Statuses

Just days before the 10th anniversary of the Smallest Federated Wiki, Ward Cunningham will be talking about the future of note taking tomorrow morning.

Free registration for the event at I Annotate 2021 should still be open.

There are also expected appearances by Daniel Doyon, Co-Founder of Readwise; Tienson Qin, Creator/Founder of LogSeq; Oliver Sauter, Founder of WorldBrain/Memex, and Flancian of the Anagora.

With any luck, it may help mark a resurgence of digital versions of the commonplace book on the order of magnitude represented by the works of Rudolphus Agricola, Desiderius Erasmus, and Philip Melanchthon during the Renaissance.

Promo card for I Annotate 2021 with the subtitle Reading Together and featuring a drawing of a book with two hands writing on each other in an ouroboros-like style

Curious that I’ve seen ramify as a verb within commonplace book settings, but not seen it in regard to zettelkasten or digital gardens in the context of Obsidian, Roam Research, Notion, et al.

I half expected to see Petrus Ramus‘s name in the etymology of the word. If nothing else, it’s a fitting word. Perhaps it was a bit of nominative determinism?

other forms: ramify; ramifies; ramified; ramifying

Yes, somehow this is the sort of Wikipedia entry I find myself editing at 10 on a Monday night:

A Catholicized version of the Theatrum entitled the Magnum theatrum vitae humanae (1631) by Lawrence Beyerlinck was one of the largest printed commonplace books of the early modern era. These two works “may fairly be described as the early modern ancestors of the great dictionnaire raisonné of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie of Diderot.”[9]

9. Havens, Earle (2001). Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (first ed.). Yale University. p. 52.

With a lovely flower drawn into this illuminated printed leaf from the Floretus cum commento, a twelfth-century florilegium (literally “books of flowers”) attributed to Bernard de Clairvaux [Cologne, 1499], could this make Clairvaux the patron saint of digital gardens?

Illuminated printed leaf from the Floretus cum commento featuring a flower drawn into the open space of a twelfth-century florilegium attributed to Bernard de Clairvaux.

Replied to a tweet by Maggie AppletonMaggie Appleton (Twitter)
A great question to be sure.

Define “ours“. “Tweetspace” is only Twitter? Perhaps not all of those at once…

The education space definitely. Many are still in the “old” blogosphere. They use phrases/hashtags like “Domain of One’s Own” (#​DoOO), personal learning networks (#​pln), #​EdTech, #​EthicalEdTech, etc.

Maybe a dash of #OpenScience, along with maybe @LibCarpentry and @theCarpentries?

#​IndieWeb is platform interoperability, along with a smattering of the others but you already knew of that overlap.

Read On Privilege & Sharing Power by Maha BaliMaha Bali (Reflecting Allowed)
Multi-USB/Plug power hub Power strip/hub that I use when I need to work outside the house I have a personal experience that I think can be used as a metaphor for privilege and power, but I need to brush up on my reading on power. All I remember from readings back during my PhD, was there are multipl...
Replied to a thread by Mike CaulfieldMike Caulfield (Twitter)
We will remember who did that work Mike. Thank you again for it!

I also remember Anil Dash’s Stop Publishing Web Pages essay in August 2012 and then 4 months later The Web We Lost. Those garden-like pages were definitely something we’ve lost. We need more of them on the higher ground outside of the floodplain of the raging waters of the storming corporate rivers. A few babbling brooks, sympathetic streams, and cordial and comforting creeks would also be most welcome in our landscape.

I’m glad to see that some are pushing back—returning to publish on the web in old, new, and even different ways. Hopefully, as in nature, the gardens and fields flourish after the unrestrained wrath of the storm.

With a lush mountain backdrop, a woman pictured from behind reaches up to suspended rocks and plants hanging from an artistic bamboo and metal structure.
Photo by Fathul Bilad on Unsplash

 

Featured photo by Saikiran Kesari on Unsplash

Annotated ‘What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text’ by Sam Anderson (nytimes.com)
The practice, back then, was surprisingly social — people would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers. ❧
This could be an interesting gift idea. Definitely shows someone that you were actively thinking about them for extended lengths of time while they were away.
 

It’s also sort of founding example for the idea of social annotation given that most prior annotation was for personal use. (Though Owen Gingerich has shown that early annotations were copied from book to book and early scribes added annotations to texts for readers as well.)

It also demonstrates the idea of proof of work (in this case love “work”), which is part of the reason that social annotation in an educational setting using tools like Hypothes.is is worthwhile. Students are indicating (via social signaling) to a teacher that they’ve read and actively engaged with the course material.

Of course, unlike the example, they’re not necessarily showing “true love” of the material!

Replied to a thread by @tjoosten and @grandeped (Twitter)
I’m happy to help you try to put together an IndieWeb-friendly version with Webmentions which work with multiple platforms including WordPress, Known, Grav, etc.

You might find some interesting examples and pieces on IndieWeb wiki, particularly their Education page. I’d love to see Matt add his example(s) to that page for others’ future reference.

I did a short demonstration of what the current website-to-website space looks like at the recent OERxDomains21 Conference. You can find the short video here on my site.

If you go the older route one of the best planet-like sites I’ve seen was http://connectedcourses.net/, which if I recall correctly was built by Alan Levine. If you poke around a bit or ask @cogdog on Twitter, I think there are some details or a recipe somewhere of how he put it together.

Chances are reasonably good that people in the or space have some ideas as well.

Writer Jean Paul (1763-1825) on the importance of his Zettelkasten, kept in the form of a commonplace book:

“In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first.”
—Jean Paul instructions to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812 (as quoted in translation from Exhibition opening on March 4th: »Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie«)

Featured image: Heinrich Pfenninger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons