Roamresearch and Obsidian are just two of the latest examples of note taking and note organizing applications that focus on atomic and networked notes. I’m tinkering with Obsidian because it does its thing on top of a local folder of markdown text files. (Before that: nvAlt)

One often referenced example from before computers is the Zettelkasten created by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. He built up a collection of 90,000 handwritten A6-sized notes using a self invented numbering and linking system.

Here is a video recording of a presentation that details the structure and inner workings of Luhmanns Zettelkasten In German.

The book How to take smart notes by Sönke Ahrens is a good manual for applying this way of personal knowledge management (PKM) to your own work. Or check out this video to get an idea.

Harold Jarche has an online workshop Personal Knowledge Mastery that is a very gentle and thorough introduction to finding your own approach in this kind of working, and more importantly: thinking.

The real treasure trove with many historic PKM examples is the Taking Note blog. No new posts there since 2018 but with an extensive archive of posts going back to 2007. All kinds of goodies like how a 18th century poet did version control to (of course) common place books or medieval notepads.

In his Cartooning syllabus, Ivan Brunetti presents a simple formula for drawing a cartoon character that anyone can easily learn to draw and adapt to make their own.

It’s a very clean, graphic approach which I figured should translate well to our custom Lego-printing process. Initial results look promising!

For a single printing, the room for expression is in position of eye, nose, limbs and clothing style. The cap, the hair and the mouth in the top two prints are from a second printing (you can see the overlapping ink). Need to take care of clear registration points for consistently positioning the paper between prints.

The vocabulary of shapes in Lego seem to lend themselves well for this. For example, the collars shape in the bottom left one is already a useful clothing variation.

Abstract ink brush strokes turned into figures, landscapes or other abstractions.

In which we quickly scribble 40 comics and cartoon characters.

In which we make 6 drawings of a thing, in ever shorter amounts of time. From four minutes down to five seconds.

“Der Begriff der Bildung zielt auf die geistige, gestalterische und moralische Entwicklung, die aus Vernunft und Freiheit heraus und ohne direkte Abhängigkeit von Politik und Wirtschaft geschieht. Gemeint ist nicht nur der Vorgang, sondern auch der Zustand bzw. das Ergebnis. Das humboldtsche Bildungsideal beinhaltet die ganzheitliche Ausbildung in Wissenschaft und Kunst und die verbindliche Einheit von Forschung und Lehre, einschließlich der Wissenschaftsfreiheit.”

(via)

En ook:

“Die Anregung aller Kräfte des Menschen, damit diese sich über die Aneignung der Welt entfalten und zu einer sich selbst bestimmenden Individualität und Persönlichkeit führen.”

(via)

In het Nederlands komt “Vorming” waarschijnlijk het dichtst bij. Maar Bildung bevat beeld (Bild), vorming bevat vorm. De term “beeld” zit voor mij meer op de inhoud. Vorm en vorming associeer ik meer met sculptuur, boetseren.

Bildung de blog gaat over beeld en tekst als sense-making tools. De echte constanten in mijn doen en laten zijn tekenen en lezen. Ik wil mezelf meer oefenen in schrijven zodat ik de combinatie tekst en beeld ook daadwerkelijk met inhoud kan onderzoeken. Niet dat beeld geen inhoud heeft, maar verhalend vertellen en verbeelden hebben zowel tekst en beeld nodig om tot een eigen manier en programma van expressie te komen.

Bildung: onderwijs en onderzoek middels tekst en beeld.