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

Were any of Arendt's Adolf Eichmann file notes done on index cards? Their arrangement, if any?

Did Karl Jaspers have a zettelkasten practice? Did he specifically pass it along to students, like Arendt?

Source for this?

Sounds very similar to Eminem's "stacking ammo".

https://www.coreycarvalho.com/

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.

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?!

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.

Want a Simplified Zettelkasten? For Beginners by Dr Maddy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w15joVA4pIc

Very quick and to the point.

It's a method that was first developed by Nicholas Luhmann. —Dr. Maddy 00:00:42

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.

Perhaps the only terse part of the book then evidently.

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.

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.

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/.

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.

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)

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.

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 settel that is essentially a #zettelkasten framework? #sqlite is involved as a datastore but tl;dr: here's a #repository for settle.vim which is a plugin that enables #settle in #neovim or #vim: https://github.com/xylous/settle.vim

more about settle: https://github.com/xylous/settle

i'll have to come back to this later, i overslept today! #readlater #futureEmory

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.

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:

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=38894f1fe3ec234cc7e2ba3287c758c2243bd692

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

Another example of similar methods.

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.

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.

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.

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?

https://discord.com/channels/992400632390615070/992428117467615333/1163824618759520318

https://metaslip.com

Multi-platform zettelkasten app with local data stored as markdown.

saw mention via https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17gvobz/metaslip_app/

u/practicalSloth interested in implementing a commonplace book using a FiloFax!

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.

Hay, Daisy. Review of Rare, Obsolete, New, Peculiar, by Sarah Ogilvie. London Review of Books, October 19, 2023. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/daisy-hay/rare-obsolete-new-peculiar.

are there specific numbers?

Presumably compiled by zettelkasten as well?

reply to u/acosmicjoke at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17bqztm/applying_zettelkasten_for_math_heavy_subjects/

Most of my math section in my ZK is primarily very basic definitions and theorems. I have very few proofs of basic things outside of my own personal work. There is an occasional useful example or two or lists of various lists of things that fit certain structures (lists of groups, rings, fields, categories, etc.)

Digital notes just don't work for me at all with respect to math, so I'm all-in on index cards and simply typeset all the necessary parts when I'm done with something if I intend to publish or share with others. Paper also makes it much easier to shuffle things around and reshape pieces as necessary to try out different structural approaches.

I also have a short stack of method cards (not dissimilar to Eno & Schmidt's "Oblique Strategies", but with a mathematical bent) to remind me of different approaches to try out when I get stuck which has been pretty beneficial.

I also take a fairly segmented approach between the writing I do for understanding a math text as I'm reading it and the permanent sort of notes I specifically make after-the-fact. My goal is never to recreate entire textbooks within the main section of my own zettelkasten, but create material for new works I might be writing for others to read.

Of course this is the basis of keeping a zettelkasten for writing as well. When you can pull up prior ideas as a bank of information to work from, you're never starting from scratch, which is difficult not only for ChatGPT, but for people in general.

Cross reference research on naming "white" things versus naming with a more specific prompt like "white" things in your refrigerator.

reply to u/IamOkei at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5s6aek/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

u/IamOkei, I know you've got a significant enough practice that not much of what I might suggest may be helpful beyond your own extension of what you've got and how it is or isn't working for you. Perhaps chatting with a zettelkasten therapist may be helpful? Does anyone have "Zettelkasten Whisperer" on a business card yet?! More seriously, I occasionally dump some of my problems and issues into a notebook, unpublished on my blog, or even into a section of my own zettelkasten, which I never index or reconsult, as a helpful practice. Others like Henry David Thoreau have done something like this and there's a common related practice of writing "Morning Pages" that you can explore. My own version is somewhat similar to the idea of rubber duck debugging but focuses on my own work. You might try doing something like this in one of Bob Doto's cohorts or by way of private consulting sessions. Another free version of this could be found by participating in Will's regular weekly posts/threads "Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week" at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/. It's always a welcoming and constructive space. There are also some public and private (I won't out them) Discords where some of the practiced hands chat and commiserate with each other. Even the Obsidian PKM/Zettelkasten Discord channels aren't very Obsidian/digital-focused that you couldn't participate as an analog practitioner. I've even found that participating in book clubs related to some of my interests can be quite helpful in talking out ideas before writing them down. There are certainly options for working out and extending your own practice.

Beyond this, and without knowing more of your specific issues, I can only offer some broad thoughts which expand on some of the earlier discussion above.

I recommend stripping away Scheper's religious fervor, some of which he seems to have thrown over lately along with the idea of a permanent note or "main card" (something I think is a grave mistake), and trying something closer to Luhmann's idea of ZKII.

An alternate method, especially if you like a nice notebook or a particular fountain pen, might be to take all of your basic literature/fleeting notes along with the bibliographic data in a notebook and then just use your analog index cards/slips to make your permanent notes and your index.

Ultimately it's all a lot of the same process, though it may come down to what you want to call it and your broad philosophy. If you're anti-antinet, definitely quit using the verbiage for the framing there and lean toward the words used by Ahrens, Dan Allosso, Gerald Weinberg, Mark Bernstein, Umberto Eco, Beatrice Webb, Jacques Barzun & Henry Graff, or any of the dozens of others or even make up your own. Goodness knows we need a lot more names and categories for types of notes—just like we all need another one page blog post about how the Zettelkasten method works by someone who's been at it for a week. Maybe someone will bring all these authors to terms one day?

Generally once you know what sorts of ideas you're most interested in, you take fewer big notes on administrivia and focus more of your note taking towards your own personal goals and desires. (Taking notes to learn a subject are certainly game, but often they serve little purpose after-the-fact.) You can also focus less on note taking within your entertainment reading (usually a waste) and focusing more heavily on richer material (books and journal articles) that is "above you" in Adler's framing. You might make hundreds of highlights and annotations in a particular book, but only get two or three serious ideas and notes out of it ultimately. Focus on this and leave the rest. If you're aware of the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule, then spend the majority of your time on the grander permanent notes (10-20%), and a lot less time worrying about the all the rest (the 80-90%).

In the example above relating to Marx, you can breeze through some low level introductory material for context, but nothing is going to beat reading Marx himself a few times. The notes you make on his text will have tremendously more value than the ones you took on the low level context. A corollary to this is that you're highly unlikely to earn a Ph.D. or discover massive insight by reading and taking note posts on Twitter, Medium, or Substack (except possibly unless your work is on the cultural anthropology of those platforms).

A lot of the zettelkasten spaces focus heavily on the note taking part of the process and not enough on the quality of what you're reading and how you're reading it. This portion is possibly more valuable than the note taking piece, but the two should be hand-in-glove and work toward something.

I suspect that most people who have 1000 notes know which five or ten are the most important to where they're going and how they're growing. Focus on those and your "conversations with texts" relating to those. The rest is either low level context for where you're headed or either pure noise/digital exhaust.

If you think of ideas as incunables, which notes will be worth of putting on your tombstone? In other words: What are your "tombstone notes"? (See what I did there? I came up with another name for a type of note, a sin for which I'm certainly going to spend a lot of time in zettelkasten purgatory.)

reply to u/Admirable_Discount75 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/knowledge_that_is_excluded_from_synthesis/

What is your purpose/need/desire to turn all this material into individual zettels or atomic ideas? If you've read the material, taken some literature notes, and reviewed them a bit, don't you broadly now know and understand the methodology? If this is the point and you might only need your notes/outline to review occasionally, then there's nothing else you need to do. If you're comparing other similar methodologies and comparing and contrasting them, then perhaps it's worth breaking some of them out into their own zettels to connect to other things you're working on. Perhaps you're going to write your own book on the topic? Then having better notes on the subject is worthwhile. If you don't have a good reason or gut feeling for why you would want or need to do it, taking hundreds of notes from a book and splitting them all into interconnected atomic notes is solely busy work.

It's completely acceptable to just keep your jumble of literature notes next to your bibliographic entry for potential future reference or quick review if necessary. Perhaps you've gotten everything you need from this source without creating any permanent notes? Or maybe only one or two of the hundreds are actually valuable to your potential long term goals?<br /> It's really only the material you feel that is relevant to your longer term goals, research, and synthesis needs that's worthwhile breaking out into permanent notes/zettels.

syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5lr0mz/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Just as Adler and Van Doren (1972) suggest that most books are only worth a quick inspectional read and fewer are worth a deeper, analytical read, most (fleeting) notes, highlights, and annotations you make are only worth their quick scribble while vanishingly few others are worthy of greater expansion and permanent note status. You might also find by extension that some of the most valuable work you'll do is syntopical reading and the creation of high value syntopical notes which you can weave into folgezettel (sequences of notes) that generate new knowledge.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that everything needs to be a perfect, permanent note. If you're distilling and writing one or two good permanent notes a day, you're killing it; the rest is just sour mash.

As ever, practice to see what works best for your needs.

Scott continues in his efforts not to make any main notes, but is pushing the indexing of ideas where they live directly in books using only a topic in his index and a page number.

He calls this practice, which he himself practices, sacrilegious. 00:00:27

What happened to pushing knowledge-building?!?

This is the second video I've seen him do this. (Previously: https://hypothes.is/a/28AkYFadEe6ZH_MjTZlnLQ). So his Antinet zettelkasten is now primarily an index and bibliographic cards with fleeting notes. He's specifically leaving out any of what he has previously called main notes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrN0kaE6DkY<br /> Is The Zettelkasten Method Really The Best Personal Knowledge Management System? by Anthony Metivier

meh...

reply to u/daneb1 and u/qnnnp at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17a0ze0/comment/k5pdgdf/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Hans Blumemberg's zettelkasten click-bait is apparently a thing!?! 🤣🤪Thanks u/Idaneb1, I feel seen, but I'll bet I'm one of only two or three who would fall for it. I had already read all of the underlying linked source material, so the quote wouldn't have helped in my case.

u/qnnnp, you're going to have to go a lot deeper for those two clicks next time. Plow through https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/collections/EP7GRG2W (or better yet, sources that aren't on it) and get back to us with something exciting! We can't wait to see what pops out.

Only for fun, I'll raise your joker with my joker "flush". 🃏♦️♣️♥️♠️🗃️ #JokerZettelClickBaitWarningFTW #ShowUsAllYourCards

Very confusing video on zettelkasten.

• reference note and literate note as separate; though I get the workflow of summarising highlights (just call it only literature or reference notes, call the highlights, highlights, or marginalia)
• fleeting notes seen as todo (which it shouldn't)

These add up to be a lot of "homework" for the user: fleeting notes tasks, going from reference notes to literature notes.

• Then goes on to say that keeping two different notes (reference and literature notes) "gives him permission to not be so selective for highlighting".

Being selective with a book (or anything you read), is actually very important. Making short annotations of what you read, be it marginalia, whatever, is a way we can subvert the homework process (because we already did the thinking as we read it).

04:23 he says that making the literature note forces him to think about the book, but we can be more active when reading, annotating and stuff, so that we don't need to do his process.

The flip side of the collector's fallacy....

reply to u/Flubber78769 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17ajd34/ive_been_struggling_with_duplicate_notes_within/

This is the value of actually indexing your content. You can do a quick search around the index entries which provides a natural check against duplication, but importantly it'll let you think about those ideas again and spend your time more profitably by expanding upon them instead.

Occasionally I'll find duplication from one source to the next which provides some support about an idea's value or spread over time, especially when I'm tracking usage of a thing, so it's not always the case that duplication is automatically a bad thing.

Three Questions About Note-Taking Systems by ANDREI SUKHOVSKII<br /> OCT 11, 2023<br /> https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/three-questions-about-note-taking

very low level....

Annotations at https://docdrop.org/video/qRSCKSPMuDc/

Zettelkasten section at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRSCKSPMuDc&t=2246s

Hans Blumenberg and his Zettelkasten by Andrei Shukhovskii https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/hans-blumenberg-and-his-zettelkasten

nothing new to me...

https://joonhyeokahn.substack.com/p/demystify-zettelkasten

If you've not already spent some time with the idea, this short one pager is unlikely to "demystify" anything. Yet another zk one-pager, and not one of the better ones.

Machine translation:

No. I started the Zettelkasten out of the simple thought that I have a bad memory. First of all, I put pieces of paper in books on which I wrote notes, so the covers of the books got ruined. Then I helped myself with folders, but when they got thicker I couldn't find anything in them. In 1952 or 1953, I started my Zettelkasten because I realized that I had to plan for a life and not for a book.

There's some missing interstitial space here about how precisely he came to it outside of the general motivation for the thing in general.

52/53 would have been after law school and in his administrative days and before his trip to Harvard in 61.

sofort weiß, wie es geht. Wenn ich einen Moment stocke, lege ich die Sache beiseite und mache etwas anderes.

Was machen Sie dann'?

Na, andere Bücher schreiben. Ich arbeite immer gleichzeitig an mehreren verschiedenen Texten. Mit dieser Methode, immer an mehreren Dingen zu arbeiten, habe ich nie Blockierungen.

Rough translation:

— I have to tell you: I never force anything, I only do what comes easy to me. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.

(Interviewer): What do you do then?

Well, write other books. I always work on several different texts at the same time. With this method of always working on multiple things, I never have any blockages.

waren. Diese Technik, so glaube ich, erklärt auch, warum ich überhaupt nicht linear denke und beim Bücherschreiben Mühe habe, die richtige Kapitelfolge zu finden, weil eigentlich ja jedes Kapitel in jedem anderen Kapitel wieder vorkommen müßte

Niklas Luhmann's process for writing from his box

Machine translation:

Q: When you start writing an essay, how do you put your note box to work?

I first make a plan for what I want to write and then take out what I can use from the note box.

Q: In contrast to a builder who only assembles prefabricated parts, a scientist must also have new ideas that are not already contained in the individual parts. Ideas like these don't come from a note box?

But. For example, I have a large set of notes on the term "functional differentiation", I also have a set of notes on "self-referential systems", and I have a large set of notes on "binarity". At the moment I am giving a lecture on ecological problems in modern societies, and my work consists of sifting through pieces of paper from the three conceptual areas outlined and combining them so that I can say something substantive on this topic. The new ideas then arise from the different possible combinations of the pieces of paper for the individual terms. Without the notes, just by thinking about it, I wouldn't come up with ideas like that. Of course my mind is required to record the ideas, but it cannot be held solely responsible for them. In this respect, I work like a computer, which can also be creative in the sense that by combining input data it produces new results that could not have been predicted. I think this technique also explains why I don't think linearly at all and why I have trouble finding the right sequence of chapters when writing books, because every chapter should actually appear in every other chapter.

An interviewer asked Luhmann if every thought that went through his head was saved into his zettelkasten, and Luhmann replied yes. This is obviously a level of conversational hyperbole.

Luhmann indicates that most of his zettelkasten notes are his own thoughts, but some are quotes, which he uses rarely.

In this interview, Lumnann indicates that he learned a number of organizational tricks while studying law.

What specifically were these? Relation to his ZK?

Any relation to Bruno First's memory work which grew out of his legal studies in the early 1900s?

With heavy early interest in anthropology, sociology and philosophy including Malinowski, it's more likely that Luhmann would have been trained in historical methods which included the traditions of note taking using card indices of that time.

In the early 1950s, Luhmann spent a year at the Lüneburg Higher Administrative Court organizing a reference system for the administrative court decisions to enable researchers to see what decisions had been made in the higher courts.

Though he had begun his zettelkasten during his studies, this referencing system may have influenced the structure of his own note taking system.

Can we pin the dates on these practices down more closely?

"Biography, Attitudes, Zettelkasten" was published under the title "The Zettelkasten costs me more time than writing books" in the Frankfurter Rundschau on Saturday, April 27, 1985, p. ZB 3, abridged.

To some extent, Luhmann felt that his books wrote themselves. He spent an inordinate amount of time writing out notes and filing them into his zettelkasten. The writing portion consisted primarily of typing out the manuscript and after writing it, he usually didn't revise it.

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/LG--lGpmEe6yvy8lp7nfPw

Luhmann felt that he spent more time working with his zettelkasten than the amount of time it took him to write his papers or books.

Luhmann attributed his productivity to the use of his zettelkasten.

During his studies Niklas Luhmann began using his zettelkasten in the early 1950s.

reply to u/Wooden-School-4091 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/172ujnk/should_i_use_zettelkasten/

This comes up fairly frequently. See https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27zettelkasten+for+studying%27 and related links for other variations and advice on this theme.

https://zeti.space/

A zettelkasten tool with potential AI functionality for linking. Cloud and local storage available.

heard about via: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/173ryxu/we_built_a_novel_tool_just_for_zetelkasten_with/

reply to u/dotinvoke at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/175a6tr/are_links_still_better_than_search_in_the_age_of/

The value in the process is making a ratchet of ideas which is highly customized to building your own lines of thought or "associative trails" if you prefer Vannevar Bush's framing.

If your idea worked, then one could "simply" rely on Google's database and a variety of associated tools to act as your zettelkasten—Bob's your uncle and you're done! In practice, you'll find that this doesn't work well. You can experiment, but I think you'll find that your own limited choices of links will work far better than the infinite number of adjacent possible links that a digital system may create on your behalf. If you're already fighting information overload, you don't want to add link overload to your list of problems.

Put in a different light, it can be interesting to randomly flip a coin and go left on heads and right on tails to see where you might end up, particularly if you're unsure. But if you actively make your own choices, you're more likely to be happier with what you see along the way and where you end up.

Excerpt of the original Dutch:

Vader heeft voor Margot en mij een kartotheekdoos leeggemaakt en er kaarjtes in gedaan. Dit wort de boekenkartotheek, we schrijven namelikj alle twee op welke boeken we gelezen hebben, ...

In the original Dutch Anne Frank uses the word "kartotheekdoos" which the translator then uses "card file".

—Anne Frank (1929-1945), diary entry dated Saturday, February 27, 1943 (age 13)

Anne Frank was given an empty card file by her father who filled it with index cards that were blank on one side. They were intended to use it as a "reading file" in which she and Margot were "supposed to note down the books we've read, the author and the date."

In the same entry she mentioned that she'd bought a separate notebook for writing down new words she encountered. Recent words she mentions encountering were "brothel" and "coquette".

Anne Frank (June 12, 1929-1945)<br /> Niklas Luhmann (December 8, 1927-1998)

Niklas Luhmann was a year and a half older than Anne Frank who received her first card index file in February 1943 (likely between the 27th, the date of her diary entry mentioning it and the prior diary entry on February 5th), from her father at the age of 13. She was intended to use it as a "reading file" to note down the books she'd read along with the author and the date.

One can only wonder at how many entries she would have made over the span of her life had it not come to such an abrupt end.

In a diary entry dated Monday, November 2, 1942, Anne Frank in an entry in which she includes a post script about the "important news that [she's] probably going to get [her] period soon." she mentions spending some time sorting out an index card file. Presumably it had been used for business purposes as she mentions that she got it from the office. Given that it had "fallen over and gotten all mixed up", it presumably didn't use a card rod to hold the cards in. It must have been a fairly big task as she asked for help from two people and not getting it, she abandoned the task because, as she wrote: "I'm not crazy enough to do it all by myself!"

Someone complaining of Scott Scheper's teaching/pedagogy/"system".

One needs to read a bit between the lines with only the initial context, but they circled around later to say:

I am talking about that A**net guy

Zettelkasten courses and teachers

Having someone who is experienced, cares, and knows the entirety of their space can be invaluable to speed you on your way to having at least an idea of the space in general and then give you pointers on your particular practice and needs. There is tremendous amount of ink spilled on the idea of zettelkasten, some of it good, some of it remarkably bad, and most of it painfully generic and useless.

Most of those I know who have serious practices have spent an inordinate amount of time reading and refining to come to where they are. They, and I, would all probably think that a good teacher and class on the subject could have saved them hundreds (thousands?) of hours of time and in exchange for a couple of hundred dollars. How much is your time worth in the balance? Can you read a cheap book or two on the topic? A few blog posts? Certainly, and many have, yet there are still lots of very basic questions which pop up here and elsewhere. Buying a book isn't the end-all either as you've still got to spend the time reading and distilling what's in it. A good instructor can boil down Ahrens' work into twenty minutes and get you up and working a lot more quickly, not to mention distilling down even a fraction of all the other potentially relevant sources.

Most of the questions in this sub-reddit are people asking for pointers either about where to start or examples of specific things they're having trouble with. Of course in the majority of the cases they could simply search this or one or two other sources to find almost exactly what they need, yet here they are posting one of the same 10 questions over and over. (I also generally get the impression that they're only thinking about the system in a theoretical fashion and aren't actually practicing it for themselves.) It's nice to have pointers like the one that u/WM2D2 provides, but how is someone new to the space supposed to find this or other specific sources without the prior knowledge? Simple search is unlikely to uncover the best sources. In my experience, a lot of the best material on zettelkasten practice doesn't even contain the word "zettelkasten" to allow one to find it via search. And what to do if or when it doesn't answer all their questions? Instructors are usually good at distilling down the particulars into a more coherent whole. This is what you're paying for.

Of those who are well-practiced, even fewer have expanded on their own individual practice to look at how others have practiced for a variety of very disparate use cases. Where is this experience to be found? Having looked at and read many sources over the years, it's definitely hard won knowledge. And what about taking the theory and turning it into actual practice? This is where a good teacher will come in handy to help you actually do the work to become better much more rapidly than any book ever could. The rules are easy, it's the practice to turn those rules into a practicable art that is the tougher road.

This being said, there is definitely a spectrum of experience and teaching ability. There are certainly only one or two people I can imagine recommending as a teacher in this specific area. Because this may be some of the most hard won knowledge to come across, I'll mention that u/taurusnoises is one of those I would recommend if you're looking to save your time and come to a useful practice for yourself without spending lots of time floundering around.

written in response to u/IamOkei at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1728f1n/why_are_people_paying_thousand_of_dollars_on/

https://github.com/flengyel/Zettel

An interesting looking and complete template example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQGb3WFEhLQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2RFMCmfRmc

Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York, NY: Tarcher Perigee, 2006.

annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:7d3165882b27dc69918cc2de97baab96

David Lynch uses meditation to expand his container of knowledge.

He's talking about movie making, but it applies to almost anything.

Because Frank Silva was a proverbial slip in David Lynch's living zettelkasten process, he ended up appearing in Twin Peaks by way of the serendipity of Lynch's method of combinatorial creativity.

David Lynch's films are a personally structured output of his zettelkasten of ideas comprised of words, sounds, images, music, sound, people, and moods.

Being an author is having the final cut on a string of ideas placed in a particular order.

The entirety of David Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish (2006) is a series of topically arranged chapters each with just a handful of either simple sentences or very short paragraphs very loosely strung together.

It's almost as if Lynch has taken his zettelkasten of ideas, potentially written on napkins from Bob's Big Boy, and dumped them out into the loose form of a book.

I'll write more in depth about it later, but I just read David Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity https://bookshop.org/a/17195/9781585425402. He definitely has a zettelkasten-like creative process which revolves around "catching ideas". He talks about the philosophy and shape of his practice, but doesn't get into the direct physical form or substrate. He doesn't mention it in the book, but in the late 70s and early 80s his process definitely involved using napkins from Bob's Big Boy restaurant. He was influenced by his teacher Frank Daniel who had a practice of using 3x5 inch index cards for his screenwriting process. The book itself has a very zettelkasten-like flavor, almost as if he wrote ideas on index cards (or napkins), gave them some light arrangement by topic and then tipped the whole into book form without heavy editing. (It would be incredibly easy to cut it back up into individual index cards.) If you're into using zettelkasten for creativity (writing/creating), you'll appreciate some of his philosophy which he also wraps in a very light meditation wrapper.

This short video encapsulates some of the ideas and flavor of his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2RFMCmfRmc.

Syndication link: https://discord.com/channels/992400632390615070/992428117467615333/1158852901192605828

https://www.openculture.com/2018/08/how-david-lynch-got-creative-inspiration.html

Lynch has spoken about the use of 3x5" index cards for screenwriting (via Frank Daniel).

Here he mentions writing down ideas for movies on the napkins provided by Bob's Big Boy restaurant. (zettelkasten made of napkins?)

reply to u/wtagg at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16wgq4l/comment/k356507/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Perhaps the easiest way to frame things is that I use my digital note taking as scaffolding in the learning and research process and the zettels in the digital space are the best filtered outcomes from some of that. If you compare my practice to that of Luhmann's one might consider most of my digital practice to be equivalent to his ZKI. Most of my analog practice is more highly focused and deliberate and is more closely limited to a small handful of topics related to my specific areas of research on memory, orality, intellectual history, Indigenous studies, education, anthropology, and mathematics (and is potentially more like Luhmann's ZK II). As a result, in hindsight—thanks for asking—, I'm simultaneously building my ZK I and ZK II instead of switching mid-career the way Luhmann did. But to be clear, a lot of my ZKII material filters (or digests, if you prefer that analogy) its way through the ZKI process along the way.

reply to u/Rampage_user at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16wgq4l/how_to_get_started_with_zk_and_obsidian/

Perhaps what I've done in Obsidian may help: I've created several folders for individual pieces:

• Zettels folder - contains permanent/atomic/evergreen notes which broadly stand on their own; I give them decimal numbers so that alphabetical sorting within the folder provides me with neighborhoods of ideas without needing to provide direct links from one idea to another on each and every note.
• Bibliography folder - contains individual notes for details about sources (books, articles, videos, etc.) which also contains the fleeting notes related to them (each can have from one to sometimes hundreds of short, not fully formed notes and excerpts);
• Index folder - contains 26 notes, one for each letter of the alphabet each of which has index entries that lead to notes in the zettels folder; Like Luhmann's my index is sparse and I rely on the neighborhoods around the notes that link from the index.

While I do have a few tags, I broadly eschew them as they don't scale well with time in my experience.

Some literature is unspecific about it, but you should know that NOT EVERY FLEETING NOTE NEEDS TO BECOME A PERMANENT NOTE. Only split out the most interesting and potentially future useful ones. Some of my book notes have hundreds of fleeting notes, highlights, etc. and I've only pulled out 3 or 4 permanent notes from them. (The side benefit is that if you need them, you've got links to those fleeting notes for later if you need to review over, use, or convert them.)

Really the best advice is to practice. A Lot. Experience will help you know when your fleeting notes should become permanent ones and how much work they need to become permanent notes. You can always adjust things in the future if your experience helps you simplify things further for you. If you make three permanent notes a week, you're doing better than most. I add 1-5 bibliographic sources a day and average about 50 fleeting notes with only one, or maybe two permanent notes on a good day.

Good luck. Now go practice...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16wj9uz/a_luhmannesque_zettelkasten_in_7_easy_steps/

One of the more compact, yet dense overviews of Luhmann's method.

https://github.com/fdavies93/zenkat

found via https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16w6t9x/i_built_a_free_zettelkasten_tool_for_command_line/

https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/2.1/features/brent/index.htm

An interesting commonplace book-like old school website with an actual "index" and fascinatingly about "Rhetorics of the Web"!

Example of a collected quote: https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/2.1/features/brent/burke.htm

Note also the linked ideas at the bottom of this example.

It also has a references section: https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/2.1/features/brent/referenc.htm

The separations of the pieces and their form is very reminiscent of a zettelkasten and the building up of pieces in places almost admits to a hand-built wiki.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Ty-9pHd2o via morganeua

An analog ZK user who prefers that format because "out of sight is out of mind". (mentioned in beginning of the video)

Overview: Brief conversation about ZK followed by taking some notes and turning them into a Luhmann-artig system.

found via:

Niklas Luhmann rejected out of town teaching positions for fear that his hard copy / analog zettelkasten might get destroyed in the moving process 🧵

— Bob Doto (@thehighpony) August 19, 2022

"He rejected a number of other universities' interests in hiring him...at an early stage, arguing that he couldn't risk taking his Zettelkasten with him in the event of an accident to lose by car, ship, train or plane." https://t.co/SmK2gLJpQ0

— Bob Doto (@thehighpony) August 19, 2022

reference ostensibly in this text, but may need to hunt it down.

Bob confirmed that it was Luhmann Handbuch: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, 2012

reply to u/pakizh at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16vgxy7/ids_or_common_names_for_notes/

Keyword search was definitely available in Luhmann's lifetime. Here's the link to the digitized version of Luhmann's keyword index: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V. Versions of this sort of indexing go back at least to John Locke's method for indexing commonplace books in 1685 (in French) and 1706 (in English). See: https://archive.org/details/13925922180LockeCommonplaceBook/mode/2up for the 1706 version. In a zettelkasten context, instead of indexing page numbers, one simply numbers their index cards and the method works exactly the same. (One could also think of it as creating a library card catalog for one's ideas instead of their books—again, using a personalized numbering system instead of the standardized Dewey Decimal System which is used for books.)

In paper versions, the numbers serve two purposes:

• Allowing the ideas to be indexed and searched for and found again. Full text search in digital contexts may be easier in some instances, but these sorts of searches may not scale well over thousands of notes and may return hundreds of results which need to be looked through to find the correct one. As a result, even good indexing in digital can pay off well in the long run.
• Placing similar ideas next to each other (when filed using numbers) allows areas of interest to build up in one's note collection. This also creates what one might call "soft links" between ideas (versus more direct, hard links using [[WikiLinks]] or explicit links to specific numbered cards). These neighborhoods of ideas eventually build up to something interesting in aggregation. Without these sorts of (decimal or alpha-numeric) numbers, it's more difficult to create this affordance in digital applications (and one has to be more vigilant for orphaned notes). One can use tags or category names in Obsidian along with the graph view to approximate some of this affordance, but it requires more work on the part of the user. Prepending sortable numbers onto the titles of notes can allow these neighborhoods to be more visible in the sidebar folder view found in many digital tools.

Some will suggest or use some sort of date/timestamp number as a unique identifier, but doing this generally has little or no value and most digital systems will automatically add date/time creation and modification timestamps to notes anyway if those are of interest or value.

More details: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/27/thoughts-on-zettelkasten-numbering-systems/

Knowing these potential affordances, try things out for a while to see how they work for you and then decide to continue or change your practice to suit your own needs.

Custom Zettelkasten Stationery?

For those who have a significant paper-based practice, have you considered commissioning custom made cards? There are a variety of stationers who do custom work and one could also purchase directly from Chinese manufacturers to get costs down by buying in bulk.

Ryan Holliday is one of the few I've seen in the wild who has mentioned custom making cards, usually done on a per-project (book) basis where he'll put a header title at the top of his note cards. Example: https://www.instagram.com/p/CeWV6xBuZUN/?hl=en

Other options could include doing custom/personalized stamps. (I have a date stamp handy for quickly stamping the dates of creation/updating in the corner of cards.)

I'm curious what suppliers/manufacturers folks have researched/used? What were your experiences? What sort of templates or printing did you use on them? Paper weight? Did you go Grid, blank, dot, lined, or all of the above? If you were looking to purchase something for yourself, what would you want?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10jx7gg/wooden_antinet_zettelkasten/

Scott Scheper commissioned a two drawer solid wood (cedar) zettelkasten box similar to those from the early 20th century. He had it listed on his website initially for $995 and then later for a reduced $495.

He created a waitlist sign up for it, ostensibly to test the interest in manufacturing/selling them as a product. To my knowledge he never made any beyond the initial prototype.

The high cost likely dampened interest compared to the much cheaper primary and secondary markets for these sorts of storage containers.

See also:<br /> - $995 https://web.archive.org/web/20230124062200/https://www.antinet.org/wooden-antinet-waitlist - $495 reduction https://web.archive.org/web/20230306195625/https://www.antinet.org/wooden-antinet-waitlist

https://wiki.openglobalmind.com/what%E2%80%99s_a_neobook_

Conference calls at 10:30 AM on Mondays. Search YouTube for past occurrences.

Relationship to wikis and zettelkasten for accumulating knowledge as a ratchet.

Jerry Michalski says that The Brain provides him with a "neighborhood perspective" of ideas when he reduces the external link number for his graph down to 1.

This is similar to Nicholas Luhmann's zettelkasten which provided neighborhoods of related notes based on distance from any particular note.

Also similar to oral cultures who relied on movement through their environment for encoding memories and later remembering them. [I'll use the tag "environmental memory" to track this until a better name comes along.]

reply to u/JonasanOniem at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ss0yu/comment/k2buxsc/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

In digital contexts it is much easier and very common to create orphaned notes that aren't connected to anything. In a paper zettelkasten, you are forced to file your note somewhere and give it a number (only to be able to find it again—it's difficult, but try not to make the mistake of conflating your number with the idea of category). The physical act of placing it in your slipbox creates an implicit link to the things around it. As a result, your four notes would all initially seem to be directly related because they're nearby, but over time, they will naturally drift apart as you intersperse new notes between and among them. Though if they're truly directly interrelated, you can write down explicit links from notes at one end of your thought space to notes which seem distant.

In your example, you may see some sort of loose link between your first and fourth notes relating to music. While it may be a distant one, given what you have, putting marching band "next to" digestible music is really the only place to put it. Over time, you'll certainly find other notes that come between them which will tend to split them apart and separate them by physical distance, but for now, if it's what you've got, then place them into the same neighborhood by giving them addresses (numbers) to suggest they live nearby. (Some note applications like Obsidian make this much harder to do, and as a result orphaned notes will eventually become a problem.)

This physical process is part of the ultimate value of building knowledge from the bottom up. Like most people, you've probably been heavily trained to want to create a hierarchy from the top down (folder-based systems on computers of the late 20th century are a big factor here) which is exactly why you're going to have problems like this at the start. You'll want to place that music note somewhere else, or worse, orphan it. For some people who may not be able to immediately trust the process, it can be easier to create a few dozen or a hundred notes and then come back to them later to file and arrange them. This will allow you to seed some ground from which to continually build and help to bridge the gap between the desire to move top-down in a system designed to move from bottom-up.

Depending on one's zettelkasten application (Obsidian, Zettlr, Logseq, The Archive, et al.) some do a better job of allowing the creation of "soft links" versus the more explicit hard or direct links (usually using [[WikiLinks]]). The soft links are usually best done by providing a number that places one note into proximity with another, but not all systems work this way. As a result, it's much easier to build a traditional commonplace book with Obsidian than it is to build a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten (see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/). The concept of tags/categories in many systems is another form of soft link that can hold ideas together, so use this affordance if your application offers it as well. But also keep in mind that if sociology is your life's work, you'll eventually amass such a huge number of digital notes tagged with "sociology" that this affordance will become useless as it won't scale well for discovery and creating links.

reply to u/JonasanOniem at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ss0yu/linking_new_notes/

This sort of practice is harder when you start out in most digital apps because there is usually no sense of "closeness" of ideas in digital the way that is implied by physical proximity (or "neighborhood") found in physical cards sitting right next to or around each other. As a result, you have to create more explicit links or rely on using tags (or indexing) when you start. I've not gotten deep into the UI of Zettlr, but some applications allow the numbering (and the way numbered ideas are sorted in the user interface) to allow this affordance by creating a visual sense of proximity for you. As you accumulate more notes, it becomes easier and you can rely less on tags and more on direct links. Eventually you may come to dislike broad categories/tags and prefer direct links from one idea to another as the most explicit tag you could give a note . If you're following a more strict Luhmann-artig practice, you'll find yourself indexing a lot at the beginning, but as you link new ideas to old, you don't need to index (tag) things as heavily because the index points to a card which is directly linked to something in the neighborhood of where you're looking. Over time and through use, you'll come to recognize your neighborhoods and the individual "houses" where the ideas you're working with all live. As an example, Luhmann spent his life working in sociology, but you'll only find a few links from his keyword register/subject index to "sociology" (and this is a good thing, otherwise he'd have had 90,000+ listings there and the index entry for sociology would have been utterly useless.)

Still, given all this, perhaps as taurusnoises suggests, concrete examples may help more, particularly if you're having any issues with the terminology/concepts or how the specific application affordances are being presented.

The simple Zettelkasten Method:<br /> 1. Buy index cards 2. Buy a box 3. ??? 4. Profit

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to his zettelkasten on the other side!

But when he got there, he realized he had forgotten the slip of paper with his perfect evergreen note. So the chicken crossed the road once again to retrieve it. But almost as if it were a jokerzettel, on the way back, a gust of wind blew the slip right out of the chicken's beak!

The chicken tried to catch the runaway slip, but it kept evading him. He chased that slip all over the farm--through the pig sty, over fences, around the grain silo.

Finally, exhausted but triumphant, the chicken caught the slip and carefully filed it away.

Moral of the story: Don't count your slips before they're indexed!

A priest, a rabbi, and Nicholas Luhmann walk into a bar. They sit down, and the priest says, "Let's all share ideas from our florilegia." The rabbi responds by pulling out his own annotation of a gloss on the commentary of Rashi which comments on the Mishnah and the Gamara. To this Luhmann replies, "You're not practicing the one true note taking religion unless you're using alpha-numeric identifiers and have appropriately cross indexed at sheet 031-R with a link branching off of note 100(1) in ZK I.

Q: Why did the zettelkasten cross the road?

A: It didn't because Barbara Tuchman, Nicholas Luhmann, Jacques Goutor, Johannes Erich Heyde, and Keith Thomas all recommend only writing on one side.

Pulling this back on topic by querying my own zettelkasten...

I've got versions of most of @Will's excellent list in my notes as well, but here are a few other metaphors (and analogies) which I don't think have been mentioned:

• child rearing; perhaps @Sascha will have an experienced perspective on this now?
• Digestion / Diffusion / Filtering / Distillation
  • Niklas Luhmann compared his zettelkasten to a septic tank. On Zettel 9/8a2 Luhmann called the Zettelkasten "eine Klärgrube" or a "septic tank;" (perhaps even "cesspool"). Waste goes in, and gets separated from the clearer stuff. You put in a lot of material, a lot of seeming waste, and it allows a process of settling and filtering to allow the waste to be separated and distill into something useful.
  • Ruminant machines
  • Barbara Tuchman used the ideas of chewing and distillation
• Grist mills and crucibles
• @Will has previously suggested relationships with flywheels before
• Statistical mechanics
• a "wooden life partner"
• woodworking has been mentioned before, but here's an extended one on wood chips in a workshop.
• Paths through forests
• Thought clouds
• avalanches/whirlpools
• Manfred Kuehn analogizes a Zettelkasten to a library
• idea/index card:zettelkasten :: person:society (see: https://hypothes.is/a/nTNZRGb2EeyZys9wX_gNTQ)
• @Sascha has previously analogized the writing process using a zettelkasten to Henry Ford's assembly line for building cars.
• Humanity is a zettelkasten in biological form.

It's possible that the process of note taking and excerpting may impose levels of analysis and synthesis on their users such that when writing and synthesizing their works that they more subtly expect their readers to do the same thing when their audiences may require more handholding and explanation.

Here, both the authors' experiences and that of the cultures in which they're writing will determine the relationship.

There's lots of analogies between thinking and digesting (rumination, consumption, etc), in reading and understanding contexts.

Source: https://hypothes.is/a/hhCGsljeEe2QlccJUQ55fA

Helbig, Daniela K. “Ruminant Machines: A Twentieth-Century Episode in the Material History of Ideas.” JHI Blog (blog), April 17, 2019. https://jhiblog.org/2019/04/17/ruminant-machines-a-twentieth-century-episode-in-the-material-history-of-ideas/.

Doto, Bob. “Inspired Destruction: How a Zettelkasten Explodes Thoughts (So You Can Have New Ones).” Personal blog. Writing by Bob Doto (blog), September 13, 2023. https://writing.bobdoto.computer/inspired-destruction-how-a-zettelkasten-explodes-thoughts-so-you-can-have-newish-ones/.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/16ilfgj/my_antinet_zettelkasten_setup/

A great walkthrough of the physical pieces that a zettelkasten user is using.

It almost borders on some of the productivity porn that is seen in the planner/productivity space.

Not seen before: some pre-made templates for placing data on physical cards.

https://keyway.com.tw/content/product/pro_cont.aspx?SiteID=1&MSid=711725301405576515&SID=712134524606134016

Plastic zettelkasten boxes used as described by u/-Angz in https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/16ilfgj/my_antinet_zettelkasten_setup/

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Notebook E, #46, 1775–1776

In this single paragraph quote Lichtenberg, using the model of Italian bookkeepers of the 18th century, broadly outlines almost all of the note taking technique suggested by Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes. He's got writing down and keeping fleeting notes as well as literature notes. (Keeping academic references would have been commonplace by this time.) He follows up with rewriting and expanding on the original note to create additional "explanations" and even "connections" (links) to create what Ahrens describes as permanent notes or which some would call evergreen notes.

Lichtenberg's version calls for the permanent notes to be "separated and ordered" and while he may have kept them in book format himself, it's easy to see from Konrad Gessner's suggestion at the use of slips centuries before, that one could easily put their permanent notes on index cards ("separated") and then number and index or categorize them ("ordered"). The only serious missing piece of Luhmann's version of a zettelkasten then are the ideas of placing related ideas nearby each other, though the idea of creating connections between notes is immediately adjacent to this, and his numbering system, which was broadly based on the popularity of Melvil Dewey's decimal system.

It may bear noticing that John Locke's indexing system for commonplace books was suggested, originally in French in 1685, and later in English in 1706. Given it's popularity, it's not unlikely that Lichtenberg would have been aware of it.

Given Lichtenberg's very popular waste books were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Reference: Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.) It would not be hard to imagine that Niklas Luhmann would have also been aware of them.

Open questions: <br /> - did Lichtenberg number the entries in his own waste books? This would be early evidence toward the practice of numbering notes for future reference. Based on this text, it's obvious that the editor numbered the translated notes for this edition, were they Lichtenberg's numbering? - Is there evidence that Lichtenberg knew of Locke's indexing system? Did his waste books have an index?

reply to u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1tuc9c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

u/atomicnotes, this is an excellent question. (Though I'd still like to come to terms with people who don't think it acts as a knowledge management system, there's obviously something I'm missing.)

Some of your distinction comes down to how one is using their zettelkasten and what sorts of questions are being asked of it. One of the earliest descriptions I've seen that begins to get at the difference is the description by Beatrice Webb of her notes (appendix C) in My Apprenticeship. As she describes what she's doing, I get the feeling that she's taking the same broad sort of notes we're all used to, but it's obvious from her discussion that she's also using her slips as a traditional database, but is lacking modern vocabulary to describe it as such.

Early efforts like the OED, TLL, the Wb, and even Gertrud Bauer's Coptic linguistic zettelkasten of the late 1970s were narrow enough in scope and data collected to make them almost dead simple to define, organize and use as databases on paper. Of course how they were used to compile their ultimate reference books was a bit more complex in form than the basic data from which they stemmed.

The Mundaneum had a much more complex flavor because it required a standardized system for everyone to work in concert against much more freeform as well as more complex forms of collected data and still be able to search for the answers to specific questions. While still somewhat database flavored, it was dramatically different from the others because of it scope and the much broader sorts of questions one could ask of it. I think that if you ask yourself what sorts of affordances you get from the two different groups (databases and word processors (or even their typewriter precursors) you find even more answers.

Typewriters and word processors allowed one to get words down on paper quicker by a magnitude of order or two faster, and in combination with reproduction equipment, made it easier to spin off copies of the document for small scale and local mass distribution a lot easier. They do allow a few affordances like higher readability (compared with less standardized and slower handwriting), quick search (at least in the digital era), and moving pieces of text around (also in digital). Much beyond this, they aren't tremendously helpful as a composition tool. As a thinking tool, typewriters and word processors aren't significantly better than their analog predecessors, so you don't gain a huge amount of leverage by using them.

On the other hand, databases and their spreadsheet brethren offer a lot more, particularly in digital realms. Data collection and collation become much easier. One can also form a massive variety of queries on such collected data, not to mention making calculations on those data or subjecting them to statistical analyses. Searching, sorting, and making direct comparisons also become far easier and quicker to do once you've amassed the data you need. Here again, Beatrice Webb's early experience and descriptions are very helpful as are Hollerinth's early work with punch cards and census data and the speed with which the results could be used.

Now if you compare the affordances by each of these in the digital era and plot their shifts against increasing computer processing power, you'll see that the value of the word processor stays relatively flat while the database shows much more significant movement.

Surely there is a lot more at play, particularly at scale and when taking network effects into account, but perhaps this quick sketch may explain to you a bit of the difference you've described.

Another difference you may be seeing/feeling is that of contextualization. Databases usually have much smaller and more discrete amounts of data cross-indexed (for example: a subject's name versus weight with a value in pounds or kilograms.) As a result the amount of context required to use them is dramatically lower compared to the sorts of data you might keep in an average atomic/evergreen note, which may need to be more heavily recontextualized for you when you need to use it in conjunction with other similar notes which may also need you to recontextualize them and then use them against or with one another.

Some of this is why the cards in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae are easier to use and understand out of the box (presuming you know Latin) than those you might find in the Mundaneum. They'll also be far easier to use than a stranger's notes which will require even larger contextualization for you, especially when you haven't spent the time scaffolding the related and often unstated knowledge around them. This is why others' zettelkasten will be more difficult (but not wholly impossible) for a stranger to use. You might apply the analogy of context gaps between children and adults for a typical Disney animated movie to the situation. If you're using someone else's zettelkasten, you'll potentially be able to follow a base level story the way a child would view a Disney cartoon. Compare this to the zettelkasten's creator who will not only see that same story, but will have a much higher level of associative memory at play to see and understand a huge level of in-jokes, cultural references, and other associations that an adult watching the Disney movie will understand that the child would completely miss.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how this all plays out for your way of conceptualizing it.

reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1l8lyk/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

How is it that you're defining knowledge management or knowledge management system?

I would argue that any zettelkasten of any stripe is taking knowledge/ideas from either content or one's own brain and transferring them into some sort of media by which they are managed or structured in some way for later linking, combination, or other reuse. By base definition this is clearly knowledge management. I don't know how one defines it otherwise except by pure denial.

Your view of zettelkasten seems remarkably narrow. As a small sample the original Maschinen der Phantasie Marbach exhibition in 2013, which broadly prefigured the popularization of zettelkasten (and in particular the launch of zettelkasten.de) which we see today featured six zettelkasten of which Luhmann's was the only one with reference numbers or what we might now consider explicit HTML-like links. Most of the others contained either explicit groupings or implied links, but that doesn't diminish the value they held for their creators for creating a conversation of ideas for them. Incidentally most of the zettelkasten featured there prefigured Luhmann's and only two were roughly contemporaneous with his.

If you look more closely at Adler, et al. you'll notice that the entire purpose of their enterprise was to create and nurture a conversation between themselves and their readers with texts and authors spanning over 2,500 years, a point which is underlined by the introductory volume which preceded the two volumes of the Syntopicon. Not coincidentally, that first volume of the 54 book series was entitled "The Great Conversation."

Specifically from Adler's "How to Read a Book", the first edition of which predated the Great Books of the Western World:

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.

This is a process which is effectuated by

Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

and later,

That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will become clear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.

(As an aside, why aren't more people talking about the nature of dialectical notes, which seem far more important and useful than either fleeting notes and permanent notes?)

In your link to Holiday, he doesn't say his system isn't a zettelkasten, a word which an English speaker was highly unlikely to have used in 2013 in any case, even when referencing Manfred Kuehn from 2007. It simply indicates that "[Luhmann's] discipline seems to exceed mine because I am a lot less ordered".

The Goitein source (which I wrote) may use commonplace book as a descriptor but that doesn't mitigate the fact that the entirety of the zettelkasten tradition arises from it (the primary difference being things written (usually) on bound pages versus slips of paper). Before these there was the closely related idea of florilegia stemming from the earlier locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).

reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1fn8w4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 and

Well, Zettelkasten is not a knowledge management system. [...] Update: I mean digital ZK. Shoe-box ZK is a combination of knowledge management system of that time and "thought system" of Niklas Luhmann. u/Aponogetone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1f23nj/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm curious to see some evidence for why both you and u/Aponogetone say that a slip box (analog, digital or otherwise) is not a knowledge management system? Perhaps you don't think of it that way or use it solely to that end, but I find it difficult to see in light of the way I use mine and others have in the past. I suspect that if I had access to either of yours I could use it as a knowledge management system and it would tell me a lot about your interests and what you know and with a bit of work I could continue using it as one.

Even an argument against the more encompassing group nature versus personal or individual knowledge management systems is blunted by the use of a Zettelkasten by Adler, Hutchins, et al. to create the Syntopicon, the group uses by the Mundaneum effort (which went to great lengths to standardize information to be findable), the Oxford English Dictionary compilation, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL), Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, or even the academics who still use photocopies or microfilm versions of S.D. Goitein's zettelkasten.

What are the rest of us missing in your argument?

reply to u/TeeMcBee and u/taurusnoises at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1ic0ot/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

And two more big yeses.

There is a growing amount of literature in the educational social annotation space in which teachers/professors are using it specifically to encourage their students to interact with class material and readings. The mechanics on the front end are exactly the same as in most ZK set ups, the difference is what happens with the annotations one makes.

An entry point into some of this research:

• General: https://web.hypothes.is/social-annotation-in-english-and-composition/
• Bibliography: https://web.hypothes.is/education/annotated/bibliography/

Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten system doesn't impose a heirarchy upon it's contents and in some ways its structure anticipates the ideas of hypertext and the internet's structure.

Also similar to the idea from Umberto Eco: https://hypothes.is/a/jqug2tNlEeyg2JfEczmepw

Fascinating to see Ryan Holiday referencing Manfred Kuehn blogposts from 2007 here.

Specifically it was a link to http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html

Given the popularity of this original Thought Catalog post and the alternate which appeared on Holiday's site, this reference would likely have helped to push the popularity of Luhmann and his Zettelkasten in English speaking territories after 2013-12-23.

Robert Greene used a color code for his index cards which also helped him to realize gaps in certain areas. He also liked them because "It also made the shoebox look pretty cool."

Ryan Holiday's system puts some of the work farther from the note taking origin compared with Nicholas Luhmann's system which places more of it up front.

How, if at all, do the payoffs from doing each of these vary for the end user of the system?

There's an interesting dichotomy which seems to be arising here. It's almost as if he's defining a folgezettel note in opposition to orphaned notes, most often seen in digital settings when importing lots of "stuff" but which Doto indicates can happen in analog systems as well.

Orphaned notes in an analog space, however are still linked by proximity even though they're not as densely linked (even from a mathematical topology perspective.)

There is a difference between the sorts of links one might make when placing an idea into an (analog) zettelkasten. A folgezettel link is more valuable than a simple tag/category link because it places an idea into a more specific neighborhood than any handful of tags. This is one of the benefits of a Luhmann-artig ZK system over a more traditional commonplace one, particularly when the work is done up front instead of being punted to a later time.

For those with a 1A2B3Z linking system (versus a pure decimal system), it may be more difficult to insert a card before other cards rather than after them because of the potential gymnastics of numbering and the natural tendency to put things into a continuing linear order.

See also: - https://hypothes.is/a/ToqCPq1bEe2Q0b88j4whwQ - https://hyp.is/WtB2AqmlEe2wvCsB5ZyL5A/docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/Introduction-to-Luhmanns-Zette---Ludecke-Daniel-h4nh8.pdf

https://lenaling.medium.com/beyond-note-taking-zettelkasten-for-writing-success-52f8c8f65945

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iRzF_ZAdUI

Scott Sheper demonstrates one of the lowest forms of zettelkasten: simply indexing an idea from a book into one's index. This includes skipping the step of excerpting the idea into it's own card.

He describes it as zettelkasten knowledge building for busy people. It's definitely a hard turn from his all-in Luhmann-esque method.

In the end it comes down to where one puts in the work. Saving the work of having done some reading for a small idea one may tangentially reference later is most of the distance, but he's still going to have to do more work later to use the idea.

17:11 declarative statements as allowing easier entrance into deep work

• Also see how it could aid in flow?