Is he poking fun at the PKM space here? This non-definition definition would seem to be a subtle jab certainly.

Zettelkasten is a method for creating "slow productivity" against a sea of information overload

Some of the framing goes back to using the card index as a means of overcoming the eternal problem of "information overload" [see A. Blair, Yale University Press, 2010]. I ran into an example the other day in David Blight's DeVane Lectures at Yale in which he simultaneously shrugged at the problem while talking about (perhaps unknown to him) the actual remedy: https://boffosocko.com/2024/09/16/paul-conkins-zettelkasten-advice/

It's also seen in Luhmann claiming he only worked on things he found easy/fun. The secret is that while you're doing this, your zettelkasten is functioning as a pawl against the ratchet of ideas so that as you proceed, you don't lose your place in your train of thought (folgezettel) even if it's months since you thought of something last. This allows you to always be building something of interest to you even (especially) if the pace is slow and you don't know where you're going as you proceed. It's definitely a form of advanced productivity, but not in the sort of "give-me-results-right-now" way that most have come to expect in a post-Industrial Revolution world. This distinction is what is usually lost on those coming from a productivity first perspective and causes friction because it's not the sort of productivity they've come to expect.

In reply to writingslowly and Bob Doto at https://discord.com/channels/992400632390615070/992400632776507447/1285175583877103749<br /> Conversation/context not for direct attribution

Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter by [[Casey Newton]]

Newton takes a thin view of the eternal question of information overload and whether or not AI might improve the situation. No serious results...

Casey Newton makes this blanket statement. Any real evidence for this beyond his "gut"?

Many "paper machines" like Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten were almost custom made not just for searching, but for browsing through regularly much like commonplace books.

Perhaps the question is really, how is your particular database designed?

reply to u/atomicnotes at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1fa0240/early_1900s_3_x_5_inch_card_index_filing_cabinet/

This is an excellent question. I strongly suspect you won't find a booklet or book from Macey after 1906 that does this, though there may have been something before that.

You'll notice that on page 9, the 1906 Macy Catalog takes what I consider to be a pot shot at their Shaw-Walker competition in the section "Not a kindergarten". Shaw-Walker was selling not just furniture, but a more specific system, as well as a magazine. Since there's something to be learned for current knowledge managers and zettel-casters in the historical experience of these companies and the systems and methods they were selling, I'll quote that section here (substitute references to enterprise and business for yourself):

Not a Kindergarten

Every successful enterprise knows its own requirements best, and develops the best system for its own purpose. We manufacture business machinery. Our appliances and supplies are boiled down to a few parts, and simple forms, and will accommodate any system in any business. The office boy can understand and use them. If we undertook to teach the whole world how to run its business, we would have to saddle the cost on those who buy for what we tried to teach those who do not.

System in business is desirable, but no system can make a business successful, where the management is deficient. So called ‘Systems’ often result in useless expense and disappointment. We retain what experience proves useful and practical; so far as possible, eliminating all complicated and useless features. This explains how we can employ the best workmanship and material, combined with pleasing designs, and sell our goods with profit at lower prices than the inferior articles offered by others.

There may have been some booklets at some point, but I've not run across them for any of the major manufacturers of the time. (I've only loosely searched this area.) Some of the general principles were covered in various articles in System Magazine which was published by Shaw-Walker, a filing cabinet manufacturer, in the early century. System Magazine was sold to McGraw-Hill which renamed it Business Week, but it is now better known as Bloomberg Business Week. In the December 1906 issue of System, W. K. Kellogg, the President of the Toasted Corn Flake Company, is quoted touting the invaluable nature of the Shaw-Walker filing system at a time when his company was using 640 drawers of their system.

To some extent the smaller discrete "system" was really a part of a broader range of information and knowledge of business and competition. This can be seen in the fact that System Magazine still exists, just under an alternate name, along with a much broader area of business schools and business systems. We've just "forgotten" (or take for granted) the art of the smaller systems and processes which seemed new in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Other companies had "systems" they sold or taught, much like Tiago Forte teaches his "Second Brain" method or Nick Milo teaches "Linking Your Thinking". However, most of them were really in the business of selling goods: furniture, filing cabinets, desks, index cards, card dividers, etc. and this was where the real money was to be found at the time.

A similar example in the space is the Memindex System booklet that came with their box and index cards. The broad principles of the system can be described in a few paragraphs so that the average person can read it and modify it to their particular needs or use case. The company never felt the need to write an entire book along the lines of David Allen's Getting Things Done or Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal Method. Allen and Carroll are selling systems by way of books or classes. Admittedly, Carroll does have custom printed notebooks for using his methods, but I suspect these are a tiny fraction of the overall notebook sales for those who use his method.

Here's evidence of a correspondence course from the Library Bureau some time after 1927, which was when they'd been purchased by Remington Rand: https://www.ebay.com/itm/335534180049 . Library Bureau had an easier time as their system was standardized for libraries, though they did have efforts to cater to business concerns the way Shaw-Walker, The Macey Company, Globe-Wernicke and others certainly did.

I think the best examples in broader book form from that time period are Kaiser's two books which still stand up pretty well today for those creating knowledge management systems, zettelkasten, commonplace books, getting things done/productivity systems, second brains, etc.

Kaiser, J. Card System at the Office. The Card System Series 1. London: Vacher and Sons, 1908. http://archive.org/details/cardsystematoffi00kaisrich.

———. Systematic Indexing. The Card System Series 2. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1911. http://archive.org/details/systematicindexi00kaisuoft.

https://storm.genie.stanford.edu/

STORM Get a Wikipedia-like report on your topic<br /> STORM is a research prototype for automating the knowledge curation process.

very organized

49:00 Voys heeft een company wiki. Hierbij hanteren ze het volgende: weet je iets niet, kijk dan in het "orakel". Zit het er niet in? Voeg het dan toe. ... Je kan ook een logboek bijhouden voor beslissingen.

Knowledge management and organizing information for use – Andy Sylvester's Web by [[Andy Sylvester]]

In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)

Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.

30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.

Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.

While using different verbiage, Kaiser is talking about the idea of information overload here and providing the means to tame it by appropriately breaking it up into pieces upon which we might better apply our energies to turn it into something.

I appreciate his emphasis on "always" here. Though given our current rise of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, this is obviously a problem which people are attempting to overcome.

Sadly, AI seem to be designed for the commercial masses in the same way that Google Search is (cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/jx6MYvETEe6Ip2OnCJnJbg), so without a large enough model of your own interests, can AI solve your personal problems? And if this is the case, how much data will it really need? To solve this problem, you need your own storehouse of personally curated data to teach an AI. Even if you have such a store for an AI, will the AI still proceed in the direction you would in reality or will it represent some stochastic or random process from the point it leaves your personal data set?

How do we get around the chicken-and-egg problem here? What else might the solution space look like outside of this sketch?

[[Ton Zijlstra]] in Become a PKM champion for yourself! – Interdependent Thoughts

Julius Kaiser contemporaneously posits that mass manufacture and maximizing efficiency (greater output for minimum input) are the primary drivers of card index system use in the early 20th century. These also improve both precision and accuracy in handling information which allow for better company or factory operation, which would have been rising concerns for businesses and manufacturing operations at the rise of scientific management during the time period.

https://pkmsummit.com/

read [[Harold Jarche]] in dead blog walking at 20

[[Ton Zijlstra]] in A Free PKM Conference Ticket For a Student – Interdependent Thoughts

I could totally see this UI with a video generated version of Niklas Luhmann answering questions using the training set of notes in his online zettelkasten at https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/tutorial

syndication link: https://bavatuesdays.com/ai106-long-live-the-new-flesh/comment-page-1/#comment-388943

Adler & Hutchinson's Great Books of the Western World was an encyclopedia-based attempt to focus society on a shared history as their common ground. H. G. Wells in his World Encyclopedia thesis attempts to forge a new "moving" common ground based on newly evolving knowledge based on distilling truth out of science. Shared history is obviously much easier to dispense and spread about compared to constantly keeping a growing population up to date with the forefront of science.

How could one carefully compose and juxtapose the two to have a stronger combined effect?

How could one distribute the effects evenly?

What does the statistical mechanics for knowledge management look like at the level of societies and nations?

link to https://hypothes.is/a/abTT1KPDEe6nqxPx4fXggw

Wells would really hate social media, which he seems to have perfectly defined with this statement.

Does information overload prevent us from using knowledge more effectively? Are we distracted by the mundane?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/189972899/in/album-72157594200490122/

Despite being used primarily as a productivity tool the PoIC system also included some features of personal knowledge management with "discovery cards" and "citation cards". Discovery cards were things which contained one's own ideas while the citation cards were the ideas of others and included bibliographic information. Citation cards were tagged on the 5th block as an indicator within the system.

Question: How was the information material managed? Was it separate from the date-based system? On first blush it would appear not, nor was there a subject index which would have made it more difficult for one to find data within the system.

https://ideaflow.app/

Audio transcription notes with AI

2023-12-12 Released on PruductHunt https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ideaflow

Gotthard Deutsch didn't adhere to any particular theory of information when it came to the size of his notes. Instead Jason Lustig indicates that his perspective was influenced by his personal motto 'de minimis curat historicus' (history's minutiae matter), and as a result, he was interested in the smallest of distinctions of fact and evidence. ᔥ

http://sea.nathanstrait.com/journaling/

A lot of this looks surprisingly familiar... (even down to the ordering that it seems to have been discovered).

:)

https://theinformed.life/

Hosted by Jorge Arango (https://jarango.com/)

https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulating-knowledge

cross reference: https://hyp.is/H5NJiLHvEeyaWksSiTFgKg/super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm (same??)

reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1l8lyk/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

How is it that you're defining knowledge management or knowledge management system?

I would argue that any zettelkasten of any stripe is taking knowledge/ideas from either content or one's own brain and transferring them into some sort of media by which they are managed or structured in some way for later linking, combination, or other reuse. By base definition this is clearly knowledge management. I don't know how one defines it otherwise except by pure denial.

Your view of zettelkasten seems remarkably narrow. As a small sample the original Maschinen der Phantasie Marbach exhibition in 2013, which broadly prefigured the popularization of zettelkasten (and in particular the launch of zettelkasten.de) which we see today featured six zettelkasten of which Luhmann's was the only one with reference numbers or what we might now consider explicit HTML-like links. Most of the others contained either explicit groupings or implied links, but that doesn't diminish the value they held for their creators for creating a conversation of ideas for them. Incidentally most of the zettelkasten featured there prefigured Luhmann's and only two were roughly contemporaneous with his.

If you look more closely at Adler, et al. you'll notice that the entire purpose of their enterprise was to create and nurture a conversation between themselves and their readers with texts and authors spanning over 2,500 years, a point which is underlined by the introductory volume which preceded the two volumes of the Syntopicon. Not coincidentally, that first volume of the 54 book series was entitled "The Great Conversation."

Specifically from Adler's "How to Read a Book", the first edition of which predated the Great Books of the Western World:

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.

This is a process which is effectuated by

Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

and later,

That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will become clear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.

(As an aside, why aren't more people talking about the nature of dialectical notes, which seem far more important and useful than either fleeting notes and permanent notes?)

In your link to Holiday, he doesn't say his system isn't a zettelkasten, a word which an English speaker was highly unlikely to have used in 2013 in any case, even when referencing Manfred Kuehn from 2007. It simply indicates that "[Luhmann's] discipline seems to exceed mine because I am a lot less ordered".

The Goitein source (which I wrote) may use commonplace book as a descriptor but that doesn't mitigate the fact that the entirety of the zettelkasten tradition arises from it (the primary difference being things written (usually) on bound pages versus slips of paper). Before these there was the closely related idea of florilegia stemming from the earlier locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).

reply to u/glugolly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1fn8w4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 and

Well, Zettelkasten is not a knowledge management system. [...] Update: I mean digital ZK. Shoe-box ZK is a combination of knowledge management system of that time and "thought system" of Niklas Luhmann. u/Aponogetone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16njtfx/comment/k1f23nj/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm curious to see some evidence for why both you and u/Aponogetone say that a slip box (analog, digital or otherwise) is not a knowledge management system? Perhaps you don't think of it that way or use it solely to that end, but I find it difficult to see in light of the way I use mine and others have in the past. I suspect that if I had access to either of yours I could use it as a knowledge management system and it would tell me a lot about your interests and what you know and with a bit of work I could continue using it as one.

Even an argument against the more encompassing group nature versus personal or individual knowledge management systems is blunted by the use of a Zettelkasten by Adler, Hutchins, et al. to create the Syntopicon, the group uses by the Mundaneum effort (which went to great lengths to standardize information to be findable), the Oxford English Dictionary compilation, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL), Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, or even the academics who still use photocopies or microfilm versions of S.D. Goitein's zettelkasten.

What are the rest of us missing in your argument?

https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/a-true-second-brain-xrODaBD2

Recommended by Michael Grossman

https://factr.com/

A social network for "organizing and sharing your knowledge".

Almost every well known writer/composer/creative throughout history had some sort of note taking or knowledge system of one sort or another (florilegium, commonplace books, notebooks, diaries, journals, zettelkasten, waste books, mnemonic techniques, etc.), which would put them into your "active" category. I think you'd be hard put to come up with evidence of a "sudden" emergence of an "active" PKM system beyond the choice of individual users to actively do something with their collections or not.

If you want to go more distant than Eminem, try looking closely at Ramon Llull's practice in the 11th century, or Homer in the c. 8th century BCE. Or to go much, much farther back, there's solid evidence that indigenous peoples in Australia had what you call both passive and active PKM systems as far back as 65,000 years ago. These are still in use today. Naturally these were not written, but used what anthropologists call orality. (See Walter Ong, Milman Parry, Lynne Kelly, Margo Neale, Duane Hamacher, et al.)

https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/lytcon-2023/zsolt-viczian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StwbQGEy1c8

This sounds like the sort of personalized AI tool I've been wishing for since the early ChatGPT models if not from even earlier dreams that predate that....

• via u/enabeh at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13s6dsg/comment/jluovm9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

How To Use The ACE Framework This Week

ACE Framework - Add - Connect - Express

yet another acronym

hmmm... because... as a tool for building/developing thoughts

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/zkefis/is_the_concept_of_personal_knowledge_management/

The framing of "permanent notes" or "evergreen notes" has probably hurt a large portion of the personal knowledge management space. Too many people are approaching these as some sort of gold standard without understanding their goal or purpose. Why are you writing such permanent/evergreen notes? Unless you have an active goal to reuse a particular note for a specific purpose, you're probably wasting your time. The work you put into the permanent note is to solidify an idea which you firmly intend to reuse again in one or more contexts. The whole point of "evergreen" as an idea is that it can actively be reused multiple times in multiple places. If you've spent time refining it to the nth degree and writing it well, then you had better be doing so to reuse it.

Of course many writers will end up (or should end up) properly contextualizing individual ideas and example directly into their finished writing. As a result, one's notes can certainly be rough and ready and don't need to be highly polished because the raw idea will be encapsulated somewhere else and then refined and rewritten directly into that context.

Certainly there's some benefit for refining and shaping ideas down to individual atomic cores so that they might be used and reused in combination with other ideas, but I get the impression that some think that their notes need to be highly polished gems. Even worse, they feel that every note should be this way. This is a dreadful perspective.

For context I may make 40 - 60 highlights and annotations on an average day of reading. Of these, I'll review most and refine or combine a few into better rougher shape. Of this group maybe 3 - 6 will be interesting enough to turn into permanent/evergreen notes of some sort that might be reused. And even at this probably only one is interesting enough to be placed permanently into my zettelkasten. This one will likely be an aggregation of many smaller ideas combined with other pre-existing ideas in my collection; my goal is to have the most interesting and unique of my own ideas in my permanent collection. The other 2 or 3 may still be useful later when I get to the creation/writing stage when I'll primarily focus on my own ideas, but I'll use those other rougher notes and the writing in them to help frame and recontextualize the bigger ideas so that the reader will be in a better place to understand my idea, where it comes from, and why it might be something they should find interesting.

Thus some of my notes made while learning can be reused in my own ultimate work to help others learn and understand my more permanent/evergreen notes.

If you think that every note you're making should be highly polished, refined, and heavily linked, then you're definitely doing this wrong. Hopefully a few days of attempting this will disabuse you of the notion and you'll slow down to figure out what's really worth keeping and maintaining. You can always refer back to rough notes if you need to later, but polishing turds is often thankless work. Sadly too many misread or misunderstand articles and books on the general theory of note taking and overshoot the mark thinking that the theory needs to be applied to every note. It does not.

If you find that you're tiring of making notes and not getting anything out of the process, it's almost an assured sign that you're doing something wrong. Are you collecting thousands of ideas (bookmarking behavior) and not doing anything with them? Are you refining and linking low level ideas of easy understanding and little value? Take a step back and focus on the important and the new. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to create?

https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2023/04/28/want-to-read.html

👀 How did I not see this?!?? 😍 Looks like a good follow up to Ann Blair's Too Much to Know (Yale, 2010) and the aperitif of Simon Winchester's Knowing What We Know (Harper) which just came out on Tuesday. 📚 Thanks for the recommendation Kimberly!

reply to u/Accomplished-Tip-597 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12fowjy/to_buy_or_not_to_buy_a_course_and_if_the_latter/

Which "industry", though? Productivity? Personal Knowledge Management? Neither of these are focused on the idea of a Luhmann-esque specific zettelkastenare they?

For the original poster, what is your goal in taking a course? What do you want to get out of it? What are you going to use such a system for? The advice you're looking for will hinge on these.

Everyone's use is going to be reasonably idiosyncratic, so not knowing anything else, my general recommendation (to minimize time, effort, and expense) would be to read one of the following (for free), practice at some of it for a few weeks before you do anything else. Then if you need it, talk u/taurusnoises into a few consultations based on what you'd like to accomplish. He's one of the few who does this who's got experience in the widest variety of traditions in addition to expertise in the platform you want (though I'd still recommend him if you were using something else.)

• https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/
• https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/ (just 1-7, though the rest is profitable)
• https://www.academia.edu/35101285/Creating_a_Commonplace_Book_CPB_

Hypothesis Animated Intro, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCkm0lL-6lc.

This was an early animation for Hypothes.is as a tool. It was on one of their early homepages and is (still) a pretty good encapsulation of what they do and who they are as a tool for thought.

https://baty.net/2022/personal-knowledge-management

reply to u/deafpolygon at https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/121ihrj/other_pkm_forums_places_to_discuss/

The space is fragmented broadly by both tools (some with specific workflows) and philosophies, so you may have to hunt/peck (or subscribe/filter) for the types of pieces you're searching for. Here's some resources you might appreciate. In the fora section things are ordered roughly by relation to the topic as well as frequency of posting/activity.

Fora

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/
• https://forum.zettelkasten.de/
• Tools for Thought Rocks https://lu.ma/community/com-mmvGpDTZoRDsxou
• https://www.reddit.com/r/NoteTaking/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/
• https://forum.obsidian.md/
• https://forum.eastgate.com/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity
• https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/

Sites

• https://jarango.com/ and related podcast
• https://rheingold.com/
• https://zettelkasten.de/
• https://writing.bobdoto.computer/
• https://boffosocko.com/category/note-taking/
• https://www.lesswrong.com/ (Not entirely focused but frequently has related material to the space)

Discord

For some communities like Obsidian, Logseq, etc. you're also likely to find discord servers with some reasonable sub-channels and activity as well. A good non-product specific Discord with related material is The Productivists at https://discord.gg/m2bP2hh3. There's also one for Zettelkasten https://discord.gg/bYrVm9sr.

And of course as you visit all these locales, be sure to mention r/PKMS and maybe more will learn that this location is a better catch-all for in-depth conversations and questions.

reply to jameslongley at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2532/personal-knowledge-management-is-bullshit

I find that these sorts of articles against the variety of practices have one thing in common: the writer fails to state a solid and realistic reason for why they got into it in the first place. They either have no reason "why" or, perhaps, just as often have all-the-reasons "why", which may be worse. Much of this is bound up in the sort of signaling and consumption which @Sascha outlines in point C (above).

Perhaps of interest, there are a large number of Hypothes.is annotations on that original article written by a variety of sense-makers with whom I am familiar. See: https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/ Of note, many come from various note making traditions including: commonplace books, bloggers, writers, wiki creators, zettelkasten, digital gardening, writers, thinkers, etc., so they give a broader and relatively diverse perspective. If I were pressed to say what most of them have in common philosophically, I'd say it was ownership of their thought.

Perhaps it's just a point of anecdotal evidence, but I've been noticing that who write about or use the phrase "personal knowledge management" are ones who come at the space without an actual practice or point of view on what they're doing and why—they are either (trying to be) influencers or influencees.

Fortunately it is entirely possible to "fake it until you make it" here, but it helps to have an idea of what you're trying to make.

// abstract - summary - Rationalist approaches to environmental problems such as climate change - apply an information deficit model, - assuming that if people understand what needs to be done they will act rationally. - However, applying a knowledge deficit hypothesis often fails to recognize unconscious motivations revealed by: - social psychology, - cognitive science, - behavioral economics.

• Applying ecosystems science, data collection, economic incentives, and public education are necessary for solving problems such as climate change, but they are not sufficient.
• Climate change discourse makes us aware of our mortality
• This prompts consumerism as a social psychological defensive strategy,
• which is counterproductive to pro-environmental behavior.
• Studies in terror management theory, applied to the study of ritual and ecological conscience formation,
• suggest that ritual expressions of giving thanks can have significant social psychological effects in relation to overconsumption driving climate change.
• Primary data gathering informing this work included participant observation and interviews with contemporary Heathens in Canada from 2018–2019.

Stop Procrastinating With Note-Taking Apps Like Obsidian, Roam, Logseq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baKCC2uTbRc by Sam Matla

sophisticated procrastination - tweaking one's system(s) or workflow with the anticipation it will help them in the long run when it is generally almost always make-work which helps them feel smart and/or productive. Having measurable results which can be used against specific goals will help weed this problem out.

optimization-procrastination trap is related to shiny object syndrome - the idea of tweaking one's system constantly

perfect tool trap - guess what? there isn't one

"Personal knowledge management is an aid to your work, not the work itself." —Sam Matla #

This is entirely dependent on what and how you're doing it. If you're actively reading and annotating, and placing it somewhere, then that is the work, just in small progressive steps.

He needs to be more specific about what he means by "personal knowledge management" as a definition of something.

PKM Weekly Feb 19 2023 – Issue 057 – Curtis McHale<br /> by Curtis McHale

Despite the affordances of recording, searching, tagging made by computerized note taking systems, the problem still remains what to search for or collect and how to relate the smaller parts to the whole.

customer relationship management vs. personal knowledge management (or perhaps more important knowledge relationship management, the relationship between individual facts to the overall whole) suggested by autocomplete on "knowl..."

Great example of a historian implying the benefit of not only a card index, but of potentially how commonplace it was to not only have one, but to have stenographers or secretaries to help manage them.

Link this to the reference in Heyde about historians and others who were pushed to employ stenographers or copyists to keep their card indexes in order.

Given the cost of employing secretaries to manage our information, one of the affordances that computers might focus on as tools for thought is lowering the barrier for management and maintenance. If they can't make this easier/simpler, then what are they really doing beyond their shininess? Search is obviously important in this context.

What was the reference to employing one person full time to manage every 11 or 12 filing cabinets' worth of documents? Perhaps Duguid in the paper piece?

In contrast to the sort of mixing of personal life and professional life suggested by C. Wright Mills' On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952), a half century earlier Gotthard Deutsch's zettelkasten method showed what Lorraine Datson would term 'mechanical objectivity'. This is an interesting shift in philosophical perspective of note taking practice. It can also be compared and contrasted with a 21st century perspective of "personal" knowledge management.

Within the history of personal knowledge management, one was often faced with where to store their notes so that it would be easy to find and use them again. Often this was done using slip methods by means of "multiple storage" by making multiple copies and filing them under various headings. This copying process was onerous and breaks the modern database principle "don't repeat yourself" (DRY).

Alternate means of doing this include storing it in one place and then linking that location to multiple subject headings in an index, though this may cause issues of remembering which subject heading when there are many appropriate potential synonyms.

Modern digital methods allow one to store a note in one location and refer to it in multiple ways electronically as well as with aliases.

This was recommended in the Obsidian Members Group Discord for teaching someone how to setup an Obsidian vault with a GitHub repo for version control. Kamil claimed it was more clear than an intro article by [[Bryan Jenks]] on how to setup GitHub with Obsidian. Jenks eventually made a video about the process.

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

Arthur introduces the topic of Robert Pirsig and slips into the GTD conversation on 2004-05-19.

Was this a precursor link to the Pile of Index Cards in 2006?

Note that there doesn't seem to be any discussion of any of the methods with respect to direct knowledge management until the very end in which arthur returns almost four months later to describe a 4 x 6" card index with various topics he's using for filing away his knowledge on cards. He's essentially recreated the index card based commonplace book suggested by Robert Pirsig in Lila.

"PKM-guru wars"!! 🤣

--alcibiad on 2023-01-15 https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10bv20v/progressive_summarization_justintime_vs_active/

"current PKM theory"? There is such a thing beyond zeitgeist?!

https://hcommons.social/@ryanrandall/109677171177320098

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1611801002415632385.html

Look into plugin "Spaced Repetition" for Obsidian

https://diggingthedigital.com/hoe-werkt-het-maken-van-een-idee-notitie/

Frank calls out what he considers a good example of actual note taking practice rather than the more often seen talk about note taking theory. The example in question is Forrest Perry's YouTube video #9 Zettelkasten: from source card to idea card.

Sorry, I'm only just seeing this now Jan. I tag a lot in Hypothes.is to help make things a bit more searchable/findable in the future. Everything in Hypothes.is gets pulled into my Obsidian vault where it's turned into [[WikiLinks]] rather than tags. (I rarely use tags in Obsidian.) Really I find tagging is better for broad generic labels (perhaps the way many people might use folders) though I tend to tag things as specifically as I can as broad generic tags for things you work with frequently become unusable over time. I recommend trying it out for yourself and seeing what works best for you and the way you think. If you find that tagging doesn't give you anything in return for the work, then don't do it. Everyone can be different in these respects.

How was this tl;dr not obvious from before the start of their journey?

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalKnowledgeMgmt/comments/zgvbg4/to_zotero_or_not_to_zotero/

I don't often add in web pages, but for books and journal articles I love Zotero for quickly bookmarking, tagging, and saving material I want to read. It's worth it's weight in gold just for this functionality even if you're not using it for writing citations in publications.

Beyond this, because of it's openness and ubiquity it's got additional useful plugins for various functions you may want to play around with and a relatively large number of tools are able to dovetail with it to provide additional functionality. As an example, the ability to dump groups of material from Zotero into ResearchRabbit to discover other literature I ought to consider is a fantastically useful feature one is unlikely to find elsewhere (yet).

coupling and decoupling or learning dynamic of innovation

People focused more on the shine than the substance.

This is an excellent summary of the space since broadly 2018ish, especially from my observations of those online.

https://fosstodon.org/@jamesravey/109456308623863660

Connecting ideas across space and time when you don't know how they'll fully relate in advance is a tough design problem.

Outliner programs, first developed for computers in 1968, are great if you know the structure of a space in advance, but creating hierarchies by guessing about relationships in advance often turn out wrong or create other problems as one progresses.

Article recommended by @wfinck. Based on backlinks, look like the author may be using Obsidian or Notion and syncing into Dropbox to create free published version of notes

https://micro.blog/jean/12885227

Micro.blog users who are into pkm, note taking, and the like.

Paul M mentioned Tilium having a shared aspect that Obsidian doesn't. Seems to be like a GitHubish approach to Obsidian.

https://pkm.social/about

Run by Nicole van der Hoeven

Info Select was on this list of DEVONthink Windows alternatives. Looks like "personal information management" preceded the boom of "personal knowledge management"

Possibly like Holochain (which is distinct from the blockchain architecture). Blockchain only seems helpful if you need all of the following: - a database - immutability - distributed data - decentralized & totally trustless - append only - cryptographically secure assurance

Confer Brandon Enright's provocative talk "Blockchain is Bullshit" for an elaboration of these features. The first 10 or so minutes is mostly uninsightful trolling, so the link takes one to his argument about the key features of blockchain.

AFAICT, Holochain eases the feature of "decentralized", although Laurie Voss suggests that it's better to think of Bitcoin & Ethereum as "distributed" (in both the structure & control).

In Voss' taxonomy, I suspect that Holochain's structure would be "distributed" (ie, "No total point of failure, all nodes work on shared goal") and control would be "federated" (ie, "Limited set of shared rules, multiple overlapping/conflicting rules below")

this is a good example of the personal side of note taking that isn't always outwardly seen

each person's notes will be personal to them

scathing, but broadly true...

Artykuł przedstawia w głównej mierze ogólne założenia Second Brain, próbuje przedstawić je w odniesieniu do zawodu programisty. Tekst nie jest szczególnie odkrywczy.

https://cosma.graphlab.fr/<br /> https://cosma.graphlab.fr/en/

When did this come out?

Appears to be a visualization tool for knowledge work. They recommend it for use with Zettlr, but it looks like it would work with other text based tools. Point it at markdown files to create graphs apparently.

This looks like the sort of standards based tool that would allow greater flexibility when using various data stores that we talk about in Friends of the Link.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Arthur Perret </span> in And you, what are you doing? (<time class='dt-published'>08/31/2022 02:40:03</time>)</cite></small>

@flancian

Tinderbox really is a fantastic name for a note taking / personal knowledge management system. Just the idea makes me want to paint flames on the sides of my physical card index. https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

syndication link

Librarian's old-school Zettelkasten

This has hints of a printed-on-cards Zettelkasten index. And [[Roman Mars]] is comparing the forgetting of the structure to how leaning on digital search systems has decreased our ability to find stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2HegcwDRnU

Makes the argument that note taking is an information system, and if it is, then we can use the research from the corpus of information system (IS) theory to examine how to take better notes.

He looks at the Wang and Wang 2006 research and applies their framework of "complete, meaningful, unambiguous, and correct" dimensions of data quality to example note areas of study notes, project management notes (or to do lists) and recipes.

Looks at dimensions of data quality from Mahanti, 2019.

What is the difference between notes and annotations?

roughly translated as the systematic pursuit of knowledge, learning, and scholarship (especially in contrast with application).

It was roughly similar to our current "science" but retains a broader meaning which includes the humanities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissenschaft

Yolanda Gibb: How a mindset of Ambidextrous Creativity can get you generating AND exploiting your ideas?

https://lu.ma/poo355tg

Ambidextrous creativity is having a balance between exploration and subsequent exploitation of those explorations.

Small companies and individuals are good at exploration, but often less good at exploitation.

Triple loop learning<br /> this would visually form a spiral (versus overlap)<br /> - Single loop learning: doing things right (correcting mistakes)<br /> - double loop learning: doing the right things (causality)<br /> - triple loop learning: why these systems and processes (learning to learn)

Assets<br /> Relational capital * Structural capital - pkm is part of this<br /> there's value in a well structured PKM for a particualr thing as it's been used and tested over time; this is one of the issues with LYT or Second Brain (PARA, et al.) how well-tested are these? How well designed?<br /> * Structural capital is the part that stays at the office when all the people have gone home * Human Capital

Eleanor Konik

4 Es of cognition<br /> * embodied * embedded * enacted * extended<br /> by way of extra-cranial processes

see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7250653/

Yolanda Gibb's book<br /> Entrepreneurship, Neurodiversity & Gender: Exploring Opportunities for Enterprise and Self-employment As Pathways to Fulfilling Lives https://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurship-Neurodiversity-Gender-Opportunities-Self-employment/dp/1800430582

Tools: - Ryyan - for literature searches - NVIVO - Obsidian - many others including getting out into one's environment

NVIVO<br /> https://www.qsrinternational.com/nvivo-qualitative-data-analysis-software/home

a software program used for qualitative and mixed-methods research. Specifically, it is used for the analysis of unstructured text, audio, video, and image data, including (but not limited to) interviews, focus groups, surveys, social media, and journal articles.

Ryyan<br /> https://www.rayyan.ai/<br /> for organizing, managing, and accelerating collaborative literature reviews

Compare to earlier archived draft from 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160629004859/https://wordsinspace.net/wordpress/2016/06/28/small-moving-intelligent-parts/

https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/idea-exchange-conference

https://twitter.com/Extended_Brain/status/1563703042125340680

Replying to @DannyHatcher. 1. Competition among apps makes them add unnecessary bells and whistles. 2. Trying to be all: GTD, ZK, Sticky Notes, proj mgmt, collaboration, workflow 3. Plugins are good for developers, bad for users https://t.co/4fbQ2nwdYd

— Extended Brain (@Extended_Brain) August 28, 2022

Part two sounds a lot like zettelkasten overreach https://boffosocko.com/2022/02/05/zettelkasten-overreach/

Part one is similar to the issue competing software companies have in attempting to check all the boxes on a supposed list of features without thinking about what their tool is used for in practice. (Isn't there a name for this specific phenomenon besides "mission creep"?)

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1348/phd-student-reporting-what-its-like-to-use-a-zettelkasten-for-the-first-time-with-my-classes/#Comment_16315

ReconfigBehSci. (2021, December 7). RT @jitsuvax: 🇵🇱NEW translation of the Covid-19 Handbook for our friends in Poland https://c19vax.scibeh.org/pl This work was only possible beca… [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1468247395070885907

https://www.bundleiq.com/post/the-history-of-pkm

I positively don't recommend this article... good example of someone "trying on" information they've been reading about, but haven't quite mastered or gone deep enough on yet. Also potentially a good example of the sort of issues that can be seen when learning in public and potentially attempting to be an influencer in a space in which one is not an expert.

https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/710585052769157141/990295586664243250

Context: influencers in the PKM space telling you the "one true way"

I was doing some random searches for older material on zettelkasten in German and came across this.

Apparently I've come across this before in a similar context: https://hypothes.is/a/CsgyjAXQEeyMfoN7zLcs0w

The description now makes me want to read it all the more!

This is a book about a box that contained the world. The box was the Picture Academy for the Young, a popular encyclopedia in pictures invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in eighteenth-century Germany. Children were expected to cut out the pictures from the Academy, glue them onto cards, and arrange those cards in ordered compartments—the whole world filed in a box of images.

As Anke te Heesen demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order. The box, and its images from nature, myth, and biblical history, were intended to teach children how to collect, store, and order knowledge. te Heesen compares the Academy with other aspects of Enlightenment material culture, such as commercial warehouses and natural history cabinets, to show how the kinds of collecting and ordering practices taught by the Academy shaped both the developing middle class in Germany and Enlightenment thought. The World in a Box, illustrated with a multitude of images of and from Stoy's Academy, offers a glimpse into a time when it was believed that knowledge could be contained and controlled.

Given the portions about knowledge and control, it might also be of interest to @remikalir wrt his coming book.