Summary tk

Modern note taking has seen a reversion to pre-Renaissance practices in which they're much more temporary tools. Relatively few students take notes with an aim for reusing them past their immediate classroom settings or current term of study.

The revitalization of the idea of the zettelkasten in the late 2010s seems to be helping to reverse this idea. However, there aren't enough online versions of these sorts of notes which allow them to be used with other publics or even to be used and shared with other collaborators. There are some growing spaces seen in the social media note taking space like the anagora.org or the digital gardens space where this seems to have some potential to take off. There's also a small community on Hypothes.is which seems to be practicing this as well, though direct links between various collections of notes is not commonplace.

This makes me wonder if it would be a useful product to have a highly linked note collection to sell to others in a modern context? It could be done entirely in text files for compatibility with Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, et al. Ideally it would be done in a more commonplace way with quotes and interlinked and could be expanded upon by the purchaser.

I am starting to think the Zettelkasten is impossible for most people. Luhmann worked on his manically, as do I. That isn't sustainable or the goal for most, increased magical efficiency is, and is does not seem that technology has been able to make it more accessible.

Still though, I cannot believe that their note taking practice produced no value. Even if it failed to write the dissertation, where would they have been without it? I guess that they wish they had spent their time on something different, but what would that have been and would if have inspired them like their professor's note archive?

Folgezettel required finding the place where a thought fits, which is quite a bit of work and can be meaningful.

I think the distinction between Folgezettel and direct links isn't useful. The real distinction is between connections that are defined relationships, and connections that are undefined.

For those who want to match Luhmann's productivity they need match his work ethic

Would maintaining a multi-user, potentially public zettelkasten have positive outcomes? Would it face the issue of becoming a scrap heap for those who don't work with it regularly? There might be an issue of trust for individual assertions which aren't properly cited our sourced.

Tummelling and solid design would probably be necessary to prevent toxicity as seen in many areas of social media.

Some discussion of doing research on zettelkasten methods and workflows.

What do note taking methods and processes look like for individual people?

What questions would one ask for this sort of research in an interview setting (compared to how one would look at extant physical examples in document-based research)? #openquestions

Link this to the work of Earle Havens on commonplace books through portions of history.

Using a zettelkasten is a bit about unlearning how you used to do things, but most importantly it requires the work input and following the process to get the "magical" outputs.

For overall understanding and creating new writing output from it, the immediate focus shouldn't be about revealing new information or simple facts so much as it's about being able to place that new information into your own context. Once this has been done then the focus can shift to later being able to potentially use that new knowledge and understanding in other novel and enlightening contexts to create new insights.

Q: How many permanent notes did it take before you felt you had a communication partner?

Sönke Ahrens has indicated that the first couple hundred notes are more of a static collection. Then from five hundred notes onward there is a shift and having an index becomes more important. It's only at about one thousand notes that one begins automatically turning to the zettelkasten to find connections. Perhaps it's at this point that the tool begins to look like a communication partner.

link this to the few other examples from others.

The zettelkasten is a tool for thought that forces you to engage more deeply with what you're reading.

Even Sönke Ahrens has indirectly attributed the idea of the zettelkasten directly to Niklas Luhmann.

2022-03-24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO7-wEc5dnc

Quit watching at around 1:40:00 where it devolved into a love fest for the club itself.

How much history is covered here?

Will mnemotechniques be covered here? Spaced repetition? Note taking methods in the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions?

How does one equitably and logically build a communally shared knowledge base for a for-profit space?

How might a communal zettelkasten work? A solid index for creating links between pieces is incredibly important here, but who does this work? How is it valued?

Example of someone thinking about the differences between their wiki, a zettelkasten, and a website.

Questions to ask after making a zettel

characters of zettel

Zettels should be Atomic

Content card is your bottom layer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wiol2oJAh6c

Nothing new here for me. She's at least a reasonably good example of what's going on here and is looking at things from a bottom up perspective rather than a top down.

I like that she talks about structure instead of using the idea of MOC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9SLlxaEEXY

They don't say outright that Luhmann invented the zettelkasten, but it's implied with the words "originally used".

Soren Bjornstad has a public zettelkasten which is in the vein of a traditional one though he indicates that others might call it a digital garden or second brain. This shows the conflation of many of these terms.

What truly differentiates digital gardens from wikis and zettelkasten?

While placing our ideas into external memory devices like notebooks or zettelkasten may allow us to forget them, mnemotechniques allow us to perform a similar task, but provides us hooks upon which they might be hung by means of association with other ideas. These hooks and association can be reactivated at later times when the ideas may be needed.

The zettelkasten allows us to do multiple things. It encourages us to clarify our ideas by writing them down, we extend them by linking them to other contexts, we actively write towards a multitude of interesting goals, by writing, we can forget the original ideas which we can later serendipitously re-link to new concepts.

Ahrens compares the writing output of Anthony Trollope to Niklas Luhmann and suggests that Luhmann wins hands down because the zettelkasten provides some additional leverage above and beyond the basic linear output of Trollope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjpjE5pMZMI

Nice overview of using TiddlyWiki for an online zettelkasten. Some obvious influence by Andy Matuschak in here.

Some of the work looks a little bit Wiki like, but seems to stay within bounds. Would have been nice if he showed how he used it as a tool once he's got the pieces together, especially if he actually does it this way.

For a tour through Soren Bjornstad's zettelkasten here, see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjpjE5pMZMI

https://www.newsletter.rikagoldberg.com/p/40-we-need-quality

This meanders a lot and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get from it...

Based on the original context:

Hey all. I have a love/hate relationship with digital gardening/zettelkasten-ing, but I understand that it's normal. More recently, my work has become very knowledge heavy, as I've started to write full time about technical things, so I've decided to try my hand, again, at a Zettelkasten. I wrote up the reasoning behind my decision here. If this post resonates with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. https://www.newsletter.rikagoldberg.com/p/40-we-need-quality

I'm thinking she's conflating the ideas of wiki and zettelkasten, which I've seen lead many people into trouble.

As permanently identified paragraph level locations, purple numbers might allow one to combinatorically rearrange sets of notes or facts in a variety of different ways.

This pattern might be seen in earlier instantiations of note taking tools like the German zettelkasten.

Documents might be generated by creating playlists of purple numbers in particular (useful) orders.

Google translation:

9/8g The Zettelkasten technique is based on experience: You can't think without writing—at least not in contexts that require selective access to memory.

That also means: you can't think without notching differences.

There's something interesting about the translation here of "notching" occurring on an index card about ideas which can be linked to the early computer science version of edge-notched cards. Could this have been a subtle and tangential reference to just this sort of computing?

The idea isn't new to me, but in the last phrase Luhmann tangentially highlights the value of the zettelkasten for more easily and directly comparing and contrasting the ideas on two different cards which might be either linked or juxtaposed.

Link to:

• Graeber and Wengrow ideas of storytelling

• Shield of Achilles and ekphrasis thesis

• https://hypothes.is/a/I-VY-HyfEeyjIC_pm7NF7Q With the further context of the full quote including "with selective access to memory" Luhmann seemed to at least to make space (if not give a tacit nod?) to oral traditions which had methods for access to memories in ways that modern literates don't typically give any credit at all. Johannes F.K .Schmidt certainly didn't and actively erased it in Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity.

https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/tutorial

This may be the best place for starting into and linking into the beginning of Luhmann's two zettelkasten.

Steven Johnson indicates that the word processor is a terrible tool for writing because it doesn't have usable affordances for building up longer pieces from one's notes or basic ideas.

He discusses his specific workflow of note taking and keeping ideas in Scrivener where he arranges them into folders and outlines which then become the source of his writing.

Different from the typical zettelkasten workflow, he's keeping his notes hierarchically organized in folders based on topic keywords and only later when creating a specific writing project making explicit links and orders between his notes to create longer pieces. It's here that his work diverges most dramatically to the zettelkasten method described by Sönke Ahrens.

Example of writing advice that builds the links in after-the-fact instead of cross-linking ideas into initial networks as they're finding them. Compare/contrast this to the creation of these networks in the zettelkasten tradition as well as Sönke Ahrens description.

There's less upfront work in creating these links at the start than there is in reloading the context in one's brain to create these links after the fact. Collecting ideas without filing, linking, or organizing them upfront also means that one is more likely to only use these ideas in the context of specific projects which one already has in mind rather than keeping them for a lifetime's work which might also create generative projects one hadn't expected.

zettels:zettelkasten::scrivenings:Scrivener::index card:index card file

Example of a neologism ("scrivenings") used specifically for marketing a feature of a technology product.

Steven Johnson identifies the three features of Scrivener which provide him with the most value.

Notice the close similarity of these features to those of a traditional zettelkasten: cards of text which can be linked together and rearranged into lines of thought.

One difference is the focus on the creation of folders which creates definite hierarchies rather than networks of thought.

https://twitter.com/royscholten/status/1488639250975408130

Leben des Quintus Fixlein by Jean Paul https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leben_des_Quintus_Fixlein

https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam

A user talks about why they've stopped using Roam Research.

I suspect that a lot of people have many of the same issues and to a great extent, it's a result of them not understanding the underlying use cases of the problems they're trying to solve.

This user is focusing on it solving the problem of where one is placing their data in hopes that it will fix all their problems, but without defining the reason why they're using the tool and what problems they hope for it to solve.

Note taking is a much broader idea space than many suppose.

In the early chapters Ahrens outlines the general form and method for taking notes for a zettelkasten, though he's not overly descriptive of the method and provides no direct examples.

In the middle chapters he talks broadly about learning research and how the zettelkasten method dovetails with these methods.

He does this almost as if he's a good teacher showing the student an outline of what to do and why, but leaving it up to them to actually do the work and experimentation to come up with their own specific methods of use to best suit their purposes. This allows them to do the work themselves so that they have a better chance of following a simple, but easy set of rules, but in a way that will allow them to potentially more quickly become an expert at the practice.

“The one who does the work does the learning,” writes Doyle (2008, 63) [Section 10.5]

In some sense, he's actively practicing what he preaches as a teaching device within his own book!

I think that this point may be actively missed by those readers who aren't actively engaging with and converting his ideas into their own and doing the work which he's actively suggesting.

The forms of thinking, writing, and elaboration that go into creating permanent notes for a slip box are natural means of facilitating actual, long-term learning.

Elaboration is thinking deeply about the meaning of what we've read, how it could inform or answer different questions, and how it can be linked or combined with other knowledge. It is one of the best-researched and most successful learning methods. While it seems to have some subtle differences, it sounds broadly similar to the Feynman technique and is related to the idea of writing questions based on one's notes in the Cornell note taking method.

What is the value of reformulating texts and ideas into one's own words rather than excerpting them?

In the commonplace tradition, learners were suggested to excerpt knowledge and place it into their commonplace books. Luhmann (2000, 154f) and Ahrens (2017, 85) suggest that instead of excerpting that one practice a form of progressive summarization of texts into their own words as a means to learn and expand ones' frames of reference and knowledge.

Chapter 9 of How to Take Smart Notes looks at some of the psychology research involving attention, multitasking, decision making, willpower, concentration, expertise, planning, to highlight the value of the design and structure of the zettelkasten as a positive tool for helping one to be more productive in their thinking and writing work.

Planning and especially overplanning your writing work can be counter-intuitively non-productive. A smarter reading and note taking approach can allow one to be playful and creative in a way that more focused, goal-oriented writing would never allow. It's also an incredibly valuable tool for when one becomes "stuck" and working on something else seems easier or more profitable.

An example of this is the Ahren's extended use of the shipping container metaphor with respect to the zettelkasten. By having a variety of ideas stewing in his zettelkasten, a simple search or link using the word box allowed him to create a fantastic metaphor for reshaping one's note taking practice. It's a bit sad that he didn't take a moment to point this out explicitly (though perhaps this isn't the way things came about?)

Ahrens provides a quick overview of some research on distraction, attention, and multi-tasking to make the point that:

The simple structure and design of the zettelkasten forces one's focus and attention on small individual tasks that cumulatively build into better thinking and writing.

(Summary of Section 9.2)

Properly framed note taking methods are themselves a hermeneutic circle for thinking and creating.

(Gadamer 2004).

All intellectual endeavors start from a preexisting set of ideas. These can then be built upon to create new concepts which then influence the original starting point and may continue ever expanding with further thought.

Ahrens argues that most writing advice goes against the idea of the hermeneutic circle and pretends as if the writer is starting with a blank page. This can prefigure some of the stress and difficulty Ernest Hemingway spoke of when he compared writing to "facing the white bull which is paper with no words on it."

While it can be convenient to think of the idea of tabula rasa, in practice it really doesn't exist. As a result the zettelkasten more readily shows its value in the writing process.

Project notes can be kept in folders either inside or outside of the zettelkasten itself, but they technically shouldn't be a permanent part of it. Perhaps it's better to think of them as a workbench or play space for ideas as they're forming into a finished piece of writing. Once the piece is done, the play space has served its purpose and can be cleaned up.

Ahrens makes a useful analogy: the reason that early attempts at shipping containers failed was because their users tried to fit them into their own way of doing business instead of reorganizing their businesses to accommodate the shipping container. Similarly one needs to consider how one's note taking method fits into their work in a more integrative way. Without properly integrating it into one's workflow seamlessly the system will fail.

I wonder if there are any labs which not only have journal clubs, but have a shared note taking system or zettelkasten as well to keep as a community resource.

I'm sure there are probably a few lab wikis in existence.

Are professors keeping public note collections that they share with students or fellow researchers?

For those interested in looking at a system in English but with a slightly different form, but ostensibly similar, try W. Ross Ashby's digitized note collection: http://www.rossashby.info/

Perhaps not coincidentally, Ashby was a research colleague of Luhmann's.

Not highlighted in this context but it bears thinking about, Ahrens is looking at writing in particular while many note taking techniques (Cornell notes, SQ3R, SQ4R, etc.) and methods geared at students are specific to capturing basic facts which may need to be learned, by which I mean memorized or at least highly familiar, so that they can later be used in future analysis.

Many of these note taking concepts are geared toward basic factual acquisition, repetition, and memorization and not future generative thought or writing applications.

It's important to separate these ideas so that one can focus on one or the other. Perhaps there are contexts within which both may be valuable, but typically they're not. Within the zettelkasten context the difference between the two may be subtly seen in the conception of "literature notes" and "permanent notes".

Literature notes are progressive summarizations which one may use to strengthen and aid in understanding and later recall. These may include basic facts which one might wish to create question/answer pairs for use in spaced repetition programs.

Permanent notes have a higher level of importance, particularly for generative writing. These are the primary substance one wants to work with while the literature notes may be the "packing peanuts" or filler that can be used to provide background context to support one's more permanent notes.

Compare this with: https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/22/different-types-of-notes-and-use-cases/

Ahrens focuses almost exclusively on Niklas Luhmann in his book How to Take Smart Notes. Sadly he misses that many others used not only the zettelkasten but other closely similar techniques including the commonplace book as a means of knowledge gathering and productivity.

There are thousands of productive researchers and writers who have broadly used many of these techniques to great advantage. In fact, it's almost hard to find famous writers or thinkers in the early Renaissance or since who did not use these systems.

Certainly Luhmann's system was one of the most refined of the group and his success is heavily underlined by his gargantuan output, but by not highlight other users of these systems, we're missing a lot more of the power of these systems.

I'd like to read this but suspect there isn't an English translation lying around.

The point of good tools of thought is to allow one to keep track of the ever increasing flood of information that also allows them to juxtapose or combine ideas in novel and interesting ways. Further, this should provide them with a means of generating and then improving upon their new ideas.

qbatten annotates on Jan 11, 2022:

Why note-taking is bad. Why you shouldn't take notes. Taking notes shouldn't be the end in itself!

I'll agree that "taking notes shouldn't be the end in itself", but they've drawn the completely wrong conclusion about note taking being bad or that this flimsy argument indicates that one shouldn't take notes.

Not everyone who wields a hammer is going to be a master craftsman and it's even less likely that someone who tinkers with one for a few months or even a few years will get there without some significant help. There's no evidence here of anything but desire for methods to work. Where was the deep practice, research into these systems described?

From the start, the featured image in the original article of a crazy person's conception of a massive collection of piles of paper to represent the process is highly illustrative of so many misconceptions.

An example here of a misconception. The zettle may be given a number, but it is also given a topic tied into an index. Because it isn't put into a "folder" or "hierarchy" isn't the same thing as not giving it a topic.

1. Rautenstrauch 1778, p. 172. The evident software command follows a deductive logic: the Latin numeral denotes a box, the Latin letter the drawer in the box, and the Arabic numeral the place of the book in the drawer.

The numbering system for books in the Viennese university library reopened in 1777 had a code system using a Roman numeral / Roman letter / Arabic numeral.

Starting with a decree by Her Majesty Maria Theresa on December 24, 1770 to create conscription numbers on Viennese houses and expanded in 1777, the government of Lower Austria created a number system to identify all houses as well as to men, women, Jews, and farm animals. Because new houses had been built since the beginning of the system houses built between whole numbered houses were assigned address including the whole number along with an alphabetic letter a, b, c, and so on depending on the number of new spaces.

It can't escape one's notice that this is substantially similar to the numbering system which Niklas Luhmann used for his zettelkasten.

Not everyone has a job where they can drop what they're doing and go work on something more interesting. But being able to switch gears to lean into creative momentum can help to increase and encourage productivity with respect to creative work and endeavors. This switching can be dramatically facilitated by having a wealth of alternate interesting options to delve into.

https://learningaloud.com/blog/2021/12/16/creating-storing-and-using-smart-notes/

Brief overview of Sonke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes with some ideas about using Zotero and Obsidian for note taking.

This is not the same sort of "communication" with an external tool that Niklas Luhmann was talking about in Communicating with Slip Boxes.

https://learningaloud.com/blog/2021/12/09/the-mysterious-zettelkasten/

Another example of how much we've forgotten of our commonplacing and note taking traditions in rhetoric, and this from someone who's actively used note cards in the past.

Luhmann did not invent the zettelkasten. (I should make bumper stickers...)

Oops: https://www.zazzle.com/niklas_luhmann_bumper_sticker-128462770354241554

Unlinked notes in paper-based knowledge systems can become lost in the shuffle. This is much harder to do in digital systems which have visual checks that highlight unlinked notes.

ferred card is located at an entirely different place in the file, frequently in the context of a completely different discussion or subject.

Niklas Luhmann's index card system had three different types of links. Direct links to individual notes, outlines with links to cards (similar to tables of contents or maps of content), and what Schmidt (2018) refers to as "collective references". These collective references sound a lot like search queries for related topics that have links to a variety of resources/cards related to a particular topic and sound like a table of contents, but without a specific hierarchy.

While it may be important that there are no privileged positions, hierarchies, or immediate structures within Luhmann's (or others') zettelkasten, this belies the value of making (even by force) at least one link from each new note to the other notes. This helps begin to create the valuable interconnections of the system which are crucial for later use. Without this "linking hierarchy" one is left with just a pile of notes which will need the aforementioned additional work and context.

subjects cannot be described in terms of a strictly hierarchical order, it is rather a form of loose coupling insofar as one can find lower-level subjects which do not fit systematically to the top-level issue but show only marginally connections.

There is something suspiciously similar about the instantiation of a zettelkasten and the idea of small pieces loosely joined.

Perhaps also related to the idea of a small number of primitives which can interact in a small number of ways, but which gives rise to incredible complexity.

How does a set of connected notes create serendipity in a systematic and theoretically informed way?

Merton, Robert King and Barber, Elinor (2004) The Travels And Adventures Of Serendipity : A Study In Sociological Semantics And The Sociology Of Science Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 2004

This is why active reading and studying are important. One can take notes and simply regurgitate them and seem wise, but having truly consumed and made a text one's own is the key.

This is somewhat similar to the criticism of the zettelkasten as seen in https://hyp.is/cqT1mG0sEeyMMRNCE79Ozw/takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

One's note cards do not equal wisdom.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article-abstract/47/1%20(139)/105/151166/Aby-Warburg-and-Cinema-Revisited?redirectedFrom=fulltext

https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/about/mnemosyne-themes

Looking at the broad themes here makes me wonder if they line up potentially with the larger groups of cards in Warburg's zettelkasten?

While the non-discursive, frequently digressive character of the Atlas frustrates any smooth critical narrative of its themes and contents, nine thematic sequences may still be discerned:

The ideas of non-discursive, digressive, and frustrated narrative could easily be applied to a stranger approaching another person's collection of notes.

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_IgMVAAAAQAAJ/page/n155/mode/2up

On page 138 Placcius shows an (uncredited?) version of Thomas Harrison's Ark of Studies.

p 140:

Somehow this sparked the realization:

The tattoos on Leonard Shelby's body in the film Memento act in some way as a physical zettelkasten of information stored on skin rather than index cards. The information can be traversed in a number of ways for a short period of time by Leonard. He uses the information over time to solve a murder.

Christoph Meiners, Anweisungen für Jünglinge zum eigenen Arbeiten besonders zum Lesen, Excerpiren, und Schreiben (Hannover, 1791), 85: ‘Man excerpire nie beym Lesen selbst. [...] Lesen hat seine Zeit, und Excerpiren hat auch seine Zeit’

Christoph Meiners recommended the separation of doing one's excerpting from one's reading perhaps in part because the creation of links between notes has different demands than the creation of the base note itself.

I find this to be generally easier as well. Often I'll provide one or two links from my note to others I know I have, or perhaps scribble down some reminders of these notes. Otherwise I generally do some additional work of creating these links in a separate sitting.

It's usually much easier to quickly add subject headings while reading and then use these as a basis of creating other more particular and direct links at a later time.

Create a list of the types of links within note taking systems and their meta data:

• taxonomies (tags, categories, subject headings, etc.)
• note to note links
• references to sources

Interesting that he makes no reference to the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions—particularly because we know he (later?) had an extensive system of index cards.

Adler's only reference to linking ideas within a book. Notice in particular that he doesn't seem to talk about linking the ideas within the book to ideas outside of the book or to one's greater store of information and knowledge. Why not? Was he missing this part?

What a great domain name and site name for a zettelkasten!

https://anaulin.org/blog/book-notes-how-to-take-smart-notes/

A brief book review of Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes with highlights.

Developed by Detlef Stern

https://t73f.de/blog/2021/zettelstore_0_1/

https://t73f.de/blog/2020/zettelkasten/

Sounds like Detlef Stern actually saw the Marbach exhibition on "Machines of the imagination".

He's also got a fairly large list of software that is commonly used to create a digital zettelkasten.

https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021193157/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

Manfred Kuehn looks at Karl Kraus' criticism of the idea of a zettelkasten as a tool which can be misused.

Of course this begs the question of what one is using their index card catalog for? Are you using it as a rhetorical thinking and creation device or simply a second memory?

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/

—Bruno Winck

Reminder to look up Roland Claude. I couldn't find his work in the usual spaces in English or French.

Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten had three different forms of links.

• The traditional keyword index/link from the commonplace book tradition
• A parent/child link upon first placing the idea into the system (except when starting a new top level parent)
• A direct link (Verweisungen) to one or more ideas already in the index card catalog.

Many note taking systems are relying on the older commonplace book taxonomies and neglect or forego both of the other two sorts of links. While the second can be safely subsumed as a custom, one-time version of the third, the third version is the sort of link which helps to create a lot of direct value within a note taking system as the generic links between broader topic heading names can be washed out over time as the system grows.

Was this last link type included in Konrad Gessner's version? If not, at what point in time did this more specific direct link evolve?

Niklas Luhmann is broadly quoting Jean Paul here. It should be noted that Jean Paul was a notable user of a note taking method very similar to that of the zettelkasten. What evidence, if any, exists for the connection between their systems. Was Jean Paul's system widely known during or after his own lifetime?

https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account by Niklas Luhmann (transl. Manfred Kuehn)

This is a reframing of some of Raymond Llull's work into the zettelkasten context.

A great quote, but this is likely a nebulous statement to those with out the experience of practice. Definitely worth expanding on this idea to give it more detail.

Every element receives its value based on the network of links and connections it has with other elements. This is just as true for ideas on index cards in a zettelkasten as it is for people within a society.

idea/index card:zettelkasten :: person:society

What other elements in complex systems is this analogy true for? Is it a truism for all elements in complex systems? What other examples can we come up with?

I want to look at the original German for this sentence, particularly with respect to the translation of the phrase "secondary memory". Is the translation semantic or literal? Might the original German have been a more literal "second brain"?

Compare this to the one or two other examples of this sort of translation from the German.

Ross Ashby's note taking system, also within the field of systems theory, shows the use of an index card set up for bibliographical notes, however in Ashby's case, the primary notes were placed into notebooks and not onto note cards.

Was there an ancestral link within the systems theory community that was spreading these ideas of note taking or were they (more likely) just so ubiquitous in the academic culture that such a link wouldn't have mattered?

(Earlier ancestors like Beatrice Webb may have been a more influential link.)

Luhmann indicated that one must keep a register of keywords to assist in the rediscovery of notes. This had been the standard within the commonplacing tradition for centuries before him. The potential subtle difference is that he seems to place more value on the placement links between cards as well as other specific links between cards over these subject headings.

Is it possible to tell from his system which sets of links were more valuable to him? Were there more of these topical heading links than other non-topical heading links between individual cards?

Continuing on the analogy between addresses for zettels/index cards and for people, the differing contexts for cards and ideas is similar to the multiple different publics in which people operate (home, work, school, church, etc.)

Having these multiple publics creates a variety of cross links within various networks for people which makes their internal knowledge and relationships more valuable.

As societies grow the number of potential interconnections grows as well. Compounding things the society doesn't grow as a homogeneous whole but smaller sub-groups appear creating new and different publics for each member of the society. This is sure to create a much larger and much more complex system. Perhaps it's part of the beneficial piece of the human limit of memory of inter-personal connections (the Dunbar number) means that instead of spending time linearly with those physically closest to us, we travel further out into other spheres and by doing so, we dramatically increase the complexity of our societies.

Does this level of complexity change for oral societies in pre-agrarian contexts?

What would this look like mathematically and combinatorially? How does this effect the size and complexity of the system?

How can we connect this to Stuart Kauffman's ideas on complexity? (Picking up a single thread creates a network by itself...)

Modern digital zettelkasten don't force the same sort of digital internal branching process that is described by Niklas Luhmann. Internal branching in these contexts is wholly reliant on the user to create it.

Many digital systems will create a concrete identifier to fix the idea within the system, but this runs the risk of ending up with a useless scrap heap.

Some modern systems provide the ability for one to add taxonomies like subject headings in a commonplace book tradition, which adds some level of linking. But if we take the fact that well interlinked cards are the most valuable in such a system then creating several links upfront may be a bit more work, but it provides more value in the long run.

Upfront links also don't require quite as much work at the card's initial creation as the creator already has the broader context of the idea. Creating links at a future date requires the reloading into their working memory of the card's idea and broader context.

Of course there may also be side benefits (including to memory) brought by the spaced repetition of the card's ideas as well as potential new contexts gained in the interim which may help add previously unconsidered links.

It can certainly be possible that at some level of linking, there is a law of diminishing returns the decreases the value of a card and its idea.

One of the benefits of physical card systems like Luhmann's is that the user is forced to add the card somewhere, thus making the first link of the idea into the system. Luhmann's system in particular creates a parent/sibling relation to other cards or starts a brand new branch.

There's an interesting analogy between Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten numbering system and the early street address system in Vienna. Just as people (often) have a fixed address, they're able to leave it temporarily and mix with other people before going back home every night. The same is true with his index cards. Without the ability to remove cards and remix them in various orders, the system has far less complexity and simultaneously far less value.

Link to reference of street addressing systems of Vienna quoted by Markus Krajewski in (chapter 3 of) Paper Machines.

Both the stability and the occasional complexity of the system give it tremendous value.

How is this linked to the idea that some of the most interesting things within systems happen at the edges of the system which have the most complexity? Cards that sit idly have less value for their stability while cards at the edges that move around the most and interact with other cards and ideas provide the most value.

Graph this out on a multi-axis drawing. Is the relationship linear, non-linear, exponential? What is the relationship of this movement to the links between cards? Is it essentially the same (particularly in digital settings) as movement?

Are links (and the active creation thereof) between cards the equivalent of communication?

I'm curious about the translation here which used the word "we". Presumably Luhmann is speaking about himself and his note card system and not using an imperial "we".

The we in this context underlines his partnership with his index card file.

Luhmann, Niklas. "Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen." Öffentliche Meinung und sozialer Wandel/Public Opinion and Social Change. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1981. 222-228.

https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes

Note the 1981 original publication date.

Given the use case that Niklas Luhmann had, the translation of zettelkasten into English is better read as "index card file" rather than the simpler and more direct translation "slip box".

While it's not often talked about in the recent contexts, there is a long history of using index cards for note taking in the United States and the idea of an index card file was once ubiquitous. There has been such a long span between this former ubiquity and our digital modernity that the idea of a zettelkasten seems like a wondrous new tool, never seen before. As a result, people in within social media, the personal knowledge management space, or the tools for thought space will happily use the phrase zettelkasten as if it is the hottest and newest thing on the planet.

An absolutely beautiful design for short notes.

This is the sort of theme that will appeal to zettelkasten users who are building digital gardens. A bit of the old mixed in with the new.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Pete Moor </span> in // pimoore.ca (<time class='dt-published'>12/24/2021 18:02:15</time>)</cite></small>

https://losangeles.craigslist.org/sfv/for/d/burbank-stackable-card-file-cabinet/7414409456.html

Steelmaster file card cabinet

https://www.etsy.com/listing/516040483/vintage-industrial-steelcase-index-card

Humans in general have a seven second window of self-consciousness. (What is the reference for this? Double check it.) The exception is when one is in conversation with someone else, and then people have much longer spans of self-consciousness.

I'm left to wonder if this is a useful fact for writing in the margins in books or into one's notebook, commonplace book, or zettelkasten? By having a conversation with yourself, or more specifically with the imaginary author you're annotating or if you prefer to frame it as a conversation with your zettelkasten, one expands their self-consciousness for much longer periods of time? What benefit does this have for the individual? What benefit for humanity in aggregate?

Is it this fact or just coincidence that much early philosophy was done as dialectic?

From an orality perspective, this makes it much more useful to talk to one's surroundings or objects like rocks. Did mnemonic techniques help give rise to our ability to be more self-conscious as a species? Is it like a muscle that we've been slowly and evolutionarily exercising for 250,000 years?

I'm not completely sure I can agree with this. Perhaps I'm missing part of his point?

There is a quirky relationship here to the idea of a personbyte, the complete amount of information and knowledge a person can have. Even misty memories that a person can remember or be reminded of are part of this knowledge. Perfect recall isn't necessary as some things can potentially be reconstituted with some thought towards recreation of an idea.

Compare this with the idea of epic poetry and song of the Yugoslavian guslars. Some may be more artful than others, but at what point are they telling a new story?

In order to become a free-standing tool, the card index needed to have self-referential closure.

This may have been one of the necessary steps for the early ideas behind computers. In addition to the idea of a clockwork universe, the index card may have been a step towards early efforts at creating the modern computer.

The key question Alberto Cevolini is exploring here.

1. Cf. Schmidt, ‘Luhmanns Zettelkasten’, 7. The heading of this file card is formulated in form of a question: ‘Geist im Kasten?’ (‘Does Spirit hide in the filing cabinet?’). Obviously, the answer is no. Many thanks to Johannes Schmidt for providing the image of this file card.

In a zettel in his system entitled "Does Spirit hide in the filing cabinet", Niklas Luhmann wrote the note: "People come, they see everything and nothing more than that, just like in porn movies; consequently, they leave disappointed." This is a telling story about the simplicity of the idea of a slip box (zettelkasten, card catalog, or commonplace book).

Niklas Luhmann, Zettelkasten II, index card no. 9/8,3

It's also a testament to the fact that the value of it is in the upfront work that is required in making valuable notes and linking them. Many end up trying out the simple looking system and then wonder why it isn't working for them. The answer is that they're not working for it.

A seemingly large bibliography, however much of it is in German and very little is in English.

I've got the J. Schmidt article from Forgetting Machines in my pile, but it's worth pulling other references in to see of English versions are available.

Cevolini, Alberto. “Where Does Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index Come From?” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 3, no. 4 (October 24, 2018): 390–420. https://doi.org/10.1163/24055069-00304002.

How have I not come across this article before?!

https://doug.show/notes-zettelkasten/

Reasonable overview of the zettelkasten method, but only scratches the surface. Nothing new or interesting here. At least he doesn't attribute invention to Luhmann.

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/three-layers-structure-zettelkasten/

Could one create a rhyzomatic wiki or similar tool for thought?

For complexity to flourish between various projects and ideas, folders are probably not the final solution. Within a zettelkasten, other emergent structures may emerge to deal with information that doesn't fit neatly into any particular folder or other structure.

Structure notes are notes about notes. Sounds similar to Maps of Content (MoC) or Tables of Contents in some sense. No one seems to have a strong or consistent name for this practice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_igOoFFTG1U

Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, in 1653, completes the basic idea of an excerpt collection as an ordering of paper slips in a physical box in alphabetic order.

Vincentius Placcius recommends excerpting to slips which can be kept in a book form, but which are a sort of hybrid card catalog/index.

1. Placcius 1689, p. 72.

Vincentius Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization (1689) offers a contemporary set of instructions on excerpting knowledge as well as a history of the subject.

In the book, he warns specifically against the loose form of indexing exhibited by Joachim Jungius. (p72)

1. On Jungius and his technique, see Meinel 1995.

Joachim Jungius (1585-1657) compiled approximately 150,000 slips of paper with accumulated knowledge sorted and bound but without indices. Markus Krajewski considers him the "first practitioner of nonhierarchical indexing."

Konrad Gessner's Bibliotheca Universalis has two audiences: librarians for it's extensive bibliography and scholars for the instruction of how to properly organize their studies by excerpting material and keeping it in a useful order.

Gessner 1548, fol. 19, translated in Zedelmaier 1992, p. 103.

This algorithm described in Gessner, 1548 fol. 19-20 is precisely that of a zettelkasten, though effectuated with slips of paper either glued or held by thread rails into a book.

The last point number 4, even takes it so far as to arrange the individual notes into a logical order and copy them into something fixed, which one could readily view as an article.

Gessner, Konrad. 1548. Pandectarum sive Partitionum Universalium. Zurich: Christoph Froschauer.

In the 19th century, the box of paper slips (zettelkasten) as a technology reaches the east coast of the United states by way of librarians who study in Europe and then apply the practice of cataloguing their own collections.

https://www.amazon.com/Indexing-Paper-Create-Indexes-Stuff/dp/1926892267/

This really could be quite useful to those with a paper commonplace book or zettelkasten

https://willtmonroe.com/microblog/hypothes-is-oer-and-smart-notes/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1459547762517688327.html

Anthony Baker experimenting with ideas from Necromant and Eleanor Konik to cross link digital notes with physical paper notes.

I've thought about doing something similar to this with my physical notebooks in the past, though hadn't done block level linking as a means of potentially pulling in and linking pieces in the future.

Often for more important linked things, I'll simply import the physical version into my digital copy at the time of first use/reference, but this could be interesting for large bodies of notes which aren't digital.

English version can be found here: The intellectual life: its spirit, conditions, methods, Internet Archive

https://blog.viktomas.com/posts/slip-box-after-a-year/

Tomas Vik discusses the path he took in looking at zettelkasten software to end up at Logseq. He specifically highlights (rightly) how much work/time is involved in doing it well, but as a result indicates he's seeing the value in the process.

This is hilarious!

An example of someone taking notes in public to model the process. Also an example of the time it takes to make notes.

Has Dan Allosso (@danallosso) done something along these lines as an example on his YouTube channel?

Here's a good example of someone asking if the time it takes to make good reading notes is worth it.

"In the Zettelkasten, there is a note that contains the argument that disproves all assertions on all other notes. But this note disappears once you open the Zettelkasten. That is, it changes its number and relocates itself, making it impossible to find. A joker."

Ha! A great meta card to have in one's system!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1re3lYaALScZ49189XIGqUVjQlMPe9uOfLEyz8y7mJuE/edit#

https://vimeo.com/173128404

Some better in-depth examples of how Niklas Luhmann used his zettelkasten as well as some of the problems he would have faced and how they were solved (or weren't).

Now that we're digitizing the Zettelkasten we often find dated notes that say things like "note 60,7B3 is missing". This note replaces the original note at this position. We often find that the original note is maybe only 20, 30 notes away, put back in the wrong position. But Luhmann did not start looking, because where should he look? How far would he have to go to maybe find it again? So, instead he adds the "note is missing"-note. Should he bump into the original note by chance, then he could put it back in its original position. Or else, not.

Niklas Luhmann had a simple way of dealing with lost cards by creating empty replacements which could be swapped out if found later. It's not too dissimilar to doing inventory in a book store where mischievous customers pick up books, move them, or even hide them sections away. Going through occasionally or even regularly or systematically would eventually find lost/misfiled cards unless they were removed entirely from the system (similar to stolen books).

So the big secret then is, how did he know that this note here exists? How could he remember that this existing note was relevant to the new one he was writing? A mystery we haven't solved yet.

I'm surprised to see/hear this!

How did Niklas Luhmann cross link his notes? Apparently researchers don't quite know, but I'd suggest that in working with them diligently over time, he'd have a reasonable internal idea from memory in addition to working with his indices and his outline cards.

The cards in some sense form a physical path through which he regularly traverses, so he's making a physical memory palace (or songline) out of index cards.

When we look at the Zettelkasten, it looks quite inconspicuous and small and doesn't give away the secret. The outer appearance is trivial, so what is it then that made Luhmann refer to it as his second brain.

the translation for "second brain" is direct? Does he provide a source for where this was recorded? It's the first time I've heard the phrase outside of Tiago Forte's use.

"The Zettelkasten takes more of my time than the writing of books." —Niklas Luhmann (via vimeo.com/173128404)

Some people complain about the amount of time that working in their zettelkasten or notes may take, and it may take a while, but it is exactly the actual work of creation that takes the longest. The rest of the process is just the copying over and editing.

[[Antonin Sertillanges]]' book ''The Intellectual Life'' is published in 1918 in which he outlines in chapter 7 the broad strokes a version of the zettelkasten method, though writing in French he doesn't use the German name or give the method a specific name.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Antonin |first1=Sertillanges |author-link1= Antonin_Sertillanges |title=The Intellectual Life: Its Sprit, Conditions, Methods |date=1960 |publisher=The Newman Press |location=Westminster, Maryland |translator-last1= Ryan |translator-first1= Mary |translator-link1= |pages=186-198 |edition=fifth printing |language=English}}</ref> The book was published in French, Italian, and English in more than 50 editions over the span of 40 years. In it, Sertillanges recommends taking notes on slips of "strong paper of a uniform size" either self made with a paper cutter or by "special firms that will spare you the trouble, providing slips of every size and color as well as the necessary boxes and accessories." He also recommends a "certain number of tagged slips, guide-cards, so as to number each category visibly after having numbered each slip, in the corner or in the middle." He goes on to suggest creating a catalog or index of subjects with division and subdivisions and recommends the "very ingenious system", the decimal system, for organizing one's research. For the details of this refers the reader to ''Organization of intellectual work: practical recipes for use by students of all faculties and workers'' by {{interlanguage link|Paul Chavigny|fr}}<ref>{{cite book |last1=Chavigny |first1=Paul |title=Organisation du travail intellectuel: recettes pratiques à l'usage des étudiants de toutes les facultés et de tous les travailleurs |date=1918 |publisher=Delagrave |language=French}}</ref>. Sertillanges recommends against the previous patterns seen with commonplace books where one does note taking in books or on slips of paper which might be pasted into books as they don't "easily allow classification" or "readily lend themselves to use at the moment of writing."

So here we have in print (we may need to double check the original French from 1921) an indicator of a note taker recommending using serial numbers on slips before Niklas Luhmann's birth.

Antonin Sertillanges recommends his reader to use a decimal system for organizing their slip box system based on that in L'Organisation du Travail intellectuel, by Dr. Paul Chavigny, Fellow of the Val de Grace, Delagrave, 1918.

This note taking system advice sounds eerily like a zettelkasten:

• categories
• non-hierarchical ordering
• serial numbers with an index
• slips of paper (index cards)

In the prior paragraph he's advised against books and even pasting slips into books.

https://hackernoon.com/how-i-use-zettelkasten-and-obsidian-to-keep-my-notes-organized

Nothing new to the conversation. This is more of a note that links zettelkasten and Obsidian and nothing more.

Another source in the public wrongly crediting Niklas Luhmann with the creating of the zettelkasten.

In the digital collections of the Bielefeld University Library, the first slip box , which Niklas Luhmann created between 1951 and 1962, can now be viewed in an image database . The collection, which includes around 24,000 pieces of paper, consists of 108 thematic and 2 bibliographical sections as well as a subject index. With the help of a detailed table of contents created by the Niklas Luhmann archive, which can be downloaded as a PDF, and a corresponding navigation bar, the various departments can be specifically selected.

Note that this is just the first slip box...