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Personal Memex

In this assignment, which unrolls over the duration of the entire term, you will create your own personal 'memex' of a kind first described by Vannevar Bush in his article, 'As We May Think.' published in The Atlantic in 1945.

You will need to download and install obsidian.md to do this. It is free.

I will walk you through how to use this software both in class, and through copious documentation.

Build your Memex

This involves:

  • making annotations on the readings, via your own Zotero library
  • or making annotations on the readings, via your Hypothes.is account
  • extracting those annotations to a single note in Obsidian
  • writing a summary note on the reading
  • refactoring the extracted annotations into individual, 'atomic' notes (one idea per note)
  • interlinking the atomic notes to each other and to the summaries as appropriate (use the graph feature to help with this; I call this 'gardening')
  • pruning extraneous notes of no value
  • adding new notes with your own thoughts/observations (including from my lectures)
  • interlinking those as well.
  • Linkages can be explicit, using [[ and ]], or they might happen via tags - we recommend using both. A tag can have subtags as well, eg #tag/subtag. Tags should capture what's important about a note; that could be its general topic, or perhaps, an idea of yours that a note speaks to.
  • you might want to have notes that you use to corral similar ideas together; these are sometimes called 'maps of content' and are lists of links, organized in some fashion as appropriate.

Then:

  • you will choose to make a subset (or all, it's up to you) of these notes available online periodically, for our review.
  • this can be done either publically or privately: Pushing your materials online at a public location | or at a private location
  • note that you do not have to use your real name if you choose to make things public.
  • I will share with you the URLs of others' memexes and I will encourage you to make external links to ideas your peers have made.

This mirrors the ways documents and servers and the other bits and pieces of the internet came to become interconnected.

Remember, not everything in your personal memx/vault has to go into the online version.

Evaluation

Elements that we look for as we evaluate your memex as it develops:

  • are notes well documented? have you used the templates to good effect?
  • are there sensible interlinkages?
  • is there evidence of careful, reflexive thinking? Is there evidence of taking in the discussions, making connections between what you have done/heard/read? Explicitly cite materials that underpin your thinking using Harvard author-date contextual citations or link to the items directly in your Zotero library
  • Are you using Hypothes.is to engage with the readings and the observations of your peers - do you link and make notes related to individual hypothesis annotations? Do you use the hypothes.is importer to ingest annotations from the web into your personal meme?
  • is there evidence for how any feedback has been considered, adopted, adapted?
  • Is there evidence for a developing sophistication in the work?
  • There may well be some small bonuses for finding and making notes from sources that explicitly deal with the history of the internet in Canada and related themes.

Assessment will be along the spectrum “unsatisfactory - satisfactory - exceptional”. Numerically, this translates as:

  • unsatisfactory: 0-2 points (ie, F-D range)
  • satisfactory: 3-4 points (ie, C-B range)
  • exceptional: 5 points (ie, A-A+ range)

First Assessment

  • have at least five sources adequately translated into note form
    • notes with the bibliographic info, general summary
    • atomic notes as appropriate
    • interlinkages
    • a map of content note providing some initial structure, an initial 'way in' to your memex

Second Assessment

  • have at least another five sources adequately translated into note form
    • notes with the bibliographic info, general summary
    • atomic notes as appropriate
    • interlinkages
    • links outwards to others' memexes, or hypothesis permalinked annotations
    • maps of content as appropriate providing a useful 'way in' to your memex as suits your own research interests

Third Assessment

  • have at least another five sources adequately translated into note form
    • notes with the bibliographic info, general summary
    • atomic notes as appropriate
    • interlinkages
    • links outwards to others' memexes, or hypothesis permalinked annotations
    • useful tag structure implemented
    • maps of content as appropriate providing a useful 'way in' to your memex as suits your own research interests

The Final Journey

At the end of the course, you will install the 'journey' plugin from the Obsidian Community Plugin catalogue (click on the 'settings' cogwheel, bottom left, community plugins -> browse) to craft a summary note for the course. 'Journey' will find paths through your notes from a starting note to a finishing note.

  • you will identify a starting note and a finishing note that will enable you to answer the question, 'what is the most powerful thing you've learned in this course'.
  • You copy the results of that path as a list of links.
  • You will make a new note into which you paste that list of links.
  • You explain the path to your reader by writing new text woven around these links that explains how the path unfolds. You may wish to embed blocks from the individual notes..
  • You will make sure that every note in that path is pushed to the online version of your memex.
  • You push this note to your online memex, and add a link to it from your index.md note called 0_Final Journey_1 - this will make it easy for us to find it.
  • At the beginning of the course, in the tutorial, you indicated to me what you wanted to get out of this class. Compile another Journey through your notes to assess that desire: was it accomplished? If not, what is lacking, and why? Explain, as you did for the previous question. Push the resulting note to your online memex, add a link to it from your index note, and call it 0_Final Journey_2.

The 'final journey' notes will show me a number of things. They will demonstrate how your thinking has evolved in the course; they will demonstrate how you make the explicit connections between the materials we've studied and your thinking on these matters. You will notice that these are not an essays. They are rather more like an evolving personal wikipedia, and these 'final journey' notes give me a path into your thought.