I guested on a recording for Andy Sylvester‘s new Thinking About Tools for Thought podcast earlier today. Hopefully I’ve lived up to the promise of the fascinating space that he’s been crafting there.
Andrew, someone in the IndieWeb chat mentioned what an awesome new website you have. I thought you might appreciate our upcoming mini-camp. There’s definitely a space in the tools for thought area that your perspective may help fill. If it’s of interest, I’d invite you to join us.

Gardens and Streams II: An IndieWebCamp Pop-up Session on Wikis, Digital Gardens, Online Commonplace Books, Zettelkasten and Note Taking

Realizing my interest in old and illuminated manuscripts, incunables, and drolleries is giving me ideas for icons, dividers, lettering, and illustrations for my sketchnotes process. These are the original (OG) sketchnotes.

See also MarginaliaMonday.

Not sure if there are many/any podcasts about digital gardens and tangential topics, but I’ve started a tag on Huffduffer for those who’d like it for discovery or adding those they find themselves: https://huffduffer.com/tags/digital+gardens

If you find a podcast with some discussion about the topic, feel free to use Huffduffer’s bookmarklet to add it to the public list. This should also work with YouTube videos and it will convert the video into audio and save it to the list.

It has an RSS feed for subscribing if you like.

How far has humankind fallen to have gone from the ☛ manicule indicating active thought in manuscripts of the 12th century  to the all-too-frequent thumbs up in the 21st century indicating a passive action with almost no thought at all?
Who else keeps a waste book

I carry around a small notebook (usually a 48 page Field Notes) for short fleeting notes. Later I copy them into my commonplace book/zettelkasten/digital garden and expand upon them. 

Waste books were used in the tradition of the commonplace book. A well known example is Isaac Newton’s Waste Book (MS Add. 4004) in which he did much of the development of the calculus. Another example is that of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who called his waste books sudelbücher, and which were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review of Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.

I the beginning of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, there’s the short exchange:

Horace Slughorn: These are trying times!
Dumbledore: Indeed.

Had I directed the movie, I would have had Dumbledore look down and acknowledge his borrowed knitting patterns magazine as he delivered his line.

I take a lot of notes, the majority of them in public using Hypothes.is. I follow a handful of others’ public notes myself, but until today I didn’t think anyone was following back or reading.

I wish this were a more common practice.

https://diggingthedigital.com/abonneren-op-aantekeningen/

The first session of my Art of Memory course went well this morning.

My favorite part: a student suggested doing a project to memorize knowledge related to (urban) foraging (what’s available, safe, identification, etc.)! Its a fantastic example because this is exactly the sort of practical knowledge many indigenous (primarily oral) peoples have used these techniques for over time.

If you’re late to the game, I think you can still register (and I’m happy to catch people up) before our next session in two weeks on July 24th.

A quick note to the personal knowledge management fanatics: Niklas Luhmann positively did NOT invent the Zettelkasten. The idea predates him by quite a bit and had even earlier forms. He’s also not the only significant example.

https://boffosocko.com/2021/07/03/differentiating-online-variations-of-the-commonplace-book-digital-gardens-wikis-zettlekasten-waste-books-florilegia-and-second-brains/