Roots of linked knowledge management
>Strong roots can pull ample nutrients despite a tumultuous past.
What is linked knowledge?
>Knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating, sharing, using and managing knowledge and information...
That's a bit broad but you can read more on Wikipedia
This is the overall parent oncept, but we're interested in the linked variety. What makes that different?
>File cabinets (opaque micro silo) vs. Idea networks (the same intuitive structure as the mind)
Links or hypertext are the essential piece that allow us to overcome many thought and communication barriers.
Links let us connect ideas across topics and sort in multiple ways at once
Links let us explore diverse structures of ideas that continuously compound and evolve over time
Linear access to isolated information is not how the brain works.
A box full of notes is a knowledge management system, but it has TONS of drawbacks and problems.
Many desktops and document apps follow this model closely, but it doesn't have to be that way...
Origins and evolution
Electric telescopes, 1934
>Paul Otlet, a Belgian bibliographer and entrepreneur who, in 1934, laid out a plan for a global network of “electric telescopes” that would allow anyone in the world to access to a vast library of books, articles, photographs, audio recordings, and films.
The memex was introduced in the famous As we may think essay, 1945
By researcher Vannevar Bush,
The Memex was an imaginary system which would allow the "associative indexing" of ideas, decades ahead of its realization
Zettelkasten slip box note system, 1960s
A way to save, communicate, and discover surprising ideas with your past self that is fast and flexible, even at a very large scale.
It was made possible using only a pen, paper, and boxes.
Project Xanadu, 1960s - 2000s
Introduces a huge range of concepts, some of which have been supported by various services that followed
The mother of all Demos, introduced hypertext concepts in 1968
Hypercard, 1987
Linked note software for Mac desktops
The Hyperlink, 1983
The World wide web, 1985-1988
The first Wiki, 1995
See WikiWikiWeb from Ward Cunningham
C2Wiki, (The Portland Pattern Repository) was the original
MediaWiki, 2002
aka the Wikipedia we all know and love
Many linked thinking apps and services , 2000s - present
This list by Brett Kromkamp is fairly comprehensive
>Illustration from Maggie Appleton's digital garden
Terms and related concepts
I think all linked knowledge management tools should support and encourage the lindy effect.
Recent and revelatory articles
Maggie Appleton is prominentin this space. She wrote her own Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
The garden and the stream, a technopastoral by Mike Caulfield came out in 2015 but is just as relevant today.
>Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships
It's Interesting to consider how using knowledge management techniques you can weave more and more of your flow into stock
This excellent paper on organizing knowledge visuallyby Francis Miller attacks a bunch of related concepts
MIT gets in on the game with their recent articleDigital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet
Quanta magazine has this gem on how animals use knowledge tools and what we can learn from them: The thoughts of a Spiderweb
Gardens of gardens
A long list of second brains by Kasper Zutterman
An excellent List of Digital gardens by Maggie Appleton
The problems with linear (unlinked) thinking
Linear thinking with lots of switching and getting interrupted sucks. In other words, files in folders, hierarchical structures, etc. are VERY bad for thinking. It's incredibly easy to lose track of things, miss connections, and fail to see context.
To be continued!
Like all pages on my project here, this is a continual work in progress.
Feel free to say hi @benfoden if you think this is interesting.