- Feb 2024
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Bought a photo printer so he could include images and photos in his zettelkasten
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Watched [[The Unenlightened Generalists]] in Linked Notes: An Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method
A 28:30 intro to zettelkasten. I could only make it about 10 minutes in. Fine, but nothing more than yet another "one pager" on method with a modified version of the Luhmann myth as motivation.
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Local file Local file
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Together, over the years, they achieved what one of their earlymasters, Charles Ammi Cutter, called a “syndetic” structure—that is,a system of referential links—of remarkable coherency andresolution.
reference for this?
definition: syndetic structure is one of coherency and resolution made up by referential links.
Why is no one using this word in the zettelkasten space?
The adjective "syndetic" means "serving to connect" or "to be connected by a conjunction". (A conjunction being a word used to connect words, phrases and clauses, for example: and, but, if). The antonym is "asyndetic" (connections made without conjoins)
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Thus, the New York Public Library has CATNYP.There is BEARCAT (Kutztown University) and ALLECAT (Allegheny) andBOBCAT (NYU’s Bobst Library) and CATS (Cambridge). There is VIRGO(the University of Virginia), FRANCIS (Williams College), LUCY(Skidmore), CLIO (Columbia), CHESTER (the University of Rochester),SHERLOCK (Bu alo State College), ARLO (the University of Colorado atColorado Springs), FRANKLIN (the University of Pennsylvania), andHarvard’s appropriately Eustace Tilleyish HOLLIS. There is BISON(SUNY Bu alo), OASIS (the University of Iowa), ORION (UCLA),SOCRATES (Stanford), ILIAD (Butler), EUCLIDPLUS (Case Western), LUMINA(the University of Minnesota), and THE CONNELLY EXPLORER (La Salle).MELVYL (the University of California system) is named after MelvilDewey; the misspelling was reportedly intentional, meant toemphasize the di erence between Dewey’s cataloging universe andour own.
List of names for computerized library card catalogs at various libraries.
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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www.wwhardware.com www.wwhardware.com
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www.leevalley.com www.leevalley.com
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https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/hardware/storage-and-organization/files/69118-index-followers
Listed as an "Index Follower". Looks to be the same model as https://www.wwhardware.com/catalog/product/view/_ignore_category/1/id/3588/s/kv-index-follower-and-track-kv047/
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Some weeks ago I explain the philosophy of Antinet Zettelkasten to my girlfriend. She was sceptical at that moment but when she saw my purple metal box full of cards and dividers she started to gather information and with her father made this one. The name is zauberkasten (magic box in german) and this is not the final version. Hope you like folks! :)
by u/osservazione at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1anwrez/zauberkasten_work_in_progress/
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Local file Local file
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All thequotations have one thing in common – they hail from the Brisbane Courier-Mail.
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turn off the light, and take off his shirt, his shorts, and his underwear.
Mr Collier had a special technique. He cut out the quotations and, dipping a brush in sweet-smelling Perkins Paste glue, he stuck the quotation onto the slip. It was quick, and some nights he could get through 100 slips. Just him and the sound of his scissors, the incessant croak of cicadas, and the greasy smell of the neighbour’s lamb chops hanging in the close air. Around midnight, he would stop work, gather up the scraps of paper, clear the table,
zettelkasten and nudity!!!
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Those times are better captured in the ten volumes, 414,825entries, and 1,827,306 quotations that were finally published in 1928.
The first edition of the Oxford English dictionary was published in 1928 in 10 volumes containing 414,825 entries and 1,827,306 quotations.
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On 3 June 1912 Edward Peacock wrote inshaky handwriting to James Murray from his deathbed: ‘I have been so longill – more than a year and a half, and do not expect ever to recover, that Ihave made up my mind to discontinue The Oxford English Dictionary for thefuture.’ He added in a postscript, ‘I am upwards of eighty years of age.’ Bythen Peacock had been a volunteer for the Dictionary for fifty-four years,making him one of the longest-serving contributors. He had submitted24,806 slips and had given great service to Murray not only as a Reader butas a Subeditor and Specialist too.
One of the longest serving OED contributors, Edward Peacock wrote 24,806 slips over 54 years which comes to approximately 1.25 notes per day.
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reading John Almon’s Anecdotes of the Life of William Pitt (1792), andproduced 600 slips, alongside her social work, in 1879.
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The Dictionary’s coverage of the leading transcendentalist, HenryDavid Thoreau, is largely due to the monumental efforts of a single woman,Miss Alice Byington of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, who sent in 5,000 slipsfrom books that included several by Thoreau:
over how long a period?
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The American who sent in the most slips was a clergyman in Ionia,Michigan, Job Pierson. A Presbyterian minister, book collector, and librarian,Pierson had the largest private library in Michigan (which included a bookpublished in the earliest days of printing, from Vienna in 1476). Over elevenyears, from 1879 to 1890, Pierson, who had studied at Williams College andattended Auburn Theological Seminary, sent in 43,055 slips from poetry,drama, and religion. His correspondence with Murray shows the breadth ofhis reading, from Chaucer (10,000 slips) to books on anatomy (5,000 slips),and lumbering (1,000 slips).
Job Pierson 43,055 slips over 11 years<br /> 10.7 notes per day
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gloryhole, a drawer in whichthings are heaped together without any attempt at order or tidiness;
compare with scrap heaps or even the method of Eminem's zettelkasten (Eminem's gloryhole ???). rofl...
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In this context, Marsh invited members of the American public to helpcreate a radical new dictionary of all English which applied the scientificmethod, was collaborative in its making, and was based on written evidence.They were asked to collect current words and especially to read books fromthe eighteenth century – because literature from earlier centuries was harderto get in America at the time. Marsh ended his appeal with the warning thatAmericans would be paid nothing for their help.
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Some Americans did write directly to Murray, and these – 196 ofthem – are the ones underlined in the address books. They represent 10 percent of all the Dictionary People with addresses and produced a total of238,080 slips that crossed the ocean before coming to rest on Murray’s deskin the Scriptorium.
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Stephen kept sending slips toMurray for twelve years, until 1891
What was his slip total to give a notes per day calculation?
(obviously not taking into account his other work...)
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during theyears that Leslie Stephen contributed to the OED, he started his owncrowdsourced project, the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). Just asMurray’s Dictionary traced the lives of thousands of words, Stephen’sdictionary traced the lives of thousands of people who made a notable impacton British history. Stephen invited 653 people to write 29,120 articles. Sixty-three volumes comprising 29,108 pages were published, the first volume in1885 and the last in 1900. The DNB is still going today, under the aegis ofOxford University Press, and it now covers the lives of 55,000 people.
Presumably this dictionary also used a card index for collection? (check...)
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Katharine also read her friend John Ruskin’s book The Eagle’s Nest(1872), lectures on the relationship between natural science and art, for theDictionary, writing out 1,000 slips.
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Robert Browning was a great favourite and also a greatfriend. Katharine sent in 500 slips from his Dramatic Idyls of 1879, and Amyproduced 300 slips from the same book.
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Dr Minor would read a text not for its meaning but for its words. It wasa novel approach to the task – the equivalent of cutting up a book word byword, and then placing each in an alphabetical list which helped the editorsquickly find quotations. Just as Google today ‘reads’ text as a series of wordsor symbols that are searchable and discoverable, so with Dr Minor. A manualundertaking of this kind was laborious – he was basically working as acomputer would work – but it probably resulted in a higher percentage of hisquotations making it to the Dictionary page than those of other contributors.
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Ranking below Thomas Austin, who sent in 165,061 slips, and WilliamDouglas, who sent in 151,982, there is a big drop to the third-highestcontributor Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield, who sent in 70,277 slips.
repetition here from before to introduce mental health...
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The Indian languages Specialist, Edward Brandreth, had D, D4, and D5beside his name in the address books and spent tireless hours in the BritishMuseum searching for fillers. Murray sent this retired member of the IndianCivil Service a total of 35 lists of desiderata, and Brandreth sent himthousands of quotations in return.
thousands of slips...
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Alexander Beazeley, an engineer who specialized in lighthouses andsent in a total of 38,233 slips, many of which were desiderata and did notrelate to lighthouses.
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theRevd William Lees, a vicar outside Reigate who sent in a total of 18,500slips;
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Murray responded a week later, giving instructions on how to read.This was towards the very end of his life and his instructions to Miss Taylorgive rare insight into Murray’s reading tips, especially instructions for readingfor desiderata, in this case words beginning with S, T, and U–Z: ‘I shouldsuggest looking it through and marking with a pencil dot such words as arementioned in the enclosed note, and any others that strike you as noteworthy,and then go through it copying out from the marked ones those immediatelywanted for the letters at which we are working the better parts of S & T, andsending these as soon as ready; then proceed to those in U to Z, and finallythe earlier words for our Supplement. I hope you will not find it too tedious;and I should be sorry if it were allowed to interfere with other calls.’
James Murray's instructions to Miss E. Hilda Taylor in 1914 for how to read for excerpting of useful words for the Oxford English Dictionary.
Compare this with his original instructions from circa 1879.
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The random selection of words by volunteers often resulted in themchoosing the same words with similar dates, and produced gaps in thequotation paragraphs, which Murray and his assistants had to fill by their ownmanual searching. This must have been like trying to find a needle in ahaystack. It was remarkable how successful Murray’s small team was at fillingthose gaps and finding earliest or latest quotations. Murray told thePhilological Society that this manual trawling for words had to be done forthe majority of words: ‘For more than five-sixths of the words we have tosearch out and find additional quotations in order to complete their historyand illustrate the senses; for every word we have to make a general search todiscover whether any earlier or later quotations, or quotations in other senses,exist.’
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two small flaws in the Dictionary’s compilation process
It is incredibly difficult to plan in advance what to collect for any zettelkasten, even when its scope is tightly defined, like it would have been for the Oxford English Dictionary.
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And yet he desperately needed the help of Subeditors because the task wastoo massive to do alone. Two years into the job, Murray had estimated thathe had sent out 817,625 blank slips to Readers. If they returned them withquotations, and if he spent a minimum of 30 seconds reading each one andallocating it to the correct sense of an entry, it would take him three workingyears to get through a third of the materials gathered.
By the second year into his editing work on the OED, John Murray estimated that he had sent out 817,625 slips to readers.
At the average price of $0.025 for bulk index cards in 2023, this would have cost $20,440, so one must wonder at the cost of having done it. How much would this have been in March 1879 when Murray tool over editorship?
How many went out in total? Who cut them all? Surely mass manufacture didn't exist at the time for them?
Sending them out would have helped to ensure a reasonable facsimile of having cards of equal size coming back.
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From the moment in March 1879 whenMurray signed the contract with Oxford University Press to be the next Editorof the Dictionary, and he took possession of 2 tons of slips at his house, hisfamily was immediately part of the project (whether they liked it or not)sorting out the slips. Their house was a workplace and the family aworkforce.
Perhaps one of the first sources of counting slips in weight rather than number!
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Helwich was the fifth-highest contributor
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The most prolific Reader in Europe – we might call him a ‘super-contributor’ – was Hartwig Helwich, a professor at the University of Viennawho wrote out the entire Cursor Mundi onto 46,599 slips. His efforts madethe medieval poem the second-most-frequently cited work in the Dictionaryafter the Bible (though in the current OED, it has dropped to eleventh in thetop sources).
This practice of writing out everything onto slips sounds like that used later (double check the timing) by the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in creating their slip corpus for later work.
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We think of the OED as a radical dictionary because of its size, itsscholarship, and its methods, and it was radical for English. But if youcompare it with other languages, there was nothing about its creation in themid-nineteenth century that had not been done before in Europe. English wasrelatively late to the table. The English editors were able to pick and choosethe best methods from different European dictionaries. The OEDimplemented European lexicographic practices, and advanced upon them, tocreate something truly revolutionary, something that would in fact end upbeing the envy of Europe.
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A section of a wall of slips in the Grimmwelt Museum showinghow the Brothers Grimm pioneered the methods used by theOED twenty years later.
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By the time the OED project commenced, Europe already had majordictionaries under way or completed in German, French, Italian, Russian, andDutch, all of which were taking advantage of the new methodologies ofContinental philology. In Germany, the Brothers Grimm had begun theDeutsches Wörterbuch in 1838. In France, Émile Littré had begun theDictionnaire de la langue française in 1841 (a dictionary of post-1600French). In the Netherlands, Matthias de Vries had begun Woordenboek derNederlandsche Taal in 1852 (a dictionary of post-medieval Dutch).
Oxford English Dictionary (1857 - )
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showing the hundreds of volunteers who corresponded with the brothers; theeditors’ lists of words and statistical counts of entries; the tracing ofetymology using the new scientific philological methods of the day; thegathering of citations from historical, published sources. I had worked in theOED archives for years and the contents of the Grimmwelt Museum lookedidentical.
They looked exactly like the slips sent into the OED by the Dictionary People. There was a world map
Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie, a previous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, said she "had worked in the OED archives for years and the contents of the Grimmwelt Museum looked identical" to them. She indicated that the similarity of the dictionary projects extended to the hundreds of volunteers, lists of words, counts of entries, etymology work, citations from published sources, and general philological methods used by the editors of the era.
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There was a dramatic wall of vastnumbers of slips, or ‘zettel’, hanging from long nails.
The Grimmwelt Museum in Kassel, Germany is the home of some of the work of Grimm Brothers work on the Deutsches Wörterbuch which features a large wall of zettel or slips hanging from long nails.
The slips hanging on nails sounds similar to Thomas Harrison's 1740's wooden cabinet of hanging slips used for excerpts and isn't far off from the organizational structure used by the subsequent Oxford English Dictionary's pigeonhole system of organization for their slip collection.
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the outright winner was a mysterious character called Thomas Austin Jnr whosent Dr Murray an incredible total of 165,061 over the span of a decade.Second place goes to William Douglas of Primrose Hill who sent in 151,982slips over twenty-two years; third place to Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield ofDevon, with 70,277 over twenty-eight years; with Dr William Chester Minorof Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum coming in fourth place with 62,720slips.
Top slip contributors to OED: 1. Thomas Austin Jnr. 165,061 slips over 10 years (45.22 notes per day) 2. William Douglas 151,982 over 22 years (18.92 notes per day) 3. Thomas Nadauld Brushfield 70,277 over 28 years (1.98 notes per day) 4. William Chester Minor 62,720 slips over 23 years (to 1906) (7.5 notes per day)
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tensof thousands of books
Tens of thousands of books were used to draw the quotations used in the OED.
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The box in the archives held two further address books belonging toMurray, and the following summer, in a box in the Bodleian Library, I foundanother three address books belonging to the Editor who had preceded him,Frederick Furnivall. As I worked my way through them, it became clear thatthere were thousands of contributors. Some three thousand, to be exact.
Sarah Ogilvie found a total of three address books from Dr. Murray as well as three address books from Frederick Furnivall which contained details about the three thousand or so contributors to the OED.
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He devised a systemof storage for all the slips in shelves of pigeonholes that lined the walls of theScriptorium.
The scriptorium for the OED relied on shelves of pigeonholes into which the slips could be sorted and stored.
There are photos of Murray with these pigeonholes stuffed behind him. Dig one of these up.
This pigeonhole practice is in marked difference to other projects like the TLL which relied on boxes on shelves.
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urray’s house at 78 Banbury Road to receive post (it is still there today).This is now one of the most gentrified areas of Oxford, full of large three-storey, redbrick, Victorian houses, but the houses were brand new whenMurray lived there and considered quite far out of town.
Considered outside of Oxford at the time, Dr. Murray fashioned the Scriptorium at his house at 78 Banbury Road. Murray received so much mail that the Royal Mail installed a red pillar box just to handle the volume.
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Readers received a list of twelve instructions on how to select a word,which included, ‘Give the date of your book (if you can), author, title (short).Give an exact reference, such as seems to you to be the best to enable anyoneto verify your quotations. Make a quotation for every word that strikes you asrare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in a peculiar way.’
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A 4 x 6-inch ‘slip’ sent in by one of the most prolific femalecontributors, Edith Thompson of Bath, who sent in 13,259slips. The underlinings and markings were made by Dr Murray.
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In addition tobeing Readers, volunteers could help as Subeditors who received bundles ofslips for pre-sorting (chronologically and into senses of meaning
The slips for the OED were sorted alphabetically and then grouped chronologically and by sense of meanings of the words.
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The volunteer ‘Readers’ were instructed to write out the words andsentences on small 4 x 6-inch pieces of paper, known as ‘slips’.
Volunteer 'Readers' for the Oxford English Dictionary were encouraged to write down interesting headwords along with their appearances in-situ along with the associated bibliographical information. The recommended paper size was 4 x 6-inch pieces of paper which were commonly called 'slips'.
(Double check this against the historical requests from James Murray.)
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Ogilvie, Sarah. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2023. https://amzn.to/3Un0sv9.
Read from 2023-12-04 to 2024-02-01
Annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:c95483c701c7fc677e89f2c44f98a30b
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- meaning order
- ars excerpendi
- digitized examples
- words
- Alice Byington
- desiderata
- alphabetical order
- zettelkasten method
- Thomas Austin Jnr
- OED slip count
- crowdsourcing
- Thomas Nadauld Brushfield
- William Chester Minor
- Michael Field
- Frederick Furnivall
- address books
- 1914
- historical linguistics
- organizational methods
- card index for dictionaries
- Edward Bandreth
- zettelkasten examples
- William Lees
- pigeonholes
- zettelkasten history
- Leslie Stephen
- group note taking
- Thomas Harrison's Ark of Studies
- Oxford English Dictionary
- zettelkasten planning
- scriptoria
- Sarah Ogilvie
- Job Pierson
- want to visit
- 4 x 6" index cards
- zettelkasten as database
- shifts in meaning
- scriptorium
- reading practices
- images
- organization
- gloryhole
- Hartwig Helwich
- Deutsches Wörterbuch (DWB)
- James Murray
- open questions
- analogies
- notes per day
- Alexander Beazeley
- philology
- compilation processes
- random distributions
- Grimmwelt Museum
- Dictionnaire de la langue française
- 1928
- Robert Browning
- XIX
- slips
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- vacation ideas
- zettelkasten for lexicography
- Elsie Taylor (aka Dame Elizabeth Cadbury)
- dictionaries
- William Douglas
- Henry David Thoreau
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- Eminem's zettelkasten
- Katharine Bradley
- crowdsourced zettelkasten
- humans vs. computers
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- Thesaurus Linguae Latinae
- drawers
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- Dictionary of National Biography (DNB)
- human computers
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- Deutsches Wörterbuch zettelkasten
- Cursor Mundi
- Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal
- Oxford English Dictionary statistics
- Oxford English Dictionary zettelkasten
- Brisbane Courier-Mail (newspaper)
Annotators
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eljardindegestalt.com eljardindegestalt.com
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How to make time for your Zettelkasten<br /> by Fernando Nóbel
meh, nothing new/insightfu....
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I'm contemplating buying some nails to make a Brothers Grimm-esque zettelwand to arrange my next piece. Forget Post-It Notes! Chris Rock eat your heart out. (h/t Thomas Harrison, 1740s)
#OldSchool #analog #FTW
see also: https://hyp.is/lczNTMazEe6bU_fwliPccg/www.grimmwelt.de/en/exhibitions/grimmwelt
Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1am3fz2/a_zettelwand/
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www.grimmwelt.de www.grimmwelt.de
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www.alamy.com www.alamy.com
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Almay Stock image of the zettel nailed to the wall of the Grimmwelt Museum.
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qnnnp.substack.com qnnnp.substack.com
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https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-eb5
quick overview article of Luhmann research sources on his zettelkasten, nothing new to me here.
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forum.the-big-bang-theory.com forum.the-big-bang-theory.com
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library card catalog featured in Leonard's apartment
https://forum.the-big-bang-theory.com/topic/357-card-catalog/
Likely just decoration, but did Leonard or Sheldon ever interact with the card catalog in their apartment? A zettelkasten perhaps?
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findingaids.lib.umich.edu findingaids.lib.umich.edu
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buyolympia.com buyolympia.com
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https://buyolympia.com/Item/bumper-crop-ask-me-about-my-rich-inner-life
I saw a bumper sticker on a car this afternoon that read "Ask Me About My Rich Inner Life". I think I'm going to have to buy one to put on my zettelkasten.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Your zettelkasten, having a perfect memory of your "past self" acts as a ratchet so that when you have a new conversation on a particular topic, your "present self" can quickly remember where you left off and not only advance the arguments but leave an associative trail for your "future self" to continue on again later.
Many thoughts and associations occur when you're having conversations with any text, whether it's with something you're reading by another author or your own notes in your zettelkasten or commonplace book. For more conversations on this topic, perhaps thumb through: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27conversations+with+the+text%27
If you view conversations broadly as means of finding and collecting information from external sources and naturally associating them together, perhaps you'll appreciate this quote:
No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum (Secker & Warburg)
(Reply to u/u/Plastic-Lettuce-7150 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ae2qf4/communicating_with_a_zettelkasten/)
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boffosocko.com boffosocko.com
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Zettelkasten Overreach
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1aglte6/eink_tablets/
I've yet to run across anyone excited about zettelkasten on their e-ink device. The note taking experience for writing/capturing seems to be there, but a user interface for sorting, searching, and interlinking seems to be wholly missing.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Okay folks. I think I better name my antinet before he gets too big and people start getting suspicious. After some thinking and googling words I don't know in order to make an acronym I think I've decided on "J.A.K.O.B". Which stands for "just a knowledgeable omnilegent box". Omnilegent apparently means reading or having read everything. The name is of course inspired by J.A.R.V.I.S (just a very intelligent system) the artificial intelligence created by Tony Stark.
u/tylermangelson named his zettelkasten J.A.K.O.B.
https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1aecx27/naming_my_baby_antinet/
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- Jan 2024
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www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/325982715454
35 drawer modular card catalog in light mid century modern design. Table with stick legs a 5x6 section including two pull out writing drawers, a 5x1 section and a top. Likely maple, in great shape. All wood and metal, includes all rods.
Listed in 2024-01-29 for $3995.00 with freight shipping extra from South Bend, IN
Labeled as a Centura 400 (model?)
Cost per drawer: $114.00
This is the first time I've seen a catalog from Sjöström on the market though on searching there are a handful floating around.
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writingslowly.com writingslowly.com
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I've sketched it out elsewhere but let's memorialize the broad strokes here because we're inspired at the moment... come back later and add in quotes from Luhmann and other sources (@Heyde1931).
Luhmann was balancing the differences between topically arranged commonplaces and the topical nature of the Dewey Decimal System (a standardized version across thousands of collections) and building neighborhoods of related ideas.
One of the issues with commonplace books, is planning them out in advance. How might you split up a notebook for long term use to create easy categories when you don't know how much room to give each in advance? (If you don't believe me, stop by r/commonplacebooks where you're likely to see this question pop up several times this year.) This issue is remedied when John Locke suggests keeping commonplaces in chronological order of their appearance and cross-indexing them.
This creates a new problem of a lot of indexing and increased searching over time as the commonplace book scales. Translating to index cards complicates things because they're unattached and can potentially move about, so they don't have the anchor effectuated by their being bound up in a notebook. But being on slips allows them to be more easily shuffled, rearranged, and even put into outlines, which are all fantastic affordances when looking for creativity or scaffolding things out into an article or book for creation.
As a result, numbering slips creates a solid anchor by which the cards can be placed and always returned for later finding and use. But how should we number them? Should it be with integers and done chronologically? (1, 2, 3, ..., n) This is nice, but makes a mish-mash of things and doesn't assist much in indexing or finding.
Why not go back to Dewey, which has been so popular? But not Dewey in the broadest sense of using numbers to tie ideas to concrete categories. An individual's notes are idiosyncratic and it would be increasingly rare for people to have the same note, much less need a standardized number for it (and if they were standardized, who does that work and how is it distributed so everyone could use it?) No, instead, let's just borrow the decimal structure of Dewey's system. One of the benefits of his decimal structure is that an infinity of new books can be placed on ever-expanding bookshelves without needing to restructure the numbering system. Just keep adding decimal places onto the end when necessary. This allows for immense density when necessary. But, importantly, it also provides some fantastic level of serendipity.
Let's say you go to learn about geometry, so you look up the topic in your trusty library card catalog. Do you really need to look at the hundreds of records returned? Probably not. You only need the the Dewey Decimal Number 516. Once you're at the shelves, you can browse through that section to see what's there and interesting in the space. You might also find things on the shelves above or below 516 and find the delights of topology and number theory or abstract algebra and real analysis. Subjects you might not necessarily have had in mind will suddenly present themselves for your consideration. Even if your initial interest may have been in Zhongmin Shen's Lectures on Finsler geometry (516.375), you might also profitably walk away with James E. Humphreys' Introduction to Lie Algebras and Representation Theory (512.55).
So what happens if we use these decimal numbers for our notes? First we will have the ability to file things between and amongst each other to infinity. By filing things closest to things which seem related to each other, we'll create neighborhoods of ideas which can easily grow over time. Related ideas will stay together while seemingly related ideas on first blush may slowly grow away from each other over time as even more closely related ideas move into the neighborhood between them. With time and careful work, you'll have not only a breadth of ideas, but a massive depth of them too.
The use of decimal numbering provides us with a few additional affordances:
1 (Neighborhoods of ideas) 1.1 combinatorial creativity Neighborhoods of ideas can help to fuel combinatorial creativity and forge new connections as well as insight over time. 1.2 writing One might take advantage of these growing neighborhoods to create new things. Perhaps you've been working for a while and you see you have a large number of cards in a particular area. You can, to some extent, put your hand into your box and grab a tranche of notes. By force of filing, these notes are going to be reasonably related, which means you should be able to use them to write a blog post, an article, a magazine piece, a chapter, or even an entire book (which may require a few fistfuls, as necessary.)
2 (Sparse indexing) We don't need to index each and every single topic or concept into our index. Because we've filed things nearby, if a new card about Finsler geometry relates to another and we've already indexed the first under that topic, then we don't need to index the second, because our future selves can easily rely on the fact that if we're interested in Finsler geometry in the future, we can look that up in the index, and go to that number where we're likely to see other cards related to the topic as well as additional serendipitous ideas related to them in that same neighborhood.
You may have heard that as Luhmann progressed on his decades long project, broadly on society and within the area of sociology, he managed to amass 90,000 index cards. How many do you suppose he indexed under the topic of sociology? Certainly he had 10s of thousands relating to his favorite subject, no? Of course he did, but what would happen over time as a collection grows? Having 20,000 indexed entries about sociology doesn't scale well for your search needs. Even 10 indexed entries may be a bit overwhelming as once you find a top level card, hundreds to thousands around it are going to be related. 10 x 100 = 1,000 cards to flip through. So if you're indexing, be conservative. In the roughly 45 years of creating 90,000 slips, Luhmann only indexed two cards with the topic of "sociology". If you look through his index, you'll find that most of his topical entries only have pointers to one or two cards, which provide an entryway into those topics which are backed up with dozens to hundreds of cards on related topics. In rarer, instances you might find three or four, but it's incredibly rare to find more than that.
Over time, one will find that, for the topics one is most interested in, the number of ideas and cards will grown without bound. Here it makes sense to use more and more specific topics (tags, categories, taxonomies) all of which are each also sparsely indexed. Ultimately one finds that in the limit, the categories get so fractionalized that the closest category one idea has with another is the fact that they're juxtaposed closely by number. The of the decimal expansion might say something about the depth or breadth of the relationship between ideas.
Something else arises here. At first one may have the tendency to associate their numbers with topical categories. This is only natural as it's a function at which humans all excel. But are those numbers really categories after a few weeks? Probably not. Treat them only as address numbers or GPS coordinates to be able to find your way. Your sociology section may quickly find itself with invasive species of ideas from anthropology and archaeology as well as history. If you treat all your ideas only at the topical level, they'll be miles away from where you need them to be as the smallest level atomic ideas collide with each other to generate new ideas for you. Naturally you can place them further away if you wish and attempt to bridge the distance with links to numbers in other locations, but I suspect you'll find this becomes pretty tedious over time and antithetical when it comes time to pull out a handful and write something. It's fantastically easier to pull out a several dozen and begin than it is to go through and need to pull out linked cards in a onesy-twosies manner or double check with your index to make sure you've gotten the most interesting bits. This becomes even more important as your collection scales.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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Watching this thread for ideas.
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writing.bobdoto.computer writing.bobdoto.computer
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Doto, Bob. “What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Bottom-Up?’” Writing by Bob Doto (blog), January 25, 2024. https://writing.bobdoto.computer/what-do-we-mean-when-we-say-bottom-up/.
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boffosocko.com boffosocko.com
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Chris keeps surfacing nice examples of people using index card systems for pkm and learning. Here Martin Luther King jr.
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The key questions at play here are where is the work of a keeping a zettelkasten done and how is represented?
The key question here is: what the Zettelkasten really is?
There is argument about something which is not provided: definition of ZK.
When it will be the definition, then it can be argued, but so there are only two one-sided heads talking to themselves about different things, but which have something in common, so they can talk endlessly.
And it has nothing to do with knowledge management, note-taking or learning, because it can be done in many ways, so then there is no need to discuss about it in terms of misunderstanding.
Misunderstanding and fallacies can be talked in terms of definitions or ideas, but it should be any will to compromise some limitations and not putting everything under umbrella-terms.
Will someone discuss that bloggers write texts like ancient philosophers so for example Plato was very first blogger? There are texts and written thoughts in both cases, aren't they!?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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It's original purpose was definitely to create unique output but you can definitely use it for other reasons!
reply to u/chasemac_ at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/19ep9rc/comment/kjempeu/
I'm curious from where you draw your "original purpose" claim? This presupposes having identified a zettelkasten progenitor who has clearly made such a statement. (If you're thinking Luhmann, you're missing the mark by centuries. And even if you're thinking Luhmann, where did he say this specifically?) While Konrad Gessner seems to have been an early progenitor in 1548, the broader idea goes much further back. Even in the early days of the commonplace book, the primary analogy was using them as "storehouses" for collecting treasure (thesaurus) aka knowledge or wisdom.
Even Luhmann's framing of his zettelkasten as his "second memory" was old by the time he wrote it:
In a short academic dissertation on the art of excerpts, Andreas Stübel described the card index as a ‘secondary and subsidiary memory’ (‘memoria secundaria and subsidiaria’), summing up in just three words the dilemma scholars had been struggling with for two centuries with respect to the use of commonplace books. As far as I know, Stübel was the first among contemporaries to speak of secondary memory. —Alberto Cevolini in “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.
If we look even further back we read Seneca the Younger in Epistulae morales, writing positively about collecting with respect to classic rhetoric:
"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in;
Without a clear originator, I might suggest that historically the first purpose was for memory followed closely by learning and then accumulating wisdom and knowledge (sententiae). Using them for output only came much later.
Why is there so much bad ink in the zettelkasten space about about "collecting"? (a la the "collector's fallacy") If you collect nothing, you'll have nothing. You have to start somewhere. Collecting happens first before anything useful comes out of the enterprise. Where are all these "people [who] do nothing but boast about the amount of cards in their box"? I'm not seeing lots of evidence of them in fora or online certainly. Show us your collection of examples of those to back up the claim. Are there index card hoarders out there who honestly have tens of thousands of notes with absolutely no purpose? I suspect it's rare.
If you're a collector, collect away! Take solace in the words of historian Keith Thomas:
Unfortunately, such diverse topics as literacy, numeracy, gestures, jokes, sexual morality, personal cleanliness or the treatment of animals, though central to my concerns, are hard to pursue systematically. They can’t be investigated in a single archive or repository of information. Progress depends on building up a picture from a mass of casual and unpredictable references accumulated over a long period. That makes them unsuitable subjects for a doctoral thesis, which has to be completed in a few years. But they are just the thing for a lifetime’s reading. So when I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics.
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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King’s box of notecards makes me think of Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten. Did you come across any hint that King was familiar with Luhmann’s organizing structure? If he was, it’s unfortunate he missed the part about clearly identified reference notes!
reply to Karen Hume at https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/martin-luther-king-jrs-organizational/comment/47959537
It is incredibly unlikely that King was aware of Luhmann's organizational structure as their practices were contemporaneous right down to their starting years. Luhmann's ZK1 comprises 7 sections with about 23,000 notes written from about 1952 to 1961 while the Morehouse Collection indicates that concerning King's research notes archive "The bulk of the notes were taken as reference material for King’s coursework while a doctoral student at Boston University (1952-1955), including notes taken specifically as reference material for King’s dissertation..." I've been actively searching for several years now, and have yet to find anyone following Luhmann's structure until after the Marbach Exhibition "Zettelkästen. Machines of Fantasy" in 2013. Broadly most have historically followed a variation of a subject heading organization, with or without indexing, similar to that found in the commonplace book tradition and described in Johannes Erich Heyde's book Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens; eine Anleitung, besonders für Studierende (multiple editions including 1931 & 1951), which was a work Luhmann read when devising his own system.
Incidentally it looks like MLK was using Weis No. 35 boxes, a version of which is still available, now from Globe-Weis: https://amzn.to/3vVcO3c. Perhaps some enterprising teachers will help students create their own versions now?
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findingaids.auctr.edu findingaids.auctr.edu
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https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/resources/159/collection_organization
Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection: Series 4: Research Notes<br /> Collection Identifier: 0000-0000-0000-0131i
This seems to be the bulk of where MLK's zettelkasten is maintained, in particular: - The General Subject file: https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/176973 - The Theologian's Debate Box https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/176974 - The Subject Index File: https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/176975 - The Author Index File: https://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/176976
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morehouse.edu morehouse.edu
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https://morehouse.edu/life/campus/martin-luther-king-jr-collection/overview/
Pictured here are three card index files, one specifically labeled as "Subject Index File" and visibly labeled on the back wall as a "Weiss No. 35". One of the individual tabs in the rear of the subject index file behind the A-Z tabs is labeled "Salvation".
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findingaids.auctr.edu findingaids.auctr.edu
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Arrangement of the Series The series is organized into eight subseries: 1. General Subject file; 2. Theologian's Debate Box; 3. Subject Index file; 4. Author Index file; 5. Title Index file; 6. Notes on Books of the Bible; 7. Notes on the Latter Prophets; 8. Notes on Philosophers. The series is arranged alphabetically. Subseries 6 and 7 arranged in order of occurrence in the Bible. Separated Materials Newsprint items have been separated to proper housing.
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The series consists primarily of notes taken by Martin Luther King, Jr. The bulk of the notes were taken as reference material for King’s coursework while a doctoral student at Boston University (1952-1955), including notes taken specifically as reference material for King’s dissertation; these notes focus specifically on theology and theologians. Later notes relate to books and articles read by King on a wide variety of subjects (1943-1968), as well as publications that mention or publish work by King, his wife, his associates, or organizations related to King (1968-1969).
Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection: Series 4: Research Notes Collection Identifier: 0000-0000-0000-0131i
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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Hess, Jillian. “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Organizational Systems.” Substack newsletter. Noted (blog), January 22, 2024. https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/martin-luther-king-jrs-organizational.
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From an organizational standpoint, the beauty of sermons is that each revolves around a specific theme. Accordingly, King could devote a single folder to each topic. He accumulated 166 folders, each with a title like “Loving your Enemies” (folder 1), “Why the Christian must Oppose Segregation” (folder 87), “Mental Slavery” (folder 113), and “The Misuse of Prayer” (folder 166). These folders contain King’s outlines; source material, like clippings from books; and drafts.
In addition to his card index, Martin Luther King, Jr. compiled a collection of 166 folders organized around various topics which he used to organize outlines, clippings, pages from books, and other source materials as well as drafts of sermons or speeches on those topics.
To some extent these folders are just larger format repositories mirroring the topical arrangements of his card index.
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My guess is that it was unintentional and the result of sloppy note-taking practices that did not clearly mark original and borrowed ideas.
Jillian Hess' guess for the origin of King's plagiarism.
It's also possible that he came from a much more oral facing cultural upbringing rather than a dyed-in-the-wool academic one which focused on attribution.
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And here are King’s early thoughts on this biblical passage, written in 1953 as a Ph.D. student:God (Amos)5:21:24—This passage might be called the key passage of the entire book. It reveals the deep ethical nature of God. God is a God that demands justice rather than sacrifice; righteousness rather than ritual. The most elaborate worship is but an insult to God when offered by those who have no mind to conform to his ethical demands. Certainly this is one of the most noble idea ever uttered by the human mind.One may raise the question as to whether Amos was against all ritual and sacrifice, i.e. worship. I think not. It seems to me that Amos' concern is the ever-present tendency to make ritual and sacrifice a substitute for ethical living. Unless a man's heart is right, Amos seems to be saying, the external forms of worship mean nothing. God is a God that demands justice and sacrifice fo can never be a substitute for it. Who can disagree with such a notion?3Notice how King wrote the topic (God) and his source (Amos 5:21:24) at the top of the note card for easy reference.
example of a note from King's zettelkasten
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one of King’s note cards on the Old Testament’s Book of Amos which includes the linesBut let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. These lines would feature in many of King’s speeches—including his famous “I Have a Dream Speech,” where King said: …we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Some of King's note cards later figured in his speeches including his "I Have a Dream" speech.
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Many of King’s notecards come from his time earning a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology at Boston University. These notecards contain a mixture of quotations from the Bible and religious thinkers as well as King’s personal views. For example, he wrote more than a thousand notecards exploring the Old Testament.
Martin Luther King, Jr. maintained a card index during his Ph.D. studies while he was at Boston University working in the area of systematic theology.
He created over a thousand notecards with respect to the Old Testament, many containing a mixture of biblical quotations as well as his own thoughts.
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A selection of King’s notecards, held at Morehouse College
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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u/taurusnoises
Nice to see that Bob Doto has joined the list of moderators at r/zettelkasten.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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I Screwed Up but I Learned A Lot About the Zettelkasten<br /> by Curly Gruene Cahall<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFxZTq8oZhI
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Without seeming to realize the split between the two ideas, Cahall seems to have organically discovered the basic difference between a topically oriented commonplace book method (on index cards) and a Luhmann-artig method of numbering cards as folgezettel.
He recommends picking one or the other, or potentially doing both and not worrying.
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It would seem like a zettelkasten joke, but Cahall has an index entry on "singular focus", yet it has two entries in disparate places in his zk. [14:02]
🤣
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Cahall has a practice of using Luhmann-artig numbering, but having tabbed cards which section his box into broad categories. Yet in an example relating to the Eisenhower Matrix, which he would naturally categorize as "productivity", he instead places it next to a card in "creativity" about dealing with tasks.
Generally I would advise people specifically not to practice this way, but presumably it works for him....
He says he never understood branching and as a result of his practice, he needs to spend much more time indexing.
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Curly Gurene Cahall calls his zettelkasten "Sherlock".
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Hiya - I'm just curious about how people use Obsidian in academia. I guess you could say I'm looking for examples of what it's used for (e.g. to take short notes or to link ideas) and in what kind of systems may guide people's vaults (e.g. Zettelkasten). I'm also just keen on connecting with other PhD candidates through these blogs. No one at my uni that I know of is currently using Obsidian for academic work
Reply to Couscous at https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/722584061087842365/1197392837952684052
A quick survey of currently active academics, teachers, and researchers who are blogging about note taking practices and zettelkasten-based methods.
Individuals
Dan Allosso is a history professor at Bemidji State University who has used Obsidian in his courses in the past. He frequently writes about related topics on his Substack channels. One can also find related videos about reading, writing, and research process as well as zettelkasten on his YouTube channel. In addition to this, Dan has a book on note taking and writing which focuses on using a card index or zettelkasten centric process.
Shawn Graham has both a blog as well as a prior course on the history of the internet using Obsidian. In the course materials he has compiled significant details and suggestions for setting up an Obsidian vault for students interested in using the tool.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick has a significant blog which covers a variety of topics centered around her work and research. Her current course Peculiar Genres of Academic Writing (2024) focuses on writing, note taking (including Zettelkasten) and encourages students to try out Obsidian, which she's been using herself. A syllabus for an earlier version of the course includes some big name bloggers in academia whose sites might serve as examples of academic writing in the public. The syllabus also includes a section on being an academic blogger and creating platform as a public intellectual.
Morganeua is a Ph.D. candidate who has a fairly popular YouTube channel on note taking within the academic setting (broadly using Obsidian, though she does touch on other tools from time to time).
Chris Aldrich is independent research who does work at the intersection of intellectual history and note taking methods and practices. He's got an active website along with a large collection of note taking, zettelkasten, commonplace books, and sense-making related articles. His practice is a hybrid one using both analog and digital methods including Obsidian and Hypothes.is.
Bob Doto is a teacher and independent researcher who focuses on Luhmann-artig zettelkasten practice and writing. He uses Obsidian and also operates a private Discord server focused on general Zettelkasten practice.
Manfred Kuehn, a professor of philosophy at Boston University, had an influential blog on note taking practices and culture from 2007 to 2018 on Blogspot. While he's taken the site down, the majority of his work there can be found on the Internet Archive.
Andy Matuschak is an independent researcher who is working at the intersection of learning, knowledge management, reading and related topics. He's got a Patreon, YouTube Channel and a public wiki.
Broader community-based efforts
Here are some tool-specific as well as tool-agnostic web-based fora, chat rooms, etc. which are focused on academic-related note taking and will have a variety of people to follow and interact with.
Obsidian runs a large and diverse Discord server. In addition to many others, they have channels for #Academia and #Academic-tools as well as #Knowledge-management and #zettelkasten.
Tinderbox hosts regular meetups (see their forum for details on upcoming events and how to join). While their events are often product-focused (ways to use it, Q&A, etc.), frequently they've got invited speakers who talk about their work, processes, and methods of working. Past recorded sessions can be found on YouTube. While this is tool-specific, much of what is discussed in their meetups can broadly be applied to any tool set. Because Tinderbox has been around since the early 00s and heavily focused on academic use, the majority of participants in the community are highly tech literate academics whose age skews to the over 40 set.
A variety of Zettelkasten practitioners including several current and retired academicians using a variety of platforms can be found at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/.
Boris Mann and others held Tools for Thought meetups which had been regularly held through 2023. They may have some interesting archived material for perusal on both theory, practice, and a wide variety of tools.
Others?
I've tried to quickly tip out my own zettelkasten on this topic with a focus on larger repositories of active publicly available web-based material. Surely there is a much wider variety of people and resources not listed here, but it should be a reasonable primer for beginners. Feel free to reply with additional suggestions and resources of which you may be aware.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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Software and applications for creating visualizations of zettelkasten contents: - Tinderbox (Mac) - Apple's Freeform (app) - Obsidian Canvas - Excalidraw (plugin for Obsidian) - Scrintal - Heptabase - Card Buddy (Mac) - AFFiNE (https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE)
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Local file Local file
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This is why choosing an external system that forces us todeliberate practice and confronts us as much as possible with ourlack of understanding or not-yet-learned information is such a smartmove.
Choosing an external system for knowledge keeping and production forces the learner into a deliberate practice and confronts them with their lack of understanding. This is a large part of the underlying value not only of the zettelkasten, but of the use of a commonplace book which Benjamin Franklin was getting at when recommending that one "read with a pen in your hand". The external system also creates a modality shift from reading to writing by way of thinking which further underlines the value.
What other building blocks are present in addition to: - modality shift - deliberate practice - confrontation of lack of understanding
Are there other systems that do all of these as well as others simultaneously?
link to Franklin quote: https://hypothes.is/a/HZeDKI3YEeyj9GcNWKX4iA
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pileofindexcards.org pileofindexcards.org
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Nearly 5 years ago, I read Watanabe Shoichi‘s “知的生活の方法 (Chiteki seikatsu no houhou = A way to intellectual life)”. His episode was very first time I realize what is card system, and it is used in academic world for long time.
Hawk Sugano was introduced to index cards circa 2001 by means of Watanabe Shoichi's book “知的生活の方法” (A Method of Intellectual Life".
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pileofindexcards.org pileofindexcards.org
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You can order Correct’s indexcard, dock, and Kokuyo’s fieldnote via the Service page.
Hawk Sugano apparently offered the Pile of Index Cards as a physical product offering by combining Correct's index card dock and Kokuyo's fieldnotes in late December 2006.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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bavatuesdays.com bavatuesdays.com
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I could totally see this UI with a video generated version of Niklas Luhmann answering questions using the training set of notes in his online zettelkasten at https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/tutorial
syndication link: https://bavatuesdays.com/ai106-long-live-the-new-flesh/comment-page-1/#comment-388943
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Agreed. Go with the FamedBearian numbering scheme.
At least Scott Scheper is advising people to ignore the advice in his own book about numbering systems. (Too bad he didn't write that advice in his own book...)
https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/193c6bu/comment/khcbe5n/
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https://www.etsy.com/shop/RelicWoodGifts
Etsy shop that does custom wooden boxes: Relic Wood Gifts<br /> Could be commissioned to do custom zettelkasten boxes.
I've seen an example of their work and it is stunningly nice.
via Librarian at Jefferson Branch of Pasadena Public library
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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JasperMcFly 10:38AM Flag I guess we need to collectively decide what the default meaning of "Zettelkasten" is. Given that Luhmann's version, and its digital variants are popular now, I would vote that the use of Zettelkasten therefore means the Luhmann version- as that is what most people are referring to at this point. Which begs the question: What are the sine qua non features of a Luhmannian Zettelkasten and related workflow? What features from his analog workflow and systematic numbering and linking and indexing must be present in hybrid or digital instantiations to qualify as a "Luhmannian Zettelkasten"?
reply to https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/19278/#Comment_19278
@JasperMcFly I'll presume that given the time differential, you may have missed my post just before yours which touches on the frivolity of the proposition of creating a single definition?
Most on this forum are going to presume that zettelkasten is precisely a slipbox in a similar form to that of Luhmann, but in practice some here and many elsewhere aren't going to see the distinction (or care). Some will unpopularly insist that a zettelkasten cannot be digital in form, but they'll also do so while simultaneously (heterodoxically and confusingly?) suggesting that one should use Wikipedia's Academic Outline of Disciplines, an idea which didn't exist during Luhmann's life.
You can make an attempt to force a definition, but I guarantee that it's a losing proposition as in practice people are going to use the word in almost any way they want—whatever you do, don't trust Humpty Dumpty's definition. It's the difference between prescriptive and proscriptive definitions. It can be seen in your very question if you look closely at your own phrase "beg the question", which in classic rhetoric means something very specific going back centuries, but in common use it has a dramatically different meaning. As ever, context will always be the king on these questions of definition, though some of us are still converging on a happy commonality.
For a bit more history here, try The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten.
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github.com github.com
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CrossLine<br /> https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine
ᔥSukhovskii in CrossLine who asks if anyone has used it for a ZK before
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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reply to oxytonic on 2023-01-08 at https://hypothes.is/a/8QdgetQOEe2XG6u5i9iAHQ
In my experience, alternating alphanumeric codes give you the "gist" of the original context. Purely with reference to my rough outline, my notecard "3516/b" implies psychology (3XXX), cognition (35XX), and memory (351X). Even the single slash implies a level of abstraction and/or specificity.
But it's not enough because it runs the risk of locking you in. Forward links on the card (or forward links to the card!) offer comparable if not competitive recontextualization, which is most likely what Luhmann means by "multiple storage".
Caution: My note here has some significant missing context which results from significant additional research.
The primary issue with analog slip boxes, particularly in academic research of Luhmann's day, was one of multiple storage. No one else I'm aware of prior to his time used Luhmann's filing scheme (and very few after until about 2013). Instead most filed multiple copies of their notes under category headings like "psychology", "cognition", and "memory" (to use your example) so that those ideas would be readily available when they came to work on their ideas relating to cognition, for example. This involved a tremendous amount of copying work. (For reference, see Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens: zeitgemässe Mittel und Verfahrungsweisen. Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931. which is the handbook which Luhmann used to scaffold his method.) It was this copying and filing under multiple categories which was commonly referred to as multiple storage. Many academics got around it by hiring assistants or secretaries who would do this duplicative work and filing on their behalf; Luhmann didn't have this additional help and it may have been a portion of the pressure for the evolution of his method.
Instead Luhmann used branching and cross-indexing his ideas along with regular use and familiarity of the space within his boxes. While his zettelkasten may seem on the surface to be done by category, the way you suggest, it definitely is not. Some of this appearance is suggested by editorial decisions made by the curators of his digital archive and, in larger part, by Scott Scheper who (sadly in my opinion) recommends using the Academic Outline of Disciplines as top level categories a practice which heavily belies some of what Luhmann was doing. While Luhmann was inspired by the Dewey Decimal System, he wasn't using the parts of it that equated numbers with topics, in part because he didn't need to and it would have been counterproductive to his ultimate method—specifically causing him to deal with multiple storage. Modern (digital) database theory and practice allows some note takers an easier way around this problem.
For more on this see: - https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/27/thoughts-on-zettelkasten-numbering-systems/ - https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/19/on-the-interdisciplinarity-of-zettelkasten-card-numbering-topical-headings-and-indices/
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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From Fleeting Notes to Project Notes – Concepts of "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens찰나의 메모에서 프로젝트 메모로 - Sönke Ahrens의 "스마트한 메모를 하는 방법"의 컨셉
다시 확인하고 아이디어 고민
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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Nori January 3 Flag I have two remarks: First, if you instead of an alphanumeric ID use a timestamp-based one, there is no need to “place” the note anywhere
@Nori said: First, if you instead of an alphanumeric ID use a timestamp-based one, there is no need to “place” the note anywhere.
Too often I see this generic advice to use a timestamp ID, but no one ever mentions what affordance that practice provides or any direct motivation for doing it. In this context it's suggested to remove the need to place the note anywhere, but if this is the only benefit, why bother having an ID at all? What other tangible benefits does a timestamp ID provide? (If the only benefit is having a record of creation, then why bother to put it into the title, which usually only causes confusion and problem in most digital systems? Digital systems have much better places to store date/time created, modified, etc. if you need them for search.)
In Luhmann's case the alphanumeric ID gave direct benefits in organically creating neighborhoods of ideas in which one could easily travel and which provided concrete, findable locations for search and linking. This appears to be part of the beneficial structure for what @IvanFerrero has, so why suggest such a change @Nori?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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It's not a Luhmann Zettelkasten if it's digital. 🗃️
reply to u/sscheper at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/18u39ca/comment/kfi3nl4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
It's not a Luhmann Zettelkasten if ~~it's digital~~ Luhmann didn't make it. 🗃️
There, I've fixed it for ya...
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FireKing File Cabinet, 1-Hour Fire Protection, 6-Drawer, Small Document Size, 31" Deep<br /> https://www.filing.com/FireKing-Card-Check-Note-Cabinet-6-Drawer-p/6-2552-c.htm
A modern index card catalog filing solution with locks and fireproofing offered by FireKing for $6,218.00 with shipment in 2-4 weeks. 6 Drawers with three sections each. Weighs 860 lbs.
at 0.0072" per average card, with filing space of 25 15/16" per section with 18 sections, this should hold 64,843 index cards.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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It doens't take into account the mental labour of actually assigning each card a numeric alpha address.
I appreciate that he takes a moment to acknowledge that this step of assigning numbers and arranging is work. Many gloss over this.
The work put in up front ideally pays off later.
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- Dec 2023
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leanpub.com leanpub.com
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https://leanpub.com/analogbrain/c/I9hqZbLpOxa9
via https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/18ufpsr/booklet_about_analog_zk/ from u/Natural_Grocery4786 aka Juan M. Ferrera
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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Andy 6:32AM Flag Shouldn't the title be "Chris Rock's Zettel output process" instead of "Chris Rock's Zettelkasten output process"? Wo ist der Kasten? (Where's the box?) I can see @Sascha shaking his head: "Das ist kein Zettelkasten."
reply to Andy at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/19108/#Comment_19108
I've got no evidence for nor against the presence of a box for these or any idea what the earlier portion of his process looks like at present. The bulletin board slips pictured were held up with pins and those on the table appear to be taped down, ostensibly to prevent accidental movement. Given their temporary nature and placement in this context, and the fact that they were highly portable for at least the span of the five shows he was preparing for in the documentary, there was certainly some container (even if it was as simple as a binder clip or a simple rubber band). Having seen shows like this roll in and out of venues before, I'm reasonably sure it was in a box at some point, so only a pedant would worry about it.
Box aside, the point here is that it shows a version of how he manufactures his output and manages his arrangement—portions of an overall process which are less frequently discussed and incredibly rarely visualized or pictured within the general community, much less in mass popular culture.
Many have argued that Eminem didn't have a zettelkasten either, and he definitely had both slips and a box. There's obviously no winning here... I won't worry too much about it until the naysayers' own Zettelkasten can manage to help them sell out Jones Beach Theater, The Prudential Center, PNC Bank Arts Center, Barclays Center, and Madison Square Garden.
Caveat pedanticus: Anyone talking about "Chris Rock's box" in public, might be held up to ridicule in his next sold-out tour. After Headliners Only and the Will Smith incident, I'm not taking any chances. 😜🃏🗃️
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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735: ＿Nen＿Kumi Name＿＿＿＿＿＿ : 2006/03/04 (Sat) 23:35:55 ID:??? >>732 5×3 was used as a book search card. (Almost all electronic now) It 's a little smaller than the popular version of the productivity notebook, making it ideal for portable notes. Other purposes include memorization cards and information retrieval. However, B7 and mini 6-hole system notebooks are almost the same size, so they are being pushed out and are not widely used in Japan. How to do it in a book called How to Write an American-style Essay. 1.Write a tentative table of contents. 2.Write out the required literature on 5x3 cards. a Classification code in the upper right corner b Author name and book title in the middle. c Assign a serial number to the top left. d Below is where you can get information.Finally, write down all the information necessary for the paper's citation list. (4-a) 3. Rewrite the literature cards into a list. (It's a pain twice, but he says to do it.) 4. Write the information on 5x3 cards. a Prepare literature cards and literature. Finish your bibliography cards. (2-e) bWrite an information card ① One memo per card, information is the golden rule ② Write it in your own words ③ When copying, enclose it in quotation marks. ⑤ Serial number of the literature card in the upper left ⑥ Tentative table of contents and card keyword in the upper right 5. Once all the literature cards are checked, rearrange them in the order of the table of contents. Elaboration. 6. The rest is drafting, footnotes, reviewing, citing, proofreading, and finishing.
Apparently there is a Japanese text with the title "How to Write and American-style Essay" which recommends using classification codes in the upper right and an assigned serial number in the top left.
How was this related (or not) to Luhmann's practice or to the practices of the Dewey Decimal System? [Update: not related at all, see: https://hypothes.is/a/bDEoiqT3Ee6lAeNajBBsjw]
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archive.org archive.org
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RE the numbering mention ed at https://hypothes.is/a/pp5DdqTpEe6FVQNRzkBV2w
Write Papers seems to be roughly the same book as アメリカ式論文の書き方 both of which are written by Ron White. Thus the numbering advice now seems more clear. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/bDEoiqT3Ee6lAeNajBBsjw)
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Ron White recommends taking notes on 3 x 5 inch index cards. One should place the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress catalog number in the upper left of their bibliography card and in the upper right corner one should number their cards consecutively (1, 2, 3, etc.). White indicates the importance of these numbers is primarily that they are unique, presumably so one can refer to them or reorder them if they are put out of order. (p46-7)
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www.flickr.com www.flickr.com
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Discovery Card Icon : Electric Bulb (lightning)Tag : 3rd block Things from my brain, mind, spirit, anything emerge from inside me, are classified into this class. This is the most important and enjoyable cards among the Four Cards. You will see your discoveries emerges in your mind like a water from spring. In fact, the 80% of index cards in my dock is dominated by this Discovery Card.
These are more similar to zettelkasten and commonplacing traditions. They comprise the majority of the system.
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www.flickr.com www.flickr.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Manfred Kuehn</span> in Taking note: Luhmann's Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>08/06/2021 00:16:23</time>)</cite></small>
Note the use of the edge highlighted taxonomy system used on these cards:
Similar to the so called high five indexing system I ran across recently.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122/
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www.chess.com www.chess.com
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Spangenthal, Paige, and Christiane Amanpour. “Two Chess Grandmasters Weigh in on ‘The Queen’s Gambit.’” Amanpour & Company (blog), November 7, 2020. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/two-chess-grandmasters-weigh-in-on-the-queens-gambit/.
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www.psychologytoday.com www.psychologytoday.com
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Flora, Carla. “The Grandmaster Experiment: How Did One Family Produce Three of the Most Successful Female Chess Champions Ever?” Psychology Today, July 1, 2005. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200507/the-grandmaster-experiment.
copy also at: https://chessdailynews.com/the-grandmaster-experiment/
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A file card system took up an entire wall. It included records of previous games for endless analytical pleasure and even an index of potential competitors' tournament histories.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Brian Stephenson@bstephen2·Aug 4, 2020Interesting to see this database, which I had read about. In the UK a #chess study enthusiast called Richard Harman built up a collection of endgame studies on index cards, indexed by material and features. He was regularly consulted by judges for 'anticipations' of new studies.1Brian Stephenson@bstephen2·Aug 4, 2020Richard died in 1986 and his Harman Database is now in my house. I kept it up-to-date for a few years but it was superseded many years ago by Harold van der Heijden's electronic database.1Brian Stephenson@bstephen2·Aug 4, 2020Card indices of #ChessProblem s exist around the World. The White-Hume Collection was split up years ago but some of it still exists. The Albrecht Collection in Germany is now on computer database and kept by Udo Degener.
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Brian Stephenson@bstephen2·Aug 5, 2020As for the Pirnie collection, not counted it, but I am slowly going through it for my online #ChessProblem database: http://bstephen.me.uk/meson/meson.pl?opt=top… . Also going through several boxes of the White-Hume Collection which I have.
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Brian Stephenson@bstephen2·Aug 4, 2020The Pirnie Collection of #ChessProblem s is index cards in Clark's shoe boxes and is held in my house. The late JP Toft created a huge card database of #ChessProblem s in Scandinavia and is now held in a public library.
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Kasparyan's zettelkasten consists of 24 wooden boxes and at least two plastic trays of cards. The trays are numbered and the highest numbered tray has the number 34 on it.
In the picture are two plastic trays, but it's not obvious how big they are or how many cards they may contain.
Approximating that these would contain about 1,200 cards each, the collection is likely between 28,800 and 40,800 cards.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>✅ https://t.co/5nGvHBm5Vo<br>Today I made a video about Henrik Kasparian's chess puzzle database which includes 30 thousand chess puzzles! In the precomputer era Kasparian used index cards to select everything in one place, and it took him decades to complete!#chess #chesspuzzle pic.twitter.com/V1H2PMKfjN
— Suren (@surenaghabek) August 3, 2020
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- chess puzzles
- Udo Degener
- chess
- open questions
- Albrecht zettelkasten
- J.P. Toft
- card index as database
- shoeboxes
- Richard Harman zettelkasten
- digitized note collections
- Richard Harman
- Genrikh Kasparyan
- White-Hume's zettelkasten
- Duncan Pirnie
- J.P. Toft's zettelkasten
- Pirnie Collection
- Duncan Pirnie zettelkasten
- George Hume
- photos
- Alain C. White
- Genrikh Kasparyan's zettelkasten
- Harold van der Heijden
- Brian Stephenson
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Kasparyan has left us a colossal legacy, not only as a composer, but also as an anthologist. Between 1963 and 1980, he published five thematically classified anthologies, which constitute an invaluable resource for students of the endgame study. But of all his books, perhaps the one to seek out first is his anthology Zamechatelnye etyudy (1982). It is the best, that is to say, the most useful and enjoyable, large-scale general anthology ever to have appeared."
via ARVES Chess Endgamestudy Association at https://arves.org/arves/index.php/en/endgamestudies/studies-by-composer/90-genrikh-kasparyan
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Presumably Genrikh Kasparyan used his card index of chess puzzles as material to write one of his many books including: - Domination in 2,545 Endgame Studies by Genrikh Kasparyan. ISBN 0-923891-87-0 - 888 Miniature Studies by Genrikh Moiseyevich Kasparian. ISBN 978-86-7686-147-7
As a chess champion, he surely used to to fuel his chess studies and chess career.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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It Took Decades To Create This Chess Puzzle Database (30 Thousand), 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9craX0M_2A.
A chess School named after Genrikh Kasparyan (alternately Henrik Kasparian) houses his card index of chess puzzles with over 30,000 cards.
The cards are stored in stacked wooden trays in a two door cabinet with 4 shelves.
There are at least 23 small wooden trays of cards pictured in the video, though there are possibly many more. (Possibly as many as about 35 based on the layout of the cabinet and those easily visible.)
Kasparyan's son Sergei donated the card index to the chess school.
Each index card in the collection, filed in portrait orientation, begins with the name of the puzzle composer, lists its first publication, has a chess board diagram with the pieces arranges, and beneath that the solution of the puzzle. The cards are arranged alphabetically by the name of the puzzle composer.
The individual puzzle diagrams appear to have been done with a stamp of the board done in light blue ink with darker blue (or purple?) and red inked stamped pieces arranged on top of it.
ᔥu/ManuelRodriguez331 in r/Zettelkasten - Chess players are memorizing games with index cards
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www.nybooks.com www.nybooks.com
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When he recorded his observations, he adhered to the Erasmian principle of distilling things down to their essence and entering them in notebooks, as if he were storing rare wine to be served for dégustation in future conversations.
This is quite similar to the advice by Sonke Ehrens and Nikolas Luhmann.
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With rough German to English translation here:
Zettelkasten as the second brain of Niklas Luhmann
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Roy Scholten</span> in "@ChrisAldrich For a somewhat in depth look at Luhmann's zettelkasten , I made a rough translation of this talk: https://t.co/ik7VTOGMV8 here: https://t.co/nAAb7aXXtC" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>11/01/2021 11:39:57</time>)</cite></small>
Watched 2021-11-01
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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https://www.amazon.com/JUNDUN-Dividers-Collapsible-Fireproof-4x6-Inch/dp/B0BNHZ3JTR/?th=1
A card index box which is waterproof and fireproof for potential travel.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Lots of analog vs digital angst here. Some of it stirred up by Scheper and his religion.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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The 3x5'' sized drawers are good, but the 4x6'' sized drawers are a tad too narrow. Not enough dividers too. A really good value for money though, if you want an actual drawer instead of a shoebox the other alternatives can get really pricey.
reply to u/Apprehensive_Net5630 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/18kpv0y/comment/kdymaeq/
Some of the alternatives look pricey, but often can be negotiated down or found at more reasonable rates if you look around for a bit. I've got some advice and ideas at: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/#Boxes
As an example, I picked up a 20 drawer 3x5" oak card index this year for $250 making it cheaper per drawer (and with more linear space per drawer) than a brand new cardboard box version. Incidentally, even buying index cards in bulk to lower cost, it'll run me more than twice what I paid for the entire card catalog to fill it with index cards (\~$550).
Directly comparing the storage space, I'd need almost 13 Vaultz 2-drawer boxes at about $75 each or $980 to equal it. I could have bought my Gaylord card index and filled it with cards and still saved money over buying a set of just the Vaultz boxes.
Having the beautiful and useful piece of furniture in the mix definitely makes the process a lot more fun and enjoyable too.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmyVf_LhF50
Nothing new or interesting here. Watched at 2x.
Sad revelation is that Scott Scheper has indoctrinated Nico to the point that he's making videos for Scheper's channel rather than for himself. I hope Nico is getting something valuable (ie, monetary payment) for this.
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docs.google.com docs.google.com
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/15gI7LozljTOvo_7oUwfnOIwfzD8O0VHVgWGr0oK3RI0/edit
When comparing, one ought to take careful account of the variety of wikis and their uses (both public and private) and not fall into the availability heuristic of thinking that all wikis are used and managed like Wikipedia solely because it is one of the biggest and most popular ones.
Some individual users slowly build their personal wikis a note at a time, but instead of linking one note to another, they place it onto a page near related ideas, which may tend to create articles over time. (Sounds a bit like folgezettel, no?) See Ward Cunningham’s (the creator of the idea of wiki) wiki for this: https://wiki.c2.com/
Many public TiddlyWiki’s, in part because of design, are created as short note/card-based ideas which may slowly accumulate from notes to articles as well. See my own example: https://tw.boffosocko.com/
It may take some digging in to find public versions, but many FedWiki sites have a very note (or card-based) root design rather than an article-based design: http://fed.wiki.org/view/federated-wiki
Bill Seitz’s public wiki is broadly a melange of all these patterns as well: http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/BillSeitz
For additional contrast and comparison, see also: - https://indieweb.org/Zettelk%C3%A4sten - https://indieweb.org/digital_garden - https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book
Looking at a variety of specific examples in practice will tend to be far more fruitful than considering a tiny handful of theoretical (and potentially non-existent) examples, particularly in light of the massive bias which is created by the existence of Wikipedia.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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New member here, is Zettelkasten the right method for my need? .t3_18fjaya._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #edeeef; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #6f7071; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #6f7071; } questionI have difficulting remembering important facts and numbers at work. I work in a strategic role for a large logistics firm. There are so many KPIs, initiatives, savings, people plans, etc.My biggest opportunity is recall in meetings to answer questions and further conversations. I can feel it holding me back and I am desperate to address it. I stumbled upon Zettelkasten, is this the right tool for me?
reply to u/chiefkeif at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/18fjaya/new_member_here_is_zettelkasten_the_right_method/
Some of your root issues may be addressed directly by engaging with by spaced repetition systems (for improving memory recall: try Anki, Mnemosyne, et al.) as well as mnemonic systems (memory palaces, the major system, etc.). Given that a Zettelkasten can be an instantiation of both of these simultaneously, you may find benefits for using it in such a setting. This being said, you may be better off with either one or both of the more proximal solutions with a zettelkasten being somewhat more distal for your specific needs.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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The Notebook by Roland Allen review – notes on living by [[Sukhdev Sandhu]]
Not so much of a review as the dumping out of most of the reviewer's highlights from the book. I get the impression that he at least read it and paid attention, but what did he actually think of it?
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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Local file Local file
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Cevolini, Alberto. “Die Erfindung des Zettelkastens als Vergessensmaschine: Eine historische und wissenssoziologische Einführung.” Polarisierte Welten. Verhandlungen des 41. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Bielefeld 2022 41 (September 29, 2023). https://publikationen.soziologie.de/index.php/kongressband_2022/article/view/1564.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAerQtNkGT0
Short video version
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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It's not that tree structures don't have to be hierarchical, it's that what you're describing is not a tree structure.This..."If we visualized all links in Luhmann's ZK, we would have a forest with many links between branches and trees."...is not a tree structure.Tree structures are by design hierarchical. They are meant to show "hereditary" (so to speak) relationships in a linear trajectory. This is accepted in more or less every discipline where they are employed. To equate Luhmann's ZK as having anything to do with that is just false. It's a mistake, and is, unfortunately, one that is regularly perpetuated.Even Schmidt (and by proxy Kieserling), who visually depict Luhmann's "analog" "branches" very much as a tree structure (aka a hierarchy) go out of their way to state on the Archive's website that having done so was an editorial decision done out of convenience and should not be taken literally or be read as representative of the structure of Luhmann's zettelkasten:"The hierarchization of the organizational structure carried out by the Niklas Luhmann archive is an editorial decision, the order of [Luhmann's zettelkasten] does not follow a strict hierarchy logic." (Schmidt)But, what about trees....?"A tree structure, tree diagram, or tree model is a way of representing the hierarchical nature of a structure in a graphical form." (guru wikipedia)For those in the back...."The zettelkasten is in no way a hierarchy." (Kieserling)And, in case there's any doubt (as many think the alphanumeric numbering schema is itself representative of a hierarchy), Schmidt couldn't be more clear:"[T]he number structure does not represent a hierarchical structure."What you're describing (see above) is more along the lines of a rhizome:"We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another.... We will be trying only to discover what other points our entrance connects to, what crossroads and galleries one passes through to link two points, what is the map of the rhizome and how the map is modified if one enters by another point." (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 3)Rhizomes are the antithesis of tree structures.“We’re tired of trees.... They’ve made us suffer too much.” (.ibid)
Collection of Bob Doto's notes on tree structures with respect to N. Luhmann's zettelkasten
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www.atomicworkflows.com www.atomicworkflows.com
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StudentsTeachersContent CreatorsEntrepreneursProgrammersProfessionalsLife-long Learners
He's at least done enough research to know the general groups of people who are already broadly using the zettelkasten method (or some other area of PKM).
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https://www.atomicworkflows.com/atomic-note-taking/
A new zettelkasten book, though oddly no physical copy and no ebook version? The fact that this is bundled with a course and seems priced on the high side seems a major turn off.
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docs.zettlr.com docs.zettlr.com
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Also, our own experiences show that when one doesn't use easy-to-recognise IDs, one is less prone to assume stuff, making them better suited to cross-link files.
Zettlr's maintainer's experience suggests that using complex zettelkasten IDs makes one less likely to assume something about what they mean and thereby making them better suited for cross-linking notes.
Part of this can be read as a means of disassociating the idea of specific topics from the notes on the cards.
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The default ID is a good call, because it uses the date in the format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS, which is unique to the second.
Zettlr uses a date-time stamp as their zettelkasten default. It doesn't suggest any useful or worthwhile reason why.
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ckarchive.com ckarchive.com
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我不用卡片盒筆記的原因。
瓦基的相反立場 opposite stance to Waji's.
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andreasvongunten.com andreasvongunten.com
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www.schmatzberger.com www.schmatzberger.com
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probefahrer.github.io probefahrer.github.io
- Nov 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Lovely. I guess what I'm trying to define is some methodology for practicing. Many times I simply resort to my exhaustive method, which has worked for me in the past simply due to brute force.Thank you for taking the time to respond and for what look like some very interesting references.
reply to u/ethanzanemiller at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/185xmuh/comment/kb778dy/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Some of your methodology will certainly depend on what questions you're asking, how well you know your area already, and where you'd like to go. If you're taking notes as part of learning a new area, they'll be different and you'll treat them differently than notes you're collecting on ideas you're actively building on or intriguing facts you're slowly accumulating. Often you'll have specific questions in mind and you'll do a literature review to see what's happing around that area and then read and take notes as a means of moving yourself closer to answering your particular questions.
Take for example, the frequently asked questions (both here in this forum and by note takers across history): how big is an idea? what is an atomic note? or even something related to the question of how small can a fact be? If this is a topic you're interested in addressing, you'll make note of it as you encounter it in various settings and see that various authors use different words to describe these ideas. Over time, you'll be able to tag them with various phrases and terminologies like "atomic notes", "one idea per card", "note size", or "note lengths". I didn't originally set out to answer these questions specifically, but my interest in the related topics across intellectual history allowed such a question to emerge from my work and my notes.
Once you've got a reasonable collection, you can then begin analyzing what various authors say about the topic. Bring them all to "terms" to ensure that they're talking about the same things and then consider what arguments they're making about the topic and write up your own ideas about what is happening to answer those questions you had. Perhaps a new thesis emerges about the idea? Some have called this process having a conversation with the texts and their authors or as Robert Hutchins called it participating in "The Great Conversation".
Almost anyone in the forum here could expound on what an "atomic note" is for a few minutes, but they're likely to barely scratch the surface beyond their own definition. Based on the notes linked above, I've probably got enough of a collection on the idea of the length of a note that I can explore it better than any other ten people here could. My notes would allow me a lot of leverage and power to create some significant subtlety and nuance on this topic. (And it helps that they're all shared publicly so you can see what I mean a bit more clearly; most peoples' notes are private/hidden, so seeing examples are scant and difficult at best.)
Some of the overall process of having and maintaining a zettelkasten for creating material is hard to physically "see". This is some of the benefit of Victor Margolin's video example of how he wrote his book on the history of design. He includes just enough that one can picture what's happening despite his not showing the deep specifics. I wrote a short piece about how I used my notes about delving into S.D. Goitein's work to write a short article a while back and looking at the article, the footnotes, and links to my original notes may be illustrative for some: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/a-note-about-my-article-on-goitein-with-respect-to-zettelkasten-output-processes/. The exercise is a tedious one (though not as tedious as it was to create and hyperlink everything), but spend some time to click on each link to see the original notes and compare them with the final text. Some of the additional benefit of reading it all is that Goitein also had a zettelkasten which he used in his research and in leaving copies of it behind other researchers still actively use his translations and notes to continue on the conversation he started about the contents of the Cairo Geniza. Seeing some of his example, comparing his own notes/cards and his writings may be additionally illustrative as well, though take care as many of his notes are in multiple languages.
Another potentially useful example is this video interview with Kathleen Coleman from the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. It's in the realm of historical linguistics and lexicography, but she describes researchers collecting masses of data (from texts, inscriptions, coins, graffiti, etc.) on cards which they can then study and arrange to write their own articles about Latin words and their use across time/history. It's an incredibly simple looking example because they're creating a "dictionary", but the work involved was painstaking historical work to be sure.
Again, when you're done, remember to go back and practice for yourself. Read. Ask questions of the texts and sources you're working with. Write them down. Allow your zettelkasten to become a ratchet for your ideas. New ideas and questions will emerge. Write them down! Follow up on them. Hunt down the answers. Make notes on others' attempts to answer similar questions. Then analyze, compare, and contrast them all to see what you might have to say on the topics. Rinse and repeat.
As a further and final (meta) example, some of my answer to your questions has been based on my own experience, but the majority of it is easy to pull up, because I can pose your questions not to my experience, but to my own zettelkasten and then quickly search and pull up a variety of examples I've collected over time. Of course I have far more experience with my own zettelkasten, so it's easier and quicker for me to query it than for you, but you'll build this facility with your own over time.
Good luck. 🗃️
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Taking notes for historical writing .t3_185xmuh._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionI'm trying to understand how to adopt parts of the Zettelkasten method for thinking about historical information. I wrote a PhD in history. My note-taking methodology was a complete mess the whole time. I used note-taking to digest a book, but it would take me two or three times longer than just reading. I would go back over each section and write down the pieces that seemed crucial. Sometimes, when I didn't know a subject well, that could take time. In the end, I would sometimes have many pages of notes in sequential order sectioned the way the book was sectioned, essentially an overlay of the book's structure. It was time-consuming, very hard, not useless at all, but inefficient.Now consider the Zettelkasten idea. I haven't read much of Luhmann. I recall he was a sociologist, a theorist in the grand style. So, in other words, they operate at a very abstract level. When I read about the Zettelkasten method, that's the way it reads to me. A system for combining thoughts and ideas. Now, you'll say that's an artificial distinction, perhaps...a fact is still rendered in thought, has atomicity to it etc. And I agree. However, the thing about facts is there are just A LOT of them. Before you write your narrative, you are drowning in facts. The writing of history is the thing that allows you to bring some order and selectivity to them, but you must drown first; otherwise, you have not considered all the possibilities and potentialities in the past that the facts reveal. To bring it back to Zettelkasten, the idea of Zettel is so appealing, but how does it work when dealing with an overwhelming number of facts? It's much easier to imagine creating a Zettelkasten from more rarefied thoughts provoked by reading.So, what can I learn from the Zettelkasten method? How can I apply some or all of its methodologies, practically speaking? What would change about my initial note-taking of a book if I were to apply Zettelkasten ideas and practice? Here is a discussion about using the method for "facts". The most concrete suggestions here suggest building Zettels around facts in some ways -- either a single fact, or groups of facts, etc. But in my experience, engaging with a historical text is a lot messier than that. There are facts, but also the author's rendering of the facts, and there are quotes (all the historical "gossip"), and it's all in there together as the author builds their narrative. You are trying to identify the key facts, the author's particular angle and interpretation, preserve your thoughts and reactions, and save these quotes, the richest part of history, the real evidence. In short, it is hard to imagine being able to isolate clear Zettel topics amid this reading experience.In Soenke Ahrens' book "How to Take Smart Notes," he describes three types of notes: fleeting notes (these are fleeting ideas), literature notes, and permanent notes. In that classification, I'm talking about "literature notes." Ahrens says these should be "extremely selective". But with the material I'm talking about it becomes a question. How can you be selective when you still don't know which facts you care about or want to maintain enough detail in your notes so you don't foreclose the possibilities in the historical narrative too early?Perhaps this is just an unsolvable problem. Perhaps there is no choice but to maintain a discipline of taking "selective" literature notes. But there's something about the Zettelkasten method that gives me the feeling that my literature notes could be more detailed and chaotic and open to refinement later.Does my dilemma explained here resonate with anyone who has tried this method for intense historical writing? If so, I'd like to hear you thoughts, or better yet, see some concrete examples of how you've worked.
reply to u/ethanzanemiller at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/185xmuh/taking_notes_for_historical_writing/
Rather than spending time theorizing on the subject, particularly since you sound like you're neck-deep already, I would heartily recommend spending some time practicing it heavily within the area you're looking at. Through a bit of time and experience, more of your questions will become imminently clear, especially if you're a practicing historian.
A frequently missing piece to some of this puzzle for practicing academics is upping the level of how you read and having the ability to consult short pieces of books and articles rather than reading them "cover-to-cover" which is often unnecessary for one's work. Of particular help here, try Adler and Van Doren, and specifically their sections on analytical and syntopical reading.
- Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated ed. edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.
In addition to the list of practicing historians I'd provided elsewhere on the topic, you might also appreciate sociologist Beatrice Webb's short appendix C in My Apprenticeship or her longer related text. She spends some time talking about handling dates and the database nature of querying collected facts and ideas to do research and to tell a story.
- Webb, Beatrice Potter. My Apprenticeship. First Edition. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926. https://archive.org/details/myapprenticeship0000beat/page/412/mode/2up.
- Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.
Also helpful might be Mill's article which became a chapter in one of his later books:
- Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.
Perhaps u/danallosso may have something illuminating to add, or you can skim through his responses on the subject on Reddit or via his previous related writing: https://danallosso.substack.com/.
Enough historians and various other humanists have been practicing these broad methods for centuries to bear out their usefulness in researching and organizing their work. Read a bit, but truly: practice, practice, and more practice is going to be your best friend here.
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Deutsch himself never theorized his index, treating it – like hiswhole focus on ‘facts’ – at face value.
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taking in sociological investigation
The simplest and most direct way of bringing home to the reader the truth of this dogmatic assertion of the scientific value of note-taking in sociological investigation...
Beatrice Webb indicates that it is an incontrovertible truth that sociologists should use a card index (zettelkasten) as a primary tool in their research.
We ought to closely notice that she wrote this truism about the field of sociology in a book published in 1926, the year prior to Niklas Luhmann's <s>death</s> birth.
How popular was her book with respect to the remainder of the field of sociology subsequently? What other sociology texts may have had similar ideas? Webb obviously quotes some of this technique in the late 1800s as being popular within the area of history. How evenly was it spread across the humanities in general?
Is Beatrice Webb's card index amongst her papers? Where might they be stored today?
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Can you provide any more information about how this method works in detail?
reply to u/ethanzanemiller at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1843k2w/comment/kb4d882/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Presuming you came into this from a search on "history" or a related topic rather than long time experience in this sub?
A card index, fichier boîte (French), or zettelkasten (German) is broadly the use of index cards (or digital versions) for research and writing. (I generally frame it as an extension of keeping a commonplace book.)
But some of it is best described within the area of "historical method" by practicing historians themselves, so also try these texts written by historians on the subject:
Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/.
Barzun, Jacques. The Modern Researcher. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992. http://archive.org/details/modernresearcher00barz_1.
Dow, Earle Wilbur. Principles of a Note-System for Historical Studies. New York: Century Company, 1924.
Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.
Gottschalk, Louis Reichenthal. Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950. https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-History-Louis-Gottschalk/dp/B001OY27L6.
Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout.
Langlois, Charles Victor, and Charles Seignobos. Introduction to the Study of History. Translated by George Godfrey Berry. First. New York: Henry Holt and company, 1898. http://archive.org/details/cu31924027810286.
Margolin, Victor. The Process of Writing World History of Design, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI.
Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.
Maybe start with Keith Thomas and Margolin which are short and then jump to either Goutor or Allosso (first half of that text) which are slightly longer but still quick reads. Umberto Eco may be the dean of studies here, though Barzun has been fairly influential. If you prefer, you can practice Luhmann's method, which is very similar though with a twist, and laid out at https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/.
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documented evidence of oral transmission of index card use as a method
reply to u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1843k2w/comment/kaypbk2/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
I'm reasonably certain that most of the transmission of the traditions was specifically from person to person rather than from text to person. Yours is an interesting and important (and rare oral) example of person to person zettelkasten transmission, of which I've been collecting some scant examples. (Other examples appreciated, inquire within.)
Interestingly a lot of this transmission is still happening every day (though now more "visibly" online) in fora like Reddit, zettelkasten.de, Discord, in social media, and even smaller group courses. As Annie Murphy Paul indicates in The Extended Mind, people like to imitate rather than innovate. Perhaps Luhmann, being on his own outside of the establishment, was more likely to innovate because he was on his own and took Heyde's advice, but evolved it to his needs rather than asking questions on Reddit?
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Who uses a card index? Top historians, that's who
reply to u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1843k2w/who_uses_a_card_index_top_historians_thats_who/
Nice finds u/atomicnotes.
We can add them to the list of other known historians who used zettelkasten including: - Barbara Tuchman - Victor Margolin - S.D. Goitein - Gotthard Deutsch - Jacques Barzun - Henry F. Graff - Keith Thomas - Jacques Goutor - Umberto Eco - Frederic L. Paxson - Earle W. Dow - Aby Warburg - Frederick Jackson Turner - Theodor Mommsen - Charles Victor Langlois - Charles Seignobos - Ernst Bernheim*
Certainly there are several hundreds (thousands?) I've missed. Those marked with a (*) have written texts covering note taking or historical method.
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zibaldone.substack.com zibaldone.substack.com
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IMPORTANT EDIT: Amongst the important sources linked below, I forgot to include THIS one, which may be the most important for contributing to your understanding of the Zettelkasten concept
HA! Apparently my work has been influential for someone. I love that he put it up top like this. 😂
via https://zibaldone.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-zettelkasten-part-2-a
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https://zibaldone.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-zettelkasten-part-2-a
I showed up expecting a one pager on zettelkasten method and was surprised to find it was about reading. :)
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www.maxtonandcompany.com www.maxtonandcompany.com
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https://www.maxtonandcompany.com/alfion
Maxton & Company also carries Notsu cards.
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www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/305189692899
The Merchants Box Co. manufactured a variety of wooden index card boxes in the 1960s.
I've seen some marked 1960 and 1962. Dates of manufacture? Sizes? Definitely 4x6".
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thatsthenorm.com thatsthenorm.com
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Live-Roaming: Using Roam to teach students in college
I'd listened to this whole episode sometime since 2022-04-05, but didn't put it in my notes.
Mark Robertson delineates how he actively models the use of his note taking practice (using Roam Research) while teaching/lecturing in the classroom. This sort of modeling can be useful for showing students how academics read, gather, and actively use their knowledge. It does miss the portion about using the knowledge to create papers, articles, books, etc., but the use of this mode of reading and notes within a discussion setting isn't terribly different.
Use of the system for conversation/discussion with the authors of various texts as you read, with your (past) self as you consult your own notes, or your students in classroom lectures/discussion sections is close to creating your own discussion for new audiences (by way of the work your write yourself.)
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1194506/4875515-mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue-live-roaming.mp3
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Empire Podcast: Lenin and The Rise of the Bolsheviks
ᔥu/atomicnotes in Who uses a card index? Top historians, that's who at r/Zettelkasten
At the start of a recent episode of the Empire Podcast (the one on the Bolshevik Revolution), historian William Dalrymple reveals that when he began to write his first history book, The White Moghul, he had no idea how to do it, so he called the eminent historian Antony Bevor, who invited him round for a lesson in using his own method - a card index. Dalrymple says he's been using a card index ever since.
Then the podcast co-host, Anita Anand says she learned this approach from William and she too has been using it ever since.
By my rough calculation, the card index lesson would have taken place about 1998-2000, so Antony Bevor probably used index cards to write his great books on Crete in WW2 and on the Battle of Stalingrad, among many others.
So that's three highly successful popular historians using a card index to research and write significant and best-selling non-fiction books.
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As to the mechanics of research, I take notes on four-by-six indexcards, reminding myself about once an hour of a rule I read long agoin a research manual, “Never write on the back of anything.”
Barbara Tuchman took her notes on four-by-six inch index cards.
She repeated the oft-advised mantra to only write on one side of a sheet.
What manual did she read this in? She specifically puts quotes on "Never write on the back of anything." so perhaps it might be something that could be tracked down?
Who was the earliest version of this quote? And was it always towards the idea of cutting up slips or pages and not wanting to lose material on the back? or did it also (later? when?) include ease-of-use and user interface features even when not cutting things up?
At what point did double sided become a thing for personal printed materials? Certainly out of a duty to minimize materials, but it also needed the ability to duplex print pages or photocopy them that way.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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Your comment inspires me to pay more attention to citing and clarifying my claims.
replying to Will at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/18885/#Comment_18885
I've generally found that this is much easier to do when it's an area you tend to specialize in and want to delve ever deeper (or on which you have larger areas within your zettelkasten) versus those subjects which you care less about or don't tend to have as much patience for.
Perhaps it's related to the System 1/System 2 thinking of Kahneman/Tversky? There are only some things that seem worth System 2 thinking/clarifying/citing and for all the rest one relies on System 1 heuristics. I find that the general ease of use of my zettelkasten (with lots of practice) allows me to do a lot more System 2 thinking than I had previously done, even for areas which I don't care as much about.
syndication link: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/18888/#Comment_18888
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Not every note box with paper slips in it is a Zettelkasten.
Sascha Fast takes a hard line on what is and is not a zettelkasten.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fP4zFQMXSw
The fun things usually happen at the messy edges. This description of zettelkasten is a perfect encapsulation of this, though it's not necessarily on the surface.
This is a well done encapsulation of what a zettelkasten. Watch it once, then practice for a bit. Knowing the process is dramatically different from practicing it. Too many people want perfection (perfection for them and from their perspective) and they're unlikely to arrive at it by seeing examples of others. The examples may help a bit, but after you've seen a few, you're not going to find a lot of insight without practicing it to see what works for you.
This could be compared with epigenetic factors with respect to health. The broad Rx may help, but epigenetic factors need to be taken into account.
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www.loc.gov www.loc.gov
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Hannah Arendt Papers - Digital Collections - Library of Congress
Hannah Arendt apparently kept a zettelkasten. The Library of Congress has a digitized version of it in their archives from her nachlass.
ᔥMikjail in comment on The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten
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Addition III, 1945 (Box 95) Correspondence and notes by Arendt. Arranged alphabetically by type of material.
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Addition I, 1966-1977 (Boxes 88-94) Manuscripts, notes, and printed and near-print material relating to books and lectures by Arendt. Arranged alphabetically by format and title. Addition I supplements the Speeches and Writings series with extensive material pertaining to the publication of The Life of the Mind, including drafts annotated by the work’s editor, Mary McCarthy. A small group of lectures is also contained in this addition.
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There are also essays and lectures in the Speeches and Writings series in addition to the lectures and seminar notes in the Subject File folders designated “Courses” Research material arranged by topic is filed under “Extracts and Notes” in the Speeches and Writings series.
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and several files of notes and miscellaneous background information.
Were any of Arendt's Adolf Eichmann file notes done on index cards? Their arrangement, if any?
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Arendt studied with Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg University
Did Karl Jaspers have a zettelkasten practice? Did he specifically pass it along to students, like Arendt?
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robertbreen.com robertbreen.com
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When Jimmy Buffett has an idea for a song — sometimes just a phrase — he writes it down on any available scrap of paper and stuffs it into an old sea chest. When he’s ready to write some new music, he sits down and pulls out all those scribbles, which I imagine must be torn off bar napkins and beer coasters, and sorts through them, one by one. He says many of his most popular songs marinated in his sea chest before emerging as lyrics.
Source for this?
Sounds very similar to Eminem's "stacking ammo".
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www.coreycarvalho.com www.coreycarvalho.com
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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So I take down notes, and then what? Jackhansonc November 8 in The Zettelkasten Method Flag Hi, A few years ago, I started to take daily note and take a lot, but at the end of a day, I have difficulty on how to deal with those notes. The major problem is, I can't decide the size of a note derived from my daily note. Say, I take a note like "5 students have sent me the language test invoice regarding applying for an academic reward. In my understanding, this could be directly put into "Academic Reward" or "Things related to Academic Reward for Language Test". But if I do so, I feel guilty because it looks not even a bit like a Zettel systems. I heard a lot of so-called atomic notes, but I never really see a real-world, down-to-earth workflow of authentic zettel.
reply to Jackhansonc at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2726/so-i-take-down-notes-and-then-what#latest
I'm not sure I understand the full context of your note and it's purpose. If I had to guess, it's closer to what I might consider a productivity note to be followed up on as part of a potential project. Personally, I keep things like this in a separate drawer (or what I would call a "department") of my zettelkasten which acts more like a Memindex (more details on my specific practice). These project and to-do related items are valuable, but I don't treat them with the same level of rigor and indexing that I do for cards with buildable ideas.
Notes from my reading, for my writing, knowledge building, etc. are the ones I keep in my primary zettelkasten department. These are the ones which are better indexed and more highly interlinked.
I know that some here do keep everything more closely integrated and to some extent mine really are are as well. I find that keeping some sort of mental separation about what specific tranches of notes are for can be helpful, and even placing them in separate drawers (or digital areas/folders) may be useful to some. As long as you can search for and find it when you need it, you can't go far wrong. In my case having a specific section for to do items and projects means I'm regularly culling through them, something which I might not be as prone to do in other portions of my collection.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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SOME OTHER THOUGHTS on Antinet Evangelistic Starter Boxes: While watching Scott's 1 on 1 with Peter "The Antinet Prince" when they were discussing having the starting categories somewhere, a thought occurred to me. We should have a box created/manufactured and pre-populated with the main sections, basic outline cards, and some starting cards (a few of each type) with blanks to reformulate some pre-printed excerpt notes. This could have a bunch of foundational stuff from Luhmann's material. It could lead to a whole line of Antinet boxes (cool drawers that are stackable/expandable) and other helpful stuff. I worked for a plastics mold manufacturing company for over 10 years and have a lot of good friends there still. I'd be willing to help in the process if others think this might be a worthwhile endeavor. What do you think u/sscheper?
https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17rbqaz/teaching_is_the_best_way_to_learn/
Example of someone using the phrase "Antinet Evangelistic Starter Boxes". It's a box of cards for god's sake! If you're going to productize it, then be a capitalist about it, but "evangelizing" it?!
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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@DrMaddy101 @DrMaddy101 @DrMaddy101 1 month ago hey, thanks for your input - you sound like an advanced Zettelkasten-er. Any recommendations for those that want the full version? Show less Read more 0 Like 0 Dislike Reply @DrMaddy101 @DrMaddy101 0/ Cancel Reply Add a reply... @jsnyrty3917 1 month ago @DrMaddy101 not advanced simply used primary sources and secondary sources like Scott Scheper’s youtube channel which explains it accurately.
reply to @DrMaddy101 and jsnyrty3917 at #
I would recommend caution here as Scheper approaches the subject like a cult, which it patently is not. He also has the tendency to gatekeep, gaslight others, and create a toxic environment. He's selling you something, and he's being rude about it at the same time. Even though he attempts to maintain something closely akin to Luhmann's practice, his poorly edited book distinctly suggests some very non-Luhmann-esque practices. The zettelkasten tradition is much richer and deeper than the surface level discussion of Luhmann. Using him as your only model is perforce going to be tremendously limiting. You'll find additional excellent (and even some more productive) examplars hiding in the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, Philip Melancthon, Konrad Gessner, John Locke, Carl Linnaeus, Thomas Harrison, Vincentius Placcius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, S. D. Goitein, Gotthard Deutsch, Beatrice Webb, Sir James Murray, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mortimer J. Adler, Niklas Luhmann, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Jacques Barzun, Vladimir Nabokov, George Carlin, Twyla Tharp, Gertrud Bauer, and even Eminem. We really need to put an end to the "Cult of Luhmann" philosophy which is going around.
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Want a Simplified Zettelkasten? For Beginners by Dr Maddy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w15joVA4pIc
Very quick and to the point.
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It's a method that was first developed by Nicholas Luhmann. —Dr. Maddy 00:00:42
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In reality, the research experience mattersmore than the topic.”
Extending off of this, is the reality that the research experience is far easier if one has been taught a convenient method, not only for carrying it out, but space to practice the pieces along the way.
These methods can then later be applied to a vast array of topics, thus placing method above topic.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I read the book and especially the chapter on numeric-alpha IDs, but I seem to be missing something. The explanation in the chapter seemed rather terse.
Perhaps the only terse part of the book then evidently.
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level 2Apprehensive_Net5630Op · 3 hr. agoI've come to think the thousands category is kind of superfluous. Instead of starting 2000, just start a card "2 management" and then create a card "25 leadership" and add below, e.g. "251 blah blah", "252 blah blah"2ReplyShareReportSaveFollowlevel 3marco89lcdm · 2 hr. agoMmm.. interesting .. Although I think is too late as I’m already well into the “2000” category and the problem presented once I’ve started to do some leadership cards. Those are 3 or 4 and I can still amend the ID number, but the management one are almost 30 already, I don’t feel like changing everything while so well advanced.. this could put me off from keeping doing it completely. Maybe worth knowing that I didn’t have an exhaustive index yet.. because of the fact that IDing the card is not clear for me
reply to u/Apprehensive_Net5630 and u/marco89lcdm at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17m7ggz/comment/k83bou9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Don't sweat the difference as there is a one-to-one and onto (or bijective) relationship between what you're doing and what u/Apprehensive_Net5630 suggests. Mathematicians would call the relationship homomorphic (ie: of the same shape), so other than the make-work exercise, you'd end up with the same exact thing with the same ordering in the end.
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Cannot get it either to be honest. I want to use the antinet method for 2 main topics: Management and Personal growthIn management, for sure needs to add notion of leadership for example: how to approach the coding identification? I’ve assigned 2000 to management: shall I assign 2500 to all cards related to leadership? This is just an example, it’s a bit unclear for me so far.
reply to u/marco89lcdm at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17m7ggz/comment/k839k22/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
The way you're currently thinking is a top down approach in which you already know everything and you're attempting to organize it to make it easier for others who know nothing about the ideas to find them. The Luhmann model supposes you know nothing about anything to begin with and you're attempting to create order from the bottom up, solely by putting related ideas you're building on close to each other and giving them numbers so that you might find them again when you need them.
If your only use is for those two topics and closely related subtopics and nothing else, then consider not using a Luhmann-artig model? Leave off the numbers and create two tabbed cards with those headings (and possibly related subheadings) and then sort your related cards behind them. (This is closer to the commonplace book tradition maintained on index cards and used by those like Mortimer J. Adler et al., Robert Greene, Ryan Holiday and Billy Oppenheimer. Example: https://billyoppenheimer.com/notecard-system/)
Otherwise the mistake you may be making is mentally associating the top level numbers with the topics. Break this habit! The numbers are only there so you can index ideas against them to be able to find them again! These numbers aren't like the Dewey Decimal system where 510.### will always mean something to do with math. You'll specifically want to intermingle disparate topics, so the only purpose the numbers provide is the ability to find what you're looking for by using the index which will give you a neighborhood in which you'll find the ideas you know are going to be hiding there or very near by.
Cards that are near to each other (using the numbers as an idea of ordering and re-finding) create a neighborhood of related ideas, even if they're disparate in topics. This might allow you to intermingle two related ideas, one which is in anthropology and another from mathematics for example, but which would otherwise potentially be thousands of cards away from each other if done in a Dewey-like system.
Or to take your example, what do you do with an idea that relates to both management AND personal growth? If it's closer to an idea on management you might place it near a related idea on that branch rather than in the personal growth section where it may be potentially less useful in the future. (You can always cross index them if need be, but place it where it creates the closest link and thus likely the greatest value for building on top of your previous ideas.)
For more on this, try: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/27/thoughts-on-zettelkasten-numbering-systems/
I suspect that Scheper suggests using the Academic Outline of Disciplines as a numbering structure because it's an early choice he made for himself and it provides a perch to give people a concrete place to start. Sadly this does a disservice because it's closer to the older commonplace topical method rather than to the spirit of the ordering that Luhmann was doing. It's especially difficult for beginners who have a natural tendency to want to do this sort of top-down approach.
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www.flickr.com www.flickr.com
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Wörgötter, Michael. “Schriftenkartei [Typeface Index], 1958–1971.” Photo sharing social website. Flickr, 2023. https://www.flickr.com/photos/letterformarchive/albums/72177720310834741. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
Found via: Coles, Stephen. “This Just In: Schriftenkartei, a Typeface Index.” Letterform Archive, November 3, 2023. https://letterformarchive.org/news/schriftenkartei-german-font-index/.
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letterformarchive.org letterformarchive.org
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At the time of their printing, only the members of West Germany’s National Printing Association could buy the cards. The circulation is estimated at fewer than 400 copies. Of these, only four were known to exist in publicly accessible collections, all in Germany — until now.
All seven of West Germany's metal type foundries collaborated to create a card index catalog (Schriftenkartei) of their typefaces. These included Bauersche Gießerei, H. Berthold AG, Genzsch & Heyse, Ludwig & Mayer, D. Stempel AG, Johannes Wagner GmbH, and C. E. Weber.
Fewer than 400 copies of the card index were available for purchase by members of West German's National Printing association.
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A notice sent to recipients of the Schriftenkartei: “With the 5th delivery you receive today, you have index cards with 527 typefaces. The type index is now complete for the time being. From now on, you will only receive the corresponding type sample index cards from the office of your responsible regional association for the newly created typefaces that are included in the casting program of the German type foundries.” In the end there were a total of 638 typeface cards, adding up to about 200 families.
The initial version of the Schriftenkartei had 527 typefaces (and thus cards), but with the release of subsequent typefaces it eventually grew to 638 typeface cards accounting for up to about 200 families.
-via postcard from the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der graphischen Verbände des deutschen Bundesgebietes e.V., Bundesverband Buchdruck (Working Group of the German Graphic Associations, Federal Book-Printing Division)
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zettelkasten.sorenbjornstad.com zettelkasten.sorenbjornstad.com
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Example of a public Zettelkasten using TiddlyWiki by Soren Bjornstad. https://zettelkasten.sorenbjornstad.com/
He's open sourced portions of it for use by others who are interested.
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https://github.com/xylous/settle.vim
ᔥEmory L. (@emory@soc.kvet.ch) at Oct 10, 2023, 08:57 (accessed:: 2023-11-03 11:10:02)
i got totally derailed by learning about a rust package called
settelthat is essentially a #zettelkasten framework? #sqlite is involved as a datastore but tl;dr: here's a #repository forsettle.vimwhich is a plugin that enables #settle in #neovim or #vim: https://github.com/xylous/settle.vimmore about settle: https://github.com/xylous/settle
i'll have to come back to this later, i overslept today! #readlater #futureEmory
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I'm in the same boat haha I enjoyed some parts of Obsidian but came back to Notion due to the user experience. I use a Zettelkasten system in the sense of a daily note but the big part that was missing for me was the ability to query all your todos into one view which I had to build an integration for. I talk about it more here if you're interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/17kfm1k/aggregating_all_todos_into_one_view/
via u/mannyocean at https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/17mg82a/zettelkasten_in_notion/
He seems to define "zettelkasten" in a productivity sense and not in the currently broader Luhmannian sense.
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citeseerx.ist.psu.edu citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
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via Barycenter0 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17gmrj8/comment/k6rkguz/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 It's so interesting to look back - this fascinating paper by Sigel from 2001 mentions Luhmann and his Zettelkasten as means to knowledge organization and topic mapping:
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Analog zettelkasten for natural sciences .t3_17kui2u._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
Reply to u/Wooden-School-4091 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17kui2u/analog_zettelkasten_for_natural_sciences/
Given that Carl Linnaeus "invented" the standardized 3x5 inch index card and used it heavily in his scientific work (read Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Müller-Wille's works for more on his practice), and a variety of others including me, use it for mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., Zettelkasten can certainly be used for STEM, STEAM, and any of the natural sciences.
See also, notes and links at: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22zettelkasten+for+studying%22
If I were using it for classes/university/general studying via lectures, I'd base my practice primarily on Cornell Notes in combination with creating questions/cards for spaced repetition and/or a variation on Leitner's System.
Some of the best material on spaced repetition these days can be found via:
- Soren Bjornstad: https://controlaltbackspace.org/repeat/
- Piotr Wozniak: https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm
and other material on their sites.
Beyond this, I'd focus my direct zettelkasten practice less on the learning portion and more on the developing or generating ideas portion of the work. Some of my practice with respect to mathematics can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17bqztm/applying_zettelkasten_for_math_heavy_subjects/
For those interested, it may bear mentioning that Bjornstad, an engineer at Remnote, has a TiddlyWiki-based zettelkasten at https://zettelkasten.sorenbjornstad.com/#PublicHomepage:PublicHomepage which he demonstrates with a walk through at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjpjE5pMZMI
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- Oct 2023
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medium.com medium.com
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Another friend and a contemporary of Darwin, The Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle, also wrote positively about Darwin’s note-taking method. In his book “La Phytographie: Or, The Art Of Describing Plants Considered From Different Points Of View”, de Candolle discussed the benefits of using slips of paper to record observations, a practice that he and his father had used in their own work. He noted that Darwin had independently developed the same method, and that he was “more impressed with it than ever”.Here is an excerpt from de Candolle’s book (translated from the French):“Mr. Darwin, whom I had the pleasure of seeing, used for his notes exactly the same method of loose slips that my father and I have followed, and which I have described in detail in my Phytographie. Eighty years of our experience have demonstrated to me its value. I am more impressed with it than ever, since Darwin devised it on his own. This method gives the work more accuracy, supplements memory, and saves years.”
Another example of similar methods.
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productivehappiness.substack.com productivehappiness.substack.com
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Zettlekasten is an index card method of storing notes for future use. Popularized by Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle is The Way, the Zettlekasten system has gained a lot of traction in recent years. YouTuber Greg Wheeler, in this short but very detailed video, shares how he integrates the Zettlekasten system with Tiago Forte’s second brain methodology in a complete walkthrough:
We have now reached peak zettelkasten-I-just-don't-know-what-the-definition-even-is-anymore. And this is a Substack focused on productivity.
The definition of zettelkasten here is the lowest possible version.
It's (falsely, I think) described as "popularized by Ryan Holiday" who has a form of practice, but doesn't describe it as zettelkasten. (Has he ever used the word on his blog? There's one throw away mention to it and Luhmann #, Google doesn't find any others.)
Then as a cherry on top, he presents a mélange of methods as a Hybrid PKM system.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Yeah, I want back in search history and see Sascha started around 2014. There are hardly any references to ZK before 2012.
reply tu u/sscheper and u/Barycenter0 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17gmrj8/before_2021_who_here_was_using_a_luhmannian/
Before 2021, who here was using a Luhmannian analog Zettelkasten?
This blogpost by Manfred Kuehn dating from 2007-12-16 is one of the earliest posts about Luhmann's Zettelkasten I've seen referenced on the early web (at least in an English language setting). You'll notice that Christian Tietze, the creator of zettelkasten.de, pops up in the comments, though it wasn't until almost six years later.
Daniel Lüdecke was also obviously reading Kuehn by 2013 and making his digital version of ZKN3. His post has a reference to a 2001 web post in German, but sadly it's not archived. One might presume he tried physical index cards prior to implementing his digital solution.
German speakers may be better versed to indicate a greater number of potential users in the 80s through the 00s as Luhmann's paper and method were relatively well known, though physical index cards were obviously going out of fashion during that time period. It's most likely that it was academics using it. By the late 00s into 2015, there were probably several dozens of people doing this practice, but identifying/contacting them will require a lot of legwork.
The zettelkasten.de forum and blog posts may indicate quite a number of users prior to 2021, but I'll leave that work to others. Christian and Sasha may have better approximations for that time period.
Given the number of digital users who are probably all mostly Luhmann-adjacent in their practices (at best), there likely still aren't a lot of people (digital or analog) who are following his particular recipe or method. Most of what I see discussed in zettelkasten and zettelkasten adjacent spaces online these days could best be described as a mélange of commonplace book and wiki-esque methods with a focus toward smaller atomic level notes. Most practices vary across a pretty wide spectrum.
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www.thenewatlantis.com www.thenewatlantis.com
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Links are associative. This is a huge deal. Links are there not only as a quick way to get to source material. They aren’t a way to say, hey here’s the interesting thing of the day. They remind you of the questions you need to ask, of the connections that aren’t immediately evident.
links can be used for search
links remind you of questions you need to ask
links can suggest other future potential links of which one isn't yet aware or which haven't fully manifested, this is some of the "magic" of the zettelkasten—it creates easy potential for future links not yet manifest.
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Let’s look at some of the attributes of the memex. Your machine is a library not a publication device. You have copies of documents is there that you control directly, that you can annotate, change, add links to, summarize, and this is because the memex is a tool to think with, not a tool to publish with.
Alan Jacobs argues that the Memex is not a tool to publish with and is thus fundamentally different from the World Wide Web.
Did Vannevar Bush suggest the Memex for writing or potentially publishing? [Open question to check] Would it have been presumed to have been for publishing if he suggests that it was for annotating, changing, linking and summarizing? Aren't these actions tantamount to publishing, even if they're just for oneself?
Wouldn't academics have built the one functionality in as a precursor to the other?
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help.metaslip.com help.metaslip.com
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Multi-platform zettelkasten app with local data stored as markdown.
saw mention via https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17gvobz/metaslip_app/
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Posted byu/practicalSloth2 days agoAnyone use a FiloFax or similar for a commonplace book? .t3_17drtzn._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } I really like the idea of being able to re-sort pages and was wondering if anyone has tried something like this? I've also considered an "Everbook", but was a bit concerned with all the loose pages of paper flying around everywhere
u/practicalSloth interested in implementing a commonplace book using a FiloFax!
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londonrealtv.libsyn.com londonrealtv.libsyn.com
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Is this the same/similar to the (now missing) interview on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ueMHkGljK0)?
See notes at: https://hypothes.is/a/NhpRyjhEEe2Yu8s-XRsrrQ
compare with https://londonreal.tv/robert-greene-power-seduction-war/# which looks like the embedded video is also missing.
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available at 