Typed index card which reads "The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions." ---Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book? (1932) #reading practices #advice

“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”
—Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book? (1932)

Annotated on December 07, 2023 at 09:51PM

Replied to a tweet by Courtney RobertsonCourtney Robertson (Twitter)
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.

Annotated Tuesday 19 May, 2020 by John NaughtonJohn Naughton (Memex 1.1)

Interestingly, I’ve found that Kindle is useful in this respect. I buy Kindle versions of books that I need for work, and highlight passages and bookmark pages as I go. And when I’ve finished the software obligingly has a collection of all the passages I’ve highlighted. 

John, you should spend a minute or two to learn about Hypothes.is as an online tool for doing this. It’s a free account or you can self-host the software yourself if you like. There are also functionalities to have public, private, or group annotations.

I often pull my own annotations to my personal website similar to your own Memex and publish them there (example: https://boffosocko.com/kind/annotation/)

Incidentally you can also annotate documents stored locally on your computer, but viewed through a browser as well as collaboratively annotating with others.

Read thread by Brendan SchlagelBrendan Schlagel (Twitter)
Just finished reading this. Some interesting tidbits hiding in it.
Read Imagining the #IndieWeb Version of WikiTribune by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)
Like many I joined WikiTribune, the new social network for news. The service quickly overtook Aacademia.edu as the primary spam engine of my inbox. Got me thinking that  Nuzzel, an app that algorithimically surfaces stuff to read by what your followers share on Twitter, already ads a layer of trust...
Read Thread by @ehanford: "Thread: There was a session today at , the annual conference of @ncte, called "Misreading the Science of Reading." I want to share so […]" #NCTE19 #ELAchat #ilachat by Emily HanfordEmily Hanford (threadreaderapp.com)
Thread: There was a session today at #​NCTE19, the annual conference of @ncte, called "Misreading the Science of Reading." I want to share some thoughts, and some reading material, to add to the conversation. #​elachat #​ilachat 1/x I've been an education reporter for a decade+. A few yrs ago, I knew nothing abt the "science of reading." But in the past 3 yrs, I've read thousands of pages of books, articles, research papers. 2/x I've interviewed hundreds of researchers, teachers, school leaders, tutors, parents, students and struggling readers. I've visited 9 states. And I've been shocked to learn that: 3/x
A tweetstorm that could be a meta-paper on the topic of reading and literacy.

hat tip:

👓 Humane Ingenuity 9: GPT-2 and You | Dan Cohen | Buttondown

Read Humane Ingenuity 9: GPT-2 and You by Dan CohenDan Cohen (buttondown.email)
This newsletter has not been written by a GPT-2 text generator, but you can now find a lot of artificially created text that has been.

For those not familiar with GPT-2, it is, according to its creators OpenAI (a socially conscious artificial intelligence lab overseen by a nonprofit entity), “a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text.” Think of it as a computer that has consumed so much text that it’s very good at figuring out which words are likely to follow other words, and when strung together, these words create fairly coherent sentences and paragraphs that are plausible continuations of any initial (or “seed”) text.

This isn’t a very difficult problem and the underpinnings of it are well laid out by John R. Pierce in *[An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise](https://amzn.to/32JWDSn)*. In it he has a lot of interesting tidbits about language and structure from an engineering perspective including the reason why crossword puzzles work.
November 13, 2019 at 08:33AM

The most interesting examples have been the weird ones (cf. HI7), where the language model has been trained on narrower, more colorful sets of texts, and then sparked with creative prompts. Archaeologist Shawn Graham, who is working on a book I’d like to preorder right now, An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology: Raising the Dead with Agent Based Models, Archaeogaming, and Artificial Intelligence, fed GPT-2 the works of the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) and then resurrected him at the command line for a conversation about his work. Robin Sloan had similar good fun this summer with a focus on fantasy quests, and helpfully documented how he did it.

Circle back around and read this when it comes out.

Similarly, these other references should be an interesting read as well.
November 13, 2019 at 08:36AM

From this perspective, GPT-2 says less about artificial intelligence and more about how human intelligence is constantly looking for, and accepting of, stereotypical narrative genres, and how our mind always wants to make sense of any text it encounters, no matter how odd. Reflecting on that process can be the source of helpful self-awareness—about our past and present views and inclinations—and also, some significant enjoyment as our minds spin stories well beyond the thrown-together words on a page or screen.

And it’s not just happening with text, but it also happens with speech as I’ve written before: Complexity isn’t a Vice: 10 Word Answers and Doubletalk in Election 2016 In fact, in this mentioned case, looking at transcripts actually helps to reveal that the emperor had no clothes because there’s so much missing from the speech that the text doesn’t have enough space to fill in the gaps the way the live speech did.
November 13, 2019 at 08:43AM

👓 WebApp: Readtrack

Read WebApp: Readtrack (Dented Reality)
Readtrack is an experimental tool built during the 2012 NYT TimesOpen Hack Day. It gives music recommendations based on the content you’re looking at by doing semantic analysis of the current…
This is a killer start for a fun little app.

👓 Do We Still Need Braille? | shades of short shady

Read Do We Still Need Braille? by Ashley (shortshady.com)
It’s a question that’s been debated more and more as the years go by. Each January is Braille literacy month, and each year I hear arguments advocating its decline. Each time, I shake my head and ask myself again how people can be so?...
A panoply of different modalities should always be available! Of course we still need Braille.

👓 A Reading Plan for 2019 | Rhoneisms

Read A Reading Plan for 2019 by Patrick Rhone (patrickrhone.net)
Last year, I publicized my reading plan for the year. Overall, I’m very happy with the number of books I managed to read (20) and the quality of what I read. There are some aspects of the plan I wish I’d been better at but that’s a small regret. I enjoyed almost everything I picked up with few...
I like the idea of a reading plan (or personal syllabus, if you will). I’m not sure I could be as rigid about letting new titles onto my list though.

I did a miserable job of reading the non-fiction on my list this year, but did a good bit of juvenile fiction that I enjoyed. I did however read a humongous amount of online content (articles, etc.) and managed to log nearly every bit of it.

👓 A year in reading: letting the pile grow | Flashing Palely in the Margins

Read A year in reading: letting the pile grow by    (inthemargins.ca)
My year in reading has been marked by reflection on who I am and who I aspire to be, but mostly, it has been marked by a realization that I am okay, that even though I can be better, it's also okay to be who I am.