Thanks @SebMacV much appreciated and no hurry—you’re doing me, and perhaps others, a kindness!
Fellow humanist at a university - I agree and also thought a lot about this. We teachers also like to share texts with our students - whether they are academic or maybe even articles and videos. A system like Readwise has the problem of wanting to distill a text and then throw it away. Some texts are for myself to learn from, but I also save a lot of links/texts/articles/videos that I wan’t to share with my students and that can change for every re-read I/we go through.
I’m also very interested in your workflow in Obsidian, but you need to start by enjoying your screen-free holiday!
These are two great points. Perhaps one or both of you can start a new thread about how best to markup books that we’re reading? That would be very helpful.
I don’t think so.
While it might be in the nature of doing for a “Humanist” to see the book as the center of his work, the majority of the other knowledge worker (and so on), are working with the informations inside a book, to get some other projects done.
It is a totally different approach, I think, how to work with a book, and what to accomplish with it.
So I also think, that BASB, Zettelkasten, and so on, might just not be a working system for someone working in the Area of “Humanists”.
It is a great system, if you need to get some informations from a book, and then work with those informations on something else.
It seems to be a not working system for someone who reads a book, to read the book, and works with it at the center of his profession.
Your point about rereading is excellent, and it underscores the ways in which Tiago and others push an efficiency narrative. From my perspective, a lot of the current notetaking discourse treats reading, writing, and knowledge work as something to be systemized, streamlined, and sold. This is good for folks like Tiago who want to sell a streamlined system, but it’s very much in tension with my experience working as a researcher in the humanities. Systems are helpful, but they’re often idiosyncratic and evolving as we learn and grow. I’ve also found that the messy moments in my process—the moments that are most difficult to recreate or codify—are often where the best work comes from.
Perhaps this echoes the paradox that @ryanjamurphy noticed. If you’re selling a system, claims like “ideas are dilutive” and “ideas have compounding value” are good marketing slogans, even if they’re in tension with each other. What I hear in those claims, however, is an economic lens—we should maximize quality, or maximize the value, of our ideas. But there are no shareholders for my journal articles or books or ideas. I don’t need to maximize value. Instead, I need to build a sustainable and fulfilling approach to dealing with difficult ideas across my career… one that contributes to my field and allows me to find meaning and growth in my work. And in my experience thus far, that requires messy and evolving approaches to work that aren’t easy to codify or sell.
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Or rather, your criteria for what makes things valuable is different from Forte et al.
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I love this sentiment.
Still, as @ThatNerd hints at, you still must have some criteria for what your knowledge system should produce.
That’s what I’m stuck on. I want to win a Nobel someday (not really, but why not). What’s the best approach to unlock that possibility? For any given researcher, there must be some quasi-economic “optimum process” that will contribute the best they can to their field while finding meaning and growth in their work.
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This is where Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From: The History Of Innovation. Riverhead Books: New York, 2010. comes into play. I’ve been reading a crap load of books about productivity and time management and writing for the last couple of years, as actual research. With very few exceptions most of them annoyed me, and the similarity and regurgitation really annoyed me (I started with books from the 1950s).
While I quibble regarding some of the historical assertions, Johnson’s book is smart. He writes about ideas as part of a network, and the effect of serendipity. I think there’s a fair amount of truth in his overall assertions.
I realize that each of us is different, with a different set of processes and strengths, but having spent a fair amount of time writing, first as a student, then as an academic teaching literature and writing classes, finally as a tech writer and ghost writer, I’ve learned a fair amount about how different people write.
In general we have a set of core interests. Ideas or assertions or facts that catch our interest tend to be in some way aligned with our core interests. One of the reasons people harp on reviewing our ideas/notes/extracts, is that we want to create relationships between ideas, and formulate our own ideas. One of the key steps in taking notes about reading or listening is that you don’t just record the other person’s ideas, you make them your own by integrating them with what you know and think and have experienced. By drawing on others’ ideas, and adding your own personal expertise, you create a new thing.
Johnson writes about a “spark file” and how it’s continuous and reviewed on a regular basis. As he reviews he sees new relationships, and ideas start to accrete until he has a “spark,” that nebulous core idea that can spawn a book or paper, or part of one.
That’s why it’s important not just to record verbatim what you’ve read, but to make connections, to do something with it, even if it’s only to note that an author’s assertion is at odds with another author’s or in agreement, or that it reminds you of something you personally experienced, or of a concept from a field you are familiar with that the author may not be. These connections, these nodes in your textual neural net, start to attract attention, and more ideas.
The *Proto Indo-European root ( teks-)of the English word text is the same root as that of textile, and technology. I think there’s logic in that.
Make note of what catches your attention. Look for connections, ,for patterns, and make your neural net of text.
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As a scientist, this was very true for me as well with regard to returning to specific journal articles that were considered landmark studies for my field. I’d return to them again and again, and would sometimes reprint them because I’d jotted so much in the margins that the “noise” of it would overcome the original text.
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