Writing Weeknotes
These past few days I have been inspired by Anil Madhavapeddy’s and Jon Sterling’s online presence to start a practice of weeknotes. Jon’s weeknotes offer a complete example of what weeknotes are, and I also recommend his post on intellectual junkyards as an overview of how the practice emerged. As he notes in that post, there was a kind of organic friction with the ‘timeless’ design architecture of Zettelkasten note-taking that pushed him towards weeknotes:
Anil’s research group at Cambridge has a practice of internal blogging and weeknotes: pretty much everyone is writing about their work in blogs that are then syndicated into a Matrix channel. Then, discussion proceeds organically in the chat and in person. These blog posts are not the transient/fleeting notes discussed by Matuschak, because they are not scraps—they are evergreen in the ‘free’ sense of being permanent discourses on a moment in time.
I have experimented variously with the practice of academic journaling, a public-facing grad log (which turned into this very-much-not-daily blog site which consists mainly of book reviews), and time-tracking softwares such as bartib to try to organize the grand structurelessness of time that is the making and breaking of the graduate student (in the R1 American institution). These writing exercises have been valuable, and have helped me to crystallize and record aspects of my thought in ways that would have been otherwise lost to the vagaries of individual memory. Reading about Anil’s group, however, reminded me that I still do crave the self-imposed structure of a regular interval through which I can hold myself accountable, given that no-one else will in the ABD (All But Dissertation) period.1
What I love about the idea of weeknotes and how Anil’s research group seems to work (though note that I have no first-hand experience of it, I have just been browsing their activities online) is how a set of relevant notes can be federated (using RSS, the great untapped potential/protocol on the web) to form a notes network. This network can then serve as the basis for a richer collaborative undertaking, wherein sets and subsets of individuals can follow each other’s research activities without the cumbersome ceremony of video/in-person catchups. Meetings of course still have their place: but there is much than can be shared, refined, and progressed through a practice of sharing regular writing in advance. As Jon Sterling writes, “[j]ournalling in the most progressive sense is simply blogging with a restricted audience”. Federated research journalling, through weeknotes or otherwise, is exactly the kind of collaboration that the Internet makes possible—yet there are too few of us who take advantage of this information highway out in the open, sharing our activities semi-publically online.
Weeknotes also seem to me exactly the kind of structure that could cohere an ABD graduate student’s final few years, especially one in a humanities program, meaning one with an intellectual commitment to the production of writing. As I have noted before, it has often seemed to me—perhaps counterintuitively—that there is greater intellectual generosity on offer in the computer sciences than the humanities: ‘perhaps’, as given the sharply precarious political economy of the latter in 21st century University, this may come as no surprise to some.2 The point of the Research University, to my mind, is to facilitate the production of knowledge that structurally escapes the imagination of the private sector, and to allow this knowledge to be shared in ways that challenge and subvert the vociferous demands of financial and economic reason. While I do not think that making information ‘free’ for all is a wholly sufficient measure to take against capital’s inexhaustible drive for surplus value, privatizing writing and research for the sake of a symbolic hierarchy (so as not to dilute one’s peer-reviewed writings with off-the-cuff thoughts in paltry blog sites, as the standard academic reasoning seems to go) seems a much more suspect route to take.
It also excites me that many in Anil’s group are building their own homebrew infrastructure to host their notes and research. Anil’s website runs on a system called Bushel; Jon Sterling has an impressive tool called Forester; Patrick Ferris uses Forester with a preprocessor he wrote called Graft; Michael Winston Dales has an OCaml static site generator. My weeknotes will of course be written and published using Rheo, the CLI tool I have been working on for a few months now that is part of the document infrastructure for augmented reading we are working on at the Free Computing Lab.
I intend that these weeknotes will allow me to continue developing Rheo not only as a more fully featured static site generator, but also to add a roam-style package for HTML export to allow backlinks, tagging, and many of the other features that exist in Forester and Bushel. One of my complaints about roam-style systems is that they are hard to adopt/navigate unless one is already quite familiar with the architectural ideas that support them. Thus I want to keep ‘vanilla’ Rheo un-roam-like so that it can still be used as the driver for sites like the Language of Language Machines, Screening the Subject, the Digital Theory Lab website, and the Rheo docsite.
And so, announcing my research weeknotes, started the day of this post—June 7th— which you can find publically available at: