compare this boiling down to his comment at https://hypothes.is/a/psgmlu7qEe6MIiNGfuzB2A

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17617#Comment_17617

There is definitely something here from a usability (and reusability) perspective when notes are broken down into smaller pieces the way that is encouraged by Hypothes.is or by writing on index cards.

Compare: - ://www.evernote.com/shard/s170/sh/d69cf793-1f14-48f4-bd48-43f41bd88678/DapavVTQh954eMRGKOVeEPHm7FxEqxBKvaKLfKWaSV1yuOmjREsMkSHvmQ - https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/

The first may be most useful for a note taker who is personally trying to make sense of material, but it becomes a massive wall of text that one is unlikely to re-read or attempt to reuse at a later date. If they do attempt to reuse it at a later date, it's not clear which parts are excerpts of the original and which are the author's own words. (This page also looks like it's the sort of notes, highlighting, and underlining recommended by Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain text using progressive summarization.)

The second set, are more concrete, more atomic, more understandable, and also as a result much more usable.

What was the purpose of these summaries? Were they of areas which weren't readily apparent in hindsight? Often most people's long summaries are really just encapsulalizations of what is apparent from the book jacket. Why bother with this? If they're just summaries of the obvious, then they're usually useless for review specifically because they're obvious. This is must make-work.

You want to pull out the specific hard-core insights that weren't obvious to you from the jump.

Most self-help books can be motivating while reading them and the motivation can be helpful, but generally they will only contain one or two useful ideas

Sounds much like the Feynman technique and is quite similar to the advice of Sonke Ahrens.

Jacques Goutor defines content notes as those that "are drawn in one way or another from the actual contents of the sources." He considers them the most important part of note taking as "they will eventually constitute the pieces of the mosaic." (p20)

He further breaks this type down into generally self-explanatory "quote notes" and "summary notes". (p20) He does advise that one writes out careful summaries so that one needn't do additional future work of writing notes on one's own notes. While he doesn't state it directly, the presumption in his presentation is that a well written summary can be directly used in one's future written project.

Compare this type of note to others like evergreen or permanent notes.

What results do Brown et al show exactly? How do they dovetail with the citations and material in Ahrens2017 on these topics?

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=3301452

Ahrens, doesn't provide a full citation of Brown, but does quote it for the same broad purpose (see: https://hypothes.is/a/8ewTno3pEeydaHscXVaIzw) specifically with respect to the idea that highlighting doesn't help in the learning process, yet students still actively do it.

https://ncase.me/nutshell/

For those interested in the ideas of annotations, inline footnotes, expandable text, additional context, stretch text, hovercards, etc., Nicky Case has recently released a new project called Nutshell (https://ncase.me/nutshell/) which has some fun user interface as well as code with which to play.

One of the best methods for technical reading is to create progressive summarizations of what one has read.

Your practice sounds akin to that of the idea of progressive summarization which many do in their overall note taking work.

I generally leave the title for last as well for just this reason. I find these titles are also incredibly helpful in reorganizing slips into broader outline forms for creating new articles.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3dbH2c3l0M

Templater scripts: - My Clippings: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/296 - Extract highlights to create mini-summary draft: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/294

This could be interesting to attempt on a book.

Ahrens goes through a variety of research on teaching and learning as they relate to active reading, escaping cognitive biases, creating understanding, progressive summarization, elaboration, revision, etc. as a means of showing and summarizing how these all dovetail nicely into a fruitful long term practice of using a slip box as a note taking method. This makes the zettelkasten not only a great conversation partner but an active teaching and learning partner as well. (Though he doesn't mention the first part in this chapter or make this last part explicit.)

What methods of studying actually make us learn something versus make us feel as if we've learned something?

Active reading, progressive summarization may be on this list while highlighting and underlining might not. Or perhaps there's a spectrum of poor to good, and if this is the case, what does it look like? Is it the same for everyone or are factors like neurodivergence part of the equation which might change this spectrum of learning methods and techniques?

Some of the lighter and more passive (and common) forms of reading, highlighting, underlining sentences and hoping to understand or even remember the content and contexts is far less valuable than active reading, progressive summarization, comparing and contrasting, and extracting smart or permanent notes from one's texts.

What is the value of reformulating texts and ideas into one's own words rather than excerpting them?

In the commonplace tradition, learners were suggested to excerpt knowledge and place it into their commonplace books. Luhmann (2000, 154f) and Ahrens (2017, 85) suggest that instead of excerpting that one practice a form of progressive summarization of texts into their own words as a means to learn and expand ones' frames of reference and knowledge.

Related to literature notes, but a small level down are the sorts of basic highlights that one makes in their books/reading. For pedagogy's sake they're a sort of fleeting note that might be better rewritten in a progressive summarization form. Too often they're not, but sit there on the page in a limbo between the lowest form of fleeting note and a literature note.

Hierarchy of annotations and notes: - fleeting notes - highlights - marginalia marks: ?, !, ⁕, †, ‡, ⁂, ⊙, doodles, phatic marks, tags, categories, topic headings, etc., - very brief annotations - literature notes (progressive summaries) - permanent notes

Literature notes could also be considered progressive summaries of what one has read. They are also a form of practicing the Feynman technique where one explains what one knows as a means of embracing an idea and better understanding it.

https://words.jamoe.org/highlight-question-and-answer/

A somewhat disingenuous reframing of the Cornell notes method. They've given it a different name potentially for marketing purposes to sell in a book. At least HQ&A is a reasonable mnemonic for what the process is.

They do highlight the value of modality shift from reading to thinking about how to formulate a question and answer as a means of learning. They don't seem to know the name or broader value of the technique however.

This question technique is also highlighted in the work of Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen. Cross reference: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ and their quantum mechanics course experiments.

They say that HQ&A is for when narrow depth is a priority and Jump Notes for when shallow depth is a priority? What's the difference here? Aren't narrow and shallow really synonyms? This should be clearer.

They sound mostly like they're talking about highlighting facts and then doing progressive summarization.

Likely from Aurifondina artium et scientiarum omnium excerpendi solerti, omnibus litterarum amantibus monstrata. worldcat

h/t: https://hyp.is/tz3lBmznEeyvEmOX-B5DxQ/infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2007/11/future-reading-.html

https://luhmann.surge.sh/learning-how-to-read

Learning How to Read by Niklas Luhmann

Not as dense as Mortimer J. Adler's advice, but differentiates reading technical material versus poetry and novels. Moves to the topic of some of the value of note taking as a means of progressive summarization which may have implications for better remembering material.

This is related to an idea that Tom Critchlow was trying to get at a bit the other day. It would definitely be interesting in this sort of setting.

Has anyone built a generalizable text zoom JavaScript library that let's you progressively summarize an article as you zoom in and out?<br><br>(Why yes I am procrastinating my to-do list. You?)

— Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) September 17, 2021

[[translation and synthesis]] - understanding the authors in your own words, and being able to summarize their points without just copy-pasting. To be able to do this well, you really need to understand the authors ideas.