Information and Intrigue by Colin B. Burke

https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA15380511&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00945404&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=cens39029

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/

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.

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.

https://andysylvester.com/2022/07/19/the-way-ahead-for-rss-and-podcasting/

Reasonable overview of history. Worth digging into to flesh out more fully with respect to the major system in particular.

https://theodora.com/encyclopedia/m2/mnemonics.html

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-ancient-soldiers-enemies.html

https://maggieappleton.com/daily-notes

https://maggieappleton.com/joining-ought

http://scripting.com/2022/07/19/152235.html?title=devNotesForMarkdownInRss

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/07/rss-support-for-markdown/

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"?

https://catswetel.com/blog/2021/5/4/an-extended-subtweet-on-power

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?

https://www.mattmaldre.com/2021/09/13/annotate-articles-online/

I love that Matt is using this tool and his annotated notes to write new material based on things he's read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

The bouba/kiki effect might be an interesting thing to use for memorizing birdsong patterns.

https://news.yahoo.com/former-teacher-says-she-fired-171921981.html#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16593976639480&csi=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.yahoo.com%2Fformer-teacher-says-she-fired-171921981.html

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/announcing-how-to-make-notes-and

Congratulations @danallosso!

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo63098990.html Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind by Ayelet Even-Ezra

Mentioned during Tinderbox Meetup: https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tagging-meetup-saturday-august-7/4841

They apparently discussed the book last week. (May be able to find the video of the discussion)

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/numbering-analog-notes

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/working-remotely

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1553503322023362560.html

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/thoughts-prior-to-publishing

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/w7ytto/we_could_literally_go_nuts_with_our_personal/

No new insight here...

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!

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/tony-dow-dead-wally-cleaver-leave-it-to-beaver-1235326146/

CalStateTEACH https://www.calstateteach.net/

https://www.vox.com/2022/7/25/23277211/supreme-court-gavin-newsom-sb-8-abortion-guns-california-assault-rifle-law

https://news.yahoo.com/mathematician-tiktok-gives-example-insane-192823997.html

A sad, but subtle bit of math shaming going on here. Worse it's indicating that math is hard for even the elite without providing proper context.

https://www.obsidianroundup.org/2022-07-23/

https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/renaissance-phrases

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-24/6th-street-viaduct-shut-for-second-night-in-a-row

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/23/1113008177/southwest-china-dinosaur-footprint-restaurant-discovery-sauropod-development

Ancient statuary wasn't white as we often see now in museums, but was brightly colored. Statuary that was outside would have been sun bleached over time as well as subject to other weathering to mute or entirely remove color.

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/12/1109995973/we-know-greek-statues-werent-white-now-you-can-see-them-in-color

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vzv2ov/the_importance_of_the_handwriting_bottleneck/

https://illusionofmore.com/internet-archive-the-racket/

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/republicans-expose-their-hypocrisy-on-abortion/670562/

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/te80rv/how_do_you_capture_fleeting_notes_in_your_workflow/

I broadly take most of my (online) notes using Hypothes.is for web pages and .pdf files. I then use the Hypothesidian set up with Templater to import all the pieces: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225

So far it's been pretty helpful and I spend a huge amount of time in Hypothes.is.

https://fraidyc.at/blog/wakey-wakey/

Updates to Fraidyc.at! 🎉

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

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

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

Link to Beatrice Webb's use of note taking methods as a means of data storage, search, and sort in the early 1900s.

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

19 February 1850 – 9 July 1942

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/humanities%E2%80%99-scholarly-infrastructure-utter-disarray

Glad I'm not the only one...

Depending on my particular mood, I'll call mine "Konrad" after Gessner, "Beatrice" after Webb, or "Bruce" (a quirky hat tip to The West Wing S7 E2: "His name is Bruce. He's a flight attendant on Aer Lingus. They've got a connecting hub out of Hamburg. You know, at first it was long walks along the Reeperbahn...")

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/w0x1m6/give_your_antinet_a_pen_name/

https://medium.com/@paulorrj/the-robert-greene-method-of-writing-books-e175ade04897

meh...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/m88637/why_not_mediawiki/

https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/03/25/figure-it-out/

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vzertk/using_the_antinet_for_professional_conferences/

Thanks /ultwalt This seems to underline the aphorism, that the more you put into something, the more you'll get out of it. It's something that many miss as an underlying benefit to these processes in general.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547390915689566211.html via https://twitter.com/nicolas_gatien/status/1547390946156969984

Nicolas, I broadly agree with you that many of these factors of reading and writing for understanding and retention are at play and the research in memory and spaced repetition underlines a lot of this. However in practice, one needs to be revisiting and actively using their notes for some particular project to remember them better. The card search may help to create both visual and physical paths that assist in memory too.

Reliance solely on a physical zettelkasten however may not be enough without active use over time, particularly for the majority of users. It's unlikely that all or even many may undertake this long term practice. Saying that this is either the "best", "optimum", or "only" way would be disingenuous to the diversity of learners and thinkers.

Those who want to add additional strength to these effects might also use mnemonic methods from indigenous cultures that rely on primary orality. These could include color, images, doodles (drolleries anyone?), or other associative methods, many of which could be easily built into an (antinet) zettelkasten. Lynne Kelly's work in this area can be highly illuminating. For pure practical application and diversity of potential methods, I recommend her book Memory Craft https://amzn.to/3zdqqGp, but she's got much more academic and in depth work that is highly illustrative.

With this background on orality and memory in mind we might all broadly view wood and stone circles (Stonehenge), menhir, standing stones, songlines, and other mnemonic devices in the archaeological and sociological records as zettelkasten which one keeps entirely in their memory rather than writing them down. We might also consider, based on this and the historical record concerning Druids and their association with trees that the trees served a zettelkasten-like function for those ancient societies. This continues to extend to lots of other cultural and societal practices throughout history. Knowledge from Duane Hamacher et al's book The First Astronomers and Karlie Noone and Krystal De Napoli's Astronomy: Sky Country will underline these theories and practices in modern indigenous settings.

https://ammienoot.com/brain-fluff/3247/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/15/ivana-trump-donald-trump-wife-death-cause

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z6f6xgGG4NKjkA5NA1kDd46whJh2Gt5rAmfX

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23188738/ipad-speech-apraxia-assistive-tech-accessibility

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/magic-mirror-cincinnati-art-museum-2146551/amp-page

https://climbtothestars.org/archives/2022/07/13/22-years-ago/

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vy4abk/interesting_thread_on_twitter_about_the_need_and/

Thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547208663768748032.html

That thread by u/taurusnoises (Bob Doto aka @thehighpony) seems to explicitly buy into the rumor that Luhmann invented the zettelkasten. He assuredly did not and was most likely taught it or some version of it by one or more teachers or colleagues in his lifetime. We're unlikely to know if he tweaked or modified it extensively from the version he was taught, but studying the methods of others may be illustrative. How did Wittgenstein use it? Newton? Georg Christoph Lichtenberg? John Locke? Barthes? Marcel Mauss? Claude Lévi-Strauss? Heck, even comedian George Carlin, dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp, and battle rapper/musician Eminem have slip box systems that they explicitly used for their creativity and work.

People have been using zettelkasten, commonplace books, florilegium, and other similar methods for centuries, and no one version is the "correct" one. What is useful is finding a system that works for you (and not finding a system that you work for). Everyone here is assuredly doing exactly as Luhmann did, you're taking a tool with a broad set of ideas, principles, and practices and putting it to use in a way that works for you. This is part of the reason why there are so many people with so many questions about the what and why in this and other fora.

We approach these methods from such a top down manner, in part, because our culture has broadly lost the thread of how these note taking practices were done historically. Instead of working with something that has always existed and been taught in our culture, and then using it to suit our needs, we're looking at it like a new shiny toy or app and then trying to modify it to make it suit our needs.

Of course to be sure, Luhmann's version of the tool as he used it is one of the most powerful forms of commonplacing we've seen, but this doesn't mean that someone doesn't change or innovate on the methods to make something even more powerful or emergent. (I'd caution against low level attempts as this ground has been heavily tread by millions of people over time.)

To add onto Nicolas-Gatien and dynodiaper's list, how about? 4. Idea generation/creation and innovation

And for those who want the bumper sticker version: https://www.zazzle.com/niklas_luhmann_bumper_sticker-128462770354241554 Or maybe, for Scott, the coffee mug version? 😁☕https://www.zazzle.com/niklas_luhmann_mug-168394795838388324

Instead of building a comments section, why not build it to send/accept Webmentions? (Webmention.io and Webmention.js with some help from Brid.gy) could implement this pretty quickly without much additional work.) This would allow your digital garden to communicate directly with others' as well as other sites online including Twitter?

I may be insane, but somehow text search here makes me wonder that Calibre might actually make an interesting interface for keeping one's notes?

Document management, text search, tagging, reference management capabilities, open source, custom meta data, server potential, etc. What's missing to prevent such an off-label use case?

https://liliputing.com/2022/07/calibre-6-0-ebook-manager-gains-full-text-search-arm-cpu-support-and-read-aloud-to-the.html

Syndication link: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1547689914078179328

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/business/media/evan-williams-leaving-medium.html

https://werd.io/2022/a-new-ceo-for-medium

https://werd.io/2022/my-indieweb-real-estate-website-part-two

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1857/zettelkasten-work-literature-driven-and-problem-driven

Somewhere I think I read that Luhmann only added about 6 cards a day to his zettelkasten. (I suspect they averaged his 90K output over the span of years he said he used it....)

My fleeting note output right now is potentially too much, and I certainly should be spending more time refining and building on my (note-based) thoughts.

It's not how many thoughts one has, but their quality and even more importantly, what one does with them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/jho1em/i_found_a_gem/

https://soranews24.com/2022/07/10/japanese-bookstore-dares-to-be-different-with-common-sense-fix-to-weird-industry-hassle/

Apparently many Japanese bookstores sort and arrange their books by Publisher rather than by author name!

While this may make some esthetic sense on behalf of publishers in a commercial space, it isn't necessarily easy for customers to find books this way.

https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pruning-for-output/

In response to my call for zettelkasten output examples, Matthias Melcher comes up to the border of what I was looking for but doesn't cover the actual output portion.

He focuses instead about some of the processing and the pruning portions, but not use for actual content creation. Is this because he doesn't actively use his notes for the creation portion? Or does he use his branching tree space as recollections of notes, perhaps to create outlines for creation?

Note specifically that he doesn't mention any sort of surprise or serendipity with respect to linking ideas nor is there any mention of "inventio" portions of the process.

https://manage.kmail-lists.com/subscriptions/web-view?a=Vc5bVr&c=01FM1J43DPQ7Z364Z8K8CX8XD5&k=8a739d0b524d1452c6bb9dcf67fb51f9&g=WQd6TQ&m=QSAze3&r=QiCJM9j

Do they need to read a recipe?

https://www.pasadenanow.com/main/new-mural-turning-heads-in-altadena

D. J. Levitin, The organized mind: thinking straight in the age of information overload. New York, N.Y: Dutton, 2014. #books/wanttoread

A general truism in my experience, but I'm curious what else Levitin has to say on this subject.

https://quiescent.us/2022/06/listen-with-a-pen/

https://quiescent.us/2022/06/think-external/

Brief example of someone who says they have an antinet zettelkasten note taking approach.

Nothing exceptional here beyond this.

https://wptavern.com/classicpress-on-the-rocks-directors-resign-new-leadership-installed

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/07/07/the-fallout-continues-us-news-pulls-columbia-university-from-its-2022-rankings/

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/29/twitter-collabs-feature-could-make-it-possible-for-users-to-co-author-tweets-with-brands/

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2022-07-08.html

https://campustechnology.com/Articles/2022/05/12/14-Equity-Considerations-for-Ed-Tech.aspx?Page=1

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vu9ct9/folks_i_need_some_advice/

https://boingboing.net/2018/03/12/the-vim-clutch-a-footpeda.html

https://warmedal.se/~bjorn/posts/2022-07-02-providing-meaningful-search-results-without-own-index.html

https://www.typography.com/blog/house-of-flying-reference-marks

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vtekz2/there_is_a_zettel_maximum_capacity_and_thats_not/

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-on-paper

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/03/90-of-everything-is-crap-a-source-of-imposter-syndrome/

https://web.hypothes.is/blog/back-to-school-with-annotation-10-ways-to-annotate-with-students/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/kv7wtq/ecos_zk_notes/

https://marshallk.com/7-steps-i-take-to-get-value-from-what-i-read-notes-on-note-taking-review

https://tinysubversions.com/spring-83/rrffcc-dfk-1.txt

Some interesting points from someone with experience on several fronts.

I love that he's published his response in plain text this way!!

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/spring-83/

I've been thinking about this sort of thing off and on myself.

I too almost immediately thought of Fraidyc.at and its nudge at shifting the importance of content based on time and recency. I'd love to have a social reader with additional affordances for both this time shifting and Ton's idea of reading based on social distance.

I'm struck by the seemingly related idea of @peterhagen's LindyLearn platform and annotations: https://annotations.lindylearn.io/new/ which focuses on taking some of the longer term interesting ideas as the basis for browsing and chewing on. Though even here, one needs some of the odd, the cutting edge, and the avant garde in their balanced internet diet. Would Spring '83 provide some of this?

I'm also struck by some similarities this has with the idea of Derek Siver's /now page movement. I see some updating regularly while others have let it slip by the wayside. Still the "board" of users exists, though one must click through a sea of mostly smiling and welcoming faces to get to it the individual pieces of content. (The smiling faces are more inviting and personal than the cacophony of yelling and chaos I see in models for Spring '83.) This reminds me of Stanley Meyers' frequent assertion that he attempted to design a certain "sense of quiet" into the early television show Dragnet to balance the seeming loudness of the everyday as well as the noise of other contemporaneous television programming.

The form reminds me a bit of the signature pages of one's high school year book. But here, instead of the goal being timeless scribbles, one has the opportunity to change the message over time. Does the potential commercialization of the form (you know it will happen in a VC world crazed with surveillance capitalism) follow the same trajectory of the old college paper facebook? Next up, Yearbook.com!

Beyond the thing as a standard, I wondered what the actual form of Spring '83 adds to a broader conversation? What does it add to the diversity of voices that we don't already see in other spaces. How might it be abused? Would people come back to it regularly? What might be its emergent properties?

It definitely seems quirky and fun in and old school web sort of way, but it also stresses me out looking at the zany busyness of some of the examples of magazine stands. The general form reminds me of the bargain bins at book stores which have the promise of finding valuable hidden gems and at an excellent price, but often the ideas and quality of what I find usually isn't worth the discounted price and the return on investment is rarely worth the effort. How might this get beyond these forms?

It also brings up the idea of what other online forms we may have had with this same sort of raw experimentation? How might the internet have looked if there had been a bigger rise of the wiki before that of the blog? What would the world be like if Webmention had existed before social media rose to prominence? Did we somehow miss some interesting digital animals because the web rose so quickly to prominence without more early experimentation before its "Cambrian explosion"?

I've been thinking about distilled note taking forms recently and what a network of atomic ideas on index cards look like and what emerges from them. What if the standard were digital index cards that linked and cross linked to each other, particularly in a world without adherence to time based orders and streams? What does a new story look like if I can pull out a card either at random or based on a single topic and only see it or perhaps some short linked chain of ideas (mine or others) which come along with it? Does the choice of a random "Markov monkey" change my thinking or perspective? What comes out of this jar of Pandora? Is it just a new form of cadavre exquis?

This standard has been out for a bit and presumably folks are experimenting with it. What do the early results look like? How are they using it? Do they like it? Does it need more scale? What do small changes make to the overall form?

For more on these related ideas, see: https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%22spring+%2783%22

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2022-07-01.html

https://www.techdirt.com/2019/06/10/mathew-higbee-cuts-runs-when-finally-challenged-questionable-shakedown/

https://www.vondranlegal.com/copyright-watchdog-did-you-receive-a-photo-infringement-demand-letter-from-higbee-associates/

https://heitnerlegal.com/2020/12/07/what-to-do-if-you-receive-a-higbee-associates-copyright-demand-letter/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GradSchool/comments/68n2ec/graduated_a_few_days_ago_so_heres_a_list_of_my/

Anecdotal evidence of someone who thinks that digital bibliography managers are better than older manual methods of bibliographical and note taking methods.

This may be the case if the management of bibliography is wholly divorced from note taking, but one still needs to integrate the two pieces at some point.

Is there evidence that people use bibliographic tools like Zotero, Endnote, Mendeley as bookmark tools for things they intend to read?

What affordances do these tools provide beyond pulling reference markers from an article and simply spitting out a fully formed and formatted bibliography?

Zotero has recently updated with version 6 to make pulling in annotations from pdf files into their bigger enterprise much easier, so perhaps it's a step back toward integrating the older zettelkasten-like methods of note taking?

https://lis653.wordpress.com/2022/04/06/license-plates-and-war-crimes/