Curious to see how these tools can be communally used for collaborative note taking, knowledge creation, and discussion.
Category: Note taking
The Jonathan Edwards Miscellanies Companions are products of JESociety's "Miscellanies Project." Essays were contributed by an international body of scholars hailing from East Asia, Australia, Europe, the UK, and North America. The contributions canvas the wide range of topics contained in Edwards' "Miscellanies."
"The Miscellanies Project" and the Companions are part of the "Visual Edwards Project" created by Robert L. Boss. A unique contribution to Jonathan Edwards studies, "Visual Edwards" is a software project that maps Edwards' writings, volumes 1-26 of the Yale critical edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, and provides a new view of America's theologian. "Visual Edwards" is, as it were, an advanced computational material which can be stretched, bent, and zoomed to direct the scholar to areas of interest. As a cartographic tool, it grants the reader visual access to Edwards in his own words.
A team-oriented project to visually unlock Edwards' notebooks, and map intricate connections in his thought, "The Miscellanies Project" and the print Companions are first steps toward the Himalayan task of visualizing Jonathan Edwards -- an ongoing project seemingly without end. To echo Edwards' sentiment in "Types," "there is room for persons to be learning more and more ... to the end of the world without discovering all."
Now available here: https://t.co/zMpGSptDKh DM me or email me at "doctor" plus "my last name" (all one word) at g mail dot you know, and I will send you my chapter in this book as a sample for FREE! https://t.co/SWqmXTP1xs
— Dr. Matthew Everhard (@matt_everhard) Dec 2, 2021

More details to come on this fun bit of history soon.
And annotation helps you save those thoughts, share them with others, and further refine them.
[[2021-11-23]] 7:30 PM
Field Notes: Reporter's Notebook from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.
John Dickerson of “Face the Nation” talks about how he uses a Reporter’s Notebook and how he helped Field Notes make one. ❧
While he doesn’t mention it, he’s capturing the spirit of the commonplace book and the zettelkasten.
[…] I see my job as basically helping people see and to grab ahold of what’s going on.
You can decide to do that the minute you sit down to start writing or you can just do it all the time. And by the time you get to writing you have a notebook full of stuff that can be used.
And it’s not just about the thing you’re writing about at that moment or the question you’re going to ask that has to do with that week’s event on Face the Nation on Sunday.
If you’ve been collecting all week long and wondering why a thing happens or making an observation about something and using that as a piece of color to explain the political process to somebody, then you’ve been doing your work before you ever sat down to do your work.
I’d love to interview him about his process as well as keeping track of his notes after-the-fact. Does he index them? Collate them? How does he archive them? What role do they play in his book writing processes? Is his system something that he was taught, something which he created and refined over time, or a little bit of both?
Where are Obsidian, Roam Research, Org Mode, Foam, Logseq, Athens, Dendron, Remnote, nvUltra, et al?
Zettelkasten History Prior to Niklas Luhmann: Antonin Sertillanges
The book was published in French, Italian, and English in more than 50 editions over the span of 40 years. In it, Sertillanges recommends taking notes on slips of “strong paper of a uniform size” either self made with a paper cutter or by “special firms that will spare you the trouble, providing slips of every size and color as well as the necessary boxes and accessories.” He also recommends a “certain number of tagged slips, guide-cards, so as to number each category visibly after having numbered each slip, in the corner or in the middle.” He goes on to suggest creating a catalog or index of subjects with division and subdivisions and recommends the “very ingenious system”, the decimal system, for organizing one’s research. For the details of this refers the reader to Organization of intellectual work: practical recipes for use by students of all faculties and workers by Paul Chavigny.[2]
Sertillanges recommends against the previous patterns seen with commonplace books where one does note taking in books or on slips of paper which might be pasted into books as they don’t “easily allow classification” or “readily lend themselves to use at the moment of writing.”
[1] Antonin, Sertillanges (1960). The Intellectual Life: Its Sprit, Conditions, Methods. Translated by Ryan, Mary (fifth printing ed.). Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press. pp. 186–198.
[2] Chavigny, Paul (1918). Organisation du travail intellectuel: recettes pratiques à l’usage des étudiants de toutes les facultés et de tous les travailleurs (in French). Delagrave.
Featured Image: zettelkasten flickr photo by x28x28de shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
On Note Taking: Putting Ideas into a Crib
I use incunables in much the same way others in the personal knowledge management space might say fleeting notes. Ideas are born and written onto a page where they are kept in proverbial cribs. Some may grow and and develop into young adults others into old age. Some flourish and later senesce. Ideally one or two outlive me.
As is typical of many species, the care and feeding of the adolescents can be a trying time.
Featured image: LEGO Babies: Nonuplet Nursery flickr photo by cproppe shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license
An Index for My Digital Commonplace Book
I must admit that with a tiny amount of research and set up, I’ve now got something that even John Locke could be jealous of.
For my future self or others interested, I’m using Multi-column Tag Map which has a variety of short codes for implementing various forms of output. Sadly it wasn’t tagged with the word index, so it took some time to find it.
I’ve always had my own administrative interface for this data as well as search and even programmatic tag completion which makes writing and posting easier. However since a lot of what I do is in the public, perhaps it will be useful for readers to have access to the same full list instead of the abbreviated ones that appear as tag clouds or in various sidebars on the site?
Currently I’ve got over 9,000 different tags on the site. Perhaps displaying them publicly will help motivate me to curate and manage them a bit better. I already see a handful of repeated versions based on spelling, spacing, or typos that could be cleaned up. Let’s go crazy!