Want a Simplified Zettelkasten? For Beginners by Dr Maddy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w15joVA4pIc
Very quick and to the point.
Want a Simplified Zettelkasten? For Beginners by Dr Maddy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w15joVA4pIc
Very quick and to the point.
I like that she's explicit about not migrating over all of one's highlights and annotations after the fact. Few people focus on this piece which is highly important and many beginners fall trap to thinking that they need to write down, save, and link everything.
What if the initial exercise of making the fleeting note was enough to have a baseline knowledge of a thing that really isn't going to be used again? Save the time and effort for the really important ideas. Build these.
An annotation like 2+2=4 is useful in 2nd grade and will be remembered/used for your lifetime. It's so ubiquitously commonplace that it doesn't need to be commonplaced into your zettelkasten. Similarly for basic ideas that anyone in a particular sub-field will already know. Delve deeper for building true insights.
This is related to the idea of collector's fallacy, but is subtly different from the usual framing. It has to do with focus against the commonplace.
It's a method that was first developed by Nicholas Luhmann. —Dr. Maddy 00:00:42
Protolyst <br /> https://protolyst.org/
You can export Pages in your workspace as PDFs with more export formats to be added in the future (I did see one other snippet that indicated .csv format export, but it doesn't appear to have .md support to dovetail with all the other tools which use this as a baseline)
Found ᔥDr. Maddy in the description from Want a Simplified Zettelkasten? For Beginners
Sönke Ahrens' Concept of "Permanent Notes" in a Zettelkasten is Completely False
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6jt7SPbhMs
One snippet of brief insight which he could have built upon, but instead he sandwiches it in multiple shills for his book, shills for his newsletter, and several heaping servings of zettelkasten cultish religion.
sigh
Given the presentation here, one wonders how long Scott spent looking through the main portion of Luhmann's ZK to verify that, in fact, that section did not appear. It's nice that he found the bilbliography card related to the footnote, but I don't see enough evidence for deep search to indicate that it might not actually exist somewhere. I also know from experience that Scott doesn't have enough strength in German to potentially pull off such a search, particularly given two different translators of Luhmann's German into English. It may have been the case that Scott missed it.
The better example would have been to use Goitein whose writing output far exceeded that of Luhmann with a fraction of the cards.
he also demonstrated unfailing empathy andgenuine commitment to their progress.
this is a good start at a definition of teaching
If you consult any dictionary you will see that the word“exactitude” is not among the synonyms of faithfulness.There are rather loyalty, honesty, respect, and devotion.Umberto Eco1Although Eco was referring to the translation of literarytexts in the lines above
The same information could have been recordedin a notebook or on slips of paper and then heaped togetherhaphazardly, but this would not have accomplished the samething.
I take issue with this statement from the translators. Do they come about it themselves or does it stem from Eco?
The general affordances of many modalities are very similar, though the ease of use and speed in arrival at a destination may be slightly different. (That is, cards can be ordered more quickly perhaps, but a similar function can be done using notebooks or slips.)
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.
Eco was aware of this predicament. As a university profes-sor, he knew that the majority of students in Italian univer-sities seldom attended classes, that very few of them wouldcontinue to write and do research, and that the degree theyeventually earned would not necessarily improve their socialconditions. It would have been easy to call for the system tobe reformed so as not to require a thesis from students ill-equipped to write one, and for whom the benefit of spendingseveral months working on a thesis might be difficult to jus-tify in cold economic terms.
Some of the missing piece here is knowing a method for extracting and subsequently building. Without the recipe in hand, it's difficult to bake a complex cake.
Not mentioned here as something which may be missing, but which Adler & Van Doren identify as strength and ability to read at multiple levels including inspectionally, analytically, and ultimately syntopically.
To some extent, the knowledge of the method for excerpting and arranging will ultimately allow the interested lifelong learner the ability to read syntopically even if it isn't the sort of targeted exercise it might be within creating a thesis.
The humanities are intrinsically creative andinnovative. They are about originality and invention, notdiscovery. This is precisely Eco’s testimony; even more thana technical manual, this book is an invitation to ingenuity, atribute to imagination.
craftsmanship
this single word for some humanists is likely to call forward the idea of
Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.
I know it did for me...
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.)
The historian David Hackett Fischer identifies presentism as a fallacy also known as the "fallacy of nunc pro tunc". He has written that the "classic example" of presentism was the so-called "Whig history", in which certain 18th- and 19th-century British historians wrote history in a way that used the past to validate their own political beliefs. This interpretation was presentist because it did not depict the past in objective historical context but instead viewed history only through the lens of contemporary Whig beliefs. In this kind of approach, which emphasizes the relevance of history to the present, things that do not seem relevant receive little attention, which results in a misleading portrayal of the past. "Whig history" or "whiggishness" are often used as synonyms for presentism particularly when the historical depiction in question is teleological or triumphalist.[2]
This sort of Whig History example seems to be cropping up again in the early 21st century as Republicans are basing large pieces of their beliefs/identity/doctrine on portions of The Federalist Papers which were marginally read at the time they were written, but because those historical documents appear to make their current positions look "right" today, they're touting them over the more influential Federalist tracts at the time of the founding of America.
Link this to example of this (which I can't seem to find right now.)
Studs Terkel, the oral historian, was known to admonish friends who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.
love "raucous conversation"!
The collection at the Newberry includes a bound copy of “The Federalist” once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Besides penciling his initials in the book, Jefferson wrote those of the founding fathers alongside their essays, which had originally been published anonymously.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the names of the previously anonymous authors of The Federalist next to their essays in his personal copy.
2023-11-01 FoTL Call<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z4WKFAhSgE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotopia
Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston by Ernest Callenbach (1975)
Note that this was published in the same year as The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
Malm, Andreas. How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Verso Books, 2021. https://www.versobooks.com/products/2649-how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline.
Aram Zucker-Scharff indicated that this was one of his favorite books on the climate crisis and has interesting consequences for both individual and group action. He said it might make an interesting pairing with Palo Alto (@Malcolm2023).
It came up as we were talking about the ideas of climate crisis in the overlap of The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Might also be interesting with respect to @Hoffer2002 [1951].
Malcolm, Harris. Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2023. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/.
Recommended by Aram Zucker-Scharff to potentially be read with respect to How to Blow up a Pipeline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Attali
Jacques Attali's work apparently considering noise and advertisements "violence".
Link to the the idea of ecoterrorism in The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey and burning down billboards.
Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster, disavowed work Thursday in the early 2000s to cast doubt on the science behind climate change and said America, on the whole, wants the federal government to “do more, right now, to address it.” “I was wrong in 2001,” Luntz told an ad-hoc Senate Democratic climate panel. “I don’t want credit. I don’t want blame. Just stop using something that I wrote 18 years ago because it’s not accurate today.”
Of course, one ought to be cognizant of the fact that he knew (or should have known) he was patently wrong then too.
His statements as quoted here allow him to gloss over the fact that a lot of the blame rests at his own feet.
Adragna, Anthony. “Luntz: ‘I Was Wrong’ on Climate Change.” POLITICO, August 21, 2019. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/21/frank-luntz-wrong-climate-change-1470653.
Potentially interesting with respect to @Linsky2023
https://context.center/topics/misinformation/#dealing-with-misinformation
https://context.center/topics/climate-change/#explainers
“This is the science that concerns itself with plants in their local association in the various climates. This science, as vast as its object, paints with a broad brush the immense space occupied by plants, from the regions of perpetual snows to the bottom of the ocean, and into the very interior of the earth, where there subsist in obscure caves some cryptogams that are as little known as the insects feeding upon them.”
—Alexander von Humboldt, 1807 “Essay on the Geography of Plants”
Cave paintings/art were known of in Humboldt's time certainly if he's using them to analogize.
during the first decades of the 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt was the second-most famous person in the world after Napoleon.
Humboldt represents the road not taken. He was a scientist who saw everything as interconnected. He called for good global stewardship and objected to the careless exploitation of resources. His warnings weren’t heeded.
Given Alexander von Humboldt's time period (1769-1859), might he have been the recipient of indigenous knowledge during the Renaissance the same way that Graeber/Wengrow demonstrate others were around that same time frame?
Humboldt was an environmental scientist even before the words environment or ecology were coined (1827 and 1875, respectively).
https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/georg+christoph+lichtenberg+%281742+to+1799%29/74905.html
One of his most famous students was Alexander von Humboldt, who thanked his mentor Lichtenberg with these words: “I do not merely regard the sum of positive insights that I was able to gather from what you told me – what I value even more is the general direction that my train of thoughts took under your guidance. Truth in itself is precious, but even more precious is the skill to find it.”
Did Lichtenberg pass along note taking practice to Humboldt?
Cosmos was unlike any previous book about nature. Humboldt took his readers on a journey from outer space to earth, and then from the surface of the planet into its inner core.
Could Alexander von Humboldt have been one of the early examples of a popular science writer?
Perhaps an early David Attenborough?
Explore What We Collectively Know About the Causes of, the Risks From, and the Solutions to Global Heating (Climate Change)
Locked post. New comments cannot be posted.
Scott's apparently so pissed, he's locked the original post.
Even though I've said this a million times, people don't get it. Not even Aldrich who is a professional Zettelkasten filibusterer.
—Scott Scheper at 2023-11-06 10:05:12PM Pacific https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17m7ggz/comment/k86izlu/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
This is really the pot calling the kettle black. Read your own book lately Scott?!?
I'd love to see his receipts with respect to a million times. Even a handful would be good, but in comparison to what he's printed in his book, saying it a million times elsewhere isn't going to carry as much weight in any case.
My criticism of his book must have been eating him up for a full day as he came back a full day to within a minute at 2023-11-07 10:06:14PM Pacific and banned me from r/antinet.
My apologies for trying to help out confused people who read your book there Scott.
I read the book and especially the chapter on numeric-alpha IDs, but I seem to be missing something. The explanation in the chapter seemed rather terse.
Perhaps the only terse part of the book then evidently.
I suspect that Scheper suggests using the Academic Outline of Disciplines as a numbering structure because it's an early choice he made for himself and it provides a perch to give people a concrete place to start. Sadly this does a disservice because it's closer to the older commonplace topical method rather than to the spirit of the ordering that Luhmann was doing. It's especially difficult for beginners who have a natural tendency to want to do this sort of top-down approach.
u/chrisaldrich is permanently banned from r/antinet
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🤣 Let's talk about who doesn't have a sense of humor!
level 2Apprehensive_Net5630Op · 3 hr. agoI've come to think the thousands category is kind of superfluous. Instead of starting 2000, just start a card "2 management" and then create a card "25 leadership" and add below, e.g. "251 blah blah", "252 blah blah"2ReplyShareReportSaveFollowlevel 3marco89lcdm · 2 hr. agoMmm.. interesting .. Although I think is too late as I’m already well into the “2000” category and the problem presented once I’ve started to do some leadership cards. Those are 3 or 4 and I can still amend the ID number, but the management one are almost 30 already, I don’t feel like changing everything while so well advanced.. this could put me off from keeping doing it completely. Maybe worth knowing that I didn’t have an exhaustive index yet.. because of the fact that IDing the card is not clear for me
reply to u/Apprehensive_Net5630 and u/marco89lcdm at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17m7ggz/comment/k83bou9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Don't sweat the difference as there is a one-to-one and onto (or bijective) relationship between what you're doing and what u/Apprehensive_Net5630 suggests. Mathematicians would call the relationship homomorphic (ie: of the same shape), so other than the make-work exercise, you'd end up with the same exact thing with the same ordering in the end.
Cannot get it either to be honest. I want to use the antinet method for 2 main topics: Management and Personal growthIn management, for sure needs to add notion of leadership for example: how to approach the coding identification? I’ve assigned 2000 to management: shall I assign 2500 to all cards related to leadership? This is just an example, it’s a bit unclear for me so far.
reply to u/marco89lcdm at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17m7ggz/comment/k839k22/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
The way you're currently thinking is a top down approach in which you already know everything and you're attempting to organize it to make it easier for others who know nothing about the ideas to find them. The Luhmann model supposes you know nothing about anything to begin with and you're attempting to create order from the bottom up, solely by putting related ideas you're building on close to each other and giving them numbers so that you might find them again when you need them.
If your only use is for those two topics and closely related subtopics and nothing else, then consider not using a Luhmann-artig model? Leave off the numbers and create two tabbed cards with those headings (and possibly related subheadings) and then sort your related cards behind them. (This is closer to the commonplace book tradition maintained on index cards and used by those like Mortimer J. Adler et al., Robert Greene, Ryan Holiday and Billy Oppenheimer. Example: https://billyoppenheimer.com/notecard-system/)
Otherwise the mistake you may be making is mentally associating the top level numbers with the topics. Break this habit! The numbers are only there so you can index ideas against them to be able to find them again! These numbers aren't like the Dewey Decimal system where 510.### will always mean something to do with math. You'll specifically want to intermingle disparate topics, so the only purpose the numbers provide is the ability to find what you're looking for by using the index which will give you a neighborhood in which you'll find the ideas you know are going to be hiding there or very near by.
Cards that are near to each other (using the numbers as an idea of ordering and re-finding) create a neighborhood of related ideas, even if they're disparate in topics. This might allow you to intermingle two related ideas, one which is in anthropology and another from mathematics for example, but which would otherwise potentially be thousands of cards away from each other if done in a Dewey-like system.
Or to take your example, what do you do with an idea that relates to both management AND personal growth? If it's closer to an idea on management you might place it near a related idea on that branch rather than in the personal growth section where it may be potentially less useful in the future. (You can always cross index them if need be, but place it where it creates the closest link and thus likely the greatest value for building on top of your previous ideas.)
For more on this, try: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/27/thoughts-on-zettelkasten-numbering-systems/
I suspect that Scheper suggests using the Academic Outline of Disciplines as a numbering structure because it's an early choice he made for himself and it provides a perch to give people a concrete place to start. Sadly this does a disservice because it's closer to the older commonplace topical method rather than to the spirit of the ordering that Luhmann was doing. It's especially difficult for beginners who have a natural tendency to want to do this sort of top-down approach.
2.Must not be a Buzzkillington3.Must not use ObsidianWe not accept bubble graph boiz, nor do we accept internally conflicted ones. 4.Must be briefTry writing posts by hand first. Don'twaste everyone's time with verbal diarrhea text walls concocted by Obsidian and digital tools. 5.Must be a practioner of ZettelkastenWe want doers, not philosophers.
I'm reasonably certain that Scott added these rules in the last day. I hypothesize that he's using his religious zeal to actively block people out of this community.
I think he retroactively added the brevity one as an excuse to kick me out. When I looked over the weekend as it happened, the only rule was sense of humor.
The funny part is that a version of it was all written by hand in my own ZK and transcribed to help the guy who had issues with his numbering.
My comment was made at 2023-11-06 11:37:52 AM Pacific. I was banned on Tuesday 2023-11-07 06:06:14 UTC
See also: - https://hypothes.is/a/PhIcLn5WEe686PujMaaDAg (Rule 5) - https://hypothes.is/a/sljWEH5UEe6QvdOn5I4qBQ (ban)
Archive.org indicates that the only rule was sense of humor on 2023-03-18 https://web.archive.org/web/20230318062730/https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/ Similarly for 2023-09-17: https://web.archive.org/web/20230917011101/https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/?rdt=41579
5.Must be a practioner of ZettelkastenWe want doers, not philosophers.
Scott literally added this rule in the past few minutes to the r/antinet Rules list.
When does annotating books become a distraction? .t3_17pitv9._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #8c8c8c; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #8c8c8c; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/Low-Appointment-2906 at https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/17pitv9/when_does_annotating_books_become_a_distraction/
Through the middle ages, bookmakers would not only leave significant margins for readers to annotate, but they also illuminated books and included drolleries which readers in the know would use in conjunction with the arts of memory (from rhetoric) to memorize portions of texts more easily. I strongly suspect this isn't what booktokkers are doing; their practice is likely more like the sorts of decorative #ProductivityPorn one sees in the Bullet journal and journaling spaces. It's performative content creation.
Those interested in refining their practices of "reading with a pen in hand", continuing the "great conversation" or having "conversations with their texts" might profitably start with Mortimer J. Adler's essay: “How to Mark a Book” (Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941). In his 1975 KCET series How to Read a Book, which was based on their book of the same name, Adler mentioned to Charles Van Doren that he would buy new copies of books so he could re-annotate them without being distracted by his older annotations.
Some have solved the problem of distracting annotations by interleaving their books so they've got lots of blank space to write their notes. It's a rarer practice now, but some publishers still print Bibles with blank pages every other page for this practice. Others put their annotations and notes into commonplace books or on index cards for their card index/zettelkasten.
As some have mentioned, friends and lovers through time have shared books with annotations as a way of sharing their thoughts. George Custer and his wife Elizabeth did this with Tennyson.
If you're interested in annotating digitally online, perhaps check out Hypothes.is where I've seen teachers and students using social annotation to read and make sense of books [example]. I've also seen groups of people use this tool for hosting online book groups/clubs.
If you're in it for fun, you might appreciate:
And those wishing to delve more deeply into the history and power of annotation might look at: Kalir, Remi H., and Antero Garcia. Annotation. The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. MIT Press, 2019. https://mitpressonpubpub.mitpress.mit.edu/annotation.
Good luck annotating! 📝
Maybe this will help: [Great Books of the Western World SYNTOPICON changes in 1986 (more info in comments) : ClassicalEducation](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/hlvnkv/great_books_of_the_western_world_syntopicon/)
reply to u/Paddy48ob at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17jscyk/comment/k80z1nn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Thanks for this pointer. As a note, when I compare my 1954 version against the photo of the 1990 edition (which has fewer pages), it's obvious that the "1. The ends of education" section in the 1954 edition is significantly more thorough with more references (and supplementary data) which don't exist in the 1990 edition. The 1990 edition presumably removes the references for the books which they may have removed from that edition (though it may have actually been even more--I didn't check this carefully).
Just comparing the two pages that I can see, I don't see any references to the added texts of the 1990 edition appearing in that version of the Syntopicon at all.
I took a quick look at the Syntopicon V1 (1990) via the Internet Archive and of the added texts that year I sampled searches for Voltaire, Erasmus, and John Calvin and the only appearances of them to be found are in the Addition Bibliography sections which is also where they appeared in the 1952 editions. My small sampling/search found no added references of any of these three to the primary portions of the main References sections, so they obviously didn't do the additional editorial work to find and insert those.
As a result, it appears that the 1952 (and reprint editions following it) have a measurably better and more valuable version of the Syntopicon. The 1990 (2nd Edition) is a watered down and less useful version of the original. It is definitely not the dramatically improved version one might have hoped for given the intervening 38 years.
The role of stylistic indicators of temporal andspatial location and orientation—those “pointing words”that linguists refer to as deictics—is essential to thecreation of this general effect.
Deixis is the use of words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context. Usually their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on contextual cues of time and/or place.
Examples include the do-, ko-, so-, a- progression (dore, kore, sore, are; docchi, kocchi, socchi, acchi, etc.) serve this function of distance from the speaker.
In German, the name Katzenelnbogen literally translates to "cat's elbow", which is arguably a later mondegreen.
Katzenellenbogen
not sure why, but this name is in my head for some reason tonight.
This is the first Google search hit and nothing else looks familiar....
Open Publishing & Why You Should Do It
Wörgötter, Michael. “Schriftenkartei [Typeface Index], 1958–1971.” Photo sharing social website. Flickr, 2023. https://www.flickr.com/photos/letterformarchive/albums/72177720310834741. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
Found via: Coles, Stephen. “This Just In: Schriftenkartei, a Typeface Index.” Letterform Archive, November 3, 2023. https://letterformarchive.org/news/schriftenkartei-german-font-index/.


When Michael Wörgötter, a Munich-based designer and educator, came across his own Schriftenkartei set earlier this year, he understood their value for designers and researchers and wanted to make them as widely accessible as possible. He scanned each card at 1200 DPI, and reprinted them in two bound volumes, along with a handy supplementary guide, written in German and English, that offers historical background. The books are available for purchase directly from Wörgötter.
Munich-based designer and educator Michael Wörgötter digitally scanned and then printed bound copies of the 638 cards of the Schriftenkartei into two volumes with a supplementary guide for additional historical background. He subsequently donated the Schriftenkartei to the Letterform Archive.
Digital copies of the cards are available on Flicker (https://www.flickr.com/photos/letterformarchive/albums/72177720310834741) and the Letterform Archive intends to provide digital copies in their online archive.
At the time of their printing, only the members of West Germany’s National Printing Association could buy the cards. The circulation is estimated at fewer than 400 copies. Of these, only four were known to exist in publicly accessible collections, all in Germany — until now.
All seven of West Germany's metal type foundries collaborated to create a card index catalog (Schriftenkartei) of their typefaces. These included Bauersche Gießerei, H. Berthold AG, Genzsch & Heyse, Ludwig & Mayer, D. Stempel AG, Johannes Wagner GmbH, and C. E. Weber.
Fewer than 400 copies of the card index were available for purchase by members of West German's National Printing association.
A notice sent to recipients of the Schriftenkartei: “With the 5th delivery you receive today, you have index cards with 527 typefaces. The type index is now complete for the time being. From now on, you will only receive the corresponding type sample index cards from the office of your responsible regional association for the newly created typefaces that are included in the casting program of the German type foundries.” In the end there were a total of 638 typeface cards, adding up to about 200 families.

The initial version of the Schriftenkartei had 527 typefaces (and thus cards), but with the release of subsequent typefaces it eventually grew to 638 typeface cards accounting for up to about 200 families.
-via postcard from the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der graphischen Verbände des deutschen Bundesgebietes e.V., Bundesverband Buchdruck (Working Group of the German Graphic Associations, Federal Book-Printing Division)
A project similar to the Schriftenkartei unfolded in East Germany (GDR) around the same time, producing a set of cards for typefaces from VEB Typoart in Latin (79 typefaces) and Cyrillic.
Coles, Stephen. “This Just In: Schriftenkartei, a Typeface Index.” Letterform Archive, November 3, 2023. https://letterformarchive.org/news/schriftenkartei-german-font-index/.
Example of a zettelkasten covering the available typefaces produced from 1958 and 1971 in West Germany.
Beginner tutorial for Obsidian Dataview by Danny Hatcher<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8eOF61wmzI
Not bad at all and has a few nice examples that slowly build on themselves.
Example of a public Zettelkasten using TiddlyWiki by Soren Bjornstad. https://zettelkasten.sorenbjornstad.com/
He's open sourced portions of it for use by others who are interested.
McGinty, Jo Craven. “James Lipton, ‘Inside the Actors Studio’ Host, Dies at 93.” New York Times, March 2, 2020, New York edition, sec. Television. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/arts/television/james-lipton-dead.html
Mr. Lipton sat across from his guests at a simple table on an unadorned stage. He flipped through questions written out on blue note cards.
One wonders if Lipton kept or filed his questions or perhaps even reused some of the interesting generic ones the way he reused the questions he credited to Bernard Pivot?
Being born in 1926, he was certainly closer to the index card generation.
https://github.com/xylous/settle.vim
ᔥEmory L. (@emory@soc.kvet.ch) at Oct 10, 2023, 08:57 (accessed:: 2023-11-03 11:10:02)
i got totally derailed by learning about a rust package called
settelthat is essentially a #zettelkasten framework? #sqlite is involved as a datastore but tl;dr: here's a #repository forsettle.vimwhich is a plugin that enables #settle in #neovim or #vim: https://github.com/xylous/settle.vimmore about settle: https://github.com/xylous/settle
i'll have to come back to this later, i overslept today! #readlater #futureEmory
An interesting looking Obsidian/Zotero plugin
ᔥTon Zijlstra (@ton@m.tzyl.eu) on Nov 01, 2023, 04:15
@richardcarter @geffrey I 2nd Richard here, prefer to keep them separate. I currently use https://zotlit.aidenlx.top/ as a plugin in both Zotero and Obsidian to handle the copying of annotations into Obsidian, rather than copy/pasting by hand. Outside of Zotero I also use hypothes.is for annotations that I grab into Obsidian through the h. API.
Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 5 - FINALE - Leather Tooling - Brass Hardware - Final Assembly <br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7LCldA51XE
Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 4 - Paring and Applying Leather https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9j9MqyoyYA
Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 3 - Wooden Boards, Carving & Mortising, Attaching the Covers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzJujQGBbak
Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 2 - Trimming & Rounding, Edge Decoration, Sewing Endbands https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFRrbxyjerE
Making A Medieval Book By Hand - Part 1 - Folding Pages, Endpapers, Piercing & Sewing<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFuWfhESpFc
I'm in the same boat haha I enjoyed some parts of Obsidian but came back to Notion due to the user experience. I use a Zettelkasten system in the sense of a daily note but the big part that was missing for me was the ability to query all your todos into one view which I had to build an integration for. I talk about it more here if you're interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/17kfm1k/aggregating_all_todos_into_one_view/
via u/mannyocean at https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/17mg82a/zettelkasten_in_notion/
He seems to define "zettelkasten" in a productivity sense and not in the currently broader Luhmannian sense.
I think you should all know that I did not come here tonight to make fun of Don Rickles. Neither did I come here to trade barbs, because it would take a comedian to do the first and a true wit to do the second.
Instead, I've come here tonight to say something nice about Don Rickles. And for that, you have to have an actor. —George C. Scott, at a roast of Don Rickles
Kurt, Serhat. “TPACK: Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge Framework.” Educational Technology (blog), May 12, 2018. https://educationaltechnology.net/technological-pedagogical-content-knowledge-tpack-framework/.
Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler’s 2006 TPACK framework, which focuses on technological knowledge (TK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), and content knowledge (CK), offers a productive approach to many of the dilemmas that teachers face in implementing educational technology (edtech) in their classrooms.
Ruben Puentedura. Technology In Education: A Brief Introduction, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMazGEAiZ9c.
Overview of a few teaching models.
How to Apply the SAMR Model with Ruben Puentedura, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTx2UQQvbU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTx2UQQvbU
Enhancement:<br /> - Substitution: Tech acts as a direct tool substitute with no functional improvement - Augmentation: Tech acts as a direct tool substitute with functional improvement
Transformation - Modification: Tech allows for significant task redesign - Redefinition: Tech allows for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable
Good tools for thought should be more than just substitutions for tools or methods one had before.
In fact, any tool or technology, if valuable, should allow for the leverage of extension and transformation, otherwise is it really a tool?
Do digital note taking tools extend the ranges of affordances versus their analog counterparts with respect to the SAMR model?
On the augmentation front, they allow one to capture things faster, but may do so at the loss of understanding due to the lack of active learning (versus passive as the tool may be robbing them of the interaction with the material).
There may be some workflow modification, but it's modest at best. Is it measurably better?
I'm unaware of anyone talking about technological redefinition of digital note taking affordances, though some of the surface level AI-related things may emerge here.
In some sense, I still think that the ease of remapping and rearranging/linking/relinking/outlining ideas in digital spaces doesn't exist, so digital note taking tools aren't doing very well even at the root substitution level.
I suspect that some people weren't exposed to the general process of good note taking and their subsequent use for linking, developing, and then creating and as a result of learning this, they're attributing their advances to the digital nature of their tools rather than the original analog process which was always there and isn't necessarily improved measurably by the digital modality.
The example of maps he shows here discusses a social interaction component which allows for an interdisciplinary approach to the knowledge scaffolding (especially if students shared their work with each other).
Are there other non-social affordances in this system? Affordances that would let an individual go further/faster by themselves?
Pam and Peggy young (sisters) published their book Sidetracked Home Executives ... (also known as the S.H.E. system) in 1979, which Marla of FlyLady used as the basis for her system, which in turn is the base for A Slob Comes Clean and several other more modern mentors. Lastly I doubt the Young sisters were the first either.
via u/Mmdrgntobldrgn at https://www.reddit.com/r/planners/comments/yzv5ov/index_card_planner_systems/
St. James, Elaine. “Replacing Day Planner With Index Cards.” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1998, sec. Business. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jun-08-he-57703-story.html.
Apparently even with growing ubiquity of computers in 1998 and in a pre-internet era, syndicated (Universal Press Syndicate) productivity expert Elaine St. James suggested the use of index cards as a means of simplifying one's life, especially as compared with big and bulky planners and notebooks which predominated the timeperiod.
Notice that she specifically doesn't suggest "going back" to using index cards in the piece. Apparently the idea of that within the zeitgeist had been lost by this time.
Are you spending too much time transferring uncompleted tasks to tomorrow’s schedule?
Example of someone suggesting the migration of uncompleted tasks from one day to another in 1998.
PDF Index Card Calendars 4 little templates for printing directly to 3 x 5 and 4 x 6 index cards (with the dates already filled in). Perfect for the Hipster PDA and other compact GTD organizational systems.
What do you do for a calendar? I'm considering moving from a moleskine GTD system to index cards for reasons you mention (waste paper, can't re-order), but love my 2-year calendar at the front
reply to verita-servus at https://www.reddit.com/r/gtd/comments/15pfz8o/comment/k7iqjwa/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Last year I had a Field Notes card with the year's calendar on it that I kept with my daily cards when necessary. (I think it came included with their "Ignition" edition.) Many companies give these sorts of calendars away as PR.
This year I used a Mizushima Perpetual Calendar Stamp to create my own custom card with the coming years' dates. (I also often use this stamp for individual months on other types of cards.) I'm sure you could also find something online to print out or draw your own if you wish. These index card specific templates might give one ideas: https://www.calendarsquick.com/printables/free.html.
Pretty much any spread one might make in a bullet journal can be recreated in index cards. Some of the biggest full page spreads or double page spreads are still doable, they may just need to be shrunk a bit or broken up. I've also printed things onto larger 8x12" card stock and then folded them down to 4x6" before to use as either larger notes or mini-folders as necessary. Usually I do this for holding the month's receipts.
This set of calendar cards from Present & Correct which are done in letterpress looked nice if you wanted to go more to the luxe side as well as to the larger side.
Given the sticker market for Hobonichi and other similar planners, you could also buy some custom decorative stickers which you could attach to cards as well. And there's nothing keeping you from just writing it all out by hand if you wish.
Options abound.
25Hypertext Avant La LettrePeter Krapp
Krapp, Peter. “Hypertext Avant La Lettre.” In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas W. Keenan, 1st ed., 432–51. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Samizdat copy available at: https://www.krapp.org/pdf/hypertextavant.pdf.
via Barycenter0 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17gmrj8/comment/k6rkguz/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 It's so interesting to look back - this fascinating paper by Sigel from 2001 mentions Luhmann and his Zettelkasten as means to knowledge organization and topic mapping:
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>As an ex-Viv (w/ Siri team) eng, let me help ease everyone's future trauma as well with the Fundamentals of Assisted Intelligence.<br><br>Make no mistake, OpenAI is building a new kind of computer, beyond just an LLM for a middleware / frontend. Key parts they'll need to pull it off:… https://t.co/uIbMChqRF9
— Rob Phillips 🤖🦾 (@iwasrobbed) October 29, 2023
Merchant, Brian. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, 2021. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/.
https://chat.collectivesensecommons.org/agora/channels/ogm-fellowship-of-the-link
Jerry Michalski's zoom account for Friends of the Link and related meetings.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/4154650256?pwd=Zm5DWGRJcmFmZGtBMmI1Wkx2WUQyZz09
Analog zettelkasten for natural sciences .t3_17kui2u._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
Reply to u/Wooden-School-4091 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17kui2u/analog_zettelkasten_for_natural_sciences/
Given that Carl Linnaeus "invented" the standardized 3x5 inch index card and used it heavily in his scientific work (read Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Müller-Wille's works for more on his practice), and a variety of others including me, use it for mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., Zettelkasten can certainly be used for STEM, STEAM, and any of the natural sciences.
See also, notes and links at: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22zettelkasten+for+studying%22
If I were using it for classes/university/general studying via lectures, I'd base my practice primarily on Cornell Notes in combination with creating questions/cards for spaced repetition and/or a variation on Leitner's System.
Some of the best material on spaced repetition these days can be found via:
and other material on their sites.
Beyond this, I'd focus my direct zettelkasten practice less on the learning portion and more on the developing or generating ideas portion of the work. Some of my practice with respect to mathematics can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17bqztm/applying_zettelkasten_for_math_heavy_subjects/
For those interested, it may bear mentioning that Bjornstad, an engineer at Remnote, has a TiddlyWiki-based zettelkasten at https://zettelkasten.sorenbjornstad.com/#PublicHomepage:PublicHomepage which he demonstrates with a walk through at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjpjE5pMZMI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYmLhurh_a4
Scott Scheper shows an outline of his spaced repetition practice for vocabulary words. He also shows his random "chaos" boxes with random notes that he keeps unfiled and unorganized.
Value of the "Graph" .t3_17jscyk._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
I have been curious what their Great Books project would have looked like if they'd kept it up since 1952. Adding additional layers of additional great books as well as seminal books from the 20th century onward. With digital humanities projects abounding as well as digitization of various zettelkasten like structures (aka databases), it would be interesting to see what a digitized version of the Syntopicon would look like today. u/AllossoDan, are you cutting it back up into digital chunks?! Need help? 😁🗃️
Wanted to join Dan Allosso Book Club at Graeber's Debt.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/225760279874
Gaylord maple library card catalog with 60 drawers in two sections with a section of three drawer pulls and a table leg base in excellent looking condition. Listed on 2023-09-06 for bidding starting at $1,800.00 with free local pick up from Mountain View, CA.
$30 per drawer

Bidding ended on 2023-09-15 with 0 bidders.
2023-09-30 Relisted for $1800 for bid. 2023-10-26 Relisted again $1800 https://www.ebay.com/itm/225841205111
If I Were To Start Over... How I'd Build a Zettelkasten Today<br /> Scott P. Scheper<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh890Uhom5M
Just another shill for his book... pass
Ran across a reference to this in the Obsidian #academia Discord channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux1GXpzXt0U
Yet another PKM Guru channel. A mixture of (he says) Tiago Forte (BASB, CODE), zettelkasten, and PKM.
Uses Craft, Canva, Figma, Spotify (for ambient focus).
He's actively creating/using some of the words and definitions of others, but also creating his own "system" definition. (hubs, etc.) He redefines Forte's C.O.D.E. to give it his own spin: Capture, Connect, Create Share.
He's got a subtle proselytizing Christian underlying message. Mentions Bible. Has hat with word "WRSHP". "Adding value to someone else's life" by sharing. Personal conversation is important to him (proselytizing). Speaking at his church about what "God has put in his heart."
Turning notes into "diamonds"
There's an outline of a system here, but he doesn't show actual practice, which is possibly the most important part, otherwise it may be unusable theory. To be able to do this system, I think, one would need to already be conversant in what is going on generally in the space or have Forte's system under control. By this point, what is Wheeler's real contribution other than a small example?
meh....
Zettlekasten is an index card method of storing notes for future use. Popularized by Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle is The Way, the Zettlekasten system has gained a lot of traction in recent years. YouTuber Greg Wheeler, in this short but very detailed video, shares how he integrates the Zettlekasten system with Tiago Forte’s second brain methodology in a complete walkthrough:
We have now reached peak zettelkasten-I-just-don't-know-what-the-definition-even-is-anymore. And this is a Substack focused on productivity.
The definition of zettelkasten here is the lowest possible version.
It's (falsely, I think) described as "popularized by Ryan Holiday" who has a form of practice, but doesn't describe it as zettelkasten. (Has he ever used the word on his blog? There's one throw away mention to it and Luhmann #, Google doesn't find any others.)
Then as a cherry on top, he presents a mélange of methods as a Hybrid PKM system.
Gilad, Elon. “In the Bigynnyng: A Brief History of the English Bible.” Haaretz, January 18, 2019. Https://web.archive.org/web/20220809202404/https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2019-01-18/ty-article-magazine/.premium/in-the-bigynnyng-a-brief-history-of-the-english-bible/0000017f-e5d2-dea7-adff-f5fbf0a70000. Internet Archive. https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2019-01-18/ty-article-magazine/.premium/in-the-bigynnyng-a-brief-history-of-the-english-bible/0000017f-e5d2-dea7-adff-f5fbf0a70000.
t is in Tyndale’s Bible that we first find the name “Passover” for the holiday Jews call Pesach; it was he who coined the word “scapegoat”; and many biblical verses that are now idiomatic in English are his own translation – notably, “my brother’s keeper,” “the powers that be,” “the salt of the earth,” among many others.
There were no Jews in England to consult with, since they had all been expelled from the country by King Edward I in 1290.
Steinberg, Avi. “After More Than Two Decades of Work, a New Hebrew Bible to Rival the King James.” The New York Times, December 20, 2018, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/hebrew-bible-translation.html.
Daniel is almost certainly the Bible’s latest book, composed during a time when Hebrew, no longer the spoken language, had gone into decline. It is one of the few books in the Hebrew Bible where Aramaic appears for long stretches of the text. And this linguistic estrangement isn’t just the historical background of Daniel’s authors, who scholars believe were living under foreign domination and religious persecution by the Seleucid Greeks around the second century B.C.
Here is Alter’s version of the well-known opening of Genesis 21, part of the story of Isaac, the miracle baby of 90-year-old Sarah, and her 99-year-old husband, Abraham: “And the Lord singled out Sarah.” The word Alter is translating as “singled out” is pakad. The King James, and most others after it, translate it as “visited.” The Jewish Publication Society has it as “remembered.” Others translate it as “kept his word,” “took note of,” “was gracious to,” “was attentive to” or “blessed.” A good literal version, provided by the canny contemporary translator Everett Fox, has it as “took account of” — and there is something numerical and even administrative about pakad. (Elsewhere in the Bible, in the context of describing a public census, pakad means “to number”; in modern Hebrew, it is related to the words for “officer,” “clerk” and “roll-call.”) Weaving together its numerical dimensions with a thread of bureaucratic banality, Alter yields the anxious verb “singled out” and with it, reveals new layers of tension in this story.
translation of pakad, an administrative word literally translated as "took account of" as "took note of"
Alter regularly composes phrases that sound strange in English, in part because they carry hints of ancient Hebrew within them. The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, whom Alter has cited, describes translations that “foreignize,” or openly signal that a translated text was originally written in another language, and those that “domesticate,” or render invisible the original language. According to Venuti, a “foreignized” translation “seeks to register linguistic and cultural differences.” Alter maintains that his translation of the Bible borrows from the idea of “foreignizing,” and this approach generates unexpected and even radical urgency, particularly in passages that might seem familiar.
In a 1969 volume on contemporary Jewish literature, drawn from essays he published in magazines, Alter championed Bellow, among others, noting, “The WASP cultural hegemony in America is over.”
Of the novelist Saul Bellow, a hero to that generation, Ozick wrote with pride that he “capsizes American English.”
Alter proves to be another Arranger, practicing the composite art that he believes has long been the life-breath of this text.
Clever way of tying Alter's "the Arranger" idea and "life-breath" (aka soul/nefesh) ideas into the story.
The art of the biblical narrative, Alter hypothesized, was finalized in a late editorial stage by some unifying creative mind — a figure who, like a film editor, introduced narrative coherence through the art of montage. Alter called this method “composite artistry,” and he would also come to use the term “the Arranger” — a concept borrowed from scholarship on James Joyce — to describe the editor (or editors) who gave the text a final artistic overlay. It was a secular and literary method of reading the Hebrew Bible but, in its reverent insistence on the coherence and complex artistry of the central texts, it has appealed to some religious readers.
The Bible isn’t just the all-time best seller, it’s consistently so, especially in the United States, where in a typical year about half a billion dollars’ worth are sold.
The poetic structure dictates its own logic.
Biblical poetry is often made up of line pairings composed of analogous images,
Alter told me about his decision to reject one of the oldest traditions in English translation and remove the word “soul” from the text. That word, which translates the Hebrew word nefesh, has been a favorite in English-language Bibles since the 1611 King James Version.
Extended discussion here of the decision to translate nefesh not as "soul" with various examples.
Peterson worked on The Message throughout the 1990s, translating the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts and paraphrasing them into contemporary American English slang. The translation was published in 2002 and had sold more than 15 million copies by 2018.
Master of Arts degree in Semitic languages from Johns Hopkins University
Shulevitz, Judith. “‘The Five Books of Moses’: From God’s Mouth to English.” Book Review of The Five Books of Moses: A Translation With Commentary by Robert Alter. The New York Times, October 17, 2004, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/books/review/the-five-books-of-moses-from-gods-mouth-to-english.html.
Take Alter's treatment of the cycle of stories in which the first two matriarchs, Sarah and Rebekah, conspire against elder sons for the benefit of younger ones. Sarah insists that Abraham drive Ishmael, his firstborn, and Ishmael's mother, Hagar, into the desert to die, to protect the inheritance of Sarah's son, Isaac. Rebekah tells her son Jacob to trick his father, the now elderly Isaac, into giving him a blessing rightfully owed to Esau, Jacob's ever-so-slightly older twin brother. The matriarchs' behavior is indefensible, yet God defends it. He instructs Abraham to do as Sarah says, and after Jacob takes flight from an enraged Esau God comes to Jacob in a dream, blesses him, and tells him that he, too, like Abraham and Isaac before him, will father a great nation.Alter doesn't try to explain away the paradox of a moral God sanctioning immoral acts. Instead he lets the Bible convey the seriousness of the problem. When Abraham balks at abandoning Ishmael and Hagar, God commands, "Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her voice." Rebekah, while instructing Jacob on how to dress like Esau so as to steal his blessing, echoes God's phrase -- listen to my voice" -- not once but twice in an effort to reassure him. As we read on in Alter's translation, we realize that the word "voice" ("kol" in Hebrew) is one of his "key words," that if we could only manage to keep track of all the ways it is used it would unlock new worlds of meaning. In the story of Hagar and Ishmael, God's messenger will tell Hagar that God will save them because he has heard the voice of the crying boy. And the all but blind Isaac will recognize the sound of Jacob's voice, so that although his younger son stands before him with his arms covered in goatskin (to make them as hairy as Esau's), and has even put on his brother's clothes (to smell more like a hunter), Isaac nearly grasps the deceit being perpetrated against him.
Something fascinating here with respect to orality and associative memory in ancient texts at the border of literacy.
What do others have to say about the use of "key words" with respect to storytelling and orality with respect to associative memory.
The highlighted portion is an interesting example.
What do other examples look like? How common might they be? What ought we call them?
Alter's translation puts into practice his belief that the rules of biblical style require it to reiterate, artfully, within scenes and from scene to scene, a set of "key words," a term Alter derives from Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who in an epic labor that took nearly 40 years to complete, rendered the Hebrew Bible into a beautifully Hebraicized German. Key words, as Alter has explained elsewhere, clue the reader in to what's at stake in a particular story, serving either as "the chief means of thematic exposition" within episodes or as connective tissue between them.
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.
In the case of the binding of Isaac, for instance, Alter not only accepts a previous translator's substitution of "cleaver" for the "knife" of the King James version but also changes "slay" (as in, "Abraham took the knife to slay his son") to "slaughter." Moreover, in his notes, he points out that although this particular Hebrew verb for "bound" (as in, "Abraham bound Isaac his son") occurs only this once in biblical Hebrew, making its meaning uncertain, we can nonetheless take a hint from the fact that when the word reappears in rabbinic Hebrew it refers specifically to the trussing up of animals. Alter's translation thus suggests a dimension of this eerie tale we would probably have overlooked: that of editorial comment. The biblical author, by using words more suited to butchery than ritual sacrifice, lets us know that he is as horrified as we are at the brutality of the act that God has asked Abraham to commit.
But Alter, along with critics like Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom, David Damrosch and Gabriel Josipovici, has spent the past quarter-century rejecting both the preacherly and the historicist approaches to the Bible and devising one that would allow us to grapple with it as literature.
The story starts with the creation of the world, and ends with Moses dying on the wrong side of the Jordan and being buried in an unmarked grave.
"Wrong side of the Jordan" almost has the flavor of a biblical version of "the wrong side of the tracks".
Goldfajn, Tal. “Thou Shalt Show: On Robert Alter’s Translation of the Hebrew Bible.” Book Review of The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter. Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2, 2020. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thou-shalt-show-on-robert-alters-translation-of-the-hebrew-bible/.
Several biblical translations into other languages in the 20th and 21st centuries have followed some kind of version of these translation norms, albeit with different goals and within different contexts. The German translation by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, whose first volume appeared in 1925, for instance, aimed to reflect the linguistic features of the original Hebrew. The central precept of Henri Meschonnic’s French translation, which came out in 1970, is “more than what a text says, it is what a text does that must be translated.” Haroldo de Campos’s translation of individual biblical books into Brazilian Portuguese in the 1990s were meant to “Hebraicize the Portuguese.”
Nice summary of various modern translations of the bible.
Alter’s keen grasp of that rhythm and syntax is evidenced by his playful 10 commandments for Bible translators: 1.Thou shalt not make translation an explanation of the original, for the Hebrew writer abhorreth all explanation. 2. Thou shalt not mangle the eloquent syntax of the original by seeking to modernize it. 3. Though shalt not shamefully mingle linguistic registers. 4. Thou shalt not multiply for thyself synonyms where the Hebrew wisely and pointedly uses repeated terms. 5. Thou shalt not replace the expressive simplicity of the Hebrew prose with purportedly elegant language. 6. Thou shalt not betray the fine compactness of biblical poetry. 7. Thou shalt not make the Bible sound as though it were written just yesterday, for this, too, is an abomination. 8. Thou shalt diligently seek English counterparts for the word-play and sound-play of the Hebrew. 9. Thou shalt show to readers the liveliness and subtlety of the dialogues. 10. Thou shalt continually set before thee the precision and purposefulness of the word-choices in Hebrew.
Take “soul” in the KJV’s Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd […] He restoreth my soul.” Alter, who has by now become famous for taking the soul out of the Hebrew Bible, gives us: “The Lord is my shepherd […] My life He brings back.” Where has the soul gone? The answer is that the Hebrew didn’t really provide it in the first place. The word “nefesh” is more concrete, meaning “breath,” “life-breath,” “essential self,” and also “throat.” It suggests the material, the bodily, or, as the biblical scholar James Barr put it, “is not a separate essence and is more like the principle of life animating the person, acting in his actions, and touched by that which touches him.”
Alter, for his part, has faith in the original, and the result is both refreshing and beautiful.
clever use of "faith" with respect to translation here
Let me illustrate by examining a well-known passage, Genesis 7:17–18, in which the flood comes and Noah’s ark is lifted up above the earth. The example involves the Hebrew syntactic tendency to open each sentence in narrative with “and,” to order the words in parallel clauses by coordination (“and” + “and” + “and”), rather than by subordination (“because,” “so,” or “although”). This biblical syntactic feature, known as parataxis, affects the text’s rhythm, its temporal interpretation, its layers of cohesion and ambiguity. Here is Alter’s rendering of this passage: “And the Flood was forty days over the earth, and the waters multiplied and bore the ark upward and it rose above the earth. And the waters surged and multiplied mightily over the earth, and the ark went on the surface of the water.”
Alter’s approaches the Bible as great literature first and foremost — an approach almost inconceivable before the mid-20th century.
Bruce, James. “The Godless Bible.” Book Review of The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter. Law & Liberty, July 15, 2022. https://lawliberty.org/book-review/the-godless-bible/.
Even still, these volumes will not rest on my shelf untouched. Yes, I have read them carefully, but I will return to them again. Indeed, whenever I speak or write about the Hebrew Bible, I plan on consulting them. You should, too.
After such a scathing review, really?? I'd be interested to hear a few paragraphs about why.
His commentary, often thought-provoking and occasionally infuriating, is never edifying.
Could it be edifying to the author who seems to have a set notion of how things should be in advance of the argument? One wonders what his translation would look like...
The reader should keep in mind that, for Alter, the Hebrew Bible is not one seamless book but a haphazard collection of texts.
!!
Perhaps not "haphazard", but they are definitely written by different authors over a large span of time, often each with their own political point of view. Bruce seems to be playing at the common misconception that the books were written as a cohesive whole supporting only one outcome.
There is some massive historical contextual collapse going on here, particularly in a broader culture in which multiple gods were the norm. Each author certainly had their own idea of what "God" was when writing.
Alter’s avoidance of straightforward translations undermines his credibility when he tackles texts used by Christians for millennia in support of their claims that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah.
His credibility or theirs?
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?
Alter says he avoids the phrase “‘like the son of man’ because of its strong, and debatable, tilt toward a messianic interpretation.”
Of course Alter's alternate translation of "son of man" allows one a closer meaning of Jews prior to the first century and Jesus, which adds a lot of undue baggage which may be seen as retconning the Hebrew Bible. It is after all, titled The Hebrew Bible and specifically not The Old Testament, thus placing it into the tradition of Christianity.
Alter’s commentary benefits from his allusions to, among others, Freud, Gilgamesh, Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer, Josephus, Joyce, Kafka, Melville, Milton, Molière, Nabokov, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Sophocles. But technical words and phrases often appear without explanation: aleatory device, autochthonous, collocation, deictic, diachronic collage, dittography, durance vile, emphatic anaphora, gnomic, haplography, metonymy, and threnody. (To my knowledge, there is no readily available glossary containing all these words—so you will just have to google one word at a time, dear reader.) Even when Alter offers a definition as an aside, I wonder how many people will benefit from his explanations., e.g., “This pairing is virtually a zeugma, the syntactic yoking together of disparate items” (Isaiah 44:15).
Is it really incumbent on the author to translate every word he's using with respect to the language in which he's writing. He's already doing us a service by translating the Hebrew. Are modern readers somehow with out a dictionary? I might believe they've not been classically educated to capture all the allusions, but the dictionary portion is a simple fix that is difficult to call him out on from a critical perspective, especially in a publication like "Law & Liberty" whose audience is specifically the liberally educated!?!
But sometimes Alter’s comments seem exactly wrong. Alter calls Proverbs 29:2 “no more than a formulation in verse of a platitude,” but Daniel L. Dreisbach’s Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers devotes an entire chapter to that single verse, much loved at the time of the American Founding: “When the righteous are many, a people rejoices, / but when the wicked man rules, a people groans.” Early Americans “widely, if not universally,” embraced the notion that—as one political sermon proclaimed—“The character of a nation is justly decided by the character of their rulers, especially in a free and elective government.” Dreisbach writes, “They believed it was essential that the American people be reminded of this biblical maxim and select their civil magistrates accordingly.” Annual election sermons and other political sermons often had Proverbs 29:2 as “the primary text.” Far from being a platitude, this single verse may contain a cure to the contagion that is contemporary American political life.
Ungenerous to take Alter to task for context which he might not have the background to comment upon.
Does Alter call it a "platitude" from it's historical context, or with respect to the modern context of Donald J. Trump and a wide variety of Republican Party members who are anything but Christian?
I was able to put the “medium” command in the extra field and also insert italics commands around the title so it was italicized. It looked like this:Medium: Review of the book Beyond the DSM: Toward a process-based alternative for diagnosis and mental health treatment by S. C. Hayes & S. Hofmann, Eds.
You can also specify the item is a book review in Extra by:Type: review-book
Reviewed title: Title of the work being reviewed
Book of Deuteronomy, Robert Altar Translation<br /> Chapters 1-11 2023-11-06 at 2:30 PM PST
https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/296803036/
Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. 1st edition. New York London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018. https://amzn.to/3QioxiS
reply to Mark Dykeman in A mystery I would like to solve 2023-10-25
In addition to the 5-6th century invasion of Angles and Saxons from roughly Northern Germany into Southern England, there was a large movement of Scandinavian peoples (Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, etc. weren't even a glimmer of countries then), with the Viking invasions of England in the 7-11th centuries. Many of these peoples settled along the coasts and intermarried and brought their customs, traditions, language, and most importantly in your quest, their names. A lot of these peoples immigrated into Northumbria which was an early medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom in what is now Northern England and south-east Scotland. Perhaps this history may "solve" some of the distal mystery for you? Kenneth Harl's "Vikings" may give some broad strokes of the history here if you're curious: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/vikings. (Naturally there may have been migration after that time too.) England is far more diverse in its roots than the majority give it credit for, though the branching from Celtic roots may mean that genetically traceable differences may largely be a wash for most. Some from the broader UK will find only a single broad "genetic smear" of Celtic ancestry with a 1-2% hint of Italian ancestry, often resulting from intermarriage at the time of the Roman invasion in the first century.
Doleac, Jennifer. “New Evidence That Lead Exposure Increases Crime.” Brookings (blog), June 1, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-evidence-that-lead-exposure-increases-crime/.
A brief meta analysis of the evidence provided by three different studies on the effects of lead exposure to children and the increased incidence of their potential adult criminal behavior.
Compare this with the levels of insanity induced in TEL production discussed in https://doi.org/10.1179/oeh.2005.11.4.384 (or alternately at https://environmentalhistory.org/about/ethyl-leaded-gasoline/) via https://hypothes.is/a/7MBWvHW7Ee6a8dvvDy9Aqw
They find that exposing populations to lead in their drinking water causes much higher homicide rates 20 years later, relative to similar places where kids avoided such exposure. They find that exposing populations to lead in their drinking water causes much higher homicide rates 20 years later, relative to similar places where kids avoided such exposure.
Example of the repetition of the body text of an article immediately after it as a featured pull quote to draw the attention of the skimming reader to the importance of the portion of the passage.
Kovarik, William. “Ethyl-Leaded Gasoline: How a Classic Occupational Disease Became an International Public Health Disaster.” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health 11, no. 4 (2005): 384–97. https://doi.org/10.1179/oeh.2005.11.4.384.
Samizdat version: https://environmentalhistory.org/about/ethyl-leaded-gasoline/
Environmental Impact of WW1 by NHC Education Programs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lucJElPVYOk
"Iron Eyes" Cody (1904–1999)[79][80] – Born as Espera Oscar de Corti, and came to be known as "The Crying Indian". An Italian-American actor most well known for his appearance in a 1970's anti-littering commercial. Cody pretended to be from various tribes and denied his Italian heritage for the rest of his life.
Is there a list of every possibility a Latin verb can take on, and it's English meaning? .t3_17hvr75._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
I've not used Mango before, but if it's like other similar apps (Duolingo, Babel, etc.) which focus primarily on spoken language and general understanding over grammar (and you've never learned other languages or had a good grounding in grammar) you're likely going to be a tad lost. These apps usually focus on spoken fluency over reading/writing which is how most Latin grammar books and high school/college courses are traditionally laid out.
You've got options:
Your question will become much clearer to you when you've seen how verbs are parsed within a grammar textbook (using person, number, and tense) as they're very logically and rigidly structured outside of a handful of irregular verbs. (Most books present these as a grid of two columns (by number: singular/plural) and three rows (first, second, third person).) As a beginner, you'll be glad to know there hasn't been a huge jump in the state of the art in Latin for several hundred years, so even inexpensive, used copies of Wheelock, Allen & Greenough, or Jenny/Scudder/Baade or a trip to the library for one of them should help you along your way. Once you've seen some of the grammatical structure of verbs and how they work, you'll come to understand that a list like what you're looking for isn't really what you're looking for.
You could, likely, in a couple of days have a rote memorization of most of the forms of almost all verbs such that when you encounter them, but in practice this means that you have to pick each one apart like a formula as you encounter them. You may be better off practicing/drilling each of the ones you encounter to make it an elemental part of you. This way you'll be able to sight read or listen and respond much more quickly and much faster than anyone who learns from standard grammars.
Good luck!
duolingo poll .t3_17h6wfs._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
I was a subscriber of Duolingo specifically for Cymraeg until about a year ago. Updates, while they seemed nice, seemed to keep putting me farther back than my previous level, and spending 20 to 30 minutes a day didn't seem to be getting me anywhere. Ultimately I gave up on Duolingo in favor of Say Something in Welsh which seemed to be a bit more challenging and improved my spoken grasp of the language. Now I need to spend some more time with some of the finer points of the grammar, but Duolingo really isn't the best place for that either.
Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of the movement on some languages on Duolingo was taking advantage of free labor of volunteers. Duolingo seemed to be getting a lot of help on the Cymraeg front which they may not be getting now and this may be a play for financial support that they probably don't really need given the usage they're seeing. Given my experience with the app and where they've placed their resources in the past, I'm actively suspicious of their motivations.
Zettelkasten Was NOT About Notetaking: A Look Inside Niklas Luhmann's Writing Process by Scott P. Scheper <br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiffkT_hk3I
25% shilling
Yeah, I want back in search history and see Sascha started around 2014. There are hardly any references to ZK before 2012.
reply tu u/sscheper and u/Barycenter0 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17gmrj8/before_2021_who_here_was_using_a_luhmannian/
Before 2021, who here was using a Luhmannian analog Zettelkasten?
This blogpost by Manfred Kuehn dating from 2007-12-16 is one of the earliest posts about Luhmann's Zettelkasten I've seen referenced on the early web (at least in an English language setting). You'll notice that Christian Tietze, the creator of zettelkasten.de, pops up in the comments, though it wasn't until almost six years later.
Daniel Lüdecke was also obviously reading Kuehn by 2013 and making his digital version of ZKN3. His post has a reference to a 2001 web post in German, but sadly it's not archived. One might presume he tried physical index cards prior to implementing his digital solution.
German speakers may be better versed to indicate a greater number of potential users in the 80s through the 00s as Luhmann's paper and method were relatively well known, though physical index cards were obviously going out of fashion during that time period. It's most likely that it was academics using it. By the late 00s into 2015, there were probably several dozens of people doing this practice, but identifying/contacting them will require a lot of legwork.
The zettelkasten.de forum and blog posts may indicate quite a number of users prior to 2021, but I'll leave that work to others. Christian and Sasha may have better approximations for that time period.
Given the number of digital users who are probably all mostly Luhmann-adjacent in their practices (at best), there likely still aren't a lot of people (digital or analog) who are following his particular recipe or method. Most of what I see discussed in zettelkasten and zettelkasten adjacent spaces online these days could best be described as a mélange of commonplace book and wiki-esque methods with a focus toward smaller atomic level notes. Most practices vary across a pretty wide spectrum.
ArtistWorks provides world-class instruction for the most popular string and band instruments through self-paced video lessons from professional musicians.
Under "Extras" in the Libby app: https://libbyapp.com
Alexander, Bryan. “Undents, Volvelles, and Didymus the Brazen-Gutted: Notes on Ann M. Blair’s Too Much to Know.” Bryan Alexander (blog), January 12, 2016. https://bryanalexander.org/reviews/undents-volvelles-and-didymus-the-brazen-gutted-notes-on-ann-m-blairs-too-much-to-know/.
Jacobs, Alan. “The Garden and the Stream.” Digital magazine. The New Atlantis (blog), May 4, 2018. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/text-patterns/the-garden-and-stream.
Links are made by readers as well as writers. A stunning thing that we forget, but the link here is not part of the author’s intent, but of the reader’s analysis. The majority of links in the memex are made by readers, not writers. On the world wide web of course, only an author gets to determine links. And links inside the document say that there can only be one set of associations for the document, at least going forward.
So much to unpack here...
What is the full list of types of links?
There are (associative) links created by the author (of an HTML document) as well as associative (and sometimes unwritten) mental links which may be suggested by either the context of a piece and the author's memory.
There are the links made by the reader as they think or actively analyze the piece they're reading. They may make these explicit in their own note taking or even more strongly explicit with tools like Hypothes.is which make these links visible to others.
tacit/explicit<br /> suggested mentally / directly written or made<br /> made by writer / made by reader<br /> others?
lay these out in a grid by type, creator, modality (paper, online, written/spoken and read/heard, other)
Links are associative. This is a huge deal. Links are there not only as a quick way to get to source material. They aren’t a way to say, hey here’s the interesting thing of the day. They remind you of the questions you need to ask, of the connections that aren’t immediately evident.
links can be used for search
links remind you of questions you need to ask
links can suggest other future potential links of which one isn't yet aware or which haven't fully manifested, this is some of the "magic" of the zettelkasten—it creates easy potential for future links not yet manifest.
Let’s look at some of the attributes of the memex. Your machine is a library not a publication device. You have copies of documents is there that you control directly, that you can annotate, change, add links to, summarize, and this is because the memex is a tool to think with, not a tool to publish with.
Alan Jacobs argues that the Memex is not a tool to publish with and is thus fundamentally different from the World Wide Web.
Did Vannevar Bush suggest the Memex for writing or potentially publishing? [Open question to check] Would it have been presumed to have been for publishing if he suggests that it was for annotating, changing, linking and summarizing? Aren't these actions tantamount to publishing, even if they're just for oneself?
Wouldn't academics have built the one functionality in as a precursor to the other?
“A tool to think with, not a tool to publish with” — this seems to me essential. I feel that I spend a lot of time trying to think with tools meant for publishing.
Which tools for thought and tools for publishing overlap? Which diverge?
Overlap: Obsidian<br /> card indexes<br /> Microsoft Excel
Publishing Only<br /> Microsoft word
Thinking Only: <br /> ...
“A tool to think with, not a tool to publish with” — this seems to me essential. I feel that I spend a lot of time trying to think with tools meant for publishing.
the Stream replaces topology with serialization.
How do we experience the zettelkasten with respect to the garden and the stream metaphor?
https://www.academia.edu/community/VDDN6V
Evina Stein has a nice list of digital manuscript databases
Hayton, Darin. “Washington Irving’s Columbus and the Flat Earth.” History of Science blog. Darin Hayton, December 2, 2014. https://dhayton.haverford.edu/blog/2014/12/02/washington-irvings-columbus-and-the-flat-earth/.
the Columbus myth is alive and well in the United States
the author cites examples of modern references including: - Lawrence Krauss (cosmologist) # - President Barak Obama # - Chris Impey, astronomer #, #
By the time Andrew White wrote his A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) (online here), Columbus’s struggles to overcome a medieval Church that believed in a flat earth had become historical fact.
By the latter 19th-century, the supposed truth of the Columbus story had completely replaced the historical truths. In works like John Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) (online here) we read nothing of the reasoned objections raised by the Council at Salamanca or of Columbus’s errors. Instead we learn that his proposal’s irreligious tendency was pointed out by the Spanish ecclesiastics, and condemned by the Council of Salamanca; its orthodoxy was confuted from the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Prophecies, the Gospels, the Epistles, and the writings of the Fathers—St. Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, St. Basil, St Ambrose.
Lactantius, of course, and now Cosmas Indicopleustes, who says nothing about antipodes but offers an easily mocked tabernacle-shaped world and flat earth.
Within a decade, William Whewell had published his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) (online here). In a section on antipodes, he admitted that most people throughout history had known the earth was round.
Link to https://hypothes.is/a/hvDAtHT0Ee6_Z3em_Dz4bg (Columbus & Washington Irving)
The seeds of the Columbus myth seem to grow from Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) (online here). Alexander Everett, Minister Plenipotentiary to Spain, had invited Irving to Madrid in the hopes that Irving would translate a recently published collection of documents on Columbus.
Source of the Columbus/Flat Earth portion of the bunk theory.
“It’s so freeing, it’s beautiful in a way, to have a great failure. There’s nowhere to go but up.”
—David Lynch