*For a more elaborate description of the structure and uses of the Syntopicon, see the PossibleApproaches to This Set in this volume (pp. 85-89) and the Preface to the Syntopicon (Vol.II, pp. xi-xxxi).
This is the first footnote of the work—a simple pointer for learning how the Syntopicon works. Because of the value of the Syntopicon, whose two volumes follow this one, this is a nice little bit of pedagogy here leading up to the Syntopicon's value.
Both the cult of learning around Dante and the cult ofignorance around Newton are phenomena of the vicious spe-cialization of scholarship.
p. xxiv
Hutchins seems to indicate that the "vicious specialization of scholarship" is in part to blame for the emergence of the "two cultures" delineated by C. P. Snow later in the decade.
As ScottBuchanan has said, "Popular science has made every manhis own quack; he needs some of the doctor's medicine."
As Stringfellow Barr has said, the world israpidly dividing into technicians who cannot tell the differ-ence between a good poem and sentimental doggerel and "cul-tured" people who know nothing about electricity exceptthat you push a button when you want it. In a society thatis highly technological the sooner the citizens understandthe basic ideas of mathematics and natural science the better.
The idea of the two cultures had been brewing for a bit...
We lament the man who, properly desiring to wrestle atfirst hand with the problems that the great poets and philos-ophers have raised, yet contents himself with the "results"and "findings" of modern science.
1952 variation of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures thesis (1959).
See also earlier comment on p xxi: https://hypothes.is/a/2BGWXiIAEe6WZyd5bbGl3g
Some readers may feel that we have been too hard on themin insisting that the great works of science are a part of theconversation and that a man who has not read them has notacquired a liberal education.
When Hermann Hesse referredto the present as "the Age of the Digest," he did not intendto say anything complimentary.
a conver-sation that has gone on for twenty-five centuries, all dogmasand points of view appear.
Does it really?!? When the conversation omits so many perspectives and points of view for lack of diversity, it's also going to be missing quite a lot that one may not anticipate either. It's also likely to go down some blind alleys that may not be as beneficial too.
the reader becomes to thisextent his own editor.
Some writers have made an important contribution to theGreat Conversation, but in a way that makes it impossible toinclude it in a set like this. These are writers, of whom Leib-nitz, Voltaire, and Balzac are notable examples, whose con-tribution lies in the total volume of their work, rather thanin a few great works, and whose total volume is too largeto be included or whose single works do not come up to thestandard of the other books in this set.
We attach importance to making whole works, as distin-guished from excerpts, available; and in all but three cases,Aquinas, Kepler, and Fourier, the 443 works of the 74 auth-ors in this set are printed complete.
There are 443 works by 74 authors in the Great Books of the Western World. All of them are printed in their entirety except for Aquinas, Kepler and Fourier.
In many cases, all or some of an author'sworks included in this set were unavailable.
One of the primary goals of The Great Books, was to make some of the (especially ancient writers) more accessible to modern audiences with respect to ready availability of their works which were otherwise much more expensive.
This certainly says something about both publishing and reading practices of the early 20th century.
The reason, then, for the omission of authors and worksafter 1900 is simply that the Editors did not feel that they oranyone else could accurately judge the merits of contempo-rary writings.
The idea of the Lindy effect is subtly hiding here. Presumably it also existed before.
It's often seen in how historians can or can't easily evaluate the impact of recent historical figures without the appropriate amount of additional evaluation with respect to passing time.
the Great Conversation coversmore than twenty-five centuries.
Broadly the entirety of the documented existence of mankind...
The final decision on the list wasmade by me.
Robert Hutchins takes sole responsibility for the final decision on the selection for the books which appear in The Great Books of the Western World series.
One wonders what sort of advice he may have sought out or received with respect to a much broader diversity of topics and writers with respect to his own time. I reminded a bit of the article The 102 Great Ideas (Life, 1948) which highlights a more progressive stance with respect to women and feminism in the examples used.
See: LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. Https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.
The set is almost self-selected, in the sense that one bookleads to another, amplifying, modifying, or contradicting it.
amplifying, modifying, contradicting...
what other means of argumentation/conversation could one enumerate here with respect to a greater conversation?
THE GREAT CONVERSATION
How specifically does the author define "The Great Conversation"?
Note that it is consistently capitalized throughout the book to give it greater importance.
They now have the chance to understandthemselves through understanding their tradition.
It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.
Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.
As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.
How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?
democracyrequires liberal education for all.
Two of the driving reasons behind the Great Books project were improvement of both education and democracy.
The democracy portion was likely prompted by the second Red Scare from ~1947-1957 which had profound effects on America. Published in 1952, this series would have considered it closely and it's interesting they included Marx in the thinkers at the end of the series.
we regard this disappearance as an aberration, and notas an indication of progress.
disappearance [of education] as an...
there's also disappearance of context of what has gone before
We may havemade errors of selection.
A great admission to make upfront in such a massive endeavor which one hopes to shape the future.
What does this mean for ars excerpendi writ large? Particularly when it may apply to hundreds of thousands?
Great books alone will not do the trick; for the peoplemust have the information on which to base a judgment aswell as the ability to make one.
The reiteration of slogans, the distortionof the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats uponthe citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long meaneither that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest andmost persistent propagandists or that the people must savethemselves by strengthening their minds so that they can ap-praise the issues for themselves.
Things have not improved measurably since the 1950s apparently. The drumbeat has only gotten worse.
We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object ofpropaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangersto democracy.
How would Robert Hutchins view the new millennium?
We are as concerned as anybodyelse at the headlong plunge into the abyss that Western civil-ization seems to be taking.
Apparently every age feels like they're moving into the abyss, even when they're making great strides.
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/search/?keyword=loeb+classical+library
Blackwell's seems to have Loeb Classical Library titles on perma-sale and includes shipping to the United States, so perhaps one of the least expensive means of collecting them.
In her spare time
I her spare time, she also appears to enjoy trolling the local Glendale school system as an intolerant goon who has issues with diversity, equity, and inclusion. https://www.therealjordanhenry.com/team
Is there any app like Obsidian for visual (art) research?
reply to u/gate18 at https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/14ve4gi/is_there_any_app_like_obsidian_for_visual_art/
Aby Warburg had a significant physical card-based zettelkasten he used for his visual research in the early 1900s. Perhaps you'd find some interesting inspiration by looking at his methods?
Converting Commonplace Books? .t3_14v2ohz._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/ihaveascone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14v2ohz/converting_commonplace_books/
Don't convert unless you absolutely need to, it will be a lot of soul-crushing make work. Since some of your practice already looks like Ross Ashby's system, why not just continue what you've been doing all along and start a physical index card-based index for your commonplaces? (As opposed to a more classical Lockian index.) As you browse your commonplaces create index cards for topics you find and write down the associated book/page numbers. Over time you'll more quickly make your commonplace books more valuable while still continuing on as you always have without skipping much a beat or attempting to convert over your entire system. Alternately you could do a paper notebook with a digital index too. I came across https://www.indxd.ink, a digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional). It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears. This could potentially be used by those who have analog commonplace/zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.
How do you use pocket sized notebooks? .t3_14to50w._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/peaberryxo at https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooks/comments/14to50w/how_do_you_use_pocket_sized_notebooks/
I generally carry one all the time and use it as a convenient "waste book". I quickly collect fleeting ideas or notes throughout the day so I don't forget the tidbits that are important. When I'm back at my desk or at the end of the day/week, I will transfer things into my calendar/planner, my primary to do list, copy out more fleshed out ideas or quotes into my commonplace book or add particular ideas and sources to my zettelkasten. It's really there for quick convenience and nothing more. If it's important it always goes somewhere else.
Morson, Gary Saul. “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature.” Commentary Magazine, July 1, 2010. https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/.
You have to love the reference to perversion of Pevear's name in the title! Wonder how they'd translate this into Russian...
Nowhere is the P&V distortion so plain and disturbing as in their versions of Tolstoy.Critics sometimes say it is impossible to ruin Tolstoy because his diction is so straightforward. But it is actually quite easy to misrepresent him if one does not understand the language of novels. Since Jane Austen, novels have tended to trace a character’s thoughts in the third person. The choice of words, and the way one thought begets another, belongs to the character, and so we come to know her inner voice. At the same time, the character’s view may not comport with the author’s, and it is the art of the writer to make clear that what the character is seeing is deluded or self-serving or foolish. This “double-voicing” lies at the heart of the 19th-century novelistic enterprise. For Dickens and Trollope, “double-voicing” becomes the vehicle of satire, while George Eliot and Tolstoy use it for masterful psychological exploration. If one misses what is going on, the whole point of a passage can be lost.
readers typically turn to translations not to hear about culinary ephemera but to read literature.
Part of literature is the Great Conversation, which often turns on the ability for writers to be understood and appreciated, often in translation. Gary Saul Morson takes P&V to task for their Russian translations which often focus on the incredibly specific nuances of direct translation, but which simultaneously lose the beauty and sense of literature. He says, "[...] readers typically turn to translations not to hear about culinary ephemera but to read literature."
Remnick, David. “The Translation Wars.” The New Yorker, October 30, 2005. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars.
At the end of our last conversation in Paris, Pevear went to his shelves and pulled down a volume in French, and read a prayer by Larbaud addressed to St. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. Following the line with his finger, Pevear squinted and, slowly, translated: “Excellent Doctor, Light of the Holy Church, Blessed Jerome. I am about to undertake a task full of difficulties, and from this moment on I beg of you to help me with your prayers so I can translate this work into French with the same spirit with which it was composed.”
Pevear, especially, has read some of the theory about translation: Walter Benjamin, José Ortega y Gasset, Roman Jakobson, and, of course, Nabokov.
Some authors who have written about translations.
“Notes from Underground” now sells eight thousand copies a year, “Crime and Punishment” twelve thousand, “The Brothers Karamazov” fourteen thousand, “Anna Karenina” twenty thousand.
Some useful numbers from 2005 on classic book sales of particular titles.
Finally, in 2000, the book was published in the U.K. Penguin sold a few hundred copies in England. At Viking-Penguin in New York, Caroline White, a senior editor, ordered a print run of thirty-two thousand, with the hope that some strong reviews would mean that the new edition would displace Garnett, the Maudes, and other translations on the academic market.
Initial print fun of the P/V translation of Anna Karenina was 32,000 copies which the publisher hoped would push other translations to the margins. Then Oprah picked it up for her book club... and the publisher ordered another printing of 800,000 copies.
He takes banal people and puts them into banal situations, but he has hope for them.
Pevear talking about Chekhov.
But Tolstoy himself said the point is to get the thing said and then, if he wasn’t sure he had said it, he would say it again and again.”
quote from Richard Pevear
In a letter to the Times Book Review in November, 1971, Nabokov wrote, “I am aware that my former friend is in poor health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honor the latter wins.”
Nabokov wrote his translation to inspire his reader to know the poem in Russian:It is hoped that my readers will be moved to learn Pushkin’s language and go through EO again without this crib. In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the reader’s attention. Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all “general ideas” (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another.
Pevear and Volokhonsky told me that they considered Nabokov’s “Onegin” one of the great triumphs of translation, even though it is nothing like their own work. Nabokov, who regarded “The Gift” and “Lolita” as his best novels, thought that his “Onegin” was perhaps the most important project of his life and, at the same time, like all translation, innately futile.
As socialist realism was imposed on Soviet writers, one form of permissible resistance, of finding an inner freedom, was to read translations of foreign writers. No private library was complete without Hemingway, Faulkner, London, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Salinger—all officially permitted as “progressive writers” exposing the “ulcers of the capitalist world.”
“Hemingway read Garnett’s Dostoyevsky and he said it influenced him,” he continued. “But Hemingway was just as influenced by Constance Garnett as he was by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Garnett breaks things into simple sentences, she Hemingwayizes Dostoyevsky, if you see what I mean.”
To compare the Garnett and the Pevear-Volokhonsky translations of “The Brothers Karamazov” is to alight on hundreds of subtle differences in tone, word choice, word order, and rhythm.“These changes seem small, but they are essential. They accumulate,” Pevear said. “It’s like a musical composition and a musician, an interpretation. If your fingers are too heavy or too light, the piece can be distorted.”“It can also be compared to restoring a painting,” Volokhonsky said. “You can’t overdo it, but you have to be true to the thing.”
For instance, they will not use an English word that the Oxford English Dictionary says came into use after the publication of the novel they are translating.
Dostoyevsky’s detractors have faulted him for erratic, even sloppy, prose and what Nabokov, the most famous of the un-fans, calls his “gothic rodomontade.”
One day, when Richard was reading “Karamazov” (in a translation by one of Garnett’s epigones, David Magarshak), Larissa, who had read the book many times in the original, began peeking over her husband’s shoulder to read along with him.
epigones is a lovely little word...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/155257403398
An Underwood & Underwood cabinet for storing stereoview (or stereograph) photos. Could potentially repurposed as a zettelkasten cabinet as the slip sizes should generally be compatible.
https://scription.typepad.com/
Patrick Ng seems to be the inventor of a chronodex visual planning system. His website has half yearly printable planner inserts for Midori's Traveler's Notebooks.
One of his downloadable templates reads:
Chronodex ideas and notations are copyrighted, it is free for personal use, please contact Patrick Ng (patrickng@mac.com) for commercial usage.
Examples of chronodex layouts on his website show his uses which also seem to include some sketchnoting usage as well.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832721946110.html?gatewayAdapt=gloMsite2usaPcglo2usa4itemAdapt
A 12 and a 24 hour variation
I ordered a rubber stamp from thestampmaker.com by uploading my modified JPG. [Edit: that cost $40, but I'm Canadian, so a good chunk of that $40 is due to horrendous shipping charges.]
via https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooks/comments/1nrtcm/anyone_else_using_scription_chronodex/
Patrick Ng's Chronodex Diary System
http://jolarsenburnett.blogspot.com/2012/01/patrick-ngs-chromodex-diary-system.html
She indicates she has an Adobe file, but I see no immediate evidence of it. Apparently waiting on permission from Patrick Ng?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/annettechung/11451796944/in/pool-1804503@N25/
Jo Larsen Burnett has a variation of Patrick Ng's chronodex: http://jolarsenburnett.blogspot.com/2012/01/patrick-ngs-chromodex-diary-system.html
https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/194730263
Hawk Sugano used a Correct Indexcard Dock (C-153DF) box for some of his index card practice.
The Brothers Karamazov book club via The Toronto Philosophy Meetup https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/
Scription Chronodox is a Beautiful, Printable, Freeform Weekly Planner for the New Year by Adam Dachis on 2011-12-29
https://stationerymanor.com/products/kokuyo-mo-series-round-stencil-template-97018
Kokuyo has a circular stencil/template (WCN-CDTAS13), which one presumably holds down in the center and then uses the various slots with a pen/pencil to circle around to make their own custom chronodex stencil outlines.
It doesn't take a genius to see how Baum-kuchen could potentially use such a tool or stamp to make a branded chronodex that also might suggest the circular layers of an actual Baum-kuchen cake.
https://www.yesstyle.com/en/tcuc.USD/coc.US/info.html/pid.1063008517?cpid=1063008516&googtrans=en
In stock version of chronodex stamp and similar bullet journal stamps.
https://www.yesstyle.com/en/ninas-house-chronodex-stamp/info.html/pid.1051531212
Naturally, someone has turned the chronodex into an inkable stamp.
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/688083/replicating-a-chronodex-in-tikz
Someone has programmed up most of a printable chronodex in TikZ for LaTeX!
https://www.amazon.com/Patrick-Chronodex-Time-Management-Planner/dp/B08CMYCF6V
Patrick Ng is selling a chronodex planner on Amazon.com
Inserting a maincards with lack of memory .t3_14ot4na._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } Lihmann's system of inserting a maincard is fundamentally based on a person's ability to remember there are other maincards already inserted that would be related to the card you want to insert.What if you have very poor memory like many people do, what is your process of inserting maincards?In my Antinet I handled it in an enhanced method from what I did in my 27 yrs of research notebooks which is very different then Lihmann's method.
reply to u/drogers8 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/14ot4na/inserting_a_maincards_with_lack_of_memory/
I would submit that your first sentence is wildly false.
What topic(s) cover your newly made cards? Look those up in your index and find where those potentially related cards are (whether you remember them or not). Go to that top level card listed in your index and see what's there or in the section of cards that come after it. Find the best card in that branch and file your new card(s) as appropriate. If necessary, cross-index them with sub-topics in your index to make them more findable in the future. If you don't find one or more of those topics in your index, then create a new branch and start an index entry for one or more of those terms. (You'll find yourself making lots of index entries to start, but it will eventually slow down—though it shouldn't stop—as your collection grows.)
Ideally, with regular use, you'll likely remember more and more, especially for active areas you're really interested in. However, take comfort that the system is designed to let you forget everything! This forgetting will actually help create future surprise as well as serendipity that will actually be beneficial for potentially generating new ideas as you use (and review) your notes.
And if you don't believe me, consider that Alberto Cevolini edited an entire book, broadly about these techniques—including an entire chapter on Luhmann—, which he aptly named Forgetting Machines!
"I keep a dated diary of sorts on index cards, though they rarely go past one card a day."This is something I haven't heard of before. So, you journal/diary on index cards, one per day?
reply to u/taurusnoises (Bob Doto) at tk
Yep, for almost a full year now on 4x6" index cards. (Receipts for the kids: https://boffosocko.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/wp-1688411021709-scaled.jpg)
Previously I'd used a Hobonichi Cousin (page per day) journal for this. (Perhaps I should have stayed with the A6 size instead of the larger A5 for consistency?) Decades ago (around 1988ish?) I had started using a 2 page per day DayTimer pocket planners (essentially pre-printed/timed index cards spiral bound into monthly booklets which they actually shipped in index card-like plastic boxes for storage/archival purposes). Technically I've been doing a version of this for a really long time in one form or another.
It generally includes a schedule, to do lists (bullet journal style), and various fleeting notes/journaling similar to the older Memindex format, just done on larger cards for extra space. I generally either fold them in half for pocket storage for the day or carry about in groups for the coming week(s) when I'm away from my desk for extended periods (also with custom blank index card notebooks/pads).
I won't go into the fact that in the 90's I had a 5,000+ person rolodex... or an index card (in the entertainment they called them buck slips) with the phone numbers and names of \~100 people I dealt with regularly when early brick cell phones didn't have great (or any) storage/functionality.
reply to Bob Doto at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14lcb4z/using_diaries_and_journals_as_source_material_for/
Ross Ashby kept his notes in notebooks/journals but he did cross-index them by topic using index cards. Rather than reference them by notebook (name/title/date) and page number, he kept a set of handwritten running page numbers across the entirety of his notebooks, so instead of Notebook 15 page 55, 1952 he'd simply write "3786" for page 3786. This can be seen on his index card for the indexed word "determinate" as an example.
For other examples, see: http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index/index.html
My own notebooks are usually titled by year and date spans along with page numbers, so I'll use those roughly as Bob describes. This has made it much easier to not need to move all my older notes into a card-based system, but still make them useable and referenceable.
For those with more explicit journaling, diary, or other writing habits, Ralph Waldo Emmerson makes an interesting example of practice as he maintained at least two commonplace books (a poetry-specific one and a general one) as well as a large set of writing journals where he experimented with writing before later publishing his work. Since there are extant (digitized and published copies) and large bodies of scholarship around them, they make an interesting case study of how his process worked and how others might imitate it.
On the diary front, of the historical examples I've seen floating around, only Roland Barthes had a significant practice of keeping his "diary" in index card form, a portion of which was published on October 12, 2010. Mourning Diary is a collection published for the first time from Roland Barthes' 330 index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother in 1977.
Not as extensive, Vladimir Nabokov recorded a "diary" of sixty-four dreams on 118 index cards beginning on October 14, 1964 as an experiment. He was following the instructions of John Dunne, a British philosopher, in An Experiment with Time. The results were published by Princeton University Press in Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov which was edited by Gennady Barabtarlo.
Presumably if one keeps a diary or journal in index card form in chronological order, they can simply reference it by date and either time or card X of Y, if there are multiple card entries for a single day. I keep a dated diary of sorts on index cards, though they rarely go past one card a day.
When I tag a note with a new keyword like [[Productivity]], it then becomes a ghost note on the graph.
This is the first time I've seen someone use the phrase "ghost note" to mean a future implied note which could be created by using wiki syntax [[*]] which in some systems like Obsidian or WikiMedia creates a (red) link which one could click on to create that note.
via u/THX-Eleven38 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14ox2tw/what_is_the_proper_way_to_create_a_moc_note_from/
Erin Floto has a metal stencil for a chronodex circular design for use in bullet journals. It's a form of circular calendar with the inner circle containing space for daily, bi-weekly, weekly, monthly and longer time horizons with succeeding rings of the circle containing space for data related to the inner categories. Some of the exterior rings also include numbered squares representing days of the month or week on which a task should be done or for which a habit on an interior part of the circle might be tracked.
The chronodex, a portmanteau of chrono (time) and index, idea is fairly simple, but can be quite complex. For actual use, one may need to be able to spin the visualization around to read and understand it.
Other stencils with habit trackers, etc: https://erinflotodesigns.com/collections/metal-stencils
CPB vs Reading Notes .t3_14li1ri._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } Does anyone separate their reading notes from their common place Notebook? I’ve always used a notebook to combine my Bullet Journal, reading notes, and Common Place. It’s been a mesh of words and I’ve been ok w that, but I just got the Remarkable 2 and I’m trying to figure out how to set it up. Any ideas?
reply to u/Nil205 at https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/14li1ri/cpb_vs_reading_notes/
I have a similar and differently formed, but still simple system compared to most here. Rather than a traditional commonplace book, I keep all my notes on index cards. I keep all my reading notes for a particular book on a series of index cards that I staple together with a citation card for the book and then file them by author and title.
When I'm done, I'll excerpt the most important parts each individual note (highlight/annotation) and expand on them on its own index card which I file away and index. In your case you might equivalently have a reading notebook where you might keep a section of notes as you read a book and then excerpt the most important or salient parts into your main commonplace. Some may prefer, especially if they own the book in question, to annotate (put their reading notes into) the book directly and then excerpt either as they go or at the end when they're done and can frame their ideas with a broader knowledge of the area in question. Sometimes at later dates you may realize you read something useful which you don't find in your commonplace book, but you can find the gist of it in your reading notes which you can reference, refresh your memory, and then excerpt into your commonplace.
For more on my sort of card index or zettelkasten (German: slip box) practice you might take a look at one or more of the following which explain the broad generalities:
If it's useful/inspiring as an example, Ross Ashby had a lifelong series of notebooks, much like a commonplace, and a separate card index where he cross-indexed all of his ideas to make them more easily searchable, findable, and cross referenceable. You can see digitized versions of the journals and index online which you can explore at http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index.html.
https://writing.bobdoto.computer/using-diaries-and-journals-as-source-material-for-zettelkasten-notes/
Additional commentary at r/Zettelkasten - Using diaries and journals as source material for zettelkasten notes by Bob Doto
Bob lays out some basic ideas for citing one's personal journal, diaries, notebooks, and other non-published writing for use in a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten. While he focuses on the scale of the mechanics of citation of one's own notes in other forms, what he's really doing is giving people explicit permission to overlap traditions to more easily use their work from other places in their zettelkasten.
Compare this with Scott Scheper's related article on 2023-05-24 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13qzgjs/connecting_a_zettelkasten_to_a_commonplace_book/ (and the related YouTube video in which he talks about giving things an "address".
Unmentioned is that in many citation managers, one would likely use a "manuscript" format for citations here. Upon checking it looks like Zotero doesn't have data fields for page number, paragraph, or line numbers for their manuscript type.
anachronistic zettelkasten
Does he really mean anachronistic here? It doesn't seem to suit the context. While he seems to be comparing the time-ordered nature of a journal versus the non-time ordered structure of a zettelkasten, I can't help but read it from the alternate, and more common (and also pejorative) perspective. Seems odd to call it out specifically as it's not an issue with respect to any other of the more commonly used sources (books, journal articles, magazines, newspapers.)
Might have been better to use anachronistic to modify zettel rather than zettelkasten which is a collective noun--that's the dissonance here for me.
Compare those, like Roland Barthes, who used a slip box as a diary, which would have been chronological. I've also got a chronological section of my slip box.
All source material is handled more or less the same way when working with a Luhmann-style zettelkasten.
I like the fact that Bob Doto is explicitly carving out the space of a Luhmann-style zettelkasten versus all the other flavors.
When you run out of ideas and desperate, try thinking “opposite” like Fosbury.
Worth adding to the list of oblique strategies...
related to methods of proof: direct proofs by day, contradiction by night
Changing methods of approach to problems
via khimtan at https://www.instagram.com/p/CpkJHCfJnyW/
galen, sojourner, chic sparrow, and le cow
Galen, Sojourner, Chic Sparrow, Le Cow, September Leather, H&M Leather, Little Mountain Bindery
have Fauxdori notebook covers
via https://www.reddit.com/r/midori/comments/v6kgi1/fauxdori_makers_youd_recommend/
Purchased from JetPens.com on 11/19/2021
2023-07-02 With very minimal use, the cap plastic cracked against metal ferrule and broke without any forcing at all. Repair? Replacement? Appears to be a common problem with TWSBI pens.
Anyone here use a method like Pile of Index Cards? .t3_7wtz59._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
It's been a while since this was asked, but in case folks stumbling across it are interested, there are a few useful examples and resources: - Original Pile of Index Cards set up: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122/ (Be sure to click on some of the example card photos which have descriptions of set up/use.) - 43 tabs: https://web.archive.org/web/20110714192833/http://pileofindexcards.org/wiki/index.php?title=43Tabs_System - Lifehacker Article: https://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficiently-organizes-ta-1599093089 - Uncluterer: https://web.archive.org/web/20140708133632/http://unclutterer.com/2014/06/17/the-pile-of-index-cards-poic-system/ - Some historical systems (esp. Memindex which preceded the PoIC): https://boffosocko.com/2023/03/09/the-memindex-method-an-early-precursor-of-the-memex-hipster-pda-43-folders-gtd-basb-and-bullet-journal-systems/
I tried Amazon too. Try search for Badge holder tray or Badge organiser and probably you can find something similar.
Amazon has badge holder trays/organizers that can be used similarly to index card bleachers.
Try: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Badge+holder+organizer&crid=10DA7CASQVMB4&sprefix=badge+holder+organizer
Zk for analyzing components
reply to u/graidan at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14n5131/zk_for_analyzing_components/
I'm intending to use some of my zk for analysis of components for their uses. Specifically, for looking at materia magica (magical ingredients) across authors / books / systems / etc. For example, all the ways that dandelion is used, looking for consistent commonalities and reasoning.
How would you do this in a ZK system? Create a branch per items under investigation? I feel like a digital solution like notion might work best, but I'd like to incorporate into my analog if I can figure out a good way to do it.
I like u/taurusnoises' description and understand it, but perhaps an alternate perspective and some examples of how others have done these things may be helpful?
One feature/affordance that a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten emphasizes is the ability to build on knowledge from the bottom up while older commonplace book and non-Luhmann zettelkasten traditions have a more top-down and/or categorical-first approach. Either of these methods can be tried in your use case to good benefit, but it helps to think about what is happening over the long run. Bottom up approaches are more useful when you're encountering new material and aren't always sure how to categorize it or know where things may be heading. These also tend to encourage greater admixtures of disparate topics, especially over use with time. Top down approaches are potentially better when you've got a broad idea of fields and sub-fields to begin with and know exactly where new ideas will best fit. Because of this they don't naturally tend to mix disparate fields of knowledge as easily, though this can be done with foresight.
It sounds like you're well-acquainted with your area (of magical ingredients) already, so you're more likely to appreciate a top down approach as a result. A Luhmann-esque zettelkasten is certainly workable here, but you'll be able to scaffold some of your material more easily from the start. You know in advance some of the structure of where you're going and what sorts of questions you'll want to ask of your notes, so you can structure it to be more helpful from the start.
As an example, in your materia magica case (for which I'll make some broad assumptions without any knowledge of the field), you might have a branch for dandelion. Under dandelion you can aggregate notes on what various authors have to say about specific uses and features. Over time you'll have a variety of notes which will allow you to quickly compare and contrast what those authors have to say about the topic. You can repeat this for other herbs, mushrooms, etc. This may make your writing on this particular area much easier.
Of course, potential complications may occur later when you may have different questions about the ideas you've collected. Perhaps you'll ask something like, how did practices differ in different geographical areas? Was practice with dandelions the same across different regions or across time? Did practices for other herbs show similar patterns? This may require additional sets of notes which can cross reference time spans and areas. To better handle this with your initial notes branching according to herbs, you may want to make project notes (maps of content, hub notes, structure notes, or whatever you want to call them) on each of these criteria with links back to the originals for studying and comparing these differences.
To make this easier, you can pull out all the original notes and reorder them accordingly and then make your project notes by noting the original card identifiers/numbers. Or perhaps you just use them to write the particular section directly. Once you're done, you can use the original numbers to file them back into the appropriate places for later use.
The broader ZK community doesn't talk as frequently or as in-depth about adding metadata relating to time, place, etc. for sorting/resorting or searching for material. Having actual index cards may make doing all of this a lot easier.
As illustrative examples, Beatrice Webb talks a bit about her use of collecting notes/data across a variety of dimensions for her sociology work as "scientific notetaking" in Appendix C of her book My Apprenticeship (1926). Broadly speaking, she's using her notes as an early form of searchable database. Similarly, Victor Margolin has a short video about his process for writing about history of design and there he's using his notes along the lines of both location as well as time. In both of these examples, we're looking at non-Luhmann-artig practices (somehow it seems more appropriate to use the German -artig than the French -esque), but I'm sure they would have worked just as well with a Luhmann structured practice as well.
And of course if none of this still makes any sense, I highly recommend you try it anyway. Your experience will assuredly bear out results and you're sure to find the answers you're looking for, and probably a little more to boot. Let us know what you find.
Webb, Beatrice P. (1926). My Apprenticeship. Longmans, Green & Co.
urn:x-pdf:d46f7c2791538c32a5ef76b13cdb9fe8
https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=urn%3Ax-pdf%3Ad46f7c2791538c32a5ef76b13cdb9fe8
Available at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/myapprenticeship0000beat/page/n7/mode/2up
I recently discovered a fantastically curated Japanese and German design inspired stationery store in Southern California not far from the Rose Bowl and the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Baum-kuchen mentioned that they plan to carry a huge array of Hobonichi products beginning this fall!! The only thing better than a Hobonichi or even a store full of them is a store full of them 10 minutes from one's home.
I had high hopes that they might already have the July start planners or blank notebooks, but alas, I'm going to have to be patient for the new Fall releases.
In addition to all the fantastic appointments in their store/atelier, I'm most impressed with their community table where they invite everyone to come in with their planners to work and plan, write, or draw in the store itself. This gives you the ability to share with others in person as well as to sample their pens, stamps, and other materials with your own notebooks and planners. Their planning table space also gives one the ability to pull a variety of items off of shelves to more easily mix and match items for building your ideal planner set up with all the trimmings and accessories. They also offer a wide array of notebook cover customization services and a fantastically kind and knowledgeable staff.
The community table at Baum-kuchen surrounded by displays of pens, pencils, stationery, and accessories.
If you find yourself in Southern California and want a unique analog and very tactile experience, stop in and see the wonders that they've got on offer at Baum-Kuchen. Lately they've been open only on Sundays at their store/atelier, but their online store is open 24/7: https://www.baum-kuchen.net/. For those who live farther afield and don't have the opportunity to visit often, you can get a strong sense of their character and wabi-sabi philosophy on their YouTube channel.
When you get the chance, stop by and say hello to Wakako, Frido, and their welcoming and generous staff in person. I'm sure you'll find me there on release day this fall (and maybe every weekend in between😜) putting my name at the top of the list for the 2024 Hobonichi offerings. I'm already practicing baking baum kuchen, a delicious cake after which the store is named, for the coming celebration.
syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/hobonichi/comments/14o08ke/more_hobonichi_in_los_angeles_and_southern/
https://welshclass.wales/podcast%2Fpodlediad
Out of curiosity: anyone here joining Camp NaNo this July? :) .t3_14l2dfo._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/nagytimi85 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/14l2dfo/out_of_curiosity_anyone_here_joining_camp_nano/
With my ZK I feel like it's NaNoWriMo all the time... Here's some prior conversation about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/xrlnqx/anyone_doing_nanowrimo/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7r9t9T9Aww
Nothing new or exciting for me here. They're rehashing the Project Zero compass points creativity idea for zettelkasten use.
I just can't get into these sort of high-ritual triage approaches to note-taking. I can admire it from afar, which I do, but find this sort of "consider this ahead of time before you make a move" approaches to really drag down my process.But, I do appreciate them from a sort of "aesthetics of academia" perspective.
Reply to Bob Doto at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14ikfsy/comment/jplo3j2/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 with respect to PZ Compass Points.
I'll agree wholeheartedly that applying methods like this to each note one takes is a "make work" exercise. It's apt to encourage people into the completist trap of turning every note they take into some sort of pristine so-called permanent or evergreen note, and there are already too many of those practitioners, who often give up in a few weeks wondering "where did I go wrong?".
It's useful to know that these methods and tools exist, particularly for younger students, but I would never recommend that one apply them on a daily or even weekly basis. Maybe if one was having trouble with a particular idea or thought and wanted to more exhaustively explore the adjacent space around it, but even here going out for a walk in nature and allowing diffuse thinking to do some of the work is likely to be just as (maybe more?) productive.
It could be the sort of thing to write down in your collection of Oblique Strategies to pull out when you're hitting a wall?
As Chris Aldridge says, for centuries the Zettelkasten approach was the standard and universal method for producing books and articles - until personal computers took over.
The entirety of this sentence goes beyond my thoughts and I don't feel it's backed up with historical evidence, particularly outside of specific areas of academia and the humanities.
Today, you either thrive on that word processor model or you don’t. I really don’t, which is why I’ve invested effort, as you have, in researching previous writing workflows, older than the all-conquering PC of the late 1980s and early 90s. At the same time, new writing tools are challenging the established Microsoft way, but in doing so are drawing attention to the fact that each app locks the user into a particular set of assumptions about the drafting and publishing process.
via u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/149knhj/comment/jobi9ro/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 on 2023-06-15
Most older card indexes are common enough, but I thought I'd tip off anyone who is all in on 5x8" index cards and may be looking for a permanent home for their growing collection that there's a reasonably rare, but lovely looking Yawman & Erbe card catalog for sale right now.
Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/14jlk69/beautiful_18_drawer_yawman_erbe_card_catalog/
Creation, (Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2009) https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/creation-2?vp=lapl
Torn between faith and science, and suffering hallucinations, English naturalist Charles Darwin struggles to complete 'On the Origin of Species' and maintain his relationship with his wife.
Director Jon Amiel Featuring: Jennifer Connelly, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones, Paul Bettany, Ian Kelly
via Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.(Break Thru Films/IFC, 2010)
National Comedy Center Becomes Home to Joan Rivers’ Career Archive<br /> by National Comedy Center
On February 17, 2014, Joan Rivers appeared on the premiere episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon–49 years to the day after her first appearance with Johnny Carson.
In 1978, she became one of the first women ever to write and direct a comedy feature–Rabbit Test, a cult classic about a man (Billy Crystal) becoming pregnant.
For reference, Octavia Bulter's Blood Child was first published in 1984 (and as part of a book in 1985).
Melissa Rivers also announced today the launch of a special edition 4-disc CD box set collection titled “Joan Rivers – The Diva Rides Again” that will feature five hours of never-before-released recordings of Joan’s comedy, including six decades worth of hilarious material and a special 16-page collector’s book of liner notes with never-before-seen photos. The box set is currently available for preorder on Amazon, Target.com and Walmart.com and will be released on August 18, 2023 on streaming platforms such as iTunes and Spotify. The set is produced and distributed by Comedy Dynamics in partnership with the Joan Rivers estate.
564 jokes are filed under PARENTS HATED ME (see: NOT WANTED) and over 300 within the STEWARDESSES category.
a file cabinet containing over 65,000 original jokes spanning from the start of her career in the 1950s to 2014 when she passed away.
The NY Times blew her obituary date of 2014 when they published material based on this press release.
Joan Rivers card index of jokes comprised 65,000 cards spanning the start of her career in the 1950s to 2014, when she passed away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6jyFE9Ps_Q
Possible example for zettelkasten output project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3uHeNgy5GM
Possible example for zettelkasten output project.
https://pages.jh.edu/jhumag/0499web/opera.html
One of Dale Keiger's favorite pieces of his own work.
https://danallosso.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-on-teaching-history
The idea that what happened was not inevitable. Understanding the contingency of the past, I think, may suggest to them that the present and future are similarly “not a done deal”.
In some respects, even the past is not a done deal. It must be examined and studied and will be viewed differently in the present and in the future, thus making history a feedback loop, though hopefully in positive ways.
I do think it’s helpful for members of the public to know some basic facts about the past. For me, it’s the same idea as the saying “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” Similarly, if you know nothing you can be convinced of anything.
These are much pithier versions of what Robert Hutchins is getting at when he's talking about the importance of the Great Conversation with respect to Democracy.
https://translate.google.com/?sl=ja&tl=en&text=%E6%B3%A8&op=translate
注 (Chū), Japanese for note
The command to schools—the invective about education—was, perhaps as ever, Janus-like: the injunction was to teach more and getbetter results, but to get kids to be imaginative and creative at the same time.They had to learn the facts of science, but they shouldn’t have original thinkingsqueezed from them in the process. It was the formal versus progressivecontroversy in a nutshell.
Can the zettelkasten method be a means of fixing/helping with this problem of facts versus creativity in a programmatic way?
John Holt, a Boston teacher. He began his bestsellingbook How Children Fail in 1964
there came in Britain at the cusp of the1920s and 1930s the Board of Education’s reports on a range of educationaltopics under the chairmanship of Sir William Hadow.
The first group comprised psychologists in the behavioural school, withfigures such as B. F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov.
We would nowadays probablycall the second group ‘constructivist’ or ‘cognitive’ or ‘sociocultural’psychologists, though the committee did not venture to name them as such. Thislatter school (or schools) they took to be associated with psychologists such asthe British Susan Isaacs, the Russian Alexander Luria, the American JeromeBruner, and the Swiss Jean Piaget.
how to helpmost effectively children from ‘poor circumstances’.
Why do governments and some so-called education leaders ask about how to best help (academically) children from "poor circumstances" in such a way that improving their circumstances is never part of the equation despite it being the immediate root of their problem?
Given the committee’s constitution, it’s all the more remarkable that itproduced probably the single strongest official impetus for progressive educationin the 20th century anywhere in the world.
Gary Thomas feels that the 1960s Plowden Report was the strongest official impetus for progressive education in the 20th century.
He suggest that it was a natural successor to the Hadow Report.
One of Dewey’s principal concerns was for the relationship between educationand democracy. He made the point that democracy is not just a form ofgovernment—it is, rather, ‘a mode of associated living, a conjoint communicated
experience’ (1916: 101).
Ernest Hemingway’s idea of the ‘crap detector’
source?
Policymakers should perhaps learn more from the Finns, who avoid imposing‘teacher-proof’ approaches on their schools. Instead, they cleave to their respectfor the teacher’s knowledge, skill, and professionalism. In Finland, teaching is ahighly sought-after career; teachers are universally respected, paid well, and areall educated to Master’s degree level. They are trusted to do a good job...and thetrust pays off: even using the most formal measures of success, the Finns’ resultsare among the best in the world.
Direct Instruction, a technique in which great hopeswere invested in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s.
Direct Instruction was a method promulgated in the 1970s and 80s that touted 'teacher-proof' methods, but ultimately didn't pan out. Some of the early gains seen in use of the method were ultimately attributed to generous resourcing rather to the program itself.
Generous resourcing might then be a better method to attempt from the start? (snarkmark)
superseded in 2015 by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), whichrelaxed directives on regular assessment.
in the USA in 2001 Congress passed a new law—the ‘No ChildLeft Behind’ Act (NCLB)—which sought to increase accountability fromschools through an array of measures, one of which instructed teachers on thekind of ‘scientifically proven’ practices they must adopt in their work.
Neville Bennett’s Teaching Styles and PupilProgress
Bennett, Neville. Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress. Open Books, 1976.
Informal teaching could, however, seemingly go wrong moreeasily than formal teaching.
What were the lineaments offormality or informality?
lineaments, what a great and infrequently used word.
The Reggio Emilia approach has become world famous (see Figure 2).Originating at more or less the same time as changes to ideas about curriculumand styles of teaching in the UK and the USA, it especially caught theimagination of educators worldwide for its energy and for the commitmentinvested by all in the community to make it a success. It combined the discoveryapproaches of the progressive educators with a dedication to communityinvolvement and especially the involvement of parents in education.
We should strive to pass on thetraditions of human thinking while teaching new generations how to engagecritically with those traditions.
Table 1. Progressive versus formal education
a nice little comparative table
The progressives say that the only kind ofmeaningful motivation comes through interest and absorption in the task orsubject itself: it’s called ‘intrinsic motivation’ in the jargon.
There are many things that we have to take on trust; everyminute of every day we have to accept the testimony and the guidance of thosewho are in a position to offer an authoritative view.
Perhaps there is a need for balance between the two perspectives of formal and progressive education. While one can teach another the broad strokes of the "rules" of note taking, for example, using the zettelkasten method and even give examples of the good and the bad, the affordances, and tricks, individuals are still going to need to try things out to see what works for them in various situations and for their specific needs. In the end, its nice to have someone hand one the broad "rules" (and importantly the reasons for them), so that one has a set of tools which they can then practice as an art.
While the progressives think of education involving discovery and play, theformalists say that to put the emphasis on discovery is to ignore the tapestry ofestablished ideas, rules, and traditions that have been handed down to us fromcountless earlier generations.
For formalists, though, learning is, sadly, hard slog. No pain, no gain. Theycontend that it is just a fact of life that there are some things that you need tolearn the hard way. There is complex information that we need to know to whichthere is no easy route. If you want to learn to write, for example, you need tounderstand the ways in which language is put together; you need to know theglue that binds sentences—the rules for making language work. This isn’t easy,say the formalists, and you don’t ‘discover’ it.
Formalist education stance: One can't simply discover everything and as a result leaning can require specific work and long practice (learning to write, for example).
For progressives, learning is natural; it’s happening all the time and it’s whathumans are programmed for. Children learn to talk, for example, without anyteaching at all. Progressive educators say that this learning of language providesus with a lesson: it shows that we are almost hard-wired for complex learning—it comes easily, if the circumstances for its acquisition are right. We shouldmake use of this strength, putting children in positions where they have theopportunity to think rather than telling them what to think.
Progressive education stance: learning is easy and we've got an innate ability to do complex learning tasks. As a result, putting students into situations where they have the ability to think is better than simply telling them what to think, which might be a more formalist stance.
For the formalists,though, it’s a process of imparting and acquiring the skills and knowledgenecessary for wellbeing and success in life. It’s about instruction and theacquisition of information and skills needed for the success of the society inwhich you live.
For the progressives, education is about supporting the ability to think critically:it should be child centred and focused on problem solving.
Her motto was ‘never interrupt aconcentrating child’
Books and Confirmation Bias by Dan Allosso
The men who crafted Great Books programs, most prominently John Erskine, Mortimer Adler, and Scott Buchanan, promoted the idea that the reading of classics was a task meant for all students, at all levels, even if the works were translated from their original language. At several colleges, the curricula of undergraduate programs came to be based upon the reading of these Great Books.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/354851703411
2 drawer Library Bureau catalog listed for $199, but sold for a lower amount.
The German word 'Arbeit', work, descends from Porto-Germanic *arbaidiz, which meant hardship or suffering. Going a couple of thousand years further back in time, the ancestor of arbaidiz was Porto-Indo-European *h₃órbʰos, which mean orphan or slave. 'Orphan' has the same root via Latin. So Arbeit <> orphan: distant cousins. 'Arbeit' did have a relative in Old English too: it was 'earfoþe', difficult, hard
via Cameron (@Black_Kettle) at https://twitter.com/Black_Kettle/status/1669382585087033347
First saw via Ryan Holiday.
Also saw a live example on 2023-06-16 at https://personalknowledgegraphs.com/#/page/pkg for an affiliate link for a book.
BookmarkNew book - Personal Knowledge Graphs, by Ivo Velitchkov
For some additional context the work can be found through https://personalknowledgegraphs.com/#/page/pkg. It also has portions of the building of the book which exist as a knowledge graph, though it doesn't appear that they put up the entirety of the book as a linked knowledge graph the way they had initially planned. I've read a few parts in draft form, including Flancian's chapter whose ideas are tremendous, but I have yet to read the remainder of the published work.
[Disclosure: I had submitted and had been accepted to write an early, historical-flavored chapter for this volume, but ultimately fell out, as did many others, over disagreements regarding their editing and/or publishing process. I'm close with Flancian and appreciate his experimental programming work on https://anagora.org/index, which one might call a multi-layered wiki of personal wikis, commonplace books, zettelkasten, diaries, notes, and other similar forms of personal knowledge. If you've got a public, digitally available version of a zettelkasten you'd like to add to his project, do reach out to him to interconnect it with the Agora and others' work there.]
Personal Website
reply to u/GlitteringFee1047 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/147yj2b/personal_website/
I've got a personal site at https://boffosocko.com which I've had for many years and used in part as a digital commonplace book/pseudo-zettelkasten. I've been an active member of the IndieWeb community for many years as well and happy to answer any questions about those experiences. To bring things closer to the overlap of that and this particular community, folks may appreciate the following related material:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/364287692051
60 drawer cabinet listed for auction on eBay starting at $800 with a buy now price of $1,800 buy now price. Listed in June and unsold and relisted. Unknown brand, though it looks like late 60/early 70s Remington-Rand.
$13/drawer at the low end going up to $30/drawer.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266292541330
Gaylord Bros. 30 drawer card catalog (6 x 5 configuration) with somewhat mismatched table listed for 999.99 on Ebay. This has been on the market for about 2 months and relisted for bid at least 4 times.
$33.33/drawer
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/961017808666751/
60 drawer cabinet in two sections with three pull out writing surfaces, and table. Listed for $1,700, took over a month to sell and likely not for listing price.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568150/
Based on having watched the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and the depictions of Rivers' card index in the film and using her hands and a lateral file for scale, her cards seem to have been 3 x 5" index cards.
cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/RvLTZjCQEe2uuaNwpTBNuA
Billy Sammeth, the Manager Fired by Cher and Joan Rivers, Tells His Side of the Story by Kevin Sessums
Donald Trump has Sonny Bono beat as a kind of used-car salesman.
As much as I wish Melissa had more talent, it ain’t easy being Joan’s daughter. She tried to segue Melissa into the jewelry collection, but Melissa just wasn’t very good at it.
Very similar sounding to the plot lines of Jean Smart's character with her daughter in Hacks.
I turn to Joan and say, “My word, Joan. I’m so impressed. Melissa knows Yiddish?” Joan goes, “No. She doesn’t know Yiddish and I don’t know Yiddish. But anybody who’s speaking to you in Yiddish is telling you a joke so you laugh at the end of it. I’ve taught her that much so nobody will think she’s stupid.” That was Joan in her 50s. She’s almost 80 now and she still treats her daughter the same way.
Second, the social life of annotation is of greater importance than individual reader response. Annotation must be studied and promoted as a social endeavor that is co-authored by groups of annotators, with interactive media, spanning on-the-ground and online settings, and in response to shared commitments.
When will we get the civil disobedience version of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Mark a Book?
How Harriet Tubman is remembered and honored
I want this Harriet Tubman stamp more than I'd like the $5 Bill Murray version... at least until the new $20 is released.
A five -dollar Bill Murray.
See a ‘$5 Bill Murray’ by Eliot Glazer
When did this idea enter the culture? This 2011 post may have helped it enter the zeitgeist.
Here too. I don't make notes in the books (underline, circle, write in the margin, etc) because they will be isolated from my PKD. I've also been "suffering" from overselection, but the points raised in my bib cards are mostly pretty short (4-6 words). I'm still a beginner and practice will show what the ideal selection level is. I think it will suit purpose, familiarity and type of material.
reply to u/rafael-adao at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1466lls/comment/jnp0kpa/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
If they're your books, then feel free. This will allow you to do more over time; then you can be more selective the second time through for the most important things which you can excerpt for your Ph.D. Later you'll find that you don't have to worry about over or under-selection because you can always revisit your marginalia (or your overselected bibcards) and excerpt things as you need them. If you don't make the marks/traces, it's a lot harder to revisit the path you took through the forest. Your readings and the marks you make can be thought of as blazing a trail for subsequent trips through the material and related materials. This can also be particularly useful when you do syntopical readings with related materials. Quite often I find in retrospect that I need more explicit notes to connect to things from newer readings. Being able to revisit those older highlights and annotations makes it much easier to find those things that I know I know, but didn't manage to capture the first time around.
Over time, and with practice you'll find your "Goldilocks" zone.
Nick Milo is offering a remote digital note taking and writing course for $485 for UCLA Extension in late summer 2023.
Nick Milodragovich
James Patterson's Kentucky fried books
Link to: - Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain: https://hypothes.is/a/8qMVggeyEe6f7G9Gd5OrNw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Memoirs_of_U._S._Grant
Early precursor to the sort of publishing and marketing work of James Patterson?
Zinoman, Jason. “A ‘Crown Jewel of Comedy’: The Joan Rivers Card Catalog of Jokes Finds a Home.” The New York Times, June 8, 2023, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/arts/television/joan-rivers-archive.html.
Help With Hecklers
Joan Rivers notes on "How to Handle a Heclker":
“And yeah, it goes on, and on, and on. And one day, we’re going to get a little intern who thinks they’re in show business and is going to sit and put each and every one of these cards onto a computer so that when I’m in England and I need a joke about doctors, I can just go into my computer and come up with a — oh, this is a tramp. This tramp donated all her organs for transplants, which should make the recipients happy because her body has never rejected anything. [LAUGHS]: So. But it just goes on, and on, and on. These are just jokes over the years, years, and years, and years of jokes. And when I die, I can sell this to some lucky, lucky comedian who will then, if they’re smart, have enough to keep them going for their whole life.”
standing in front of her card index for comedy, built into a wall of other files.
In a scene from the documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” the comedian explains how she kept a record of her jokes and cross-indexed them.CreditCredit...Break Thru Films/IFC
In the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, she explains how she kept and filed records of her jokes.
Example typewritten jokes from Joan Rivers' card index of comedy:
Rivers, who wrote gags at all hours, paid close attention to setups and punchlines, typing them up and cross-referencing them by categories like “Parents hated me” or “Las Vegas” or “No sex appeal.” The largest subject area is “Tramp,” which includes 1,756 jokes.
Joan Rivers card index of jokes is categorized by topical headings like "Parents hated me", "Las Vegas", and "No sex appeal". The largest subject category in her collection was "Tramp" with 1,756 jokes.
In Carlin’s archives, by contrast, the jokes were “mainly scraps of paper organized into Ziploc baggies then put into a folder by topic.”
quote by Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center
When it comes to the Joan Rivers joke collection, “I don’t know that another exists that is nearly as vast,” Gunderson said.
Ignoring Bob Hope's collection or possibly that by Sid Caesar.
Joan Rivers’s card catalog of jokes and include material covering a vast swath of comedy history, from the 1950s to 2015.
Joan Rivers card index of jokes spans material covering the 1950s to 2015.
Instead, Rivers is donating the extensive collection to the National Comedy Center, the high-tech museum in Jamestown, N.Y., joining the archives of A-list comics like George Carlin and Carl Reiner. The fact that the jokes will be accessible is only one of the reasons for Melissa Rivers’s decision.
To avoid the Raiders of the Lost Ark problem, Melissa Rivers donated her mother's joke collection to the National Comedy Center so it would be on display and accessible. The New York-based museum is also home to the archives of George Carlin and Carl Reiner.
Take a look at some of the artifacts from her archive, which includes 65,000 cross-referenced gags and is headed to the National Comedy Center.
Joan Rivers' card catalog of ~65,000 cross referenced jokes will be housed at the National Comedy Center, a museum in Jamestown, NY.
I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand, and enter in a little book short hints of what you find that is curious or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such particulars in your memory, where they will be ready either for practice on some future occasion if they are matters of utility, or at least to adorn and improve your conversation if they are rather points of curiosity.
Benjamin Franklin letter to Miss Stevenson, Wanstead. Craven-street, May 16, 1760.
Franklin doesn't use the word commonplace book here, but is actively recommending the creation and use of one. He's also encouraging the practice of annotation, though in commonplace form rather than within the book itself.
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