discuss through my own history:
- cataloguing/indexing
- excerpting
As a kid I used a lot of paper and read a lot of books. I grew up in a time and place transitioning from well-indexed physical encyclopaedias to well-indexed early Google, before SEO and AI-summary. I scoured for and wrote down information I found in the world, in books and online.
I always wanted to make things and I always wanted to know things, so this culminated largely in a mass of ‘booklets’, designed to be mostly informational and mildly entertaining.
I view this now as a curational practise, a mnemonic device and an act of expression. Mostly I wanted to share things I found interesting and believed to be truthful, through the most rigorous research an autistic child is capable of (that is to say, pretty rigorous). But I also wrote about things I wanted to be true, or ways I wanted the world to work.
Through schooling my exploration felt artificially split into 1-hour chunks. The physical matter of learning we kept at first in a named drawer, then in folders, then subject-specific books. Occasionally we’d keep a project-focused folder, which made a lot more sense to me. Subjects and exercise books divided knowledge and thought into arbitrary chunks kept chronological, not at all recomposable.
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commonplace books in youth
- ‘learning journals’
- ‘wet-play’ books
- school planner
- words-at-the-end-of-the-day
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constantly frustrated by the impracticality of handouts
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kept separate they were lost and damaged
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started to copy out handouts into the main flow - the materiality of it was not helpful past first engagement, wanted the core text extracted
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when we had free reign come Sixth Form I kept binder per subject and wrote scrap notes
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I converted less-temporary notes into useable guides later - my first practise of ‘fleeting notes’ as discussed in the ‘PKM’ space
-
write for yourself by default
from paper to digital
- developed a strong aversion to paper
- used whiteboard wherever possible - not portable
- that’s where the stuff I wanted to capture was already - benefitting from past work/others work more readily
- fell out of good notetaking practise when studying computing - the info you need doesn’t well fit a notebook - forever looking for a decent digital equivalent
digital - switching
- privacy and portability of the very personal
- bulky apps, non-existent apps
- interfaces
- multi-type
- multi-source, share to
- de-googling, open-source
- equivalents wouldn’t store images or had no easy/reliable backups
- enforced filesystems and hierarchies
- lock-in and limits
- always experimenting with new systems
- backups, robustness
- data portability
- pkm space, fleeting notes and zettlekastens
| structured notes | personal notes | bookmarked links | ’read it later' | 'inspiration’, saved images, captured data, screenshots, etc |
|---|
| Microsoft Office docs (backed up by OneDrive) | various notebooks | browser bookmarks | browser bookmarks | across downloaded / screenshots folders, file system |
| Onenote (backed up by OneDrive) | Onenote (backed up by OneDrive) | browser bookmarks | browser bookmarks | across downloaded / screenshots folders, local on smartphone, filesystem (backed up by OneDrive), Onenote (backed up by OneDrive) |
| Evernote | Evernote | browser bookmarks | browser bookmarks | across downloaded / screenshots folders, local on smartphone, filesystem (backed up by Google Drive), |
| Google Keep (backed up by Google) | Google Keep (backed up by Google) | browser bookmarks | Pocket | across downloaded / screenshots folders, local on smartphone, filesystem (backed up by Google Drive), |
| Notion | Notally | Raindrop.io | Raindrop.io | across downloaded / screenshots folders, local on smartphone, filesystem (backed up by MEGA), Pinterest |
| Capacities | Capacities | across browser bookmarks, Raindrop.io and Capacities | across browser bookmarks and Raindrop.io | across local on smartphone, Pinterest |
| Tana | Tana | browser bookmarks | browser bookmarks | across local on smartphone, Pinterest |
| AnyType | AnyType | across browser bookmarks and AnyType | Readwise | across local on smartphone, Pinterest |
| md via logseq (backed up by MEGA) | md via logseq (backed up by MEGA) | json file in prep for me knowing i’d end up building something, plus an extra quick dump in Google Sheets. now possibly lost on broken laptop?? | Omnivore | across local on smartphone, filesystem (backed up by MEGA), Pinterest |
| md via Obsidian (backed up by MEGA) | md via Obsidian (backed up by MEGA) | json file in prep for me knowing i’d end up building something, plus an extra quick dump in Google Sheets. now possibly lost on broken laptop?? | Readwise | across local on smartphone, filesystem (backed up by MEGA), Pinterest |
| Pod | Pod | Pod | does Readwise let you self-host? | Pod |
scope
not mentioning - later consideration, as ensuring the security of very sensitive documents should be relatively trivial with the privacy-conscious granular mechanisms of a Solid Pod based system - i.e. other people have considered this angle in depth as another entire motivator for the systems already, password storing apps have their own encryption mechanisms, etc.
- personal private document storage eg medical, financial
- signing legal documents, confidential file sharing
- passwords and ‘secure notes’
also not considering here as it is closely linked but adjacent work - special cases I’ll expand on later
- photo memories, home videos, etc
- personal data such as contacts, media tracking, etc
digital cultures
- Facebook -> Tumblr -> TikTok -> Tumblr
- as I developed socio-political understanding it was echoed in my experiences online
- self-actualisation through finding community online
- from fandom to queerness to neurodivergence to collectivism
extra information practise in the family home
- the little notes and lists my mum writes
- todos and planning still on paper or whiteboard
- mood boards, vision boards, poster walls, christmas list collages