(2021-11-19) Johnson Capturing And Colliding

Steven Johnson: Capturing and Colliding

of course any attempt to design a workflow for thinking has to incorporate ideas that originate in other people’s minds too.

Over the years, as I’ve experimented with different ways of organizing my creative process, one of the central challenges has turned out to be figuring out the best technique for storing quotations from whatever I happen to be reading.

In my book Where Good Ideas Come From, I wrote about the Enlightenment-era practice of maintaining what was then called a “commonplace book”

I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but the Hypercard app I designed when I was a sophomore in college—which I discussed in the introduction to this series—was really my attempt to build a commonplace book using the new tools made possible by personal computers and the graphic interface

When I began writing for a living in earnest in the late 1990s, I used employ research assistants for my books, both to track down obscure scholarly articles in libraries, but mostly just to type up the quotations from print sources so that I would have them in digital form.

Milton, Bacon, and Locke would no doubt be thrilled to see the sheer number of apps and other services out there that allow you to store and revisit the ideas of other people.

it’s not sufficient simply to capture quotations from other people. The really valuable step is getting them to collide in productive ways with other quotations

This is not just a matter of convenience, by the way. Thinking is a fundamental social activity; even our best ideas are on some level amalgams of other ideas from other minds that we’ve stumbled across in our own intellectual journey

It’s not just about storing interesting ideas. The real trick is making new links of association between them.

You can do some of this just by adjusting your reading habits. I like to read two or three books concurrently—though one of them is usually a novel—precisely because I’m more likely to stumble up an interesting connection if I’ve just switched from one book to another

But of course, we now have computers to serve as our outboard memory. They can surface old quotations for us when they’re most relevant, and make powerful new connections. Or at least they should be able to do this. The software I used to rely on to organize all my quotes—Devonthink—has a wonderful algorithm for making subtle semantic connections between short blocks of text, so you can select one passage and ask the program to suggest other, related passages from your private commonplace book

I now use a different workflow, which I gravitated to because so many of my quotes started to come from e-books that I read in the Kindle app on an iPad.

Readwise.io.

Readwise has one key feature that I rely on constantly to produce interesting new collisions in my commonplace book. Every day, I get a personalized email from them—called “Your Daily Readwise”—which includes six quotes, five from my collection and one recommended to me based on my reading habits.

The quotes are selected partly based on a “spaced repetition” algorithm

But the thing I really value about these emails is the semi-random way they re-surface quotes from a wide range of books

There’s a randomness to the algorithm that it is clearly part of its power. It’s a serendipity engine, though one that is pre-filtered by my own selection process in choosing the original quotes.

Digital Text

Suggested tools

Print Text

Audio

I’ve become a huge fan of Descript, which will do more-or-less instant transcriptions of recorded audio, but then maps the transcript onto the original audio