In a new Inc. webinar, Limitless author and memory expert Jim Kwik taught the audience a new way to take notes so as to get the most value out of them. You should start using it immediately -- I know I'm going to. It all begins with drawing a line down the center of the page.
“At the end of each chapter write a few bullet points that summarize what you’ve read and make it personal if you can — that is, apply it to something in your life. Also, note any unanswered questions. When you’re done the book, put it down for a week.”
“Pick up the book again and go through all your notes. Most of these will be garbage but there will be lots you want to remember. Write the good stuff on the inside cover of the book along with a page number.”
“(Optional) Copy out the excerpts by hand or take a picture of them to pop into Evernote. Tag accordingly.”
I ran across a Chrome extension for highlights, annotations, and tagging tonight. It’s called Learning Paths. It works roughly as advertised for creating and saving highlights and annotations online. With a social silo log in process (I didn’t see an email login option), you’ve quickly got an account on the service.
You can then use the extension to highlight, tag, and annotate web pages. One can export their data as a .csv file which is nice. They’ve also got an online dashboard which displays all your data and has the ability to see public data from other users as well.
One of the interesting pieces they support is allowing users to tweet a thread from all their highlights of a piece online. Upon seeing this I thought it might make a useful feature for getting data into one’s personal wiki, website, or digital garden, particularly now that ThreadReaderApp supports posting unrolled Twitter threads to one’s Micropub enabled website.
So the workflow goes something like this (with links to examples of my having tried it along the way):
While this works relatively well, there are a few drawbacks:
While the idea works roughly in practice, it isn’t as optimal as the workflow or data fidelity I’ve found in using more robust tooling like that found in Hypothes.is for which I’ve also built a better UI on my website.
Still others, might appreciate the idea, so have at it! I’d love to see others’ ideas about owning their highlights, annotations, and related data in a place they control.
I suspect that a reasonable WordPress user could probably set up a free Hypothes.is account and use the RSS feed from it (something like https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=username) to create an IFTTT.com recipe to post it as a public/draft to their WordPress website.
My version presented here has also been augmented by also using the Post Kinds Plugin to which I’ve manually added a custom annotation post type along with some CSS for the yellow highlight effect. These additional coding flourishes aren’t absolutely necessary for those who just want to own the data on their website.
If you want to get even fancier you could also do RSS to IFTTT to do a webhook post to an Micropub endpoint or custom code your own solution using their API. Lots of options are available, the most difficult part may be knowing that something like this could even be done.
via.hypothes.is to the URLs of articles manually so I can use Hypothes.is on my phone. I’ve finally had enough of the manual timesuck that I’ve gone in search of an answer since there is not yet a mobile app solution.
I’ve long been an Android user, so I broke out the URL Forwarder app which uses the ubiquitous share functionality of most phone platforms and adds a thin layer of program-ability.
In short I created a new filter and cleverly named it “Hypothesize”. Then I added the filter url “http://via.hypothes.is/@url” and left the replaceable text alone.
Now I can take an article from almost anywhere on my phone (reading services like Pocket, my feed readers, or even articles within the browser themselves), click share, choose “URL Forwarder” from the top of the list, select “Hypothesize” and the piece I want to annotate magically opens up with Hypothes.is ready to go in my default browser. Huzzah!
The three taps are ever so much easier than trying to tap a URL to edit it it and then typing. Why didn’t I think of this years ago?
Have you had this problem? Do you have a better solution or work around?
This tool copies annotations from one group to another, and optionally also from one domain to another. Only top-level annotations will be copied, replies are ignored. Only maxAnnotations will be copied, the default is 2 as a safety check. The Hypothesis username you provide will be the creator of copied annotations. If the source or destination group is not Public, the Hypothesis user must be a member to read from the source or write to the destination. Tick lmsMode if you're a teacher copying your own prompts from one course group to another. More Hypothesis tools.
How did research even happen before the internet? It seems like there was a lot more mnemonic discipline involved. Especially in botany etc: how would you intuit whether you found a new species (of any sort of artifact)?
— Max Krieger (@maxkriegers) May 11, 2020
cc @Meaningness @andy_matuschakA researcher told me when I was ~12 that on Fridays, he collects all the elementary functions from his papers (like cos(30deg)) so he doesn't have to wait until Monday to go to the library to check the books containing the values. It might not have been cos but you get it.
— adjoint +/- norm (@adamnemecek1) May 11, 2020incredible. I hope someone did an ethnography/photo archive of this kind of thing pre internet. I wonder what his workspace looked like, I'm picturing something like this:https://t.co/EJE6rg7e5H
— Max Krieger (@maxkriegers) May 11, 2020Yeah, I grew up with 5x8 index cards and spent much of my undergraduate time in windowless basement rooms of libraries trying to find books that had been mis-shelved.
— David Chapman (@Meaningness) May 11, 2020
They got seriously creepy at night.
Her TED talk shows quickly how she did something similar, but with birds and bird identification. Her work has examples of how many other cultures did this as well.
Hypothesify is a Firefox extension for the annotation tool Hypothes.is. It can start and close a selected webpage or a PDF document in Hypothes.is, it checks for public annotations and it generates codes in html, markup, :hiccup for Roam etc..
Jeremy Cherfas (jeremycherfas.net)People have written some interesting things following on from the pop-up IndieWebCamp that Chris Aldrich organised a couple of weeks ago. The Garden and the Stream set out to compare and contrast wikis and weblogs and how the two might be used. It was a terrific success, and I’m sorry I wasn’t a...
Nevertheless, the very fact that I am going through my notes reflects a new habit I am trying to build, of setting time aside every week, and sometimes more often, deliberately to tend the oldest notes I have and the notes I created or edited in the past week. Old notes take longer, because I have to check old links and decide what to do if they have rotted away. Those notes also need to be reshaped in line with zettelkasten principles. That means deciding on primary tags, considering internal links, splitting the atoms of long notes and so on. At times it frustrates me, but when it goes well I do see structure emerging and with it new thoughts and new directions to follow. ❧
This is reminiscent of the idea that indigenous peoples regularly met at annual feasts to not only celebrate, but to review over their memory palaces and perform their rituals as a means of reviewing and strengthening their memories and ideas.
Annotated on May 09, 2020 at 07:17AM
I separate collecting from processing because I don’t hack everything that pops up in my mind while I read a text into my computer. Instead, I take notes on paper.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
—Steve Jobs (via lifehacker and Zettel no. 201308301352) ❧
in other words, it’s just statistical thermodynamics. Eventually small pieces will float by each other and stick together in new and hopefully interesting ways. The more particles you’ve got and the more you can potentially connect or link things, the better off you’ll be.
Annotated on March 23, 2020 at 04:36PM
In this post I try to dig into the nature of a Zettel. When philosophers speak about the nature of something they refer to its most basic qualities. If you substract one of those you would have something different.
I’ll construct two forms of a Zettel:
The Outer Form
The Inner Form
The outer form refers to entities that are necessary for its existence.
The inner form refers to entities that compose its inner structure. ❧
Annotated on March 23, 2020 at 05:16PM
When I search in my archive for the tag #diet I get really annoying results. I don’t only get notes on diet. I get notes on carbohydrates, insulin sensitivity and many other. “Why is that a problem?”, you might ask. “All the above topics are relevant for diet, aren’t they?” No, and here is why.
There are two different types of tags:
Tags for topics. You use tags to group notes under a topic.
Tags for objects. You use tags to group notes around an object, real or conceptual. ❧
Annotated on March 23, 2020 at 05:06PM
The tags for objects are much more precise and reveal real connections. They narrow down the search way more which is hugely important if your archive grows. They only give you what you want, and not the topic which also contains what you want. ❧
Annotated on March 23, 2020 at 05:07PM
After the awesome discussion of Sascha’s latest blog post, I meditated about all the different kinds of ties between notes. Here’s what I came up with.
You can translate “Folgezettel” (literally: “subsequent note”) as “note sequence”. ❧
Annotated on March 23, 2020 at 04:47PM
Our brain can only hold to so much information at a time. ❧
of course this is why I like mnemonics and specific techniques like the method of loci. We can not only retain more but the memories can be stored in interesting ways that increase their potentially creativity like creating a Zettelkasten in the brain.
Annotated on March 23, 2020 at 04:53PM
Using a Zettelkasten is about optimizing a workflow of learning and producing knowledge. The products are texts, mostly. The categories we find fit the process well at the moment are the following:
Knowledge Management: general information about what it means to work and learn efficiently.
Writing: posts on the production of lasting knowledge, and about sharing it with others through your own texts.
Reading: posts about the process of acquisition of new things and the organization of sources.