Personal Knowledge Management Systems & Digital Gardens
I was spending another late night in revenge bedtime procrastination trying to reach a creative revelation before I granted myself sleep when I decided to peruse the contents of the DC Libby catalog for books I could check out that would simulate the knowledge I would be exploring if I actually had applied in time for the Information Management Studies Master’s Program.
Documented search terms:
Honestly kind of disappointing results, especially for audiobooks I could read while commuting. Which led me to reddit for “personal knowledge management” book recs
So then I started Reading this essay by Mike Caulfield about the Garden and the Stream which describes the idea of making a personal wiki. I knew I was on the right path because the second section of the essay mentioned an internet deep dive I fell in love with months back: the 1998 Original Hypertext Garden.
In section three, he says if you haven’t read Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay As We May Think, you need to. So I google it and read the AI summary but since that seems against the point of discovery, I click on the first link past the water guzzling recap of key themes and historical significance. And I discover this fascinating website (https://www.historyofinformation.com) on the History of Information The about page reads: “The many extensively annotated timelines available in HistoryofInformation.com are designed to help you follow the historical development of physical and digital information and media, and attitudes about them, and interrelationships between them, in both theory and practice, from the beginning of records to the present.”
The website includes 5,000 entries filterable by over 100 themes. In the age of AI and having discovered this from the r/Obsidian subreddit I was brainstorming the semantic tagging or knowledge graph search functions that could be powering this on the back end but if I go to the About page, I get the great joy of finding the author Jeremy Norman does this all MANUALLY!!!
A labor of love to build the database of all databases. In it for the love of all that is data and info and holy.
He got the idea from issuing the fifth edition of Morton's Medical Bibliography and having to fit the space limitations in the back index of only 200 pages. Which harkens back to the joys of manual reference books being a physical entity that acknowledged the labor and material storing knowledge requires.
But in the great cyberage, he perseveres: “These limitations I remedied in the greatly expanded interactive online version of the bibliography at historyofmedicineandbiology.com”
The book Word by Word describes the process of a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster in finding printed references for every instance of word usage. There are so many careers that are cousin to being an archivist. Curatorial studies for instance. (detour)
Now this makes me want to rush to buy a copy of Mindy Su’s Cyberfeminism because having a physical book feels more permanent of a reminder to return to the project I wanted to complete in May of giving her credit for all the cool work she is doing in a space she quasi invented. But how can I engage with digital work outside of the digital space?
Is art complete without an audience? Is journaling only transformed into writing when it has the intention of being shared and how public does that have to be before you want to claim being a writer?
I kept reading the Caulfield essay’s articulation of the difference between the real evolution of web as we know it today and the Vannevar Bush essay’s historic vision of a Memex (which functions nearly identically to a Commonplace Journal). He muses, “Your machine is a library not a publication device. You have copies of documents is there that you control directly, that you can annotate, change, add links to, summarize, and this is because the memex is a tool to think with, not a tool to publish with.”
Now there is even legal implications for how much we consider a social media site a publisher versus platform and we have consistently ruled (? since I last checked) that as they exist now they do not have to monitor content, simply host it. But we do not own own content or have the freedom to share it without censorship, so legally as a user we end up with the least amount of agency compared to the degree of control offered by the memex.
Caulfield’s history of the internet boiled down to “server-centric web” -> hypertext forums and blogging -> cooptation by personal page feed readers and the next evolution is for the youth of today to create the nostalgia to wish to restart the cycle all over again.
“The web not as a reconfigurable model of understanding but of sealed shut presentations.” This is exactly how it feels to move away from quote tweets and visible likes to having long disconnected threads where no one is reacting to each other. Social media has increasingly become corporations of one mouthing off and advertising to each other to build brand equity in attention.
Now with the present day context of an AI summary being placed at the top of Google search results (and the anger many people have at being summarized to), his frustrations the 2015 internet search results show hundreds of articles and blog posts of opinions but almost no syllabus-ready summary of an issue. We have since built the Tower of Bable and every syllabus, every reading, and every discussion post is one prompt engineered context window tokenized response away from getting its phD.
Now I want to create a collaborative digital garden that lets me commonplace journal and interact with media thoughtfully in public! Is there a way to self host your own blog with friends that is not Github? Or to collaborate on a larger Obsidian graph? I found this article on Digital Gardens for Non-Techies that suggested Roam Research as an option for more learning in public. It did give me a check list of features I want in my own Digital Garden (backlinks, hover previews, and visual graphs; having a different song playing in the back of different articles.) I am curious about the piece of html (?) code that changes the AO3 chapter view to whole text to ctrl + f through everything.
Something about storage that I find philosophically interesting is efficiency and acknowledging resource limitations requires decisive hierarchies about worth. This transposes over land, hard drives, real estate, storage unit rentals, evictions, syllabus construction, art museums. It’s like the derivative of mathematics and the scarcity model of economics.
How is this being handled in AI summary weights? I know there is a whole field of comp sci discussing this and I’d love a front row seat to the most interesting voices. I should post in #ai
One solution I found while researching ways to host a personal knowledge management system on a personal server is the Zettelkasten system. On its introductory page the compiler describes the difference in knowledge and information: “Information could be summarized in one sentence most of the time. Most of the time, it is “dead”. Information just is. … Every bit of knowledge you add has the potential to be useful in ways you might not be able to see in the moment you produce it.”