An underrated feature of physical books is how through used bookstores, estate sales, etc., they flirt with being a form of temporally resilient communal resource.
I have a couple books that are in their fifth century of life. They are not expensive or rare, just sets of words that have had 400+ years of people using them, kept in good shape and passed from caretaker to caretaker ("owner" isn't the right word in this case. I am caretaking for it. We are all librarians)
On this subject, lately I've become obsessed with personal libraries and archives, both physical and digital. I don't have a grand thesis yet, but there's something to the role an individual's practice of collecting and curating can lead to a distributed system of stored knowledge, particularly in arenas traditional institutions miss, but even just as a caretaking mentality, library as practice
@paul ahhhh I love this and this mentality! I hadn't seen Soundpipe but this is such an amazing example of this emerging definition of "library" I'm trying to explore. I love the module list, such a great example of documentation as something communicative, connective, and valuable
@Milouchkna aw that's so cool you did bookbinding! It's one of my dreams to finally have time to take some bookbinding classes. And I'll keep dreaming of a return to long fibers
@mncmncmnc very much love the idea of having your information well indexed, on file.
the technical means of archival is practically a prerequisite for any form of #memex.
@mncmncmnc you need to have the thing to begin to exercise self-determinism, figuring out how & where you wish to integrate the information article with the rest of your articles, informations, things, & perhaps likely even your own brain.
@mncmncmnc i obsess over what feels like a core lifelong gaeas, to make the computing real. to reify processes, objects, such that each can stand alone & be talked about, is graspable as a distinct thing.
https://cybre.space/@jauntywunderkind420/106615559775431425
kind of cryptic, but this paean to shells, for example, is because of what graspable things processes & files are & how the shell empowers one to view edit & script the environment & it's processes.
@jauntywunderkind420 ahhhh I love this shell image. Thanks for sharing it. The way you put "crunching" "pushing" data around is both poetic and true. I want your "Paean To Shells" manifesto now
@mncmncmnc gosh i love the use of the word "caretaker" in this context. ive been calling myself an "amateur archivist" (as opposed to a "data hoarder") lately, but i think i should be leaning more towards the idea of taking care of my data and curating it rather than just dumping it wholesale onto the cheapest hard drives i can find.
If you have more thoughts on this topic, i look forward to hearing them
@jaxter184 Yeah! Part of what I like about a librarian-like approach is it forces me to decide if I really *care* about each object that I could accumulate and hold. And if so, if the answer is yes, then that provides the motivation to care for it. But I think there's a place for the data hoarders too! For those who preserve the wholesale dumps. That to me can also be an important form of caretaking! Of preservation
@mncmncmnc I love creating a personal library. I have a 'lib' category in dendron.so where I collect all the highlights of the articles and their notes, books, small poems etc.
I wish everyone had an accessible library so that we all could discover more stuff/recommendations/views without the elaborate social dance of getting familiar with everyone.
@mncmncmnc do you mean like this https://www.lucs.lu.se/LUCS/103/LUCS.103.pdf
@behemoth yes this is definitely part of it! Thank you so much for sharing this :)
far & away digital effervescence
@mncmncmnc big #DigitalGarden vibe.
i don't think we have even the beginning of a sense of archive or possession or ordering over information. it's all gone kaboom, effervseced out of reach & out of hand, become far & away wild to us all.
so right now, starting with this- it's a wip, it's chaotic- seems like the wisest, like what the spirit has to be. lean in to gardening, to letting data be planted, bloom, & grow, let it be culled & shaped & harvested some times, carefully. let in wilds, & find forms there-in.
@mncmncmnc I have this caretaking mentality with projects of mine like Soundpipe and sndkit to an extent. And that's a great way to describe it too: caretaking.
Originally, Soundpipe aimed to be a means to try and better preserve and curate the audio DSP algorithms found in computer music programs like Csound. In a way, I consider them my like my cultural heritage. I don't really feel a sense of "ownership" with these projects. More of a deep responsibility to ensure that the collective wisdom of computer musicians from past generations get properly passed down to the computer musicians of future generations.