"A collection of notes is a curious archive of attempts. Attempts to understand the language we use, the logic we trace, and the images we generate to understand life today. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13), would say that these notebooks are “worlding” exercises, weaving and stringing together different potentials.’"

"we are really interested in exploring artistic research. Artists, like scientists, are pioneers when it comes to creating new forms of connectivity between worlds that seem to have nothing in common with each other. They embark on the endless study of everything that contributes to different formulations of what we call reality. Taking artistic research seriously means accepting disorganisation within the relationship between disciplines that deal with contemporary art. The rise of cultural studies, critical theory, and the many variations of post-Marxist understanding of the relationship between art and economics is the fruit of…"

"Note taking encompasses witnessing, drawing, writing, and diagrammatic thinking; it is speculative, manifests a preliminary moment, a passage, and acts as a memory aid.

With contributions by authors from a range of disciplines, such as art, science, philosophy and psychology, anthropology, economic- and political theory, language- and literature studies, as well as poetry, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts constitutes a space of dOCUMENTA (13) to explore how thinking emerges and lies at the heart of re-imagining the world. In its cumulative nature, this publication project is a continuous articulation of the emphasis of dOCUMENTA (13) on the propositional, underlining the flexible mental moves to generate space for the possible. Thoughts, unlike statements, are always variations: this is the spirit in which these notebooks are proposed."

[via: http://frieze.com/issue/article/books2027/ AND http://halloween-in-january.tumblr.com/post/21407577412 AND http://www.jennasutela.com/frieze ]

"Notes from a six-day workshop with Johanna Drucker at MIT (April 2012)

[ALL APOLOGIES FOR MIS/INFORMATION BELOW. THESE ARE UNEDITED NOTES WRITTEN IN THE MOMENT AT MIT HYPERSTUDIO]"

"while a 24 year old medical student…Ross [Ashby] started writing a journal…44 years later, his journal had 7,400 pages, in 25 volumes…

…digitally restored images of all 7,400 pages & 1,600 index cards are available on this web site in various views, with extensive cross-linking that is based on the keywords in Ross's original alphabetical index…

The user interface has been made as intuitive as possible, with links and pop-up information attached to everything that stood still long enough…

To browse Ross's Journal, you can perform any of the following:

1. Select a volume from the Bookshelf.
2. View the 14½ subject categories in the Other Index.
3. Browse through the 678 keywords in the alphabetical Index.
4. Enter a page number between 1 and 7189 here: then press Enter.
5. If you are looking for journal entries around a particular date use the Timeline.
6. You could read the 2,300 transcribed journal entry Summaries.
7. Throw caution to the wind, and jump to a Random page."

"I’m sick & tired of things so vast I can’t understand them. Genetics. Capitalism. International relations…

Everything in my experience confirms that I am here. I stretch almost compulsively, feeling out my body’s physicality…

Somehow I have landed in a nunnery. Dedicated to the advancement of science & art. There should just be a fucking school, where people go to learn multiplication in the reproductive sense.

We are the scum of earth. The thought leaders. There is some debauchery, but in comparison this is a place of rigor. Home of chaste workers.

What’s disturbing is that the educated go out & control world. I met a consultant who has broken trust down to a science, which she sells to corporations. Trust, she says, is good for business. & what about business? What’s that good for? I asked her. She smiled smart-but-dead-like & said, you have to believe that growing the economy is good for the world. Consulting is a desired job—maybe the quintessential job—of the educated class."

"Blair talks about an interesting concept: florilegium.

“… which, rather than summarizing, selected the best passages or “flowers” from authoritative sources.”

Tweets can be thought of as forced florilegium – the constraint of 140 characters forces us to distill the important or best information (our own or from others) and share it. the idea that each tweet is a specially picked flower puts the onus on the author of the tweet to be trusted to have picked the ‘best flower’ to share. this also points to the role of curator that individuals often play – we choose what to tweet based on how we would like ourselves and the communities we are affiliated with to be represented."

…Twitter allows for varied forms of note-taking, some covered by Blair, but also beyond those examples partly because of the affordances of the new tools. a type of collaborative note-taking manifests in the ‘chat’ communities on Twitter during their scheduled meetings…"

[See the comments too.]

"…glaring weakness of “realtime” services like Twitter & Instagram as journalistic outlets: their narrow focus on “the now” & their relative disregard for the archival. While…the off-the-cuff, throwaway nature of Twitter or Instagram may be a big part of their appeal to otherwise reluctant amateur journalists…it’s a pretty poor journal that can’t be easily recalled later.<br />
<br />
I’ve struggled a bit with this (I still dearly wish I could access my earliest tweets to put together my own tweet book), but I’ve recently found comfort in my friend Kellan’s notion of “long form tweeting.” Increasingly, I’ve come to think of Twitter & Instagram as notebooks where I develop & discuss ideas that I later elaborate on on my personal blog (I like to think of it a bit like F Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks full of fragmentary ideas…). ”Real time” services are great for journalistic impetus and visceral feedback, but I’ve come go think of Tumblr as my final draft."

"Even if we can capture intention and overcome sharing, we might come back to consider what was formerly known as the commonplace book. How might new book designers — of any format — replicate its sense of wholeness and real-time cataloging online? Do we need to?<br />
<br />
It’s critical that the new book designer consider how and where these marks might be shared. I’m not suggesting that all annotations be social lest we become self-conscious in our book-relationships. One of the principal pleasures of taking notes is the intimacy with a passage, the outright honesty with which one might scribble, “Gasp!” or “Hogwash,” or “True that,” for later reminding. But there will need to be equal consideration given to what to keep personal as to what to make shareable.<br />
<br />
After all, some sentiments are best left between you and your margins."

"I differ slightly from Rachel in terms of where it all lives. She uses DEVONthink, a program with which I’m admittedly not completely familiar. I’ve played a lot with Evernote, and whilst it kinda did what I wanted it to, there was always something vaguely uncomfortable about the mass of different types of information in there. Notes, screengrabs, clipped web pages, links, photos. It was all in once place, but it all seemed a bit disorganised, which was the opposite of what I wanted.<br />
<br />
Instead, I try and use one piece of software for each task.1 I stick my bookmarks in Delicious, my lists and notes as plain text in Simplenote (by way of Notational Velocity), my photos in iPhoto and occasionally Flickr, &c. In short, one thing well." [Something similar to this works for me too, though I'm not really sure whether it's because that's best for me or if it's because I've invested so much time in specialized buckets. And the "Only Collect" article is a gem — glad to see it pop up again.]

"SoundPaper is the best way to take notes on your iPad.

It tracks what you type and draw while recording audio, so you'll never worry about missing an important detail.

While playing back your recording, just tap a word; SoundPaper will jump right to that point in the audio.

If you need to use another document or app, SoundPaper will automatically pause the recording. When you come back, just tap the "Record" button. SoundPaper will continue from where you left off.

Use SoundPaper's powerful drawing tool for quick sketches. It's easy to edit them, too. Tap a drawing to select it, or tap twice to select an individual stroke. From there, you can drag it to wherever you want, or tap "Delete" to get rid of it. Use two fingers to zoom and scroll."

"The Cornell note-taking system is a widely-used notetaking system devised in the 1950s by Walter Pauk, an education professor at Cornell University. Pauk advocated its use in his best-selling How to Study in College, but its use has spread most rapidly in the past decade."

"Simplenote replaces the Notes app on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. When you download Simplenote, you get free access to our web app and a variety of desktop apps, so you can access your notes from anywhere."

"Weeknotes are updates about what your business has been doing over the past seven days or so.

"Dan Bricklin's® Note Taker App (a Software Garden® product) is an app for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch.

"So, here’s the hack: a simple iPhone-optimized page that’s nothing but a big text field. It’s a Notes substitute. But here’s what’s cool:

"Together lets you keep everything in one place. Text, documents, images, movies, sounds, web pages and bookmarks can all be dragged to Together for safe keeping, tagged, previewed, collected together in different ways and found again instantly."

" UberNote is an all purpose notes and personal information manager accessible through your Internet web browser. Do you use yahoo mail, gmail, or hotmail? Just like those systems allow you to access your email, UberNote is used to access your personal no

"create custom notetaking sheets for any or all of your classes. The custom sheets can be blank (Cornell Style), ruled, or graph style. They are output with your name, the name of your class, and the date - that is, if you provide that information."

"halfway through those pages of horrible cursive, I stopped expecting to be graded and started writing for myself...primary goal of a notebook is to get out of the way...I needed lines in 3rd grade when I was learning how to write. I’m good now, thanks.

"As with many scientists, Linus Pauling utilized bound notebooks to keep track of the details of his research as it unfolded. A testament to the remarkable length and diversity of Dr. Pauling's career, the Pauling Papers holdings include forty-six research notebooks spanning the years of 1922 to 1994 and covering any number of the scientific fields in which Dr. Pauling involved himself. In this regard, the notebooks contain many of Pauling's laboratory calculations and experimental data, as well as scientific conclusions, ideas for further research and numerous autobiographical musings."

"Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere."

"Those notes are illegal, Faulkner and Moulton contend, since they are derivative works of the professor's copyrighted lectures."

"Evernote wants to be a database for every bit of knowledge in your life. It takes all of the digital data you collect throughout your day, both the important and the inconsequential, and stores them in a centrally-located library that's accessible in an

"Mindomo is a versatile Web-based mind mapping tool, delivering the capabilities of desktop mind mapping software in a Web browser - with no complex software to install or maintain."

"New aspirational goal for any aspiring lifehacker: write notes on a pad of paper without taking the pad out of your pocket!"

"Edgies is a Stickies type memo and launcher application. Unlike Stickies, it won't take spaces on the screen."

"What do you do when you read a couple of sentences in a post or article that really resonate? How do you capture and organize those snippets? What tools? How often do you recall those sentences, access them? How do you search? Is your process working?"