464 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2021
    1. Ideas have a history, but so do the tools that lend disembodied ideas their material shape −− most commonly, text on a page. The text is produced with the help of writing tools such as pencil, typewriter, or computer keyboard, and of note-taking tools such as ledger, notebook, or mobile phone app. These tools themselves embody the merging of often very different histories. Lichtenberg’s notebooks are a good example, drawing as they do on mercantile bookkeeping, the humanist tradition of the commonplace book, and Pietist autobiographical writing (see Petra McGillen’s detailed analysis).

      I like the thought of not only the history of thoughts and ideas, but also the history of the tools that may have helped to make them.

      I'm curious to delve into Pietist autobiographical writing as a concept.

  2. gordonbrander.com gordonbrander.com
    1. There are rumors Pascal wrote the Pensées on notecards, and pinned these cards to a wall, connecting related thoughts with yarn. An early example of hypertext?

      This certainly fits into the broad general ideas surrounding note taking, commonplace books, and zettelkasten as tools for thought. People generally seemed to have used relatively similar methods but shoehorned them into the available tools they had at the time.

      This also, incidentally isn't too far off from how indigenous peoples the world over have used memory techniques (memory palaces, songlines, etc.) to hold together and pollinate their own thinking.

      Raymond Llull took things a step further with his combinatoric methods, though I've yet to see anyone attempting that in the area of digital gardens.

    1. But “humane technology” is precisely the sort of pleasant sounding but ultimately meaningless idea that we must be watchful for at all times. To be clear, Harris is hardly the first critic to argue for some alternative type of technology, past critics have argued for: “democratic technics,” “appropriate technology,” “convivial tools,” “liberatory technology,” “holistic technology,” and the list could go on.

      A reasonable summary list of alternatives. Note how dreadful and unmemorable most of these names are. Most noticeable in this list is that I don't think that anyone actually built any actual tools that accomplish any of these theoretical things.

      It also makes more noticeable that the Center for Humane Technology seems to be theoretically arguing against something instead of "for" something.

  3. Apr 2021
    1. DM gives you simple but/and powerful tools to mark up, annotate and link your own networked collections of digital images and texts. Mark up your image and text documents with highlights that you can then annotate and link together. Identify discreet moments on images and texts with highlight tools including dots, lines, rectangles, circles, polygons, text tags, and multiple color options. Develop your projects and publications with an unlimited number of annotations on individual highlights and entire image and text documents. Highlights and entire documents can host an unlimited number of annotations, and annotations themselves can include additional layers of annotations. Once you've marked up your text and image documents with highlights and annotations, you can create links between individual highlights and entire documents, and your links are bi-directional, so you and other viewers can travel back and forth between highlights. Three kinds of tools, entire digital worlds of possible networks and connections.

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

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

  4. Mar 2021
    1. I've come across about 20 reference for Ivan Illitch over the past month. Not sure what is driving it. Some mentions are coming out of educator circles, others from programmers, some from what I might describe as "knowledge workers" (digital gardeners/Roam Cult/Obsidian crowds). One tangential one was from someone in the hyperlink.academy crowd.

      Here's a recent one from today that popped up within a thread shared in IndieWeb chat:

      Ivan Illich continues to be even more more relevant than he was at the height of his New Left popularity. Conviviality in the digital tools we use has continued to wither https://t.co/D88V6KL7Ez pic.twitter.com/OFDYTjXyCn

      — Count Bla (@123456789blaaa) March 15, 2021
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality look very interesting. Perhaps they've distilled enough that their ideas are having a resurgence?

    2. He wrote that "[e]lite professional groups ... have come to exert a 'radical monopoly' on such basic human activities as health, agriculture, home-building, and learning, leading to a 'war on subsistence' that robs peasant societies of their vital skills and know-how. The result of much economic development is very often not human flourishing but 'modernized poverty', dependency, and an out-of-control system in which the humans become worn-down mechanical parts."[13] Illich proposed that we should "invert the present deep structure of tools" in order to "give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency."[34]

      Amazon anyone?

  5. Feb 2021
    1. The idea of a purely linear text is a myth; readers stitch together meanings in much more complex ways than we have traditionally imagined; the true text is more of a network than a single, fixed document.

      The internet isn't a new invention, it's just a more fixed version of the melange of text, ideas, and thought networks that have existed over human existence.

      First there was just the memory and indigenous peoples all over the world creating vast memory palaces to interconnect their thoughts. (cross reference the idea of ancients thinking much the way we do now from the fist episode or so of Literature and History)

      Then we invite writing and texts which help us in terms of greater storage without the work or relying solely on memory. This reaches it's pinnacle in the commonplace book and the ideas of Llull's combinatorial thought.

      Finally we've built the Internet which interconnects so much more.

      But now we need to go back and revisit the commonplace book and memory techniques to tie them altogether. Perhaps Lynne Kelly's concept of The Third Archive is what we should perfect next until another new instantiation comes to augment the system.

    1. They also turned their reading into writing, because commonplacing made them into authors. It forced them to write their own books; and by doing so they developed a still sharper sense of themselves as autonomous individuals. The authorial self took shape in the common man’s commonplace book, not merely in the works of great writers. It belonged to the general tendency that Stephen Greenblatt has called “Renaissance self-fashioning.”

      This fits into my broader developing thesis about thinking and writing as a means of evolving thought.

  6. Jan 2021
  7. Nov 2020
    1. Scenario

      Inshot Storytelling app, Video Editor & Video Maker InShot has a lot of photo and video editing features in one. There is a small learning curve. Many girls on the field have creatively combined photo and video content, applied effects and enhancements to specific sections and added transitions too. Harnessing the capabilities of InShot for storytelling has immense possibilities. It could potentially lead to a creators movement where people share details about their lives through videos and narration. It also could be used for product stories and marketing. InShot app runs on a phone and ASPi is used as a repository and exchange node - during COVID lockdown, a server online is also used so physical movement is reduced.

      Syncthing. A continuous file synchronization program Ever thought of connotations of sharing in today’s world. Well, Syncthing allows us to securely backup data without the need to trust a third-party cloud provider. Sharing and syncing files between devices on a local network or over the internet is made easier through Syncthing. This could help in fostering community archives as access to files over multiple devices can be made effortless. In localised sense, people can also look up resources or their queries and find answers with their peers.

    2. Scenario 1

      Kolibri The offline app for universal education Kolibri makes high quality education technology available in low-resource communities such as rural schools, refugee camps, orphanages, non-formal school systems, and prison systems. While the internet has thoroughly transformed the availability of educational content for much of the world, many people still live in places where online access is poor or even nonexistent. Kolibri is a great solution for these communities. It's an app that creates an offline server to deliver high-quality educational resources to learners. What makes Kolibri unique is that it offers a way to bring different content sources offline into a central repository in a structured way. Beyond that, it brings in a host of tools to help align the content with national and local curricular standards, and on the student side it offers a self-paced personalized learning experience with support tools for teachers to track student progress. Kolibri can be envisioned also for local teaching, DIY courses, self initiated inquiries, equal opportunities for 21st century skills etc.

  8. Oct 2020
    1. What if the best tools for thought have already been discovered? In other words, perhaps the 1960s and 1970s were an unrepeatable golden age, and all we can expect in the future is gradual incremental improvement, and perhaps the occasional major breakthrough, at a decreasing frequency?

      Many have been, but they've been forgotten and need to be rediscovered and repopularized as well as refined.

      Once this has happened, perhaps others may follow. Ideas like PAO are incredibly valuable ones that hadn't previously existed, but were specially built for remembering specific types of information. How can we combinatorially use some of these other methods to create new and interesting ones for other types of tools?

    2. Put another way, many tools for thought are public goods. They often cost a lot to develop initially, but it’s easy for others to duplicate and improve on them, free riding on the initial investment. While such duplication and improvement is good for our society as a whole, it’s bad for the companies that make that initial investment. And so such tools for thought suffer the fate of many public goods: our society collectively underinvests in them, relative to the benefits they provide
  9. Aug 2020
  10. Jun 2020
    1. One need arose quite commonly as trains of thought would develop on a growing series of note cards. There was no convenient way to link these cards together so that the train of thought could later be recalled by extracting the ordered series of notecards. An associative-trail scheme similar to that out lined by Bush for his Memex could conceivably be implemented with these cards to meet this need and add a valuable new symbol-structuring process to the system.

      This reminds me of of how the Roam Research app has implemented bidirectional links and block references.

    2. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

      This sounds a lot like Rheingold's tools for thought.

    1. With that said, the term “tools for thought” has been widely used since Iverson’s 1950s and 1960s work An account may be found in Iverson’s Turing Award lecture, Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979). Incidentally, even Iverson is really describing a medium for thought, the APL programming language, not a narrow tool. introducing the term. And so we shall use “tools for thought” as our catch all phrase, while giving ourselves license to explore a broader range, and also occasionally preferring the term “medium” when it is apt.
  11. May 2020
    1. What I think we're lacking is proper tooling, or at least the knowledge of it. I don't know what most people use to write Git commits, but concepts like interactive staging, rebasing, squashing, and fixup commits are very daunting with Git on the CLI, unless you know really well what you're doing. We should do a better job at learning people how to use tools like Git Tower (to give just one example) to rewrite Git history, and to produce nice Git commits.
  12. Oct 2019
  13. Jan 2019
  14. www.at-the-intersection.com www.at-the-intersection.com
    1. I mean it's just a pain to go in and I'm used to it now, but to go in on, you know, the different exchanges and each one has, has to be input different whether it's be typed in manually, whether you have to switch back and forth to look at the order book and Gemini or where you can copy and paste from below in Bittrex
  15. Nov 2018
    1. 25 Important Apps And Digital Learning Tools For University Students

      Excellent article offering 25 important apps to help University students and digital learning.The best part is that they are all free (so easily fits into a students' budget.

      From note taking to keeping track of grades, this list of the best apps will help improve classroom success and student engagement.

      RATING: 5/5 (rating based upon a score system 1 to 5, 1= lowest 5=highest in terms of content, veracity, easiness of use etc.)

  16. Oct 2016