Statuses

I guested on a recording for Andy Sylvester‘s new Thinking About Tools for Thought podcast earlier today. Hopefully I’ve lived up to the promise of the fascinating space that he’s been crafting there.
Andrew, someone in the IndieWeb chat mentioned what an awesome new website you have. I thought you might appreciate our upcoming mini-camp. There’s definitely a space in the tools for thought area that your perspective may help fill. If it’s of interest, I’d invite you to join us.

Gardens and Streams II: An IndieWebCamp Pop-up Session on Wikis, Digital Gardens, Online Commonplace Books, Zettelkasten and Note Taking

Realizing my interest in old and illuminated manuscripts, incunables, and drolleries is giving me ideas for icons, dividers, lettering, and illustrations for my sketchnotes process. These are the original (OG) sketchnotes.

See also MarginaliaMonday.

Not sure if there are many/any podcasts about digital gardens and tangential topics, but I’ve started a tag on Huffduffer for those who’d like it for discovery or adding those they find themselves: https://huffduffer.com/tags/digital+gardens

If you find a podcast with some discussion about the topic, feel free to use Huffduffer’s bookmarklet to add it to the public list. This should also work with YouTube videos and it will convert the video into audio and save it to the list.

It has an RSS feed for subscribing if you like.

How far has humankind fallen to have gone from the ☛ manicule indicating active thought in manuscripts of the 12th century  to the all-too-frequent thumbs up in the 21st century indicating a passive action with almost no thought at all?
Annotated Helping Hands on the Medieval Page by Erik Kwakkel (medievalbooks)
We are taught not to point. Pointing with your finger is rude, even though it is often extremely convenient and efficient. Medieval readers do not seem to have been hindered by this convention: in …
👈

As I’m thinking about this, I can’t help but think that Hypothes.is, if only for fun, ought to add a manicule functionality to their annotation product.

I totally want to be able to highlight portions of my reading with an octopus manicule!

I can see their new tagline now:

Helping hands on the digital page.

I’m off to draw some octopi…

Replied to How to remember more of what you read by Aaron DavisAaron 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 a post by Andrew DoranAndrew Doran (https://andrewdoran.uk/blog/)
Are there any paid WordPress themes out there with good implementations of webmentions, or is this not (yet?) mainstream enough?
I’m not sure what you’re asking here?

What functionality are you looking for in a theme beyond what is already set up within the two WordPress webmention plugins (Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks)? Are you asking about Microformats markup in themes?

Replied to a tweet (Twitter)
As Francis Urquhart might say, “You might very well think that…”

The whole point of that post is to show that og hasn’t solved it. There are too many flavors of metacrap and no standards. And worse og is not only not “open” it’s a DRY violation.

If you want to spelunk a bit, Cory Doctorow approached the idea back in 2001: Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia

Replied to a tweet by Matthew Daniel Eddy (Twitter)
Don’t think we’re just sitting here holding our breath and waiting…

Sometimes we turn blue and fall off our chair. 🪑🥶

Any update on publication?

Who else keeps a waste book? 

I carry around a small notebook (usually a 48 page Field Notes) for short fleeting notes. Later I copy them into my commonplace book/zettelkasten/digital garden and expand upon them. 

Waste books were used in the tradition of the commonplace book. A well known example is Isaac Newton’s Waste Book (MS Add. 4004) in which he did much of the development of the calculus. Another example is that of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who called his waste books sudelbücher, and which were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review of Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.

I the beginning of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, there’s the short exchange:

Horace Slughorn: These are trying times!
Dumbledore: Indeed.

Had I directed the movie, I would have had Dumbledore look down and acknowledge his borrowed knitting patterns magazine as he delivered his line.