Notes

Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes

Eight: Data types and Structure

There’s lots of data I want in my commonplace: likes, bookmarks, things I read, annotations, notes, quotes, watches, listens, etc. 

I implement them with Post Kinds Plugin to provide both structure, presentation, and context to most of my notes.

#HeyPresstoConf20

Each post can have its own category and tags for a variety of taxonomic and (most importantly) search purposes.

 

Six: Social Media?

Social media provides a bit of a simulacrum of the sort of networked thinking we might like to have, but you need to have dozens of accounts for different pieces of knowledge and collection and have followerships in all for interaction. Here we’re missing the idea of centralization.

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It’s also painfully difficult to search for your data across the multiple information silos which often block search engines.

Five: The Memex

This is just what Vannevar Bush suggests in his famous article As We May Think in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic. Here he posits the Memex, and opens up the idea of networked information.

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The internet itself could be though of as a massive living and ever-growing commonplace book which can be digitally queried to provide the answers to nearly every conceivable question.

(Some may forget that Bush was the thesis advisor of Claude Shannon, the father of the modern digital age.)

 

Four: Networked Thinking

Handwritten commonplaces could be a person’s own version of “networked thinking” and mode of creation. So why not take the additional step further and have a digital online commonplace?

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The ability to tag, hyperlink, and search sites adds to their general usability in a way that traditional handwritten commonplace books lacked.

Three: History & Examples

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century.

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The following all had/kept commonplaces:

  • Charles Darwin
  • Francis Bacon
  • Ben Jonson
  • John Milton
  • Mrs Anna Anderson
  • E.M. Forster
  • John Locke
  • W.H. Auden
  • H.P. Lovecraft
  • Virginia Woolf
  • Joseph Conrad
  • Washington Irving
  • Victor Hugo
  • Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton, a mathematician and physicist, used a “Waste Book” to write his initial conceptualization of the calculus. A digitized copy of this commonplace is held at the University of Cambridge and is freely available to view online.

 

Two: Definition

Commonplaces are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aide-mémoire for remembering useful concepts or facts.

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Each one is unique to its creator’s particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler’s responses.

“Commonplace” is a translation of the Latin locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós, see literary topos) which means “a general or common topic”, such as a statement of proverbial wisdom.

One: Introduction

Good morning #HeyPresstoConf20! 

I’ll briefly show how I use my WordPress website as an evolution of the Renaissance era commonplace book. This now often goes by the other names wiki, digital garden, second brain, or zettelkasten.

A personal website is more than a “blog.” Rather than spread my digital identity & data across social media, I keep it in one spot for (re)search & re-use.

If you have questions, feel free to ask via Twitter or the comments section of my website. You can also explore my website which has lots of examples–big and small.

All of my presentation today is on my own website with additional tidbits and context. The highlight portions are being syndicated to Twtitter.

For those who need the additional context, this post is one of fifteen which will appear in succession as a Twitter “presentation” for the Hey Pressto! Conference 2020: A WordPress and ClassicPress conference which happens only on Twitter (and my personal website/commonplace book).

Just musing a bit: I can create an IFTTT recipe to create a webhook to target a Micropub endpoint on my website, but it would be cooler if I could directly add a recipe to target the Micropub endpoint directly. I want IFTTT: the micropub client.

cc: Zapier, Integromat, n8n

Reminder: We’re hosting A Domain of One’s Own Meetup: “Domains and the Cloud” in about 2 hours. Hope you’ll join us. 
Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2020 at 12:00 PM Eastern / 9:00 AM Pacific

https://events.indieweb.org/2020/09/domain-of-one-s-own-meetup-september-2020–908ut7UmA2T3

Have you watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix? Curious what to do next to help solve the (your) problem? The IndieWeb’s Homebrew Website Club will be discussing just that at 6:30 Pacific tonight after The Social Dilemma Round Table.

Join us here: https://events.indieweb.org/2020/09/homebrew-website-club-west-coast-zwt9zal3H3DP

Kanye West apparently tweeted screenshots of one of his contracts with Def Jam in 2012 this morning. While it may seem crazy and odd, this is the sort of data that doesn’t get leaked within the entertainment industry very often. I’m curious to see how the level of the details released shifts the balance of power to artists in the future since surely this contract would represent one of the higher levels of performer contract in the business at the moment.

A&R and business affairs executives are sure to hate this for the coming year(s). It would be nice if more artists shared these sorts of points in public to help out others without the level of legal representation that Kanye has.

I also wonder if/when these sorts of contracts will have non-disclosure clauses in them to help protect the labels? It may start today if artists aren’t careful.