Reply to @Edmund https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/21907/#Comment_21907

Doto's book is the best and tightest yet for explaining both how to implement a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten as well as why along with the affordances certain elements provide. He does a particularly good job of providing clear and straightforward definitions which have a muddy nature in some of the online spaces, which tends to cause issues for people new to the practice. Sadly, for me, there isn't much new insight due to the amount of experience and research I bring to the enterprise.

I do like that Doto puts at least some emphasis on why one might want to use alphanumerics even in digital spaces, an idea which has broadly been sidelined in most contexts for lack of experience or concrete affordances for why one might do it.

The other area he addresses, which most elide and the balance gloss over at best, is that of the discussion of using the zettelkasten for output. Though he touches on some particular methods and scaffolding, most of it is limited to suggestions based on his own experience rather than a broader set of structures and practices. This is probably the biggest area for potential expansion and examples I'd like to see, especially as I'm reading through Eustace Miles' How to Prepare Essays, Lectures, Articles, Books, Speeches and Letters, with Hints on Writing for the Press (London: Rivingtons, 1905).

I could have had some more material in chapter 3 which has some fascinating, but still evolving work. Ideas like interstitial journaling and some of the related productivity methods are interesting, but Doto only barely scratches the surface on some of these techniques and methods which go beyond the traditional "zettelkasten space", but which certainly fall in his broader framing of "system for writing" promise.

Doto's "triangle of creativity", a discussion of proximal feedback, has close parallels of Adler and Hutchins' idea of "The Great Conversation" (1952), which many are likely to miss.

For those who missed out, Dan Allosso has posted video from the sessions at https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/ Sadly missing, unless you're in the book club, are some generally lively side chat discussions as the primary video discussion was proceeding. The sessions had a breadth of experiences from the new to the old hands as well as from students to teachers and everywhere in between.

Die Fossilindustrie finanziert seit Jahrzehten Universitäten und fördert damit Publikationen in ihrem Interesse, z.B. zu false solutions wie #CCS. Hintergrundbericht anlässlich einer neuen Studie: https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/05/universities-fossil-fuel-funding-green-energy

Studie: https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.904

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1601640985858957312.html

Example of a literature review/research workflow using online repositories (like Google Scholar, Scopus, Clarivate, etc.), Zotero, Research Rabbit, and Obsidian.

https://www.explainpaper.com/

Another in a growing line of research tools for processing and making sense of research literature including Research Rabbit, Connected Papers, Semantic Scholar, etc.

Functionality includes the ability to highlight sections of research papers with natural language processing to explain what those sections mean. There's also a "chat" that allows you to ask questions about the paper which will attempt to return reasonable answers, which is an artificial intelligence sort of means of having an artificial "conversation with the text".

cc: @dwhly @remikalir @jeremydean

In "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" (1952), C. Wright Mills talks about his methods for note taking, thinking, and analysis in what he calls "sociological imagination". This is a sociologists' framing of their own research and analysis practice and thus bears a sociological related name. While he talks more about the thinking, outlining, and writing process rather than the mechanical portion of how he takes notes or what he uses, he's extending significantly on the ideas and methods that Sönke Ahrens describes in How to Take Smart Notes (2017), though obviously he's doing it 65 years earlier. It would seem obvious that the specific methods (using either files, note cards, notebooks, etc.) were a bit more commonplace for his time and context, so he spent more of his time on the finer and tougher portions of the note making and thinking processes which are often the more difficult parts once one is past the "easy" mechanics.

While Mills doesn't delineate the steps or materials of his method of note taking the way Beatrice Webb, Langlois & Seignobos, Johannes Erich Heyde, Antonin Sertillanges, or many others have done before or Umberto Eco, Robert Greene/Ryan Holiday, Sönke Ahrens, or Dan Allosso since, he does focus more on the softer portions of his thinking methods and their desired outcomes and provides personal examples of how it works and what his expected outcomes are. Much like Niklas Luhmann describes in Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen (VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1981), Mills is focusing on the thinking processes and outcomes, but in a more accessible way and with some additional depth.

Because the paper is rather short, but specific in its ideas and methods, those who finish the broad strokes of Ahrens' book and methods and find themselves somewhat confused will more than profit from the discussion here in Mills. Those looking for a stronger "crash course" might find that the first seven chapters of Allosso along with this discussion in Mills is a straighter and shorter path.

While Mills doesn't delineate his specific method in terms of physical tools, he does broadly refer to "files" which can be thought of as a zettelkasten (slip box) or card index traditions. Scant evidence in the piece indicates that he's talking about physical file folders and sheets of paper rather than slips or index cards, but this is generally irrelevant to the broader process of thinking or writing. Once can easily replace the instances of the English word "file" with the German concept of zettelkasten and not be confused.

One will note that this paper was written as a manuscript in April 1952 and was later distributed for classroom use in 1955, meaning that some of these methods were being distributed from professor to students. The piece was later revised and included as an appendix to Mill's text The Sociological Imagination which was first published in 1959.

Because there aren't specifics about Mills' note structure indicated here, we can't determine if his system was like that of Niklas Luhmann, but given the historical record one could suppose that it was closer to the commonplace tradition using slips or sheets. One thing becomes more clear however that between the popularity of Webb's work and this (which was reprinted in 2000 with a 40th anniversary edition), these methods were widespread in the mid-twentieth century and specifically in the field of sociology.

Above and beyond most of these sorts of treatises on note taking method, Mills does spend more time on the thinking portions of the practice and delineates eleven different practices that one can focus on as they actively read/think and take notes as well as afterwards for creating content or writing.

My full notes on the article can be found at https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0138200b4bfcde2757a137d61cd65cb8

Semantic Scholar is a digital tool created by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington in 2015. It's corpus is publicly available for search and is used by other tools including Connected Papers.

https://openknowledgemaps.org/

Open Knowledge maps is a visual literature search tool that is based on keywords rather than on a paper's title, author, or DOI. The service was founded in 2015 by Peter Kraker, a former scholarly communication researcher at Graz University of Technology.

Quinn, A. E., Trachtenberg, A. J., McBrien, K. A., Ogundeji, Y., Souri, S., Manns, L., Rennert-May, E., Ronksley, P., Au, F., Arora, N., Hemmelgarn, B., Tonelli, M., & Manns, B. J. (2020). Impact of payment model on the behaviour of specialist physicians: A systematic review. Health Policy, 124(4), 345–358. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2020.02.007

British Journal of Social Psychology. (n.d.). Wiley Online Library. https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)2044-8309

Science in the time of COVID-19. Nat Hum Behav 4, 327–328 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0879-9

Call for Papers: COVID19-Pandemic. (n.d.). Https://Www.Apa.Org. Retrieved June 11, 2020, from https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/amp/call-for-papers-covid19-pandemic

American Psychological Association. Interdivisional call for papers: Developing resilience in response to stress and trauma. Apa.org. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/hea/interdivisional-call-for-papers-resilience-stress-trauma

In the Thomas Copy, the allusion to Coleridge, "but I shall kill no albatross" is not attributed in text, but rather added by hand as a citation at the bottom of the page: "x Coleridge's Ancient Mariner x"

In the Thomas Copy, Mary's marginal note outlines her dissatisfaction with the opening chapters of the 1818 edition. Indeed, these chapters would be heavily augmented and revised for the 1831, presumably in accordance with Shelley's observations here.

In the Thomas copy beneath the line "This manuscript will doubtless afford you the greatest <u>pleasure</u>," is written a the single word: "impossible." We cannot tell if this was Mary's comment or was put in by another reader.

In the Thomas Copy, at the bottom of this page, an unknown hand states: "You said your family was not scientific." If this notation is in Mary's hand, she may be speaking to her character Victor, noting a discrepancy in his account of their familiarity with the sciences.