- Nov 2022
-
-
Antique Vintage Yawman & Erbe Card Catalog 3 Drawer File Cabinet
-
-
Local file Local file
-
raphy. Surely the fault of that savant was not neglecbut over-confidence in the virtue of the fiche, and the true morthat there is no necessary salvation in the fiche and the card-indTh
Surely the fault of that savant was not neglect, but over-confidence in the virtue of the fiche [index card], and the true moral is that there is no necessary salvation in the fiche and the card-index [aka zettelkasten].
Here the author is referencing part of the preface of Anatole France's book Penguin Island (1908) where a scholar drowns in a whirlpool of index cards.
-
- Oct 2022
-
Local file Local file
-
On the whole, his efficiency probablyreduced the time required for taking and filing notes to the amountother historians spent in note-taking alone. What he wrote in hisnotes was brief, and yet specific enough so that he saved himself thejob of searching at length for what he had read. His mind was freeto reflect and appraise.
Earl Pomeroy suggests that Paxson's note taking method freed his mind to better reflect and appraise his work. This allows a greater efficiency of work, particularly when it comes to easier search and recall as well as the overall process which becomes easier through practice.
-
he also put the scraps to-gether into patterns that fascinated his students.
-
None of these notes wasever used in his writing; probably they were taken with no thoughtof specific use, but out of absorption in the American scene.
It's quite likely that one will take a large number of notes with no immediate goal or plan for use and this is completely acceptable. Often these notes go towards the more immediate goal of forming one's own understanding and setting of a broader tableau for material one will write in the future.
-
he three-by-five inch slipsof thin paper eventually filled about eighty wooden file drawers.And he classified the notes day by day, under topical-chronologicalheadings that eventually extended from 4639 B.C. to 1949, theyear after his death.
Frederic L. Paxson kept a collection of 3 x 5 " slips of thin paper that filled eighty wooden file drawers which he organized using topical-chronologic headings spanning 4639 BCE to 1949.
Tags
- combinatorial creativity
- 3 x 5" slips
- examples
- Frederic L. Paxson's zettelkasten
- writing for understanding
- chronological order
- efficiency
- note taking affordances
- card index for teaching
- atomic notes
- 3 x 5" index cards
- Frederic L. Paxson
- note taking why
- card index as memory
- writing process
- topical headings
- card index for writing
Annotators
-
-
-
I feel sympathy for Robert Southey, whose excerpts from his voracious reading were posthumously published in four volumes as Southey’s Common-Place Book. He confessed in 1822 that,Like those persons who frequent sales, and fill their houses with useless purchases, because they may want them some time or other; so am I for ever making collections, and storing up materials which may not come into use till the Greek Calends. And this I have been doing for five-and-twenty years! It is true that I draw daily upon my hoards, and should be poor without them; but in prudence I ought now to be working up these materials rather than adding to so much dead stock.
-
Since Anatole France’s description in Penguin Island of the scholar drowned by an avalanche of his own index cards, it has been hard to take them seriously.
In Penguin Island, Anatole France describes a scholar drowned by an avalanche of their own index cards!
-
Before the Xerox machine, this was a labour-intensive counsel of perfection; and it is no wonder that many of the great 19th-century historians employed professional copyists.
According to Keith Thomas, "many of the great 19th-century historians employed professional copyists" as a means of keeping up with filing copies of their note slips under multiple subject headings.
-
-
ead.nb.admin.ch ead.nb.admin.ch
-
https://ead.nb.admin.ch/html/comment_0.html
The layout and format of this online archive is highly reminiscent of a digital zettelkasten and could even be used as a user interface for implementing one. It has a nice alpha-numeric form.
-
-
www.gutenberg.org www.gutenberg.org
-
Les murs du cabinet de travail, le plancher, le plafond même portaient des liasses débordantes, des cartons démesurément gonflés, des boîtes où se pressait une multitude innombrable de fiches, et je contemplai avec une admiration mêlée de terreur les cataractes de l'érudition prêtes à se rompre. —Maître, fis-je d'une voix émue, j'ai recours à votre bonté et à votre savoir, tous deux inépuisables. Ne consentiriez-vous pas à me guider dans mes recherches ardues sur les origines de l'art pingouin? —Monsieur, me répondit le maître, je possède tout l'art, vous m'entendez, tout l'art sur fiches classées alphabétiquement et par ordre de matières. Je me fais un devoir de mettre à votre disposition ce qui s'y rapporte aux Pingouins. Montez à cette échelle et tirez cette boîte que vous voyez là-haut. Vous y trouverez tout ce dont vous avez besoin. J'obéis en tremblant. Mais à peine avais-je ouvert la fatale boîte que des fiches bleues s'en échappèrent et, glissant entre mes doigts, commencèrent à pleuvoir. Presque aussitôt, par sympathie, les boîtes voisines s'ouvrirent et il en coula des ruisseaux de fiches roses, vertes et blanches, et de proche en proche, de toutes les boîtes les fiches diversement colorées se répandirent en murmurant comme, en avril, les cascades sur le flanc des montagnes. En une minute elles couvrirent le plancher d'une couche épaisse de papier. Jaillissant de leurs inépuisables réservoirs avec un mugissement sans cesse grossi, elles précipitaient de seconde en seconde leur chute torrentielle. Baigné jusqu'aux genoux, Fulgence Tapir, d'un nez attentif, observait le cataclysme; il en reconnut la cause et pâlit d'épouvante. —Que d'art! s'écria-t-il. Je l'appelai, je me penchai pour l'aider à gravir l'échelle qui pliait sous l'averse. Il était trop tard. Maintenant, accablé, désespéré, lamentable, ayant perdu sa calotte de velours et ses lunettes d'or, il opposait en vain ses bras courts au flot qui lui montait jusqu'aux aisselles. Soudain une trombe effroyable de fiches s'éleva, l'enveloppant d'un tourbillon gigantesque. Je vis durant l'espace d'une seconde dans le gouffre le crâne poli du savant et ses petites mains grasses, puis l'abîme se referma, et le déluge se répandit sur le silence et l'immobilité. Menacé moi-même d'être englouti avec mon échelle, je m'enfuis à travers le plus haut carreau de la croisée.
France, Anatole. L’Île Des Pingouins. Project Gutenberg 8524. 1908. Reprint, Project Gutenberg, 2005. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8524/pg8524.html
Death by Zettelkasten!!
(Coming soon to a theater near you...)
In the preface to the novel Penguin Island (L'Île des Pingouins. Calmann-Lévy, 1908) by Nobel prize laureate Anatole France, a scholar is drowned by an avalanche of index cards which formed a gigantic whirlpool streaming out of his card index (Zettelkasten).
Link to: Historian Keith Thomas has indicated that he finds it hard to take using index cards for excerpting and research seriously as a result of reading this passage in the satire Penguin Island.<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/rKAvtlQCEe2jtzP3LmPlsA
Translation via: France, Anatole. Penguin Island. Translated by Arthur William Evans. 8th ed. 1908. Reprint, New York, NY, USA: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Penguin_Island/6UpWAvkPQaEC?hl=en&gbpv=0
Small changes in the translation by me, comprising only adding the word "index" in front of the occurrences of card to better represent the historical idea of fiches used by scholars in the late 1800s and early 1900s, are indicated in brackets.
The walls of the study, the floor, and even the ceiling were loaded with overflowing bundles, paste board boxes swollen beyond measure, boxes in which were compressed an innumerable multitude of small [index] cards covered with writing. I beheld in admiration mingled with terror the cataracts of erudition that threatened to burst forth.
“Master,” said I in feeling tones, “I throw myself upon your kindness and your knowledge, both of which are inexhaustible. Would you consent to guide me in my arduous researches into the origins of Penguin art?"
“Sir," answered the Master, “I possess all art, you understand me, all art, on [index] cards classed alphabetically and in order of subjects. I consider it my duty to place at your disposal all that relates to the Penguins. Get on that ladder and take out that box you see above. You will find in it everything you require.”
I tremblingly obeyed. But scarcely had I opened the fatal box than some blue [index] cards escaped from it, and slipping through my fingers, began to rain down.
Almost immediately, acting in sympathy, the neighbouring boxes opened, and there flowed streams of pink, green, and white [index] cards, and by degrees, from all the boxes, differently coloured [index] cards were poured out murmuring like a waterfall on a mountain-side in April. In a minute they covered the floor with a thick layer of paper. Issuing from their in exhaustible reservoirs with a roar that continually grew in force, each second increased the vehemence of their torrential fall. Swamped up to the knees in cards, Fulgence Tapir observed the cataclysm with attentive nose. He recognised its cause and grew pale with fright.
“ What a mass of art! ” he exclaimed.
I called to him and leaned forward to help him mount the ladder which bent under the shower. It was too late. Overwhelmed, desperate, pitiable, his velvet smoking-cap and his gold-mounted spectacles having fallen from him, he vainly opposed his short arms to the flood which had now mounted to his arm-pits . Suddenly a terrible spurt of [index] cards arose and enveloped him in a gigantic whirlpool. During the space of a second I could see in the gulf the shining skull and little fat hands of the scholar; then it closed up and the deluge kept on pouring over what was silence and immobility. In dread lest I in my turn should be swallowed up ladder and all I made my escape through the topmost pane of the window.
-
-
boffosocko.com boffosocko.com
-
As an example, in The Crown season 1 episode 4 “Act of God” (Netflix, 2016) there is a scene portraying former British Prime Minister Clement Atlee in his office in which he is prominently bookended in the background by two four drawer card indexes: one 3 x 5″ and the other 4 x 6″.
This example comes directly from my notes: https://hypothes.is/a/Cz7e_lHKEe2Qv79IbEgmNw
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
I can't quite grasp this concept, although it seems interesting for my specific case. Isn't the index box supposed to be organized by alphabetical order? How can personal notes be placed right in such an order?
los2pollos reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y5un81/comment/it667sq/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
There are a wide variety of methods of organizing and sorting one's note cards including by topic (usually alphabetical), by date, by idea, by author, by title, etc.
If you're using it as a diary, you'd probably keep that subsection in order by date written, and then potentially have it cross indexed by subject if those things were important to you.
If you kept other information like mood, health, activities, exercise, glasses of water per day (for example) on them, you could resort and re-order them by those data as well if you liked. And naturally, this ability to resort/reorder one's notes has been one of the greatest features and affordances to these systems historically.
-
Memorization is not about a language, rather about a feeling you have about information. In other words, how deep it resonates with your life. In this sense, I was also exploring the idea that having an Antinet Zettelkasten is almost like having a "diary", not for your personal feelings or emotions, rather for exploring the way in which your entire mind and heart work together over the years in which we discover the world. For me, exploring subjects and studying is an internal discovery.
in reply to los2pollos<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y5un81/comment/it4jy3c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
You're not the only one to think of a card index as diary. Roland Barthes practiced this as well. His biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call it his fichierjournal.
-
-
natto.dev natto.dev
-
Natto https://natto.dev<br /> built by Paul Shen https://twitter.com/_paulshen
-
-
-
Andere Sammlungen sind ihrem Verwendungszweck nie zugeführt worden. Der Germanist Friedrich Kittler etwa legte Karteikarten zu allen Farben an, die dem Mond in der Lyrik zugeschrieben worden sind. Das Buch dazu könnte jemand mit Hilfe dieser Zettel schreiben.
machine translation (Google):
Other collections have never been used for their intended purpose. The Germanist Friedrich Kittler, for example, created index cards for all the colors that were ascribed to the moon in poetry. Someone could write the book about it with the help of these slips of paper.
Germanist Friedrich Kittler collected index cards with all the colors that were ascribed to the moon in poetry. He never did anything with his collection, but it has been suggested that one could write a book with his research collection.
-
-
Local file Local file
-
There is a box stored in the German Literature Archive in Marbach, thewooden box Hans Blumenberg kept in a fireproof steel cabinet, for it con-tained his collection of about thirty thousand typed and handwritten notecards.1
Hans Blumenberg's zettelkasten of about thirty thousand typed and handwritten note cards is now kept at the German Literature Archive in Marbach. Blumenberg kept it in a wooden box which he kept in a fireproof steel cabinet.
-
-
www.loom.com www.loom.com
-
https://www.loom.com/share/a05f636661cb41628b9cb7061bd749ae
Synopsis: Maggie Delano looks at some of the affordances supplied by Tana (compared to Roam Research) in terms of providing better block-based user interface for note type creation, search, and filtering.
These sorts of tools and programmable note implementations remind me of Beatrice Webb's idea of scientific note taking or using her note cards like a database to sort and search for data to analyze it and create new results and insight.
It would seem that many of these note taking tools like Roam and Tana are using blocks and sub blocks as a means of defining atomic notes or database-like data in a way in which sub-blocks are linked to or "filed underneath" their parent blocks. In reality it would seem that they're still using a broadly defined index card type system as used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to implement a set up that otherwise would be a traditional database in the Microsoft Excel or MySQL sort of fashion, the major difference being that the user interface is cognitively easier to understand for most people.
These allow people to take a form of structured textual notes to which might be attached other smaller data or meta data chunks that can be easily searched, sorted, and filtered to allow for quicker or easier use.
Ostensibly from a mathematical (or set theoretic and even topological) point of view there should be a variety of one-to-one and onto relationships (some might even extend these to "links") between these sorts of notes and database representations such that one should be able to implement their note taking system in Excel or MySQL and do all of these sorts of things.
Cascading Idea Sheets or Cascading Idea Relationships
One might analogize these sorts of note taking interfaces to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While there is the perennial question about whether or not CSS is a programming language, if we presume that it is (and it is), then we can apply the same sorts of class, id, and inheritance structures to our notes and their meta data. Thus one could have an incredibly atomic word, phrase, or even number(s) which inherits a set of semantic relationships to those ideas which it sits below. These links and relationships then more clearly define and contextualize them with respect to other similar ideas that may be situated outside of or adjacent to them. Once one has done this then there is a variety of Boolean operations which might be applied to various similar sets and classes of ideas.
If one wanted to go an additional level of abstraction further, then one could apply the ideas of category theory to one's notes to generate new ideas and structures. This may allow using abstractions in one field of academic research to others much further afield.
The user interface then becomes the key differentiator when bringing these ideas to the masses. Developers and designers should be endeavoring to allow the power of complex searches, sorts, and filtering while minimizing the sorts of advanced search queries that an average person would be expected to execute for themselves while also allowing some reasonable flexibility in the sorts of ways that users might (most easily for them) add data and meta data to their ideas.
Jupyter programmable notebooks are of this sort, but do they have the same sort of hierarchical "card" type (or atomic note type) implementation?
Tags
- user interface
- integrated development environment
- category theory
- Roam Research
- integrated thinking environments
- Jupyter
- types of notes
- scientific note taking
- watch
- programmable notes
- card index as database
- Boolean algebra
- Maggie Delano
- Tana
- CSS
- cascading idea sheets
- Beatrice Webb
- building blocks
- idea links
- super tags
Annotators
URL
-
-
www.flotsamandfork.com www.flotsamandfork.com
-
www.sub.uni-hamburg.de www.sub.uni-hamburg.de
-
Sein Nachlass umfasst u. a. Notizen zu allen wichtigen naturphilosophischen Fragen seiner Zeit und Briefwechsel mit seinen Schülern, die sich an den verschiedenen Universitäten des protestantischen Deutschlands und der Niederlande aufhielten. Er schrieb Literaturauszüge, Beobachtungsmitschriften, Vorlesungsvorbereitungen und anderes mehr auf kleine Zettel, von denen heute noch knapp 42.000 in der Stabi erhalten sind.
machine translation (Google):
His estate includes i.a. Notes on all important natural-philosophical questions of his time and correspondence with his students who stayed at the various universities in Protestant Germany and the Netherlands. He wrote excerpts from literature, observation notes, lecture preparations and other things on small pieces of paper, of which almost 42,000 are still preserved in the Stabi today.
Die Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky (Stabi) houses the almost 42,000 slips of paper from Joachim Jungius' lifetime collection of notes which include excerpts from his reading, observational notes, his lecture preparations, and other miscellaneous notes.
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
Does anyone else work in project-based systems instead? .t3_y2pzuu._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/m_t_rv_s__n https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/y2pzuu/does_anyone_else_work_in_projectbased_systems/
Historically, many had zettelkasten which were commonplace books kept on note cards, usually categorized by subject (read: "folders" or "tags"), so you're not far from that original tradition.
Similar to your work pattern, you may find the idea of a "Pile of Index Cards" (PoIC) interesting. See https://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficiently-organizes-ta-1599093089 and https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122 (read the descriptions of the photos for more details; there was also a related, but now defunct wiki, which you can find copies of on Archive.org with more detail). This pattern was often seen implemented in the TiddlyWiki space, but can now be implemented in many note taking apps that have to do functionality along with search and tags. Similarly you may find those under Tiago Forte's banner "Building a Second Brain" to be closer to your project-based/productivity framing if you need additional examples or like-minded community. You may find that some of Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking (LYT) is in this productivity spectrum as well. (Caveat emptor: these last two are selling products/services, but there's a lot of their material freely available online.)
Luhmann changed the internal structure of his particular zettelkasten that created a new variation on the older traditions. It is this Luhmann-based tradition that many in r/Zettelkasten follow. Since many who used the prior (commonplace-based) tradition were also highly productive, attributing output to a particular practice is wrongly placed. Each user approaches these traditions idiosyncratically to get them to work for themselves, so ignore naysayers and those with purist tendencies, particularly when they're new to these practices or aren't aware of their richer history. As the sub-reddit rules indicate: "There is no [universal or orthodox] 'right' way", but you'll find a way that is right for you.
-
-
www.flickr.com www.flickr.com
-
riclav 16y Do you implement any kind of analogue "trackback"? In other words, does 2006.7.14 18.06 know that it has been linked to? If not, would there be value in having this kind of function?
The original PoIC didn't include bi-directional links, but the idea was brought up and considered.
-
-
mleddy.blogspot.com mleddy.blogspot.com
-
Google "Hawk Sugano" and "PoIC" for the reinvention and updating of a system much in use by the Japanese (Umedao author) and Germans (Buhmann author) in the Sixties and Seventies. Neither of these works has been translated into English...apparently Japan and Germany are jealously holding on to their State Secrets ;)
This post was via Den https://www.blogger.com/profile/15319877273178044093
What are these references to Umedao and Buhmann? Quck searches don't yield much. Need to look deeper.
-
-
www.flickr.com www.flickr.com
-
GTD Card Icon : Square (check box)Tag : 4th block. Squared as open-loop first, and filled later as accomplished. The GTD is advanced To-Do system proposed by David Allen. Next action of your project is described and processed through a certain flow. The GTD cards are classified into this class. 4th block is squared as open-loop first, and filled later as accomplished. The percentage of GTD Cards in my dock is less than 5 %.
-
-
unclutterer.com unclutterer.com
-
Brief explanation of the Pile of Index Cards system, but without significant depth.
-
I’m with Iris (and Jane) about the PoIC system — I don’t understand how the system works once it is set up. It’s a shame as it might be very useful. Ideally, I’d like to set it up with notebooks in Evernote instead of actual index cards and boxes (the last thing I need in my life is more paper clutter). That way it would be easily searchable, too).
As is apparently often in describing new organizing systems (commonplace books, zettelkasten, PoIC, etc.), not everyone is going to understand it the first time, or even understand what is going on or why one would want to use it.
This post by Susan is such an example.
Susan does almost immediately grasp that this might be something one could transfer into a digital system however, particularly for the search functionality.
-
-
web.archive.org web.archive.org
-
Several months back I'd thought about adapting the 43 folders system to a zettelkasten sort of system. I'm obviously not the first to have done so.
-
-
www.flickr.com www.flickr.com
-
https://www.flickr.com/photos/aki_oda/2684257358/
Visual diagram of PoIC system, similar to 43 folders and GTD systems.
-
-
www.flickr.com www.flickr.comkf3331
-
https://www.flickr.com/photos/36761543@N02/
Kf333 falls into the tradition of PoIC which they associated directly.
They photographed and saved their cards into Flickr.
-
-
lifehacker.com lifehacker.com
-
https://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficiently-organizes-ta-1599093089
LifeHacker covers the Hawk Sugano's Pile of Index Cards method, which assuredly helped promote it to the GTD and productivity crowd.
One commenter notices the similarities to Ryan Holiday's system and ostensibly links to https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/
Two others snarkily reference using such a system to "keep track of books in the library [,,,] Sort them out using decimal numbers on index cards in drawers or something..." and "I need to tell my friend Dewey about this! He would run with it." Obviously they see the intellectual precursors and cousins of the method, though they haven't looked at the specifics very carefully.
One should note that this may have been one of the first systems to mix information management/personal knowledge management with an explicit Getting Things Done set up. Surely there are hints of this in the commonplace book tradition, but are there any examples that go this far?
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
Posted byu/raphaelmustermann9 hours agoSeparate private information from the outline of academic disciplines? .t3_xi63kb._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } How does Luhmann deal with private Zettels? Does he store them in a separate category like, 2000 private. Or does he work them out under is topics in the main box.I can´ find informations about that. Anyway, you´re not Luhmann. But any suggestions on how to deal with informations that are private, like Health, Finances ... does not feel right to store them under acadmic disziplines. But maybe it´s right and just a feeling which come´ out how we "normaly" store information.
I would echo Bob's sentiment here and would recommend you keep that material like this in a separate section or box all together.
If it helps to have an example, in 2006, Hawk Sugano showed off a version of a method you may be considering which broadly went under the title of Pile of Index Cards (or PoIC) which combined zettelkasten and productivity systems (in his case getting things done or GTD). I don't think he got much (any?!) useful affordances out of mixing the two. In fact, from what I can see looking at later iterations of his work and how he used it, it almost seems like he spent more time and energy later attempting to separate and rearrange them to get use out of the knowledge portions as distinct from the productivity portions.
I've generally seen people mixing these ideas in the digital space usually to their detriment as well—a practice I call zettelkasten overreach.
-
-
Local file Local file
-
there might be a miscellaneous division, which wouldserve as a "tickler" and which might even be equipped with a set ofcalendar guides so that the "follow-up" system may be used.
An example of a ticker file in the vein of getting things done (GTD) documented using index cards and a card file from 1917. Sounds very familiar to the Pile of Index Cards (PoIC) from the early 2000s.
-
Sutherland, Lois Gilbert. “The English Teacher’s Card File.” The English Journal 6, no. 2 (1917): 111–12. https://doi.org/10.2307/801508.
Lois Gilbert Sutherland suggests using a card index system for multiple uses in the classroom including notes, administration, and general productivity.
There are so many parallels from this to how people are using platforms like Obsidian, Roam Research, and Notion in 2022.
-
-
zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
-
image courtesy hawkexpress on flickr
Interesting to see the first post on zettelkasten.de in 2013 has a photo of hawkexpress' Pile of Index Cards (PoIC) in it.
This obviously means that Christian Tietze had at least a passing familiarity with that system, though it differed structurally from Luhmann's version of zettelkasten.
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
Underlining Keyterms and Index Bloat .t3_y1akec._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
Hello u/sscheper,
Let me start by thanking you for introducing me to Zettelkasten. I have been writing notes for a week now and it's great that I'm able to retain more info and relate pieces of knowledge better through this method.
I recently came to notice that there is redundancy in my index entries.
I have two entries for Number Line. I have two branches in my Math category that deals with arithmetic, and so far I have "Addition" and "Subtraction". In those two branches I talk about visualizing ways of doing that, and both of those make use of and underline the term Number Line. So now the two entries in my index are "Number Line (Under Addition)" and "Number Line (Under Subtraction)". In those notes I elaborate how exactly each operation is done on a number line and the insights that can be derived from it. If this continues, I will have Number Line entries for "Multiplication" and "Division". I will also have to point to these entries if I want to link a main note for "Number Line".
Is this alright? Am I underlining appropriately? When do I not underline keyterms? I know that I do these to increase my chances of relating to those notes when I get to reach the concept of Number Lines as I go through the index but I feel like I'm overdoing it, and it's probably bloating it.
I get "Communication (under Info. Theory): '4212/1'" in the beginning because that is one aspect of Communication itself. But for something like the number line, it's very closely associated with arithmetic operations, and maybe I need to rethink how I populate my index.
Presuming, since you're here, that you're creating a more Luhmann-esque inspired zettelkasten as opposed to the commonplace book (and usually more heavily indexed) inspired version, here are some things to think about:<br /> - Aren't your various versions of number line card behind each other or at least very near each other within your system to begin with? (And if not, why not?) If they are, then you can get away with indexing only one and know that the others will automatically be nearby in the tree. <br /> - Rather than indexing each, why not cross-index the cards themselves (if they happen to be far away from each other) so that the link to Number Line (Subtraction) appears on Number Line (Addition) and vice-versa? As long as you can find one, you'll be able to find them all, if necessary.
If you look at Luhmann's online example index, you'll see that each index term only has one or two cross references, in part because future/new ideas close to the first one will naturally be installed close to the first instance. You won't find thousands of index entries in his system for things like "sociology" or "systems theory" because there would be so many that the index term would be useless. Instead, over time, he built huge blocks of cards on these topics and was thus able to focus more on the narrow/niche topics, which is usually where you're going to be doing most of your direct (and interesting) work.
Your case sounds, and I see it with many, is that your thinking process is going from the bottom up, but that you're attempting to wedge it into a top down process and create an artificial hierarchy based on it. Resist this urge. Approaching things after-the-fact, we might place information theory as a sub-category of mathematics with overlaps in physics, engineering, computer science, and even the humanities in areas like sociology, psychology, and anthropology, but where you put your work on it may depend on your approach. If you're a physicist, you'll center it within your physics work and then branch out from there. You'd then have some of the psychology related parts of information theory and communications branching off of your physics work, but who cares if it's there and not in a dramatically separate section with the top level labeled humanities? It's all interdisciplinary anyway, so don't worry and place things closest in your system to where you think they fit for you and your work. If you had five different people studying information theory who were respectively a physicist, a mathematician, a computer scientist, an engineer, and an anthropologist, they could ostensibly have all the same material on their cards, but the branching structures and locations of them all would be dramatically different and unique, if nothing else based on the time ordered way in which they came across all the distinct pieces. This is fine. You're building this for yourself, not for a mass public that will be using the Dewey Decimal System to track it all down—researchers and librarians can do that on behalf of your estate. (Of course, if you're a musician, it bears noting that you'd be totally fine building your information theory section within the area of "bands" as a subsection on "The Bandwagon". 😁)
If you overthink things and attempt to keep them too separate in their own prefigured categorical bins, you might, for example, have "chocolate" filed historically under the Olmec and might have "peanut butter" filed with Marcellus Gilmore Edson under chemistry or pharmacy. If you're a professional pastry chef this could be devastating as it will be much harder for the true "foodie" in your zettelkasten to creatively and more serendipitously link the two together to make peanut butter cups, something which may have otherwise fallen out much more quickly and easily if you'd taken a multi-disciplinary (bottom up) and certainly more natural approach to begin with. (Apologies for the length and potential overreach on your context here, but my two line response expanded because of other lines of thought I've been working on, and it was just easier for me to continue on writing while I had the "muse". Rather than edit it back down, I'll leave it as it may be of potential use to others coming with no context at all. In other words, consider most of this response a selfish one for me and my own slip box than as responsive to the OP.)
Tags
- indices
- The Bandwagon
- Universal Decimal Classification
- Niklas Luhmann's index
- examples
- bottom-up vs. top-down
- hierarchies
- information theory
- commonplace books vs. zettelkasten
- Claude Shannon
- Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten
- zettelkasten
- reply
- multi-disciplinary research
- Dewey Decimal System
Annotators
URL
-
-
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
-
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>u/taurusnoises</span> in One of the ways I use my zettelkasten (though Obsidian) to write essays : Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>08/10/2022 12:28:58</time>)</cite></small>
-
-
www.greyroom.org www.greyroom.org
-
http://www.greyroom.org/issues/60/20/the-dialectic-of-the-university-his-masters-voice/
“The Indexers pose with the file of Great Ideas. At sides stand editors [Mortimer] Adler (left) and [William] Gorman (right). Each file drawer contains index references to a Great Idea. In center are the works of the 71 authors which constitute the Great Books.” From “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog,” Life 24, no. 4 (26 January 1948). Photo: George Skadding.
-
-
kathleenmccook.substack.com kathleenmccook.substack.com
-
Photos from
"The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog," Life, 26 January 1948, 92–3.
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
Index cards for commonplacing?
I know that Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday have talked about their commonplace methods using index cards before, and Mortimer J. Adler et al. used index cards with commonplacing methods in their Great Books/Syntopicon project, but is anyone else using this method? Where or from whom did you learn/hear about using index cards? What benefits do you feel you're getting over a journal or notebook-based method? Mortimer J. Adler smoking a pipe amidst a sea of index cards in boxes with 102 topic labels (examples: Law, World, Love, Life, Being, Sin, Art, Citizen, Change, etc.)
-
-
Local file Local file
-
Here again we seethe emphasis on writing as a movement that resists reification andall the intimidations of language. It is not surprising that Barthesshould have sought a form that would foster this infinite process. Theform lay, not in the fragment as such, but in the organization orarrangement that could be made from the fragments. He underlinedthis on an unpublished index card from 16 July 1979: ‘I can clearlysee this much (I think): my “notes” (Diary) as such, are not enough (Iincline towards them but in fact they’re a failure). What’s needed isanother turn of the screw, a “key”, which will turn these Notes-Diaryinto the mere notes of work that will be constructed and writtencontinuously: basically, to write notes, the index cards: to classifythem, turn them into bundles, and as I usually do, compose by takingone bundle after another.’11
-
These index cards,which Barthes began as a student, using them as a bibliographicaland then lexicographical resource, gradually became the place wherehe recorded a great deal of his life. In them, he assembled things hehad seen and heard, travel impressions, phrases that he liked, ideasand plans.
Roland Barthes used his card index as more than the traditional bibliographical, excerpting, and note taking tool that many had before him. He also used it to accumulate notes on what he had seen and heard in his daily life, phrases he liked, and plans. It came to serve the function, particularly in the last two years of his life, of a diary or what biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call his fichierjournal or index-card diary.
Are there examples of this practice before this time? Certainly in the commonplace book tradition, the ideas of journal, diary, and commonplace had been mixed before.
-
These index cards,which Barthes began as a student, using them as a bibliographicaland then lexicographical resource, gradually became the place wherehe recorded a great deal of his life.
Roland Barthes began using index cards as a student.
-
Bouttes contributedfrequently to Barthes’s seminar and gave an unusual paper at thecolloque de Cerisy called ‘Le diamantfoudre’ (‘The diamond-lightning’). He was darkly dazzling, strange, sombre, unexpected.Barthes thought he had something of Des Esseintes about him,witness an anecdote noted in his card index diary: ‘J.L.: in a phasewhere, in the restaurant, he deconstructs the menus, greatlyshocking the waiters. The other evening, at Prunier’s, oysters andoyster gratin, yesterday, at Le Balzar, oeuf en gelée and oysters,coffee ice cream and ice cream.’59
- BNF, NAF 28630, ‘Grand fichier’, 3 January 1975.
Roland Barthes' biographer Tiphaine Samoyault quotes portions of what he calls Barthes' card index diary.
This can also be seen in the published cards which comprise Barthes' Mourning Diary about the period following his mother's death.
Are there other people who've used their card index as a diary the way that some use it for productivity?
-
-
Local file Local file
-
Examining the cards, it becomes clear that the index constitutes not a mythic totalhistory but a specific set of facts and data that piqued Deutsch’s interest and whichreflected his personal research priorities (see Figure 2).
Zettelkasten, if nothing else, are a close reflection of the interests of the author who collected them.
link: Ahrens mentions this
-
Deutsch’s focus on facts was commonplace among professional US historians atthis time, as was his conception of the ‘fact’ as a small item that could fit onto the sizeof an index card (Daston, 2002).
Find this quote and context!
-
Max Raisin (1881–1957),reflected that lessons often devolved into ‘reading several events with dates out of alittle notebook’ (Raisin, 1952: 147; Hertzman, 1985: 83-8).
Max Raisin indicated that Gotthard Deutsch read several events with dates out of a little notebook during lectures. Was this really a notebook or possibly a small stack/deck of index cards? The could certainly be easily mistaken....
Check these references
-
-
journals.sagepub.com journals.sagepub.com
-
Indeed, Deutsch’s index is massive but middling, especially when placed alongside those of Niklas Luhmann, Paul Otlet, or Gershom Scholem.
Curious how Deutsch's 70,000 facts would be middling compared to Luhmann's 90,000? - How many years did Deutsch maintain and collect his version?<br /> - How many publications did he contribute to? - Was his also used for teaching?
Otlet didn't create his collection alone did he? Wasn't it a massive group effort?
Check into Gershom Scholem's collection and use. I've not come across his work in this space.
-
Does Deutsch’s index constitute a great unwritten work of history, as some have claimed, or are the cards ultimately useless ‘chips from his workshop’?
From his bibliography, it appears that Deutsch was a prolific writer and teacher, so how will Lustig (or others he mentions) make the case that his card index was useless "chips from his workshop"? Certainly he used them in writing his books, articles, and newspaper articles? He also was listed as a significant contributor to an encyclopedia as well.
It'd be interesting to look at the record to see if he taught with them the way Roland Barthes was known to have done.
-
Gotthard Deutsch (1859–1921) taught at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati from 1891 until his death, where he produced a card index of 70,000 ‘facts’ of Jewish history.
Gotthard Deutsch (1859-1921) had a card index of 70,000 items relating to Jewish history.
-
-
forums.nanowrimo.org forums.nanowrimo.org
-
https://forums.nanowrimo.org/t/linking-up-zettelkasten-or-card-index-method-writers/433719
Looking for writers who are using an index card-based, Zettelkasten (German translation: slip box), or fichier boîte method for writing. Both traditional methods in the vein of Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Ende, Anne Lamott, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, or Robert Pirsig as well as Niklas Luhmann-esque methods (perhaps better for non-fiction) are fine.
Commonplace book practitioners are also welcome.
How many index cards will it take you to get to 50,000 words? (Reminder: It’s easier to write a few sentences or an index card at a time than focusing on thousands of words a day…)
-
-
www.aaa.si.edu www.aaa.si.edu
-
Card File by Robert Morris, 1961 Russell, Walter, photographer
-
-
www.artsy.net www.artsy.net
-
Card File, 1962Metal, wood, paper26 5/8 × 10 5/8 × 1 9/16 in67.6 × 27 × 4 cmNational Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
-
-
Local file Local file
-
Built and assembled without anyparticular significance or any value, Walter de Maria's Boxes for MeaninglessWork could also be an echo of Duchamp's sound strategies. In aparallel project, Robert Morris realized Card File (1962-3), a series ofcards on which a series of hazy concepts are written and laid out alphabetically on a vertical support. Through this initial process, Morriscreated a description of the necessary stages required to achieve thework. The terms used in this file include such things as accidents,alphabets, cards, categories, conception, criticism, or decisions, dissatisfactions, durations, forms, future, interruptions, names, numbers,possibilities, prices, purchases, owners, and signature. As a result, thework had no content other than the circumstances of its execution.Through this piece, Morris also asserted that if one wished to understand and penetrate all subtleties of the work, one would have toconsider all the methods used in bringing it forth. The status of thework of art is immediately called into question, because the range ofcards can undergo a change:In a broad sense art has always been on object, static and final, eventhough structurally it may have been a depiction or existed as afragment. What is being attacked, however, is something more thanart as icon. Under attack is the rationalistic notion that art is a formof work that results in a finished product. Duchamp, of course,attacked the Marxist notion that labor was an index of value, butReadymades are traditionally iconic art objects. What art now has inits hand ismutable stuffwhich need not arrive at the point of beingfinalized with respect to either time or space. The notion thatworkis an irreversible process ending in a static icon-object no longer hasmuch relevance.25Marcel Duchamp's musical and "Dismountable approximation" illustrate this process perfectly. John Cage recalled that "for his final opus,Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, exhibited in Philadelphia, [Duchamp] wrote a book [the "Dismountable approximation"]that provided a blueprint for dismantling the work and rebuilding it.26It also provided information on how to proceed, as well as the only definition of the musical notation, isn't that so? So it is a musical work ofart; because when you follow the instructions you produce sounds."27But Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas was never createdas a musical piece, even though it is entirely "possible to do it. . . .Andif one takes it like a musical piece, one gets the piece [that Duchamp]This content downloaded from 194.27.18.18 on Fri, 18 Dec 2015 12:35:27 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
card file as art!
-
-
archive.org archive.org
-
https://archive.org/details/refiningreadingw0000meij/page/256/mode/2up?q=index+card
Refining, reading, writing : includes 2009 mla update card by Mei, Jennifer (Nelson, 2007)
Contains a very generic reference to note taking on index cards for arranging material, but of such a low quality in comparison to more sophisticated treatments in the century prior. Apparently by this time the older traditions have disappeared and have been heavily watered down into just a few paragraphs.
-
-
archive.org archive.org
-
https://archive.org/details/cardindexsystema00dart/mode/2up
The card index system applied to the writing of specification for building construction by Dart, Whitman (University of Illinois, 1905)
-
-
archive.org archive.org
-
Local file Local file
-
Cattell, J. McKeen. “Methods for a Card Index.” Science 10, no. 247 (1899): 419–20.
Columbia professor of psychology calls for the creation of a card index of references to reviews and abstracts for areas of research. Columbia was apparently doing this in 1899 for the psychology department.
What happened to this effort? How similar was it to the system of advertising cards for books in Germany in the early 1930s described by Heyde?
-
-
Local file Local file
-
Dwyer, Edward J. “File Card Efficiency.” Journal of Reading 26, no. 2 (1982): 171–171.
Ease of use in writing and grading with short assignments by using 4 x 6" index cards in classrooms.
This sounds like some of the articles from 1912 and 1917 about efficiency of card indexes for teaching.
I'm reminded of some programmed learning texts that were card-based (or really strip-based since they were published in book form) in the 1960s and 1970s. Thse books had small strips with lessons or questions on the front with the answers on the reverse. One would read in strips through the book from front to back and then start the book all over again on page one on the second row of strips and so on.
-
-
Local file Local file
-
Rotzel, Grace. “Card File.” The English Journal 6, no. 10 (December 1917): 691–691. https://doi.org/10.2307/801092.
Follow up note to prior article indicating some sorter term benefits of filing student work and taking notes on it for helping to create improvement over time.
-
In the February, 1917, number of the English Journal there warticle on "The English Teacher's
-
-
Local file Local file
-
Breitenbach, H. P. “The Card Index for Teachers.” The School Review 20, no. 4 (1912): 271–72.
Apparently in 1912, the card index was little known to teachers... this isn't the sort of use case I was expecting here...
The general gist of this short note is an encouraging one to suggest that instead of traditional grade books, which are still used heavily in 2022, teachers should use rolodex like cards for keeping attendance and notes on a student's progress.
Presumably this never caught on. While some elementary teachers still use older paper gradebooks, many others have transferred to digital LMS platforms.
-
-
www.jstor.org www.jstor.org
-
Teatr Maly - Kartoteka - Rozewicz (The Card File by Rozewicz, Maly Theater)Creatordesigner: Maciej Urbaniec (Polish, 1925-2004)
-
-
archive.org archive.org
-
Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout
-
I love that he closes the pamphlet again with a nod to comfort and ease of use.
...what this pamphlet has sought to do is to make it possible for the researcher to develop a way of doing things which will be as productive and as comfortable as possible.
-
...the historian is only as good as his card-file.<br /> —Jacques Goutor, (p360
-
I love the phrasing of the title of his penultimate section "Making the card-file work", which makes it seem like the card file is ultimately doing the work of writing. Ultimately however, it's the work that was put into it that makes the card file useful, a sentiment that Jacques Goutor emphasizes when he says "How well this succeeds depends partly upon what was put into the file, and partly on how it was put in." (p34)
-
Thesis to bear out (only tangentially related to this particular text):
Part of the reason that index card files didn't catch on, especially in America, was that they didn't have a solid/concrete name by which they went. The generic term card index subsumed so much in relation to library card catalogues or rolodexes which had very specific functions and individualized names. Other cultures had more descriptive names like zettelkasten or fichier boîte which, while potentially bland within their languages, had more specific names for what they were.
-
For the second time Goutor mentions using different size cards for different note types, but doesn't specifically advise for it or provide a reason. Perhaps his advice for consistency and card size applies only to cards of particular types? (p28)
link to: https://hypothes.is/a/XPphjkNZEe2s3i9VV4qt1g
Incidentally he also specifically mentions 7x9" cards here too. How frequently used were these as a standard?
-
Goutor defines self-help notes as notes which one would use to refresh their memory about what remains to be done or researched, problems that remain to be solved, or information which is needed to be researched or found. (p26) These are akin in some sense to what I call "open questions". He also indicates that these notes might be triggered by one's daily activities or occasional musings which relate to one's project but occur outside of its active pursuit. In this sense, they have a similar feel to the idea of Ahrens' fleeting notes, but in Goutor's practice they aren't defined as occurring while one is doing active reading or research.
He suggests that one keeps these notes in a separate area so that they might be systematically and regularly visited for review, further research, or answering as the opportunities to do so present themselves. Once the questions have been answered and appropriate notes updated or added, these self-help notes can be discarded.
-
While he previously recommended using note cards of the same size, the examples in Goutor (1980) have 3x5" cards for bibliographic notes and 5x7" or larger cards for content notes. (p19, 21)
Is there a reason stated anywhere here for this discrepancy or change? One would ostensibly keep them in different places/sections of one's card index, but does the size difference help to differentiate the two to aid in sorting? Is the larger card intended to hold more long form writing?
Goutor is in Canada, so were 5x7" cards more common or standardized there in the late 1970s and early 80s?
A5 measures 148 × 210 millimeters or 5.83 × 8.27 inches, so is a bit larger than 5x7".
5x7" is a more standard photo size, so was this chosen as the result of storage options from the photography space?
5x7" is scantly available in America in 2022, but only from Hamilco. A few others make cardstock in that size but not specifically as index cards.
-
There is a difference between various modes of note taking and their ultimate outcomes. Some is done for learning about an area and absorbing it into one's own source of general knowledge. Others are done to collect and generate new sorts of knowledge. But some may be done for raw data collection and analysis. Beatrice Webb called this "scientific note taking".
Historian Jacques Goutor talks about research preparation for this sort of data collecting and analysis though he doesn't give it a particular name. He recommends reading papers in related areas to prepare for the sort of data acquisition one may likely require so that one can plan out some of one's needs in advance. This will allow the researcher, especially in areas like history or sociology, the ability to preplan some of the sorts of data and notes they'll need to take from their historical sources or subjects in order to carry out their planned goals. (p8)
C. Wright Mills mentions (On Intellectual Craftsmanship, 1952) similar research planning whereby he writes out potential longer research methods even when he is not able to spend the time, effort, energy, or other (financial) resources to carry out such plans. He felt that just the thought experiments and exercise of doing such unfulfilled research often bore fruit in his other sociological endeavors.
-
Goutor indicates that "a certain amount of individual in methods is commendable, and indeed necessary." but that "it soon becomes apparent that there are some ways of doing things more efficient and ultimately more productive than others". But he goes on to bemoan that how to manuals offer little help.
(p3, Introduction)
Tags
- user interface
- research methods
- garbage in garbage out
- manuals on note taking
- fleeting ideas
- historians
- note taking affordances
- note card sizes
- note taking
- zettelkasten
- types of notes
- scientific note taking
- card index as productivity system
- diffuse thinking
- references
- cards of equal size
- fichier boîte
- fleeting notes
- potential thesis
- Beatrice Webb
- quotes
- individuality
- card index for writing
- On Intellectual Craftsmanship
- 1980
- Herman Hollerith
- open questions
- consistency
- Jacques Goutor
- index card user interface
- self-help notes
- card index as database
- C. Wright Mills
- Canada
- card index
- research planning
- paper standards
- read
- 5 x 7" index cards
- comfort
- 7 x 9" index cards
- 3 x 5" index cards
- productivity
- physical reminders
Annotators
URL
-
-
archive.org archive.org
-
Portion of a hand-written card file listing manuscripts, documents, and portraits contained in the Boston Public Library's Chamberlain Collection of Autographs. Cards are organized by last name of the creator or subject. Names of persons who have signed documents are also listed.
-
-
Local file Local file
-
In "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" (1952), C. Wright Mills talks about his methods for note taking, thinking, and analysis in what he calls "sociological imagination". This is a sociologists' framing of their own research and analysis practice and thus bears a sociological related name. While he talks more about the thinking, outlining, and writing process rather than the mechanical portion of how he takes notes or what he uses, he's extending significantly on the ideas and methods that Sönke Ahrens describes in How to Take Smart Notes (2017), though obviously he's doing it 65 years earlier. It would seem obvious that the specific methods (using either files, note cards, notebooks, etc.) were a bit more commonplace for his time and context, so he spent more of his time on the finer and tougher portions of the note making and thinking processes which are often the more difficult parts once one is past the "easy" mechanics.
While Mills doesn't delineate the steps or materials of his method of note taking the way Beatrice Webb, Langlois & Seignobos, Johannes Erich Heyde, Antonin Sertillanges, or many others have done before or Umberto Eco, Robert Greene/Ryan Holiday, Sönke Ahrens, or Dan Allosso since, he does focus more on the softer portions of his thinking methods and their desired outcomes and provides personal examples of how it works and what his expected outcomes are. Much like Niklas Luhmann describes in Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen (VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1981), Mills is focusing on the thinking processes and outcomes, but in a more accessible way and with some additional depth.
Because the paper is rather short, but specific in its ideas and methods, those who finish the broad strokes of Ahrens' book and methods and find themselves somewhat confused will more than profit from the discussion here in Mills. Those looking for a stronger "crash course" might find that the first seven chapters of Allosso along with this discussion in Mills is a straighter and shorter path.
While Mills doesn't delineate his specific method in terms of physical tools, he does broadly refer to "files" which can be thought of as a zettelkasten (slip box) or card index traditions. Scant evidence in the piece indicates that he's talking about physical file folders and sheets of paper rather than slips or index cards, but this is generally irrelevant to the broader process of thinking or writing. Once can easily replace the instances of the English word "file" with the German concept of zettelkasten and not be confused.
One will note that this paper was written as a manuscript in April 1952 and was later distributed for classroom use in 1955, meaning that some of these methods were being distributed from professor to students. The piece was later revised and included as an appendix to Mill's text The Sociological Imagination which was first published in 1959.
Because there aren't specifics about Mills' note structure indicated here, we can't determine if his system was like that of Niklas Luhmann, but given the historical record one could suppose that it was closer to the commonplace tradition using slips or sheets. One thing becomes more clear however that between the popularity of Webb's work and this (which was reprinted in 2000 with a 40th anniversary edition), these methods were widespread in the mid-twentieth century and specifically in the field of sociology.
Above and beyond most of these sorts of treatises on note taking method, Mills does spend more time on the thinking portions of the practice and delineates eleven different practices that one can focus on as they actively read/think and take notes as well as afterwards for creating content or writing.
My full notes on the article can be found at https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0138200b4bfcde2757a137d61cd65cb8
-
I am trying, you see, to build aframework containing all the key elements which enterinto the work; then to put each section in separate fbldersand continually readjust the whole framework aroundchanges in them.
Evidence that Mills is talking specifically about papers and individual folders (potentially tagged or categorized) rather than a card index system.
-
certainly surrounding oneself with acircle of people who will listen and t a l k - - a n d at times theyhave to be imaginary characters--is one of them
Intellectual work requires "surfaces" to work against, almost as an exact analogy to substrates in chemistry which help to catalyze reactions. The surfaces may include: - articles, books, or other writing against which one can think and write - colleagues, friends, family, other thinkers, or even imaginary characters (as suggested by C. Wright Mills) - one's past self as instantiated by their (imperfect) memory or by their notes about excerpted ideas or their own thoughts
Are there any other surfaces we're missing?
-
But how is this f i l e - - w h i c h so far must seem to thereader more like a j o u r n a l - - u s e d in intellectual produc-tion?
By asking this question this way, Mills is explicitly indicating that his "file" is not a journal, and by implication probably doesn't take the form of a notebook, though we should be on the lookout for more evidence of this given the long tradition of the commonplace book.
-
Use of File
It bears pointing out that Mills hasn't specifically described the form of his "file". Is he using note cards, slips, sheets of paper? Ostensibly one might suppose given his context and the word "file" which he uses that he may be referring to either hanging files, folders, and sheets of paper, or a more traditional index card file.
-
A personal file is thesocial organization of the individual's memory; it in-creases the continuity between life and work, and it per-mits a continuity in the work itself, and the planning of thework; it is a crossroads of life experience, professionalactivities, and way of work. In this file the intellectualcraftsman tries to integrate what he is doing intellectuallyand what he is experiencing as a person.
Again he uses the idea of a "file" which I read and understand as similar to the concepts of zettelkasten or commonplace book. Unlike others writing about these concepts though, he seems to be taking a more holistic and integrative (life) approach to having and maintaining such system.
Perhaps a more extreme statement of this might be written as "zettelkasten is life" or the even more extreme "life is zettelkasten"?
Is his grounding in sociology responsible for framing it as a "social organization" of one's memory?
It's not explicit, but this statement could be used as underpinning or informing the idea of using a card index as autobiography.
How does this compare to other examples of this as a function?
-
In the file, onecan experiment as a writer and thus develop o n e ' s ownpowers of expression.
Tags
- knowledge work
- card index for writing
- Sönke Ahrens
- Johannes Erich Heyde
- index card files
- intellectual surfaces
- files
- zettelkasten
- zettelkasten and memory
- rhetoric
- Charles Seignobos
- inspiration
- social organization
- C. Wright Mills
- Charles Victor Langlois
- card index
- journals
- Heyde's zettelkasten method
- conversations with the text
- conversations between texts
- card index as writing teacher
- card index as autobiography
- conversations
- social order
- Beatrice Webb
- Umberto Eco
- review
- tools for thought
- academic writing
Annotators
-
- Sep 2022
-
-
By the way, for smaller collections and even more so for catalogues, the meaningful“Rothahn”-Normschaltbuch [normative book] can be applied.
What is this??
-
Who can say whether I will actually be searchingfor e.g. the note on the relation between freedom of will and responsibility by looking at itunder the keyword “Verantwortlichkeit” [Responsibility]? What if, as is only natural, I willbe unable to remember the keyword and instead search for “Willensfreiheit” [Freedom ofWill] or “Freiheit” [Freedom], hoping to find the entry? This seems to be the biggestcomplaint about the entire system of the sheet box and its merit.
Heyde specifically highlights that planning for one's future search efforts by choosing the right keyword or even multiple keywords "seems to be the biggest complaint about the entire system of the slip box and its merit."
Niklas Luhmann apparently spent some time thinking about this, or perhaps even practicing it, before changing his system so that the issue was no longer a problem. As a result, Luhmann's system is much simpler to use and maintain.
Given his primary use of his slip box for academic research and writing, perhaps his solution was in part motivated by putting the notes and ideas exactly where he would both be able to easily find them, but also exactly where he would need them for creating final products in journal articles and books.
-
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, as thegraphic shows.
With respect to Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten, it seems he eschewed the Heyde's advice to use subject headings as the Anschrift (address). Instead, much like a physical street address or card card catalog system, he substituted a card address instead. This freed him up from needing to copy cards multiple times to insert them in different places as well as needing to create multiple cards to properly index the ideas and their locations.
Without this subtle change Luhmann's 90,000 card collection could have easily been 4-5 times its size.
-
More important is the fact that recently some publishershave started to publish suitable publications not as solid books, but as file card collections.An example would be the Deutscher Karteiverlag [German File Card Publishing Company]from Berlin, which published a “Kartei der praktischen Medizin” [File Card of PracticalMedicine], published unter the co-authorship of doctors like R.F. Weiß, 1st edition (1930ff.).Not to be forgotten here is also: Schuster, Curt: Iconum Botanicarum Index, 1st edition,Dresden: Heinrich 1926
As many people used slip boxes in 1930s Germany, publishers sold texts, not as typical books, but as file card collections!
Link to: Suggestion that Scott Scheper publish his book on zettelkasten as a zettelkasten.
-
Many know from their own experience how uncontrollable and irretrievable the oftenvaluable notes and chains of thought are in note books and in the cabinets they are stored in
Heyde indicates how "valuable notes and chains of thought are" but also points out "how uncontrollable and irretrievable" they are.
This statement is strong evidence along with others in this chapter which may have inspired Niklas Luhmann to invent his iteration of the zettelkasten method of excerpting and making notes.
(link to: Clemens /Heyde and Luhmann timeline: https://hypothes.is/a/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA)
Presumably he may have either heard or seen others talking about or using these general methods either during his undergraduate or law school experiences. Even with some scant experience, this line may have struck him significantly as an organization barrier of earlier methods.
Why have notes strewn about in a box or notebook as Heyde says? Why spend the time indexing everything and then needing to search for it later? Why not take the time to actively place new ideas into one's box as close as possibly to ideas they directly relate to?
But how do we manage this in a findable way? Since we can't index ideas based on tabs in a notebook or even notebook page numbers, we need to have some sort of handle on where ideas are in slips within our box. The development of European card catalog systems had started in the late 1700s, and further refinements of Melvil Dewey as well as standardization had come about by the early to mid 1900s. One could have used the Dewey Decimal System to index their notes using smaller decimals to infinitely intersperse cards on a growing basis.
But Niklas Luhmann had gone to law school and spent time in civil administration. He would have been aware of aktenzeichen file numbers used in German law/court settings and public administration. He seems to have used a simplified version of this sort of filing system as the base of his numbering system. And why not? He would have likely been intimately familiar with its use and application, so why not adopt it or a simplified version of it for his use? Because it's extensible in a a branching tree fashion, one can add an infinite number of cards or files into the midst of a preexisting collection. And isn't this just the function aktenzeichen file numbers served within the German court system? Incidentally these file numbers began use around 1932, but were likely heavily influenced by the Austrian conscription numbers and house numbers of the late 1770s which also influenced library card cataloging numbers, so the whole system comes right back around. (Ref Krajewski here).
(Cross reference/ see: https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA
Other pieces he may have been attempting to get around include the excessive work of additional copying involved in this piece as well as a lot of the additional work of indexing.
One will note that Luhmann's index was much more sparse than without his methods. Often in books, a reader will find a reference or two in an index and then go right to the spot they need and read around it. Luhmann did exactly this in his sequence of cards. An index entry or two would send him to the general local and sifting through a handful of cards would place him in the correct vicinity. This results in a slight increase in time for some searches, but it pays off in massive savings of time of not needing to cross index everything onto cards as one goes, and it also dramatically increases the probability that one will serendipitously review over related cards and potentially generate new insights and links for new ideas going into one's slip box.
Tags
- books
- examples
- Johannes Erich Heyde
- Melvil Dewey
- zettelkasten numbering
- note taking affordances
- chains of thought
- note taking advice
- taxonomies
- Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten
- zettelkasten
- working theory
- card catalogs
- serendipity
- indices
- aktenzeichen
- combinatorial creativity
- subject headings
- conscription numbers
- Niklas Luhmann's index
- card index as publication format
- card index
- Scott P. Scheper
- numbering systems
Annotators
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
Posted byu/jackbaty4 hours agoCard sizes .t3_xib133._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } I've been on-again/off-again with paper for PKM, but one thing remains consistent each time: I don't enjoy using 4x6 index cards. I much prefer 3x5-inch cards. I realize that it's irrational, but there it is.My question is if I dive into building an antinet, will I regret using 3x5 cards? I already have hundreds of them. I have dividers, holders, and storage boxes for them. I just prefer how they _feel_, as weird as that sounds.I'd like to hear if people are using 3x5 cards successfully or if you've come to regret it.
While it may be slightly more difficult to find larger metal/wood cases for the 4x6 or 5x8 cards, it's a minor nuisance and anyone who wants them will eventually find the right thing for them. Beyond this, choose the card size that feels right to you.
If you don't have an idea of what you need or like, try things out for 10-20 cards and see how it works for you, your handwriting size, and general needs. People have been using 3x5, 4x6, and even larger for hundreds of years without complaining about any major issues. If Carl Linnaeus managed to be okay with 3x5, which he hand cut by the way, I suspect you'll manage too.
Of course I won't mention to the Americans the cleverness of the A6, A5, A4 paper standards which allows you to fold the larger sizes in half to get the exact next smaller size down. Then you might get the benefit of the smaller size as well as the larger which could be folded into your collection of smaller cards, you just have to watch out for accidentally wrapping ("taco-ing") a smaller card inside of a larger one and losing it. I suppose you could hand cut your own 5" x 6" larger cards to do this if you found that you occasionally needed them.
For the pocketbook conscious, 3x5 does have the benefit of lower cost as well as many more options and flexibility than larger sizes.
At least commercial card sizes are now largely standardized, so you don't have deal with changing sizes the way Roland Barthes did over his lifetime.
My personal experience and a long history of so many manuals on the topic saying "cards of the same size" indicates that you assuredly won't have fun mixing different sized slips together. I personally use 3x5" cards in a waste book sense, but my main/permanent collection is in 4x6" format. Sometimes I think I should have done 3 x 5, but it's more like jealousy than regret, particularly when it comes to the potential of a restored fine furniture card catalog. But then again...
-
-
Local file Local file
-
As I write this book, for instance, I am sitting in a small room, beforea laptop computer, surrounded by books, papers, and magazines—all ofwhich I am, in some metaphorical sense, “in conversation with” (in muchthe same way I am also in conversation with you, my imagined reader).But what I am actually doing is working with a set of materials—lookingfor books on my shelves and flipping through them, folding pages over ormarking them with Post-its, retyping passages, filing and retrieving print-outs and photocopies, making notes in margins and on index cards, and,of course, composing, cutting, pasting, formatting, revising, and printingblocks of prose. I am, that is, for the most part, moving bits of text and paperaround.
Joseph Harris uses a mélange of materials to make his writing including books, papers, magazines, from which he is copying sections out, writing in margins, making notes on index cards and then moving those pieces of text and pieces of paper (the index cards, and possibly Post-it notes) around to create his output.
He doesn't delineate a specific process for his excerpting or note taking practice. How does he organize his notes? Is he just pulling them from piles around him? Is there a sense of organization at all?
-
-
-
Joseph Harris' text Rewriting: How to do things with texts (2006) sounds like a solid follow on text to the ideas found in Sönke Ahrens (2017) or Dan Allosso (2022).
-
-
web.archive.org web.archive.org
-
https://web.archive.org/web/20080412071219/http://eastgate.com/catalog/Briefcase.html
Eastgate systems used to make a "3x5 Card Briefcase" to capture short notes on the go which could later "be scanned or transcribed to Tinderbox."
Tinderbox was one of the first digital tools to be used in a way very similar to zettelkasten of old, particularly by academics, who are a large portion of their power user base.
-
-
www.connectedtext.com www.connectedtext.com
-
By the way, Luhmann's system is said to have had 35.000 cards. Jules Verne had 25.000. The sixteenth-century thinker Joachim Jungius is said to have had 150.000, and how many Leibniz had, we do not know, though we do know that he had one of the most ingenious piece of furniture for keeping his copious notes.
Circa late 2011, he's positing Luhmann had 35,000 cards and not 90,000.
Jules Verne used index cards. Joachim Jungius is said to have had 150,000 cards.
-
-
www.getfrictionless.com www.getfrictionless.com
-
Capture Cards (red) 4.00 Beautifully Useful 3″ x 5″ Index Cards (Pack of 100)I created my Capture Cards to help make it easier for me to capture ideas, make notes, and record tasks as they happen. Good tools have a way of removing frustration and stress from a workflow, and for me, these cards do just that.Just enough structure to help you capture, but not enough to get in the way.They’re printed full-bleed on 70lb (heavy and durable) premium smooth white cover stock, and you get 100 2-sided cards in each pack. They feel great in your hand, yet hold up well in your pocket.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140707053048/http://www.getfrictionless.com/products/capture-cards-red
Simple index cards, but sold with a purpose in mind: capturing notes!
One is reminded here of waste books and fleeting notes.
Image:<br />
-
-
mleddy.blogspot.com mleddy.blogspot.com
-
I've been spelunking through your posts from roughly the decade from 2005 onward which reference your interest in index cards. Thanks for unearthing and writing about all the great index card material from that time period. Have you kept up with your practices?
I noticed that at least one of your posts had a response by MK (Manfred Kuehn, maintainer of the now defunct Taking Note blog (2007-2018). Was it something you read at the time or kept up with?
Have you been watching the productivity or personal knowledge management space since roughly 2017 where the idea of the Zettelkasten (slip box or card index) has taken off (eg. https://zettelkasten.de/, Sonke Ahren's book How to Take Smart Notes, Obsidian.md, Roam Research, etc.?) I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on them or even what your practice has meant over time.
Thanks again.
Cheers! -CJA
-
-
The casting director Marion Dougherty, in the documentary Casting By (dir. Tom Donahue, 2012): “I would keep the three-by-five card. I would put down anything that hit my mind.” The card for Dustin Hoffman (whose first screen appearance was in an episode of Naked City) notes Bob Duval’s (Robert Duvall’s) judgment that Hoffman is “v.g.” — very good. Notice the name of Blair Brown in the third screenshot. The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd is an Orange Crate Art and Musical Assumptions favorite.
The documentary Casting By (2012) shows casting director Marion Dougherty's 3 x 5" index card collection which she used for casting notes. In particular they show an example card for Dustin Hoffman with his details. In Hoffman's case, his card included the older telephone numbers with exchanges (EN2-6933 or Endicott2 6933), so these cards may have also served a contact purpose similar to more modern rolodexes. Different from them however, Dougherty's also included heights, credits, and other observations relevant to the casting process.
Screen capture from the movie
-
-
www.flickr.com www.flickr.com
-
indexcard (情報カード).
Japanese translation of index card
-
-
musicalassumptions.blogspot.com musicalassumptions.blogspot.com
-
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Michael Leddy</span> in Orange Crate Art: Writing and index cards (<time class='dt-published'>09/15/2022 10:38:15</time>)</cite></small>
Elaine Fine is Michael Leddy's wife.
-
-
mleddy.blogspot.com mleddy.blogspot.com
-
https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2005/03/writing-and-index-cards.html
Looser tradition here for using index cards for writing. Comment have some interesting potential examples from circa 2005
-
-
www.takenote.space www.takenote.space
-
I didn't see/couldn't find this image in the Life archive, but it was obviously contemporanous to the others
-
-
mleddy.blogspot.com mleddy.blogspot.com
-
The Field Notes journal serves as RAM, the index cards as HDD, metaphorically speaking...(brain is CPU).
Den analogizes their note taking system to computing on 2010-11-11 8:43 PM.
-
-
mleddy.blogspot.com mleddy.blogspot.com
-
Pen + Gear Graph-Ruled Index Cards. They’re a bit on the thin side, but they take ink well, without feathering or bleeding through. And they’re printed with a very fine light-blue grid (five squares to the inch) that doesn’t get in the way of what one is writing or drawing or mapping. These cards are much better than Oxford or Staples grid cards, and a fraction of the cost of Exacompta: 48¢ for 100 cards. Highly recommended.
https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2017/08/index-card-recommendation.html
Walmart has these index cards, but only in 3x5" format.
-
-
mleddy.blogspot.com mleddy.blogspot.com
-
https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2010/01/card-file-steals-scene-in-tv-debut.html
The card index in the episode of “Betty, Girl Engineer,” from the second season of Father Knows Best, first aired on April 11, 1956, is ostensibly a rolodex, though the teacher hands out the cards without copying them.
Lots of sexism in this episode...
-
-
mleddy.blogspot.com mleddy.blogspot.com
-
I’m not sure how to explain the photograph — that might be a cardfile, not a shoebox. The number of blue lines per card in the Pale Fire passage suggests that John Shade used 6 x 4 cards. It looks like Nabokov in the car has 6 x 4s too.
What size index cards did Vladimir Nabokov use?
See also: series of Nabokov photos of him and index cards.
-
After a leisurely lunch, prepared by the German cook who came with the house, I would spend another four-hour span in a lawn chair, among the roses and mockingbirds, using lined index cards and a Blackwing pencil, for copying and recopying, rubbing out and writing anew, the scenes I had imagined in the morning. Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay (1973)
-
The manuscript, mostly a Fair Copy, from which the present text has been faithfully printed, consists of eighty medium-sized index cards, on each of which Shade reserved the pink upper line for headings (canto number, date) and used the fourteen light-blue lines for writing out with a fine nib in a minute, tidy, remarkably clear hand, the text of this poem, skipping a line to indicate double space, and always using a fresh card to begin a new canto. Pale Fire (1962) [From Charles Kinbote's foreword to his edition of John Shade's poem.]
-
-
images.google.com images.google.com
-
Uladimir Nabokov Ithaca, New YorkDate taken:1958Photographer:Carl Mydans
-
-
images.google.com images.google.com
-
Uladimir Nabokov Ithaca, New YorkDate taken:1958Photographer:Carl Mydans
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
Posted byu/piloteris16 hours agoCreative output examples .t3_xdrb0k._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } I am curious about examples, if any, of how an anti net can be useful for creative or artistic output, as opposed to more strictly intellectual articles, writing, etc. Does anyone here use an antinet as input for the “creative well” ? I’d love examples of the types of cards, etc
They may not necessarily specifically include Luhmann-esque linking, numbering, and indexing, but some broad interesting examples within the tradition include: Comedians: (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten for references/articles) - Phyllis Diller - Joan Rivers - Bob Hope - George Carlin
Musicians: - Eminem https://boffosocko.com/2021/08/10/55794555/ - Taylor Swift: https://hypothes.is/a/SdYxONsREeyuDQOG4K8D_Q
Dance: - Twyla Tharpe https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000SEOWBG/ (Chapter 6)
Art/Visual - Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/archive/archive-collections/verkn%C3%BCpfungszwang-exhibition/mnemosyne-materials
Creative writing (as opposed to academic): - Vladimir Nabokov https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html - Jean Paul - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00168890.2018.1479240 - https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/EJC34721 (German) - Michael Ende https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Endes-Zettelkasten-Skizzen-Notizen/dp/352271380X
-
-
-
Google Forms and Sheets allow users toannotate using customizable tools. Google Forms offers a graphicorganizer that can prompt student-determined categorical input andthen feeds the information into a Sheets database. Sheetsdatabases are taggable, shareable, and exportable to other software,such as Overleaf (London, UK) for writing and Python for coding.The result is a flexible, dynamic knowledge base with many learningapplications for individual and group work
Who is using these forms in practice? I'd love to see some examples.
This sort of set up could be used with some outlining functionality to streamline the content creation end of common note taking practices.
Is anyone using a spreadsheet program (Excel, Google Sheets) as the basis for their zettelkasten?
Link to examples of zettelkasten as database (Webb, Seignobos suggestions)
-
-
Local file Local file
-
arranged according to their subject-matter ;" that" epigraphic monuments belonging to the sameterritory mutually explain each other when placedside by side ;" and, lastly, that " while it is all butimpossible to range in order of subject-matter ahundred thousand inscriptions nearly all of whichbelong to several categories ; on the other hand,each monument has but one place, and a verydefinite place, in the geographical order."
Similar to the examples provided by Beatrice Webb in My Apprenticeship, the authors here are talking about a sort of scientific note taking method that is ostensibly similar to that of the use of a modern day computer database or spreadsheet function, but which had to be effected in index card form to do the sorting and compiling and analysis.
Do the authors here use the specific phrase scientific note taking? It appears that they do not.
-
the method of slips is the only one mechanicallypossible for the purpose of forming, classifying, andutiUsing a collection of documents of any greatextent. Statisticians, financiers, and men of letterswho observe, have now discovered this as well asscholars.
Moreover
A zettelkasten type note taking method isn't only popular and useful for scholars by 1898, but is useful to "statisticians, financiers, and men of letters".
Note carefully the word "mechanically" here used in a pre-digital context. One can't easily keep large amounts of data in one's head at once to make sense of it, so having a physical and mechanical means of doing so would have been important. In 21st century contexts one would more likely use a spreadsheet or database for these types of manipulations at increasingly larger scales.
-
-
Local file Local file
-
chapter 4 includes repro-ductions of index cards with handwritten corrections andadditions. As unfamiliar as this way of taking notes may beto today’s students, it evokes nostalgic memories for thoseof us who attended college before the 1990s.
In 2015, when considering Umberto Eco's use of index cards in his classic book How to Write a Thesis, Francesco Erspamer comments that taking notes using index cards was more common and even nostalgic for those who attended college prior to 1990
-
Bibliographical Index Card File
Note that here in the index, Eco differentiates the index card file with the descriptor "bibliographical" as there is another card file that will play a part.
-
- Aug 2022
-
www.tennsco.com www.tennsco.com
-
1. Heavy Duty ConstructionAll welded construction. Six channel uprights providethe basis for an exceptionally stable frame.2. Secured Drawer ContentsPrevent unauthorized access to valuable or sensitiveinformation with our integrated keyed gang-lock.3. Gang Locking of DrawersPlunger style lock secures all drawers simultaneously.4. Maximum StabilityFour leveling glides provide additional stability andbetter drawer alignment when floors are unlevel.5. Store More Than Just CardsVersatile drawer sizes offer secure storage for almostanything, including paper documents, computer media,CDs, blu-ray discs, etc.6. Drawers Stay ShutPositive locking thumb latches ensure thatdrawers stay closed until ready to open them.7. Solid FoundationBase has a fully welded, enclosed bottom to keep theunit structurally aligned even when fully loaded.8. Durable, Attractive FinishPowder-coated durable finish.12356784CARD AND MULTIMEDIA
https://www.tennsco.com/AppFiles/BROCHURES/Filing%20Brochure%20-%20Web.pdf
4 x 6" cards<br /> CF-846 $1,746.00 43,400 card capacity<br /> CF-646
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
Card Storage
reply on: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wzblc9/card_storage/
The smaller 1 to 3 drawer vintage metal card files are readily available on eBay usually between $15 and $40. This isn't bad given how expensive new files can run. Many were made with small fittings that allow them to be stackable. Usually these are sturdy, but light enough for relatively inexpensive shipping.
The larger multi drawer full cabinets can run a couple hundred, but their bigger issue is that they're so large and heavy that they can be in the range of $800 or more to ship anywhere. If you want something like this, your best bet is to try to find something local that you can drive to and pick up locally. If you're into 4x6" cards, double check with the seller to make sure that they'll fit. Often even the somewhat larger cabinets are a 1/4" too short for 4x6 cards, much less the slightly taller tabbed cards (A-Z) you might use for separating sections. I've refinished some old steel furniture like this in the past and it's not easy or cheap, but if someone is desperate...
https://www.ebay.com/b/Index-Card-File-Cabinet-In-Office-Filing-Cabinets/3299/bn_7022123911
Those who might want something new might also look into Bisley which makes some reasonably nice card index files with and without locks, though you might have to order them directly through their New York Offices. https://www.bisley.sk/userfiles/bisley/product/e84b22bf2d7156d048ad076ff74f895d.pdf
-
-
www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
-
When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husband’s last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-five—the Russian novelist’s only surviving heir, and translator of many of his books—has wrestled for three decades with the decision of whether to honor his father’s wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
Nabokov's wishes were that his heirs burn the index cards on which he had handwritten the beginning of his unfinished novel The Original of Laura. His wife Vera, not able to destroy her husband's work, couldn't do it, so the decision fell to their son Dimitri. Having translated many of his father's works previously, Dimitri Nabokov ultimately allowed Penguin the right to publish the unfinished novel.
-
-
uni-bielefeld.de uni-bielefeld.de
-
A-6 format
This is 4-1/8 x 5-7/8 in which is close to the American 4x6 inch index card.
-
-
-
The most suitable format seems to be DIN A6 (14.8 x 10.5 cm).
Or roughly 4 x 6".
-
Kartenwächter[card guards], also called alarm cards.
-
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.
-
For use on the desk, papersheets are the right choice.
paper over card in terms of sheet thickness, particularly over time
-
-
threadreaderapp.com threadreaderapp.com
-
I am sponsored by Big Notecard.
-
-
-
Forcertainlyagreatervarietyofcards,clippings,andsuchlikecan befiledbehind 4x6slipsthan behind3x5's.
A benefit of 4 x 6" cards is that clippings and other items can often be more easily filed along with them as opposed to the smaller 3 x 5" cards.
-
shall I adopt the 3x5 slip or the 4x61
Dow indicates in 1924 that 3 x 5" and 4 x 6" are both commonly had in a range of materials the US as well as boxes or cases to keep them in. He does mention that one can also cut their own paper, indicating that this is a possibility.
-
-
funnylog.gitee.io funnylog.gitee.io
-
表示的就是使用了覆盖索引,性能上会快很多
-
-
www.heise.de www.heise.de
-
Mit der Normierung von Karteikarten für die Karteikästen eigener Fabrikation machte Dewey sich um die Weiterentwicklung der Verzettelungstechniken verdient, ohne etwas damit zu verdienen. Um den ökonomischen Ruin zu verhindern, stellte das Library Bureau im Jahr 1888 die eigene Buchführung vom traditionellen Verbuchungssystem auf das schnellere und kostengünstigere System des "card index" um. Der "Technologietransfer zwischen Bibliothek und Büro" (Krajewski), nämlich die Buchführung in Zettelkästen, wird ein Erfolgsschlager: Banken und Versicherungen, Stahl- und Eisenbahnunternehmen übernehmen das Karteisystem und damit auch die Karteikästen von Deweys Firma.
With the standardization of index cards for the filing boxes of his own manufacture, Dewey earned himself the further development of the routing techniques without earning anything with it. In order to prevent economic ruin, the Library Bureau switched its own bookkeeping from the traditional accounting system to the faster and more cost-effective system of the "card index" in 1888. The "technology transfer between library and office" (Krajewski), namely bookkeeping in card boxes, is a hit: banks and insurance companies, steel and railway companies take over the card system and thus also the card boxes from Dewey's company.
This is a fascinating way of making one's product indispensable. Talk about self-dogfooding!
Sounds similar to the way that some chat messaging productivity apps were born (Slack was this way?). The company needed a better way to communicate internally and so built it's own chat system which they sold to others.
-
-
-
While Heyde outlines using keywords/subject headings and dates on the bottom of cards with multiple copies using carbon paper, we're left with the question of where Luhmann pulled his particular non-topical ordering as well as his numbering scheme.
While it's highly likely that Luhmann would have been familiar with the German practice of Aktenzeichen ("file numbers") and may have gotten some interesting ideas about organization from the closing sections of the "Die Kartei" section 1.2 of the book, which discusses library organization and the Dewey Decimal system, we're still left with the bigger question of organization.
It's obvious that Luhmann didn't follow the heavy use of subject headings nor the advice about multiple copies of cards in various portions of an alphabetical index.
While the Dewey Decimal System set up described is indicative of some of the numbering practices, it doesn't get us the entirety of his numbering system and practice.
One need only take a look at the Inhalt (table of contents) of Heyde's book! The outline portion of the contents displays a very traditional branching tree structure of ideas. Further, the outline is very specifically and similarly numbered to that of Luhmann's zettelkasten. This structure and numbering system is highly suggestive of branching ideas where each branch builds on the ideas immediately above it or on the ideas at the next section above that level.
Just as one can add an infinite number of books into the Dewey Decimal system in a way that similar ideas are relatively close together to provide serendipity for both search and idea development, one can continue adding ideas to this branching structure so they're near their colleagues.
Thus it's highly possible that the confluence of descriptions with the book and the outline of the table of contents itself suggested a better method of note keeping to Luhmann. Doing this solves the issue of needing to create multiple copies of note cards as well as trying to find cards in various places throughout the overall collection, not to mention slimming down the collection immensely. Searching for and finding a place to put new cards ensures not only that one places one's ideas into a growing logical structure, but it also ensures that one doesn't duplicate information that may already exist within one's over-arching outline. From an indexing perspective, it also solves the problem of cross referencing information along the axes of the source author, source title, and a large variety of potential subject headings.
And of course if we add even a soupcon of domain expertise in systems theory to the mix...
While thinking about Aktenzeichen, keep in mind that it was used in German public administration since at least 1934, only a few years following Heyde's first edition, but would have been more heavily used by the late 1940's when Luhmann would have begun his law studies.
https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA
When thinking about taking notes for creating output, one can follow one thought with another logically both within one's card index not only to write an actual paper, but the collection and development happens the same way one is filling in an invisible outline which builds itself over time.
Linking different ideas to other ideas separate from one chain of thought also provides the ability to create multiple of these invisible, but organically growing outlines.
-
-
-
By the earlytwentieth century advice manuals on research methods recommended takingnotes on index cards.141
Here Blair quotes Chavigny and Heyde, but crucially leaves out Bernheim, Langlois & Seignobos, and Beatrice Webb.
Check the others, specifically for index card references, but Webb uses slips or sheets (and often larger ones).
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
ManuelRodriguez331 · 8 hr. agotaurusnoises wrote on Aug 20, 2022: Technik des Wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens by Johannes Erich HeydeThe idea of grouping similar notes together with the help of index cards was mainstream knowledge in the 1920'er. Melvil Dewey has invented the decimal classification in 1876 and it was applied to libraries and personal note taking as well.quote: “because for every note there is a systematically related one in the immediate vicinity. [...] A good, scholarly book can grow out of the mere collection of notes — not an ingenious one, indeed" [1]The single cause why it wasn't applied more frequently was because of the limitation of the printing press. In the year 1900 only 100 scholarly journals were available in the world. There was no need to write more manuscripts and teach the art of Scientific Writing to a larger audience.[1] Kuntze, Friedrich: Die Technik der geistigen Arbeit, 1922
Index card systems were insanely popular in the early 1900's for note taking and uses of all other sorts (business administration, libraries, etc.). The note taking tradition of the slip box goes back even further in intellectual history with precedents including miscellanies, commonplace books, and florilegia. Konrad Gessner may have been one of the first to have created a method using slips of rearrangeable paper in the 1500s, but this general pattern of excerpting, note taking and writing goes back to antiquity with the concept of locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).
What some intellectual historians are hoping for evidence of in this particular source is a possible origin of the idea of the increased complexity of direct links from one card to another as well as the juxtaposition of ideas which build on each other. Did Luhmann innovate this himself or was this something he read or was in general practice which he picked up? Most examples of zettelkasten outside of Luhmann's until those in the present, could be described reasonably accurately as commonplace books on index cards usually arranged by topic/subject heading/head word (with or without internal indices).
Perhaps it was Luhmann's familiarity with Aktenzeichen (German administrative "file numbers") prior to his academic work which inspired the dramatically different form his index card-based commonplace took? See: https://hyp.is/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA/www.wikiwand.com/de/Aktenzeichen_(Deutschland)
Is it possible that he was influenced by Beatrice Webb's ideas on note taking from Appendix C of My Apprenticeship (1924) which was widely influential in the humanities and particularly sociology and anthropology? Would he have been aware of the work of historians Ernst Bernheim followed by Charles Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos? (see: https://hypothes.is/a/DLP52hqFEe2nrIMdrd4U7g) Did Luhmann's law studies expose him to the work of jurist Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785) who wrote about his practice in his autobiography and subsequently influenced generations of practitioners including Jean Paul and potentially Hegel?
There are obviously lots of unanswered questions...
-
-
-
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.
-
-
scottscheper.com scottscheper.com
-
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.
-
-
render.plexus.earth render.plexus.earth
-
https://render.plexus.earth/
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
Glad you liked it. That's an example of the "let's let the zettelkasten direct my writing" approach. This is different than the "I have something I'm working on. Let's see if there's anything in the zettelkasten to support/refute it" approach, which I also do. So, I might call one "directive," and the other "supportive." (Although, I'm just making that up).
Different modes/approaches to writing when using a zettelkasten:<br /> - directive: let the zettelkasten direct the writing project - supportive: one has a particular writing project in mind and uses their zettelkasten collection to support their thinking and writing for that.
Are there other potential methods in addition to these two?
-
Hit me up. Happy to show my zettel-based writing, and how my notes translate into published content, both short- and long-form.
Thanks u/taurusnoises, your spectacular recent video "Using the Zettelkasten (and Obsidian) to Write an Essay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OUn2-h6oVc is about as close to the sort of public example of output creation I had been looking for!
I'm sure that there are other methods and workflows out there which vary by person, method, and modality (analog/digital) and it would be interesting to see what those practices look like as examples for others to use, follow, and potentially improve upon.
I particularly appreciate that your visual starting perspective of the graph view in Obsidian fairly closely mimics what an analog zettelkasten user might be doing and seeing within that modality.
I'm still collecting extant examples and doing some related research, but perhaps I'll have some time later in the year to do some interviews with particular people about how they're actively doing this as you suggested.
On a tangential note, I'm also piqued by some of the specific ideas you mention in your notes in the video as they relate to some work on orality and memory I've been exploring over the past several years. If you do finish that essay, I'd love to read the finished piece.
Thanks again for this video!
-
-
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT1EExZkzMM
Quick outline of how Holiday reads, annotates, and then processes the ideas from books into his index card-based commonplace book.
-
-
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
-
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
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
I have a notifications on the German equivalent to craigslist on Karteikasten, Karteikartenschrank, Karteischrank, Apothekenschrank and the like in a 50km radius around here. Hope one day something comes up that is reasonable priced and small enough to fit the trunk of our little electric car :-)
https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wjvoqq/if_youre_going_to_cast_some_zettels_you_may_as/
A list of German words and English equivalents for index card related containers and furniture
Karteikasten - index box<br /> Karteikartenschrank - index card cabinet<br /> Karteischrank - filing cabinet Apothekenschrank - apothecary cabinet
-
I just frowned at my cardboard boxes.I’m aiming to build something similar out of wood soon. But I also had an idea to build a bookshelf with drawers incorporated, a row of vertical draws on both sides of the shelf and/or one down the middle. Ideally creating book cubbies between the drawers where I could organize related books next to appropriate zettles. Not sure how attached to that idea I am though, seems like something I will like for the moment and find very novel in the future (pun certainly intended).
reply to GnauticalGnorman
Don't frown at cardboard. Everyone starts their journey with a single card and a humble box. Filling up a first box is an accomplishment that gives you time to dream about the box you want to have.
Of potential interest, the cost of index cards to fill these files will be almost the investment in the box itself. Is this similar to the rule of thumb in the art world that the price of the frame should reflect the investment in the artwork?
-
-
collation.folger.edu collation.folger.edu
-
www.jasongilbertson.com www.jasongilbertson.com
-
Structure notes—sometimes called index notes
- index notes or toc, there it sounds like toc, just list the relevant notes
- how about MOC?
-
-
www.ischool.berkeley.edu www.ischool.berkeley.edu
-
Historical Hypermedia: An Alternative History of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 and Implications for e-Research. .mp3. Berkeley School of Information Regents’ Lecture. UC Berkeley School of Information, 2010. https://archive.org/details/podcast_uc-berkeley-school-informat_historical-hypermedia-an-alte_1000088371512. archive.org.
https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/audio/2010-10-20-vandenheuvel_0.mp3
Interface as Thing - book on Paul Otlet (not released, though he said he was working on it)
- W. Boyd Rayward 1994 expert on Otlet
- Otlet on annotation, visualization, of text
- TBL married internet and hypertext (ideas have sex)
- V. Bush As We May Think - crosslinks between microfilms, not in a computer context
- Ted Nelson 1965, hypermedia
t=540
- Michael Buckland book about machine developed by Emanuel Goldberg antecedent to memex
- Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine: Information, Invention, and Political Forces (New Directions in Information Management) by Michael Buckland (Libraries Unlimited, (March 31, 2006)
- Otlet and Goldsmith were precursors as well
four figures in his research: - Patrick Gattis - biologist, architect, diagrams of knowledge, metaphorical use of architecture; classification - Paul Otlet, Brussels born - Wilhelm Ostwalt - nobel prize in chemistry - Otto Neurath, philosophher, designer of isotype
Paul Otlet
- wrote bibliography on law
- book: Something on Bibliography #wanttoread
- universal decimal classification system
- mundaneum
- Le Corbusier - architect worked with Otlet for building for Mundaneum; See: https://socks-studio.com/2019/05/05/the-shape-of-knowledge-the-mundaneum-by-paul-otlet-and-henri-la-fontaine/
Otlet was interested in both the physical as well as the intangible aspects of the Mundaneum including as an idea, an institution, method, body of work, building, and as a network.<br /> (#t=1020)
Early iPhone diagram?!?
(roughly) armchair to do the things in the web of life (Nelson quote) (get full quote and source for use) (circa 19:30)
compares Otlet to TBL
Michael Buckland 1991 <s>internet of things</s> coinage - did I hear this correctly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things lists different coinages
Turns out it was "information as thing"<br /> See: https://hypothes.is/a/kXIjaBaOEe2MEi8Fav6QsA
sugane brierre and otlet<br /> "everything can be in a document"<br /> importance of evidence
The idea of evidence implies a passiveness. For evidence to be useful then, one has to actively do something with it, use it for comparison or analysis with other facts, knowledge, or evidence for it to become useful.
transformation of sound into writing<br /> movement of pieces at will to create a new combination of facts - combinatorial creativity idea here. (circa 27:30 and again at 29:00)<br /> not just efficiency but improvement and purification of humanity
put things on system cards and put them into new orders<br /> breaking things down into smaller pieces, whether books or index cards....
Otlet doesn't use the word interfaces, but makes these with language and annotations that existed at the time. (32:00)
Otlet created diagrams and images to expand his ideas
Otlet used octagonal index cards to create extra edges to connect them together by topic. This created more complex trees of knowledge beyond the four sides of standard index cards. (diagram referenced, but not contained in the lecture)
Otlet is interested in the "materialization of knowledge": how to transfer idea into an object. (How does this related to mnemonic devices for daily use? How does it relate to broader material culture?)
Otlet inspired by work of Herbert Spencer
space an time are forms of thought, I hold myself that they are forms of things. (get full quote and source) from spencer influence of Plato's forms here?
Otlet visualization of information (38:20)
S. R. Ranganathan may have had these ideas about visualization too
atomization of knowledge; atomist approach 19th century examples:S. R. Ranganathan, Wilson, Otlet, Richardson, (atomic notes are NOT new either...) (39:40)
Otlet creates interfaces to the world - time with cyclic representation - space - moving cube along time and space axes as well as levels of detail - comparison to Ted Nelson and zoomable screens even though Ted Nelson didn't have screens, but simulated them in paper - globes
Katie Berner - semantic web; claims that reporting a scholarly result won't be a paper, but a nugget of information that links to other portions of the network of knowledge.<br /> (so not just one's own system, but the global commons system)
Mention of Open Annotation (Consortium) Collaboration:<br /> - Jane Hunter, University of Australia Brisbane & Queensland<br /> - Tim Cole, University of Urbana Champaign<br /> - Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory annotations of various media<br /> see:<br /> - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311366469_The_Open_Annotation_Collaboration_A_Data_Model_to_Support_Sharing_and_Interoperability_of_Scholarly_Annotations - http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130205/index.html - http://www.openannotation.org/PhaseIII_Team.html
trust must be put into the system for it to work
coloration of the provenance of links goes back to Otlet (~52:00)
Creativity is the friction of the attention space at the moments when the structural blocks are grinding against one another the hardest. —Randall Collins (1998) The sociology of philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (p.76)
Tags
- Open Annotation Collaboration
- Herbert Van de Sompel
- hypermedia
- Le Corbusier
- materialization of knowledge
- Mundaneum
- Ted Nelson
- W. Boyd Rayward
- material culture
- atomic ideas
- octagonal index cards
- S. R. Ranganathan
- Herbert Spencer
- Universal Decimal Classification
- evidence
- Web 2.0
- references
- Emanuel Goldberg
- Charles van den Heuvel
- Otto Neurath
- atomic notes
- atomist philosophy
- Jane Hunter
- index cards
- idea links
- Hypothes.is
- Michael Buckland
- Paul Otlet
- Tim Cole
- Randall Collins
- semantic web
- listen
- Tim Berners-Lee
- Vannevar Bush
- Wilhelm Ostwalt
- mnemonic devices
- memex
Annotators
URL
-
-
socks-studio.com socks-studio.com
-
Notice the octagonal shape of this rooms which mirrors in some ways the octagonal index cards mentioned by Charles van den Heuvel in his Regents Lecture (2008) which Otlet used to link via subject headings. You'll see here subject headings on the walls of the architecture to match.
link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/8e9hThZ4Ee2hWAcV1j5B9w
-
-
wiki.c2.com wiki.c2.com
-
used for project management. The logistics for the Gulf War were managed on index cards. Read "Moving Mountains" by Lt. General George Pagonis.
Example of index cards used for project management.
-
-
www.popularmechanics.com www.popularmechanics.com
-
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a19379/a-short-history-of-the-index-card/
Broad history essay but doesn't dig into the weeds. Feels a lot like a few other essays I've seen of this sort. Content farmish...
-
-
multimediaman.blog multimediaman.blog
-
https://multimediaman.blog/2016/09/30/how-the-index-card-launched-the-information-age/
A quick overview of the index card and it's role in history from Linnaeus to Dewey to the Mundaneum.
-
As described by Otlet, the ambition of the UBR was to build “an inventory of all that has been written at all times, in all languages, and on all subjects.”
Paul Otlet attempted to index all the worlds' knowledge years before Goggle was conceived.
-
In 1895, the Belgians Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Henri La Fontaine founded the International Institute of Bibliography (IIB) and began working on something they called the Universal Bibliographic Repertory (UBR), an enormous catalog based on index cards. Funded by the Belgian government, the UBR involved the collection of books, articles, photographs and other documents in order to create a one-of-a-kind international index.
-
After thirty years of working with notebooks, Linnaeus began to experiment with a filing system of information recorded on separate sheets of paper.
Carl Linnaeus used notebooks for thirty years before beginning to experiment with information written on slips of paper.
-
-
www.semanticscholar.org www.semanticscholar.org
-
Unbeknownst to me, I've got a Semantic Scholar author page with an h-index of 4...
-
-
www.bisley.com www.bisley.com
-
132 A6HD FCB24 - card index cabinet (2)* 6 x 4” (A6) 159 (6.2”) 434 (17”)
4x6" Index card cabinet
Bisley show room in New York (212) 675-3055
-
-
thoughtcatalog.com thoughtcatalog.com
-
Protect it at all costs. As the historian Douglas Brinkley said about Ronald Reagan’s collection of notecards: “If the Reagans’ home in Palisades were burning, this would be one of the things Reagan would immediately drag out of the house. He carried them with him all over like a carpenter brings their tools. These were the tools for his trade.”
Another example of saving one's commonplace in case of a fire!
link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/BLL9TvZ9EeuSIrsiWKCB9w - https://hypothes.is/a/zHUghMiaEeuKKvcrc5ux5w
-
I’ve been keeping my commonplace books in variety of forms for 6 or 7 years. But I’m just getting started.
In August 2013 Ryan Holiday said that he'd been commonplacing for "6 or 7 years".
-
Ronald Reagan actually kept quotes on a similar notecard system.
By at least 2013 Ryan Holiday was aware of Ronald Reagan's note card system from a 2011 USA Today article and related book.
-
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.
-
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
-
-
lifehacker.com lifehacker.com
-
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."
-
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.
-
-
orangecounty.craigslist.org orangecounty.craigslist.org
-
VISIT OUR HUGE OFFICE FURNITURE WAREHOUSE! Take a virtual tour here: https://youtu.be/0Ez-eB-0u8w (copy and paste) Recycled Office Furnishings 10036 Freeman Avenue Santa Fe Springs, Ca. 90670 We accept Visa, MC, Amex, and debit cards! Mon - Fri: 9am to 5pm, Sat: 9am to 2pm Please call for Saturday hours on holiday weekends www.recycledofficefurnishings.com *alternate phone number: 562 777-2289*
-
-
www.officebarn.biz www.officebarn.biz
-
9 drawer card catalog file<br /> Remington Rand
-
-
www.officebarn.biz www.officebarn.biz
-
8 drawer card catalog file<br /> Allsteel
-
-
www.merriam-webster.com www.merriam-webster.com
-
from Latin<br /> prefix in- meaing "toward"; <br /> with<br /> index, indic- "forefinger, informer, sign"<br /> dicere "to say";<br /> dicare "to make known"
late Middle English: from Latin index, indic- ‘forefinger, informer, sign’, from in- ‘towards’ + a second element related to dicere ‘say’ or dicare ‘make known’; compare with indicate. The original sense ‘index finger’ (with which one points), came to mean ‘pointer’ (late 16th century), and figuratively something that serves to point to a fact or conclusion; hence a list of topics in a book (‘pointing’ to their location).
Use over time<br />
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
-
-
Alternate index card holding furniture for display?<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wffvs4/alternate_index_card_holding_furniture_for_display/
Separate from boxes for long term card holding storage, does anyone have any suggestions they like for organizing or temporarily displaying cards?
I've got a couple card tray rack organizers (originally intended for playing cards, but great for zettels) which I generally like.
I've also seen Levenger's note card "bleachers" which are similar, but more expensive. - Note Card Bleachers - Portable Note Card Bleachers - Nantucket Bamboo Compact Bleachers
Levenger index card bleacher for compactly displaying index cards in an array on a desk so that portions are visible but that they don't take up space.
Does anyone have anything else they like for compact working/displaying aside from laying cards out on tables/desks?
Do you have other methods for this sort of organization or layout of ideas visually? Corkboards, magnetic whiteboards/walls, other?
-
-
universitylifecafe.k-state.edu universitylifecafe.k-state.edu
-
https://universitylifecafe.k-state.edu/bookshelf/academicskills/indexcardstudysystem.html
Natalie Umberger is writing about an "index card study system" in an academic study skills context, but it's an admixture of come ideas from Cornell Notes and using index cards as flashcards.
The advice to "Review your notes and readings frequently, so the material is 'fresh.' " is a common one (through at least the 1980s to the present), though research on the mere-exposure effect indicates that it's not as valuable as other methods.
How can we stamp out the misconception that this sort of review is practical?
-
-
www.preservearticles.com www.preservearticles.com
-
This page seems to be broadly copied from the book Secretarial Practice and Company Law by Arun Kumar and Rachana Sharma (Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) Limited, 1998) # and specifically page 529.
It contains no other history or references that I can immediately see. The book seems to be written for a secretarial audience in India in the 1990's, and while interesting not otherwise pertinent to immediate to my historical questions.
-
The system of card indexing was propagated by a French Person called Abb’e Jean Rozier (1734-93). The index is prepared by allotting a separate card to each piece of information. The required information are written on the cards. All cards are of uniform size and are arranged in alphabetical, numerical or geographical order.
This source is questionable in it's sourcing and seems to mix several different methods and systems, so we'll need to treat it with a massive grain of salt.
It does Mention Abb'e Jean Rozier (1734-93) as a historical figure related to propagating a system of card indexing which is a new name to me and thus worth looking into.
Is Abb'e here a title? (potentially the French translation of the English abbot which is correctly abbé, so this may have had a typo.)
The dates of life given would indicate that this is not the balloonist/scientist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Pil%C3%A2tre_de_Rozier
-
- Jul 2022
-
docdrop.org docdrop.org
-
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
-
-
niklas-luhmann-archiv.de niklas-luhmann-archiv.de
-
https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V
One may notice that Niklas Luhmann's index within his zettelkasten is fantastically sparce. By this we might look at the index entry for "system" which links to only one card. For someone who spent a large portion of his life researching systems theory, this may seem fantastically bizarre.
However, it's not as as odd as one may think given the structure of his particular zettelkasten. The single reference gives an initial foothold into his slip box where shuffling through cards beyond that idea will reveal a number of cards closely related to the topic which subsequently follow it. Regular use and work with the system would have allowed Luhmann better memory with respect to its contents and the searching through threads of thought would have potentially sparked new ideas and threads. Thus he didn't need to spend the time and effort to highly index each individual card, he just needed a starting place and could follow the links from there. This tends to minimize the indexing work he needed to do regularly, but simultaneously makes it harder for the modern person who may wish to read or consult those notes.
Some of the difference here is the idea of top-down versus bottom-up construction. While thousands of his cards may have been tagged as "systems" or "systems theory", over time and with increased scale they would have become nearly useless as a construct. Instead, one may consider increasing levels of sub-topics, but these too may be generally useless with respect to (manual) search, so the better option is to only look at the smallest level of link (and/or their titles) which is only likely to link to 3-4 other locations outside of the card just before it. This greater specificity scales better over time on the part of the individual user who is broadly familiar with the system.
Alternatively, for those in shared digital spaces who may maintain public facing (potentially shared) notes (zettelkasten), such sparse indices may not be as functional for the readers of such notes. New readers entering such material generally without context, will feel lost or befuddled that they may need to read hundreds of cards to find and explore the sorts of ideas they're actively looking for. In these cases, more extensive indices, digital search, and improved user interfaces may be required to help new readers find their way into the corpus of another's notes.
Another related idea to that of digital, public, shared notes, is shared taxonomies. What sorts of word or words would one want to search for broadly to find the appropriate places? Certainly widely used systems like the Dewey Decimal System or the Universal Decimal Classification may be helpful for broadly crosslinking across systems, but this will take an additional level of work on the individual publishers.
Is or isn't it worthwhile to do this in practice? Is this make-work? Perhaps not in analog spaces, but what about the affordances in digital spaces which are generally more easily searched as a corpus.
As an experiment, attempt to explore Luhmann's Zettelkasten via an entryway into the index. Compare and contrast this with Andy Matuschak's notes which have some clever cross linking UI at the bottoms of the notes, but which are missing simple search functionality and have no tagging/indexing at all. Similarly look at W. Ross Ashby's system (both analog and digitized) and explore the different affordances of these two which are separately designed structures---the analog by Ashby himself, but the digital one by an institution after his death.
-
-
Local file Local file
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
“ 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
- Industrial Democracy (book)
- scientific instruments
- databases
- note taking
- combinations
- electroscope
- 1898
- slips
- Physics
- Charles Seignobos
- card index as discovery
- card index as memory
- balances
- Charles Langlois
- Chemistry
- card index as database
- intellectual history
- card index
- prisms
- discovery
- Beatrice Webb
- index cards
- tools for thought
- 1897
Annotators
-
-
www.ibm.com www.ibm.comIBM Docs1
-
Quarto 215 x 275 mm
roughly 8.46 inches x 10.8 inches or about the size of an 8.5 x 11" sheet
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
-
medium.com medium.com
-
-
Robert uses a system based on flashcards
flashcards?!?!! A commonplace book done in index cards is NOT based on "flashcards". 🤮
Someone here is missing the point...
-
-
docdrop.org docdrop.org
-
Over the course of his intellectual life, from about 1943 until hissudden death in 1980, Barthes built a card index consisting of morethan 12,250 note cards – the full extent of this collection was notknown until access to it was granted to the manuscript researchers ofthe Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) inFrance (Krapp, 2006: 363).3
Roland Barthes accumulated a card index of more than 12,250 note cards beginning in 1943 which were held after his death in 1980 at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) in France.
Barthes' dates 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980 age 64
He started his card index at roughly age 28 and at around the same time which he began producing written work. (Did he have any significant writing work or publications prior to this?)
His card collection spanned about 37 years and at 12,250 cards means that was producing on average 0.907 cards per day. If we don't include weekends, then he produced 1.27 cards per day on average. Compare this with Ahrens' estimate of 6 cards a day for Niklas Luhmann.
With this note I'm starting the use of a subject heading (in English) of "card index" as a generic collection of notes which are often kept in one or more boxes. This is to distinguish it from the more modern idea of zettelkasten in the Luhmann framing which also connotes a dense set of links between the cards themselves, though this may not have been the case historically. Card index is also specifically separate from 'index card' which is an individual instance of an item that might be found in a card index. At present, I'm unaware of a specific word in English which defines the broader note taking context or portions thereof relating to index cards in the same way that a zettelkasten implies. This may be the result of the broad use of index cards for so many varying uses in the early 20th century. For these other varying uses I'll try to differentiate them henceforth with the generic 'index card files' which might also be used to describe the containers in which cards might be found.
-
-
-
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.
-
-
www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
-
https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/spring-83/
I've been thinking about this sort of thing off and on myself.
I too almost immediately thought of Fraidyc.at and its nudge at shifting the importance of content based on time and recency. I'd love to have a social reader with additional affordances for both this time shifting and Ton's idea of reading based on social distance.
I'm struck by the seemingly related idea of @peterhagen's LindyLearn platform and annotations: https://annotations.lindylearn.io/new/ which focuses on taking some of the longer term interesting ideas as the basis for browsing and chewing on. Though even here, one needs some of the odd, the cutting edge, and the avant garde in their balanced internet diet. Would Spring '83 provide some of this?
I'm also struck by some similarities this has with the idea of Derek Siver's /now page movement. I see some updating regularly while others have let it slip by the wayside. Still the "board" of users exists, though one must click through a sea of mostly smiling and welcoming faces to get to it the individual pieces of content. (The smiling faces are more inviting and personal than the cacophony of yelling and chaos I see in models for Spring '83.) This reminds me of Stanley Meyers' frequent assertion that he attempted to design a certain "sense of quiet" into the early television show Dragnet to balance the seeming loudness of the everyday as well as the noise of other contemporaneous television programming.
The form reminds me a bit of the signature pages of one's high school year book. But here, instead of the goal being timeless scribbles, one has the opportunity to change the message over time. Does the potential commercialization of the form (you know it will happen in a VC world crazed with surveillance capitalism) follow the same trajectory of the old college paper facebook? Next up, Yearbook.com!
Beyond the thing as a standard, I wondered what the actual form of Spring '83 adds to a broader conversation? What does it add to the diversity of voices that we don't already see in other spaces. How might it be abused? Would people come back to it regularly? What might be its emergent properties?
It definitely seems quirky and fun in and old school web sort of way, but it also stresses me out looking at the zany busyness of some of the examples of magazine stands. The general form reminds me of the bargain bins at book stores which have the promise of finding valuable hidden gems and at an excellent price, but often the ideas and quality of what I find usually isn't worth the discounted price and the return on investment is rarely worth the effort. How might this get beyond these forms?
It also brings up the idea of what other online forms we may have had with this same sort of raw experimentation? How might the internet have looked if there had been a bigger rise of the wiki before that of the blog? What would the world be like if Webmention had existed before social media rose to prominence? Did we somehow miss some interesting digital animals because the web rose so quickly to prominence without more early experimentation before its "Cambrian explosion"?
I've been thinking about distilled note taking forms recently and what a network of atomic ideas on index cards look like and what emerges from them. What if the standard were digital index cards that linked and cross linked to each other, particularly in a world without adherence to time based orders and streams? What does a new story look like if I can pull out a card either at random or based on a single topic and only see it or perhaps some short linked chain of ideas (mine or others) which come along with it? Does the choice of a random "Markov monkey" change my thinking or perspective? What comes out of this jar of Pandora? Is it just a new form of cadavre exquis?
This standard has been out for a bit and presumably folks are experimenting with it. What do the early results look like? How are they using it? Do they like it? Does it need more scale? What do small changes make to the overall form?
For more on these related ideas, see: https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%22spring+%2783%22
Tags
- yearbooks
- cadavre exquis
- calmness
- experimental fiction
- Spring '83
- Markov monkey
- quiet
- Pandora's box
- Derek Sivers
- Now Now Now
- Lindy library
- web standards
- narrative forms
- alternate universes
- combinatorial creativity
- media studies
- experimental media
- read
- Dragnet
- atomic notes
- atomic idea links
- index cards
- Fraidyc.at
Annotators
URL
-
-
www.remastery.net www.remastery.net
-
Even the sloppiest manuscript would bring twenty new cards for my hoard.
This quote is similar to the broad idea (source(s)?) that one can learn something even from the worst books or the man who's a fool.
I've excerpted the portion of the quote that appears before this in the past. See: https://hyp.is/jqug2tNlEeyg2JfEczmepw/3stages.org/c/gq_title.cgi?list=1045&ti=Foucault%27s%20Pendulum%20(Eco)
-
- Jun 2022
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
u/sscheper in writing your book, have you thought about the following alternative publishing idea which I'm transcribing from a random though I put on a card this morning?
I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a traditional linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index at the end so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it?
It could be done roughly like Edward Powys Mathers' Cain's Jawbone or Henry Korn's Pontoon Manifesto? Perhaps numbered consecutively to make it easier to bring back into that format, but also done with your zk numbering so that people could order it and use it that way too? This way you get the book as well as a meta artifact of what the book is about as an example of how to do such a thing for yourself. Maybe even make a contest for a better ordering for the book than the one you published it in ?
Link to: - https://hyp.is/6IBzkPfeEeyo9Suq-ZmCKg/www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/
-
-
www.scientificamerican.com www.scientificamerican.com
-
surveys indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control.
Based on surveys, readers indicate that two important parts of textual navigation are sense of control and serendipity.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Electronic_journal_literature.html?id=YSFlAAAAMAAJ
How does the control over a book frame how we read? What does "power over" a book look like compared to "power with"?
What are the tools for thought affordances that paper books provide over digital books and vice versa?
I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it.
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
Luhmann’s zettelkasten use case .t3_vlape5._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; } I was just thinking… I wonder what Luhmann’s use case for his zettelkasten was. By this I mean, was his original use for it for knowledge development, then his papers/books came as a successful bi-product? Or was his original intention to use it to actually write books/papers in the first place… Does anyone have any insight on this?
When asked by Bielefeld University to report on his research projects, Luhmann famously replied:
“Theory of society; duration: 30 years; costs: none”.
In this there is a tremendously large nod to his zettelkasten to permit this work to be done.
Though technically at the current price of $11.78 for 1,000 index cards on Amazon right now and a total of 92,000 cards, Luhmann should have better budgeted 1083.76 for the paper not to mention the cost of pens and pencils.
Luhmann, N. (1997). Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (2 vols). Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Published in translation as Theory of society (2 vols.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2012–2013.
-
-
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
-
The slipbox and index cards on which Vladimir Nabokov wrote his novel Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote most of his works including Lolita using index cards in a slip box. He ultimately died in 1977 leaving an unfinished manuscript in note card form for the novel The Original of Laura. Penguin later published the incomplete novel with in 2012 with the subtitle A Novel in Fragments. Unlike most manuscripts written or typewritten on larger paper, this one came in the form of 138 index cards. Penguin's published version recreated these cards in full-color reproductions including the smudges, scribbles, scrawlings, strikeouts, and annotations in English, French, and Russian. Perforated, one could tear the cards out of the book and reorganize in any way they saw fit or even potentially add their own cards to finish the novel that Nabokov couldn't.
Index card on which Nabokov collated notes on ages, heights, and measurements for school aged girls as research for his title character Lolita.
More details at: https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html
-
-
www.iemoji.com www.iemoji.com
-
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.
-
-
-
Sometimes the goal is nothing more than a personal mantra such as “keep itsimple” or “something perfect” or “economy” to remind me of what I was thinkingat the beginning if and when I lose my way. I write it down on a slip of paper and it’sthe first thing that goes into the box.
-
The second was “makedance pay for the dancers.” I’ve always been resentful of the fact that some of theso-called elite art forms can’t survive on their own without sponsorship andsubsidies. It bothers me that dance companies around the world are not-for-profitorganizations and that dancers, who are as devoted and disciplined as any NFL orNBA superstar, are at the low end of the entertainment industry’s income scale. Iwanted this Broadway-bound project not only to elevate serious dance in thecommercial arena but also to pay the dancers well. So I wrote my goals for theproject, “tell a story” and “make dance pay,” on two blue index cards and watchedthem float to the bottom of the Joel box.
Given the importance of dance in oral cultures, what, why, and how has dance moved to be one of the seemingly lowest and least well paid art forms in modern society?
How might modern dance regain its teaching and mnemonic status in our culture?
-
I also like the simplicity of a box. There’s a purpose here, and it has a lot to dowith efficiency. A writer with a good storage and retrieval system can write faster.He isn’t spending a lot of time looking things up, scouring his papers, and patrollingother rooms at home wondering where he left that perfect quote. It’s in the box.
A card index can be a massive boon to a writer as a well-indexed one, in particular, will save massive amounts of time which might otherwise be spent searching for quotes or ideas that they know they know, but can't easily recreate.
-
There are separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done. If you want a glimpseinto how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes.
Tags
- project management
- human resources
- popular culture
- open questions
- zettelkasten
- orality
- goals
- card index as memory
- dance
- storage
- Twyla Tharp
- direction
- writing advice
- mnemonic media
- mantras
- card index as autobiography
- intentionality
- productivity
- perspective
- quotes
- art
- index cards
- mnemonic dance
Annotators
-
-
danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
-
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.
-
-
forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
-
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?
-
Mario Bunge (1919–2020) was an Argentine-Canadian philosopher and physicist. Here are some excerpts from his book Between Two Worlds: Memoirs of a Philosopher-Scientist (Springer-Verlag, 2016) about his use of card-boxes
Mario Bunge had a card index note taking practice.
-
-
-
You may prefer notebooks to cards for note taking-very well:use what you like, but invariably; it will save you time andannoyance. If you use cards , use small ones (3" x 5") so that youuse a separate card for each fact, title, or memorandum toyourself. The cards are then easily shuffled for grouping. If youuse a notebook, leave a margin for the key word, letter, or num-ber which you will insert later as an index to the contents.
-
-
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
-
together with his friend Wendell Hertig Taylor, kept a running tally of every mystery book that came along. Their brief descriptions, scribbled on three-by-five-inch index cards, eventually coalesced into “A Catalogue of Crime,” one of the foremost reference works in the mystery/suspense genre.
Jacques Barzun had a card index for cataloging mystery/suspense books which he maintained on 3x5" cards with his friend Wendell Hertig Taylor.
Did he keep a card index for his ideas as well?
-
-
datatracker.ietf.org datatracker.ietf.org
- May 2022
-
www.uni-bielefeld.de www.uni-bielefeld.de
-
The pixel portrait of Niklas Luhmann was created by Sebastian Zimmer (CCeH) using the software AndreaMosaic from the image of 1271 slips of paper from the 'Zettelkasten'.
© Alexander Kluge/ Universität Bielefeld*
-
-
via3.hypothes.is via3.hypothes.is
-
Thus, the sensitive seismographer of avant-garde develop-ments, Walter Benjamin, logically conceived of this scenario in 1928, of communicationwith card indices rather than books: “And even today, as the current scientific methodteaches us, the book is an archaic intermediate between two different card indexsystems. For everything substantial is found in the slip box of the researcher who wroteit and the scholar who studies in it, assimilated into its own card index.” 47
- Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstra ß e, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1928/1981), 98 – 140, at 103.
Does Walter Benjamin prefigure the idea of card indexes conversing with themselves in a communicative method similar to that of Vannevar Bush's Memex?
This definitely sounds like the sort of digital garden inter-communication afforded by the Anagora as suggested by @Flancian.
-
Despite the librarian card-theoreticalrecommendation of only using cardboard or strong paper as a bearer of information,17Luhmann relies on plain typewriter paper for spatial economy, which can quickly lead,however, to the deterioration of the medium with frequent browsing.
For Luhmann's time, the librarian recommendation for substrate was either cardboard or strong paper as the carrier for information, but he eschewed this recommendation in favor of plain typewriter paper because it took up less space. This came at the cost of deterioration of many of his cards through regular use however.
-
According to this, the arrangement consists of “wooden boxes with drawers that pullout in the front, and cards in octavo format ” (= DIN A5).
Luhmann's zettelkasten collection of cards was in octavo format, aka DIN A5 (148mm x 210mm or 5.8" x 8.3").
-
commenting in an interview: “By the way, many people havecome here to see that.”13 The writing tool became an object of desire, especially foryoung academics seeking to add a carefully planned card index to their carefully plannedcareers: “After all, Fred wants to be a professor.” 1
Luhmann indicates that aspiring academics came to visit to see his card collection in potentially planning their own.
- Ralf Klassen, “Bezaubernde Jeannie oder Liebe ist nur ein Zeitvertreib,” in Wir Fernsehkinder. Eine Generation ohne Programm, ed. Walter Wüllenweber (Berlin: Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, 1994), 81 – 97, at 84.
-