But what about the unimagined future projects that may be our most important. Zettelkasten methods cover for this better perhaps?

I really appreciate that he's actively using examples from across a variety of domains to indicate the depth and breadth of areas which can benefit from commonplacing and note taking domains.

In addition to this as a standalone quote...

If nothing else, one should keep a commonplace book so that they have a treasure house of nifty quotes to use as chapter openers for the books they might write.

It would be useful to suggest here:

Ideally one's note taking applications would automatically archive web pages to the Internet Archive as you take notes from them. This means that if they should disappear in the future, you'd have recourse to a useful and workable back up.

Tiago Forte self-reports that he captures two notes a day.

Link to other's notes per day including Barthes, Luhmann, et al.

The most valuable work one can do in note taking is creating active links from one piece of knowledge to another, particularly if they're both surprising.

Anecdotally I do see a lot of people putting all of their work into collecting notes, and none of it rephrasing things into their own words to improve understanding or linking ideas together to create new ideas. The latter are both far superior to the former.

Your notes shouldn't be a place to collect what you already know.

Four broad criteria for collecting notes: - Is it surprising? - Is it useful? - Is it personal? - Does it inspire me?

Forte places these in the exact reverse order, but I would prefer to place them in order of importance to me, based on experience. I don't use the inspiration portion as often, but it may be more valuable for fiction writers, artists, and other creatives.

Collecting everything in your notes, especially in digital realms where saving is phenomenally easier and nearly automatic, is a fatal flaw in note taking.

Interlinking your ideas can help to create a harmony within your collection. There are no loose ends or lost ideas. There is a place for everything and everything is in its proper place, ready to be used and reused.

Beethoven kept a variation of a waste book in that he kept a pocket notebook for quick capture of ideas. Later, instead of copying them over into a permanent place, he'd translate and amplify on the idea in a second notebook. Later on, he might pick up the idea again in a third notebook with further improvements.

By doing this me might also use the initial ideas as building blocks for more than one individual piece. This is very clever, particularly in musical development where various snippets of music might be morphed into various different forms in ways that written ideas generally can't be so used.

This literally allowed him to re-use his "notes" at two different levels (the written ones as well as the musical ones.)

Twyla Tharp tells the story of a colleague who is a magazine editor. They keep a pile of clippings of phots, illustrations, and stories in their desk and mine it, often with others, for something that will create story ideas for new work.

This method is highly similar to that of Eminem's "Stacking Ammo" method.

Regardless of what sort of physical instantiation one's notes may take, a workable storage option for them is necessary whether it is a simple box, a shelving system, a curiosity cabinet, a flat file, or even an entire room itself.

https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1414053242120646656

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8078819

Example of a writer who wholly conflates "note sharers" with "digital gardners" and the "second brain" crowd.

It's likely that these words and terminology have all become conflated due to ambiguous use.

In the framing here, I don't think it was so much Ahren's book, but the florescence of note taking tools (many of them very technical and appealing to the male/techbro crowd mentioned earlier in the piece). Though perhaps some of this tech crowd were influenced by Ahrens to make these tools which simply accelerated the space.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eminem/comments/7mf19q/lose_yourself_handwritten/

Eminem's handwritten lyrics for "Lose Yourself"

High resolution versions:

https://i.imgur.com/iFNPFqe.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/XGRLLtW.jpg

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/note-cards?s=r

Outline of one of Dan's experiments writing a handbook about reading, thinking, and writing. He's taking a zettelkasten-like approach, but doing it as a stand-alone project with little indexing and crosslinking of ideas or creating card addresses.

This sounds more akin to the processes of Vladimir Nabokov and Ryan Holiday/Robert Greene.

Anecdotal evidence of contemplation of suicide based on over-collection of notes without creating a clear thesis or use for them.

I'm curious who the colleague was and what or how their note taking system wasn't working for them. Most likely the inability to link ideas to each other, lack of clear examples of others doing the practice to help guide them?

https://scottscheper.com/letter/2/

Brief outline of how Scheper came to note taking and his journey to zettelkasten.

There's some magical thinking involved here. While the system has some arbitrary internal branching, the surprises come from the system's perfect memory that the human user doesn't have. This makes it appear that the system creates its own creativity, but it is really the combinatorics of the perfect memory system with use over time.

Link to: serendipity of systems based on auto-complete

Is there evidence that Luhmann's system aimed to create anything from the start in a sort of autopoietic sense? Or is it (more likely) the case that Luhmann saw this sort of "alter ego" emerging over time and described it after-the-fact?

Based on his experiences and note takers and zettelkasten users might expect this outcome now.

Are there examples of prior commonplace book users or note takers seeing or describing this sort of experience in the historical record?

Related to this is the idea that a reader might have a conversation with another author by reading and writing their own notes from a particular text.

The only real difference here is that one's notes and the ability to link them to other ideas or topical headings in a commonplace book or zettelkasten means that the reader/writer has an infinitely growable perfect memory.

The four principles Niklas Luhmann used to build his notebox system are:

1. Analog
2. Numeric-alpha
3. Tree
4. Index

The first letters of those four principles (A, N, T, I) are what comprise an Antinet. An Antinet Zettelkasten is a network of these four principles.

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/401/hopeful-theorist

This is a fascinating first hand example of note taking experience spanning several decades. It includes descriptions of personal experience with a wide variety of most of the major note taking digital applications during this time period and provides a clear preference for a text-only (digital) format.

It describes a collection of over 10,000 text notes and 6,000 bibliographic entries.

"Here I am on the floor showing you freaking note cards, which really means that I have made it in life." —Scott P. Scheper

Rather than using his notes as the actual writing, Barzun suggests writing "from memory" and only occasionally using prompting from one's notes.

This is wholly opposed to the idea of reusing the writing of one's notes in more advanced zettelkasten methods.

It would seem that Barzun didn't create links between particular ideas as he made them given the fact that his outlines are abstract and his connections felt "weak and artificial".

Notice the words "usable version of a longer document". Notes should be reusable in some form.

Do not omit these last- they will not come back at will, even when you return to the item that gave

When reading, it's important to sketch out your own novel ideas and thoughts as you go as they will be difficult or impossible to recover them.

advice about quantity of notes

Barzun analogies notes as "old friends". He, like many others, encourages note takers to put ideas into their own words.

Ideas move pretty fast. If you don't stop and write them down once in a while, you could forget them.

Cross reference:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller

Barzun, Jacques. Simple and Direct : A Rhetoric for Writers. Revised edition. University of Chicago Press, 1985.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3dbH2c3l0M

Templater scripts: - My Clippings: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/296 - Extract highlights to create mini-summary draft: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/294

This could be interesting to attempt on a book.

Some excellent questions that nudge one into an "orthodox" zettelkasten practice.

A referent to Hegel's note taking system.

"To be sure, one will initially produce mostly waste." -Niklas Luhmann

How true!!! I see many people with this initial problem and not an insignificant few give up entirely because of this.

Knowledge increases (exponentially?) in value with connections to other ideas.

Nice list of custom names for area specific commonplaces.

Actor and comedian Jerry Seinfeld, arguably the most influential comedian of his generation, wrote in his book Is This Anything?:

Whenever I came up with a funny bit, whether it happened on a stage, in a conversation or working it out on my preferred canvas, the big yellow legal pad, I kept it in one of those old- school accordion folders . . . A lot of people I’ve talked to

link to other comedian practices: This one is most similar to George Carlin perhaps, though not as zany. Also similar to Adam Sandler, though he uses spiral bound notebooks.

In an interview about how she wrote the smash hit “Blank Space,”3 Swift says, “I’ll be going about my daily life and I’ll think, ‘Wow, so we only have two real options in relationships—it’s going to be forever or it’s going to go down in flames,’ so I’ll jot that down in my notes . . . I’ll come up with a line that I think is clever like ‘Darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream’ and I just pick them and

NME, “Taylor Swift—How I Wrote My Massive Hit ‘Blank Space,’ ”NME.com, October 9, 2015, YouTube video, 3:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bYUDY4lmls

link to Eminem and "stacking ammo"

Immediate knowledge capture by highlighting, annotating, or other means when taking notes can help to decrease cognitive load. This is similar to other productivity methods like quick logging within a bullet journal system, writing morning pages, or Getting Things Done (GTD). By putting everything down in one place, you can free your mind of the constant need to remember dozens of things. This frees up your working memory to decrease stress as you know you've captured the basic idea for future filtering, sorting, and work at a later date.

Though it may lead down the road to the collector's fallacy, one should note down, annotate, or highlight the things that resonate with them. Similar to Marie Kondo's concept in home organization, one ought to find ideas that "spark joy" or move them internally. These have a reasonable ability to be reused or turned into something with a bit of coaxing and work. Collect now to be able to filter later.

I'm sort of surprised that Forte hasn't trademarked this "method". Immediately on it's face it looks a lot like the general steps of note taking for a zettelkasten, or let's be honest, almost any note taking method. Nice to see that he's reminding people to do some distillation and expression using their notes however as this is where most people lose the thread.

Missing from this description is the work that is involved in revisting, re-reading, and interacting with your notes. This is not an easy process, but this paragraph belies the work involved and makes it seem "magical" with the use of the words 'illuminating', 'gravitating', 'cross-pollinating' which are all external processes or forces that don't require work from the individual.

List of some affordance of digital note taking over handwriting: * search * sharing * backups (copies) * editing * linking (automatic?) * syncing to multiple spaces for ease of use

7 Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 421.

relate this to Eminem's "stacking ammo".

Forte's definition of a note.

Most people weren't taught positive or even useful note taking skills in school, and this is a massive problem in a knowledge-based and knowledge privileged society.

imitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

Some may categorize handbooks on note taking within the productivity space as "self-help" or "self-improvement", but still view it as something that happens outside of ones' self. Doesn't improving one's environment as a means of improving things for oneself count as self-improvement?

Marie Kondo's minimalism techniques are all external to the body, but are wholly geared towards creating internal happiness.

Because your external circumstances are important to your internal mental state, external environment and decoration can be considered self-improvement.

Could note taking be considered exbodied cognition? Vannevar Bush framed the Memex as a means of showing associative trails. (Let's be honest, As We May Think used the word trail far too much.)

How does this relate to orality vs. literacy?

Orality requires the immediate mental work for storage while literacy removes some of the work by making the effort external and potentially giving it additional longevity.

Anecdotal evidence that not centralizing one's work is a road to failure.

Centralized note taking for easy search is key!

I had this same sense early on, but it involved a capacious memory rather than a reliance on written notes that I needed to consult.

He does build a sense of excitement and magic around the idea of taking notes here, though sadly he's covering up the amount of work that maintaining such a system entails.

The ideas behind knowledge management are largely timeless, but they are far from unchanging. They have evolved slowly over 2000+ years until we broadly threw many of them away in the early 20th century.

One only need read a few pages of Ann M. Blair's Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age to see some of the changes and shifts within the space from the 1400s on.

I might argue that you're consuming in in the wrong way and thus not able to re-use it at the correct time.

Blackwood Magazine most likely introduced the term marginalia in 1819. Edgar Allen Poe popularized the term with some of his published material entitled Marginalia.

What other (popular) published examples of marginalia exist?

Source for the Blackwood Magazine assertion?

Sascha Fast analogizes the writing process using a zettelkasten to Henry Ford's assembly line for building cars. Each worker on the assembly line has a limited bit of knowledge for their individual part of the process, but most of the knowledge and value is built into the overarching process itself. This makes the overall system quicker and more efficient.

Similarly with note taking, each individual portion of the process is simple and self-contained, but it allows the writer to create a much more creative and complex piece in the end. Here an individual can accomplish all of the individual steps in a self-contained way while focusing on individual steps without becoming lost in the subsequent steps which would otherwise require a tremendous additional amount of energy.

Ahrens uses the phrase permanent notes and never uses the words evergreen notes. Evergreen notes stems from Andy Matuschak's reading of Ahrens, likely with a side reference to the idea of evergreen articles which is a closely related commonplace idea in journalism.

The difference between the permanent(evergreen) and fleeting comes from where one chooses to put the actual work into their system. One can collect thousands of fleeting notes in their system, but it's more likely that it will eventually collapse on itself and do the author no good. Better is to put as much work in up front to get to a good permanent note that is reusable in potentially many contexts.

Much of this stems back at least as far as Vincentius Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization (1689) where he offers a contemporary set of instructions on excerpting knowledge from books as well as a history of the subject of note taking. In the book, he warns specifically against the practice exhibited by Joachim Jungius (1585-1657) who left behind approximately 150,000 slips (or scraps) of paper (zettels). Because there was no index to it or links between the notes Jungius' collection was ostensibly useless following his death. His scraps were literally a "scrap heap".

Indices are certainly an old construct. One of the oldest structured examples in the note taking space is that of John Locke who detailed it in Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as A New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706).

Previously commonplace books had been structured with headwords done alphabetically. This meant starting with a preconceived structure and leaving blank or empty space ahead of time without prior knowledge of what would fill it or how long that might take. By turning that system on its head, one could fill a notebook from front to back with a specific index of the headwords at the end. Then one didn't need to do the same amount of pre-planning or gymnastics over time with respect to where to put their notes.

This idea combined with that of Konrad Gessner's design for being able to re-arrange slips of paper (which later became index cards based on an idea by Carl Linnaeus), gives us an awful lot of freedom and flexibility in almost any note taking system.

Building blocks of the note taking system

• atomic ideas
• written on (re-arrangeable) slips, cards, or hypertext spaces
• cross linked with each other
• cross linked with an index
• cross linked with references

are there others? should they be broken up differently?

Godfathers of Notetaking

• Aristotle, Cicero (commonplaces)
• Seneca the Younger (collecting and reusing)
• Raymond Llull (combinatorial rearrangements)
• Konrad Gessner (storage for re-arrangeable slips)
• John Locke (indices)
• Carl Linnaeus (index cards)

What are the common pitfalls when choosing a note taking application or platform?

Own your data

Prefer note taking systems that don't rely on a company's long term existence. While Evernote or OneNote have been around for a while, there's nothing to say they'll be around forever or even your entire lifetime. That shiny new startup note taking company may not gain traction in the market and exist in two years. If your notes are trapped inside a company's infrastructure and aren't exportable to another location, you're simply dead in the water. Make sure you have a method to be able to export and own the raw data of your notes.

Test driving many

and not choosing or sticking with one (or even a few)<br /> Don't get stunned into inaction by the number of choices.

Shiny object syndrome

is the situation where people focus all attention on something that is new, current or trendy, yet drop this as soon as something new takes its place.<br /> There will always be new and perhaps interesting note taking applications. Some may look fun and you'll be tempted to try them out and fragment your notes. Don't waste your time unless the benefits are manifestly clear and the pathway to exporting your notes is simple and easy. Otherwise you'll spend all your time importing/exporting and managing your notes and not taking and using them. Paper and pencil has been around for centuries and they work, so at a minimum do this. True innovation in this space is exceedingly rare, and even small affordances like the ability to have [[wikilinks]] and/or bi-directional links may save a few seconds here and there, in the long run these can still be done manually and having a system far exceeds the value of having the best system.

(Relate this to the same effect in the blogosphere of people switching CMSes and software and never actually writing content on their website. The purpose of the tool is using it and not collecting all the tools as a distraction for not using them. Remember which problem you're attempting to solve.)

Future needs and whataboutisms

Surely there will be future innovations in the note taking space or you may find some niche need that your current system doesn't solve. Given the maturity of the space even in a pen and paper world, this will be rare. Don't worry inordinately about the future, imitate what has worked for large numbers of people in the past and move forward from there.

Others? Probably...

https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/resources

It's true that each note taking application may be purpose fit for a particular use, but having a single store for all of your notes is incredibly important for future search and re-discovery. Keeping one's notes across a range of applications is disaster waiting to happen, at least until there is a bigger aggregate search function that can search across multiple platforms.

The typical student note taking method of transcribing, using (or often not using at all), and keeping notes is doomed to failure.

Many students make the mistake of not making their own actual notes. By this I don't mean they're not writing information down. In fact many are writing information down, but we can't really call these notes. Notes by definition ought to transform something seen or heard into one's own words. Without the transformation, these students think that they're taking notes, but in reality they're focusing their efforts on being transcriptionists. They're attempting to capture something for later consumption. This is a deadly trap! By only transcribing, they're not taking advantage of transforming information by putting ideas down in their own words to test their understanding. Often worse, even if they do transcribe notes, they don't revisit them. If they do revisit them, they're simply re-reading them and not actively working with them. Only re-reading them will lead to the illusion that they're learning something when in fact they're falling into the mere-exposure effect.

Students who are acting as transcriptionists would be better off simply reading a textbook and taking notes directly from that.

A note that isn't revisited or revised, may as well be a note not taken. If we were to consider a spectrum of useful, valuable, and worthwhile notes, these notes would be at the lowest end of the spectrum.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/QgkL6IkIEeym7OeN9v9New

This says so much about modern note taking in the academy.

Another working day on #BarbaraBodichon begins. I love my writing table but sometimes wish I’d one of those svelte, shiny offices where nothing appears to be out of place, even behind closed drawers/doors. What’s your desk look like right now, #Twitterstorians? #WorkplacePix pic.twitter.com/vk9iA3gnT7

— jane robinson (@janerobinson00) May 19, 2022

Niklas Luhmann kept a portion of his note taking system (ZK II Note 9/8j) specifically for joke related slips. It has been referred to as his jokerzettel.

This would seem to be in keeping with other examples kept in America by Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, George Carlin, and a wide variety of comics like Adam Sandler et al. who have moved to using notebooks.

This is the first time I've seen the word/phrase jokerzettel in print.

Umberto Eco's book How to Write a Thesis (MIT Press, 2015, #) can broadly be thought of as a zettelkasten system, but it advises a separate system for each project or writing assignment. This is generally good advice, and potentially excellent for students on a one-time basis, but it prevents one from benefitting from the work over multiple projects or even a lifetime.

In some sense, a more traditional approach, and one seen used in Niklas Luhmann's example is to keep different sections separated by broad topics.

Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten #1 had 108 broad topics (along with a bibliography and a subject index), and zettelkasten #2 had 11 broad topics. (Cross reference: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhaltsuebersicht)

The zettelkasten structure allowed a familiar "folder" like top level structure, but the bibliographic and subject indices allowed them to interlink ideas from one space to the next for longer term work on multiple projects simultaneously.

https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/

The PKM space has gotten crazy, but mostly through bad practice, lack of history, and hype. There are a few valid points I see mirrored here, but on the whole this piece is broadly off base due to a lack of proper experience, practice and study. I definitely would recommend he take a paid course to fix the issue, but delve more deeply into recommended historical practices.

This perspective is the same sort of hero worship that has too often been beaten into people (and especially students) over the centuries.

You have to be an absolute genius to be able to create work like that of Francis Bacon, Conrad Gessner, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Carl Linnaeus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Isaac Newton, Umberto Eco, Philip Melanchthon, Erasmus Darwin, Rudolphus Agricola, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Burns right?

Here's the secret: all of them kept extensive notebooks, commonplace books, or zettelkasten-like note collections. Small little pieces aggregated over time allowed them to create great things.

I suspect that if one looks at famous creators/writers throughout history they will discover that some sort of personal knowledge management system at the core of their practice.

This completely loses the fact that two different areas of work can be used fruitfully in combinatorically creative ways to expand insight and knowledge. While you can loosely forget what is in your notes, the fact that they exist and are interlinked helps you resurface and reuse them. If you're not reusing and constantly linking them, then you're failing.

I will agree that there are far too many "influencers" and "gurus" out there selling something in the note taking space. Almost none of them know what the hell they're talking about.

In watching the space and seeing the sorts of conversations and questions I see online in Twitter, Reddit, and other fora, I too often see people talking about the system(s) and not actually using the systems. Very few get to a critical mass of well written notes, which I estimate to be about 500 to 1000 before they give up. Most aren't taking good notes and are imposing far more structure on them as if they're writing wiki articles instead of taking notes. Too many things go wrong in their processes before they're giving up and moving on. This has the effect of making the enterprise appear to be a failure.

I suspect that the author of this piece is in this last group and instead of thinking about why they're failing, they're lashing out about the hype in the space. Certainly there is way too much hype, and that isn't necessarily a good thing. But there's also not nearly enough practice and that is far worse.

This sounds clever, but it belies the amount of work that can go into such systems on the font end instead of on the back end. It also sounds as if the author hasn't used such a system to even a low level of critical mass to begin discovering any serendipity or finding any insight in their links.

This is all too correct. Sadly the older methods for writing, note taking, thinking, and memory have fallen by the wayside, so most literate moderns don't have the tradition most of (elite educated) Western culture has had for the past 2000+ years. The long tradition of commonplace books and their related versions including waste books, florilegium, sudelbücher, scholia, glossae, notebooks, anthologies, sylvae, table books, vade mecum, memoranda books, diaries, miscellanies, pocket books, thesauruses, etc. underlines your thesis well. The Zettelkasten, exactly like almost all of these others, is simply an iteration of the commonplace book instantiated into index card form. One of the reasons that Umberto Eco's advice on writing seems so similar to the zettelkasten method is that he was a medievalist scholar who was aware of these long traditions of writing, note taking, and memory and leveraged these for himself, though likely in a slightly different manner. Would anyone suggest that he didn't have a voluminous output or an outsized impact on society and culture? If one really wants to go crazy on the idea of backlinks and the ideas of creativity and invention, perhaps they ought to brush up on their Catalan and read some Ramon Llull? He was an 11th century philosopher and polymath who spent a lot of time not only memorizing much of his personal knowledge, but who invented combinatorial creative methods for juxtaposing his volumes of information to actively create new ideas. I guarantee no backlinking system held a match to his associative methods. Now if someone wanted to mix some mysticism into the fray, then perhaps there might be a competition... Many who are now writing so positively about Zettelkasten or backlinks are doing so in much the same way that humanist scholars like Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, and Philip Melanchthon did when writing about and re-popularizing commonplace books in the 1500s. The primary difference being that the chance that they leave as lasting a legacy is much smaller. Worse many of them are crediting Luhmann for the actual invention of the Zettelkasten when his is but one instantiation on a long evolution of many note taking devices over literal millennia. I'm still waiting for folks to spend more time talking about Carl Linnaeus' revolutionary invention and use of the index card. Or John Locke's system for creating a new indexing system for commonplace books. Generally we don't talk about these innovations because their users spent more of their time using their systems to get other more important things done for their legacies. In the end, the message seems clear, anyone can be incredibly productive; most of it boils down to having some sort of system of reading, thinking, note taking, and new production and sticking with it for a while. Have a system; use your system; evolve it slowly to work well for you and the way you think and work.

https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook

IFTTT.com sent out a marketing email today in which one of the five major headlines was "Automated Notebook": "Your Ideas and Inspiration in one place" with a big "Explore" button that goes to https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook

https://heptabase.com/

A visual note-taking tool for learning complex topics. (YC W22)

... notekeeping was an art, a performance, that took place on, around, and across paper. —Matthew Daniel Eddy

I'm also reminded of this in the framing of lack of performance as students I didn't know regularly asked me in college why I didn't take notes.

Only years on now do I realize it was because they and I had been taking the wrong types of notes.

Odd that this .pdf is garbling the highlighted text...

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

Eddy, Matthew Daniel (anticipated 2022). Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo173084820.html

https://fieldnotesbrand.com/apparel/remember-it-now-tee

Field Notes, a manufacturer of notebooks, uses the credo "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now." This is an fun restatement of the idea behind the power of the Feynman technique.

Link to Ahrens' version of this idea.

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

Looks like some reasonable export to other services to get your notes out of the Boox e-reader.

https://lifehacker.com/which-epaper-tablet-is-best-for-digital-notes-1848859314

Most people born since the advent of the filing cabinet and the computer have spent a lifetime using a hierarchical folder-based mental model for their knowledge. For greater value and efficiency one needs to get away from this model and move toward linking individual ideas together in ways that they can more easily be re-used.

To accomplish this many people use an index-based method that uses topical or subject headings which can be useful. However after even a few years of utilizing a generic tag (science for example) it may become overwhelmed and generally useless in a broad search. Even switching to narrower sub-headings (physics, biology, chemistry) may show the same effect. As a result one will increasingly need to spend time and effort to maintain and work at this sort of taxonomical system.

The better option is to directly link related ideas to each other. Each atomic idea will have a much more limited set of links to other ideas which will create a much more valuable set of interlinks for later use. Limiting your links at this level will be incredibly more useful over time.

One of the biggest benefits of the physical system used by Niklas Luhmann was that each card was required to be placed next to at least one card in a branching tree of knowledge (or a whole new branch had to be created.) Though he often noted links to other atomic ideas there was at least a minimum link of one on every idea in the system.

For those who have difficulty deciding where to place a new idea within their system, it can certainly be helpful to add a few broad keywords of the type one might put into an index. This may help you in linking your individual ideas as you can do a search of one or more of your keywords to narrow down the existing ones within your collection. This may help you link your new idea to one or more of those already in your system. This method may be even more useful and helpful for those who are starting out and have fewer than 500-1000 notes in their system and have even less to link their new atomic ideas to.

For those who have graphical systems, it may be helpful to look for one or two individual "tags" in a graph structure to visually see the number of first degree notes that link to them as a means of creating links between atomic ideas.

To have a better idea of a hierarchy of value within these ideas, it may help to have some names and delineate this hierarchy of potential links. Perhaps we might borrow some well ideas from library and information science to guide us? There's a system in library science that uses a hierarchical set up using the phrases: "broader terms", "narrower terms", "related terms", and "used for" (think alias or also known as) for cataloging books and related materials.

We might try using tags or index-like links in each of these levels to become more specific, but let's append "connected atomic ideas" to the bottom of the list.

Here's an example:

• broader terms (BT): [[physics]]
• narrower terms (NT): [[mechanics]], [[dynamics]]
• related terms (RT): [[acceleration]], [[velocity]]
• used for (UF) or aliases:
• connected atomic ideas: [[force = mass * acceleration]], [[$$v^2=v_0^2​+2aΔx$$]]

Chances are that within a particular text, one's notes may connect and interrelate to each other quite easily, but it's important to also link those ideas to other ideas that are already in your pre-existing body of knowledge.

See also: Thesaurus for Graphic Materials I: Subject Terms (TGM I) https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm1/ic.html

Newcomers to note taking practice using tools like Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, et al. often see very nice and clean-cut toy examples of note collections which are impeccably linked and maintained. This may also be the case for those who publish their notes (or portions thereof) in public settings on the web. In reality, this sort of rigidness and beautifully manicured practice almost never happens. There are varying levels of messiness in actual people's notes. Beginners should be aware of this and not hold themselves to too high a standard and use this as an excuse not to practice and get their work done.

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.

Historical note taking practices can tell us many things aside from just the ways in which textual information was managed. They can also tell us about how people lived, how they thought, how they used memory and writing and how these things were understood culturally.

We do however need to be careful in how we interpret these documents historically. We need to attempt to view them exegetically and not eisegetically. We also need to be careful to look at them from a "large world" perspective and not presume that small things had large and heavy influence on things to come in the future.

This quote is worth looking up and checking its context. Particularly I'm interested to know if the purpose of summarizing the source is to check one's understanding of the ideas as is done in the Feynman technique, or if the purpose is a reminder summary of the piece itself?

Link to Ahrens mentions of this technique for checking understanding. (Did he use the phrase Feynman in his text?)

Annotations or notes are definitely the first step towards having a collection of excerpts from one's reading. Where to put them can be a useful question though. Should they be in the margins for ease of creation or should they go into a notebook. Both of these methods may require later rewriting/revision or even moving into a more convenient permanent place. The idea "don't repeat yourself" (DRY) in programming can be useful to keep in mind, but the repetition of the ideas in writing and revision can help to quicken the memory as well as potentially surface additional ideas that hadn't occurred upon the notes' original capture.

Sönke Ahrens apparently missed this bit of advice.

link to the Arthur C. Clarke quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." which appeared in his 1962 book “Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible”.

Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

Footnote:

Sacchini (1614)—further references to “Sacchini” will be to this edition; warm thanks to Helmut Zedelmaier for sharing with me his photocopy of this edition. Further editions include: Sammieli (Saint-Mihiel, Lorraine), 1615; Ingolstadt 1616; Bordeaux 1617; Dillingen 1621; Leipzig 1711 and 1738; and Venetiis Britonum (Vannes, Brittany), 1866. It was translated into French (Sacchini [1786]) and German, Über die Lektüre, ihren Nutzen und die Vortheile sie gehörig anzuwenden, nach dem Lateini- Notes to Pages 70–72 283 schen des Sacchini teutsch bearbeitet und mit einem Anhange begleitet von Herrmann Walchner (Karlsruhe, 1832). I am grateful to Helmut Zedelmaier for the information about the German edition, which I have not seen. Sacchini’s De ratione . . . legendi was a source for Rainierio Carsughi, Ars bene scribendi (Rome, 1709), as discussed in Haskell (2003), 260. For the full range of Jesuit practices of note-taking (including notes taken under dictation) see Nelles (2007)—I am grateful to Paul Nelles for helpful conversations over the years. On Sacchini, see also Dainville (1978), 224–27.

Zedelmaier argues that scholarly methods of informa- tion management inspired bureaucratic information management; see Zedelmaier (2004), 203.

Go digging around here for links to the history of index cards, zettelkasten, and business/accounting.

Compare this with the waste book tradition in accounting.

I seem to recall a book or two like this that were on the best seller list in the 1990s and early 2000s based on a best selling Christian self help book, but with an edition that had a journal like reflection space. Other than the old word rapiaria, is there a word for this broad genre besides self-help journal?

An example might be Rhonda Byrne's book The Secret (Atria Books, 2006) which had a gratitude journal version (Atria Books, 2007, 978-1582702087).

Another example includes Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life (Zondervan, 2002) with a journal version (Zondervan, 2002, 978-0310807186).

There's also a sub-genre of diaries and journals that have these sort of preprinted quotes/reflections for each day in addition to space for one to write their own reflections.

Has anyone created a daily blogging/reflection platform that includes these sorts of things? One might repurpose the Hello Dolly WordPress plugin to create journal prompts for everyday writing and reflection.

Based on this definition of a "note", one must wonder if my public notes here on Hypothes.is are then not notes as they are tacitly circulated publicly from the first use. However they are still specifically and distinctly preparatory towards some future finished work, I just haven't yet decided which ultimate work in which they'll appear.

If Bernard of Clairvaux had secretaries take notes during his sermons for later revision and circulation, how did he compose them in the first place? Were they outlined and delivered mnemonically/orally with some extemporaneous embellishment?

Ann Blair's definition of note taking

Summary tk

Modern note taking has seen a reversion to pre-Renaissance practices in which they're much more temporary tools. Relatively few students take notes with an aim for reusing them past their immediate classroom settings or current term of study.

The revitalization of the idea of the zettelkasten in the late 2010s seems to be helping to reverse this idea. However, there aren't enough online versions of these sorts of notes which allow them to be used with other publics or even to be used and shared with other collaborators. There are some growing spaces seen in the social media note taking space like the anagora.org or the digital gardens space where this seems to have some potential to take off. There's also a small community on Hypothes.is which seems to be practicing this as well, though direct links between various collections of notes is not commonplace.

Early modern reference works, handbooks, and pedagogical practices created a sort of standardized set of subject headings amongst note takers.

A similar sort of effort could have been seen in the blogosphere of the early 2000s in which Technorati and their search functionality may have helped to standardize some of these same sorts of taxonomic issues within their product which was widely used at the time.

Blogs

Blogging is a form of public note sharing that isn't dissimilar to seventeenth-century note sharing practices in group settings.

This makes me wonder if it would be a useful product to have a highly linked note collection to sell to others in a modern context? It could be done entirely in text files for compatibility with Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, et al. Ideally it would be done in a more commonplace way with quotes and interlinked and could be expanded upon by the purchaser.

cross reference her paper:

Blair, Ann. “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (September 2004): 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1086/427303.

There is a parallel between these practices and the same sort of practices seen in social media posting, annotating, and bookmarking, however in the digital realm the user interface is so simple that one needn't put very much thought into the process and the results become almost instantaneously meaningless. Was this the case in the medieval context as well, or did the readers/compilers get more out of their practices?

https://shop.boox.com/

phy. In that sense, the reproduction of these three slips ironically resonates, if on a different scale, with the world tour of the mask of Tutankhamen. It refers, if not to the magic silence of a relic, at least to the ghostly parergonal quality of what French language calls a reliquat.

Hollier argues that Barthes' reproduced cards are not only completely divorced from their original context and use, but that they are reproduced for the sheen of reality and artistic fashion they convey to the reader. So much thought, value, and culture is lost in the worship of these items in this setting compared to their original context.

This is closely linked to the same sort of context collapse highlighted by the photo of Chief William Berens seated beside the living stones of his elders in Tim Ingold's Why Anthropology Matters. There we only appreciate the sense of antiquity, curiosity, and exoticness of an elder of a culture that is not ours. These rocks, by very direct analogy, are the index cards of the zettelkasten of an oral culture.

Chief William Berens seated beside the living stones of his elders; a picture taken by A. Irving Hallowell in 1930, between Grand Rapids and Pikangikum, Ontario, Canada. (American Philosophical Society)

Hollier, Denis. “Notes (On the Index Card).” October 112, no. Spring (2005): 35–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397642

Read: 2022-04-20 15:36

Interesting material on Barthes' use of note cards, though not in depth. Some interesting discussion on the idea of autobiography from a philosophical perspective.

The first five sections were interesting to me, the last two a bit denser and not as clear or interesting without additional context.

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?

Bonniot quoted in Michel Leiris, La Règle du jeu (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 1658.

Stéphane Mallarmé's son in law Dr. Bonniot indicates that "Mallarmé, as we know, used to jot down his first ideas, the first outlines of his work on eighths of half-sheets of school notebook size—notes he would keep in big wooden boxes of China tea.”

Given that Mallarmé lived from 1842 to 1898, his life predated the general rise and mass manufacture of the index card, but like many of his generation and several before, he relied on self-made note tools like standard sized sheets of paper cut in eighths which he kept in somewhat standard sized boxes.

https://winnielim.org/library/collections/personal-websites-with-a-notes-section/

Winnie has some excellent examples of people's websites with notes, similar to that of https://indieweb.org/note. But it feels a bit like she's approaching it from the perspective of deeper ideas and thoughts than one might post to Twitter or other social media. It would be worthwhile looking at examples of people's practices in this space that are more akin to note taking and idea building, perhaps in the vein of creating digital gardens or the use of annotation tools like Hypothes.is?

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.

It really kills me to see these types of jargon and acronyms popping up in the technology space around note taking. What do these really mean? Why should the average user care? It all feels like the sort of careless marketing and buzzwords like "second brain" or "MOC" (maps of content).

https://www.thunknotes.com/

https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1517207721866452992

It took me a long time (probably more than 7-8 years of working in the industry) to get somewhat decent at capturing notes in meetings.<br><br>How can one get better at note taking? What has worked well for you? What do good note takers do particularly well?

— Shreyas Doshi (@shreyas) April 21, 2022

This question and the responses are an interesting snapshot of note taking practices, particularly for work related meetings.

I too had hoped that Ann Blair would discuss her own methods of note taking, compiling, and analysis.

Perhaps we should interview her for the details?

Some scholars study annotations as part of material culture. Are they leaving out too much by solely studying those physically left in the books about which they were made, or should we instead also be looking at other sources like commonplace books, notebooks, note cards, digital spaces like e-readers that allow annotation, social media where texts are discussed, or even digital marginalia in services like Hypothes.is or Perusall?

Some of these forms of annotation allow a digital version of cut and paste which doesn't cause damage to the original text, which should be thought of as a good thing though it may separate the annotations from the original physical object.

In an interview with Le Monde in 1973, Barthes indicated that while his note taking practice was somewhat akin to that of a commonplace book where one might collect interesting passages, or quotations, he was also specifically writing down ideas which came to him, but doing so in "in the rhythm of a sentence, so that from that moment on, things are already taking on an existence as writing." This indicates that he's already preparing for future publications in which he might use those very ideas and putting them into a more finished form than most might think of when considering shorter fleeting notes used simply as a reminder. By having the work already done, he can easily put his own ideas directly into longer works.

Was there any evidence that his notes were crosslinked or indexed in a way so that he could more rapidly rearrange his ideas and pre-written thoughts to more easily copy them into longer articles or books?

While the three index cards of Barthes that were reproduced in the 1977 edition of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes may have been "primarily for reality-effect value as evidence of an expanding taste for historical documents" as argued by Hollier, it does indicate the value of the collection to Barthes himself as part of an autobiographical work.

I've noticed that one of the cards is very visibly about homosexuality in a time where public discussion of the term was still largely taboo. It would be interesting to have a full translation of the three cards to verify Hollier's claim, as at least this one does indicate the public consumption of the beginning of changing attitudes on previously taboo subject matter, even for a primarily English speaking audience which may not have been able to read or understand them, but would have at least been able to guess the topic.

At least some small subset of the general public might have grown up with an index-card-based note taking practice and guessed at what their value may have been though largely at that point index card note systems were generally on their way out.

'Memory crutch' implies a physical human failing that needs assistance rather than a phrase like aide-mémoire that doesn't draw that same attention.

In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.

Given this and the easy portability of index cards, should we instead of recommending notebooks, laptops, or systems like Cornell notes, recommend students take notes directly on their note cards and revise them from there? The physicality of the medium may also have other benefits in terms of touch, smell, use of colors on them, etc. for memory and easy regular use. They could also be used physically for spaced repetition relatively quickly.

Teachers using their index cards of notes physically in class or in discussions has the benefit of modeling the sort of note taking behaviors we might ask of our students. Imagine a classroom that has access to a teacher's public notes (electronic perhaps) which could be searched and cross linked by the students in real-time. This would also allow students to go beyond the immediate topic at hand, but see how that topic may dovetail with the teachers' other research work and interests. This also gives greater meaning to introductory coursework to allow students to see how it underpins other related and advanced intellectual endeavors and invites the student into those spaces as well. This sort of practice could bring to bear the full weight of the literacy space which we center in Western culture, for compare this with the primarily oral interactions that most teachers have with students. It's only in a small subset of suggested or required readings that students can use for leveraging the knowledge of their teachers while all the remainder of the interactions focus on conversation with the instructor and questions that they might put to them. With access to a teacher's card index, they would have so much more as they might also query that separately without making demands of time and attention to their professors. Even if answers aren't immediately forthcoming from the file, then there might at least be bibliographic entries that could be useful.

I recently had the experience of asking a colleague for some basic references about the history and culture of the ancient Near East. Knowing that he had some significant expertise in the space, it would have been easier to query his proverbial card index for the lived experience and references than to bother him with the burden of doing work to pull them up.

What sorts of digital systems could help to center these practices? Hypothes.is quickly comes to mind, though many teachers and even students will prefer to keep their notes private and not public where they're searchable.

Another potential pathway here are systems like FedWiki or anagora.org which provide shared and interlinked note spaces. Have any educators attempted to use these for coursework? The closest I've seen recently are public groups using shared Roam Research or Obsidian-based collections for book clubs.

Barthes kept his system to a 'strict format' of cards which were one quarter the size of his usual sheet of writing paper, though he did adjust the size over time as paper sizes standardized within Europe. Hollier indicates that the collection had considerable 'interior mobility' and the cards were constantly reordered with use. Barthes also apparently frequently annotated and altered his notes on cards, so they were also changing with use over time.

Did he make his own cards or purchase them? The sizing of his paper with respect to his cards might indicate that he made his own as it would have been relatively easy to fold his own paper in half twice and cut it up.

Were his cards numbered or marked so as to be able to put them into some sort of standard order? There's a mention of 'interior mobility' and if this was the case were they just floating around internally or were they somehow indexed and tethered (linked) together?

The fact that they were regularly used, revise, and easily reordered means that they could definitely have been used to elicit creativity in the same manner as Raymond Llull's combinatorial art, though done externally rather than within one's own mind.

Note the idea here about how easily portable a 1,000 card index must have been or alternately how important it must have been that Barthes traveled with it.

Walter Benjamin used a zettelkasten like note taking technique.

Roland Barthes' use of index cards has been documented by the following:

Krapp, P. (2006) ‘Hypertext Avant La Lettre’, in W. H. K. Chun & T. Keenan (eds), New Media, Old Theory: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge: 359-373.

Hollier, D. (2005) ‘Notes (on the Index Card)’, October 112 (Spring): 35-44.

Calvet, J.-L. (1994) Roland Barthes: A Biography. Trans. S. Wykes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Includes some research on the use Roland Barthes made of index cards for note taking to create his output.

Wait, what?! Someone's written an essay on index card use by these two?!

First time I've run across the French term fichier boîte (literally 'file box') for index card boxes or files.

As someone looking into note taking practices and aware of the idea of the zettelkasten, the suspense is building for me. I'm hoping this paper will have the payoff I'm looking for: a description of Roland Barthes' note taking methods!

https://kinopio.club/

A digital card-based system for taking and collecting notes.

The linking of one zettel to another can be a lot of work, but it is also the thing which improves the creativity and serendipity of the enterprise.

To a great extent, Hypothes.is has such a small footprint of users (in comparison to massive platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that it's never been a performative platform for me. As a design choice they have specifically kept their social media functionalities very sparse, so one also doesn't generally encounter the toxic elements that are rampant in other locations. This helps immensely. I might likely change my tune if it were ever to hit larger scales or experienced the Eternal September effect.

Beyond this, I mostly endeavor to write things for later re-use. As a result I'm trying to write as clearly as possible in full sentences and explain things as best I can so that my future self doesn't need to do heavy work or lifting to recreate the context or do heavy editing. Writing notes in public and knowing that others might read these ideas does hold my feet to the fire in this respect. Half-formed thoughts are often shaky and unclear both to me and to others and really do no one any good. In personal experience they also tend not to be revisited and revised or revised as well as I would have done the first time around (in public or otherwise).

Occasionally I'll be in a rush reading something and not have time for more detailed notes in which case I'll do my best to get the broad gist knowing that later in the day or at least within the week, I'll revisit the notes in my own spaces and heavily elaborate on them. I've been endeavoring to stay away from this bad habit though as it's just kicking the can down the road and not getting the work done that I ultimately want to have. Usually when I'm being fast/lazy, my notes will revert to highlighting and tagging sections of material that are straightforward facts that I'll only be reframing into my own words at a later date for reuse. If it's an original though or comment or link to something important, I'll go all in and put in the actual work right now. Doing it later has generally been a recipe for disaster in my experience.

There have been a few instances where a half-formed thought does get seen and called out. Or it's a thought which I have significantly more personal context for and that is only reflected in the body of my other notes, but isn't apparent in the public version. Usually these provide some additional insight which I hadn't had that makes the overall enterprise more interesting. Here's a recent example, albeit on a private document, but which I think still has enough context to be reasonably clear: https://hypothes.is/a/vmmw4KPmEeyvf7NWphRiMw

There may also be infrequent articles online which are heavily annotated and which I'm excerpting ideas to be reused later. In these cases I may highlight and rewrite them in my own words for later use in a piece, but I'll make them private or put them in a private group as they don't add any value to the original article or potential conversation though they do add significant value to my collection as "literature notes" for immediate reuse somewhere in the future. On broadly unannotated documents, I'll leave these literature notes public as a means of modeling the practice for others, though without the suggestion of how they would be (re-)used for.

All this being said, I will very rarely annotate things privately or in a private group if they're of a very sensitive cultural nature or personal in manner. My current set up with Hypothesidian still allows me to import these notes into Obsidian with my API key. In practice these tend to be incredibly rare for me and may only occur a handful of times in a year.

Generally my intention is that ultimately all of my notes get published in something in a final form somewhere, so I'm really only frontloading the work into the notes now to make the writing/editing process easier later.

Where

My annotations broadly flow into two spaces:

Obsidian

My private Obsidian-based vault is where I collect the notes and actively work on, modify, edit, and expand them if and when necessary. This is also the space where I'm broadly attempting to densely interlink them together for future use and publication in other venues. If I could, I would publish these all on the web, but I've yet to find a set up with a low enough admin tax that I can publish them inexpensively in a way I'd like them to appear (primarily with properly linked [[WikiLinks]]) while still owning them in my own space.

I've been experimenting around with using Blot.im as a solution to display them here https://notes.boffosocko.com/, but at present it's a very limited selection of my extant notes and doesn't include Webmention or other niceties I'd like to add. As it's a very alpha stage experiment I don't recommend anyone follow or use it and it may disappear altogether in the coming months.

WordPress

My main website uses WordPress. To a great extent, this is (now) primarily a back up location and the majority of the annotations are unpublished to the public, but are searchable to me on the back end.

I do, however, use it occasionally for quickly publishing and syndicating select annotations which I think others may find interesting or upon which I'm looking for comments/feedback and don't expect that the audience I'd like these from will find them natively on Hypothes.is' platform. An example of this might be a paper I was reading this weekend on Roland Barthes which discusses his reasonably well documented zettelkasten-like note taking practice. The article can be found here: https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/373-604-1-PB.pdf with the annotations seen here: https://docdrop.org/pdf/The-Card-Index-as-Creativity-Ma---Wilken-Rowan-upq8g.pdf/. To tip off others in the space, I made a post on my site with a bit of a puzzle and syndicated it to Twitter. A few hours later I posted a follow up with some additional details and links to my notes on hypothesis which got some useful feedback from Matthias Melcher on the Barthes paper as well as on a related paper I mentioned by Luhmann, particularly about German translation, with which I have little facility.

Another recent illustrative example was this annotation on the Library of Congress website about Vladimir Nabokov which was picked up by my website (though unpublished/not public) but which I syndicated to Twitter primarily to be able to send a notification to Eleanor Konik who I know is interested in the idea of World Building using historical facts and uses Obsidian in her work. (The @mention in the tweet is hiding in the image of the index card so that I could save text space in the main tweet.) Several others interested in note taking and zettelkasten for writing also noticed it and "liked" it. Not being on Hypothes.is to my knowledge much less following me there, neither Eleanor nor the others would have seen it without the Tweet.

Nabokov used index cards for his research & writing. In one index card for Lolita, he creates a "weight-heigh-age table for girls of school age" to be able to specify Lolita's measurements. He also researched the Colt catalog of 1940. #WorldBuildinghttps://t.co/i16Yc7CbJ8 pic.twitter.com/JSjXV50L3M

— Chris Aldrich (@ChrisAldrich) April 10, 2022

How

Obsidian

Getting annotations from Hypothes.is to Obsidian is a short two-step process which is reasonably well automated so that I don't spend a lot of time cutting/pasting/formatting.

I start with an IFTTT recipe that takes the RSS output of Hypothes.is and creates text files directly into my Obsidian vault. The results are quite rudimentary and only include the title of the document, the permalink of the Hypothes.is post, the highlighted text, and my annotation. It doesn't include the tags as RSS doesn't have a specification for these.

Second, I've set up Hypothesidian which has a much higher fidelity dovetail with the Hypothes.is API to get all the data and even the formatting set up I'm looking for. A reasonably well laid out set of instructions with a low/no code approach for it can be found at https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225. It allows importing annotations by a variety of methods including by date and by document URL. I've also made a small modification to it so that tags on Hypothes.is are turned into [[wikilinks]] in Obsidian instead of #tags which I only use sparingly.

All the IFTTT annotations will be ported individually into a specific Obsidian folder where I'll process them. I can then quickly use Hypothesidian to import the properly laid out version (using templates) of the notes with just a few keystrokes and then focus my time on revising my notes if necessary and then linking them to the appropriate notes already in my system. Finally I'll move them into the appropriate folder based on their content—typically one of the following: zettelkasten, wiki, commonplace, dictionary, or sources (for bibliographic use). Careful watchers will notice that I often use Hypothes.is' "page notes" functionality to create a bookmark-like annotation into which I will frequently post the URL of the page and occasionally a summary of a piece, these are imported into my system and are used as source/bibliographic information. I also have some dovetailing with Zotero as a bibliographic set up which feeds into this data as well.

This version which I've cobbled together works well for me so that I'm not missing anything, but there are definitely other similar processes available out there both for Obsidian (with plugins or scripts) as well as for other platforms. If I'm not mistaken, I think Readwise (a paid solution) has a set up for note transfer and formatting.

WordPress

As there isn't an extant Micropub client for Hypothes.is I initially used RSS as a transport layer to get my notes from Hypothes.is into WordPress. The fidelity isn't great in part because RSS doesn't include any tags. To get some slightly better presentation I set up a workflow using RSS output from Hypothes.is as input into an IFTTT workflow which outputs to a webhook that stands in as a Micropub client targeting my websites Micropub server. Some of the display on my site is assisted by using the Post Kinds plugin, which I know you've been working around yourself. The details may be above some, but I've outlined most of the broad strokes of how this is done in a tutorial at https://boffosocko.com/2020/01/21/using-ifttt-to-syndicate-pesos-content-from-social-services-to-wordpress-using-micropub/. In that example, I use the service Pocket as an example, but Hypothes.is specific information could easily be swapped out on a 1-1 basis.

A custom stand-alone or even an integrated micropub client for Hypothes.is would be a fantastic project if someone wanted to dig into the details and dovetail it with the Hypothes.is API.

Why

Ideally, I'm hoping that small pieces loosely joined and IndieWeb building blocks will allow me to use the tools and have the patterns I'm looking for, without a lot of work, so that I can easily make annotations with Hypothes.is but have and share (POSSE) my content on my own site in a way that works much the way many IndieWeb sites dovetail with Twitter or Mastodon.

I'm doing some portions of it manually at present, without a lot of overhead, but it would be fun to see someone add micropub and webmention capabilities to Hypothes.is or other IndieWeb building blocks. (I suspect it won't be Hypothes.is themselves as their team is very small and they're already spread thin on multiple other mission critical projects.)

In the end, I'm using Hypothes.is as a well designed and convenient tool for quickly making notes on digital documents. All the data is flowing to one of two other locations where I'm actually making use of it. While there is some social layer there, I'm getting email notifications through the Hypothes.is settings and the data from my responses just gets rolled back into my spaces which I try to keep open and IndieWeb friendly by default. At the same time, for those who want or need it, Hypothes.is' interface is a great way of reading, searching, sorting, and interacting with my notes in public, particularly until I get something specific and user friendly up to do it on my own domain.

My first view, even before any of the potential social annotation angle, is that in annotating or taking notes, I'm simultaneously having a conversation with the author of the work and/or my own thoughts on the topic at hand. Anything beyond that for me is "gravy".

I occasionally find that if I'm writing as I go that I'll have questions and take a stab only to find that the author provides an answer a few paragraphs or pages on. I can then look back at my thought to see where I got things right, where I may have missed or where to go from there. Sometimes I'll find holes that both the author and I missed. Almost always I'm glad that I spent the time thinking about the idea critically and got to the place myself with or without the author's help. I'm not sure that most others always do this, but it's a habit I've picked up from reading mathematics texts which frequently say things like "we'll leave it to the reader to verify or fill in the gaps" or "this is left as an exercise". Most readers won't/don't do this, but my view is that it's almost always where the actual engagement and learning from the material stems.

Sometimes I may be writing out pieces to clarify them for myself and solidify my understanding while other times, I'm using the text as a prompt for my own writing. My intention most often is to add my own thoughts in a significantly well-thought out manner such that I can in the near future reuse these annotations/notes in essays or other writing. Some of this comes from broad experience of keeping a commonplace book for quite a while, and some of it has been influenced on reading about the history of note taking practices by others. One of the best summations of the overall practice I've seen thus far is Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes (Create Space, 2017), though I find there are some practical steps missing that can only be found by actually practicing his methods in a dedicated fashion for several months before one sees changes in their thought patterns, the questions they ask, and the work that stems from it all. And by work, I mean just that. The whole enterprise is a fair amount of work, though I find it quite fun and very productive over time.

In my youth, I'd read passages and come up with some brilliant ideas. I might have underlined the passage and written something like "revisit this and expand", but I found I almost never did and upon revisiting it I couldn't capture the spark of the brilliant idea I had managed to see before. Now I just take the time out to write out the entire thing then and there with the knowledge that I can then later revise it and work it into something bigger later. Doing the work right now has been one of the biggest differences in my practice, and I'm finding that projects I want to make progress on are moving forward much more rapidly than they ever did.

A photo of Roland Barthes from 1963 featured in Picturing Barthes: The Photographic Construction of Authorship (Oxford University Press, 2020) DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0007

There appears to be in index card file behind him in the photo, which he may have used for note taking in the mode of a zettelkasten.

link to journal article notes on:

Wilken, Rowan. “The Card Index as Creativity Machine.” Culture Machine 11 (2010): 7–30. https://culturemachine.net/creative-media/

In case I've not explicitly saved the idea of ars excerpendi into the notebook.

Jeremias Drexel became one of the earliest educators and reformers to recommend against the ars memoria and instead use the art of excerpting as a means external written memory.

While students apparently have ignored the instructions in the past resulting in breaches of academic integrity, teachers can prompt active learning even during exams by prompting students to write answers to questions on open book/open notes in their own words.