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Jorge ArangoThe promise of computers augmenting our minds has been a long time coming. We’re beginning to see better tools for extending human cognition, but good guidebooks for using them have been scarce.
Jorge Arango’s new book, Duly Noted, fills this gap elegantly. It shows you how to extend your mind with connected digital notes that capture your thoughts and nourish them in a personal knowledge garden from which you can harvest and share your unique insights.
We talked about:
- the motivation for his new book, Duly Noted
- how his personal experience with note-taking, the emergence of the digital media, and his background as an information architect converged to inspire his interest in digital networked note-taking
- the challenge presented to note-takers by the huge variety of kinds of notes, and his taxonomy of types of notes
- some of the history of computers as tools to augment our cognitive capabilities
- his concept of the “personal knowledge garden”
- his take on Brian Eno’s articulation of the differences between architecture and gardening
- the differences between thinking spaces and writing spaces
- the difference in mental models applied when moving between physical and digital note-taking media
- the rise of hypertext-based note-taking tools
- how your content-strategy skills around structured content help your note-taking and knowledge gardening
Jorge’s bio
Jorge Arango is an information architect, author, and educator. For almost three decades, he has architected digital experiences and made the complex clear for organizations ranging from non-profits to Fortune 500 corporations.
He is the author of Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind Through Connected Notes, Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places and co-author of Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond, the fourth edition of O’Reilly’s celebrated Polar Bear book.
In addition to his design consulting practice, Jorge hosts The Informed Life podcast, writes a blog, and teaches at the California College of the Arts.
Connect with Jorge online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 175. Throughout our days, we are all taking note of things for a variety of reasons in a number of ways. A to-do list on your computer. A scribble in the margin of a book. A blog post idea in a Google doc. In his new book, Duly Noted, Jorge Arango sets out principles and practices to create a digital note-taking regimen and then shows you how to connect and cultivate your notes in a personal knowledge garden where you can gather your thoughts and harvest insights.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 175 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Jorge Arango. Jorge is an independent information architect. He’s an author. He’s an educator, and I asked him on the show today to talk about his new book, Duly Noted. So welcome, Jorge. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Jorge:
Hey Larry, thank you for inviting me. I’m very excited to be here. And as you have noted, I have a new book called Duly Noted, and I’m excited about that. As you also mentioned, I’m an information architect. That’s what I do for a living, and I have been doing that for a long time, and what gets me out of bed these days is the fact that we have access to all this information in the world, and those of us who work in this space have been part of making it possible for there to be more information in the world than there’s ever been before. And that’s a good thing, and it can also be a bad thing. I’m very focused on the good… Let’s make it good. So that’s what gets me motivated and we can talk more about what that means in the context of this book.
Larry:
I see. Well, that leads to one of the… As I read the book – it’s a fantastic book and everybody should get it – but one of the things that struck me as I read it, especially as I got deeper into it and you started talking about how to structure things and organize and metadata and all that stuff, and I’m like, “Okay, this guy’s an information architect. I wonder if a sales executive or a CEO had had similar insights and written a book, if it would’ve been different.” So do you feel like these are universal, not truths, but insights that you’ve discovered, or do you feel like your background as an information architect, how do you think that informed the book?
Jorge:
Yeah, that’s a great question, and maybe to give folks a bit of background, folks might not know what we are talking about here. The book is called Duly Noted because it’s basically about note-taking and you might ask yourself, “What? Really? A whole book about notes?” Notes are something that I think a lot of us take for granted. We’ve been doing it for a long time. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid in school, and I think a lot of people started taking notes like that. In my case, I remember the late ’70s and early ’80s using a, these big three-ring plastic binders to keep loose leaf notes. So it’s one of those things where we can take it for granted, and yet, they have tremendous power. And this book is about how to take better notes, but not just any kind of notes. It’s specifically about using digital tools to take better notes and focusing on, “What is different about digital?”
Jorge:
So digital is different than those Trapper Keepers that I used when I was in school, and it has some capabilities and some constraints, and we have to understand digital as a medium if we want to make good use of this. And the question, knowing that as a background, then you might reframe the question as, “Why is an information architect writing about note-taking somehow?” And the way that I came to this subject is that I have been taking notes for a long time. Like I said, I started in school, but then in work, I would do things like take notes about what was happening in meetings, for example, meeting minutes. A lot of people do that, and I’ve been doing that for a long time. And I started taking that kind of notes in paper, much like I did with the school notes, and eventually I moved over to doing it with a computer. And I had this realization that there were things about doing this with a computer that were different than doing it on paper.
Jorge:
And moreover, there were similarities between some of the things that I needed to do to make information more useful when I was taking notes from what I was doing to make information more useful for other people as an information architect. So in some ways, my career as an information architect is about making information easier to access, more findable, more understandable for other people, and this is about doing the same thing, but for myself, for yourself. So there’s quite an affinity there, and I had written a book prior to this one called Living in Information, which is about designing and building digital systems, which I called in the book information environments, that better honor people’s attention, that allow us to think better using these digital spaces. But it was written for designers, for people who are information architects or user experience designers, that sort of thing. And this book, this new book, I see as a compliment to that.
Jorge:
But rather than being addressed to the people who are designing digital systems, it’s more addressed at the users of digital information, people in every walk of life who are interacting with information, perhaps knowledge workers, students, authors, teachers, anyone whose work revolves around knowledge and working with information can benefit from knowing a little bit of information architecture. And that’s what this book tries to do. It tries to bring principles and practices from the world of information architecture to managing your own stuff.
Larry:
Nice. The whole intent of this podcast is to democratize content strategy practice and sounds like we’re very aligned on that. It also resonates. I had Abby Covert on a few months ago and she was talking specifically about democratizing information architecture. So there’s some kind of a plot happening here to get these practices and principles out to more folks. I love that. One thing, as you were talking about the history of your own personal history of note-taking, I was thinking about one of the things that you do really well in the book. I had never really thought about how many different kinds of notes there are and you go everything from to-do lists, hanging a sticky on the refrigerator to class notes or all those things in between. Tell me a little bit about the scope of intent of note-taking and how you focus it into this digital realm that you’re focusing on in the book.
Jorge:
One of the challenges with the word notes is that it’s one of those words that we use to refer to a bunch of different things. And when you start thinking about it, we talk about… Let’s say something like a sticky note. That’s a very common note type. When you say notes, many of the people listening in might have thought of sticky notes first. It’s a very common use for notes. We also use the word notes to refer to the sort of things that we write down when we’re capturing meeting minutes. We use the word notes to refer to the marginalia that we capture when we’re reading a Kindle book, for example. We will highlight certain passages and maybe make notes with the highlight and we call all those things notes, but if you think about them, they’re very different, both in intent and in form. And one of the first steps in making better use of notes as a means for thinking better, which is ultimately what this book is about, is to acknowledge and recognize that when we say notes, we mean different things.
Jorge:
And doing this little taxonomy of different note types is a way to help readers be more intentional about what they use and for what ends. So if you’re going to do brainstorming, for example, you might benefit from sitting down with a very large sheet of paper and maybe some colored markers and you can do something like a mind map or a brain dump onto the page. Whereas if you’re trying to make a list of things that you need to buy at the grocery store, that’s not going to be well served by a large sheet of paper with colored pens. So just knowing what you’re trying to do and what part of your cognitive abilities you’re trying to augment and then knowing what note types are available to you can help you be more intentional about this stuff and therefore think better.
Larry:
And I love that, the whole intent of it being to augment human intelligence. I think that’s really coming to the fore with AI getting so prominent, but it’s an old concept. I love that Howard Rheingold invoked Doug Engelbart’s name in the intro to the book. And for people who don’t know Doug Engelbart, I think he was… Was he the first person that talks explicitly and specifically about using digital tools to augment human knowledge?
Jorge:
Well, he was very early. There were precedents. Well, Vannevar Bush didn’t talk specifically about digital stuff, but he was talking about something that was like a proto hypertext type system. And the Engelbart, my impression is that one of his main contributions is that he actually built a prototype of such a system. So it wasn’t just about talking about this stuff. It was about embodying these principles, bringing them to life in an actual functioning system, which was obviously very influential. And, yes, you mentioned Howard Rheingold. Just for context here as well, I feel very privileged to have had Howard write what I consider to be a fabulous forward to the book. And Howard wrote a book which was very influential to me called Tools for Thought, which traced the history of computers as a mind augmentation technology, starting way back in the late 19th century with people like Charles Babbage and Lady Lovelace.
Jorge:
And this book, Howard’s book in this case, traces the history of computers as a mind augmentation technology. And to me, that is one of the motivating factors behind doing this work in that I find the idea that there are technologies that can augment our cognitive abilities, I find it tremendously exciting, because I’m just a regular person. I have what I consider to be a below average memory, and I have experienced in myself just having the ability to write down things and to keep track of ideas to be incredibly empowering and to allow me to do the things that I would not have been able to do had I not been able to extend my cognitive abilities with things out in the environment, including computers. So I consider that to be central to this project.
Larry:
Yeah, and that notion of augmenting both just human activities in general, but especially the memory part of it, I guess that gets at the main… The overarching intent of any note is to help you remember something. But one of the things I love about the book is that you, “Okay, that’s step one.” And then you have this whole garden that you cultivate to do something with those ideas. So I assume the higher intent is that what? You talk about sparking insights and harvesting ideas down the road. Can you talk a bit about that knowledge garden metaphor that you use in the book?
Jorge:
Yeah, absolutely. The central metaphor in the book is that what I am inviting the reader to build or to consider building is what I’m calling in the book a personal knowledge garden. And this is a metaphor that has, pardon the pun, it has long roots in the field. I did an interview with Mark Bernstein, the designer of Tinderbox, a hypertext note-taking app, and a long time contributor to the hypertext community, where he mentioned that the metaphor has very early uses in Xerox PARC in the 1970s. I think Cathy Marshall was a researcher he cited talking about this kind of agricultural metaphor or botanical metaphor. And the idea here is that you think of building for yourself a space, a metaphorical space, where you can go to do work. And again, I’m talking completely metaphorically. This is not a physical space you go to. It’s a place that you go to in your mind where you can feel at ease that you are keeping ideas.
Jorge:
And the reason why I gravitated to this gardening metaphor is twofold. One is the notion that a garden is something that grows over time. It’s not something that you do overnight. It’s something that requires work. It requires patience. It requires elbow grease. It requires commitment and a certain degree of love to do, and it’s something that brings you pleasure. It’s not just work. It’s something that, if you’re into it, really gives you meaning and it’s fulfilling. It’s an activity that nurtures you more than by producing actual fruit. So that’s one reason. The other origin, at least for me, is it came through something that I read by Brian Eno, the musician and record producer, and he made a distinction between architecture and gardening. And as you might imagine, as an information architect and someone who was educated as an architect, that resonated with me.
Jorge:
The distinction that he drew there was that architecture can be thought of as a top down activity where you are defining structures and those structures then get built and once they’re built, they’re there. So you have to do a lot of thinking up front about the form that the thing is going to take, and you have to do the structuring a bit upfront. And he contrasted that creative work with the work of a gardener where the gardener also has some structures that they put up front, but the intent is not to have those structures reflect the final vision of the thing. Instead, those structures are there to enable the growth of these organic artifacts or these organic things that are the real form of the place.
Jorge:
And the gardener doesn’t so much design and build the place as nurture it into being somehow, and the gardener stewards the place. It’s not the sort of work that we do as architects where we’re defining the thing upfront and then putting it into the world. It’s more we are creating these structures that are there to encourage a certain growth, a certain emergent structure, certain bottom up forms. And I think that that’s a more appropriate way to think about these knowledge spaces than the sort of work that I do as an information architect, which does entail thinking up front about the structures that will allow people to find stuff.
Larry:
Mm-hmm. It’s interesting. As you say that, there’s still room for architecture in this because even if you’re just building the lattice work for a garden or for a feature in a garden, that’s still… But it’s not to hang art on the wall. It’s to have this organic thing unfold there instead. I love that, and it seems like a more realistic way when you think about how the world actually operates. It seems like, I don’t know, that when you’re actually trained as an architect, which I think… I wonder what percentage of information architects have that background.
Jorge:
I know a few of them, particularly people of my vintage who started in this field before this was something that you could study in university. So there’s obviously a lot of folks with different backgrounds, but architecture, I’ve met a few.
Larry:
When you think about just that notion of architecture to facilitate cultivation and nourishing and nurturing and all that versus just the place to put stuff, it seems it’s an important distinction. I think that’s really interesting, especially in the context of note-taking, because each note, I’m going to probably go way too far with this, is it seeds or is it… Tell me a little bit about how you put the note-taking schemes and systems and practices that you advocate into that garden metaphor.
Jorge:
Well, the metaphor is a metaphor and one has to be careful with metaphors because one can end up constraining themselves too much if you try to overfit the work into the metaphor. But there are parallels here. You mentioned the idea of a seed, and I know at least one person, Maggie Appleton, who has a website where she publishes her garden. There are people who publish their knowledge gardens. They’re called digital gardens. You can Google that phrase and find a bunch of them. One of my favorites is Maggie Appleton’s. And one of the reasons that I like Maggie’s is that I think it does a really good job of balancing this kind of emergent bottom-up structure stuff with something that is navigable by people like myself who are not the builders of the place.
Jorge:
One of the challenges with making this kind of thing public is that if you’re doing it for yourself, the structure of the place is going to be highly idiosyncratic, and by definition, it’s not going to be as accessible to third parties as something that is intentionally designed to be usable by a lot of people. But Maggie’s garden is interesting because it does have a structural design that makes it possible for you as a visitor to navigate it and to find value there. And one of the things she does is she has a taxonomy for tagging posts that marks the stage of the idea in its lifespan going from… I forget the terms, but it’s going from seedling, from something that has sprouted, quote, unquote, and something that is more developed so that you can get a sense, you can get a read on how thought through these ideas are.
Jorge:
Because this is the thing. These are thinking spaces. These are not spaces… I don’t think of them primarily as publications. I think of them primarily as notebooks in the sense that you are doing thinking work there. Thinking work I think of as different than publishing work. They are clearly related, but you do a different kind of thinking when you are just trying to think about what something is or what it means or what you think about it than when you are trying to put something out into the world that is meant to be sold or consumed or educate people, for example. So they are slightly different. And I’m talking here about the former, so it’s really interesting to see someone who is doing that thinking in public and acknowledging that, “This idea is not fully grown yet. Let’s just tag it as a seedling.”
Larry:
And I love that she has a taxonomy for the stage that something that… I love that you invoked Maggie’s name too, because she first came to my attention, and this is where I’m going to just ham-handedly turn this back to content strategy a little bit, but she first came to my attention as she was working on this block protocol format thing. Because we’re kind of still… Especially on the web, and this is one of the things you talk about in the book is about the structure of notes and how to organize them and attach metadata to them for figuring out how they relate to one another.
Larry:
But another way to think about that is that block thing and blocks are, I don’t know, there’s no set definition of it, but it’s you have a document on a webpage or something and then there are parts of it. And one of those ways to label those parts is a block. And so that’s how Maggie first came to my thinking, and she was super-thoughtful about that. And I’m just wondering, this notion of lattice works and gardens and meaningful chunks of things, how that all comes together and then when you’re talking about the intent of a notebook to document and augment your thinking versus a publication for sharing with folks, there’s a lot going on in there.
Jorge:
There is, and I think you’re right to relate this to content strategy because there are a lot of similarities there. One of the challenges that we face as people trying to navigate what has become a really complex information environment is that we are experiencing information through mental models that have been formed by pre-digital media. And we are dealing with digital information and we are inhabiting environments that are shaped by digital information. And you referred casually to metadata, but metadata is a good example of what I’m talking about here. I think that most people who started thinking with notes, like I did with paper, had not paid a lot of attention to metadata. Metadata is not something that is inherent to thinking on paper. Now, it is not to say that there isn’t metadata there.
Jorge:
The one that comes to mind are page numbers and the indices in books, which are a fairly late invention, as far as I know, into the codex, the book form. Books were around for a long time before someone had the idea to put numbers on pages so that you could randomly access information in the book. But when I was using Trapper Keepers as a kid, I wasn’t thinking, “Is there something that can describe this beyond thinking, ‘Hey, this loose leaf goes in this particular subject in the binder’? I don’t know. “This class was about science or about social studies or about what have you.” But I wasn’t thinking too much about metadata, and I think that what’s happened, and this is part of the reason why I wrote the book, is that we need different mental models to make good use out of the tools that we have now, the capabilities that digital brings to the table. And if you look at note-taking tools… I was about to say something profoundly unfair.
Jorge:
There have been incredibly powerful tools for a long time. One that immediately… Well, you already mentioned the Doug Engelbart’s system. There’s the work that Ted Nelson did on Xanadu, which was, I think, more conceptual than realized. I know that there are prototypes of that, but it’s not something you can easily use. But then in the ’80s we had HyperCard. I’ve already referenced Tinderbox, Mr. Bernstein. That tool has been around for over 20 years. And these are all tools that I think make good use of what is really special about digital as a set of thinking technologies. The problem is that using those tools requires different mental models, like I was saying. And so the tools that have become most popular for taking digital notes are tools that mimic the capabilities of paper-based systems.
Jorge:
I would think that among the most popular of these is Apple Notes, the app that comes with iPhones or in the Android space, it’s something like Google Keep. And both of those are fairly capable tools, but they are designed, I think, primarily to be understandable by people who are used to thinking of notes as things that live in notebooks, perhaps in folders. They have this very hierarchical structure, and they make links between nodes second class citizens of some kind. I believe that both… Well, I know for a fact that Apple nodes has links and I think that Google Keep does as well. I don’t use Google Keep, but I think both of those tools have the capability of adding links, but it’s fairly difficult to do so, just to give an example.
Jorge:
I know that Apple Notes has tags, but that’s a fairly recent development. But for the most part, these are tools that are meant to be used by a lot of people and therefore, leverage pre-digital metaphors very heavily. And what’s happened now over the last few years, I would say over the last five years or so, is that there have been a slew of new tools coming to market that are really digitally native, and they make creating… I’m going to use the phrase hypertext note-taking systems, which is a kind of highfaluting phrase, but they make it possible to take these digitally native notes in a way that it’s fairly easy to get into if you understand a few basic principles, right?
Jorge:
And I’m talking about tools like… I guess the best known is Notion, but there’s also Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, there’s a bunch of them. And these tools don’t… They kind of jettison this paper notebook metaphor in favor of something that is much more, I think, authentic to the digital medium, and they’re incredibly powerful if you understand what digital note-taking can do and what digital media is good at. One of the intents in Duly Noted is to teach you these basic principles. It’s like, “What is the mental model you need to actually use these digital tools to think better?”
Larry:
Yeah, and that’s amazingly helpful, and I think it’s interesting, because I was going to ask you as you were talking a minute ago about how do you make that leap? How do you get out of those pre-digital mental models? And it’s exactly those tools. These are developers who are living just a little bit in the future compared to where most of us are and helping us see that. Because I think Obsidian in particular comes the closest. You invoked Ted Nelson’s name. It kind of has transclusion in it. It has all kinds of linking capabilities and all those things that Ted was talking about, what, 40 or 50 years ago.
Larry:
Hey, Jorge, I can’t believe we’re coming up close to time. These conversations always go way too quick. But before we wrap, I want to make sure, is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation that you’d like to revisit or that you just want to make sure we share before we go?
Jorge:
No, you’ve been super generous with your time already. This is great. I do think that the shout-out to the relationship between this stuff and content strategy is really important, and I think that folks who understand how to structure content to make it scalable and to allow people to… I’m going to try to call it out. To give folks who are creating content the flexibility to create the content that a system needs in order to communicate while also imposing some degree of coherence and consistency are going to be able to very easily get into it. Because you already have a big part of this mental model in place.
Jorge:
You understand metadata. You understand things like tagging and linking and the role that they play. It’s just taking those mental models and then applying them to this other domain, which has to do with your own personal information. You’re designing not for an audience of customers, patients, users, whatever you call the users in your particular domain. You’re designing it for an audience of you, which is you of the future, the person that you’re going to be five years from now when you encounter this idea or whatever, and many of the same principles apply. It’s just a slightly different audience.
Larry:
Yeah, no, I love that. You of the future, I think about it all the time. Every time I find a little Post-it I left for myself and go like, “Oh, thank you.” But also, and I’m just thinking out loud here a little bit, but I feel like this garden-ey thing is way more appropriate to modern content ecosystems, which are more like gardens and are way more iterative and organic, and there’s a lot of emergent strategy coming out of things you discovered. All of that stuff seems really amenable to and will be well-supported by the insights in your book, so thank you for that.
Jorge:
Well, I appreciate that. That’s the intent. This is emergent structure that we’re talking about and it’s structure that hopefully helps you think better. That’s the whole point.
Larry:
Yep. Appreciate that. Jorge, one very last thing, Jorge, what’s the best way, if folks want to connect or follow you online, what’s the best way to reach out?
Jorge:
The best place to find me is my website, which is jarango.com. So J-A-R-A-N-G-O, J-A-R-A-N-G-O, I need to make sure I pronounce that right, .com. And then if you want to learn more about the book, it’s dulynoted.fyi. So it’s the name of the book dot fyi. And I just wanted to let you know that if you buy the book from our friends at Rosenfeld Media, the publisher, they are extending a discount code for listeners of this show, and the code is ContentPod, and that will get you 20% off the price of the book.
Larry:
Thanks so much for that, and thanks for the great conversation, Jorge. I’ll put all that information in the show notes as well, and we’ll time the launch of the discount code so that it lasts. We’ll time it to drop just about the same time as the podcast.
Jorge:
Yeah, I should have said it. That discount code is going to work for a limited time, so you want to make sure that you use it up.
Larry:
Cool. Well, we’ll get it in there for sure. Thank you so much, Jorge. This was a fun conversation.
Jorge:
Larry, this has been lovely. Thank you for hosting me.
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