In the Foucault Reader, Michel Foucault claims his greatest trick is an old one called hypomnemata. The last time I googled on hypomnemata, all the top hits were explicit Foucault references.
The hypomnema or hypomnemata are similar to diaries (or weblogs even), except they are not written one time and maybe never looked at again. They are to be reread and rewritten over and over for the writer’s education and work and progress. I have been doing a bunch of this for years and it is only since November of 2008 that I have established a system that I am confident of using daily and feel that the pages will continue to contain useful information for years. Every page is dated and numbered. I now have close to 1900 pages with this dating/numbering scheme. Foucault claims this is a great idea and I don’t know about that, but so far I like it just fine. It does keep ideas that I like to think about from sinking too far down the stack through neglect into oblivion.
After five years it is reviewed one last time and then tossed into the dumpster.
My system is not that complicated and very much resembles what I was doing seven or eight years ago, which was close to plain-vanilla journaling. Now I use printer paper, which I line myself with microsoft word in alternating colors: tan-lavender-orange-light green-rose-light blue-gray. There are fifteen pages per color. At any given time I carry with me sixty pages; the fifteen in the active queue and the filled three previous sets. Right now my active pile goes back to the 23 rd of August. The first thing written on every new page is the date and this date’s page number in the top right corner.
When I fill up the current active set (of fifteen pages), I carefully read the set that will go upside down on the stack of a thousand pages or so on my bedroom floor. Some stuff will get copied onto a new fresh sheet to keep in the current active bin. Other stuff will get circled in red, starred, or otherwise annotated as something I would like to be able to review, or to find fairly fast. I use a lot of cartoon drawings and glyphs and diagrams and graphs.
I personally find it easier to find stuff out of hardcopy because keyword searches only work if you can remember the keyword and how to spell most of it. Depending on what I am looking for, I can scan through up to ten or fifteen pages in a minute; also, if it takes me a long time to find something and I have to search through a lot, I always find at least one pleasant surprise by happy happenstance.
JenniferRM, I looked at those links and some of it is intriguing. I do not log everything and am not interested in a complete map of every thought I think. What I am after is to refine and rewrite and connect my very best thoughts. This is the sense I read Foucault’s discussion of the hypomnemata. If you are interested in looking at this, you can find it on page 364 of the 1st edition of the Foucalt Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books. Foucault is generally thought of as intimidating, but I find this book very approachable. Rabinow has done a careful job presenting his version of Foucault, and it is a different guy than you see in the originals. There is always humor in Foucault, but in Rabinow’s presentation there is a sense that the humor is a mask for a deep underlying sadness, like Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a clown when there is no one around” character.
In any case, the man was a tornado of a scholar in terms of his ability to dig into library stacks and extract original connections from the overabundance of material waiting there for anybody with the exploratory instincts of people such as Michel Foucault, and when he talks about his methods, that is something which is worth attending to closely. The section on the hypomnemata is in the context of Rabinow interviewing him specifically on the topic of his methods.
Can you give an example of the kind of thing you use this to record? Is it for ideas, new concepts, notes to self, things to do later … ? What kind of things do you save, and how are they useful?
I was thinking about something similar recently, although I came at it from a different direction. Every once in a while I’ll think of something I call a “puzzle piece”—a bit of my own personality, or a rationale for something I do or feel. A piece of the puzzle that is me. Examples are along the lines of “Oh, I just remembered this experience I once had regarding such-and-such; no wonder I react to such-and-such so strongly now.”
I usually talk to someone about the puzzle pieces in a logged medium, but I don’t otherwise record them. It occurred to me that if I did, I’d be writing a manual to myself, and that might be very handy. Would anyone else be interested in some kind of structured site with the purpose of helping people develop their own “manuals” in this way? I’ll need to think about the requirements a little more before committing to building it, but I’m tentatively interested, especially if someone wants to help. (It wouldn’t be IA specifically, but self-knowledge is a useful thing.)
It’s also possible that the right format for this would not be an interactive site so much as a text guide for finding your own puzzle pieces.
Sorry for the delay, I didn’t see the reply because it wasn’t “leafward” of my response but on another branch so the software didn’t point me back here.
I read Foucault’s discussion of the hypomnemata. If you are interested in looking at this, you can find it on page 364 of the 1st edition of the Foucalt Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books.
Thanks, I appreciate the reference! Its in my system now, with a link back to here. It sounds like I do similar things already though not optimized for finding my mental gems. My working processes tend to be more “coral like”—with waves of growth and death and re-use of ancient content, but without a strong habit or theory to keep things stably repeating. Still, I like to see how other people tend their own thought gardens out of pure curiosity even when I don’t apply very much.
Kimbro’s system sounds like an impractically expensive version of yours, but there are similar themes. He prefers the flexible utility of physical note taking systems, uses four-color pens to track different phases and attitudes toward writing and re-writing, encourages ideogram invention, has mutating archival/mobile distinctions, and has numbering/sorting/reference systems so that the structure can be adjusted on the fly.
I would love to have some sort of browser plugin that would be a combination of this and supermemo, where, before going to bed, it would compile a sort of TL;DR summary of all of the most interesting and relevant articles I read that day, as well as those from a week ago (or whatever the optimal cadence for memory) for me to review and better commit to memory. I attempted a weak version of this the other day by simply reviewing all of the page titles in my browser history, and I think it did help a bit, but the real challenge would be in filtering it down to a short list of the information we most wish to remember, for those of us who find the web too shiny.
I think it would make for a really fascinating read if you plugged some keywords into google scholar like “diary”, “life logging”, “personal journal”, “mind mapping”, or something else that you think might be methodologically similar and found experimental research conclusions that you could vividly illustrate by reference to your personal experiences—“Hey I’ve seen that!”
Also, I’m curious about your mechanics and producing a truly fixed habit that is actually valuable and which persists over periods longer than a year. Have you ever heard of Lion Kimbro’s How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think and if so, do you have any thoughts on it?
Have you ever heard of Lion Kimbro’s How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think and if so, do you have any thoughts on it?
The title sounded interesting, so I followed the link and tried to read it.
(Ow, my head! It hurts...)
There are some very intriguing ideas in there, and also some very scary ones, and I haven’t finished it yet, and I’m not sure I want to and… ow. Just, ow.
I think there should be some kind of warning on your link, but I’m not sure what it should warn about exactly.
Those are my thoughts on it, to the degree that I am still able to think at the moment. ;-)
I don’t know about tossing into the dumpster. It seems that one interested in cryonics could get more mileage out of this by doubling this as part of that really long letter that partially amnesiac you could read after revival or that omega could use to reconstruct a approximation of you. Perhaps locking it away where you can’t read it?
In the Foucault Reader, Michel Foucault claims his greatest trick is an old one called hypomnemata. The last time I googled on hypomnemata, all the top hits were explicit Foucault references.
The hypomnema or hypomnemata are similar to diaries (or weblogs even), except they are not written one time and maybe never looked at again. They are to be reread and rewritten over and over for the writer’s education and work and progress. I have been doing a bunch of this for years and it is only since November of 2008 that I have established a system that I am confident of using daily and feel that the pages will continue to contain useful information for years. Every page is dated and numbered. I now have close to 1900 pages with this dating/numbering scheme. Foucault claims this is a great idea and I don’t know about that, but so far I like it just fine. It does keep ideas that I like to think about from sinking too far down the stack through neglect into oblivion.
After five years it is reviewed one last time and then tossed into the dumpster.
OK a couple more details.
My system is not that complicated and very much resembles what I was doing seven or eight years ago, which was close to plain-vanilla journaling. Now I use printer paper, which I line myself with microsoft word in alternating colors: tan-lavender-orange-light green-rose-light blue-gray. There are fifteen pages per color. At any given time I carry with me sixty pages; the fifteen in the active queue and the filled three previous sets. Right now my active pile goes back to the 23 rd of August. The first thing written on every new page is the date and this date’s page number in the top right corner.
When I fill up the current active set (of fifteen pages), I carefully read the set that will go upside down on the stack of a thousand pages or so on my bedroom floor. Some stuff will get copied onto a new fresh sheet to keep in the current active bin. Other stuff will get circled in red, starred, or otherwise annotated as something I would like to be able to review, or to find fairly fast. I use a lot of cartoon drawings and glyphs and diagrams and graphs.
I personally find it easier to find stuff out of hardcopy because keyword searches only work if you can remember the keyword and how to spell most of it. Depending on what I am looking for, I can scan through up to ten or fifteen pages in a minute; also, if it takes me a long time to find something and I have to search through a lot, I always find at least one pleasant surprise by happy happenstance.
JenniferRM, I looked at those links and some of it is intriguing. I do not log everything and am not interested in a complete map of every thought I think. What I am after is to refine and rewrite and connect my very best thoughts. This is the sense I read Foucault’s discussion of the hypomnemata. If you are interested in looking at this, you can find it on page 364 of the 1st edition of the Foucalt Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books. Foucault is generally thought of as intimidating, but I find this book very approachable. Rabinow has done a careful job presenting his version of Foucault, and it is a different guy than you see in the originals. There is always humor in Foucault, but in Rabinow’s presentation there is a sense that the humor is a mask for a deep underlying sadness, like Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a clown when there is no one around” character.
In any case, the man was a tornado of a scholar in terms of his ability to dig into library stacks and extract original connections from the overabundance of material waiting there for anybody with the exploratory instincts of people such as Michel Foucault, and when he talks about his methods, that is something which is worth attending to closely. The section on the hypomnemata is in the context of Rabinow interviewing him specifically on the topic of his methods.
Can you give an example of the kind of thing you use this to record? Is it for ideas, new concepts, notes to self, things to do later … ? What kind of things do you save, and how are they useful?
I was thinking about something similar recently, although I came at it from a different direction. Every once in a while I’ll think of something I call a “puzzle piece”—a bit of my own personality, or a rationale for something I do or feel. A piece of the puzzle that is me. Examples are along the lines of “Oh, I just remembered this experience I once had regarding such-and-such; no wonder I react to such-and-such so strongly now.”
I usually talk to someone about the puzzle pieces in a logged medium, but I don’t otherwise record them. It occurred to me that if I did, I’d be writing a manual to myself, and that might be very handy. Would anyone else be interested in some kind of structured site with the purpose of helping people develop their own “manuals” in this way? I’ll need to think about the requirements a little more before committing to building it, but I’m tentatively interested, especially if someone wants to help. (It wouldn’t be IA specifically, but self-knowledge is a useful thing.)
It’s also possible that the right format for this would not be an interactive site so much as a text guide for finding your own puzzle pieces.
Everything that is now up on my blog comes directly from my hypomnemata.
Sorry for the delay, I didn’t see the reply because it wasn’t “leafward” of my response but on another branch so the software didn’t point me back here.
Thanks, I appreciate the reference! Its in my system now, with a link back to here. It sounds like I do similar things already though not optimized for finding my mental gems. My working processes tend to be more “coral like”—with waves of growth and death and re-use of ancient content, but without a strong habit or theory to keep things stably repeating. Still, I like to see how other people tend their own thought gardens out of pure curiosity even when I don’t apply very much.
Kimbro’s system sounds like an impractically expensive version of yours, but there are similar themes. He prefers the flexible utility of physical note taking systems, uses four-color pens to track different phases and attitudes toward writing and re-writing, encourages ideogram invention, has mutating archival/mobile distinctions, and has numbering/sorting/reference systems so that the structure can be adjusted on the fly.
I would love to have some sort of browser plugin that would be a combination of this and supermemo, where, before going to bed, it would compile a sort of TL;DR summary of all of the most interesting and relevant articles I read that day, as well as those from a week ago (or whatever the optimal cadence for memory) for me to review and better commit to memory. I attempted a weak version of this the other day by simply reviewing all of the page titles in my browser history, and I think it did help a bit, but the real challenge would be in filtering it down to a short list of the information we most wish to remember, for those of us who find the web too shiny.
I think it would make for a really fascinating read if you plugged some keywords into google scholar like “diary”, “life logging”, “personal journal”, “mind mapping”, or something else that you think might be methodologically similar and found experimental research conclusions that you could vividly illustrate by reference to your personal experiences—“Hey I’ve seen that!”
Also, I’m curious about your mechanics and producing a truly fixed habit that is actually valuable and which persists over periods longer than a year. Have you ever heard of Lion Kimbro’s How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think and if so, do you have any thoughts on it?
The title sounded interesting, so I followed the link and tried to read it.
(Ow, my head! It hurts...)
There are some very intriguing ideas in there, and also some very scary ones, and I haven’t finished it yet, and I’m not sure I want to and… ow. Just, ow.
I think there should be some kind of warning on your link, but I’m not sure what it should warn about exactly.
Those are my thoughts on it, to the degree that I am still able to think at the moment. ;-)
Crazy.
I don’t know about tossing into the dumpster. It seems that one interested in cryonics could get more mileage out of this by doubling this as part of that really long letter that partially amnesiac you could read after revival or that omega could use to reconstruct a approximation of you. Perhaps locking it away where you can’t read it?
Could you elaborate on this system (or link to a description)?