I attended the PKM Summit the past days in Utrecht. It was fun and inspiring. During the extended lunchbreak yesterday I went outside to enjoy a bit of sunshine and walk around town. Ending up in the Steven Sterk book shop I also browsed the shelves there a bit.
One title, From The Winter Archives, stood out to me. Being primed with thoughts of personal knowledge management and note making, I approached the title from that angle. The book, originally titled Fra vinterarkivene, is a 2015 novel by Norwegian writer Merethe Lindstrøm, and completely unconnected to such associations on PKM.
Five years ago Robin Sloan blogged about how newsletters should have seasons, and I blogged about it in response in more general terms, looking at seasons for any creative output. As were are moving from winter to spring, I was also reminded about the different tasks that come with the change of seasons around the house. Disconnecting the water tap before winter, removing some lights early spring, bringing back down the cushions for the garden benches.
Can my notes, can sections of my notes have seasons? There is always an ebb and flow in attention to certain topics and matters, which translate in the use, editing and creation of notes. That is maybe of a different frequency, a week or a few, a month, not a quarter year like a season. The thought of having a folder with notes named ‘the Winter archive’ crossed my mind, just because it sounded interesting, not because I have any notion about what it might actually contain.
Just a whimsical spring thought, riffing off a book title while my mind was simmering with notions about personal knowledge management.
My most intimate experience with PKM is with the journal my father kept from 1966 until he died.
Until 1990 this was done in yearly notebooks; some of these were government-issued dated logs (he was a public servant), others were off the shelf date books. These are currently on a bookshelf in my mother’s living room, and I browse through them regularly.
After 1990 he switched to using Microsoft Word; he abandoned the “yearly volume” approach and simply added on to the end of One Big File for 19 years (8.5 MB, 2.2 million words).
Something got lost in the transition, at least for me, the unintended reader: the yearly volumes are like chapters in a book, “seasons” of his life; the Word file is simply a river of life. I prefer the former.
Yes! My grandmother had a row of notebooks in a kitchen cupboard. Listing prices she paid for things, when coal was delivered etc, the harvest from their vegetable garden around the house etc. The sense of time that a row of notebooks provides is very different from an ever growing text document on a harddrive.