Digital Smart Notes Part 4: Creating Permanent Notes In Roam Research<br /> by Harley Stanger

Part 1: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-1-the-capture-toolkit/ - Part 2: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-2-exporting-highlights-to-roam-research-with-readwise/ - Part 3: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-3-creating-literature-notes-in-roam-research/ - Part 4: Digital Smart Notes Part 4: Creating Permanent Notes In Roam Research

synopsis of Ahrens

reply to u/Turbulent-Focus-1389 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1132e2r/your_antinet_walkthrough/

Examples like this would certainly be useful/helpful, but you may be waiting a while. Until then some extant (if possibly longer or even written) examples are always helpful. Some may be a bit less Antinet in shape, but the examples are useful none-the-less: - See comment thread here: https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/12/call-for-model-examples-of-zettelkasten-output-processes/ - https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/#historical-examples - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcs4tyey18 with notes at https://notes.andymatuschak.org/ (though perhaps a deeper view into them is more illustrative: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z4AX7pHAu5uUfmrq4K4zig9x8jmmF62XgaMXm?stackedNotes=z4KZ9973AoHhvM9Pj5Qrds48JXNbMEwVJmVRw&stackedNotes=z8RTzukqNLKFXzqLwx25HrUrg5E5jiziGznWB&stackedNotes=z6UDDkom8Aifg6mLdjT1sPtbMBweCmpyTwmJT - Scott Scheper has a LOT here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSofW8L-FnU-Z8BFXqv8JZt5Cp0mj2_Eb - Ryan Holiday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk - Robert Greene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ueMHkGljK0

There's a catalog for this exhibition available:

Meschede, Friedrich, ed. Serendipity. Vom Glück des Findens. Snoeck Verlagsges, 2015. https://www.buecher.de/shop/buecher/serendipity-vom-glueck-des-findens/broschiertes-buch/products_products/detail/prod_id/43762021/.

Serendipity - Vom Glück des Findens Niklas Luhmann Ulrich Rückriem Jörg Sasse 11 07 15 11 10 15 - Kunsthalle Bielefeld

ᔥ[[Andreas Fasel]] in Niklas Luhmann: Ein Zettelkasten als zweites Gehirn at 2015-06-28<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-13 11:45:39)

Fasel, Andreas. “Niklas Luhmann: Ein Zettelkasten als zweites Gehirn.” Die Welt, June 28, 2015, web edition, sec. North Rhine-Westphalia. (https://www.welt.de/regionales/nrw/article143147819/Ein-Zettelkasten-war-Luhmanns-zweites-Gehirn.html.

google translate:

The Zettelkasten will be shown in the exhibition “ Serendipity – From the Luck of Finding ” at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, July 11 to October 11

In addition to having appeared in the Marbach zettelkasten exhibition in 2013, Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten also appeared in the exhibition "Serendipity: From the Luck of Finding" at Kunsthalle Bielefeld from July 11 - October 11, 2015.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/lNF9RKvTEe28Rqcr9qzi8w

Coincidence that Schmidt shows a journalist Luhmann's zettelkasten in 2015 and asks if they're disappointed?

It's reasonably likely that he'd already read ZKII 9/8,3.

see: https://hypothes.is/a/GFj15IcbEe21OIMwT2TOJA

in the article which follows below, there's an explicit mention of this specific zettel, so the question on priority here is closed.

google translate:

It's a pity that Schmidt shouldn't be interested in such private matters. Because the aim of his research project, which is funded by the NRW Academy of Sciences and Arts, is to prepare Niklas Luhmann's scientific estate for his scientific descendants.

When everything is scanned, note by note must be transferred from handwriting to typescript. Then all cross-references with which Luhmann has networked his slips of paper should also be linked digitally. "And in the end, individual sections of the box could perhaps also be published in book form," explains Schmidt. Duration of the project: 16 years.

Schmidt's work on Niklas Luhmann's scientific estate is funded by the NRW Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the project is expected to last 16 years. The careful observer will notice that this duration is over half of Luhmann's own expected project length of 30 years. The cost of which is also significantly more than the "cost: none" that Luhmann projected at the time.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/zUjEIvfWEeykOiO1E8YAYw

Researchers ought to account for the non-insignificant archival cost of their work once it's done.

google translate:

The world of Niklas Luhmann – Schmidt now sometimes finds it on the back of the slip. Because Luhmann apparently recycled every scrap of paper he could find for his box. So it can happen that on the front of the note there are condensed reflections on the concept of autopoiesis or summaries of unknown treatises from earlier centuries, while on the back you can find the first arithmetic exercises by Luhmann's children. Or check statements. Or instructions to the household help: “Sweep and wipe the basement stairs thoroughly”, for example.

Luhmann adhered to the standard advice to write only on one side of his cards, though perhaps not just for the usual reasons, but in part because he recycled the papers he had at hand to make his slips. On the backs of his notes one can find instructions he'd made to his household help, his children's homework papers, bank statements, and other papers he happened to have at hand.

Schmidt estimated in 2015 that it would take at least a year to scan in the entire corpus of Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten, imaging 50 cards at a time.

Instead of using pre-made stiff index cards, Luhmann used standard paper which he cut up into DIN A6 sized slips which he packed into his drawers. Schmidt had trouble removing slips from some of the boxes because they were packed so tightly.

Exactly how much space would be saved writing on standard paper versus index cards in a collection as large as Luhmann's?

google translate:

And yet he never found what he was actually looking for, but something new and surprising.

While you'll only find in your zettelkasten exactly what you placed there, you may be surprised to find more than you expected.

google translate:

The curiosity of his students and colleagues, who wanted to analyze the box, was correspondingly high. For years, however, Luhmann's children fought in court about the scientific legacy, and for a long time there was no question of a reappraisal. It was not until 2011 that the University of Bielefeld was able to buy Luhmann's intellectual legacies. And now, since the beginning of the year, research has actually been going on into what this box, which sociologists have sometimes referred to as the Holy Grail, is all about.

Bielefeld University sued Luhmann's estate (his children) over his intellectual legacy. In 2011 they were finally able to purchase his papers, but research on his papers and zettelkasten didn't begin until early 2015.

google translate:

When the universal scholar, who was as lovable as he was odd, died in 1998, he not only left behind a work of world renown, but also that box of papers that was already the subject of legends during his lifetime.

This article indicates that Luhmann's zettelkasten was legendary during his lifetime, but was this really the case? Luhmann indicated people's disappointment in his own writing (ZKII 9/8,3), but is there other anecdotal evidence that this wasn't the case?

What does the lawsuit between the family and the Bielefeld over his papers indicate?

Hennemann, Alexa. “Ausstellungseröffnung am 4. März: »Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie« Mit Navid Kermani, Norbert Miller und Meike Werner. Zum 250. Geburtstag von Jean Paul.” Deutches Literatur Archiv Marbach, February 13, 2013. https://www.dla-marbach.de/presse/presse-details/news/pm-11-2013/.

http://www.pearltrees.com/barockschloss/knowledge-management-germany/id12863560

Knowledge Management in Germany by Barockschloss

Example of someone using the social bookmarking application Pearltrees as a form of digital zettelkasten. They've created a collection of cards about zettelkasten.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/r6nzos/niklas_luhmanns_daily_work_routine/

Because one may need to spend an inordinate amount of time filtering through potentially bad suggestions of artificial intelligence, the time and energy spent keeping a commonplace book or zettelkasten may pay off magnificently in the long run.

... which is not a bad implementation of mind uploading given current technical constraints.

This is the key feature you should consider before deciding how to implement your ZettelkastenIsForLifeNotJustForChristmas.

This makes me want to create RoundPegRoundHole. But then I'm not sure whether this should be in h. or tw. I would lean towards a public tw which has the feeling of TV Tropes in that it's a database of patterns. Perhaps that's the use case of publishing a subset of a tw/Zettelkasten.

The other (meta) thought this generated was how the decision of whether to be public or private interrupts the pleasant flow that comes from knowing exactly where to put a note and how to divide a thought. This is what experience tiddlywiki fluency is trying to capture.

Zettelkasten workflow<br /> by pqnelson

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/tb04cc/how_to_take_smart_notes_by_ahrens_receives_its/

https://gitlab.com/sthesing/zettels

Arbeiten mit Zettelkästen<br /> by Daniel Lüdecke

at this time in 2013-08-29, Christian Tietze was hosting zettelkasten.de on his personal domain before it moved later that year to its ultimate site, thus the reason that the Twitter link here resolves to Christian's site https://christiantietze.de/ now.

At the time, Daniel was obviously aware of both Christian and Manfred Kuehn's Taking Note blog.

He was also aware of Kuehn's original translation of Luhmann's essay in it's original location at http://scriptogr.am/kuehnm/post/2012-12-22-111621 before it moved. (I remember spending ages puzzling out the original location via the Internet Archive).

https://zettels.info/en/inf/impressum.asp

https://zettels.info/en/int/default.asp

A digital note taking product

ᔥ[[Frank Berzbach]] in Künstliche Intelligenz aus Holz - sciencegarden - Magazin für junge Forschung at 2002-06-30<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-10 06:59:08)<br /> where he referred to it as "A free online Zettelkasten by Joachim Richter"

A Luhmann web article from 2001-06-30!

Berzbach, Frank. “Künstliche Intelligenz aus Holz.” Online magazine. Magazin für junge Forschung, June 30, 2001. https://sciencegarden.net/kunstliche-intelligenz-aus-holz/.

Interesting to see the stark contrast in zettelkasten method here in an article about Luhmann versus the discussions within the blogosphere, social media, and other online spaces circa 2018-2022.

ᔥ[[Daniel Lüdecke]] in Arbeiten mit (elektronischen) Zettelkästen at 2013-08-30 (accessed:: 2023-02-10 06:15:58)

google translate:

So if you raise such a wooden life partner, you will get more and more interesting answers to your questions after a few years...

I love the idea of rearing a zettelkasten as a "wooden life partner".

google translate:

The Zettelkasten always tends to know less than you do, but always as much as we have written on cards.

Google translate:

In addition to the methods of conventional research, card boxes are usually created in which index cards are used to record what needs to be constantly quoted. Students often try this out intensively for their diploma thesis for the first time. Notes are sorted alphabetically according to keywords and authors, and what has been sorted into the box can also be taken out again.

An indication from 2001 of the state of the art of zettelkasten written in German. Note that the description is focused more on the index card or slip-based version of a commonplace book sorted alphabetically by keywords and authors primarily for quoting. Most students trying the method for the first time are those working on graduate level theses.

Luhmanns Arbeitsweise im elektronischen Zettelkasten<br /> by Daniel Lüdecke

translation: Luhmann's way of working in the electronic zettelkasten

https://github.com/Zettelkasten-Team/Zettelkasten

Lüdecke, Daniel. “Introduction to Luhmann’s Zettelkasten - Thinking and Its Technical Implementation.” Presented at the Trier Digital Humanities Autumn School 2015, Trier University, October 1, 2015. https://strengejacke.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/introduction-into-luhmanns-zettelkasten-thinking.pdf..

The fact that Luhmann changed the structure of his zettelkasten with respect to the longer history of note taking and note accumulation allowed him several useful affordances.

In older commonplacing and slip box methods, one would often store their notes by topic category or perhaps by project. This mean that after collection one had to do additional work of laying them out into some sort of outline to create arguments and then write them out for publication. This also meant that one was faced with the problem of multiple storage or copying out notes multiple times to file under various different subject headings.

Luhmann overcame both of these problems by eliminating categories and placing ideas closest to their most relevant neighbor and numbering them in a branching fashion. Doing this front loads some of the thinking and outlining work which would often be done later, though it's likely easier to do when one has the fullest context of a note after they've made it when it is still freshest in their mind. It also means that each note is linked to at least one other note in the system. This helps notes from being lost and allows a simpler indexing structure whereby one only needs to use a few index entries to get close to the neighborhood of an idea as most other related ideas are likely to be nearby within a handful or more of index cards.

Going from index to branches on the tree is relatively easy and also serves the function of reminding one of interesting prior reading and ideas as one either searches for specific notes or searches for placing future notes.

When it comes to ultimately producing papers, one's notes already have a pre-arranged sort of outline which can then be more easily copied over for publication, though one can certainly still use other cross-links and further rearranging if one wishes.

Older methods focused on broad accretion of materials into subject ordered piles while Luhmann's practice not only aggregated them, but slowly and assuredly grew them into more orderly trains of thought as he collected.

Link to: The description in Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens (section 1.2 Die Kartei) at https://hypothes.is/a/-qiwyiNbEe2yPmPOIojH1g which heavily highlights all the downsides, though it doesn't frame them that way.

Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten<br /> http://fremdlesen.de/?p=297

Zettelkasten: Niklas hol' mir 'n Bier!<br /> Niklas Luhmann: Hatte ich doch bloss nie diessen ver-fluchten zettelkasten erfunden!

translation:

Niklas get me a beer!<br /> If only I had never invented that damn note box!

Link to: Effort of maintaining a zettelkasten: https://hypothes.is/a/ahU8YqmoEe2tL79vZF9PvQ

https://strengejacke.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/introduction-to-luhmanns-zettelkasten-thinking-and-its-technical-implementation/

This is the acid test of whether the process is working.

https://www.thesing-online.de/blog/zettelkasten-hypertext-linearity-sequentiality

an elegant little statement

https://www.edwinwenink.xyz/posts/59-writing_not_collecting/

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10xls6m/does_anyone_ever_get_frustrated/

This question calls to mind that I haven't seen the word consilience in this space at all. Search pulls up only one post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zg80qc/comprehensible_texts_productivity_and_again/

Where does consilience sit with respect to the use of a zettelkasten?

Example of someone (u/HerrRey) who defines zettelkasten as "concept oriented, atomic notes that are linked to each other", but who doesn't use or exclude "IDs or the folgezettel method". Interestingly they feel like they're not getting the "big picture" of their work.

Is there an affordance in these missing pieces that prevents them from seeing the big picture because of what they're missing? Is it just neurodiversity? Are they not creating outputs which connect the small to the big, and thus missing it that way?

http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/

Some in the current zettelkasten space come close to this (Bob Doto comes to mind) while others seem to be more dogmatic. I think people generally ultimately do this in practice, but there is still a lingering sense of orthodoxy.

So nice to see a blog post specifically talk about "Luhmann's Zettelkasten method" rather than a more generic zettelkasten method as being Luhmann's. Notice the 2015 date before the "fame" had caught on in the blogosphere's productivity porn space closer to 2018.

reply to u/stjeromeslibido at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10wj6tv/what_are_your_two_favourite_articles_videos_or/

My favorite video for its utter brevity and compactness combined with complexity and trueness to the historical record, not to mention the spectacular production value - The Process of Writing World History of Design, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI.

Runner up video, which I love for the supreme simplicity of the method—literally slips and a box - “The Speed Traders/Mandela/Eminem.” 60 Minutes. CBS, October 10, 2010. https://youtu.be/pPXBwy3JgVo?t=64

My favorite article for its practicality and some studied perspective - Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.

Origin story of TW implementation.

Route 1 to pragmatic Zettelkastening!

Zettelkasten example using my preferred toolchain.

Possibly the quickest way to get the technique under your fingers by browsing the author's example.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10tpngb/concepts_maps_and_zettelkasten/

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_map

What are the connections between zettelkasten and conceptual maps?

How are they different/similar to Tony Buzan's mind maps?

Stettler, Lucia. “Geheime Gästekartei überlebt Hotelbrand – und birgt Zündstoff.” Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF), April 8, 2021, sec. Kultur. https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/brisanter-fund-geheime-gaestekartei-ueberlebt-hotelbrand-und-birgt-zuendstoff.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>ManuelRodriguez331</span> in Advantages of Analog note taking : Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>02/07/2023 08:33:25</time>)</cite></small>

Google Translate:

Lois Hechenblaikner, Andrea Kühbacher, Rolf Zollinger (editors): «No more Easter greetings! The secret guest file of the Grandhotel Waldhaus in Vulpera". Edition Patrick Frey, 2021.

The richly illustrated volume offers an exciting journey into a piece of Swiss tourism history: the editors have very carefully curated the 20,000 index cards from the years 1920-1960, structured them by topic and placed them in a larger, social context.

The readers learn a lot about the clientele in the Hotel Waldhaus, sometimes even in small biographical portraits; and they can use concrete examples to follow how the concierge's use of language has changed over time - especially in connection with Jewish guests, for example.

Which edition did you read?

This is the second time I've seen people refer to "the 8 point summary". I don't recall seeing this in the 2017 edition. Maybe it was added in the second ed.

I struggled to locate this definition in the 2017 edition of the book, either because it isn't there, or because it doesn't have an index.

https://cathieleblanc.com/2023/02/05/choosing-learning-materials/

Cathie notices that students skip materials about the theoretical "why" of assignments to get to the simpler assignments.

This seems to be an issue with some in the personal knowledge management space who want to jump into the technology, the terminology, and moving things about without always understanding what they're doing or why. Many end up giving up as a result. Few books provide reasoning behind the terminologies or building blocks they describe to provide the theoretical why. As a result some may figure it out from long, fraught practice, but it's likely that more are not seeing the results they expect and thus giving up.

Categorizing ideas (and or indexing them for search) can be useful for quick bulk storage, but the additional work of linking ideas to each other with in a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten can be more useful in the long term in developing ideas.

Storage by category means that ideas aren't immediately developed explicitly, but it means that that work is pushed until some later time at which the connections must be made to turn them into longer works (articles, papers, essays, books, etc.)

Those who practice analog note taking have a high level of friction which prevents them from over-collecting (or "capture bloat", importing "all the things", or "collector's fallacy") ideas, which may not rise to a certain level of value. Beyond this, the requirement to find at least one other note to link each idea to provides a smaller hurdle against these hoarding practices.

https://www.harpgallery.com/shop/item42735.html

https://www.harpgallery.com/photos/42/7/35/card42735file3.jpg?v=1664570467

Photo here indicates offices at:<br /> - [255] Canal Street, New York - [???] Chestnut [??], Philadelphia - [???- ???] Mission [??], San Francisco

With manufacturing in Ilion, NY

Refinished 4 drawer 3x5 sold for $750 on 2023-01-11

https://www.ebay.com/itm/115316277621

Clarke & Baker Co. had offices in New York and Philadelphia

https://www.ebay.com/itm/255962754535

Clarke & Baker, 280 Broadway manufactured card index boxes in the early 1900s.

In TiddlyWiki this just means having > 1 tiddler visible.

So this is a way to abstract elements in Toulmin's approach to argument construction from the data which instantiates the specific point being argued.

Doable in TiddlyWiki as it's just guidance on how to write tiddlers.

Structure notes is a technical term. They're "meta-notes" in that they're notes that point to other notes containing content.

This seems to be what Ahrens means by a "sequence". I guess there's one explicit sequence defined by notes and their forward/back links, but structure notes can create used to arbitrary sequences.

This also seems to be the key mechanism by which a linear narrative is created.

This reminds me of esoteric transmission, in the sense that the ghost is only visible to those who are already prepared to see it.

It's also fitting that tantra is often narrowly equated with tantric sex.

"Екатерина Шульман: Практический Нострадамус, или 12 умственных привычек, которые мешают нам предвидеть будущее". vedomosti/ (in Russian). Retrieved 24 June 2021.

A Note on the Cargo Cult of Zettelkasten

Modern cargo cults can be seen in many technology and productivity spaces where people are pulled in by exaggerated (or sometimes even real claims) of productivity or the general "magic" of a technology or method.

An example is Niklas Luhmann's use of his zettelkasten which has created a cargo cult of zettelkasten aspirants and users who read one or more of the short one page blog posts about his unreasonable productivity and try to mimic it without understanding the system, how it works, or how to make it work for them. They often spend several months collecting notes, and following the motions, but don't realize the promised gains and may eventually give up, sometimes in shame (or as so-called "rubbish men") while watching others still touting its use.

To prevent one's indoctrination into the zettelkasten cult, I'll make a few recommendations:

Distance yourself from the one or two page blog posts or the breathless YouTube delineations. Ask yourself very pointedly: what you hope to get out of such a process? What's your goal? Does that goal align with others' prior uses and their outcomes?

Be careful of the productivity gurus who are selling expensive courses and whose focus may not necessarily be on your particular goals. Some are selling very pointed courses, which is good, while others are selling products which may be so broad that they'll be sure to have some success stories, but their hodge-podge mixture of methods won't suit your particular purpose, or worse, you'll have to experiment with pieces of their courses to discover what may suit your modes of working and hope they'll suffice in the long run. Some are selling other productivity solutions for task management like getting things done (GTD) or bullet journals, which can be a whole other cargo cults in and of themselves. Don't conflate these![^1] The only thing worse than being in a cargo cult is being in multiple at the same time.

If you go the digital route, be extremely wary of shiny object syndrome. Everyone has a favorite tool and will advocate that it's the one you should be using. (Often their method of use will dictate how much they love it potentially over and above the affordances of the tool itself.) All of these tools can be endlessly configured, tweaked, or extended with plugins or third party services. Everyone wants to show you their workflow and set up, lots of which is based on large amounts of work and experimentation. Ignore 99.999% of this. Most tools are converging to a similar feature set, so pick a reasonable one that seems like it'll be around in 5 years (and which has export, just in case). Try out the very basic features for several months before you change anything. Don't add endless plugins and widgets. You're ultimately using a digital tool to recreate the functionality of index cards, a pencil, and a box. How complicated should this really be? Do you need to spend hundreds of hours tweaking your system to save yourself a few minutes a year? Be aware that far too many people touting the system and marketers talking about the tools are missing several thousands of years of uses of some of these basic literacy-based technologies. Don't join their island cult, but instead figure out how the visiting culture has been doing this for ages.[^2] Recall Will Hunting's admonition against cargo cults in education: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”[^3]

Most people ultimately realize that the output of their own thinking is only as good as the inputs they're consuming. Leverage this from the moment you begin and ignore the short bite-sized advice for longer form or older advice from those with experience. You're much more likely to get more long term value out of reading Umberto Eco or Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren[^4] than you are an equivalent amount of time reading blog posts, watching YouTube videos, or trolling social media like Reddit and Twitter.

Realize that reaching your goal is going to take honest-to-goodness actual work, though there is potential for fun. No matter how shiny or optimized your system, you've still got to do the daily work of reading, watching, listening and using it to create anything. Focus on this daily work and don't get sidetracked by the minutiae of trying to shave off just a few more seconds.[^5] In short, don't get caught up in the "productivity porn" of it all. Even the high priest at whose altar they worship once wrote on a slip he filed:

"A ghost in the note card index? Spectators visit [my office to see my notes] and they get to see everything and nothing all at once. Ultimately, like having watched a porn movie, their disappointment is correspondingly high." —Niklas Luhmann. <small>“Geist im Kasten?” ZKII 9/8,3. Niklas Luhmann-Archiv. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8-3_V. (Personal translation from German with context added.)</small>

[^1] Aldrich, Chris. “Zettelkasten Overreach.” BoffoSocko (blog), February 5, 2022. https://boffosocko.com/2022/02/05/zettelkasten-overreach/.

[^2]: 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.

[^3]: Good Will Hunting. Miramax, Lawrence Bender Productions, 1998.

[^4]: Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

[^5]: Munroe, Randall. “Is It Worth the Time?” Web comic. xkcd, April 29, 2013. https://xkcd.com/1205/.

Recommended resources

Choose only one of the following and remember you may not need to read the entire work:

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/.

Bernstein, Mark. Tinderbox: The Tinderbox Way. 3rd ed. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, Inc., 2017. http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/TinderboxWay/index.html.

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.

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.

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.

https://elizabethfilips.podia.com/validation-cohort-muse

Elizabeth Filips is running a validation cohort for a course (presumably called MUSE, the marketing name for her "system" as well) on how to take notes and build a zettelkasten (or a second brain—there's evidence that she's taken Tiago Forte's course). She's got some indications that she's using a zettelkasten-like method for creation, but her burgeoning empire also appears to be firmly centered in the productivity porn space. I'm curious how she views her Muse system being different from a zettelkasten?

She's got an incredibly focused sales funnel web presence here.

reply to u/New-Investigator-623 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10r6uwp/comment/j6wy4mf/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Ideas, concepts, propositions, et al. in this context are just the nebulous dictionary definitions. Their roots and modern usage have so much baggage now that attempting to separate them into more technical meanings is difficult unless you've got a solid reason to do so. I certainly don't here. If you want to go down some of the rabbit hole on the differences, you might appreciate Winston Perez' work on concept modeling which he outlines with respect to innovation and creativity here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGQ-dW7yfPc.

I debated on a more basic framing of chemistry or microbiology versus statistical mechanics or even the closely related statistical thermodynamics, but for the analogy here, I think it works even if it may scare some off as "too hard". With about 20 linear feet of books in my library dedicated to biology, physics, math, engineering with a lot of direct focus on evolutionary theory, complexity theory, and information theory I would suggest that the underlying physics of statistical mechanics and related thermodynamics is precisely what allows the conditions for systems to evolve and emerge, for this is exactly what biological (and other) systems have done. For those intrigued, perhaps Stuart Kauffman's Origins of Order (if you're technically minded) or At Home in the Universe (if you're less technically oriented) are interesting with respect to complexity and emergence. There's also an interesting similar analogy to be made between a zettelkasten system and the systems described in Peter Hoffman's book Life's Rachet. I think that if carefully circumscribed, one could define a zettelkasten to be "alive". That's a bigger thesis for another time. I was also trying to stay away from the broad idea of "atomic" and drawing attention to "atomic notes" as a concept. I'm still waiting for some bright physicist to talk about sub-atomic notes and what that might mean... I see where you're going with phenomics, but chemistry and statistical mechanics were already further afield than the intended audience who already have issues with "The Two Cultures". Getting into phenomics was just a bridge too far... not to mention, vastly more difficult to attempt to draw(!!!). 😉 Besides, I didn't want Carol Greider dropping into my DMs asking me why didn't I include telomeres or chancing an uncomfortable LAX-BWI flight and a train/cab ride into Baltimore with Peter Agre who's popped up next to me on more than one occasion.

Honestly, I was much less satisfied with the nebulousness of "solution of life"... fortunately no one seems to be complaining about that or their inability to grapple with catalysis. 🤷🏼

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2zY7l2tzoQ

Ugh... another short mediocre introduction. Repeats the origin myth.

Seems to take a very Ahrens' based framing, but screws up a few pieces. More focus on "hub notes" and completely misses the idea of an index somehow?!?

The last section of 2+ minutes really goes off the rails and recommends converting notes from other places and muddles about "Favorite problems" (ostensibly a reference to Feynman's 12 Favorite Problems, but isn't direct about it?).

Also encourages the "Feynman technique"...

re: https://hypothes.is/a/HqT-lG1fEeqHX7fnzQAfGg

A zettelkasten provides a catalytic surface to which ideas in the "solution of life" can more easily adhere to speed their reaction with ideas you've already seen and collected.

Once combined via linking, further thinking and writing, they can be released as novel ideas for everyone to use.

Here's a real-life example using Obsidian. I suspect the success is in the use rather than the tool, and I would go for TiddlyWiki.

One of the values of social media is that it can allow you to practice or rehearse the potential value of ideas and potentially getting useful feedback on individual ideas which you may be aggregating into larger works.

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2502/time-well-spent

Presumably written by Edmund

reply to u/sscheper at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10o4jnl/comment/j6ii64d/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Is this about as close as Scott Scheper comes to recommending taking Cornell Notes?!? 😂

Let's be honest that this is roughly what this (and Bibcards) ultimately is. You take some general notes on a lecture (book or other material) as a sense making tool to help you better understand the material. You write down some bits you want to remember and use for some brief spaced repetition perhaps. You write down some pointed questions to help review for a test later. The subtle difference is that Cornell notes were designed to do the sense making, summary, and repetition portions well for students and learners, but didn't focus as much on the longer tail of knowledge creation using analysis, and synthesis. To fill in the last mile for your card index, take the best idea(s) (maybe one or two at most) and flesh it out to create a useful maincard.

If it's useful try some 8 x 12" paper for your lecture notes, and take them Bibcard or Cornell Notes style. Once you've excerpted your main card notes, you can fold your sheet in half twice and file it with your Bibcards, naturally taking care to have the paper's spine face up to prevent other slips from becoming lost in between. (This obviously works best for those using 4 x 6" index cards though if you're in the 3 x 5" camp, then use 6" x 10" sheets for folding.) For those with middle grades or high school students, this may be a more profitable method for introducing these methods to their study, learning, and creation patterns.

Summary: Cornell Notes can be an excellent method for capturing session-based fleeting notes and distilling them down into permanent notes. Cornell Notes focus on the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy rather than the broader spectrum that a zettelkasten method might.

reply to u/IamOkei at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10mha0u/what_are_your_goals_for_creating_your_zettelkasten/

The gloriousness of combinatorial creativity!

https://www.antinet.org/wooden-antinet-waitlist

$995 for a single wooden, two drawer card index is a lot on the ridiculous side. Once can get rare vintage ones in excellent condition online for nearly a tenth the price!

Restored fine furniture versions with several dozen drawers go in this range.

Possibly the worst is that these don't even have following blocks to hold partial drawers of cards upright.

link to: https://boffosocko.com/2022/12/26/the-ultimate-guide-to-zettelkasten-index-card-storage/

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10k6apz/antinet_for_nomads/

reply to u/stjeromeslibido at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10nlu4l/comment/j6dhx2t/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

It's relatively easy since it's all hiding in my notes. lt may become a book one of these days, I'm just not sure how to approach it quite yet, though I'm getting close to the philosophy I think is missing from the bigger space. I find it somewhat useful to use my notes to create longer responses in spaces like this that I expect I'll reuse in a book.

One can find utility in asking questions of their own note box, but why not also leverage the utility of a broader audience asking questions of it as well?!

I've seen that same copy of Webb's book floating around in various places. In fact, it's the exact same fingerprinted version of the .pdf that I originally read, which can be seen by appending https://via.hypothes.is/ to the URL like this https://via.hypothes.is/http://digamoo.free.fr/webb1926.pdf which will quickly reveal my own notes in the margins. (It may help some to find the small portions outside of Appendix C which relate to note making. 😀)

If you want to follow me down the rabbit hole on some of the intellectual history and examples, try: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/ which I try to keep updated with new pieces as they arrive.

reply to u/stjeromeslibido at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10nlu4l/comment/j6bdgma/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I've used data from my own cards to create timelines before using the Knightlab's TimelineJS tool: https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=18QD2-Kx0WdFBzqDv1sTkQWOJLGHGXsvr4NBLYNiX9FA&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650%27%20width=%27100%%27%20height=%27650%27%20webkitallowfullscreen%20mozallowfullscreen%20allowfullscreen%20frameborder=%270%27

You'll note that it's got a fun card-like flavor to its design. 🤩

Historically, while they had certainly done so much earlier, historians began doubling down on slip-based research work flows in the late 1800's. Many in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were heavily influenced by the idea of "historical method" or the German "Wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens". Primary sources going back over a century have included:

• Bernheim, Ernst. Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie : mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hilfsmittelzum Studium der Geschichte ... völlig neu bearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage. 1889. Reprint, Leipzig : Duncker, 1903. http://archive.org/details/lehrbuchderhisto00bernuoft.
• 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.
• Dow, Earle Wilbur. Principles of a Note-System for Historical Studies. New York: Century Company, 1924.
• Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957. http://archive.org/details/modernreseracher0000unse.
• 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.

A few prime examples of historians practicing this sort of card index method (though not necessarily in the same form as Niklas Luhmann) include:

• Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.
• Pomeroy, Earl. “Frederic L. Paxson and His Approach to History.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39, no. 4 (1953): 673–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/1895394.
• Aldrich, Chris. “S.D. Goitein’s Card Index (or Zettelkasten).” BoffoSocko (blog), January 15, 2023. https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten/.
• Lustig, Jason. “‘Mere Chips from His Workshop’: Gotthard Deutsch’s Monumental Card Index of Jewish History.” History of the Human Sciences 32, no. 3 (July 1, 2019): 49–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695119830900.
• Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout.
• Margolin, Victor. The Process of Writing World History of Design, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI.

Margolin's short video is particularly lovely for its incredible depth despite its brevity.

Beyond this there is also a very rich history of sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, linguists, and others in the humanities using similar methods.

Beatrice Webb has a fairly good description of how she created her "scientific notes" in the late 1880/1890s in a database-like fashion in the appendix to her memoir My Apprenticeship and expanded on some of the ideas in a more specific text a few years later.

• Webb, Beatrice. My Apprenticeship. First Edition. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926.
• Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.

A good description from Bob Doto.

reply to u/jackbaty at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10mjwq9/ive_decided_i_dont_care_too_much_where_new_notes/

u/jackbaty, If it doesn't make sense for you (yet, or for your specific needs), you can always follow in the footsteps of the hundreds of thousands who used a topical subject heading method of the commonplace book before Luhmann's example shifted the space over the last decade. If it worked for Francis Bacon, you'll probably be alright too... (See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/10/reframing-and-simplifying-the-idea-of-how-to-keep-a-zettelkasten/)

I find that sometimes, it is useful to bank up a few dozen cards before filing/linking them together. Other times I'll file them by category in a commonplace book like system to ruminate a bit only later to move them to a separate Luhmann-esque zettelkasten area where they're more tightly linked with the ideas around them. After you've been doing it a while, it will be easier to more tightly integrate the three-way conversation or argument you're having between yourself, your card index, and the sources you're thinking about (or reading, watching, listening to). You mention that "my brain needs at least some level of structure", and I totally get it, as most of us (myself included) are programmed to work that way. I've written some thoughts on this recently which may help provide some motivation to get you around it: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/19/on-the-interdisciplinarity-of-zettelkasten-card-numbering-topical-headings-and-indices/

It helps to have a pointed reason for why you're doing all this in the first place and that reason will dramatically help to shape your practice and its ultimate structure.

reply to u/pipepistolnoscope at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10lqfsn/comment/j62dp7o/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

These are slightly easier to find in a variety of styles, colors, and materials if you're using European A5 or A6 slip sizes. Search for 6 ring binders which usually come in A5 or A6 sizes for a variety of planners, calendars, and general notes with accessories. Franklin Covey has a variety of binders for their 4.25" x 6.75" note pages and planners which will likely work with index cards, but I haven't tried that.

If you use US standard index cards 4 x 6" or 3 x 5", you'll want an appropriate 6 ring hole punch to pre-punch your cards as appropriate, but keep in mind the two standard sizes can be slightly off with respect to the binder you find but they're probably close enough it shouldn't be a big issue as most of the binders are slightly larger in both directions to protect the paper inside.

I recently posted about note taking on the go, so you might find some interesting ideas, methods, modifications or even DIY options there or in the comments: https://boffosocko.com/2022/12/01/index-card-accessories-for-note-taking-on-the-go/

If you really want to go crazy you can get 6-hole punches to make your own cards.

And if you like you can co-opt those holes in your notebox by using them for taxonomy terms and removing/or not the connective pieces to indicate membership of a group. Then by putting a knitting needle through large groups of cards, you can sort through your collection to find related items the way they used to in early computing with edge-notched cards. 😉🗃️

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2483/tablet-for-zettelkasten#latest

https://supernote.com/pages/note-system-everything-you-need-to-stay-organized

The Ratta Supernote e-reader/e-note device indicates that you can link notes "in a zettelkasten-like" way.

Interesting that they say this rather than "wiki-like"...

Not so much origin myth here, but popularization myth…

The index is the place for categorization. Now the questions is how deep is good enough to categorize.

This idea is quite interesting in the sense that categorization is limiting. Defining is limitation

https://wildrye.com/let-your-notes-dictate-the-purpose-of-your-pkm-system/

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10h23fm/wildly_aspirational/

On the Jokerzettel

9/8j Im Zettelkasten ist ein Zettel, der das Argument enthält, das die Behauptungen auf allen anderen Zetteln widerlegt.

Aber dieser Zettel verschwindet, sobald man den Zettelkasten aufzieht.

D.h. er nimmt eine andere Nummer an, verstellt sich und ist dann nicht zu finden.

Ein Joker.

—Niklas Luhmann, ZK II: Zettel 9/8j

Translation:

9/8j In the slip box is a slip containing the argument that refutes the claims on all the other slips. But this slip disappears as soon as you open the slip box. That is, he assumes a different number, disguises himself and then cannot be found. A joker.

Many have asked about the meaning of this jokerzettel over the past several years. Here's my slightly extended interpretation, based on my own practice with thousands of cards, about what Luhmann meant:

Imagine you've spent your life making and collecting notes and ideas and placing them lovingly on index cards. You've made tens of thousands and they're a major part of your daily workflow and support your life's work. They define you and how you think. You agree with Friedrich Nietzsche's concession to Heinrich Köselitz that “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.” Your time is alive with McLuhan's idea that "The medium is the message." or in which his friend John Culkin said, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

Eventually you're going to worry about accidentally throwing your cards away, people stealing or copying them, fires (oh! the fires), floods, or other natural disasters. You don't have the ability to do digital back ups yet. You ask yourself, can I truly trust my spouse not to destroy them?,What about accidents like dropping them all over the floor and needing to reorganize them or worse, the ghost in the machine should rear its head?

You'll fear the worst, but the worst only grows logarithmically in proportion to your collection.

Eventually you pass on opportunities elsewhere because you're worried about moving your ever-growing collection. What if the war should obliterate your work? Maybe you should take them into the war with you, because you can't bear to be apart?

If you grow up at a time when Schrodinger's cat is in the zeitgeist, you're definitely going to have nightmares that what's written on your cards could horrifyingly change every time you look at them. Worse, knowing about the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle, you're deathly afraid that there might be cards, like electrons, which are always changing position in ways you'll never be able to know or predict.

As a systems theorist, you view your own note taking system as a input/output machine. Then you see Claude Shannon's "useless machine" (based on an idea of Marvin Minsky) whose only function is to switch itself off. You become horrified with the idea that the knowledge machine you've painstakingly built and have documented the ways it acts as an independent thought partner may somehow become self-aware and shut itself off!?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa9v8Z7Rac

And worst of all, on top of all this, all your hard work, effort, and untold hours of sweat creating thousands of cards will be wiped away by a potential unknowable single bit of information on a lone, malicious card and your only recourse is suicide, the unfortunate victim of dataism.

Of course, if you somehow manage to overcome the hurdle of suicidal thoughts, and your collection keeps growing without bound, then you're sure to die in a torrential whirlwind avalanche of information and cards, literally done in by information overload.

But, not wishing to admit any of this, much less all of this, you imagine a simple trickster, a joker, something silly. You write it down on yet another card and you file it away into the box, linked only to the card in front of it, the end of a short line of cards with nothing following it, because what could follow it? Put it out of your mind and hope your fears disappear away with it, lost in your box like the jokerzettel you imagined. You do this with a self-assured confidence that this way of making sense of the world works well for you, and you settle back into the methodical work of reading and writing, intent on making your next thousands of cards.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10gnh3u/box_update/

Example of a zettelkasten maintainer (u/A_Dull_Significance) who has shown a photo of their zettelkasten box with the superimposed words "My Baby!" over the box label as a means of indicating how valuable it is to them.

This is a great euphemism for the fun "work" of maintaining a zettelkasten.

via u/A_Dull_Significance at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10gnh3u/box_update/

This sounds somewhat similar to Mark Robertson's method of "live Roaming" (using Roam Research during his history classes) as a teaching tool on top of other prior methods.

link to: Roland Barthes' card collection for teaching: https://hypothes.is/a/wELPGLhaEeywRnsyCfVmXQ

http://richardcarter.com/sidelines/converting-my-notes-into-a-chapter/

Summary of Richard Carter's writing process from notes to product.

I've not seen this explicitly laid out as advice before though in most contexts people's note taking spaces have historically been divorced from their writing spaces for publication because slips and notes are usually kept physically separate from the working spaces or finished parts, but Richard Carter specifically separates the digital spaces in which he takes his notes and then uses them for creating end products. While he could both take notes in Obsidian, his tool of choice for notes, as well as write his finished pieces there, he actively changes contexts to use a different digital app to compose his notes into final pieces.

What affordances does this context shift provide? <br /> - blank slate may encourage reworking and expansion of original notes - is there a blank slate effect and what would it entail? - potentially moves the piece into a longer format space or tool which provides additional writing, formatting or other affordances (which? there don't seem to be any in this case aside from a potential "distraction free mode" which may tend to force one to focus only on the piece at hand rather than the thousands of other pieces (notes) hiding within the app)

What affordances does this remove?<br /> - He's forced to repeat himself (cut & paste / DRY violation)

Is it easier or harder (from a time/effort perspective) to provide citations with such a workflow? Carter does indicate that for him:

Having links to original sources in my outline makes the compilation of references for the chapter far easier than it used to be.

To test out some potential ideas and flow of a particular chapter for which he already had a corpus of notes, Richard Carter created a mindmap outline of some of his ideas. This in combination with testing out further ideas in his writing journal "three weeks later" caused him to make some significant changes in the structure of his chapter.

Richard Carter uses his writing journal practice to "think out loud" to himself. Often, laying out extended arguments helps people to refine and reshape their thinking as they're better able to see potential holes or missing pieces of arguments. It's the same sort of mechanism which is at work in rubber duck debugging of computer code: by explaining a process one is more easily able to see the missing pieces, errors, or problems with the process at hand.

Carter's separate note taking and writing journal practice being used as a thought space or writing workshop of sorts is very similar to the process seen in my preliminary studies of Henry David Thoreau's work in which he kept commonplace books and separate (writing) journals which show evidence of his trying ideas on for size and working them before committing them to his published works.

reply to IvanFerrero at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1740/anybody-using-this-approach-to-manage-contacts-how#latest

Many of the digital note taking tools that run off of text allow you to add metadata to your basic text files (as YAML headers, inline with a key:: value pair, or via #tags). Many of them have search functionality or use other programmatic means like query blocks, DataView, DataViewJS, etc. for doing queries on your files to get back lists, tables, charts, etc. of the data you're looking for.

The DataView repository has some good examples of how this works with something like Obsidian. Fortunately if you're using simple text files you can usually put them into one or more platforms to get the data and affordances you want out of them individually.

As an example, I have a script block in my daily note in Obsidian for birthdays in my notes that fall on today's date:

```dataview LIST birthday FROM "Lists/People" WHERE birthday.day = date(2023-01-18).day ```

If I put the text birthday:: 1927-12-08 into a note about Niklas Luhmann, his name and birthday would appear in my daily note on his birthday. One can use similar functionality to create tables of books they read with titles, authors, ratings, dates read, etc. or a variety of other data input which parses through your plaintext files. Services like Obsidian, Logseq, et al. are getting better about allowing these types of programmatic searches for users without backgrounds in programming and various communities usually provide help for pre-made little snippets like the one above that one can cut and paste into their notes to get the outputs that they need. Another Obsidian based example that uses text files for tracking academic journal articles can be found at https://nataliekraneiss.com/your-academic-reading-list-in-obsidian/; I'm sure there are similar versions for other text-based platforms.

In pre-digital times, for a manual version of a rolodex like this in paper, one could use different color cards as pseudo-tags (doctors are on yellow cards, family members on blue cards, friends on green cards, etc.) or adding edge notches or even tabs to represent different types of metadata. See for example the edge colored cards in Hawkexpress' Pile of Index Cards: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122

As humans we're good at separating things based on categories. The Dewey Decimal System systematically separates mathematics and history into disparate locations, but your zettelkasten shouldn't force this by overthinking categories. Perhaps the overlap of math and history is exactly the interdisciplinary topic you're working toward? If this is the case, just put cards into the slip box closest to their nearest related intellectual neighbor—and by this I mean nearest related to you, not to Melvil Dewey or anyone else. Over time, through growth and branching, ideas will fill in the interstitial spaces and neighboring ideas will slowly percolate and intermix. Your interests will slowly emerge into various bunches of cards in your box. Things you may have thought were important can separate away and end up on sparse branches while other areas flourish.

If you make the (false) choice to separate math and history into different "sections" it will be much harder for them to grow and intertwine in an organic and truly disciplinary way. Universities have done this sort of separation for hundreds of years and as a result, their engineering faculty can be buildings or even entire campuses away from their medical faculty who now want to work together in new interdisciplinary ways. This creates a physical barrier to more efficient and productive innovation and creativity. It's your zettelkasten, so put those ideas right next to each other from the start so they can do the work of serendipity and surprise for you. Do not artificially separate your favorite ideas. Let them mix and mingle and see what comes out of them.

If you feel the need to categorize and separate them in such a surgical fashion, then let your index be the place where this happens. This is what indices are for! Put the locations into the index to create the semantic separation. Math related material gets indexed under "M" and history under "H". Now those ideas can be mixed up in your box, but they're still findable. DO NOT USE OR CONSIDER YOUR NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!! Don't make the fatal mistake of thinking this. The numbers are just that, numbers. They are there solely for you to be able to easily find the geographic location of individual cards quickly or perhaps recreate an order if you remove and mix a bunch for fun or (heaven forfend) accidentally tip your box out onto the floor. Each part has of the system has its job: the numbers allow you to find things where you expect them to be and the index does the work of tracking and separating topics if you need that.

The broader zettelkasten, tools for thought, and creativity community does a terrible job of explaining the "why" portion of what is going on here with respect to Luhmann's set up. Your zettelkasten is a crucible of ideas placed in juxtaposition with each other. Traversing through them and allowing them to collide in interesting and random ways is part of what will create a pre-programmed serendipity, surprise, and combinatorial creativity for your ideas. They help you to become more fruitful, inventive, and creative.

Broadly the same thing is happening with respect to the structure of commonplace books. There one needs to do more work of randomly reading through and revisiting portions to cause the work or serendipity and admixture, but the end results are roughly the same. With the zettelkasten, it's a bit easier for your favorite ideas to accumulate into one place (or neighborhood) for easier growth because you can move them around and juxtapose them as you add them rather than traversing from page 57 in one notebook to page 532 in another.

If you use your numbers as topical or category headings you'll artificially create dreadful neighborhoods for your ideas to live in. You want a diversity of ideas mixing together to create new ideas. To get a sense of this visually, play the game Parable of the Polygons in which one categorizes and separates (or doesn't) triangles and squares. The game created by Vi Hart and Nicky Case based on the research of Thomas Schelling provides a solid example of the sort of statistical mechanics going on with ideas in your zettelkasten when they're categorized rigidly. If you rigidly categorize ideas and separate them, you'll drastically minimize the chance of creating the sort of useful serendipity of intermixed and innovative ideas.

It's much harder to know what happens when you mix anthropology with complexity theory if they're in separate parts of your mental library, but if those are the things that get you going, then definitely put them right next to each other in your slip box. See what happens. If they're interesting and useful, they've got explicit numerical locators and are cross referenced in your index, so they're unlikely to get lost. Be experimental occasionally. Don't put that card on Henry David Thoreau in the section on writers, nature, or Concord, Massachusetts if those aren't interesting to you. Besides everyone has already done that. Instead put him next to your work on innovation and pencils because it's much easier to become a writer, philosopher, and intellectual when your family's successful pencil manufacturing business can pay for you to attend Harvard and your house is always full of writing instruments from a young age. Now you've got something interesting and creative. (And if you must, you can always link the card numerically to the other transcendentalists across the way.)

In case they didn't hear it in the back, I'll shout it again: ACTIVELY WORK AGAINST YOUR NATURAL URGE TO USE YOUR ZETTELKASTEN NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!!

Giannakis, Georgios K., Christoforo Charalambakis, Franco Montanari, and Antonios Rengakos, eds. Studies in Greek Lexicography. Studies in Greek Lexicography. Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes 72. De Gruyter, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110622744.

Skimmed for portions relating to the Bauer zettelkasten

repetition of what appears on their primary web page in early 2023. the .pdf document doesn't appear to exist anymore (it redirects to https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/ddglc/index.html

A digitized version of Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten has been available online since 2015.

Katsikadeli, Christina. “Language Contact and Contact Induced Change in the Light of the (Digital) Lexicography of Greek Loanwords in the Non-Indo-European Languages of the Greco-Roman Worlds (Coptic, Hebrew/Aramaic, Syriac).” In Studies in Greek Lexicography, 21–40. Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes 72. Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110622744-003.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpvEY-2dSdU

In this episode, I explain the memory system I created in order to expand my memory to new heights. I call it the Sirianni Method and with it, you can learn how to create an intentional photographic memory.

Who the hell is the Sirianni this is named for, himself? (In the comments he mentions that "it's my italian grandpa's last name, I always liked it and a while back started naming things after it)

tl;dr: He's reinvented the wheel, but certainly not the best version of it.

What he's describing isn't remotely related to the idea of a photographic memory, so he's over-hyping the results, which is dreadful. If it were a photographic memory, he wouldn't need the spaced-repetition portion of his practice. While he mentions how he's regularly reviewing his cards he doesn't mention any of the last century+ of research and work on spaced repetition. https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm is a good place to start for some of this.

A lot of what he's doing is based on associative memory, particularly by drawing connections/links to other things he already knows. He's also taking advantage of visual memory by associating his knowledge with a specific picture.

He highlights emotion and memory, but isn't drawing clear connections between his knowledge and any specific emotions that he's tying or associating them to.

"Intentional" seems to be one of the few honest portions of the piece.

Overview of his Sirianni method: pseudo-zettelkasten notes with written links to things he already knows (but without any Luhmann-esque numbering system or explicit links between cards, unless they're hiding in his connections section, which isn't well supported by the video) as well as a mnemonic image and lots of ad hoc spaced repetition.

One would be better off mixing their note taking practice with associative mnemonic methods (method of loci, songlines, memory palaces, sketchnotes, major system, orality, etc.) all well described by Lynne Kelly (amongst hundreds before her who got smaller portions of these practices) in combination with state of the art spaced repetition.

The description of Luhmann's note taking system here is barely passable at best. He certainly didn't invent the system which was based on several hundred years of commonplace book methodology before him. Luhmann also didn't popularize it in any sense (he actually lamented how people were unimpressed by it when he showed them). Popularization was done post-2013 generally by internet hype based on his prolific academic output.

There is nothing new here other than that he thinks he's discovered something new and is repackaging it for the masses with a new name in a flashy video package. There's a long history of hucksters doing this sort of fabulist tale including Kevin Trudeau with Mega Memory in the 1990s and going back to at least the late 1800s with "Professor" Alphonse Loisette and the system he sold for inordinate amounts to the masses including Mark Twain.

Most of these methods have been around for millennia and are all generally useful and well documented though the cultural West has just chosen to forget most of them. A week's worth of research and reading on these topics would have resulted in a much stronger "system" more quickly.

Beyond this, providing a fuller range of specific options and sub-options in these areas so that individuals could pick and choose the specifics which work best for them might have been a better way to go.

Content research: D- Production value: A+

{syndication link](https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10ehrbd/comment/j4u495q/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)

he [Luhmann] popularized method of expanding your memory called the zettelkasten method (04:49)

At least he doesn't go with the invention myth, but it's also false that he was the one who popularized it... others online popularized it.

Andy is Adapting the approach of zettelkasten writer Christian Tietze

Aschheim, Steven E., and Vivian Liska, eds. The German-Jewish Experience Revisited. Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts 3. De Gruyter, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110367195.

Skimmed for references with respect to Aby Warburg and his zettelkasten.

Apparently Aby Warburg "obsessively kept" notes on antisemitic incidents on the Eastern front in his zettelkasten.

This piece looks at Warburg's Jewish identity as supported or not by the contents of his zettelkasten, thus placing it in the use of zettelkasten or card index as autobiography.

Might one's notes reflect who they were as a means of creating both their identity while alive as well as revealing it once they've passed on? Might the use of historical method provide its own historical method to be taken up on a meta basis after one's death?

https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/24570

Some interesting programming and structured data with relationship to the Gertrud Bauer Zettelkasten Online.

Richter, Tonio Sebastian. “Whatever in the Coptic Language Is Not Greek, Can Wholly Be Considered Ancient Egyptian”: Recent Approaches towards an Integrated View of the Egyptian-Coptic Lexicon.” Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies. Journal de La Société Canadienne Pour Les Études Coptes 9 (2017): 9–32. https://doi.org/10.11588/propylaeumdok.00004673.

Skimmed for the specifics I was looking for with respect to Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten.

This repeats chunks of prior notes from https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/ddglc/bauer-db/index.html, but is a better published/referenceable verion of it than just the web page.

Link to : - https://hypothes.is/a/nrqq3JXqEe2i5TOTRdgmQg - https://hypothes.is/a/uCcDTJXnEe2nZFtz8Aa_LQ

61 Available online at http://research.uni-leipzig.de/ddglc/bauerindex.html. The Work on this parergon to the lexicographical labors of the DDGLC project was funded by the Gertrud-und Alexander Böhlig-Stiftung. The digitization of the original card index was conducted by temporary collaborators and volunteers in the DDGLC project: Jenny Böttinger, Claudia Gamma, Tami Gottschalk, Josephine Hensel, Katrin John, Mariana Jung, Christina Katsikadeli, and Elen Saif. The IT concept and programming were carried out by Katrin John and Maximilian Moller.

Digitization of Gertrud Bauer's zettelkasten was underway in 2017 to put the data into a MySQL database with the intention of offering it as an online user interface sometime in 2017.

https://petersmith.org/blog/2022/12/10/zettelkasten/