7 Personal knowledge management could be the Modernist urge to reinforce Grand Narratives

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....

July 16, 2022 · 2 min · jay l. colbert

7a Personal knowledge management can come from a state of play

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....

July 16, 2022 · 1 min · jay l. colbert

12 Favorite Questions

How can I learn enough about algorithms and Clojure so I can create generative art without tutorials? What do I need to know about Clojure? What do I need to know about algorithms? Fields Voronoi What do I need to know about composition? What do I need to know about Quil? What do I need to know about clojure2d? How do I explore aesthetics in knowledge management? How can I improve my thinking to make better decisions?...

June 21, 2022 · 1 min · jay l. colbert

4a Opera queens are embodied personal information management

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....

June 21, 2022 · 2 min · jay l. colbert

spirituality and information

🌱 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....

June 5, 2022 · 2 min · jay l. colbert

5a The aesthetics of information affects our relationships to it

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...

May 29, 2022 · 1 min · jay l. colbert