Topic: Communication with the Zettelkasten: How to get an adequate partner, junior partner? – important after working with staff becomes more and more difficult and expensive. Zettel’s reality
The best and most challenging communication partner you may experience is a version of your past self. A searchable set of notes is the closest approximation of this one is likely to find.
Von Bu ̈ low and Krusche analyze this system as a medium of “conversationwith oneself,” where the Zettelkasten stands in for lacking or absent inter-locutors.19
They write this, but was it before or after Luhmann wrote his essay on Communication with the Slip Box to suggest the idea? Presumably there was heavy influence here.
But having a conversation partner in your topic is actually ideal!
What's the solution: dig into your primary sources. Ask open-ended questions, and refine them as you go. Be open to new lines of inquiry. Stage your work in Conversation with so-and-so [ previously defined as the author of the text].
Stacy Fahrenthold recommends digging into primary sources and using them (and their author(s) as a "conversation partner". She doesn't mention using either one's memory or one's notes as a communication partner the way Luhmann does in "Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen" (1981), which can be an incredibly fruitful and creative method for original material.
but i i think the first couple of hundred notes are more like a collection and you look 00:34:29 for um connections and there are some but you remember them because yes the amount where it's where it doesn't surprise you 00:34:43 uh it's more you know where they are and i think the from 500 on um there's a shift um and then you need to uh figure out how to um 00:34:58 find them again so the index or some kind of system becomes more important and i think a couple of thousand notes and uh you're 00:35:12 automatically turning to your set of custom [Music] as the place where you will likely find some kind of connection
Q: How many permanent notes did it take before you felt you had a communication partner?
Sönke Ahrens has indicated that the first couple hundred notes are more of a static collection. Then from five hundred notes onward there is a shift and having an index becomes more important. It's only at about one thousand notes that one begins automatically turning to the zettelkasten to find connections. Perhaps it's at this point that the tool begins to look like a communication partner.
link this to the few other examples from others.