Tag: writing

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Reading Bob Doto’s recent book on his note making and writing practices, he explained how he uses his Luhmann-style alphanumeric numbering of notes as a way to spot where a richer grouping is emerging as a possible starting point for his writing. It made me ask, how to spot similar patterns in my digital notes without that numbering system?

Alphanumeric numbering

The alphanumeric numbering basically works like this: When you start your notes collection, you number the notes from the very first one. Say you start with your first two notes on two different topics, A and B. For Topic A, the first note you give the number 1. Topic B’s first note 2. Then for each new note, you decide where to place it in the existing collection. If you think it’s connected to Topic A, it may become 1a. A few notes down the line on other topics you may make a note you place in 1b. Then some time later you have a note you want to place directly after 1a. but not after 1b, so you number it 1a1, etc. Key here is that the numbering system doesn’t give a premade structure where you need to slot a new note in an existing hole (unlike library numbering systems). The numbering system merely means you must choose a first place where you place a new note, intentionally making a first connection to an existing note and number it accordingly. For physical note making systems on index cards this is I think basically the only way to do it, if you don’t want to use a predefined structure (and you don’t because structure is emergent from working with your notes, a knowledge output, not an administrative tool), and do want a navigable and explorable system.

Alphanumeric numbering to detect growth in your system

At the other end of his PKM system, where Doto creates writings using the material he collected over time, the alphanumeric system helps him in finding potential things to write about. Topics where there are lots of notes, accumulated over some period of time, will show up as denser parts of his alphanumeric system. Say in Topic B’s number 2 branch above, a year later there are just 1 or 2 new notes. 2.1 and 2.2. That is a signal Topic B wasn’t an interest that gained any depth that year. But say that note number 1a is now a grouping of a dozen notes, 1a1-1 and a further forking set below it, and 1a2 has some, and there’s 1a3 with no further notes attached. Clearly something happened there in the intervening time. Your attention attached a range of notes to that first starting point 1a, and perhaps it means you have something to write there to bring those notes together. It’s like a grape bunch on a vine. Vine 2 hasn’t grown any grapes let alone any bunches of them, but Vine 1a has. And there may be other grape bunches, bigger, smaller, elsewhere. You choose a bunch to make some wine, i.e. inspecting and reflecting on that grouping of notes and then writing.

On not having alphanumeric numbering in my system

My notes are not numbered that way, although they do contain a timestamp. They’re not numbered because I have a digital notes collection, in which it is easy to make links between notes. I add the time stamp both for unique titles (‘Some good summarising title 20241018125808’ is different from ‘Some good summarising title 20020424125820’ despite the same title text) and to glance from the title from which period in my activities something comes. My notes always have a link to another already existing note, like the alphanumeric system, I always intentionally choose a first connection. Without it, it is not really a navigable and explorable system. However, over time or at the time of first writing, I may add additional links from that note to others. It is not always visible which link was the first link, the equivalent of choosing the first position in the alphanumeric system.

On the output side this means I cannot easily spot where the density of my notes has grown to a budding grape bunch. I can see which notes are most heavily connected, using the Obsidian graph, but that’s equivalent to pointing a lot to a main branch, and the more I point to a single note the less meaningful it is, as it becomes more of a generic category essentially.

So what are my options to detect emerging dense spots in my notes?

The alphanumeric grape bunch is basically a group of one or more short or longer lineages originating from a single point somewhere in the total.
Those lineages are present in my notes too, but not easy to spot. Sometimes I make deliberate chains (Note B linking to more abstract concept A, and to more tangible example C, making an A-B-C train of thought), but not often. Lineages would be easier to spot if links in notes had metadata, like the time of linking. This would both show in a note the first link (the first place it was put in), and allow across notes the exploration of the sequence in which notes x, y and z got connected by looking at note creation data and incoming linkages. Links are information objects in their own right, and have different aspects like direction(s), character, intensity, a time dimension and a versioning history, none of which is captured in my system (nor in those of others I saw). Links can also grow into new notes. A link between A and B over time and through reflection deepening in meaning, necessitating its own note to express it with enough atomicity.

Might local graphs help?

The local graph of a note in my Obsidian tool can provide a bit of lineage, by looking at the vicinity of a single note limited to incoming links and set to a depth of 2 or higher. It’s not visually obvious though, it doesn’t jump out. In the following graph (incoming links, depth 2, with ‘Links as information object’ as the branching off point) I colored the different branches. Note that the title for each node/note has a timestamp showing how much time there was between one note and the following added to the lineage. Some notes have the same date, meaning they were written in the more or less the same sitting. Also note that some older notes link to some newer notes, indicating I edited the note to include a new link to a newer note)

What also emerges from this image is that several ‘lineages’ connect further ‘down’. Essentially they create a loop, a circle of notes. There are many more, and I think they are a sign of density (one that alphanumeric numbering doesn’t have), yet like lineages not easy to spot. Two examples are shown below. One circle based on a depth of 2, another with depth 3.

While this type of visualisation isn’t useless, it’s also not obviously useful in this case. Would there be other ways to search for things like “lines longer than 3 notes, with more than 1 branching off point with at least 2 notes depth”.

Do you have ways to spot emerging clusters outside of alphanumeric numbering and graphs in your notes? As a suggestion for your potential next writing?

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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.

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I find that I feel writing a non-fiction subject oriented book is nonsense for non-academics. I feel a strong aversion to the idea of writing a non-fiction book, as people have suggested to me occasionally since university.

Different elements are part of that aversion:

  • There’s a plethora of non-fiction books that to me seem 300 to 400 pages of anecdotal padding around a core idea that would fit on the backflap. Many such books lack tables of content and indexes, seemingly to better hide that one or few core ideas, so you need to go through all pages to find them.
  • The motivation for non-fiction writers to write a book I often find suspect. Aimed at marketing and PR, in support of selling themselves as consultant for instance. Written not to serve an audience, or even find one, but as a branding prop. That makes the actual content often even thinner. Such as taking something anecdotal like “I had this great project I enormously enjoyed doing” and anointing it as the new truth, “Organise all your projects like this, it’s a universal method!”
  • I equally find my own favourite topics suspect as material for writing a book. I don’t think any of the topics I work on, and have been working on, are deep enough or have enough solid foundation to stand on their own as a book. It could only become a range of anecdotes around ideas that themselves fit in a sentence or two. In my activities context and environment are key in working out how an idea can be made to work for a client, and that’s the work. That’s a good source of anecdotes, but not more. See the first bullet. A book about it would be a collection of opinions, and in my eyes would take a rather large amount of work to give those ideas a more solid footing.

In a conversation with E about this a few months ago, she said that’s a very arrogant stance towards authors (they have nothing to say), as well as belittling myself (I have nothing to say). I think those are both the same things, that most people, including me, don’t have enough to say to fill a book, to spend tens of thousands of words on. Many have enough to say on enough moments to at that time fill a great blogpost, article, a pamphlet (like the one about birthday unconferences shown in the right hand column), or an essay. But not a book, an artefact that seems such a heavyweight creation and production process in comparison. There are those who write a book by collating material that was previously written as blogposts, or as internal notes, and then somewhat rearranged. I see that as case in point more than counter argument.

As stated at the top, I make exceptions for academic books, explaining or introducing a field or actual research and their popular science counterparts, and for non-subject non-fiction, that e.g. describes a journey (geographically, or through life for instance, ‘true stories’, the history of a topic and how we ended up in the current situation, that sort of thing).
I also don’t mean fiction. Fiction’s role is very different, and any story that makes you read the next sentence and the next and the next is not what I mean here.
In that sense I very much appreciate the work of Cory Doctorow, who writes articles, essays, columns and blogposts about the topics he cares about, and writes fiction books to explore those same topics along different and novel routes.

Yet, our house holds many non-fiction books. A stack of books that keeps ever growing. So, why is that? Is it that there is more value in the whole, the collection of books read, and those unread, as opposed to the lack of value I perceive in any singular book in itself? Or maybe I don’t understand what writing a non-fiction book is, and what it is for. There are people reading my blog who have written non-fiction books. What were your motivations and aims? Why a book?

How long is the list of draft postings in your CMS? I had about 30 from the past 3 years. This morning I went through them and moved those that still look like a posting could come from them into my Obsidian notes. I have a writing folder there, and I find it easier to write there than in the back-end of WordPress, where I still do most of my blogwriting (including this post). Those drafts that had no actual content or were very much connected to a specific moment in time (today we went…) I deleted. About a dozen drafts remain and now live in my notes. Let’s see if having those drafts in an environment where I can encounter them more regularly leads to finishing them. In the past weeks I’ve done my weeknotes postings in Obsidian first as a note, and noticed how it increased the speed of writing. (Afterwards I still need to add links and images in WP though, it’s not a micropub editor.)

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Last week I treated myself with an Boox Nova2 e-ink Android tablet, after reading about it in Robert Lender’s blog. (Meanwhile he has blogged his first impressions and experiences, in German) For most of the week the device sat on my desk, as I didn’t have time yet to take a proper look. Today I finally tried my hand at working with the device, so here are some first impressions.

The Nova2 is intended as a work device for me. To read non-fiction and annotate, as well as for handwritten notes and sketches. It therefore needs to be a seamless part of my workflow, meaning that things I write or annotate need to easily flow into other steps and the tools connected to those steps. Handwritten notes to be either exported as is, or transposed into text. Annotations exported and retrievable. The crucial thing for that is the ability to escape the specific silo a device is part of.

The Nova2 promises a handful of useful things:

  • Syncing with various cloud tools (Evernote, Dropbox e.g.),
  • E-mailing,
  • Handwritten note taking,
  • Multilingual text recognition of handwritten notes,
  • Run a variety of e-reader apps as a generic Android tablet
  • Optimise it for left handed use

My first impressions are only about trying those things out. Once I’ve done that, I can start looking at the workflow of the device itself, and the fit with the rest of my workflow.

It starts up slowly I feel.

It’s a Chinese product, so despite it being an Android device, there’s no preloaded Google stuff on it. That isn’t a big issue, on the contrary, but to use it as an e-reader I also wanted to have the Kindle app installed and that required the Google store. It took me several attempts to get it loaded, until I realised I had to register the device with Onyx first as well. That was a simple as giving it an e-mail address (a unique one as per usual), and typing in the confirmation code received on that mail address. I’m not sure what activating it with Onyx means. I’m not synchronising with the Onyx platform, but I’m not fully sure nothing gets send there. After that connecting it to a Google account and loading the Google store was easy. I also connected my Evernote account, which worked flawlessly.

I set the device up to push my handwritten notes to Evernote. That at first didn’t work. As it turns out this too was because the device wasn’t registered yet with Onyx. So after I got the Google store working, pushing to Evernote also worked.

I set up a new email address, that IMAPs to my mail server from the mail app on the device. This should mean I can also mail notes (to various other applications I’ve given an email address, like my Kindles, my blogs etc.)

Handwriting on devices I’ve never much liked, such as on an iPad, or using the Wacom A4 sized writing pad I use on my desk. Too often it feels like writing with your finger, it lacks fine motor control, and the feedback is usually slightly off, making writing awkward and the result illegible. My handwriting is already hard enough to read in the best of circumstances. This device handles it very well, I’m impressed. I’ve set it up for left handed writing, also meaning I moved the controls to the right hand side of the screen. Writing in the notes app that comes with the Nova2 is really good, and feels natural, also as the protective adhesive layer helps provide the right type of resistance like you have on paper. Hand writing in Evernote doesn’t work. It’s the ‘fat finger’ style of writing again, and the writing shows up on the screen a bit down and to the right of where the pen tip actually is, making it really hard to continue in the spot you left off a second or two earlier.

When you write in the device’s notes app, you have an ‘AI’ option to turn it into text. It will try to also interpret doodles, so you can’t really use it if you have notes and doodles on the same page. For just text at first I got very weird results, but then remembered I should set the language right. Once I did that, letting the writing recognition function know the notes are in Dutch, then it worked fine. Transmogrifying my handwriting into text is done online somewhere, so the device needs to be connected. I don’t know where my notes end up to be processed. I take notes in Dutch and English mostly, sometimes in German. My notes usually contain both Dutch and English at the same time. It seems that I can only select one language for the text recognition algorithm, so that isn’t optimal. That it is able to process Dutch at all is a step up from other apps and devices I tried.

I’ve installed several reading apps, next to the Onyx one itself: Kindle and Kobo. I keep my e-book library in Calibre (and I really should add my more recent Amazon purchases there), and it should therefore be possible to also load books into the native reader app. Likely that is the fastest one after all.
However, I haven’t succeeded yet in connecting the Nova2 to my laptop over USB. My filetransfer application sees the device as locked all the time, so I can’t access its storage. This is something I need to figure out, as this is the preferred route to move files between Calibre and the Nova2. It is possible to transfer files via wifi. If you go to the devices IP address in your local network (the Nova2 will tell you what its IP address is), then you get a html page allowing you to select files to upload. Doing that, I got some epubs and pdfs loaded on the Nova2 to read. [UPDATE plugging the Nova2 into the other USB port on my Mac, Calibre launches automatically as it immediately recognises the device. Android File Transfer does not see the device at all on that port, where it does see it on the first port but as locked. With Calibre working I can now manage the books on the Nova2 well]

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I like the notion of cards, that @visakanv describes, and threading them into a bigger whole.

What would be ideal, I think, is if all information could be represented as “cards”, and all cards could be easily threaded. Every book, every blogpost, every video, even songs, etc – all could be represented as “threaded cards”. Some cards more valuable than others.

In a way, a lot of what I’ve been trying to do with my personal knowledge management, notetaking, etc is to assemble an interesting, coherent, useful thread of thread of threads, of everything I care about. A personal web of data, with interesting trails and paths I can share with others.

I have a huge, sprawling junkyard mess of Workflowy notes, Evernote cards, Google keep cards, Notes, blogposts, etc etc ad infinitum. Buried in there are entire books worth of interesting + useful information. But it suffers from bad or non-existent threading, constrained by memory.

I too have a mountain’s worth of snippets, pieces, half sentences. And I have a much lower stack of postings and extended notes. Interesting stuff doesn’t get shared, because I envision a more extensive, a more ‘complete’ write-up that then more often than not never happens. The appeal to PKM above is key here for me. The world isn’t just cards, I agree with Neil, who pointed me to the posting above, fragmentation isn’t everything. Because synthesis and curation are important. However, having that synthesis in a fully different channel than the ‘cards’ from which it is built, or rather not having the cards in the same place, so that both don’t exist in the same web of meaning seems less logical. It’s also a source of hesitance, a threshold to posting.

Synthesis and curation presume smaller pieces, like cards. Everything starts out as miscellaneous, until patterns stand out, as small pieces get loosely joined.
I don’t know why Visakanv talks of threading only in the context of Twitter. Almost like he’s reinventing tags (tags are a key organising instrument for me). To me threading sounds a bit like a trail of breadcrumbs, to show from which elements something was created. Or cooking, where the cards are the list of ingredients, resulting in a dish, and dishes resulting in a dinner or a buffet.

More ‘cards’, snippets, I find a useful take on how to post in this space (both the blog part and the wiki part), and also bring more from other channels/tools in here.

(I took the photos during Breda Photo Festival, of Antony Cairns IBM CTY1 project, which is photos printed on IBM punch cards and held together with pins.)