Sounds like you're doing what Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren would call "inspectional reading" and outlining the space of your topic. This is both fine and expected. You have to start somewhere. You're scaffolding some basic information in a new space and that's worthwhile. You're learning the basics.

Eventually you may come back and do a more analytical read and/or cross reference your first sources with other sources in a syntopical read. It's at these later two levels of reading where doing zettelkasten work is much more profitable, particularly for discerning differences, creating new insights, and expanding knowledge.

If you want to think of it this way, what would a kindergartner's zettelkasten contain? a high school senior? a Ph.D. researcher? 30 year seasoned academic researcher? Are the levels of knowledge all the same? Is the kindergartner material really useful to the high school senior? Probably not at all, it's very basic. As a result, putting in hundreds of atomic notes as you're scaffolding your early learning can be counter-productive. Read some things, highlight them, annotate them. You'll have lots of fleeting notes, but most of them will seem stupidly basic after a month or two. What you really want as main notes are the truly interesting advanced stuff. When you're entering a new area, certainly index ideas, but don't stress about capturing absolutely everything until you have a better understanding of what's going on. Then bring your zettelkasten in to leverage yourself up to the next level.

• Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1940. https://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1940jul06-00011/
• Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.

reply to u/jack_hanson_c at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1g9dv9b/is_scoping_the_subject_a_counterzettelkasten/

This chapter is essentially what one ought to glean from skimming the TOC, the Index, and doing a brief inspectional read (Adler, 1972).

( ~ 6:25-end )

Steps for designing a reading plan/list: 1. Pick a topic/goal (or question you want to answer) & how long you want to take to achieve this. 2. Do research into the books necessary to achieve this goal. Meta-learning, scope out the subject. The number of books is relative to the goal and length of the goal. 3. Find the books using different tools such as Google & GoodReads & YouTube Recommendations (ChatGPT & Gemini are also useful). 4. Refine the book list (go through reviews, etc., in Adlerian steps, do an Inspectional Read of everything... Find out if it's truly useful). Also order them into a useful sequence for the syntopical reading project. Highlight the topics covered, how difficult they are, relevancy, etc. 5. Order the books (or download them)

Reminds me a bit of Scott Young's Metalearning step, and doing a skill decomposition in van Merriënboer et al.'s 10 Steps to Complex Learning

( ~ 10:20)

Kathleen recommends as part of an inspectional reading to find out who the author is. This is valuable and I believe not something Adler & van Doren mentioned in their book.

Knowing who the author is gives more context to the book and potentially some information about credibility.

Will implement this.

(~5:40)

It appears she put some sticky notes at important points/structure references while reading inspectionally...

Does this not take too much effort/time for an inspectional read a la Adler?

( ~ 10:45)

This is basically layered learning and making use of the creation of prior knowledge.

(~10:00)

It's not just about your domain knowledge on a subject, it's also about your reading skill in general and how difficult a book is written.

This video tells me I need to spend more time actually reflecting on the table of contents and title. As well as with the pigeonholing; classify in the mind in what categories this book falls.

(~3:00) Syntopical Reading requires building a map of the topic across sources (coming up with one's own terms) in order to find out what each author is saying.

How does one do this if the process of syntopical reading is the process by which one comes up with the knowledge? I believe the answer lies in a high skill level of Inspectional Reading

Obviously, one cannot make a perfect map from the get go, and this should not be the intention (defeat perfectionism)... However, a rough sketch or map is far more valuable than none at all.

I believe this is also the point of Dr. Justin Sung's prestudy... Building the barebone structure of the mindmap, finding the logic behind it all; the first layer.

Some of the missing piece here is knowing a method for extracting and subsequently building. Without the recipe in hand, it's difficult to bake a complex cake.

Not mentioned here as something which may be missing, but which Adler & Van Doren identify as strength and ability to read at multiple levels including inspectionally, analytically, and ultimately syntopically.

To some extent, the knowledge of the method for excerpting and arranging will ultimately allow the interested lifelong learner the ability to read syntopically even if it isn't the sort of targeted exercise it might be within creating a thesis.

Adler and Van Doren define structural note making as the sorts of questions one might ask at the level of inspectional reading including: - what kind of book is it? - what is it about? - what is the overall structure with respect to the argument the author intends to make?

also includes opening oneself up to open questions one might either ask themselves or those which the author proposes.

The authors don't cover it, but the skimming portion of inspectional reading helps one to build some of the context which the author is attempting to relay. Preloading some of this context will decrease one's mental burden when more deeply and actively attempting to consume a text.

sub-type of [[inspectional reading]] - reading the table of contents, skimming pages, looking for the hooks - how does this relate to [[proximity principle]] and [[scanning patterns]] - but getting a sense enough to know "is this book worth adding to the collection" for deeper reading

I think this is where I've been able to use #ADHD to it's advantages at times is with [[inspectional reading]] - being able to skim a large amount of content and get a sense of what I want to dig into later on or not.