Braiding Sweetgrass
by Robin Kimmerer
(non-fiction, philosophy)
Started July 2022 32% – stuck on a boring chapter
Seeing that you’ve stalled on Braiding Sweetgrass (one of my favorites), if you’ll allow me, I’ll make a recommendation that worked out incredibly well for me when I read it.
I came to it at a time when I was doing a lot of reading on Indigenous ways of knowing and the idea of orality. As a result, in addition to buying a physical copy, I got an audiobook version from the library. My first reading was actually a listening. There was something more intriguing, poetic, and authentic about hearing it. Listening also give more power to her voice as a storyteller. Once I’d finished, I revisited some of my favorite parts to re-read and make some notes.
The book also has some benefit in that while it is somewhat linear, the chapters could be read out of order or even skipped without destroying the whole.
I hope you ultimately find it as beautiful as I did.
I spend a lot of time making notes from my reading. I’ve even made notes from my reading of books about making notes from one’s reading. Have I lost you yet?
Many people who write or otherwise opine about making notes from your reading say you should underline or highlight favourite or key passa...
That book annotating monster Adler indicated that if he read books second and subsequent times that he would generally purchase a new copy and mark it up afresh. Doublemonster!
If, like me, you grieve Halloween’s passing, I’m delighted to inform you that I have officially extended Halloween season. The last day of the season is now November 22.
Excellent news, as this gets us almost to the celebration of Mari Lwyd!
Replied toa thread by Donna Yates and Shawn Graham (archaeo.social)
For the past few weeks I've been working hard to bring a modified #Zettelkasten system into my academic life via #Obsidian. Obsidian (or knowledge management) tips, tricks, plugins, etc very welcome.
@Drdonnayates I'd say, ignore the temptation to install all the plugins, until you get the feel of things. And even then, keep it minimal. Otherwise I at least get distracted in pursuit of The One True System instead of just using the damned thing.
You might find some use in the materials re Obsidian I use with my students, https://shawngraham.github.io/hist1900
@electricarchaeo OH do I so want the one true system...I want it.
@Drdonnayates@electricarchaeo
Shawn’s admonition to keep things simple is valuable. I’m hoping to go through his excellent looking class materials shortly.
If it provides some reassurance, though I’ve not gotten into the specifics I’m reasonably certain that Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, among many others, had significant practices.
If you go beyond basic notes, I’ll have something on to do list functionality shortly, but our friend @kfitz had something here recently: https://kfitz.info/tasks-matter/
If you’ve not found it yet, Obsidian has a Discord with a specific channel for academia.
Nous avons tous pris des notes durant nos cours, nos réunions ou pendant la lecture d’un livre. Mais que deviennent ces notes ? Est-ce qu’il n’existe pas un moyen de les rendre durable dans le temps et surtout de les utiliser de façon efficace? Cette méthode c’est le ZETTELKASTEN, une technique inventée par NIKLAS LUHMANN pour organiser ses notes et ses observations pour en faire des livres et des articles denses et riches. https://youtu.be/1ycG6ojNPq8 #zettelkasten #efficacité #organisation #ecrire
@ctietze @romainlarue
Pourquoi ne pas utiliser la méthode des fiches de Roland Barthes? 😁 #FichierBoîte
https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27fichier+bo%C3%AEte%27
I started the second week of "Programming 101: An Introduction to #Python for Educators" on #FutureLearn and wrote a small quiz about Arabic verbs: https://github.com/kranatalie/Introduction-to-Python/blob/main/arabic-quiz-bot.py It was fun again and I'm actually a little proud! Would really like to recommend the course again. It's the perfect gentle introduction for me that doesn't overwhelm but still teaches enough to get an idea of what's possible. Looking forward to the final challenge this week: Building commands into your bot. Let's try this! https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/programming-101
A new year brings new calls for a return to personal blogging as an antidote to the toxic and extractive systems of social media.
@cplong@sramsay
IndieWeb, blogging, fountain pens?!? I almost hate to mention it for the rabbit hole it may become, but you’ll get a bit of all three here: https://micro.blog/discover/pens. Happy New Year!
The combination of Zotero (with the Better BibTeX plugin) and Obsidian with the Citation and Projects plugins are the perfect way for me as a PhD student to keep track of the literature to be read and already read.
This is excellent! I’d already had the majority of it set up and I was going to spend some time this week to write some custom code with Dataview to do this, but apparently there’s a reasonably flexible plugin that will get me 95% of what I’m sure to want without any work! Thanks Natalie.
Incidentally, I spent a chunk of yesterday looking at S.D. Goitein’s note taking process (zettelkasten) in his work on the Cairo Geniza, specifically with respect to:
Zinger, Oded. “Finding a Fragment in a Pile of Geniza: A Practical Guide to Collections, Editions, and Resources.” Jewish History 32, no. 2 (December 1, 2019): 279–309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-019-09314-6.
Slowly customizing my site layout enough to get it to validate h-entry info according to this nifty tool: https://indiewebify.me Wow, do I teach myself best by exploring other examples. #blogging #indieWeb
@ryanrandall@natalie I’m seeing more HCommons folx looking at #IndieWeb, so I’ll mention that I’ve got several IndieWeb friendly sites including on #WordPress as does @KFitz, who I think has also been experimenting with static sites lately. If you need support, there’s a great and helpful community you’ll find at https://chat.indieweb.org for all your questions. You might find some useful tidbits and examples at https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education as well.
What website(s) are you using if you blog about movies / TV shows and want to link to general info about them? Is it still IMDB, or is there something better?
@tchambers @coachtony @jeffjarvis@mathowie Thanks for these links! Definitely exciting to see how this is being approached from different angles. I’m excited for this next chapter.
@buster@medium.social @tchambers @coachtony@medium.social @jeffjarvis@mathowie
Another example of longer posts which are folded under a “read more” type link within the Fediverse itself can be seen in the Hometown fork of Mastodon (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown), which is running the hcommons.social platform. The admins have upped the character limit to 1000 instead of the usual 500. Ideally those reading in other parts of the network would see the beginning of a post and a “Read more” link to read the remainder of the piece.
I often post to my own WordPress website which has a plugin to make it appear as if it were ActivityPub compatible. If I follow it via a Hometown-based (Mastodon) server, like my hcommons.social account, I see all the full short notes/replies content which are usually 1000 characters or less. For posts over that limit, there’s a “Read More >” which opens up the entirety of the article within the hcommons.social interface where I can read it in its entirety. Naturally there’s a link to the original, so I can also go back to read that if I chose.
I’ve just gone over the 1000 character limit, so I’ll post this on my own site, syndicate a copy to my hcommons.social account, and with any luck it will serve as an example of how all this might work between WordPress, a forked version of Mastodon, and Mastodon itself, as well as for testing it for reading in other parts of the Fediverse if one wished.
Beyond this reading experience, one should also be aware of a separate user interface/interaction problem inherent in how Mastodon and potentially other parts of the Fediverse handle replies and who can see them. I’ll leave this link to explain that issue separately: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109559268498004036. (Hopefully your instance will let you see a subsection of some of the replies to it…)
An additional benefit that one gets in bolting on ActivityPub the way it works for my WordPress site is that folks who subscribe to @chrisaldrich can see linked text natively from within Mastodon despite the fact that Mastodon doesn’t allow one to wrap text with URLs to link out.
Apropos of my last boost (https://post.lurk.org/@liza/109621185749177937), as well as Chris Long's recent suggestion (https://hcommons.social/@cplong/109604628817946536), I've just logged into Feedly for the first time in eons. 19 of the feeds I had been following are now not-found, and another 18 have been inactive for a period of a year or longer. I'm doing some significant pruning, but also looking for new feeds to add. If the move out of Twitter has got you contemplating blogging again, send me a link!
A group of people have been posting with the tag #FeedReaderFriday with some people and resources for just this sort of effort.
If you’re repopulating a feed reader, I’ve got a long list in which folks may find some interesting tidbits hiding: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/. Potentially easier if your reader supports OPML.
Also apropos of feed readers, I've just rediscovered [NetNewsWire](https://netnewswire.com). How awesome that @brentsimmons has kept it alive (and still free!) after all this time.
@KFitz NetNewsWire may be one of the rarest beasts of all in that it’s an old web project, like Upcoming.org, which was sold off to one or more companies, but later repurchase and revitalized by its original creator. I hope we see more of this in the coming years. #WebReclamation
Ok, so I have a Remarkable. I use Zotero a lot, and have started experimenting with Obsidian. I also have used Matter, but never really grew to love it and am considering Readwise, although I suppose I could go back to Pocket.
Anyone have good workflows that centre around Remarkable / Zotero, but include Obsidian and / or Readwise?
#ResearchWorkflow #ToolsOfAcademia #WritingTools
I've seen a bunch of people sharing this and repeating the conclusion: that the success is because the CEO loves books t/f you need passionate leaders and... while I think that's true, I don't think that's the conclusion to draw here. The winning strategy wasn't love, it was delegation and local, on the ground, knowledge. This win comes from a leader who acknowledges people in the stores know their communities and can see and react faster to sales trends in store... https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and
@Chronotope Also heavily at play here in their decentralization of control is regression toward the mean (Galton, 1886) by spreading out buying decisions over a more diverse group which is more likely to reflect the buying population than one or two corporate buyers whose individual bad decisions can destroy a company.
Tracy Durnell (tracydurnell.com)
Kimberly Hirsh, PhD
Romain Larue
Ryan Randall
kimonostereo
Buster Benson (@buster@medium.social)
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Fredrik Graver
Aram Zucker-Scharff