A little more on my note-making process

Hi all,

As I had more detailed questions on how I process my notes, I thought I’d walk you through an example. I think this might show where the easy work happens, but also the hard work of thinking/linking.

I am currently working on a paper for the Society for American Archaeology on my ongoing project at the ancient site of Tiwanaku. One of the sections in this (short!) presentation will be on proto-urbanism, an issue explored in my region in great detail by the late John Janusek. This chunk of work was well suited for a short 45 minute time block I had for writing yesterday. Below are the steps I took.

I searched Obsidian, and discovered quickly that I have never actually synthesized Janusek’s thoughts on proto-urbanism (and how it is in communication with others’ work). So, I dug up a 2015 article where I knew he discussed his thinking in some detail. I didn’t sit down and read the entire paper and highlight/annotate (my usual approach when dealing with a new paper). Instead, I simply jumped to the sections where he discussed this issue, and copy and pasted into a text document.

I then worked to synthesize down all the relevant information into key points. At this stage I added titles as a way to structure the content of the key ideas. As I tighten these down, I make sure that I am properly referencing where the ideas come from.

Once edited down/paraphrased in my own words (for my own interests), the many chunks of quoted text resulted in 4 key points: “Cities as Process” (a point that I know connects with other notes I have in my collection), “Incipient proto-urbanism in the Titicaca basin” (the issue that drove me to this article in the first place), “Late Formative proto-urbanism and periodicity” (I think I have notes on this), and “Andean Proto-urbanism and animistic ecologies” (again, linked to other notes that I have). So the next stage – and really the one that Ahrens stressed in the reading last week – is thinking further with these, and connecting them. So off to Obsidian I go.

Above I’m adding relevant information to Obsidian note. Note that when I type the # symbol it draws up all the tags in a “auto-complete” fashion. For this note, I will add tags for #religion/animism #urbanism and #relational_ontology. Also note that I have added the bibliographic information. Not yet added are the Literature notes (a note that compiles all the notes I have taken from this reading) and the relevant associated other notes.

As I add the relevant information, I’ll also clean up the note and try to think more about why I took this note and how it might connect. For instance, in the animistic ecology note, I will do a quick search of my database to see if I have notes with Urban + animism. And I do!

Above is a previous note that I took on urbanism and animism in an article on Hittite urbanisms. I add a link both here and on my previous note – clearly I have a number of themes emerging on this theme on animism and urbanism (which often is under the umbrella of relational archaeologies). I direct myself to the notes on a later Janusek article where he further develops this thinking on “eco-regime” and animism.

I continue to do this with all four notes, trying to parse the various connections and conversations that each note engages. Ahrens is useful here

“The slip-box forces us to ask numerous elaborating questions: What does it mean? How does it connect to … ? What is the difference between … ? What is it similar to? That the slip-box is not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections between notes. Connections can be made between heterogeneous notes – as long as the connection makes sense…the slip-box is forcing us to elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously.”

So, I find other connections: to Wengrow and Graeber on “seasonal complexity” (which helps me think about urbanism as not being the same year round), to Bandy’s writing on the seasonality of raised field agriculture in the region, all of which is connected in the individual note. My note on Cities as Process connects to a much more networked series of notes I use in my Ancient Cities class (but is not immediately relevant to this writing project).

Above a “literature note” that assembles all links to all the notes taken on a particular reading, and the abstract. While not at all necessary, I like having a bird’s eye view of what I produced out of something I read. If I come back to this article in 6-months time, I may add to it given a particular issue I’m grappling with…at which point the list of permanent notes would grow.

Ok. I now have all that I can work with from Janusek on proto-urbanism. These notes now serve for a paragraph in my conference presentation on proto-urbanism.

Janusek (2015) argues that Tiwanaku “emergent centrality” came from previous centuries of “incipient urbanism”, of a broader distributed network of Late Formative centers and settlements. These places, sites like Chiripa and Kala Uyuni on the Taraco Peninsula and Khonkho Wanakne, were site of “cyclical ritual convergence”. The site of Khonkho Wankane (show image) was an example of “distributed proto-urbanism”, across both the landscape but also across the human:non-human divide. There were many such proto-urban centers that were networked, but the glue was as much in stones, mountains, as water as it was in politically-motivated leaders. In Andes both human and non-human forces and cycles were built in/embodied within proto-urban forms. Janusek argues that Tiwanaku was founded on an ” utterly pragmatic, if profoundly ritualized, animistic ecology” (Janusek 2015: 230).

As recent writings stress, however, such ancient urbansims were likely cyclical in nature (see Graeber and Wengrow 2021 on “seasonal complexity”). Janusek points to a range of evidence – including ephemeral surfaces covered by thin layers of erosional sedimentation and short-term hearths – to suggest that these were “sparsely inhabited centers of recurring periodic gathering and ritual activity.” The implication of this “cyclical mobility” is that not all those that built these centers or participated in the rituals lived in the center. As we will below, our efforts to understand the earliest occupations of Tiwanaku are driven by a goal to take seriously both the human and non-human, but also the seasonal complexity that may have characterized this dynamic place.

It is still a “shitty rough draft”, and will likely change as other aspects of the paper develop. But I have now woven in how my take on other issues – namely the importance of non-human entities and seasonality (both which Janusek only briefly touches on in his discussion) – aligns with the theme of proto-urbanism. And I know that there are a series of connected paths I can explore in my network of notes if I need to engage an associated topic. Next time I have 45 minutes, I’ll be grappling with a section in the text on how our new phasing of the site is transforming our understanding. Here I *know * that I have ~6 or 7 existing relevant notes I can simply lay out and play with to synthesize this argument.

A last point to remember: this is just *my system*. This can all be accomplished in fewer steps or more analogue driven approaches. The critical point is the thinking that goes with the note-making, and how the writing happens at each step along the way.