cut out paper as Luhmann hadto.
On the back of his notes, you will find not only manuscript drafts, but also old bills or drawings by his children. [footnote]
While it's possible that Luhmann may have cut some of his own paper, by the time he was creating his notes the mass manufacture of index cards of various sizes was ubiquitous enough that he should never have had to cut his own. He certainly wasn't forced to manufacture them the way Carl Linnaeus had to.
Here, the card index func-tions as a ‘thinking machine’,67 and becomes the best communication partner for learned men.68
From a computer science perspective, isn't the index card functioning like an external memory, albeit one with somewhat pre-arranged linked paths? It's the movement through the machine's various paths that is doing the "thinking". Or the user's (active) choices that create the paths creates the impression of thinking.
Perhaps it's the pre-arranged links where the thinking has already happened (based on "work" put into the system) and then traversing the paths gives the appearance of "new" thinking?
How does this relate to other systems which can be thought of as thinking from a complexity perspective? Bacteria perhaps? Groups of cells acting in concert? Groups of people acting in concert? Cells seeing out food using random walks? etc?
From this perspective, how can we break out the constituent parts of thought and thinking? Consciousness? With enough nodes and edges and choices of paths between them (or a "correct" subset of paths) could anything look like thinking or computing?
ow about using a scratch pad slightly smaller than the page-size of the book -- so that the edges of the sheets won't protrude?
Interesting to note here that he suggests a scratch pad rather than index cards here given his own personal use of index cards.
index card file
Given the use case that Niklas Luhmann had, the translation of zettelkasten into English is better read as "index card file" rather than the simpler and more direct translation "slip box".
While it's not often talked about in the recent contexts, there is a long history of using index cards for note taking in the United States and the idea of an index card file was once ubiquitous. There has been such a long span between this former ubiquity and our digital modernity that the idea of a zettelkasten seems like a wondrous new tool, never seen before. As a result, people in within social media, the personal knowledge management space, or the tools for thought space will happily use the phrase zettelkasten as if it is the hottest and newest thing on the planet.
An absolutely beautiful design for short notes.
This is the sort of theme that will appeal to zettelkasten users who are building digital gardens. A bit of the old mixed in with the new.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Pete Moor </span> in // pimoore.ca (<time class='dt-published'>12/24/2021 18:02:15</time>)</cite></small>
Commonplaces were no longer repositories of redundancy, but devices for storing knowledge expansion.
With the invention of the index card and atomic, easily moveable information that can be permuted and re-ordered, the idea of commonplacing doesn't simply highlight and repeat the older wise sayings (sententiae), but allows them to become repositories of new and expanding information. We don't just excerpt anymore, but mix the older thoughts with newer thoughts. This evolution creates a Cambrian explosion of ideas that helps to fuel the information overload from the 16th century onward.
Through an inner structure of recursive links and semantic pointers, a card index achieves a proper autonomy; it behaves as a ‘communication partner’ who can recommend unexpected associations among different ideas. I suggest that in this respect pre-adaptive advances took root in early modern Europe, and that this basic requisite for information pro-cessing machines was formulated largely by the keyword ‘order’.
aliases for "topical headings": headwords keywords tags categories
An analogous situation is the use of visiting cards: “ One arrives at one of the famous spas, a couple of hours after arriving one sends out a few hundred visiting cards, and the same day one is introduced to the whole society of the resort, and acquainted with two to three hundred people as if one had already lived
with them for many years.” 62
What ever happened to visiting cards? They should make a resurgence in the social media space, n'cest pas?
One more thing ought to be explained in advance: why the card index is indeed a paper machine. As we will see, card indexes not only possess all the basic logical elements of the universal discrete machine — they also fi t a strict understanding of theoretical kinematics . The possibility of rear-ranging its elements makes the card index a machine: if changing the position of a slip of paper and subsequently introducing it in another place means shifting other index cards, this process can be described as a chained mechanism. This “ starts moving when force is exerted on one of its movable parts, thus changing its position. What follows is mechanical work taking place under particular conditions. This is what we call a machine . ” 11 The force taking effect is the user ’ s hand. A book lacks this property of free motion, and owing to its rigid form it is not a paper machine.
The mechanical work of moving an index card from one position to another (and potentially changing or modifying links to it in the process) allows us to call card catalogues paper machines. This property is not shared by information stored in codices or scrolls and thus we do not call books paper machines.
Foucault proclaimed in a footnote: “ Appearance of the index card and development of the human sciences: another invention little celebrated by historians. ”
from Foucault 1975, p. 363, n. 49; see Foucault 1966, pp. XV and passim for discourse analysis.
Is he talking here about the invention of the index card about the same time as the rise of the scientific method? With index cards one can directly compare and contrast two different ideas as if weighing them on a balance to see which carries more weight. Then the better idea can win while the lesser is discarded to the "scrap heap"?
Here, I also briefl y digress and examine two coinciding addressing logics: In the same decade and in the same town, the origin of the card index cooccurs with the invention of the house number. This establishes the possibility of abstract representation of (and controlled access to) both texts and inhabitants.
Curiously, and possibly coincidently, the idea of the index card and the invention of the house number co-occur in the same decade and the same town. This creates the potential of abstracting the representation of information and people into numbers for easier access and linking.
What differs here from other data storage (as in the medium of the codex book) is a simple and obvious principle: information is available on separate, uniform, and mobile carriers and can be further arranged and processed according to strict systems of order.
The primary value of the card catalogue and index cards as tools for thought is that it is a self-contained, uniform and mobile carrier that can be arranged and processed based on strict systems of order. Books have many of these properties, but the information isn't as atomic or as easily re-ordered.
s Alan Turing proved only years later, these machines merely need (1) a (theoretically infi nite) partitioned paper tape, (2) a writing and reading head, and (3) an exact
procedure for the writing and reading head to move over the paper segments. This book seeks to map the three basic logical components of every computer onto the card catalog as a “ paper machine,” analyzing its data processing and interfaces that may justify the claim, “Card catalogs can do anything!”
Purpose of the book.
A card catalog of index cards used by a human meets all the basic criteria of a Turing machine, or abstract computer, as defined by Alan Turing.
“ Card catalogs can do anything ” — this is the slogan Fortschritt GmbH
What a great quote to start off a book like this!
Now that we're digitizing the Zettelkasten we often find dated notes that say things like "note 60,7B3 is missing". This note replaces the original note at this position. We often find that the original note is maybe only 20, 30 notes away, put back in the wrong position. But Luhmann did not start looking, because where should he look? How far would he have to go to maybe find it again? So, instead he adds the "note is missing"-note. Should he bump into the original note by chance, then he could put it back in its original position. Or else, not.
Niklas Luhmann had a simple way of dealing with lost cards by creating empty replacements which could be swapped out if found later. It's not too dissimilar to doing inventory in a book store where mischievous customers pick up books, move them, or even hide them sections away. Going through occasionally or even regularly or systematically would eventually find lost/misfiled cards unless they were removed entirely from the system (similar to stolen books).
So the big secret then is, how did he know that this note here exists? How could he remember that this existing note was relevant to the new one he was writing? A mystery we haven't solved yet.
I'm surprised to see/hear this!
How did Niklas Luhmann cross link his notes? Apparently researchers don't quite know, but I'd suggest that in working with them diligently over time, he'd have a reasonable internal idea from memory in addition to working with his indices and his outline cards.
The cards in some sense form a physical path through which he regularly traverses, so he's making a physical memory palace (or songline) out of index cards.
on advocate for the index card in the early twentieth century called for animitation of “accountants of the modern schoolY”1
Paul Chavigny, Organisation du travail intellectuel: Recettes pratiques a` l’usage des e ́tudiants de toutes les faculte ́s et de tous les travailleurs (Paris, 1920)
Chavigny was an advocate for the index card in note taking in imitation of "accountants of the modern school". We know that the rise of the index card was hastened by the innovation of Melvil Dewey's company using index cards as part of their internal accounting system, which they actively exported to other companies as a product.
Offloading can be far more complex, however, and doesn’t necessarily involve language. For example, “when we use our hands to move objects around, we offload the task of visualizing new configurations onto the world itself, where those configurations take tangible shape before our eyes” (243-244).
This is one of the key benefits over the use of index cards in moving toward a zettelkasten from the traditional commonplace book tradition. Rearranging one's ideas in a separate space.
Raymond Llull attempted to do this within his memory in the 12th century, but there are easier ways of doing this now.
https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2018/06/29/a-starttofinish-literature.html
Great overview of a literature review with some useful looking links to more specifics on note taking methods.
Most of the newer note taking tools like Roam Research, Obsidian, etc. were not available or out when she wrote this. I'm curious how these may have changed or modified her perspective versus some of the other catch-as-catch-can methods with pen/paper/index cards/digital apps?
I remember also seeing this as an indexing system for index cards in 2007. https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/sets/72157594200490122/
It's not too dissimilar a pattern from the early 20th century edge-notched cards which were used to make sorting collections easier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge-notched_card Of course doing this for a notebook isn't going to work as easily.
In her book Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt, writer Marge Piercy described how she used needle cards instead of a notebook: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}I keep neither a journal nor a notebook. I have a memory annex which serves my purposes. It uses edge-notched cards. Edge-notched cards are cards which have holes around the borders as opposed to machine punch cards which are punched through the body. The cards are sorted with knitting needles. I have a nice sophisticated system which I call the "General Practitioner."[12]
Interesting to see that Marge Piercy used an edge-notched card system for personal use in the manner of a commonplace book.
See reference: Piercy, Marge (1982). Parti-colored blocks for a quilt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 27–28. doi:10.3998/mpub.7442. ISBN 0472063383. OCLC 8476006.
In writing my dissertation and working on my first book, I used an index card system, characterized by the "one fact, one card" maxim, made popular by Beatrice Webb. [4]
I've not come across Beatrice Webb before, but I'm curious to see what her system looks like based on this statement.
From the footnotes:
She observed in the appendix to her My Apprenticeship of 1926, called The Art of Note-Taking: "It is difficult to persuade the accomplished graduate of Oxford or Cambridge that an indispensable instrument in the technique of sociological enquiry - seeing that without it any of the methods of acquiring facts can seldom be used effectively - is the making of notes" Webb, Beatrice (1926) My Apprenticeship (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.), pp. 426-7.
To me, the greatest benefit of IndexCards is that they force you to not write too much. This is a big help to those of us who are still squishing the bitter juice of BigDesignUpFront from our brains. The expense and rarity of vellum played a similar role in MedievalArchitecture.
This is one of the points made in TheMythOfThePaperlessOffice -- that workplaces often shift from more efficient paper-based technologies to less efficient electronic technologies (electronic technologies can be either more or less efficient, of course) because computers symbolize The Future, Progress, and a New Way Of Doing Things. An office on the move, that's what an office that uses cutting-edge technology is. Not an office that is stuck in the past. And the employees are left to cope with the less productive, but shinier, New Way. -- ApoorvaMuralidhara
New technologies don't always have the user interface to make them better than old methods.
In 2003, Ross's family gave his journals, papers, and correspondence to the British Library, London. Then, in March 2004, on the last day of the W. Ross Ashby Centenary Conference, they announced the intention to make his journal available on the Internet. Four years later, this website fulfilled that promise, making this previously unpublished work available on-line.
The journal consists of 7,189 numbered pages in 25 volumes, and over 1,600 index cards. To make it easy to browse purposefully through so many images, extensive cross-linking has been added that is based on the keywords in Ross's original keyword index.
This definitely sounds like a commonplace book. Also an example of one which has been digitized.
Now, whenever I have a thought worth capturing, I write it on an index card in either marker pen or biro (depending on the length of the thought), and place in the relevant box. I use index cards for books, blogs, conversations I overhear at the club, memories, etc. They’re in my coat pocket when I fetch the kids from school. I leave them handy in the locker at the swimming pool (where I do much of my best thinking). And I run with them. Sound weird? Well, I’m in good company. Ryan Holiday[116], Anne Lamott[117], Robert Greene[118], Oliver Burkeman[119], Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Nabokov[120] and Ludwig Wittgenstein[121] all use (d) the humble index card to catalogue and organise their thoughts. If you’re serious about embarking on this digital journey, buy a hundred-pack of 127 x 76mm ruled index cards for less than a pound, rescue a shoebox from the attic and stick a few marker-penned notecards on their end to act as dividers. Write a “My Digital Box” label on the top of the shoebox, and you’re off.
apparently a quote from Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money by David Sawyer FCIPR.
Notes about users of index card based commonplace books.
I am also interested in the work and method of Ross Ashby. His card index and notebooks have been put online by the British Commputer Society. I am fascinated by his law of requisite variety and how variety relates to complexity and its unfolding in general and in relation to design.
Sounds like Ross Ashby kept a commonplace book here.
Could be worth looking into: http://www.rossashby.info/ and digging further.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-05-08-reagan-notes-book-brinkley_n.htm
An article indicating that President Ronald Reagan kept a commonplace book throughout his life. He maintained it on index cards, often with as many as 10 entries per card. The article doesn't seem to indicate that there was any particular organization, index, or taxonomy involved.
It's now housed at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA.
I keep my index cards in chronological order : the newest card comes at front of the card box. All cards are clasified into four kinds and tagged according to the contents. The sequence is equivalent to my cultural genetic code. Although it may look chaotic at the beginning, it will become more regulated soon. Don't be afraid to sweep out your mind and capture them all. Make visible what is going on in your brain. Look for a pattern behind our life.
Example of a edge-based taxonomy system for index cards.
Ronald Reagan also kept a similar system that apparently very few people knew about until he died. In his system, he used 3×5 notecards and kept them in a photo binder by theme. These note cards–which were mostly filled with quotes–have actually been turned into a book edited by the historian Douglas Brinkley. These were not only responsible for many of his speeches as president, but before office Reagan delivered hundreds of talks as part of his role at General Electric. There are about 50 years of practical wisdom in these cards. Far more than anything I’ve assembled–whatever you think of the guy. I highly recommend at least looking at it.
Ronald Reagan kept a commonplace in the form of index cards which he kept in a photo binder and categorized according to theme. Douglas Brinkley edited them into the book The Notes: Ronald Reagan's Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom.
https://hackaday.com/2019/06/18/before-computers-notched-card-databases/
Originally suggested by Alan Levine. Some interesting specific examples here, but I've been aware of the concept for a while.
https://deepstash.com/ appears to be a note taking tool geared toward zettelkasten and productivity. It's got an interesting card-based UI.
They were input laboriously by hand either on punched cards, with each card holding up to eighty characters or one line of text (uppercase letters only), or on paper tape, where lower-case letters were perhaps possible but which could not be read in any way at all by a human being. Father Busa has stories of truckloads of punched cards being transported from one center to another in Italy. All computing was carried out as batch processing, where the user could not see the results at all until printout appeared when the job had run.
It may be of interest to some that the first 'computer' used punch cards and tape; it was the Jacquard loom. Here is a link to information about the Jacquard loom and it's influence on computing. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/jacquard.html
Your post says nothing at all to suggest Luhman didn’t “invent” “Zettelkasten” (no one says he was only one writing on scraps of paper), you list two names and no links
My post was more in reaction to the overly common suggestions and statements that Luhmann did invent it and the fact that he's almost always the only quoted user. The link was meant to give some additional context, not proof.
There are a number of direct predecessors including Hans Blumenberg and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. For quick/easy reference here try:
If you want some serious innovation, why not try famous biologist Carl Linnaeus for the invention of the index card? See: http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/research/centres/medicalhistory/past/writing/
(Though even in this space, I suspect that others were already doing similar things.)
Researcher working on the idea of Carl Linnaeus and the invention of the index card.
Synapsen, a digital card index by Markus Krajewski
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Goodreads</span> in Markus Krajewski (Author of Paper Machines) | Goodreads (<time class='dt-published'>07/04/2021 00:22:32</time>)</cite></small>
Forty years ago, Michel Foucault observed in a footnote that, curiously, historians had neglected the invention of the index card. The book was Discipline and Punish, which explores the relationship between knowledge and power. The index card was a turning point, Foucault believed, in the relationship between power and technology.
This piece definitely makes an interesting point about the use of index cards (a knowledge management tool) and power.
Things have only accelerated dramatically with the rise of computers and the creation of data lakes and the leverage of power over people by Facebook, Google, Amazon, et al.
In 1780, two years after Linnaeus’s death, Vienna’s Court Library introduced a card catalog, the first of its kind. Describing all the books on the library’s shelves in one ordered system, it relied on a simple, flexible tool: paper slips. Around the same time that the library catalog appeared, says Krajewski, Europeans adopted banknotes as a universal medium of exchange. He believes this wasn’t a historical coincidence. Banknotes, like bibliographical slips of paper and the books they referred to, were material, representational, and mobile. Perhaps Linnaeus took the same mental leap from “free-floating banknotes” to “little paper slips” (or vice versa).
I've read about the Vienna Court Library and their card catalogue. Perhaps worth reading Krajewski for more specifics to link these things together?
Worth exploring the idea of paper money as a source of inspiration here too.
according to Charmantier and Müller-Wille, playing cards were found under the floorboards of the Uppsala home Linnaeus shared with his wife Sara Lisa.
In 1791, France’s revolutionary government issued the world’s first national cataloging code, calling for playing cards to be used for bibliographical records.
Reference for this as well?
Linnaeus may have drawn inspiration from playing cards. Until the mid-19th century, the backs of playing cards were left blank by manufacturers, offering “a practical writing surface,” where scholars scribbled notes, says Blair. Playing cards “were frequently used as lottery tickets, marriage and death announcements, notepads, or business cards,” explains Markus Krajewski, the author of Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs.
There was a Krajewski reference I couldn't figure out in the German piece on Zettelkasten that I read earlier today. Perhaps this is what was meant?
These playing cards might also have been used as an idea of a waste book as well, and then someone decided to skip the commonplace book as an intermediary?
Linnaeus experimented with a few filing systems. In 1752, while cataloging Queen Ludovica Ulrica’s collection of butterflies with his disciple Daniel Solander, he prepared small, uniform sheets of paper for the first time. “That cataloging experience was possibly where the idea for using slips came from,” Charmantier explained to me. Solander took this method with him to England, where he cataloged the Sloane Collection of the British Museum and then Joseph Banks’s collections, using similar slips, Charmantier said. This became the cataloging system of a national collection.
Description of the spread of the index card idea.
More than 1,000 of them, measuring five by three inches, are housed at London’s Linnean Society. Each contains notes about plants and material culled from books and other publications. While flimsier than heavy stock and cut by hand, they’re virtually indistinguishable from modern index cards.
Information culled from other sources indicates they come from the commonplace book tradition. The index card-like nature becomes the interesting innovation here.
The Swedish 18th-century naturalist Carolus (Carl) Linnaeus is habitually credited with laying the foundations of modern taxonomy through the invention of binominal nomenclature. However, another innovation of Linnaeus' has largely gone unnoticed. He seems to have been one of the first botanists to leave his herbarium unbound, keeping the sheets of dried plants separate and stacking them in a purpose built-cabinet. Understanding the significance of this seemingly mundane and simple invention opens a window onto the profound changes that natural history underwent in the 18th century.
Dug up with respect to the idea of Carl Linnaeus inventing the idea of the index card.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Wikipedia</span> in Index card - Wikipedia (<time class='dt-published'>07/03/2021 21:36:58</time>)</cite></small>
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Towards the end of his career, in the mid-1760s, Linnaeus took this further, inventing a paper tool that has since become very common: index cards. While stored in some fixed, conventional order, often alphabetically, index cards could be retrieved and shuffled around at will to update and compare information at any time.
Invention of index card dated to the 1760's by Carl Linnaeus.
Linnaeus had to manage a conflict between the need to bring information into a fixed order for purposes of later retrieval, and the need to permanently integrate new information into that order, says Mueller-Wille. “His solution to this dilemma was to keep information on particular subjects on separate sheets, which could be complemented and reshuffled,” he says.
Carl Linnaeus created a method whereby he kept information on separate sheets of paper which could be reshuffled.
In a commonplace-centric culture, this would have been a fascinating innovation.
Did the cost of paper (velum) trigger part of the innovation to smaller pieces?
Did the de-linearization of data imposed by codices (and previously parchment) open up the way people wrote and thought? Being able to lay out and reorder pages made a more 3 dimensional world. Would have potentially made the world more network-like?
cross-reference McLuhan's idea about our tools shaping us.
This system was invented by Carl Linnaeus,[1] around 1760.
How is it not so surprising that Carl Linnaeus, the creator of a huge taxonomic system, also came up with the idea for index cards in 1760.
How does this fit into the history of the commonplace book and information management? Relationship to the idea of a zettelkasten?
Dafür spricht das Credo des Literaten Walter Benjamin: Und heute schon ist das Buch, wie die aktuelle wissenschaftliche Produktionsweise lehrt, eine veraltete Vermittlung zwischen zwei verschiedenen Kartotheksystemen. Denn alles Wesentliche findet sich im Zettelkasten des Forschers, der's verfaßte, und der Gelehrte, der darin studiert, assimiliert es seiner eigenen Kartothek.
The credo of the writer Walter Benjamin speaks for this:
And today, as the current scientific method of production teaches, the book is an outdated mediation between two different card index systems. Because everything essential is to be found in the slip box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar who studies it assimilates it in his own card index.
Here's an early instantiation of thoughts being put down into data which can be copied from one card to the next as a means of creation.
A similar idea was held in the commonplace book tradition, in general, but this feels much more specific in the lead up to the idea of the Memex.
Media theorist Markus Krajewski has devoted a book specifically to the paper machinery of cards and catalogs. He traces the origins of this machinery back to sixteenth-century attempts at indexing books, and through the twists and turns of library technology in Europe and the U.S. over the following centuries.
Jan Zoń - A New Revolutionary Cards Method
This highlights a question I've had for a while: What is the best encoding method for very quickly memorizing a deck of cards while still keeping a relatively small ceiling on the amount of space to memorize and work out in advance.
I want to revisit it and do the actual math to maximize the difference between the methods.
hub.cards allows you to create and design your next modern business card for free. Our newly developed editor is like no other on the web and makes all your creative dreams come true. If you're not a creative genius, you can choose from thousands of templates to create an appealing card.
Best free editor for creating business cards. Digital & physical ones.
Context notes are used as a map to a series of notes. A context note that outlines a more complex concept or broader subject, using links to other notes in the process. For example, while I’m reading a book, I build an outline of the things I find relevant, based on my highlights and notes of the book. Each of the outline’s items links to a separate note explaining the idea in more detail, and usually contains the highlighted text of the book.
The basic idea behind Zettelkasten is to build a repository of the knowledge you gain through the years. The idea is similar to what Paul Jun, of Creative Mastery, writes about keeping a Commonplace Book, or Ryan Holiday’s notecard system. Zettelkasten adds the powerful idea of linking notes to create a web of interlinked knowledge.
I really like this picture here. Perhaps for a business card? http://static.nautil.us/5236_78289d91e9c4adcf4e97d6b3d4df6ae0.jpg
McCulloch was a confident, gray-eyed, wild-bearded, chain-smoking philosopher-poet who lived on whiskey and ice cream and never went to bed before 4 a.m.
Now that is a business card title!
His card was on the table
"Calling cards became popular at the end of the 18th century and bore the visitor's name, title and residence." (Grace, Maria. "Morning Calls and Formal Visits: Socializing in the Regency Era" English Historical Fiction Authors, http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2013/08/morning-calls-and-formal-visits.html . Accessed 24 April 2017.) The purpose of the calling card that Willoughby leaves behind at Mrs. Jennings' residence serves to inform her, as the mistress of the house, of his presence in London. As her acquaintance, it would have been considered rude of him not to do so.
