About

Welcome! You have stumbled upon the corner of the internet where I am doing my part to tend the digital commons. My name is Luke Miller, and this personal website is a mix of commonplace book, working notes, and digital garden.

The Stream is a record of my attention. Reading notes, memories, conversations, resources, etc. are all thrown in together. In this area, the internal editor in my brain is not allowed to raise his eyebrows disapprovingly or clear his throat. I can add whatever I want. The notes here are the raw elements of the knowledge system, and they are dated and unedited.

Some of those ideas make their way into the Lab, where they are at various stages of completion and coherence. I use patterns drawn from the history of knowledge work to take the initial insights from the stream and turn them into something more thoughtful and useful. These patterns help me elaborate on ideas, connect notes, argue with past notes, and track progress.

Next is the Garden where you'll find a collection of structures that provide entry points into the underlying body of notes. You'll find a Syntopicon, a Glossary of Concept Handles, an emblem book, and many others. These structures are not another stage in the development of an idea. They are more like an overlapping and complementary set of maps that help you navigate those ideas.

Finally, there is an Essays section. This is where some of the notes will be pulled together into more finished pieces. Or at least there should be everything goes as planned.

It occurs to me now that those last few paragraphs make the whole process seem very tidy and neat, as if the notes and ideas march in obedient little lines from one section to the next. In reality, some ideas will never make it out of the Stream. Others will be updated and revised over many months in the Lab. The whole process is meant to reflect what knowledge work looks like in practice: messy, recursive, unpredictable, and serendipitous.

I have always loved the metaphor that Tolkien used for writing:

"One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter."

So I guess in that sense, part of this site is my compost bin. I'll let you decide which part.

The list of people who have influenced this experiment is long: Aphthonius' progymnasmata, Thomas Aquinas and his Summa, Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon, Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten, Christopher Alexander's pattern language, Andy Matuschak's working notes, Conor White-Sullivan and the Roam Research community, and many more. I have shamelessly borrowed from all of these people, but probably not always in ways they would recognize or approve.

The site is built using Tufte CSS, which accounts for the typography, sidenotes, margins, and reading features. All of the content for the site starts in a Roam Research graph. I write and think there. Then, from time to time, I export the graph as JSON, run a couple of scripts, and convert the right notes into what you see here. Among other things, this means I don't have to use one system for writing and another for publishing.

I suppose I should insert the usual disclaimer about "the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed on this blog belonging solely to the author..." Blah, blah. But this is not really true, is it? Some of the views, thoughts, and opinions here are ones I am considering, quoting, or arguing with. Some notes are solid. Others are in progress. Some are no doubt wrong. I will try to keep all of this cleaned up, but I make no promises. This is the downside of working with the garage door open. Sometimes people stop by when everything is in disarray.

On that note, if you find ideas here worth using or challenging, feel free to let me know. I believe the best thinking happens in dialogue with others.