Bildung

Nu te zien in de Gooische Brink 35 Hilversum. Lego-prints van Martijn van der Blom en Roy Scholten.

— #art #hilversum #printmaking

— A post by Roy Scholten

Facilitated working through a complex site building question. A webcam pointing at some handdrawn diagrams was super useful in keeping the discussion on track.

I've been collecting links on Wardley Mapping for some time now, still need to dedicate time to figure out how/where this applies to the visualizing, mapping things I already do.

For example, modeling content. I wrote up how to build a content model in Obsidian.

Found out that the Common Pochard* had been missing from the collection all this time! Fixed that.

Preparations for an exhibition in the center of town together with Martijn. More on that soon.

Sounds: saw a tweet that asked for goose bump recommendations. Didn't reply there, but: – Blood on the Motorway by DJ Shadow – Ashtray Wasp by Burial – Encore from Tokyo by Keith Jarrett

#weeknotes 2020-48

— A post by Roy Scholten

Facilitating a discussion on a complex subject through hand drawn diagrams and a webcam hovering above. The drawings were essential in keeping the discussion productive and on track.

— A post by Roy Scholten

This is somewhat Drupal specific, but the graph view in Obsidian is a fun and flexible way to visualize a content model.

Assuming you want to document these different kinds of things and see how they relate:

  • Content types (news, product, person, form, event, …)
  • Vocabularies (event types, colors, sizes, materials, …)
  • Media types (image, video, audio, document, …)

Steps:

  1. Create a separate vault for the content model
  2. Create a note for each content type
  3. Use wikilinks to relate different content types
  4. Use tags to indicate vocabularies
  5. Create and insert image, video, etc. placeholders
  6. Look at the pretty graph!

Create a separate vault

This is just a folder somewhere on your computer. Store it in your dropbox, google drive, nextcloud or similar to access from other computer machines, but you knew that already.

From the bottom-left sidebar in Obsidian click the thingy which wants to look like a vault. From there, you can name your new vault and point to the folder you want to use.

Create a note per content type

Start creating a note for each content type that is in your model. Use the name of the content type as the file name. So create a “product.md” for your product content type, “news.md” for your… you get the point.

Use links to connect the content types

Create links between related content types. In Drupal content type speak, these would be reference fields. A reference field lives on the content type that does the pointing to the other content type. The direction matters so it's meaningful to create the link in the file for the content type that will have the reference.

Use tags for vocabularies

Obsidian understands hashtags (“#somelabel”).

Now here we need to make a mental leap. In regular use, hashtags are often used as quite specific labels, e.g. “yellow”, “banana”, “merino wool”, etc.

Not here. For your content model you're not primarily concerned with the specifics of wether a content item is tagged with “blue”, “apple”, or “denim”. What you want to document is that your content types want to use tags from (in this exampe) these collections of terms: “colours”, “fruit” and “textiles”. In Drupal speak: use hashtags to indicate which vocabularies the content type will be able to use.

Create and insert media placeholders

Images, videos, documents and the like are considered media types in Drupal. Similar to content types, but media objects are treated as a separate type of content types, because technical reasons, mostly.

A similar leap as we did with tags for vocabularies above with an additional simplification. Instead of using placeholder audio and video files, we'll use images for each media type. Use the name of each file and a bit of iconography to make them distinct. Create these images and add them to the vault:

  • image.png
  • video.png
  • audio.png
  • document.png

(audio icon via https://freesvg.org/volume-icon)

For each content type that uses one or more of these media types, embed the corresponding image in the body of the note.

Here's an example of a testimonial content type note that contains a video and uses the fruit and colours vocabularies. The file would be called “testimonial.md” and the minimal contents would be:

# Testimonial ![[video.png]] #fruit #colours

Look at the pretty graph!

Got your content type notes in place and linked, hashtags for vocabularies added and media items embedded? Great, now switch to the graph view.

By default you'll probably only see the content type notes. Expand the “Filters” section in the little box top left of the graph and toggle the switches to also show tags and attachments. You may also want to toggle the “Arrows” switch that is in the “Display” section. The arrows will show the direction of your references, or, which note is doing the pointing to another note.

Here's the content model of the Umami food magazine demo that ships with Drupal core:

(download these umami content model files here: https://github.com/yoroy/purple-maze)

What I think works well

  • The very explicit network-like presentation, which is very much not looking like a sitemap.
  • For a more complex content model like the one in the picture at the top of this post it clearly shows which content types are the workhorse hubs in the collection, connecting to many other pieces.
  • Extending, changing the model is very easy to do, it's all just simple markdown text files and a few image attachments.

Further explorations and limitations

  • Content types, vocabularies and media types are the three essential building Drupal content modeling building blocks. The Obsidian concepts of notes, tags and image embeds are the three availabe kinds of things to map to. Should you need a fourth type of building block like e.g. a custom entity type, I don't know how to introduce a fourth type of thing in Obsidian. It's scriptable so there's probably a way around this?
  • You could add the other fields a content type uses (body, summary, duration, etc) as a list to the content of the corresponding note. I don't think this simple markdown format is the best way to specify the configuration details for each field.
  • Maybe there's a more fine-grained way to do this, using a note for each field instead of for each content type. Would probably need to use folders for each content type then.

#contentmodeling #drupal

— A post by Roy Scholten

Please be sure to check out this beautiful schematic map from the 12th century. That tweet also has the link to the full scan of the book it is in. Oh my, such great looking pages.

“If you cut an animal skin into 4 sets of two pages, the number of possible ways of arranging these 4 pieces into a booklet is 6,144.” via @LitteraCarolina.

My account on drupal.org turned 15 years old this week. Quite the ride. Drupal is a large open source content management system. I help design it. More on that here.

Emily Webber on serendipity in the workplace.

Dinosaurs. 10 dino cards in legopress added to the print portfolio. It's a collaboration with Martijn from 2017. The little arms of the T-rex were a design challenge, but no more. Also, T-rex vs. Triceratops.

The dino cards were a precursor to the 50 birds project that's still underway. Here's a short video browsing through all the trial and error prints that lead up to the final design. I wrote a short article on this project, in dutch, here.

Bill Sienkiewicz, always Bill Sienkiewicz.

New sounds. More noise for tumbling through space via Prava Kollektiv: Arkhtinn, HWAUOCH, and personal favorite Voidsphere*.

#weeknotes 2020-47

— A post by Roy Scholten

Second pass of a new bird print

Going to have a look at this intro to Sketch Your System

I found out too late about this workshop on making medieval ink. Youtube has the goods, of course.

Small indieweb tweaks to www.royscholten.nl, just h-card stuff for now. On yoroy.com I even had webmentions and some syndication going for a short while, but it's all very fiddly still. Also, I turned yoroy.com into a static html site (in dutch) so that removed those types of features.

Het goede en gewenste van structured content is ook dat sommige dingen daardoor juist niet meer mogelijk zijn! https://write.as/bildung/onmogelijk

More Luhmann* Zettelkasten geekery. Here's a talk by one of the researchers that are working to digitize this analog knowledge database: https://vimeo.com/173128404. The presentation is German spoken, so I created a rough but mostly complete translation

Coming May next year: The filing cabinet, a vertical history of information. “The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information.”

Sounds: new Aesop Rock (the rapper with the largest vocabulary), Black Curse – Endless Wound and Convulsing – Grievous. The last one oddly helped achieve some actual flow during work this week.

#weeknotes 2020-46

— A post by Roy Scholten

Personal Knowledge Management, the Very Serious Name for “how do I store my notes so that I'll do something with it”. Second brain, idea gardens, personal knowledge mastery, etc. See previously on here.

One example that is often referred to is Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten. This German sociologist published some 50 books and 600 essays between the 50's and 90's of the 20th century. This intellectual productivity was in large part made possible through the 90.000 small paper notes of his thinking that he wrote, stored and linked in his so-called Zettelkasten (slip box).

Here's a video of a presentation by one of the researchers working to digitize this analog knowledge database. It's a good introduction, und also, the presentation is German spoken, so I created this rough but mostly complete translation

Luhmann worked this way to ensure that he would encounter many different perspectives when considering a certain topic or problem. At a certain volume of notes, the Zettelkasten became a generator of surprises, unexpected analogies, connections and perspectives, even for the very person who wrote all of them in the first place.

For me, when making art, the free exploration of ideas, forms and images is my way of trying to surprise myself. Especially with printmaking, what you put in is different from what you get out.

Surprising yourself in such a way can be a truly joyful experience. It's worth pursuing.

— A post by Roy Scholten

The CMS_ui project dedicated some posts of the Drupal views module user interface from 2006, 2008 and 2011.

I was heavily involved in these efforts (1, 2 ), it was one of my first substantial contributions to the project as a designer. Still proud of this concept model.

#drupal #design

— A post by Roy Scholten

Het goede en gewenste van structured content is ook dat sommige dingen daardoor juist niet meer mogelijk zijn!

Gestructureerde content maakt het makkelijker om daar waar dat gepast is (opsommingen, gerelateerd, inserts) zaken op basis van regels en filters te tonen. Business rules?

Daar alsnog een directe redactionele ingreep op mogelijk maken via een grafische gebruikers-interface gaat daar dan recht tegenin. “Soms” is een special case van “altijd”, dus die telt niet om de vraag kleiner te maken.

De management tools zijn in die gevallen eerder indirect: tweak de business rules, pas je taxonomie aan, stel de regels voor filtering bij.

#contentmodeling

— A post by Roy Scholten

Sinds afgelopen zomer een nieuwe start met schets/log/dag-boeken. In eerste instantie als losbladige katernen aangemaakt. Vier dubbelgevouwen A4 maakt 16 pagina's A5. Produceer 8 katernen en je hebt 128 pagina's voor een boek.

De eerste twee exemplaren die op deze manier tot stand zijn gekomen heb ik doorgenomen op thema's en kandidaat vervolgonderzoeken

mogelijke vervolgonderzoeken

  1. een gotische letter (kapitalen) in Lego. Dik-dun verlopen door twee drukgangen met off-sets. Eventueel ook uitzoeken wat er kan als de bodemplaat onder 45 graden gezet wordt.
  2. Het comics karakter Jacob van M. in nog sterker middeleeuwse stilering doorontwikkelen door middel van verdere Barry/Brunotti oefeningen
  3. Kalligrafische Ruimte 3: in het 2e journal staan abstract kalligrafische monoprints die met kleurpotlood zijn aangevuld en/of met posca stiften omlijst en gedecoreerd. Daar op door, op groter formaat, in individuele pieces?
  4. De oost-indische inkt oefeningen waarin een vlek in een tekening wordt omgewerkt zijn interessant want zowel wit op zwarte als zwart op witte lijnvoering worden gecomgineerd. Gerelateerd aan 2 hierboven, want ook in deze oefeningen heb ik dezelfde stilering voor gezichten, uitdrukkingen toegepast. Combineren met monoprint achtergronden, omgevingen?

Eerste conclusies

#creativejournal #review #2020

— A post by Roy Scholten