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.

https://ar5iv.org/

Someone is cleverly converting arXiv pages into responsive HTML5.

View any arXiv article URL by changing the X to a 5

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=

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.

https://www.fermatslibrary.com/margins

A tool for creating and sharing marginalia. Geared toward the education space, but has relatively limited UI and isn't as feature rich as Hypothes.is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ahrens provides a quick overview of some research on distraction, attention, and multi-tasking to make the point that:

The simple structure and design of the zettelkasten forces one's focus and attention on small individual tasks that cumulatively build into better thinking and writing.

(Summary of Section 9.2)

Properly framed note taking methods are themselves a hermeneutic circle for thinking and creating.

(Gadamer 2004).

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

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

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

Is there evidence that this is true?

Let's be honest that there are certainly methods for doing all of this within our brains and not needing to rely on external structures. This being said, using writing, literacy, and external structures does allow us to process things faster than before.

Can we calculate what the level of greater efficiency allows for doing this? What is the overall throughput difference in being able to forget and write? Not rely on communication with others? What does a back of the envelope calculation for this look like?

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

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

The point of good tools of thought is to allow one to keep track of the ever increasing flood of information that also allows them to juxtapose or combine ideas in novel and interesting ways. Further, this should provide them with a means of generating and then improving upon their new ideas.

Whether it's for writing, to do lists, or other productivity spaces, a well designed system is something that one can put their absolute trust into. This allows one to free themselves from the burden of tracking and dealing with minutiae so they can get serious work done.

https://reallifemag.com/rank-and-file/

An interesting example of someone who fell into the trap of thinking that a particular tool or tools would magically make them smarter or help them do a particular line of work without showing any deep evidence of knowing what they were doing. The discussion here flows over a number of mixed note taking domains with no clear thrust for what they were using it pointedly for. The multiple directions and lack of experience likely doomed them to failure here.

Thinking that the tool will solve a particular problem without knowing what the tool does or how to use it properly will surely set one up for failure. You can use a screwdriver like a hammer, but your results won't be as good as using a hammer and using it properly.

https://gingkowriter.com/

This looks like an interesting tool for moving from notes to an outline to a written document. Could be interesting for dovetailing with a zettelkasten.

How to move data from something like Obsidian to Ginko Writer though?

There is a generation of people who grew up at the edge of the creation of computers and the web where they were simultaneously designing both the container and its contents at the same time. People before and after this typically worked on one or the other and most often on the contents themselves without access to the containers.

https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis

Analyse the structure of your Obsidian graph using various analysis techniques

https://www.obsidianroundup.org/ite-not-second-brain/

Eleanor Konik describes why second brain is a terrible term for note taking apps.

At what point could digital tools be said to be thinking? Do they need to be generative? It certainly needs to be on the other side of serendipitously juxtaposing two interesting ideas. One can juxtapose millions of ideas, it's the selection of a tiny subset of these as "better" or more interesting than the others and then building off of that that constitutes this sort of generative thought.

https://vimeo.com/232545219

from: Eyeo Conference 2017

• http://eyeofestival.com/2017/speaker/robin-sloan/
• https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2017/232545219

Description

Robin Sloan at Eyeo 2017 | Writing with the Machine | Language models built with recurrent neural networks are advancing the state of the art on what feels like a weekly basis; off-the-shelf code is capable of astonishing mimicry and composition. What happens, though, when we take those models off the command line and put them into an interactive writing environment? In this talk Robin presents demos of several tools, including one presented here for the first time. He discusses motivations and process, shares some technical tips, proposes a course for the future — and along the way, write at least one short story together with the audience: all of us, and the machine.

Notes

Robin created a corpus using If Magazine and Galaxy Magazine from the Internet Archive and used it as a writing tool. He talks about using a few other models for generating text.

Some of the idea here is reminiscent of the way John McPhee used the 1913 Webster Dictionary for finding words (or le mot juste) for his work, as tangentially suggested in Draft #4 in The New Yorker (2013-04-22)

Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/t2a9_pTQEeuNSDf16lq3qw and https://hypothes.is/a/vUG82pTOEeu6Z99lBsrRrg from https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary

Croatian acapella singing: klapa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sciwtWcfdH4

Writing using the adjacent possible.

Corpus building as an art [~37:00]

Forgetting what one trained their model on and then seeing the unexpected come out of it. This is similar to Luhmann's use of the zettelkasten as a serendipitous writing partner.

Open questions

How might we use information theory to do this more easily?

What does a person or machine's "hand" look like in the long term with these tools?

Can we use corpus linguistics in reverse for this?

What sources would you use to train your model?

References:

• Andrej Karpathy. 2015. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks"
• Samuel R. Bowman, Luke Vilnis, Oriol Vinyals, et al. "Generating sentences from a continuous space." 2015. arXiv: 1511.06349
• Stanislau Semeniuta, Aliaksei Severyn, and Erhardt Barth. 2017. "A Hybrid Convolutional Variational Autoencoder for Text generation." arXiv:1702.02390
• Soroush Mehri, et al. 2017. "SampleRNN: An Unconditional End-to-End Neural Audio Generation Model." arXiv:1612.07837 applies neural networks to sound and sound production

Similar statements have been made by others:

I could quote Luhmann on this as well, who thought that "without writing one cannot think," But there is nothing peculiarly "Luhmannian" about this idea. Isaac Asimov is said to have said "Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers." And, to give one other example, E. B. White (of "Strunk and White" fame) claimed that "writing is one way to go about thinking." In other words, writing is thinking. And since I do almost all my significant writing in ConnectedText these days, it might be called my "writing environment."—Manfred Kuehn

I think this was Luhmann's full quote:

Ohne zu schreiben, kann man nicht denken; jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvoller, anschlussfähiger Weise.

(Translation) You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way.

Luhmann’s “you” or "one" in his quote is obviously only a Western cultural referent which erases the existence of oral based cultures which have other ways to do their sophisticated thinking. His ignorant framing on the topic shouldn’t be a shared one. Oral cultures managed to do their thinking through speech and memory.

Various quotes along the lines of "writing is thinking".

What is the equivalent in oral societies? Memory is thinking?

1. Luhmann, Zettelkasten II, index card no. 9/8g (my translation).

The act of taking notes helps to focus the mind and one's concentration. This facilitates better and deeper thinking. While he erases oral cultures and those who used mnemonic techniques, Niklas Luhmann said, "without writing, there is no thinking."

Engel calls his system the Caper Star because the "spirited leaps of imagination" are required to help the student on their quest.

72 Emanuele Tesauro, Il Cannocchiale aristotelico, 5th ed. (Venice, 1669), 83. On this inven-tion, see also Umberto Eco, Dall’albero al labirinto. Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione (Milan, 2007), 45–7.

Emanuele Tesaurio's Indice Categorico was a tool for thought which aimed to discover new information by using metaphors and analogies with respect to the categories or taxonomies so as to draw links between them.

From a computer science perspective, isn't the index card functioning like an external memory, albeit one with somewhat pre-arranged linked paths? It's the movement through the machine's various paths that is doing the "thinking". Or the user's (active) choices that create the paths creates the impression of thinking.

Perhaps it's the pre-arranged links where the thinking has already happened (based on "work" put into the system) and then traversing the paths gives the appearance of "new" thinking?

How does this relate to other systems which can be thought of as thinking from a complexity perspective? Bacteria perhaps? Groups of cells acting in concert? Groups of people acting in concert? Cells seeing out food using random walks? etc?

From this perspective, how can we break out the constituent parts of thought and thinking? Consciousness? With enough nodes and edges and choices of paths between them (or a "correct" subset of paths) could anything look like thinking or computing?

https://www.etymonline.com/

https://www.goedel.io/p/tools-for-thought-but-not-for-search

Searching for two ingredients in an effort to find a recipe that will allow their use should be de rigueur in a personal knowledge manager, sadly it doesn't appear to be the case.

This sort of simple search not working in these tools is just silly.

They should be able to search across blocks, pages, and even provide graph views to help in this process. Where are all the overlaps of these words within one's database?

https://www.goedel.io/p/tft-performance-methodology?ck_subscriber_id=1372436421

Set up for some experiments in Obsidian, Roam Research, and Logseq to test performance.

How can the idea of agency expansion within games be used as a broader tool?

https://getchirrapp.com/

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

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

There is an interesting difference between artificial intelligence and intelligence automation. Index cards were already doing the second by the early 1940s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRnQ8lYcvFU

rewatched

One's native language is one of their most important tools for thought.

Good lessons learned

https://www.trismegistos.org/abb/search.php

https://www.ru.nl/ptrs/chps/abbreviationes/abbrevpro.php

Stories are an important way of thinking about and explaining the world. They may also be a potential brain hack.

Note their use here just after Hari has mentioned that connecting with people (often by way of their stories) is a basic human condition and need. Also note that Hari was previously a columnist with a slant, has he realized that this is the better way to convince people of plausible sounding things? Particularly without source, attribution, research, and potentially cherry picking data.

Are we blinding ourselves by telling stories? Particularly without comparison or actual testing?

I saw a book about this topic months ago and need to find it and dig it up.

Developed by Detlef Stern

https://t73f.de/blog/2021/zettelstore_0_1/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>John Philpin</span> in // John Philpin (<time class='dt-published'>01/05/2022 22:55:00</time>)</cite></small>

https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021193157/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

Manfred Kuehn looks at Karl Kraus' criticism of the idea of a zettelkasten as a tool which can be misused.

Of course this begs the question of what one is using their index card catalog for? Are you using it as a rhetorical thinking and creation device or simply a second memory?

Compare and contrast this admonition and extension with

Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. — John M. Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review, March 1967) (Culkin was a friend and colleague of Marshall McLuhan)

We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us. —Winston Churchill

Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. — John M. Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review, March 1967) (Culkin was a friend and colleague of Marshall McLuhan)

https://web.archive.org/web/20081030052305/http://www.solutionwatch.com/368/fifty-ways-to-take-notes/

Mostly an historical list of online tools for note taking.

No discussion of actual functionality or usefulness. Sounds more like for making to do lists and passing notes rather than long term knowledge management and upkeep. Nothing about the benefits of centralizing data in one place.

meh...

First we shape our tools, then they shape us...

Julian Lucas indicates that tools like Microsoft Word, WordStar, WordPerfect, and Google Docs, are writing tools which ultimately result into the vertical integration of Medium. The mistake here is that while they are certain tools and one can write into them and use them for editing, they are all probably best thought of as tools in the chain of moving toward publishing with Medium being the example that allows one to present their work as well as a distribution mechanism with a cheery on top.

What she is not focusing enough (any?) attention on is the creation processes at the start. How does one come up with an interesting idea? How does one do the research? How does one collect ideas moving toward some teleological endpoint? Tools that address these ideas of invention and creation are the real writing tools that writers so elusively search out.

Far better to look at note taking tools or tools like Hypothes.is that go to the roots of the creation process. Tools that can take fleeting ideas and collect them. Tools that can take those collections and interlink them. Tools that allow for combinatorial juxtaposition and rearrangement. Tools that allow outlining.

It is only after this that one may use a tool like Microsoft Word to do the final arrangement, editing, and polish before sending it off to a publisher.

Given the diversions of modern digital life, perhaps the best way to do one's writing is to do it at the moment of reading the actual references. Often while reading, one isn't as apt to have their attention diverted by the vagaries of life, instead they are focused on the thing at hand. It is while one has this focused attention that they should let their note taking practice while reading take over.

Even if you are distracted, you can at least maintain focus on a single line of text and your thoughts related to it and write them down in either a summary sentence or with a few related ideas which are sparked by the initial idea.

(This note is such an example.)

Then one can start and complete a small idea at a time and then letting them build over time and space, then recollect them to create a piece which then doesn't need to be written and painfully created, but which may only need an outline structure and some final polish and editing.

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

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

What exactly would be the ideal group of features in a writer's perfect tool? There are many out there for a variety of axes of production, but does anything cover it all?

Functionality potentially for:

• taking notes
• collecting examples
• memory
  • search or other means of pulling things up at their moment of need
• outlining functionality
• arranging and rearranging material
• spellcheckers
• grammar checkers
• other?

With

• easy of use
• efficiency
• productivity

https://legacy.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?t=28963

https://app.element.io/

The sentiment that it is impossible to think without writing is patently wrong. While it's an excellent tool, it takes an overly textual perspective and completely ignores the value of orality an memory in prehistory.

Modern culture has lost so many of our valuable cultural resources that we have completely forgotten that they even existed.

Oral cultures certainly had networked thought, Luhmann and others simply can't imagine how it may have worked. We're also blinded by the imagined size of societies in pre-agricultural contexts. The size and scope of cities and city networks makes the history of writing have an outsized appearance.

Further, we don't have solid records of these older netowrks, a major drawback of oral cultures which aren't properly maintained, but this doesn't mean that they didn not exist.

https://new-xkit-extension.tumblr.com XKit for Tumblr functionality

https://us.makerscabinet.com/products/ferrule

What a beautiful looking instrument!

Humans in general have a seven second window of self-consciousness. (What is the reference for this? Double check it.) The exception is when one is in conversation with someone else, and then people have much longer spans of self-consciousness.

I'm left to wonder if this is a useful fact for writing in the margins in books or into one's notebook, commonplace book, or zettelkasten? By having a conversation with yourself, or more specifically with the imaginary author you're annotating or if you prefer to frame it as a conversation with your zettelkasten, one expands their self-consciousness for much longer periods of time? What benefit does this have for the individual? What benefit for humanity in aggregate?

Is it this fact or just coincidence that much early philosophy was done as dialectic?

From an orality perspective, this makes it much more useful to talk to one's surroundings or objects like rocks. Did mnemonic techniques help give rise to our ability to be more self-conscious as a species? Is it like a muscle that we've been slowly and evolutionarily exercising for 250,000 years?

This looks like a fascinating tool. Similar in function to what @Flancian is attempting to do?

Perhaps I'll tinker with it soon...

Focusing on literacy as one of the features that makes humanity special is a major flaw. In fact, it is likely our earlier orality and the attendant portions that come with that which made us unique within the animal kingdom. While transmission of knowledge and information may be quicker with literacy and even with computer technology, our ability to cope with it stems first from our orality.

https://f5bot.com/

Peter Molnar set this up with Integromat to send Webmentions.

The definition of ownership here is at odds. The person invented the thought, they're just storing it somewhere else that isn't their own brain. This doesn't release ownership necessarily.

https://www.archaeology.org/issues/339-1905/trenches/7567-trenches-england-folkton-drums-stonehenge-measurement

The diameter of the Folkton Drums and the Lavant Drum seem to be based on the "long foot" (1.056 ft) discovered by Andrew Chamberlain and Mike Parker Pearson. The drums ratios are 1:7:8:9 to the long foot respective (the Lavant Drum last).

What was the origin of the stone used to manufacture these? Do the designs on the drums have a potential mnemonic use for the builders which may have used them as measuring devices?

These are held by the British Museum: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1893-1228-15

Their round nature may have made them easy to roll out measurements. the grooved "tops" may have allowed them to roll on wooden beams of some sort.

What relationship, if any, is the bone pin that was found with them?

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Alison Fisk </span> in "The Folkton Drums. Three cylinders carved from chalk about 5,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period. Decorated with geometric designs and stylised faces. Discovered, along with a bone pin, in a child’s round barrow (burial) in Yorkshire in 1889. #FindsFriday #Archaeology https://t.co/6IyUTN9bCt" (<time class='dt-published'>12/11/2021 09:11:48</time>)</cite></small>

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/three-layers-structure-zettelkasten/

Could one create a rhyzomatic wiki or similar tool for thought?

https://github.com/chetachiezikeuzor/Highlightr-Plugin A minimal and aesthetically pleasing highlighting menu that makes color-coded highlighting much easier.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Note Apps </span> in "Got time to play with @chetachiiii's @obsdmd plugin called Highlightr and I love it! https://t.co/qIK47NOT4D https://t.co/SQal55OMdX" (<time class='dt-published'>12/07/2021 21:42:44</time>)</cite></small>

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

This might be the case if the tools drove the people, but isn't it more likely the way in which different people use the tools?

Which direction gives rise to more complexity?

likely attested elsewhere, but he credits https://www.inkandswitch.com/muse/

via Jess Martin https://jessmart.in/

Specifically highlighting that the "focus must be on the 'using', not the 'thing'".

This quote is very reminiscent of John M. Culkin's quote (often misattributed to McLuhan) "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Linus Lee</span> in Towards a research community for better thinking tools | thesephist.com (<time class='dt-published'>12/01/2021 08:23:07</time>)</cite></small>

https://frankmcpherson.blog/2021/12/03/i-think-folks.html

https://thesephist.com/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Frank McPherson</span> in Frankly... (<time class='dt-published'>12/03/2021 12:49:46</time>)</cite></small>

The primary value of the card catalogue and index cards as tools for thought is that it is a self-contained, uniform and mobile carrier that can be arranged and processed based on strict systems of order. Books have many of these properties, but the information isn't as atomic or as easily re-ordered.

tools

https://nowcomment.com/

In a category of tool like Hypothes.is. Worth checking out for UI and functionality.

technologies

https://github.com/judell/h_notify

quizzes and assignments at the end of each section to track their performance

effectiveness of using technology devices in online English classrooms.

usage of the tool increased substantially at the start of lockdown, with the bulk of study activity occurring on weekday mornings.

easy access to digi-tools.

5.a.

1. preparedness

5.a.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1459547762517688327.html

Anthony Baker experimenting with ideas from Necromant and Eleanor Konik to cross link digital notes with physical paper notes.

I've thought about doing something similar to this with my physical notebooks in the past, though hadn't done block level linking as a means of potentially pulling in and linking pieces in the future.

Often for more important linked things, I'll simply import the physical version into my digital copy at the time of first use/reference, but this could be interesting for large bodies of notes which aren't digital.

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.

discussions, assessment, sharing and interaction

both teachers and students were ready with digital skills and tools

What is missing in this train of thought is search. The real challenge is recalling of information easily, whether that is traditional search or something more AI-ish that can uncover connections between items that I don't see myself. What I want is a tool that can search across all my repositories, and that requires either APIs for communication or standard data storage formats. I prefer APis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_personal_information_managers

Network map of relationships between greek philosophers

https://www.tweetshelf.com/

Discovery tool for Twitter recommendations

"The Zettelkasten takes more of my time than the writing of books." —Niklas Luhmann (via vimeo.com/173128404)

Some people complain about the amount of time that working in their zettelkasten or notes may take, and it may take a while, but it is exactly the actual work of creation that takes the longest. The rest of the process is just the copying over and editing.

So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?

The tools for thought crowd should all be reading Kalir and Garcia's book Annotation.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xodo.pdf.reader&hl=en_US&gl=US

https://www.squidnotes.com/

Wow, the Thingiverse website is a real rabbit hole: https://www.thingiverse.com/

It builds on many of these traditions, but there is a rather sizeable movement in the physical world as well as lots online of sketchnotes which might fit the bill for you Roy.

The canonical book/textbook for the space seems to be Sketchnote Handbook, The: the illustrated guide to visual note taking by Mike Rohde.

For a solid overview of the idea in about 30 minutes, I found this to be a useful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evLCAYlx4Kw

Lean Canvas

For the builders collective, I created some tools that are open source and useful for design and social architecture. Other projects are coding challenges to experiment with what is possible on the web.

This experiment is based on the Lean Canvas, based on the Business Model Canvas from the book Business Model Generation.

Type in the grey box at the top of the page. Click or tap in the boxes to add the text as a box in each section of the Lean Canvas. Click on the box to delete.

There is no save functionality, so be sure to take a screenshot. Or roll your own by using the code on Codepen and GitHub.

create animated drawings. export to gif