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  1. Last 7 days
    1. Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

      The Dan Allosso book club continues on its tour of looking at historical myths, particularly with respect to economics in the United States.

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  2. Mar 2024
    1. The battalion commander claimed that he protestedbut was merely told by the operations officer and division�mmander that the German police could provide the cordonand leave the shooting to the Lithuanians.

      after-the fact testimony, war crime trial and memory guilt?

    2. instructed continuously aboutthe political necessity of the measures.
    1. can truly and uprightly say, before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them; but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded by Satan.

      The argument here really seems to be that it is not her fault. A lot of people during this time were claiming Satan made them fdo these things

    1. Office Organisation, of which the work here discussed forms part, 2has been considerably modified within recent years, and Avhatis called the " card system " has now come very much into vogue.

      The nebulous, but colloquial "card system" was a common, but now lost moniker for the use of a card index in business settings in the early 1900s.

    1. Read [[Martha S. Jones]] in Sleuthing the Card Catalog

    2. The Library of Congress discontinued the use of “Negroes” as a subject heading in 1976.
    3. I fingered my way through where I thought I’d find entries: African American, Afro-American, Black. Nothing there. I had to then brainstorm like it was 1999, or was it 1989, 1979, or even earlier, to discover the right term. As far back as 1984, the Library of Congress, whose subject headings most research libraries in the United States utilize, admitted that it was “frustrating” to search for Black people in its catalog because two terms were simultaneously in use: “Afro-Americans” and “Blacks.”1 Neither term made it into the old Peabody Library catalog, so perhaps it and the terminology it reflected dated from an even earlier time.

      Research on keywords and their shifting meanings over time can make things difficult for the novice researcher. This example from Martha S. Jones certainly highlights this perspective even in under a century of semantic shift.

  3. Feb 2024
    1. Unit commanders subsequentlydistributed instructions on “The Art of Writing a Letter,” urgingsoldiers to write “manly, hard and clear letters.” Many impressionswere “best locked deep in the heart because they concern only sol-diers at the front . . . Anyone who complains and bellyaches is notrue soldier.
    2. “Actuallythe impact of letters from the front, which had been regarded as ex-traordinarily important, has to be considered more than harmfultoday,” he noted: “soldiers are pretty blunt when they describe thegreat problems they are fighting under, the lack of winter gear . . .insufficient food and ammunition.”
    3. From the perspective of the regime, lettersfrom the front served to justify the war and to bind together the na-tion in a common purpose. Military officials underscored the im-portance of writing home; letters from the battle front supplied “akind of spiritual vitamin” for the home front and reinforced its “at-titude and nerves.
    4. Lettersand photographs, and the effort to archive them, indicated the ex-tent to which soldiers deliberately placed themselves in world his-tory and adopted for themselves the heroicizing vantage of theThird Reich
    5. the simple act of writing or mailing a letter distin-guished Germans from Jews. The distinction affected the abilityof people in the war to bear witness, to send news, and to makesense of extraordinary events. It indicated the destruction of onecommunity of remembrance and the survival of another.
    6. In time ofwar, families frequently established archives in order to documenttheir role in national history
    7. In time of war and separation, the letters to andfrom soldiers serving on the front lines were precious signs of life.They were avowals of love and longings for home. They describedthe battlefield and conditions of military occupation and eventuallyprovided historians with crucial documents about popular attitudestoward the war and knowledge about the Holocaust.
    8. With smuggled letters, private diaries,and secret archives, Jewish victims made enormous efforts to leavebehind accounts of the atrocities the Nazis were committing.
    9. Emigration meant the dispersion of the archive of Jewishlife in Germany, scattering the traces of ancestors and the signs ofcollective history. While German “Aryans” were driving their an-cestries deep into Germany’s past, German Jews were cutting loosefrom their heritage.Racial Grooming • 141
    10. apoliceman’s “perp book”: “a small selection” of photographs fea-tured photographs of the imprisoned physicians, lawyers, and otherprofessionals whose newly shaven heads created the “eternal sem-blances” by which Jews dissolved into criminals.1
    11. Well-appointed homes were ransacked and formerly prominent cit-izens tormented because Jews were regarded as profiteers whosewealth and social standing mocked the probity of the Volksgemein-schaft; children and the elderly were terrorized because they were“the Jew” whose very existence threatened Germany’s moral, polit-ical, and economic revival
    12. The vernacular tag, at least in Berlin, of Reichskristallnacht, or“night of shattered glass,” to designate what should be considered anationwide pogrom against more than 300,000 Germans Jews inNovember 1938, was inflected with sardonic humor, which mockedthe pretentiousness of Nazi vocabulary in which Reich-this andReich-that puffed up the historical moment of the regime
    13. In the context of the Spanish CivilWar, which broke out in July 1936, the Moscow “show trials”against old Bolsheviks in August 1936, and the November 1936anti-Comintern pact between Germany and Japan, the Nazis persis-tently linked Germany’s Jews to the Communist threat.
    14. The acknowledgment that there was a fundamental differencebetween Germans and Jews revived much older superstitions hold-ing that physical contact with Jews was harmful or that Jewish mendefiled German women.
    15. The fact is that it is totally possible,” he carefully noted,“that the National Socialist state would use such a law to make it aduty for those without means and who are dependent on handoutsfrom the state to more or less ‘voluntarily’ take their lives.
    16. . The Nazis carried out involuntary euthanasia in order“to purge the handicapped from the national gene pool,” but war-time conditions gave the program legitimacy and cover.
    17. German legal com-mentators reassured the German public by citing U.S. programs asprecedents and quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1927 opinion,“three generations of imbeciles are enough”
    18. Run largely alongside the state justice and penal system, concen-tration camps became a dumping ground for Gemeinschaftsfremde,“enemies of the community,” who were to spend the rest of theirlives thrown away.

      gemeinschaftsfremde - enemies of the community

    19. The consciousness of generation, and the assumption thatold needed to be replaced with new, undoubtedly opened youngminds to the tenets of racial hygiene, which were repeatedly parsedin workshops and lectures.
    20. Filled with photographs, graphs, and tables, thepropaganda of the Office for Racial Politics made the crucial dis-tinction between quantity and quality—Zahl und Güte—easy tounderstand. Unlike Streicher’s vulgar antisemitic newspaper, DerStürmer, the Neues Volk appeared to be objective, a sobering state-ment of the difficult facts of life

      hiding behind objectivity. ppl saying things and being like well its just fact w/o the ability to double check

    21. new visual regime repeatedly in-troduced the German body, most often in portraits of sunnyathletes, large families, and marching soldiers, and sometimes bycontrast in juxtaposed close-up shots of misshapen, degenerate
    22. In November in Weimar, he promised that “if to-day there are still people in Germany who say: ‘We are not goingjoin your community, but stay just as we always have been,’ then Isay: ‘You will die off, but after you there will a young generationthat doesn’t know anything else!’”

      brah

    23. It was the modern, scientificworld of “ethnocrats” and biomedical professionals, not the anti-communist Freikorps veterans of the SA, who devised Ahnenpässeand certificates of genetic health and evaluated the genetic worth ofindividuals.

      not exactly a bait and switch but somewhere along those lines, hitler gained loyalty by kicking out communism and then harnessed the goodwill to be like "you know what else we need to do"

    24. As parents, educators, volunteers, and soldiers, millions of Ger-mans played new parts in cultivating Aryan identities and segregat-ing out unworthy lives. They did not always do so willingly, andthey certainly did not anticipate the final outcomes of total war andmass murder.
    25. most Germans had little reason tothink of the Third Reich as particularly sinister. “It was possible tolive in Germany throughout the whole period of the dictatorship,”
    26. During the war Klemperer, like so manyother Jews, was forced to move into the drastically smaller quartersof a “Jew house,” which meant that he had to dispose of books andpapers. “[I] am virtually ravaging my past,” he wrote in his di-ary on 21 May 1941. “The principal activity” of the next daywas “burning, burning, burning for hours on end: heaps of letters,manuscripts.

      nazis enforced the creation of aryan archives and forced the destruction of jewish ones, creating an imbalance in how much material there was in order to control the historical narrative

    1. Read [[Martha S. Jones]] in A New Face for an Old Library Catalog

      Discussion on harmful content in library card catalogs and finding aids.

      The methods used to describe archive material can not only be harmful to those using them, but they also provide a useful historical record of what cataloguers may have been thinking contemporaneously as they classified and organized materials.

      This is another potentially useful set of information to have while reading into historical topics from library card catalogs compared to modern-day digital methods.

      Is anyone using version control on their catalogs?

    1. The cards datingfrom 1911 to 1975 at the New York State Library in Albany (whereMelvil Dewey was librarian from 1889 to 1906) were thrown awaylast month as a consequence of a historical-preservation projectinvolving the building in which they were stored.

      Sad that a "historical-preservation project" resulted in the loss of such an interesting historical artifact.

    1. The random selection of words by volunteers often resulted in themchoosing the same words with similar dates, and produced gaps in thequotation paragraphs, which Murray and his assistants had to fill by their ownmanual searching. This must have been like trying to find a needle in ahaystack. It was remarkable how successful Murray’s small team was at fillingthose gaps and finding earliest or latest quotations. Murray told thePhilological Society that this manual trawling for words had to be done forthe majority of words: ‘For more than five-sixths of the words we have tosearch out and find additional quotations in order to complete their historyand illustrate the senses; for every word we have to make a general search todiscover whether any earlier or later quotations, or quotations in other senses,exist.’
    2. Readers were asked to choose words they considered ‘rare’ and the choice ofthese words was random – they were not guided by Murray on what wasneeded. This resulted in a dearth of quotations for common words whichultimately had to be found by Murray and his assistants. In the first part of theDictionary alone, ‘nearly the whole quotations for about, after, all, also, and,in Part I, and for any, as, in Part II, have had to be found by myself and myassistants’, he explained to the Philological Society. If he had his time again,he said that he would have directed his Readers differently, with theinstructions, ‘Take out quotations for all words that do not strike you as rare,peculiar, or peculiarly used.’
    3. Miss Clowes of Ipswich and Miss Wheaton of Bloomsbury Square‘threw up’ (gave up)
    1. https://pages.oup.com/ol/cus/1646173949115570121/submit-words-and-evidence-to-the-oed

      The modern day digital version of an OED contribution slip includes database fields for the following:

      • Submission type (new word or sense of a word; information about origin/etymology; other)
      • the word or phrase itself
      • the part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, other)
      • pronunciation (recording, IPA, rhyming words, etc.)
      • the definition or sense number as defined in the OED
      • quotation evidence with full text, and bibliographical references/links)
      • additional notes

      Only the first two fields are mandatory.

  4. Jan 2024
    1. there is a bad stereotype about earth this is due to the fact that earth was a popular um was a 00:33:09 building material for um popular social classes

      for - earth building - stigmatized - historical reasons

  5. johnhalbrooks.substack.com johnhalbrooks.substack.com
    1. I have left the word wyrd untranslated from the Old English. It means something like “fate” or “doom.” It is the ancestor of the modern English word weird. When Shakespeare refers to the witches in Macbeth as the “weird sisters,” he doesn’t mean that they are strange (though they are), but rather that they have to do with fate. Weird in its modern sense (meaning “strange” or “uncanny”) is probably connected to the mysterious or “weird” nature of fate.
  6. Dec 2023
      • for: science and religion, flat earth misconception, DH, Deep Humanity - science and religion - historical relationship

      • summary

        • Dutch historian Jochem Boodt explains how fake news isn't something new, but as old as the history books!
        • Science and religion were not antagonist in early Western history, as is believed today. This was fake news fabricated in a fascinating way.
        • He uses the example of the common misconception that before Columbus, people thought the earth was flat.
  7. Nov 2023
    1. Lovely. I guess what I'm trying to define is some methodology for practicing. Many times I simply resort to my exhaustive method, which has worked for me in the past simply due to brute force.Thank you for taking the time to respond and for what look like some very interesting references.

      reply to u/ethanzanemiller at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/185xmuh/comment/kb778dy/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      Some of your methodology will certainly depend on what questions you're asking, how well you know your area already, and where you'd like to go. If you're taking notes as part of learning a new area, they'll be different and you'll treat them differently than notes you're collecting on ideas you're actively building on or intriguing facts you're slowly accumulating. Often you'll have specific questions in mind and you'll do a literature review to see what's happing around that area and then read and take notes as a means of moving yourself closer to answering your particular questions.

      Take for example, the frequently asked questions (both here in this forum and by note takers across history): how big is an idea? what is an atomic note? or even something related to the question of how small can a fact be? If this is a topic you're interested in addressing, you'll make note of it as you encounter it in various settings and see that various authors use different words to describe these ideas. Over time, you'll be able to tag them with various phrases and terminologies like "atomic notes", "one idea per card", "note size", or "note lengths". I didn't originally set out to answer these questions specifically, but my interest in the related topics across intellectual history allowed such a question to emerge from my work and my notes.

      Once you've got a reasonable collection, you can then begin analyzing what various authors say about the topic. Bring them all to "terms" to ensure that they're talking about the same things and then consider what arguments they're making about the topic and write up your own ideas about what is happening to answer those questions you had. Perhaps a new thesis emerges about the idea? Some have called this process having a conversation with the texts and their authors or as Robert Hutchins called it participating in "The Great Conversation".

      Almost anyone in the forum here could expound on what an "atomic note" is for a few minutes, but they're likely to barely scratch the surface beyond their own definition. Based on the notes linked above, I've probably got enough of a collection on the idea of the length of a note that I can explore it better than any other ten people here could. My notes would allow me a lot of leverage and power to create some significant subtlety and nuance on this topic. (And it helps that they're all shared publicly so you can see what I mean a bit more clearly; most peoples' notes are private/hidden, so seeing examples are scant and difficult at best.)

      Some of the overall process of having and maintaining a zettelkasten for creating material is hard to physically "see". This is some of the benefit of Victor Margolin's video example of how he wrote his book on the history of design. He includes just enough that one can picture what's happening despite his not showing the deep specifics. I wrote a short piece about how I used my notes about delving into S.D. Goitein's work to write a short article a while back and looking at the article, the footnotes, and links to my original notes may be illustrative for some: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/a-note-about-my-article-on-goitein-with-respect-to-zettelkasten-output-processes/. The exercise is a tedious one (though not as tedious as it was to create and hyperlink everything), but spend some time to click on each link to see the original notes and compare them with the final text. Some of the additional benefit of reading it all is that Goitein also had a zettelkasten which he used in his research and in leaving copies of it behind other researchers still actively use his translations and notes to continue on the conversation he started about the contents of the Cairo Geniza. Seeing some of his example, comparing his own notes/cards and his writings may be additionally illustrative as well, though take care as many of his notes are in multiple languages.

      Another potentially useful example is this video interview with Kathleen Coleman from the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. It's in the realm of historical linguistics and lexicography, but she describes researchers collecting masses of data (from texts, inscriptions, coins, graffiti, etc.) on cards which they can then study and arrange to write their own articles about Latin words and their use across time/history. It's an incredibly simple looking example because they're creating a "dictionary", but the work involved was painstaking historical work to be sure.

      Again, when you're done, remember to go back and practice for yourself. Read. Ask questions of the texts and sources you're working with. Write them down. Allow your zettelkasten to become a ratchet for your ideas. New ideas and questions will emerge. Write them down! Follow up on them. Hunt down the answers. Make notes on others' attempts to answer similar questions. Then analyze, compare, and contrast them all to see what you might have to say on the topics. Rinse and repeat.

      As a further and final (meta) example, some of my answer to your questions has been based on my own experience, but the majority of it is easy to pull up, because I can pose your questions not to my experience, but to my own zettelkasten and then quickly search and pull up a variety of examples I've collected over time. Of course I have far more experience with my own zettelkasten, so it's easier and quicker for me to query it than for you, but you'll build this facility with your own over time.

      Good luck. 🗃️

    2. Taking notes for historical writing .t3_185xmuh._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionI'm trying to understand how to adopt parts of the Zettelkasten method for thinking about historical information. I wrote a PhD in history. My note-taking methodology was a complete mess the whole time. I used note-taking to digest a book, but it would take me two or three times longer than just reading. I would go back over each section and write down the pieces that seemed crucial. Sometimes, when I didn't know a subject well, that could take time. In the end, I would sometimes have many pages of notes in sequential order sectioned the way the book was sectioned, essentially an overlay of the book's structure. It was time-consuming, very hard, not useless at all, but inefficient.Now consider the Zettelkasten idea. I haven't read much of Luhmann. I recall he was a sociologist, a theorist in the grand style. So, in other words, they operate at a very abstract level. When I read about the Zettelkasten method, that's the way it reads to me. A system for combining thoughts and ideas. Now, you'll say that's an artificial distinction, perhaps...a fact is still rendered in thought, has atomicity to it etc. And I agree. However, the thing about facts is there are just A LOT of them. Before you write your narrative, you are drowning in facts. The writing of history is the thing that allows you to bring some order and selectivity to them, but you must drown first; otherwise, you have not considered all the possibilities and potentialities in the past that the facts reveal. To bring it back to Zettelkasten, the idea of Zettel is so appealing, but how does it work when dealing with an overwhelming number of facts? It's much easier to imagine creating a Zettelkasten from more rarefied thoughts provoked by reading.So, what can I learn from the Zettelkasten method? How can I apply some or all of its methodologies, practically speaking? What would change about my initial note-taking of a book if I were to apply Zettelkasten ideas and practice? Here is a discussion about using the method for "facts". The most concrete suggestions here suggest building Zettels around facts in some ways -- either a single fact, or groups of facts, etc. But in my experience, engaging with a historical text is a lot messier than that. There are facts, but also the author's rendering of the facts, and there are quotes (all the historical "gossip"), and it's all in there together as the author builds their narrative. You are trying to identify the key facts, the author's particular angle and interpretation, preserve your thoughts and reactions, and save these quotes, the richest part of history, the real evidence. In short, it is hard to imagine being able to isolate clear Zettel topics amid this reading experience.In Soenke Ahrens' book "How to Take Smart Notes," he describes three types of notes: fleeting notes (these are fleeting ideas), literature notes, and permanent notes. In that classification, I'm talking about "literature notes." Ahrens says these should be "extremely selective". But with the material I'm talking about it becomes a question. How can you be selective when you still don't know which facts you care about or want to maintain enough detail in your notes so you don't foreclose the possibilities in the historical narrative too early?Perhaps this is just an unsolvable problem. Perhaps there is no choice but to maintain a discipline of taking "selective" literature notes. But there's something about the Zettelkasten method that gives me the feeling that my literature notes could be more detailed and chaotic and open to refinement later.Does my dilemma explained here resonate with anyone who has tried this method for intense historical writing? If so, I'd like to hear you thoughts, or better yet, see some concrete examples of how you've worked.

      reply to u/ethanzanemiller at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/185xmuh/taking_notes_for_historical_writing/

      Rather than spending time theorizing on the subject, particularly since you sound like you're neck-deep already, I would heartily recommend spending some time practicing it heavily within the area you're looking at. Through a bit of time and experience, more of your questions will become imminently clear, especially if you're a practicing historian.

      A frequently missing piece to some of this puzzle for practicing academics is upping the level of how you read and having the ability to consult short pieces of books and articles rather than reading them "cover-to-cover" which is often unnecessary for one's work. Of particular help here, try Adler and Van Doren, and specifically their sections on analytical and syntopical reading.

      • Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated ed. edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.

      In addition to the list of practicing historians I'd provided elsewhere on the topic, you might also appreciate sociologist Beatrice Webb's short appendix C in My Apprenticeship or her longer related text. She spends some time talking about handling dates and the database nature of querying collected facts and ideas to do research and to tell a story.

      Also helpful might be Mill's article which became a chapter in one of his later books:

      Perhaps u/danallosso may have something illuminating to add, or you can skim through his responses on the subject on Reddit or via his previous related writing: https://danallosso.substack.com/.

      Enough historians and various other humanists have been practicing these broad methods for centuries to bear out their usefulness in researching and organizing their work. Read a bit, but truly: practice, practice, and more practice is going to be your best friend here.

    1. Muchrecent scholarship on card indexes and factuality falls into one of two modes: first,scholars have excavated early modern indexes, catalogues, and the pursuit of ‘facts’to demonstrate information overload prior to the contemporary ‘information age’ as wellas the premodern attempts to counteract the firehose of books and other information(Blair, 2010; Krajewski, 2011; Mu ̈ ller-Wille and Scharf, 2009; Poovey, 1998;

      Zedelmaier, 1992). All the same, a range of figures have tracked and critiqued the trajectory of the ‘noble dream’ of historical and scientific ‘objectivity’ (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, 1994: 241-70; Daston and Galison, 2007; Novick, 1988).

      Lustig categorizes scholarship on card indexes into two modes: understanding of information overload tools and the "trajectory of the 'noble dream' of historical and scientific 'objectivity'".

    2. Deutsch himself never theorized his index, treating it – like hiswhole focus on ‘facts’ – at face value.
    3. Moreover, card indexes give further form to Bruno Latour’s meditations on writing: ifLatour described writing as a kind of ‘flattening’ of knowledge, then card indexes, likevertical files, represent information in three dimensions, making ideas simultaneouslyimmutable and highly mobile, and the smallness of ideas and ‘facts’ forced to fit onpaper slips allowed for reordering (Latour, 1986: 19-20).
    4. However, the miniscule size of ‘facts’ did not neces-sarily reflect Deutsch’s adherence to any theory of information. Instead, it indicated hispersonal interest in distinctions of the smallest scale, vocalized by his motto ‘de minimiscurat historicus’, that history’s minutiae matter.

      Gotthard Deutsch didn't adhere to any particular theory of information when it came to the size of his notes. Instead Jason Lustig indicates that his perspective was influenced by his personal motto 'de minimis curat historicus' (history's minutiae matter), and as a result, he was interested in the smallest of distinctions of fact and evidence. ᔥ

    5. he spoke of the ‘historian’s credo’ that ‘the factscrubbed clean is more eternal than perfumed or rouged words’ (Marcus, 1957:466).17

      Jacob Marcus, ‘The Historian’s Credo’, 1958, AJA Marcus Nearprint File, Box 2.

    1. Maybe you were even taught this at school, that historically seen the church has stood in the way of scientific progress. 00:00:50 And with the coming of Christendom, the light of reason was taken away and a dark age fell over Europe. I'm here to tell you this is all 19th century propaganda of a number of guys fed up with the church and applying their personal grudges to the entire history of Christianity, And they totally succeeded.
      • for: historical myth - church opposed science

      • historical myth: European churches opposed science in the middle ages

        • historical fact: European churches supported science in the middle ages
    1. GRMacGirl · 3 days agoSame. I journal them in a Commonplace Book. If I feel the need to keep a note IN the book for some reason I write it on a separate piece of paper and tuck it between the pages. Exception: cooking/recipe books where I need to have the information right there any time I’m cooking the food.

      Interesting use of the verb "journal" to indicate placing something into a commonplace book.

    1. In reality, the research experience mattersmore than the topic.”

      Extending off of this, is the reality that the research experience is far easier if one has been taught a convenient method, not only for carrying it out, but space to practice the pieces along the way.

      These methods can then later be applied to a vast array of topics, thus placing method above topic.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_analysis)

      relationship with context collapse

      Presentism bias enters biblical and religious studies when, by way of context collapse, readers apply texts written thousands of years ago and applicable to one context to their own current context without any appreciation for the intervening changes. Many modern Christians (especially Protestants) show these patterns. There is an interesting irony here because Protestantism began as the Catholic church was reading too much into the Bible to create practices like indulgences.)

  8. Oct 2023
    1. Biblical Hebrew has an unusually small vocabulary clustered around an even smaller number of three-letter roots, most of them denoting concrete actions or things, and the Bible achieves its mimetic effects partly through the skillful repetition of these few vivid words.
    1. Alter knows it ain’t Jesus.

      The colloquial use of the word "ain't" here very specifically pegs James Bruce, the author, as writing his argument for an audience of Christians in the Southern part of the United States. It's even more stark as most of his review is of a broadly scholarly nature where the word "ain't" or others of its register would never be used.

      How does the shift in translation really negate room for Jesus? If it was a truism that it stood for Jesus, then couldn't one just as simply re-translate the New Testament to make sure that the space for him is still there? Small shifts in meaning and translation shouldn't undermine the support for Jesus so easily as Bruce suggests, otherwise there are terrible problems with these underpinnings of Christianity.

      If one follows Bruce's general logic, then there's a hell of a religion based on Nostradamus' work we're all going out of our way to ignore.

      What would historical linguistics have to say about this translation?

    1. Those who prefer research methods to be buried may find Ogilvie’s habit of making explicit her archival travails frustrating, but it’s fascinating watching her track the contributors down.

      Link to the hidden process discussed by Keith Thomas:

      Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.

    1. Viel gelesen und vor allen Dingen begonnen, mit einem Zettelka-sten zu arbeiten, also Zettel vollgeschrieben. In den Zetteln habeich die Literatur, mit der ich mich vorwiegend beschäftigte, verar-beitet, also Soziologie und Philosophie. Damals habe ich vor allemDescartes und Husserl gelesen. In der soziologischen Theorie hatmich der frühe Funktionalismus beschäftigt, die Theorien von Mali-nowski und Radcliffe-Brown; dies schloß ein, daß ich mich auchsehr stark mit Kulturanthropologie und Ethnologie befaßte

      With heavy early interest in anthropology, sociology and philosophy including Malinowski, it's more likely that Luhmann would have been trained in historical methods which included the traditions of note taking using card indices of that time.

    1. If it requires too many words, you have not seen theunity but a multiplicity.

      How are they defining "multiplicity" here? There seems to be a tacit definition with respect to being in opposition to "unity" (of a work), but not an explicit one. It also seems to be a shaded meaning with respect to the more common one.

      unity: essence, core, coherence, oneness

      They use the word "multiplicity" in the usual sense of large number or multitude on p55: "The multiplicity of the rules indicates the complexity of the one habit to be formed, not a plurality of distinct habits."

      They also revisit it in the upcoming section: "Mastering the Multiplicity: The Art of Outlining a Book" on p88

      Perhaps its just me but there's a linguistic "softness" of the uses of unity and multiplicity here with respect to 2023. Though these two opposites fit the dictionary definitions of their words, is it possible that this softness is the result of a sort of historical linguistic shift I'm feeling in these words? I can't quite put my finger on it, but perhaps it's the relationship of unity to religion? Neither seem to be frequently used these days.

      The Ngram Viewer shows peaks for the use of unity in 1660 and 1960 of almost 75% higher usage compared to a broader historical average. It is generally waning since. Multiplicity has about 1/4 the use of unity and has remained flat over time. What caused the peaks in the use of "unity" during these periods? This 1972 use was on the downslope of the 1960s peak. Was it used in the 1940 version?

      The 20th century increase in the use of unity begins around 1914 and may have been related to political shades of meaning going into WWI with another marked rise in the lead up to WW2.

  9. Sep 2023
    1. On Philosophical Method

      How do historical method and philosophical method compare? contrast?

      Were they tied to similar traditions? co-evolve? evolve separately?

  10. Aug 2023
    1. Methodenstreit mischten sich zahlreichenamhafte Historiker und andere Geisteswissenschaftlerein. Warburg leistete keinen direkten publizistischen Bei-trag, nahm jedoch, wie der Zettelkasten belegt, als passi-ver Beobachter intensiv an der Debatte teil.359

      Karl Lamprecht was one of Warburg's first teachers in Bonn and Warburg had a section in his zettelkasten dedicated to him. While Warburg wasn't part of the broader public debate on Lamprecht's Methodenstreit (methodological dispute), his notes indicate that he took an active stance on thinking about it.

      Consult footnote for more:

      59 Vgl. Roger Chickering, »The Lamprecht Controversy«, in: Historiker- kontroversen, hrsg. von Hartmut Lehmann, Göttingen 20 0 0, S. 15 – 29

    2. Ernst Bernheim,

      Aby Warburg's (1866-1929) zettelkasten had references to Ernst Bernheim (1850-1942). Likelihood of his having read Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (1889) as potential inspiration for his own zettelkasten?

      When did Warburg start his zettelkasten?

      According to Wikipedia, Warburg began his study of art history, history and archaeology in Bonn in 1886. He finished his thesis in 1892, so he may have had access to Bernheim's work on historical method. I'll note that Bernheim taught history at the University of Göttingen and at the University of Bonn after 1875, so they may have overlapped and even known each other. We'll need more direct evidence to establish this connection and a specific passing of zettelkasten tradition, though it may well have been in the "air" at that time.

    1. Lamprecht's ambitious Deutsche Geschichte (13 vols., 1891-1908) on the whole trajectory of German history sparked a famous Methodenstreit (methodological dispute) within Germany's academic history establishment, especially Max Weber, who habitually referred to Lamprecht as a mere dilettante. Lamprecht came under criticism from scholars of legal and constitutional history like Friedrich Meinecke and Georg von Below for his lack of methodological rigor and inattention to important political trends and ideologies. As a result, Lamprecht and his students were marginalized by German academia, and interdisciplinary social history remained something of a taboo among German historians for much of the twentieth century.
    1. Storytelling functions as a tool to heal from and protect against historical trauma and ongoing challenges Indigenous communities experience. "It is medicine." —Beltran & Begun, 2013 (quoted in @Okeefe2021 video at 10:41)

      Basic knowledge and understanding for me, but nice to have a source for it in particular.

    1. Allosso, Dan. “Kuhn’s Paradigms.” Substack newsletter. MakingHistory (blog), August 17, 2023. https://danallosso.substack.com/p/kuhns-paradigms.

    2. Science must find for every effect a single cause. The historian is rarely faced with the same requirement.Historians have the advantage of being able to live with explanatory ambiguity that would be unacceptable in science.
    3. Kuhn denied that scientific development progresses by a series of “successive increments” that add to the accumulation of facts making up current knowledge like bricks building a wall.

      This feels like the sort of flavor of historical method of Ernst Bernheim mixed with Gerald Weinberg's Fieldstone Method.

    1. "in his youth he was full of vim and vigor"

      vim<br /> 2023 definition: energy; enthusiasm

      vim is rarely ever seen outside of the context of the phrase "vim and vigor" and seems to be a calcified word within this phrase.

      vigor<br /> 2023 definition: physical strength and good health

    2. "in his youth he was full of vim and vigor"

      Do calcified words eventually cease to have any definition over time? That is they have a stand alone definition, then a definition within their calcified phrase, then they cease to have any stand alone definition at all though they continue existence only in those calcified phrases.

  11. Jun 2023
    1. The German word 'Arbeit', work, descends from Porto-Germanic *arbaidiz, which meant hardship or suffering. Going a couple of thousand years further back in time, the ancestor of arbaidiz was Porto-Indo-European *h₃órbʰos, which mean orphan or slave. 'Orphan' has the same root via Latin. So Arbeit <> orphan: distant cousins. 'Arbeit' did have a relative in Old English too: it was 'earfoþe', difficult, hard
    1. Commentators insisted that gossip was the province of women. Originally meaning ‘godparent’, ‘gossip’ shifted its meaning across the early modern period. It became commonplace to accuse women of gossiping and of being gossips, and a set of meanings crystallised around the word that reflected men’s anxiety about what women were saying about them behind their backs.
  12. May 2023
    1. I may not understand this right, but if I'm creating an original idea, who am I citing for? Maybe it's just something I never understood properly how that worked and that's the issue. Part of the reason I was asking if anyone knew of actual academic research that had been published while using a ZK was so I could see how it worked, in action.

      reply to u/ruthlessreuben at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/w5yz0n/comment/ihxojq0/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      u/ruthlessreuben, as a historian, you're likely to appreciate some variations which aren't as Luhmann-centric. Try some of the following:

      The following note taking manuals (or which cover it in part) all bear close similarities to Luhmann's system, but were written by historians and related to the ideas of "historical method":

      Although she's a sociologist, you might also appreciate Beatrice Webb's coverage which also has some early database collection flavor:

      Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.

  13. Apr 2023
    1. 09:36 - From his early youth, he loved to collect stamps,09:42 and he said if all the images which are around us09:47 would have been lost,09:47 an album of stamps would help us to understand the world.

      Just as Warburg's suggestion that an album of collected stamps could help us to understand the world visually if all other images were lost, perhaps subsections of traces of other cultures could do the same.

    1. Some observers termed Thom’s text a biography while others refer to it as a history. But these monikers might mislead contemporary readers who would expect a biography or history produced by an academic press to be undergirded by scholarly methods – including archival research and citations that document its claims in that record. Today we understand Thom’s text to be less a work of biography or history and more a hagiography: the effort of an admiring descendant who compiled the varied recollections of elders and their impressions of Mr. Hopkins and his family.

      How do we better distinguish the margins between histories, biographies, and hagiographies and the motivations of the writers who produce them?

      How do we better underline these subtleties to the broader publics outside of historians and other specialists?

    1. 1881: Railroads [Statute] Railroad companies required to furnish separate cars for colored passengers who pay first-class rates. Cars to be kept in good repair, and subject to the same rules governing other first-class cars for preventing smoking and obscene language. Penalty: If companies fail to enforce the law required to pay a forfeit of $100, half to be paid to the person suing, the other half to be paid to the state’s school fund.

      Railroads/Transportation was a big thing as I am noticing a lot of laws were becoming effective in this time frame. Although the Jim Crow Laws were to promote segregation, this law at least ensured that colored people are recieving the services at the rate they are paying. They were able to sue companies if they were treated otherwise. The cars of the trains were to be in good condition and could not be different than the cars and services for white people.

    2. 1870: Education [Statute] Schools for white and colored children to be kept separate.

      I feel like the voices of chidldren were limited, marginalized and omitted. I feel this was because they had feelings too! I think not all white kids wanted to be racists towards other children but were influenced by their families. And to have all these laws put into place as a black child, I would be sad that people feel like I am a distraction or that I am so disgustiing that they do not want to sit next to me or play on the same play ground as me. They were children and could not express their true feelings, even caucasion children.

    3. Separate schools required for white and black children

      This is signifigant because we wouldnt see the first african american student attend an all white school until Ruby Bridges nearly 100 years later (1960). Between the years of the Jim Crow Laws in Tennesse, there were a couple other laws that were effective when it came to education. Whites and colored people, high school and elemantary, separate facilities, and eventually even adding penalties of fines and imprisonment.

    4. As of 1954, segregation laws for miscegenation, transportation and public accommodation were still in effect.

      Thesis; As of 1954, segregation laws for miscegenation, transportation and public accommodation were still in effect.

      I say this is the thesis because this senetence tells the point of the entire article; what was outlawed and when these laws would become ineffective. After this sentence, we would see a list of the laws that were put into place during this time.

    5. The State of Tennessee enacted 20 Jim Crow laws between 1866 and 1955

      Jim Crow Laws were set into place for years 1866-1955 in the state of Tennesee. These Jim Crow Laws were laws that outlawed miscegenation, transportaion and public accomodation of black people and white people. The 1869 Law stated that no person can be excluded from recieving an education from tne University of Tennesee due to race but mandated that black people receive the same education in a separate faciliity. These Jim Crow Laws in Tennesee would last until 1955.

    1. I decided to translate the German “Zettelkasten” as “Zettelkasten” since I consider this an established term.

      An example of a bi-lingual German-English speaker/writer specifically translating and using Zettelkasten as an established word in English.

    1. appeared in his Rochester, New York newspaper, The North Star, on July 28, 1848.

      Who is the audience? Is the document/artifact created for public/private setting?

      It was created for the public. Fredrick Douglas published his article in his Rochester, New York newspaper. The article, The North Star, dates July 28th, 1848.

    2. One of the most interesting events of the past week, was the holding of what is technically styled a Woman’s Rights Convention, at Seneca Falls

      What is the main argument/thesis/idea/ of the document in one sentence?

      Women need to be as equal as a man.

    3. All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman;

      Why is it important and or significant?

      This is significant because women have been recognized equal to a man. Whereas these observations and impressions were taken at the very first womens rights convention. This convention was followed by the article, The North Star by Fredrick Douglas.

    4. were almost wholly conducted by women;

      Fredrick Douglas observed that the convention was ran by mostly women. He says depsite the different opinions and view points, these women maintained good decorum. He says their proceedings were marked by ability and dignity. At this convention, he would see these women read grievances and other documents setting forth the rights for women.

    5. On July 19-20, 1848, 68 women and 32 men attended the First Women’s Rights Convention which was held in the upstate New York town of Seneca Falls

      When- July 19-20th, 1848 Who- 100 people (32males/68females) Fredrick Douglas attended and wrote his impressions about the convention in a newspaper. Article named, The North Star What- Very first womens rights conventions. Article : The North Star Where- NewYork, Seneca Falls.

    1. Fredrick Douglas was one of one hundred people who attended the very first womens rights conevention. Located in New York, Seneca Falls. Frederick Douglas is the author of the article, The North Star. Dated July 28th, 1848. Article is about

  14. Mar 2023
    1. Hayes, William C. Review of Historical Records of Rameses III, by William F. Edgerton and John A. Wilson. American Journal of Archaeology 40, no. 4 (1936): 558–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/498809.

      https://www.jstor.org/stable/498809

      ...have been diligently consulted and compared with the present versions and the authors have also availed themselves of the invaluable material contained in the Zettelkasten of the Berlin Wirterbuch der...

      This is the oldest appearance of the word "Zettelkasten" appearing in a journal article which I could find on JSTOR.

      I'm not surprised it's in a journal in the humanities and specifically on archaeology.

      Update: even better, this has introduced me to a massive new ZK: Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache!


      Where is Indiana Jones' zettelkasten?!

    1. Dass das ägyptische Wort p.t (sprich: pet) "Himmel" bedeutet, lernt jeder Ägyptologiestudent im ersten Semester. Die Belegsammlung im Archiv des Wörterbuches umfaßt ca. 6.000 Belegzettel. In der Ordnung dieses Materials erfährt man nun, dass der ägyptische Himmel Tore und Wege hat, Gewässer und Ufer, Seiten, Stützen und Kapellen. Damit wird greifbar, dass der Ägypter bei dem Wort "Himmel" an etwas vollkommen anderes dachte als der moderne westliche Mensch, an einen mythischen Raum nämlich, in dem Götter und Totengeister weilen. In der lexikographischen Auswertung eines so umfassenden Materials geht es also um weit mehr als darum, die Grundbedeutung eines banalen Wortes zu ermitteln. Hier entfaltet sich ein Ausschnitt des ägyptischen Weltbildes in seinem Reichtum und in seiner Fremdheit; und naturgemäß sind es gerade die häufigen Wörter, die Schlüsselbegriffe der pharaonischen Kultur bezeichnen. Das verbreitete Mißverständnis, das Häufige sei uninteressant, stellt die Dinge also gerade auf den Kopf.

      Google translation:

      Every Egyptology student learns in their first semester that the Egyptian word pt (pronounced pet) means "heaven". The collection of documents in the dictionary archive comprises around 6,000 document slips. In the order of this material one learns that the Egyptian heaven has gates and ways, waters and banks, sides, pillars and chapels. This makes it tangible that the Egyptians had something completely different in mind when they heard the word "heaven" than modern Westerners do, namely a mythical space in which gods and spirits of the dead dwell.

      This is a fantastic example of context creation for a dead language as well as for creating proper historical context.

    1. Hayes, William C. Review of Historical Records of Rameses III, by William F. Edgerton and John A. Wilson. American Journal of Archaeology 40, no. 4 (1936): 558–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/498809.

      Tagged this because it's the first appearance of Zettelkasten in an English language setting in the JSTOR repository.

      see also: https://hypothes.is/a/RYZOssqXEe2H5wtABI0puA

      Started on 2023-03-24; finished on 2023-03-27.

    2. Allavailable earlier copies and parallel texts havebeen diligently consulted and compared with thepresent versions and the authors have also availedthemselves of the invaluable material contained inthe Zettelkasten of the Berlin Wirterbuch der

      ägyptischen Sprache.

      This is the first use of the word Zettelkasten in an English (non-German) context in JSTOR that I've been able to find.

      Still likely not the first appearance, but reasonably early...

    1. Review: [Untitled] Roman und Satire im 18. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Poetik by Jörg Schönert Review by: J. D. Workman Monatshefte, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter, 1970), pp. 420-421 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30156502

      ...form of the period for which there are no classical "rules." Schinert musters his evidence in an interesting and generally very lucid manner, although at times he may seem somewhat overzealous, if not indeed repetitious, in assembling all the data: at times one detects the faint odor of the Zettelkasten...

      faint odor! ha! and in an English language document.

    1. In Memoriam: Josef Körner (9 May 1950) Robert L. Kahn The Modern Language Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1963), pp. 38-59 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3720394

      ...of German letters long before Heine, impudently naive and imprudently honest, though always in- dustrious, 'griindlich' (and was it not Korner who 'discovered' the numerous un- published notebooks of Friedrich Schlegel and, in turn, left behind some twenty ' Zettelkasten ' which were recently acquired by Bonn University, a unique 'Fund-...

      example of use of zettelkasten in English here in 1963 specifically as a loan word from German...

    1. Review: [Untitled] Historical Records of Rameses III by William F. Edgerton, John A. Wilson Review by: William C. Hayes American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1936), pp. 558-559

      ...have been diligently consulted and compared with the present versions and the authors have also availed themselves of the invaluable material contained in the Zettelkasten of the Berlin Wirterbuch der...

      This is the oldest appearance of the word "Zettelkasten" appearing in a journal article which I could find on JSTOR.

      I'm not surprised it's in a journal in the humanities and specifically on archaeology.


      Where is Indiana Jones' zettelkasten?!

    1. Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens. (Sektion 1.2 Die Kartei) Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931.

      annotation target: urn:x-pdf:00126394ba28043d68444144cd504562

      (Unknown translation from German into English. v1 TK)

      The overall title of the work (in English: Technique of Scientific Work) calls immediately to mind the tradition of note taking growing out of the scientific historical methods work of Bernheim and Langlois/Seignobos and even more specifically the description of note taking by Beatrice Webb (1926) who explicitly used the phrase "recipe for scientific note-taking".

      see: https://hypothes.is/a/BFWG2Ae1Ee2W1HM7oNTlYg

      first reading: 2022-08-23 second reading: 2022-09-22

      I suspect that this translation may be from Clemens in German to Scheper and thus potentially from the 1951 edition?

      Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens; eine Anleitung, besonders für Studierende. 8., Umgearb. Aufl. 1931. Reprint, Berlin: R. Kiepert, 1951.

    1. Isuwans

      Isuwa (transcribed Išuwa and sometimes rendered Ishuwa) was the ancient Hittite name for one of its neighboring Anatolian kingdoms to the east. Isuwa is the origin of our word 'Asia'.

    1. Seen in a Hoskins business equipment advertisement in Business magazine (1903) for card index:

      YOUR BUSINESS AT YOUR FINGER ENDS

      Close to the phrase "at your finger tips". Would it have appeared before or after this?

      Business: The Magazine for Office, Store and Factory. Vol. 16. Business Man’s Publishing Company, 1903. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Business/QKaxezfHjL0C?hl=en&gbpv=0.

    1. Washington, George. “From George Washington to The States, 8 June 1783.” University of Virginia Press, Founders Online, National Archives http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-11404.

      See also copy at: https://americainclass.org/sources/makingrevolution/independence/text1/washingtoncircularstates.pdf


      Referenced by Chapter: Founding Myths by Akhil Reed Amar in Kruse, Kevin M., and Julian E. Zelizer. Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Basic Books, 2023. Location 538-539

      Washington had emphasized the need for such an indivisible union—most dramatically in his initial farewell address, a world-famous circular letter to America’s governors in 1783.

    1. None of this is easy. In the words of Jill Lepore, one of our finest historians, “Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.”

      ostensibly in The Story of America: Essays on Origins

  15. Feb 2023
    1. Sam Matla talks about the collector's fallacy in a negative light, and for many/most, he might be right. But for some, collecting examples and evidence of particular things is crucially important. The key is to have some idea of what you're collecting and why.

      Historians collecting small facts over time may seem this way, but out of their collection can emerge patterns which otherwise would never have been seen.

      cf: Keith Thomas article

      concrete examples of this to show the opposite?

      Relationship to the idea of AI coming up with black box solutions via their own method of diffuse thinking

    1. R. G. Collingwood’s critique of what hecalled ‘scissors and paste’ history – meaning both those who uncritically cited earlierworks, and the use of scissors and paste to cut apart sources on index cards
    2. Herbert Baxton Adams’ model of ahistorical seminar room suggested it have a dedicated catalogue;
    3. Deutsch’s close friendJoseph Stolz, writing of the Chicago rabbi Bernard Felsenthal (1822–1908) who hadpenned a history of that city’s Jews and was instrumental in the 1892 formation of theAmerican Jewish Historical Society, noted that Felsenthal ‘was not the systematic orga-nizer who worked with a stenographer and card-index’ (Stolz, 1922: 259).

      Great example of a historian implying the benefit of not only a card index, but of potentially how commonplace it was to not only have one, but to have stenographers or secretaries to help manage them.

      Link this to the reference in Heyde about historians and others who were pushed to employ stenographers or copyists to keep their card indexes in order.


      Given the cost of employing secretaries to manage our information, one of the affordances that computers might focus on as tools for thought is lowering the barrier for management and maintenance. If they can't make this easier/simpler, then what are they really doing beyond their shininess? Search is obviously important in this context.

      What was the reference to employing one person full time to manage every 11 or 12 filing cabinets' worth of documents? Perhaps Duguid in the paper piece?

    4. One student’s rabbinical thesis, also completed that year,opened with the declaration: ‘We must not forget that History is a Science. Its facts cannever be doubted. One may indeed, differ as to the interpretation of facts but neverdispute the fact per se!’ (orig. emph., Holtzberg, 1916: Introduction).

      Interesting to see this quote in light of the work of Ernst Bernheim and historical method.

      At what point did history begin to be viewed as a science this way? (Did it predate Berheim?) Is it still?

    5. Anecdotes’, he concluded, ‘havetheir historic value, if properly tested’ – reflecting both his interest in details and also theneed to ascertain whether they were true (Deutsch, 1905b).
    6. Deutsch’s index was created out of an almost algorith-mic processing of historical sources in the pursuit of a totalized and perfect history of theJews; it presented, on one hand, the individualized facts, but together also constitutedwhat we might term a ‘history without presentation’, which merely held the ‘facts’themselves without any attempt to synthesize them (cf. Saxer, 2014: 225-32).

      Not sure that I agree with the framing of "algorithmic processing" here as it was done manually by a person pulling out facts. But it does bring out the idea of where collecting ends and synthesis of a broader thesis out of one's collection begins. Where does historical method end? What was the purpose of the collection? Teaching, writing, learning, all, none?

    7. one finds in Deutsch’s catalogue one implementation of what LorraineDaston would later term ‘mechanical objectivity’, an ideal of removing the scholar’s selffrom the process of research and especially historical and scientific representation (Das-ton and Galison, 2007: 115-90).

      In contrast to the sort of mixing of personal life and professional life suggested by C. Wright Mills' On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952), a half century earlier Gotthard Deutsch's zettelkasten method showed what Lorraine Datson would term 'mechanical objectivity'. This is an interesting shift in philosophical perspective of note taking practice. It can also be compared and contrasted with a 21st century perspective of "personal" knowledge management.

    1. Lois Hechenblaikner, Andrea Kühbacher, Rolf Zollinger (Hrsg.): «Keine Ostergrüsse mehr! Die geheime Gästekartei des Grandhotel Waldhaus in Vulpera». Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.Der reich bebilderte Band bietet eine spannende Reise in ein Stück Schweizer Tourismusgeschichte: Die Herausgeber haben die 20'000 Karteikarten aus den Jahren 1920-1960 sehr sorgfältig kuratiert, nach Themen gegliedert und in einen grösseren, gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhang gestellt.Die Leserinnen und Leser erfahren viel über die Klientel im Hotel Waldhaus, zum Teil sogar in kleinen biografischen Porträts; und sie können an konkreten Beispielen verfolgen, wie sich der Sprachgebrauch der Concierges im Laufe der Zeit verändert – gerade zum Beispiel im Zusammenhang mit jüdischen Gästen.

      Google Translate:

      Lois Hechenblaikner, Andrea Kühbacher, Rolf Zollinger (editors): «No more Easter greetings! The secret guest file of the Grandhotel Waldhaus in Vulpera". Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.

      The richly illustrated volume offers an exciting journey into a piece of Swiss tourism history: the editors have very carefully curated the 20,000 index cards from the years 1920-1960, structured them by topic and placed them in a larger, social context.

      The readers learn a lot about the clientele in the Hotel Waldhaus, sometimes even in small biographical portraits; and they can use concrete examples to follow how the concierge's use of language has changed over time - especially in connection with Jewish guests, for example.

  16. Jan 2023
    1. Semantic leadership   Extent to which word usage by one entity is subsequently adopted by others. Specifically, Klein measures how often novel semantic usage in a given newspaper is mirrored by other newspapers. When a newspaper is a semantic leader, its semantic usage better predicts the later usage of that word in other newspapers compared to those other newspapers' own, earlier usage of the word.

      How might this leadership happen within the social epidemic view of Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point framework?

      • the law of the few,
      • the stickiness factor, and
      • the power of context

      and with respect to mavens, connectors, and salespeople?

    1. This anyway would explain the apparent paradox of theBetsimisaraka: supposedly created by a failed philosopher king but,in fact, remaining as a stubbornly egalitarian people to this day,notorious, in fact, for their refusal to accept the authority of overlordsof any sort.

      The modern day culture of the Betsimisaraka which displays both egalitarian and stubborn people who refuse the authority of any overlords is some of the evidence that their culture through pirate stories into Europe were the beginnings of the Enlightenment.

      • Llyn Bochlwyd (lake gray cheek)
      • Foel Fawr
      • Coed Llugwy
      • Cwm Cneifion

      Erasure of culture

      Memory and place names

      "A nation which forgets its past has no future." - Winston Churchill (check quote and provenance)

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLQ6XlG0MQ4

    1. a common technique in natural language processing is to operationalize certain semantic concepts (e.g., "synonym") in terms of syntactic structure (two words that tend to occur nearby in a sentence are more likely to be synonyms, etc). This is what word2vec does.

      Can I use some of these sorts of methods with respect to corpus linguistics over time to better identified calcified words or archaic phrases that stick with the language, but are heavily limited to narrower(ing) contexts?

    1. For the time being, my writing app of choice is Ulysses, but plenty of others are available—even, heaven help you, Micros✽ft W✽rd.

      Multiple interesting things going on here with the use of "Micros✽ft W✽rd".

      He's simultaneously: - Voldemorting the phrase to some extent so that it doesn't show up easily or at all in digital search. - He's visually marring the phrase to show active dislike of the software and its general use - By using the symbols, he's effectively turning the word into a form of profanity the way many have used the top row of symbols on typewriters to indicate swear words in the 20th century. Examples: sh@t, dmn, he!!, or any set of four symbols like &%^ to generally indicate a "four letter word" as many profane words typically have four letters.

    1. For some scholars, it is critical thatthis new Warburg obsessively kept tabs on antisemitic incidents on the Easternfront, scribbling down aphorisms and thoughts on scraps of paper and storingthem in Zettelkasten that are now searchable.

      Apparently Aby Warburg "obsessively kept" notes on antisemitic incidents on the Eastern front in his zettelkasten.


      This piece looks at Warburg's Jewish identity as supported or not by the contents of his zettelkasten, thus placing it in the use of zettelkasten or card index as autobiography.


      Might one's notes reflect who they were as a means of creating both their identity while alive as well as revealing it once they've passed on? Might the use of historical method provide its own historical method to be taken up on a meta basis after one's death?

    1. If it interests you, GPC lists phrases like dysgu ar gof. This page then gives the example, "Yn yr hen ddyddiau byddai pobl yn dysgu cerddi ar gof" - like saying "to learn by heart" in English.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/10acr9j/sut_i_ddweud_i_memorized_yn_gymraeg/

      Fascinating that the Welsh language doesn't seem to have a direct translatable word/verb for "to memorize". The closest are dysgu (to learn, to teach) and cofio (to remember).

      Related phrase: yn dysgu cerddi ar gof (to learn poems by heart), though this last is likely a more direct translation of an English concept back into Welsh.

      Is this lack of a seemingly basic word for such a practice a hidden indicator of the anthropology of their way of knowing?

      If to learn something means that one fully memorizes it from the start, then one needn't sub-specify, right?

    1. An additional affordance of <Y> is that it may be the first known example of an ‘action‘ word, i.e. a verb (‘to give birth’), although we acknowledge that this is ambiguous: it could function as a noun, ‘birth’, or ‘place of birth’.
    1. “In the beginning of my engagement with Geniza studies, I innocently supposed that I didnot need to deal with the original of a document already mentioned by another scholar. To-day, it is clear to me that the Geniza scholar must examine the original even for a docu-ment that has been fully published (even by Goitein), not to mention a document only men-tioned.” See S. D. Goitein, “The Struggle between the Synagogue and the Community” (inHebrew), in Hayyim (Jefim) Schrimann: Jubilee Volume, ed. Shraga Abramson and AaronMirsky (Jerusalem, 1970), 69–77, 71 n. 8 (my translation)

      Geniza studies rule of thumb: ALWAYS consult the original of a document when referencing work by other scholars as new translations, understandings, context, history, and conditions regarding the original work of the scholar may have changed.

    2. Another problem arises from the very nature of documentary material astexts not written for posterity. When reading Geniza letters, one is often in theposition of an uninvited guest at a social event, that is, someone who is unfa-miliar with the private codes and customs shared by the inner circle. Writersoften do not bother to explain themselves in a complete manner when they

      know that the recipient is already familiar with the subject. 17

      17 Indeed, writers often used this shared understanding to stress the relationship they had with the recipients.

    3. this short piece is meant as a basic practical guidewritten by a historian rather than by a curator or a bibliographer.
  17. Dec 2022
    1. Is the ZK method worth it? and how it helped you in your projects? .t3_zwgeas._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionI am new to ZK method and I'd like to use it for my literature review paper. Altho the method is described as simple, watching all those YT videos about the ZK and softwares make it very complex to me. I want to know how it changed your writing??

      reply to u/Subject_Industry1633 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zwgeas/is_the_zk_method_worth_it_and_how_it_helped_you/ (and further down)

      ZK is an excellent tool for literature reviews! It is a relative neologism (with a slightly shifted meaning in English over the past decade with respect to its prior historical use in German) for a specific form of note taking or commonplacing that has generally existed in academia for centuries. Excellent descriptions of it can be found littered around, though not under a specific easily searchable key word or phrase, though perhaps phrases like "historical method" or "wissenschaftlichen arbeitens" may come closest.

      Some of the more interesting examples of it being spelled out in academe include:

      For academic use, anecdotally I've seen very strong recent use of the general methods most compellingly demonstrated in Obsidian (they've also got a Discord server with an academic-focused channel) though many have profitably used DevonThink and Tinderbox (which has a strong, well-established community of academics around it) as much more established products with dovetails into a variety of other academic tools. Obviously there are several dozens of newer tools for doing this since about 2018, though for a lifetime's work, one might worry about their longevity as products.

    2. Your story is familiar to many and I was in the same position as you until recently. It’s an example of people believing in the Collector’s Fallacy: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/I’d recommend that article as a good reason for others to adopt the active approach of ZK, rather than the passive approach of collecting articles and mostly not reading them.

      What does the collector's fallacy really relate to?

      If you're collecting material you're not processing and either linking/tagging for future active use, then yes, it's definitely a fallacy. Collecting articles and tidbits that you don't read and don't use, at least in the moment is a massive waste.

      But if, instead, you're collecting tidbits of context and examples over time, say like historian Keith Thomas (? double check this reference, but I think it was him in his essay Working Methods (LRB, 2010)) describes, and then linking them into some sort of larger thesis or puzzling out some pattern between and amongst those examples, then you're collecting correctly and productively.

  18. Nov 2022
    1. The final thing I will say is, we have the 2016 model in our mind that, if there's a normie Republican, they get crushed by Donald Trump. Why should a Mike DeWine, not that he's going to run, but why — normie Republicans did way better than the performative Republicans.

      https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/brooks-and-capehart-on-the-midterm-results-and-what-it-means-trumps-role-in-the-gop#transcript

      video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Km_Vyhvww

      David Brooks here (coins?) uses the phrase "normie Republican" to describe Republicans who tend to center rather than to the far right, Christian right, or who are Trump Republicans. Some of those people might describe these normie Republicans as Rhinos (Republicans in name only.)

      Typically I've only seen "normie" used by those who identify as ADHD, Aspergers, or otherwise on the (neurodiverse) spectrum to describe average people who don't display those behaviors.


      Judy Woodruff: So, I just want to be clear. We're using the word normie, as in — this is a David Brooks word, right? (LAUGHTER)

      David Brooks: No, this — I did not invent this. I think two generations below me invented that word. (LAUGHTER)

      Brooks admits he learned the word from others, but he's also using it with a different meaning and context than the original "normie" unadorned.

  19. view.connect.americanpublicmedia.org view.connect.americanpublicmedia.org
    1. The word “kafala” in Arabic has traditionally been used to describe a social and moral “responsibility to another.”  Researchers Ray Jureidini and Said Fares Hassan write, “kafala contracts were used to protect the weak and vulnerable by instituting the patronage of a prominent local who provided whatever protection was required.” Think of raising an orphaned child, for example. In business, kafala originally referred to contracts where a guarantor assumes liability for another person (e.g. a cosigner for a loan).    Kafala nowadays is often used to describe the legal relationship between businesses and migrant workers. Employers, typically citizens, act as sponsors for workers and assume legal responsibility for their movement and actions in exchange for their right to work in a geographic area. 

      The use of kafala shows a shift from a meaning of social responsibility into a meaning co-opted by capitalism and social contract.

    1. Originally blogs were called weblogs: a log of activity that you wrote to the web. Peter Merholz jokingly split the term into two words to make it an activity: we blog. Ev Williams started to use it as a verb and a noun: to blog. And the rest is history.
    1. Harvard a guy by the name of um Alfred Bushnell Hart uh Well Albert sorry Albert I always get Alfred 00:02:31 and Albert wrong um wrote a five volume set of primary sources and he was one of the first um American historians that was actually um trained in Germany by Prof you know 00:02:43 in this new kind of professional history that that they began doing at about that time
    1. This is a doctrine so practically important that we could have wismore than two pages of the book had been devoted to note-takiand other aspects of the " Plan and Arrangement of CollectionsContrariw

      In the 1923 short notices section of the journal History, one of the editors remarked in a short review of "The Mechanical Processes of the Historian" that they wished that Charles Johnson had spent more than two pages of the book on note taking and "other aspects of the 'Plan and Arrangement of Collections'" as the zettelkasten "is a doctrine so practically important" to historians.

    2. T., T. F., A. F. P., E. R. A., H. E. E., R. C., E. L. W., F. J. C. H., and E. J. C. “Short Notices.” History 8, no. 31 (1923): 231–37.

  20. Oct 2022
    1. Pomeroy, Earl. “Frederic L. Paxson and His Approach to History.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39, no. 4 (1953): 673–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/1895394

      read on 2022-10-30 - 10-31

    2. Thus Paxson was not content to limit historians to the immediateand the ascertainable. Historical truth must appear through some-thing short of scientific method, and in something other than scien-tific form, linked and geared to the unassimilable mass of facts.There was no standard technique suited to all persons and purposes,in note-taking or in composition. "The ordinary methods of his-torical narrative are ineffective before a theme that is in its essen-tials descriptive," he wrote of Archer B. Hulbert's Forty- Niners(1931) in 1932. "In some respects the story of the trails can notbe told until it is thrown into the form of epic poetry, or comes un-der the hand of the historical novelist." 42

      This statement makes it appear as if Paxson was aware of the movement in the late 1800s of the attempt to make history a more scientific endeavor by writers like Bernheim, Langlois/Seignobos, and others, but that Pomeroy is less so.

      How scientific can history be as an area of study? There is the descriptive from which we might draw conclusions, but how much can we know when there are not only so many potential variables, but we generally lack the ability to design and run discrete experiments on history itself?

      Recall Paxson's earlier comment that "in history you cannot prove an inference". https://hypothes.is/a/LIWSoFlLEe2zUtvMoEr0nQ

      Had enough time elapsed up to this writing in 1953, that the ideal of a scientific history from the late 1800s had been borne out not to be accomplished?

    3. I am not much like Turner ; but I believe that I am like him in that Iam aware that in history you cannot prove an inference. You cannotprove causation, much as you crave to do it. You may present sequencesof events, whose relationship suggests a link-up of cause and consequence ;

      you may carry on the inquiry for a lifetime without discovering other events inconsistent with the hypothesis which has caught your eye. But you can never get beyond a circumstantial case. . . .<br /> "A Footnote to the Safety-Valve," August 15, 1940, Paxson Papers (University of California Library, Berkeley)

    4. Paxson wrote several unusually sharp reviews of books by Mc-Master, Rhodes, and Ellis P. Oberholtzer, historians whose methodshave been compared with his own

      Examples of other historians who likely had a zettelkasten method of work.


      Rhodes' method is tangentially mentioned by Earle Wilbur Dow as being "notebooks of the old type". https://hypothes.is/a/PuFGWCRMEe2bnavsYc44cg

    5. the writer of "scissors and paste history" ;

      One cannot excerpt their way into knowledge, simply cutting and pasting one's way through life is useless. Your notes may temporarily serve you, but unless you apply judgement and reason to them to create something new, they will remain a scrapheap for future generations who will gain no wisdom or use from your efforts.

      relate to: notes about notes being only useful to their creator

    6. The Verdict of History," he scrawled on anote : "There is none — . . . Apart from verif of facts There is noverdict only onesided testimony." "

      Note, n.d. (probably made during the 1920's), unsorted, Paxson File.

    7. He felt that the Beards had gonetoo far in making their facts "generally incidental to some conclu-sion that has pre-determined their selection and arrangement." 1

      One can easily leave out bits of evidence or cherry pick evidence to arrive at a given a priori conclusion. The truest thinker or historian will use the fullest context of evidence available at the time to arrive at their conclusion.

      Naturally, additional evidence and emergent effects as history unfolds may change some of these conclusions over time.

    8. "Say what one may of historical philos-ophy," he wrote in 1926, "history is a matter of facts; and theestablishment of facts, desiccated as they may be, is the chief func-tion of the genuine historian."

      Review of John B. Black, The Art of History; A Study of Four Great His- torians of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1926), New York Herald Tribune Books, December 12, 1926, p. 12.

    9. Hethus followed, over a wider range of data than any one man couldhope to use fully, the advice that he sometimes gave in reviews,that a historian should work fully through the background material.

      Frederic L. Paxson frequently advised that a historian should work fully through the background material.

    1. It is possible this Miscellany collection was assembled by Schutz as part of his own research as an historian, as well as the letters and documents collected as autographs for his interest as a collector;

      https://catalog.huntington.org/record=b1792186

      Is it possible that this miscellany collection is of a zettelkasten nature?

      Found via a search of the Huntington Library for Frederic L. Paxson's zettelkasten

    1. The first episode portrayed the 16th century scientist Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake by Catholic priests for teaching that the Earth orbits the Sun. The problem? Bruno wasn’t a scientist and he wasn’t persecuted for his heliocentric views. Of course Bruno’s persecution was tragic, but the church killed him for promoting the occult worship of Egyptian deities and other quirky theological beliefs.

      Historical Falsification.

    1. Preceding anyspecific historiographical method, the Zettelkasten provides the space inwhich potential constellations between these things can appear concretely,a space to play with connections as they have been formed by historic pre-decessors or might be formed in the present.

      relationship with zettelkasten in the history of historical methods?

    1. All materials available will be evaluated: Dictionaries, glossaries, and texts of a literary and non-literary nature. The slip box presently contains 1.5 million slips referring to 12 million references; the slips are supplemented by means of digital material.

      Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français (DEAF) is a dictionary built out of a slip box containing 1.5 million slipswith over 12 million references.

    1. It was Ranke, too, who set the historian’s task: to find out wie eseigentlich gewesen ist, what really happened, or, literally, how itreally was. His goal is one that will remain forever just beyond ourgrasp for reasons I explained in a “Note on Sources” in The Guns ofAugust (a paragraph that no one ever reads but I think is the bestthing in the book). Summarized, the reasons are that we who writeabout the past were not there. We can never be certain that we haverecaptured it as it really was. But the least we can do is to stay withinthe evidence.
    2. Tuchman, Barbara W. Practicing History. Ballantine, 1982.

    1. The result of this historical amnesia is that the presentgeneration is easy prey to distortions of the past

      Active historical amnesia is a feature that can dramatically disrupt and change human culture. Naturally this can be either a good or a bad thing depending on the subsequent changes with respect to broader society. Given stronger historical context, however, one might better plan for future changes and benefits.

      Historical amnesia is harder to implement in smaller, close knit Indigenous oral communities, but with the right conditions in highly connected and dramatically diverse world wide communities it can be implemented at mass scale as has been shown by recent social media and political shifts creating a post-truth society.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. Deutsch wrote often of history’s ‘scientific’ nature and inductive approach, leading toan almost positivistic method. ‘From individual facts’, he wrote, ‘one ascends to prin-ciples’, continuing: ‘Facts have to be arranged in a systematic manner . . . First we mustknow, and afterward we may reason’. This ‘systematic’ arrangement, he believed, sepa-rated the historian from the mere annalist or chronicler (Deutsch, 1900b: 166).

      This scientific viewpoint of history was not unique to the time and can be seen ensconced in popular books on historical method of the time, including Bernheim and Langlois/Seignobos.

    1. It may seem a curious relic of positivistic history, but closer examination allows us to interrogate the materiality of scholarly labor.

      Given the time period (1859-1921), what was the potential influence, if any, on Deutsch and his methods by historical methods writers and the evolution of the science of history by Ernst Bernheim or Seignobos/Langlois from that same period?

    1. Leopold von Ranke (German: [fɔn ˈʁaŋkə]; 21 December 1795 – 23 May 1886) was a German historian and a founder of modern source-based history.[3][4] According to Caroline Hoefferle, "Ranke was probably the most important historian to shape [the] historical profession as it emerged in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century".[5] He was able to implement the seminar teaching method in his classroom and focused on archival research and the analysis of historical documents. Building on the methods of the Göttingen School of History,[6] he was the first to establish a historical seminar. Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources (empiricism), an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics (Außenpolitik). Ranke also had a great influence on Western historiography. He was ennobled in 1865, with the addition of a "von" to his name.
    1. here are several ways I havefound useful to invite the sociological imagination:

      C. Wright Mills delineates a rough definition of "sociological imagination" which could be thought of as a framework within tools for thought: 1. Combinatorial creativity<br /> 2. Diffuse thinking, flâneur<br /> 3. Changing perspective (how would x see this?) Writing dialogues is a useful method to accomplish this. (He doesn't state it, but acting as a devil's advocate is a useful technique here as well.)<br /> 4. Collecting and lay out all the multiple viewpoints and arguments on a topic. (This might presume the method of devil's advocate I mentioned above 😀)<br /> 5. Play and exploration with words and terms<br /> 6. Watching levels of generality and breaking things down into smaller constituent parts or building blocks. (This also might benefit of abstracting ideas from one space to another.)<br /> 7. Categorization or casting ideas into types 8. Cross-tabulating and creation of charts, tables, and diagrams or other visualizations 9. Comparative cases and examples - finding examples of an idea in other contexts and time settings for comparison and contrast 10. Extreme types and opposites (or polar types) - coming up with the most extreme examples of comparative cases or opposites of one's idea. (cross reference: Compass Points https://hypothes.is/a/Di4hzvftEeyY9EOsxaOg7w and thinking routines). This includes creating dimensions of study on an object - what axes define it? What indices can one find data or statistics on? 11. Create historical depth - examples may be limited in number, so what might exist in the historical record to provide depth.

  21. Sep 2022
    1. The book's controversial assertions that the life of Jesus should be written like the life of any historic person, and that the Bible could and should be subject to the same critical scrutiny as other historical documents caused controversy[19] and enraged many Christians,[20][21][22][23] and Jews because of its depiction of Judaism as foolish and absurdly illogical and for its insistence that Jesus and Christianity were superior.[17]

      Ernest Renan argued in Life of Jesus that Jesus should be studied and written about like any other historic person or process. His life and the history and writings around it should be open to critical scrutiny just like any other biography or autobiography.

    1. https://twitter.com/inkasrain/status/1566410516721016833

      Does anyone know what exactly this is? A friend gave it to me years ago when they visited Jerusalem. I don't read Hebrew. Is it something harmless or should it be shamshed(jew magic)? (attached photo of a mezuzah)

      The idea of "magic" here within a modern religious context is interesting in that it shows the divergence of religion and magic as concepts with respect to cultural practices.

      The phrasing also has a sense of othering the unknown culture with a sense of fear in the idea that the object should be smashed. There's also a lack of basic science knowledge and tinge of superstition implied by the fact that they think that smashing will somehow dissipate the unknown magic.

      So many different cultural indicators of various things going on here...

  22. Aug 2022
    1. To increase the granularity of vcontrol, HTML elements can be subclasssed

      The "subclassing" word choice here is interesting. It matches the model eventually suggested in HTML 3.x, but at the time of this draft, HTML was in a draft specification stage (third revision — "02") for HTML 2.0

      I'm interested in the discussion that led to this.

    1. We might learn something new, if we understood both sides.

      Allosso is using "both sides" in a broadly journalistic fashion the way it had traditionally meant in the mid to late 21st century until Donald J. Trump's overtly racist comment on Aug. 15, 2017 "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides." following the Charlottesville, VA protests.

      Perhaps it might be useful if people quit using the "both sides" as if there were only two perspectives on an issue (for or against), when in reality there is often a spectrum of thoughts and feelings, not all mutually exclusive, about issues?

    1. The use o f t h ediphthong is becoming rare.

      Interesting that he notices this and explicitly calls it out in a handbook on writing.

    2. Dutcher, George Matthew. “Directions and Suggestions for the Writing of Essays or Theses in History.” Historical Outlook 22, no. 7 (November 1, 1931): 329–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/21552983.1931.10114595

    3. In Italian,however, note the different practice: quattrocento, for es-ample, means the century from 1 January 1400 to 31 Decem-ber 1499.
    4. Mechanical form.Use standard size (8t/,xll in.) type-writer pa er or the essay paper in standard use a t the in-stitution. %or typing, use an unruled bond paper of goodquality, such as “Paragon Linen” or “Old Hampshire Mills.”At the left of the page leave a margin of 1% to l’/e inches;and a t the top, bottom, and right of the page, a margin of1 inch. Write only on one side of the paper. In ty in thelines should be double-spaced. Each chapter shouyd feginon a new page. Theses for honors and degrees must be typed;other essays may be typed or legibly written in ink. Whetherthe essay is typed or written, the use of black ink is prefer-able. The original typewritten copy must be presented. Incase two copies of a thesis are required, the second copymust be the first carbon and must be on the same quality ofpaper as the original.

      Definitely a paragraph aimed at the student in the manner of a syllabus, but also an interesting tidbit on the potential evolution of writing forms over time.


      How does language over time change with respect to the types and styles of writing forms, particularly when they're prescribed or generally standardized over time? How do these same standards evolve over time and change things at the level of the larger pictures?

    5. The special considerations which enter into the determina-tlon of the credibility of historical statements are discussed,with considerable fullness, in Hereford B. George, Histori-aal evidence, Oxford, 1909; Allen Johnson, Hhtorian andhistorical evidence, New York, 1926; and Charles G. Crump,Hwtory and historical reeearch, London, 1928. The studentwill receive some aid in handltng the roblems of conflictingauthorities by using Frederic Doncalf and August C. Krey,Parallel source p r o b l e m in medieval history, New York andLondon, 1912 [Harper‘s parallel aource problems], or one ofthe other volumes in the same series.

      These look fascinating, but alas for another day.

    6. Mr. York Powell, lateregius professor of modern histor a t Oxford, said: “Theformation and expression of ethicarjudgments . . . is nota thing within the historian’s province.”
    7. The use ofhyphens in compound words is becoming less frequent exceptwhen essential for clarity of meaning. The customary prac-tice is to write such words as coordinate with the dieresisrather than the hyphen.
    8. Perspectiae and continuity. Correct perspective is es-sential t o sound critical malysis and interpretation. Thehistorical writer must always keep the time element clearlyin mind, and must recognize that an estimate of any histori-cal ersonage or event is determined in no small measureby t1e time or the conditions under which the person livedor the event occurred
    9. Irony is a dangerous literary device which should beused only with the greatest caution.
    10. works inEnglish are convenient introductions to the prohems andmethods of historical research: Charles V. Langlois andCharles Seignobos, Introduction to the rludy of history, NewYork, 1898; John M. Vincent, Historical research, an outlineof theory and practice, New York, 1911; and, to a morelimited extent, Fred M. Fling, Writing of history, an intro-duction to historical method, New Haven, 1920. The studentwho is specializing in history should early familiarize him-self with these volumes and then acquaint himself with otherworks in the field, notably Ernst Bernheim, hehrbuch derhistorwehen Methode und der Beschichtsplrilosophie, 6th ed.,Leipzig, 1908

      I'm curious, what, if any, detail Fling (1920) and Vincent (1911) provide on note taking processes?

    11. While it is a fundamental principle that workscontemporary with an event are presumably more authenticthan later ones, it should be borne in mind that the morerecent secondary works are frequently based on more ma-terials and present new interpretations.
  23. www.janeausten.pludhlab.org www.janeausten.pludhlab.org
    1. clever young German artist at the Cape

      Jocelyn Harris mentioned in her talk "Who is Captain Wentworth" that this a reference to a specific historical person who painted Austen's brother Frank's (a sailor) portrait. The Thing about Austen podcast does a full episode (29) on this miniature.

    1. the writings of the Spanish physician JuanHuarte, who in the late sixteenth century published a widely translated studyon the nature of human intelligence. In the course of his investigations, Huartecame to wonder at the fact that the word for “intelligence,” ingenio, seems tohave the same Latin root as various words meaning “engender” or “generate.”
    1. https://forum.saysomethingin.com/t/grasshoppers/36340

      Variations of the word grasshopper in Welsh:<br /> * Ceiliog y gwair * Sioncyn y gwair * Robin sbonciwr * Sbonciwr y gwair * Ceiliog y rhedyn

      Note that the last one translates as cockerel of the fern and is probably related to kilhog-raden (in Bretton) and kulyek reden (in Cornish).

      The verb (y)sboncio means to spring/leap/jump<br /> thus sbonciwr is someone/something that springs, leaps or jumps and is also related to sboncen (the game squash).

      gwair translates as grass

  24. Jul 2022
    1. Professor Ernst Bernheim, of the University ofGreifswald, has worked through nearly all themodern works on historical method, and the fruitof his labours is an arrangement under appropriateheadings, most of them invented by himself, of agreat number of reflections and selected references.His Lehrhuch der historischen Methode^ (Leipzig, 1894,8vo) condenses, in the manner of German Lehrhiicher,the special literature of the subject of which ittreats.

      These French authors are specifically aware of Ernst Bernheim's 1894 text which also has sections on note taking methods. Should be interesting to see how this differs at least for the brief portion of Bernheim I read on the topic.

      Link to: - https://hyp.is/RJ-6-AekEe268sOEeQ79Yw

    2. The best work that has hitherto been published (in French) onhistorical method is a pamphlet by MM. Ch. and V. Mortet, LaScience de Vhistoire (Paris, 1894, 8vo), 88 pp., extracted from vol. xx.of the Grande Encyclopidie
    3. The present "Introduction to the Study of History''is thus intended, not as a summary of ascertained factsor a system of general ideas on universal history, butas an essay on the method of the historical sciences.

      General purpose of the text.

    1. Bernheim, Ernst. Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie: mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hilfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte. Leipzig : Duncker & Humblot, 1908. http://archive.org/details/lehrbuchderhist03berngoog.

      Title translation: Textbook of the historical method and the philosophy of history : with reference to the most important sources and aids for the study of history

      A copy of the original 1889 copy can be found at https://digital.ub.uni-leipzig.de/mirador/index.php

    2. Ein grofer Teil der Regestenarbeit wird neuerdings demForscher durch besondere Regestenwerke abgenommen, nament-lich auf dem Gebiet der mittelalterlichen Urkunden. Daf diesebevorzugt werden, hat zwei Griinde: erstens sind die Urkundenfur die Geschichte des Mittelalters gewissermafen als festesGerippe von besonderer Wichtigkeit; zweitens sind sie so ver.streut in ihren Fund- und Druckorten, da8 die Zusammen-stellung derselben, wie sie ftir jede Arbeit von neuem erforder-lich wire, immer von neuem die langwierigsten und mtthsamstenVorarbeiten n&tig machen wiirde. Es ist daher von griéStemNutzen, da8 diese Vorarbeiten ein fir allemal gemacht und demeinzelnen Forscher erspart werden.

      Ein großer Teil der Regestenarbeit wird neuerdings dem Forscher durch besondere Regestenwerke abgenommen, namentlich auf dem Gebiet der mittelalterlichen Urkunden. Daß diese bevorzugt werden, hat zwei Gründe: erstens sind die Urkunden fur die Geschichte des Mittelalters gewissermafen als festes Gerippe von besonderer Wichtigkeit; zweitens sind sie so verstreut in ihren Fund- und Druckorten, daß die Zusammenstellung derselben, wie sie ftir jede Arbeit von neuem erforderlich wire, immer von neuem die langwierigsten und mtthsamsten Vorarbeiten nötig machen würde. Es ist daher von größtem Nutzen, daß diese Vorarbeiten ein fir allemal gemacht und dem einzelnen Forscher erspart werden.

      Google translation:

      A large part of the regesta work has recently been relieved of the researcher by special regesta works, especially in the field of medieval documents. There are two reasons why these are preferred: first, the documents are of particular importance for the history of the Middle Ages as a solid skeleton; Secondly, they are so scattered in the places where they were found and printed that the compilation of them, as would be necessary for each new work, would again and again necessitate the most lengthy and laborious preparatory work. It is therefore of the greatest benefit that this preparatory work should be done once and for all and that the individual researcher be spared.

      While the contexts are mixed here between note taking and historical method, there is some useful advice here that while taking notes, one should do as much work upfront during the research phase of reading and writing, so that when it comes to the end of putting the final work together and editing, the writer can be spared the effort of reloading large amounts of data and context to create the final output.

    3. nennt man Regesten, Regesta, eine Ableitung von dem Verbumregerere, das schon bei Quintilian in der Bedeutung ,abschreiben,eintragen“ vorkommt. Spezielle Zusammenstellungen der Auf-enthaltsorte historischer Persinlichkeiten aus den Quellen nenntman Itinerare.

      Derartige geordnete Eintragungen historischer Materialien nennt man Regesten, Regesta, eine Ableitung von dem Verbum regerere, das schon bei Quintilian in der Bedeutung ,abschreiben, eintragen“ vorkommt. Spezielle Zusammenstellungen der Aufenthaltsorte historischer Persönlichkeiten aus den Quellen nennt man Itinerare. (p 556-557)

      Google translation:

      Such ordered entries of historical material are called regesta, regesta, a derivation of the verb regerere, which already occurs in Quintilian in the meaning "to copy, to enter". Special compilations of the whereabouts of historical figures from the sources are called itineraries.

      Regesta in this context are complete copies of ordered entries of historical material. One might also translate this as historical copies or entries.

      While Bernheim is talking about historical records and copies thereof in his discussion of regesta, he does bring up a useful point about manual note taking practice: one needn't completely copy the original context, just do enough work to create context for yourself so as not to be overburdened with excess material later. Some working in digital contexts may find it easy to simply copy and paste everything from an original document, but capturing just the useful synopsis may be enough, particularly when the original context can be readily revisited.

    4. 3. Regesten.Da wir gesehen haben, wieviel auf tibersichtliche Ordnungbei der Zusammenstellung des Materials ankommt, muff manauf die praktische Einrichtung seiner Materialiensammlung vonAnfang an bewufte Sorgfalt verwenden. Selbstverstindlichlassen sich keine, im einzelnen durchweg gtiltigen Regeln auf-stellen; aber wir kinnen uns doch tiber einige allgemeine Ge-sichtspunkte verstindigen. Nicht genug zu warnen ist vor einemregel- und ordnungslosen Anhiufen und Durcheinanderschreibender Materialien; denn die zueinander gehérigen Daten zusammen--gufinden erfordert dann ein stets erneutes Durchsehen des ganzenMaterials; auch ist es dann kaum miglich, neu hinzukommendeDaten an der gehirigen Stelle einzureihen. Bei irgend gréferenArbeiten muff man seine Aufzeichnungen auf einzelne loseBlatter machen, die leicht umzuordnen und denen ohne Unm-stinde Blatter mit neuen Daten einzuftigen sind. Macht mansachliche Kategorieen, so sind die zu einer Kategorie gehérigenBlatter in Umschligen oder besser noch in K&sten getrennt zuhalten; innerhalb derselben kann man chronologisch oder sach-lich alphabetisch nach gewissen Schlagwiértern ordnen.
      1. Regesten Da wir gesehen haben, wieviel auf tibersichtliche Ordnung bei der Zusammenstellung des Materials ankommt, muß man auf die praktische Einrichtung seiner Materialiensammlung von Anfang an bewußte Sorgfalt verwenden. Selbstverständlich lassen sich keine, im einzelnen durchweg gültigen Regeln aufstellen; aber wir können uns doch über einige allgemeine Gesichtspunkte verständigen. Nicht genug zu warnen ist vor einem regel- und ordnungslosen Anhäufen und Durcheinanderschreiben der Materialien; denn die zueinander gehörigen Daten zusammenzufinden erfordert dann ein stets erneutes Durchsehen des ganzen Materials; auch ist es dann kaum möglich, neu hinzukommende Daten an der gehörigen Stelle einzureihen. Bei irgend größeren Arbeiten muß man seine Aufzeichnungen auf einzelne lose Blätter machen, die leicht umzuordnen und denen ohne Umstände Blätter mit neuen Daten einzufügen sind. Macht man sachliche Kategorieen, so sind die zu einer Kategorie gehörigen Blätter in Umschlägen oder besser noch in Kästen getrennt zu halten; innerhalb derselben kann man chronologisch oder sachlich alphabetisch nach gewissen Schlagwörtern ordnen.

      Google translation:

      1. Regesture Since we have seen how much importance is placed on clear order in the gathering of material, conscious care must be exercised in the practical organization of one's collection of materials from the outset. It goes without saying that no rules that are consistently valid in detail can be set up; but we can still agree on some general points of view. There is not enough warning against a disorderly accumulation and jumble of materials; because to find the data that belong together then requires a constant re-examination of the entire material; it is also then hardly possible to line up newly added data at the appropriate place. In any large work one must make one's notes on separate loose sheets, which can easily be rearranged, and sheets of new data easily inserted. If you make factual categories, the sheets belonging to a category should be kept separate in covers or, better yet, in boxes; Within these, you can sort them chronologically or alphabetically according to certain keywords.

      In a pre-digital era, Ernst Bernheim warns against "a disorderly accumulation and jumble of materials" (machine translation from German) as it means that one must read through and re-examine all their collected materials to find or make sense of them again.

      In digital contexts, things are vaguely better as the result of better search through a corpus, but it's still better practice to have things with some additional level of order to prevent the creation of a "scrap heap".

      link to: - https://hyp.is/i9dwzIXrEeymFhtQxUbEYQ


      In 1889, Bernheim suggests making one's notes on separate loose sheets of paper so that they may be easily rearranged and new notes inserted. He suggested assigning notes to categories and keeping them separated, preferably in boxes. Then one might sort them in a variety of different ways, specifically highlighting both chronological and alphabetical order based on keywords.

      (This quote is from the 1903 edition, but presumably is similar or the same in 1889, but double check this before publishing.)

      Link this to the earlier section in which he suggested a variety of note orders for historical methods as well as for the potential creation of insight into one's work.