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....

Taken from Andy Matuschak: Sort of like a /now page, but with a broader time horizon and focused on what I’m thinking about. aesthetics and aesthetics of information cyborgs, but in the assemblages sense Portrayals of information sources, seeking, and transmission in books and film rhizomes and Deleuze in general sensuality in response to information and tools spirituality and information

Instead of putting a query in my daily template, I can generate a running list of fleeting notes via a default query. I can do the same for a running list of drafts to work on. In the default query section of config.edn: {:title "💡 FLEETING" :query (and (property type fleeting) (not (property tags templates)) (not (task done))) :result-transform (fn [result] (sort-by (fn [h] (get h :block/created-at)) result)) :collapsed? true :breadcrumb-show?...

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....

When viewing a query in table view in Logseq, you can order the properties by toggling them off and toggling them back on in the order you want them to appear.

🌱 seedling I first started thinking about the relationship between spirituality and information when Kyle Courtney, the copyright librarian at Harvard, told me about an interaction he had with a Buddhist monk. Some monks were collaborating with Harvard to give texts to the library, I think. These texts go back to the Middle Ages, so of course they’re in the public domain, ready to be digitized. Until one Monk said, “I wrote this one....

The visual components of both information and how we interact with information (such as using arrows to draw connections in the quotation below) reinforce the sensual aspect of working with information, knowledge, and metadata. In particular, this person’s statement that they make their “thoughts hold hands” brings a physical and almost erotic element to how they visualize the network of their thinking. i love arrows -> and drawing connections -> noticing patterns -> making my thoughts hold hands ->1...