or as Vannevar Bush might have said, everyone will have their own idiosyncratic associative trails...

reply to u/jordynfly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13b0b5c/comment/jjcu3cn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm curious what your area of research is? What are you studying with respect to Zettelkasten?

Caveat notetarius. Note collections are highly idiosyncratic to the user or intended audience, thus quality will vary dramatically on the creator's needs and future desires and potential uses. Contemporaneous, very simple notes can be valuable for their initial sensemaking and quite often in actual practice stop there.

Ultimately, only the user can determine perceived quality and long term value for themselves. Future generations of historians, anthropologists, scholars, and readers, might also find value in notes and note collections, but it seems rare that the initial creators have written them with future readers and audiences in mind. Often they're less useful as the external reader is missing large swaths of context.

For my own personal notes, I consider high quality notes to be well-sourced, highly reusable, easily findable, and reasonably tagged/linked. My favorite, highest quality notes are those that are new ideas which stem from the combination of two high quality notes. With respect to subjectivity, some of my philosophy is summarized by one of my favorite meta-zettels (alt text also available) from zettelmeister Umberto Eco.

Anecdotally, 95% of my notes are done digitally and in public, but I've only got scant personal evidence that anyone is reading or interacting with them. I never write them with any perceived public consumption in mind (beyond the readers of the finished pieces that ultimately make use of them), but it is often very useful to get comments and reactions to them. I'm only aware of a small handful of people publishing their otherwise personal note collections (usually subsets) to the web (outside of social media presences which generally have a different function and intent).

Intellectual historians have looked at and documented external use cases of shared note collections, commonplace books, annotated volumes, and even diaries. There are even examples of published (usually posthumously) commonplace books, waste books, etc., but these are often for influential public and intellectual figures. Here Ludwig Wittgenstein's Zettel, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura, Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Waste Books, Ralph Waldo Emmerson, Ronald Reagan's card index commonplace, Stobaeus' Anthology, W. H. Auden's A Certain World, and Robert Southey’s Common-Place Book come quickly to mind not to mention digitized scholarly collections of Niklas Luhmann, W. Ross Ashby, S.D. Goitein, Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, and Aby Warburg's notes. Some of these latter will give you an idea of what they may have thought quality notes to have been for them, but often they mean little if nothing to the unstudied reader because they lack broader context or indication of linkages.

Once again we see themes of neglect, and of becoming ones own person. The ambiguity of Mansfield's stories, leave us to our own subjective interpretations. This is the kind of writing that I love, because it challenges our own sensibilities, forcing the reader into making up their own minds, without anymore meaningful a measure for right or wrong, than the readers own life experience. In this way her stories successfully imitate real life. We go around imperfect machines, interpreting life through a murky lens, with feelings that are complicated, dull, sharp, definite... I know this story is a sad one. I feel sad for William, but I'm not sure I should.

Ouch! I like how the omnipresent narrators in Mansfields' stories are so not objective, like goggles through which we must see the world. Exposed to merely a few short scenes from which we extrapolate to the characters' entire personas, our judgments are very susceptible to the narrators' stance. There's little room for us to perceive Isabel as the martyr, or her friends as exuberant rather than shallow, or William as an ignorant, sullen person who doesn't care much about his family. I wonder if/how narrators' subjectivity could be measured by inspecting adjectives in unquoted lines (e.g., how to distinguish between a description of a person in a scene and a description of a person in general).

Truth is obviously an important theme in a detective novel. Collins lays the metaphor thick here with the quicksand, conjuring imagery of truth lost in the muddy sands. Rosanna also mentions that she "may own" the truth - but is truth not objective fact? It emphasizes the question of perception versus reality and the epistemology of truth. For Rosanna, truth is what she believed to be true, her truth. She died due to the burden of this truth, fully believing in its validity.

This passage highlights the subjectivity in these narratives as a whole. Franklin believes that everyone would interpret Lucy's actions as that of a madwoman, and it is certainly the case that those whom he surrounds himself with would agree. However, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for Lucy's actions that only women of her and Rosanna's class would know - people who have no voice in these narratives.

Like mholder pointed out, this also speaks to Foucault's "Self Writing." In this case, I think the connection to the notebook and/or letter (correspondence) is important, where the "expanded self" is due in large part thanks to the non-anthropomorphic materials the writer interacts with (a la Barad's intra-activity, if I'm making that connect aright).

Following their Foucault reference, this reminds me of his "Self Writing" piece. The self is formed through the physical, material act of writing -- "the present as actual" -- and the transmission of self across space and time through the letter -- "the present as virtual". The subject, then, emerges against the interplay of the material and the virtual.

[unlike linear] nonlinear temporality is a feminist proposal to resist liberal individualistic modes of doing politics. Organizing politically in a nonlinear temporality involves creating situationist feminist politics; nonlinear activism is one that does not construct origins but mobilizes different political consciousness and creates many subject positions.

THESIS part 2: the development of "modern subjectivity." This can sometimes draw attention from disagreements between women in Austen novels. Charlotte challenges the "social practices that do not appear germane to liberation." She does not follow a romantic plot.

Moe questions the problem with viewing Elizabeth as the sole modern, feminist character.

An example of a scholar with a new spin on modern subjectivity.

Like Fanon who describes colonizers as also being somehow split, Anzaldua recognizes the split of white people. Dual consciousness manifests itself in different ways depending on positions of power.

Dual identity seems to be a common theme in race and postcolonial studies. DuBois has double consciousness, the condition of African Americans viewing themselves as American but being viewed by white America as black and as a problem. Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth describes the split subjectivity of the colonized. Nervous Conditions is a novel by Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga which extends Fanon's split subjectivity to describe how her two protagonists are split between their desire for a Western education, independence and feminism and their Rhodesian culture.

Would we ever speak? Think about what kind of model of human subjectivity is at work here.

For since sounds are voluntary and indifferent signs of any ideas, a man may use what words he pleases to signify his own ideas to himself: and there will be no im-perfection in them, if he constantly use the same sign for the same idea: for then he cannot fail of having his meaning understood, wherein consists the right use and perfection of language (Locke, 817).

Makes me think back to the subjectivity of what rhetoric and language can be; as long as one person believes it to be true, then it must be true

This is reminiscent of Locke's thoughts on simple and complex ideas: the only way language truly work is if both parties have the same understanding of the words being used. Sheridan seems to take it a bit further, though, possibly drawing upon Hume's decanting of subjectivity.

I don't fully understand this but it was the most intriguing sentence in the piece for me. Are our social media services doing the care work of attending to our need for in-control socialization? Are they our new safe spaces that replace the therapist's office? I also wonder about whether people who work in a caring capacity have a unique relationship with social media.

Individuality/variability even in the same society/ community.