reply to @ayjay @annie at https://micro.blog/ayjay/48571448

@ayjay I've long presumed you were digitally commonplacing by means of your websites, so thanks for laying out some of your specific current thoughts on the process.

​@Annie I've been collecting examples of bloggers who are using their personal websites as commonplaces, zettelkasten, and "thought spaces" at https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book. If you're interested, you'll also find examples and details to explore in my own digital commonplace. "Thought spaces" is an interesting entry point.

Doctorow goes through more of his process in which he's saving both his "box of delights" and the refashioning of them into longer pieces in "20 years a blogger". In his case it's (now) all done on Pluralistic and syndicated out from there, in much the same way @dave has done for years.

20 years a blogger on 2021-01-13 by [[Cory Doctorow]]

I always thought that Alan Jacobs blogging practice was a method of commonplacing and digital publishing all rolled up into one. Nice to see him lay out some of his thinking and method here.

https://www.libraryfutures.net/post/how-much-does-obamas-summer-reading-list-cost-your-library

https://www.jonmsterling.com/index.xml

ᔥRichard in A forest of evergreen notes at 2024-06-02<br /> (accessed:: 2024-06-07 11:14:53)

https://wildrye.com/your-blog-as-a-commonplace-book/

reply to u/ihaveascone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14v2ohz/converting_commonplace_books/

Don't convert unless you absolutely need to, it will be a lot of soul-crushing make work. Since some of your practice already looks like Ross Ashby's system, why not just continue what you've been doing all along and start a physical index card-based index for your commonplaces? (As opposed to a more classical Lockian index.) As you browse your commonplaces create index cards for topics you find and write down the associated book/page numbers. Over time you'll more quickly make your commonplace books more valuable while still continuing on as you always have without skipping much a beat or attempting to convert over your entire system. Alternately you could do a paper notebook with a digital index too. I came across https://www.indxd.ink, a digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional). It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears. This could potentially be used by those who have analog commonplace/zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.

Will libraries have the same problems with the digital transition that music and journalism have had?

http://bactra.org/

An interesting raw html-based website that also serves the functions of notebook and to some extent a digital commonplace.

Cosma Shalizi is a professor in the statistics department at CMU.

Peter Smith calls his website his commonplace book.

https://standardebooks.org/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>awarm.space</span> in Making a modern ebook with Standard Ebooks (<time class='dt-published'>08/02/2021 12:08:19</time>)</cite></small>

https://www.iamabook.online/

https://www.indxd.ink/

A digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional).

It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears.

This could potentially be used by those who have analog zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>sgtstretch </span> in @Gaby @pimoore so a good friend of mine makes [INDXD](https://www.indxd.ink/) which is for indexing analog notebooks and being able to find things. I don't personally use it, but I know @patrickrhone has written about it before. (<time class='dt-published'>10/27/2022 17:59:32</time>)</cite></small>

via https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/

If you want to try commonplacing digitally, u/Citrie is developing commonplaces.io — if you try it, please send them any feedback you have!

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/usj4dvF0Eeut6W8aTWJVaQ

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

Some of the basic outline of this looks like OER (Open Educational Resources) and its "five Rs": Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and/or Redistribute content. (To which I've already suggested the sixth: Request update (or revision control).

Some of this is similar to:

The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb [Tantek Çelik](http://tantek.com/2011/174/t1/read-fork-write-merge-web-osb110

Idea of collections of learning as collections or "playlists" or "readlists". Similar to the old tool Readlist which bundled articles into books relatively easily. See also: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/26/indieweb-readlists-tools-and-brainstorming/

Use of Wiki version histories

Some of this has the form of a Wiki but with smaller nuggets of information (sort of like Tiddlywiki perhaps, which also allows for creating custom orderings of things which had specific URLs for displaying and sharing them.) The Zettelkasten idea has some of this embedded into it. Shared zettelkasten could be an interesting thing.

Data is the new soil. A way to reframe "data is the new oil" but as a part of the commons. This fits well into the gardens and streams metaphor.

Jerry, have you seen Matt Ridley's work on Ideas Have Sex? https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex Of course you have: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/3e2c5c75-fc49-0688-f455-6de58e4487f1/attachments/8aab91d4-5fc8-93fe-7850-d6fa828c10a9

I've heard Jerry mention the idea of "crystallization of knowledge" before. How can we concretely link this version with Cesar Hidalgo's work, esp. Why Information Grows.

Cross reference Jerry's Brain: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/4bfe6526-9884-4b6d-9548-23659da7811e/notes

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

Tiago Forte directly equates a "digital commonplace book" with his concept of a "Second Brain" in his book Building a Second Brain.

Why create a new "marketing term" for something that should literally be commonplace!

https://3stages.org/quotes/index.html

I thought I'd bookmarked this before, but apparently not in my notebook. Example of an explicit online commonplace book, primarily with quotes from J. Jacobs' reading.

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

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

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Learning Commons </span> in Annotating a text - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - LibGuides at Mater Christi College (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2022 13:46:42</time>)</cite></small>

https://barnsworthburning.net/

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

It shouldn't take people hours a day with multiple posts, message boards, reading replies, and excessive research to implement a commonplace book. Herein lies a major problem with these systems. They require a reasonable user manual.

One of the reasons I like the idea of public digital gardens is that one can see directly how others are using the space in a more direct and active way. You can see a system in active use and figure out which parts do or don't work or resonate with you.

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/episode-005-interview-with-chris-aldrich/

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Thinking_About_Tools_For_Thought_Ep_005.mp3

This didn't turn out too badly for a half an hour. As ever I dislike listening to my own voice.

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/episode-001-introduction/

https://thinkingabouttoolsforthought.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Thinking_About_Tools_For_Thought_Ep_001.mp3

Just noticed that Mark Bernstein, the writer of Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas, has page about commonplace books on his site, which he wrote with his note taking cum digital gardening tool Tinderbox.

Edward Betts is using his website as a commonplace book of sorts with a wide variety of topic headings based on his reading.

He also keeps a separate wiki: https://edwardbetts.com/wiki/

This would appear to be an interesting direct connection of the analogy of commonplaces to digital gardens.

I've always had history and philosophy around me from a relatively young age. Some of this stems from a practice of mnemonics since I was eleven and a more targeted study of the history and philosophy of mnemonics over the past decade. Some of this overlaps areas like knowledge acquisition and commonplace books which I've delved into over the past 6 years. I have a personal website that serves to some extent as a digital commonplace book and I've begun studying and collecting examples of others who practice similar patterns (see: https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book and a selection of public posts at https://boffosocko.com/tag/commonplace-books/) in the blogosphere and wiki space. As a result of this I've been watching the digital gardens space and the ideas relating to Zettelkasten for the past several years as well. If you'd like to go down a similar rabbit hole I can recommend some good books.

There's apparently a product that will turn one's Roam Research notes into a digital garden.

Great to see a bridge for making these things easier for the masses, but I have to think that there's a better and cheaper way. Perhaps some addition competition in the space will help bring the price down.

I've only run across the German "Gemeinplatz" a few times with this translation attached. Sad to think that this negative connotation has apparently taken hold. Even in English the word commonplace can have a somewhat negative connotation as well meaning "everyday, ordinary, unexceptional" when the point of commonplacing notes is specifically because they are surprising or extraordinary by definition.

Your phrasing of "evergreen notes" seems close enough. I've seen some who might call the shorter notes you're making either "seedlings" or "budding" notes. Some may wait for bigger expansions of their ideas into 500-2000 word essays before they consider them "evergreen" notes. (Compare: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history and https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes). Of course this does vary quite a bit from person to person in my experience, so your phrasing certainly fits.

I've not seen it crop up in the digital gardens or zettelkasten circles specifically but the word "evergreen" is used in the journalism space) to describe a fully formed article that can be re-used wholesale on a recurring basis. Usually they're related to recurring festivals, holidays, or cyclical stories like "How to cook the perfect Turkey" which might get recycled a week before Thanksgiving every year.

Revisiting this essay to review it in the framing of digital gardens.

In a "gardens and streams" version of this metaphor, the stream is flow and the garden is stock.

This also fits into a knowledge capture, growth, and innovation framing. The stream are small atomic ideas flowing by which may create new atomic ideas. These then need to be collected (in a garden) where they can be nurtured and grow into new things.

Clippings of these new growth can be placed back into the stream to move on to other gardeners. Clever gardeners will also occasionally browse through the gardens of others to see bigger picture versions of how their gardens might become.

Proper commonplacing is about both stock and flow. The unwritten rule is that one needs to link together ideas and expand them in places either within the commonplace or external to it: essays, papers, articles, books, or other larger structures which then become stock for others.

While some creators appear to be about all stock in the modern era, it's just not true. They're consuming streams (flow) from other (perhaps richer) sources (like articles, books, television rather than social media) and building up their own stock in more private (or at least not public) places. Then they release that article, book, film, television show which becomes content stream for others.

While we can choose to create public streams, but spending our time in other less information dense steams is less useful. Better is to keep a reasonably curated stream to see which other gardens to go visit.

Currently is the online media space we have structures like microblogs and blogs (and most social media in general) which are reasonably good at creating streams (flow) and blogs, static sites, and wikis which are good for creating gardens (stock).

What we're missing is a structure with the appropriate and attendant UI that can help us create both a garden and a stream simultaneously. It would be nice to have a wiki with a steam-like feed out for the smaller attendant ideas, but still allow the evolutionary building of bigger structures, which could also be placed into the stream at occasional times.

I can imagine something like a MediaWiki with UI for placing small note-like ideas into other streams like Twitter, but which supports Webmention so that ideas that come back from Twitter or other consumers of one's stream can be placed into one's garden. Perhaps in a Zettelkasten like way, one could collect atomic notes into their wiki and then transclude those ideas into larger paragraphs and essays within the same wiki on other pages which might then become articles, books, videos, audio, etc.

Obsidian, Roam Research do a somewhat reasonable job on the private side and have some facility for collecting data, but have no UI for sharing out into streams.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs</span> in the blog garden – Snakes and Ladders (<time class='dt-published'>07/01/2021 09:15:23</time>)</cite></small>

Alan Jacobs seems to be delving into the area of thought spaces provided by blogs and blogging.

In my view, they come out of a cultural tradition of commonplace books becoming digital and more social in the the modern era. Jacobs is obviously aware of the idea of Zettelkasten, but possibly hasn't come across the Sonke Ahrens' book on smart notes or the conceptualization of the "digital garden" stemming from Mike Caulfield's work.

He's also acquainted with Robin Sloane, though it's unclear if he's aware of the idea of Stock and Flow.

A list of public digital gardens and digital commonplace books using Obsidian Publish.

I've seen this pattern. I suspect some of the issue is having a clean, useful user interface for actually using the thing instead of spending time setting it up and tweaking it.

I've been seeing some of this in the digital gardening space online. People are actively hosting their annotations, thoughts, and ideas, almost as personal wikis.

Some are using RSS and other feeds as well as Webmention notifications so that these notebooks can communicate with each other in a realization of Vanmevar Bush's dream.

Networked academic samizdat anyone?

I've noticed that Dan Mackinlay has some public notebooks with an interesting system for indicating knowledge process too.

Your new home on the web

Understory is a digital garden, a micro-publishing space for you to plant the seeds of your ideas and grow them into bi-directionally linked web portals.

via IndieWeb Chat

example of a digitial garden in public

This has to be one of the baddest-ass things I've seen in months. I wish more people had public-facing commonplace books like this!

Bonus points that Whitney calls it a Whiki! :)

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>whitney trettien</span> on Twitter: "I'm excited to share a digital edition of Susanna Collet's 17th-century commonplace book, held at @morganlibrary. @zoe_braccia & I made it using @digitalmappa. It features a full transcription/facsimile & a searchable library of Collet's source texts. https://t.co/VSCMmBhMS6 https://t.co/fyrbwS9kk1" (<time class='dt-published'>04/09/2021 10:49:31</time>)</cite></small>

Susanna Collet's Commonplace Book

We really need to get around to scheduling the second session of Gardens and Streams.

This looks fascinating. I'm not so much interested in the coding/programming part as I am the actual "working in public" portions as they relate to writing, thinking, blogging in the open and sharing that as part of my own learning and growth as well as for sharing that with a broader personal learning network. I'm curious what lessons might be learned within this frame or how educators and journalists might benefit from it.

I've seen some people building digital commonplace books in real time, but I'm also curious to see more academics doing it and seeing what tools and platforms they're using to do it.

Given the prevalence for these in text, I'd be particularly curious to see them being done as .txt or .md files and then imported into platforms like Obsidian, Roam Research, Org Mode, TiddlyWiki, et al for cross linking and backlinking.

I've seen some evidence of people doing some of this with copies of the bible, but yet to see anyone digitize and cross link old notebooks or commonplace books.

There's a nice kernel of an idea here that one's website should be built and made (useful) for ones self first and only secondarily for others. This is what makes it a "personal" website.

This idea underlies the reason why one might want to have a public online commonplace book or digital garden.

Doesn't this obfuscate the process? Literature became digital. Digital enables a wide range of futther activity to take place on top of literature, including, perhaps, it's datafication.

Estas líneas y las siguientes definen un conjunto interesante de posibilidades para las publicaciones digitales. ¿Cómo podemos hacerles Bootstrap desde lo que ya tenemos? (ejp: Grafoscopio y el Data Week).

"Thousands of files containing details of prisoners arrested during 1913 Lockout, Easter Rising published online," RTÉ Six-One News (2016-05-11) [flash video]

http://www.rte.ie/news/player/2016/0511/20986024-thousands-of-files-containing-details-of-prisoners-arrested-during-1913-lockout-easter-rising-published-online/

RTÉ Six-One News report on the restoration of DMP Prisoners Books to the Garda Museum and Archives, and launch of the four digitised volumes of Dublin Metropolitan Police prisoner books from the Irish revolutionary period.

"UCD Library Cultural Heritage: Launch of the Dublin Metropolitan Police Prisoners Books." Flickr (2015-05-11)

Flickr album of photographs from the SPITU-sponsored launch of the digital DMP Prisoners Books at Liberty Hall, Dublin.

"SIPTU presents historic DMP files to Garda and to UCD online library" (2016-05-11) http://www.siptu.ie/media/pressreleases2016/featurednews/fullstory_19808_en.html

SIPTU presented ‘Prisoners Books’ concerning over 30,000 people arrested by the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) between 1905 and 1918 to the Garda Síochána at a ceremony in Liberty Hall, Dublin, this morning (11th May).

PULSE, 1916. http://www.broadsheet.ie/2016/05/11/fingers-on-the-pulse-of-1916/

The Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) Prisoners Books for 1905-1908 and 1911-1918 are amongst the most valuable new documents to come to light on the revolutionary decade.

They include important information on social and political life in the capital during the last years of the Union, from the period of widespread anticipation of Home Rule, to the advent of the 1913 Lockout, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the Easter Rising and its aftermath in 1916, and including the conscription crisis of 1918.

They will also be invaluable to those interested in criminology, genealogy, and family history.

The collection comprises of four large leather bound, double ledger volumes containing hand written entries that record the details of daily charge sheets issued by DMP members to offenders or alleged offenders.

Each volume contains the name, age, address, occupation, alleged offence and, in most cases, outcome of cases involving over 30,000 people arrested by the DMP.

Each volume also contains an index of prisoners with references to the pages containing details of the charge. The information in these volumes serves, therefore, to provide new perspectives on life in Dublin during a time of war and revolution.

Dublin Metropolitan Police's Prisoners Books released," Irish Geneology News (2016-05-12) http://www.irishgenealogynews.com/2016/05/dublin-metropolitan-polices-prisoners.html

Launched yesterday at Liberty Hall, these records date from Ireland's revolutionary era and include all manner of crimes listed in register pages headed 'Prisoners charged with offences involving dishonesty'. ...

"Historic police records showing Connolly and Larkin arrests found in skip," Irish Independent (2016-05-11) http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/historic-police-records-showing-connolly-and-larkin-arrests-found-in-skip-34707471.html

The four missing volumes of 'Prisoner Books' listing the arrests of more than 30,000 people between 1905 and 1918 include the "crimes" of labour leaders Jim Larkin (seditious conspiracy), James Connolly (incitement to crime), revolutionary Maud Gonne MacBride (defence of the realm) and suffragette Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, (glass-breaking with other suffragettes).

"Records of 1916 Rising arrests published online," Irish Examiner (2016-05-12)

Reports containing details of 30,000 arrests by the Dublin Metropolitan Police more than 100 years ago have been published online, writes Dan Buckley.

They contain details of prisoners during the Lockout of 1913, the outbreak of the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising.

perlegi