Note-taking is an essential activity even beyond a formal learning environment. In notebooks, we save ideas, stories, photos, lists, sketches, and other pieces of information we’d rather not lose. And each time we return to them, the contents give us a somewhat—or at times, markedly—different impression. We return to our notes with new knowledge and tested perspectives, so it’s no surprise that one might be astounded by what one wrote the previous year.
But should notes be stagnant? Certain kinds of information are immutable (and we’d like to maintain that constancy), and other kinds change all the time. The sort of notes I aim to gather is the mix. For example, I hope to curate poems, as well as biographical information on their authors. Also, wouldn’t it be great if mutable information contained in a note updated itself?
For this reason, it makes sense to me for notes on this medium to be computable, wherever necessary. I’ve used Wolfram and Jupyter Notebooks extensively. I think both are great, especially for scientific endeavours, but my preference is the former. I’ve written about Wolfram Notebooks, and on this site I use the symbol to highlight them.