Notes on peoples personal databases
Index Card System.
Summary Ideas, quotes, references to a page in book etc are written down on index cards. These index cards are sorted according to theme / catergory and if a card belongs to multiple themes it's duplicated. Ryan's themes include specific books he wants to write, strategy, life, writing, education, misc. i.e. his personal interests.
When reading books he'll make notes in the margins, then later return to this book and transfer the notes that still seem important to cards. This wait before transfering gives time to reevaluate which notes seems truely worth making cards for.
This system was inspired from Robert Green's System
robertgreene I read a book, very carefully, writing on the margins with all kinds of notes. A few weeks later I return to the book, and transfer my scribbles on to note cards each card representing an important theme in the book. For instance, in Mastery, the theme of mirror neurons. After going through several dozen books, I might have three hundred cards, and from those cards I see patterns and themes that coalesce into hardcore chapters. I can then thumb through the cards and move them around at will. For many reasons I find this an incredible way to shape a book.
A personal wiki / website with time tracking https://wiki.xxiivv.com/#about
https://twitter.com/neauoire/status/1072630296934318080
Notes and ideas recorded on A6 cards (~10x15cm) ordered by catergories in a series of drawers.
Quite popular under the term Zettelkasten or Slipbox system.
Linguist.
Instead, she set out to record the frequency of every symbol in the tablets, both in general and then in a variety of positions within words: initial, final position, medial, second, and next to last. She also recorded the frequency of every character in juxtaposition to that of every other character.
It was a mammoth task, performed without the aid of computers. In addition, during the years surrounding the Second World War, writing materials were hard to come by. Kober recorded her detailed analysis on index cards she made from the backs of old greetings cards, and the insides of covers of examination books.
"She stole a lot of checkout slips from the Brooklyn College library,"� adds Margalit Fox. "And all of these she painstakingly cut with scissors, one at a time, until she had something like a 180 thousand cards that she had hand cut."
Definitely a task better suited to a computer program!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awce_j2myQw
This one project but it's still quite interesting as example of organising information
https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam
This reminds me a little of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
Also seems Xanadu-ish. https://obsidian.md/
(I'm currently using this, after boost note jumped the shark)
https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
The majority of links in the memex are made by readers, not writers. On the world wide web of course, only an author gets to determine links.
https://github.com/zadam/trilium
Separate out the Dump and Refine phases. This suits notes and a personal database might also share aspects of that. A personal database would have two parts:
- a have "reference" i.e. things not written by you
- your notes.
In the reference section you could dump in websites, quotes, tweets, maybe even epubs. The personally authored part would be distinct from this but draw on the reference section. https://medium.com/@bytebase/an-iterative-approach-to-notes-f1c2a28c4d29