reading
Books are meant to be used
Wow, that's pretty cool
Why we should read
Narrative codes
A web of books
Silent Conversation
A GameSilent Conversation tells classic stories, poems and haiku in an interactive way, inspired by Walter Savage Landor's motto What is reading but silent conversation?. They are presented as levels where the player controls a small line (similar to a text prompt) to go through the winding words.
Interoperable Personal Libraries and Ad Hoc Reading Groups
An Article by Maggie AppletonWe would need a system that enables people to:
- Publish a list of books they would be willing to discuss with other people to the open web. Antilibraries – collections of books you haven't read yet but would like to read – are particularly well suited to this proposition.
- See which books people in their social network want to discuss, and/or subscribe to other people's lists
- Be notified when 4+ people in their network have the same book on their discussion list – possibly via an email thread?
- Coordinate and schedule a time to read and discuss the book with that group.
If a book can be summarized, is it worth reading?
An Article by Austin KleonIt is my opinion that if a book’s contents can be adequately “summed up,” so that you really don’t miss anything by reading the summary, it is not actually a book worth reading. (Of course, there’s no way to tell whether a summary is adequate or not unless you have also read the book.) Also, I suspect that the harder you find it to summarize a book you have read, the more valuable it might be.
Highlighter
An ApplicationHighlighter is a personal knowledge bank and collaborative learning network designed to feed your curiosity and help you examine new ideas.
Finding nourishment vs. identifying poison
An Article by Austin Kleon & Olivia LaingA useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments.
I would like to adopt that line as a mission statement: “To be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment rather than identify poison.”
Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you don’t find nourishment, you’ll starve to death.
Which Books You Truly Love
An Essay by Salman RushdieI believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song.
Of Note: Better Text Annotations for the Web
An Article by Brandon DornGenerally speaking (and ignoring questions of styling, API availability, etc.), an ideal Web annotation pattern follows these principles:
- Annotations appear in close visual proximity to the primary content.
- Their design neither distracts from nor hides the primary content.
- The preceding principles are followed regardless of screen width.
The only pattern I’ve found that meets these criteria is FiveThirtyEight’s.
...As it turns out, FiveThirtyEight didn't invent this pattern. It likely originated in medieval illuminated manuscripts which contain “interleave notes” — comments written literally between the lines.
What 80% Comprehension Feels Like
An ArticleOne of the major principles of extensive reading is that if a learner can comprehend material at 98% comprehension, she will acquire new words in context, in a painless, enjoyable way. But what is 98% comprehension?
The case for rereading
An Article by Mandy BrownReread a book enough times, or often enough—keep it at hand so you can flip to dog-eared pages and marked up passages here and there—and it will eventually root itself in your mind. It becomes both a reference point and a connector, a means of gathering your knowledge and experience, drawing it all together. It becomes the material through which you engage with the world.
The most interesting things that come to mind
A Fragment by Nabeel QureshiA meta note, inspired both by Proust and by this book about Proust: after reading a book, when you're making notes, don't refer to the book; just write down the most interesting things that come to mind. This is a better way of digging out what actually struck you about the book; as soon as you have the book to reference, you will start looking up the bits you "should" write about, and end up aiming at comprehensiveness rather than interestingness. Your actual criterion should be whatever interested you. Later, you can fill in quotations & references.
Title Cities
An Artwork by Nicholas RougeuxA book’s title page contains more than its namesake—including its author, contributors, publisher, and release date, and. Antiquarian books are known for having lengthy titles, especially those of a scientific nature. These books’ frequently unassuming title pages are gateways to a wealth of knowledge and the focal point of this project.
Title pages of antique influential scientific books covering a variety of subjects were coded and reimagined as colorful cityscapes based solely on their words to illustrate the unique body of knowledge readers would find within.
Boxes were drawn around each word of a title page and color-coded by its first letter (words beginning with “A” are one color, “B” another, and so on). Each title page has its own palette. Those boxes were then upended and arranged to form an abstract cityscape while maintaining their original sizes relative to each other.
Understanding Understanding
A dot went for a walk
A dot went for a walk and turned into a line.
The dot, the line, the dance, the story, and the painting had found connections. Memory became learning, learning became understanding.Learning is remembering what one is interested in. Learning, interest, and memory are the tango of understanding.
Creating a map of meaning between data and understanding is the transformation of big data into big understanding.
The dot had embraced understanding.
Understanding precedes action.
Each of us is a dot on a journey.Admitting ignorance
The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't know something. Striving to be the dumbest person in the room.
When you don’t have to filter your inquisitiveness through a smoke screen of intellectual posturing, you can genuinely receive or listen to new information. If you are always trying to disguise your ignorance of a subject, you will be distracted from understanding it.
Information imposters
Information imposters: This is nonsense that masquerades as information because it is postured in the form of information. We automatically give a certain weight to data based on the form in which it is delivered to us. Because we don’t take the time to question this, we assume that we have received some information.
My favorite example of this is in cookbook recipes that call for you to “cook until done.” This doesn’t tell you very much. Why bother? Information imposters are fodder for administravitis.
Michaelangelo's hammer
A young man named Michelangelo stands in front of a huge granite monolith. He stands there at a time in history before the technologies that brought us the hammer and chisel have occurred. He gazes at the rock. He dreams his dream and the best that he is able to say is, What a wonderful stone you are.
…
Michaelangelo now stands in front of the same rock. Thrust into his hands are a hammer in one and a chisel in the other. He looks at his hands, at the technological tools that they hold, and gazing at the same stone, with epiphanic zeal, says I must let Moses out.
I won't get
If I don't ask, I won't get.
Talking with Clinton
When you are talking with Clinton, he is not looking over your shoulder to see who else is in the room. You can tell he is not thinking about how he is going to respond to you. He is there, present and listening.
By the way, when you scramble the letters in the word listen, it becomes a new word: silent. We’re so often wrapped up in our own self-talk, we forget to listen and learn the information in the first place…and you can’t remember or understand something you never observed.
Scales of change
To understand revolutionary change in its full complexity – not just what happened, but why it happened – we need a model that works across multiple scales, and the disciplines that traverse them.
The method
Well no, see, that’s the tricky part. I always try to come up with things that when they find out the method, the method is as interesting as the effect itself. — David Blaine
Selling your own ignorance
When you sell your expertise - and what I mean by sell is to move ahead in a corporation, or sell an idea to a publisher, or sell an ability to a client - by definition, you’re selling from a limited repertoire.
However, when you sell your ignorance to move ahead, when you sell your desire to create and explore and navigate paths to knowledge, when you sell your curiosity - you sell from a bucket with an infinitely deep bottom that represents an unlimited repertoire. And, you sell in a way that’s not intimidating, in a way that joins the explanation to the fascination that comes with understanding.
You only understand something relative to something you already understand
A good question is better than a brilliant answer
The eyes of a traveler
We’ve all heard that travel broadens the mind. But beneath this cliché lies a deep truth. Things stand out because they’re different, so we notice every detail, from street signs to mailboxes to two you pay at a restaurant. We learn a lot when we travel, not because we are any smarter on the road but because we pay such close attention. On a trip, we become our own version of Sherlock Holmes, intensely observing the environment around us. We are continuously trying to figure out a world that is foreign and new.
Too often, we go through our day-to-day life on cruise control, oblivious to huge swaths of our surroundings. To notice friction points – and therefore opportunities to do things better – it helps to see the world with fresh eyes. When you meet creative people with lots of ideas constantly bubbling to the surface, you often come away feeling that they are operating on a different frequency. And they are, most of the time. They have all their receptors on — and frequently turned up to eleven. But the fact is, we are all capable of this mode. Try to engage a beginner’s mind. For kids, everything is novel, so they ask lots of questions, and look at the world wide-eyed, soaking it all in. Everywhere they turn, they tend to think, Isn’t that interesting? rather than, I already know that.
By adopting the eyes of a traveler and a beginner’s mindset, you will notice a lot of details that you might normally have overlook. You put aside assumptions and are fully immersed in the world around you. In this receptive mode, you’re ready to start actively searching out inspiration.
Cart before the horse
It seemed to him that in pursuit of an all-purpose, all-serving health care plan, the country was designing an ocean liner before it even understood why boats float.
The What and the How
How many aspects of problem solving and design solutions are there? Many, many might answer.
But there are actually just two: What to do and how to do it.
Before anything else, before you consider how you’re going to get it done or how much you’ll have to pay for it or how you’ll get permission to do it — before anything else, you have to decide what you want. You have to decide what kind of place you want to live in, what kind of community, what kind of city.
We don’t pay enough attention to the old adage: Be careful what you wish for, because you just may get it.
Thinking with the hand
The idea of thinking with your hands is not the exclusive domain of sculptors or engineers. In healthcare, for exams, surgeons have a powerful link between the head and the hands. Of course, like all healthcare professionals, their work involves a lot of deep knowledge and understanding. But it’s not all in their brain. If you were in medical school, learning to be a surgeon, for example, would you want your professor to be someone who writes about surgery or would you rather be taught by a surgeon? Many surgeons don’t publish scholarly articles. They spent time perfecting their skill with their hands. In some ways, the relationship between surgery and the larger field of medicine is analogous to the relationship between design and the larger field of engineering. Designers — and design thinkers —often think with their hands.
A pattern of understandings
The clock has no finished design and it has been made without any careful drawings or mathematical calculations. The pieces are only made if I can hold their details in my head as I make them, without reference to any set of external measures. I do make rough sketches of some parts as a path to understanding them, but never use these during the making of the parts. The clock gradually grows through trial and error and lots of physical work with metal, but out of this has come a set of principles of making that were not clear to me before doing the clock. I have finally realized that what I am actually making is a pattern of understandings of the process of making rather than the things that are actually being made. — Richard Benson
#15
How different am I, making clock number 15, from the process of natural selection laboring under changing conditions to generate the biological constructs? That ancient evolutionary system works on the basis of trial and error repeated in huge numbers over immense spans of time, with the failures discarded and the successes retained. At times it seems to me that my clock making is quite similar, as my mind, just barely thinking, sorts through huge numbers of possibilities and discards them as failures before even trying them, so the few that are made have a pretty good chance of success. Is this foresight some form of understanding? I think not. No revelation here, just enough thinking to spur the maker on to cut some piece of metal which, once made, might fail or succeed. Yet — in either case — the thing made and its creation remains the sole root of any real understanding that takes place. The clock is crude but gets built, and even in its base simplicity teaches its maker how to understand what must be understood for something to be made. — Richard Benson
A classroom without walls
The city is education – and the architecture of education rarely has much to do with the building of schools. The city is a schoolhouse, and its ground floor is both bulletin board and library. The graffiti of the city are its window displays announcing themselves, telling about what they’re doing and why and where they’re doing it. Everything we do – if described, made clear, and made observable – is education: the Show and Tell, the city itself. It is a classroom without walls, an open university for people of all ages offering a boundless curriculum with unlimited expertise. If we can make our urban environment comprehensible and observable, we will have created classrooms with endless windows on the world.