https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZgMpjjgCRA
Combining sketchnotes with Cornell Notes in a fairly straightforward manner.
He mentions anecdotally that teachers who have used custom icons for their subjects see students drawing some of them on their exam papers as mental associative tags. This is the same sort of use that drolleries had in medieval manuscripts.
There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully
General methods of annotating or marking a text:<br /> - underlining, circling, boxing, enclosing, or highlighting - vertical lines in margin - stars, asterisks, symbols, dogears, (implied: bookmarks) - numbers sequencing arguments - page numbers as cross references - writing in the margin: questions and answers - writing in the endpapers
Are there other methods and marks that aren't catalogued here?
The idea of drolleries used as mnemonics is one which quickly comes to mind.
They do mention cross-references to page numbers within the text, but fail to mention links to ideas in other texts. (Perhaps they cover this later under syntopical reading and marking?)
As the book recounts, annotation is a centuries-old practice. For example, decorative images called drolleries were added in the margins of medieval texts as visual comments on themes in the text.
I've not seen it argued elsewhere (yet), but I would make a case that the majority of drolleries weren't so much comment on themes in text as that they were loci placed into the books at either intervals or in particular locations as part of the practice of the art of memory. They act as signposts to which the reader can more easily memorize portions of books by attaching the ideas on those pages to the dramatic and absurd images painted into them as suggested by Rhetorica ad Herennium (https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL403/1954/volume.xml).
Cross reference: The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates (University of Chicago, 1966).for the historical practice of memory in the West, though she doesn't mention drolleries at all.
cc: @remikalir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiated_initial
I wonder if these still exist in the new spaces of productivity porn in within journaling? Perhaps the application of stickers in peoples' planners sort of serves some of this functionality, though I'd consider them to be more in the drollery family.
Anecdotal mention here of someone using sketchnotes or doodling as a mnemonic device.
Sketchnotes could be a means of implementing visual method of loci in one's note taking. Like creating a faux memory palace. Also somewhat similar, expecially in the case of the leaf doodle mentioned above, to the idea of drolleries, but in this case, they're not taking advantage of the memory's greater capacity of imagination to make things even more memorable for long term retention.
Quintilian is skeptical of the art of memory. His preferred scheme is to divide words on the page intosmall, memorizable chunks, each subdivision serving as a sort oflocusin page-space. Indeed, Quintilian even suggests thatthe best mnemonic image one can construct is simply an image of the tablet or papyrus on which one wrote (11.2.27–32).
And for renaissance scholars, this quote may be the reason that drolleries are so widespread in illuminated manuscripts.
They were also instructed not to mark or write on the word list, and not to use their mobile phones or any other electronic devices or aids to assist in the activity.
Doing this specifically prevents the non-mnemotechniques group from adding their own visual loci in the form of annotations, drolleries, etc.