Tag: note making

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How could I not buy these small notebooks? Made by my friend Peter from paper cut-offs from boxes he made and printed in Tuscany, they are made from Magnani 1404 paper. Magnani started making paper in Pescia in 1404 (they ceased operation in recent years, but another Magnani is still making paper, since 1481), right at the moment in time that the literate population of Tuscany started using paper notebooks to make everyday notes, and lots of them. Paper had become affordable and available enough roughly a century earlier, with Tuscany being at the heart of that, and Florentine merchants used their book keeping system and the paper notebooks needed for it to build a continent spanning trade network. After the Black Death personal note taking took off too, and from 1400 onwards it had become commonplace:

At the end of the Middle Ages, urban Tuscans seemed stricken with a writing fever, a desire to note down everything they saw.’ But they remained a peculiarly local phenomenon: there was something uniquely Florentine (or more accurately ‘Tuscan’ as examples also survive from Siena and Lucca) about them,…

Allen, Roland. The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (p. 61).”

Around the turn of the year I gave The Notebook as a present to Peter thinking it would be something to his liking. My own notes have helped me learn and work for decades. E and I when we lived in Lucca for a month, passed through Pescia by train en route to Firenze.

Tuscany, paper from a company that was there from the start of everyday note taking, The Notebook, personal knowledge management, and friendship, all coming together in this piece of craftsmanship. How could I not buy them? So I did.

A useful tip from Nicole van der Hoeven that I adopted in the past days: using the title of a note also as a linked heading inside the note. Especially since the change in Obsidian that de-emphasizes the title of a note in the interface. My note titles are meaningful, Andy Matuschak style, and usually result from writing the note or from writing another note from which it branches off. (My titles also contain a timestamp ensuring they’re unique and providing the ability to place a note in time. Example: “Optimal unfamiliarity 20040107122600”) Having it as primary header in the note itself means I will more likely think about improving the title when I develop the note over time.

Personally, I put the filename as a heading, but I also put it as a link. When I rename the file, the link (which is also the heading), automatically updates.
Nicole van der Hoeven

Screenshot of what that looks like in practice:


Screenshot of a note title optimal unfamaliarity with its title as a header linking to the note itself

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A personal knowledge management (pkm) and note making oriented rewrite by Dan Allosso of what was originally a guide for writing in the humanities by his father S.F. Allosso.

Allosso, being a historian, acknowledges the long history of methods that in the last 20 yrs or so were gathered under the pkm label. His advice on the why, what and how of making notes is more focused on their role in creating outputs than other texts about making notes (where output often is ignored or only addressed by hand waving).

At the very least that allows the notes maker to relax and to not obsess about doing ‘the system’ right to the point that it obscures what the system is actually for.

Short read, mostly well known territory but some useful takeaways still. Read as e-book.

Bookmarked Agency Made Me Do It by Mike Travers

This looks like an interesting site to explore and follow (though there is no feed). First in terms of the topic, agency. I’m very interested myself in the role of technology in agency, specifically networked agency which is located in the same spot where a lot of our everyday complexity lives. Second in terms of set-up. Mike Travers left his old blog behind to create this new site, generated from his Logseq notes, which is “more like an open notebook project. Parts of it are essay-like but other parts are collections of rough notes or pointers to content that doesn’t exist yet. The two parts are somewhat intertwingled”. I’m interested in that intertwingling to shape this space here differently in similar ways, although unlike Travers with existing content maintained. Something that shows the trees and the forest at the same time, as I said about it earlier.

Agency Made Me Do It, an evolving hypertext document which is trying to be some combination of personal wiki and replacement for my old blog. … I’ve been circling around the topic of agency for a few decades now. I wrote a dissertation on how metaphors of agency are baked into computers, programming languages, and the technical language engineers use to talk about them. … I’m using “agency” as kind of a magic word to open up the contested terrain where physical causality and the mental intersect. … We are all forced to be practitioners of agency, forced to construct ourselves as agents…

Mike Travers

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Here are some impressions of my increased usage of Hypothes.is, a social annotation tool, in the past few days.
I follow Chris Aldrich his Hypothes.is RSS feed, and his usage has been both a good example and source of learning in the past months, as well as a nudge to experiment and adopt Hypothes.is myself.

What follows is a list of some early impressions that I formulated earlier today in an email. I thought I might as well post them here.

  • I played with the API to get a grip of how I might interact with the annotations I make, and with those of others I’m interested in. Added the existence of annotations to my blogposts in WordPress through the API too.
  • The Obsidian plugin to get annotations into my notes is an absolute prerequisite, because I need those notes in my own workflow.
  • I find working in browser for annotations somewhat distracting and uncomfortable (and I need to remind myself that they will end up in my notes, I feel the urge to also download it directly to my notes.)
  • I try to add an Archive link to the annotated article as the first link. It is slowly becoming habitual.
  • I mention existing notes in my annotations when I make them in Obsidian. Because it is one context that is a matter of starting a link [[ and I have forward search through all note titles. In hypothes.is being browser based this is a bit harder, as it means switching tools to retrieve the correct note titles. They do then work when they end up in Obsidian of course. At the same time, in my earlier use of a markdown downloader I would just mention those associations in the motivation to save a link, which is worse. Hypothes.is sits in the middle of saving a bookmark with motivation and annotating in Obsidian itself.
  • I do have some performative urges when annotating publicly. Maybe they will disappear over time.
  • The firefox hypothes.is bookmarklet I use doesn’t seem to play nice with archive.org. There’s another I haven’t tested yet.
  • I notice that any public annotations are licensed CC0 (public domain). Not sure what I think about that yet. It’s a logical step as such, but I don’t fully see yet what it may mean for subseqeunt learning processes internally and further down the process of creating insights or outputs. Is CC0 also applied to closed groups (educational settings e.g.)? Private annotations are just that, and don’t have CC0, but then you miss out on the social aspects of annotation.
  • My thoughts keep wandering to interacting with hypothes.is without using it directly to annotate webarticles through the browser. Are there any tools or people who build on or share with hypothes.is using the W3C standards / API, but don’t necessarily use hypothes.is themselves? Or run their own instance, which should be possible? I suspect that would open opportunities for a more liquid experience between this blog, my notes, and annotated articles.

Bookmarked Web Annotation Data Model by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

I wasn’t aware of it, but there’s a W3C model for annotations (in JSON). It was mentioned in the book Annotation I’ve been reading in the past weeks. Not sure if this is something I have a use for, but it may be an interesting way to transform and share book notes on this site. It was suggested that Hypothes.is uses this model. There’s also a Hypothes.is API which suggests it might be possible to pull annotations from there, although I don’t suppose you could push them there as a way of publishing annotations.

The Web Annotation Data Model specification describes a structured model and format to enable annotations to be shared and reused across different hardware and software platforms. … The specification provides a specific JSON format for ease of creation and consumption of annotations based on the conceptual model …, and the vocabulary of terms that represents it. This specification was derived from the Open Annotation Community Group’s outcomes. … This document was published by the Web Annotation Working Group as a Recommendation

W3C