Big Sky Café

Software Environments For Note-Making 

“Waaaah!!!!!???? It takes 170,000 years for a photon to go from the center of the sun to the surface! Then only 8 minutes to get to us on earth!?

Wow - this fact is so crazily awesome - I wanna to do something with it! I’m wanna drop it into a jar of other awesome stuff that I’ve collected (like book, class-notes, ideas, images) - connect it up, shake it up and pour it out a thousand different ways to see what happens! I also want to observe some things about cognition and explore ways to remember and interact with the knowledge I’m running into.

Let me settle down and say this better. There are many ways to use journaling and note-making to study and create with aspects of cognition - aspects such as memory formation, learning, semantic networks, narrative, personality, and our internal representations of our lives and the world we live them in. One of the ways I do this by creating cognitively focused software and computer environments. In this series I’ll share a little of what I’ve worked on to animate simple note-making. I’ll also look at how to work with notes that involve history dates, images, personal writings, class-notes, creative writing and other things. I use all this myself for note-making - I have over 28 thousand notes in it! If you like this sort of thing you can get in touch (timothy.smith@outlook.com)

Let’s start with a few simple notes from a book I’m reading: “15 Million Degrees: A Journey to the Centre of the Sun.” In this episode we’ll look at a design principle I find essential:

In Situ Contextualization: Whenever possible leave the knowledge that we work with in the context in which it occurs.

I have developed something called PKML (Personal Mark-Up Language) to explore ways to do that (more on PKML ->). The idea is simple - I want to take notes and read them as they are. But I ALSO want to get inspired and do more with the knowledge immediately and right there in the body of the note itself. Then I want the added stuff to disappear unit I want to activate it.

This sample note includes two paragraphs. The author (me!) has found 17 ways to connect this note and previous notes and journal entries (these were found by hand or with the help of automated analysis - more on that later). While taking the note, the author looked up 4 new terms (added to the integrated Personal Knowledge system for future notes and review). The author also created 5 thought questions and other learning resources. These are left embedded, behind the scenes, in the text of the note and made visible when the author wants to view or use them. Finally, one of several animated interfaces in the system shows one of the questions coming up when the author asked the system to quiz him on science related notes!

The last image is a visualization tool called Knowledge Animator. We’ll get into visualizations soon. For now picture this: Drop your notes into a big jar - shake it up - a combination of related snippets floats to the surface. You shake it some more and the combinations change! Tilt it in a specific direction and you start to drive through the connections from all kinds of cognitive angles - maybe you’ll dive down into a definition - or sideways to connections to other notes from other books. The more you drop in the more it can do! … more on this next time!