To become a more proficient active reader who uses highlighting effectively you need to think about what contextual information will be required for comprehension when you review annotations in the future. Longer highlights may be required.

While multiple readings of a text in antiquity may have been rarer, due to the cheap proliferation of books, one can more easily "blaze a trail" through their reading to make it easier or quicker to rebuild context on subsequent readings.

Look at history of reading to see which books would have been more likely re-read, particularly outside of one's primary "area" of expertise.

Link to the trails mentioned by Vannevar Bush in As We May Think.

https://curatella.com/reviewing-notes-while-deep-reading/

Can symbol that represents one thing change over a long period of time to mean something different?

Why was the apple chosen as the representation of temptation?

A Theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with there function in both artificially constructed and natural languages.

Brief description of what the LARA system does.

https://www.unige.ch/callector/lara

example: https://www.issco.unige.ch/en/research/projects/callector/le_petit_prince_abc2vocabpages/hyperlinked_text.html

Typography is not about how it should look but rather how it can convey the message.

I like this statement because when it comes to typography it is meant to reveal the beauty behind the design.

It's true that if you can transfer your thought and ideas in your design, your audience would be able to understand your message.

self-pityingly or tearfully sentimental, often through drunkenness.

Not showing due respect for another person or being impertinent

The writer seems to to talking about the reader of a design becoming overwelmed by the text in a design when they look at it if there is to much causing the message of the design to be lost or not focused on in the design.

What role does technology play in shaping design?

Because of the technological advances that we have made, technology has helped designers to re-imagine the impossible.

Technology has helped us to create the impossible.

What distinguishes the field, or fields, of design from other creative occupations?

I think that creativity is key for distinguishing the difference between design and other occupation.

As a designer you have to be neutral and creative in getting your clients message across.

According to this author, what role should design play in society?

I think that the author was talking about how the design community should be the new avant-garde.

I think that designers should be at the forefront of the design community.

In the early chapters Ahrens outlines the general form and method for taking notes for a zettelkasten, though he's not overly descriptive of the method and provides no direct examples.

In the middle chapters he talks broadly about learning research and how the zettelkasten method dovetails with these methods.

He does this almost as if he's a good teacher showing the student an outline of what to do and why, but leaving it up to them to actually do the work and experimentation to come up with their own specific methods of use to best suit their purposes. This allows them to do the work themselves so that they have a better chance of following a simple, but easy set of rules, but in a way that will allow them to potentially more quickly become an expert at the practice.

“The one who does the work does the learning,” writes Doyle (2008, 63) [Section 10.5]

In some sense, he's actively practicing what he preaches as a teaching device within his own book!

I think that this point may be actively missed by those readers who aren't actively engaging with and converting his ideas into their own and doing the work which he's actively suggesting.

Even when taught that some methods of learning don't work, students will still actively use and focus on them.

Are those using social annotation purposely helping students to steer clear of these methods? is there evidence that the social part of some of these related annotation or conversational practices with both the text and one's colleagues helpful? Do they need to be taken out of the text and done in a more explicit manner in a lecture/discussion section or in a book club like setting similar to that of Dan Allossso's or even within a shared space like the Obsidian book club to have more value?

What methods of studying actually make us learn something versus make us feel as if we've learned something?

Active reading, progressive summarization may be on this list while highlighting and underlining might not. Or perhaps there's a spectrum of poor to good, and if this is the case, what does it look like? Is it the same for everyone or are factors like neurodivergence part of the equation which might change this spectrum of learning methods and techniques?

The mere-exposure effect can be dangerous when rereading a text because we are more likely to falsely believe we understand it. Robert Bornstein's research from 1989 indicates that we will tend to like the text more, which can pull us into confirmation bias.

Bornstein, Robert F. 1989. “Exposure and Affect: Overview and Meta-Analysis of Research, 1968-1987.” Psychological Bulletin 106 (2): 265–89.

Active reading with a pen in your hand and the creation of smart notes is a small-scale equivalent of a full introductory lecture from the perspective of Richard Feynman's technique for testing understanding.

Active reading is roughly equivalent to the idea of reading with a pen in your hand or showing evidence of a mind at play.

Some of the lighter and more passive (and common) forms of reading, highlighting, underlining sentences and hoping to understand or even remember the content and contexts is far less valuable than active reading, progressive summarization, comparing and contrasting, and extracting smart or permanent notes from one's texts.

An active reader is always thinking, writing, and annotating. The notes from this process can and could easily be used to facilitate writing and generating new material showing new contexts and new modes of thought.

I appreciate how he puts some priority in note taking, but it does matter what your read.

Better:

It matters both what you read and how you take notes.

because, of course, you've got to read the digital version of this book!

https://dancohen.org/2019/07/23/engagement-is-the-enemy-of-serendipity/

Dan Cohen talks about a design change in the New York Times app that actively discourages exploration and discovery by serendipity.

This is similar to pulling out digital copies of books you're looking for instead of going to the library, tracking down the book on the shelf and in the process seeing and experiencing the books on the shelf which are nearby, or even the book that catches your eye across the aisle, wasn't in your sphere of search or interest, but you pick it up anyway.

How can we bring this sort of design back to digital experiences?

It's not just the algorithmic feeds which are narrowing our interests and exposure, but the design of our digital spaces as well.

this is an interesting article... and it goes deeply into the wider details behind the product it's reviewing. We don't normally see that with standard reviews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jFDzgHZOEk

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Remi Kalir</span> in Video: how i ANNOTATE my books // tips on annotating for beginners (DocDrop) (<time class='dt-published'>01/19/2022 20:47:29</time>)</cite></small>

r/antiwork reading list - go through this

r/anarchy101 reading list - go through this

r/socialism reading list - go through this

An incredibly short, but dense essay on annotating books, but one which doesn't go into the same sort of detail as he gets in his book length treatment in How to Read a Book.

Missing here is the social aspect of annotating a book. In fact, he actively recommends against loaning one's annotated books for fear of losing the details and value in them.

Where did the idea of speed reading being a measure of our intelligence stem?

Certainly in a world of information overload there is the perception that greater consumption is better, but lack of comprehension and memory are the enemies.

Comprehension and the ability to remember the books we read should be of the utmost importance.

Nice to see him pay some homage to orality here.

-Mortimer J. Adler

Collision reduction in Hash Tables : Open Addressing

Wall with stickie note sized print outs taped to it. They contain a QR code, presumably linking to the thing they want to read with a Title and author below it.

Fiction transcends plentitude of generations

Almost like saying that "man cannot live by bread alone"...

An interesting classification of books which fits a fair amount of my own views, particularly looking at the difference between fiction, poetry, and non-fiction.

Source?

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Manfred Kuehn</span> in Taking note: Grafton on the Future of Reading (<time class='dt-published'>01/01/2022 12:57:23</time>)</cite></small>

Future Reading: Digitization and its discontents. By Anthony Grafton October 29, 2007 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/05/future-reading

he page note can function as a general guide. When I teach I use it as a place to share possible instructions. For example, I want to share a close reading of John's work so that we can be a bit better prepared for the meet on #nwpstudio for First Chapter Friday with John McCaffrey. Or as John writes in the short afterword in the story, "If you really want to know the real story: what I felt, why I did what I did, why I didn’t do what I could? Listen. Listen close. It’s the only way."

https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmann-on-learning-how-to-read.html

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021193426/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmann-on-learning-how-to-read.html

Nothing notable here...

https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/grafton-on-future-of-reading.html

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20200925225654/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/grafton-on-future-of-reading.html

Reading is hard to disrupt.

Speeding up and dramatically improving the reading process is incredibly difficult. No one has yet made really huge strides in this space. Google has made it imminently more accessible to the masses, but it still requires a lot of physical work and processing on our part.

https://luhmann.surge.sh/learning-how-to-read

Learning How to Read by Niklas Luhmann

Not as dense as Mortimer J. Adler's advice, but differentiates reading technical material versus poetry and novels. Moves to the topic of some of the value of note taking as a means of progressive summarization which may have implications for better remembering material.

Two Iron Laws of College Reading https://crookedtimber.org/2021/12/22/two-iron-laws-of-college-reading/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/can-distraction-free-devices-change-the-way-we-write

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis </span> in 📑 Can “Distraction-Free” Devices Change the Way We Write? | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>12/27/2021 14:09:33</time>)</cite></small>

entretiens de Royaumont

It's about expressing oneself or creates distortion rather than valuing or achieving a certain look that they should convey.

in a way that relates to the grammatical arrangement of words

in a sentence: a syntactically complicated language

definition

That's understandable because doing the same type of style over and over again can be boring sometimes.

The format of many "great books" courses is to help students relate the texts to their own lives, not to have a better understanding of the books or to hone methods of interpreting them.

This isn't too dissimilar to the way that many Protestants are taught to apply the Bible to their daily lives.

Are students mis-applying the great books because they don't understand their original ideas and context the way many religious people do with the Bible?

The aim of the book.

I'm intrigued. I don't see an easy route from where we are to a society giving up on its professionals.

See here for more information.

And possibly law.

I prefer the positive interpretation, of how much more there is to know. Quantifying anything in terms of how much we do not have is limited because we have finite knowledge out of an infinite set.

Each book instead of referencing something we do not know is a portal into things we have yet to know.

I think Nassim Taleb also mentioned elsewhere that having a lot of books you haven't read shows interest in a topic.

Writing to understand what I read is critical to my practice. Doing so socially is particularly helpful when I don't understand something or am lacking the motivation to keep reading.

Our close reading passage this week is from Book 10, lines 406-449:

from: 10.406 "so she spoke, and the proud heart in me was persuaded..." to 10. 449: "...but followed along in fear of my fierce reproaches."

Instructions: as with last week's passage, pay attention to every detail that catches your attention, or that doesn't seem to make sense. Context matters: the scene in last week's passage was Ithaca, a relatively normal if disorderly human community, but this week's passage deals with events on a magical island where humans are easily changed into animals. Is this island in any way a threat to the homecomings of Odysseus and his men? In your view, does it affect their behavior?

Hopkins at Home The Odyssey of Homer: a Close Reading

Sample close reading passage: 5.475 - 5.493 (end of chapter 5)

This moment occurs at the end of book five, just after Odysseus has escaped the rage of Poseidon by dragging himself ashore on the island of Scheria (likely Corfu), land of the Phaiakians/Phaeacians. Odysseus has just decided to look for shelter in the nearby forest, which despite the danger of wild animals offers somewhat more warmth than the wet shore of the river from which he has crawled. To help with our discussion I’ve divided the text into three parts.

I’d suggest printing this out and jotting your thoughts down—circle words that strike you as significant, as having multiple meanings, etc. Enjoy! You can send your thoughts to me or just keep your notes handy for our next class.

Karnofsky suggests that the cost/benefit ratio of how we typically think of reading may not be as simple as we intuitively expect i.e. we think that 'more time' = 'more understanding'.

If you're simply reading to inform yourself about a topic, it may be worth reading a couple of book reviews, and listening to an interview or two, rather than invest the significant amount of time necessary to really engage with the book.

A few hours of skimming and reviews/interviews may get you to 25% understanding and retention, which in many cases may be more than enough for your needs of being basically informed on the topic. Compared to the 50 - 100 hours necessary for a deep, analytical engagement with the text, that would only get you to 50% understanding and retention.

That being said, if your goal is to develop expertise, both Karnofsky and Adler ('How to read a book') suggest that you need a deep engagement with multiple texts.

https://site.pennpress.org/material-texts-2021/9780812236422/textual-situations/

This looks interesting for a later time...

Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers by Andrew Taylor

Generations of scholars have meditated upon the literary devices and cultural meanings of The Song of Roland. But according to Andrew Taylor not enough attention has been given to the physical context of the manuscript itself. The original copy of The Song of Roland is actually bound with a Latin translation of the Timaeus.

Textual Situations looks at this bound volume along with two other similarly bound medieval volumes to explore the manuscripts and marginalia that have been cast into shadow by the fame of adjacent texts, some of the most read medieval works. In addition to the bound volume that contains The Song of Roland, Taylor examines the volume that binds the well-known poem "Sumer is icumen in" with the Lais of Marie de France, and a volume containing the legal Decretals of Gregory IX with marginal illustrations of wayfaring life decorating its borders.

Approaching the manuscript as artifact, Textual Situations suggests that medieval texts must be examined in terms of their material support—that is, literal interpretation must take into consideration the physical manuscript itself in addition to the social conventions that surround its compilation. Taylor reconstructs the circumstances of the creation of these medieval bound volumes, the settings in which they were read, inscribed, and shared, and the social and intellectual conventions surrounding them.

https://torrentfreak.com/book-publishers-expand-uk-pirate-site-blocking-151128/

Blocking at the ISP level has been used as a strategy for preventing copyright for a while. What better methods might exist? Is this method just whack-a-mole?

https://infohist.fas.harvard.edu/news/information-cultures-series-john-hopkins-university-press

This looks like a fascinating series and who could go wrong with Ann Blair, Anthony Grafton, and Earle Havens?

Also interesting to see what sorts of things they will find interesting at the cutting edge of all these disciplines.

Wondering whether, for fun, we ought to be doing a close listening instead of a close reading of Home.

I love the phrase "a web that your read instead of one that tries so very hard to read you."

Where exactly do we situate note taking? Certainly within the space of rhetoric, but also as Ann M. Blair suggests within the history of reading.

What else? manuscript studies, psychology, others?

This whole section looks the most interesting and promising to me: reading, memory, and notes!

I'll likely read these first and at best skim the rest depending on content.

1: dividing into two parts

2: relating to, involving, or proceeding from dichotomy the plant's dichotomous branching a dichotomous approach can't be split into dichotomous categories

merriam webster

This is true because a Designer can communicate one's ideas in a clear and sensible way. Companies need design in order to get as many people to associate themselves with them.

1: a powerful often violent whirlpool sucking in objects within a given radius tried to shoot the canoe across a stretch of treacherous maelstrom — Harper's

2: something resembling a maelstrom in turbulence the maelstrom enveloping the country a maelstrom of emotions

merriam webster

Reason or justification for existence.

merriam

Absolutely, depending on the work and the intention behind it. You wouldn't want your audience to be confused about the readability of your work.

At least he did it quickly as possible because it's a known fact that people can have similar ideas as you.

article

Definition of ephemera 1: something of no lasting significance —usually used in plural

2 ephemera plural : paper items (such as posters, broadsides, and tickets) that were originally meant to be discarded after use but have since become collectibles

merriam webster

This is not surprising at all. Funny thing is just as he mentioned that...it made me realize there's barely any black designers being known, especially around that time.

Pages 35 to 39

comment in hypothesis for class.

Read from here to page 29 of the pdf (54) - 3 hours

They're definitely not catering to my reading, annotating, and writing experience.

This is related to an idea that Tom Critchlow was trying to get at a bit the other day. It would definitely be interesting in this sort of setting.

Has anyone built a generalizable text zoom JavaScript library that let's you progressively summarize an article as you zoom in and out?<br><br>(Why yes I am procrastinating my to-do list. You?)

— Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) September 17, 2021

Aside from reading words to put ideas into my brain, one of the reasons I like to read digital words is that the bigger value proposition for me is an easier method to add annotations to what I'm reading and then to be able to manipulate those notes after-the-fact. I've transcended books and the manual methods of note taking. Until I come up with a better word for it, digital commonplacing seems to be a useful shorthand for this new pattern of reading.

polyphonic: style of musical composition employing two or more simultaneous but relatively independent melodic lines

merriam

primordial: existing in or persisting from the beginning (as of a solar system or universe)

merriam

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Suzanne Conklin Akbari</span> in Growing a Research Network: Approaches to Global Book History | Penn Libraries (<time class='dt-published'>09/12/2021 21:11:23</time>)</cite></small>

1. Going to Paris for the first time must be exciting, so having the station relatively near is a good thing.

1. I like to travel with my dogs and having a park nearby is a good reason to choose this place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfXE6VCBo3k

This boils down to distilling one's notes down to something smaller.

Book review (and cultural commentary) on Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, (Public Affairs, 2008).

Or more powerful, in a read, write, remix, and edit space.

Somewhat related to:

The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb 2011-06-23 at OSBridge2011 having lunch with Ward, Tantek exclaimed

https://indieweb.org/2011/Smallest_Federated_Wiki#Inspiration

https://fs.blog/2021/08/remember-books/

A solid overview of how to read. Not as long or as in-depth as Mortimer J. Adler, but hits all of the high points in an absorbable manner.

Definitely worth re-reading...

This is a good list of questions to put into a template to ask both while and after reading a book.

What other regularly recurring questions might go into such a list?

via https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/nancy-pearls-rule-of-50-for-dropping-a-bad-book/article565170/

Most Medieval manuscripts specifically left wide columns of space to encourage readers to mark up their texts.

cross reference: Medieval notepads - Khan Academy

<small>Detail, London, British Library, Harley MS 3487 (13th century)—[source](http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=16790)</small>

Spark:

Some people think and endeavor to read a book once and take such great notes that they'll never have to read it again. They're fooling themselves if they think they can do this. The context of what's in the book compared to the context of what they already know is ever-changing. The new you that re-reads a book years or months later will notice new and different things. Make new and interesting connections. Much like Heraclitus's river, we ourselves are ever-changing, and our changing contexts will allow us to get different things from what we're reading on subsequent visits.

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

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

https://blogs.princeton.edu/notabilia/2014/07/12/15th-century-bookmark-with-column-indicator/

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/the-medieval-origins-of-the-modern-footnote

In a version similar to a footnote, a line and a dot were first used much as we use the carot symbol (^) today for editing to indicate the insertion of a missing line.

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/finding-books

Static bookmarks may have indicated "ritual" or habitual use of books and the information they contained, while dynamic bookmarks may indicate the need for retrieving (temporary) information from one or more pages.

Register bookmark

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/the-medieval-desktop

Images of Medieval reading practices generally pictured pens along with books. In the rare cases where pens were not included, the desks pictured were messy and thus covered up the pens involved.

This just happened to me last Summer when I felt pretty guilty about putting down a book I was reading for fun. As an English major, I feel an extra incentive to keep reading because that's what people expect of me. That is, since I am devoting a great deal of my life and school career to reading, I am required to finish all books I pick up. If I don't, then I have somehow failed.

1. საკუთარი სიამოვნებისთვის სისტემატიური კითხვა ხელს უწყობს მოსწავლის განათლებას ბევრი მიმართულებით.

2. გარეგანი ჯილდოს მიცემა (მაგ., თამაში დრო) როგორც მინიმუმ არაა აუცილებელი (სიამოვნებისთვის კითხვა უკვე ჯილდოა) და შეიძლება საზიანოც იყოს (გარეგან ჯილდოს მიჩვეული მოსწავლე სკოლის გარეთ თავისით წაიკითხავს?)

3. სკოლაში მოცულობითი ბიბლიოთეკის ყოლა მაღალი გავლენა აქვს მოსწავლეების განათლებაზე. იმხელა, რომ შეუძლია გადაწონს სიღარიბით გამოწვეული ნეგატიური ეფექტი.

https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2019/04/01/dissertating-in-the.html

A description of some of Kimiberly Hirsh's workflow in keeping a public research notebook (or commonplace book).

I'd be curious to know what type of readership and response she's gotten from this work in the past. For some it'll bet it's possibly too niche for a lot of direct feedback, but some pieces may be more interesting than others.

Did it help her organize her thoughts and reuse the material later on?

Calibre isn't a bad tool/application for doing this for a variety of document types and managing meta data

Link https://www.zhihu.com/question/21407675/answer/154012115

on the purpose of taking notes, annotating one's reading, or commonplacing

highlight is a quote from

C. Wright Mills' profound "Appendix: On Intellectual Craftsmanship," as found in his book on The Sociological Imagination.[16]

What a magnificent quote.

This is an interesting point. Faculty members take reading assignments seriously; some folks will skip events rather than show up unprepared. Starting with a facilitator's presentation is an interesting way over that barrier.

John Milton's commonplace book was an exercise in moral philosophy and it was compiled for action, not just a collection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4Qsu03Oz30

This same sort of functionality is something I'd built into my TiddlyWiki ages ago. Interesting to see some of these same sorts of functionalities being built into other note taking tools.

Sort of makes me want to consider nested tags in Obsidian...

any book that can be read for understanding or information can probably be read for entertainment as well, just as a book that is capable of increasing our understanding can also be read purely for the information it contains. (This proposition cannot be reversed: it is not true that every book that can be read for entertainment can also be read for under­standing.)

reading for understanding >= reading for information >= reading for entertainment

What sort of mathematical relationship would we call this? Linear? Associative? Equivalence relation?, etc.? Let's define it more specifically.

This book will focus on and emphasize reading for greater understanding with the benefit that, when accomplished, reading for information should take care of itself without significantly more work.

Here they're comparing reading for information and reading for understanding.

How do these two modes relate to Claude Shannon's versions of information (surprise) and semantics (the communication) itself. Are there other pieces which exist which we're not tacitly including here? It feels like there's another piece we're overlooking.

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

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

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

Reading is a receptive active undertaking in the same way as a catcher receiving a pitch in baseball.

How much more active can it be than also actively annotating and note taking?

This is an incredibly important fact. It's gone even further with additional advances in advertising and social media not to mention the slow drip mental programming provided by algorithmic feeds which tend to polarize their readers.

People simply aren't actively reading their content, comparing, contrasting, or even fact checking it.

I suspect that this book could use an additional overhaul to cover many of these aspects.

This could be a fascinating discussion to take a close look at later in the book.

This was apparently true in the 1940s and 1970s. Have things improved measurably since?

Adler apparently kept a commonplace book in the form of a massive zettelkasten (and may have kept a more traditional commonplace book as well). I wonder if they detail any note taking details or advice here.

Seems as if Slavitt has translated a lot of modernity into an ancient text which likely didn't have many of our modern references. This seems to be the sort of reading into a text that many moderns do to the Bible. Better would be to read it as the author intended to the audience to which it was intended rather than reading additional meanings into the text.

This idea of playing hopscotch#%22Table_of_Instructions%22_and_structure) through a text reminds me of some mathematics texts I've come across where the author draws out a diagram of potential readings and which portions are prerequisites so that professors using the book might pick and choose chapters to skip in their presentations.

Also reminiscent of the Choose Your Own Adventure books from childhood too.

cross reference: [[John Barth]], [[Henry James Korn]] and [[experimental fiction]], and [[hypertext]]

typo

Digital Social Reading · Works in Progress by [[Federico Pianzola]] (2021)

Federico mentioned this in the group chat at I Annotate 2021.

An awesome looking annotation tool that dovetails with Zotero to invite students and readers into texts with annotations.

Demonstrated by Axel Dürkop at the Social Hour: Annotate This Party With Annotation Show-and-Tell