If metadata is the sum total of what can be said about any information object at any given time, then the bodies of trans people undergoing medical forms of transition are living, always-changing metadata records. They are the information object, and they are also what can be said about the information object. My transsexual body is a catalog, a finding aid, of every testosterone injection I have given myself in my thigh, of the parts of my body I have willingly destroyed to create something better in their wake, of the process of teaching myself to shave my face (which is way different than shaving your legs, it turns out), of the ways my sexuality changed, of the hours of speech and movement therapy I did, of the fact that I’m still afraid to use gendered bathrooms in public after 4 years....

These are the speaker notes of a talk I gave at the New Hampshire Archives Group Spring 2022 Workshop on [[May 17th, 2022]] Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming to my presentation when you could just leave and go outside. My name is Jay L. Colbert, and today I’ll be presenting “Describing Absence: The Complicated Power of Metadata Surrogates in Libraries & Archives” Advanced notice that this presentation will mention suicide and potentially upsetting language....

🌱 seedling There seems to be a popular belief that an archive is where you put things you don’t need anymore. They remain there, safe for when you need them, but they require no maintenance. In our personal knowledge management systems, in our code bases, wherever, you just throw things in there. That is not an archive. That is an attic. Archives require maintenance, care, and intention. They require workers who catalog the materials of people and institutions....

🌿 budding and almost ready to split into Zettels My note seedlings don’t take root and branch off, with branches returning to a single point (the trunk of the tree). My note seedlings are, instead, rhizomes. The notes and ideas don’t have one origin point. “Branches can grow out of any spot towards any direction.”1 “Rhizomes, however, do not function according to representation. Nothing in a rhizome represents something else. There are only connections....

🌱 seedling archival silence the unintentional or purposeful absence or distortion of documentation of enduring value, resulting in gaps and inabilities to represent the past accurately[^1] In particular, archival silence often happens in collections relating to Indigenous people and enslaved people. How do we ethically describe resources about people we have power over, historically or otherwise, if information about them was never never collected? How do we bring attention to these silences?...

Every time I search a note-taking tool online, I inevitably see it: “Using insert-tool-here to build my second brain” or some variation on that theme. The video or blog post will always go over the basics of what a second brain is, and it usually mentions that the person took Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain course. So I guess it’s my turn. What is Building a Second Brain Building a Second Brain is a methodology, online course, and (as of writing this post) forthcoming book by Tiago Forte....

about me My name is Jay, and I’m a librarian. I’m passionate about knowledge management and organization, personal or otherwise, and I’m a nerd for anything hypertext. I also love opera and my two pets: my cat King Arthur and my bearded dragon Coop. about this site This is a 🍀 digital garden. It contains my notes on various things I’m interested in. These notes are at various stages of growth....

What is a digital garden? To quote Maggie Appleton’s “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden”, They’re not following the conventions of the “personal blog,” as we’ve come to know it. Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis. A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date....

🌱 seedling For all of human history knowledge has been controlled and held by the elite and powerful and privileged. —Carrie Ben-Ysrael When we have control over how we relate to information and knowledge, that can be a radical act. When others control our relationship to information, it shapes our reality in ways we might not notice. It also affects how we construct the social identities of ourselves and others.1...

What is a Zettelkasten? In German, Zettelkasten means “slip box.” It is both a method of personal knowledge management and a physical (or digital) system you maintain. The method was popularized by German scholar Niklas Luhmann who used it as a “conversation partner” to help write hundreds of articles and books. To create a Zettelkasten, you need two compartments: literature notes and Zettels. Literature notes are just bibliographic information. Niklas Luhmann wrote the citations of resources on index cards....