Notes

Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes
Who else at #I⁠Anno21 has a practice of public annotation using Hypothes.is? Or perhaps on your own website, or other platform? Please share your usernames, URLs, and feeds so we can all have a richer group of examples.

For example, you can find me at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich, much of which is mirrored on my personal website in various ways as bookmarks, read posts, notes, and even a custom annotation post. Here are a few others I follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

Many annotation tools have scant social features, but there are ways to follow others’ work.

 

Just days before the 10th anniversary of the Smallest Federated Wiki, Ward Cunningham will be talking about the future of note taking tomorrow morning.

Free registration for the event at I Annotate 2021 should still be open.

There are also expected appearances by Daniel Doyon, Co-Founder of Readwise; Tienson Qin, Creator/Founder of LogSeq; Oliver Sauter, Founder of WorldBrain/Memex, and Flancian of the Anagora.

With any luck, it may help mark a resurgence of digital versions of the commonplace book on the order of magnitude represented by the works of Rudolphus Agricola, Desiderius Erasmus, and Philip Melanchthon during the Renaissance.

Promo card for I Annotate 2021 with the subtitle Reading Together and featuring a drawing of a book with two hands writing on each other in an ouroboros-like style

Curious that I’ve seen ramify as a verb within commonplace book settings, but not seen it in regard to zettelkasten or digital gardens in the context of Obsidian, Roam Research, Notion, et al.

I half expected to see Petrus Ramus‘s name in the etymology of the word. If nothing else, it’s a fitting word. Perhaps it was a bit of nominative determinism?

other forms: ramify; ramifies; ramified; ramifying

Yes, somehow this is the sort of Wikipedia entry I find myself editing at 10 on a Monday night:

A Catholicized version of the Theatrum entitled the Magnum theatrum vitae humanae (1631) by Lawrence Beyerlinck was one of the largest printed commonplace books of the early modern era. These two works “may fairly be described as the early modern ancestors of the great dictionnaire raisonné of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie of Diderot.”[9]

9. Havens, Earle (2001). Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (first ed.). Yale University. p. 52.

With a lovely flower drawn into this illuminated printed leaf from the Floretus cum commento, a twelfth-century florilegium (literally “books of flowers”) attributed to Bernard de Clairvaux [Cologne, 1499], could this make Clairvaux the patron saint of digital gardens?

Illuminated printed leaf from the Floretus cum commento featuring a flower drawn into the open space of a twelfth-century florilegium attributed to Bernard de Clairvaux.

Writer Jean Paul (1763-1825) on the importance of his Zettelkasten, kept in the form of a commonplace book:

“In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first.”
—Jean Paul instructions to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812 (as quoted in translation from Exhibition opening on March 4th: »Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie«)

Featured image: Heinrich Pfenninger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Evie (taunting me to tuck her in before she gets to 15): …, 9-Mississippi, 10-Mississippi, 11-Mississippi, …

Me: We don’t Mississippi in this house! Maybe we should Tennessee since that’s where Grandma and Grandpa live?

Evie: I’ve Mississippi’ed since I was three.

Me: Maybe since we’re Welsh we should Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch? You know: 1-Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, 2-Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, …

Together: 3-Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch…

Evie (interrupting): Wait, what number are we on now???

Just saw my first news report since the start of the pandemic and introduction of vaccines where a reporter specified in voice over of video of people sitting within a foot or two of each other that everyone was fully vaccinated.

Helps make it feel like we’ve turned some sort of corner.

Of course the segment was about the coming plague of locusts…