Aegir (Aegir.org)I've been meaning to do some kind of index card style template for the site for ages and never got round to it. Now I have. I’m quite pleased with it. CSS repeating gradient lines and all that. ❧
ᔥ in // pimoore.ca ()
Today we reached the end of Middlemarch. Here are some of my students' copies pic.twitter.com/KPm9QO5wdd
— Amber Regis (@AmberRegis) December 10, 2021
“People come, they see everything and nothing more than that, just like in porn movies; consequently, they leave disappointed.”
This is a telling story about people’s perception of the simplicity of the idea of a slip box (zettelkasten, card catalog, commonplace book or whatever you want to call your note taking system).
It’s also a testament to the fact that the value of a zettelkasten is in the upfront work that is required in making valuable notes and linking them. Many people end up trying out the simple looking system and then wonder why it isn’t working for them. The answer is that they’re not working for it.
Just as sex can be fun, working with a system of notes can be fun. (“Just” can be a problematic word, n’cest pas?) In either framing, both partners need to do some work—neither necessarily the same work. The end result can be magic.
As Potter Stewart might have said, “I may not be able to define proper note taking, but I know it when I see it.”
Mandy Brown (A Working Library)books are a means of listening to the thoughts of others so that you can hear your own thoughts more clearly. ❧
And annotation helps you save those thoughts, share them with others, and further refine them.
...when I browse from someone’s blog over to their Substack it feels like going from a sweet little neighborhood into a staid corporate park. A little piece of joy dies in me when that happens because it’s another reminder of the corporatization of the web. ❧
For academics, annotation is also essential to scholarly communication and knowledge production. With Annotation, we eagerly accepted a social and scholarly responsibility to spark, curate, and facilitate discussion about annotation. ❧
In the name of God, I ask the technology giants to stop exploiting human weakness, people’s vulnerability, for the sake of profits without caring about the spread of hate speech, grooming, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation.
Image made with the help of BibleMunger 2.0
JR Dingwall (jrdingwall.ca)This week I was able to catch up a bit on some podcasts I subscribe to. One of the casts I’ve been enjoying lately is 25 Years of Ed Tech, a serialized version of Martin Weller’s book by the same title. Now audio books are plenty good by themselves, but this particular podcast has an addition episode per chapter called “between the chapters” where a host interviews members of the ed tech community (those around Martin in some way) about the topic of the previous chapter. This week was all about blogs.
He mentions Stephen Downes‘ regular workflow as well. I think mine is fairly similar to Stephen’s. To some extent, I write much more on my own website now than I ever had before. This is because I post a lot more frequently to my own site, in part because it’s just so easy to do. I’ll bookmark things or post about what I’ve recently read or watched. My short commentary on some of these is just that—short commentary. But occasionally I discover, depending on the subject, that those short notes and bookmark posts will spring into something bigger or larger. Sometimes it’s a handful of small posts over a few days or weeks that ultimately inspires the longer thing. The key seems to be to write something.
Perhaps a snowball analogy will work? I take a tiny snowball of words and give it a proverbial roll. Sometimes it sits there and other times it rolls down the hill and turns into a much larger snowball. Other times I get a group of them and build a full snowman.
Of course lately a lot of my writing starts, like this did, as an annotation (using Hypothes.is) to something I was reading. It then posts to my website with some context and we’re off to the races.
It’s just this sort of workflow that I was considering when I recently suggested that those using annotation as a classroom social annotation tool, might also consider using it to help students create commonplace books to help students spur their writing. The key is to create small/low initial stakes that have the potential to build up into something bigger. Something akin to the user interface of Twitter (and their tweetstorm functionality). Write a short sentence or two on which you can hit publish, but if the mood strikes, then write another, and another until you’ve eventually gotten to something that could be a blog post (or article). Of course if you do this, you should own it.
This is also the sort of perspective which Sönke Ahrens takes in his excellent book How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers, though there he’s prescribing something for general note taking when I might suggest it’s a prescription for a pedagogy behind living and writing.
We are taught not to point. Pointing with your finger is rude, even though it is often extremely convenient and efficient. Medieval readers do not seem to have been hindered by this convention: in …
As I’m thinking about this, I can’t help but think that Hypothes.is, if only for fun, ought to add a manicule functionality to their annotation product.
I totally want to be able to highlight portions of my reading with an octopus manicule!
I can see their new tagline now:
Helping hands on the digital page.
I’m off to draw some octopi…
Instead of using the historic word “commonplacing”, Eminem uses the fantastic euphemism “stacking ammo”. Given his use of his words and lyrics collection in battle rap, this seems very apropos.
Cooper analogizes the collection as the scrawlings of a crazy person. In some sense, this may be because there is no traditional order, head words, or indexing system with what otherwise looks like a box of random pages and ideas. One might argue that the multitude of notebooks, papers, colors, sizes, etc. provides a sort of context which Eminem could use as a method of loci for remembering where to find particular ideas, thus making the need for an indexing system feel superfluous to him. This is even more likely if he’s regularly using, maintaining, and mining his material for daily work.
ᔥ in Eminem has his own version of commonplace system containing words that rhyme. : commonplacebook ()
Matthew Daniel Eddy (Intellectual History Review Volume 20, Issue 2, Pages 227-252)Müller-Wille and Scharf ‘Indexing Nature’, also points out that Linnaeus interleaved blanksheets into his texts so that he could take notes. Cooper points out that this had been a common practice in natural historysince at least the late seventeenth century (Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous, 74–5). ❧
Jamie Tanna (Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer)Announcing the Microformats translation layer for book data.
h-book ❧
h-book is an experimental microformat at best.
I might recommend for minimizing the vocabulary that one might use the existing h-product instead and allow parsers to find an ISBN, Library of Congress book number, ASIN, UPC, or other product code to determine “bookness”.
Annotated on August 01, 2021 at 09:13AM
Jonathan Edwards’s so-called “Blank Bible.” JE received as a gift from Benjamin Pierpoint, his brother in law, a unique book. Structurally, it is a strange animal. It is a small, double-column King James, unstitched and then spliced back together again inside a large blank journal. The result is a one-of-a-kind Bible that has an empty sheet between every page of Scripture text.❧
Interleaving a copy of your favorite text can leave massive amounts of space for marginalia!
Copies of print and digital editions of Jonathan Edwards’ blank Bible are available.
Apparently one can buy modern copies of interleaved bibles as well: https://www.amazon.com/Interleaved-Journal-Hardcover-Letter-Comfort/dp/078524316X/
Video review of an interleaved bible:
What other books can be found in interleaved editions? Ayn Rand perhaps?
Matthias Melcher (x28's new Blog)Comment on Chris Aldrich’s very comprehensive description of the “new boil” of note-taking.
One thing expected from the note-taking tools, makes me particularly skeptical: their collaborative/ public use. I think the lifecycle of notes cannot be continuous from capturing to communication, unless I forgo the possibility of cryptic, sloppy, abbreviated shorthand meant just for the “me later” that Magdalena Böttger depicted so aptly in 2005. ❧
Some of the value of notes being done and readable in public means that one typically puts a bit more effort into them at the start. This can make them much more useful and valuable later on. It also means that they usually have more substance and context for use by others in collaboration or other reuses.
Short notes are often called fleeting notes which may or may not be processed into something more substantive. The ones that do become more substantive can more easily be reused in other future settings.
Sonke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes is one of the better arguments for the why and how of note taking.
Annotated on July 06, 2021 at 10:24AM
Note that such careful treatment applies only to a certain kind of my notes. While many project-related notes go straight to simple folders of the operating system, the notes that don’t fit in one of the folders, deserve special attention. I don’t know yet where I might deploy them — possibly in multiple places. ❧
I like that you’ve got such a fascinating system. It’s very similar in form and substance to one that I use, but which relies on a wholly different technology stack: https://boffosocko.com/2020/08/29/a-note-taking-problem-and-a-proposed-solution/
Annotated on July 06, 2021 at 10:25AM
Which makes them similar to “commonplace”: reusable in many places. But this connotation has led to a pejorative flavor of the German translation “Gemeinplatz” which means platitude. That’s why I prefer to call them ‘evergreen’ notes, although I am not sure if I am using this differentiation correctly. ❧
I’ve only run across the German “Gemeinplatz” a few times with this translation attached. Sad to think that this negative connotation has apparently taken hold. Even in English the word commonplace can have a somewhat negative connotation as well meaning “everyday, ordinary, unexceptional” when the point of commonplacing notes is specifically because they are surprising or extraordinary by definition.
Your phrasing of “evergreen notes” seems close enough. I’ve seen some who might call the shorter notes you’re making either “seedlings” or “budding” notes. Some may wait for bigger expansions of their ideas into 500-2000 word essays before they consider them “evergreen” notes. (Compare: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history and https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes). Of course this does vary quite a bit from person to person in my experience, so your phrasing certainly fits.
I’ve not seen it crop up in the digital gardens or zettelkasten circles specifically but the word “evergreen” is used in the journalism space to describe a fully formed article that can be re-used wholesale on a recurring basis. Usually they’re related to recurring festivals, holidays, or cyclical stories like “How to cook the perfect Turkey” which might get recycled a week before Thanksgiving every year.
Annotated on July 06, 2021 at 10:37AM
Julia Tan (Integrating Webmentions Into NextJS Blog)I've been meaning to check out webmentions for a while now, as I had been debating between installing some kind of comments package for this blog or just using social to interact with visitors and readers. I had a day off on Friday, and so decided to take the plunge and try implementing webmentions as a way to collate all of the Twitter interactions with my blog posts.
It wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be, so I’ve written this blog post for anyone who’s trying to do the same with their NextJS blog. ❧
I recall Monica Powell writing a bit about this with some video a while back.
Perhaps not as useful after-the-fact, but her post is hiding on in the see also section of https://indieweb.org/Webmention where I’ve archived a copy of your article as well. Maybe the IndieWeb wiki needs a NextJS page to make this a bit more findable? Where else might you have looked for guidance.
Perhaps the similarities and differences in your approaches will help others in the future.
Annotated on June 27, 2021 at 08:38PM
Tell me on Twitter @bionicjulia and have your tweet show up below! ❧
Or alternately write about it on your own site and send a webmention. 🙂
Annotated on June 27, 2021 at 08:41PM
