arjun's itp-blog

philosophy, system & navigation:

written on .

philosophy:

i am a graduate-student on a mission 1 — information is all around me, and i do not wish for it to merely blow by. itp academically mandates each student to maintain a blog, and i wanted to maintain mine in a non-arborescent fashion 2.

for the last 3 years, i have carefully maintained a closed zettlekasten or ‘digital-brain’. that project is now paused, as all my time goes into itp, and this blog becomes my central repository.

a screenshot of my older zettlekasten.

system:

i collect notes (or images). these may arise from:

  • conversations
  • thoughts
  • reading
  • lectures (i consider classes, podcasts, and any other (primarily) unidirectional audio-exchange as lectures).
  • observations

these may then interconnect amongst themselves, and / or evolve into:

  • ideas
  • experiments
  • research
  • writings (writings deemed complete may find their way to my website )

at the end of this tryst between the abstract (collection; some evolution) and the concrete (artifacts during evolution, often via making), i may be left with:

  • projects (which may then find their way to my website)
  • reflections (which will also be considered writings)

these, i may choose to share with the outside world.

the above-mentioned list items are also searchable as tags (for example, search for writings). i can’t link them all on this page because of the way quartz is structured.

i may, also, require folders — containing all entries made during / related to a specific course. these will show up on the left (or inside the kebab-menu on a phone).

navigation:

The garden is the web as topology. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships.

from the garden and the stream, by jacky.

perhaps the best way is to wander, and tell me about the new paths that you discovered.

however, in general, navigation on the desktop looks like so: similar on the phone, but with these differences:

acknowledgements:

kezia & matt for generously sharing their time to help me debug; jacky for making quartz; felixnie for helping people with custom-sort; andre, lucia & jasmine for sharing their blogs; itp for requiring a blog; shobhan for introducing me to discipline; and sakina for bearing my unhealthy obsession with getting this right.

Footnotes

  1. on the flight from delhi to new-york, i penned down 5 vows for graduate-school. ↩

  2. a non-arborescent network is defined as “A nonlinear and non-hierarchical network with no specific entry or exit points”, by jacky. ↩

connections: