You don’t make a bagel by first baking a bialy and then punching out the center. No—you roll out a snake of dough and join the ends together to form the bagel. If you denied that a bagel has a hole, you’d be laughed out of New York City, Montreal, and any self-respecting deli worldwide. I consider this final.
Not exactly a QED sort of proof, but I’ll take it as an axiom. 🙂
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Thinking about how annotations in my books are really conversations with the text which also spur thinking about them in a way that’s similar to rubber duck debugging.
An awful lot of my thinking happens in the margins.
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Having a (digital) commonplace book means that I have infinite space in my margins.
https://boffosocko.com/2021/06/08/55791943/
Writer Jean Paul (1763-1825) on the importance of his Zettelkasten, kept in the form of a commonplace book:
It looks like we also set up IndieWeb plugins to see who was mentioning us. We also used The Events Calendar, Search Everything (better searches), Really Simple SSL, Easy Fancybox, Google Forms, and Page Links To (as a form of link shortener for external links).
— Matt (Next Level Proctoring CEO Nightmare Fuel)™ (@grandeped) June 7, 2021
I’m happy to help you try to put together an IndieWeb-friendly version with Webmentions which work with multiple platforms including WordPress, Known, Grav, etc.
You might find some interesting examples and pieces on IndieWeb wiki, particularly their Education page. I’d love to see Matt add his example(s) to that page for others’ future reference.
If you go the older route one of the best planet-like sites I’ve seen was http://connectedcourses.net/, which if I recall correctly was built by Alan Levine. If you poke around a bit or ask @cogdog on Twitter, I think there are some details or a recipe somewhere of how he put it together.
Chances are reasonably good that people in the #DS106 or #DoOO space have some ideas as well.
The practice, back then, was surprisingly social — people would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers. ❧
This could be an interesting gift idea. Definitely shows someone that you were actively thinking about them for extended lengths of time while they were away.
It’s also sort of founding example for the idea of social annotation given that most prior annotation was for personal use. (Though Owen Gingerich has shown that early annotations were copied from book to book and early scribes added annotations to texts for readers as well.)
It also demonstrates the idea of proof of work (in this case love “work”), which is part of the reason that social annotation in an educational setting using tools like Hypothes.is is worthwhile. Students are indicating (via social signaling) to a teacher that they’ve read and actively engaged with the course material.
Of course, unlike the example, they’re not necessarily showing “true love” of the material!
The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain. ❧
This is a phenomenal way to do a look back at a year in reading. I’ll have to consider how to pull it off for myself this year.
So I am going to watch this but I have some trepidation because this was exactly the thesis I was advancing in 2014/2015 (see for example "The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral") right down to targeting the news feed as the start of it all https://t.co/k75qRUxWN4
I also remember Anil Dash’s Stop Publishing Web Pages essay in August 2012 and then 4 months later The Web We Lost. Those garden-like pages were definitely something we’ve lost. We need more of them on the higher ground outside of the floodplain of the raging waters of the storming corporate rivers. A few babbling brooks, sympathetic streams, and cordial and comforting creeks would also be most welcome in our landscape.
I’m glad to see that some are pushing back—returning to publish on the web in old, new, and even different ways. Hopefully, as in nature, the gardens and fields flourish after the unrestrained wrath of the storm.
Mike Caulfield (Twitter)
