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This large and interesting collection of books, writings, quotes and other artefacts on note making and personal knowledge management, tools for thought in short, through the ages is something to explore at leisure. It seems to have been put together by Chris Aldrich some two years ago. Great stuff. Came across it in Chris’s Hypothes.is stream, and didn’t immediately realise it was a reference to his own collection.
Working on a visual representation of the European data strategy landscape, integrated as well as alongside a textual representation this morning. It makes for a pleasant experience. The experience comes from what Zsolt Viczián’s Excalidraw plugin for Obsidian allows me to do, something I mentioned here earlier after the PKM Summit last March where Zsolt showed this.
Excalidraw drawings are basically text files describing the drawing, which are then rendered in the viewer. What the plugin supports is putting other text elements outside the drawing elements, and exclude them from the visual view. This creates two representations of the same file: one the drawing presented visually, one the text content outside the visual. Zsolt calls it the ‘flip side’ of a drawing, being a note accompanying the drawing. I see it more like two different views on the same thing. I have a hotkey (cmd arrow down) enabled to flip a note between both views.
Putting both views next to each other, and working in both at the same time, allows me a seamless mode of working, switching between visual material and text writing. As shown in the screenshot below.
Here you see the same note twice, opened in two tabs. The left side is the textual representation. It also contains an embedded auto-generated image from the visual representation but that is something I choose to do. Underneath that image you see some notes I wrote.
The right hand side shows the visual representation, a drawing of how I perceive the context of the European single market for data (at least, part of it).
I use the visual side as a Systems Convening landscape, to think about barriers, possible interventions, visibility etc. I use the text side to turn those thoughts into notes, potential actions, and links to other relevant material, or to write down things I think might be added to the visual.
Over the years my main problem with working more visually has been the lack of fluidity between the visual and the textual. Basically rendering them into two separate silos. Few tools solve that issue (Tinderbox is one). This means I usually favor the textual side of things. Where I use images, they are ‘frozen’ moments of the ever evolving textual side. The set-up this morning is not silo’d and here the creation of visual elements aids the text creation and vice versa, while I work on both in parallel in a single note. Both text and visual evolve together. Very nice.
Bookmarked Latticework: Unifying annotation and freeform text editing for augmented sensemaking by Matthew Siu and Andy Matuschak
Back in early February I got a chance to work with a beta tool for sense making in my notes. See my impressions at the time. Matthew Siu and Andy Matuschak watched me for an hour as I used their prototype tool to start shaping a workshop design from various inputs. I was intrigued and enthusiastic, but a few weeks later due to some tech glitches I stopped using it. Today Maarten den Braber in an e-mail pointed me to Latticework from last June, describing the project as it stood at the end. It’s an interesting read, which I annotated (if you read those annotations, start at bottom of the page to read them from the top of the article (or use Hypothes.is to see them in context,there’s no way to link to the overview directly for non-users I think).
I re-installed the plugin in Obsidian, and will work with it some more. Here’s hoping some of the original glitches no longer occur.
We had a strong personal motivation for this project: we often find ourselves stuck in our own creative work. Latticework’s links might make you think of citations and primary sources—tools for finding the truth in a rigorous research process. But our work on Latticework was mostly driven by the problems of getting emotionally stuck, of feeling disconnected from our framing of the project or our work on it.
Matthew Siu and Andy Matuschak
I topped 1000 annotations in Hypothesis today. That is a year and 9 months after reaching 100 after the first month, or about 45 per month in total. Almost all of them are public annotations (97%).
While I do use it regularly, I don’t use it daily or at high volume. Annotations are automatically added to my local notes through the Hypothesis API, which is where I continue working on them. About the same number of annotations I make directly from my browser to my notes using a markdown webclipper, mostly when I save an entire article. Any annotations of PDFs I do in Zotero, and then there’s the e-book and paper book annotations. So at most a quarter of my annotations is in Hypothes.is.
In my annotations I have become accustomed to referencing existing notes (I have a little hotkey that lets me search and then paste a note title as markdown link in the annotation), using tags, and adding to-do’s that are picked up by my to-do lists. Things I started doing in the first month, like adding webarchive urls as page note, I still routinely do. All good reduction of friction I find.
I made it possible to post a first page annotation to Hypothes.is directly from my feed reader a year ago. While in theory that is very useful, in practice I’ve used it sparingly. Mostly because I have been spending less time inside my feed reader I think.
Many annotations are just basically bookmarking an article with a first remark for curation and being able to find it back in my own terms. While I do return to some of those for more extensive annotation, that is not often. Partly because I may do that in my local notes, partly because as always you encounter more than you can process. I do regularly re-find my annotations in my notes when searching, which is useful, and that sometimes results in revisiting an article for further annotation.
There is some performance effect involved in public annotation I suspect. I annotate mostly in English and am always aware others may read that. Especially criticism brings that awareness. It makes it feel like a form of blogging, but with an even smaller audience than my blog’s.
The social effect I experience of using Hypothes.is is very small. I’m not involved in annotating groups, which undoubtedly would feel different. I have had some conversation resulting from annotation however, which is always fun.
While I am enthusiastic about Hypothes.is as a tool, it hasn’t become a central tool, nor the primary ‘place’ for annotating things. I wonder if that would be different if I was more capable in interacting more with the API (e.g. to send changes or other annotations sources to H.), or if I could run a personal instance of it and federate that.
I started using Hypothes.is after the summer of 2022 because of reading the book Annotation by Kalir and Garcia in the spring of 2022 (although my Hypothesis account already existed).
My perception of annotations has permanently changed because of reading that book. It is now a much more everyday occurrence and practice within my sense making, not just for academic articles or books, and can take different shapes and forms. Just that most of that takes place outside of Hypothes.is.
The innovations in personal knowledge management are sparse and far between, is a phrase that has circulated in my mind the past three weeks. Chris Aldrich in his online presentation at PKM Summit expressed that notion while taking us through an interesting timeline of personal knowledge management related practices. As his talk followed that timeline, it didn’t highlight the key innovations as an overview in itself. I had arranged the session because I wanted to raise awareness that many practices we now associate with 20th century or digital origins, in fact are much older. It’s just that we tend to forget we’re standing on many shoulders, taking a recent highly visible example as original source and our historic horizon. Increased historic awareness is however something different than stating there has been hardly any notable innovation in this space over the course of millennia. Because that leads to things like asking what then are the current adjacent possible innovations, what branches might be developed further?
It all starts with a question I have for Chris however: What are the innovations you were thinking of when you said that?
Below I list some of the things that I think are real innovations in the context of personal knowledge management, in roughly chronological order. This is a list from the top of my head and notes, plus some very brief search on whether what I regard as origin of a practice is actually a more recent incarnation. I have left out most of the things regarding oral traditions, as it is not the context of my practices.
Chris, what would be your list of key innovations?
A pkm practitioner working on his notes. Erasmus as painted by Holbein, public domain image.
Afgelopen woensdag nam ik deel aan een RADIO webinar over persoonlijk kennismanagement (pkm). Ik vertelde over hoe ik sinds lange tijd voor mezelf aan PKM doe. Het webinar was getiteld ‘Word PKM kampioen’. Ik begon met te zeggen dat je geen PKM kampioen wordt ten opzichte van anderen, maar ten opzichte van jezelf. Je helpt jezelf sneller te leren en al eerder geformuleerde ideeën en inzichten in te zetten in je werk. Als je het resultaat van iemands PKM-systeem ziet dat al jaren bestaat, is het makkelijk te denken dat zo’n groot construct bouwen voor jezelf niet mogelijk is of te veel tijd kost. Het punt is echter dat geen enkel uitgebreid PKM-systeem op basis van een blauwdruk gebouwd is. Het is ontstaan uit langdurig toepassen van kleine handelingen. Kleine handelingen die al vanaf de eerste keer dat je ze doet waarde hebben voor jezelf. Een lange wandeling is volledig opgebouwd uit eenvoudige voetstappen.
Tijdens het webinar kwamen we net een beetje tijd tekort om dat punt nogmaals aan het eind te maken: klein en makkelijk beginnen is hoe je PKM vanaf het eerste moment waardevol maakt voor jezelf. Die kleine dingen maken je PKM kampioen. Je PKM systeem groeit vanzelf als het voor je leren en kenniswerk nuttig is.
Ik wil twee dingen aanwijzen uit een iets langer lijstje dat ik hieronder noem en waar ik mee had willen eindigen woensdag. Die twee dingen zijn volgens mij vanaf het eerste begin van belang en nut:
Door het eerste methodiekje help je je toekomstige zelf om te snappen wat je in de bewaarde info zag, en hoe die van nut kan zijn. Het tweede methodiekje zorgt dat je ook gebruikt wat je bewaard hebt. Zoals Lykle de Vries bij het webinar zei, het valideert je inspanning om dingen te bewaren.
Dit zijn twee heel praktische dingen die meteen uitvoerbaar zijn.
Het iets langere lijstje met tips bevat ook wat meer abstracte dingen die ook over houding en reflectie op je werkwijzen gaan:
Ter illustratie een paar afbeeldingen van hoe ik dingen die ik bewaar voor mezelf annoteer. Je ziet twee varianten. Er komen voorbeelden uit mijn notitie-tool (Obsidian), en voorbeelden uit de online annotatietool hypothes.is (die uiteindelijk ook automatisch in mijn notitietool terechtkomen). Je ziet hoe ik formuleer waarom ik iets bewaar, en je ziet ook links naar eerdere notities, trefwoorden of namen van auteurs. Die helpen allemaal bij het terugvinden als ik later een gerelateerde vraag heb. Zie ook hoe de omschrijving niet per se betekenis heeft voor iemand anders dan mijzelf. Het zijn mijn duidingen bij iets, en dat maakt het voor mij makkelijker terug te vinden. De P in PKM staat voor persoonlijk immers. Natuurlijk is die eerste annotatie in veel gevallen niet het eindstadium. Daarna volgt nog verwerking en til ik de interessantste dingen uit het bewaarde en maak daar losse notities in mijn eigen woorden van. Maar veel blijft ook gewoon in deze toestand tot ik het een keer vind op basis van een vraag of behoefte. Dat is dan kennelijk het juiste moment om de verdere verwerking van die informatie te doen.
Het hele verhaal dat ik in het webinar vertelde zal ik in een andere blogpost beschrijven.