In an earlier post or maybe in an annotation I observed that I’ve become more interested in tweeting reactions to a text than in taking notes. While reading “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission” by Ann Blair, I highlighted and commented in the pdf, took a few notes, and tweeted thirteen times. As it happens, one of this week’s other readings, “As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush is something I read last year for ITP, highlighted and commented on, took a few notes, and tweeted.

It seems that I took my notes on Bush on a paper print out that I recycled, so I no longer have them. Therefore I have a means of evaluating the success of my note-taking via two of the three methods, one adversaria and one closer to historica, per Drexel.

Reviewing my notes from my read and later the classroom discussion, I see that the first were primarily quotations from the text. I pulled passages that were meaningful to me, that I found contentious, or that had words I didn’t understand. My class notes are phrases that also meant something at the time, but neither set of bullet points is particularly meaningful to me now. The tweets are also not very intellectually evocative, but they do remind me of the feeling of reading the text. It is likely that the notes and tweets were useful to me in the short-term, but long-term, they are not illuminating. (see what I did there?) It is possible that the notes I took, if I did take them, in the text would bring the essay back to me. As it is, I’ll need to reread, or at least skim, the article if I want it back in my brain. Do we take notes for short-term or long-term recall? Or maybe even for immediate recall?

I’ve been thinking about advice given at a Pro-Tips from Profs panel I participated in at New Student Orientation at my college. Cognitive Psychologist Lisa Son told students that they should take notes by hand, that there are studies that show that method is superior to taking notes on a computer. I’m also interested in the lasting value of artistic note-taking, as seen in CUNY GC alum Margaret Galvan‘s portfolio:

I’ve begun taking notes like that occasionally, drawing pictures sometimes. It’s definitely more fun and legible than chicken-scratch notes and helps with the emotion of the lecture, presentation, or article the way tweeting a silly animated gif does.

The topic of note-taking is engaging to me–more so than Vannevar Bush’s Memex. That may be because Blair’s four Ss: storing, sorting, summarizing, and selecting are meaningful to me as a librarian. Preserving, classifying, describing, and…selecting are what I do, physically and intellectually with the print and digital materials in my charge. In other words, I can relate. I wonder how much of the work done by scholars is rendering their subjects relatable. When I mock, uplift, or like something on Twitter, I am taking charge of it in a way. I’m just another uncredentialed schmo, but I can take a dead guy to task for something he wrote 70+ years ago disparaging libraries. Other people in the Twitterverse, typically people I can relate to–people who have chosen to follow my utterances (typically library and zine folk) or who are attending the same event I am (typically library and zine folk)–can comment back. They can agree, disagree, amplify, add, or classify what I’m saying by “loving” it, responding, retweeting, or adding commentary or new hashtags.

I’m thinking about tweets and hashtags as social media commonplacing, and as liking and retweeting as a way of gathering florilegium, akin to the methodologies of our 13th century forebears. Then again, they’re not really “our” forebears, are they? The women in our class would not have been preachers in the Middle Ages. Possibly the white men in our class, or our professor, but literacy wasn’t for everyone. Blair cites Foucault’s interest in copybooks because of what they imply about the copier, rather than in the subjects being quoted. Equally, who takes notes and how has social implications, as well as individual.

I don’t have an easy way to prove this, but people using hypothes.is are likely to be academy affiliated. With that affiliation comes a narrowing of the population that surely excludes in greater number people of color, people from lower economic classes, perhaps people in the sciences, people in non English-speaking countries, maybe people with learning disabilities, etc. Theoretically Twitter is more democratic, but in reality, of course it, too, favors people of wealth and education, per Shannon Tien for Hootsuite.

Tien wrote about Twitter demographics with a marketing audience in mind. It isn’t too far into her article that Blair addresses how commercial uses drove the early history of note-taking. Merchants keeping two books–one for recording and one for sorting. The act of sorting into categories is, per psychologist Son, is where the value lies. At that panel for undergrads I referenced earlier, Son recommended that students read over their notes and create questions for themselves as part of their nightly study practice. That is something note takers using print, pdf, or social media might also benefit from. The act of making decisions about what one has observed, how to categorize it, seems like it would be useful for fixing it better in one’s mind. That’s how it seems anyway. I’ll leave off there for now. The more I write, the harder it might be for a reader to make it through my post and want to comment on in, which is where Twitter comes in handy!