Public research notes

I've decided to start publishing parts of my notes collection as a kind of personal wiki, or what is sometimes called a digital garden (this is why my site is meri.garden). I've so far mostly shared the parts that are not original work, but rather collected and sometimes annotated literature by others where I have an interest in citing their work as part of my own personal research and writing. There is a pretty comprehensive list of these books, essays etc here: Literature. Some of these pages include the entire text or pdf of the original work, or samples from it. The most comprehensively integrated is Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar. There are also significant parts of Endnotes journal included.

There are also topic pages and author pages which are generally serving as ways of linking between different texts, and sometimes as places to place relevant quotes, and occasionally some original thoughts. Many exist but are empty. Some somewhat fleshed out topic pages worth checking out are autonomy, political ontology and development.

I write my notes in Obsidian and use the markdown export plugin to copy notes (with their linked assets) to the Git repo for my website. I then commit and push the files in the Git repo to publish them to Github, which triggers a static build of my site on Vercel. The code for rendering the Markdown uses Unified.js with some small customisations.

My intention in publishing this network of notes at this stage is not to try to present anything singularly impressive, but to put into practice some of my learnings about cognition as enaction and as an emergent phenomenon that is derived from relational networks rather than purely rational reflection - the network of notes might be understood to form a nascent 'cognitive assemblage' (Hayles, 2017). Naturally I’d like to find ways to collaborate and interweave this process with those of people who share some of my interests, so let me know if you’re interested. Hosting this on my personal-professional website is more for convenience and autonomy than a commitment to my individual ‘authorship’.

Future research is likely to expand more on the topics mentioned above as well as peer-to-peer networks and protocols like Freenet and Willow Protocol, trust and identity in digital systems, Cybernetics, Commoning, Marxism and discourses around communisation and production through a political ontology lens, new materialisms and distributed agency, feminist political ecology, and some emerging ideas around Intelligence-led Organising.

Some improvements to the code publishing these notes should include support for listing backlinks to pages, nice citation rendering, LaTeX rendering for mathy bits, callouts, dynamic lists and filtering based on metadata (like 'type' attributes). I’m also interested to explore the use of AI systems like GraphRAG in building knowledge management systems like this, and potential applications for radical political organisations. Trying not to stress myself out about it though. If you have any thoughts, feedback or questions please contact me at hello@meri.garden :)