Week 255: Building the tool I want to use
(Assuming we get quorum at Thursday's practice, we have a new schedule date. So this will be short, and filled with previously released material.)
I've been extending the box of index cards this week, and planning out how I want this to expand. Part of the haul I got from my retiring boss' desk was a set of index cards, but the majority of them were multicolored. This has given me the thought that I should be using these for specific purposes within the cards. There's 50 or so cards in four colors, Pink, Orange, Yellow, and Green and I'm trying to assign each color a different special function.
I see this stack of cards as a perpetual writing prompt. At some point after the book is complete, I am going to be back in the question writing grind, and I want to have a method where I could create questions without having to come up with all the ideas for what to write. I also want to have a method of developing something a similar system for any coach or player who wants to really build their team up through practice questions.
While I've got the white cards being populated with ideas for questions, there are also mental prompts I want to put into the set so as to force exploration beyond the stack, or to put information in special forms. I think I have the tasks I want to associate with each color, and as I put them together I'll be using them as specific types of prompts.
Green cards are just going to be tabular data, the writing prompt with them will be to take one entry of the data and write about it, or to use a bonus to ask about three members of the class. So one green card could be "Wars of Succession", another could be "Speakers of the House." This would end up as my repository of failed You Gotta Know attempts, and things that are too commonplace or long to fit those columns. Some of these may end up being my old study guides written in PDF, shrunk down to data, while others may just get cribbed from book tables. For the latter, I'd put the book source on the back of the card. There are already a few white cards which would fit this pattern, I may have to mark these with a green highlighter.
Orange cards will be space for entries in the easily confused list. Each end of the card gets an entry for the differences, while the middle has the commonalities, if there are any. Caldecott gets one end of the card, Newbery gets the other end. I want these as a special color so I'm reminded that you have to write not only to uniquely identify one, but specifically eliminate the other.
Yellow cards will have prompts that go external to the stack. Things like "Who won the Nobel Prize this year?" that have a changing answer, or a reminder to go back to valuable sources: "Pick a random page in From Abacus to Zeus," "What historical events took place 100 years ago?" This is to ensure that the stack doesn't become an internally locked structure.
Pink cards will be research questions for coming up with ideas on a particular type of subject. I did this on the facebook page for the last book as a method of breaking down a type of answer and coming up with how one would gather information on the subject. The idea behind this at the time was that if you could study how a writer picks information which could be part of the tossup question's early portion, or the bonus leadin, you could pick up all the clues that would get used. This is a really hard work solution for training, but if you are doing writing about a subject, and you want to gather inspiration about the subject. In the example below, taken from the page, was for authors, and the idea is to have the questions as writing prompts for a class of answers. So pick an author at random, think about these questions as you research, and create your question based on the questions on the card.
Each of the colored cards could also inspire a white card to be created if it generates enough information.
Part of this is me trying to create a tool that I can use, and then seeing if it might be valuable to someone else. Because this is a tactile, handwritten thing, it's probably going to be of use only to me. Part of the utility of it was that I personally had to write the card down, and exercise those pieces of my knowledge and build up that memory. Part of that utility was my personally curating the stack of cards, deciding what needs to be in there and what doesn't. To propagate it will require me scanning the cards into some other form, and I've been dissatisfied with the tools I've been using which I'd have to adapt for that purpose. Tiddlywiki and Obsidian lack the right random selection tools I'd want to use, the former doesn't randomly select, the latter only picks a random document from the entire vault. I find myself longing for the abandonware Windows system accessory Cardfile.exe, which had the right skeuomorphic design cues of a Rolodex.
It's not a tool I can give to someone and have them use, but it is a tool I can suggest that someone build for themselves, with their development process being part of the value of it to them. And that will be valuable to someone studying for quizbowl, or for anything else.
Pink Card Example
from: https://www.facebook.com/notes/361417778541622/
Author Writing prompts
1. What is their full name, pen name(s), nationality, language(s) they wrote in, city of birth, and years they flourished?
2. Did they ever portray their hometown in their work? Did they ever portray the city in which they wrote in their work? Did they portray portions of their upbringing, education, or non-literary career in their work?
3. What was their first work published? Were any of their juvenile works published later?
4. What was their last work published in their lifetime? Were any of their works published posthumously? Was it a book they had been working on up to their death, or were those posthumous works abandoned?
5. Are they noted for having a particular relation with a particular publisher, editor, or publishing house? This includes those that they nominated as their literary executor. Were they the editor, publisher, or literary executor of another writer?
6. Are any of their works a collaboration with another author or authors? Who were those authors?
7. Were any of their works pastiches or parodies of other authors' works? Who and or what were they parodying? Were any of their works parodied by later authors?
8. Did they create a character who was a model of the author themselves? Did they create a character who was a model of a person they knew?
9. Are any of their works based on historical events? Did they create a character who was a model of a historical figure? Did they appropriate a historical figure and include them in their work?
10. Did they create a character who appears in multiple works? What do we know about that character?
11. Did they borrow a character from another author's work? Was a character of theirs borrowed by another author?
12. Did they any of their works retell a tale from classical literature, mythology, epic poetry, the Bible, or Shakespeare?
13. Did they attempt to translate, or otherwise update, an older work or the works of another author?
14. Did any of their works coin a word or phrase still used today?
15. Did any of their works become the subject of literary criticism by another author? Was their life written into a biography by another author? Did they write memoirs or an autobiography?
16. Were any of their works a significant departure from their normal creations? If they were a novelist did they write a single play or poem? Were any of their works specifically written in a genre (science fiction, western, mystery, fantasy)? Did they write any works specifically for children? Did they write any non-fiction? Did they write biographies of any famous people?
17. Are any of their works written as polemics for or protests against political issues or governments?
18. Did they create a fictional city, region, or country in which their work(s) is/are set?
19. Did they associate with other authors? Did they form a group or movement with other authors?
20. Did they have any notable relatives who were also writers? Did they have any notable relatives who were famous for reasons other than writing? Did they marry into a family which had notable members?