Category: Learning

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The video above is a conversation between Nicole van der Hoeven who hosted it, Bob Doto who wrote the excellent A System for Writing, and Tris Oaten of the No Boilerplate YT-channel (that I did not know before).
Having watched this video where PKM systems are discussed and the different approaches the three participants have, a thought emerged. A thought that I have had previously at PKM events, or when I browse through e.g. the Obsidian forum. In a lot of PKM conversations people can talk past each other due to unspoken assumptions about what your system ‘should’ be.
Not necessarily in the video above, it’s just that watching this conversation made me think about it again.

One dimension is those that assume their system is for personal knowledge. Subjective and temporal as Bob at some point clearly says in the video. As opposed to a system to store references, facts and objective knowledge.

Another is using top-down and up-front created structures vs emerging structures that are earned over time and where noticing emergent structures is newly forming personal knowledge.

A third is whether your PKM system or your Zettelkasten is seen as the whole thing, a artefact-as-is (and thus perhaps transferable in its own right), or whether one’s interaction with it, your own thinking plus your PKM system / Zettelkasten is the whole thing and thus a fully personal tool. Do you see yourself as part of your PKM system, or not?

These three differences in attitude and resulting approach determine quite a bit it seems of what you choose to do and not do in practice (such as the Folgezettel part of the conversation in the video shows).

But it seems to me we hardly ever spell out our own starting assumptions (and thus design parameters) of one’s PKM system and where we see ourselves. We merely project our own ‘givens’ onto the outside world.

What Bob Doto says in the video for instance about his practices resonates well with my own, born from personal knowledge, emergent structures and personal interactive tool.
To me PKM is personal along three dimensions, a personal system, personal knowledge, and personal management, which map well on the three dimensions of assumptions just listed. But I sometimes get the sense that to others that sounds like not as PKM at all, just as making it up as you go along. Which isn’t a false description per se, except for the implied judgement that it won’t yield results and isn’t a deliberate design choice. While I see ratchets and compounding effects.

Maybe we need to more often precede our conversations about PKM system design choices with speaking our usually unspoken assumptions about what type of systems works for us.
Although paradoxically it may be the case that for some that isn’t perceived as a need, if they already assume there is a single cluster of ‘right’ ways of doing things. Then of course it is not needed to speak of assumptions, because what is right is external. Vice versa to me it is not PKM, is not P at all, if it’s assumed there’s a single right way of doing it for all. Then PKM is a method and productivity hack, but not a system for thinking and sensemaking.

For next year’s European PKM Summit I think I need to come up with a short way of describing that and put it on my name badge.

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From ancient Greece 32 tragedies are available to us. These plays, from the 5th century BCE, mostly don’t have a good ending. Hence our use of the word tragedy.

The 32 remaining are from just three authors, Euripides (18), Aeschylus (7) and Sophocles (7).
Hundreds of tragedies have been written, we know of some 300 more through fragments and titles from just those three authors. There were other authors, and we know the number of festivals and stagings etc. that we know took place implies there have been hundreds more than that. Just at the Athens festivals alone an estimated 648 different tragedies have been performed over a 70 year period in the 5th century BCE. Just 1 or 2 percent of tragedies written and staged are left to us. A tragedy in its own right.

Why these 32 works? These three authors mostly because a century onwards, the Greeks themselves held them in high regard. But beyond that, why these out of the 300 or so the 3 authors wrote? Mostly because of the Romans. 24 of 32 remaining works were selected by Roman grammatic scholars 600 years later, becoming canon in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. All 7 from both Aeschylus and Sophocles, and 10 by Euripides. Likely because of their link to the Homeric tales, which was central in Roman educational efforts. The number 24 isn’t a coincidence either, aiding memory techniques and echoing the 24 chapters in the Iliad and the Odyssee. Of these 24 we have multiple manuscripts and comments and marginalia, because they were taught and used.

This filter, 600 years after the tragedies were written, and 1800 years ago to us means that neither the ancient Greeks nor we ourselves have had any influence on the logic of this selection. The 24 handed down to us through the Roman filter, weren’t selected because the Greeks thought them most representative, nor because we think they are the most outstanding work. And possibly not because of esthetic reasons at all, but because of Roman educational preferences in teaching Greek grammar.

The other 8, all by Euripides, have come to us via a different way. Their titles are in alphabetic order, ε to ι, a piece of what once would have been a full overview of Euripides work, being copied together by some scribes. No selection criteria, just coincidence that one part of these ‘collected works’ survived. No annotations or comments either, just the works.

We know tragedies end badly, right? The ancient Greek word, originally meaning something like ‘goat song’, has come to mean that very thing to us. But it’s not that the ancient Greek playwrights were all depressed or nihilists. It seems it’s just that the Romans selected 24 works that mostly ended badly. Contemporary sources from Ancient Greece tell us tragedies did also end happily, and that such plays were very popular. Yet, the Roman selection 600 years later definitely picked mostly ones ending in, well, tragedy.

Comparing the two groups of plays by Euripides gives an enormous contrast though: of the 10 Roman selected works by Euripides only 2 end happily (20%), of the 8 ‘alphabetical’ ones by the same author, 7 end happily (88%). A reverse image!

The Roman selection is what made tragedies tragedies for us. A group of people 600 years removed from the source of these plays and 1800 years removed from us. For their own, unknowable to us, reasons. It’s a survival bias, not an inherent trait of the plays concerned.

And we’re stuck with that choice.

Tragic.

Also highly fascinating, I find.

Sources: Libraries of the Mind by William Marx (2025), page 3 and 112-116, Greek Tragedy on Wikipedia.

Twenty years ago today E and I visited Reboot 7 in Copenhagen. What I wrote a decade ago at the 10th anniversary of that conference still holds true for me.

Over time Reboot 7 became mythical. A myth that can’t return. But one we were part of, participated in and shaped.
Still got the t-shirt.


The yellow t-shirt with red text from the 2005 Reboot 7 conference, on my blue reading chair in my home office 20 years on.

Seventeen years ago today I blogged about a barcamp style event in Amsterdam I co-hosted, called GovCamp_NL. I struck up a conversation there about open government data after having had a similar conversation the week before in Austria. It marked the beginning of my work in this field. We just welcomed the thirteenth team member in the company that over time grew out of that first conversation. Our work at my company is driven by the same thing as the event, something I’ve come to call constructive activism.

These days, the principles and values that drove those events, and have set the tone for the past two decades of everything I’ve done professionally and socially, seem more important than ever. They are elemental in the current geopolitical landscape around everything digital and data. We can look back on our past selves with 20 years hindsight and smile about our one time optimism, because so much exploitation, abuse and surveillance grew out of the platforms and applications that originate in the early 00’s. But not because that optimism was wrong. Naive yes, in thinking that the tech would all take care of itself, by design and by default, and we just needed to nudge it a bit. That optimism in the potential for (networked) agency, for transparency, for inclusion, for diversity, and for global connectedness is still very much warranted, as a celebration of human creativity, of the sense of wonder that wielding complexity for mutual benefit provides, just not singularly attached to the tech involved.
Anything digital is political. The optimism is highly political too.

The time to shape the open web and digital ethics is now, is every day. Time for a reboot.

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I’ve been long fascinated by memory palaces. As a primary school kid and again as a teenager when I encountered the concept, I concluded that, while fascinating, they were more effort than what I would gain. My memory was fine, and first conjuring up a set of locations and then visualising evocative things in them to remember something seemed an awful lot of upfront trouble.

In recent months I’ve looked at memory palaces and other mnemonic techniques again. Reading Wayfinding by Michael Bond gave me insights into the role of the spatial brain in remembering, but also mental health and ageing. Reading Lynne Kelly’s Memory Craft gave me lots of insights both in various memory methods, as well as the effort and repetition that goes into them and which thus supports learning. Both were fun reads.

I decided to create a memory palace in my home office, which now has 45 loci.
Which leaves me with the question, what do I want to remember in it? And, I don’t know!

I find it quite hilarious that I can’t come up with something worthwhile to put in a memory palace! 😀
However I suspect that it might be the same for others. Searching forums for memory techniques, most applications are focused on showing off how well the methods work. Memory competitions to remember a random deck of cards in sequence in a few minutes.

Not a whole lot examples of memory palaces used for something ‘real’ and significant to its user.

Do use memory palaces? What do you remember with them for the long term? Why that? Would a note to link to be enough too?

In reply to SPARK! Toon random kennis in Obsidian by Frank Meeuwsen

Leuk Frank! Ik heb het nog niet geprobeerd of bekeken, maar ik ga dit denk ik proberen te gebruiken om een random quote uit mijn map van web clippings te halen en af te beelden bovenin mijn Daglog. Om op die manier blootgesteld te worden aan dingen die ik al een keer bewaarde. Je vraagt naar aanvulling: zou je in plaats van een map ook naar een enkel bestand kunnen wijzen? Bijvoorbeeld naar de annotaties van een boek dat ik net las, zodat ik dat als het ware verder verwerk door toevallige interactie er mee.

… op mijn Obsidian homepage laad ik continu een random paragraaf uit de Tao Te Ching. Door op een button te klikken verandert de paragraaf en kan ik naar het origineel doorklikken voor verdere studie. Ik maakte hiervoor een eigen script…. Kun je hier iets mee? Zo ja, waar gebruik je het nu voor?

Frank Meeuwsen

On a mailing list last week someone mentioned they had a subscription to the university library of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. It turns out that Dutch universities offer outsiders access to their libraries. The conditions may vary, I don’t know.

Utrecht University being nearest to us, I checked out if they offer a similar service. They do. Registering with them as an outsider is free, and that provides access to their digital and physical collections on-site. They also have a paid subscription that allows lending books.

I registered for a subscription last weekend, and yesterday visited the university library to take the needed administrative steps and pay. I now have a library card.
On-site you log in into the university’s wifi network, with your library ID, and then have access to their digital collections.

I look forward to exploring how this can aid my reading and work.