reply to u/Hugglebuns at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1gpx62s/is_a_zettelkasten_a_largely_unknown_form_of/lwtoopw/:

I appreciate that you scratch some of the historical surface, but your apple/tomato analogy is flimsy and the family tree is a lot closer. Too often we're ignoring the history of ars excerpendi, commonplacing, waste books, summas, and early encyclopedias from the broad swath of intellectual history. What we now call a zettelkasten evolved very closely out of all these traditions. It's definitely not something that Luhmann suddenly invented one morning while lounging in the bath.

Stroll back a bit into the history to see what folks like Pliny the Elder, Konrad Gessner, Theodor Zwinger, Laurentius Beyerlink, or even the Brothers Grimm were doing centuries back and you'll realize it's all closer to a wide variety of heirloom apples and a modern Gala or Fuji. They were all broadly using zettelkasten methods in their work. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are more like sons and daughters, or viewed in other ways, maybe even parents to the zettelkasten. Almost everyone using them has different means and methods because their needs and goals are all different.

If you dig a bit you'll find fascinating tidbits like Samuel Hartlib describing early versions of "cut and paste" in 1641: “Zwinger made his excerpta by being using [sic] of old books and tearing whole leaves out of them, otherwise it had beene impossible to have written so much if every thing should have beene written or copied out.” As nice as Obsidian's new Web Clipper is this month, it's just another tool in a long line of tools that all do the same thing for much the same reasons.

Ignoring these contributions and their closeness means that you won't be able to take advantage of the various affordances all these methods presented in your own slip box, whichever form it takes. How will you ever evolve it into the paper machine that students a century hence are copying and mimicking and pontificating about in their version of Reddit? Why couldn't a person's slip box have some flavor of an encyclopedia? Maybe it's closer to Adler's Syntopicon? Maybe something different all together for their particular use?

Try some of the following for more details: <br /> - Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.<br /> - Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines.<br /> - Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. 1st ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

For deeper dives on methods, try: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/tags/note%20taking%20manuals/items/F8WSEABT/item-list

cc: u/JasperMcGee u/dasduvish u/Quack_quack_22

Miles, 1905 uses an arrow symbol with a hash on it to indicate a "connecting link between two Sentences or Paragraphs, etc."

It's certainly an early example of what we would now consider a hyperlink. It actively uses a "pointer" in it's incarnation.

Are there earlier examples of these sorts of idea links in the historical record? Surely there were circles and arrows on a contiguous page, but what about links from one place to separate places (possibly using page numbers?) Indexing methods from 11/12C certainly acted as explicit sorts of pointers.

Johns, Adrian. The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo183629196.html

Lacy, Tim. The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. https://amzn.to/3R2rCox.

Intellectual history of Greece as an evolution from mythos to logos

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.

Cahoone, Lawrence. The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida - Course Guidebook. The Great Courses 4790. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2010. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/modern-intellectual-tradition-from-descartes-to-derrida.

Cahoone, Lawrence. The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida. Audible Audio Edition. The Great Courses 4790. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2013. https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Intellectual-Tradition-Descartes-Derrida/dp/B00DTO5BTO.

Annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:92bff7dc89e6440afc484388b7b72d79

alternate version: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A92bff7dc89e6440afc484388b7b72d79

Duncan, Dennis. Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age. 1st ed. London: Allen Lane, 2021. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324002543.

annotation link: urn:x-pdf:a4bd1877f0712efcc681d33d58777e55

https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3Aa4bd1877f0712efcc681d33d58777e55

The wear of cards can be an important part of your history with the information you handle.

Luhmann’s slips show some of this sort of wear as well, though his show it to extreme as he used thinner paper than the standard index card so some of his slips have incredibly worn/ripped/torn tops more than any grime. Many of my own books show that grime layer on the fore-edge in sections which I’ve read and re-read.

One of my favorite examples of this sort of wear through use occurs in early manuscripts (usually only religious ones) where readers literally kissed off portions of illuminations when venerating the images in their books. Later illuminators included osculation targets to help prevent these problems. (Cross reference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370119878_Touching_Parchment_How_Medieval_Users_Rubbed_Handled_and_Kissed_Their_Manuscripts_Volume_1_Officials_and_Their_Books)

(syndication link: https://boffosocko.com/2024/02/04/55821315/#comment-430267)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work,_Wealth_and_Happiness_of_Mankind

Trilogy<br /> - The Outline of History (1919–1920) - The Science of Life (1929) - The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932)

https://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php

H. G. Wells and the "World Brain" or "World Encyclopedia" : History of Information by Jeremy Norman

Wells, H. G. “The Idea of a World Encyclopedia.” Harper’s Magazine, April 1937. https://harpers.org/archive/1937/04/the-idea-of-a-world-encyclopedia/.

Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. Edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton. Translated by David Gerard. 1st ed. Foundations of History Library. 1958. Reprint, London: N.L.B., 1976.

Cevolini seems to be saying that it was an innovation of Harrison's Ark of Studies that it served as a second memory.

Surely my translation is "off" as the use of a variety of notes and writing long prior to this were used in this way.

Cevolini, Alberto. “Die Erfindung des Zettelkastens als Vergessensmaschine: Eine historische und wissenssoziologische Einführung.” Polarisierte Welten. Verhandlungen des 41. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Bielefeld 2022 41 (September 29, 2023). https://publikationen.soziologie.de/index.php/kongressband_2022/article/view/1564.

Machine translation:

No. I started the Zettelkasten out of the simple thought that I have a bad memory. First of all, I put pieces of paper in books on which I wrote notes, so the covers of the books got ruined. Then I helped myself with folders, but when they got thicker I couldn't find anything in them. In 1952 or 1953, I started my Zettelkasten because I realized that I had to plan for a life and not for a book.

There's some missing interstitial space here about how precisely he came to it outside of the general motivation for the thing in general.

52/53 would have been after law school and in his administrative days and before his trip to Harvard in 61.

Helbig, Daniela K. “Ruminant Machines: A Twentieth-Century Episode in the Material History of Ideas.” JHI Blog (blog), April 17, 2019. https://jhiblog.org/2019/04/17/ruminant-machines-a-twentieth-century-episode-in-the-material-history-of-ideas/.

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Notebook E, #46, 1775–1776

In this single paragraph quote Lichtenberg, using the model of Italian bookkeepers of the 18th century, broadly outlines almost all of the note taking technique suggested by Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes. He's got writing down and keeping fleeting notes as well as literature notes. (Keeping academic references would have been commonplace by this time.) He follows up with rewriting and expanding on the original note to create additional "explanations" and even "connections" (links) to create what Ahrens describes as permanent notes or which some would call evergreen notes.

Lichtenberg's version calls for the permanent notes to be "separated and ordered" and while he may have kept them in book format himself, it's easy to see from Konrad Gessner's suggestion at the use of slips centuries before, that one could easily put their permanent notes on index cards ("separated") and then number and index or categorize them ("ordered"). The only serious missing piece of Luhmann's version of a zettelkasten then are the ideas of placing related ideas nearby each other, though the idea of creating connections between notes is immediately adjacent to this, and his numbering system, which was broadly based on the popularity of Melvil Dewey's decimal system.

It may bear noticing that John Locke's indexing system for commonplace books was suggested, originally in French in 1685, and later in English in 1706. Given it's popularity, it's not unlikely that Lichtenberg would have been aware of it.

Given Lichtenberg's very popular waste books were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Reference: Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.) It would not be hard to imagine that Niklas Luhmann would have also been aware of them.

Open questions: <br /> - did Lichtenberg number the entries in his own waste books? This would be early evidence toward the practice of numbering notes for future reference. Based on this text, it's obvious that the editor numbered the translated notes for this edition, were they Lichtenberg's numbering? - Is there evidence that Lichtenberg knew of Locke's indexing system? Did his waste books have an index?

Winchester, Simon. Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, 2023. https://www.harperacademic.com/book/9780063142886/knowing-what-we-know.

https://www.krapp.org/

Professor of Film & Media Studies, Informatics, English, and Music - UC Irvine

I don't have any affiliation with the book (other than ordering a copy for myself), but thought I'd share the pre-order details for the forthcoming book Shift Happens: A book about keyboards by Marcin Wichary: https://shifthappens.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders The book, shipping in October 2023, was originally funded on Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwichary/shift-happens. Even more details available at https://shifthappens.site/. The author Marcin Wichary compiled a huge list of typewriter/keyboard resources, books, and manuals at https://archive.org/details/wicharytypewriter which the hard core historians and type enthusiasts many may also appreciate. (h/t u/amidfallenleaves @ r/typewriters/#)

reply to u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13cqnsk/comment/jjkwc05/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Definitely history in service of the present and the future. Too many people are doing some terribly hard work attempting to reinvent wheels which have been around for centuries.

The Incoherence of the Philosophers by al-Ghazali marks a dramatic turn in Islamic philosophy away from Aristotle and Plato which had been followed by previous Arab philosophers like Avicenna and al-Farabi.

Blair, Ann M. “The Rise of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe.” Intellectual History Review 20, no. 3 (August 4, 2010): 303–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2010.492611.

Annotation target: urn:x-pdf:202007e9836543a7b69e7045c81f5965

Hypothes.is: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Aurn%3Ax-pdf%3A202007e9836543a7b69e7045c81f5965

A fascinating combination of office furniture types in 1906!

The Adjustable Table Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan manufactured a combination table for both telephones and index cards. It was designed as an accessory to be stood next to one's desk to accommodate a telephone at the beginning of the telephone era and also served as storage for one's card index.

Given the broad business-based use of the card index at the time and the newness of the telephone, this piece of furniture likely was not designed as an early proto-rolodex, though it certainly could have been (and very well may have likely been) used as such in practice.

I totally want one of these as a side table for my couch/reading chair for both storing index cards and as a temporary writing surface while reading!

This could also be an early precursor to Twitter!

Folks have certainly mentioned other incarnations: - annotations in books (person to self), - postcards (person to person), - the telegraph (person to person and possibly to others by personal communication or newspaper distribution)

but this is the first version of short note user interface for both creation, storage, and distribution by means of electrical transmission (via telephone) with a bigger network (still person to person, but with potential for easy/cheap distribution to more than a single person)

Let YOUR MIND GO FREE Do not tax your brain trying to re- member. Get the MEMINDEX HABIT and you can FORGET WITH IMPUNITY. An ideal reminder and handy system for keeping all memoranda where they will appear at the right time. Saves time, money, opportunity. A brain saver. No other device answers its purpose. A Great Help for Busy Men, Used and recommended by Bankers, Man- ufacturers, Salesmen, Lawyers, Doctors, Merchants, Insurance Men, Architects, Ed- ucators, Contractors, Railway Managers Engineers, Ministers, etc., all over the world. Order now and get ready to Begin the New Year Right. Rest of '06 free with each outfit. Express prepaid on receipt of price. Personal checks accepted

Also a valuable card index for desk use. Dated cards from tray are carried in the handy pocket case, 2 to 4 weeks at a time. To-day's card always at the front. No leaves to turn. Helps you to PLAN YOUR WORK WORK YOUR PLAN ACCOMPLISH MORE You need it. Three years' sales show that most all business and professional men need it. GET IT NOW. WILSON MEMINDEX CO. 93 Mills St., Rochester, N. Y.

Interesting that the use of the portmanteau memindex (as memory + index) for a card index being used to supplement one's memory. It can't go unnoticed that the Wilson Memindex Co. was manufacturing and selling these as early as 1906, several decades before Vannevar Bush's use of the word Memex which seems derivative and removes more of the traces of index from the root.

Note the use of card sizes 2 3/4 x 4 1/2" and 3 x 5 1/2" for this system.

Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.

ISBN: 978-0-300-11251-1 (cloth) Library of Congress Control Number: 2010024663

annotation target: url: urn:x-pdf:1a01bfa446187f0bb8bd5db6cc6ad53e

from<br /> Fling, F. M. (1920) The Writing of History: An Introduction to Historical Method. New Haven: Yale University Press.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Intellectual_historians

Interestingly Erspamer doesn't mention any prior history or traditions of this sort of practice, just that it works for creating theses within the humanities very well. How does he miss this as motivation?

Presumably for him it's a "cultural practice" and Eco delineates it well. Erspamer learned from Eco and it's just what he does... The only questioning done is how 90s technology fit into the picture and that was only surface level questioning...

There's definitely something off about this as a recommendation for the overall system.

Google translate:

In addition to the methods of conventional research, card boxes are usually created in which index cards are used to record what needs to be constantly quoted. Students often try this out intensively for their diploma thesis for the first time. Notes are sorted alphabetically according to keywords and authors, and what has been sorted into the box can also be taken out again.

An indication from 2001 of the state of the art of zettelkasten written in German. Note that the description is focused more on the index card or slip-based version of a commonplace book sorted alphabetically by keywords and authors primarily for quoting. Most students trying the method for the first time are those working on graduate level theses.

Winchester, Simon. Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, 2023. https://www.harperacademic.com/book/9780063142886/knowing-what-we-know.

https://lu.ma/2u5f7ky0

I attended this live this morning from 9:20 - 10:45 AM

Aschheim, Steven E., and Vivian Liska, eds. The German-Jewish Experience Revisited. Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts 3. De Gruyter, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110367195.

Skimmed for references with respect to Aby Warburg and his zettelkasten.

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

Flanders, Judith. A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. Main Market edition. London: Picador, 2021.

Moller, Violet. The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2019. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546484/the-map-of-knowledge-by-violet-moller/.

I've now seen a handful of (all online) sources quote a 17th Century origin for similar note taking methods. What exactly are they referring to specifically? What are these sources? None seem to be footnoted.

Thomas F. Tout, one of the founders of the Historical Association, was one of the first professors to introduce original research into the undergraduate program in the early 1900s.

Helbig, Daniela K. “Life without Toothache: Hans Blumenberg’s Zettelkasten and History of Science as Theoretical Attitude.” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 1 (2019): 91–112. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2019.0005

machine translation (Google):

The estate is not only a scientific-historical document, but also interesting because of the back: Jungius used sermon texts and devotional literature, school notes and old letters as note paper. In addition, much was left in the estate that was assigned to him at some point, including a number of manuscripts by someone else, e.g. B. to the astronomy of Nicolaus Reimers.

In addition to the inherent value of the notes which Jungius took and which present a snapshot of the state-of-the art of knowledge for his day, there is a secondary source of value as he took his notes on scraps of paper that represent sermon texts and devotional literature, school notes, and old letters. These represent their own historical value separate from his notes.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/m2izykwGEe2TaktJuW0Qgg

https://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficiently-organizes-ta-1599093089

LifeHacker covers the Hawk Sugano's Pile of Index Cards method, which assuredly helped promote it to the GTD and productivity crowd.

One commenter notices the similarities to Ryan Holiday's system and ostensibly links to https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/

Two others snarkily reference using such a system to "keep track of books in the library [,,,] Sort them out using decimal numbers on index cards in drawers or something..." and "I need to tell my friend Dewey about this! He would run with it." Obviously they see the intellectual precursors and cousins of the method, though they haven't looked at the specifics very carefully.

One should note that this may have been one of the first systems to mix information management/personal knowledge management with an explicit Getting Things Done set up. Surely there are hints of this in the commonplace book tradition, but are there any examples that go this far?

This scientific viewpoint of history was not unique to the time and can be seen ensconced in popular books on historical method of the time, including Bernheim and Langlois/Seignobos.

reference for this quote? date?

Walter Benjamin's fantastic re-definition of a book presaged the invention of the internet, though his instantiation was as a paper based machine.

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

Fickert, Kevin-Steven. “Die Geschichte des Zettelkatalogs : eine historisch-kritische Betrachtung eines Verzeichnismediums und seiner Regelwerke.” Fachhochschule Stuttgart Hochschule der Medien, 2003. https://hdms.bsz-bw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/141

via Ton Zijlstra

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/wrytqj/comment/ilax9tc/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Index card systems were insanely popular in the early 1900's for note taking and uses of all other sorts (business administration, libraries, etc.). The note taking tradition of the slip box goes back even further in intellectual history with precedents including miscellanies, commonplace books, and florilegia. Konrad Gessner may have been one of the first to have created a method using slips of rearrangeable paper in the 1500s, but this general pattern of excerpting, note taking and writing goes back to antiquity with the concept of locus communis (Latin) and tópos koinós (Greek).

What some intellectual historians are hoping for evidence of in this particular source is a possible origin of the idea of the increased complexity of direct links from one card to another as well as the juxtaposition of ideas which build on each other. Did Luhmann innovate this himself or was this something he read or was in general practice which he picked up? Most examples of zettelkasten outside of Luhmann's until those in the present, could be described reasonably accurately as commonplace books on index cards usually arranged by topic/subject heading/head word (with or without internal indices).

Perhaps it was Luhmann's familiarity with Aktenzeichen (German administrative "file numbers") prior to his academic work which inspired the dramatically different form his index card-based commonplace took? See: https://hyp.is/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA/www.wikiwand.com/de/Aktenzeichen_(Deutschland)

Is it possible that he was influenced by Beatrice Webb's ideas on note taking from Appendix C of My Apprenticeship (1924) which was widely influential in the humanities and particularly sociology and anthropology? Would he have been aware of the work of historians Ernst Bernheim followed by Charles Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos? (see: https://hypothes.is/a/DLP52hqFEe2nrIMdrd4U7g) Did Luhmann's law studies expose him to the work of jurist Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785) who wrote about his practice in his autobiography and subsequently influenced generations of practitioners including Jean Paul and potentially Hegel?

There are obviously lots of unanswered questions...

https://jhiblog.org/lesson-plans/

https://www.nz.histinst.rwth-aachen.de/go/id/datdr

related: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-658-27798-7_4-1

History and Foundations of Information Science

This series of books focuses on the historical approach or theoretical approach to information science and seeks a broader interpretation of what we consider as information (i.e., information is in the eye of the beholder, be it sets of data, scholarly publications, works of art, material objects, or DNA samples), and an emphasis upon how people access and interact with this information.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/history-and-foundations-information-science

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/uc-berkeley-school-of-information/id194966956

https://multimediaman.blog/2016/09/30/how-the-index-card-launched-the-information-age/

A quick overview of the index card and it's role in history from Linnaeus to Dewey to the Mundaneum.

https://www.preservearticles.com/business/what-is-card-indexing-and-explain-its-advantages-and-disadvantages/1740

This page seems to be broadly copied from the book Secretarial Practice and Company Law by Arun Kumar and Rachana Sharma (Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) Limited, 1998) # and specifically page 529.

It contains no other history or references that I can immediately see. The book seems to be written for a secretarial audience in India in the 1990's, and while interesting not otherwise pertinent to immediate to my historical questions.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo63098990.html Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind by Ayelet Even-Ezra

Mentioned during Tinderbox Meetup: https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tagging-meetup-saturday-august-7/4841

They apparently discussed the book last week. (May be able to find the video of the discussion)

Another of the abounding examples of people thinking that writing and literacy are the first technology of thinking.

Niklas Luhmann cites Langlois and Seignobos' Introduction to the Study of History (1898) at least once, so there's evidence that he read at least a portion of the book which outlines some portions of note taking practice that resemble portions of his zettelkasten method.

Beatrice Webb's note taking system here shows indications of being actively used as a database system!

Lima, Manuel. The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, 2014. https://papress.com/products/the-book-of-trees-visualizing-branches-of-knowledge.

Bernheim, Ernst. Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie: mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hilfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte. Leipzig : Duncker & Humblot, 1908. http://archive.org/details/lehrbuchderhist03berngoog.

Title translation: Textbook of the historical method and the philosophy of history : with reference to the most important sources and aids for the study of history

A copy of the original 1889 copy can be found at https://digital.ub.uni-leipzig.de/mirador/index.php

Je nach der Beschaffenheit des Themas und des Materials wird es oft praktisch sein, von sachlicher Ordnung abzusehen und nur die äußerlich chronologische anzuwenden. Gerade dann ist es von größtem Wert, die Eintragungen auf lose Blätter zu machen, damit man dieselben nach den verschiedenen Gesichtspunkten der Zusammengehörigkeit zeitweilig umordnen und dann wieder in die Grundordoung zurücklegen kann. Um die einzelnen Notizen leicht auffinden zu können, ist es ratsam, die Daten oder Schlagwörter oben darüberzuschreiben; und die Blätter oder Zettel müssen von nicht zu dünnem Papier sein, damit man sie schnell durchblättern kann.

Soweit es sich um Abschriften ganzer Akten oder Nachrichten handelt, bedarf es keiner besonderen Erörterungen. Doch solche völlige Abschriften wird man nur machen, wo es sich um archivalische Quellen oder entlegenere Drucke handelt, die man nicht so leicht wieder erreichen kann. Im übrigen wird man sich mit Auszügen und Notizen begnügen, welche entweder das aus den Quellen ausheben, was für das Thema in Betracht kommt, oder nur im allgemeinen auf die Quellenstellen hinweisen. Im ersteren Falle kommt es darauf an, das Brauchbare und Wichtige scharf zu erkennen und präzis zu notieren; im letzteren Falle muß die Hindeutung wenigstens derart präzisiert sein, daß man beim späteren Durchsehen der Notizen gleich ersieht, was in der betreffenden Quellenstelle zu erwarten ist, und daß die Identität der Notiz mit dem Inhalt der Quellenstelle nicht zweifelhaft sein kann; bei Urkunden erfordert letzteres besondere Sorgfalt, da nicht selten über den-selben (tegenstand zur selben Zeit mehrere ähnliche Dokumente ausgestellt worden sind: man tut daher gut, die Identität jedes Stückes durch Aufnotierung des Anfanges und Schlusses (Incipit und Explicit) sicherzustellen, wobei zu bemerken ist, daf hier als Anfang und Schluß nicht die formelhaften Teile, die sogenannten Protokolle, welche eben als feststehende Formeln nicht für die einzelne Urkunde unterscheidend sind, gelten, sondern daß man Anfang und Schluß des individuellen Textes notiert, eine Art der Bezeichnung, die allgemein bei den päpstlichen Bullen angewandt wird, indem man von der Bulle Unam sanctam oder Ausculta fili usw. spricht.

Google translation:

Depending on the nature of the subject and the material, it will often be practical to dispense with factual order and use only the outwardly chronological one. It is precisely then that it is of the greatest value to make the entries on loose sheets of paper, so that they can be temporarily rearranged according to the various aspects of belonging together and then put back into the basic order. In order to be able to easily find the individual notes, it is advisable to write the dates or keywords above them; and the sheets or slips of paper must be of paper that is not too thin so that they can be leafed through quickly.

As far as copies of entire files or messages are concerned, no special discussion is required. But such complete copies will only be made from archival sources or more remote prints that cannot easily be accessed again. For the rest, one will be content with excerpts and notes, which either extract from the sources what comes into consideration for the subject, or only refer to the sources in general. In the first case it is important to clearly recognize what is useful and important and to write it down precisely; in the latter case, the indication must at least be specified in such a way that, when looking through the notes later, one can immediately see what is to be expected in the relevant source and that the identity of the note with the content of the source cannot be in doubt; for certificates the latter requires special care, as it is not uncommon for same (te, several similar documents existed at the same time have been issued: one does therefore well, the identity of each piece by notating the beginning and end (Incipit and explicit), noting that here as beginning and end not the formulaic parts that so-called protocols, which are simply fixed formulas are not distinctive for the individual document, apply, but that one sees the beginning and end of the individual text noted, a form of designation commonly applied to the papal bulls, speaking of the bull Unam sanctam or Ausculta fili, etc.

Continuing on in his advice on note taking, Bernheim tells us that notes on loose sheets of paper (presumably in contrast with the bound pages of a commonplace book or other types of notebooks), "can be temporarily rearranged according to the various aspects of belonging together and then put back into the basic order". He recommends giving them dates (presumably to be able to put them back into their temporal order), as well as keywords. He also suggest that "the sheets or slips of paper must be of paper that is not too thin so that they can be leafed through quickly." (translated from German)

Note that he doesn't specify the exact size of the paper (at least not in this general section) other than to specify either "die Blätter oder Zettel" (sheets or slips) . Other practices may be more indicative of the paper size he may have had in mind. Are his own papers extant? Might those have an indication of his own personal practice as it may have differed from his published advice?

https://soranews24.com/2022/07/10/japanese-bookstore-dares-to-be-different-with-common-sense-fix-to-weird-industry-hassle/

Apparently many Japanese bookstores sort and arrange their books by Publisher rather than by author name!

While this may make some esthetic sense on behalf of publishers in a commercial space, it isn't necessarily easy for customers to find books this way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodge-podge

How is this broadly related to the intellectual history of commonplace books, zettelkasten, and other note taking matters.

I recall an idea of a Hodge-podge book from my youth, but these may have been published children's activity books for fun rather than collecting tidbits as in something closer to a scrapbook.

Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo - Thought about this randomly while editing notes for [[Forte2022]]

This sentiment is very similar to one in a recent lecture series I'd started listening to: The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida #.

Lawrence Cahoone specifically pointed out that he would be highlighting the revolutionary (and also consequently the most famous) writers because they were the ones over history that created the most change in their field of thought.

How does the novel and the different manage to break through?

How does this relate to the broad thesis of Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?

The comment Wengrow makes about "remarking on [an anarchist's] politics" as a means of attacking their ideas is quite similar to the sort of attacks that are commonly made on women. When female politicians make relevant remarks and points, mainstream culture goes to standbys about their voice or appearance: "She's 'shrill'", or "She doesn't look very good in that dress." They attack anything but the idea itself.

F*ck! I've been scooped!

Apparently I'm not the only one who has noticed this, though I notice that he doesn't cite Frances A. Yates, which would have certainly been the place for having come up with this historical background (at least that's where I found it.)

The Llullian arts can be more easily practiced with ideas placed on moveable index cards than they might be with ideas stored in one's own memory. Thus the index card as a tool significantly decreases the overhead and provides an easier user interface for permuting one's ideas and combining them. This decrease in mental work appearing at a time of information overload also puts specific pressure on the older use of the art of memory to put it out of fashion.

https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/

The PKM space has gotten crazy, but mostly through bad practice, lack of history, and hype. There are a few valid points I see mirrored here, but on the whole this piece is broadly off base due to a lack of proper experience, practice and study. I definitely would recommend he take a paid course to fix the issue, but delve more deeply into recommended historical practices.

Prior to the flourishing of reference materials, Peter Abelard (1079-1142) had articulated the idea of "the multitude and diversity of authoritative opinion" to be found in available material. How was one to decide which authority to believe in a time before the scientific method?

link to https://hypothes.is/a/oMSaKLb2EeyXOE_0Yh1Chw

Interesting that Vincent of Beauvais indicates that there were discrepancies between the authors, but leaves it up to the reader to decide for themself.

What would the reader do in these cases in a culture before the scientific method and the coming scientific revolutions? Does this statement prefigure the beginning of a cultural shift?

Are there other examples of (earlier) writers encouraging the the comparison of two different excerpts from "expert" or authoritative sources to determine which should have precedence?

What other methods would have encouraged this sort of behavior?

While there are ancient compilations by writers including Pliny, Diogenes Laertius, and Stobaeus, many authors in the Renaissance credited Aulus Gellius as the founder of the genre.

Leaf numbering was seen in the Middle Ages, but printing in the Renaissance greatly increased the number of books with page numbers.

George is asking a good question here and one I've even asked myself, but doesn't seem to have spent any time looking at intellectual history.

Almost all great thinkers were not only significant writers as well, but most, at least in Western culture, kept significant notes of their work, had a commonplace book(s), waste books, sudelbücher, zettelkasten, etc.

Of course most were also fairly wealthy and had the free time to be able to do their work which also helped to tip the balance in their favor.

Hierarchical systems of knowledge in Indigenous cultures helps to ensure rigor, competency, and most importantly accuracy of knowledge passed down from generation to generation.

In Warlpiri, the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west associatively correspond with the ideas of "Law", "ceremony", "skin", and "language" respectively. The idea of "Country" lies at the center of these directions in a space that Westerners would describe as "here".

This directional set up underlines the value of each of the related concepts and provides pride of place to "Country" and one's being "in Country".

Compare these with the Japanese pattern of こ (ko), そ (so), あ (a), ど (do) which describe a location with respect to the speaker.

Western readers should notice here, that the author centers the name and position of the origin of this knowledge at the start of the sentence. While it is associated with him, it is also certainly associated with all his preceding ancestors and Elders who passed this information down.

One might suspect that this practice isn't as common with base-level cultural knowledge, but that it becomes more important at succeeding levels of intimate area-based restricted knowledge. Placing the origin of the knowledge here at a more basic level of knowledge may help to instruct Western readers slowly and more surely understand how this foreign culture works.

How closely does this practice generally look like the Western idea of citing one's sources which only evolved slowly over history and became more common with the flood of information in the 1500s?

Developed by Elders Dr. Albert Marshall and Murdina Marshall, the Mi'kmaw word Etuaptmunk describes the concept of "Two-Eyed Seeing". It is based on the lived experience of Indigenous peoples who have the ability to see the world from both the Western and Indigenous perspectives with one eye on the strengths of each practice.

The idea behind Etuaptmunk is designed and geared toward Western thinkers who place additional value on the eyes and literacy. Perhaps a second analogy of "Two-Eared Hearing" might better center the orality techniques for the smaller number of people with lived experiences coming from the other direction?

These ideas seem somewhat similar to that of the third culture kid.

http://www.officemuseum.com/filing_equipment.htm

https://pennmaterialtexts.org/homepage

How awesome looking is this? Note the regular online meetings/presentations and the backlog of videos on their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Ng6px3fgc4Yjw-en1GcsA

https://collect.readwriterespond.com/monks-a-polymath-and-an-invention-made-by-two-people-at-the-same-time-its-all-in-the-history-of-the-index/

Great find Aaron. Thanks for the ping.

I've gone back further than this for the commonplace and the florilegium which helped to influence their creation, though I've not delved into the specific invention or general use of indices in the space heavily. I suspected that they grew out of the tradition of using headwords, though I'm not sure that indices became more popular until the paper by John Locke in 1689 (in French) or 1706 (in English).

I'll put Dr. Duncan's book into the hopper and see what he's got to say on the topic.

Austrian National Library; it is widely, and often proudly, considered the first card catalog in library history.

The first card catalogue in library history, later known as the Josephinian catalog, began on May 22, 1780 in the Austrian National Library.

Ahrens focuses almost exclusively on Niklas Luhmann in his book How to Take Smart Notes. Sadly he misses that many others used not only the zettelkasten but other closely similar techniques including the commonplace book as a means of knowledge gathering and productivity.

There are thousands of productive researchers and writers who have broadly used many of these techniques to great advantage. In fact, it's almost hard to find famous writers or thinkers in the early Renaissance or since who did not use these systems.

Certainly Luhmann's system was one of the most refined of the group and his success is heavily underlined by his gargantuan output, but by not highlight other users of these systems, we're missing a lot more of the power of these systems.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Anne Ganzert</span> in (1) Anne Ganzert on Twitter: "@ChrisAldrich @gipperfish @jdconnor @vaultofculture This is early 17th century right? Nice! I always considered Aby Warburg my favorite „early adopter“ but this sounds great. One clear Warburg benefit: the Mnemosyne Atlas is still around and even digitized 👏🏻" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>01/16/2022 12:54:03</time>)</cite></small>

Just as Western historians erase indigenous ideas as misunderstandings or fabrications or outright appropriation of those ideas as pre-existing ideas in European culture, is it possible that we do the same thing with orality and memory? Are medievalists seeing mnemotechniques of the time and not properly interpreting them by not seeing them in their original contexts and practices?

The idea of talking rocks, as an example, is dismissed as lunacy, crazy, or some new-age hokum, but in reality it's at the far end of the spectrum. It's so unknowable for Western audiences that it's wholly dismissed rather than embraced, extended, and erased.

What does the spectrum of potentially appropriated ideas look like? What causes their adoption or not, particularly in cases of otherwise cultural heterodoxy?

Reference that discusses calculating machines and information processors.

With the invention of the index card and atomic, easily moveable information that can be permuted and re-ordered, the idea of commonplacing doesn't simply highlight and repeat the older wise sayings (sententiae), but allows them to become repositories of new and expanding information. We don't just excerpt anymore, but mix the older thoughts with newer thoughts. This evolution creates a Cambrian explosion of ideas that helps to fuel the information overload from the 16th century onward.

aliases for "topical headings": headwords keywords tags categories

In order to become a free-standing tool, the card index needed to have self-referential closure.

This may have been one of the necessary steps for the early ideas behind computers. In addition to the idea of a clockwork universe, the index card may have been a step towards early efforts at creating the modern computer.

This is what I have been arguing all along as I've been doing my research as well.

https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.alumni.jhu.edu/article/837669

Institute of Intellectual History University of St Andrews, Scotland started under Richard Whatmore

Davies, A., Seaton, A., Tonooka, C., & White, J. (2021). Covid-19, online workshops, and the future of intellectual exchange. Rethinking History, 25(2), 224–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2021.1934290

This reference appears to show some of the historical link between the method of loci in rhetoric with that of commonplacing ideas within books. The fact that the word box may suggest some relational link between commonplacing and zettelkasten.

Pull up other works by Daniela K. Helbig to see what else might be interesting.

One cannot call the history of intellectual property a purely proletarian struggle.