#Personal Knowledge Management

[gredi-bird]

the best thing about using a zettelkasten system for organization is you get to play with your funny little cards instead of actually facing your problems

[just-queue]

I can't tell if starting a zettelkasten system is actually going to solve my memory problems, help me organize my thoughts, and become a more knowledgeable person or if that's just the neurodivergent "oh pretty shiny new toy" talking

[recsspecs]

Good students, on the other hand, constantly raise the bar for themselves

as they focus on what they haven’t learned and mastered yet. This is why high achievers who have had a taste of the vast amount of knowledge out there are likely to suffer from what psychologists call imposter syndrome, the feeling that you are not really up to the job, even though, of all people, they are (Clance and Imes 1978; Brems et al. 1994).

- How to Take Smart Notes (Sönke Ahrens)

[wanderingmindthoughts]

currently reading "building a second brain", as part of my efforts towards this blog but also in general in my life -my phd is demanding a lot of knowledge-organization skills that I don't really have. I want to use this blog as an organization tool about my thougths and beliefs, but I'm still hesitant on how personal I want to get. like, I'm okay sharing philosophical concepts and developing them, but I don't think I want to publicly think about my trauma and personal relationships. I would love to use this for my academic stuff, but I guess I can get into trouble about sharing research before it's published -so it may be prudent to use some kind of private note-taking tool for that (I'm considering logseq)

[daytura]

out of curiosity, what is telegraphy of communication?

Telegraphic thinking condenses amodal, propositional information; it is complex semantic clustering. This makes it ideal for rapidly wielding (findings from) sizeable topics while remaining durable enough for reuse amongst other telegraphic statements. Long-term telegraphy would also stimulate some idiolect, either repurposing existing phrases with new definitions or using haptic phrasing to "pull" semantic value closer to the "surface" of the text. But does telegraphy actually provide mass communicative value? Thought and communication may fuse and feedback into each other at the level of language, but they cannot be wholly interchanged nor should they be. Academics do not make their work as short as possible; they make it as organized as possible. Telegraphy is most effective as a transient functional response.

---

Telegraphy of information is basically being as direct and terse with your wording as possible while keeping max information. It's a bit more rich than summarization — all the chatbots can summarize, ad nauseum. This is closer to Ernest Hemingway, thesis sentences, specific distributivity, etc. You condense your thinking, and triage what you actually care about for your intended recipient (e.g. another person, a piece of writing, your future self). I don't have it down perfectly, but I'm trying. The former shouldn't be a mandate for telegraphic writing; we all speak and write differently, so it holds that every person has a slightly different telegraphic style. I prefer to compound adjectives. Maybe someone else likes sticking individual nouns together; or they simply away with propositions, conjunctions, and other function words.

From Cevolini and Schmidt 2016, "Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe":

Whereas the early notes [in Niklas Luhmann's entire oeuvre of notes, from his time as a senior civil servant all the way to an academic and professor of sociology] from the 1950s and 1960s frequently tended to be more of the running-text kind and more closely reflected the original readings, they increasingly became more compact and thesis-like in the 1970s. Particularly, these later notes were not simply excerpts [...] for instance, the [bibliographic] notes from reading an entire book frequently fit onto one of these cards [A-6 European format].

And from one of his cards in the ongoing digitization project, translated:

536/2c18a Important consequences for the process of institutionalization: There is a lack of time to explicitly protest against everything implied. As a result, one becomes entangled in shared assumptions.

I think my last sentence sums up my stance on telegraphic writing well: it's not always sustainable or appropriate, and that's fine. If you wrote and spoke like that all the time, it'll impede your communication. Luhmann's publications were and still are notoriously difficult to translate into English, because he couldn't quite get out of this slipbox/condensing mentality. (Apparently his transcribed lectures are easier to follow.) You compare him to someone like Bob Doto who has been a writer long before he picked up the zettelkasten system: his book, "A System for Writing" is written as if he organized and drafted it like it were a regular book (because it is). Telegraphic phrasing serves an internal function to propagate and stimulate further thinking, but it doesn't (necessarily) constitute the blogpost you'll be posting to Tumblr or Substack.

[leftcollectionreview]

Introduction

So Tumblr is new to me. TBH posting online is new to me. But I'm trying to be more proactive about exploring and synthesizing my own thoughts, so I'm going to try and make a habit of it. I can do a more thorough introduction another time, but I want to identify two topics that are going to be important to me.

Being transgender and living in a society that is awful because of it. Particularly having that identity politically weaponized and used as a cudgel against me and others.

Political organizing, particularly field and union organizing. There's quite a bit of content on here about union organizing (which we love) but not very much about the reality of politically organizing strangers.

Personal Knowledge Management. I'm trying to use this for accountability and learning in public. There seems to be a small but active PKM community on Tumblr, so I'm excited to see what non-mainstream, non-productivity PKM takes I find.

This middle one is particularly interesting to me. Yes, going outside sucks. Talking to strangers sucks even more. Talking with strangers who disagree with us sucks the most. But it's also the only way that we're going to see the political change that we want to see. Many people don't know a single person that has a different political affiliation (or don't know that person does). We need to get out there and talk with folks if we ever want that to change.

And whoever came up with the rule to never talk about religion and politics was obviously full of shit and privilege. Talk about politics all the time. Make people uncomfortable with the reality of their choices. Make good trouble.

[thliterary]

This week we're back to looking at ObsidianMD - in particular plugins!

[moonlightvigil8]

PKM

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is the idea that you should manage your knowledge externally with a tool. But be careful, the biggest problem with PKM is when you sharpen your metaphorical axe instead of chopping down trees, ending up the day with doing no work and grinding down your axes to nothing. Realistically, this would mean fiddling with your tools instead of using them to do the things you want to do.

Your system should serve you, not you serving it.

Strands

There are 4 approaches to organizing your PKM system, each with strengths and weaknesses.

1. Idea First

2. Topic First

3. Action First

4. Time First

Idea First

This would be the idea of atomic notes, each note has an idea and you organize them by connections between those ideas.

Topic First

Something similar to how you would take notes in school, you start with the notes known as a map of content and create notes around that.

Action First

You put the information in the place where it is most useful, whether it is in something you need to finish or where you know you will need it in the future. note that, when it doesn't matter where you put the note, this becomes less useful overtime.

Time First

You want to organize your information chronologically, this means having a daily note and putting the information on that day and it will automatically be moved to a note where it is most useful, you don't have to think about where to put the information since it is always in the daily note.

PARDEC

PARDEC is my alternative to the LATCH method for organization, it's an acronym that stands for:

- Process

- Alphanumeric

- Relationship

- Date

- Environment

- Category

These would be all the ways to find information that I know.

Process

This would be what stage of production something is in. A book could be being written, edited or revised for example.

Alphanumeric

This is a mix between alphabetical and numeric. Using this you can create a hierarchy similar to folders without their limitations.

Relationship

How this information relates to other information. There are two types of relationships, simple and complex. Simple relationships are "this relevant information is here", while complex relationships depend more on context to make sense.

Date

Anything related to time. The best format is year-month-day so it's easier to search because you can increase the precision as you add more information.

Environment

Environment in the geospatial sense. So cities, coffee shops, etc. Anything related to a place.

Category

Organize information based on shared characteristics.

Tools

Folders

Folders are the classic way to organize a computer, but they are actually a trap. Folders are a physical limitation of paper and there is no paper here.

In general, use folders when you want to separate things because you can only have a note on a single folder.

Tags

Tags unite, because a note can have multiple tags so a tag can contain a variety of notes.

If you can use hierarchical tags, you can create a folder hierarchy without the folder limitation.

Now I'll go over how I use tags:

Set

Set tags are the largest group of tags that work for any type of grouping you want to have with a tag.

'#set/PKM', '#set/school' for example.

If you want you can use the PARA method as tags, so you don't have to move files around, which kinda makes the Resources and Archive useless, but whatever.

ON

This tag is used to describe the general content of a note, something superficial and present in other notes to link them together.

'#on/electronics', '#on/physics' for example.

That's how Odysseas uses his tags and indexes, even tho he uses notes as tags.

Type

Describes the type of note, very explanatory.

'#type/daily-note', '#type/PDF' for example.

You can use Metadata to do this if you want to use fewer tags.

Metadata

The metadata of something should be in the same file you are working on.

To create metadata in Obsidian you can add properties with a command or put '---' in the first line of the file, or you can do it in the body of the file with the following format '[Property::Value]'.

Here you can put the Environment, Date and Process information.

Links

Links are the most powerful, flexible and therefore complex tool of all that I will talk about here.

The format of a link is to put two pairs of square brackets ([[]]) around the name of the note you want to link to. This is how you represent simple and complex relationships explained above.

If it is not obvious why a link is made you should always explain why so that when you return to the note you will not be left wondering what you meant by it. To get this further we can use '[Semantic::[[Links]]]', AKA put a link as a value of a property, then you can put briefly how these two notes relate to each other.

If you think about it, there's not much difference between a link or a tag, so the main difference in using a note with a link instead of a tag is that with the note, you can give context as to why the relationship makes sense in that context, and with the tag you can make hierarchy.

Maps of Content

Maps of Content, or MOCs, have 2 main functions, orient ourselves in or spaces of our PKM, and think about how this information and ideas relate to each other.

For the first function, a automated list of ideas work, but for the second one, the inconvenience of thinking and relating ideas is the point.

Maps are user interface, so considering what is not brought in is just as important as what gets in.

There is two ways of making a MOC, top-down or bottom-up.

Top-down means that you pick your topic of the MOC and then build the notes around it.

Bottom-up means you want to make a MOC using already existing notes and make them more manageable and useful.

Alphanumeric Identifier

To use the alphanumeric identifier, for example, you have a parent note with the ID 100 and children like 101.1 and 101.2, these notes can have child notes like 101.1a1 and 101.2b1. Be careful with this system because if you put a "10" or "aa" you might break the order because numbers take precedence over letters, so the note 10.10a would be above the note 10.9a even though the note was made first. This doesn't happen in Obsidian.

Zettelkasten or a Digital Garden

The Zettelkasten system is an information organization system focused on creating new ideas by putting together other ideas.

To do this we will use two types of notes, literature notes and permanent notes. Literature notes are your thoughts about a piece of media. Anything you think is right, wrong or interesting. Permanent notes are loose ideas that are free to connect. The value of an idea comes from how it relates to other ideas.

That's why we make one note per idea, to allow it to have as many connections as possible and to be able to reuse the same idea in as many places as possible. And that's why some people are against changing permanent notes, because changing the note would change its relationship with related notes.

In Nikolas Luhman's zettelkasten he used alphanumeric identifiers, but instead of using them hierarchically, he used them mainly as unique identifiers, this means that most of the notes were not in the "right" place, but in a place that allowed them to have some kind of relationship with the note above, because with paper, putting the note in the wrong place would mean not being able to find it when you wanted to.

[zen-blitz]

💡 Overwhelmed by info overload? Turn saved notes into actionable insights! Build a PKM system & reclaim your focus. Learn how here!

(via Stop Scrolling! : Mastering Intentional Information Consumption)

[creep3r-chan]

Wow, okay thanks a lot, now your making me GEEK OUT over characters I DON'T EVEN KNOW ABOUT!!! Because you post about them so damn much and now I'm associating them with YOU and this is ALL YOUR FAULT!!! BECAUSE NOW EVERY TIME THEY COME ACROSS MY DASH I THINK ABOUT YOU AND GEEK OUT!!! YOUR FAULT!!! YOU DID THIS TO ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[lil-gingerbread-queen]

Bruce: The most Nepo Baby of the Nepo Babies

Type of day when he pretends he has a hangover to not deal with their bs. The peace inside the company is all Lucius works.

He does not accept criticism.

The Gotham Knights' hoodie is Dick's or Jason's, and was in the kitchen that morning when Bruce ran late for the meeting.

Rip to the (paid) intern that was terrified to bring documents to THE Bruce Wayne and found themselves stuck in his office, listening to him telling stories about his kids for hours.

"I don't understand why we need to make more money, we're already rich." (he's talking about the highers up)

Just a bunch of doodled memes of how I believe Bruce Wayne acts with his company. He is not a capitalist, he doesn't care about making more profit and doesn't understand finance.

If you think Brucie Wayne is just an act, talk to Lucius Fox, who has to endure Bruce' antics at WE. The man whines like a child about having to speak to any shareholders, he has to be dragged to meetings. In Bruce's eyes, his job is "using the company's money to improve the people's life", "talking about his kids" and "being a pain in the ass of the highers up". If someone is trying to kill Bruce Wayne, 50% of chances some WE shareholder or board member ordered the kill because they are tired of him stopping them from playing the game of capitalism. His other employees love him, tho. There aren't janitors as well treated than the ones working for Wayne.

[wanderingmindthoughts]

this is why I want to get better at writing consistently... personal wikipedias are so useful. I want to have all my knowledge organized in neat color-coded rows. I did download a book about personal knowledge bases; I need it on my kindle and get on with it. I bet it will help me a lot with my phd

thanking all the gods because I had the foresight to document all the commands of my last project, because otherwise this entire week would have been spent making a single makefile

[daytura]

Forestry

I'm not sure if it's because my frontal lobes are more mature than they were a year ago but I've lately regained an appreciation for structured information. Outlines, trees, hierarchies. A rhizome is nice -- really nice, actually -- but it's not complete. A forest of trees and their roots is more complete, but it's not complete either. What's needed is an ecosystem, a broad diversification of information organization and knowledge structures and superstructures, where features of one structure bleed into the other but do not collapse into a global monism (though, of course, it could be interpreted that way); the mycelium network does not act alone, and as much as it circuits and circuits into itself, it also circuits out of itself, gluing trees, bushes, and flowers together. And the soil, factual nutrients and rocks stage the plants; so too the decomposers, the itty bitty bacteria, tidying up after epistemo-senescence. And the air, where birds and bees glide across networks unbenowst, but still arriving where they need to be

[neonhellscape]

new rt everyone shes a freak whos pretty sure shes been been given the role of rogue trader as an act of divine intervention to eventually replace the godemperor and bring new glory to the imperium which she thinks is dull and stagnant. dont worry about why she keeps marazhai caged in her trophy room like he's bait its not important and completely irrelevant to the fact ive joke nicknamed her simon thresh. has anyone noticed a lot of slaaneshi demons during warp jumps lately

[catstar91]

Ok phandom peeps, I need to get something off my chest. I cannot stop thinking about it, it’s so funny that this happened to me!

So I’ve been casually perusing the DP fandom for a while, right? Like for several years at least! What can I say? I like art! So at various points I had talked to my aunt about some stuff related, like fun stuff about the phandom and the existence of ghost king aus and stuff. Recently though, I found a fanfic that I spent AN ENTIRE DAY reading and doing nothing else! Like I stayed up late the night before, woke up to immediately read more! I don’t normally read fanfics, let alone any long form story, cuz my attention span is shit and has been shit basically all my life! So in the evening when I was a good chunk of the way through the fic, I talked to my aunt about it! Cuz it’s funny! I found a lot of things in it very amusing and wanted to share!

And then she asked for a link…

The next thing I know, within a few months, probably 3 months later at most, my aunt starts telling me about phandom lore I had never even heard of before! She literally made an ao3 account!!! Guys I am floored! I’ve been idly watching from the shadows for so long, and then I accidentally get my aunt into the phandom and she starts telling me about a red duck candle that’s apparently been integral DPxDC lore for YEARS!

What have I DONE???

[unopenablebox]

oh thank god the sequel to hild opens with 3 pages of maps and 5 pages of an alphabetical cast of characters