8 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2023
    1. In these instances, he could outsource partsof the work process to his personal amanuenses, his youngest children,Martha and Friedrich, who acted as scribes and copied book passagesthat he had marked.

      Many writers and excerpters had amanuenses as helpers to copy out passages or to copy material over for them. Theodor Fontane would mark passages in books for his children to excerpt and copy over for him.

      Compare this manual labor to that of more modern tools like Hypothes.is which allow one to digitally highlight and then excerpt almost automatically.

  2. Feb 2023
    1. Wordcraft shined the most as a brainstorming partner and source of inspiration. Writers found it particularly useful for coming up with novel ideas and elaborating on them. AI-powered creative tools seem particularly well suited to sparking creativity and addressing the dreaded writer's block.

      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.

    2. In addition to specific operations such as rewriting, there are also controls for elaboration and continutation. The user can even ask Wordcraft to perform arbitrary tasks, such as "describe the gold earring" or "tell me why the dog was trying to climb the tree", a control we call freeform prompting. And, because sometimes knowing what to ask is the hardest part, the user can ask Wordcraft to generate these freeform prompts and then use them to generate text. We've also integrated a chatbot feature into the app to enable unstructured conversation about the story being written. This way, Wordcraft becomes both an editor and creative partner for the writer, opening up new and exciting creative workflows.

      The interface of Wordcraft sounds like some of that interface that note takers and thinkers in the tools for thought space would appreciate in their

      Rather than pairing it with artificial intelligence and prompts for specific writing tasks, one might pair tools for though interfaces with specific thinking tasks related to elaboration and continuation. Examples of these might be gleaned from lists like Project Zero's thinking routines: https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines

    3. For instance, if the user selects a phrase, a button to "Rewrite this phrase" is revealed along with a text input in which the user can describe how they would like the phrase to be rewritten. The user might type "to be funnier" or "to be more melancholy", and the Wordcraft application uses LaMDA and in-context learning to perform the task.
  3. Aug 2022
    1. Do not depend on the typistfor any service or assistance except actual copying.

      the amanuensis has evolved into a typist.

      A subtle admonishment here to "do your own work".

      In academic settings, depending on level, the amanuensis may do more than just type or transcribe. For students, it should just be transcription, but for others, the level of input is highly likely to increase...

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  4. May 2022
    1. Are you scanning all your analogue note cards?

      I do scan them, though in a somewhat different workflow than the batch processing that some might imagine. The broad outline and some of the specific details can be found here: Handwriting my Website with a Digital Amanuensis. The comments section of that post has some useful tips for folks on other platforms.