How can we manage and write curricula better in the 21^st century? An approach I’ve explored extensively is building directed graphs of learning competencies and modeling these relationships in AirTable. In this series of documents, I demonstrate how AirTable exceeds many other technologies for organizing, tracking, and maintaining curricula. I hope this serve as a guide to building a dedicated community of AirTable practitioners!

How can we take better notes for scholarship / self-improvement. Can we make those notes meaningful with linked data?

A means for building graph representations of relationships.

In about 2009, while in Austin, I got really into the Semantic Web. After spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to do something useful with it, I just let it go. I resolved that I was really either too dumb to figure it out or it was needlessly abstruse. The state of the research seems to suggest that the latter was probably the case. Regardless, I didn’t pin my career or financial stakes to it and, it turns out, that was for the best.

But recently I’ve been reading a lot more and I’m not merely content to catalog my notes in a simple list or even a JSON data structure. I’d like to be able to diagram thoughts, concepts, characters, themes, etc. and be able to render a graph of the imaginary universe (or argument, etc.). I’m keeping track of, and publishing, my research here.

Yes, the 19^th century technique for writing faster.

My grandmother was a practitioner of the art (I believe she may have done some stenography at NYU in the immediate post-war years).

The only lesson that I retained from her was “Steven, it’s about writing in circles.” She took a needle-sharp pencil and lightly traced the Gregg shorthand ovals that define most of the strokes. Intersecting, they looked like she was drawing the guide-shapes to illustrate a portrait. She then scribbled out a few words and I thought that was incredibly cool.

In honor of her, I decided I wanted to learn this skill too.