3,941 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2022
    1. https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/notes-against-note-taking-systems

      The writer rails against note taking systems, and then suggests a note taking system (commonplace books)?!? What a sad circular argument.

      Of course, far too many get stuck in the idea of productivity porn and that is a problem... rail against that...

    1. Wieman, Carl. “How to Become a Successful Physicist.” Physics Today 75, no. 9 (September 2022): 46–52. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.5082

      The details here are also good in teaching almost all areas of knowledge, particularly when problem solving is involved.

      How might one teach the practice of combinatorial creativity?

    1. Cattell, J. McKeen. “Methods for a Card Index.” Science 10, no. 247 (1899): 419–20.


      Columbia professor of psychology calls for the creation of a card index of references to reviews and abstracts for areas of research. Columbia was apparently doing this in 1899 for the psychology department.

      What happened to this effort? How similar was it to the system of advertising cards for books in Germany in the early 1930s described by Heyde?

    1. Dwyer, Edward J. “File Card Efficiency.” Journal of Reading 26, no. 2 (1982): 171–171.

      Ease of use in writing and grading with short assignments by using 4 x 6" index cards in classrooms.

      This sounds like some of the articles from 1912 and 1917 about efficiency of card indexes for teaching.

      I'm reminded of some programmed learning texts that were card-based (or really strip-based since they were published in book form) in the 1960s and 1970s. Thse books had small strips with lessons or questions on the front with the answers on the reverse. One would read in strips through the book from front to back and then start the book all over again on page one on the second row of strips and so on.

    1. Rotzel, Grace. “Card File.” The English Journal 6, no. 10 (December 1917): 691–691. https://doi.org/10.2307/801092.

      Follow up note to prior article indicating some sorter term benefits of filing student work and taking notes on it for helping to create improvement over time.

    1. Sutherland, Lois Gilbert. “The English Teacher’s Card File.” The English Journal 6, no. 2 (1917): 111–12. https://doi.org/10.2307/801508.


      Lois Gilbert Sutherland suggests using a card index system for multiple uses in the classroom including notes, administration, and general productivity.

      There are so many parallels from this to how people are using platforms like Obsidian, Roam Research, and Notion in 2022.

    1. Breitenbach, H. P. “The Card Index for Teachers.” The School Review 20, no. 4 (1912): 271–72.


      Apparently in 1912, the card index was little known to teachers... this isn't the sort of use case I was expecting here...

      The general gist of this short note is an encouraging one to suggest that instead of traditional grade books, which are still used heavily in 2022, teachers should use rolodex like cards for keeping attendance and notes on a student's progress.

      Presumably this never caught on. While some elementary teachers still use older paper gradebooks, many others have transferred to digital LMS platforms.

    1. https://ymlaenwelsh.com/2018/11/11/on-word-field-farming/

      Creating world fields (groups of words related to a particular area or field of knowledge) can be helpful for acquiring vocabulary in a new language. There's no research here to back up the claim, but it's an interesting word game and method for familiarize oneself with a small area and acquire new words related to an area or various related stem words.

    1. On this point, for instance, thebook on John Dewey's technique of thought by Bogos-lovsky, The Logic of Controversy, and C.E. Ayers' essayon the gospel of technology in Philosophy Today andTomorrow, edited by Hook and Kallen.

      The Technique of Controversy: Principles of Dynamic Logic by Boris B. Bogoslovsky https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Technique_of_Controversy/P-rgAwAAQBAJ?hl=en

      What was Dewey's contribution here?


      The Gospel of Technology by C. E. Ayers https://archive.org/details/americanphilosop00kall/page/24/mode/2up

  2. Sep 2022
    1. Federal Reserve Bank, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in2019” (Washington DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2020).
    2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
    1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/

      Good overview article of some of the psychology research behind misinformation in social media spaces including bots, AI, and the effects of cognitive bias.

      Probably worth mining the story for the journal articles and collecting/reading them.

    2. A 2015 study by OSoMe researchers Emilio Ferrara and Zeyao Yang analyzed empirical data about such “emotional contagion” on Twitter and found that people overexposed to negative content tend to then share negative posts, whereas those overexposed to positive content tend to share more positive posts.
    3. In a set of groundbreaking studies in 1932, psychologist Frederic Bartlett told volunteers a Native American legend about a young man who hears war cries and, pursuing them, enters a dreamlike battle that eventually leads to his real death. Bartlett asked the volunteers, who were non-Native, to recall the rather confusing story at increasing intervals, from minutes to years later. He found that as time passed, the rememberers tended to distort the tale's culturally unfamiliar parts such that they were either lost to memory or transformed into more familiar things.

      early study relating to both culture and memory decay

      What does memory decay scale as? Is it different for different levels of "stickiness"?

    1. The fact that too much order can impede learning has becomemore and more known (Carey 2014).
    2. After looking at various studies fromthe 1960s until the early 1980s, Barry S. Stein et al. summarises:“The results of several recent studies support the hypothesis that

      retention is facilitated by acquisition conditions that prompt people to elaborate information in a way that increases the distinctiveness of their memory representations.” (Stein et al. 1984, 522)

      Want to read this paper.

      Isn't this a major portion of what many mnemotechniques attempt to do? "increase distinctiveness of memory representations"? And didn't he just wholly dismiss the entirety of mnemotechniques as "tricks" a few paragraphs back? (see: https://hypothes.is/a/dwktfDiuEe2sxaePuVIECg)

      How can one build or design this into a pedagogical system? How is this potentially related to Andy Matuschak's mnemonic medium research?

    1. I recommended Paul Silvia’s bookHow to write a lot, a succinct, witty guide to academic productivity in the Boicean mode.

      What exactly are Robert Boice and Paul Silvia's methods? How do they differ from the conventional idea of "writing"?

    1. Courtney, Jennifer Pooler. “A Review of Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts.” The Journal of Effective Teaching 7, no. 1 (2007): 74–77.

      Review of: Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/9248.

    2. Murray, D. M. (2000). The craft of revision (4th ed.). Boston: Harcourt College Publish-ers.
    3. Elbow, P. (1999). Options for responding to student writing. In R. Straub (Ed.), Asourcebook for responding to student writing (pp. 197-202). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20120122115952/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/10/13/one-pocket-rule/

      Noguchi Yukio had a "one pocket rule" which they first described in “「超」整理法 (cho seiri ho)”. The broad idea was to store everything in one place as a means of saving time by not needing to search in multiple repositories for the thing you were hunting for. Despite this advice the Noguchi Filing System didn't take complete advantage of this as one would likely have both a "home" and an "office" system, thus creating two pockets, a problem that exists in an analog world, but which can be mitigated in a digital one.

      The one pocket rule can be seen in the IndieWeb principles of owning all your own data on your own website and syndicating out from there. Your single website has the entire store of all your material which makes search much easier. You don't need to recall which platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al.) you posted something on, you can save time and find the thing much more quickly by searching one place.


      This principle also applies to zettelkasten and commonplace books (well indexed), which allow you to find the data or information you put into them quickly and easily.

    1. https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2005/05/tools-for-serious-readers.html

      Interesting (now discontinued) reading list product from Levenger that in previous generations may have been covered by a commonplace book but was quickly replaced by digital social products (bookmark applications or things like Goodreads.com or LibraryThing.com).

      Presently I keep a lot of this sort of data digitally myself using either/both: Calibre or Zotero.

    1. Pen + Gear Graph-Ruled Index Cards. They’re a bit on the thin side, but they take ink well, without feathering or bleeding through. And they’re printed with a very fine light-blue grid (five squares to the inch) that doesn’t get in the way of what one is writing or drawing or mapping. These cards are much better than Oxford or Staples grid cards, and a fraction of the cost of Exacompta: 48¢ for 100 cards. Highly recommended.

      https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2017/08/index-card-recommendation.html

      Walmart has these index cards, but only in 3x5" format.

    1. Sword, Helen. “‘Write Every Day!’: A Mantra Dismantled.” International Journal for Academic Development 21, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 312–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2016.1210153.

      Preliminary thoughts prior to reading:<br /> What advice does Boice give? Is he following in the commonplace or zettelkasten traditions? Is the writing ever day he's talking about really progressive note taking? Is this being misunderstood?

      Compare this to the incremental work suggested by Ahrens (2017).

      Is there a particular delineation between writing for academic research and fiction writing which can be wholly different endeavors from a structural point of view? I see citations of many fiction names here.

      Cross reference: Throw Mama from the Train quote

      A writer writes, always.

    1. https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2010/01/card-file-steals-scene-in-tv-debut.html

      The card index in the episode of “Betty, Girl Engineer,” from the second season of Father Knows Best, first aired on April 11, 1956, is ostensibly a rolodex, though the teacher hands out the cards without copying them.

      Lots of sexism in this episode...

    1. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3641225-mcconnell-throws-shade-on-grahams-proposed-national-abortion-ban/

      I've recently run across a few examples of a pattern that should have a name because it would appear to dramatically change the outcomes. I'm going to term it "decisions based on possibilities rather than realities". It's seen frequently in economics and politics and seems to be a form of cognitive bias. People make choices (or votes) about uncertain futures, often when there is a confluence of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and these choices are dramatically different than when they're presented with the actual circumstances in practice.

      A recent example was a story about a woman who was virulently pro-life who when presented with a situation required her to switch her position to pro-choice.

      Another relates to choices that people want to make about where their children might go to school versus where they actually send them, and the damage this does to public education.

      Let's start collecting examples of these quandaries at all levels of making choices in the real world.


      What is the relationship to this with the mental exercise of "descending into the particular"?

      Does this also potentially cause decision fatigue in cases of voting spaces when constituents are forced to vote for candidates on thousands of axes which they may or may not agree with?

    1. Bjorn, Genevive A., Laura Quaynor, and Adam J. Burgasser. “Reading Research for Writing: Co-Constructing Core Skills Using Primary Literature.” Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice 7, no. 1 (January 14, 2022): 47–58. https://doi.org/10.5195/ie.2022.237

      Found via:

      #AcademicTwitter I survived crushing reading loads in grad school by creating a straightforward method for analyzing primary literature, called #CERIC. Saved my sanity and improved my focus. @PhDVoice. Here’s the free paper - https://t.co/YehbLQNEqJ

      — Genevive Bjorn (@GeneviveBjorn) September 11, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      I'm curious how this is similar to the traditions of commonplace books and zettelkasten from a historical perspective.

    2. However, the ongoing struggle to develop literature synthesis at thedoctoral level suggests that students’ critical reading skills are notsufficiently developed with commonly used strategies and methods(Aitchison et al., 2012; Boote & Beile, 2005).
    1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jeff-bezos-under-fire-after-tweet-about-queen-s-b2165039.html

      Jeff Bezos should know better than to punch down like this. Uju Anya got put in Twitter jail for not deleting her post which Twitter took down anyway.

      Twitter taking down Dr. Anya's post is disingenuous with respect to the tons of crap that they leave up... and much of that far worse than the content here.

      read on 2022-09-09 at 1:58 PM

    1. The list is compiled each year by the Marist Mindset team of Professor Tommy Zurhellen, Associate Professor of English; Dr. Vanessa Lynn, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice; and Dr. Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, Assistant Professor of Art and Digital Media.
    1. I have a long list of ideas I want to pursue in cosmology, quantum mechanics, complexity, statistical mechanics, emergence, information, democracy, origin of life, and elsewhere. Maybe we’ll start up a seminar series in Complexity and Emergence that brings different people together. Maybe it will grow into a Center of some kind.

      https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2022/03/06/johns-hopkins/

      Somehow I missed that Sean Carroll had moved to Johns Hopkins? Realized today when his next book showed up on my doorstep with his new affiliation.

    1. 我简单总结了一下,这半年来做笔记的方式和工具。记录演变工具演变理由书上划线记录纸质书和笔简单摘录书中的句子软件:Typora简单记录长篇的读书笔记软件:Typora简单管理长篇的读书笔记软件:Logseq可折叠,更方便深入消化读书笔记软件:Heptabase有白板,可辅助思考在整理的表格中,可以看到我选择记录方式和工具的理由,方便和简单占了大头。因为我知道我怕麻烦,要想让我不怕麻烦,除非处理这些麻烦事能让我解决更麻烦的问题。

      对我来说可能还是太麻烦,我想我应该记录关键字,然后靠搜索引擎和记忆来完成。如果记忆都想不起来,再多再好的笔记也难以回忆。

    1. neural additive model (NAM) [15]. The NAM is a differentiable (gradient-based) additive model which can adapt as the estimated latent treatment benefits are updated during training.
    2. S-learner strategy

      What is S-learner strategy?

    3. GAMs [12]

      learn more about generalized additive models

    1. ABOUT THIS SERIES LAist will examine how dyslexia screening and mitigation work across California's education system every Wednesday for six weeks. August 3: The ScienceAugust 10: The Realities Of Early ChildhoodAugust 17: Policy Meets PracticeAugust 24: Bringing Dyslexia To CollegeAugust 31: How Teachers Are PreparedSeptember 7: Through The Cracks
  3. Aug 2022
    1. https://occidental.substack.com/p/the-adlernet-guide-part-ii?sd=pf

      Description of a note taking method for reading the Great Books: part commonplace, part zettelkasten.

      I'm curious where she's ultimately placing the cards to know if the color coding means anything in the end other than simply differentiating the card "types" up front? (i.e. does it help to distinguish cards once potentially mixed up?)

    1. Although there is more than one way to implement a Zettelkasten system, the essential elements are always the same: brief summaries on cards, organized into categories.

      https://medium.com/flourish-inc/wait-what-the-did-i-just-read-4b00ff02d1b7

      She's basically describing a form of the original zettelkasten (a slip or index card-based commonplace book), but where did she get this from? If it was the blogosphere, which is highly likely these days, then she's either misread or heavily simplified the practice (Luhmann's practice) back down to it's original form.

      She seems to take for granted how to link physical cards.

    1. კითხვის მიზნები: * კონკრეტული ინფორმაციას ვეძებთ * არჩევენი რომ გავაკეთოთ * გართობისვის/ ახალი ამბების გაცნობისთვის * შინაარსის სიღრმისეულად გააზრებისთვის/ დაფიქრებისთვის * სიამოვნებისთვის

    1. I am going to add some optional 'reading and doing' directions to my posts. Might be helpful.

      1. You might listen to the poem first.
      2. You might answer the question that Trethewey asks first. Maybe you can engage in the margins with it.
      3. You can make all or part of your responses public or private.
      4. You can start a group to consider the question.
      5. You can have at it in the order presented: my intro--> Twitter thread--> my response to the thread-->check out the link-->listen to the poem.
      6. Perch in the margins with the withered wild grapes and the black haw and the redbuds.
      7. Join in the work of forecasting your own life.
    1. Moser, Johann Jacob . 1773. Vortheile vor Canzleyverwandte und Gelehrte in Absicht aufAkten-Verzeichnisse, Auszü ge und Register, desgleichen auf Sammlungen zu kü nfftigenSchrifften und wü rckliche Ausarbeitung derer Schrifften. T ü bingen: Heerbrandt.

      Heavily quoted in chapter 4 with respect to his own zettelkasten/excerpting practice.

      Is there an extant English translation of this?

    1. Heinen, Armin. “Wissensorganisation.” In Handbuch Methoden der Geschichtswissenschaft, edited by Stefan Haas, 1–20. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27798-7_4-1

      Will have to order or do more work to track down a copy of this and translate it.

      Has a great bibliography to mine for some bits I've been missing.

    1. Thought the middle names are similar, but slightly different spellings, this would seem to indicate that Stanford professor Samuel S. Seward, Jr. (author of Note-taking) is the brother of politician William Henry Seward.

    1. https://scottscheper.com/letter/36/

      Clemens Luhmann, Niklas' son, has a copy of a book written in German in 1932 and given to his father by Friedrich Rudolf Hohl which ostensibly is where Luhmann learned his zettelkasten technique. It contains a 34 page chapter titled Die Kartei (the Card Index) which has the details.

    1. Don’t make claims unless you can cite documentation, formalized guidelines, and coding examples to back those claims up. People need to know why they are being asked to make a change, and another developer’s personal preference isn’t a good enough argument.
    1. Chris Aldrichs Blog ist sehr gefährlich, denn, wenn man einmal darin zu lesen angefangen hat, dann kommt man so schnell nicht mehr davon los. Ich selbst wurde durch einen bestimmten Beitrag angelockt und ertappe mich jetzt immer wieder dabei, dass ich durch sämtliche Beiträge und Pages seines Blogs stöbere. Er selbst nutzt sein Weblog wie folgt: I use this website as my primary hub for online identity and communication. It’s also my online commonplace book. Schon alleine damit ist geklärt, warum man so viele Dinge dort entdecken kann.  Ich komme auf alle Fälle weiterhin regelmäßig dort vorbei und einen seiner Feeds -- alle wären wohl nicht zu händeln -- habe ich in meinem Reader übernommen.

      https://kuemmerle.name/foren/topic/chris-aldrich#postid-148

      Google Translate:

      Chris Aldrich 's blog is very dangerous because once you start reading it, it's hard to get off. I myself was lured by a certain post and now find myself rummaging through all the posts and pages on his blog.

      He himself uses his weblog as follows:

      I use this website as my primary hub for online identity and communication. It's also my online common place book.

      That alone explains why you can discover so many things there. In any case, I continue to visit there regularly and I have adopted one of his feeds -- all of them would probably not be manageable -- in my reader.

    1. I stole the title from this Substack post. I cannot put this much better than them: “we’ve chosen to optimize for feelings— to bring the quirks and edges of life back into software. To create something with soul.” Enjoyment is an important component of my day to day. 

      Optimizing for feelings seems to be a broader generational movement (particularly for the progressive movement) in the past decade or more.

      https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/optimizing-for-feelings #wanttoread

    1. https://cyberzettel.com/chris-aldrich-and-his-research-on-digital-public-zettelkasten/

      This looks exciting!

      You've also nudged me to convert my burgeoning broader top level tag of "note taking" into a full fledged category (https://boffosocko.com/category/note-taking/) which shortly will contain not only the material on zettelkasten but commonplace books and other related areas.

      Usually once a tag has more than a couple hundred entries, it's time to convert it to a category. This one was long overdue.

    1. https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a19379/a-short-history-of-the-index-card/

      Broad history essay but doesn't dig into the weeds. Feels a lot like a few other essays I've seen of this sort. Content farmish...

    2. Amherst College library described in Colin B. Burke's Information and Intrigue, organized books and cards based on author name. In both cases, the range of books on a shelf was random.

      Information and Intrigue by Colin B. Burke

    1. Systematische Anleitung zur Theorie und Praxis der Mnemonik : nebst den Grundlinien zur Geschichte u. Kritik dieser Wissenschaft : mit 3 Kupfertaf. by Johann Christoph Aretin( Book )18 editions published in 1810 in 3 languages and held by 52 WorldCat member libraries worldwide

      Google translation:<br /> Systematic instructions for the theory and practice of mnemonics: together with the basic lines for the history and criticism of this science: with 3 copper plates.

      First published in 1810 in German

      http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n83008343/

    1. https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/

      An early essay from Ryan Holiday about commonplace books including how, why, and their general value.

      Notice that the essay almost reads as if he's copying out cards from his own system. This is highlighted by the fact that he adds dashes in front 23 of his paragraphs/points.

    1. https://lifehacker.com/im-ryan-holiday-and-this-is-how-i-work-1485776137

      An influential productivity article from 2013-12-18 that is seen quoted over the blogosphere for the following years that broadened the idea of the commonplace book and the later popularity of the zettelkasten.

      Note that zettelkasten.de was just starting up at about this time period, though it follows the work of Manfred Kuehn's note taking blog.

    1. https://www.kevinmarks.com/memex.html

      I got stuck over the weekend, so I totally missed Kevin Marks' memex demo at IndieWebCamp's Create Day, but it is an interesting little UI experiment.

      I'll always maintain that Vannevar Bush really harmed the first few generations of web development by not mentioning the word commonplace book in his conceptualization. Marks heals some of this wound by explicitly tying the idea of memex to that of the zettelkasten however. John Borthwick even mentions the idea of "networked commonplace books". [I suspect a little birdie may have nudged this perspective as catnip to grab my attention—a ruse which is highly effective.]

      Some of Kevin's conceptualization reminds me a bit of Jerry Michalski's use of The Brain which provides a specific visual branching of ideas based on the links and their positions on the page: the main idea in the center, parent ideas above it, sibling ideas to the right/left and child ideas below it. I don't think it's got the idea of incoming or outgoing links, but having a visual location on the page for incoming links (my own site has incoming ones at the bottom as comments or responses) can be valuable.

      I'm also reminded a bit of Kartik Prabhu's experiments with marginalia and webmention on his website which plays around with these ideas as well as their visual placement on the page in different methods.

      MIT MediaLab's Fold site (details) was also an interesting sort of UI experiment in this space.

      It also seems a bit reminiscent of Kevin Mark's experiments with hovercards in the past as well, which might be an interesting way to do the outgoing links part.

      Next up, I'd love to see larger branching visualizations of these sorts of things across multiple sites... Who will show us those "associative trails"?

      Another potential framing for what we're all really doing is building digital versions of Indigenous Australian's songlines across the web. Perhaps this may help realize Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's dream for a "third archive"?

    1. https://universitylifecafe.k-state.edu/bookshelf/academicskills/indexcardstudysystem.html

      Natalie Umberger is writing about an "index card study system" in an academic study skills context, but it's an admixture of come ideas from Cornell Notes and using index cards as flashcards.

      The advice to "Review your notes and readings frequently, so the material is 'fresh.' " is a common one (through at least the 1980s to the present), though research on the mere-exposure effect indicates that it's not as valuable as other methods.

      How can we stamp out the misconception that this sort of review is practical?

  4. Jul 2022
    1. https://danallosso.substack.com/p/thoughts-prior-to-publishing

      <iframe title="vimeo-player" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/735211043?h=68a6bdd022" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

      I love the pointed focus @danallosso puts on output here. I think he's right that the "conversation between the writer, the text, and their notes" (in my framing combinatorial creativity) is where the real value is to be had.

      His explanation of the "evergreen note" is highly valuable here. One should really do as much work upfront to make it as evergreen as possible. Too many people (especially in the digital gardens space) put the emphasis on working on these evergreen notes over time to slowly improve and evolve them and that's probably the wrong framing to take. Write it once, write it well, then reuse it.

    1. https://remikalir.com/blog/sabbatical-annotated/

      It was great seeing you in person yesterday @remikalir! Glad you could make the time to hang out. Do let me know if you need anything while you're here in the neighborhood or in your pending travels on sabbatical.

      Congratulations again on all this news! I'm sure it's a bit overwhelming and a lot of change to adjust to, but I'm sure you'll come out far ahead.

      I told Evie about your sister's choreography annotation work when I picked her up from ballet. She pulled a small pocket notebook out of her ballet bag that I didn't know she had full of some of her own choreography notes!! I was so proud...

      Safe travels my friend!