Typewriter Video Series - Episode 147: Font Sizes and the Writing Process by [[Joe Van Cleave]]

typewriters for note making

double or 1 1/2 spacing with smaller typefaces may be more efficient for drafting documents, especially first drafts

editing on actual paper can be more useful for some

Drafting on a full sheet folded in half provides a book-like reading experience for reading/editing and provides an automatic backing sheet

typewritten (or printed) sheets may be easier to see and revise than digital formats which may hide text the way ancient scrolls did for those who read them.

Jack Kerouac used rolls of paper to provide continuous writing experience. Doesn't waste the margins of paper at the top/bottom. This may be very useful for first drafts.

JVC likes to thread rolls of paper into typewriters opposite to the original curl so as to flatten the paper out in the end.

read [[Stephen Robertson]] in A New Graduate Course for 2022: Digital Scholarship

Historian and author David McCullough prefers a manual typewriter over computers with keyboards specifically because it forces him to slow down and take his time.

Ref: @Nichol2016 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5966990/

1478-1518, Notebook of Leonardo da Vinci (''The Codex Arundel''). A collection of papers written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452, d. 1519), in his characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left), including diagrams, drawings and brief texts, covering a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes. The core of the notebook is a collection of materials that Leonardo describes as ''a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place according to the subjects of which they treat'' (f. 1r), a collection he began in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli in Florence, in 1508. To this notebook has subsequently been added a number of other loose papers containing writing and diagrams produced by Leonardo throughout his career. Decoration: Numerous diagrams.

Just as using a text for writing generative annotations (having a conversation with a text) is a useful exercise for writers and thinkers, creative writers can stand to have similar textual creativity prompts.

Compare Wordcraft affordances with tools like Nabokov's card index (zettelkasten) method, Twyla Tharp's boxes, MadLibs, cadavre exquis, et al.

The key is to have some sort of creativity catalyst so that one isn't working in a vacuum or facing the dreaded blank page.

Ippolito, Daphne, Ann Yuan, Andy Coenen, and Sehmon Burnam. “Creative Writing with an AI-Powered Writing Assistant: Perspectives from Professional Writers.” arXiv, November 9, 2022. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.05030.

See also: https://wordcraft-writers-workshop.appspot.com/learn

A Google project entering the public as ChatGPT was released and becoming popular.

For additional experiences, see: https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/authors-note/

Too many in the productivity porn space focus on the apps and the potential workflows without looking at the question "why" at all. It's rare that any focus on understanding or actual output.

Winnie later goes on to point out that this is much like gardening: it is a slow process, and the process has its seasons which wax and wane, expanding and contracting. You sow. You seed. You water. You fertilize. You wait. You pick weeds. You water. Pick some more weeds. You might prune. You flick off the japanese beetles. And because of the cyclical nature of the planet we inhabit, we also have periods where nothing grows, and the soil lies dormant. Waiting. Resting. This, too, can be embraced as we carve out our little corners of the web, and really all aspects of our lives. I know I'm nearly as tender to myself as I should be.

Many people treat their blogging practice as an experimental thought space. They try out new ideas, explore a small space, attempt to come to understanding, connect new ideas to their existing ideas.

Ton Zylstra coins/uses the phrase "metablogging" to think about his blogging practice as an evolving thought space.

How can we better distill down these sorts of longer ideas and use them to create more collisions between ideas to create new an innovative ideas? What forms might this take?

The personal zettelkasten is a more concentrated form of this and blogging is certainly within the space as are the somewhat more nascent digital gardens. What would some intermediary "idea crucible" between these forms look like in public that has a simple but compelling interface. How much storytelling and contextualization is needed or not needed to make such points?

Is there a better space for progressive summarization here so that an idea can be more fully laid out and explored? Then once the actual structure is built, the scaffolding can be pulled down and only the idea remains.

Reminiscences of scaffolding can be helpful for creating context.

Consider the pyramids of Giza and the need to reverse engineer how they were built. Once the scaffolding has been taken down and history forgets the methods, it's not always obvious what the original context for objects were, how they were made, what they were used for. Progressive summarization may potentially fall prey to these effects as well.

How might we create a "contextual medium" which is more permanently attached to ideas or objects to help prevent context collapse?

How would this be applied in reverse to better understand sites like Stonehenge or the hundreds of other stone circles, wood circles, and standing stones we see throughout history.

Note the use of the word "seedlings" here in a context reminiscent of the metaphor of the digital garden.

It should be recognized that these basic note types are very different than the digital garden framing of 📤 (seedbox), 🌱 (seedling), 🪴 (sapling), 🌲 (evergreen), etc. which are another measure of the growth and expansion of not just one particular idea but potentially multiple ideas over time. These are a project management sort of tool for focusing on the growth of ideas. Within some tools, one might also use graph views and interconnectedness as means of charting this same sort of growth.

Sönke Ahrens' framing of fleeting note, literature note, and permanent note are a value assignation to the types of each of these notes with respect to generating new ideas and writing.

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

Is the phrase "digital writing" as fraught as "digital native"? Or has it morphed into just plain writing? I still find myself bridging the gap analog -digital gap. For example, a summer goal is to make annotation of pdf's as close to paper as I can. I invested in a reMarkable tablet to make this happen. Do I consider it "digital writing"--yes and no. It is the merging of digital and analog. I do it so as to have less friction and quicker feedback with students. None of this matters if students can't take in the feedback or if my feedback sucks, but that is another pedagogic and compositional concern.

I think of myself as a Moffett guy, in that early on in my teaching I found the notion of "Teaching the Universe of Discourse" and exciting and clear map for building curriculum and for assessing my students' progress at any moment. I learned to focus on a balance of the different kinds of writing in the UNIVERSE of discourse. When I began to think about what it meant to teach digital writing, I returned to Moffett's notion of looking at the range of possibility. And as the words here, "ever-changing" and "landscape," suggest, we can constantly be thinking about what to include in our digital curriculum. Snapchat? Instagram? Is blogging still an important part of the landscape? What does it mean to have more characters available on Twitter? Do my students need more time in something like a Google community with short, interactive online conversation or do they need to slow down a bit and create a web page? It's exciting to be playing in this field, and it's even more exciting when youth recognize that they can choose where they want to play and make a difference digitally as well -- and what they need to learn to have an impact digitally.

Is paper a realm? Have never thought of it that way. Every medium is a realm? Is it helpful analytically to make this distinction? Similarly, it is helpful to make the same distinction between digital and not digital?