to organise one's knowledge

21 Feb 2021

I’m a such nerd, but I feel like, in order to be a good nerd, I should organise my knowledge a bit more. The universe seems to point in this direction too since I have encountered many synchronicities (found in newsletters, facebook comments, conversation with friends) about it in the recent past.

Furthermore, it’s been a while I want to somewhat reorganize this digital garden by categories. I just always have been too lazy to implement the feature. Afterall, in the first place, what I liked the most about digital gardens was that it was not like a blog in the way the content was organised. And yet my very own digital garden only showcase my notes in chronological order. Therefore I am in reflexion about if my urge to organize my knowledge should be partly a makeover of Ravirer or if it should be something apart this project.

So far I use Zotero to store what I’m reading. My library is public, but I don’t think it’s relevant to anybody to really dive through it since it’s such a mess. Even I go rarely see older pieces that lives there. I used Obsidian, a graph-based note-taking software, for a little time to organize my ideas (after that Roam Research became a paid application) but didn’t create any workflow whatsoever on it.

At the moment, if I’m not thinking about how realistic it is for me to code and write such a thing, my ideal way of organizing everything would be to have an index page with all the categories of subject I’m covering. On the main page of the subject would be a selective bibliography on the topic and maybe some comments to contextualise the discipline. I would like to have a search bar that would allow me (and/or people) to search through all the entries. I’d like to let myself be messy a little with those bibliographies but also have a page where I showcase bibliographies of which I am proud, in a sense that I find them very complete or original.

But parrallely, I am thinking that this selective bibliographies project could be remote of this garen, because this way it would be easier to make it collaborative. And if I want to make something collaborative, I wish I could still use GitHub, but I don’t know how much this technology is accessible to people not from the tech-world.

But at the end of the day, my concerns still go to the idea of contextualisation. This newsletter issue sparked my interest on the topic. In it, Sari Azout says very wisely that

[…]thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content – “what should I read?” – and not enough on the structure – “how do we collect, store, and contextualize the information we consume?” We seem to have forgotten that the goal is not to consume more information. The goal is to think better, so we can achieve our goals.

Therefore, she points out that

Three intersecting problems remain unsolved:

1. Our feed-based information architecture is obsessed with the present.
2. We consume information recreationally, not as a way to achieve our goals.
3. Curation has been too focused on the information and not enough on architecture; how we collect, store, augment, and utilize what’s already in our minds.

So yeah, that’s good food for thought. And to go back to my particular situation, I feel like I would be very willing to invest energy in order to “fix those issues” but at the same time, I realise that it might “not be that worth it” because I have almost no visibility with my digital garden. Therefore, I was thinking that I maybe do need to start a newsletter and stuff.

Another thing that really motivates me is that (unfortunately) my university sucks lol. My classes, and the reading that needs to be done for those, are so very pointless and not up to date in my opinion and it makes me kind of angry because there is relevant stuff to teach people who wants to work in cultural animation, and yet this relevant stuff isn’t at the agenda. Therefore, I would like to build an alternate cursus to build the gap.

So many projects and direction I could take, it’s a bit overwhelming. But at the same time, I am very grateful because this whole situation exists namely because I had the chance to read and listen to so many interesting things these last years. I’ll meditate on that.