I have a very specific method for organizing my research and thoughts whenever I’m writing anything longer than a short article. I learned this method from a teacher in middle school, and I cannot imagine how a human being could write a book any other way.
Example of someone who learned an index card based commonplace book method for note taking and writing.
Last night I posted a message to both Mastodon and Twitter saying how great M's support for RSS is. Apparently a lot of people on Masto didn't know about it and the response has been resounding. And the numbers are very lopsided. The piece has been "boosted" (the Masto equiv of RT) 1.1K times, yet I only have 3.7K followers there. Meanwhile on Twitter, where I have 69K followers, it has been RTd just 17 times. My feeling was previously that Mastodon was more alive, it's good to have a number to put behind that.
http://scripting.com/2022/12/03.html#a152558
Anecdotal evidence for the slow death of Twitter and higher engagement on Mastodon.
I'm enamored of this idea as well and this is a fascinating example.
It seems similar to the related (and also difficult-to-name) concept which I've called combinatorial creativity. One of the earliest versions I've seen is that of Raymond Llullus' work with respect to combinatorial mnemonics described in Frances Yates' The Art of Memory (1966). Farnam Street's post is a good start https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/, but I've been collecting other examples: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22combinatorial+creativity%22 and other names for it over time.
I can't help but wonder what Ericsson's role of deliberate practice would look like with arts as the subject? What motivates long term deliberate practice?
Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. 1966. Reprint, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Memory-Frances-Yates/dp/0226950018.
Ericsson, K. Anders, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer. The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review, 1993.
https://www.dalekeiger.net/untitled/
Dale Keiger is tap dancing his way into a definition for the underlying traits for encouraging and expanding on creativity. There's definitely something here worth pursuing further and giving a specific name to.
Some it is very akin to the ideas behind combinatorial creativity of working (dancing in Kelly's case) on the mundane with precision and drive and perhaps at least a soupçon of obsessiveness, but openness to the new.
How can we sharpen this set of ideas to settle on the right list of "ingredients"? Is there a way to hone in on this sort of creation of flow within a certain creative area while simultaneously not getting bored? Is it the small string of creative breakthroughs in the process of practice which open up new avenues and help create the flow to prevent boredom?
How might relate to Anders Ericsson's work on on deliberate practice or plateau principle coming into play, particularly to prevent boredom to encourage one to continue on with their practice?
I haven't put my finger on it but there were hints in it from a Yo-Yo Ma ad for Masterclass I saw the other day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbjgHkj-syM)..
“Dr Essai has observed time and again how the finest artists are the ones whose idea of fun is spending hour after hour, day after day doing the same thing over and over and over and over. And then some more. … The essential personality quirk could be described as nothing more than being endlessly fascinated and pleased by the repetitive tasks that make art.”
This same sort of repetition is seen in the success of salespeople. Can they repetitively make the same (or slowly improving) pitches day after day without getting tired of hearing "no" to eventually the appropriate number of yeses they need to make a living.
https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/
What a solid looking list of non-fiction books.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/12/the-ethics-of-syndicating-comments-using-webmentions/
Not an answer to the dilemma, though I generally take the position of keeping everything unless someone asks me to take it down or that I might know that it's been otherwise deleted. Often I choose not to delete my copy, but simply make it private and only viewable to me.
On the deadnaming and related issues, it would be interesting to create a webmention mechanism for the h-card portions so that users might update these across networks. To some extent Automattic's Gravatar system does this in a centralized manner, but it would be interesting to see it separately. Certainly not as big an issue as deadnaming, but there's a similar problem on some platforms like Twitter where people will change their display name regularly for either holidays, or lately because they're indicating they'd rather be found on Mastodon or other websites.
The webmention spec does contain details for both editing/deleting content and resending webmentions to edit and/or remove the original. Ideally this would be more broadly adopted and used in the future to eliminate the need for making these choices by leaving the choice up to the original publisher.
Beyond this, often on platforms that don't have character limits (Reddit for example), I'll post at the bottom of my syndicated copy of content that it was originally published on my site (along with the permalink) and explicitly state that I aggregate the replies from various locations which also helps to let people know that they might find addition context or conversation at the original post should they be interested. Doing this on Twitter, Mastodon, et al is much harder due to space requirements obviously.
While most responses I send would fall under fair use for copying, I also have a Creative Commons license on my text in an effort to help others feel more comfortable with having copies of my content on their sites.
Another ethical layer to this is interactions between sites which both have webmentions enabled. To some extent this creates an implicit bi-directional relationship which says, I'm aware that this sort of communication exists and approve of your parsing and displaying my responses.
The public norms and ethics in this area will undoubtedly evolve over time, so it's also worth revisiting and re-evaluating the issue over time.
https://werd.io/2022/the-fediverse-and-the-indieweb
The idea behind this is great, but the hurdles for supporting dozens of publishing specifications can be awfully daunting. Where do we draw the line?
So instead of Publishing on my Own Site and Syndicating Elsewhere, I plan to just Publish and Participate.
The easiest publishing (syndication) workflow of all.
https://blog.erinshepherd.net/2022/11/a-better-moderation-system-is-possible-for-the-social-web/
The trust one must place in the creator of a blocklist is enormous, because the most dangerous failure mode isn’t that it doesn’t block who it says it does, but that it blocks who it says it doesn’t and they just disappear.
Why on earth don’t we have an enormous spam problem?” and my answer to that is: you know, I just don’t know. I guess implementing AP has been too much effort for spammers up until now?
This lack of spam is very likely indicative of the difficulty of implementing an AP-based platform.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Erin Alexis Owen Shepherd</span> in A better moderation system is possible for the social web (<time class='dt-published'>12/03/2022 11:10:32</time>)</cite></small>
https://dahlstrand.net/1670017739/
This is the first #FeedReaderFriday post I've seen in the wild from someone I don't know. :)
https://www.manton.org/2022/12/02/moving-from-mastodon.html
Details for moving from one instance to another.
tldr.nettime is an instance for artists, researchers, and activists interested in exploring the intersections of technology, culture, and politics. It has grown out of nettime-l, one of the longest-running mailing lists on the net — in particular, on the 'cultural politics of the internet'.
https://www.downes.ca/post/74564
Stephen Downes is doing a great job of regular recaps on the shifts in Twitter/Mastodon/Fediverse lately. I either read or saw all these in the last couple of days myself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/24/world/europe/isle-of-man-manx-language.html
Each November, the island hosts the Cooish (pronounced koosh), a five-day festival of Manx language and culture.
government of the island, a self-governing British Crown Dependency that is not a part of the United Kingdom, but whose residents are British citizens.
I have about fourteen or sixteen weeks to do this, so I'm breaking the course into an "intro" section that covers some basic stuff like affordances, and other insights into how tech functions. There's a section on AI which is nothing but critical appraisals on AI from a variety of areas. And there's a section on Social Media, which is the most well formed section in terms of readings.
https://zirk.us/@shengokai/109440759945863989
If the individuals in an environment don't understand or perceive the affordances available to them, can the interactions between them and the environment make it seem as if the environment possesses agency?
cross reference: James J. Gibson book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966)
People often indicate that social media "causes" outcomes among groups of people who use it. Eg: Social media (via algorithmic suggestions of fringe content) causes people to become radicalized.
https://www.wood-finishes-direct.com/blog/what-is-pva-glue/
Pretty thorough article on PVA glues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Wp0sLpnMY
PVA Glue used in bookbinding, but isn't inexpensive.
Recommendations in order: PVA, Tacky Glue, Mod Podge (regular)
Brush on top edge and do two coats. Don't get it down between sheets.
Even when reading a book,the goal-oriented nature and intention of reading is paramount.6
61 Mortimer Jerome Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, Rev. and updated ed (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 45.
I see some of the sense of this footnote, which helps to establish some ethos by calling to mind Adler/Van Doren's classic, but this particular page in their text is really about paying enough attention not to fall asleep and thus doesn't underline Scheper's point as well as references to other portions of their book about goals and active reading.
“I first make a plan of what I am going to write,and then take from the note cabinet what I can use.”60
source:
60 Hans-Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 11.
I rather like the phrase "note cabinet" which isn't used often enough in the zettelkasten space. Something more interesting than filing cabinet which feels like where things are stored to never be seen again versus a note cabinet which is temporary and directed location storage specifically meant for things to actively be reused.
you’ll spend the beginning phases learning by readingbooks in brand new fields and noting down brand new ideas. You’ll mostlybe writing reformulation notes in this phase.
Yet another new name for a sub-type of notes, here he uses reformulation notes as a shorthand for the old advice to rewrite ideas you find in your own words. This advice is often suggested to accomplish two things: - avoid plagiarism - restatement of ideas in your own words is related to the Feynman Technique and assists one in learning and ensuring they understand the concepts
the Antinet can serve both states. It can assist someone who’s in thegrowth state (without a clear end goal), and it can also assist someone who’sin the contribution state (with a clearly defined book or project).
This could be clearer and "growth state" and "contribution state" feel like jargon which muddles:
two of the broad benefits/affordances of having a zettelkasten: - learning and scaffolding knowledge (writing for understanding) - collecting and arranging material for general output
bib notes
you’re doing things the old way,the hard way, the true way.
note the pathos along with a bit of religious zeal here about the "true way".
“I started my Zettelkasten,because I realized that I had to plan for a life and not for a book.”5
from Niklas Luhmann, Niklas Luhmann Short Cuts (English Translation), 2002, 22.
People are fascinated with how Luhmann became a book-writing academicresearch machine. The answer? The Antinet.
He highlights this here because it seems convenient to his thesis about a "true way", but Scheper has also mentioned in other venues that it was Luhmann's tenacity of working at his project that was largely responsible for his output.
I believe he made that statement in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgMh6iuFbT4
351
temporary bookmark,
Jesus Christ, Scott, it’s about time!
He'd warned about it in the introduction, but here it is, finally on page 341, how to build the thing we've come for. That was apparently a lot of motivation.
https://www.dalekeiger.net/tironean-shorthand/
Potential links between Tironian shorthand and mnemonics of the 1800s?
It’s juvenile, but the doctor loves the idea that tucked into a corner of a psalter might have been some shorthand for Brother Cadfael — what a dick.
😇
Thomas Becket brought it back
Thomas Becket brought back Tironian shorthand after monasteries had stopped using it.
In the Admonitio generalis (General admonition), an important collection of legislation issued in 789, the most famous Carolingian ruler, Charlemagne, implored that schools be established for the learning of not only the Psalms, chant, and grammar, but also notae, or ‘written signs.’
monastic scribes in the Middle Ages who not only employed it, but expanded it to around 14,000 symbols. (!) Most of the documentation dates from the Carolingian dynasty in the 8th and 9th centuries.
No one can say how many symbols Tiro came up with — presumably he wrote it down, but no such key is known to have survived — but successors began adding to it until, according to Isidore of Seville writing around 630 CE, no less than Seneca himself had topped it up to 5,000 symbols.
https://mxb.dev/blog/the-indieweb-for-everyone/
Generally speaking: The more independence a technology gives you, the higher its barrier for adoption.
I've previously framed this as a greater range of choices (towards independence) requires more work--both work to narrow down one's choices as well as potentially work to build and maintain..
Likewise, Luhmann probably learned some of his system from someone else. Most of us don't learn the things we do in complete and total isolation. That said, at the end of the day - our writing process is extremely personal.
reply to u/deafpolygon at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/z5haa9/comment/iy6yowi/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
It's been reported by his son that Luhmann did learn about a method (which either he heavily modified or someone else showed him their modification thereof) from Johannes Erich Heyde. There's sure to be more details on this in Scott Scheper's upcoming book Antinet Zettelkasten.
see: Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens: zeitgemässe Mittel und Verfahrungsweisen. Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931.
It's not as refined or as compartmentalized as Luhmann's process, but art Historian Victor Margolin broadly outlines his note taking and writing process in reasonable detail in this excellent three minute video. (This may be one of the shortest and best produced encapsulations of these reading/note taking/writing methods I've ever seen.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI
Though he indicates it was a "process [he] developed", it is broadly similar to that of the influential "historical method" laid out by Ernst Bernheim and later Seignobos/Langlois in the late 1800s.
https://g13g.blog/2021/03/16/get-your-blog-posts-on-mastodon/
I should write some documentation up for this.
http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
Digital version similar to WTFEngine.
https://www.oblique-strategies.com/
A web-based version similar to WTFEngine.
https://andy-bell.co.uk/im-genuinely-enjoying-social-media-again/
The TTRG (time to reply guy) was getting so fast, that I can’t actually remember the last time I tweeted something helpful like a design or development tip. I just couldn’t be arsed, knowing some dickhead would be around to waste my time with whataboutisms and “will it scale”?
https://www.dalekeiger.net/on-being-a-gentleman-well-unread/
Both your 積ん読 game and master level antilibrary skills are on wonderful display here.
Wayne Gretzky could skate to where he knew the puck would go because not only did he know what the other players were going to do, he knew how the puck played off the boards differently in every NHL arena.
sportswriters used to talk about how Larry Bird could look at a newspaper photograph from any game he’d played as a Boston Celtic and recall where everyone else had been on the court at that moment, knowledge that informed his play every time he brought the ball forward.
Those inherent physical attributes were not what defines star athletes. The great ones, be it Jordan or Ohtani or Messi or Williams, possess superior knowledge, said the neuro. Tom Brady isn’t a great quarterback because he’s big or has a strong arm. Thousands of men are big with strong arms. Brady is great because he knows more about football, and what he has to do to play it better, than anyone else. His brain has an extraordinary store of football knowledge and the ability to process it at lightning speed.
Your observations here ring true to me. They're also supported by similar observations by Malcolm Gladwell in chapters 8 and 9 (I believe) of Miracle and Wonder. There he's got stories of Wilt Chamberlain and Paul Simon which provide additional examples though he's also attributing some of the success to memory and the idea of situational awareness. He quotes his own researcher there who makes some comments on short versus long artistic careers and how they relate to creativity and longevity. See also this "zettel": https://hypothes.is/a/Kd7X4lvPEe250Gvn57Pbdg
Gladwell, Malcolm, Bruce Hedlam, and Paul Simon. Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon. Audiobook. Pushkin Industries, 2021. https://amzn.to/3ENU32D
James Clear:The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over.
But Dr Essai has observed time and again how the finest artists are the ones whose idea of fun is spending hour after hour, day after day doing the same thing over and over and over and over. And then some more.
This seems to fit in with Malcolm Gladwell's observation about Paul Simon see: https://hypothes.is/a/Kd7X4lvPEe250Gvn57Pbdg
https://github.com/mwt/apfollow/
Code and buttons for creating ActivityPub Follow me interface
https://odd.blog/2022/11/06/how-to-add-your-blog-to-mastodon/
Matthew Thomas has created a remote follow tool called apfollow, with source available. This creates a page where you can follow a Mastodon account by entering your own details in a box and it redirects you to your home server to do the follow. Here’s a link to follow my Mastodon.ie account.
This looks cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEXF3JgdHVY
Fountain pen network
ink journals for keeping track of pens, ink, and samples
ink review formats
swab books
q-tip swabs
ink sample vials and tray holders
a bulb syringe for flushing water through to clean pens is a good idea when doing many at a time
A list of congress members on Mastodon.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/27/musk-followers-bernie-cruz/
The Post analyzed data from ProPublica’s Represent tool, which tracks congressional Twitter activity.
Literature, philosophy, film, music, culture, politics, history, architecture: join the circus of the arts and humanities! For readers, writers, academics or anyone wanting to follow the conversation.
level 2SupremoZanneOp · 3 yr. agowell, there's always an opportunity to make new 88x31 buttons. Now since modern systems are approaching the 8K resolution, we should start making 264x93 buttons, so it's time to scale up the dimensions for modern resolutions.
HA!
Natalie @natalie@hcommons.social Follow @chrisaldrichoh wow, your website is mind-blowing! i have to check this out in detail. This is what I hope my future (social) media presence is going to look like one day.A question about syndicating your posts: What happens to the syndicated copies of a post after deleting it?.. my ideal would be: I have full control over my contributions. Probably an illusion? November 27, 2022 at 1:59 AM
https://hcommons.social/@natalie/109415180134582494
I believe Victor Margolin when he says that he developed his own system. That's what I did in the years before people started widely discussing personal knowledge systems online. Nobody taught me how to do it when I was in college. @chrisaldrich repeatedly tries to connect everyone's knowledge practices to an ongoing tradition that stretches back to commonplace books, but he overstates it. There is such a thing as independent development of a personal knowledge system. I know it because I've lived it. It's not so difficult that it requires extraordinary genius.
Reply to Andy https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/16865#Comment_16865
Andy, I'll take you at your word. You're right that none of it requires extraordinary genius--though many who seem to exhibit extraordinary genius do have variations of these practices in their lives, and the largest proportion of them either read about them or were explicitly taught them.
With these patterns and practices being so deeply rooted in our educational systems for so long (not to mention the heavy influences of our orality and evolved thinking apparatus even prior to literacy), it's a bit difficult for many to truly guarantee that they've done these things independently without heavy cultural and societal influence. As a result, it's not a far stretch for people to evolve their own practices to what works for them and then think that they've invented something new. The common person may not be aware of the old ideas of scala naturae or scholasticism, but they certainly feel them in their daily lives. Commonplacing is not much different.
By analogy, Elon Musk might say he created the Tesla, but it's a far bigger stretch for him to say that he invented a new means of transportation, or a car, or the wheel when we know he's swimming in a culture rife with these items. Humans are historically far better at imitation than innovation. If people truly independently developed systems like these so many times, then in the evolutionary record of these practices we should expect to see more diversity than we do in practice. We might expect to see more innovation than just the plain vanilla adjacent possible. Given Margolin's age, time period, educational background, and areas of expertise, there is statistically very little chance that he hadn't seen or talked about versions of this practice with several dozens of his peers through his lifetime after which he took that tacit knowledge and created his own explicit version which worked for him.
Historian Keith Thomas talks about some of these traditions which he absorbed himself without having read some of the common advice (see London Review of Books https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary). He also indicates that he slowly evolved to some of the often advised practices like writing only on one side of a slip, though, like many, he completely omits to state the reason why this is good advice. We can all ignore these rich histories, but we'll probably do so at our own peril and at the expense of wasting some of our time to re-evolve the benefits.
Why are so many here (and in other fora on these topics) showing up regularly to read and talk about their experiences? They're trying to glean some wisdom from the crowds of experimenters to make improvements. In addition to the slow wait for realtime results, I've "cheated" a lot and looked at a much richer historical record of wins and losses to gain more context of our shared intellectual history. I'm reminded of one of Goethe's aphorisms from Maxims and Reflections "Inexperienced people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago."
http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/Acute.html
Acute Strategies are a crowdsourced deck of advice and aphorisms collected by Gregory Taylor as an homage to the original deck of Oblique Strategies.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/163G79vq-mFWjIqMb9AzYGbr5Y8YMGcpbSzJRutO8tpw/edit
Howard Rheingold, et al. A Guide to Crap Detection Resources
hcommons.social is a microblogging network supporting scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world.
https://hcommons.social/about
The humanities commons has their own mastodon instance now!
If more Americans were like TV Tropes’ users—that is, if they could spot the recurring motifs in purported political plots—might they also be better at separating fact from fiction?
Perhaps EIP could partner with On the Media to produce a trope consumer handbook for elections, vaccines, and various conspiracy theory areas?
Cross reference: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/breaking-news-consumers-handbook
Our familiarity with these elements makes the overall story seem plausible, even—or perhaps especially—when facts and evidence are in short supply.
Storytelling tropes play into our system one heuristics and cognitive biases by riding on the tailcoats of familiar story plotlines we've come to know and trust.
What are the ways out of this trap? Creating lists of tropes which should trigger our system one reactions to switch into system two thinking patterns? Can we train ourselves away from these types of misinformation?
“pattern language” to describe the show’s plot formulas, which they and ultimately other users would then apply to a variety of programs.
Tropes are shorthand storytelling methods that rely on a common storytelling grammar or pattern language to quickly relay information to the viewer or listener.
As part of the Election Integrity Partnership, my team at the Stanford Internet Observatory studies online rumors, and how they spread across the internet in real time.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Something similar! Here it is: https://t.co/x1DPx9dm0P
— Renee DiResta (@noUpside) November 26, 2022
https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/09/10-thoughts-after-100-annotations-in-hypothes-is/
annotations of "10 Thoughts After 100 Annotations in Hypothes.is"
I love that you've got a comments heading for Hypothes.is annotations on your post @tonz! This is awesome.
https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/08/added-hypothes-is-annotations-link-to-posts/
Also... just to show the functionality. (aka: First!)
https://www.zylstra.org/blog/hypothes-is-roll/
A blogroll for Hypothes.is!
https://brainsteam.co.uk/annotations/
Example of someone owning their Hypothes.is annotations and publishing them on their own website.
https://brainsteam.co.uk/2022/11/26/one-week-with-hypothesis/
I too read a lot of niche papers and feel the emptiness, but because I'm most often writing for myself anyway, its alright. There are times, however, when I see a growing community of people who've left their associative trails behind before I've found a particular page.
I've used the phrase "digital exhaust" before, but I like the more positive framing of "learning exhaust".
If you've not found it yet, my own experimentations with the platform can largely be found here: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/
https://github.com/soulwire/WTFEngine
This could be used to generate a zettelkasten card website....
https://www.oblique.pouruntemps.com/
Looks like this was built with WTFEngine (https://github.com/soulwire/WTFEngine)
The Storyspace map view has proven to be enormously useful and durable, letting writers express relationships by clustering as well as by linking. Other spatial hypertext systems -- especially VIKI and VKB (Cathy Marshall, then at Xerox PARC and Frank Shipman, Texas A&M) and ART (Kumiyo Nakakoji, NIST) provided inspiration and encouragement as well. The export template mechanism was sketched in a long discussion at Hypertext '98 with Marc and Jocelyn Nanard (Montpellier) and Daniel Schwabe (PUC, Brazil), and the Nanard's brilliant work on MacWeb demonstrated that Tinderbox agents were in fact viable. Elli Mylonas, David Durand, and Steve DeRose motivated the central role of XML. Mitch Kapor's Agenda was an early inspiration, and James Fallows demonstrated, in essays on Agenda and Zoot, that writers could and would use sophisticated agents.
Inspiration for Tinderbox
Mark: Cathy Marshall at Xerox PARC originally started speaking about information gardening. She developed an early tool that’s the inspiration for the Tinderbox map view, in which you would have boxes but no lines. It was a spatial hypertext system, a system for connecting things by placing them near each other rather than drawing a line between them. Very interesting abstract representational problem, but also it turned out to be tremendously useful.
Cathy Marshall was an early digital gardener!
Mark: Yeah. And I actually think the Agile revolution in software development is software development catching up to the fact that it’s a writer-ly art. Writers don’t know where they’re going or how they’re going to express it when they start out. Neither, it turns out, does software developers. They can pretend by writing it the first time in a spec language and then coding it and then, checking the specification, then finding out that they’ve written the wrong thing and writing a new specification. That was when I was getting started, the right way to write software.
Agile software development is akin to the design of the writing process.
All research… All significant research is, in some respects, bottom-up. There is no alternative. And so, the only research that you can do top-down entirely is research for which you already have the solution.
Research, by design, is a bottom-up process.
One of the first things that was discovered about building complicated technical hypertext is that you don’t know what the structure will be in advance. And as you’re adding information, you know you want to keep the information, but you frequently don’t know what the information you’re adding is. You can’t describe its type or its nature or its importance in advance. You just suspect that it’s going to be pertinent somehow. Or you see a terrific quotation that you know will be great to use, but you don’t know when that quotation will fit or even if it’ll fit in this book, or if you’ll have to save it for something else. Finding ways to say, “I think these two things are related somehow, but I don’t want to commit myself yet as to exactly how,” turns out to be quite an interesting design problem. Hypertext people started out, in fact, by inventing the outliner very early — 1968. And outliners are terrific if you already know the structure of your information space. But hierarchies are not good if you’re just guessing about how things fit together because you tend to build great elaborate structures that turn out to be wrong, and you have to unbuild them, and then you’ve got a terrible pile on your desk.
Connecting ideas across space and time when you don't know how they'll fully relate in advance is a tough design problem.
Outliner programs, first developed for computers in 1968, are great if you know the structure of a space in advance, but creating hierarchies by guessing about relationships in advance often turn out wrong or create other problems as one progresses.
Mark: The Japanese hypertext scholar Kumiyo Nakakoji talks about amplified representational talkback, which is a general design phenomenon. An architect, an artist, or a writer puts something on paper and then looks at it. You look at it, and then it seems different from what you had in mind, and you either correct what you’ve written, or you see that what you’ve written is right and correct your bad idea. That kind of representational talkback is fundamental to all sorts of all creative processes, from the sciences to the arts.
http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/
An online version of Howard Rheingold's 1985 book.
Whenever I read about the various ideas, I feel like I do not necessarily belong. Thinking about my practice, I never quite feel that it is deliberate enough.
https://readwriterespond.com/2022/11/commonplace-book-a-verb-or-a-noun/
Sometimes the root question is "what to I want to do this for?" Having an underlying reason can be hugely motivating.
Are you collecting examples of things for students? (seeing examples can be incredibly powerful, especially for defining spaces) for yourself? Are you using them for exploring a particular space? To clarify your thinking/thought process? To think more critically? To write an article, blog, or book? To make videos or other content?
Your own website is a version of many of these things in itself. You read, you collect, you write, you interlink ideas and expand on them. You're doing it much more naturally than you think.
I find that having an idea of the broader space, what various practices look like, and use cases for them provides me a lot more flexibility for what may work or not work for my particular use case. I can then pick and choose for what suits me best, knowing that I don't have to spend as much time and effort experimenting to invent a system from scratch but can evolve something pre-existing to suit my current needs best.
It's like learning to cook. There are thousands of methods (not even counting cuisine specific portions) for cooking a variety of meals. Knowing what these are and their outcomes can be incredibly helpful for creatively coming up with new meals. By analogy students are often only learning to heat water to boil an egg, but with some additional techniques they can bake complicated French pâtissier. Often if you know a handful of cooking methods you can go much further and farther using combinations of techniques and ingredients.
What I'm looking for in the reading, note taking, and creation space is a baseline version of Peter Hertzmann's 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot combined with Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. Generally cooking is seen as an overly complex and difficult topic, something that is emphasized on most aspirational cooking shows. But cooking schools break the material down into small pieces which makes the processes much easier and more broadly applicable. Once you've got these building blocks mastered, you can be much more creative with what you can create.
How can we combine these small building blocks of reading and note taking practices for students in the 4th - 8th grades so that they can begin to leverage them in high school and certainly by college? Is there a way to frame them within teaching rhetoric and critical thinking to improve not only learning outcomes, but to improve lifelong learning and thinking?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Intrigue</span> in intrigue (<time class='dt-published'>08/29/2022 15:00:52</time>)</cite></small>
"I've developed a way of working to make this huge project of a world history of design manageable."<br /> —Victor Margolin
Notice here that Victor Margolin doesn't indicate that it was a process that he was taught, but rather "I've developed". Of course he was likely taught or influenced on the method, particularly as a historian, and that what he really means to communicate is that this is how he's evolved that process.
"I begin with a large amount of information." <br /> —Victor Margolin
"As I begin to write a story begins to emerge because, in fact, I've already rehearsed this story in several different ways by getting the information for the cards, mapping it out and of course the writing is then the third way of telling the story the one that will ultimately result in the finished chapters."<br /> —Victor Margolin
Snowball lets you quickly find and filter through papers using the snowballing method. Start with a core collection of papers, and find more by going through their citations and references.
Intrigue lets you quickly organize the papers you read alongside your thoughts in a visual & clean manner.
https://socialmediaissues.net/
Website for Social Media Issues, A resource for Comm 182/282. A course offered by Howard Rheingold at Stanford, Autumn, 2013
Aram Saroyam and, I believe, Jackson Maclow produced something similar. MacLow's The Pronouns was super important to me back in grad school.
reply to Bob Doto on https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/z3f8kb/comment/ixlocl7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Do you have something particular on Saroyam for this? I found The Pronouns by Jackson Mac Low, but only tangential hits on Saroyam.
Similar useful efforts, though not in as clear-cut card format are: * Project Zero's thinking routines: https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines * Untools: https://untools.co/
https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/z3f8kb/oblique_strategies_a_custom_zettelkasten_for/
Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published a card index of un-numbered and purposefully unordered ideas in 1975 as a tool for increasing creativity. They called it "Oblique Strategies". Each card contained an aphorism for helping one to reframe their approach to problems or questions they faced.
Black box with cards containing aphorisms to help increase creativity. Photo by V&A Images from the David Bowie Archive.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies<br /> Canonical site with complete list of versions: http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/OSintro.html
ZK practitioners might profitably have a subsection in their box with these strategies to help themselves randomly increase their own creativity while working either inside or outside of their boxes. Potentially useful for writing, music, art, etc.
Tools for better thinking Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Howard Rheingold</span> in Howard Rheingold: "Y'all know about "Tools for …" - Mastodon (<time class='dt-published'>11/13/2022 17:33:07</time>)</cite></small>
Looks similar to Project Zero https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines
Trope, trope, trope, strung into a Gish Gallop.
One of the issues we see in the Sunday morning news analysis shows (Meet the Press, Face the Nation, et al.) is that there is usually a large amount of context collapse mixed with lack of general knowledge about the topics at hand compounded with large doses of Gish Gallop and F.U.D. (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).
a more nuanced view of context.
Almost every new technology goes through a moral panic phase where the unknown is used to spawn potential backlashes against it. Generally these disappear with time and familiarity with the technology.
Bicycles cause insanity, for example...
Why does medicine and vaccines not follow more of this pattern? Is it lack of science literacy in general which prevents it from becoming familiar for some?
What if instead of addressing individual pieces of misinformation reactively, we instead discussed the underpinnings — preemptively?
Perhaps we might more profitably undermine misinformation by dismantling the underlying tropes the underpin them?
Journalists often emphasize that something is novel when they cover it because novelty supports something being newsworthy, and is appealing to audiences
Journalists emphasize novelty because it underlines newsworthiness.
Alternately, researchers underline novelty, particularly in papers, because it underlines technology that might be sold/transferred and thus patented, a legal space that specifically looks at novelty as a criterion. By saying something is novel in the research paper, it's more likely that a patent examiner will be primed to believe it.
And that, perhaps, is what we might get to via prebunking. Not so much attempts to counter or fact-check misinfo on the internet, but defanging the tropes that underpin the most recurringly manipulative claims so that the public sees, recognizes, & thinks:
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>And that, perhaps, is what we might get to via prebunking. Not so much attempts to counter or fact-check misinfo on the internet, but defanging the tropes that underpin the most recurringly manipulative claims so that the public sees, recognizes, & thinks:😬
— Renee DiResta (@noUpside) June 19, 2021
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Renee DiResta</span> in Twittter Thread by @noUpside about tropes and misinformation - Thread Reader App (<time class='dt-published'>06/21/2021 14:22:17</time>)</cite></small>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCLCIw-HSJc
I'm curious if you knew if Nelson, Engelbart or any of their contemporaries had/maintained/used commonplace books or card indexes as precursors of their computing work? That is, those along the lines of those most commonly used by academics, for example as described by Markus Krajewski in Paper Machines (MIT Press, 2011) or even Beatrice Webb's Appendix C on Note Taking in My Apprenticeship (Longmans, 1926) in which she describes a slip (or index card)-based database method of scientific note taking. I've always felt that Vannevar Bush held things back unnecessarily by not mentioning commonplace book traditions in As We May Think.
https://ooh.directory/blog/2022/first-two-days/
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2022/11/25/how-to-weave-the-artisan-web/
“But Scalzi,” I hear you say, “How do we bring back that artisan, hand-crafted Web?” Well, it’s simple, really, and if you’re a writer/artist/musician/other sort of creator, it’s actually kind of essential:
https://medievalist.micro.blog/about/
hanging by a thread, although the
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/results-wales-now-need-reach-25602153
https://ooh.directory/
https://app.tana.inc/
https://betterhumans.pub/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18
https://www.maier.co.uk/insights/oblique-strategies/
David Bowie used a pack of Eno/Schmidt's Oblique Strategies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRc7MUybCsE
Interview with BBC in which Brian Eno discusses the origin of his Oblique Strategies with Peter Schmidt.
Changing the order in which you do things. —Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies
This sounds like the sort of shift Walter Murch made in his sound editing by doing his first cut completely without sound. If you can't tell the story visually without sound the whole thing will fall apart. But you can use the sound, music, etc. to supplement, gild, and improve a picture.
How might we ground Oblique Strategies in research-based outcomes?
Austin Kleon made his own deck of Oblique Strategies by handwriting them onto the front of playing cards with black sharpie.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Making my own Oblique Strategies deck. https://t.co/a1FpNifdLp pic.twitter.com/XsnRBt0GNW
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) November 1, 2015
Kalir, Jeremiah H. “The Value of Social Annotation for Teaching and Learning: Promoting Comprehension, Collaboration and Critical Thinking with Hypothesis.” White paper. San Francisco: Hypothes.is, October 21, 2022. https://web.hypothes.is/research-white-paper/
Social Annotation and Mathematics Education
My internal mathematician wishes there was more substance in this particular portion.
TE LESS FORMAL ACADEMIC STUFF
We find favorwith Mortimer J. Adler’s stance, from 1940,that “marking up a book is not an act ofmutilation but of love.”18
also:
Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it. —Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.
They also suggest that due to the relative low cost of books, it's easier to justify writing in them, though they carve out an exception for the barbarism of scribbling in library books.
The prevalence of annotation online is a reminderthat the web is an information fabric woven together by linked resources. Annotationincreases the thread count of that fabric.
onversation among groups ofreaders over time.
An intriguing story of influential annotations in the history of science can be seen in Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read in which he traces annotations by teachers and students of Copernicus' De revolutionibus to show spread of knowledge in early modern astronomy.
Gingerich, Owen. The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. William Heinemann, 2004.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who’scredited with the first use of the term marginalia, in 1819, coined the term as literarycriticism and to spark public dialogue.6
6 Coleridge, S. T. (1819). Character of Sir Thomas Brown as a writer.Blackwood’s Magazine 6(32), 197.
Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote in 1844, “In the marginalia, too, we talkonly to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly — boldly — originally — with abandonnement— without conceit.”1
Poe, E. A. (1844). Marginalia. United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 15, 484, https://www.eapoe.org/works/misc/mar1144.htm
Curious that Poe framed marginalia as a self-conversation rather than a conversation with the text itself...
https://prosimpli.com/index-card-holder/
Reasonable state-of-the-art of index card holders. Does manage to leave out some of the bleacher display methods, but otherwise not bad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wzblc9/card_storage/
This page has links to some of the most common zettelkasten boxes and manufacturers mentioned on the r/antinet Reddit.
https://www.staples.com/Vaultz-Locking-4x6-Index-Card-Cabinet-Double-Drawer-Black/product_2229125
4 x 6" Index card filing cabinet; 2 drawers, with lock
$85.99 from Staples on 2022-11-21
2 drawer box for 4 x 6" index cards.
STEELMASTER by MMF Industries 263644BLA Index Card File Holds 400 4 x 6 cards, 6 3/4 x 4 1/5 x 5
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16848998233
metal box for 4 x 6" index cards
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/kuggis-box-with-lid-transparent-black-00514033/#content
7 x 10.25 x 6"
This is big enough and just about the perfect size for 4 x 6" index cards. The lid has a slight indent to make it easily stackable.
https://david.shanske.com/venue/santa-fe-depot/
GWG has now got locations built into the Simple Location Plugin!
What sorts of prompts or questions could teachers and learners use on a regular basis, similar to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies, to improve their learning environments, creativity, and learning outcomes?
Powerful, non-judgmental questions
- If you had to guess, what would have to be true for you to...?
- If you did know...
- (on tangent) ...and how does that relate to you?
- What's not allowing you to...?
- What prevents you from asking…?
- Do you want to go into this?
- What's your criteria for saying yes?
- What would have you say yes?
- What are the things we're lacking?
- What's the scary question that you're not asking?
- What are the qualities you want for [being, action, process, etc.]?
- How would you behave if you were the best in the world at what you do?
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>I'm starting a list of powerful, non-judgmental questions for coaching or just relationships in general. Here's the starting batch https://t.co/ktsYVxkQna pic.twitter.com/Dq1zQnWqAS
— Tiago Forte (@fortelabs) January 15, 2019
These questions and similar ones (work this out) could be interesting prompts to be included on a syllabus or as starts for an annotated syllabus. (eg: What do you want to get out of this class? What do you already know about these areas? How can we expand on what you know? What would you like to explore?, etc.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
So much to unpack here.
Similar to experiments I've seen by Henry James Korn (esp. The Pontoon Manifesto), John Irwin, etc.
Similarities to means of forcing Llullan combinatorial creativity, but in alternate form.
In late 2006, Eno released 77 Million Paintings, a program of generative video and music specifically for home computers. As its title suggests, there is a possible combination of 77 million paintings where the viewer will see different combinations of video slides prepared by Eno each time the program is launched. Likewise, the accompanying music is generated by the program so that it's almost certain the listener will never hear the same arrangement twice.
Brian Eno's experiments in generative music mirror some of the ideas of generative and experimental fiction which had been in the zeitgeist and developing for a while.
Certainly the fictional ideas were influential to the zeitgeist here, but the technology for doing these sorts of things in the musical realm lagged the ability to do them in the word realm.
We're just starting to see some of these sorts of experimental things in the film space and with artificial intelligence they're becoming much easier to do in all of these media spaces.
In some of the film spaces, they exist, but may tend to be short in nature, in part given the technology and processing power required.
see also: Deepfake TikTok of Keanu Reeves which I've recently run across (algorithmically) on Instagram: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/unreal-keanu-reeves-ai-deepfake/
Had anyone been working on generative art? Marcel Duchamp, et al? Some children's toys can mechanically create generative art which can be subtly modified by the children using axes of color, form, etc. Etch-a-sketch, kaleidoscopes, doodling robots (eg: https://www.amazon.com/4M-Doodling-Robot-Packaging-Vary/dp/B002EWWW9O).
In 1971, Eno co-formed the glam and art rock band Roxy Music. He had a chance meeting with saxophonist Andy Mackay at a train station, which led to him joining the band. Eno later said: "If I'd walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now".[24]
How does idea density influence the rate of creativity?
What are the thermodynamics of creativity? I've probably got enough material for a significant book chapter if not perhaps a book on this topic.
May need a more public friendly name. Burning Creativity?
At one point, Eno had to earn money as paste-up assistant for the advertisement section of a local paper for three months. He quit and became an electronics dealer by buying old speakers and making new cabinets for them before selling them to friends.[12]
One moment this article describes Eno as eschewing conventional jobs, but then describes him going back to two different ones. The second one as an electronics dealer is at least tangential to his music/sound career and may have helped give him some tools for operating in the space which he wanted to be.
Whilst at school, Eno used a tape recorder as a musical instrument[17]
I personally did something akin to this when I was a child sometime between 9 and 12 with our family tape recorder. Did I do so because it was simply a creativity tool, which is generally how I used it, in my environment, or had Brian Eno and others' influences seeped into the culture encouraging this? Where does zeitgeist start and stop?
In 1964, after earning four O-levels, including one in art and maths, Eno had developed an interest in art and music and had no interest in a "conventional job".[12]
When did the definition of a so-called "conventional job" emerge? Presumably after the start of the industrial revolution when people began moving from traditional crafts, home work, farm work, and other general subsistence work.
What defines a non-conventional job? Does it subsume caring work? What does David Graeber have to say about this in Bullshit Jobs?
In the mid-1970s, he co-developed Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards featuring aphorisms intended to spur creative thinking.
A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the oldart-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out ofnowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. Ibecame (and still am) more and more convinced that the importantchanges in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. Icall this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius. This word isnow starting to gain some currency - the philosopher James Ogilvy uses itin his most recent book.
Book Source: Eno, Brian. A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary. 1st edition. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Section: A Letter to Dave Stewart, p 354
Cross reference quote and further usage/refinement of the word from popular blog post by Kevin Kelly Scenius, or Communal Genius: https://hypothes.is/a/SgYqomnBEe2_Yaf4i1JnCg
