Example of someone using hair ties and smaller internal boxes to prevent zettelkasten cards from being dumped out due to child mischief.

via: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1bv6sxy/moving_again_and_a_tip_on_transporting/

Able to see lots of cards at once.

ZK practice inspired by Ahrens, but had practice based on Umberto Eco's book before that.

Broad subjects for his Ph.D. studies: Ecology in architecture / environmentalism

3 parts: - zk main cards - bibliography / keywords - chronological section (history of ecology)

Four "drawers" and space for blank cards and supplies. Built on wheels to allow movement. Has a foldable cover.

He has analog practice because he worries about companies closing and taking notes with them.

Watched TheNoPoet's How I use my analog Zettelkasten.

The huge frozen card catalog of the Library of Congress currently suers from alarming levels of public trauma: like the movie trope in which the private eye tears a page from a phone

Information loss in digitizing catalog cards...

Digitization efforts in card collections may result in the loss or damage of cards or loss of the materials which the original cards represented in the case of library card catalogs.

FireKing File Cabinet, 1-Hour Fire Protection, 6-Drawer, Small Document Size, 31" Deep<br /> https://www.filing.com/FireKing-Card-Check-Note-Cabinet-6-Drawer-p/6-2552-c.htm

A modern index card catalog filing solution with locks and fireproofing offered by FireKing for $6,218.00 with shipment in 2-4 weeks. 6 Drawers with three sections each. Weighs 860 lbs.

at 0.0072" per average card, with filing space of 25 15/16" per section with 18 sections, this should hold 64,843 index cards.

One of the benefits of having a separate working bibliography for a project is that it provides a back up copy in the case that one loses or misplaces one's original bibliography note cards. (p 50)

https://www.amazon.com/JUNDUN-Dividers-Collapsible-Fireproof-4x6-Inch/dp/B0BNHZ3JTR/?th=1

A card index box which is waterproof and fireproof for potential travel.

In a diary entry dated Monday, November 2, 1942, Anne Frank in an entry in which she includes a post script about the "important news that [she's] probably going to get [her] period soon." she mentions spending some time sorting out an index card file. Presumably it had been used for business purposes as she mentions that she got it from the office. Given that it had "fallen over and gotten all mixed up", it presumably didn't use a card rod to hold the cards in. It must have been a fairly big task as she asked for help from two people and not getting it, she abandoned the task because, as she wrote: "I'm not crazy enough to do it all by myself!"

found via:

Niklas Luhmann rejected out of town teaching positions for fear that his hard copy / analog zettelkasten might get destroyed in the moving process 🧵

— Bob Doto (@thehighpony) August 19, 2022

"He rejected a number of other universities' interests in hiring him...at an early stage, arguing that he couldn't risk taking his Zettelkasten with him in the event of an accident to lose by car, ship, train or plane." https://t.co/SmK2gLJpQ0

— Bob Doto (@thehighpony) August 19, 2022

reference ostensibly in this text, but may need to hunt it down.

Bob confirmed that it was Luhmann Handbuch: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, 2012

—Halleyscomet08 on 2023-07-07 3:05 AM at https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/979886299785863178/1126816131659878491

The potential separation of newspaper clippings from index cards and their attendant annotations/meta data (due to aging of glue) can be a potential source of note loss when creating a physical card index.

In the documentary California Typewriter (Gravitas Pictures, 2016) musician John Mayer mentions that he's never lost a typed version of his notes, while digital versions of his work essentially remain out of sight and thus out of mind or else they risk digital erasure by means of either data loss, formatting changes, or other damage.

Mayer also mentions that he loves typewriters for their ability to easily get out stream of consciousness thinking which is a mode of creativity he prefers for writing lyrics.

via u/nagytimi85 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13s84q3/comment/jlof6b9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

File this one under the most bizarre potential note collection damage vector: a parrot who bites index cards!

—u/stockwestfale at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/12jjsgl/about_archiving_my_analog_zettelkasten/

The TLL was moved to a monastery in Bavaria during WWII because they were worried that the building that contained the zettelkasten would be bombed and it actually was.

The slips have been microfilmed and a copy of them is on store at Princeton as a back up just i case.

[01:17:00]

Related here is the horcrux problem of note taking or even social media. The mental friction of where did I put that thing? As a result, it's best to put it all in one place.

How can you build on a single foundation if you're in multiple locations? The primary (only?) benefit of multiple locations is redundancy in case of loss.

Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene are counter examples, though Greene's books are distinct projects generally while Holiday's work has a lot of overlap.

srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/brisanter-fund-geheime-gaestekartei-ueberlebt-hotelbrand-und-birgt-zuendstoff

Google translate:

four wooden boxes with highly explosive contents were spared. They were stored in a different building at the time of the inferno. They contained 20,000 guest cards that concierges and receptionists had kept secretly between 1920 and 1960.

The Grandhotel Waldhaus burned down in 1989, but saved from the inferno were 20,000 guest cards with annotations about them that were compiled between 1920 and 1960.

At the Grandhotel Waldhaus in Vulpera, Switzerland concierges and receptionists maintained a business-focused zettelkasten of cards. In addition to the typical business function these cards served denoting names, addresses, and rooms, the staff also made annotations commenting on the guests and their proclivities.

1:

2:

3:

4:

5:

6:

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10k6apz/antinet_for_nomads/

On the Jokerzettel

9/8j Im Zettelkasten ist ein Zettel, der das Argument enthält, das die Behauptungen auf allen anderen Zetteln widerlegt.

Aber dieser Zettel verschwindet, sobald man den Zettelkasten aufzieht.

D.h. er nimmt eine andere Nummer an, verstellt sich und ist dann nicht zu finden.

Ein Joker.

—Niklas Luhmann, ZK II: Zettel 9/8j

Translation:

9/8j In the slip box is a slip containing the argument that refutes the claims on all the other slips. But this slip disappears as soon as you open the slip box. That is, he assumes a different number, disguises himself and then cannot be found. A joker.

Many have asked about the meaning of this jokerzettel over the past several years. Here's my slightly extended interpretation, based on my own practice with thousands of cards, about what Luhmann meant:

Imagine you've spent your life making and collecting notes and ideas and placing them lovingly on index cards. You've made tens of thousands and they're a major part of your daily workflow and support your life's work. They define you and how you think. You agree with Friedrich Nietzsche's concession to Heinrich Köselitz that “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.” Your time is alive with McLuhan's idea that "The medium is the message." or in which his friend John Culkin said, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

Eventually you're going to worry about accidentally throwing your cards away, people stealing or copying them, fires (oh! the fires), floods, or other natural disasters. You don't have the ability to do digital back ups yet. You ask yourself, can I truly trust my spouse not to destroy them?,What about accidents like dropping them all over the floor and needing to reorganize them or worse, the ghost in the machine should rear its head?

You'll fear the worst, but the worst only grows logarithmically in proportion to your collection.

Eventually you pass on opportunities elsewhere because you're worried about moving your ever-growing collection. What if the war should obliterate your work? Maybe you should take them into the war with you, because you can't bear to be apart?

If you grow up at a time when Schrodinger's cat is in the zeitgeist, you're definitely going to have nightmares that what's written on your cards could horrifyingly change every time you look at them. Worse, knowing about the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle, you're deathly afraid that there might be cards, like electrons, which are always changing position in ways you'll never be able to know or predict.

As a systems theorist, you view your own note taking system as a input/output machine. Then you see Claude Shannon's "useless machine" (based on an idea of Marvin Minsky) whose only function is to switch itself off. You become horrified with the idea that the knowledge machine you've painstakingly built and have documented the ways it acts as an independent thought partner may somehow become self-aware and shut itself off!?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa9v8Z7Rac

And worst of all, on top of all this, all your hard work, effort, and untold hours of sweat creating thousands of cards will be wiped away by a potential unknowable single bit of information on a lone, malicious card and your only recourse is suicide, the unfortunate victim of dataism.

Of course, if you somehow manage to overcome the hurdle of suicidal thoughts, and your collection keeps growing without bound, then you're sure to die in a torrential whirlwind avalanche of information and cards, literally done in by information overload.

But, not wishing to admit any of this, much less all of this, you imagine a simple trickster, a joker, something silly. You write it down on yet another card and you file it away into the box, linked only to the card in front of it, the end of a short line of cards with nothing following it, because what could follow it? Put it out of your mind and hope your fears disappear away with it, lost in your box like the jokerzettel you imagined. You do this with a self-assured confidence that this way of making sense of the world works well for you, and you settle back into the methodical work of reading and writing, intent on making your next thousands of cards.

Worry about dropping a tray of slips and needing to reorganize them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYj1jneBUQo

Forrest Perry shows part of his note taking and idea development process in his hybrid digital-analog zettelkasten practice. He's read a book and written down some brief fleeting notes on an index card. He then chooses a few key ideas he wants to expand upon, finds the physical index card he's going to link his new idea to, then reviews the relevant portion of the book and writes a draft of a card in his notebook. Once satisfied with it, he transfers his draft from his notebook into Obsidian (ostensibly for search and as a digital back up) where he may also be refining the note further. Finally he writes a final draft of his "permanent" (my framing, not his) note on a physical index card, numbers it with respect to his earlier card, and then (presumably) installs it into his card collection.

In comparison to my own practice, it seems like he's spending a lot of time after-the-fact in reviewing over the original material to write and rewrite an awful lot of material for what seems (at least to me—and perhaps some of it is as a result of lack of interest in the proximal topic), not much substance. For things like this that I've got more direct interest in, I'll usually have a more direct (written) conversation with the text and work out more of the details while reading directly. This saves me from re-contextualizing the author's original words and arguments while I'm making my arguments and writing against the substrate of the author's thoughts. Putting this work in up front is often more productive at least for areas of direct interest. I would suspect that in Perry's case, he was generally interested in the book, but it doesn't impinge on his immediate areas of research and he only got three or four solid ideas out of it as opposed to a dozen or so.

The level of one's conversation with the text will obviously depend on their interest and goals, a topic which is relatively well laid out by Adler & Van Doren (1940).

circulating among scholars of the documentary Geniza.

Prior to being shipped to the National Library of Israel, Goitein's index card collection was photographed in Princeton and transferred to thirty microfilm rolls from which digital copies in .pdf format have been circulating among scholars of the documentary Geniza.

Link to other examples of digitized note collections: - Niklas Luhmann - W. Ross Ashby - Jonathan Edwards

Are there collections by Charles Darwin and Linnaeus as well?

https://youtu.be/VFs3_COOMp8?t=1130

He mentions (not seriously) getting into a spat with his wife who threatens to throw his zettelkasten out the window as a means of retaliation! 🤣

https://youtu.be/VFs3_COOMp8?t=1103

Mention of worry over losing a zettelkasten due to fire or water damage, versus digital loss due to electric/power failure.

Hard drive failure and lack of back ups are also a problem.

I recall portions about Socrates deriding "writing" as a mode of expression, but I don't recall specific sections on note taking. What is Ann Blair's referent for this?

The "emerging popularity of taking physical notes" seems not to be in evidence with only one exemplar of a student who lost their notes within the Blair text.

Another example of someone saying that if their house were to catch fire, they'd save their commonplace book (first or foremost).

Frederic Paxson took his note file from Wisconsin to Washington D.C. when he went into war service from 1917-1918, which Earl Pomeroy notes as an indicator of how little burden it was, but he doesn't make any notation about worries about loss or damage during travel, which may have potentially occurred to Paxson, given his practice and the value to him of the collection.

May be worth looking deeper into to see if he had such worries.

Relying on cut up slips of paper rather than the standard cards of equal size, Keith Thomas has relayed that his slips often "get loose and blow around the house, turning up months later under a carpet or cushion."

He also suspects that some of his notes have accidentally been thrown away by falling off his desk and into the nearby waste basket which camouflages his notes amongst similar looking trash.

episcopal-orthodox reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y77414/comment/isyqc7b/

As long as you're not using flimsy, standard paper for your slips like Luhmann (they deteriorate too rapidly with repeated use), you can frame your carrying them around more positively by thinking that use over time creates a lovely patina to your words and ideas. The value of this far outweighs the fear of loss, at least for me. And if you're still concerned, there's always the option that you could use ars memoria to memorize all of your cards and meditate on them combinatorially using Llullan wheels the way Raymond Llull originally did. 🛞🗃️🚀🤩

u/LBHO https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y77414/worried_about_paper_cards_being_lost_or_destroyed/

As a firm believer in the programming principle of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), I can appreciate the desire not to do the work twice.

Note card loss and destruction is definitely a thing folks have worried about. The easiest thing may be to spend a minute or two every day and make quick photo back ups of your cards as you make them. Then if things are lost, you'll have a back up from which you can likely find OCR (optical character recognition) software to pull your notes from to recreate them if necessary. I've outlined some details I've used in the past. Incidentally, opening a photo in Google Docs will automatically do a pretty reasonable OCR on it.

I know some have written about bringing old notes into their (new) zettelkasten practice, and the general advice here has been to only pull in new things as needed or as heavily interested to ease the cognitive load of thinking you need to do everything at once. If you did lose everything and had to restore from back up, I suspect this would probably be the best advice for proceeding as well.

Historically many have worried about loss, but the only actual example of loss I've run across is that of Hans Blumenberg whose zettelkasten from the early 1940s was lost during the war, but he continued apace in another dating from 1947 accumulating over 30,000 cards at the rate of about 1.5 per day over 50 some odd years.

Writer Jean Paul on the importance of his Zettelkasten.

"In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first," the poet Jean Paul instructed his wife before setting out on a journey in 1812.

link to: https://hyp.is/BLL9TvZ9EeuSIrsiWKCB9w/ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/ur5xjv/handwritten_cards_to_a_digital_back_up_workflow/

For those who keep a physical pen and paper system who either want to be a bit on the hybrid side, or just have a digital backup "just in case", I thought I'd share a workflow that I outlined back in December that works reasonably well. (Backups or emergency plans for one's notes are important as evidenced by poet Jean Paul's admonition to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812: "In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first.") It's framed as posting to a website/digital garden, but it works just as well for many of the digital text platforms one might have or consider. For those on other platforms (like iOS) there are some useful suggestions in the comments section. Handwriting My Website (or Zettelkasten) with a Digital Amanuensis

His collection is incredibly important to him. He states this in a way that's highly reminiscent of Jean Paul.

"In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first." —instructions from Jean Paul to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812 #

18 Von Bülow and Krusche, “Vorla ̈ ufiges,” 273.

Hans Blumenberg's first zettelkasten dates to the early 1940s, but was lost during the war though he continued the practice afterwards. The collection of his notes housed at Marbach dates from 1947 onward.

Hans Blumenberg's zettelkasten of about thirty thousand typed and handwritten note cards is now kept at the German Literature Archive in Marbach. Blumenberg kept it in a wooden box which he kept in a fireproof steel cabinet.