//28 September 2024

Tending to a knowledge garden

Thoughts on “thinking tools”, note-taking, commonplace books, software, systems and more. A work-in-progress, exploratory pile of stuff. Related to the concept of a digital garden from a FOSS perspective.

This is a monster post, documenting a struggle to share my learning/thinking/indexing process in a way that might be useful to beginner and seasoned gardeners alike. Or the very least, serving as a personal archive of some value to me.

Note that it is not a review or a tutorial. The probability of coming accross as simultaneously boring and incomprehensible is quite high. To add to the confusion, I won’t be using the proper jargon from coding or PKM in order to keep things more widely accessible.

Luckily, I just happened to discover :Nutshell, a tool to make expandable, embeddable explanations. This way, everyone can go as deep as they wish, one step at a time. Let’s try it below!

:Intro, or a blast from the past

In 8th grade, I started a notebook of epic proportions that I would keep throughout high school and beyond. In it, I strove to capture and preserve scribbles of trivia as I came about them, deliberately mixing as many subjects as possible. On the :same page, ideally.

It wasn’t some genius brainstorming tactic. It wasn’t at all “optimised for efficiency”. It was simply fun. And it reflected most faithfully the random walks I was having in the world of learning. As an example, one page was housing a list of the :four fundamental forces, a map of Ireland, a pancake recipe, and the definition of a :pangram.

Later on, I mostly copied poems, song lyrics, guitar chords and quotes. Without realising it, I was keeping a :commonplace book—a term I would only come across a decade after the fact. It made perfect sense: any person who engages with knowledge needs a way to compile and organise it. They would likely build some system from the ground up, often not thinking about it as “building a system”, but rather as solving a practical problem for themselves.

Over the last ten+ years, this is exactly what I have been doing, going way beyond that initial single notebook. Incidentally, in the same time period there has been an explosion of productivity apps, note-taking apps, wikis, :bullet journals, and everything in between. In 2024, you’re unlikely to be going blind into this, much more likely you’d be overwhelmed with choices.

So here’s a bunch of solutions that work for me and might be useful for other fellow gardeners. Terms like personal knowledge management (PKM) succinctly describe what I will be writing about. Still, they sound pompous and frigid. Moreover, even if PKM is considered to be bottom-up, to me it carries a connotation of a top-down approach, like an unfortunate app forced upon you by your employer. Perhaps the garden allegory is too zany in comparison, but we’re flying with it instead.

:Why, or personal circumstances and values

Look, this might get a little technical. My setup exclusively uses :free and open-source software (FOSS) and is either :self-hosted or offline. I’m a maniac who enjoys tinkering with software and computers in her spare time and I’ve been maintaining (and growing) my tiny digital garden for years. I’m also an advocate for online privacy and “the indie web”. Therefore, I’ve already built an environment that allows me to try out and use alternative services, even come up with my own solutions at times.

It is clear to me that not many people are in such position or share the same attitudes, but in the end everyone makes their own decisions about the trade-offs in resources/values/convenience. This time, I’m not here to argue a point or influence your decision, but rather to inform your decision-making and demonstrate some real options.

On the practical side, there exists a malleable work/life boundary that I like to uphold as much as possible through the use of separate devices. “Work stuff” (for my employer and my scientific research) remains siloed entirely on my work laptop, both for confidentiality and for piece of mind. Everything else is at least somewhat interconnected and as robust as reasonably possible to realities like limited space, moving out, travelling, device failure/replacement, etc. I will be focusing more on that personal knowledge garden, though the system itself can easily carry over to a work environment, and in fact I suspect the more common use case to be work/education-related rather than simply personal enjoyment.

:The tools

Here’s how I’ve streamlined my use cases until now:

:The basics

:Capturing

I find that capturing needs to be immediate and effortless. Examples include: writing on paper scraps or post-its, keeping a journal, using browser bookmarks or read-it-later widgets, highlighting lines in books, taking screenshots, etc. My streamlined way in the last few years has been a combo of Joplin for digital content and Supernote as paper replacement/hybrid solution.

For those familiar with :Evernote, I’m basically recreating it with Joplin in a self-hosted way. I have topical notebooks in Joplin (like Articles, Bookmarks, Ideas, Physics, Music…) and, while browsing, I will use the Firefox extension to clip whole articles, screenshots, or links to the appropriate notebook. This saves them locally on my PC, and I’ve set up Joplin to synchronise to my Nextcloud, meaning I also have access to all my saved stuff from my phone via the mobile app (including offline, since the notes are saved to the phone memory as well). At any point, I can open the Joplin desktop or mobile app and type a note, which will be saved and synced. I use this for long-form text, like drafts for my website, collecting resources for my projects, saving useful code snippets, too. It is incredibly versatile and even whole files can be embedded to notes (though I’ve chosen not to do that for the most part, to keep things light).

The other tool, Supernote, is my go-to scrap paper/journal replacement. I jot down notes and to-do lists, keep notes from phone calls or podcasts, sketch, do back-of-the-envelope maths, copy some song chords—literally anything I would do with an endless paper note pad. It has saved me so much paper and clutter. Since I got it back in 2019, many new features have been introduced and at this point I’m not even using its full capacity and I’m still amazed by it. It would have been incredibly useful to have had something similar ten years ago. The capturing aspect carries to reading as well, since I read PDFs and EPUBs on the device and can mark them with a pen (something I never do with paper books), as well as easily select whole passages and add notes to them, which then get extracted to a “digest” file. This is basically an automated way to generate book summaries or lists with quotes. I can even load a PDF with sheet music instead of printing it and mark it while playing. The hype is real!

:Structuring

As the garden grows, it becomes increasingly important to do some landscaping. Structuring could be part of capturing—like making new folders, creating categories, or applying tags as you go, letting the whole thing evolve holistically into a controlled chaos. Yet, I discovered I prefer to keep capturing and structuring separate, because the uncertainty about how to label something or where to store it can get in the way of actually capturing it. So either I have a huge time investment at the start to figure out my structure and then follow it (like I did with Joplin), or I just dump everything in one place and later refine and rearrange it (like I mostly do with Supernote).

The structuring part of the process is potentially the biggest time sink and with the highest chance to over-engineer your system into unfriendly/unusable territory. I like to believe that I’ve found the balance for myself even though the current state is not as neat as it could be. Arguing from the law of diminishing returns, I would question the addition of more structure beyond a serviceable steady state—purely aesthetic reasons are unlikely to sway me (though I know they are important to others).

At the core of my structuring lies the idea of a separate tool/app/flow for a separate context. For example, I would save many articles, essays, quotes and trivia to the corresponding Joplin notebooks while reading online (one context); I would save research articles on my work laptop in Zotero (second context); I would select only my favourite quotes from Joplin and copy them into a small paper notebook for quotes (third context), etc. This last example is clearly a next-level action, because of course I don’t need to have a separate notebook for quotes, I don’t use it for capturing them. Instead, it’s an example of combining structuring/curating with reviewing. If I don’t have the time for it, it doesn’t matter, since I would do it just for the joy of it anyway, and it won’t interfere with the act of saving the quote in the first place.

:Reviewing

Reviewing and revisiting your knowledge garden—either by idly browsing it for fun, or for the sake of creating something else—is the proverbial reaping of what you saw. If you’ve worked at it in the previous two steps, this step can feel really like entering your own private Internet/library and it’s amazing.

Here are a few examples of what I do to review. I re-read articles saved offline in Joplin while I’m on the train/plane. If I need to recall something in conversation, I can pull my phone and look up the exact quote/link/resource that I’ve seen earlier. When I’m drafting a post for my website, or a story, or an episode for a podcast (or anything else really), I can flick through the stuff I’ve saved “just in case” months, years ago. Of course, this is a way of giving credit where credit’s due, though citations are a whole other topic.

The power of the knowledge garden lies in having an almost lifelong collection with me at all times, which is not tied to a single device/location/service provider (since I can copy the Joplin files anywhere and export the Supernote content as PDFs).

Recently though, I started getting a bit lost in all of it. Or rather, my actual brain memory can’t keep up with it as much as I would like to. That’s why I’ve started reviewing in a more intentional way. And one trick for it is to align the reviewing with another activity. The aforementioned example of the separate quotations notebook illustrates it quite well. By copying my favourite quotes, I am simultaneously reviewing my collection and practicing calligraphy (and creating redundancy on top). The two activities pair naturally together, as I can work on my handwriting in an uninterrupted manner, focusing on words I’d like to remember instead of empty practice phrases.

If you’re not into writing and calligraphy, a completely different angle to reviewing could be the use of text-to-speech in order to listen to your notes while you do chores/drive. Or perhaps you might go the interactive route and build a quiz/a game to play with your friends. Seriously, think about how you can sneak in the reviewing into something else in your life you want to/have to do. Just staring at a screen or a notebook might not be your best bet.

:Outro, or looking ahead

Woah. So many words to describe something that has become second nature. Really, it is much simpler than I made it sound. Yet by writing it all up, I realise how I shouldn’t minimise it or take it for granted. My knowledge garden is a tiny pocket realm which, among other things, gave me continuity while post codes changed and the ground beneath me shifted.

What’s next? First, at times I wish to better mobilise what I’ve gathered thus far for some purpose, yet I’m on the fence about actually doing it. Somehow I enjoy keeping the sense of serenity.

Second, I might reconsider keeping some sections open to the public. I used to do that in the now abandoned ħive website, but I’m open to new ideas (that don’t involve infinite scroll feeds). Currently playing around with dokuWiki, although I doubt this will be “it”. Also I completely brushed aside how I do things for my actual work/PhD, which probably deserves a separate and much shorter post.

And third, while I still get excited to try out new software and learn more about PKM methods, frankly I don’t see myself making a drastic change in my garden any time soon. Perhaps refinement of the system already in place, nothing more. The next challenge would be to get the most of what I already have: revisit old notes and digests of books, figure out how to include this knowledge in my writings and conversations more explicitly. Or I’ll just embrace the :Kim Kitsuragi way and run around with a notebook everywhere, which I will nonchalantly consult mid-conversation.

Thanks to everyone who made it this far and I hope you got inspired to work on your own knowledge garden!

:x Journal

:x Forces

In physics, the fundamental interactions or fundamental forces are the interactions that do not appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. There are four known to exist:

The gravitational and electromagnetic interactions produce long-range forces whose effects can be seen directly in everyday life. The strong and weak interactions produce forces at minuscule, subatomic distances and govern nuclear interactions inside atoms.

:x Kim

Kim Kitsuragi is a character from the role-playing video game :Disco Elysium.

Kim writes almost everything down in his notebook, even if it appears to be inconsequential. He seems to have some trouble remembering details if he neglects to record them. Kim states that he uses his notebook to make deductions and “think” by writing everything down rather than internally, like Harry does. This can be observed while reading his notes as well as through an Esprit de Corps passive check. However, he is still capable of making associations without writing them out.