His definition of a memex is simply a mechanized (or what we would now call digitized) commonplace book, which has a long history in the literature of personal knowledge management.
I’ll note here that he’s somehow still stuck on the mechanical engineering idea of mechanized. Despite the fact that he was the advisor to Claude Shannon, father of the digital revolution, he is still thinking in terms of mechanical pipes, levers, and fluids. He literally had Shannon building a computer out of pipes and fluid while he was a student at [[MIT]].
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A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. 1
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The idea of an “associative trail” here brings to mind both the ars memorativa and the method of loci as well as–even more specifically–the idea of songlines. Bush’s version is the same thing simply renamed.
↬ Jeremy Dean via: ‘What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text’ - The New York Times (06/09/2021 14:50:00)
Certainly songlines don’t need validation by Vannevar Bush, but perhaps the fact that there’s a connection may help the West see the immense value in their long tradition.
My reading of this quote also makes me think that Bush didn’t know about the art of memory, though computer storage is necessarily larger and stronger by comparison.
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One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. 1
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This makes me wonder if one could use and search emoji in the tags in Hypothes.is. What could we do with this?
Maybe:
- 📖 for read
- 🔖 for bookmark
- 🎧 for listened (when annotating podcasts)
- 🎞️ or 📺 for watched
- 👍 for like
- 💬 for a reply as starters….
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My markings grew more elaborate — I made stars, circles, checks, brackets, parentheses, boxes, dots and lines (straight, curved and jagged). I noted intra- and extratextual references; I measured cadences with stress marks
Your annotation skills can definitely progress in many ways, even if that means getting messier in order to mark more intentionally and purposefully. —nchassagne Sep 25, 2018
I’ve progressed into using url links, images, gifs, emojis and so on. —choppa1890 Dec 18, 2020 1
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Thanks for this pointer. :)
Similar in tone is also Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? (The Atlantic, 2008) which eventually grew into his book The Shallows.
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might end up serving equally well as a bridge between online and literary culture, between focus and distraction:
Konnikova argues so much more recently in the New Yorker. —Jeremy Dean Jan 2, 2016 1
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Recall that he wrote this just before the Amazon Kindle had annotation ability and was in more competition (then) for e-books with Apple’s platform and others on the horizon. He cites John Dickerson in particular and further below he cites James Bridle, who spent some time building the now-defunct Open Bookmarking idea in two different incarnations with a community around that. I suspect that if one delves into the blogosphere or Twitter around the time of this article, there would be much more to be seen/had. Sadly there was a lot of positivity and seeming competition in the space then and not much has come out of it other than Hypothes.is, which is primarily a web tool. The dreamed of UI for e-readers just doesn’t exist somehow…
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recent wave of public teeth-gnashing about the future of marginal notes.
Citation? Jeremy Dean Jan 2, 2016 1
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One could use a service like IFTTT.com, Integromat, or Zapier to pipe the RSS Feed of their annotations into Notion or other services: See, for example: https://ifttt.com/notion
Here’s some details about how I’m doing it for some other platforms: https://boffosocko.com/2020/08/29/a-note-taking-problem-and-a-proposed-solution/
Example of someone using the search functionality of Hypothes.is as a commonplace.
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While I do my best to transfer my hypothes.is annotations to notion. I am more likely to find everything i am looking for in my hypothes.is tags or annotations, than anything else. —choppa1890 Dec 18, 20201
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