@chrisaldrich I absolutely use index cards, and there are loads of people now emulating or trying to emulate, a Zettelkasten, using analog or digital index cards. There's a huge subculture around Personal Knowledge Management, at present, which I'm a bit baffled by.
@Medievalist A pleasure to meet you here!
I blame Manfred Kuehn's note taking blog and the Marbach Exhibit of zettelkasten in 2013. Of cource the fleet of shiny new objects representing Roam Research, Obsidian, and Notion during the pandemic didn't help people with perhaps too much time on their hands.
I'm curious where you learned your own practice (book? teacher? other?) How is yours organized (by traditional subject categories, chronological, project-based, other)? I'd suspect given your timeline and subject matter expertise, it's certainly not based on Niklas Luhmann's model. As a side project, I've been tracing the intellectual traditions of these practices back to some of their intellectual origins.
And finally Shwmae! Dw i'n falch o gwrdd â chi. I've been learning modern Welsh with an eye toward eventually delving into old Welsh for an orality-based thesis I've got. I'm curious if you have any favorite resources or books you particularly like for the "beginner"? (A question I'm sure you get every day... 😉)
@chrisaldrich I learned to use index cards for bibliographic research as a child, in English class. I took notes by hand in school and as an undergrad, and while studying for my qualifying exams, I created HypdrCard stacks for my study notes, and later, teaching notes and research notes. Those were converted to HTML pages. Later, I used VoodooPad (a macOS/iOS app) for permanent notes (local wiki, exports HTML). Last year I tried a bunch of apps for note management for research/writing, settled on Obsidian, but am moving away from it, and going with static html pages. I've created so many simple html sites, for work, that I can keyboard basic html very easily. It's stable. It's attaractive, and it's very portable.
I still take a lot of notes by hand, especially in terms of reading printed /codex books, but those I keep end up on the computer.
As a Medievalist, with a solid background in English Renasiassance and Early 17th literature, who worked for a rhetorician, the koino topoi were fairly standard parts of educaiton for centures. Common place books were common place. I even started <a href="https://konoitopoi.blogspot.com">a commonplace blog</a>, in part becasue early blogs reminded me of the 18th century version of the commonplace book.
The tech community/podcasts have a lot of overlap with productivity podcasts, and interest in PKM stuff (see the <ahref="https://www.relay.fm/focused">Focused podcast</a>, for instace, from David Sparks and Mike Schmitz).. I'm both fascinated and horrified by it, so have been reading a lot about it, as I read books about reading.
I created this page of <a href="https://www.digitalmedievalist.com/opinionated-celtic-faqs/learn-medieval-welsh/">resources for learning Medieval Welsh</a>. The page is on my list of pages to update, but it's got about ten pages listed ahead of it.
And good to meet you too!