- Aug 2022
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For in fact a note -system at its bestmust be very largely an individual thing.
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Dow, Earle Wilbur. Principles of a Note-System for Historical Studies. Century Company, 1924.
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Newspaper clippings were usually placed in boxes or file storages dependingon their scientific or otherwise valuable content. This procedure is inadequate as it means thatone forgets about the clipping when it might have been useful, or, if one does not forget aboutthe clipping, it is nowhere to be found in the ever growing pile of collection folders (or canonly be found after hours of searching for it).
the scrap heap problem
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After theactual note is written and the blueprints are removed, on each of the three cards one keywordis underlined with a pencil or a red pen so that each card can be placed inside the box basedon its underlined keyword
This works, but I'm a bit disappointed at this advice/revelation...
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carbon paper process
I wasn't expecting advice for creating multiple copies of cards with carbon paper...
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The most suitable location is at the bottom right of thenote sheet for reasons that will become obvious later.
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For the sheets that are filled with content on one side however, the most most importantaspect is its actual “address”, which at the same time gives it its title by which it can alwaysbe found among its comrades: the keyword belongs to the upper row of the sheet
following the commonplace tradition, the keyword gets pride of place...
Watch here the word "address" and double check the original German word in translation. What was it originally? Seems a tad odd to hear "address" applied to a keyword which is likely to be just one of many. How to keep them all straight?
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it has proven useful only to write on one side of them.
the traditional advice
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another advantage to the small size: A6 (14.8 x 10.5 cm) has exactly the samemeasurements as the official German Reich postcard does, which is also the maximum sizepermitted for private post cards. What follows from this is the fact that one can easily addpost cards with scientific or non-scientific content into the sequence of sheets without havingto copy them.
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In the mercantile world, the energy- and time consuming note book process has been replacedwith a file card system because competition forces them to save time and energy.
note the evolution here based on competition from practices in another field (accounting)
What was his experience within accounting and these traditions?
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scientists as well asstudents of science carefully put the diverse results of their reading and thinking process intoone or a few note books that are separated by topic.
A specific reference to the commonplace book tradition and in particular the practice of segmenting note books into pre-defined segments with particular topic headings. This practice described here also ignores the practice of keeping an index (either in a separate notebook or in the front/back of the notebook as was more common after John Locke's treatise)
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The sheet box
Interesting choice of translation for "Die Kartei" by the translator. Some may have preferred the more direct "file".
Historically for this specific time period, while index cards were becoming more ubiquitous, most of the prior century researchers had been using larger sheets and frequently called them either slips or sheets based on their relative size.
Beatrice Webb in 1926 (in English) described her method and variously used the words “cards”, “slips”, “quarto”, and “sheets” to describe notes. Her preference was for quarto pages which were larger pages which were likely closer to our current 8.5 x 11” standard than they were to even larger index cards (like 4 x 6".
While I have some dissonance, this translation makes a lot of sense for the specific time period. I also tend to translate the contemporaneous French word “fiches” of that era as “sheets”.
See also: https://hypothes.is/a/OnCHRAexEe2MotOW5cjfwg https://hypothes.is/a/fb-5Ngn4Ee2uKUOwWugMGQ
Tags
- topical headings
- note card sizes
- dates
- cards
- note taking advice
- 1931
- accounting influence on note taking
- translations
- postcards
- fiches
- scrap heaps
- sheets
- 1926
- John Locke indexing method
- kartei
- Beatrice Webb
- competition
- index cards
- slips
- search strategies
- quarto
- note taking
- commonplace books
- carbon paper
- note taking methods
- write only on one side
- copies
- lost in translation
- note taking affordances
Annotators
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/.
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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Annotate Books has added a 1.8-inch ruled margin on every page. The ample space lets you to write your thoughts, expanding your understanding of the text. This edition brings an end to does convoluted, parallel notes, made on minute spaces. Never again fail to understand your brilliant ideas, when you go back and review the text.
This is what we want to see!! The publishing company Annotate Books is republishing classic texts with a roomier 1.8" ruled margin on every page to make it easier to annotate texts.
It reminds me about the idea of having print-on-demand interleaved books. Why not have print-on-demand books which have wider than usual margins either with or without lines/grids/dots for easier note taking and marginalia?
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Local file Local file
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the task maybe undertaken by any instructor who finds that good notesare necessary for successful work in his course.
Just as physics and engineering professors don't always rely on the mathematics department to teach all the mathematics that students should know, neither should any department rely on the English department to teach students how to take notes.
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Seward, Samuel Swayze. Note-Taking. Boston, Allyn and Bacon, 1910. http://archive.org/details/cu31924012997627
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Devices for note-taking. In taking notes of reading,use slips of paper the size of the standard library card(8 x 6 in.). For more extended notes and for typewrittennotes, the standard half-sheet (6% x 8% in.) is usually themost satisfactory sire. For special purposes still larger sheetsare sometimes essential. In any extended investi ation theuse of different colored sli s or different coloref inks forcertain classes of notes w i g often prove a convenient andtime-savin device. It is especially desirable, thus, to dis-tinguish bifliogra hical data from subject matter. Each slipshould contain onyy a single note. Put a topical heading atthe top of each slip of subject notes and a reference to thevolume and page of the authority quoted.
The transcription on this from .pdf via Hypothesis is dreadful! In particular for the card sizes. The actual text reads as:
- Devices for note-taking. In taking notes of reading, use slips of paper the size of the standard library card (3 x5 in.). For more extended notes and for typewritten notes, the standard half-sheet (5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.) is usually the most satisfactory size. For special purposes still larger sheets are sometimes essential. In any extended investigation the use of different colored slips or different colored inks for certain classes of notes will often prove a convenient and time-saving device. It is especially desirable, thus, to distinguish bibliographical data from subject matter. Each slip should contain only a single note. Put a topical heading at the top of each slip of subject notes and a reference to the volume and page of the authority quoted.
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Dutcher, George Matthew. “Directions and Suggestions for the Writing of Essays or Theses in History.” Historical Outlook 22, no. 7 (November 1, 1931): 329–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/21552983.1931.10114595
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Useful suggestions in regard tonote-taking will be found in Samuel S . Seward, Note-taking,Boston, 1910; and, especially for more advanced students, inEarle W. DOW, Principles of a note-system for hirton’calstudies, New York, 1924
He's read Langlois/Seignobos and Bernheim, but doesn't recommend/reference them for note taking, but points to Seward and Dow instead.
What are the differences between the four methods?
Note that this advice is in 1931, a few years after Beatrice Webb's My Apprentice which has a section on note taking that prefers the first two without mention of the latter two.
It would appear that Seward is the brother of William Henry Seward. see: https://hypothes.is/a/MwspfCBOEe2YCpesAgwiGQ
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The instructor may require the submission of the notesas an evidence of pro ress before the writing of the essayis begun, or he may as! for their presentation with the com-pleted essay.
It's nice to have some evidence of progress, but I know very few students who appreciated this sort of grading practice. I know I hated it as a kid, so it's particularly pernicious and almost triggering to see it in print going back to 1908, 1911, and subsequently up to 1931.
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These Directions and suggestions were first cornpiled in1908, and the first edition was printed in 1911 for use in theauthor‘s own classes. The present edition is the result ofthorough revision and is planned for general use.
This will be much more interesting given that he'd first written about this topic in 1908 and has accumulated more experience since then.
Look for suggestions about the potential change in practice over the ensuing years.
Is the original version extant in his papers?
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(see paragraph 28)
an example within this essay of a cross reference from one note to another showing the potential linkages of individual notes within one's own slipbox.
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One can't help but notice that Dutcher's essay, laid out like it is in a numbered fashion with one or two paragraphs each may stem from the fact of his using his own note taking method.
Each section seems to have it's own headword followed by pre-written notes in much the same way he indicates one should take notes in part 18.
It could be illustrative to count the number of paragraphs in each numbered section. Skimming, most are just a paragraph or two at most while a few do go as high as 5 or 6 though these are rarer. A preponderance of shorter one or two paragraphs that fill a single 3x5" card would tend to more directly support the claim. Though it is also the case that one could have multiple attached cards on a single idea. In Dutcher's case it's possible that these were paperclipped or stapled together (does he mention using one side of the slip only, which is somewhat common in this area of literature on note making?). It seems reasonably obvious that he's not doing more complex numbering or ordering the way Luhmann did, but he does seem to be actively using it to create and guide his output directly in a way (and even publishing it as such) that supports his method.
Is this then evidence for his own practice? He does actively mention in several places links to section numbers where he also cross references ideas in one card to ideas in another, thereby creating a network of related ideas even within the subject heading of his overall essay title.
Here it would be very valuable to see his note collection directly or be able to compare this 1927 version to an earlier 1908 version which he mentions.
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n composition d o not be a slave tothe notes and books: they only furnish the materials fromwhich the essay is t o be constructed.
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the slips by the topicalheadings. Guide cards are useful to gdicate the several head-ings and subheadings. Under each heading classif the slipsin writing, discarding any that may not prove useful andmaking cross references for notes which may be needed foruse in more than one lace. This classification will reveal,almost automatically, wiere there are deficiencies in the ma-terials collected which should be remedied. The completedand classified collection of notes then becomes the basis ofcomposition.
missing some textual context here for full quote...
Dutcher is recommending arranging notes and cards by topical headings in a commonplace sort of method. He does recommend a sub-arrangement of placing them in logical order for one's writing however. He goes even further and indicates one may "make cross references for notes which may be needed for use in more than one place." Which provides an early indication of linking or cross linking cards to multiple places within in one's card index. (Has this cross referencing (linking) idea appeared in the literature specifically before, or is this an early instantiation of this idea?)
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Symbols might conveniently have been used for woids ofsuch frequent occurrence as: for, in, of, with, as, to, the,bill, statute, footnote.
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works inEnglish are convenient introductions to the prohems andmethods of historical research: Charles V. Langlois andCharles Seignobos, Introduction to the rludy of history, NewYork, 1898; John M. Vincent, Historical research, an outlineof theory and practice, New York, 1911; and, to a morelimited extent, Fred M. Fling, Writing of history, an intro-duction to historical method, New Haven, 1920. The studentwho is specializing in history should early familiarize him-self with these volumes and then acquaint himself with otherworks in the field, notably Ernst Bernheim, hehrbuch derhistorwehen Methode und der Beschichtsplrilosophie, 6th ed.,Leipzig, 1908
I'm curious, what, if any, detail Fling (1920) and Vincent (1911) provide on note taking processes?
Tags
- 1924
- references
- read
- writing process
- 1931
- examples
- Fred M. Fling
- George Matthew Dutcher
- zettelkasten
- 1910
- student surveillance
- William Henry Seward
- historical method
- note taking process
- composition
- grading
- note taking methods
- writing output
- note taking affordances
- cross references
- evidence of learning
- practical advice
- note taking advice
- shorthand
- Samuel S. Seward Jr.
- evidence of progress
- writing advice
- Beatrice Webb
- paper machines
- index cards
- John M. Vincent
- Earle W. Dow
- symbols
- note taking
- 1908
- surveillance
- idea links
- ars notaria
Annotators
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worldcat.org worldcat.org
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Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens by Johannes Erich Heyde( Book )29 editions published between 1931 and 1970 in 3 languages and held by 197 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
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Technik des Wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens. Eine anleitung, besonders für Studierende, mit Ausführlichem Schriftenverzeichnis by Johannes Erich Heyde( Book )25 editions published between 1933 and 1951 in German and Undetermined and held by 114 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
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Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens; eine Anleitung, besonders für Studierende by Johannes Erich Heyde( Book )32 editions published between 1931 and 1951 in German and held by 179 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
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scottscheper.com scottscheper.com
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https://scottscheper.com/letter/36/
Clemens Luhmann, Niklas' son, has a copy of a book written in German in 1932 and given to his father by Friedrich Rudolf Hohl which ostensibly is where Luhmann learned his zettelkasten technique. It contains a 34 page chapter titled Die Kartei (the Card Index) which has the details.
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Heyde, Johannes Erich. 1931. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens. Zeitgemässe Mittelund Verfahrensweisen: Eine Anleitung, besonders für Studierende, 3rd ed. Berlin: Junkerund Dünhaupt.
A manual on note taking practice that Blair quotes along with Paul Chavigny as being influential in the early 21st century.
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occidental.substack.com occidental.substack.com
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Malachy Walsh23 hr agoI'm 75 years old. Unfortunately I rejected the notecard method when it was taught in high school, instead choosing cumbersome notebooks all the way through graduate school...until Richard McKeon at University of Chicago recommended using notecards not only as a record of my reading and other experiences but also as a source of creative and rhetorical invention. This was a mind opening, life changing perspective. His only rule: each card or slip should pose and answer a single question. He recommended organizing all journal entries by one of the following topics: 1. By the so called great ideas in the Syntopticon. 2. By work or business projects, activities and events(I spent my life as an advertising man, juggling many assignments over 30 years, from Frosted Flakes to The Marines to Ford). 3. By great books worthy of Adler's analytical readings. 4. By everyday living topics like family, friends, health, wealth, politics, business, car, house, occasions, etc. This way of working has served me well. I believe a proper book case is half full of books and half full of boxes of notes about those books. Notice that McKeon's advice is not limited to writing and reflecting about the books we read. McKeown also encourages reflection on all areas of experience that are important to us. I guess I have an Aristotelian view that our lives consist of thinking, doing, making, and interacting and that writing offers us a way of connecting our thinking with these other activities. So, the nature, scope, and shape our "note system" should be designed to help us engage successfully in our day to day activities and long term enterprises. How should follow What and Why, connect with Who, and fit with When and Where. Any success I have had in business or personal life I attribute to McKeon's advice.
Richard McKeon's advice, as relayed by a student, on how to take notes using an index card based practice.
Does he have a written handbook or advice on his particular method?
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howaboutthis.substack.com howaboutthis.substack.com
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I see connections between ideas more easily following this approach. Plus, the combinations of ideas lead to even more new ideas. It’s great!
Like many others, the idea of combinatorial creativity and serendipity stemming from the slip box is undersold.
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It’s recommended that you summarize the information you want to store in your own words, instead of directly copying the information like you would in a commonplace book.
recommended by whom? for what purpose?
Too many of these posts skip the important "why?" question
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myhub.ai myhub.ai
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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The network of trails functions as a shared external memory for the ant colony.
Just as a trail of pheromones serves the function of a shared external memory for an ant colony, annotations can create a set of associative trails which serve as an external memory for a broader human collective memory. Further songlines and other orality based memory methods form a shared, but individually stored internal collective memory for those who use and practice them.
Vestiges of this human practice can be seen in modern society with the use and spread of cultural memes. People are incredibly good at seeing and recognizing memes and what they communicate and spreading them because they've evolved to function this way since the dawn of humanity.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I have it in Kindle version. The book is not bad, but for me there wasn't anything new. Probably because I have already read too much about notetaking and "thinking on paper" -- I have read too much, to be honest, it's becoming an obsession.Also, the book is meant for college students as a handbook on writing. I read only the first 7 chapters on notetaking, the rest of the book was about writing well.Little bit disappointed that the book doesn't have a reference/bibliography section at the end, even though he mentions in the book how important it is to reference your sources.
I too wished for more sources, especially on some of the great quotes.
Admittedly, for those who're already eyeball deep in note taking practice, there may not be much new, but for some who are confused or confounded by some of Ahrens' descriptions and presentation, this cuts through some of the details and gets more quickly to the point.
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Local file Local file
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Mortimer Adler (another independent scholar). “My train of thought greiout of my life just the way a leaf or a branch grows our of a tree.” His thinking and writing occurred as a regular part of his life. In one of his book;Thinking and Working on the Waterfront, he wrote:My writing is'done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fieldswhile waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Now and then I take aday off to “put myself in order." I go through the notes, pick and discard.The residue is usually a few paragraphs. My mind must always have somethingto chew on. I think on man, America, and the world. It is not as pretentiousas it sounds.
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Local file Local file
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Furthermore, thisdisparagement and neglect were surely unnecessary. P
note taking too...
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Contemporary scholarship is not in a position to give a definitive assessmentof the achievements of philosophical grammar. The ground-work has not beenlaid for such an assessment, the original work is all but unknown in itself, andmuch of it is almost unobtainable. For example, I have been unable to locate asingle copy, in the United States, of the only critical edition of the Port-RoyalGrammar, produced over a century ago; and although the French original isnow once again available, 3 the one English translation of this important workis apparently to be found only in the British Museum. It is a pity that this workshould have been so totally disregarded, since what little is known about it isintriguing and quite illuminating.
He's railing against the loss of theory for use over time and translation.
similar to me and note taking...
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I'm working on my zettelkasten—creating literature notes and permanent notes—for 90 min a day from Monday to Friday but I struggle with my permanent note output. Namely, I manage to complete no more than 3-4 permanent notes per week. By complete I mean notes that are atomic (limited to 1 idea), autonomous (make sense on their own), connected (link to at least 3 other notes), and brief (no more than 300 words).That said, I have two questions:How many permanent notes do you complete per week on average?What are your tips to increase your output?
reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/wjigq6/how_do_you_increase_your_permanent_note_output
In addition to all the other good advice from others, it might be worth taking a look at others' production and output from a historical perspective. Luhmann working at his project full time managed to average about 6 cards a day.1 Roland Barthes who had a similar practice for 37 years averaged about 1.3 cards a day.2 Tiago Forte has self-reported that he makes two notes a day, though obviously his isn't the same sort of practice nor has he done it consistently for as long.3 As you request, it would be useful to have some better data about the output of people with long term, consistent use.
Given even these few, but reasonably solid, data points at just 90 minutes a day, one might think you're maybe too "productive"! I suspect that unless one is an academic working at something consistently nearly full time, most are more likely to be in the 1-3 notes a day average output at best. On a per hour basis Luhmann was close to 0.75 cards while you're at 0.53 cards. Knowing this, perhaps the best advice is to slow down a bit and focus on quality over quantity. This combined with continued consistency will probably serve your enterprise much better in the long run than in focusing on card per hour or card per day productivity.
Internal idea generation/creation productivity will naturally compound over time as your collection grows and you continue to work with it. This may be a better sort of productivity to focus on in the long term compared with short term raw inputs.
Another useful tidbit that some neglect is the level of quality and diversity of the reading (or other) inputs you're using. The better the journal articles and books you're reading, the more value and insight you're likely to find and generate more quickly over time.
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ljvmiranda921.github.io ljvmiranda921.github.io
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Analog tools also allow me to express my intention freely. For example, when using a blank notebook, I can write anywhere: begin from the bottom, on the margins, or intersperse it with quick diagrams or illustrations. On the other hand, note-taking apps usually force me to think line by line. It’s not bad, but it misses out on several affordances that pen and paper provides.
affordance of location on a page in analog pen/paper versus digital line by line in note taking
I did sort of like the idea of creating information anywhere on the page within OneNote, but it didn't make things easy to draw or link pieces on the same page in interesting ways (or at least I don't remember that as a thing.)
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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For the sake of simplicity, go to Graph Analysis Settings and disable everything but Co-Citations, Jaccard, Adamic Adar, and Label Propogation. I won't spend my time explaining each because you can find those in the net, but these are essentially algorithms that find connections for you. Co-Citations, for example, uses second order links or links of links, which could generate ideas or help you create indexes. It essentially automates looking through the backlinks and local graphs as it generates possible relations for you.
comment on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OUn2-h6oVc
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cyberzettel.com cyberzettel.com
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https://cyberzettel.com/chris-aldrich-and-his-research-on-digital-public-zettelkasten/
This looks exciting!
You've also nudged me to convert my burgeoning broader top level tag of "note taking" into a full fledged category (https://boffosocko.com/category/note-taking/) which shortly will contain not only the material on zettelkasten but commonplace books and other related areas.
Usually once a tag has more than a couple hundred entries, it's time to convert it to a category. This one was long overdue.
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thoughtcatalog.com thoughtcatalog.com
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Don’t let it pile up. A lot of people mark down passages or fold pages of stuff they like. Then they put of doing anything with it. I’ll tell you, nothing will make your procrastinate like seeing a giant pile of books you have to go through and take notes on it. You can avoid this by not letting it pile up. Don’t go months or weeks without going through the ritual. You have to stay on top of it.
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I use 4×6 ruled index cards, which Robert Greene introduced me to. I write the information on the card, and the theme/category on the top right corner. As he figured out, being able to shuffle and move the cards into different groups is crucial to getting the most out of them.
Ryan Holiday keeps a commonplace book on 4x6 inch ruled index cards with a theme or category written in the top right corner. He learned his system from Robert Greene.
Of crucial importance to him was the ability to shuffle the cards and move them around.
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A commonplace book is a way to keep our learning priorities in order. It motivates us to look for and keep only the things we can use.
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And if you still need a why–I’ll let this quote from Seneca answer it (which I got from my own reading and notes): “We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application–not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech–and learn them so well that words become works.”
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https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/
Holiday followed this article up two days later with https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/everyone-should-keep-a-commonplace-book-great-tips-from-people-who-do/
This article predated a somewhat related LifeHacker piece: https://lifehacker.com/im-ryan-holiday-and-this-is-how-i-work-1485776137
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lifehacker.com lifehacker.com
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I know a lot of people use Evernote for this but I think physical is better. You want to be able to move the stuff around.
Holiday prefers physical index cards over digital systems like Evernote because he wants to have the ability to "move the stuff around."
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It's several thousand 4x6 notecards—based on a system taught to by my mentor Robert Greene when I was his research assistant—that have ideas, notes on books I liked, quotes that caught my attention, research for projects or phrases I am kicking around.
Ryan Holiday learned his index card-based commonplace book system from writer Robert Greene for whom he worked as an assistant.
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maggieappleton.com maggieappleton.com
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There's also a good chance the DNP encourages people to spend non-significant amounts of time journaling and writing notes they never look back on.
While writing notes into a daily note page may be useful to give them a quick place to live, a note that isn't revisited is likely one that shouldn't have been made at all.
Tools for thought need to do a better job of staging ideas for follow and additional work. Leaving notes orphaned on a daily notes page may help in the quick capture process, but one needs reminders about them, means of finding them, and potential means of improving them.
If they're swept away continuously, then they only serve the sort of functionality of cleaning out of ideas that morning pages do. It's bad enough to have a massive scrap heap that looks and feels like work, but it's even worse to have it spread out among hundreds or thousands of separate files.
Does digital search fix this issue entirely? Or does it just push off the work to later when it won't be done either.
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Half the time I begin typing something, I'm not even sure what I'm writing yet. Writing it out is an essential part of thinking it out. Once I've captured it, re-read it, and probably rewritten it, I can then worry about what to label it, what it connects to, and where it should 'live' in my system.
One of my favorite things about Hypothes.is is that with a quick click, I've got a space to write and type and my thinking is off to the races.
Sometimes it's tacitly (linked) attached to another idea I've just read (as it is in this case), while other times it's not. Either way, it's coming out and has at least a temporary place to live.
Later on, my note is transported (via API) from Hypothes.is to my system where I can figure out how to modify it or attach it to something else.
This one click facility is dramatically important in reducing the friction of the work for me. I hate systems which require me to leave what I'm doing and opening up another app, tool, or interface to begin.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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I like to imagine all the thoughts and ideas I’vecollected in my system of notes as a forest. I imagine itas three-dimensional, because the trains of thought I’vebeen working on for some time look like trees, withbranches of argument, point, and counterpoint andleaves of source-based evidence. Actually, the forest isfour-dimensional, because it changes over time, growingas I add more to it. A piece of output I make using thisforest of thoughts is like a path through the woods. It’sa one-dimensional narrative or interpretation that startsat one point, moves in a line or an arc (sometimes azig-zag) through the woods, touching some but not allof the trees and leaves. I like this imagery, because itsuggests there are many ways to move through the forest.
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www.mattmaldre.com www.mattmaldre.com
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https://www.mattmaldre.com/2021/09/13/annotate-articles-online/
I love that Matt is using this tool and his annotated notes to write new material based on things he's read.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Fiona McPherson has some good suggestions/tips in her book on Effective Notetaking. In general it revolves around using relevant icons for your illustrations and limiting your supporting text of the diagrams. (I.e. Have a good icon that explains the process and only 2-4 words paired with the icon).
I haven't delved into McPherson's work yet, but it's in my pile. She's one of the few people who've written about both note taking and memory, so I'm intrigued. I take it you like her perspective? Does she delve into any science-backed methods or is she coming from a more experiential perspective?
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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https://danallosso.substack.com/p/announcing-how-to-make-notes-and
Congratulations @danallosso!
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- Jul 2022
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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https://danallosso.substack.com/p/thoughts-prior-to-publishing
<iframe title="vimeo-player" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/735211043?h=68a6bdd022" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>I love the pointed focus @danallosso puts on output here. I think he's right that the "conversation between the writer, the text, and their notes" (in my framing combinatorial creativity) is where the real value is to be had.
His explanation of the "evergreen note" is highly valuable here. One should really do as much work upfront to make it as evergreen as possible. Too many people (especially in the digital gardens space) put the emphasis on working on these evergreen notes over time to slowly improve and evolve them and that's probably the wrong framing to take. Write it once, write it well, then reuse it.
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minnstate.pressbooks.pub minnstate.pressbooks.pub
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For those curious about the idea of what students might do with the notes and annotations they're making in the margins of their texts using Hypothes.is, I would submit that Dan Allosso's OER handbook How to Make Notes and Write (Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022) may be a very useful place to turn. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/
It provides some concrete advice on the topic of once you've highlighted and annotated various texts for a course, how might you then turn your new understanding, ideas, and extant thinking work into a blogpost, essay, term paper or thesis.
For a similar, but alternative take, the book How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking by Sönke Ahrens (Create Space, 2017) may also be helpful as well. This text however requires purchase via Amazon and doesn't carry the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (by-nc-sa 4.0) license that Dr. Allosso's does.
In addition to the online copy of the book, there's an annotatable .pdf copy available here: http://docdrop.org/pdf/How-to-Make-Notes-and-Write---Allosso-Dan-jzdq8.pdf/ though one can download .epub and .pdf copies directly from the Pressbooks site.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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I think claims of magical moments of “emergentcomplexity” where the note system reaches some sortof critical mass and begins spitting out answers like anoracle are probably a bit exaggerated. They sound a bittoo much like the Singularity. But it’s also true, I suspect,that by reviewing our notes regularly, comparing SourceNotes and making Point Notes out of them, anddiligently connecting new ideas into the train of thoughtthey emerged from, we’ll create a tree that will have morebranches and leaves in some places than in others. Thosebranches will be where the action is; where we can expectto find a lot of material we can turn into output.
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As I was reviewing these I wrote thePoint Note pictured, continuing the train of thought thatadvocates of the zettelkasten system often claim it “shows”you what some people call “hot nodes”, which can tell you(sometimes surprising) things about the topic you arepursuing.
"hot nodes"? I've not come across this as a thing... source?
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Imagine that when you reading The Odyssey in a WorldLiterature class, you found you were interested in
Or maybe you were interested in color the way former British Prime Minister William Gladstone was? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_on_Homer_and_the_Homeric_Age
Or you noticed a lot of epithets (rosy fingered dawn, wine dark sea, etc.) and began tallying them all up the way Milman Parry did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milman_Parry
How might your notes dramatically change how we view the world?
Aside: In the Guy Ritchie film Sherlock Holmes (2009), Watson's dog's name was Gladstone, likely a cheeky nod to William Gladstone who was active during the setting of the movie's timeline.
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This might be all you need, if your notes are directedtoward a small, immediate goa
I like that there are a variety of potential contexts here which students might find themselves within (short term versus long term / big projects versus small). The broad advice can be useful to more people because they can pick and choose for their own needs.
This is similar to Umberto Eco's advice which is geared toward a longer thesis, though he mentions that one might continue on their system across additional topics or even an entire career.
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An Index is something you must physically create asyou add cards in a physical note system.
Watch closely to see how Allosso's description of an index comes to the advice of John Locke versus the practice of Niklas Luhmann.
Alternately, is it closer to a commonplace indexing system or a shallowly linked, but still complex zettelkasten indexing system?
In shared digital systems, I still suspect that densely indexed notes will have more communal value.
Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/nrk0vgoCEe2y3CedssHnVA
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Thewhole point of this note-making process is not only toprovide ourselves with ideas we want to pursue, but toactually show us which ideas we are most interested in.
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Thetechniques and tools we’re going to discuss in this sectionon note-making are focused mostly on texts, but they canbe applied to ideas that come to you from discussion,listening to lectures, experiment, or life experience.
This might also include other forms of art including song and dance.
Link this to: - choreography notation (@remikalir's sister in ballet) - Caleb Deschanel's cinematography notation which he likened to musical notation
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“Taking Notes” rather than what I typically say, MakingNotes.
I love the distinction here between "taking notes" and "making notes". Too many focus on the "taking notes" portion and never get to the making part of the equation.
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ven if that reader is just future-you –and this is one of the benefits of making notes your futureself can read!
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interacting with other ideas and remaining part of ourtrain of thought.
Within our own notes, connections allow the ideas we developing to survive by
There are several levels of "evolutionary" development of one's notes. One can compare and contrast two different notes to help determine the truth or falsity of each, but groups of linked notes may also evolve and survive against other groups by competing both for attention as well as their potential truth or falsity.
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“Comparing notes” is a metaphor for talking throughideas for good reason
What is the origin of this metaphor?
One might suspect the 1500s or during the Scientific Revolution?
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Far more important than what these notes are calledis what they do in helping you make the transition fromacquiring information from others to making it yourown.
This welcome point is not often seen in the broader literature on this subject! Thanks Dan!
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many others
A longer list I've been sporadically maintaining: - https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book#Platforms
Tiago Forte has a curated/downloadable list here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/resources
Tags
- choreography notation
- note taking why
- future self
- Umberto Eco
- Milman Parry
- John Locke indexing method
- historical linguistics
- metaphors
- aphorisms
- Niklas Luhmann's index
- Sherlock Holmes
- Sherlock Holmes (2009)
- Guy Ritchie
- open questions
- note taking affordances
- note making
- Homer
- note taking advice
- Dan Allosso
- surprise
- magic of note taking
- color
- indices
- quotes
- Caleb Deschanel
- William Gladstone
- note taking metaphors
- epithets
- audience
- evolution of knowledge
- understanding
- comparing notes
- note taking for paradigm shifts
- note taking
- cinematography notation
- interests
- note taking vs. note making
- serendipity
- note taking applications
- orality vs. literacy
Annotators
URL
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developassion.gumroad.com developassion.gumroad.com
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https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit
Sébastien Dubois selling an Obsidian Starter Kit for €19.99 on Gumroad.
Looks like it's got lots of support and description of many of the big buzz words in the personal knowledge management space. Not sure how it would work with everything and the kitchen sink thrown in.
found via https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalKnowledgeMgmt/comments/w8dw94/obsidian_starter_kit/
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writingcommons.org writingcommons.org
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Synthesis notes are a strategy for taking and using reading notes that bring together—synthesize—what we read with our thoughts about our topic in a way that lets us integrate our notes seamlessly into the process of writing a first draft. Six steps will take us from reading sources to a first draft.
Similar to Beatrice Webb's definition of synthetic notes in My Apprentice (1926), thought this also includes movement into actually drafting writing.
What year was this written?
The idea here seems to be less discrete in the steps of the writing process and subsumes multiple things instead of breaking them into discrete conceptual parts. Has this been some of what has caused issues in the note taking to creation process in the last century?
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Local file Local file
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The industrious apprentice will find in the Appendix (C) a short memorandumon the method of analytic note-taking, which we have found most convenient inthe use of documents and contemporaneous literature, as well as in the recording ofinterviews and personal observations.
method of analytic note-taking from Beatrice Webb
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And whilst I could plan out an admirable system ofnote-taking, the actual execution of the plan was, owing toan inveterate tendency to paraphrase extracts which I in¬tended to copy, not to mention an irredeemably illegible hand¬writing, a wearisome irritation to me.
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in a later chapter I call it syntheticnote-taking, in order to distinguish it from the analytic note¬taking upon which historical work is based.
Webb distinguishes synthetic note taking from analytic note taking.
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CHAPTER ICHARACTER AND CIRCUMSTANCEIn the following pages I describe the craft of a social in¬vestigator as I have practised it. I give some account of myearly and crude observation and clumsy attempts at reason¬ing, and then of the more elaborated technique of note¬taking, of listening to and recording the spoken word and ofobserving and even experimenting in the life of existinginstitutions.
While she leaves note taking specifically to Appendix C, Beatrice Webb mentions her "more elaborated technique of note-taking" in the second sentence of the book.
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Struggling with the Co-op. News and enduring all the miseries ofwant of training in methods of work [I write some weeks later].Midway I discover that my notes are slovenly, and under wrong head¬ings, and I have to go through some ten weeks’ work again! Up at6.30 and working 5 hours a day, sometimes 6. Weary but not dis¬couraged. [MS. diary, July 26, 1889.]
Indication that in July 1889, Beatrice Webb was developing her note taking methods and had a setback.
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It wasnot until we had completely re-sorted all our innumerable sheets ofpaper according to subjects, thus bringing together all the facts relatingto each, whatever the trade concerned, or the place or the date—andhad shuffled and reshuffled these sheets according to various tentativehypotheses—that a clear, comprehensive and verifiable theory of theworking and results of Trade Unionism emerged in our minds; tobe embodied, after further researches by way of verification, in ourIndustrial Democracy (1897).
Beatrice Webb was using her custom note taking system in the lead up to the research that resulted in the publication of Industrial Democracy (1897).
Is there evidence that she was practicing this note taking/database practice earlier than this?
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The centre of the sheet will be occupied by the text of the note, that is,the main statement or description of the fact recorded, whether it bea personal observation of your own, an extract from a document, aquotation from some literary source, an answer given in evidence, or astatistical calculation or table of figures.
Beatrice Webb's list of the types of notes one might include on their sheets.
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THE ART OF NOTE-TAKING
Beatrice Webb's suggestions: - Use sheets of paper and not notebooks, specifically so one can re-arrange, shuffle, and resort one's notes - She uses quarto pages as most convenient (quarto sizes have varied over time, but presumably hers were in the range of 8.5 x 11" sheets of paper, and thus rather large compared to index cards
It takes some careful attention, but her description of her method and how she used it in a pre-computer era is highly indicative of the fact that Beatrice Webb was actively creating a paper database system which she could then later query to compile data to either elicit insight or to prove answers to particular questions.
She specifically advises that one keep one and only one sort of particular types of data on each card whether that be dates, locations, subjects, or categories of facts. This is directly equivalent to the modern database design of only keeping one value in a particular field. As a result, each sheet within her notes might be equivalent to a row of related data which might contain a variety of different types of individual data. By not mixing data on individual sheets one can sort and resort their tables and effectively search through them without confusing data types.
Her work and examples here would have been in the period of 1890 and 1910 (she specifically cites that this method was used for her research on the "principles of 1834" which was subsequently published as English Poor Law Policy in 1910) at a time after Basile Bouchon and Joseph Marie Jacquard and contemporaneously with Herman Hollerith who were using punched cards for some of this sort of work.
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the making of notes, or whatthe French call “ fiches ’O
French notes:<br /> fiches - generally notes, specifically translates as "sheets"<br /> fichier - translates as "file"<br /> fichier boîte - translates as "file box" (aka zettelkasten in German)
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An instance may be given of the necessity of the “ separate sheet ” system.Among the many sources of information from which we constructed our bookThe Manor and the Borough were the hundreds of reports on particular boroughsmade by the Municipal Corporation Commissioners in 1835 .These four hugevolumes are well arranged and very fully indexed; they were in our own possession;we had read them through more than once; and we had repeatedly consulted themon particular points. We had, in fact, used them as if they had been our own boundnotebooks, thinking that this would suffice. But, in the end, we found ourselvesquite unable to digest and utilise this material until we had written out every oneof the innumerable facts on a separate sheet of paper, so as to allow of the mechanicalabsorption of these sheets among our other notes; of their complete assortment bysubjects; and of their being shuffled and reshuffled to test hypotheses as to suggestedco-existences and sequences.
Webb's use case here sounds like she's got the mass data, but that what she really desired was a database which she could more easily query to do her work and research. As a result, she took the flat file data and made it into a manually sortable and searchable database.
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By the method of note-taking that I have described, it was practicableto sort out all our thousands of separate pieces of paper according toany, or successively according to all, of these categories or combinationof categories
The broad description of Beatrice Webb's note taking system sounds almost eerily like the idea behind edge notched cards, however in her case she was writing note in particular locations on cards in an effort to help her cause rather than putting physical punch holes into them.
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final cause
How Aristotelian!
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recipe for scientific note-taking
Notice that Beatrice Webb uses the modifier "scientific" to describe her note taking. She also indicates that note taking has a "scientific value".
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For a highly elaborated and skilled processof “ making notes ”, besides its obvious use in recording observationswhich would otherwise be forgotten, is actually an instrument of dis¬covery.
Beatrice Webb sees the primary uses of notes as a memory device and a discovery device.
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This process serves a similar purpose in sociology to that of theblow-pipe and the balance in chemistry, or the prism and the electro¬scope in physics. That is to say, it enables the scientific worker to breakup his subject-matter, so as to isolate and examine at his leisure itsvarious component parts, and to recombine them in new and experi¬mental groupings in order to discover which sequences of events have acausal significance
Beatrice Webb analogized the card index (or note taking using slips of paper) as serving the function of a scientific tool for sociologists the way that chemists use blow pipes and balances or physicists use the prism or electroscope. These tools all help the researcher examine small constituent parts and then situate them in other orderings to provide insight into the subject areas.
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If what is in question ”, states the most learned German methodologist, “ isa many-sided subject, such as a history of a people or a great organisation, theseveral sheets of notes must be so arranged that for each aspect of the subject thematerial can be surveyed as a whole. With any considerable work the notes mustbe taken upon separate loose sheets, which can easily be arranged in different orders,and among which sheets with new dates can be interpolated without difficulty ”(Lehrbuch der historischen Metkode, by Bernheim, 1908, p. 555).
Note the broad similarities as well as small differences to Konrad Gessner's approach in 1548:
- When reading, everything of importance and whatever appears useful should be copied onto a good sheet of paper. 2. A new line should be used for every idea. 3.“ Finally, cut out everything you have copied with a pair of scissors; arrange the slips as you desire, first into larger clusters which can then be subdivided again as often as necessary.” 4. As soon as the desired order is produced, arranged, and sorted on tables or in small boxes, it should be fixed or copied directly. —Gessner, Konrad. Pandectarum sive Partitionum Universalium. 1548. Zurich: Christoph Froschauer. Fol. 19-20"
Given that the original was in German, did the original text use the word zettelkasten?
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“ Every one agrees nowadays ”, observethe most noted French writers on the study of history, “ that it is advisable to collectmaterials on separate cards or slips of paper. . . . The advantages of this artifice areobvious; the detachability of the slips enables us to group them at will in a host ofdifferent combinations; if necessary, to change their places; it is easy to bring textsof the same kind together, and to incorporate additions, as they are acquired, in theinterior of the groups to which they belong ” (Introduction to the Study of History,by Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos, translated by C. G. Berry, 1898, p.103). “
Tags
- combinations
- 1897
- scientific note taking
- intellectual history
- French
- final cause
- fiches
- card index as discovery
- Charles Seignobos
- zettelkasten
- flat files
- apprenticeships
- Herman Hollerith
- discovery
- scientific instruments
- Charles Langlois
- card index as database
- edge-notched cards
- prisms
- balances
- note taking methods
- punched cards
- note taking affordances
- Ernst Bernheim
- Basile Bouchon
- Industrial Democracy (book)
- note taking advice
- databases
- Konrad Gessner
- fichier boîte
- Physics
- Joseph Marie Jacquard
- quotes
- card index
- Beatrice Webb
- 1548
- index cards
- slips
- archives
- tools for thought
- Aristotelian
- search
- computer science
- card index as memory
- note taking
- 1898
- Chemistry
- autobiography
- electroscope
- 1908
- modifiers
- 1889
Annotators
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niklas-luhmann-archiv.de niklas-luhmann-archiv.de
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Langlois, Charles-Victor / Seignobos, Charles (1898): Introduction to the Study of History. London
Niklas Luhmann cites Langlois and Seignobos' Introduction to the Study of History (1898) at least once, so there's evidence that he read at least a portion of the book which outlines some portions of note taking practice that resemble portions of his zettelkasten method.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi kept a notebook, called Zibaldone, from 1817 to 1832. The idea of keeping that, which contains no fewer than 4,526 pages, was possibly suggested by a priest who fled from the French Revolution and came to live in the poet's hometown. The priest suggested that "every literary man should have a written chaos such as this: notebook containing sottiseries, adrersa, excerpta, pugillares, commentaria... the store-house out of which fine literature of every kind may come, as the sun, moon, and stars issued out of chaos."[1]
Iris Origo, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude. Helen Marx Books. 1999. pp. 142-3.
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luhmann.surge.sh luhmann.surge.sh
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Perhaps the best method would be to take notes—not excerpts, but condensed reformulations of what has been read.
One of the best methods for technical reading is to create progressive summarizations of what one has read.
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learntrepreneurs.com learntrepreneurs.com
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See also the author's (Eva Keiffenheim) article on RoamBrain: THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR BUILDING A ZETTELKASTEN WITH ROAM RESEARCH
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, FBA (née Potter; 22 January 1858 – 30 April 1943) was an English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer. It was Webb who coined the term collective bargaining. She was among the founders of the London School of Economics and played a crucial role in forming the Fabian Society.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
Link to Beatrice Webb's use of note taking methods as a means of data storage, search, and sort in the early 1900s.
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Local file Local file
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The system of slips the best — Its drawbacks — Means ofobviating them^The advantage of good "private librarian-ship"
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Importance of classification —The first impulse wrong—Thenote-book system not the best—Nor the ledger-systemNor the " system " of trusting the memory
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Langlois, Charles Victor, and Charles Seignobos. Introduction to the Study of History. Translated by George Godfrey Berry. First. New York: Henry Holt and company, 1898. http://archive.org/details/cu31924027810286.
Suggested by footnote in Beatrice Webb's My Apprenticeship.
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Local file Local file
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Bernheim, Ernst. Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie: mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hilfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte. Leipzig : Duncker & Humblot, 1908. http://archive.org/details/lehrbuchderhist03berngoog.
Title translation: Textbook of the historical method and the philosophy of history : with reference to the most important sources and aids for the study of history
A copy of the original 1889 copy can be found at https://digital.ub.uni-leipzig.de/mirador/index.php
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Ein grofer Teil der Regestenarbeit wird neuerdings demForscher durch besondere Regestenwerke abgenommen, nament-lich auf dem Gebiet der mittelalterlichen Urkunden. Daf diesebevorzugt werden, hat zwei Griinde: erstens sind die Urkundenfur die Geschichte des Mittelalters gewissermafen als festesGerippe von besonderer Wichtigkeit; zweitens sind sie so ver.streut in ihren Fund- und Druckorten, da8 die Zusammen-stellung derselben, wie sie ftir jede Arbeit von neuem erforder-lich wire, immer von neuem die langwierigsten und mtthsamstenVorarbeiten n&tig machen wiirde. Es ist daher von griéStemNutzen, da8 diese Vorarbeiten ein fir allemal gemacht und demeinzelnen Forscher erspart werden.
Ein großer Teil der Regestenarbeit wird neuerdings dem Forscher durch besondere Regestenwerke abgenommen, namentlich auf dem Gebiet der mittelalterlichen Urkunden. Daß diese bevorzugt werden, hat zwei Gründe: erstens sind die Urkunden fur die Geschichte des Mittelalters gewissermafen als festes Gerippe von besonderer Wichtigkeit; zweitens sind sie so verstreut in ihren Fund- und Druckorten, daß die Zusammenstellung derselben, wie sie ftir jede Arbeit von neuem erforderlich wire, immer von neuem die langwierigsten und mtthsamsten Vorarbeiten nötig machen würde. Es ist daher von größtem Nutzen, daß diese Vorarbeiten ein fir allemal gemacht und dem einzelnen Forscher erspart werden.
Google translation:
A large part of the regesta work has recently been relieved of the researcher by special regesta works, especially in the field of medieval documents. There are two reasons why these are preferred: first, the documents are of particular importance for the history of the Middle Ages as a solid skeleton; Secondly, they are so scattered in the places where they were found and printed that the compilation of them, as would be necessary for each new work, would again and again necessitate the most lengthy and laborious preparatory work. It is therefore of the greatest benefit that this preparatory work should be done once and for all and that the individual researcher be spared.
While the contexts are mixed here between note taking and historical method, there is some useful advice here that while taking notes, one should do as much work upfront during the research phase of reading and writing, so that when it comes to the end of putting the final work together and editing, the writer can be spared the effort of reloading large amounts of data and context to create the final output.
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nennt man Regesten, Regesta, eine Ableitung von dem Verbumregerere, das schon bei Quintilian in der Bedeutung ,abschreiben,eintragen“ vorkommt. Spezielle Zusammenstellungen der Auf-enthaltsorte historischer Persinlichkeiten aus den Quellen nenntman Itinerare.
Derartige geordnete Eintragungen historischer Materialien nennt man Regesten, Regesta, eine Ableitung von dem Verbum regerere, das schon bei Quintilian in der Bedeutung ,abschreiben, eintragen“ vorkommt. Spezielle Zusammenstellungen der Aufenthaltsorte historischer Persönlichkeiten aus den Quellen nennt man Itinerare. (p 556-557)
Google translation:
Such ordered entries of historical material are called regesta, regesta, a derivation of the verb regerere, which already occurs in Quintilian in the meaning "to copy, to enter". Special compilations of the whereabouts of historical figures from the sources are called itineraries.
Regesta in this context are complete copies of ordered entries of historical material. One might also translate this as historical copies or entries.
While Bernheim is talking about historical records and copies thereof in his discussion of regesta, he does bring up a useful point about manual note taking practice: one needn't completely copy the original context, just do enough work to create context for yourself so as not to be overburdened with excess material later. Some working in digital contexts may find it easy to simply copy and paste everything from an original document, but capturing just the useful synopsis may be enough, particularly when the original context can be readily revisited.
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der Beschaffenheit des Themas und des Materials wird es oft_ praktisch sein, von sachlicher Ordnung abzusehen und nur dieHuGBerlich chronologische anzuwenden. Gerade dann ist es vongréBtem Wert, die Eintragungen auf lose Blu&tter zu machen,damit man dieselben nach den verschiedenen Gesichtspunktender Zusammengehirigkeit zeitweilig umordnen und dann wiederin die Grundordoung zurticklegen kann. Um die einzelnenNotizen leicht auffinden zu kinnen, ist es ratsam, die Datenoder Schlagwirter oben dartiberzuschreiben; und die Bl&tteroder Zettel miissen von nicht zu diinnem Papier sein, damitman sie schnell durchblattern kann.Soweit es sich um Abschriften ganzer Akten oder Nach-richten handelt, bedarf es keiner besonderen Erérterungen.Doch solche véllige Abschriften wird man nur machen, wo essich um archivalische Quellen oder entlegenere Drucke handelt,die man nicht so leicht wieder erreichen kann. Im tibrigenwird man sich mit Ausztigen und Notizen begniigen, welcheentweder das aus den Quellen ausheben, was fiir das Themain Betracht kommt, oder nur im allgemeinen auf die Quellen-stellen hinweisen. Im ersteren Falle kommt es darauf an, dasBrauchbare und Wichtige scharf zu erkennen und prizis zunotieren; im letzteren Falle mu8 die Hindeutung wenigstensderart prizisiert sein, daf8 man beim sp&teren Durchsehen derNotizen gleich ersieht, was in der betreffenden Quellenstellezu erwarten ist, und da® die Identit&t der Notiz mit dem Inhaltder Quellenstelle nicht zweifelhaft sein kann; bei Urkundenerfordert letzteres besondere Sorgfalt, da nicht selten iiber den-selben (tegenstand zur selben Zeit mehrere dhnliche Dokumenteausgestellt worden sind: man tut daher gut, die Identitét jedesStiickes durch Aufnotierung des Anfanges und Schlusses (In-cipit und Explicit) sicherzustellen, wobei zu bemerken ist, dafhier als Anfang und Schlu8 nicht die formelhaften Teile, diesogenannten Protokolle, welche eben als feststehende Formelnnicht fiir die einzelne Urkunde unterscheidend sind, gelten,sondern daf man Anfang und Schlu8 des individuellen Textesnotiert, eine Art der Bezeichnung, die allgemein bei den pupst-lichen Bullen angewandt wird, indem man von der Bulle Unamsanctam oder Ausculta fili usw. spricht.
Je nach der Beschaffenheit des Themas und des Materials wird es oft praktisch sein, von sachlicher Ordnung abzusehen und nur die äußerlich chronologische anzuwenden. Gerade dann ist es von größtem Wert, die Eintragungen auf lose Blätter zu machen, damit man dieselben nach den verschiedenen Gesichtspunkten der Zusammengehörigkeit zeitweilig umordnen und dann wieder in die Grundordoung zurücklegen kann. Um die einzelnen Notizen leicht auffinden zu können, ist es ratsam, die Daten oder Schlagwörter oben darüberzuschreiben; und die Blätter oder Zettel müssen von nicht zu dünnem Papier sein, damit man sie schnell durchblättern kann.
Soweit es sich um Abschriften ganzer Akten oder Nachrichten handelt, bedarf es keiner besonderen Erörterungen. Doch solche völlige Abschriften wird man nur machen, wo es sich um archivalische Quellen oder entlegenere Drucke handelt, die man nicht so leicht wieder erreichen kann. Im übrigen wird man sich mit Auszügen und Notizen begnügen, welche entweder das aus den Quellen ausheben, was für das Thema in Betracht kommt, oder nur im allgemeinen auf die Quellenstellen hinweisen. Im ersteren Falle kommt es darauf an, das Brauchbare und Wichtige scharf zu erkennen und präzis zu notieren; im letzteren Falle muß die Hindeutung wenigstens derart präzisiert sein, daß man beim späteren Durchsehen der Notizen gleich ersieht, was in der betreffenden Quellenstelle zu erwarten ist, und daß die Identität der Notiz mit dem Inhalt der Quellenstelle nicht zweifelhaft sein kann; bei Urkunden erfordert letzteres besondere Sorgfalt, da nicht selten über den-selben (tegenstand zur selben Zeit mehrere ähnliche Dokumente ausgestellt worden sind: man tut daher gut, die Identität jedes Stückes durch Aufnotierung des Anfanges und Schlusses (Incipit und Explicit) sicherzustellen, wobei zu bemerken ist, daf hier als Anfang und Schluß nicht die formelhaften Teile, die sogenannten Protokolle, welche eben als feststehende Formeln nicht für die einzelne Urkunde unterscheidend sind, gelten, sondern daß man Anfang und Schluß des individuellen Textes notiert, eine Art der Bezeichnung, die allgemein bei den päpstlichen Bullen angewandt wird, indem man von der Bulle Unam sanctam oder Ausculta fili usw. spricht.
Google translation:
Depending on the nature of the subject and the material, it will often be practical to dispense with factual order and use only the outwardly chronological one. It is precisely then that it is of the greatest value to make the entries on loose sheets of paper, so that they can be temporarily rearranged according to the various aspects of belonging together and then put back into the basic order. In order to be able to easily find the individual notes, it is advisable to write the dates or keywords above them; and the sheets or slips of paper must be of paper that is not too thin so that they can be leafed through quickly.
As far as copies of entire files or messages are concerned, no special discussion is required. But such complete copies will only be made from archival sources or more remote prints that cannot easily be accessed again. For the rest, one will be content with excerpts and notes, which either extract from the sources what comes into consideration for the subject, or only refer to the sources in general. In the first case it is important to clearly recognize what is useful and important and to write it down precisely; in the latter case, the indication must at least be specified in such a way that, when looking through the notes later, one can immediately see what is to be expected in the relevant source and that the identity of the note with the content of the source cannot be in doubt; for certificates the latter requires special care, as it is not uncommon for same (te, several similar documents existed at the same time have been issued: one does therefore well, the identity of each piece by notating the beginning and end (Incipit and explicit), noting that here as beginning and end not the formulaic parts that so-called protocols, which are simply fixed formulas are not distinctive for the individual document, apply, but that one sees the beginning and end of the individual text noted, a form of designation commonly applied to the papal bulls, speaking of the bull Unam sanctam or Ausculta fili, etc.
Continuing on in his advice on note taking, Bernheim tells us that notes on loose sheets of paper (presumably in contrast with the bound pages of a commonplace book or other types of notebooks), "can be temporarily rearranged according to the various aspects of belonging together and then put back into the basic order". He recommends giving them dates (presumably to be able to put them back into their temporal order), as well as keywords. He also suggest that "the sheets or slips of paper must be of paper that is not too thin so that they can be leafed through quickly." (translated from German)
Note that he doesn't specify the exact size of the paper (at least not in this general section) other than to specify either "die Blätter oder Zettel" (sheets or slips) . Other practices may be more indicative of the paper size he may have had in mind. Are his own papers extant? Might those have an indication of his own personal practice as it may have differed from his published advice?
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3. Regesten.Da wir gesehen haben, wieviel auf tibersichtliche Ordnungbei der Zusammenstellung des Materials ankommt, muff manauf die praktische Einrichtung seiner Materialiensammlung vonAnfang an bewufte Sorgfalt verwenden. Selbstverstindlichlassen sich keine, im einzelnen durchweg gtiltigen Regeln auf-stellen; aber wir kinnen uns doch tiber einige allgemeine Ge-sichtspunkte verstindigen. Nicht genug zu warnen ist vor einemregel- und ordnungslosen Anhiufen und Durcheinanderschreibender Materialien; denn die zueinander gehérigen Daten zusammen--gufinden erfordert dann ein stets erneutes Durchsehen des ganzenMaterials; auch ist es dann kaum miglich, neu hinzukommendeDaten an der gehirigen Stelle einzureihen. Bei irgend gréferenArbeiten muff man seine Aufzeichnungen auf einzelne loseBlatter machen, die leicht umzuordnen und denen ohne Unm-stinde Blatter mit neuen Daten einzuftigen sind. Macht mansachliche Kategorieen, so sind die zu einer Kategorie gehérigenBlatter in Umschligen oder besser noch in K&sten getrennt zuhalten; innerhalb derselben kann man chronologisch oder sach-lich alphabetisch nach gewissen Schlagwiértern ordnen.
- Regesten Da wir gesehen haben, wieviel auf tibersichtliche Ordnung bei der Zusammenstellung des Materials ankommt, muß man auf die praktische Einrichtung seiner Materialiensammlung von Anfang an bewußte Sorgfalt verwenden. Selbstverständlich lassen sich keine, im einzelnen durchweg gültigen Regeln aufstellen; aber wir können uns doch über einige allgemeine Gesichtspunkte verständigen. Nicht genug zu warnen ist vor einem regel- und ordnungslosen Anhäufen und Durcheinanderschreiben der Materialien; denn die zueinander gehörigen Daten zusammenzufinden erfordert dann ein stets erneutes Durchsehen des ganzen Materials; auch ist es dann kaum möglich, neu hinzukommende Daten an der gehörigen Stelle einzureihen. Bei irgend größeren Arbeiten muß man seine Aufzeichnungen auf einzelne lose Blätter machen, die leicht umzuordnen und denen ohne Umstände Blätter mit neuen Daten einzufügen sind. Macht man sachliche Kategorieen, so sind die zu einer Kategorie gehörigen Blätter in Umschlägen oder besser noch in Kästen getrennt zu halten; innerhalb derselben kann man chronologisch oder sachlich alphabetisch nach gewissen Schlagwörtern ordnen.
Google translation:
- Regesture Since we have seen how much importance is placed on clear order in the gathering of material, conscious care must be exercised in the practical organization of one's collection of materials from the outset. It goes without saying that no rules that are consistently valid in detail can be set up; but we can still agree on some general points of view. There is not enough warning against a disorderly accumulation and jumble of materials; because to find the data that belong together then requires a constant re-examination of the entire material; it is also then hardly possible to line up newly added data at the appropriate place. In any large work one must make one's notes on separate loose sheets, which can easily be rearranged, and sheets of new data easily inserted. If you make factual categories, the sheets belonging to a category should be kept separate in covers or, better yet, in boxes; Within these, you can sort them chronologically or alphabetically according to certain keywords.
In a pre-digital era, Ernst Bernheim warns against "a disorderly accumulation and jumble of materials" (machine translation from German) as it means that one must read through and re-examine all their collected materials to find or make sense of them again.
In digital contexts, things are vaguely better as the result of better search through a corpus, but it's still better practice to have things with some additional level of order to prevent the creation of a "scrap heap".
link to: - https://hyp.is/i9dwzIXrEeymFhtQxUbEYQ
In 1889, Bernheim suggests making one's notes on separate loose sheets of paper so that they may be easily rearranged and new notes inserted. He suggested assigning notes to categories and keeping them separated, preferably in boxes. Then one might sort them in a variety of different ways, specifically highlighting both chronological and alphabetical order based on keywords.
(This quote is from the 1903 edition, but presumably is similar or the same in 1889, but double check this before publishing.)
Link this to the earlier section in which he suggested a variety of note orders for historical methods as well as for the potential creation of insight into one's work.
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www.connectedtext.com www.connectedtext.com
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Beatrice Webb, the famous sociologist and political activist, reported in 1926: "'Every one agrees nowadays', observe the most noted French writers on the study of history, 'that it is advisable to collect materials on separate cards or slips of paper. . . . The advantages of this artifice are obvious; the detachability of the slips enables us to group them at will in a host of different combinations; if necessary, to change their places; it is easy to bring texts of the same kind together, and to incorporate additions, as they are acquired, in the interior of the groups to which they belong.'" [6]
footnote:
Webb 1926, p. 363. The number of scholars who have used the index card method is legion, especially in sociology and anthropology, but also in many other subjects. Claude Lévy-Strauss learned their use from Marcel Mauss and others, Roland Barthes used them, Charles Sanders Peirce relied on them, and William Van Orman Quine wrote his lectures on them, etc.
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medium.com medium.com
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It’s the practical application of a concept already used in classrooms called elaborative interrogation.
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with established worldwide fame and prestige, to step in his previous successes to write more-of-the-same books and convert all the attention in cheap money. Just like Robert Kiyosaki did with his 942357 books about “Rich dad”.
Many artists fall into a creativity trap caused by fame. They spend years developing a great work, but then when it's released, the industry requires they follow it up almost immediately with something even stronger.
Jewel is an reasonable and perhaps typical example of this phenomenon. She spent several years writing the entirety of her first album Pieces of You (1995), which had three to four solid singles. As it became popular she was rushed to release Spirit (1998), which, while it was ultimately successful, didn't measure up to the first album which had far more incubation time. She wasn't able to build up enough material over time to more easily ride her initial wave of fame. Creativity on demand can be a difficult master, particularly when one is actively touring or supporting their first work while needing to
(Compare the number of titles she self-wrote on album one vs. album two).
M. Night Shyamalan is in a similar space, though as a director he preferred to direct scripts that he himself had written. While he'd had several years of writing and many scripts, some were owned by other production companies/studios which forced him to start from scratch several times and both write and direct at the same time, a process which is difficult to do by oneself.
Another example is Robert Kiyosaki who spun off several similar "Rich Dad" books after the success of his first.
Compare this with artists who have a note taking or commonplacing practice for maintaining the velocity of their creative output: - Eminem - stacking ammo - Taylor Swift - commonplace practice
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medium.com medium.com
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notes.andymatuschak.org notes.andymatuschak.org
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www.otherlife.co www.otherlife.co
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I tried using Roam for about two weeks once. I used Roam and only Roam, diligently. After only two weeks, my knowledge graph was utterly unintelligible and distressing.
While one can take a lot of notes in two weeks, even just six quality notes a day (Niklas Lumann's pace was six per day while Roland Barthes was closer to 1 and change per day) only provides about 84 cards or zettels. This isn't enough to make anything distressing or unintelligible. It's also incredibly far short of creating any useful links to create anything. He should have trimmed things down and continued for about 24 weeks to see any significant results. (Of course this also begs the question: what was his purpose in pursuing such a system in the first place?)
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But it's not a trivial problem. I have compiled, at latest reckoning, 35,669 posts - my version of a Zettelkasten. But how to use them when writing a paper? It's not straightforward - and I find myself typically looking outside my own notes to do searches on Google and elsewhere. So how is my own Zettel useful? For me, the magic happens in the creation, not in the subsequent use. They become grist for pattern recognition. I don't find value in classifying them or categorizing them (except for historical purposes, to create a chronology of some concept over time), but by linking them intuitively to form overarching themes or concepts not actually contained in the resources themselves. But this my brain does, not my software. Then I write a paper (or an outline) based on those themes (usually at the prompt of an interview, speaking or paper invitation) and then I flesh out the paper by doing a much wider search, and not just my limited collection of resources.
Stephen Downes describes some of his note taking process for creation here. He doesn't actively reuse his notes (or in this case blog posts, bookmarks, etc.) which number a sizeable 35669, directly, at least in the sort of cut and paste method suggested by Sönke Ahrens. Rather he follows a sort of broad idea, outline creation, and search plan akin to that described by Cory Doctorow in 20 years a blogger
Link to: - https://hyp.is/_XgTCm9GEeyn4Dv6eR9ypw/pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/
Downes suggests that the "magic happens in the creation" of his notes. He uses them as "grist for pattern recognition". He doesn't mention words like surprise or serendipity coming from his notes by linking them, though he does use them "intuitively to form overarching themes or concepts not actually contained in the resources themselves." This is closely akin to the broader ideas ensconced in inventio, Llullan Wheels, triangle thinking, ideas have sex, combinatorial creativity, serendipity (Luhmann), insight, etc. which have been described by others.
Note that Downes indicates that his brain creates the links and he doesn't rely on his software to do this. The break is compounded by the fact that he doesn't find value in classifying or categorizing his notes.
I appreciate that Downes uses the word "grist" to describe part of his note taking practice which evokes the idea of grinding up complex ideas (the grain) to sort out the portions of the whole to find simpler ideas (the flour) which one might use later to combine to make new ideas (bread, cake, etc.) Similar analogies might be had in the grain harvesting space including winnowing or threshing.
One can compare this use of a grist mill analogy of thinking with the analogy of the crucible, which implies a chamber or space in which elements are brought together often with work or extreme conditions to create new products by their combination.
Of course these also follow the older classical analogy of imitating the bees (apes).
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Famously, Luswig Wittgenstein organized his thoughts this way. Also famously, he never completed his 'big book' - almost all of his books (On Certainty, Philosophical Investigations, Zettel, etc.) were compiled by his students in the years after his death.
I've not looked directly at Wittgenstein's note collection before, but it could be an interesting historical example.
Might be worth collecting examples of what has happened to note collections after author's lives. Some obviously have been influential in scholarship, but generally they're subsumed by the broader category of a person's "papers" which are often archived at libraries, museums, and other institutions.
Examples: - Vincentius Placcius' collection used by his students - Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten which is being heavily studied by Johannes F.K. Schmidt - Mortimer J. Adler - was his kept? where is it stored?
Posthumously published note card collections - Ludwig Wittgenstein - Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project - Ronald Reagan's collection at his presidential library, though it is more of an commonplace book collection of quotes which was later published - Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary - Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura - others...
Just as note collections serve an autobiographical function, perhaps they may also serve as an intellectual autobiographical function? Wittgenstein never managed to complete his 'big book', but in some sense, doesn't his collection of note cards serve this function for those willing to explore it all?
I'd previously suggested that Scott P. Scheper publish not only his book on note taking, but to actually publish his note cards as a stand-alone zettelkasten example to go with them. What if this sort of publishing practice were more commonplace? The modern day equivalent is more likely a person's blog or their wiki. Not enough people are publicly publishing their notes to see what this practice might look like for future generations.
Tags
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- posthumous publication
- Johannes F.K. Schmidt
- magic of note taking
- Sönke Ahrens
- outlines
- content creation
- note taking metaphors
- Scott P. Scheper
- analogies
- Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten
- longevity
- combinatorial creativity
- Walter Benjamin
- published zettelkasten
- card index as autobiography
- note reuse
- note taking
- note taking process
- posthumous notes
- pattern recognition
- food analogies
- Vincentius Placcius
- apes
Annotators
URL
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7XbgD4VVa4
Matthias Melcher's note taking process. Quick capture as text. Linking and categorizing later, and then import into a private WordPress space.
No indication here what happens after, though ostensibly some of it is covered here: https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pruning-for-output/
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Your practice sounds akin to that of the idea of progressive summarization which many do in their overall note taking work.
I generally leave the title for last as well for just this reason. I find these titles are also incredibly helpful in reorganizing slips into broader outline forms for creating new articles.
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drive.google.com drive.google.com
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portability, thedisplays are getting ever smaller. Unfortunately,small displays force you to classify your notesimmediately you receive or generate them. The studysuggests that knowledge workers may beuncomfortable with these devices as note-takersexcept for non-prima~ aspects of their work such asnoting a telephone number, a diary date or a shortmessage for a colleague. In these cases, users canclassify the note’s subsequent use before they start towrite it. In contrast, if knowledge workers are usingsuch a notebook to jot down an idea they have justheard, they will be forced to classi~ the inherently“unclassifiable” and it is unlikely to inform themlater as it will have disappeared for ever into thebowels of the device. Maybe this is why the A4 pador notebook is an old-favourite of knowledge workerswhose functionality will be hard to match.
Kidd indicates that knowledge workers may prefer to take notes in physical notebooks because they're not forced to classify them immediately, but they can use their physical presence and location as a means of indicating that some sort of follow up is required. Comparing this to most digital notes which don't have this same sort of location, one is more worried that the computer filing them away will mean that they become lost almost instantaneously. Some notes like diary dates and phone numbers which may have very specific locations for noting them don't fall under these auspices, but other longer and more detailed notes certainly would.
A digital zettelkasten or commonplace may help to alleviate this as individual ideas are linked and indexed in multiple ways which make them easier to both find, use and expand upon.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Realizing that my prior separate advice wasn't as actionable or specific, I thought I'd take another crack at your question.
Some seem to miss the older techniques and names for this sort of practice and get too wound up in words like categories, tags, #hashtags, [[wikilinks]], or other related taxonomies and ontologies. Some become confounded about how to implement these into digital systems. Simplify things and index your ideas/notes the way one would have indexed books in a library card catalog, generally using subject, author and title.
Since you're using an approach more grounded in the commonplace book tradition rather than a zettelkasten one, put an easy identifier on your note (this can be a unique title or number) and then cross reference it with any related subject headings or topical category words you find useful.
Here's a concrete example, hopefully in reasonable detail that one can easily follow. Let's say you have a quote you want to save:
No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
In a paper system you might give this card the identification number #237. (This is analogous to the Dewey Decimal number that might be put on a book to find it on the shelves.) You want to be able to find this quote in the future using the topical words "power", "information", "connections", and "quotes" for example. (Which topical headings you choose and why can be up to you, the goal is to make it easier to dig up for potential reuse in future contexts). So create a separate paper index with alphabetical headings (A-Z) and then write cards for your topical headings. Your card with "power" at the top will have the number #237 on it to indicate that that card is related to the word power. You'll ultimately have other cards that relate and can easily find everything related to "power" within your system by using this subject index.
You might also want to file that quote under two other "topics" which will make it easy to find: primarily the author of the quote "Umberto Eco" and the title of the source Foucault's Pendulum. You can add these to your index the same way you did "power", "information", etc., but it may be easier or more logical to keep a bibliographic index separately for footnoting your material, so you might want a separate bibliographic index for authors and sources. If you do this, then create a card with Umberto Eco at the top and then put the number #237 on it. Later you'll add other numbers for other related ideas to Eco. You can then keep your card "Eco, Umberto" alphabetized with all the other authors you cite. You'll effect a similar process with the title.
With this done, you now have a system in which you don't have to categorize a single idea in a single place. Regardless of what project or thing you're working on, you can find lots of related notes. If you're juggling multiple projects you can have an index file or document outline for these as well. So your book project on the History of Information could have a rough outline of the book on which you've got the number #237 in the chapter or place where you might use the quote.
Hopefully this will be even more flexible than Holiday's system because that was broadly project based. In practice, if you're keeping notes over a lifetime, you're unlikely to be interested in dramatically different areas the way Ryan Holiday or Robert Greene were for disparate book projects, but will find more overlapping areas. Having a more flexible system that will allow you to reuse your notes for multiple settings or projects will be highly valuable.
For those who are using digital systems, ask yourself: "what functions and features allow you to do these analog patterns most easily?" If you're using something like Obsidian which has #tagging functionality that automatically creates an index of all your tags, then leverage that and remove some of the manual process. The goal is to make sure the digital system is creating the structure to allow you to easily find and use your notes when you need them. If your note taking system doesn't have custom functionalities for any of these things, then you'll need to do more portions of them manually.
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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I wonder if Scott P. Scheper has done any videos on his writing/composing process for getting material out of his card file for creating his book for which I've seen portions of a few chapters floating around. I've loosely followed his YouTube channel and his r/antinet community on Reddit, but I haven't seen this portion of his process in any detail.
This (export) part also seems like one of the more intense, manual, and heaving lifting pieces of the process. I've yet to see any digital tools which automate or make this portion of the work easier.
Perhaps a graph view of connected nodes with titles in which one can highlight nodes as a selection method and then export them in some process to a space where they might be potentially reordered or shuffled into a linear order for further editing and ultimately publishing, might be useful? Even saying this takes forever much less doing it easily with an inspiring user interface..
Link to: https://hyp.is/9PV1jP5OEeyPumNKyckR1A/danallosso.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-on-paper
Syndication links: - https://danallosso.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-on-paper/comment/7610486
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I'm trying to get info OUT of my note-taking system. It's not as easy as I'd like it to be.
This is one of the biggest problems with any of the systems digital or analog. The workflows for this are all generally not great.
I'm actually trying some advice from Konrad Gessner from the 1500s today. I've printed out some of my digital notes about Tiago Forte's new book to arrange and organize them in an attempt to reuse all my writing and thinking about it into a review of the book. It'll probably take a bit as I've left them for a week or two, but I'm curious to see what the manual process looks like here in an effort to help make the digital portion potentially easier.
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In one of his videos he talks about "approaching the mind of god" or something similar, in a way I can't entirely tell whether he is paraphrasing an early-modern note-taker or saying that's what he thinks he is doing himself. I don't really care whether he's religious or not, unless it compromises the system he's building.
These always read as hyperbole to me, but it's difficult to explain the surprise and serendipity of re-finding things in one's notes on a regular basis. It's akin to the sort of cognitive dissonance that religious people have when encountering the levels of complexity formed by living systems through evolution. Not having better words for describing the experience, they may resort to descriptions of magic or religion to frame their experiences.
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web.hypothes.is web.hypothes.is
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self-reflexive annotation
circle back to this...
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As marginal note-taking it often is the basis for questions asked in class discussion or points made in a final paper.
Jeremy Dean indicates that marginal notes are often "the basis for [...] points made in a final paper", but I wonder how frequently this is the case in the computer era? I rarely see or hear of educators encouraging the reuse of marginalia or even notes in academic settings, even within the framing of Hypothes.is which is an ideal tool for such a practice.
It's been my experience that while notes are in margins, they tend to sit there lonely and unused. Few are actually creating content based on them. When this is the case, memory of the idea or issue at hand is necessary so that it may be looked up and transcribed back into a bigger piece. When it does happen it's also far more likely to be academic writers or researchers who are concertedly building up particular areas. It's much less likely to be high school or undergraduate college students who should have picked up the practice earlier in junior high school or even elementary school so that their school research years are easier.
A potential resurgence of this broader practice may be coming back into vogue with the slew of new note taking apps that have been popping up and the idea of the zettelkasten coming back into a broader consciousness.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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various bibliographic catalog from the end of the '800 and '900 (from Paul Otlet/Henry La Fontaine Munaneum to Ranganathan faceted classification system passing through Niklas Luhmann, Carl Sagan and many others
Look into Henry La Fontaine, Mundaneum, Ranganathan's faceted classification system.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification
What was Carl Sagan's system?
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marshallk.com marshallk.com
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Or if I’m jogging, I associate each thing I want to remember with one of my limbs, then I go through them one at a time “left arm, left leg…” when I’m done running and I write them down.
Example of someone in the wild using their body as a locus for attaching memories temporarily so that they can recall ideas for making note of later.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Worth taking a look at the various affordances of folders vs. links vs. tags.
Some of these functionalities may be highly dependent on the particular tool in question and what affordances the tool allows for these ideas.
Has anyone done this comprehensively across a number of tools other than threads in fora like reddit, zettelkasten.de, etc.?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/vofakc/folders_vs_links_vs_tags/
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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How to write a thesis, by Umberto Eco. Eco is very heavily opinionated, in a brash and amusing way. Naturally, the writing is stellar. He also dedicates a lot of the book to the use of index cards for managing a bibliography, which was very pertinent at the time it was written. Even though the physical medium of index cards is no longer current and we are all busy fighting the Mendeley/Zotero/Endnote wars, there is still much to be learned from this book about effectively managing a bibliography.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GradSchool/comments/68n2ec/graduated_a_few_days_ago_so_heres_a_list_of_my/
Anecdotal evidence of someone who thinks that digital bibliography managers are better than older manual methods of bibliographical and note taking methods.
This may be the case if the management of bibliography is wholly divorced from note taking, but one still needs to integrate the two pieces at some point.
Is there evidence that people use bibliographic tools like Zotero, Endnote, Mendeley as bookmark tools for things they intend to read?
What affordances do these tools provide beyond pulling reference markers from an article and simply spitting out a fully formed and formatted bibliography?
Zotero has recently updated with version 6 to make pulling in annotations from pdf files into their bigger enterprise much easier, so perhaps it's a step back toward integrating the older zettelkasten-like methods of note taking?
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www.remastery.net www.remastery.net
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https://medium.com/curious/umberto-ecos-index-card-system-90faaa19734f
author: Julius Reizen
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Beyond the cards mentioned above, you should also capture any hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry on separate cards. Regularly go through these to make sure that you are covering everything and that you don’t forget something.I consider these insurance cards because they won’t get lost in some notebook or scrap of paper, or email to oneself.
Julius Reizen in reviewing over Umberto Eco's index card system in How to Write a Thesis, defines his own "insurance card" as one which contains "hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry". These he would keep together so that they don't otherwise get lost in the variety of other locations one might keep them
These might be akin to Ahrens' "fleeting notes" but are ones which may not easily or even immediately be converted in to "permanent notes" for one's zettelkasten. However, given their mission critical importance, they may be some of the most important cards in one's repository.
link this to - idea of centralizing one's note taking practice to a single location
Is this idea in Eco's book and Reizen is the one that gives it a name since some of the other categories have names? (examples: bibliographic index cards, reading index cards (aka literature notes), cards for themes, author index cards, quote index cards, idea index cards, connection cards). Were these "officially" named and categorized by Eco?
May be worthwhile to create a grid of these naming systems and uses amongst some of the broader note taking methods. Where are they similar, where do they differ?
Multi-search tools that have full access to multiple trusted data stores (ostensibly personal ones across notebooks, hard drives, social media services, etc.) could potentially solve the problem of needing to remember where you noted something.
Currently, in the social media space especially, this is not a realized service.
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- Jun 2022
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pz.harvard.edu pz.harvard.edu
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Compass Points, a routine for examining propositions.
via https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Compass%20Points_0.pdf
- E- excited
- W- worrisome
- N - need to know
- S - stance or suggestion for moving forward
These could be used as a simple set of rules for thumb for evaluating and expanding on ideas in note taking or social annotation settings.
Compare these with the suggestions of Tiago Forte in his book Building a Second Brain. Which is better? More comprehensive? Are there any ideas missing in a broader conceptualization? Is there a better acronymization or analogy for such a technique?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I very much appreciate your commitment to growth and learning. I also think it's nice to have colorful posts here vs. a ghost town. My feedback would be to gear your posts towards how to use an Antinet to produce written output. Specifically what main note you created, with pictures of the main note, and then elaborate on what they actually mean, and share a written post about the idea. You've done several of these posts, and I'd say lean even more towards sharing the most powerful thought/the most powerful maincard you've developed all week. For frequency, I'd say one post a week on this would be great.My main point is this: the primary use of Luhmann's Antinet was written output. The thoughts he shared were deep and developed because of the Antinet process. We're not in the PKM space, we're in the AKD space. Analog Knowledge Development, focusing on written output. The paradox is, when changing your mindset to written output, you actually become more of a learning machine.
One of the toughest parts about these systems is that while they're relatively easy to outline (evidence: the thousands of 500-1000 word blog posts about zettelkasten in the last 3 years), they're tougher to practice and many people have slight variations on the idea (from Eminem's "Stacking Ammo" to Luhmann's (still incomplete) digital collection). Far fewer people are sticking with it beyond a few weeks or doing it for crazy reasons (I call it #ProductivityPorn, while Scott has the colorful phrase "bubble graph boys").
For those who visit here, seeing discrete cards and ideas, videos, or examples of how others have done this practice can be immensely helpful. While it can be boring to watch a video of someone reading and taking notes by hand, it can also be incredibly useful to see exactly what they're doing and how they're doing it (though God bless you for speeding them up 😅).
This is also part of why I share examples of how others have practiced these techniques too. Seeing discrete examples to imitate is far easier than trying to innovate your way into these methods, particularly when it's difficult to see the acceleration effects of serendipity that comes several months or years into the process. Plus it's fun to see how Vladimir Nabokov, Anne Lamott, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bob Hope, Michael Ende, Twyla Tharp, Roland Barthes, Kate Grenville, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Joan Rivers, Umberto Eco, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Raymond, Llull, George Carlin, John Locke, and Eminem all did variations of this for themselves. (This last sentence has so much entropy in it, I'm certain that it's never been written before in the history of humanity.)
And isn't everyone tired to death of Luhmann, Luhmann, Luhmann? You'd think that no one had ever thought to take note of anything before?!
While my own approach is a hybrid of online and offline techniques, I've gotten long emails from people following my Hypothes.is feed of notes and annotations saying what a useful extended example it is. Of course they don't see the follow up that entails revision of the notes or additional linking, tagging, and indexing that may go on, but it's at least enough of an idea that they understand the start of the practice.
(Incidentally, I wrote most of this using a few cards from my own system. 🗃️✂️🖋️)
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www.wikiwand.com www.wikiwand.com
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Das gerichtliche Aktenzeichen dient der Kennzeichnung eines Dokuments und geht auf die Aktenordnung (AktO) vom 28. November 1934 und ihre Vorgänger zurück.[4]
The court file number is used to identify a document and goes back to the file regulations (AktO) of November 28, 1934 and its predecessors.
The German "file number" (aktenzeichen) is a unique identification of a file, commonly used in their court system and predecessors as well as file numbers in public administration since at least 1934.
Niklas Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, when he obtained a law degree, before beginning a career in Lüneburg's public administration where he stayed in civil service until 1962. Given this fact, it's very likely that Luhmann had in-depth experience with these sorts of file numbers as location identifiers for files and documents.
We know these numbering methods in public administration date back to as early as Vienna, Austria in the 1770s.
The missing piece now is who/where did Luhmann learn his note taking and excerpting practice from? Alberto Cevolini argues that Niklas Luhmann was unaware of the prior tradition of excerpting, though note taking on index cards or slips had been commonplace in academic circles for quite some time and would have been reasonably commonplace during his student years.
Are there handbooks, guides, or manuals in the early 1900's that detail these sorts of note taking practices?
Perhaps something along the lines of Antonin Sertillanges’ book The Intellectual Life (1921) or Paul Chavigny's Organisation du travail intellectuel: recettes pratiques à l’usage des étudiants de toutes les facultés et de tous les travailleurs (in French) (Delagrave, 1918)?
Further recall that Bruno Winck has linked some of the note taking using index cards to legal studies to Roland Claude's 1961 text:
I checked Chavigny’s book on the BNF site. He insists on the use of index cards (‘fiches’), how to index them, one idea per card but not how to connect between the cards and allow navigation between them.
Mind that it’s written in 1919, in Strasbourg (my hometown) just one year after it returned to France. So between students who used this book and Luhmann in Freiburg it’s not far away. My mother taught me how to use cards for my studies back in 1977, I still have the book where she learn the method, as Law student in Strasbourg “Comment se documenter”, by Roland Claude, 1961. Page 25 describes a way to build secondary index to receive all cards relatives to a topic by their number. Still Luhmann system seems easier to maintain but very near.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Scott P. Scheper </span> in Scott P. Scheper on Twitter: "The origins of the Zettelkasten's numeric-alpha card addresses seem to derive from Niklas Luhmann's early work as a legal clerk. The filing scheme used is called "Aktenzeichen" - See https://t.co/4mQklgSG5u. cc @ChrisAldrich" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>06/28/2022 11:29:18</time>)</cite></small>
Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/Jlnn3IfSEey_-3uboxHsOA - https://hypothes.is/a/4jtT0FqsEeyXFzP-AuDIAA
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodge-podge
How is this broadly related to the intellectual history of commonplace books, zettelkasten, and other note taking matters.
I recall an idea of a Hodge-podge book from my youth, but these may have been published children's activity books for fun rather than collecting tidbits as in something closer to a scrapbook.
Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo - Thought about this randomly while editing notes for [[Forte2022]]
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Local file Local file
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There is no single right way to build a Second Brain. Your systemcan look like chaos to others, but if it brings you progress anddelight, then it’s the right one.
All this description and prescription, then say this?!
I'll agree that each person's system should be their own and work for them, but it would have been more helpful to have this upfront and then to have looked at a broad array of practices and models for imitation to let people pick and choose from a variety of practices instead of presenting just one dish on the menu: P.A.R.A. with a side of C.O.D.E.
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You might have arrived at this book because you heard about thisnew field called personal knowledge management, or maybe whenyou were trying to find guidance in how to use a cool new notetakingapp. Maybe you were drawn in by the promise of new techniques forenhancing your productivity, or perhaps it was the allure of asystematic approach to creativity.
The broad audiences for this book.
This may have been better place in the introduction to draw these people in.
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There’s no need to capture every idea; the best ones willalways come back around eventually.
While one can certainly capture a lot of cruft that isn't actionable or easily reusable, it's a fable that the best ideas will come back around. All too often the really brilliant ideas can be quickly lost to the wind if not captured immediately.
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Here are more specific examples of what those opportunitiesmight look like
He's got a very specific type of notes for productivity compared with the sort of notes a student, academic, or researcher might take. This has consequences to the sort of system one has and how productive or not it is.
At some point in the book he sounds as if he's talking about notes for content creation/production, but he's also mixing in work productivity sorts of notes which can be treated dramatically differently.
Modern systems need to better distinguish between these two sorts of modes. (Are there others?) What should we even call these things to distinguish them and how they might be differently handled?
What do the two things have in common that allow them to be conflated? What is different that suggests distinguishing them and separating them?
Which digital tools are better for each of these? Do some handle both well? Should there be a mental or physical separation of them?
Am I just wholly wrong here?
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The nice thing about notes, unlike to-dos, is that they aren’turgent. If one important to-do gets overlooked, the results could becatastrophic. Notes, on the other hand, can easily be put on hold anytime you get busy, without any negative impact.
Nice that he differentiates specifically between notes and to-do items.
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send off your draft or beta orproposal for feedback. Share this Intermediate Packet with a friend,family member, colleague, or collaborator; tell them that it’s still awork-in-process and ask them to send you their thoughts on it. Thenext time you sit down to work on it again, you’ll have their input andsuggestions to add to the mix of material you’re working with.
A major benefit of working in public is that it invites immediate feedback (hopefully positive, constructive criticism) from anyone who might be reading it including pre-built audiences, whether this is through social media or in a classroom setting utilizing discussion or social annotation methods.
This feedback along the way may help to further find flaws in arguments, additional examples of patterns, or links to ideas one may not have considered by themselves.
Sadly, depending on your reader's context and understanding of your work, there are the attendant dangers of context collapse which may provide or elicit the wrong sorts of feedback, not to mention general abuse.
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Of the two stages of this process, convergence is where mostpeople struggle.
Of course they'll struggle here because now they must recontextualize a huge amount of work and fill in all the details with things they might have also collected and linked previously.
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the time you sit down tomake progress on something, all the work to gather and organize thesource material needs to already be done. We can’t expectourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. Ilearned that innovation and problem-solving depend on a routine thatsystematically brings interesting ideas to the surface of ourawareness.
By writing down and collecting ideas slowly over time, working on them in small fits and spurts, when one finally comes to do the final work on their writing project or other work, the pieces only need minor shaping to take their final form. This process allows for a much greater level of serendipity, creativity, and potential sustained genius of connecting ideas across time to take shape in a final piece.
How does this relate to diffuse thinking? How can slow diffuse thinking be leveraged into this process?
Writing down fleeting notes while walking around can be valuable as one's ideas brew slowly in the mind (diffuse thinking) in combination with active combinatorial creativity, thus a form of Llullan combinatorial diffusion.
Many business books seem so shallow and often only have one real insight which is repeated multiple times, perhaps to drive the point home or perhaps just to have enough filler to seem being worth the purchase of a book.
Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich is an example of this, though it shows a different form of genius in expanding the idea from a variety of perspectives so that eventually everyone will absorb the broader idea which is distilled to great effect into the title.
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Some digital notes apps allow you to displayonly the images saved in your notes, which is a powerful way ofactivating the more intuitive, visual parts of your brain.
Visual cues one can make in their notes and user interfaces that help to focus or center on these can be useful reminders for what appears in particular notes, especially if visual search is a possibility.
Is this the reason that Gyuri Lajos very frequently cuts and pastes images into his Hypothes.is notes?
Which note taking applications leverage this sort of visual mnemonic device? Evernote did certainly, but other text heavy tools like Obsidian, Logseq, and Roam Research don't. Most feed readers do this well leveraging either featured photos, photos in posts, or photos in OGP.
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First, while using the previous retrieval methods, it is a good ideato keep your focus a little broad. Don’t begin and end your searchwith only the specific folder that matches your criteria.
The area of serendipity becomes much more powerful when one has ideas both directly interlinked, ideas categorized with subject headings or tags, or when one can have affordances like auto-complete.
The method Forte suggests and outlines allows for some serendipity, but not as much as other methods with additional refinements. Serendipity in Forte's method isn't as strong as in others.
In this section he's talking about some of the true "magic of note taking" which is discussed by Luhmann and others.
link to:<br /> Luhmann's writings on serendipity and surprise when using his zettelkasten (Communication with the Slipbox...)<br /> Ahrens mentions of this effect
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Sometimes you know a project is coming and can startsaving things to a project folder in advance,
no mention of the affordances of being able to cross-link things or even transclude them from an original location (which works for one currently) to another useful location.
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eventually you’ll have so many IPs at yourdisposal that you can execute entire projects just by assemblingpreviously created IPs. This is a magical experience that willcompletely change how you view productivity.
another example of the idea of "magical" experience that comes when taking notes. This one isn't about idea creation or even serendipity though, but relates specifically to being "bulk productive".
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Intermediate Packets
example of the creation of a buzz word for something not really quite necessary. It's useful to give names to things, but this is just a synonym for a note, isn't it?
definitely not as developed as "second brain"
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The myth of the writer sitting down before a completely blankpage, or the artist at a completely blank canvas, is just that—a myth.
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There is one more layer we can add, though
This four layer processing thing is painful and I suspect few are going to spend this much time on so many potential ideas.
Ahren's framing of fleeting notes and permanent notes is quicker and easier.
Also missing is any sort of inherent link to any other ideas or even to a broader index to make it somewhat easier to find/use. Simply filing it into a folder, even an "important" one seems fairly useless and make-work.
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Our notes are things to use,not just things to collect.
Many people take notes, they just don't know where they're taking them to. It's having a concrete use for them after you've written them down that makes all the difference. At this point, most would say that they do read back over them, but this generally creates a false sense of learning through familiarity. Better would be turning them into spaced repetition flashcards, or linking them to ideas and thoughts already in our field of knowledge to see if and where they fit into our worldview.
link to - research on false feeling of knowledge by re-reading notes in Ahrens
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Quantum Notetaking
really?! now we're selling something wiz bang!
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“As I was reading the book and makingthese notes and then putting them on the margins obviously themore pens I was using and the more rulers, and the more squigglylines, sort of implied the excitement of the book was higher andhigher, so that the sheer amount of ink on the page would tell melater on this is one of the most important scenes.”
The density of annotations on a text can tell one about where the value and excitement of a work may be hiding.
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“I think it’s important to put your impressions down on the firstreading because those are the initial instincts about what youthought was good or what you didn’t understand or what you thoughtwas bad.”
First gut reactions can be highly valuable and should be noted because it's incredibly difficult to remember what it was like before you knew a thing. It's hard to revisit a thing with beginner's eyes and those reactions can help one to improve and refine a thing.
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Coppola’s strategy for making the complex, multifaceted filmrested on a technique he learned studying theater at HofstraCollege, known as a “prompt book.”
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Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, Irecommend organizing them according to where they are going
This is a useful distinction.
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The goal of organizing our knowledge is to move our goalsforward, not get a PhD in notetaking.
HA! Though many do fall into this trap.
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Archives: Things I’ve Completed or Put on Hold
The P.A.R.A. method seems like an admixture of one's projects/to do lists and productivity details and a more traditional commonplace book. Keeping these two somewhat separate mentally may help users with respect to how these folders should be used.
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By takingthat small extra step of putting a note into a folder (or tagging it*) fora specific project, such as a psychology paper you’re writing or apresentation you’re preparing, you’ll encounter that idea right at themoment it’s most relevant. Not a moment before, and not a momentafter.
But what about the unimagined future projects that may be our most important. Zettelkasten methods cover for this better perhaps?
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Dance might seem like the creative medium that could leastbenefit from “organizing.”
I really appreciate that he's actively using examples from across a variety of domains to indicate the depth and breadth of areas which can benefit from commonplacing and note taking domains.
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Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent andoriginal in your work.—Gustave Flaubert
In addition to this as a standalone quote...
If nothing else, one should keep a commonplace book so that they have a treasure house of nifty quotes to use as chapter openers for the books they might write.
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Even if the original webpage disappears, you can often use this informationto locate an archived version using the Wayback Machine, a project of theInternet Archive that preserves a record of websites: https://archive.org/web/.
It would be useful to suggest here:
Ideally one's note taking applications would automatically archive web pages to the Internet Archive as you take notes from them. This means that if they should disappear in the future, you'd have recourse to a useful and workable back up.
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On average I capture just twonotes per day
Tiago Forte self-reports that he captures two notes a day.
Link to other's notes per day including Barthes, Luhmann, et al.
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Annotators
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boingboing.net boingboing.net
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And the added bonus here is that Devonthink has a wonderful feature where you can take the entire contents of a folder and condense it down into a single text document. So that's how I launch myself into the actual writing of the book. I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I'm looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes.
The perfect antidote to Hemingway's White Bull.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHw-WdiNbw
Example of someone's explicit note taking practice. While there's some missing context hiding without pre-knowledge of what a zettelkasten is, it's an n interesting example for modeling purposes for beginners.
Tags
Annotators
URL
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www.iemoji.com www.iemoji.com
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The fact that there are three discrete emoji for the - card file box 🗃️ - card index dividers 🗂️ - card index (aka rolodex) 📇
indicate the importance of these older analog tools, even in a more modern digital space.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Develop knowledge, leave the overthinking to the bubble graph boys (digital notetakers).
🤣
Something I love here about the use of "bubble graph boys" as a pejorative to describe the productivity porn space in digital note taking.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Tiago's book follows the general method of the commonplace book, but relies more heavily on a folder-based method and places far less emphasis and value on having a solid index. There isn't any real focus on linking ideas other than putting some things together in the same folder. His experience with the history of the space in feels like it only goes back to some early Ryan Holiday blog posts. He erroneously credits Luhmann with inventing the zettelkasten and Anne-Laure Le Cunff created digital gardens. He's already retracted these in sketch errata here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/endnotes.
I'll give him at least some credit that there is some reasonable evidence that he actually used his system to write his own book, but the number and depth of his references and experience is exceptionally shallow given the number of years he's been in the space, particularly professionally. He also has some interesting anecdotes and examples of various people including and array of artists and writers which aren't frequently mentioned in the note taking space, so I'll give him points for some diversity of players as well. I'm mostly left with the feeling that he wrote the book because of the general adage that "thought leaders in their space should have a published book in their area to have credibility". Whether or not one can call him a thought leader for "re-inventing" something that Rudolphus Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus firmly ensconced into Western culture about 500 years ago is debatable.
Stylistically, I'd call his prose a bit florid and too often self-help-y. The four letter acronyms become a bit much after a while. It wavers dangerously close to those who are prone to the sirens' call of the #ProductivityPorn space.
If you've read a handful of the big articles in the note taking, tools for thought, digital gardens, zettelkasten space, Ahren's book, or regularly keep up with r/antinet or r/Zettelkasten, chances are that you'll be sorely disappointed and not find much insight. If you have friends that don't need the horsepower of Ahrens or zettelkasten, then it might be a reasonable substitute, but then it could have been half the length for the reader.
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www.facultyfocus.com www.facultyfocus.com
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By asking students to share their annotations openly, we help students to see a wide range of annotation practices, thus demystifying what has often been a private, individual practice.
Teachers can model their own reading and annotating practices for students, but this can be expanded when using social annotation. This will allow students to show each other a wider variety of potential note taking and annotation strategies which help to reinforce the teacher's own modeling. This can be useful modelling of a practice in public which has historically been done privately.
By featuring notes which might be reused for papers or developing later research, teachers can also feature the portions of the note taking process which can be reused for developing new ideas. How might annotations within a text be linked to each other outside of the particular flow of the paper? Might there have been different orderings for the arguments that may have been clearer?
What ideas in the broader class might the ideas within a particular text be linked to? What ideas outside of the class can be linked to those found within the text?
In less experienced groups, teachers might occasionally call out individual annotations in discussion to ask the group for what purposes a student might have annotated specific portions to highlight the various methods and reasons.
What are the list of particular note types here? - Paraphrasing segments to self-test for understanding - Creation of spaced repetition type notes for memorizing definitions and facts - Conversations with the text/original author and expansion of the ideas - Questioning the original text, do we agree/disagree? - Linking ideas from the text into one's broader knowledge base - Highlighting quotes for later reuse - others??
Link to - double-entry journaling in Bruce Ballenger<br /> - types of questions one might ask within a text, Ballenger again
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www.worldcat.org www.worldcat.org
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https://www.worldcat.org/title/curious-researcher-a-guide-to-writing-research-papers/oclc/757689134
In his third edition, he mentions leaning into index cards more in the first edition. Get a copy to see what the differences look like in his prescribed practices. (@2022-06-20)
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Why you NEED to learn Obsidian
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxfTVdohSwA
Christine Moskell talks about a professor's final exam design prompting students to go back to annotations and add new commentary (or links to other related knowledge) that they've gained during the length of a course.
Link to:
This is very similar to the sort of sensemaking and interlinking of information that Sönke Ahrens outlines in his book How to Take Smart Notes though his broader note taking thesis goes a few additional steps for more broadly synthesizing ideas into longer papers, articles, theses, and books.
Dr. Moskell also outlined a similar tactic at the [[Hypothesis Social Learning Summit - Spotlight on Social Reading & Social Annotation]] earlier today, though that video may not be accessible for a bit.
Cross reference: https://web.hypothes.is/event/social-learning-summit-spotlight-on-social-reading-social-annotation/
How can we better center and model these educational practices in our pedagogies?
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As an autodidact, you will meet many different content formats on the road to understanding. Not all formats are created equal, and some work better than others. Add to that learning preferences, and you’ve got yourself a complicated situation.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awce_j2myQw
Francis Ford Coppola talks about his notes and notebook on The Godfather.
He went to the Cafe Trieste to work.
Coppola had an Olivetti typewriter. (4:20)
Sections on pitfalls
I didn't need a script cause I could have made the movie just from this notebook.
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jonudell.info jonudell.info
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http://jonudell.info/h/zotero/
This tool reads your Zotero library, finds items imported by URL, looks for associated Hypothesis annotations, and syncs them to Zotero as child notes.
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I know one magazine editor who hoardsnewspaper and magazine clippings.
Twyla Tharp tells the story of a colleague who is a magazine editor. They keep a pile of clippings of phots, illustrations, and stories in their desk and mine it, often with others, for something that will create story ideas for new work.
This method is highly similar to that of Eminem's "Stacking Ammo" method.
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It’s not the only answer, of course. Maurice Sendak has a room that’s theequivalent of my boxes, a working studio that contains a huge unit with flat pulloutdrawers in which he keeps sketches, reference materials, notes, articles. He works onseveral projects at a time, and he likes to keep the overlapping materials out of sightwhen he’s tackling any one of them. Other people rely on carefully arranged indexcards. The more technological among us put it all on a computer. There’s no singlecorrect system. Anything can work, so long as it lets you store and retrieve yourideas—and never lose them.
Regardless of what sort of physical instantiation one's notes may take, a workable storage option for them is necessary whether it is a simple box, a shelving system, a curiosity cabinet, a flat file, or even an entire room itself.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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To Kendrick Lamar, note-taking is like time-travel. By writing down key words, Kendrick can remember emotions that would otherwise be lost to the entropy of memory.
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www.choosingeasy.com www.choosingeasy.com
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Note Sharers aka Digital Gardeners aka Second Brainers
Example of a writer who wholly conflates "note sharers" with "digital gardners" and the "second brain" crowd.
It's likely that these words and terminology have all become conflated due to ambiguous use.
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Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes changed so much.Now everyone is condemning note-takers (those collecting knowledge in heaps, e.g. via the good old Evernote) and praising note makers (those selecting their notes and linking them to other knowledge and producing their own thinking through them, e.g. via newish tools such as Obsidian)
In the framing here, I don't think it was so much Ahren's book, but the florescence of note taking tools (many of them very technical and appealing to the male/techbro crowd mentioned earlier in the piece). Though perhaps some of this tech crowd were influenced by Ahrens to make these tools which simply accelerated the space.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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https://www.reddit.com/r/Eminem/comments/7mf19q/lose_yourself_handwritten/
Eminem's handwritten lyrics for "Lose Yourself"
High resolution versions:
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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https://danallosso.substack.com/p/note-cards?s=r
Outline of one of Dan's experiments writing a handbook about reading, thinking, and writing. He's taking a zettelkasten-like approach, but doing it as a stand-alone project with little indexing and crosslinking of ideas or creating card addresses.
This sounds more akin to the processes of Vladimir Nabokov and Ryan Holiday/Robert Greene.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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1980s: "I always typed a few hours a day on a heavy and noisy IBM typewriter. Before converting to the Apple faith, I wrote down every interesting idea or possibly useful datum on 5 × 8 cards that I kept in card-boxes. But I used them only sparingly to write papers of books, for they were just random collections. Once an unknown American scholar phoned me to announce that he was about to commit suicide because he had failed to craft a general theory of ideas out of thousands of cards that he had filled in the course of a decade. He had been a casualty of dataism, the idea that knowledge of anything is just a collection of bits of knowledge." (pp. 273–274)
Anecdotal evidence of contemplation of suicide based on over-collection of notes without creating a clear thesis or use for them.
I'm curious who the colleague was and what or how their note taking system wasn't working for them. Most likely the inability to link ideas to each other, lack of clear examples of others doing the practice to help guide them?
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scottscheper.com scottscheper.com
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https://scottscheper.com/letter/2/
Brief outline of how Scheper came to note taking and his journey to zettelkasten.
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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If Luhmann’s notebox system was not dynamic and fluid and not one of pure order, either, how can one think of Luhmann’s notebox system? In my experience using an Antinet Zettelkasten, I find it to be more organic in nature. Like nature, it has simple laws and fundamental rules by which it operates (like the laws of thermodynamics in physics); yet, it’s also subject to arbitrary decisions. We know this because in describing it, Luhmann uses the word arbitrary to describe its arbitrary internal branching. We can infer that arbitrary, means something that was decided by Luhmann outside of some external and strict criteria (i.e., strict schemes like the Dewey Decimal Classification). (12)12 This arbitrary, random structure contributes to one of its most distinctive aspects of the system–the aspect of surprises. Because of its unique structure, the Antinet is noted as “a surprise generator,” and a system that develops “a creativity of its own.” (13)
There's some magical thinking involved here. While the system has some arbitrary internal branching, the surprises come from the system's perfect memory that the human user doesn't have. This makes it appear that the system creates its own creativity, but it is really the combinatorics of the perfect memory system with use over time.
Link to: serendipity of systems based on auto-complete
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It would lack a unique personality or an “alter ego,” which is what Luhmann’s system aimed to create. (9)
Is there evidence that Luhmann's system aimed to create anything from the start in a sort of autopoietic sense? Or is it (more likely) the case that Luhmann saw this sort of "alter ego" emerging over time and described it after-the-fact?
Based on his experiences and note takers and zettelkasten users might expect this outcome now.
Are there examples of prior commonplace book users or note takers seeing or describing this sort of experience in the historical record?
Related to this is the idea that a reader might have a conversation with another author by reading and writing their own notes from a particular text.
The only real difference here is that one's notes and the ability to link them to other ideas or topical headings in a commonplace book or zettelkasten means that the reader/writer has an infinitely growable perfect memory.
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The four principles Niklas Luhmann used to build his notebox system are: Analog Numeric-alpha Tree Index The first letters of those four principles (A, N, T, I) are what comprise an Antinet. An Antinet Zettelkasten is a network of these four principles.
The four principles Niklas Luhmann used to build his notebox system are:
- Analog
- Numeric-alpha
- Tree
- Index
The first letters of those four principles (A, N, T, I) are what comprise an Antinet. An Antinet Zettelkasten is a network of these four principles.
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- perfect memory
- magical thinking
- magic of note taking
- antinet zettelkasten
- combinatorics
- quotes
- autocomplete
- zettelkasten
- autopoiesis
- conversations with the text
- Scott P. Scheper
- Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten
- combinatorial creativity
- personality
- note taking
- commonplace books
- note taking methods
- emergence
- serendipity
- alter ego
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/401/hopeful-theorist
This is a fascinating first hand example of note taking experience spanning several decades. It includes descriptions of personal experience with a wide variety of most of the major note taking digital applications during this time period and provides a clear preference for a text-only (digital) format.
It describes a collection of over 10,000 text notes and 6,000 bibliographic entries.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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"Here I am on the floor showing you freaking note cards, which really means that I have made it in life." —Scott P. Scheper
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You have, of course, another guide to the right sequence: thenotes in front of you; but let them spur, not drag you onward.In short, write from memory-as far as possible-with only oc-casional pron1pting from the notes, and make everything correctand shipshape later.
Rather than using his notes as the actual writing, Barzun suggests writing "from memory" and only occasionally using prompting from one's notes.
This is wholly opposed to the idea of reusing the writing of one's notes in more advanced zettelkasten methods.
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It is both better for writingpractice and safer for transcription if the note is so framed thatit could be understood by a stranger. With such a technique youare also equipped to do precis writing, that is, make a condensedbut usable version of a longer document.
Notice the words "usable version of a longer document". Notes should be reusable in some form.
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them birth, and it is galling to have to say, "Now, what wasthat bright idea I had about this?"
Do not omit these last- they will not come back at will, even when you return to the item that gave
When reading, it's important to sketch out your own novel ideas and thoughts as you go as they will be difficult or impossible to recover them.
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If you take too many notes, theywill swamp you. You wi ll shuffle and review them over and overand be left bewildered. It will be almost as bad as having all therelevant books and encyclopedias piled on your desk. So takenotes only upon what you judge to be: the main new points,the complex events or ideas, the striking statements (for quoting),and also your ow n thoughts as they pop into your mind whilereading in preparation.
advice about quantity of notes
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