https://mitpressonpubpub.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/syyor4ra/release/1?readingCollection=31668090

From Chapter 3 of Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia's book Annotation.

I've referenced this image so many times, I ought to finally bookmark it, right?

Ted Nelson shows a similar one when talking about Project Xanadu and the importance of parallel texts.

Ted Nelson felt visible connections between text were the most important part of his Xanadu project.

There are close parallels between these in digital spaces and songlines and related orality based mnemonic techniques.

https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/a/aris-and-phillips-classical-texts-apctlup/?cc=us&lang=en&

reply to RichardCarter, timbushell8640, _jared, et al at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laXcJyx9xCc&lc=UgwDgpIktVi8yFDjEVZ4AaABAg

I see you @timbushell8640 and @RichardCarter. ;)

Let's be clear that synoptic (meaning "seen together") is certainly a useful word apart from syntopic. Quite often it's used to describe the books Matthew, Mark, and Luke of the New Testament which are sometimes placed together on the same page to compare the stories, particularly for historical analysis. This sort of reading, not too dissimilar to syntopical reading, is a fantastic analytical tool as well and is described well by Bart Ehrman in one of his more scholarly works. Reading these books this way shows that the so-called synoptic gospels are anything but consistent (talk about crosses to bear....) Given the increase in the number of biblical scholars in the late 1800s doing this specific sort of reading (synoptic) may have influenced Adler's choice of neologism to describe that particular reading method. For those that haven't seen a synoptic book presentation, Throckmorton's version is a fairly good/popular one, though others certainly exist, including versions for translators which have side by side versions of books in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, etc. These can be found by searching for books with "interlinear", "parallel" and/or "polyglot" in their titles, especially with respect to bibles. They're somewhat similar to the layouts of the Loeb Classics collection, though those only have Greek/English or Latin/English in parallel.

Ehrman, Bart D. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Second Edition. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Chapter 6, "The Synoptic Problem and Its Significance for Interpretation", pp76-83.

Throckmorton, Jr., Burton H. Gospel Parallels: A Comparison of the Synoptic Gospels, New Revised Standard Version. 5th Revised edition. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1992.

Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. 1st edition. New York London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018. https://amzn.to/3QioxiS

Relationship to the first two commandments against worshiping other gods and the use of idols?

How does this relate to the standing stone found in the room at Khirbet Qeiyafa from the time of David?

Dates of this text with respect to Khirbet Keiyafa?

relationship of synoptical and syntopical

Did the idea of syntopicality exist prior to Adler? Did it spring from the work of German religious scholars of XIX C who began doing synoptical readings and comparisons of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke in the Bible?

link to the "great conversation" quote of Whitehead about Plato: https://hypothes.is/a/qb2T7l9nEe6uVVOdez8mKw

What comes out of alternately reading theological books with understanding and compassion and then switching to raw logic?

they provide a broader definition of sacred/holy texts that extend to books which form the basis of a groups' identity and often involve orthodoxy.

relation to politics, gender identity, cults, etc.

https://latin.packhum.org/

This website contains essentially all Latin literary texts written before A.D. 200, as well as some texts selected from later antiquity.

https://www.degruyter.com/database/btl/html?lang=en

https://mittelalter.hypotheses.org/22292

reply to u/stjeromeslibido at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10qw4l5/are_there_symbols_for_supported_by_or/

In addition to the other excellent suggestions, I don't think you'll find anything specific that that was used historically for these, but there are certainly lots of old annotation symbols you might be able to co-opt for your personal use.

Evina Steinova has a great free cheat sheet list of annotation symbols: The Most Common Annotation Symbols in Early Medieval Western Manuscripts (a cheat sheet).

More of this rabbit hole:

• Steinová, Evina. Notam Superponere Studui: The Use of Annotation Symbols in the Early Middle Ages. Brepols, 2019.
• Cappelli, Adriano. The Elements of Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography. University of Kansas Libr., 1984.
• Coulson, Frank, and Robert Babcock. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography. Oxford University Press, 2020.
• Lindsay, W. M. Notae Latinae. Cambridge University Press, 2013. https://archive.org/download/notaelatinaeacco00lindrich/notaelatinaeacco00lindrich.pdf.
• Bains, Doris. A Supplement to Notae Latinae (Abbreviations in Latin Mss. of 850 to 1050 A.D.). Cambridge [England] University Press, 1936. http://archive.org/details/supplementtonota0000bain.

(Nota bene: most of my brief research here only extends to Western traditions, primarily in Latin and Greek. Obviously other languages and eras will have potential ideas as well.)

Tironian shorthand may have something you could repurpose as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes

Some may find the auxiliary signs of the Universal Decimal Classification useful for some of these sorts of notations for conjoining ideas.

Given the past history of these sorts of symbols and their uses, perhaps it might be useful for us all to aggregate a list of common ones we all use as a means of re-standardizing some of them in modern contexts? Which ones does everyone use?

Here are some I commonly use:

Often for quotations, citations, and provenance of ideas, I'll use Maria Popova and Tina Roth Eisenberg's Curator's Code:

• ᔥ for "via" to denote a direct quotation/source— something found elsewhere and written with little or no modification or elaboration (reformulation notes)
• ↬ for "hat tip" to stand for indirect discovery — something for which you got the idea at a source, but modified or elaborated on significantly (inspiration by a source, but which needn't be cited)

Occasionally I'll use a few nanoformats, from the microblogging space, particularly

• L: to indicate location

For mathematical proofs, in addition to their usual meanings, I'll use two symbols to separate biconditionals (necessary/sufficient conditions)

• (⇒) as a heading for the "if" portion of the proof
• (⇐) for the "only if" portion

Some historians may write 19c to indicate 19th Century, often I'll abbreviate using Roman numerals instead, so "XIX".

Occasionally, I'll also throw drolleries or other symbols into my margins to indicate idiosyncratic things that may only mean something specifically to me. This follows in the medieval traditions of the ars memoria, some of which are suggested in Cornwell, Hilarie, and James Cornwell. Saints, Signs, and Symbols: The Symbolic Language of Christian Art 3rd Edition. Church Publishing, Inc., 2009. The modern day equivalent of this might be the use of emoji with slang meanings or 1337 (leet) speak.

https://abbreviationes.net/

Much like earlier scribal errors, there are textual errors inserted into digitization projects which may have gone from documentary originals, into handwritten (translated) copies, which then were copied manually via typewriter, and then copied again into some digital form, and then changed again into other digital forms as digital formats changed.

As a result it is often fruitful to be able to compare the various versions to see the sorts of errors which each level of copying can introduce. One might suppose that textual errors were only common when done by scribes using manual techniques, but it is just as likely for errors to be inserted between digital copies as well.

Tracy Durnell comments on a quote that divides internet users in 'word people' and 'image people' by by position the entire internet as a modern form of oral culture. The only reason in that perspective for the abundance of text is early bandwidth and technology limitations. Nowadays presentations, streaming, videos and podcasts make a much direct version of distributing oral expressions. When Durnell talks about oral culture is that because of the style more than the format? Blogs, IRC chats, microblogging and messaging are more oral in tone. Whereas ;'serious' texts are still in document shape. Reminds me of annotation as conversation and as social interaction.

Dialectical notes are made at the level of syntopical reading and entail creating a conversation not only between the reader and the author, but create a conversation of questions and answers between and among many texts and the reader.

https://infiniteconversation.com/

an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. Everything you hear is fully generated by a machine. The opinions and beliefs expressed do not represent anyone. They are the hallucinations of a slab of silicon.

Coogan, Michael David, Marc Zvi Brettler, Carol Ann Newsom, and Pheme Perkins, eds. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: With the Apocrypha. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Intellectual work requires "surfaces" to work against, almost as an exact analogy to substrates in chemistry which help to catalyze reactions. The surfaces may include: - articles, books, or other writing against which one can think and write - colleagues, friends, family, other thinkers, or even imaginary characters (as suggested by C. Wright Mills) - one's past self as instantiated by their (imperfect) memory or by their notes about excerpted ideas or their own thoughts

Are there any other surfaces we're missing?

It's annotations all the way down...

I like that he touches on one of the important parts of the gardens and streams portion of online digital gardens here, though he doesn't tacitly frame it this way.

https://archaeologyofreading.org/

The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.

Perhaps some overlap here with: - Workshop in the History of Material Texts https://pennmaterialtexts.org/about/events/ - Book Traces https://booktraces.org via Andrew Stauffer, et al. - Schoenberg Institute's Coffe with a Codex https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/ (perhaps to a lesser degree)

ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: ‘RT @JASPStats: How to obtain introductory texts using the Learn Bayes Module in JASP. #stats #openSource https://t.co/dn7jyFr59i’ / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved 6 March 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1326512599903694848

Some scholars study annotations as part of material culture. Are they leaving out too much by solely studying those physically left in the books about which they were made, or should we instead also be looking at other sources like commonplace books, notebooks, note cards, digital spaces like e-readers that allow annotation, social media where texts are discussed, or even digital marginalia in services like Hypothes.is or Perusall?

Some of these forms of annotation allow a digital version of cut and paste which doesn't cause damage to the original text, which should be thought of as a good thing though it may separate the annotations from the original physical object.

Stages of annotation in the medieval period

When is Hypothes.is going to branch out into the business of professional readers to add aids to texts?! :)

Link this to the professional summary industry that reads books and summarizes them for busy executives

Link this to the annotations studied by Owen Gingerich in The Book Nobody Read.

https://pennmaterialtexts.org/homepage

How awesome looking is this? Note the regular online meetings/presentations and the backlog of videos on their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Ng6px3fgc4Yjw-en1GcsA

Any serious historical or other academic work should include a conversation with the body of other scholarship with which argues for or against.

Comparing and contrasting one idea with another is crucial for any sort of advancement.

http://web.ceu.hu/medstud/manual/MMM/home.html

Most Medieval manuscripts specifically left wide columns of space to encourage readers to mark up their texts.

cross reference: Medieval notepads - Khan Academy

<small>Detail, London, British Library, Harley MS 3487 (13th century)—[source](http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=16790)</small>

Here's an example of a blogger using the idea of writing a blog as being in conversation with himself.

It obviously doesn't predate Niklas Luhmann's conversation with slip boxes, but the general tenor is certainly similar in form and function.

The idea of taking notes here as a conversation both with onesself as well as the author is essentially the old idea of making annotations in the margins of a book.

He's repackaging it in the framing of a zettelkasten, but it's the same sort of conversation that @remikalir talks about, though in that case Remi is usually talking about class-wide group conversations with a text.

Cross-reference this with Luhmann's paper Communicating with Slip-boxes which is a portion of the story from the zettelkasten perspective.

Certainly someone in the commonplace or annotation traditions mentioned the idea of a conversation? Either with themselves, with the author, or with the text itself? Was this ever tacitly acknowledged before Luhmann?

I agree that local mentor texts are the best, if you can find them. Not many rural mentor texts.

Mingling with the author has a pleasant ring to it. Better than a "conversation with the text"? Definitely has a nicer warmth.

He could have replace plane with something warmer as well.

This is related in a way with the way [[Niklas Luhmann]] spoke about communicating with his [[Zettelkasten]] as means of collaborating. (See: http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes)

Add these to our list.

With some continued clever searching today along with some help from an expert in Elizabethan English, I've found an online version of Robert Copland's (poor) translation from the French, some notes, and a few resources for assisting in reading it for those who need the help.

The text:

• The art of memory, that otherwyse is called the Phenix A boke very behouefull and profytable to all professours of scyences. Grammaryens, rethoryciens dialectyke, legystes, phylosophres [and] theologiens. Petrus, Ravennas, ca. 1448-1508 or 9., Copland, Robert, fl. 1540-1547. [Imprynted at London: In Fletestrete at the sygne of the George by Wyllyam Myddylton, [ca. 1545]]

This is a free text transcription and will be easier to read than the original black-letter Elizabethan English version.

For those without the background in Elizabethan English, here are a few tips/hints:

• Short 3 page article/crash course on Middle English
• You can learn to read Middle English

For the more obscure/non-obvious words:

• Middle English Dictionary (online) from University of Michigan
• Project Gutenberg Middle English Dictionary

Finally, keep in mind that the letter "y" can often be a printer's substitution for the English thorn character) Þ, so you'll often see the abbreviations yͤ for "the" and yͭ as an abbreviation for "that".

Copland's original English, first printing of Ravenna can be accessed electronically through a paid Proquest account at most universities. It is listed as STC 24112 if you have access to a firewall-free site that lets you look at books on Early English Books Online (EEBO). A photocopy can be obtained through EEBO reprints on Amazon. Unless you've got some reasonable experience with Elizabethan black-latter typography, expect this version to be hard to read. It isn't annotated or modernized.

@ehcolston I'm curious to hear what the Wilson/Pena text looks like. I'm guessing it's not scholarly. I think Wilson is a recent college grad and is/was a publishing intern at a company in the LA Area. I'm not sure of Pena's background. I suspect it may be a version of the transcribed text I've linked with a modest updating of the middle English which they've self-published on Amazon.

Of course, given the multiple translations here, if anyone is aware of a more solid translation of the original Latin text into English, do let us know. The careful observer will notice that the Latin version is the longest, the French quite a bit shorter, and the English (Copland) incredibly short, so there appears to be some untranslated material in there somewhere.

I haven't searched all the versions of Peter of Ravenna's name (yet) in all locations, but I recall hearing of an Italian version as well (and it's likely that there was one given its popularity).

A bit of digging around this morning has uncovered a digital copy of a French translation in the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé (Paris).:

• 1545: L'art de memoire qui est aultrement inscript le phenix livre treffort utille & profitable a tous professeurs des sciences, grammariens, rheteurs, dialetiques, legistes philosophes & theologiens

Given the date and the scant 16 pages, this is likely to be the edition which was the source of Robert Copland's English translation. As the edition doesn't appear to have an author, it's possible that this was the reason that Copland's translation didn't list one either.

The Latin -> French -> middle English -> modern English route seems an awfully muddy way to go, but without anything else, it may have to suffice for some of us for the moment.

Potential sub-title: "The syllabus is a living conversation"

The thoughtfulness and design of of Hypothes.is is incredibly valuable to me specifically because it dramatically increases my textual productivity in combination with my digital commonplace book.

Connect this to the Jeremy Dean's idea of it helping to facilitate a conversation with texts. Nate Angell had a specific quote of it somewhere, but it might also reside in this document: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14682753.2017.1362168

English Journal example of disrupting Gatsby.

This text analysis that it contains words written in hebrew and deciphering of the first sentence of the text using hebrew translation seems to align with what this author is saying about the text being passed down through the family.

She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.

[Source] (https://hyp.is/GB7sZKjvEeidoGeGo8L6jA/www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mysterious-manuscript-decoded-computer-scientists-ai-a8180951.html)

This seems to align with the analysis of Sukhwant Singh

Sukhwant Singh's analysis here seems to fit with a lot of other's partial analysis/observations such as multiple characters representing the same character, certain characters only appearing at the end of words etc. It seems quite compelling. The dates however, are a century too early although that does not necessarily dispel his theory that it is written in Landa Khojki.

This might suggest the same thing as Tiltman's analysis in that a single character may take several forms.

When learning that there were over 100 characters used in the manuscript my first thought was that perhaps variations of a character were used to represent the same character.

This is very interesting. It seems to suggest that each word may be scrambled based on the characters used.

Here is a documentary on the Voynich Manuscript published in 2014.

Here is a copy of the full manuscript.

The text seems to be split into four parts (based on the drawings); botanicals, astrological charts, women bathing, and what appears to be recipes. For this reason it's theorized that the Voynich Manuscript is an encoded medical book.

Both the mineral pigments used in the paint as well as the large and consistent quality of the parchment indicates the text would have cost quite a bit of money to produce.

The Voynich Manuscript has not been deciphered despite people dedicating their entire lives to the challenge. Even modern deciphering computerized methods have not picked up a pattern.

Interestingly, the drawings of some of the plants seem to show cellular level detail. The first microscope didn't exist until centuries later.

The Voynich Manuscript was carbon dated to 1404-1430. The dovetail wall in one of the drawings given the time period indicates the author probably lived in Italy as that's the only known place during that time period with that style of architecture.

By comparing Pride and Prejudice's concerns of marriage to Emma and Mansfield Park, Moe improves her argument about Austen's comprehension of marriage by using relevant texts to apply to Charlotte and Elizabeth's respective situations.

important to share with 470

Page 220

Humanistic research takes place in a rich milieu that incorporates the cultural context of artifacts. Electronic text and models change the nature of scholarship in subtle and important ways, which have been discussed at great length since the humanities first began to contemplate the scholarly application of computing.

For which annotation is key.