Replied to a post by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (hcommons.social)
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.
Having been studying Welsh for a while, this video about how it informed J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation of Elvish languages for his fiction was fascinating.

The fact that he uses the word Nazgûl [~““35:51] from the Irish (nasc) and Scots Gaelic (nasg) words meaning “ring” to take a linguistic dig at Irish is notable. He was probably motivated by his political views of the time rather than celebrating (as one should) the value and diversity of all languages.

Tolkien once termed Welsh ‘the elder language of the men of Britain’; this talk explores how the sounds and grammar of Welsh captured Tolkien’s imagination and are reflected in Sindarin, one of the two major Elvish languages which he created.

Via https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/medieval-welsh. For those interested on Tolkien, they’ve got a huge list of other scholarly content on his work: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/keywords/tolkien.

After Ahrens’ book I see an awful lot of people talking about “processing” books. There are too many assumptions about what this can mean and this hides many levels of inherent work involved in analyzing and synthesizing knowledge. I would suggest that we’re better off talking about reading them, annotating, excerpting, and thinking about them, or maybe writing about and combining them with other knowledge than “processing” them.
Liked #141: Intellectual Exoskeletons — Andy Matuschak by trst (huffduffer.com)
From language and writing to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, computers and Adobe Photoshop, our species has a history of inventing tools for augmenting our own intelligence. But what comes next? Andy Matuschak is a developer and designer. He helped build iOS at Apple, founded and led Khan Academy's...
Likes #141: Intellectual Exoskeletons — Andy Matuschak.
In addition to becoming incomprehensibly js;dr in Mastodon 4.0, why did change it’s default reply workflow to make me copy a URL, switch to a different window, go to my server, log in, paste the URL, search, and then reply? I used to be able to just input my account and go directly to a reply box? This new user interface of 7 steps is far worse than the prior two… 
Replied to a post by Fredrik GraverFredrik Graver (hcommons.social)
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
@fgraver I have a reasonably tight integration of Obsidian and Zotero and see the lure of Readwise but prefer manual import for most parts outside of Hypothes.is. As for the Remarkable piece, if you must given their T&C, your best bets are searching https://www.obsidianroundup.org/ from @eleanorkonik or the Obsidian Discord channel for #academia. Click through for links/details.
Replied to a post by Aram Zucker-ScharffAram Zucker-Scharff (Indieweb.Social)
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.
Replied to a post by Ben AdidaBen Adida (Adida.net Mastodon)
I'm pessimistic about the chances of a federated Twitter gaining and sustaining wide adoption. But I could be wrong, and I'd love to be wrong. So in the spirit of contributing rather than just whining, I wrote up a few thoughts. Don't let federation make the experience suck. cc @blaine http://benlog.com/2022/12/28/dont-let-federation-make-the-experience-suck/ #federation #web #mastodon
@blaine@mastodon.social I can’t find the quote from earlier in the week for proper attribution, but someone essentially said “Mastodon brought a spec (ActivityPub, etc.) to a user experience fight.” This is too true, but we also need to be careful of all this not devolving into the RSS Atom Wars which sidetracked developers and allowed corporations to win on the usability front. Conversation on this post already shows heavy evidence of this devolution into architecture astronomy instead of usability. 😔
Replied to a post by Arindam Basu (@arinbasu1@social.arinbasu.online)Arindam Basu (@arinbasu1@social.arinbasu.online) (social.arinbasu.online)
Please share some resources on #Zettelkasten you have found useful.
@emkmiller@sciences.social, @josh@sciences.social, @arinbasu1@social.arinbasu.online Here’s a collection of material I’ve written relating to Zettelkasten which some may find useful: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

In this area, I prefer using Zotero for collecting, ResearchRabbit for expanding scope, Hypothes.is for note taking/annotations which I then pipe into Obsidian for revising, cross linking, and further writing/revisions. Depending on the project, some of it may be more analog with index cards similar to Victor Margolin’s process.

To show the general benefits, I’m copying and pasting from my own prior notes and writing:

ZK is an excellent tool for literature reviews! It is a relative neologism (with a slightly shifted meaning in English over the past decade with respect to its prior historical use in German) for a specific form of note taking or commonplacing that has generally existed in academia for centuries. Excellent descriptions of it can be found littered around, though not under a specific easily searchable key word or phrase, though perhaps phrases like “historical method” or “wissenschaftlichen arbeitens” may come closest.
Some of the more interesting examples of it being spelled out in academe include:

For academic use, anecdotally I’ve seen very strong recent use of the general methods most compellingly demonstrated in Obsidian (they’ve also got a Discord server with an academic-focused channel) though many have profitably used DevonThink and Tinderbox (which has a strong, well-established community of academics around it) as much more established products with dovetails into a variety of other academic tools. Obviously there are several dozens of newer tools for doing this since about 2018, though for a lifetime’s work, one might worry about their longevity as products.

I study many of these methods from the viewpoint of intellectual history (and not just for my own use), so I’m happy to discuss them and their variations ad nauseam.