A page from the commonplace book of William Stukeley, with a sketch plan of standing stones at Avebury, southern England.

In both cases – speech and writing – the materiality of language undergoes a transformation (to audible sounds or written signs) which in turn produces a mental shift.

Hugh makes the Ark, allegorically, a prefiguration of the Church(para. 6), using an exegetical commonplace going back at least to St. Ambrose

The credibility bookcase, with its towering, idiosyncratic array of worn volumes, is itself an affectation. The expert could choose to speak in front of his art prints or his television or his blank white walls, but he chooses to be framed by his books. It is the most insidious of aesthetic trends: one that masquerades as pure intellectual exercise.

Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., sends personalized URLs to customers with a list of handpicked recommendations.

I kept losing content that I edited out and then wanted to put it back in.

The students in Raphael Folsom’s Spanish Borderlands course read primary sources on a weekly basis. Rather than taking notes on 3×5 index cards as we did when I was a kid, the students take the same type of note in the Drupal system. They fill out some basic bibliographic information about the source, write a short summary of the source, and then take a note about an interesting facet of the text.

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

This principle requires us to expand our definition of “publication” beyond the usual narrow sense. Few people will ever publish their work in an academic journal or even on a blog. But everything that we write down and share with someone else counts: notes we share with a friend, homework we submit to a professor, emails we write to our colleagues, and presentations we deliver to clients all count as knowledge made public.

The second article is from Tom Critchlow titled Building a Digital Garden. What I really like about Tom's piece is his discussion of the idea of "non-performative blogging" in your personal space on the web.I love this idea. Instead of "content marketing" we can use our websites to get back to what made the web awesome while also creating better resources for ourselves and our users.

Although I’ve already got a blog (you’re reading it!), I decided not to mirror my book reviews here. I post normal content so infrequently that anyone who wanted to read the blog but wasn’t interested in book reviews would be inundated with content they didn’t want. In the end, I spun up an additional WordPress instance on my web space (something that my host, Krystal Hosting, makes very easy to do) to keep the reviews completely isolated from everything else.

The main thing that dissuaded him, he says, is that “I wouldn’t want to sell a book to a philistine, which is what every bookseller has to do.”

I want to extract a reusable piece out of it in a way that it can be connected to many different things eventually. I want to make a home page for this idea or fact. My hub for thinking about this.

Catch up by reading my last post of digital streams, campfires and gardens.

How do you manage information flows? If anyone is using a personal wiki-style long term information tool I’d love to hear from you!

The complementary principle to dividing isgathering and collecting. Eachnew composition can also be conceived as a place into which culled and rec-ollected matters are gathered. The very concept of reading in Latin is basedonthenotionof‘‘gathering,’’Latinlegere, ‘‘to read’’ having as its root mean-ing ‘‘to collect up, to gather by picking, plucking, and the like.’’ The Greekverblegōhad a similar range of meaning, from ‘‘to lay’’ something down or‘‘to lay asleep’’ to ‘‘to lay [things] in order,’’ hence ‘‘to gather, pick up,’’ ‘‘torelate,’’ ‘‘to speak purposefully.’’ The name of one venerable and essential typeof ancient and medieval encyclopedia puns on these closely allied verbs: theflorilegium, ‘‘flower-culling’’ (with a pun on ‘‘flower-reading’’), a collection ofsayings, maxims, and stories collected from past works, sometimes quotedexactly (though in mnemonically brief segments), but often just summarized.The best known of these through much of the Middle Ages was ValeriusMaximus’sDicta et facta memorabilia(early first century..), but there aremany other examples. Indeed, the premodern encyclopedia itself is a sort ofmemory-book, the flowers of (one’s extensive) reading gathered up in someorderly arrangement for the purpose of quick, secure recollection in connec-tion with making a new composition. After all, this is one essential purposeof encyclopedias even today.

Gardens were also popular, the medieval sort of garden,with orderly beds of medicinal plants and fruit trees separated by grass andsurrounded by a wall. Undoubtedly, gardens became popular with monasticand later writers because of the Song of Songs, a preeminent text for mysticalmeditation. Various other Biblical structures were often used too: the Taber-nacle described in Exodus; the Temple described in  Kings; the Jerusalemcitadel envisioned by Ezekiel and often conflated with the Heavenly City ofthe Apocalypse. We now would never think to organize an encyclopedia ofknowledge on the plan of Noah’s Ark, but for a clerical audience to whomthis text was as familiar as the order of the alphabet is to us—why not? It is asimple (if large), clearly arranged (if imaginary) composition site, containingmany useful compartments with a straightforward route among them, a sortof foundational map to use in arranging your materials (orresin Latin) as yougather them into the location of your new composition from the networksof your experiences, including of course all your experiences of books, music,and other arts. Thus, in the course of an ideal medieval education, in addi-tion to acquiring a great many segments of scriptural and classical texts, onealso would acquire an extensive repertoire of image-schemes in which to putthem, both ‘‘to lay them away’’ and ‘‘to collect them’’ in new arrangementson later occasions.

Re-collection is not passive, but rather an activity involvinghuman will and thought; it is often defined as a form of reasoning. One mayconveniently think of this activity in spatial terms, as if memories have beenstored in a variety of places and must be called together in a common placewhere we can become aware of them, where we can ‘‘see’’ them again andknow them in the present.

Twenty Stories Bookmobile, which left L.A. traffic for Providence, Rhode Island, in 2018

Now all information belongs to a single category, and it all pours through a single channel.

To have, but maybe not to read. Like Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” seems to have been an “event” book that many buyers didn’t stick with; an analysis of Kindle highlights suggested that the typical reader got through only around 26 of its 700 pages. Still, Piketty was undaunted.

“In his influential De Copia (1512),” writes Professor Richard Yeo, “Erasmus advised that an abundant stock of quotations and maxims from classical texts be entered under various loci (places) to assist free-flowing oratory.” Arranged under ‘Heads’ and recorded as ‘common-places’ (loci communes), these commonplace books could be consulted for speeches and written compositions designed for various situations — in the law court, at ceremonial occasions, or in the dedication of a book to a patron. Typical headings included the classical topics of honour, virtue, beauty, friendship, and Christian ones such as God, Creation, faith, hope, or the names of the virtues and vices.

Neither ought anything to be collected whilst you are busied in reading; if by taking the pen in hand the thread of your reading be broken off, for that will make the reading both tedious and unpleasant.

Interestingly, I’ve found that Kindle is useful in this respect. I buy Kindle versions of books that I need for work, and highlight passages and bookmark pages as I go. And when I’ve finished the software obligingly has a collection of all the passages I’ve highlighted.

The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 Paperback – Illustrated, September 2, 2000

Fifty-Two Stories Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 14, 2020 by Anton Chekhov (Author), Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)

Now, if I notice a moment in a past Are.na conversation that highlights the topic, I add it to the topic's channel. Now the text block sits in the middle of a Venn diagram — both part of a chat log and part of a curated selection from conversations I have.

Writing in the margins has always been an essential activity for students.

Gary Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without “re-story-ation.”

I have read a heap of books in my time; I am a scholar in my own way

“The idea of a ‘blog’ needs to get over itself,” wrote Joel Hooks in a post titled Stop Giving af and Start Writing More. “Everybody is treating writing as a ‘content marketing strategy’ and using it to ‘build a personal brand’ which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.” It is almost as if he had reached down into my soul and figured out why I no longer had the vigor I once had for sharing on my personal blog. For far too long, I was trying to brand myself. Posts became few and far between. I still shared a short note, aside, once in a while, but much of what I shared was for others rather than myself.

Despite having something that worked sort of like a blog, I maintained various resources and links of other neat ideas I found around the web. It was a digital garden that I tended, occasionally plucking weeds and planting new ideas that may someday blossom into something more.

My blog posts were merely random thoughts — bits and pieces of my life.

“Extraordinary Commonplaces,” Robert Darnton

Early compilations involved various combinations of four crucial operations: storing, sorting, selecting, and summarizing, which I think of as the four S’s of text management. We too store, sort, select, and summarize information, but now we rely not only on human memory, manuscript, and print, as in earlier centuries, but also on computer chips, search functions, data mining, and Wikipedia, along with other electronic techniques.

About LibriVox LibriVox Objective To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. Our Fundamental Principles Librivox is a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project Librivox donates its recordings to the public domain Librivox is powered by volunteers Librivox maintains a loose and open structure Librivox welcomes all volunteers from across the globe, in all languages

Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.

The future of eBooks is not in the production of digital photocopies you can read by the pool. The future of eBooks lies in re-imagining the book as an open, easily accessible, immersive experience; a connected community of discovery. Scott Abel The Content Wrangler

e-book

David could be a terror when you got it wrong, but when you got it right—when you wrote something that made him smile—he’d make you feel like you’d hung the moon. I can remember coming to his office after closing a piece on day laborers and him looking at me and saying, “I was just talking about how fucking great your piece was this week.” I was a kid who had never felt like he’d done anything great for anyone. And it was only when working for David that I came to understand that I might actually be “good” (to say nothing of great) at anything. Part of that realization wasn’t just in what David said about my own work, but where he set the bar. David would bring in writers from Vanity Fair to hold workshops with the staff. He’d introduce me to journalists who were doing incredible work. He’d clip articles from the New Yorker or Esquire and leave them on my desk with a note attached: “This is the level of work I expect of you.”

My summaries of books I've read and liked

Pedro’s book “The Master Algorithm” takes readers on a journey through the five dominant paradigms of machine learning research on a quest for the master  algorithm. Along the way, Pedro wanted to abstract away from the mechanics so that a broad audience, from the CXO to the consumer, can understand how machine learning is shaping our lives

Okay this is absolutely blowing up my timeline in the last 24 hrs so I'm gonna bite— *Now brainstorming: 100 opinions on books & reading* (1 like = 1 opinion. Max 100. RT if you'd like some hot takes about antilibraries, bookstores, reading habits & more!)

you will find better treatise for all individual topics covered; for example:- What we understand about the brain is essentially covered by Tim Urban in his article "Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future" in, I might add, more entertaining manner. Alternatively, for a much more in-depth look, look at the book "Principles of Neural Design"- The short time Oliveira spends on superintelligence is better covered by Bostrom in his book "Superintelligence", which Oliveira references- What an algorithm is and what can be computed is better covered by "What algorithms want"- The "common sense" aspect of AI is better covered by "Common Sense, the Turing Test and the Quest for Real AI"- On the title promise, how science is "redefining humanity", the Digital Mind is relatively light on, aside from broadly listing topics that we need to think about like ownership and rights. For a (much) further-taken discussion on this, look at Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus, for example.

a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the author of payment. I think most of the filesharing community feels that the record industry is a vestigal organ that will slowly fall off and die – I don’t know to what extent that feeling would extend to publishing houses since they are to some extent a different animal. In the end, I think that regular people will never feel very guilty “stealing” from a faceless corporation, or to a lesser extent, a multi-millionaire like King.

I assume they are primarily produced by individuals like me – bibliophiles who want to share their favorite books with others. They likely own hundreds of books, and when asked what their favorite book is look at you like you are crazy before rattling of 10-15 authors, and then emailing you later with several more. The next time you see them, they have a bag of 5-10 books for you to borrow.

Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore – a download does not translate to a lost sale.

With digital copies, it is more difficult to assign cost. The initial file costs x dollars to create, but you can make a million copies of that file for no cost. Therefore, it is hard to assign a specific value to a digital copy of a work except as it relates to lost sales.

I do not pretend that uploading or downloading unpurchased electronic books is morally correct, but I do think it is more of a grey area than some of your readers may.

three terrific popular books by Ben Goldacre - "Bad science", "Bad pharma" and "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that"

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference is a 2010 book by Cordelia Fine, written to debunk the idea that men and women are hardwired with different interests. The author criticizes claimed evidence of the existence of innate biological differences between men and women's minds as being faulty and exaggerated, and while taking a position of agnosticism with respect to inherent differences relating to interest/skill in 'understanding the world' versus 'understanding people', reviews literature demonstrating how cultural and societal beliefs contribute to sex differences.

Green has built up a stable, useful relationship with the software, mostly opening it to scribble down interesting lines that occur to him, or that are spoken to him, to use later on in his writing.

In the case of library users, there is a strong tie between technology and library use. For instance, the technology-rich profiles of Information Omnivores might suggest that their gadgets could provide all the media and data they could possibly need—yet they still patronize libraries at high levels.

A personal blog is an online journal, your day to day thoughts published on the web rather than in (or in addition to) a physical notebook. It is an unfinished story, a scratch pad, an outboard brain; and while there are highlights it is more the journey that's the important aspect.

Goodreads is nearly useless for finding recommendations

From quill and ink, to the printing press and book formatting, to digital applications and platforms, annotation is - and always has been - tightly coupled to the technologies of the day.

Research. As zero-textbook-cost degrees are implemented across the country, research could be conducted to analyze the impact of degree establishment on student access and success, as well as on faculty pedagogical practice. Metrics related to access and success might include credit loads, withdrawal rates, persistence rates, pass rates, and actual cost savings.

Following his abdication in 2004, Norodom Sihanouk, the former King of Cambodia, began to share his remarks in a rather creative way. Sihanouk established a website which, despite his passing in 2012, remains updated and well-organized to this day.7http://norodomsihanouk.info The archive includes selections of Sihanouk’s personal correspondences, handwritten recipes, musical compositions, and film commentary. It also includes many annotated newspaper and magazine articles.

Kahle has been critical of Google's book digitization, especially of Google's exclusivity in restricting other search engines' digital access to the books they archive. In a 2011 talk Kahle described Google's 'snippet' feature as a means of tip-toeing around copyright issues, and expressed his frustration with the lack of a decent loaning system for digital materials. He said the digital transition has moved from local control to central control, non-profit to for-profit, diverse to homogeneous, and from "ruled by law" to "ruled by contract". Kahle stated that even public-domain material published before 1923, and not bound by copyright law, is still bound by Google's contracts and requires permission to be distributed or copied. Kahle reasoned that this trend has emerged for a number of reasons: distribution of information favoring centralization, the economic cost of digitizing books, the issue of library staff without the technical knowledge to build these services, and the decision of the administrators to outsource information services

The position of machine products in the civilized scheme of consumption serves to point out the nature of the relation which subsists between the canon of conspicuous waste and the code of proprieties in consumption. Neither in matters of art and taste proper, nor as regards the current sense of the serviceability of goods, does this canon act as a principle of innovation or initiative. It does not go into the future as a creative principle which makes innovations and adds new items of consumption and new elements of cost. The principle in question is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a positive law. It is a regulative rather than a creative principle. It very rarely initiates or originates any usage or custom directly. Its action is selective only. Conspicuous wastefulness does not directly afford ground for variation and growth, but conformity to its requirements is a condition to the survival of such innovations as may be made on other grounds. In whatever way usages and customs and methods of expenditure arise, they are all subject to the selective action of this norm of reputability; and the degree in which they conform to its requirements is a test of their fitness to survive in the competition with other similar usages and customs.

To understand what has happened, we only need to look at the history of writing and printing to note two very different consequences (a) the first, a vast change over the last 450 years in how the physical and social worlds are dealt with via the inventions of modern science and governance, and (b) that most people who read at all still mostly read fiction, self-help and religion books, and cookbooks, etc.* (all topics that would be familiar to any cave-person).

Europe’s oldest intact book has been discovered after being closed inside a hermit monk’s coffin for over 400 years. It will go on display at the British Library as part of an exhibition featuring prized manuscripts like the Lindisfarne Gospels and Beowulf. The show is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see how medieval Anglo-Saxons depicted their own culture through early writings.

we should beware the peril of books as glorified wallpaper.

Pomerantz, Jeffrey. Metadata. The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. The MIT Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-0-262-52851-1. $15,95

Everything Notebook

NCERT books are the best and popular resources for the students who are serious about their career and studies and willing to prepare for the entry level exams. It is the most demand able and easiest way to improve your progress.

technology companies have made it work that way. Ebook stores from Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Barnes and Noble all follow broadly the same rules. You’re buying a licence to read, not a licence to own.

There’s bad news for users of Microsoft’s eBook store: the company is closing it down, and, with it, any books bought through the service will no longer be readable.To soften the blow, the company has promised to refund any customers who bought books through the store (a clue that there may not have been that many of them, hence the closure. Microsoft did not offer further comment).

look

commonplace book

Isaacson pointed out that more than 7,000 pages from Da Vinci’s notebooks survived to today–a stretch of 500 years. He asked how many of our tweets and Facebook posts will survive even 50 years. Paper, it turns out, is a durable medium of information storage.

"The blog serves as a kind of steam valve for me," he says. "I put stuff out there that I'm forming an opinion about, and another blogger starts arguing with me and giving me feedback, and I haven't even finished what I was posting!"

Margaret Atwood

The main thing that dissuaded him, he says, is that “I wouldn’t want to sell a book to a philistine, which is what every bookseller has to do.”

Jean Prévost’s “La Première Partie des Subtiles et Plaisantes Inventions,” the earliest known important conjuring book, printed in Lyons in 1584.

Jean Prévost’s “La Première Partie des Subtiles et Plaisantes Inventions,” the earliest known important conjuring book, printed in Lyons in 1584.

Nigel Travis, who is the Executive Chairman of the Board for Dunkin’ Brands. He has an exercise that he calls “define your demise” (he describes this in his book, The Challenge Culture: Why the Most Successful Organizations Run on Pushback).

I uncovered the miracle of the bright cross, as I found it in books

Classics Book Club

A Taste of Honey

The Girl on the Boat

The Robots of Dawn

without downloading or reading them.

Many of the university’s holdings “were invisible to the world,” Coleman says. Google’s involvement promised to change that.

“It’s hard to imagine going through a day doing the work we academics do without touching something that wouldn’t be there without Google Book Search,”

a persistent cultural challenge: how to balance copyright and fair use and keep everybody—authors, publishers, scholars, librarians—satisfied. That work still lies ahead.

Avid lovers of books and nature, they conspired to marry the two in a vast library woven into the Western landscape — a literary refuge where patrons could spend the night among the books, attend lectures and maybe catch a trout.

literature became data

one particular book shop in Australia has embraced the exact opposite policy – instead of focusing on the cover, they want people to focus on the contents without even knowing what the cover looks like.

system of books,

Furthermore, the results could focus on drawing the user into the virtual app space (immersive) or could use the portable nature of tablet to extend the experience into the physical space inhabited by the user (something I have called ’emersive’). Generative (emersive) Books that project coloured ambient light and/or audio into a darkened space Generative (immersive) Books that display abstracted video/audio from cameras/microphone, collaged or augmented with pre-designed content Books that contain location specific content from the internet combined with pre-authored/designed content

English professors, because literature provided teachable content, something to write about other limn oneself or arbitrarily chosen subjects in which the teacher was not an expert.

but this edu-cation did not include classical learning, literacy in Greek and Latin, or formal training in rhetoric, except in a few elite schools for boys destined for the univer-sity

read the Bible and keep reflective journals

But allow him to acquire experience in those objects, his feeling becomes more exact and nice: He not only perceives the beauties and defects of each part, but marks the distinguishing species of each quality, and assigns it suitable praise or blame.