Note taking | Chris Aldrich

📅 RSVP to Early Tools For Thought, with Mark Bernstein | Tools for Thought Rocks!

RSVPed Attending Early Tools For Thought, with Mark Bernstein

Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems, Inc., is the designer of Tinderbox: https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

Join Mark as he turns back the clock to examine some early Tools For Thought, and the people who created them. There’s quite a lot to learn from both, as well as a research literature that repays study.

The infinite canvas as a thinking space now has a long history, but few of the early systems are well known. I think some of them might be worth a brief look, in terms of the ideas they brought forward and in terms of the tasks they sought to address. For example:

Sketchpad: Ivan Sutherland’s system from the 1960 kicked off interactive computer graphics AND object-oriented programming.

NLS/Augment: Doug Engelbart’s original outliner, the first system that explicitly sought to be a tool for thought.

Xanadu: Ted Nelson’s early proposal for a hypertext docuverse.

Storyspace: the first system intended for non-sequential narrative. Introduced in 1987 and still in use today.

Intermedia: a platform for digital pedagogy, developed at Brown and BBN.

KMS: a hypertext system for technical documentation, the source of Akscyn’s Law

Microcosm: A hypertext system based chiefly on contextual links, the ancestor of all sculptural hypertext.

Aquanet: the 1990 system from Halasz, Trigg, and Marshall at Xerox PARC, described as a tool to hold your knowledge in place.

VIKI: the first spatial hypertext system, designed by Cathy Marshall as a reaction to Aquanet and the start of an enormously influential line of research

A notepad for my Zettelkasten! 🗃️

30 index cards, some bookbinder’s (PVA) glue, a brush, some clips, and ten minutes of craft time. We’re ready for the road…

Index Card Accessories for Note Taking on the Go

Index Card “Notebooks”?

Before I go the DIY route, has anyone seen gummed 4 x 6″ index cards available for sale? I’d love to have a bunch of index cards temporarily glued together almost in notebook form for easy use and portability.

I’m looking for something along the lines of traditional note pads or memo pads like this: https://finecardstock.com/product/memo-pads-paper-white-4×6/, but which used a thicker index card stock.

I know there are a handful of manufacturers who make spiral bound versions with perforations for tearing cards out, but I’m looking for something a tad less bulky for putting in a back pocket or jacket pocket. I’ve also considered using binder clips and even book rings, but again, I’m trying to slim the system down.

If there’s nothing great, I may just go with my favorite cards and DIY with some PVA Glue which is often used in book binding and is suggested frequently in crafting videos like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Wp0sLpnMY. In the end, this may be the best route to allow me to choose my favorite cards in addition to how thick I can make the “notebooks”.

Note card cases, folios, and holders

Similar/related/useful things I’ve come across in this related space:

Kaitiaki 3×5 Inches Index Card Organizer, though they don’t seem to have anything for 4 x 6 inch index cards.

Rite in the Rain (zettelkasting in the elements while hiking anyone?), though they all appear to be designed around 3 x 5″ cards.

Oxford At-Hand Note Card Case, this could work, but as ever, it only seems to be available for 3 x 5″ index cards

YOAVIP 4×6 Index Cards Clear Plastic Holder looked interesting, but was a larger, notebook sized version, though still had some useful portability features, yet might be a bit persnickety for regular in-and-out usage.

Other ideas?

Has anyone else done this or anything similar? How about wallets, folios, or thin covers? What’s your experience?

Update

This is ultimately what I ended up doing:

A notepad for my Zettelkasten! 🗃️
30 index cards, some bookbinder’s (PVA) glue, a brush, some clips, and ten minutes of craft time. We’re ready for the road…

Analog Zettelkasten Nightmares 🗃️

Replied to Commonplace Book, a Verb or a Noun? by

Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)

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.

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?

Victor Margolin’s zettelkasten process for note taking and writing

It’s not as refined or as compartmentalized as Niklas 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.)

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.

Victor Margolin’s note taking and writing process

Collecting materials and bibliographies in files based on categories (for chapters)
Reads material, excerpts/note making on 5 x 7″ note cards
- Generally with a title (based on visual in video)
- excerpts have page number references (much like literature notes, the refinement linking and outlining happens separately later in his mapping and writing processes)
- filed in a box with tabbed index cards by chapter number with name
- video indicates that he does write on both sides of cards breaking the usual rule to write only on one side
Uses large pad of newsprint (roughly 18″ x 24″ based on visualization) to map out each chapter in visual form using his cards in a non-linear way. Out of the diagrams and clusters he creates a linear narrative form.
Tapes diagrams to wall
Writes in text editor on computer as he references the index cards and the visual map.

I’ve developed a way of working to make this huge project of a world history of design manageable.
—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.
—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.
—Victor Margolin

Listened to Howard Rheingold on Tools for Thought | Episode 94 • August 14, 2022 by Jorge Arango from The Informed Life

“We’re extremely powerful when it comes to making sense and finding connections, doing it visually instead of with a page.” Howard Rheingold is an eminent author, maker, and educator. His work has explored and defined key aspects of digital culture, including the use of computers as tools for mind augmentation, virtual communities, and social media literacy. In this conversation, we discuss computers as extensions for our minds, Douglas Engelbart’s unfinished revolution, basic literacies for interacting in information environments, and the resurgence of Tools for Thought.

Interesting and some useful base material here on literacies, but one can’t get very deep in 30 minutes with Rheingold on this topic. I would have rather this been 6 hours long and then multiple times that.

Listened to Mark Bernstein on Tinderbox by

Jorge Arango from The Informed Life

Mark Bernstein is chief scientist of Eastgate Systems, Inc. He’s been writing hypertexts and developing hypertext authoring software since the late 1980s. Mark is the creator of Tinderbox and other tools for thinking that “harness the power of the link.” In this conversation, we discuss thinking through connected notes.

Some subtle insights here.

representational talkback; the design of taking notes in the present when you’re not sure how they’ll connect to ideas in the (imagined) future; The Tinderbox Way; by force, all research is bottom up.

New Mastodon Instances and a Local Timeline Experiment

I’ve been tempted to join a smaller Mastodon instance to be able to appreciate the value of having a useful local timeline. Mastodon.social is so large as to have a generally un-useful local timeline because I lack the context of all the users and its generally very hit-and-miss for my discovery and serendipity needs. It’s not like I really spent a lot of time sipping from Twitter’s firehose timeline, which is a rough equivalent.

I almost jumped yesterday when Jim Groom and the Reclaim Hosting spun up a Mastodon instance focused on DS 106 at https://social.ds106.us/about. I’ve followed a large part of that community for over a decade, but didn’t have the bandwidth.

This morning I noticed that Boris Mann and gang have spun up a Mastodon instance around the idea of tools for thought which dovetails with their efforts at Tools for Thought Rocks! So I’m going to bite there to see what happens and have the experience of a smaller specific and focused timeline to watch.

I still have to figure out how to best dovetail the experience into my own IndieWeb site given potential limitations with backfeed of POSSE posts from Brid.gy. Perhaps I’ll just use it as read only to start and simply federate my content there? We’ll see. It’s solely an experiment, but some of those few already there are people I see regularly. No guarantees on how much I’ll post there, but if it’s your favorite reader/platform you can find me at @chrisaldrich@toolsforthought.rocks. Most likely anything I post to it will be more relevant to thinking.

As ever, following me directly via my own site is the best way to ensure you’re getting the best of everything.

Hypothes.is as a Digital Zettelkasten for Neologism and Word Collection for Wordnik

A little while ago, one of the followers of my Hypothes.is account where I actively mark up my reading with highlights, annotations, and notes asked me why I was tagging seemingly random sentences with “wordnik” and other odd tags that started with “hw-“. Today I thought I’d write out the explanation of the habits around one of my side hobbies of word collecting.

Some background

In the book The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester describes the pigeonhole and slip system that professor James Murray used to create the Oxford English Dictionary. The editors essentially put out a call to readers to note down interesting every day words they found in their reading along with examples sentences and references. They then collected these words alphabetically into pigeonholes and from here were able to collectively compile their magisterial dictionary. Those who are fans of the various methods of knowledge collection and management represented by the index card-based commonplace book or the zettelkasten, will appreciate this scheme as a method of collectively finding and collating knowledge. It’s akin to Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine’s work on creating the Mundaneum, but focused on the niche area of lexicography and historical linguistics.

The Professor and the Madman is broadly the fascinating story of Dr. W. C. Minor, an insane asylum patient, who saw the call to collect words and sentences began a written correspondence with James Murray by sending in over ten thousand slips with words from his personal reading.

Wordnik and Hypothes.is

A similar word collecting scheme is currently happening on the internet now, though perhaps with a bit more focus on interesting neologisms (and hopefully without me being cast as an insane asylum patient.) The lovely folks at the online dictionary Wordnik have been using the digital annotation tool Hypothes.is to collect examples of words as they happen in the wild. One can create a free account on the Hypothes.is service and quickly and easily begin collecting words for the effort by highlighting example sentences and tagging with “wordnik” and “hw-[InsertFoundWordHere]”.

So for example, this morning I was reading about the clever new animations in the language app Duolingo and came across a curious new word (at least to me): viseme.

To create accurate animations, we generate the speech, run it through our in-house speech recognition and pronunciation models, and get the timing for each word and phoneme (speech sound). Each sound is mapped onto a visual representation, or viseme, in a set we designed based on linguistic features.

So I clicked on my handy browser extension for Hypothes.is, highlighted the sentence with a bit of context, and tagged it with “wordnik” and “hw-viseme”. The “hw-” prefix ostensibly means “head word” which is how lexicographers refer to the words you see defined in dictionaries.

Then the fine folks at Wordnik are able to access the public annotations matching the tag Wordnik, and use Hypothes.is’ API to pull in the collections of new words for inclusion into their ever-growing corpus.

Since I’ve collected interesting new words and neologisms for ages anyway, this has been a quick and easy method of helping out other like minded word collectors along the way. In addition to the ability to help out others, a side benefit of the process is that the collected words are all publicly available for reading and using in daily life! You can not only find the public page for Wordnik words on Hypothes.is, but you can subscribe to it via RSS to see all the clever and interesting neologisms appearing in the English language as collected in real time! So if you’re the sort who enjoys touting new words at cocktail parties, a rabid cruciverbalist who refuses to be stumped by this week’s puzzle, or a budding lexicographer yourself, you’ve now got a fantastic new resource! I’ve found it to be far more entertaining and intriguing than any ten other word-of-the-day efforts I’ve seen in published or internet form.

If you like, there’s also a special Hypothes.is group you can apply to join to more easily aid in the effort. Want to know more about Wordnik and their mission, check out their informative Kickstarter page.

Some will think I’m in the pocket of #BigIndexCard, but I’m thinking it’s time to re-introduce #IndexCards to the #EdTech scene. It will dramatically personalize learning while locking out the #SurveillanceCapitalism crowd.
#CriticalPedagogy #WissenschaftlichenArbeitens #zettelkasten

I’ve already been doing the work anyway, so I’ve updated my NaNoWriMo profile to reflect the research and writing work I’m doing on a book related to note taking and its historical traditions. I’m writing it using my commonplace book and Luhmann-esque zettelkasten as tools.