reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to a tweet by Harold Jarche (Twitter)

"If [the Luddites] had their way we wouldn’t be living in a world with ‘no technology’, we’d be living in a world where communities have a say in the technological decisions that will impact them.” https://t.co/hXuhSKmIQD https://t.co/yjFiVKOWST
— Harold Jarche (@hjarche) November 1, 2021

E.P. Thompson also has additional perspective on the invention of the clock and pocket watches as a powerful technology with respect to this in Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism. #SaintMonday AND #SaintTuesday, ora pro nobis.

Replied to a tweet by

Courtney Robertson (Twitter)

Any thoughts about the Goodreads replacement going toward @indieweb / Mastadoon model? As in, still a social network, but entirely related to self-owning our part in the system? https://t.co/82eX8RTyX3
— Courtney Robertson (@courtneyengle) October 27, 2021

On the IndieWeb front there are some interesting evolving examples and state of the art documented at:

In particular, I quite enjoy the micropub client IndieBookClub for posting reading updates to my WordPress site (it supports other platforms with Micropub support too.) More details: https://indieweb.org/indiebookclub. Here’s an example of how I’m tracking what I read on my own site: https://boffosocko.com/kind/read/ or if you want just the books.

If you’d like a non-WordPress hosted solution, you might take a look at Manton Reece’s excellent Micro.blog platform which has a nice book/reading UI: https://micro.blog/discover/books or https://micro.blog/discover/books/grid. (It uses IndieWeb technologies including micropub, so you can use IndieBookClub with it. You can also syndicate to it from your WordPress site if you prefer to have your own infrastructure and just join the community there for the conversation.)

I’m happy to help if you’d like further tips/pointers for any of the above.

On the Mastodon front, you might take a look at Mouse Reeve‘s Bookwyrm (GitHub) which is one of the best custom set ups in the ActivityPub space.

Replied to a post by

Chris Aldrich (stream.boffosocko.com)

@amandalicastro Thanks. Purchased. Even if the answer doesn't lie within, @CathyNDavidson may be one of only a few people one could trust with such a book title. Also picked up Now You See it to compare with Annie Murphy Paul's new text The Extended Mind.

I finished it Saturday evening. Sadly the answer doesn’t lay here. There’s a great history of higher education since the late 1800s specific to Charles Eliot’s ideas and the subsequent fallout. Sadly he was reforming Puritan education based on his then-current circumstances. He apparently didn’t delve back further to reverse the Puritan reforms from almost 300 years earlier.

The book is great and has some excellent solid examples to act as a guide. Thanks for the recommendation.

I still strongly suspect the pattern goes back to the Puritan educational reforms of the late 1500s with Peter Ramus. I’ll have to delve into some of his writings and perhaps the work of Walter Ong to see the outcome. If others have ideas of where to look specifically, I’d love to hear them.

Replied to a tweet by

Annie Murphy Paul (Twitter)

Chris, you may be interested in this review of "Now You See It" that I wrote . . . https://t.co/TnnbQ3NHWf
— Annie Murphy Paul (@anniemurphypaul) September 25, 2021

Thanks for the great cross-reference! It was incredibly prescient writing for 2011. Reminiscent of Audrey Watters work, but from a neuropsychology research angle.
Annotations: https://via.hypothes.is/https://slate.com/culture/2011/08/cathy-n-davidson-s-now-you-see-it-do-the-young-really-rule-in-the-internet-era.html
Can’t wait to delve into your book next.

Replied to How to remember more of what you read by

Aaron Davis (Read Write Collect)

Across a series of posts (1,2,3), Steve Brophy explains his use of Roam Research and the Zettelkasten methodology to develop a deeper dialogue with what he reads. This is broken up into three steps, the initial capturing of ‘fleeting notes‘, rewriting the text in our own words as ‘Literature N...

Some useful looking links here. Thanks Aaron.

I’ve been digging deeper and deeper into some of the topics and sub-topics.

The biggest problem I’ve seen thus far is a lot of wanna-be experts and influencers (especially within the Roam Research space) touching on the very surface of problem. I’ve seen more interesting and serious people within the Obsidian community sharing their personal practices and finding pieces of that useful.

The second issue may be that different things work somewhat differently for different people, none of whom are using the same tools or even general systems. Not all of them have the same end goals either. Part of the key is finding something useful that works for you or modifying something slowly over time to get it to work for you.

At the end of the day your website holds the true answer: read, write, respond (along with the implied “repeat” at the end).

One of the best and most thorough prescriptions I’ve seen is Sönke Ahrens’ book which he’s written after several years of using and researching a few particular systems.

I’ve been finding some useful tidbits from my own experience and research into the history of note taking and commonplace book traditions. The memory portion intrigues me a lot as well as I’ve done quite a lot of research into historical methods of mnemonics and memory traditions. Naturally the ancient Greeks had most of this all down within the topic of rhetoric, but culturally we seem to have unbundled and lost a lot of our own traditions with changes in our educational system over time.

Replied to Introducing a Microformats API for Books: books-mf2.herokuapp.com by

Jamie Tanna (Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer)

Announcing the Microformats translation layer for book data.

This is awesomeness!

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

Replied to Jonathan Edwards’ Organizational Genius by

Dr. Matthew Everhard (theLAB)

For all the help that Edwards has given scholars and pastors in the areas of theology, philosophy, and missions, it is probably due time that someone devote a doctoral project to Edwards’ organizational genius.

I’m particularly interested here in the idea of interleaved books for additional marginalia. Thanks for the details!

An aspect that’s missing from the overall discussion here is that of the commonplace book. Edwards’ Miscellanies is a classic example of the Western note taking and idea collecting tradition of commonplace books.

While the name for his system is unique, his note taking method was assuredly not. The bigger idea goes back to ancient Greece and Rome with Aristotle and Cicero and continues up to the modern day.

From roughly 900-1300 theologians and preachers also had a sub-genre of this category called florilegia. In the Christian religious tradition Philip Melanchthon has one of the more influential works on the system: De locis communibus ratio (1539).

You might appreciate this article on some of the tradition: https://blog.cph.org/study/systematic-theology-and-apologetics/why-are-so-many-great-lutheran-books-called-commonplaces-or-loci

You’ll find Edwards’ and your indexing system bears a striking resemblance to that of philosopher John Locke, (yes that Locke!): https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685