1,247 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2022
    1. if you're thinking without 00:03:26 writing chances are you're fooling yourself we're only

      If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking. —Leslie Lamport.“Thinking Above the Code.” Lecture presented at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft Research, July 15, 2014. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/leslie-lamport-thinking-code/. Timestamp: 03:26

      Link to:<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/rvisgFDXEe2s-SuJJGw3cA<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/yEFMHoCkEeyl34fItJe__w

      Note that the spoken quote is different from the written quote.

    1. https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/browse/

      History of Philosophy: Summarized & Visualized

      This could be thought of as a form of digital, single-project zettelkasten dedicated to philosophy. It's got people, sources, and ideas which are cross linked in a Luhmann-sense (without numbering) though not in a topical index-sense. Interestingly it has not only a spatial interface and shows spatial relationships between people and ideas over time using a timeline, but it also indicates—using colored links—the ideas of disagreement/contrast/refutation and agreement/similarity/expansion.

      What other (digital) tools of thought provide these sorts of visualization affordances?

    1. Sayers, Dorothy L. The Lost Tools of Learning. E. T. Heron, 1948.

    2. For the sole true end of educationis simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whateverinstruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
    3. We have lostthe tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, thechisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, wehave merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task andno more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no manever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.”
    4. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and everysubject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get themastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effortexpended by the person who has not the tools at his command.
    5. Thewhole of the Trivium was in fact intended to teach the pupil the proper use ofthe tools of learning, before he began to apply them to “subjects” at all

      The point of putting the Trivium in front of the Quadrivium is that the student is first taught the use of the "tools of learning" before they are then taught how to apply them to broad subjects as a means of learning how to learn.

  2. app.sane.fyi app.sane.fyi
    1. Ida JosefiinaInfopunk. Into pdfs, information systems that support intentional thinking, cyborgs, and the future of humanity. This thought space is an introduction to me and my work.

      https://app.sane.fyi/space/ida-ida-josefiina-75044

    1. Doch ganz gleich, ob der Zettelkasten auf ein Buch, ein Werk oder auf eine Gedankenwolke mit wechselnder Niederschlagsneigung hinauslief - er ist stets mehr als das Ganze, dessen Teile er gesammelt hat. Denn es stecken stets noch andere Texte in ihm als diejenigen, die aus ihm hervorgegangen sind. Insofern wäre die Digitalisierung des einen oder anderen Zettelkastens ein Geschenk an die Wissenschaft.

      machine translation (Google):

      But regardless of whether the Zettelkasten resulted in a book, a work, or a thought cloud with varying degrees of precipitation - it is always more than the whole whose parts it has collected. Because there are always other texts in it than those that emerged from it.

      There's something romantic about the analogy of a zettelkasten with a thought cloud which may have varying degrees of precipitation.

      Link to other analogies: - ruminant machines - the disappointment of porn - others?

    1. 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

  3. cosma.graphlab.fr cosma.graphlab.fr
    1. https://cosma.graphlab.fr/<br /> https://cosma.graphlab.fr/en/

      When did this come out?

      Appears to be a visualization tool for knowledge work. They recommend it for use with Zettlr, but it looks like it would work with other text based tools. Point it at markdown files to create graphs apparently.

      This looks like the sort of standards based tool that would allow greater flexibility when using various data stores that we talk about in Friends of the Link.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Arthur Perret </span> in And you, what are you doing? (<time class='dt-published'>08/31/2022 02:40:03</time>)</cite></small>

      @flancian

    1. In "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" (1952), C. Wright Mills talks about his methods for note taking, thinking, and analysis in what he calls "sociological imagination". This is a sociologists' framing of their own research and analysis practice and thus bears a sociological related name. While he talks more about the thinking, outlining, and writing process rather than the mechanical portion of how he takes notes or what he uses, he's extending significantly on the ideas and methods that Sönke Ahrens describes in How to Take Smart Notes (2017), though obviously he's doing it 65 years earlier. It would seem obvious that the specific methods (using either files, note cards, notebooks, etc.) were a bit more commonplace for his time and context, so he spent more of his time on the finer and tougher portions of the note making and thinking processes which are often the more difficult parts once one is past the "easy" mechanics.

      While Mills doesn't delineate the steps or materials of his method of note taking the way Beatrice Webb, Langlois & Seignobos, Johannes Erich Heyde, Antonin Sertillanges, or many others have done before or Umberto Eco, Robert Greene/Ryan Holiday, Sönke Ahrens, or Dan Allosso since, he does focus more on the softer portions of his thinking methods and their desired outcomes and provides personal examples of how it works and what his expected outcomes are. Much like Niklas Luhmann describes in Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen (VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1981), Mills is focusing on the thinking processes and outcomes, but in a more accessible way and with some additional depth.

      Because the paper is rather short, but specific in its ideas and methods, those who finish the broad strokes of Ahrens' book and methods and find themselves somewhat confused will more than profit from the discussion here in Mills. Those looking for a stronger "crash course" might find that the first seven chapters of Allosso along with this discussion in Mills is a straighter and shorter path.

      While Mills doesn't delineate his specific method in terms of physical tools, he does broadly refer to "files" which can be thought of as a zettelkasten (slip box) or card index traditions. Scant evidence in the piece indicates that he's talking about physical file folders and sheets of paper rather than slips or index cards, but this is generally irrelevant to the broader process of thinking or writing. Once can easily replace the instances of the English word "file" with the German concept of zettelkasten and not be confused.

      One will note that this paper was written as a manuscript in April 1952 and was later distributed for classroom use in 1955, meaning that some of these methods were being distributed from professor to students. The piece was later revised and included as an appendix to Mill's text The Sociological Imagination which was first published in 1959.

      Because there aren't specifics about Mills' note structure indicated here, we can't determine if his system was like that of Niklas Luhmann, but given the historical record one could suppose that it was closer to the commonplace tradition using slips or sheets. One thing becomes more clear however that between the popularity of Webb's work and this (which was reprinted in 2000 with a 40th anniversary edition), these methods were widespread in the mid-twentieth century and specifically in the field of sociology.

      Above and beyond most of these sorts of treatises on note taking method, Mills does spend more time on the thinking portions of the practice and delineates eleven different practices that one can focus on as they actively read/think and take notes as well as afterwards for creating content or writing.


      My full notes on the article can be found at https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0138200b4bfcde2757a137d61cd65cb8

    2. On this point, for instance, thebook on John Dewey's technique of thought by Bogos-lovsky, The Logic of Controversy, and C.E. Ayers' essayon the gospel of technology in Philosophy Today andTomorrow, edited by Hook and Kallen.

      The Technique of Controversy: Principles of Dynamic Logic by Boris B. Bogoslovsky https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Technique_of_Controversy/P-rgAwAAQBAJ?hl=en

      What was Dewey's contribution here?


      The Gospel of Technology by C. E. Ayers https://archive.org/details/americanphilosop00kall/page/24/mode/2up

    3. I found in the files three relevant types of "existingmaterials": several theories having to do with the topic;materials already worked up by others as evidence forthose theories; and data already gathered and in variousstages of accessible centralization, but not yet madetheoretically relevant.
    4. Method and theory are like thelanguage of the country you live in: it is nothing to bragabout that you can speak it, but it is a disgrace, as well asan inconvenience, if you cannot.
    5. In this essay I am going to try candidly to report how Ibecame interested in a topic I happen now to be studying,and how I am going about studying it. I know that in doingthis I run the risk of failing in modesty and perhaps even ofclaiming some peculiar virtue for my own personal habits.1 intend no such claims. 1 know also that it may be said:"WelL, that's the way you work; but it's not of much use tom e . " To this the reply seems quite clear; it is: " W o n d e r -ful. Tell me how you w o r k . "

      We could use more of this in the current tools for thought space. Given neurodiversity, having a smorgasbord of options from which to choose from and then to be able to pick and choose or experiment on what works for you in particular seems to be the best route forward.

    6. Perhaps there are al-ready too many formal discourses on method, and cer-tainly there are too many inspirational pieces on how tothink. Neither seem to be of much use to those for whomthey are apparently intended. The first does not usuallytouch the realities of the problem as the beginning studentencounters them: the second is usually vulgar and oftennonsense.

      A description of the problem.

      Also missing are concrete examples and modeling of behavior for students to see and follow.

  4. Sep 2022
    1. After a leisurely lunch, prepared by the German cook who came with the house, I would spend another four-hour span in a lawn chair, among the roses and mockingbirds, using lined index cards and a Blackwing pencil, for copying and recopying, rubbing out and writing anew, the scenes I had imagined in the morning. Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay (1973)
    1. Critical reading methods, such asCERIC, make hidden expectations of doctoral programs explicit.

      Are some of the critical reading methods they're framing here similar to or some of the type found at Project Zero (https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines)?

    2. 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?

    1. Why doesn’t tech usually focus on me using it for my communities as is, and rather present itself as having me join a made up community whose raison d’etre is exploiting our attention for profit? That’s not community building, that’s extraction, instrumentalising your users, while dehumanising them along the way. To me it’s in those communities everyone is already part of where the scaling for technology is to be found.

      A tech company's view is often limited to customer audience, and dubs it community. A person's view starts from within the communities they're already part of: how does a tool support (my role in) my communities?

    1. https://lu.ma/w6c1b9cd

      [[Anne-Laure Le Cunff & Nick Milo - How can we do Combinational Creativity]]

      Details

      Date: [[2022-09-06]]<br /> Time: 9:00 - 10:00 AM<br /> Host: [[Nick Milo]]<br /> Location / Platform: #Zoom<br /> URL: https://lu.ma/w6c1b9cd<br /> Calendar: link <br /> Parent event: [[LYT Conference 2]]<br /> Subject(s): [[combinational creativity]]

      To Do / Follow up

      • [ ] Clean up notes
      • [ ] Post video link when available (@2022-09-11)

      Video

      TK

      Attendees

      Notes

      generational effect

      Silent muses which resulted in drugs, alcohol as chemical muses.

      All creativity is combinational in nature. - A-L L C

      mash-ups are a tacit form of combinatorial creativity

      Methods: - chaining<br /> - clustering (what do things have in common? eg: Cities and living organisms have in common?)<br /> - c...

      Peter Wohlleben is the author of “hidden life of trees”

      CMAPT tools https://cmap.ihmc.us/

      mind mapping

      Metaphor theory is apparently a "thing" follow up on this to see what the work/research looks like

      I put the following into the chat/Q&A:

      The phrase combinatorial creativity seems to stem from this 2014 article: https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/, the ideas go back much further obviously, often with different names across cultures. Matt Ridley describes it as "ideas have sex" https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex; Raymond Llull - Llullan combinatorial arts; Niklas Luhmann - linked zettels; Marshall Kirkpatrick - "triangle thinking" - Dan Pink - "symphonic thinking" are some others.

      For those who really want to blow their minds on how not new some of these ideas are, try out Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's book Songlines: The Power and Promise which describes songlines which were indigenous methods for memory (note taking for oral cultures) and created "combinatorial creativity" for peoples in modern day Australia going back 65,000 years.

      Side benefit of this work:

      "You'll be a lot more fun at dinner parties." -Anne-Laure

      Improv's "yes and" concept is a means of forcing creativity.

      Originality is undetected plagiarism - Gish? English writer 9:41 AM quote; source?

      Me: "Play off of [that]" is a command to encourage combintorial creativity. In music one might say "riff off"...

      Chat log

      none available

    1. https://twitter.com/Extended_Brain/status/1563703042125340680

      Replying to @DannyHatcher. 1. Competition among apps makes them add unnecessary bells and whistles. 2. Trying to be all: GTD, ZK, Sticky Notes, proj mgmt, collaboration, workflow 3. Plugins are good for developers, bad for users https://t.co/4fbQ2nwdYd

      — Extended Brain (@Extended_Brain) August 28, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Part two sounds a lot like zettelkasten overreach https://boffosocko.com/2022/02/05/zettelkasten-overreach/

      Part one is similar to the issue competing software companies have in attempting to check all the boxes on a supposed list of features without thinking about what their tool is used for in practice. (Isn't there a name for this specific phenomenon besides "mission creep"?)

  5. Aug 2022
    1. good tools for thought arise mostly as a byproduct of doing original work on serious problems

      In the context of use

    1. What is not OK is what I perceive as the dominant attitude today: sell SciPy as a great easy-to-use tool for all scientists, and then, when people get bitten by breaking changes, tell them that it’s their fault for not having a solid maintenance plan for their code.
    1. The moral is not to abandon useful tools; rather, it is, first, that one shouldmaintain enough perspective to be able to detect the arrival of that inevitable daywhen the research that can be conducted with these tools is no longer important;

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32341607

      Didn't read it all, but the total number of notes, many likely repetitive or repetitive of things elsewhere makes me think that there is a huge diversity of thought within this space and different things work for different people in terms of work and even attention.

      The missing piece is that all of this sits here instead of being better curated and researched to help some forms of quicker consensus. I'm sure there are hundreds of other posts just like this on HN with all the same thoughts over and over again with very little movement forward.

      How can we help to aggregate and refine this sort of knowledge to push the borders for everyone broadly rather than a few here and there?

    1. Tools are instruments to achieve something, and systems are the organization of such.

      Feels like there's more here if we delve a bit deeper...

    2. Sometimes, I find digital apps urging me to integrate with another application or extension: connect to calendar, install this, install that (and sure, it may also be my own damn fault). They force me to get into a “system” rather than focus on what the tool provides. It’s overwhelming. Over-optimization leads to empty work, giving me a feeling of productivity in the absence of output, like quicksand. It hampers me from doing actual work.
    1. For the sake of simplicity, go to Graph Analysis Settings and disable everything but Co-Citations, Jaccard, Adamic Adar, and Label Propogation. I won't spend my time explaining each because you can find those in the net, but these are essentially algorithms that find connections for you. Co-Citations, for example, uses second order links or links of links, which could generate ideas or help you create indexes. It essentially automates looking through the backlinks and local graphs as it generates possible relations for you.
    1. The effort got him accolades and commit access to the Rails repo.

      But having commit access and the having ability to fiddle with bugs are two orthogonal sets of privileges...

  6. Jul 2022
    1. This process serves a similar purpose in sociology to that of theblow-pipe and the balance in chemistry, or the prism and the electro¬scope in physics. That is to say, it enables the scientific worker to breakup his subject-matter, so as to isolate and examine at his leisure itsvarious component parts, and to recombine them in new and experi¬mental groupings in order to discover which sequences of events have acausal significance

      Beatrice Webb analogized the card index (or note taking using slips of paper) as serving the function of a scientific tool for sociologists the way that chemists use blow pipes and balances or physicists use the prism or electroscope. These tools all help the researcher examine small constituent parts and then situate them in other orderings to provide insight into the subject areas.

    1. 5.5 Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.

      5.5 Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.

    1. Photo editing must separate from the crowd and express your personality.The problem, however, is that there are several high-quality picture editors to pick from.

      Lightroom, Luminar AI, and ON1 Photo RAW were mentioned in the list. These are RAW editors used before Photoshop. The shot is then brought into Photoshop (or another editor) for local modifications. Lightroom and Photoshop are used. Thanks!

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

      TRIZ (/ˈtriːz/; Russian: теория решения изобретательских задач, teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadatch), literally: "theory of inventive problem solving " is “the next evolutionary step in creating an organized and systematic approach to problem solving. The development and improvement of products and technologies according to TRIZ are guided by the objective Laws of Engineering System Evolution. TRIZ Problem Solving Tools and Methods are based on them.” In another description, TRIZ is "a problem-solving, analysis and forecasting tool derived from the study of patterns of invention in the global patent literature".

      It was developed by the Soviet inventor and science-fiction author Genrich Altshuller (1926-1998) and his colleagues, beginning in 1946. In English the name is typically rendered as the theory of inventive problem solving, and occasionally goes by the English acronym TIPS.

    1. https://twinery.org/

      Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

      You don’t need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.

      Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.


      Heard referenced in Reclaim Hosting community call as a method for doing "clue boards".


      Could twinery.org be used as a way to host/display one's linked zettelkasten or note card collection?

    1. Here are some glimpses into my tool collection. Many things are still experimental. At present, I use sticky notes of 7.5cm x 7.5cm size. Many of the notes are divided into 4x4 or 4x8 very small boxes with a tool name of one or two words in it. Other notes are small diagrams or mind maps, or they show sheet layouts I found useful. The frequencies of tool use vary wildly - some rarely used tool items went into the tool collection as part of a bundle of similar tools. Next, here are some tool bundles - for this posting, I choose those tools that I have found most useful. Basics: The tools I use most often are simple things like the following: Describe the situation / describe the problems / describe goals / make a list of questions. The Feynman technique: I imagine the A4 sheet and its boxes as a deck of slides, where I try to explain things to a skeptical audience. Focus on difficulties: What are the problems? / Where are conflicts? / Where are gaps? / Where could this fail? Concatenation tools: These tools help me to develop thoughts from one box to the next to the next. Examples: What is crucial here? / Probe deeper. / What are the problems here? / What are my options now? - These tools can have a compound effect when used in iterations - in one single step, their benefit is small, but used over ten or twenty steps, they can actually make a dent. Focus on progress: MIMX = make it more X = make it more powerful / larger / faster / simpler / more complex / ... / What would the founders of Microsoft do? / Make a model with many building blocks and parameters and play around. Representations: Describe your topic and your ideas as a concept map / a mind map / a diagram / in ordinary text / in a proto-math notation. Diagram types: timelines / transitions between states / input-output diagrams / graphs / trees / boxes / tables. TRIZ principles: It's a selection from the 40 canonical items - I found the more physics-based principles less useful, so I left them out. SCAMPER: Substitute / combine / adapt / maximize or minimize / put to other uses / eliminate / rearrange. Creativity tools: Brainstorming / formulate negations and opposites to the ideas you've tried so far / po! = provocative operation, by Edward de Bono / transfer key concepts from a similar domain. Stimuli for ideas from inventions: This is largely a personal list of inventions I find impressive. Stimuli for ideas from geometrical concepts: I find concepts useful like points / lines / curves / circles / spirals / ... Lists of prefixes for concepts and ideas: anti- / proto- / pseudo- / a- / counter- / co- / cluster- / super- / trans- / ... Provocations and challenges: You are wrong. / You have the wrong focus. / What would the opposite look like? / What would John von Neumann say? / ... I use most of the tools for idea generation in the 4 column or the 4x4 sheet layout, with one stimulus in each box, where I can jump between boxes with ease. Typically, many stimuli do not yield remarkable germinal ideas, but on a good evening, some do.
    1. Unfortunately, many corporate software programsaim to level or standardise the differences betweenindividual workers. In supporting knowledgeworkers, we should be careful to provide tools whichenable diversification of individuals’ outputs.Word-processors satisfi this criterion; tools whichembed a model of a knowledge worker’s task in thesoftware do not.

      Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.


      This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.


      Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

      This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

    2. Kidd, Alison. “The Marks Are on the Knowledge Worker.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 186–91. CHI ’94. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 1994. https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191740.

    1. Thanks for all the fantastic literature tips! Added to the list 😊

      If these are the types of things that are interesting, you might also try a shared bibliography that a handful of readers/researchers share and contribute to: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought

    1. Adversely, the Topics feature did not seem super helpful which was surprising because I initially thought that this feature would be helpful, but it just did not seem super relevant or accurate. Maybe this is because as a work of literature, the themes of the play are much more symbolic and figurative than the literal words that the play uses. Perhaps this function would work better for text that is more nonfiction based, or at least more literal. 

      I read your Voyant analysis of Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House," and I think we almost pick the same tools that we believe to be crucial for our text analysis. Like you, I mostly visualize my chosen literary work with Cirrus, Terms, Berry, and Trends. I also use links to ?look into how these words are used interdependently to contextualize the story told. I also had difficulty understanding how functions like Topics would benefit my understanding of the texts on a layered and complex level. I checked and thought maybe the problem was with the word count of the document. By default setting, Topics generates the first 1000 words in a document, and A Doll's House has 26210 words. In order to use this tool in the most efficient way possible, you can try to use the Topics slider ( the scroll bar) to adjust the number of topics you want to generate (max is 200). I have read A Doll's House before, so I couldn't speak for those who haven't. However, the clusters of chosen terms hint to me that this fiction deals with bureaucracy and finance via repeated words like "works," "money," and "paper." I can also recognize some words classified as names, so many characters are involved in the story. There is also a vague clue of the story's setting, which is during the winter season, from the repetition of the word "Christmas." It appears that someone is getting angry at someone for their wrongdoings, and this drama occurs in a family. While Topics cannot give me a complete storyline, it gives me a good chunk of puzzles to piece together the core gist of the story. It happened to me when I analyzed Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Words like "whale," "sea," "sailor," and "chase" allowed me to make a reasonable assumption that there was a group of sailors that went after a giant whale in the sea. I still prefer to use other tools, but that was how I utilized Topics for my knowledge of the text. I agree that text with more literal content, like self-help books, would definitely yield better results with Voyant Tools' Topics.

    1. The first trap was hunting, the main way of life for about two million years in Palaeolithic times. As Stone Age people perfected the art of hunting, they began to kill the game more quickly than it could breed. They lived high for a while, then starved.

      Anthropology and Archelogy findings support the idea that humans began laying progress traps as early as two million years ago. Our great success at socialization and communication that harnessed the power of collaboration resulted in wiping out entire species upon which we depended. Short term success leading to long term failure is a central pattern of progress traps.

      Anthropology and Archelogy findings support the idea that humans began laying progress traps as early as two million years ago. Our great success at socialization and communication that harnessed the power of collaboration resulted in wiping out entire species upon which we depended. Short term success leading to long term failure is a central pattern of progress traps.

      A remarkable paper from Tel Aviv researchers studying early hunters in the Southern Levant as early as 1.5 million years ago revealed that our ancestors in this part of the world were poor resource managers and over many generations, continually hunted large game to extinction, forcing descendants to hunt progressively smaller game.

      Annotation of the 2021 source paper is here: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fabs%2Fpii%2FS0277379121005230&group=world Annotation of a science news interview with the researchers here: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2021%2F12%2F211221102708.htm&group=world

      The researchers even surmise that the extinction of game animals by around 10,000 B.C. is what gave rise to agriculture itself!

  7. Jun 2022
    1. The trending topics on Twitter can be used as a form of juxtaposition of random ideas which could be brought together to make new and interesting things.

      Here's but one example of someone practicing just this:

      Y’all, imagine Spielberg’s Sailor Moon pic.twitter.com/xZ1DEsbLTy

      — Matty Illustration (@MN_illustration) June 30, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      cc: https://twitter.com/marshallk

    1. Explore more Thinking Routines at pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines
    2. Compass Points, a routine for examining propositions.

      via https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Compass%20Points_0.pdf

      • E- excited
      • W- worrisome
      • N - need to know
      • S - stance or suggestion for moving forward

      These could be used as a simple set of rules for thumb for evaluating and expanding on ideas in note taking or social annotation settings.

      Compare these with the suggestions of Tiago Forte in his book Building a Second Brain. Which is better? More comprehensive? Are there any ideas missing in a broader conceptualization? Is there a better acronymization or analogy for such a technique?

    1. TagTeam is an open-source tagging platform and feed aggregator developed for the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society under the direction of Peter Suber.

      About TagTeam

    1. surveys indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control.

      Based on surveys, readers indicate that two important parts of textual navigation are sense of control and serendipity.

      http://books.google.com/books/about/Electronic_journal_literature.html?id=YSFlAAAAMAAJ


      How does the control over a book frame how we read? What does "power over" a book look like compared to "power with"?

      What are the tools for thought affordances that paper books provide over digital books and vice versa?


      I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it.

    1. Giving Your First Brain a New Job

      This entire chapter thus far (to the end of this section at minimum) sounds like it would have been better motivating material.

      It also has a more touchy-feely and less concrete nature which puts in the self-help category and not so much in the tools for thought space.

    2. You might have arrived at this book because you heard about thisnew field called personal knowledge management, or maybe whenyou were trying to find guidance in how to use a cool new notetakingapp. Maybe you were drawn in by the promise of new techniques forenhancing your productivity, or perhaps it was the allure of asystematic approach to creativity.

      The broad audiences for this book.

      This may have been better place in the introduction to draw these people in.

    3. Tharp calls her approach “the box.”

      In The Creative Habit, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp has creative inspiration and note taking practice which she calls "the box" in which she organizes “notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me”. She also calls her linking of ideas within her box method "the art of scratching" (chapter 6).

      related: combinatorial creativity triangle thinking


      [[Twyla Tharp]] [[The Creative Habit]] #books/wanttoread

    4. My parents noticed that I didn’tplay with LEGOs like other kids. Instead I spent my time organizingand reorganizing the pieces. I remember being completelycaptivated by the problem of how to create order out of the chaos ofthousands of pieces of every shape and size. I would invent neworganizational schemes—by color, by size, by theme—as I becameobsessed with the idea that if I could just find the right system, Iwould finally be able to build my magnum opus—a LEGO spaceshiplike the ones I saw in the sci-fi movies I loved

      This is also generally an administrative problem in this space. People spend ages tinkering with their tools and not enough time using them for what the tools are meant for.

    1. For Jerome Bruner, the place to begin is clear: “One starts somewhere—where the learner is.”

      One starts education with where the student is. But mustn't we also inventory what tools and attitudes the student brings? What tools beyond basic literacy do they have? (Usually we presume literacy, but rarely go beyond this and the lack of literacy is too often viewed as failure, particularly as students get older.) Do they have motion, orality, song, visualization, memory? How can we focus on also utilizing these tools and modalities for learning.

      Link to the idea that Donald Trump, a person who managed to function as a business owner and president of the United States, was less than literate, yet still managed to function in modern life as an example. In fact, perhaps his focus on oral modes of communication, and the blurrable lines in oral communicative meaning (see [[technobabble]]) was a major strength in his communication style as a means of rising to power?

      Just as the populace has lost non-literacy based learning and teaching techniques so that we now consider the illiterate dumb, stupid, or lesser than, Western culture has done this en masse for entire populations and cultures.

      Even well-meaning educators in the edtech space that are trying to now center care and well-being are completely missing this piece of the picture. There are much older and specifically non-literate teaching methods that we have lost in our educational toolbelts that would seem wholly odd and out of place in a modern college classroom. How can we center these "missing tools" as educational technology in a modern age? How might we frame Indigenous pedagogical methods as part of the emerging third archive?

      Link to: - educational article by Tyson Yunkaporta about medical school songlines - Scott Young article "You should pay for Tutors"


      aside on serendipity

      As I was writing this note I had a toaster pop up notification in my email client with the arrival of an email by Scott Young with the title "You should pay for Tutors" which prompted me to add a link to this note. It reminds me of a related idea that Indigenous cultures likely used information and knowledge transfer as a means of payment (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power). I have commented previously on the serendipity of things like auto correct or sparks of ideas while reading as a means of interlinking knowledge, but I don't recall experiencing this sort of serendipity leading to combinatorial creativity as a means of linking ideas,

    1. Tiago's book follows the general method of the commonplace book, but relies more heavily on a folder-based method and places far less emphasis and value on having a solid index. There isn't any real focus on linking ideas other than putting some things together in the same folder. His experience with the history of the space in feels like it only goes back to some early Ryan Holiday blog posts. He erroneously credits Luhmann with inventing the zettelkasten and Anne-Laure Le Cunff created digital gardens. He's already retracted these in sketch errata here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/endnotes.

      I'll give him at least some credit that there is some reasonable evidence that he actually used his system to write his own book, but the number and depth of his references and experience is exceptionally shallow given the number of years he's been in the space, particularly professionally. He also has some interesting anecdotes and examples of various people including and array of artists and writers which aren't frequently mentioned in the note taking space, so I'll give him points for some diversity of players as well. I'm mostly left with the feeling that he wrote the book because of the general adage that "thought leaders in their space should have a published book in their area to have credibility". Whether or not one can call him a thought leader for "re-inventing" something that Rudolphus Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus firmly ensconced into Western culture about 500 years ago is debatable.

      Stylistically, I'd call his prose a bit florid and too often self-help-y. The four letter acronyms become a bit much after a while. It wavers dangerously close to those who are prone to the sirens' call of the #ProductivityPorn space.

      If you've read a handful of the big articles in the note taking, tools for thought, digital gardens, zettelkasten space, Ahren's book, or regularly keep up with r/antinet or r/Zettelkasten, chances are that you'll be sorely disappointed and not find much insight. If you have friends that don't need the horsepower of Ahrens or zettelkasten, then it might be a reasonable substitute, but then it could have been half the length for the reader.

    1. The box is not a substitute for creating. The box doesn’t compose or write apoem or create a dance step. The box is the raw index of your preparation. It is therepository of your creative potential, but it is not that potential realized.

      Great quote about what a zettelkasten isn't. This is also one of the reasons why I've underlined the amount of work that one must put into the box to get productive material back out the other end.

    1. Harness collective intelligence augmented by digital technology, and unlock exponential innovation. Beyond old hierarchical structures and archaic tools.

      https://twitter.com/augmented_CI

      The words "beyond", "hierarchical", and "archaic" are all designed to marginalize prior thought and tools which all work, and are likely upon which this broader idea is built. This is a potentially toxic means of creating "power over" this prior art rather than a more open spirit of "power with".

  8. May 2022
    1. However, what if we replace “ human face ” in this decisive quotewith “interface,” that is, the interface between man and apparatus?

      This wording seems quite profound.

      It means that by creating a personification of our tools, we can more easily communicate with them.

      Do people personify their computers? I remember in the late 80s and early 90s computer workstations, especially in university settings, having personified names.

      Link this to the personification of rocks w.r.t. talking rocks and oral traditions.

      link to: https://hypothes.is/a/KosdVt1qEeykU2dTuVZT3Q

    2. In a word thatKleist borrows from Kant: a “midwifery of thought.”45
      1. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, Zweiter Teil, II. Ethische Methodenlehre, 1st Section, §50: “He is the midwife of his thoughts,” on the teacher-student relationship.
    3. a constellation already described in 1805 by Heinrich von Kleist in his fascinat-ing analysis of the “Midwifery of Thought”: “If you want to know something and cannotfind it through meditation, I advise you, my dear, clever friend, to speak about it withthe next acquaintance who bumps into you.” 43 The positive tension that such a conversa-tion immediately elicits through the expectations of the Other obliges one to producenew thought in the conversation. The idea develops during speech. There, the sheeravailability of such a counterpart, who must do nothing further (i.e., offer additionalstimulus through keen contradiction of the speaker) is already enough; “There is a specialsource of excitement, for him who speaks, in the human face across from him; and agaze which already announces a half-expressed thought to be understood often givesexpression to the entire other half.”44
      1. Heinrich von Kleist, “Ü ber die allm ä hliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Zweiter Band, ed. Helmut Sembdner (M ü nchen: dtv, 1805/2001), 319 – 324, at 319.
      2. Ibid., 320.

      in 1805 Heinrich von Kleist noted that one can use conversation with another person, even when that person is silent, to come up with solutions or ideas they may not have done on their own.

      This phenomena is borne out in modern practices like the so-called "rubber duck debugging", where a programmer can talk to any imagined listener, often framed as a rubber duck sitting on their desk, and talk through the problem in their code. Invariably, talking through all the steps of the problem will often result in the person realizing what the problem is and allow them to fix it.

      This method of verbal "conversation" obviously was a tool which indigenous oral cultures frequently used despite the fact that they didn't have literacy as a tool to fall back on.

    4. commenting in an interview: “By the way, many people havecome here to see that.”13 The writing tool became an object of desire, especially foryoung academics seeking to add a carefully planned card index to their carefully plannedcareers: “After all, Fred wants to be a professor.” 1

      Luhmann indicates that aspiring academics came to visit to see his card collection in potentially planning their own.

      1. Ralf Klassen, “Bezaubernde Jeannie oder Liebe ist nur ein Zeitvertreib,” in Wir Fernsehkinder. Eine Generation ohne Programm, ed. Walter Wüllenweber (Berlin: Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, 1994), 81 – 97, at 84.
    1. a society-wide hyperconversation. This hyperconversation operationalizes continuous discourse, including its differentiation and emergent framing aspects. It aims to assist people in developing their own ways of framing and conceiving the problem that makes sense given their social, cultural, and environmental contexts. As depicted in table 1, the hyperconversation also reflects a slower, more deliberate approach to discourse; this acknowledges damaged democratic processes and fractured societal social cohesion. Its optimal design would require input from other relevant disciplines and expertise,

      The public Indyweb is eminently designed as a public space for holding deep, continuous, asynchronous conversations with provenance. That is, if the partcipant consents to public conversation, ideas can be publicly tracked. Whoever reads your public ideas can be traced.and this paper trail is immutably stored, allowing anyone to see the evolution of ideas in real time.

      In theory, this does away with the need for patents and copyrights, as all ideas are traceable to the contributors and each contribution is also known. This allows for the system to embed crowdsourced microfunding, supporting the best (upvoted) ideas to surface.

      Participants in the public Indyweb ecosystem are called Indyviduals and each has their own private data hub called an Indyhub. Since Indyweb is interpersonal computing, each person is the center of their indyweb universe. Through the discoverability built into the Indyweb, anything of immediate salience is surfaced to your private hub. No applications can use your data unless you give exact permission on which data to use and how it shall be used. Each user sets the condition for their data usage. Instead of a user's data stored in silos of servers all over the web as is current practice, any data you generate, in conversation, media or data files is immediately accessible on your own Indyhub.

      Indyweb supports symmathesy, the exchange of ideas based on an appropriate epistemological model that reflects how human INTERbeings learn as a dynamic interplay between individual and collective learning. Furthermore, all data that participants choose to share is immutably stored on content addressable web3 storage forever. It is not concentrated on any server but the data is stored on the entire IPFS network:

      "IPFS works through content adddressibility. It is a peer-to-peer (p2p) storage network. Content is accessible through peers located anywhere in the world, that might relay information, store it, or do both. IPFS knows how to find what you ask for using its content address rather than its location.

      There are three fundamental principles to understanding IPFS:

      Unique identification via content addressing Content linking via directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) Content discovery via distributed hash tables (DHTs)" (Source: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/how-ipfs-works/)

      The privacy, scalability, discoverability, public immutability and provenance of the public Indyweb makes it ideal for supporting hyperconversations that emerge tomorrows collectively emergent solutions. It is based on the principles of thought augmentation developed by computer industry pioneers such as Doug Englebart and Ted Nelson who many decades earlier in their prescience foresaw the need for computing tools to augment thought and provide the ability to form Network Improvement Communities (NIC) to solve a new generation of complex human challenges.

    1. Creativity depends on acreative process.
    2. Sharpen Our Unique Perspectives

      Perhaps better: Provide fodder for thinking and creating?

    3. There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a SecondBrain to perform for us:1. Making our ideas concrete.2. Revealing new associations between ideas.3. Incubating our ideas over time.4. Sharpening our unique perspectives.

      Does the system really do each of these? Writing things down for our future selves is the thing that makes ideas concrete, not the system itself. Most notebooks don't reveal new associations, we actively have to do that ourselves via memory or through active search and linking within the system itself. The system may help, but it doesn't automatically create associations nor reveal them. By keeping our ideas in one place they do incubate to some extent, but isn't the real incubation taking place in a diffuse way in our minds to come out later?

    4. . In a 2004 study byAngelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki, they discovered that when monkeys andhumans consistently use a tool to extend their reach, such as using a rake toreach an object, certain neural networks in the brain change their “map” of thebody to include the new tool. This fascinating finding reinforces the idea thatexternal tools can and often do become a natural extension of our minds
    1. This art of method was understood by Ramus and Ramists as its own efficacious art of memory. InScholae in liberales artes, Ramus is explicit about his disdain for the visual mnemonic rules suggested byclassical sources.“The art of memory,”he counters,“consists entirely in division and composition. If weseek then an art which will divide and compose things, we shall find the art of memory”(qtd. in Yates 233).Ramus thus enfolds the fourth canon into his methodical framework, linking memorization of content withits“division and composition,”that is, with its organization.

      Arrangement and organization definitely have their place and can be helpful. However they may also tend to become too rigid to the point that one's thinking begins to lack creativity and invention. Where is the space for the Llullist arts of combinatorial thought here?

    1. In §§ 4–5, I examine the socio-evolutionary circumstances under which a closed combinatory, such as the one triggered by the Llullian art, was replaced by an open-ended combinatory, such as the one triggered by a card index based on removable entries. In early modernity, improvement in abstraction compelled scholars to abandon the idea that the order of knowledge should mirror the order of nature. This development also implied giving up the use of space as a type of externalization and as the main rule for checking consis-tency.

      F*ck! I've been scooped!

      Apparently I'm not the only one who has noticed this, though I notice that he doesn't cite Frances A. Yates, which would have certainly been the place for having come up with this historical background (at least that's where I found it.)


      The Llullian arts can be more easily practiced with ideas placed on moveable index cards than they might be with ideas stored in one's own memory. Thus the index card as a tool significantly decreases the overhead and provides an easier user interface for permuting one's ideas and combining them. This decrease in mental work appearing at a time of information overload also puts specific pressure on the older use of the art of memory to put it out of fashion.

    1. Active reading to the extreme!

      What a clever innovation building on the ideas of the art of memory and Raymond Llull's combinatoric arts!

      Does this hit all of the areas of Bloom's Taxonomy? I suspect that it does.

      How could it be tied more directly into an active reading, annotating, and note taking practice?

    1. Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

      Saving the entire story for context, but primarily for this Marshall McLuhan-esque quote:

      “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

      I want to know the source of the quote.

    1. For example, Campbell talks about personal cyberinfrastructures when he suggests providing students with hosting space and their own domain as soon as they start their studies: Suppose that when students matriculate, they are assigned their own web servers […] As part of the first-year orientation, each student would pick a domain name […] students would build out their digital presences in an environment made of the medium of the web itself. […] In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure— one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career—and beyond. (Campbell, 2013, p. 101–102)

      Giving a student their own cyberinfrastructures, a set of digital tools, is not too dissimilar from encouraging them to bring tools like notebooks, paper, index cards, pens, and paper in the early 20th century or slate and chalk generations earlier.

      Having the best tools for the job and showing them how to use them is paramount in education. Too often we take our tools for thought for granted in the education space. Students aren't actively taught to use their pens and paper, their voices, their memories, or their digital technologies in the ways that they had been in the past. In the past decade we've focused more on digital technologies, in part, because the teachers were learning to use them in tandem with their students, but this isn't the case with note taking methods like commonplacing, card indexes (or zettelkasten). Some of these methods have been taken for granted to such an extent that some of them are no longer commonplace within education.


      I'll quickly note that they don't seem to have a reference to Campbell in their list. (oops!) Presumably they're referencing Gardner Campbell, though his concept here seems to date to 2009 and was mentioned heavily in the ds106 community.

    1. Who can integrate bidi links into a larger system, expand in concentric circles, and take them to their logical conclusion — ubiquity across all information surfaces. ... Across Closed Worlds (Chat, Notes, Projects) to Open Worlds (Twitter, Blogs, Feeds) & everything in between The [[wiki link]] is just like #'s and @'s — public-domain innovations in hypertext. But just cause your social app has @'s and #'s doesn't mean people will use it.

      This is a fine sentiment, but a networked version of wikilinks is bound to cause conflicts in folksonomies and issues with sourcing and verifiability. The potential for context collapse is potentially too great to have these scale for this type of knowledge production. One would need to have trusted groups to create usefulness. Search at scale for these is likely to be at issue as well.

      Are the affordances beyond the local scale really any better than current web technologies? What about the potential effects on the commons?

    2. Bidirectional links are a feature, not a product. Every productivity software will have them in 10 years. We saw this happen already with Kanban boards via Trello. Notion took them. Airtable took them. GitHub took them.

      Create a list of tools that feature [[wikilink]] functionality.

      • WikiMedia
      • TiddlyWiki
      • other wikis...
      • Roam Research
      • Obsidian
      • other note taking apps...
      • Trello
      • Notion
      • Airtable
      • GitHub
    1. $L(#&$'&$+-41,[*$4'2'+18$081**)--C*Y$*+=4#&+*$=*#$+"#*#$+--8*$+-$8#1)&$"-H$+-$H)'+#Y$4)1HY$1&4$0180=81+#$-&$*"##+*$-.$919#)$+"1+Y$H"#&$08'99#4Y$*+198#4Y$-)$28=#4$+-2#+"#)Y$7#0-C#$1$&-+#7--@V

      What are the differences in the affordances of handwritten notes versus digital notes? Worth making a complete list.

  9. Apr 2022
    1. using rome as a almost a tool to convey information to your future self

      One's note taking is not only a conversation with the text or even the original author, it is also a conversation you're having with your future self. This feature is accelerated when one cross links ideas within their note box with each other and revisits them at regular intervals.


      Example of someone who uses Roam Research and talks about the prevalence of using it as a "conversation with your future self."


      This is very similar to the same patterns that can be seen in the commonplace book tradition, and even in the blogosphere (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), or IndieWeb which often recommends writing on your own website to document how you did things for your future self.

    1. Another visual-mapping tool is Open Knowledge Maps, a service offered by a Vienna-based not-for-profit organization of the same name. It was founded in 2015 by Peter Kraker, a former scholarly-communication researcher at Graz University of Technology in Austria.

      https://openknowledgemaps.org/

      Open Knowledge maps is a visual literature search tool that is based on keywords rather than on a paper's title, author, or DOI. The service was founded in 2015 by Peter Kraker, a former scholarly communication researcher at Graz University of Technology.

    2. In 2019, Smolyansky co-founded Connected Papers, one of a new generation of visual literature-mapping and recommendation tools.

      https://www.connectedpapers.com/

      https://twitter.com/ConnectedPapers


      Something about the name Connected Papers reminds me of the same sort of linking name that Manfred Kuehn gave to his note taking software ConnectedText.

    1. the development of intelligent thinking is fundamentally a social process

      great quote


      How can social annotation practices take advantage of these sorts of active learning processes? What might be done in a flipped classroom setting to get students to use social annotation on a text prior to a lecture and have the questions and ideas from these sessions brought into the lecture space for discussion, argument, and expansion?

    1. A filing system is indefinitely expandable, rhizomatic (at any point of timeor space, one can always insert a new card); in contradistinction with the sequen-tial irreversibility of the pages of the notebook and of the book, its interiormobility allows for permanent reordering (for, even if there is no narrative conclu-sion of a diary, there is a last page of the notebook on which it is written: its pagesare numbered, like days on a calendar).

      Most writing systems and forms force a beginning and an end, they force a particular structure that is both finite and limiting. The card index (zettelkasten) may have a beginning—there's always a first note or card, but it never has to have an end unless one's ownership is so absolute it ends with the life of its author. There are an ever-increasing number of ways to order a card index, though some try to get around this to create some artificial stability by numbering or specifically ordering their cards. New ideas can be accepted into the index at a multitude of places and are always internally mobile and re-orderable.

      link to Luhmann's works on describing this sort of rhizomatic behavior of his zettelkasten


      Within a network model framing for a zettelkasten, one might define thinking as traversing a graph of idea nodes in a particular order. Alternately it might also include randomly juxtaposing cards and creating links between ones which have similarities. Which of these modes of thinking has a higher order? Which creates more value? Which requires more work?

    2. Not unlike Duchamp’s door that is both open and closed at thesame time, the card file resists the syntagmatic closure of the sentence by sustain-ing the openness of the paradigm.

      Resisting syntagmatic closure

      Ideas placed into a card file or zettelkasten resist syntagmatic closure. Even well-formed structures in a card file can accept, expand, and integrate new ideas.

      Is a zettelkasten ever done?

    1. As Derrida writes ofthe computer, ‘I don’t feel the interposition of the machine as a sortof progress in transparency, univocity, or easiness. Rather, we areparticipating in a partly new plot’ (2005: 21). H
    2. Furthermore,combinatorial logic dictates that the card index is also the wellspringof creativity insofar as it permits expansive possibilities for futureintellectual endeavours (see Hollier, 2005: 40; cf. Krapp, 2006:367).
    3. the card indexis the quintessential structuralist tool in that it simultaneouslycombines the paradigmatic (selection) with the syntagmatic(combination) in one mechanism.
    1. Reviewing The Original of Laura, Alexander Theroux describes the cards as a “portable strategy that allowed [Nabokov] to compose in the car while his wife drove the devoted lepidopterist on butterfly expeditions.”

      While note cards have a certain portability about them for writing almost anywhere, aren't notebooks just as easily portable? In fact, with a notebook, one doesn't need to worry about spilling and unordering the entire enterprise.

      There are, however, other benefits. By using small atomic pieces on note cards, one can be far more focused on the idea and words immediately at hand. It's also far easier in a creative and editorial process to move pieces around experimentally.

      Similarly, when facing Hemmingway's White Bull, the size and space of an index card is fall smaller. This may have the effect that Twitter's short status updates have for writers who aren't faced with the seemingly insurmountable burden of writing a long blog post or essay in other software. They can write 280 characters and stop. Of if they feel motivated, they can continue on by adding to the prior parts of a growing thread. Sadly, Twitter doesn't allow either editing or rearrangements, so the endeavor and analogy are lost beyond here.

    1. Many famous antique texts are misunderstood and many others have been completely dismissed, all because the literary style in which they were written is unfamiliar today. So argues Mary Douglas in this controversial study of ring composition, a technique which places the meaning of a text in the middle, framed by a beginning and ending in parallel. To read a ring composition in the modern linear fashion is to misinterpret it, Douglas contends, and today’s scholars must reevaluate important antique texts from around the world.Found in the Bible and in writings from as far afield as Egypt, China, Indonesia, Greece, and Russia, ring composition is too widespread to have come from a single source. Does it perhaps derive from the way the brain works? What is its function in social contexts? The author examines ring composition, its principles and functions, in a cross-cultural way. She focuses on ring composition in Homer’s Iliad, the Bible’s book of Numbers, and, for a challenging modern example, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, developing a persuasive argument for reconstruing famous books and rereading neglected ones.

      Mary Douglas has a fascinating looking text on ring composition, a literary style which puts the meaning of the text in the middle and frames it with the beginning and end which are in parallel.

      Texts like the Bible, Homer, and even Tristram Shandy might be looked at from a different perspective with this lens.


      Suggested to me by Ann Bergin within the context of The Extended Mind

  10. Mar 2022
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnFHwl2Dbr0

      • System should be as frictionless as possible.
      • Capture in one location. (She says as few as possible, but this is too wishy-washy: she's got a "Readwise page" and a "Links page".)
      • There needs to be levels of processing.
        • Split out based on future value.
      • Everything has resources. How to capture metadata and be able to cite it?

      Everything needs to have a "Why"? What is the context for capturing? What is the reason? How will it be used in the future? Why was it interesting?

      She also describes how she collects notes in various formats (books, online articles, Kindle, Twitter, etc.) It primarily involves using Notion along with a variety of other sub-applications including Instapaper for sharing to Notion.

      Dramatically missing from this presentation is the answer to the question "why" collect all this stuff? How is she using it in the future? What is the overall value? She touches on writing the why for herself as she's taking notes, but I get the impression that she's not actively practicing what she preaches, and I suspect that many don't. This leaves me with the impression that she's collecting with no end goal, which for many may be fine.

      She's got a gaping hole in the processing section which likely needs a video unto itself and which would probably go a long way toward answer the "why" question above.

      In looking at her other videos, I see she's using the phrase "second brain" and words like productivity. There seems to be a high level of disconnect between those using "second brain" and the "why do this?" question other than the simple idea of "productivity" which seems to be a false trap that gets people into the mindset of being a collector for collections' sake.


      Almost hilariously she's got videos with titles like: - "I'm a productivity guru and I hate it." - "Productivity YouTube is brainwashing you"


      She's titled the final portion of the video "Outro" which is actually displayed on the video UI. This might be useful for production purposes but should be changed or omitted for actual consumption.


      The title "How I Remember Everything I Read" is pure clickbait here. It's more aptly titled, "How I Take and Save Notes". Where's the how I use this after? or how I review over it all to actually remember it/memorize it? There's nothing here to support this end of things which is the promise given in the title.

  11. readlists.jim-nielsen.com readlists.jim-nielsen.com
    1. https://readlists.jim-nielsen.com/

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Jim Nielsen</span> in (Re)Introducing Readlists (<time class='dt-published'>03/25/2022 23:09:14</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Orality is a technology or as a tool for thinking.

    2. but i i think the first couple of hundred notes are more like a collection and you look 00:34:29 for um connections and there are some but you remember them because yes the amount where it's where it doesn't surprise you 00:34:43 uh it's more you know where they are and i think the from 500 on um there's a shift um and then you need to uh figure out how to um 00:34:58 find them again so the index or some kind of system becomes more important and i think a couple of thousand notes and uh you're 00:35:12 automatically turning to your set of custom [Music] as the place where you will likely find some kind of connection

      Q: How many permanent notes did it take before you felt you had a communication partner?


      Sönke Ahrens has indicated that the first couple hundred notes are more of a static collection. Then from five hundred notes onward there is a shift and having an index becomes more important. It's only at about one thousand notes that one begins automatically turning to the zettelkasten to find connections. Perhaps it's at this point that the tool begins to look like a communication partner.


      link this to the few other examples from others.

    3. it is a tool for productivity um but i think it's a technology that forces you to [Music] engage more deeply with 00:29:06 the text you're reading

      The zettelkasten is a tool for thought that forces you to engage more deeply with what you're reading.

    1. A major advance in user interfaces that supports creative exploration would the capacity to go back in time, to review and manipulate the history of actions taken during an entire session. Users will be able to see all the steps in designing an engine and change an early design decision. They will be able to extract sections of the history to replay them or to convert into permanent macros that can be applied in similar situations. Extracting and replaying sections of history is a form of direct man ipulation programming. It enables users to explore every alternative in a decision-making situation, and then chose the one with the most favorable outcomes.

      While being able to view the history of a problem space from the perspective of a creation process is interesting, in reverse, it is also an interesting way to view a potential learning experience.

      I can't help but think about the branching tree networks of knowledge in some math texts providing potential alternate paths through the text to allow learners to go from novice to expert in areas in which they're interested. We need more user interfaces like this.

    2. Powerful tools can support creativity: Innovation can be facilitated by powerful tools that supply templates and support exploratory processes such as brainstorming (offering links to related concepts), state-space expl oration (trying out all permutations), idea combining (systematic pairings), rapid prototyping, and simulation modeling.

      State-space exploration and idea combining (systematic pairings) are just modern reimaginings of ideas going back to Raymond Llull and possibly earlier.

    3. The design of tools for toolsmiths (Brooks, 1996)

      Brooks, Frederick, Jr., The computer scientist as toolsmith II, Communications of the ACM 39, 3 (March 1996), 61-68.

    1. Hands can be a prompt, a window, a way station—butwhat they ought never have to be is still.

      Missing reference in this chapter on encouraging gestures as a tool for thought: "idle hands are the devil's workshop".

      Could the Bible have been encouraging the use of one's hands for communication??

    2. “It is from the attempt of expressing themselves thatunderstanding evolves, rather than the other way around,” he maintains.

      —Woff-Michael Roth

      Actively attempting to express oneself is one of the best methods of evolving one's understanding.

      Link this to the ideas related to being forced to actively manufacture the answer to a question is one of the best ways to learn.

    3. Research shows that people who are asked to write on complex topics,instead of being allowed to talk and gesture about them, end up reasoning lessastutely and drawing fewer inferences.

      Should active reading, thinking, and annotating also include making gestures as a means of providing more clear reasoning, and drawing better inferences from one's material?

      Would gestural movements with a hand or physical writing be helpful in annotation over digital annotation using typing as an input? Is this related to the anecdotal evidence/research of handwriting being a better method of note taking over typing?

      Could products like Hypothes.is or Diigo benefit from the use of digital pens on screens as a means of improving learning over using a mouse and a keyboard to highlight and annotate?

    1. https://opml.glitch.me/

      Get websites and RSS Feeds of the people you follow on Twitter. Import the OPML-file with your favorite feedreader. Examples: Feedly, Inoreader Tiny Tiny RSS, NewsBlur.

  12. Feb 2022
    1. 9/8g Hinter der Zettelkastentechnik steht dieErfahrung: Ohne zu schreiben kann mannicht denken – jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvollen,selektiven Zugriff aufs Gedächtnis voraussehendenZusammenhängen. Das heißt auch: ohne Differenzen einzukerben,kann man nicht denken.

      Google translation:

      9/8g The Zettelkasten technique is based on experience: You can't think without writing—at least not in contexts that require selective access to memory.

      That also means: you can't think without notching differences.

      There's something interesting about the translation here of "notching" occurring on an index card about ideas which can be linked to the early computer science version of edge-notched cards. Could this have been a subtle and tangential reference to just this sort of computing?

      The idea isn't new to me, but in the last phrase Luhmann tangentially highlights the value of the zettelkasten for more easily and directly comparing and contrasting the ideas on two different cards which might be either linked or juxtaposed.


      Link to:

      • Graeber and Wengrow ideas of storytelling
      • Shield of Achilles and ekphrasis thesis

      • https://hypothes.is/a/I-VY-HyfEeyjIC_pm7NF7Q With the further context of the full quote including "with selective access to memory" Luhmann seemed to at least to make space (if not give a tacit nod?) to oral traditions which had methods for access to memories in ways that modern literates don't typically give any credit at all. Johannes F.K .Schmidt certainly didn't and actively erased it in Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity.

    1. Steven Johnson indicates that the word processor is a terrible tool for writing because it doesn't have usable affordances for building up longer pieces from one's notes or basic ideas.

      He discusses his specific workflow of note taking and keeping ideas in Scrivener where he arranges them into folders and outlines which then become the source of his writing.

      Different from the typical zettelkasten workflow, he's keeping his notes hierarchically organized in folders based on topic keywords and only later when creating a specific writing project making explicit links and orders between his notes to create longer pieces. It's here that his work diverges most dramatically to the zettelkasten method described by Sönke Ahrens.

    2. Something about Scrivener elicits a lot of strong feelings from people who have used it, both positive and negative. It has a growing community of writers who swear by it, and a parallel community that is tired of hearing all the Scrivener-heads raving about their magic tool.

      Scrivener and its community are an example of a tool for thought being thought of as a magical tool potentially without people thinking about what the tool is doing that makes things so dramatically different.

      This article is written in 2017 just before the expansion of the zettelkasten craze in various social media spaces.

    3. Two things are worth noting here: the nests and the non-linearity. The different layers are nested in structure. Hunches come together to form ideas which come together to form stories. But sequence only becomes critical in the top layers: stories, arguments, chapters. The different between the two stages is like the difference between the pushpin evidence board from The Wire — a scattered network of clues and potential connections—and a prosecutor’s closing statement in a criminal trial.
    1. https://www.zotero.org/save?type=

      URL for adding URL, ISBN, DOI, PMID, or arXiv IDs to one's Zotero account.

      I've created a mobile shortcut using the URL Forwarder app to accomplish this with a share functionality after highlighting an ISBN.

      Might also try using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.srowen.bs.android&hl=en with the added custom search query custom search URL https://www.zotero.org/save?q=%s to see if that might work as well. This should allow using a scanner to get ISBN barcodes into the system as well. Useful for browsing at the bookstore.

      I should also create a javascript bookmarklet for this pattern as well.

      See also: - https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/77178/barcode-scanner - https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/76471/scanning-isbn-barcode-to-input-books-to-zotero-library

      Alternate URL paths for this: - https://www.zotero.org/save?type=isbn - https://www.zotero.org/save?q=

    1. https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam

      A user talks about why they've stopped using Roam Research.

      I suspect that a lot of people have many of the same issues and to a great extent, it's a result of them not understanding the underlying use cases of the problems they're trying to solve.

      This user is focusing on it solving the problem of where one is placing their data in hopes that it will fix all their problems, but without defining the reason why they're using the tool and what problems they hope for it to solve.

      Note taking is a much broader idea space than many suppose.

    1. Working with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storinginformation in there instead of in your head, i.e. not learning. On thecontrary, it facilitates real, long-term learning

      The forms of thinking, writing, and elaboration that go into creating permanent notes for a slip box are natural means of facilitating actual, long-term learning.

    2. he best-researched and mostsuccessful learning method is elaboration. It is very similar to whatwe do when we take smart notes and combine them with others,which is the opposite of mere re-viewing (Stein et al. 1984)Elaboration means nothing other than really thinking about themeaning of what we read, how it could inform different questions andtopics and how it could be combined with other knowledge

      Elaboration is thinking deeply about the meaning of what we've read, how it could inform or answer different questions, and how it can be linked or combined with other knowledge. It is one of the best-researched and most successful learning methods. While it seems to have some subtle differences, it sounds broadly similar to the Feynman technique and is related to the idea of writing questions based on one's notes in the Cornell note taking method.

    3. Bjork, Robert A. 2011. “On the Symbiosis of Remembering,Forgetting and Learning.” In Successful Remembering andSuccessful Forgetting: a Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork,edited by Aaron S. Benjamin, 1–22. New York, NY: PsychologyPress.
    4. While it is obvious that familiarity is not understanding, we have nochance of knowing whether we understand something or just believewe understand something until we test ourselves in some form.

      The Cornell notes practice of writing questions in the empty left column as a means of testing knowledge can be an effective tool after taking notes to ensure that one has actually learned and understood the broad concepts. They can also be used for spaced repetition purposes as well.

      Valuable though they may be as teaching and learning tools, they don't figure directly into the idea of permanent notes from a zettelkasten perspective.

    5. Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the advantages of writing. In oralpresentations, we easily get away with unfounded claims. We candistract from argumentative gaps with confident gestures or drop acasual “you know what I mean” irrespective of whether we knowwhat we meant. In writing, these manoeuvres are a little too obvious.It is easy to check a statement like: “But that is what I said!” Themost important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confrontourselves when we do not understand something as well as wewould like to believe.

      In modern literate contexts, it is easier to establish doubletalk in oral contexts than it is in written contexts as the written is more easily reviewed for clarity and concreteness. Verbal ticks like "you know what I mean", "it's easy to see/show", and other versions of similar hand-waving arguments that indicate gaps in thinking and arguments are far easier to identify in writing than they are in speech where social pressure may cause the audience to agree without actually following the thread of the argument. Writing certainly allows for timeshiting, but it explicitly also expands time frames for grasping and understanding a full argument in a way not commonly seen in oral settings.

      Note that this may not be the case in primarily oral cultures which may take specific steps to mitigate these patterns.

      Link this to the anthropology example from Scott M. Lacy of the (Malian?) tribe that made group decisions by repeating a statement from the lowest to the highest and back again to ensure understanding and agreement.


      This difference in communication between oral and literate is one which leaders can take advantage of in leading their followers astray. An example is Donald Trump who actively eschewed written communication or even reading in general in favor of oral and highly emotional speech. This generally freed him from the need to make coherent and useful arguments.

    6. Separate and Interlocking Tasks

      Chapter 9 of How to Take Smart Notes looks at some of the psychology research involving attention, multitasking, decision making, willpower, concentration, expertise, planning, to highlight the value of the design and structure of the zettelkasten as a positive tool for helping one to be more productive in their thinking and writing work.