I've felt guilty in the past that often we don't directly discuss the book and what it says, but since we've each individually had our own "conversations with the author", our sessions then become a method of taking those extant (hidden discussions) and bringing them to a group to have not only discussions with each other, but extend those discussions with other books we've read and connecting them with reading, watching, listening we've done with other sources. In some sense, we're creating connections (conversations) with all the other things rather than necessarily discussing the exact thing at hand. This is a different form of work than the work of the initial discussion we individually have with the author (in this case Adrian Johns) and this is something many book groups don't go past.

I don't feel so guilty about it anymore...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/126p7tk/what_its_like_to_have_a_conversation_with_your/

Your zettelkasten, having a perfect memory of your "past self" acts as a ratchet so that when you have a new conversation on a particular topic, your "present self" can quickly remember where you left off and not only advance the arguments but leave an associative trail for your "future self" to continue on again later.

Many thoughts and associations occur when you're having conversations with any text, whether it's with something you're reading by another author or your own notes in your zettelkasten or commonplace book. For more conversations on this topic, perhaps thumb through: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27conversations+with+the+text%27

If you view conversations broadly as means of finding and collecting information from external sources and naturally associating them together, perhaps you'll appreciate this quote:

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum (Secker & Warburg)

(Reply to u/u/Plastic-Lettuce-7150 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ae2qf4/communicating_with_a_zettelkasten/)

love "raucous conversation"!

It's possible that the process of note taking and excerpting may impose levels of analysis and synthesis on their users such that when writing and synthesizing their works that they more subtly expect their readers to do the same thing when their audiences may require more handholding and explanation.

Here, both the authors' experiences and that of the cultures in which they're writing will determine the relationship.

There's lots of analogies between thinking and digesting (rumination, consumption, etc), in reading and understanding contexts.

Source: https://hypothes.is/a/hhCGsljeEe2QlccJUQ55fA

Texts are patient conversationalists always waiting for you to write your side of the conversation into the margin before they continue on with their side of the conversation. Sadly, too many readers (students especially) don't realize that there's a conversation going on.

Link to:<br /> - https://hypothes.is/a/bBwyhkN3Ee6nQNPI5xmSnQ - https://hypothes.is/a/GvRApkN3Ee6LbBPqqX-A5Q

Margins in books and on paper are blank spaces for "dark ideas" asking to be filled in while "reading with a pen in hand" so that the reader can have a conversation with the text.

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/GvRApkN3Ee6LbBPqqX-A5Q on dark ideas

When will we get the civil disobedience version of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Mark a Book?

Example of a teacher talking about the great conversation in the framing of the humanities....

Within the pantheon of types of notes there are: - paraphrasing notes, which one can use to summarize ideas for later recall and review as well as to check one's own knowledge and understanding of what an author has said. - commentary notes, which take the text and create a commentary on them, often as part of having a conversation with the text. These can be seen historically in the Midrashim tradition of commenting on Torah.

[23:12 - 24:47]

separately also: - productivity notes - to do lists, reminders of work to be done, often within or as part of a larger complex project

A book can't only be about the text, it has to be about the reader's interaction with it and thoughts about it. Without these, the object has no value.

Annotations are the traces left behind of how one valued a book as they read and interacted with it.

How did Michael Oakeshott's philosophy overlap with the idea of the 'Great Conversation' or 20th century movement of Adler's Great Books of the Western World.

How does it influence the idea of "having conversations with the text" in the annotation space?

https://youtu.be/r9idbh-U2kM?t=3544

Stefan Zweig (reference? his memoir?) apparently suggested that students translate authors as a means of becoming more intimately acquainted with their work. This is similar to restating an author in one's own words as a means of improving one's understanding. It's a lower level of processing that osculates on the idea of having a conversation with a text.

tk: track this reference down. appropriate context?

Poe, E. A. (1844). Marginalia. United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 15, 484, https://www.eapoe.org/works/misc/mar1144.htm

Curious that Poe framed marginalia as a self-conversation rather than a conversation with the text itself...

And this, in part, is just what makes social readers so valuable: a tight(er) integration of a reading and conversational interface.

https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/8/mastodon-is-just-blogs/

Dialectical notes are made at the level of syntopical reading and entail creating a conversation not only between the reader and the author, but create a conversation of questions and answers between and among many texts and the reader.

https://www.explainpaper.com/

Another in a growing line of research tools for processing and making sense of research literature including Research Rabbit, Connected Papers, Semantic Scholar, etc.

Functionality includes the ability to highlight sections of research papers with natural language processing to explain what those sections mean. There's also a "chat" that allows you to ask questions about the paper which will attempt to return reasonable answers, which is an artificial intelligence sort of means of having an artificial "conversation with the text".

cc: @dwhly @remikalir @jeremydean

For her online book clubs, Maggie Delano defines four broad types of notes as a template for users to have a common language: - terms - propositions (arguments, claims) - questions - sources (references which support the above three types)

I'm fairly sure in a separate context, I've heard that these were broadly lifted from her reading of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a book. (reference? an early session of Dan Allosso's Obsidian Book club?)

These become the backbone of breaking down a book and using them to have a conversation with the author.

Intellectual work requires "surfaces" to work against, almost as an exact analogy to substrates in chemistry which help to catalyze reactions. The surfaces may include: - articles, books, or other writing against which one can think and write - colleagues, friends, family, other thinkers, or even imaginary characters (as suggested by C. Wright Mills) - one's past self as instantiated by their (imperfect) memory or by their notes about excerpted ideas or their own thoughts

Are there any other surfaces we're missing?

What's the solution: dig into your primary sources. Ask open-ended questions, and refine them as you go. Be open to new lines of inquiry. Stage your work in Conversation with so-and-so [ previously defined as the author of the text].

Stacy Fahrenthold recommends digging into primary sources and using them (and their author(s) as a "conversation partner". She doesn't mention using either one's memory or one's notes as a communication partner the way Luhmann does in "Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen" (1981), which can be an incredibly fruitful and creative method for original material.

http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes

So was Manfred Kuehn calling Umberto Eco an uncivilized barbarian?!

See: https://hyp.is/4sD8LCciEe2XKBc7KhCshg/takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2013/08/underlining-in-library-books.html

syndication link

How is one to have an intimate conversation with a text if their annotations are not written in the margins? Placing your initial notes somewhere else is like having sex with your clothes on.

syndication link

A useful analogy here might be the idea of having a conversation with a text. Much the way you'd have dramatically different conversations with your family versus your friends, your teachers, or a stranger in line at the store, you'll approach each particular in a different way based on the various contexts in which both they exist and the contexts which you bring to them.

Possibly even more than three ways, depending on how many are participating in the margins here. ;)

I like that he touches on one of the important parts of the gardens and streams portion of online digital gardens here, though he doesn't tacitly frame it this way.

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.

1. Heinrich von Kleist, “Ü ber die allm ä hliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Zweiter Band, ed. Helmut Sembdner (M ü nchen: dtv, 1805/2001), 319 – 324, at 319.
2. Ibid., 320.

in 1805 Heinrich von Kleist noted that one can use conversation with another person, even when that person is silent, to come up with solutions or ideas they may not have done on their own.

This phenomena is borne out in modern practices like the so-called "rubber duck debugging", where a programmer can talk to any imagined listener, often framed as a rubber duck sitting on their desk, and talk through the problem in their code. Invariably, talking through all the steps of the problem will often result in the person realizing what the problem is and allow them to fix it.

This method of verbal "conversation" obviously was a tool which indigenous oral cultures frequently used despite the fact that they didn't have literacy as a tool to fall back on.

Jason Kleinberg takes basic tunes and then has a list of variations of practice styles which he runs through with each one (eg. single-finger, octave double stops scale, old-time, polkafy, blues, etc.) and he plays those tunes in these modified styles not only to practice, but to take these "musical conversations" and translate them into his own words. This is a clever way of generating new music and potentially even new styles by mixing those which have come before. To a great sense, he's having a musical conversation with prior composers and musicians in the same way that an annotator will have a conversation in the margins with an author. It's also an example of the sort of combinatorial creativity suggested by Raymond Llull's work.

People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.

This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.

I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).

Learning has been shown to be linked to engagement with peers in social situations over guidance from faculty mentors.

Cross reference: David F. Feldon et al., “Postdocs’ Lab Engagement Predicts Trajectories of PhD Students’ Skill Development,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (October 2019): 20910–16

Are there areas where this is not the case? Are there areas where this is more the case than not?

Is it our evolution as social animals that has heightened this effect? How could this be shown? (Link this to prior note about social evolution.)

Is it the ability to scaffold out questions and answers and find their way by slowly building up experience with each other that facilitates this effect?

Could this effect be seen in annotating texts as well? If one's annotations become a conversation with the author, is there a learning benefit even when the author can't respond? By trying out writing about one's understanding of a text and seeing where the gaps are and then revisiting the text to fill them in, do we gain this same sort of peer engagement? How can we encourage students to ask questions to the author and/or themselves in the margins? How can we encourage them to further think about and explore these questions? Answer these questions over time?

A key part of the solution is not just writing the annotations down in the first place, but keeping them, reviewing over them, linking them together, revisiting them and slowly providing answers and building solutions for both themselves and, by writing them down, hopefully for others as well.

This is a great question and I ask it frequently with many different answers.

I've not seen specific numbers, but I suspect that the majority of Hypothes.is users are annotating in small private groups/classes using their learning management system (LMS) integrations through their university. As a result, using it and hoping for a big social experience is going to be discouraging for most.

Of course this doesn't mean that no one is out there. After all, here you are following my RSS feed of annotations and asking these questions!

I'd say that 95+% or more of my annotations are ultimately for my own learning and ends. If others stumble upon them and find them interesting, then great! But I'm not really here for them.

As more people have begun using Hypothes.is over the past few years I have slowly but surely run into people hiding in the margins of texts and quietly interacted with them and begun to know some of them. Often they're also on Twitter or have their own websites too which only adds to the social glue. It has been one of the slowest social media experiences I've ever had (even in comparison to old school blogging where discovery is much higher in general use). There has been a small uptick (anecdotally) in Hypothes.is use by some in the note taking application space (Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq, etc.), so I've seen some of them from time to time.

I can only think of one time in the last five or so years in which I happened to be "in a text" and a total stranger was coincidentally reading and annotating at the same time. There have been a few times I've specifically been in a shared text with a small group annotating simultaneously. Other than this it's all been asynchronous experiences.

There are a few people working at some of the social side of Hypothes.is if you're searching for it, though even their Hypothes.is presences may seem as sparse as your own at present @tonz.

Some examples:

@peterhagen Has built an alternate interface for the main Hypothes.is feed that adds some additional discovery dimensions you might find interesting. It highlights some frequent annotators and provide a more visual feed of what's happening on the public Hypothes.is timeline as well as data from HackerNews.

@flancian maintains anagora.org, which is like a planet of wikis and related applications, where he keeps a list of annotations on Hypothes.is by members of the collective at https://anagora.org/latest

@tomcritchlow has experimented with using Hypothes.is as a "traditional" comments section on his personal website.

@remikalir has a nice little tool https://crowdlaaers.org/ for looking at documents with lots of annotations.

Right now, I'm also in an Obsidian-based book club run by Dan Allosso in which some of us are actively annotating the two books using Hypothes.is and dovetailing some of this with activity in a shared Obsidian vault. see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/24/55803196/. While there is a small private group for our annotations a few of us are still annotating the books in public. Perhaps if I had a group of people who were heavily interested in keeping a group going on a regular basis, I might find the value in it, but until then public is better and I'm more likely to come across and see more of what's happening out there.

I've got a collection of odd Hypothes.is related quirks, off label use cases, and experiments: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/ including a list of those I frequently follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

Like good annotations and notes, you've got to put some work into finding the social portion what's happening in this fun little space. My best recommendation to find your "tribe" is to do some targeted tag searches in their search box to see who's annotating things in which you're interested.

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.

Brandon Lewis seems to be talking about actively taking two papers and placing them "in dialogue with each other" potentially by reading, annotating, and writing about them with himself as an intermediary.

Even when taught that some methods of learning don't work, students will still actively use and focus on them.

Are those using social annotation purposely helping students to steer clear of these methods? is there evidence that the social part of some of these related annotation or conversational practices with both the text and one's colleagues helpful? Do they need to be taken out of the text and done in a more explicit manner in a lecture/discussion section or in a book club like setting similar to that of Dan Allossso's or even within a shared space like the Obsidian book club to have more value?