Not all of the jokes in Phyllis Diller's collection were written by her. Many include comic strips she collected as well as jokes written by others and sent in to her.

One of the biggest contributors to her collection of jokes was Wisconsin housewife Mary MacBride, the mother of five children. Jokes contributed by others include their names on the individual cards.

Some of the cards in Phyllis Diller's gag file were numbered, but the curatorial and collections team at the Smithsonian didn't have enough data to determine what these were or what they meant at the time of transcription.

Indigenous cultures can "see" dark constellations (example: the Australian emu in the sky) which are defined empty spaces which are explicitly visible.

Using this concept, one could think of or use blank index cards in a zettelkasten or even the empty (negative) spaces between cards as "dark ideas" (potential ideas which need to be thought of and filled in).

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/FlqusEN1Ee6XEr_9StPUlA

Lone child nodes cry out for siblings.

When I was in middle school a teacher told me only to put a sub-bullet point in an outline only if it wasn't an orphan (if you had one sub-point it should have at least one sibling, otherwise don't include it). This was miserable advice because it ended trains of thought which might otherwise grow into something.

On the other hand it could be better framed that if you have only one child, you should brainstorm to come up with others.

Notes about what you don't know (open questions), empty outline slots, red links as [[wikilinks]], and other "holes" in tools for thought provide a bookmark for where one may have quit exploring, but are an explicit breadcrumb for picking up that line of thought and continuing it at a future time.

Linear writing in one's notebooks, books they're reading, and other places doesn't always provide an explicit space which invites the reader or writer to fill them in. One has to train themselves to annotate in the margins to have a conversation with the text. Until one sees these empty spaces as inviting spaces they can be invisible to the eye.

abramdemski suggests starting with an idea you're interested in working on and fleshing out when you start your zettelkasten. This harkens back to Montessori teaching philosophies.

Rather than using card index boxes, abramdemski prefers using book rings to hold his cards together in batches.

First reference I've seen for someone suggesting using half size 3 x 5" index cards so that they could use commercially available Magic: The Gathering (MTG) boxes.

Oxford and possibly other manufacturers already make 1/2 size 3 x 5" index cards.

Which others? where?

To my knowledge there weren't many (any?) examples floating around in 2019.

Another advising to use the analog method for learning even if one is going to switch to a digital zettelkasten.

He uses the word "good" here while others may have potentially used the word "magic", but writing in a space that values critical thinking, he would have been taken to task for having done so. In any case he's not able to put his finger on the inherent value of analog over digital.

I've seen people describing how many cards they think they need before the method is useful, but this is the first time I've seen someone use a timeframe to describe useful effects.

This article was likely a big boost to the general idea of zettelkasten in the modern zeitgeist.

Note the use of the phrase "Zettelkasten method of note-taking" which would have helped to distinguish it from other methods and thus helping the phrase Zettelkasten method stick where previously it had a more generic non-name.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1

A somewhat early, comprehensive one page description of the zettelkasten method from September 2019.

Using Magic: The Gathering boxes for younger children and teenagers might be a more palatable way to introduce the zettelkasten method of note taking to them, particularly when it's a game in which they have a pre-existing interest.

https://www.amazon.com/mtg-deck-box/s?k=mtg+deck+box

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T382CLwAjsy3fmecf/how-to-take-smart-notes-ahrens-2017

ᔥ[[abramdemski]] in The Zettelkasten Method (accessed:: 2023-08-25 10:12:42)

Niklas Luhmann indicates that it may take a number of years to reach critical mass. This may be different for everyone based on the number of ideas they place into it and the amount of work they do in creating connections.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki, has indicated that he thinks it takes roughly 500 pages in a wiki for the value to begin emerging.†

How many notes and what level of links/complexity is a good minimal threshold for one to be able to see interesting and useful results?

† Quote in FedWiki session on 2021-12-29

https://www.reddit.com/r/Arno_Schmidt/comments/1267heb/arno_schmidt_compulsively_wrote_and_hoarded/

Lots of great anecdotal mentions here which should be tracked down for more authority.

https://www.oliverburkeman.com/onwriting

Oliver Burkerman, of Four Thousand Weeks fame, is testing out zettelkasten based on Ahrens' book.

As long as you know and understand what you're writing, use as many languages as you or your zettelkasten wants or needs.

I'm often working with ideas from other languages and cultures which have no direct translations into English, so I use those native words interspersed with English. Sometimes I don't have words in any language and make up a shorthand phrase in English until I can come up with a better word. Often I'll collect examples of the same "foreign" words in multiple contexts to tease out their contextual meanings as was comprehensively done with large group zettelkasten like the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache. I also frequently use mathematical symbols, equations, and other scientific notations, graphs, drawings, color, etc. to make my meanings clear.

I've also worked with historical figures who have had names in multiple languages over the centuries and cross index them in a variety of different languages based on context. As an example, I've got at least 11 different variations of names for Ramon Llull in almost as many languages and variations of transliterations. I try to keep each one in its original context, but link them in my index.

There are certainly zettelkasten out there written in four and more languages as suited the needs of their users. S.D. Goitein certainly used Hebrew, English, German, Arabic, Aramaic in his and may have likely had other languages (Yiddish, Coptic, Egyptian?) interspersed to lesser extents. Adolph Erman certainly used Egyptian hieroglyphs along with German in his. It can easily be argued that their zettelkasten and work required multiple languages.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180627163317im_/https://aaew.bbaw.de/wbhome/Broschuere/abb08.jpg A example zettelkasten slip showing a passage of text from the victory stele of Sesostris III at the Nubian fortress of Semna. The handwriting is that of Adolf Erman, who had "already struggled with the text as a high school student".

At the end of the day, they're your notes, so write them as you like.

Thanks Sascha for an excellent primer on the internal machinations of our favorite machines beyond the usual focus on the storage/memory and indexing portions of the process.

Said another way, a zettelkasten is part of a formal logic machine/process. Or alternately, as Markus Krajewski aptly demonstrates in Paper Machines (MIT Press, 2011), they are early analog storage devices in which the thinking and logic operations are done cerebrally (by way of direct analogy to brain and hand:manually) and subsequently noted down which thereby makes them computers.

Just as mathematicians try to break down and define discrete primitives or building blocks upon which they can then perform operations to come up with new results, one tries to find and develop the most interesting "atomic notes" from various sources which they can place into their zettelkasten in hopes of operating on them (usually by juxtaposition, negation, union, etc.) to derive, find, and prove new insights. If done well, these newly discovered ideas can be put back into the machine as inputs to create additional newer and more complex outputs continuously. While the complexity of Lie Algebras is glorious and seems magical, it obviously helps to first understand the base level logic before one builds up to it. The same holds true of zettelkasten.

Now if I could only get the printf portion to work the way I want...

category theory + zettelkasten... hmmm... feels a bit like Leibniz chasing a universal language

what is a zettelkasten monad?

Zettelkasten advice:

1. Have a goal in mind
2. Really... have a goal. Write it down.
3. Practice at it, a lot
4. When stuck, read some of the bits below
5. Practice, practice, practice.

Here are a list of some of the strongest books which focus on the topic or cover things from various interesting perspectives: - Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017. - Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/. (Specifically the first half of the book.) - Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957. http://archive.org/details/modernreseracher0000unse. - Bernstein, Mark. Tinderbox: The Tinderbox Way. 3rd ed. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, Inc., 2017. http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/TinderboxWay/index.html. - Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis. - Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout. - Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062. - Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. (Especially chapter seven). - Weinberg, Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005.

Read one (or two) and then dive in and actually practice (and practice and practice some more) things for a while.

For some of the smaller subtleties which aren't covered in books, try one of the two following collections for individual bits of advice and insight: - https://writing.bobdoto.computer/zettelkasten/ - https://zettelkasten.de/posts/ - https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

https://www.printables.com/model/558873-zettelkasten-index-boxes-slip-box

Someone has designed a DIY printer project for making your own stackable zettelkasten boxes.

See post at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15wkuel/zettelkasten_index_boxes_slip_box_make_your_own/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13nmcym/i_read_the_top_ten_zettelkasten_articles_on/

A list of some popular one-pagers on the Zettelkasten Method.

Read contemporaneously in May 2023

@pgrhowarth @MartinBB @tevka and other historians (and sociologists, anthropologists, humanists, etc.) who want to delve into some of the ideas of historical method, zettelkasten, note taking, intellectual craftsmanship outside of Luhmann's version, I've compiled a list of various primary sources who have written on a variety of related methods throughout the past few hundred years: https://www.zotero.org/chrisaldrich/tags/note%20taking%20methods/items/KTZXN3EV/item-list

Historians in particular have used indexing their notes as a means of creating analog databases for individual facts outside of their other writing/compiling practices. Thus a mixture of methods may suit your working needs.

To help frame it one might also consult the following: * Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary. * Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.

I've got a relatively short overview of some of these methods and examples of users at https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/.

Context:

Damit hatte der 84-jährige Mommsen ein Projekt initiiert, an dem Profanwie Kirchenhistoriker in Deutschland auch noch lange nach seinem Tode arbeiteten und das gute Fortschritte machte: Al s Jülicher, der nach dem Tode Seecks 1921 die alleinige Leitung übernahm, auf Grund seines Augenleidens 1929 von seinen Verpflichtungen entbunden wurde, Ubergab er der Kommission etwa 75000 Zettel, deren Systematisierung allerdings nicht zum Abschluß kam74. Von einer Veröffentlichung des Materials sah man ab, da «weder der Zustand des Manuskripts noch die inzwischen völlig veränderte wissenschaftliche Lage es gestatteten, die Prosopographie zum Druck zubringen75».

Nachdem nur einige Zettelkästen im Zweiten Weltkrieg verloren gegangen waren, wurde 1951 ein Teil der Materialien leihweise dem von A.H.M. Jones, John Morris und H.-I. Marrou in Cambridge und Paris begründeten Unternehmen, das sich zum Ziel gesetzt hatte, eine weltliche und eine kirchliche Prosopographie der Spätantike zu erarbeiten, zur Verfügung gestellt76. Während wir heute aus technischen und organisatorischen Gründen mit zweiverschiedenen Prosopographien -einer weltlichen und einer kirchlichen- zu arbeiten haben, die beide noch nicht abgeschlossen sind, hatte Mommsen die Nützlichkeit, ja die Notwendigkeit einer spätantiken Prosopographie erkannt, die weltliche und kirchliche Würdenträger gemeinsam erschließt und aufführt.

1. Ibid.: Schreiben H. LlETZMANNs vom 6.10.1936.
2. Weder die Prosopography oflhe Later Roman Empire (= PLRE) noch die Prosopographie chretienne du Bas-Empire erwähnen diesen Sachverhalt; während in PLRE I (hrsg. v. A.H.M. JONES, J.R. MARTINDALE, J. MORRIS), Cambridge 1971, V zu lesen ist: «The project of a prosopographical dictionary of the Later Roman Empire was originated by Theodor Mommsen but... it failed of fruition, largely through the Intervention of the two World Wars. The bulky archives representing the work of many German seholars lay in Berlin during the second war when they were damaged and in part destroyed, together with essential records, during an Allied bombing raid. Consequently when the prqject was taken up in England after the war, the work had to be restarted from the very beginning. The present volume therefore represents the first stage of fulfilment of Mommsen's original project», heißt es im ersten Band der Prosopographie chretienne: A. MANDOUZE (Hrsg.), Prosopographie de l'Afrique chretienne (303-533), Paris 1982, 7: «On sait qu'ä la fin du siecle dernier, sur l'initiative de Th. Mommsen et d'Ad. Harnack, l'Academie des Sciences de Berlin avait commence' ä preparer un vaste dictionnaire prosopographique du Bas-Empire. Sans doute concu de facon trop ambitieuse, victime aussi des sequelles de la Premiere Guerre mondiale, ce projet fut definitivement abandonne" en 1933»; cf. hierzu auch H. CHANTRAINE, Ein neues Hilfsmittel zur Erforschung der Spätantike: Die Prosopographie chretienne du Bas-Empire, in: Francia 11, 1984,697ff., v.a. 697f.

Machine translation:

The 84-year-old Mommsen had thus initiated a project on which both profane and church historians in Germany continued to work long after his death and which made good progress: Al s Jülicher, who took over the sole management after Seeck's death in 1921 due to his eye problems in 1929 was relieved of his obligations, he handed over around 75,000 slips of paper to the Commission, the systematisation of which, however, was not completed ^74. The material was not published because "neither the condition of the manuscript nor the scientific situation, which had meanwhile completely changed, allowed the prosopography to be printed^75".

After only a few card boxes had been lost in World War II, some of the materials were loaned to A.H.M. Jones, John Morris and H.-I. Marrou in Cambridge and Paris, which had set itself the goal of developing a secular and an ecclesiastical prosopography of late antiquity. While today, for technical and organizational reasons, we have to work with two different prosopographies - one secular and one ecclesiastical - both of which have not yet been completed, Mommsen recognized the usefulness, indeed the necessity, of a late antique prosopography that explores secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries together and performs.

1. Ibid.: Letter from H. LlETZMANN dated October 6, 1936.
2. Neither the Prosopography oflhe Later Roman Empire (= PLRE) nor the Prosopographie chretienne du Bas-Empire mention this fact; while in PLRE I (ed. by A.H.M. JONES, J.R. MARTINDALE, J. MORRIS), Cambridge 1971, V one can read: «The project of a prosopographical dictionary of the Later Roman Empire was originated by Theodor Mommsen but... it failed of fruition, largely through the Intervention of the two World Wars. The bulky archives representing the work of many German scholars lay in Berlin during the second war when they were damaged and in part destroyed, together with essential records, during an Allied bombing raid. Consequently when the project was taken up in England after the war, the work had to be restarted from the very beginning. The present volume therefore represents the first stage of fulfillment of Mommsen's original project," says the first volume of the Prosopographie chretienne: A. MANDOUZE (ed.), Prosopographie de l'Afrique chretienne (303-533), Paris 1982, 7: "On said qu'a la fin du siecle dernier, sur l'initiative de Th. Mommsen et d'Ad. Harnack, l'Academie des Sciences de Berlin avait commence' a preparer un vaste dictionnaire prosopographique du Bas-Empire. Sans doute concu de facon trop ambitieuse, victime aussi des sequelles de la Premiere Guerre mondiale, ce projet fut definitivement abandonne" en 1933"; cf. on this also H. CHANTRAINE, A new tool for researching the Late antiquity: The prosopography chretienne du Bas-Empire, in: Francia 11, 1984, 697ff., especially 697f.

This would seem to indicate that Theodor Mommsen potentially had a zettelkasten which he was using to compile his work, but there is some ambiguity here that the slips and boxes may have been those of scholars who came after him and were working on his notes and systematizing them for future publication. Perhaps they were Mommsen's and others were arranging them for potential publication as they only had subject heading orderings, which would have been the most likely mode of the day (versus a more Luhmann-artig ordering.)

syndication link: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2649/theodor-mommsens-zettelkasten/

Rebenich, Stefan. “Theodor Mommsen and the Relationship of Age History and Patristic (Theodor Mommsen und das Verhältnis von Alter Geschichte und Patristik).” In Patristique et antiquité tardive en Allemagne et en France de 1870 à 1930 : Influences et échanges: Actes du colloque franco-allemand de Chantilly (25-27 octobre 1991), edited by Jacques Fontaine, R. Herzog, and Karla Pollmann, 131–54. Paris: Brepols, 1993. https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/46/1/Rebenich_Mommsen_1993.pdf.

reply to u/SunghoYahng at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15sqiq2/zettelkasten_for_normies_what_normies_really_need/

u/SunghoYahng, some of your article sounds like a pared down digital version of a commonplace book which allows for links, so it fits into the older zettelkasten tradition, just not into the more Luhmann-artig version on which this subreddit is generally more focused. Perhaps yours is closer to a digital version of the analog commonplace using index cards that Billy Oppenheimer describes having learned from Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene?

Often people focus too much on Luhmann's prodigious output and then immediately imply or say you should adopt his very specific system without describing what his system did or why it worked so well for him and his particular needs. Very few focus on what it is that they want to accomplish and how they might use his system or the thousands of variations on it throughout history to come to those goals as quickly and easily as they can.

You commit a version of this sin in your opening lines:

The content about Zettelkasten is mostly too long and practically useless. The purpose of this text is to write only what normies really need to know.

Who are these so-called "normies" and what specifically are they trying to accomplish? You don't define either of them, and possibly worse do it in a negative framing. The system you're describing might be a great one, but for whom? What do you expect them to use it for? What will they get out of it?

Many people talk about the "magic" of a zettelkasten and then wave their hands at some version of a workflow of what they think it is or what they think it should be. Perhaps what we all really need is a list of potential affordances that different methods allow and how one might leverage those affordances. How might they be mixed and matched? Then users can decide what outcomes they wish to have (writing, thinking, aggregation, bookmarking, collecting, creativity, artificial memory, serendipity, productivity, wiki, spaced repetition, learning, time wasting, etc., etc.) and which affordances are necessary within their workflow/system to effectuate those specific goals? Finally they can pick and choose a specific version of a methodology/workflow and either an analog substrate (index cards, notebooks, memory palace, etc.) or digital tool/application (Obsidian, Roam Research, The Archive, etc.) to save it all in. Of course once you've chosen that analog or digital tool, does it actually have the affordances you want or need in actual practice? Are they easy to use? Practical? Do they save you time? Are they simple or over-engineered? What happens when they scale to a year of regular use or even a lifetime?

As a simple example, many writers would love a seriously good outliner functionality in their system to pull out the materials they want to work with and then appropriately order them for a potential final written output. In practice, index cards on a big table are fantastic for this process while most (all?) current digital tools are miserable at it. And of course once you've gotten the outline you like in an analog space you have to type it all out to print/publish in a final form, something which the digital affordance of cut and paste would make much simpler. Who wouldn't love a tool that could give you all of these affordances, presuming you needed them?

​

While we're on outlining, very few talk about the ease-of-use that some professional outliners like Dave Winer's Drummer or Little Outliner have versus some of the more text-editing focused tools like Obsidian which are generally poor as outliners (if you could even call them that) in comparison.

If you're interested in folgezettel and outlining, you might appreciate some subtleties in Bob's piece: https://writing.bobdoto.computer/folgezettel-is-not-an-outline-luhmanns-playful-appreciation-of-disfunction/

cross reference https://hypothes.is/a/OhcWSjxyEe6V8DP9P6WNQQ

https://sunghoyahng.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-for-normies-what-normies

A VERY slim version.

This method is interesting, I like the aesthetics of such commonplace books. However, in terms of functionality, it is nearly fully replaced with the Antinet Zettelkasten method. Perhaps I could use some of this to improve my journals though? In addition, this does inspire me to create progressive summarization pages of my ideas and concepts, contained in Sage Scientia, in Notion or Obsidian.

A method such as this, or Zettelkasten, can help create theoretical expertship... It might not be the MOST EFFICIENT, but it is highly effective.

https://www.nerosnotes.co.uk/collections/foglietto

Looks sort of similar to Ugmonk's offerings...

https://reasonabledeviations.com/2022/04/18/molecular-notes-part-1/

Maybe come back to read this???

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/textmate-zettelkasten/

TextMate could be used as a Zettelkasten app, but doesn't do active links for files and the search is very basic.

http://www.hoppersofficefurniture.com/index.cfm?bxxe=1&Fuseaction=ProductHome&SearchWords=&CategoryID=25&ProductID=573

Has carried used metal card index files in the past for $295

reply to u/Efficient_Earth_8773 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15fjb97/does_anyone_has_its_zettelkasten_in_google_docs/

Experimenting can be interesting. I've tried using spreadsheet software like Google Sheets or Excel which can be simple and useful methods that don't lose significant functionality. I did separate sheets for zettels, sources, and the index. Each zettel had it's own row with with a number, title, contents, and a link to a source as well as the index.

Google Docs might be reasonably doable, but the linking portion may be one of the more difficult affordances to accomplish easily or in a very user-centric fashion. It is doable though: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/45893?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop, and one might even mix Google Docs with Google Sheets? I could see Sheets being useful for creating an index and or sources while Docs could be used for individual notes as well. It's all about affordances and ease of use. Text is a major portion of having and maintaining a zettelkasten, so by this logic anything that will allow that could potentially be used as a zettelkasten. However, it helps to think about how one will use it in practice on a day-to-day basis. How hard will it be to create links? Search it? How hard will it be when you've got thousands of "slips"? How much time will these things take as it scales up in size?

A paper-based example: One of the reasons that many pen and paper users only write on one side of their index cards is that it saves the time of needing to take cards out and check if they do or don't have writing on the back or remembering where something is when it was written on the back of a card. It's a lot easier to tip through your collection if they're written only on the front. If you use an alternate application/software what will all these daily functions look like compounded over time? Does the software make things simpler and easier or will it make them be more difficult or take more time? And is that difficulty and time useful or not to your particular practice? Historian and author David McCullough prefers a manual typewriter over computers with keyboards specifically because it forces him to slow down and take his time. Another affordance to consider is how much or little work one may need to put into using it from a linking (or not) perspective. Using paper forces one to create a minimum of at least one link (made by the simple fact of filing it next to another) while other methods like Obsidian allow you to too easily take notes and place them into an infinitely growing pile of orphaned notes. Is it then more work to create discrete links later when you've lost the context and threads of potential arguments you might make? Will your specific method help you to regularly review through old notes? How hard will it be to mix things up for creativity's sake? How easy/difficult will it be to use your notes for writing/creating new material, if you intend to use it for that?

Think about how and why you'd want to use it and which affordances you really want/need. Then the only way to tell is to try it out for a bit and see how one likes/doesn't like a particular method and whether or not it helps to motivate you in your work. If you don't like the look of an application and it makes you not want to use it regularly, that obviously is a deal breaker. One might also think about how difficult/easy import/export might be if they intend to hop from one application to another. Finally, switching applications every few months can be self-defeating, so beware of this potential downfall as you make what will eventually need to be your ultimate choice. Beware of shiny object syndrome or software that ceases updating in just a few years without easy export.

A Fred-box could be very useful. This contains cards with useful snippets of thought, very small usually, that don't need a particular ordering or connection of thought but are worth it to be reminded of every now and then, a shuffle if it were.

If need be used in connective thought as well, the content could be copied over into an Antinet entry as well.

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

Good overview of the method and details for how to implement.

Possibly the king of the one page zettelkasten descriptions.

https://www.magneticmemorymethod.com/zettelkasten/

I'd found this page through general search and then a few days later someone from Metivier's "team" (an SEO hire likely) emailed me to link to it from a random zk page on my own site (not a great one).

Metivier seems to have come to ZK from the PKM space (via a podcast I listened to perhaps?). This page isn't horrible, but seems to benefit greatly from details I've added to the Wikipedia page over the past few years.

reply to IvanCyb at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1587onp/comment/jt8zbu4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 Asking broadly about indexing methods in zettelkasten

When you begin you'll find yourself creating lots of index entries to start, in part because you have none, but you'll find with time that you need to do less and less because index entries already exist for most of what you would add. More importantly most of the entries you might consider duplicating are likely to be very near cards that already have those index entries.

As an example if you have twenty cards on cultural anthropology, the first one will be indexed with "cultural anthropology" to give you a pointer of where to start. Then when you need to add a new card to that section, you'll look up "cultural anthropology" and skim through what you've got to find the closest related card and place it. You likely won't need to create a new index entry for it at all.

But for argument's sake, let's say you intend to do some work at the intersection of "cultural anthropology" and "writing" and this card is also about "writing". Then you might want to add an index entry for "writing" from which you'll branch off in the future. This will tend to keep your index very sparse. As an example you can look at Niklas Luhmann's digitized collection to notice that he spent his career in the area of "sociology" but there are only just a few pointers from his index into his collection under that keyword. If he had tagged every single card related to "sociology" as "sociology" in his index, the index entry for it would have been wholly unusable in just a few months. Broadly speaking his entire zettelkasten is about sociology, so you need to delve a few layers in and see which subtopics, sub-subtopics, sub-sub-subtopics, etc. exist. As you go deeper into specific topics you'll notice that you branch down and out into more specific subareas as you begin to cover all the bases within that topic. If you like, for fun, you can see this happening in my digital zettelkasten on the topic of "zettelkasten" at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22zettelkasten%22. The tool only shows the top 50 tags for that subject in the side bar, but you can slowly dig down into subtopics to see what they look like and a bit of how they begin to overlap.

Incidentally, this is one of the problems with those who tag everything with top level topic headings in digital contexts—you do a search for something important and find so much that it becomes a useless task to try to sift through it all. As a result, users need better tools to give them the ability to do more fine-grained searching, filtering, and methods of discovery.

reply to u/SnooPandas3432 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/158tzk7/zettelkasten_on_a_ring_binder_with_looseleaf_paper/

She didn't specify a particular dimension, but I recall that Beatrice Webb used larger sheets of paper than traditional index-card sized slips in her practice and likely filed them into something akin to hanging files in a filing cabinet.

For students, I might suggest using the larger sheets/3-ring binder to make Cornell notes for coursework and then later distilling down one or two of the best ideas from a lecture or related readings into index card form for filing away over time. You could then have a repository of bigger formatted literature notes from books/lectures with more space and still have all the benefits of a more traditional card-based zettelkasten for creativity and writing. You could then have the benefit of questions for spaced repetition for quizzes/tests, while still keeping bigger ideas for writing papers or future research needs.

https://blog.ayjay.org/unanswered-questions/

The index-card based notes pictured in this post certainly makes me think that Alan Jacobs has the sort of note taking/commonplace book sort of practice I thought he would.

Robert Hutchins, former dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929), president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago, closes his preface to his grand project with Mortimer J. Adler by giving pride of place to Adler's Syntopicon. It touches on the unreasonable value of building and maintaining a zettelkasten:

But I would do less than justice to Mr. Adler's achievement if I left the matter there. The Syntopicon is, in addition to all this, and in addition to being a monument to the industry, devotion, and intelligence of Mr. Adler and his staff, a step forward in the thought of the West. It indicates where we are: where the agreements and disagreements lie; where the problems are; where the work has to be done. It thus helps to keep us from wasting our time through misunderstanding and points to the issues that must be attacked. When the history of the intellectual life of this century is written, the Syntopicon will be regarded as one of the landmarks in it. —Robert M. Hutchins, p xxvi The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. 1952.

Adler's Syntopicon has been briefly discussed in the forum.zettelkasten.de space before. However it isn't just an index compiled into two books which were volumes 2 and 3 of The Great Books of the Western World, it's physically a topically indexed card index or a grand zettelkasten surveying Western culture. Its value to readers and users is immeasurable and it stands as a fascinating example of what a well-constructed card index might allow one to do even when they don't have their own yet. For those who have only seen the Syntopicon in book form, you might better appreciate pictures of it in slipbox form prior to being published as two books covering 2,428 pages:

Two page spread of Life Magazine article with the title "The 102 Great Ideas" featuring a photo of 26 people behind 102 card index boxes with categorized topical labels from "Angel" to "Will".

Mortimer J. Adler holding a pipe in his left hand and mouth posing in front of dozens of boxes of index cards with topic headwords including "law", "love", "life", "sin", "art", "democracy", "citizen", "fate", etc.

Adler spoke of practicing syntopical reading, but anyone who compiles their own card index (in either analog or digital form) will realize the ultimate value in creating their own syntopical writing or what Robert Hutchins calls participating in "The Great Conversation" across twenty-five centuries of documented human communication. Adler's version may not have had the internal structure of Luhmann's zettelkasten, but it definitely served similar sorts of purposes for those who worked on it and published from it.

References

• LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.
• Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. Edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

syndication link: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2623/mortimer-j-adlers-syntopicon-a-topically-arranged-collaborative-slipbox/

p xxvi

Hutchins closes his preface to his grand project with Mortimer J. Adler by giving pride of place to Adler's Syntopicon.

Adler's Syntopicon isn't just an index compiled into two books which were volumes 2 and 3 of The Great Books of the Western World, it's physically a topically indexed card index of data (a grand zettelkasten surveying Western culture if you will). It's value to readers and users is immeasurable and it stands as a fascinating example of what a well-constructed card index might allow one to do even when they don't have their own yet.

Adler spoke of practicing syntopical reading, but anyone who compiles their own card index (in either analog or digital form) will realize the ultimate value in creating their own syntopical writing or what Robert Hutchins calls participating in "The Great Conversation" across twenty-five centuries of documented human communication.

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/WF4THtUNEe2dZTdlQCbmXw

The way Hutchins presents the idea of "Adler's achievement" here seems to indicate that Hutchins didn't have a direct hand in compiling or working on it directly.

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/622/syntopicon

Some in the ZK space have looked at the Syntopicon, but they primarily see the finished book product and don't seem to be aware of the slip-based portion of the project.

reply to u/gate18 at https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/14ve4gi/is_there_any_app_like_obsidian_for_visual_art/

Aby Warburg had a significant physical card-based zettelkasten he used for his visual research in the early 1900s. Perhaps you'd find some interesting inspiration by looking at his methods?

https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/archive/archive-collections/verkn%C3%BCpfungszwang-exhibition/mnemosyne-materials

reply to u/ihaveascone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14v2ohz/converting_commonplace_books/

Don't convert unless you absolutely need to, it will be a lot of soul-crushing make work. Since some of your practice already looks like Ross Ashby's system, why not just continue what you've been doing all along and start a physical index card-based index for your commonplaces? (As opposed to a more classical Lockian index.) As you browse your commonplaces create index cards for topics you find and write down the associated book/page numbers. Over time you'll more quickly make your commonplace books more valuable while still continuing on as you always have without skipping much a beat or attempting to convert over your entire system. Alternately you could do a paper notebook with a digital index too. I came across https://www.indxd.ink, a digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional). It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears. This could potentially be used by those who have analog commonplace/zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/155257403398

An Underwood & Underwood cabinet for storing stereoview (or stereograph) photos. Could potentially repurposed as a zettelkasten cabinet as the slip sizes should generally be compatible.

A zettelkasten if used properly by the practitioner, can also have these elements of GRINDE integrated (though it is more textual than visual): - you group knowledge by linking (making a initial connection with folgezettel) - reflective: what you write reflects your own ideas in relation to what you read or are learning (and it is very non-linear) - with a ZK, you can make more distant connections to other notes, and bring them together in hubs - in these hubs, you can create a flow of notes, deciding which are stronger/better, in order (which allows you to emphasise what is better etc.)

note: a ZK is for long term, while a mind map is limited in scope (though probably better for the short term)

https://www.ebay.com/p/1154231946

https://www.amazon.com/Correct-C-121DF-Card-Business-Single/dp/B008324IPA

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/194730263

Hawk Sugano used a Correct Indexcard Dock (C-153DF) box for some of his index card practice.

reply to u/drogers8 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/14ot4na/inserting_a_maincards_with_lack_of_memory/

I would submit that your first sentence is wildly false.

What topic(s) cover your newly made cards? Look those up in your index and find where those potentially related cards are (whether you remember them or not). Go to that top level card listed in your index and see what's there or in the section of cards that come after it. Find the best card in that branch and file your new card(s) as appropriate. If necessary, cross-index them with sub-topics in your index to make them more findable in the future. If you don't find one or more of those topics in your index, then create a new branch and start an index entry for one or more of those terms. (You'll find yourself making lots of index entries to start, but it will eventually slow down—though it shouldn't stop—as your collection grows.)

Ideally, with regular use, you'll likely remember more and more, especially for active areas you're really interested in. However, take comfort that the system is designed to let you forget everything! This forgetting will actually help create future surprise as well as serendipity that will actually be beneficial for potentially generating new ideas as you use (and review) your notes.

And if you don't believe me, consider that Alberto Cevolini edited an entire book, broadly about these techniques—including an entire chapter on Luhmann—, which he aptly named Forgetting Machines!

reply to u/taurusnoises (Bob Doto) at tk

Yep, for almost a full year now on 4x6" index cards. (Receipts for the kids: https://boffosocko.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/wp-1688411021709-scaled.jpg)

Previously I'd used a Hobonichi Cousin (page per day) journal for this. (Perhaps I should have stayed with the A6 size instead of the larger A5 for consistency?) Decades ago (around 1988ish?) I had started using a 2 page per day DayTimer pocket planners (essentially pre-printed/timed index cards spiral bound into monthly booklets which they actually shipped in index card-like plastic boxes for storage/archival purposes). Technically I've been doing a version of this for a really long time in one form or another.

It generally includes a schedule, to do lists (bullet journal style), and various fleeting notes/journaling similar to the older Memindex format, just done on larger cards for extra space. I generally either fold them in half for pocket storage for the day or carry about in groups for the coming week(s) when I'm away from my desk for extended periods (also with custom blank index card notebooks/pads).

I won't go into the fact that in the 90's I had a 5,000+ person rolodex... or an index card (in the entertainment they called them buck slips) with the phone numbers and names of \~100 people I dealt with regularly when early brick cell phones didn't have great (or any) storage/functionality.

reply to Bob Doto at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14lcb4z/using_diaries_and_journals_as_source_material_for/

Ross Ashby kept his notes in notebooks/journals but he did cross-index them by topic using index cards. Rather than reference them by notebook (name/title/date) and page number, he kept a set of handwritten running page numbers across the entirety of his notebooks, so instead of Notebook 15 page 55, 1952 he'd simply write "3786" for page 3786. This can be seen on his index card for the indexed word "determinate" as an example.

For other examples, see: http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index/index.html

My own notebooks are usually titled by year and date spans along with page numbers, so I'll use those roughly as Bob describes. This has made it much easier to not need to move all my older notes into a card-based system, but still make them useable and referenceable.

For those with more explicit journaling, diary, or other writing habits, Ralph Waldo Emmerson makes an interesting example of practice as he maintained at least two commonplace books (a poetry-specific one and a general one) as well as a large set of writing journals where he experimented with writing before later publishing his work. Since there are extant (digitized and published copies) and large bodies of scholarship around them, they make an interesting case study of how his process worked and how others might imitate it.

​

On the diary front, of the historical examples I've seen floating around, only Roland Barthes had a significant practice of keeping his "diary" in index card form, a portion of which was published on October 12, 2010. Mourning Diary is a collection published for the first time from Roland Barthes' 330 index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother in 1977.

Not as extensive, Vladimir Nabokov recorded a "diary" of sixty-four dreams on 118 index cards beginning on October 14, 1964 as an experiment. He was following the instructions of John Dunne, a British philosopher, in An Experiment with Time. The results were published by Princeton University Press in Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov which was edited by Gennady Barabtarlo.

Presumably if one keeps a diary or journal in index card form in chronological order, they can simply reference it by date and either time or card X of Y, if there are multiple card entries for a single day. I keep a dated diary of sorts on index cards, though they rarely go past one card a day.

https://writing.bobdoto.computer/using-diaries-and-journals-as-source-material-for-zettelkasten-notes/

Additional commentary at r/Zettelkasten - Using diaries and journals as source material for zettelkasten notes by Bob Doto

Bob lays out some basic ideas for citing one's personal journal, diaries, notebooks, and other non-published writing for use in a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten. While he focuses on the scale of the mechanics of citation of one's own notes in other forms, what he's really doing is giving people explicit permission to overlap traditions to more easily use their work from other places in their zettelkasten.

Compare this with Scott Scheper's related article on 2023-05-24 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13qzgjs/connecting_a_zettelkasten_to_a_commonplace_book/ (and the related YouTube video in which he talks about giving things an "address".

Unmentioned is that in many citation managers, one would likely use a "manuscript" format for citations here. Upon checking it looks like Zotero doesn't have data fields for page number, paragraph, or line numbers for their manuscript type.

I like the fact that Bob Doto is explicitly carving out the space of a Luhmann-style zettelkasten versus all the other flavors.

https://m.tb.cn/h.5Z13g30?tk=KLGsdsMqWwm

Suggested by u/khimtan at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/14mx0gx/card_holder_tray_now_i_can_view_around_35_cards/

reply to u/graidan at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14n5131/zk_for_analyzing_components/

I'm intending to use some of my zk for analysis of components for their uses. Specifically, for looking at materia magica (magical ingredients) across authors / books / systems / etc. For example, all the ways that dandelion is used, looking for consistent commonalities and reasoning.

How would you do this in a ZK system? Create a branch per items under investigation? I feel like a digital solution like notion might work best, but I'd like to incorporate into my analog if I can figure out a good way to do it.

I like u/taurusnoises' description and understand it, but perhaps an alternate perspective and some examples of how others have done these things may be helpful?

One feature/affordance that a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten emphasizes is the ability to build on knowledge from the bottom up while older commonplace book and non-Luhmann zettelkasten traditions have a more top-down and/or categorical-first approach. Either of these methods can be tried in your use case to good benefit, but it helps to think about what is happening over the long run. Bottom up approaches are more useful when you're encountering new material and aren't always sure how to categorize it or know where things may be heading. These also tend to encourage greater admixtures of disparate topics, especially over use with time. Top down approaches are potentially better when you've got a broad idea of fields and sub-fields to begin with and know exactly where new ideas will best fit. Because of this they don't naturally tend to mix disparate fields of knowledge as easily, though this can be done with foresight.

It sounds like you're well-acquainted with your area (of magical ingredients) already, so you're more likely to appreciate a top down approach as a result. A Luhmann-esque zettelkasten is certainly workable here, but you'll be able to scaffold some of your material more easily from the start. You know in advance some of the structure of where you're going and what sorts of questions you'll want to ask of your notes, so you can structure it to be more helpful from the start.

As an example, in your materia magica case (for which I'll make some broad assumptions without any knowledge of the field), you might have a branch for dandelion. Under dandelion you can aggregate notes on what various authors have to say about specific uses and features. Over time you'll have a variety of notes which will allow you to quickly compare and contrast what those authors have to say about the topic. You can repeat this for other herbs, mushrooms, etc. This may make your writing on this particular area much easier.

Of course, potential complications may occur later when you may have different questions about the ideas you've collected. Perhaps you'll ask something like, how did practices differ in different geographical areas? Was practice with dandelions the same across different regions or across time? Did practices for other herbs show similar patterns? This may require additional sets of notes which can cross reference time spans and areas. To better handle this with your initial notes branching according to herbs, you may want to make project notes (maps of content, hub notes, structure notes, or whatever you want to call them) on each of these criteria with links back to the originals for studying and comparing these differences.

To make this easier, you can pull out all the original notes and reorder them accordingly and then make your project notes by noting the original card identifiers/numbers. Or perhaps you just use them to write the particular section directly. Once you're done, you can use the original numbers to file them back into the appropriate places for later use.

The broader ZK community doesn't talk as frequently or as in-depth about adding metadata relating to time, place, etc. for sorting/resorting or searching for material. Having actual index cards may make doing all of this a lot easier.

As illustrative examples, Beatrice Webb talks a bit about her use of collecting notes/data across a variety of dimensions for her sociology work as "scientific notetaking" in Appendix C of her book My Apprenticeship (1926). Broadly speaking, she's using her notes as an early form of searchable database. Similarly, Victor Margolin has a short video about his process for writing about history of design and there he's using his notes along the lines of both location as well as time. In both of these examples, we're looking at non-Luhmann-artig practices (somehow it seems more appropriate to use the German -artig than the French -esque), but I'm sure they would have worked just as well with a Luhmann structured practice as well.

And of course if none of this still makes any sense, I highly recommend you try it anyway. Your experience will assuredly bear out results and you're sure to find the answers you're looking for, and probably a little more to boot. Let us know what you find.

Sascha's process of incoporating the problems into the ZK workflow

Effective problem-solving method that can be incorporated with ease in the Zettelkasten technique.

When it comes to thinking, the Zettelkasten solves an important issue which is the problem of scope, which is impossible at the current moment in mindmapping software such as Concepts.

Mainly, Zettelkasten allows you gain a birds-eye holistic view of a topic, branch, or line of thought, while allowing you to at the same time also gain a microscopic view of an "atomic" idea within that thought-stream, therefore creating virtually infinite zoom-in and zoom-out capability. This is very, very, beneficial to the process of deep thinking and intellectual work.

Think of branches not as collections, but rather as conversations

When a branch starts to build, or prove itself, then ask the question (before indexing): "What is the conversation that is building here?"

Also related to Sönke Ahrens' maxim of seeking Disconfirming Information to counter Confirmation Bias. By thinking of branches as conversations instead of collectives, you are also more inclined to put disconfirming information within the branch.

reply to u/nagytimi85 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/14l2dfo/out_of_curiosity_anyone_here_joining_camp_nano/

With my ZK I feel like it's NaNoWriMo all the time... Here's some prior conversation about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/xrlnqx/anyone_doing_nanowrimo/

The author goes into the correlation between categorization (branching) and the use of the index and the focus on them respectively. He mentions he "learned" that branching would be more beneficial than the using of the index to make finding the cards easier.

I strongly disagree with this focus. I agree with the "relational" principle of put the card between the one that has the closest proximital conceptual relation. The Zettelkasten's power relies in serendipitous creativity (or creativity/insight by chance), this is facilitated highly by the use of connectivity between cards, where each card as you go down the "hierarchy" of "branches" will be more unrelated to the original topic. (See also Luhmann's paper Communication with Zettelkasten, Manfred Kuehn Translation and Johannes F.K. Schmidt's article on Zettelkasten within Forgetting Machines, as well as his video presentation about Zettelkasten). In short, the friction of searching for cards by following trains of thought through connectivity boosters insight by chance and therefore facilitates the power of the system.

This is also, I believe, why Bob Doto argues to let categories emerge after the creation of notes/streams of thought instead of making the names for the "branches" up front.

I believe Luhmann himself also emphasized the use of the index by calling it a system of "query into the database," the index is the main navigational map for the Zettelkasten. If you have a question for your "communication partner" the index is the way to go. For example, if I wanted to know the impact of cognitive load theory within employee management as a CEO, I would go to my index and collect the entrances for both "branches" or terms, and then start reading these thought streams... Afterward, I might synthesize and create a new branch somewhere, in one of the aforementioned categories, or an entire new one, where I put the results of this questioning.

My own system of numbering and branching in this way is the following: A number signifies a note's position within a stream of thought. I branch off if, following the relational principle, a note adds unto a thought on a specific card, but not the stream specifically. This gets signified by a letter.

So, 1a1, 1a2, 1a3, and 1a4 are all part of the same stream while 1a, 1b, and 1c would all be different "branches" stemming from the original card that would be 1 in this case. This can repeat infinitely, therefore facilitating what Luhmann calls "Infinite potential for inward growth" of the system. It's autopoietic and cybernetic. (See also: The Radical Luhmann by Hans-Georg Moeller).

Something that can benefit the finding of notes once the system grows sufficiently large is the use of "structure" or "hub" cards where you put down a few key entrances to concepts related to this stream of thought or "branch" in remote sections of the Zettelkasten.

My note-taking method is informed by the commonplace book and zettelkasten: why reinvent a wheel that needs no reinventing (it is only, really, about translating things from one medium to another)

Before the advent of the computer, the use of a zettelkasten or commonplace book to research was "common place".

What happened with the transition? Perhaps the methodology was lost in the transition, people just dumping things into a word file?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6jyFE9Ps_Q

Possible example for zettelkasten output project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3uHeNgy5GM

Possible example for zettelkasten output project.

A zettelkasten involves a lot of layers in Bloom's taxonomy (see third annotation with context)

Can the zettelkasten method be a means of fixing/helping with this problem of facts versus creativity in a programmatic way?

Perhaps there is a need for balance between the two perspectives of formal and progressive education. While one can teach another the broad strokes of the "rules" of note taking, for example, using the zettelkasten method and even give examples of the good and the bad, the affordances, and tricks, individuals are still going to need to try things out to see what works for them in various situations and for their specific needs. In the end, its nice to have someone hand one the broad "rules" (and importantly the reasons for them), so that one has a set of tools which they can then practice as an art.

According to Henderson, there are three steps to keeping a commonplace book:

1) Read (Consume)

"Commonplace books begin with observation."

2) Capture (Write) Always also capture the source.

3) Reflect Write own thoughts about the material. Synthesize, think.

I'd personally use a digital commonplace book (hypothes.is), like Chris Aldrich explains, as my capture method and my Antinet Zettelkasten as my reflect methodology. This way the commonplace book fosters what Luhmann would call the thought rumination process.

(1:21:20-1:39:40) Chris Aldrich describes his hypothes.is to Zettelkasten workflow. Prevents Collector's Fallacy, still allows to collect a lot. Open Bucket vs. Closed Bucket. Aldrich mentions he uses a common place book using hypothes.is which is where all his interesting highlights and annotations go to, unfiltered, but adequately tagged. This allows him to easily find his material whenever necessary in the future. These are digital. Then the best of the best material that he's interested in and works with (in a project or writing sense?) will go into his Zettelkasten and become fully fledged. This allows to maintain a high gold to mud (signal to noise) ratio for the Zettelkasten. In addition, Aldrich mentions that his ZK is more of his own thoughts and reflections whilst the commonplace book is more of other people's thoughts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OUn2-h6oVc

an example for https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/12/call-for-model-examples-of-zettelkasten-output-processes/

reply to u/GlitteringFee1047 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/147yj2b/personal_website/

I've got a personal site at https://boffosocko.com which I've had for many years and used in part as a digital commonplace book/pseudo-zettelkasten. I've been an active member of the IndieWeb community for many years as well and happy to answer any questions about those experiences. To bring things closer to the overlap of that and this particular community, folks may appreciate the following related material:

• https://indieweb.org/zettelkasten
• https://indieweb.org/digital_garden
• https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book

quote by Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center

I'm curious if anyone has ever experimented with making an online Luhmann-esque Zettelkasten using WikiMedia as their platform?

What were the pros/cons you found for doing so?

Have you tried other methods (index cards, Obsidian, other(s)?), and if so what affordances did MediaWiki provide or were lacking for what you were attempting to accomplish?

Did you use transclusion functionality?

Did you attempt to build or implement backlink functionality? Use the API or plugins for this?

Did you build some sort of custom index (manually, programatically, other)?

If you used it for writing, what methods did you attempt with respect to taking the smaller pieces/ideas and building them up into longer written pieces?

Links to specific public examples are welcome here. I'll also accept links to public versions of commonplace books or similar forms which also use MediaWiki as their infrastructure.

syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/144hzn9/zettelkasten_with_mediawiki/

I would argue that it is more subtle than this. It allows you to forget, but the aim is to allow you to learn, remember, and slowly build.

reply to u/coachdan007 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13ygoz9/comment/jn80a7z/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Mostly these references were using Hypothesis, though I do have some material in Zotero. I don't use Raindrop. IIRC, I knew I'd seen the topics before and did a search for the tag bible and then narrowed it down my adding on zettelkasten and it popped up immediately. A large number of my replies here are just querying my digital ZK and spitting out pre-packaged answers or pointers to relevant material. I also occasionally do the same thing with my analog version, though with those I have to type them out. I follow roughly the same process for doing my own queries and writing. You get surprisingly good at it after a while, particularly when you know it's in there somewhere. Of course r/ has it's own internal search function too, so you could check out: - https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/search/?q=bible&restrict_sr=1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/search/?q=bible&restrict_sr=1

and have a slightly wider net to get the fishes and loaves you're seeking. With the proper notes at hand, perhaps you'll soon be able to turn water into wine? Interestingly, I think you're the first who's ever asked this question here (or other related fora). I hope people don't think I spend all my time writing all these custom answers when I'm just tipping out my zettelkasten. (Though I do always keep my original answers too in the eventuality that I ever want to turn all of these thoughts into an article or book.)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256099662210

American Business Systems Co. at 212 Summer Street, Boston, MA manufactured six drawer wooden card indexes some time circa early 1900s.

https://www.bulkofficesupply.com/

The lost index cards of Harold Innis :: Writing Slowly — by Richard (aka u/atomicnotes)

snippets on my note with some brief extensions...

I'm aware that HI's collection is now missing, but it could be partially recreated from typescript and the numbered notes.

Presumably the archives which contain the papers of Harold Innis.

Zettelkasten Lesson Plan Intro

Not much here beyond his longer article, though it does have a sample format for zettel which can be useful for those starting out.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/334894285475

On a postcard dated 1942-07-01, the Wabash Cabinet Company announced the "Removal of its New York Office on July 1st to 60 EAST 42nd STREET, (Lincoln Building)".

reply to u/drogers8 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13wlfbs/how_to_select_a_keyword_for_your_main_card/

I'm don't think I've ever seen that advice anywhere in my own reading. I've been doing this for ages and would suggest that it's actively bad advice. Use a keyword that seems useful, beneficial, and which you're likely to have the most interest in in the future. What do you suspect the future you will use to search for that card or a branch on that idea in the future? Use that.

Also, don't overthink this stuff. Just practice. You're going to make some mistakes, but with a small number of cards you'll start to figure it out on your own before things get too large. Your practice today is not going to look like your practice in 6 months and it'll change again 6 months after that.

https://random-blather.com/2014/04/28/information-isnt-power/

Illustration by David Somerville based on the original by Hugh McLeod.

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/ysRBGgACEe6UNPvIvmWBkQ

This diagram is roughly a cartoon of the zettelkasten process, especially if the panels are labeled: reading, excerpting/synopsis, linking, serendipity, writing.

Santalucia, Nick. “The Zettelkasten in the Secondary Classroom.” Blog, July 6, 2021. https://www.nicksantalucia.com/blog/the-zettelkasten-in-the-secondary-classroom-k12.

Reply to Will Simpson at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17939/#Comment_17939

There should be more conversation about zettelkasten as both a "ratchet" as well as a "flywheeel". Sometimes I feel like it's hard to speak of these things for either lack of appropriate words/naming and/or having a shared vocabulary for them.

Even Luhmann's "second memory" has a mushiness to it, but I certainly see your sense of it as a thing which moves forward. I have the same sort of sense with the Aboriginal cultural idea of a "songline" which acts as both a noun as well as having an internal sense of being a verb to me. The word "google" has physically and specifically undergone the transition from noun to verb in a way which "second memory" and "songline" haven't, though perhaps they should? The difference is that the word google is much more concrete and simple while second memory and songline have a lot more cultural material and meaning sitting with them if you know them and their fuller attendant practices.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13tv9ls/question_how_fast_did_you_name_your_antinet/

Mine was a bit into the process, but not until I got the filing cabinet where they'll all ultimately live: https://boffosocko.com/2022/08/08/55808119/#Naming

See examples of people naming them here including: - Cvrie (Fallout 4 reference) - torspedia (after username on MediaWiki installation) - Todd (Bad Words reference to study binder) - Plumeria (after 4 months) - Hamilton after video - Epictetus (meaning "to acquire" from stoicism) - Zeke (short for Ezekiel) - Stewie (personal communication, Scheper's nickname, not mentioned on this page)

Bob Ross' "happy accidents" tied to the idea of serendipity or the outcome of combinatorial creativity within a zettelkasten.

Ross's version is related to experimentation and the idea of adjacent possible. Taking a current known and extending it to see what will happening and accepting the general outcome. This was one of the roots of his creative process.

super interesting that Luhmann referred to his zettelkasten as a communication partner explicitly himself.

also interesting given AI models are easier to train now with several models already open sourced which allows actual interaction with your notes! would love to see where it goes.

reply to u/muhlfriedl by way of reply to u/chounosumuheya at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13s6dsg/comment/jlpt8ai/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Examples of zettelkasten users

S.D. Goitein, Beatrice Webb, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Harold Innis, Victor Margolin, Eminem, Aby Warburg, Antonin Sertillanges, Jacques Barzun, C. Wright Mills, Gotthard Deutsch, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Vladimir Nabokov, Gerald Weinberg, Michael Ende, Twyla Tharp, Hans Blumenberg, Keith Thomas, Arno Schmidt, Mario Bunge, Sönke Ahrens, Dan Allosso for a few more. If you go with those who used commonplace books and waste books, which are notebook-based instead of index card-based, there are thousands upon thousands more.

Historically the easier question might be: what creators didn't use one of these systems and was successful?!? The broad outlines of these methods go back much, much farther than Niklas Luhmann. These patterns are not new...

Personally, I've used my own slip box to write large portions of the articles on my website. I also queried it to compile this reply.

Atomic notes are not for making connections, but to facilitate more writing

quote via https://forum.zettelkasten.de/profile/dandennison84

reply to dandennison84 at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17921/#Comment_17921

I've written a bit before on The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten, the latter of which has been emerging since roughly 2013 in English language contexts. Some of it is similar to or extends @dandennison84's framing along with some additional history.

Because of the richness of prior annotation and note taking traditions, for those who might mean what we're jokingly calling ZK®, I typically refer to that practice specifically as a "Luhmann-esque zettelkasten", though it might be far more appropriate to name them a (Melvil) "Dewey Zettelkasten" because the underlying idea which makes Luhmann's specific zettelkasten unique is that he was numbering his ideas and filing them next to similar ideas. Luhmann was treating ideas on cards the way Dewey had treated and classified books about 76 years earlier. Luhmann fortunately didn't need to have a standardized set of numbers the way the Mundaneum had with the Universal Decimal Classification system, because his was personal/private and not shared.

To be clear, I'm presently unaware that Dewey had or kept any specific sort of note taking system, card-based or otherwise. I would suspect, given his context, that if we were to dig into that history, we would find something closer to a Locke-inspired indexed commonplace book, though he may have switched later in life as his Library Bureau came to greater prominence and dominance.

Some of the value of the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system stems from the same sorts of serendipity one discovers while flipping through ideas that one finds in searching for books on library shelves. You may find the specific book you were looking for, but you're also liable to find some interesting things to read on the shelves around that book or even on a shelf you pass on the way to find your book.

Perhaps naming it and referring to it as the Dewey-Luhmann note taking system or the Dewey-Luhmann Zettelkasten may help to better ground and/or demystify the specific practices? Co-crediting them for the root idea and an early actual practice, respectively, provides a better framing and understanding, especially for native English speakers who don't have the linguistic context for understanding Zettelkästen on its own. Such a moniker would help to better delineate the expected practices and shape of a note taking practice which could be differentiated from other very similar ones which provide somewhat different affordances.

Of course, as the history of naming scientific principles and mathematical theorems after people shows us, as soon as such a surname label might catch on, we'll assuredly discover someone earlier in the timeline who had mastered these principles long before (eg: the "Gessner Zettelkasten" anyone?) Caveat emptor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk

I wish he'd gotten into more of the detail of the research and index card making here as that's where most of the work lies. He does show some of his process of laying out and organizing the cards into some sort of sections using 1/3 cut tabbed cards. This is where his system diverges wildly from Luhmann's. He's now got to go through all the cards and do some additional re-reading and organizational work to put them into some sort of order. Luhmann did this as he went linking ideas and organizing them up front. This upfront work makes the back side of laying things out and writing/editing so much easier. It likely also makes one more creative as one is regularly revisiting ideas, juxtaposing them, and potentially generating new ones along the way rather than waiting until the organization stage to have some of this new material "fall out".

https://www.krapp.org/

Professor of Film & Media Studies, Informatics, English, and Music - UC Irvine

I am wholly unsurprised that Harold Innis maintained a card index (zettelkasten) through his research life, but I am pleased to have found that his literary estate has done some work on it and published it. The introduction seems to have some fascinating material on the form and structure as well as decisions on how they decided to present and publish it.

https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Harold-Adams-Innis-Heritage/dp/0802063829/

https://amzn.to/45xxFXH

via: Georg Henrik von Wright, “The Wittgenstein Papers,” The Philosophical Review 78:4 (1969), 483–563, here: 487.

von Wright seems to indicate that Wittgenstein created typescripts which he cut up into zettel and then was able to rearrange them into final forms.

https://www.3x5life.com/

Compare with other products in this category: - Analog (Jeff Sheldon productivity system) - Memindex - Bullet Journal - Frictionless Capture Cards - Pile of Index Cards

Connecting a Zettelkasten to a Commonplace Book

Interesting to see Scott trying this... I'm sure I've seen it before in a setting like this, but its obviously been done in the commonplace space by itself.

reply to u/edumanos at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13p0myn/academic_using_of_zettelkasten/

The Luhmann's method was very specific to him, but the broader slip box method has been in wide use in academic settings for centuries, particularly in the humanities. I most often recommend Umberto Eco's book in conjunction with Adler/Van Doren's How to Read a Book, but below are a small selection of manuals on very closely related note taking methods. These can be found in a handful of languages and some even more specific to particular areas of study, though broadly they're all useful to almost any area. You'll note that some are available for free on archive.org as they're out of copyright, have been scanned, or are open educational resources. I've tried to link most of these for convenience.

If this list isn't enough, or you're looking for something written for a specific subfield (sociology, for example), let me know as I'm sure there are a plethora of others, or even some fun short pieces like: - Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary. - Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.

My favorite short/overview video is that of Victor Margolin's process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI.

As for self-plagiarism, some have used a red pencil or other means to mark cards (notes) they've used in specific works as they write so that they know they've been used and can then self-cite their prior works to avoid self-plagiarism or to up their citation count.

• Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017.
• Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/.
• Barzun, Jacques. The Modern Researcher. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992. http://archive.org/details/modernresearcher00barz_1.
• Bernstein, Mark. Tinderbox: The Tinderbox Way. 3rd ed. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, Inc., 2017. http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/TinderboxWay/index.html.
• Blair, Ann M. “Manuals on Note-Taking (Ars Excerpendi).” In Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World. Brill, May 7, 2014. https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-the-neo-latin-world/manuals-on-note-taking-ars-excerpendi-B9789004271029_0058.
• Chavigny, Paul Marie Victor. Organisation du travail intellectuel, recettes pratiques à l’usage des étudiants de toutes les facultés et de tous les travailleurs. Paris: Delagrave, 1918. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011209555.
• DeCarlo, Matthew, Cory Cummings, and Kate Agnelli. Graduate Research Methods in Social Work. Open Social Work, 2021. https://doi.org/10.21061/msw-research.
• Dow, Earle Wilbur. Principles of a Note-System for Historical Studies. New York: Century Company, 1924.
• Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.
• Gessner, Konrad. Pandectarum Sive Partitionum Universalium. 1st Edition. Zurich: Christoph Froschauer, 1548.
• Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout.
• Heyde, Johannes Erich, and Heinz Siegel. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens. 10th ed. 1931. Reprint, Berlin: Kiepert, 1970. https://www.worldcat.org/title/TECHNIK-DES-WISSENSCHAFTLICHEN-ARBEITENS.-MIT-E.-ERG.BEITR.-DOKUMENTATION-VON-HEINZ-SIEGEL.-10.DURCHGES.AUFL/oclc/1075391218.
• Kuntze, Friedrich. Die Technik der geistigen Arbeit (The technique of mental work). Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1923.
• Langlois, Charles Victor, and Charles Seignobos. Introduction to the Study of History. Translated by George Godfrey Berry. First. New York: Henry Holt and company, 1898. http://archive.org/details/cu31924027810286.
• ———. Introduction to the study of history. London, Cass, 1966. http://archive.org/details/introductiontos00langgoog.
• Leicester, Mal, and Denise Taylor. Take Great Notes. 1st edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2019.
• Maxfield, Ezra Kempton. “Suggestions for Note Taking.” Delaware College Bulletin 6, no. 4 (December 1910).
• Mei, Jennifer. Refining, Reading, Writing : Includes 2009 Mla Update Card. Nelson Canada, 2007. http://archive.org/details/refiningreadingw0000meij.
• Range, Ellen. Take Note! Taking and Organizing Notes. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Cherry Lake Publishing, 2014.
• Schrag, Zachary M. The Princeton Guide to Historical Research. Princeton University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1pdrrc9.
• Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert. La vie intellectuelle; son esprit, ses conditions, ses méthodes. Paris, Éditions de la Revue des jeunes, 1921. http://archive.org/details/lavieintellectue00sert.
• Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife.
• Seward, Samuel Swayze. Note-Taking. Boston, Allyn and Bacon, 1910. http://archive.org/details/cu31924012997627.
• Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.
• Weinberg, Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005.

Good luck!

https://www.arno-schmidt-stiftung.de/Archiv/Zettelarchiv.html

The »notes of the day« shown so far from Arno Schmidt's note box for »Zettel's Traum« can be downloaded here:

Nie wiem, skąd wzięło się to stwierdzenie. Nawet jeśli zawiesimy kwestię oryginalności Zettelkasten (gdzie jest bowiem oryginał?) i weźmiemy pod uwagę chociążby to, jak notował Luhmann, to zauważymy, że kolorów (przede wszystkim czerwonego) u niego nie brakuje.

Nie jestem właśnie przekonany. Nie wiem, co tu jest podstawą, a co nie. Według mnie istotą Zettelkasten jest gromadzenie informacji w jednym miejscu, a tym, co pozwala to jedno miejsce określić są kategorie, etykiety z kolei pozwalają nawigować po notatkach, które mogą być rozsiane po różnych kategoriach.

reply to drogers8 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13eyg8p/comment/jkaksn4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

You can find some basic top level or second level DDC listings online, but to get the full set of listings, you've got to subscribe to the system which is updated every few years, something only library systems and large publishers typically do. To give yourself an idea of how deep this rabbit hole goes the DDC 23 is four volumes long and each volume is in the 1,000 page range. The DDC 23 self-identifies as 0.25.4'31-dc22. For most categories DDC generally only goes as deep as the thousands place (like Finsler geometry) though others will go slightly deeper usually to designate locations/cities. Most libraries only categorize to the tenths place, and sometimes these numbers can be found on the copyright page of books, often with the DDC volume number. I mentioned the UDC in that piece, but didn't give any links, but you could try:<br /> - https://udcsummary.info/php/index.php?lang=en - https://udcc.org/index.php/site/page?view=subject_coverage - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Decimal_Classification

Honestly, you're wasting time and making way more work for yourself to adopt one of these numbering methods for a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten. Try asking yourself this question: What benefits/affordances will I get in the long run for having my numbering system mirror the DDC or UDC? (Unless you can come up with a really fantastic answer, you're just making more work to look up headings/numbers on a regular basis.)

In practice the numbers are simply addresses so you can quickly find things again using your index. If you're doing threads of cards (folgezettel), you're going to very quickly have tangentially related ideas of things mixed together anyway. (As an example, I've got lots of science and even some anthropology mixed into my math section, so having DDC numbers on those would be generally useless at the end of the day.) If it helps, Nicolas Gatien has a pretty reasonable and short video which makes this apparent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdHH3YjOnZE.

reply to u/drogers8 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13eyg8p/extended_numbering_and_why_use_outline_of/

Based on my research, Scott Scheper was the one of the original source for people adopting the Academic Outline of Disciplines. I've heard him say before that he recommends it only as a potential starting place for people who are new to the space and need it as a crutch to get going. It's an odd suggestion as almost all of the rest of his system is so Luhmann-based. I suspect it's a quirk of how he personally started and once moving it was easier than starting over. He also used his own ZK for showing others, and it's hard to say one thing in a teaching video when showing people something else. Ultimately it's hard to mess up on numbering choices unless you're insistent on using only whole numbers or natural numbers. I generally wouldn't suggest complex numbers either, but you might find some interesting things within your system if you did. More detail: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/27/thoughts-on-zettelkasten-numbering-systems/ The only reason to have any standardized base or standardized numbers would be if you were attempting to have a large shared ZK with others. If this is your intent, then perhaps look at the Universal Decimal Classification, though a variety of things might also work including Dewey Decimal.

reply to u/throwthis_throwthat at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13gcbj1/requesting_advice_for_where_to_put_a_related_idea/

I don't accept the premise of your question. This doesn't get said often enough to people new to zettelkasten practice: Trust your gut! What does it say? You'll learn through practice that there are no "right" answers to these. Put a number on it, file it, and move on. Practice, practice, practice. You'll be doing this in your sleep soon enough. As long as it's close enough, you'll find it. Save your mental cycles for deeper thoughts than this.

Asking others for their advice is fine, but it's akin to asking a well-practiced mnemonist what visual image they would use to remember something. Everyone is different and has different experiences and different things that make their memories sticky for them. What works incredibly well for how someone else thinks and the level of importance they give an idea is never as useful or as "true" as how you think about it. Going with your gut is going to help you remember it better and is far likelier to make it easier to find in the future.