A fascinating combination of office furniture types in 1906!

The Adjustable Table Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan manufactured a combination table for both telephones and index cards. It was designed as an accessory to be stood next to one's desk to accommodate a telephone at the beginning of the telephone era and also served as storage for one's card index.

Given the broad business-based use of the card index at the time and the newness of the telephone, this piece of furniture likely was not designed as an early proto-rolodex, though it certainly could have been (and very well may have likely been) used as such in practice.

I totally want one of these as a side table for my couch/reading chair for both storing index cards and as a temporary writing surface while reading!

This could also be an early precursor to Twitter!

Folks have certainly mentioned other incarnations: - annotations in books (person to self), - postcards (person to person), - the telegraph (person to person and possibly to others by personal communication or newspaper distribution)

but this is the first version of short note user interface for both creation, storage, and distribution by means of electrical transmission (via telephone) with a bigger network (still person to person, but with potential for easy/cheap distribution to more than a single person)

fncll indicates that:

Both of Jackson's books on marginalia are practically required reading: Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books and Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia

Nearly a hundred years before Galileo and two hundred years before Newton, in a series of diagrams and notes in the Codex Arundel, Da Viinci was able to calculate the gravitational constant to an accuracy within 10 percent of the accepted value.

https://www.zotero.org/support/note_templates

Used this and the templates for setting up templates in Zotero to import notes from .pdf files into Zotero to migrate into Obsidian.

reply https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/16622/#Comment_16622

Adler has an excellent primer on this subject that covers a lot of the basics in reasonable depth: - Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1940. (https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-courses/how-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf)

Marking books can be useful not only to the original reader, but future academics and historians studying material culture (eg: https://apps.lib.umich.edu/online-exhibits/exhibits/show/marks-in-books), and as @GeoEng51 indicates they might be shared by friends, family, romantic interests, or even perhaps all of the above (see: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2017/4/mrs-custers-tennyson).

For those interested in annotation marks and symbols (like @ctietze's "bolt" ↯) I outlined a few ideas this last month at: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10qw4l5/comment/j6vxn6a/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Mrs. Custer’s Tennyson April 2017<br /> by William Logan

https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/brisanter-fund-geheime-gaestekartei-ueberlebt-hotelbrand-und-birgt-zuendstoff

cc: @remikalir: Interesting example here of a historical collection of business files annotated by hotel staff used in a digital humanities perspective for semantic shift and tracking antisemitism over time.

Published book:<br /> Hechenblaikner, Lois, Andrea Kühbacher, and Rolf Zollinger. Keine Ostergrüsse mehr!: Die geheime Gästekartei des Grand Hotel Waldhaus in Vulpera. 3rd ed. Zürich: Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.

srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/brisanter-fund-geheime-gaestekartei-ueberlebt-hotelbrand-und-birgt-zuendstoff

Google translate:

four wooden boxes with highly explosive contents were spared. They were stored in a different building at the time of the inferno. They contained 20,000 guest cards that concierges and receptionists had kept secretly between 1920 and 1960.

The Grandhotel Waldhaus burned down in 1989, but saved from the inferno were 20,000 guest cards with annotations about them that were compiled between 1920 and 1960.

https://abbreviationes.net/

The myth of technology - is - the myth that the software issues are technical; - whereas what matters is - communicating to the mind and heart of the user, - and that is not a technical issue at all.

do how : annotations & TrailMarks - instead of tags - compose Clues

compose : Clue - Clue consist of two parts a Clue Term and - an Outline - (possibly nested) ordered list of items - where items can be text images html fragment or nested clues

https://unclutter.lindylearn.io/

A tool similar to Readability (now Mercury). Also has read it later and highlighting functionality built in.

Sadly it doesn't seem to dovetail well with Hypothes.is' overlay. :(

```turtle @prefix : http://www.sparontologies.net/example/ . @prefix cito: http://purl.org/spar/cito/ . @prefix c4o: http://purl.org/spar/c4o/ . @prefix oa: http://www.w3.org/ns/oa# . @prefix per: http://data.semanticweb.org/person/ .

:annotation a oa:Annotation ; oa:hasBody :citation ; oa:hasTarget :in-text-ref-pointer ; oa:annotatedBy per:silvio-peroni .

:citation a cito:Citation; cito:hasCitingEntity :paper-a ; cito:hasCitationEvent cito:extends ; cito:hasCitedEntity :paper-b .

:in-text-ref-pointer a c4o:InTextReferencePointer ; c4o:hasContent "[6]" . ```

```turtle @prefix : http://www.sparontologies.net/example/ . @prefix cito: http://purl.org/spar/cito . @prefix cnt: http://www.w3.org/2011/content# . @prefix oa: http://www.w3.org/ns/oa# .

:annotation a oa:Annotation; oa:motivatedBy oa:commenting ; oa:hasBody :comment ; oa:hasTarget :citation .

:comment a cnt:ContentAsText ; cnt:chars "I'm citing that paper because it initiated this whole new field of research." .

:citation a cito:Citation; cito:hasCitingEntity :paper-a ; cito:hasCitationCharacterization cito:cites ; cito:hasCitedEntity :paper-b . ```

Because reading, annotating/note taking, and occasional outlining and writing can be broken down into small, concrete building blocks, each part of the process can be done separately and discretely with relatively easy ability to shift from one part of the process to another.

Importantly, one can be working on multiple different high level projects (content production: writing, audio, video, etc.) simultaneously in a way which doesn't break the flow of one's immediate reading. While a particular note within a piece may not come to fruition within a current imagined project, it may spark an idea for a future as yet unimagined project.

Aside: It would seem that Ryan Holiday's descriptions of his process are discrete with respect to each individual project. He's never mentioned using or reusing notes from past projects for current or future projects. He's even gone to the level that he creates custom note cards for his current project which have a title pre-printed on them.

Does this pre-titling help to provide him with more singular focus for his specific workflow? Some who may be prone to being side-tracked or with specific ADHD issues may need or be helped by these visual and workflow cues to stay on task, and as a result be helped by them. For others it may hinder their workflows and creativity.

This process may be different for beginning students or single project writers versus career writers (academics, journalists, fiction and non-fiction writers).

As a concrete example of the above, I personally made a note here about Darwin and Lamarck for a separate interest in evolution which falls outside of my immediate area of interest with respect to note taking and writing output.

1.This class is intended to help you advance and afterward apply reasonable as well as hypothetical data as it connects with the social brain research of game and exercise science. A portion of the areas connected with this class incorporate character, inspiration, excitement, objective setting, initiative, symbolism, collective vibes, social impact, social examination, and correspondence.

1. "Coach" Pick a previous or current mentor and survey from that individual data about their training, educator, & instructor reasoning essential. Being involved in different circumstances that have molded that person way of thinking. Being able to manage as well as things they oversee inside their groups, procedures they use to get competitors arranged for rivalry, and a reflection on how things have changed throughout the long term.

1. This course is online so this would roughly take 2 to 3 hours a day to do good.

4.Late work is not accepted and you will not be allowed to post anything on canvas.

The suggestion of visual highlighting making ideas stand out, but without the idea of their location within the notes being a helpful part of the mnemonic technique.

https://omnivore.app/<br /> Open source version of readwise

Originally bookmarked from phone on Sun 2023-01-15 11:25 PM

updated: 2023-01-17 with tag: "accounts"

Bacon, Bennett, Azadeh Khatiri, James Palmer, Tony Freeth, Paul Pettitt, and Robert Kentridge. “An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-Writing System and Phenological Calendar.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal, January 5, 2023, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774322000415.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19

There may be questions as to whether or not this represents written language, but, if true, this certainly represents one of the oldest examples of annotation in human history!

cc: @remikalir

https://tressel.xyz/

Tressel, a paid tool roughly like Readwise.io

Like the affordances with respect to memory, giving notes a "place" can give them additional power.

https://github.com/CondeNast/atjson

They're using annotations in this context more like CSS, but instead of adding the markup into the content as is done in HTML and processing it, they've physically separated the text and the markup entirely and are using location within the text to indicate where the formatting should take place.

https://jamesg.blog/2022/12/30/highlight-js/

https://www.goodreads.com/notes/59660671-building-a-second-brain/7458926-tiago

And as if I requested it this morning, here's an example of an author using annotations to create engagement/start a conversation/start an informal book club discussion using Goodreads and annotations on their own work.

cc: @remikalir

https://www.goodreads.com/notes/57643476-annotation/3524158-markgrabe-grabe

I rarely see notifications from Goodreads about annotations (typically via Kindle) unless they're from the author of the book posting them, ostensibly to generate engagement with their readers. Interesting to see Mark Grabe sharing his annotations on @remikalir and @anterobot's book on annotation though. :)

https://iiif.io/api/search/2.0/change-log/

🤔

I have thought long about the same issue and beyond. The triple (wiki, Hypothesis, donations) could be a working way to search for OER, form a social group processing them, and optionally support the creators.

I imagine that as follows: a person wants to learn about X. They can head to the wiki site about X and look into its Hypothesis annotations, where relevant OER with their preferred donation method can be linked. Also, study groups interested in the respective resource or topic can list virtual or live meetups there. The date of the meetups could be listed in a format that Hypothesis could search and display on a calendar.

Wiki is integral as it categorizes knowledge, is comprehensive, and strives to address biases. Hypothesis stitches websites together for the benefit of the site owners and the collective wisdom that emerges from the discussions. Donations support the creators so they can dedicate their time to creating high-quality resources.

Main inspirations:

Deschooling Society - Learning Webs

Building the Global Knowledge Graph

Schoolhouse calendar

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/09/10-thoughts-after-100-annotations-in-hypothes-is/

I love that you've got a comments heading for Hypothes.is annotations on your post @tonz! This is awesome.

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/08/added-hypothes-is-annotations-link-to-posts/

Also... just to show the functionality. (aka: First!)

My internal mathematician wishes there was more substance in this particular portion.

• Use of \(LaTeX\)
• annotating the breakdown of logic in problems
• providing missing context
• filling in details of problems left as an exercise for the student
• others?

also:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it. —Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

They also suggest that due to the relative low cost of books, it's easier to justify writing in them, though they carve out an exception for the barbarism of scribbling in library books.

An intriguing story of influential annotations in the history of science can be seen in Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read in which he traces annotations by teachers and students of Copernicus' De revolutionibus to show spread of knowledge in early modern astronomy.

Gingerich, Owen. The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. William Heinemann, 2004.

6 Coleridge, S. T. (1819). Character of Sir Thomas Brown as a writer.Blackwood’s Magazine 6(32), 197.

Poe, E. A. (1844). Marginalia. United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 15, 484, https://www.eapoe.org/works/misc/mar1144.htm

Curious that Poe framed marginalia as a self-conversation rather than a conversation with the text itself...

https://scrivanolabs.github.io/

https://reclipped.com/

• [ ] Reminder to check out video annotations using Reclipped

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Jan Knorr</span> in "@reclipped seems to be the best video annotating tool at the moment. It reminds me of @hypothes_is a lot. @ChrisAldrich what do you think about it as a https://t.co/iEahoO0Cly power user? How do you annotate videos? https://t.co/DP7WFaDKd9" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>11/16/2022 13:46:27</time>)</cite></small>

https://laist.com/news/politics/voter-game-plan

I annotated the hell out of my 2022 midterm ballot!

this is a good example of the personal side of note taking that isn't always outwardly seen

each person's notes will be personal to them

General methods of annotating or marking a text:<br /> - underlining, circling, boxing, enclosing, or highlighting - vertical lines in margin - stars, asterisks, symbols, dogears, (implied: bookmarks) - numbers sequencing arguments - page numbers as cross references - writing in the margin: questions and answers - writing in the endpapers

Are there other methods and marks that aren't catalogued here?

The idea of drolleries used as mnemonics is one which quickly comes to mind.

They do mention cross-references to page numbers within the text, but fail to mention links to ideas in other texts. (Perhaps they cover this later under syntopical reading and marking?)

https://library.harvard.edu/collections/reading-harvard-views-readers-readership-and-reading-history

Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History<br /> Exploring the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard's libraries.

He's literally drawing out bi-directional links to other ideas in his collection of notes as he creates fleeting notes so that he doesn't forget them in the future.

This practice is quite similar to writing out good spaced repetition question/answer cards for forcing active recall and better long term memory.

https://www.explainpaper.com/

Another in a growing line of research tools for processing and making sense of research literature including Research Rabbit, Connected Papers, Semantic Scholar, etc.

Functionality includes the ability to highlight sections of research papers with natural language processing to explain what those sections mean. There's also a "chat" that allows you to ask questions about the paper which will attempt to return reasonable answers, which is an artificial intelligence sort of means of having an artificial "conversation with the text".

cc: @dwhly @remikalir @jeremydean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI3yiPA6npA

Generally interesting and useful, but is broadly an extended advertisement for JetPens products.

Transparent sticky notes allow one to take notes on them, but the text is still visible through the paper.

One can use separate pages to write notes and then use washi tape to tape the notes to the page in a hinge-like fashion similar to selectively interleaving one's books.

https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ge4efpkxh985s8eszbb9dr2e/

Simple user interface example of highlighting and annotations on an article in Readwise Reader.

Readwise announced on 2022-09-29, that they've shipped the ability to use their feed reader product to share public versions of one's read and annotated articles.

https://www.reddit.com/r/readwise/comments/xrc7b7/new_in_reader_share_your_annotated_documents/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hill_(historian)

Christopher Hill's practice of creating indices of topics of interest to him in the end papers of his books is similar to that of Mortimer J. Adler who attested this practice as well.

A line in the margin doesn't fit with any mnemotechniques I'm aware of, so it's more likely a method to indicate what he had read, and up to what point. Likely not an indicator of storage to memory.

https://glasp.co/home

Glasp is a startup competitor in the annotations space that appears to be a subsidiary web-based tool and response to a large portion of the recent spate of note taking applications.

Some of the first users and suggested users are names I recognize from this tools for thought space.

On first blush it looks like it's got a lot of the same features and functionality as Hypothes.is, but it also appears to have some slicker surfaces and user interface as well as a much larger emphasis on the social aspects (followers/following) and gamification (graphs for how many annotations you make, how often you annotate, streaks, etc.).

It could be an interesting experiment to watch the space and see how quickly it both scales as well as potentially reverts to the mean in terms of content and conversation given these differences. Does it become a toxic space via curation of the social features or does it become a toxic intellectual wasteland when it reaches larger scales?

What will happen to one's data (it does appear to be a silo) when the company eventually closes/shuts down/acquihired/other?

The team behind it is obviously aware of Hypothes.is as one of the first annotations presented to me is an annotation by Kei, a cofounder and PM at the company, on the Hypothes.is blog at: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/a-letter-to-marc-andreessen-and-rap-genius/

But this is true for Glasp. Science researchers/writers use it a lot on our service, too.—Kei

cc: @dwhly @jeremydean @remikalir

https://glasp.co/

Glasp is a recent entrant to the social web highlighting and note taking space.

https://www.folia.com/iannotate/

This annotation application appears to be only for iOS platforms only at the moment.

https://venturebeat.com/business/box-is-shutting-down-crocodoc-personal-and-webnotes-on-november-1/

This list is a great framework for showing students what they don't know, so they can actively work and practice at becoming better at their craft.

I feel like actively annotating and "reading with a pen in hand" has been a great way to practice many of these points. Questioning texts, marking open problems, etc. goes a long way toward practicing these methods.

Goutor mentions that the innovation of photocopying, while potentially useful in some cases, isn't a replacement for actual reading and proper note taking. (p30) These same sorts of affordances and problems might be similar in the newer digital/online realm for people who rely on either whole scale copy/pasting or highlight capturing of texts, but who don't do the actual work of reading, processing, and creating good notes.

Some of the benefits like portability, ease of access, ability to work with delicate primary materials, better facsimiles of things like maps or tables, etc. are still true.

https://medium.com/workings/how-i-take-notes-when-doing-research-90a649f10098

Stowe Boyd looks at Clive Thompson's note taking process which uses Scrivener.

Nothing new here for me.

https://gizmodo.com/justin-long-knows-life-is-short-1849448109

What specifically does she define "writing" to be? What exactly is she writing, and how much? What does her process look like?

One might also consider the idea of active reading and writing notes. I may not "write" daily in the way she means, but my note writing, is cumulative and beneficial in the ways she describes in her list. I might further posit that the amount of work/effort it takes me to do my writing is far more fruitful and productive than her writing.

When I say writing, I mean focused note taking (either excerpting, rephrasing, or original small ideas which can be stitched together later). I don't think this is her same definition.

I'm curious how her process of writing generates new ideas and creativity specifically?

One might analogize the idea of active reading with a pen in hand as a sort of Einsteinian space-time. Many view reading and writing as to separate and distinct practices. What if they're melded together the way Einstein reconceptualized the space time continuum? The writing advice provided by those who write about commonplace books, zettelkasten, and general note taking combines an active reading practice with a focused writing practice that moves one toward not only more output, but higher quality output without the deleterious effects seen in other methods.

Throughout Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts (Utah State University Press, 2006) Joseph Harris presents highlighted sidebar presentations he labels "Intertexts".

They simultaneously serve the functions of footnotes, references, (pseudo-)pull quotes, and conversation with his own text. It's not frequently seen this way, but these intertexts serve the function of presenting his annotations of his own text to model these sorts of annotations and intertextuality which he hopes the reader (student) to be able to perform themselves. He explicitly places them in a visually forward position within the text rather than hiding them in the pages' footnotes or end notes where the audience he is addressing can't possibly miss them. In fact, the reader will be drawn to them above other parts of the text when doing a cursory flip through the book upon picking it up, a fact that underlines their importance in his book's thesis.

This really is a fantastic example of the marriage of form and function as well as modelling behavior.

cc: @remikalir

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2HegcwDRnU

Makes the argument that note taking is an information system, and if it is, then we can use the research from the corpus of information system (IS) theory to examine how to take better notes.

He looks at the Wang and Wang 2006 research and applies their framework of "complete, meaningful, unambiguous, and correct" dimensions of data quality to example note areas of study notes, project management notes (or to do lists) and recipes.

Looks at dimensions of data quality from Mahanti, 2019.

What is the difference between notes and annotations?

I quite like the idea of intertexts, which have the feeling of annotating one's own published work with the annotations of others. A sort of reverse annotation. Newspapers and magazines often feature pull quotes to draw in the reader, but why not have them as additional voices annotating one's stories or arguments.

This could certainly be done without repeating the quote twice within the piece.

Not related to this text, but just thinking...

Writing against a blank page is dreadful and we all wish we would be visited by the muses. But writing against another piece of text can be incredibly fruitful for generating ideas, even if they don't necessarily relate to the text at hand. The text gives us something to latch onto for creating work.

Try the following exercise:<br /> Write down 20 things that are white.<br /> (Not easy is it?)

Now write down 20 things in your refrigerator that are white?<br /> (The ideas come a lot easier don't they, even if you couldn't come up with 20.)

The more specific area helped you anchor your thoughts and give them a positive direction. Annotating against texts in which you're interested does this same sort of anchoring for your brain when you're writing.

Is there research on this area of concentration with respect to creativity?

https://web.hypothes.is/blog/celebrating-nearly-40-million-annotations

Or annotate it right now: https://docdrop.org/pdf/Are-Your-Students-Doing-the-Rea---Hypothes.is-gaulj.pdf/

Has it already been that long?!

Apparently my account dates to January 18, 2012, so I apparently missed an important anniversary.

https://web.hypothes.is/blog/100000-annotations/

https://hypothes.is/users/heatherstaines<br /> Joined: November 11, 2016<br /> Annotations: 1,063 (public as of 2022-08-12)

Date of publication: 2020-02-07<br /> Duration: 3 yr 3 mo or 1,183 days<br /> Average of: ~100,000/1,183 = 84.53 annotations per day

These would be closer to the idea of fleeting notes per day and not a more zettelkasten-like permanent note. It does provide at least a magnitude of order level of measurement on practice however.

Note that it's possible that as a part of the company she has multiple accounts including one with an earlier born by date which would tend to dilute the average.

The publication is dated 2020-02-07 (which matches publication meta data) and somehow Heather makes an annotation on the post itself (dated 2020-02-02) saying she's already at 105,000 annotations. This could have given a smaller window on a few week's worth of annotations, except for the improbably mismatch in dates.

So was Manfred Kuehn calling Umberto Eco an uncivilized barbarian?!

See: https://hyp.is/4sD8LCciEe2XKBc7KhCshg/takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2013/08/underlining-in-library-books.html

syndication link

How is one to have an intimate conversation with a text if their annotations are not written in the margins? Placing your initial notes somewhere else is like having sex with your clothes on.

syndication link

Highlighted portion is a quote from Kuehn sub-quoting David Lodge, Deaf Sentence (New York: Viking 2008)

Ownership is certainly a factor here, but given how inexpensive many books are now, if you own it, why not mark it up? See also: Mortimer J. Adler's position on this.

Marking up library books is a barbarism; not marking up your own books is a worse sin.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170429050031/http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2013/08/underlining-in-library-books.html

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/making-proper-marks-in-books/

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/26/us/trump-search-affidavit-release.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/wue2ex/looking_for_books_with_wider_margins_for/

Not long after I posted this it had about 3 upvotes, including my automatic 1. It's now at 0, and there are several responses about not writing in books at all. It seems like this particular book community is morally opposed to writing in one's books! 🤣

Why though? There's a tremendously long tradition of writing in books, and probably more so when they were far more expensive! Now they're incredibly inexpensive commodities, so why should we be less inclined to write in them, particularly when there's reasonable evidence of the value of doing so?

I might understand not writing in library books as part of their value within the commons, but https://booktraces.org/ indicates that almost 12% or more of the books they've tracked prior to 1924 have some sort of mark, writing, or evidence that it was actively read.

Given what I know of the second hand markets, it's highly unlikely that my books (marked up or not) will ever be read by another person.

There's so much more to say here, but I just haven't the time today...