for documenting the stream of consciousness, collecting stories in the context of the media that people are experiencing on the web.

I believe that this clearly explains the issue, the physical print does not portray Kamala Harris as the vice-president of the United States.

Certain 16th-century editions of the Italian poet Petrarch's works were affixed with a woodcut of an urn containing the ashes of lovers, along with a Phoenix. Donne is credited with moving away from a Petrarchan tradition in poetry, and would have been well-acquainted with this work.

Source: The Poems of John Donne: Volume One, edited by Robin Robbins (Routledge)

The eagle and the dove have been called upon by many different authors to represent a range of relationships. These include "predatory appetite and power versus submissive gentleness," "strength and tender purity," "pleasure and sorrow," and "the active and contemplative lives."

Source: The Poems of John Donne: Volume One, edited by Robin Robbins (Routledge)

Note on History of Poetry:

Donne wrote The Canonization around the turn of the 17th century, a time when European poetry was ruled by Petrarchan sonnets. Some attempts, including by C.S. Lewis have been made to categorize poets of this era (Lewis used "drab and "Golden", others; "plain" and "eloquent") but the spectrum of poets defies easy categorization. One important aspect of the time period was the innovation of language itself. Poetry and literature were moving away from Latin and French, and vernacular English continued to develop.

Source: English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century, Nasrullah Mambrol (Research Scholar, Department of Studies in English, Kannur University)

The final trick of this Donne poem comes from a historical impact he is unlikely to have predicted. After all, he never published his own poems. And yet, 400+ years later, his lyrics are still studied by scholars and students. He has been canonized in the literary sense. Furthermore, as love poems like this are some of his best-known, his love has in fact been canonized.

General Historical Note:

Donne likely writes this poem at the very beginning of the 17th century, though it could have been anywhere from the 1590s until the 1620s. This range came at the end of the Elizabethan period and contains the reign of James I, the first Stuart monarch. This was a period of great growth for England, with increasing naval power leading to the formation of the East India company, as well as the colony of Jamestown, expanding the power of the British empire in both hemispheres.

Sources: The Late Tudors, England 1547-1603; British Museum

https://youtu.be/qYsMtroVLeA?t=62

Faces become a mnemonic for attaching information to our social circles. These tie into trust, friendship, and context.

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

Some books only have small bits of wisdom in them to begin with, so summaries can be good.

However, if one puts the "quality" content in a primary position, then the text itself will often have some incredibly valuable context that may be missing from summaries.

Sanders, J., Spruijt, P., Dijk, M. van, Elberse, J., Lambooij, M., Kroese, F., Bruin, M. de, & Unit, C. B. (2021). Understanding a national increase in COVID-19 vaccination intention: A mixed methodological approach. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rpc2g

These are really great questions that are raised by the authors. Prior to this, I have not really considered or questioned who gets chosen to "represent" Psychology or why we are learning about them (e.g. Freud, Watson) over other theorists. This also relates to the reading by Conolly-Smith on Historiography which brings up the importance of questioning "who writes history, with what agenda in mind, and towards what ends?“ demonstrating that there is a purpose to the Psychological knowledge that gets recorded and remembered.

People remember interrupted or unfinished tasks better than completed tasks.

Examples: I've had friends remember where we left off on conversations months/years later and we picked right back up.

I wonder what things effect these memories/abilities? Context? Importance? Other?

§ 17 (1) S. 1, 2 2. InfSchMV

§ 2 (1a) 2. InfSchMV

How is this similar to/different from modern Bible readers erasing the original context of the texts and reimagining the words for their lives in a world far removed from the original?

Interesting to see so many different words to describe not just those who are poorly read, but those who have misunderstood or misapplied their reading.

Historically, I wonder how much of this may have been applied to those who misused quotations out of context?

I'm not sure I agree with this perspective of not necessarily asking for outside help.

What if the author is at fault for not communicating properly or leaving things too obscure? Is this the exception of which he speaks?

What if the author isn't properly contextualizing all the necessary information to the reader? This can be a particular problem when writing history across large spans of both time and culture or even language.

I don't agree with this viewpoint. Just like Heraclitus' river, the information in an article or book may not change, but there is a contextual change in the reader, in their thinking, their circumstances, and their time that may give them a different reading or perspective of the same material at later dates.

Of course not all material is actually worth reading more than once either. But for some material a second or third reading may help them create new ideas and new links to prior ideas.

doxography

Much like attempting to reconstruct history from portions of the Bible, one must consider the context of the pieces in its own time and with the context of the authors' time, space, and other thought.

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://hub.jhu.edu/2021/07/09/how-the-mind-links-objects/

A study that quantifies association within the brain and indicates the region where it occurs.

https://bookriot.com/twitter-book-recommendations/

https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008.12.41/

A searing review of David R. Slavitt's translation of Lucretius.

The "close enough" nature of the translation seems like the intellectual slide shown by too many moderns which decontextualizes our historical precedents. Perhaps fine for a quick view, but could be a slippery slope for taking as part of the basis for Western intellectual tradition.

This idea is a bit on the extreme side, but it does suggest that having a multi-card comparison view in a PKM system would be useful.

Drawing on Raymond Llull's combitorial memory system from the 12th century and a bit of Herman Ebbinghaus' spaced repetition (though this is also seen in earlier non-literate cultures), one could present two (or more) random atomic notes together as a way of juxtaposing disparate ideas from one's notes.

The spaced repetition of the cards would be helpful for one's long term memory of the ideas, but it could also have the secondary effect of nudging one to potentially find links or connections between the two ideas and help to spur creativity for the generation of new hybrid ideas or connection to other current ideas based on a person's changed context.

I've thought about this in the past (most likely while reading Frances Yates' Art of Memory), but don't think I've bothered to write it down (or it's hiding in untranscribed marginalia).

On the difference for writing for one's self and for others. Of course there's also the need to be able to re-decifer one's notes again in the future. It may be best to keep more detailed for your future self as if you're writing for the public.

I like the idea of distance in "communication space" which comes up in the comments. This is related to context collapse and shared contexts which are often too-important in our communication with regard to being understood in the far future.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Matthias Melcher</span> in Commonplace Book | x28's new Blog (<time class='dt-published'>07/06/2021 11:13:34</time>)</cite></small>

Buckee, C., Noor, A., & Sattenspiel, L. (2021). Thinking clearly about social aspects of infectious disease transmission. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03694-x

Reminder that there's value in capturing the context of one's ideas. Who knows what might be missing or what others may wish to know in the future?

i feel like if i if i use the word new somewhere i want to go through and like no no no no new to who and put the question mark there just to remember that there are those um models that come before us right and there are those traditions that come before us that are even in some ways operating when we don't even you know notice or recognize them

Asking the question "new to who?" can be important whenever using the word new can be very revealing. We need to recall and respect that everyone comes from a different context.