9 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
  2. Dec 2023
  3. Feb 2023
    1. „Und?“, fragt Schmidt und macht eine Kunstpause, „enttäuscht?“

      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.

    2. Schade eigentlich, dass sich Schmidt für solche Privatheiten gar nicht interessieren soll. Denn das Ziel seines Forschungsprojekts, das von der NRW-Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste finanziert wird, ist es, den wissenschaftlichen Nachlass des Niklas Luhmann für dessen wissenschaftliche Nachfahren aufzubereiten. Wenn alles gescannt ist, muss Zettel für Zettel von der Handschrift in Maschinenschrift übertragen werden. Dann sollen sämtliche Querverweise, mit denen Luhmann seine Zettel untereinander vernetzt hat, auch digital verlinkt werden. „Und am Ende könnten vielleicht einzelne Abteilungen des Kastens auch in Buchform veröffentlicht werden“, erklärt Schmidt. Laufzeit des Projekts: 16 Jahre.

      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.

    3. Man kann zwar 50 Zettel auf einmal in den Scanner legen, doch für jeden einzelnen muss eine eigene Datei angelegt werden. Schmidt rechnet, dass es ein Jahr dauern wird, bis der ganze Kasten digital erfasst ist.

      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.

  4. Jul 2022
    1. Famously, Luswig Wittgenstein organized his thoughts this way. Also famously, he never completed his 'big book' - almost all of his books (On Certainty, Philosophical Investigations, Zettel, etc.) were compiled by his students in the years after his death.

      I've not looked directly at Wittgenstein's note collection before, but it could be an interesting historical example.


      Might be worth collecting examples of what has happened to note collections after author's lives. Some obviously have been influential in scholarship, but generally they're subsumed by the broader category of a person's "papers" which are often archived at libraries, museums, and other institutions.

      Examples: - Vincentius Placcius' collection used by his students - Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten which is being heavily studied by Johannes F.K. Schmidt - Mortimer J. Adler - was his kept? where is it stored?

      Posthumously published note card collections - Ludwig Wittgenstein - Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project - Ronald Reagan's collection at his presidential library, though it is more of an commonplace book collection of quotes which was later published - Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary - Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura - others...


      Just as note collections serve an autobiographical function, perhaps they may also serve as an intellectual autobiographical function? Wittgenstein never managed to complete his 'big book', but in some sense, doesn't his collection of note cards serve this function for those willing to explore it all?


      I'd previously suggested that Scott P. Scheper publish not only his book on note taking, but to actually publish his note cards as a stand-alone zettelkasten example to go with them. What if this sort of publishing practice were more commonplace? The modern day equivalent is more likely a person's blog or their wiki. Not enough people are publicly publishing their notes to see what this practice might look like for future generations.

  5. Jun 2022
    1. ZK II: Note 9/8 9/8 Zettelkasten 1 as a cybernetic system Combination of disorder and order, of lump formation and unpredictable combination realized in ad hoc access. Precondition: waiver of fixed order. The upstream differentiation: search aids vs. content; Registers, questions, ideas vs. Existing forms and partly makes superfluous what must be assumed in terms of inner order .

      Niklas Luhmann thought of the zettelkasten as a cybernetic system.

      He considers a precondition of its creation is that it ought to waive any "fixed order", allow for search, and the asking of questions.


      There are only the outlines of brief and scant thoughts here however, which would have required significant amounts of additional context not contained on the card. As a result one would require additional underpinning to understand what Luhmann means here as the card definitively couldn't have been directly or easily reused for future writing beyond the basic sketch outline he provides. What proportion of cards have brief thought sketches like this versus more fully thought out and directly reusable ideas within his system? Does Schmidt provide any guidance here without reading portions of the larger corpus? How does this differ from the guidance of Ahrens?

      (Translation from German to English via Google)

  6. Feb 2022
  7. Jan 2022
    1. The following article is a revised and shortened version of: Schmidt, J.F.K. (2016). Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Think-ing Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine. In A. Cevolini (Ed.), Forgetting Machines: Knowledge ManagementEvolution in Early Modern Europe (pp. 289–311). Leiden/Boston: Brill

      Note that this article is a revised and shortened form of a chapter in Cevolini's Forgetting Machines. I'm tempted to just read that instead...