reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to A thread on Hypothes.is in relation to Audrey Watters' Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015: Indie Ed-Tech by Audrey Watters, Jeremy Dean, Dan Whaley (Hack Education / Hypothes.is)

it supports students and teachers and schools in managing their own infrastructure, their own labor, their own data.
—Audrey Watters

Ok, so is hypothes.is doing this? How can it?

my annotations must be better accessible/organizable --the current "My Annotations" is not enough

annotation must be exportable

—jeremydean on Dec 30, 2015

And ultimately, you need to be able to completely run your own annotation infrastructure, but create and access it through a universal client.

—dwhly on Dec 30, 2015

Sure. Less clear to me how that looks/works and what that I do today online is similar in "ownership." But does your "you" refer to students or teachers or schools or all of the above?

The first two (I list) seem key in terms of practical adherence to these principles for everyday users.

—jeremydean on Dec 30, 2015

It's similar in character to the Domain of One's Own initiative. From a long term perspective, you might be better off taking ownership of your own infrastructure, that you can carry with you and guarantee will be available over long time periods (decades to centuries). Hypothes.is should at the very least permit you to do so if you prefer-- regardless of whether we continue to provide an annotation service at scale (which I very much think we should).

Your question around "you" is an important one. I might for instance, set up my own annotation server for my personal notes-- with the confidence that I'll always be able to find a reliable hosting provider for those. Similar to how I have my own web domain, and I host it at one place now, but I can always move it if that location goes out of business-- and my website will be identical to its current form in the new place. In the same way, my current personal email is through an address at my own domain. I don't need to depend on gmail being around forever.

As a teacher, I might use a more common service provider (like Hypothes.is) for class lessons-- one that my students are already likely to have accounts on. As web travelers, we're really accustomed to browsing seamlessly between servers-- it's understood to be the essential architecture of the web. Bringing it to the world of annotations has extraordinary benefits (IMHO) and will serve to foster more adoption and more diversity of applications.

—dwhly on Dec 30, 2015

I’ve been thinking over some of this question for the better part of a decade and even more pointedly since November.

Some of what I’ve been looking at relates back to the renaissance ideas of the commonplace book as well as memory techniques dating back to ancient Greece and even further back. There are ideas like wikis (personal as well as public–Audrey references a great post by Mike Caulfield in her article) and online notebooks tools like Evernote, OneNote, TiddlyWiki, Roam Research, etc. If a student could quickly add all their highlights/annotations into their website, online notebook, Zettelkasten, or other related learning tools, then they could use them for reading, reviewing, or even spaced repetition as provided by platforms like Anki, Mnemosyne, or NeuraCache.

Going back to Jeremy’s original question though:

Ok, so is hypothes.is doing this? How can it?

Hypothesis could immediate do this and quite effectively if it supported the W3C recommended Micropub spec. In short, it’s a standard and open source method for publishing data to a broad spectrum of surfaces so that developers don’t need to build custom solutions for each of thousands of snowflake platforms.

That is, in addition to its current functionality, you could add some code to make Hypothesis a Micropub client!

The quickest and most flexible approach I might suggest would be to allow users to publish their annotations/highlights not only to their accounts, but have UI to trigger a micropub request to their website, online notebook, or other platform.

There’s nothing more I’d want than an easy way to own all the data I’m collecting with Hypothesis and Micropub could quickly add it for a wide variety of set ups and systems. There are already implementations of Micropub servers for a variety of CMS software including WordPress, Drupal, Known, Craft, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, Blot, and Micro.blog with others being added, including Grav. Some of us are actively working on adding it to Wiki-related software as well. Since large portions of the Domain of One’s Own movement are built on these handful, you’d have some pretty quick coverage of not only all this space but even more.

I suspect your dev team could build an implementation in just a few days and it would open up a huge advantage for allowing users to more easily own their H related data on their own websites or in other online locations (while still utilizing the Hypothesis platform for more complex functionality).

There’s some solid documentation and a wealth of open source clients you could look at or borrow code from as well as a test suite. I suspect the IndieWeb Dev chat channel would surface a few additional developers to answer questions about any other issues as they crop up.

If you’d like a quick 5-10 minute demo of how this works for a handful of other clients in conjunction with something like WordPress, I’m happy to volunteer the time and spitball some potential ways Hypothesis could dovetail it and leverage its power.

Replied to a thread (Twitter)

Has anyone built a @netlify / @eleven_ty bookmarklet for creating a new post with a selected bit of text + URL from a website to make link-blogging easier?
— Chris Enns (@iChris) May 13, 2020

@ChrisAldrich has something for WordPress, IIRC.
— André Jaenisch (@AndreJaenisch) May 13, 2020

Lots of potential ways of shaving this yak.

The best “modern” way would be to create a Micropub endpoint and then you can use some of the excellent multi-platform Micropub clients like Quill, Omnibear, Micropublish.net, etc. The benefit of this is that you get way more than just bookmarks.

I don’t know if anyone has set one up to work with Eleventy or Netlify, but there is some prior art for other static site generators.

The low brow solution may be to take the route I took with TiddlyWiki, but that includes some cutting and pasting, so it may be helpful, but isn’t a completely automatic solution. You’ll note there’s a reply at the bottom of the post that modified my code for use with Roam Research which also includes code for browser extensions as well.

If you want to go crazy with some .php, there’s Parse This code for a plugin for WordPress that might be co-opted. It will parse a variety of pages for microformats, JSON-LD, schema, OGP, etc. to return rich data on a huge variety of websites to give you lots of metadata to create a bookmark, but this may be over and above anything you might want. I use it as a built-in product in the Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress to create a wide variety of post types for reply contexts.

Replied to Background by Kate Bowles (Music for Deckchairs)

Make sure the background is clean and generic, and make sure to remove any family photographs, or anything that might be a distraction. I try not to write much about the place where I work, but thi…

Kate’s excellent piece reminds of this apt New Yorker cartoon from a week or so back, although it features a well-dressed man in a tie.

New Yorker cartoon featuring a man neatly dressed in a cute corner on a computer conference call while chaos and mess reigns everywhere else in the room that the camera doesn't see. — Zoom in on reality.

We all know there’s mess everywhere for everyone, otherwise the “joke” wouldn’t land. The sad reality is that the “joke” is our daily harried existence. We definitely don’t need the added pressure of having to performatively pretend otherwise on top of it all.

Perhaps to help out with the nonsense we ought to all post the dual views of the “fantasy” and the “reality”?

Here’s mine which features an impromptu Ikea table crammed into the living room and just feet from the bathroom, the tiny laundry closet, and the kitchen because the “home office” is overly occupied. Notice the hats/shirts/sweaters for days on which self-care has been neglected and I need to throw on something vaguely presentable to appear on camera for a minute or two. (Note: munchkin removed for privacy, but you can see her work six inches from mine.)

Replied to a thread (Twitter)

How did research even happen before the internet? It seems like there was a lot more mnemonic discipline involved. Especially in botany etc: how would you intuit whether you found a new species (of any sort of artifact)?

cc @Meaningness @andy_matuschak
— Max Krieger (@maxkriegers) May 11, 2020

A researcher told me when I was ~12 that on Fridays, he collects all the elementary functions from his papers (like cos(30deg)) so he doesn't have to wait until Monday to go to the library to check the books containing the values. It might not have been cos but you get it.
— adjoint +/- norm (@adamnemecek1) May 11, 2020

incredible. I hope someone did an ethnography/photo archive of this kind of thing pre internet. I wonder what his workspace looked like, I'm picturing something like this:https://t.co/EJE6rg7e5H
— Max Krieger (@maxkriegers) May 11, 2020

Yeah, I grew up with 5x8 index cards and spent much of my undergraduate time in windowless basement rooms of libraries trying to find books that had been mis-shelved.

They got seriously creepy at night.
— David Chapman (@Meaningness) May 11, 2020

Niklas Luhmann’s idea of Zettelkasten impinges on some of this, but for a deep dive on how indigenous cultures all over the world did this in a pre-industrial setting look at Dr. Lynne Kelly‘s work. Specifically: Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and When knowledge was power (2012, Latrobe University, PhD thesis). She’s got a fantastic bibliography on her website as well.

Her TED talk shows quickly how she did something similar, but with birds and bird identification. Her work has examples of how many other cultures did this as well.

Replied to a thread by

Andy Matuschak (Twitter)

In January, I spent all day every day for a week with a reMarkable. The plan: sit on the beach; read; write; think. Being able to use my whole library outside in the sand—with digital ink!—was so freeing.

Alas it has many flaws, so I returned it…but the price just dropped 45%! pic.twitter.com/py1LXy08xi
— Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) May 10, 2020

This thread makes me wonder when the Hypothes.is team will be allowed to build a layer onto e-reader platforms? Another great idea might be for e-readers and note taking tools to have built-in micropub clients so I can use them to publish to my website or other platforms.

Replied to Major Beniowski and the Major System (Art of Memory Forum)

My post on the history of the major system 13 listed Major Beniowski as the source of the name of the Major System.
However, a reader commented with some skepticism that the Major System is named after the Major.

This is a fantastic website, but there are several important errors on this page. For example, is there really any evidence that the “Major” system was named after Major Beniowski? I’ve never seen any proof of this, and it seems highly unlikely, for the following reasons: (a) Then wouldn’t it be called the “Beniowski System”? (And if he’d been just “Mr. Beniowski”, would anyone call it the “Mr. System”?); (b) Beniowski was a fairly obscure character in the history of mnemonics, compared to Feinaigle, Paris, et al.; (c) There are significant differences between Beniowski’s phonetic key and the most popular one today: i.e., Beniowski used /h/ and /w/, which means he wasn’t following Aimé Paris directly; and (d) MOST IMPORTANTLY, Tony Buzan was calling it the “Major System” at least 30 years ago, but only in the sense that it’s the “major” (primary, etc.) system for memorizing numbers – there was no mention whatsoever of Beniowski. (Of course examples of “minor” systems would be shapes, 2 = swan, and rhyming, 2 = shoe.) Here’s a great, short bio of Major Bartlomiej Beniowski: http://www.chartistancestors.co.uk/major-bartlomiej-beniowski-chartisms-military-adviser/
Sheldon
Does anyone have any background info on the origin of the term? Has Tony Buzan ever talked about where he got the name from? I don’t think that Harry Lorayne used the term Major System, but I’m not sure.

I spent some time last night quickly skimming through my copy of Bruno Furst’s You Can Remember (a home study course in 12 booklets, rather than a book) and copies of How to Remember (Greenberg, 1944; I’ve got the 1947 edition) which was later reprinted as The practical way to better memory. In all of them he’s pretty consistent in using the phrases “The Basic List” (for 0-9 letter/numbers) and “The Number Code” to refer to the functionality of the Major System. That I can see he definitely doesn’t use Major System to describe the idea.

Furst doesn’t make any references to prior art or work in the historical record except the one which @Graham has mentioned. It appears on p131 of How to Remember as:

This numerical system has been used by Berol, Roth, Loisette and other writers on the subject, and it seems pointless not to avail ourselves of a tested method which has proved satisfactory for many years.

There’s also a reference on page 56 of How to Remember:

Books of modern times dealing with association-laws, for instance those by Loisette and Poehlmann, are divided as follows in respect to the differences in concepts from a purely practical point of view

I’m digging up copies of David M. Roth’s Roth Memory Course, Felix Berol’s Berol System (which may have included work by his brothers William and Max), and Christof Ludwig Poehlmann aka Christopher Louis Pelman about whom I’ve found a nice trove of material on a related method at https://www.ennever.com/histories/history386p.php?sitever=standard. I don’t have much hope that any of these references will credit any of their prior sources as most of them seem to have made their livings on their courses and writing and wouldn’t have wanted to “give away their sources as potential competition”.

There is a chance that Major Beniowski was the source of the system for all of these authors given the relatively wide spread nature of his work during his life, his international travel, and the fact that he spoke multiple languages. But at the same time there’s a large number of people using this or similar methods in the 1800’s. Having more direct evidence would be useful. I only became aware of the moniker by seeing it on the Wikipedia page, and previously used the “number system” as Furst did to describe it.

I do notice that Furst uses the phrase “Furst Method” at least once in his correspondence course, but it’s in reference to the Major System and several other peg and related systems (notably not the method of loci in *You Can Remember*). It seems fairly regular for practitioners of this time period who were writing books to use their surname and call it their method.

One interesting case seems to be that of Marcus Dwight Larrow alias Silas Holmes alias Alphonse Loisette (referenced by Furst) who peddled a system for inordinate sums (including to Mark Twain who gave him a testimonial at the time). His system was exposed in a book in 1888 and was interesting or influential enough to have garnered a book review in the journal Science (see: “Loisette” exposed, together with Loisette’s Complete System of Physiological Memory. By G. S. FELLOWS. New York, The Author. 8‡ 25 cents published 20 July 1888).

Replied to Stones only by Kate Bowles (Music for Deckchairs)

The purpose of Stonehenge is lost to us. There will always be debate about its meaning. Stonehenge Visitor Centre, Wiltshire I grew up in England, although I wasn’t born here. Here. I’m…

I ran across this 5 year old article courtesy of a few recent tweets:

This took me back to a time and something I’d forgotten writing, that has made me rethink where we are now: https://t.co/COgNQnutZr

— Kate Bowles (@KateMfD) April 25, 2020

“power is distributed very unevenly throughout the global network of higherEd institutions. If digital innovation is left to the market, we will continue to see scale and standardisation dressed up as personalisation and differentiation.” ⁦@KateMfD⁩ https://t.co/pqskuKPbQj

— Robin DeRosa (@actualham) April 25, 2020

What surprises me is that it’s about education and pedagogy that starts off with a vignette in which Kate Bowles talks about the unknown purpose of Stonehenge.

But I’ve been doing some serious reading on the humanities relating to memory, history, and indigenous cultures over the last few years. It dawns on me:

I know what those stones are for!

A serious answer provided by Australian science and memory researcher Dr. Lynne Kelly indicates that Stonehenge and similar monolithic sites built by indigenous cultures across the world are–in fact–pedagogic tools!!

We’ve largely lost a lot of the roots of our ancient mnemonic devices through gradual mis- and dis-use as well as significant pedagogic changes by Petrus Ramus, an influential French dialectician, humanist, logician, and educational reformer. Scholar Frances Yates indicated in The Art of Memory that his influential changes in the mid-1500’s disassociated memory methods including the method of loci, which dated back to ancient Greece, from the practice of rhetoric as a field of study. As a result we’ve lost a fantastic tradition that made teaching and the problem of memory far worse.

Fortunately Lynne Kelly gives a fairly comprehensive overview of indigenous cultures across human history and their use of these methods along with evidence in her book Memory Code which is based on her Ph.D. thesis. Even better, she didn’t stop there and she wrote a follow up book that explores the use of these methods and places them into a modern pedagogy setting and provides some prescriptive uses.

I might suggest that instead of looking forward to technology as the basis of solutions in education, that instead we look back—not just to our past or even our pre-industrial past, but back to our pre-agrarian past.

Let’s look back to the tremendous wealth of indigenous tribes the world over that modern society has eschewed as “superstitious” and “simple”. In reality, they had incredibly sophisticated oral stories and systems that they stored in even more sophisticated memory techniques. Let’s relearn and reuse those techniques to make ourselves better teachers and improve our student’s ability to learn and retain the material with which they’re working.

Once we’ve learned to better tap our own memories, we’ll realize how horribly wrong we’ve been for not just decades but centuries.

This has been hard earned knowledge for me, but now that I’ve got it, I feel compelled to share it. I’m happy to chat with people about these ideas to accelerate their growth, but I’d recommend getting them from the source and reading Dr. Kelly’s work directly. (Particularly her work with indigenous peoples of Australia, who helped to unlock a large piece of the puzzle for her.) Then let’s work together to rebuild the ancient edifices that our ancestors tried so desperately to hand down, but we’ve managed to completely forget.

The historical and archaeological record:
The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments by Dr. Lynne Kelly

A variety of methods and teaching examples:
Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History by Dr. Lynne Kelly

Annotated on April 26, 2020 at 08:34PM

Replied to a tweet by

Greg McVerry (Twitter)

@chrisaldrich if you are labeling astronomical monoliths as the world's first wiki, look outside of neolithic British Isles, for example, Wurdi Youang https://t.co/xX2PmyTPH3 (https://t.co/dDTVFX48WQ)
— https://jgregorymcverry.com (@jgmac1106) April 26, 2020

Without checking, I have to think that I carefully couched my wording there. For that audience, I did use the more famous example of Stonehenge, for which there is some pretty solid evidence for my claim. There are other examples in the archaeological record that certainly are older and in other cultural contexts. I can easily think of standing stones that are as old as 12,000 years old for which the same case could be made in borderline agricultural societies. The tough part is that would have required the definition of standing stones and a lot of other pieces which I didn’t feel I had the time to create the context for in that setting.

I imagine that there are potentially examples of this sort of behavior going back as far as 30-40,000 years or more, but there is is no direct (known) archaeological evidence left to make such cases. There are oral histories of indigenous peoples in Australia that indicate memories of things that do exist in the geological record to provide some evidence of this.

I’ll also point out that astronomical use is NOT equal to memory use. To make that claim you’d need a lot of additional evidence. In fact, I might suggest something stronger, particularly about Stonehenge. Stonehenge’s primary use was not an astronomical one. Its primary use was as a mnemonic device. The astronomical one was important for the ritual practice (we would call it spaced repetition in modern psychology and pedagogic contexts), but wholly tangential.

If you’re interested in the underlying evidence, Dr. Lynne Kelly has an excellent Ph.D. thesis on the topic, but you might find her book The Memory Code, which expands on the thesis, more accessible. She’s also got a great bibliography of these topics on her website.

Replied to IndieWeb and TW by Tristan (TiddlyWiki Google Group)

Hey guys,
I read about IndieWeb some time ago and managed to dive into it a little the last days. As far as I can tell TW would be a perfect fit for this and since we are moving to federation it should be quite easy to integrate - at least that is what I thought... I found Hangout #52 when Jeremy mentioned IndieWeb - but unfortunately these 5 seconds is all there is about this matter.
First of I thought adding the "rel-me" to the single page version was all one had to do, but I think that was naive ;)
My next idea was that maybe I could tweak the static page generation template but that again would destroy dynamic syndication...
So my question is (please bare with me if I missed some source) does anybody has something running or some pre-release stuff in this direction?
And if not (most probably) do you have any idea/advice/hint...?
Cheers
Tristan

TiddlyWiki is a very solid looking platform for IndieWeb use (essentially using TW as a personal website). I am having some issues with the js;dr (cURL-ability) issue, but there are some methods for using it to create a static website.

To help others out and provide some examples, I’ve started a stub page for TiddlyWiki on the IndieWeb wiki, which uses MediaWiki. (If you have the rel=”me” stuff set up in the second article about h-card linked below, you should be able to use your TiddlyWiki URL to log into the IndieWeb wiki and document yourself, changes, and ideas.)

I’ve been writing up some of my explorations using TiddlyWiki for IndieWeb on my primary website (with copies on my TiddlyWiki) for those who are interested in taking a look or experimenting for themselves.

For those interested in following my particular progress, you can find all of my related content on my site with this tag: https://boffosocko.com/tag/tiddlywiki/ or follow via RSS at https://boffosocko.com/tag/tiddlywiki/feed/.

For those who are interested in delving in further, I might suggest looking at my IndieWeb/TiddlyWiki To Do List for things that could potentially be worth working on next:

adding proper h-entry and h-feed microformats markup
adding microformats markup and/or customizing tiddlers as articles, notes, bookmarks, and other types of posts
backfeed of comments from Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, GitHub, Mastodon using Brid.gy
adding a full implementation of webmentions for core
- figuring out the js;dr problem for sending webmentions
Adding set up to potentially allow posting to TiddlyWiki using Micropub (may run into js;dr problems?)
Look into using TiddlyWiki as a Micropub server
Adding header information for using TiddlyWiki with Microsub readers (this should be fairly easy)

There is a lot of open source code in a variety of languages that does a lot of this stuff already in addition to lots of examples, so do search the IndieWeb wiki or ask in the IndieWeb chat for help or pointers so that you won’t necessarily need to reinvent the wheel.

Replied to a tweet by Toby Osbourn (Twitter)

Today I'm going to try to understand webmentions a lot better than I do. If you've played and have links or thoughts, I'm all ears.
— Toby Osbourn (@tosbourn) April 2, 2020

I wrote and intro article on Webmention a while back for A List Apart: Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet and Jason McIntosh just wrote Webmentions, Active and Passive which is solid.

From there, I’d take a look at the canonical Webmention page of the IndieWeb wiki which has a huge number of resources. Since it looks like you’re coming from a Ruby perspective, you might appreciate the Ruby page on the IndieWeb wiki which has some pre-existing resources which may cut back on your work and learning curve. Perhaps Jason Garber (@jgarber)might be a useful resource within the Ruby world?

If you’re using other platforms/languages, simply search the IndieWeb wiki for other details relating to Webmention. Have questions as you delve in? Just ask in the IndieWeb #Dev chat.

Outline for a Hypothes.is Crash Course