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In the quotation below, author David Foster Wallace touches on a core aspect of the Modernist movement of literature and art: there are Grand Narratives, inherent truths, that guide our lives. These narratives are “how things should be.” The chaos and disruption caused by WWI made it seem like those Grand Narratives were gone. Think of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” a sort of Modernist interpretation of the Fisher King story....

Instead of personal knowledge management coming from the need to restore control over our attention and knowledge, it can come from the desire to explore and create. David Foster Wallace describes this as an “intellectual adventure.” We don’t restore meaning and patterns, we find them. Our relationship to information can be exploratory and curious. For me – I mean, a lot of the motivation had to do with, it seems to me, that so much of pre-millennial life in America consists of enormous amounts of what seem like discrete bits of information coming, and that the real kind of intellectual adventure is finding ways to relate them to each other and to find larger patterns and meanings, which of course is essentially narrative, but that structurally it’s a bit different....

During the [[055 - Feminist Scrapbooking]] episode of my podcast [[librarypunk]], we had on feminist scrapbooker Kristin Tweedale to talk about scrapbooking as a mode of information and knowledge management and how to do it in anti-capitalist ways. One of us (I’m blanking on who) mentioned someone in the family having a scrapbook with all the pictures removed. Not only was the scrapbook empty, but it had once been full of photos that were no longer there....

The [[189 - Library Socialism & Usufruct]] episode of the [[Srsly Wrong]] podcast mentions that writing in library books is not defacing or destroying them; rather, “value” is added because the library lends out the thoughts and scribbles of everyone who had that book before. Even if an item hasn’t been scribbled in, the library, in theory, is still lending that item with its entire history of having been used and enjoyed by others....

Opera queens (gay men who are fans of opera) collect the ephemera of opera to a degree which borders on hoarding: recordings, programs, pictures, signatures, interviews, memories, etc. There is no larger system by which they capture or organize this information, nor is there anything these men do with what they collect. Instead of using personal knowledge management systems, opera queens are personal information management. They are the tool which captures information....

As part of scrapbooking, scrapbookers capture and collect ephemera of the things they do throughout a day, week, month, or other chunk of time. They use scrapbooks to preserve memories. Archives are usually a collection of materials of an institution or person. Scrapbooks, then, are the archives of a person where they are both the archivist and the person whose materials are being archived. They have been metaphorically defined as “the secretions of an organism”, and are distinguished from documents that have been consciously written or created to communicate a particular message to posterity....

Much of contemporary metadata scholarship focuses on the ethics of descriptive metadata, particularly classification systems. Rightly so. However, like Susan Sontag argues in her essay “Against Interpretation,” I think the focus on ethics and its effects on end users has become more important than the metadata and the labor of the library worker. Instead of purely focusing on ethics, we if we focused on aesthetics. What insights will the open up about the nature of metadata work?...

Our digital tools and systems, like note-taking apps and search algorithms, are created by people. Our biases and ideologies are built into the tools. John M. Culkin follows this line of thought when giving a brief explanation of The Medium is the Message. Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.1 So, when we trust tools built by other people, we are also trusting their biases and ideologies to shape us and our ideas....

The aesthetics of a tool can bring us joy, discomfort, peace, or any number of emotional responses. People made the decisions about the user interface, the possible workflows, the graphics and design, etc. with, one would hope, the end-user in mind. These emotional responses happen in the body and have various sensual responses. Culkin, making a pun on message, likens our tools to massages because of how they affect our sensual experience....

Do we count our mind as a tool we created? Or is our mind a creator whom we must trust? Either way, the mind is embodied in our somatic responses to tools. Jon Greenaway explores this fact through the films of [[David Cronenberg]], stressing how the mind is not just embodied but extends beyond the body which contains it. When we trust the creators of tools, we are, at the core, trusting how their minds are embodied in and alter the physical world....