"How To" Directory by [[Anna Havron]]

Doto, Bob. A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly - A Zettelkasten Primer. 1st ed. New Old Traditions, 2024. https://amzn.to/3ztjrfb.

Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:231323658d79d9bdf946e1cfbe01e500

Alternate annotation view

Miles, Eustace Hamilton. How to Prepare Essays, Lectures, Articles, Books, Speeches and Letters, with Hints on Writing for the Press. London: Rivingtons, 1905. http://archive.org/details/howtoprepareessa00mileuoft.

Doto wastes no time getting into the most important aspects of note taking. Even before the book has begun, the copyright page in the front matter is getting you ready for what is about to come:

Please cite the author and book when quoting.

https://thesiswhisperer.com/podcasts/<br /> On The Reg (OTR) is a podcast about Work, with an academic slant.

in ¶90-96 he provides some advice about selection and discrimination of reading sources and materials for indexing as a means of cutting down on the information overload problem

Some of his factors include: - relying on experience in a field/area to narrow down - limiting one's scope of activity - staying away from reference books (dictionaries, encyclopedias - discriminate in favor of the specific versus the general - don't admit duplicative literature (unless one is working syntopically—though he doesn't admit this caveat), and prefer the most authoritative sources - prefer authoritative authors, when given, but make space for new writers who may be more careful in their writing and argumentation - discriminate by style and composition and in particular stay away from pernicious advertising-related material (today he might advocate away from listicles, content farms, etc.)

Devising Card Systems

Many modern-day note takers and knowledge workers might take solace in the broad advice provided by J. Kaiser in 1908. In describing some of the broad categories of uses of card index filing systems for business use he says that each entity "has its individual character and individual requirements, and its individual character" (ie, everyone is different and has different needs), therefore everyone "must devise [their] system in accordance with [their] own requirements" and should "be the best judge as to what these requirements are." He continues on in the rest of the book to outline a variety of suggestions and methods which one might use or adopt, but he doesn't dictate specific methods and leaves those decisions up to the end user.

When devising their own systems, one certainly ought to heed this advice when looking at a variety of alternative methods like Forte's P.A.R.A., Milo's LYT, or even in mimicking Luhmann's idiosyncratic Zettelkasten set up. Are these methods best for your particular use cases? Are they simple enough for what you want to do, or are they overly structured and complicated? The key is to be able to classify and file things quickly so that they can be easily accessed in the future, all the rest becomes additional details and overhead to support on an ongoing basis.

(¶76)

reply to u/oursong at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1bideq7/literature_notes_question/

My bibliographic/literature notes are my personal (brief) index of what I found interesting in the book. I can always revisit most of what the book contained by reviewing over it. When done I excerpt the most important and actionable items on their own cards with a reference back to the book and page/loc number. Depending on my needs I may revisit at later dates and excerpt other pieces from my indexed items if it turns out I need them.

From an efficiency perspective, I find that it seems like a waste of time to split out hundreds of lower-level ideas when I may only need the best for my work.

original source?

it's Benjamin Franklin letter to Miss Stevenson, Wanstead. Craven-street, May 16, 1760.<br /> see: https://hyp.is/HZeDKI3YEeyj9GcNWKX4iA/www.gutenberg.org/files/40236/40236-h/40236-h.htm

Barbara Tuchman took her notes on four-by-six inch index cards.

She repeated the oft-advised mantra to only write on one side of a sheet.

What manual did she read this in? She specifically puts quotes on "Never write on the back of anything." so perhaps it might be something that could be tracked down?

Who was the earliest version of this quote? And was it always towards the idea of cutting up slips or pages and not wanting to lose material on the back? or did it also (later? when?) include ease-of-use and user interface features even when not cutting things up?

At what point did double sided become a thing for personal printed materials? Certainly out of a duty to minimize materials, but it also needed the ability to duplex print pages or photocopy them that way.

reply to u/Rampage_user at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16wgq4l/how_to_get_started_with_zk_and_obsidian/

Perhaps what I've done in Obsidian may help: I've created several folders for individual pieces:

• Zettels folder - contains permanent/atomic/evergreen notes which broadly stand on their own; I give them decimal numbers so that alphabetical sorting within the folder provides me with neighborhoods of ideas without needing to provide direct links from one idea to another on each and every note.
• Bibliography folder - contains individual notes for details about sources (books, articles, videos, etc.) which also contains the fleeting notes related to them (each can have from one to sometimes hundreds of short, not fully formed notes and excerpts);
• Index folder - contains 26 notes, one for each letter of the alphabet each of which has index entries that lead to notes in the zettels folder; Like Luhmann's my index is sparse and I rely on the neighborhoods around the notes that link from the index.

While I do have a few tags, I broadly eschew them as they don't scale well with time in my experience.

Some literature is unspecific about it, but you should know that NOT EVERY FLEETING NOTE NEEDS TO BECOME A PERMANENT NOTE. Only split out the most interesting and potentially future useful ones. Some of my book notes have hundreds of fleeting notes, highlights, etc. and I've only pulled out 3 or 4 permanent notes from them. (The side benefit is that if you need them, you've got links to those fleeting notes for later if you need to review over, use, or convert them.)

Really the best advice is to practice. A Lot. Experience will help you know when your fleeting notes should become permanent ones and how much work they need to become permanent notes. You can always adjust things in the future if your experience helps you simplify things further for you. If you make three permanent notes a week, you're doing better than most. I add 1-5 bibliographic sources a day and average about 50 fleeting notes with only one, or maybe two permanent notes on a good day.

Good luck. Now go practice...

—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?

reply to u/FilterGrad6 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16iwdep/newbie/

Digital is just a tool. Why necessarily chose it over analog unless you can specifically identify affordances which dramatically improve your experience or output?

As you've discovered, shiny object syndrome may prevent you from collecting enough into one place to be truly useful and valuable. Pick one that seems to work for you and build from there.

If paper was good enough for the practices and outputs of Carl Linnaeus, Konrad Gessner, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, John Locke, Hans Blumenberg, Roland Barthes, Beatrice Webb, Jacques Barzun, Niklas Luhmann, Gertrud Bauer, Marcel Mauss, Phyllis Diller, and so many others is there any reason it shouldn't work just as effectively for your work?

reply to Efficient_Eart_8773 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ad43u/comment/jzaas4l/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Though depending on your needs and desires, you can really do both to effectuate the outcomes you'd like to have. The secret is knowing which affordances, structures, and methods suit your desired outcomes. (Of course if you're going to dump your box out and do massive rearrangements or take large portions out and want to refile them for other needs, then you're going to have to give them numbers and do that re-filing work.)

I've seen snippets of saved language in Thoreau's journal (commonplace) which were re-used in other parts of his journal which ultimately ended up in a published work. As he didn't seem to have a significant index, one can only guess that he used occasional browsing or random happenstance delving into it to have moved it from one place to another.

As ever, what do you need and what will best get you there?

Link to:<br /> What Got You Here Won't Get You There

reply to u/taurusnoises and u/Leander_znsnsj at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/162os2q/how_can_i_use_zettelkasten_as_a_high_school/

I'm generally in the same boat as u/taurusnoises and don't think that a Luhmann-artig ZK is necessarily the right way to go—particularly at the lower levels.

I would suggest that if interested students look closely at the overall set up, they'll find that the literature note portion is almost identical to that of the Cornell note-taking method. The primary differences between them are placing more emphasis on follow-up and review, forcing yourself to answer questions, and doing spaced repetition. (Of course, naturally, there's nothing wrong with doing all your Cornell Notes on index cards despite every version I've ever seen recommending sheets of paper!)

If you do ultimately choose to go with the expanded zettelkasten workflow, I would recommend you spend more time focusing on your own thoughts on the facts and ideas as they relate to the the Cornell portion. Focus more on the area of your major (or particular interests if you're still unsure of your major) in which you're most likely to need to create writing or other particular outputs. One or two good main cards a day with a full class load is a solid start.

Keep in mind that as you enter new areas, you will likely make lots of basic, factual, low level notes while you're learning. Don't worry about this (and don't ignore it either) as working with these ideas will help you to scaffold your knowledge and understand it better. You may not have lots of high quality main notes which will usually come as you get deeper into the nuances of your subject. You should still expect to find and generate insights though and these may be highly valuable as you need to execute projects or write papers.

Good luck!

https://www.dtsheffler.com/blog/2015-08-05-one-thought-per-note/ archive version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220124223433/https://www.dtsheffler.com/blog/2015-08-05-one-thought-per-note/

ᔥ[[abramdemski]] in The Zettelkasten Method (accessed:: 2023-08-25 12:00:07)

A statement of the common "one idea per card" (or per note). He doesn't state it, but links to an article whose title is "One Thought Per Note".

Who else has use this or similar phrasing in the historical record? - Beatrice Webb certainly came pretty close. - Others?

Zettelkasten advice:

1. Have a goal in mind
2. Really... have a goal. Write it down.
3. Practice at it, a lot
4. When stuck, read some of the bits below
5. Practice, practice, practice.

Here are a list of some of the strongest books which focus on the topic or cover things from various interesting perspectives: - Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017. - Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/. (Specifically the first half of the book.) - Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957. http://archive.org/details/modernreseracher0000unse. - Bernstein, Mark. Tinderbox: The Tinderbox Way. 3rd ed. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, Inc., 2017. http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/TinderboxWay/index.html. - Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis. - Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout. - Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062. - Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. (Especially chapter seven). - Weinberg, Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005.

Read one (or two) and then dive in and actually practice (and practice and practice some more) things for a while.

For some of the smaller subtleties which aren't covered in books, try one of the two following collections for individual bits of advice and insight: - https://writing.bobdoto.computer/zettelkasten/ - https://zettelkasten.de/posts/ - https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

Jillian Hess makes her own journals as a means of elevating her note-taking experience.

reply to u/ManuelRodriguez331 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15ehcy5/why_is_the_index_card_half_full/

There has been debate about the length of notes on slips since the invention of slips and it shows no signs of coming to broad consensus other than everyone will have their personal opinion.

If you feel that A6 is is too big then go down a step in size to A7. One of the benefits of the DIN A standard is that you can take the next larger card size and fold it exactly in half to have the next size smaller. This makes it easier to scale up the size of your cards if you prefer most of them to be smaller to save space, just take care not to allow larger folded cards to "taco" smaller cards in a way they're likely to get lost. If you really needed more space, you could easily use an A1 or A2 and fold it down to fit inside of your collection! (Sadly 4x6 and 3x5 cards don't have this affordance.)

Fortunately there are a variety of available sizes, so you can choose what works best for yourself. Historically some chose large 5x8", 6x9", or even larger "slips". Some have also used different sizes for different functions. For example some use 3x5 for bibliographic cards and 4x6 for day-to-day ideas. I've seen stacked wooden card catalog furniture that had space for 3x5, 4x6, and 8.5x11 in separate drawers within the same cabinet. Some manufacturers even made their furniture modular to make this sort of mixed use even easier.

One of the broadly used pieces of advice that does go back centuries is to use "cards of the same size" (within a particular use case). This consensus is arrived at to help users from losing smaller cards between larger/taller cards. Cards of varying sizes, even small ones, are also much more difficult to sort through. Slight of hand magicians will be aware of the fact that shaving small fractions of length off of playing cards is an easy way of not only marking them, but of executing a variety of clever shuffling illusions as well as finding some of them very quickly by feel behind the back. Analog zettelkasten users will only discover that smaller, shorter cards are nearly guaranteed to become lost among the taller cards. It's for this reason that I would never recommend one to mix 4x6, A6, or even the very closely cut Exacompta Bristol cards, which are neither 4x6 nor A6!

I once took digital notes and printed them on paper and then cut them up to fit the size of the individual notes to save on space and paper. I can report that doing this was a painfully miserable experience and positively would NOT recommend doing this for smaller projects much less lifelong ones. Perhaps this could be the sort of chaos someone out there might actually manage to thrive within, but I suspect it would be a very rare individual.

As for digital spacing, you may win out a bit here for "saving" paper space, but you're also still spending on storage costs in electronic formatting which historically doesn't have the longevity of physical formats. Digital also doesn't offer the ease of use of laying cards out on a desktop and very quickly reordering them for subsequent uses.

There are always tradeoffs, one just need be aware of them to guide choices for either how they want to work or how they might work best.

Personally, I use 4x6" cards because I often write longer paragraphs on them. Through experimentation I found that I would end up using two or more 3x5 cards more often than I would have had mostly blank 4x6 cards and used that to help drive my choice. I also find myself revisiting old cards and adding to them (short follow ups, links to other cards, or other metadata) and 3x5 wouldn't allow that as easily.

As ever, YMMV...

See also: [[note lengths]] and/or [[note size]].

reply to u/IvanCyb at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/15eljnf/how_do_you_refer_from_and_to_multiple_sources/

Usually if I find a quote somewhere, I'll try to track down the original source, check the context and excerpt it from the original. If it's something mission critical, I might note that it was excerpted and used in other sources and whether it was well excerpted for their case or not. Sometimes, quoting can also help to make a solid case about the influence a work had and notes on that can be a useful thing. If I make multiple notes about the same sort of idea, that's fine, though I typically try to file them all next to each other for easy consultation and comparison, if necessary. As an example, I have quotes from multiple sources about note taking indicating that one should only write on one side of a(n index) card. Some quote earlier sources, some state it without attribution, some say they've learned to do so over time and with experience. Some give reasons why and some don't. The only way to track these practices over time is to note them all together for comparing and contrasting. It wasn't until I'd seen the third mention that I realized the practice was an interesting/important one and worth tracking, so I had to go back and dig up the originals which I had written briefly on their bibliographic cards with page numbers, so it made things easier to create main cards out of them. Because they're all stored together, there's only one index entry for them (for the first one), under "note taking" with the subheading "write only on one side". Alternately I might have made a single note card about the idea of the practice and created a list with pointers of those who used it (or didn't) and links to the sources where I originally found them. Do what makes most sense for you for tracking based on your own situation and needs. You may also find that these things happen frequently when doing literature reviews and things are repeated often within a field. Sometimes it's helpful to figure out who said a thing first and whether or not others are repeating/quoting them or coming to the same conclusion on their own. Is it a solid conclusion? What is the evidence or lack thereof? The only way to know is to start keeping track of these patterns in your reading and notes. Where and how you choose to track it in your zettelkasten is up to you. Sometimes it may be in brief notes with the original source, sometimes in a "hub note", and still others broken out into primary cards collected together.

Reply to Bob Doto at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14ikfsy/comment/jplo3j2/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 with respect to PZ Compass Points.

I'll agree wholeheartedly that applying methods like this to each note one takes is a "make work" exercise. It's apt to encourage people into the completist trap of turning every note they take into some sort of pristine so-called permanent or evergreen note, and there are already too many of those practitioners, who often give up in a few weeks wondering "where did I go wrong?".

It's useful to know that these methods and tools exist, particularly for younger students, but I would never recommend that one apply them on a daily or even weekly basis. Maybe if one was having trouble with a particular idea or thought and wanted to more exhaustively explore the adjacent space around it, but even here going out for a walk in nature and allowing diffuse thinking to do some of the work is likely to be just as (maybe more?) productive.

It could be the sort of thing to write down in your collection of Oblique Strategies to pull out when you're hitting a wall?

reply to u/throwthis_throwthat at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13gcbj1/requesting_advice_for_where_to_put_a_related_idea/

I don't accept the premise of your question. This doesn't get said often enough to people new to zettelkasten practice: Trust your gut! What does it say? You'll learn through practice that there are no "right" answers to these. Put a number on it, file it, and move on. Practice, practice, practice. You'll be doing this in your sleep soon enough. As long as it's close enough, you'll find it. Save your mental cycles for deeper thoughts than this.

Asking others for their advice is fine, but it's akin to asking a well-practiced mnemonist what visual image they would use to remember something. Everyone is different and has different experiences and different things that make their memories sticky for them. What works incredibly well for how someone else thinks and the level of importance they give an idea is never as useful or as "true" as how you think about it. Going with your gut is going to help you remember it better and is far likelier to make it easier to find in the future.

Jared Henderson writes excerpted ideas in block capital letters and his own observations and thoughts in small print as a means of distinguishing his own ideas from others.

Others might do this using other means: fonts, color, writing instrument, etc.

from Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

Cross reference with Seneca's note taking metaphors with apes.

Note taking should serve a specific purpose; it should be a means to some end.

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?

Example of someone falling prey to shiny object syndrome, switching tools incessantly, then focusing on too many of the wrong things/minutiae and getting lost in the shuffle.

Don't get caught up into this. Understand the basics of types of notes, but don't focus on them. Let them just be. Does what you've written remind you of the end goal?

reply to u/jordynfly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13b0b5c/comment/jjcu3cn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm curious what your area of research is? What are you studying with respect to Zettelkasten?

Caveat notetarius. Note collections are highly idiosyncratic to the user or intended audience, thus quality will vary dramatically on the creator's needs and future desires and potential uses. Contemporaneous, very simple notes can be valuable for their initial sensemaking and quite often in actual practice stop there.

Ultimately, only the user can determine perceived quality and long term value for themselves. Future generations of historians, anthropologists, scholars, and readers, might also find value in notes and note collections, but it seems rare that the initial creators have written them with future readers and audiences in mind. Often they're less useful as the external reader is missing large swaths of context.

For my own personal notes, I consider high quality notes to be well-sourced, highly reusable, easily findable, and reasonably tagged/linked. My favorite, highest quality notes are those that are new ideas which stem from the combination of two high quality notes. With respect to subjectivity, some of my philosophy is summarized by one of my favorite meta-zettels (alt text also available) from zettelmeister Umberto Eco.

Anecdotally, 95% of my notes are done digitally and in public, but I've only got scant personal evidence that anyone is reading or interacting with them. I never write them with any perceived public consumption in mind (beyond the readers of the finished pieces that ultimately make use of them), but it is often very useful to get comments and reactions to them. I'm only aware of a small handful of people publishing their otherwise personal note collections (usually subsets) to the web (outside of social media presences which generally have a different function and intent).

Intellectual historians have looked at and documented external use cases of shared note collections, commonplace books, annotated volumes, and even diaries. There are even examples of published (usually posthumously) commonplace books, waste books, etc., but these are often for influential public and intellectual figures. Here Ludwig Wittgenstein's Zettel, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura, Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Waste Books, Ralph Waldo Emmerson, Ronald Reagan's card index commonplace, Stobaeus' Anthology, W. H. Auden's A Certain World, and Robert Southey’s Common-Place Book come quickly to mind not to mention digitized scholarly collections of Niklas Luhmann, W. Ross Ashby, S.D. Goitein, Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, and Aby Warburg's notes. Some of these latter will give you an idea of what they may have thought quality notes to have been for them, but often they mean little if nothing to the unstudied reader because they lack broader context or indication of linkages.

Zhao briefly describes Cal Newport's Questions, Evidence, Conclusions (QEC) framework which she uses as a framework for quickly annotating books and then making notes from those annotations later.

How does QEC differ from strategies in Adler/Van Doren?

There's something interesting lurking here on note taking practice as well.

Generic notes for learning may rephrase or summarize an idea int one's own words and are equivalent to basic information or articles as framed by Clark/Keiger. But in building towards something, that goes beyond the basic, one should strive in their notes to elicit experience and generate insight; take the facts and analyze them, create something new, interesting, and unique.

reply to u/whysofancy at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12u8gbv/comment/jh61vqw/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

My general advice is to keep things as stupidly simple as possible and use as few tools/platforms as you can get away with.

If you haven't come across them, I highly recommend these two books:

• Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.
• Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated ed. edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.

You might also appreciate the short article by Mills:

Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.

Chances are pretty good your college/university's library does regular tutorials for tools like Zotero, particularly at the beginning of the term. Raul Pacheco has some good notes/ideas which may be helpful for things like literature reviews: http://www.raulpacheco.org/resources/. For Hypothes.is, try starting with this tutorial by their head of education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09z5hyBMs8s. If you're using Obsidian with Zotero, I'd recommend this walk through https://forum.obsidian.md/t/zotero-zotfile-mdnotes-obsidian-dataview-workflow/15536 and this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbGJH08ZfCs. If you have other tools in mind that you'd like to use, let the community know and perhaps we can make some suggestions about tutorials, but really, just jump in and try something out. Search YouTube and see what you find.

At the end of the day, start using a tool or two and simply practice with them. Practice, practice, and practice some more as that's what you'll be doing regularly in grad school. Read, write notes, organize them, write short articles or papers as practice. You'll eventually build up enough for a much longer thesis.

Why the Single Note Matters by Sascha Fast

Diligence is required.

Stream of Consciousness to Atomic Notes: A Powerful Note-Taking Workflow

Broadly a workflow that takes journaling/morning pages and then progressively refines them into atomic-like notes.

Uses the idea of open loops from the GTD-space.

Too many zettelkasten aspirants only want the presupposed "rules" for keeping one or are interested in imitating one or another examples. Few have interest in the actual day to day practice and these are often the most adept. Of course the downside of learning some of the pieces online leaves the learner with some (often broken) subset of rules and one or two examples (often only theoretical) and then wonder why their actual practice is left so wanting.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/ZeZEgNm8Ee2woUds5QzgOw

reply to u/all_flowers_in_time_ at https://www.reddit.com/r/NoteTaking/comments/12g3idj/any_easy_strategies_to_improve_my_notetaking/

In many ways I was just like you in school...

Some of it depends on what your notes are for. Are you using them to write things in your own words to increase understanding and tie them into other ideas? Are you using them as reminders? Are you using them to build material for later (papers, articles, write a book, other?) For memorization?

Your notes look like they've got a Cornell Notes appearance, so perhaps more formally structuring your pages that way will help? Creating sample test questions afterward for practice and recall can be highly useful and force you to create answers which is dramatically more productive than simply reviewing over notes which usually creates a false sense of familiarity.

If you're using them for memorization, then perhaps convert the notes after lecture into flash cards (physical cards, Anki, Mnemosyne, etc.) that you can use for spaced repetition.

If you're using them to later create other content, then perhaps a commonplace book or zettelkasten structure may be helpful for cross indexing ideas. If you're not familiar with these, try out the following book which covers all of these use cases and mores:

Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017.

I wish I had been able to do so when I was a student.

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_

After having used his zettelkasten for 26 years, Luhmann mentions that he chose normal paper as his substrate for note taking over thicker index cards to save on storage space and particularly to make it possible to keep more material closer to his desk rather than need to store it at larger distances within his office. This allows more slips per drawer and also tends to have an effect on productivity with respect to daily use and searching.

One might need to balance this out with frequency of use and slip wear, as some slips in his box show heavy use and wear, especially at the top.

reply to u/iamharunjonuzi at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12bvcmn/how_do_i_store_when_coming_across_an_actual_fact/

How central is the fact to what you're working at potentially developing? Often for what may seem like basic facts that are broadly useful, but not specific to things I'm actively developing, I'll leave basic facts like that as short notes on the source/reference cards (some may say literature notes) where I found them rather than writing them out in full as their own cards.

If I were a future biologist, as a student I might consider that I would soon know really well what a cell was and not bother to have a primary zettel on something so commonplace unless I was collecting various definitions to compare and contrast for something specific. Alternately as a non-biologist or someone that doesn't use the idea frequently, then perhaps it may merit more space for connecting to others?

Of course you can always have it written along with the original source and "promote" it to its own card later if you feel it's necessary, so you're covered either way. I tend to put the most interesting and surprising ideas into my main box to try to maximize what comes back out of it. If there were 2 more interesting ideas than the definition of cell in that documentary, then I would probably leave the definition with the source and focus on the more important ideas as their own zettels.

As a rule of thumb, for those familiar with Bloom's taxonomy in education, I tend to leave the lower level learning-based notes relating to remembering and understanding as shorter (literature) notes on the source's reference card and use the main cards for the higher levels (apply, analyze, evaluate, create).

Ultimately, time, practice, and experience will help you determine for yourself what is most useful and where. Until you've developed a feel for what works best for you, just write it down somewhere and you can't really go too far wrong.

use of theausaurus to limit subject headings...

Note-taking techniques I: The index card method<br /> by Raul Pacheco-Vega

What does his full collection look like? Does he have a larger filing cabinet or boxes or are they all smaller modular boxes?

How does he handle the variety of sizes here? Particularly the differences between 4 x 6 and 5 x 8 as it sounds like he may use them similarly outside of their size difference.

Poem from the inside back cover of a 1913 Memindex Catalog:

JUST JOT IT DOWN.

If you’re going to meet a man<br /> Jot it down<br /> If you’ve got a little plan<br /> Jot it down<br /> If you never can remember<br /> Your requirements for September<br /> ’Till October or November<br /> Jot ’em down.

If you’ve got a note to pay<br /> Jot it down<br /> If its due the first of May<br /> Jot it down<br /> If collections are so slow<br /> That to meet the note you know<br /> You must dun old Richard Roe<br /> Jot it down

If you have a happy thought<br /> Jot it down<br /> If there’s something to be bought<br /> Jot it down<br /> Whether duty calls or pleasure<br /> If you’re busy or at leisure<br /> It will help you beyond measure<br /> Jot it down

If there’re facts that you’d retain<br /> Jot ’em down<br /> If you’ve got to meet a train<br /> Jot it down<br /> If at work or only play<br /> If at home or far away<br /> In the night or in the day<br /> Jot it down

One can make links between ideas more explicit using words like x ["supports", "contradicts", "supports", "challenges", "extends", "contradicts", etc] y. However it can be even more useful and beneficial to not only state the connection in the loosest of terms, but to explore and develop what that connection is and how it works. The more explicit one can be, the better.

If it's a metaphor, analogy, or abstraction, how far can one push those relationships before they collapse? Can the abstraction be encompassed in a mathematical sense that one case completely consumes another?

Structure notes can take a variety of forms including lists, diagrams, mind maps, tables, and tables of contents.

Q: Can I use a card index for note taking?

ChatGPT does a reasonable bit of advice on how one would use a card index for note taking.

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.

Most veteran note takers will advise against importing old notes into a new digital space for the extra amount of administrative overhead and refactoring it can create.

Often old notes may be: - well assimilated into your memory already - poorly sourced or require lots of work and refactoring to use or reuse them - become a time suck trying to make them "perfect"

Better advice is potentially pull them into your system in a different spot so they're searchable and potentially linkable/usable as you need them. If this seems like excessive work, and it very well may be, then just pull in individual notes as you need or remember them.

With any luck the old notes are easily searchable/findable in whichever old system they happen to be in, so they're still accessible.

I'll note here the conflicting definitions of multiple storage in my tags to mean: - storing a single note under multiple subject headings or index terms - storing notes in various different (uncentralized locations), so having multiple different zettelkasten at home/office, storing some notes in social media locations, in various notebooks, etc. This means you have to search across multiple different interfaces to find the thing you're looking at.

I should create a new term to distinguish these two, but for now they're reasonably different within their own contexts that it's not a big problem unless one or the other scales.

Should You Have One Zettelkasten or Many?<br /> by Christian Tietze

Of course the metaphor of the bees and their honey is the biggest which we've all failed to mention! It's my favorite because of its age, its location within the tradition of rhetoric and sententiae/ars excerpendi, its prolific use through history, and the way it frames collecting and arranging for the use of creativity and writing.

In the his classic on rhetoric, Seneca gave an account of his ideas about note-taking in the 84th letter to Luculius ("On Gathering Ideas"). It begins from ut aiunt: "men say", that we should imitate the bees in our reading practice. For as they produce honey from the flowers they visit and then "assort in their cells all that they have brought in", so we should, "sift (separate) whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading" because things keep better in isolation from one another, an idea which dovetails with ars memoria, the 4th canon of rhetoric.

"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says: 'pack close the flowering honey And swell their cells with nectar sweet.' "

Generations later in ~430 CE, Macrobius in his Saturnalia repeated the same idea (he assuredly read Seneca, though he obviously didn't acknowledge him):

"You should not count it a fault if I shall set out the borrowings from a miscellaneous reading in the authors' own words... sometimes set out plainly in my own words and sometimes faithfully recorded in the actual words of the old writers... We ought in some sort to imitate bees; and just as they, in their wandering to and fro, sip the flowers, then arrange their spoil and distribute it among the honeycombs, and transform the various juices to a single flavor by some mixing with them a property of their own being, so I too shall put into writing all that I have acquired in the varied course of my reading... For not only does arrangement help the memory, but the actual process of arrangement, accompanied by a kind of mental fermentation which serves to season the whole, blends the diverse extracts to make a single flavor; with the result that, even if the sources are evident, what we get in the end is still something clearly different from those known sources."

Often in manuscripts writers in the middle ages to the Renaissance would draw bees or write 'apes' (Latin for bees) in the margins of their books almost as bookmarks for things they wished to remember or excerpt for their own notes.

Of course, neither of these classical writers mentions the added benefit that the bees were simultaneously helping to pollenate the flowers, which also enhances the ecosystem.

• Seneca (2006) Epistles 66-92. With an English translation by Richard G. Gummere. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 277-285.
• Havens, Earle. Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2001.

Some systems require a unique identifier, but the people who are using a datetime stamp or random number anywhere in their (Luhmann-esque) zettelkasten title (here's a good example) are leading you astray. Doubly so if it occurs at the beginning of the title. There are no affordances in this practice and it's more likely to cause problems at scale. Just say no! (Note this is not the same as using a Luhmann-esque identifier at the start of a title as a means of providing a sort order of one's notes held in an individual folder.)

Are there any reasons for someone to do this?! - perhaps for file name conflicts when digitally inserting notes into a system using third party clients with titles which may cause conflicts (though these could/should be removed later for easier reading); - counterexample: https://hypothes.is/a/Jux0pq7yEe2Uqj9mFXS3nQ - Another potential issue is in shared or collaborative note taking spaces where collision is more likely because others don't have the shared context. - perhaps for forcing sort orders on daily notes or recurring meetings MeetingA YYYY-MM-DD, etc., though these are probably in a separate area of one's box and not in their zettelkasten section.

The point of a zettelkasten is to provide one help in ordering and building their knowledge, not in ordering their notes by time created. This will rarely (sans database-related use cases perhaps) provide any insight and digital systems have other easier and better ways of doing this if you need it.

Worse, some systems may not do autocompletion on words in the middle of titles, so starting a card with a datetime can hamper this functionality. One should check this against their particular system.

Some useful and solid advice here.

reply to u/Turbulent-Focus-1389 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/112wup1/beginner_question/

I'd recommend you do your best to stay away from rigid category-like classifications and see what develops. For specifics see: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/19/on-the-interdisciplinarity-of-zettelkasten-card-numbering-topical-headings-and-indices/

If it's easier to conceptualize, think of it all like a map which may have place names, but also has numerical coordinates. Sometimes a specific name like Richard Macksey's house is useful, but other times thinking about a specific coordinate and the general neighborhoods around them will be far more useful in your community development plan. A religion-only neighborhood without religious activities, religious food, religious organization or communication will be a a sad one indeed. If you segregate your communities, they're likely not to be very happy places for co-mingling of ideas and the potential resultant creativity you'll get out of them.

Bob Doto also suggests a similar philosophy in some of his work, particularly with respect to folgezettel: https://writing.bobdoto.computer/zettelkasten/

I'll note that this is an incredibly hard thing to do at the start, but it's one which you may very well wish you had done from the beginning.

Some in the current zettelkasten space come close to this (Bob Doto comes to mind) while others seem to be more dogmatic. I think people generally ultimately do this in practice, but there is still a lingering sense of orthodoxy.

His description of paragraphs from 150 to 350 words is interesting with respect to the amount of material that will fit on a 3x5" inch card during the note taking process.

reply to u/jackbaty at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10mjwq9/ive_decided_i_dont_care_too_much_where_new_notes/

u/jackbaty, If it doesn't make sense for you (yet, or for your specific needs), you can always follow in the footsteps of the hundreds of thousands who used a topical subject heading method of the commonplace book before Luhmann's example shifted the space over the last decade. If it worked for Francis Bacon, you'll probably be alright too... (See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/10/reframing-and-simplifying-the-idea-of-how-to-keep-a-zettelkasten/)

I find that sometimes, it is useful to bank up a few dozen cards before filing/linking them together. Other times I'll file them by category in a commonplace book like system to ruminate a bit only later to move them to a separate Luhmann-esque zettelkasten area where they're more tightly linked with the ideas around them. After you've been doing it a while, it will be easier to more tightly integrate the three-way conversation or argument you're having between yourself, your card index, and the sources you're thinking about (or reading, watching, listening to). You mention that "my brain needs at least some level of structure", and I totally get it, as most of us (myself included) are programmed to work that way. I've written some thoughts on this recently which may help provide some motivation to get you around it: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/19/on-the-interdisciplinarity-of-zettelkasten-card-numbering-topical-headings-and-indices/

It helps to have a pointed reason for why you're doing all this in the first place and that reason will dramatically help to shape your practice and its ultimate structure.

He's got a collection of ideas around the area with some useful history: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

His practical advice is usually to quit reading about the theory and do the thing. Choose the simplest path and stick with it a while. See what happens. What's useful? What's not? Practice, practice, practice.

—Brian W. Kernighan, 1974 “UNIX for Beginners” [PDF] as Bell Labs Technical Memorandum 74-1273-18 on 29 October 1974.

For easier editing and reuse of sentences, or even portions of lines of text, one can (and should) write sentences or sentence fragments on their own lines in digital contexts.

This way future edits or the ability to more easily cut and paste will far easier in addition to keeping your version control files simpler and easier to read and visually track your changes. (That is in many version control systems, instead of a change appearing to affect an entire paragraph, it will only show on the single line that was changed thereby making the change easier to see.)

This particular affordance may be a particularly useful one for note takers who expect to regularly reuse their notes in other contexts. Many forms of software (including Tex, LaTeX, and even markdown) will autowrap newlines so that a sentence broken up into clauses on multiple lines will properly wrap back into a proper looking single line when printed. Take care that in many Markdown versions adding two spaces at the end of a line will automatically create a newline in your text.

Apparently sharing/comparing notes was reasonable advice in 1910 including the idea of in-class signals for splitting up note taking amongst multiple people.

Compare this to shared notes (Google Docs, Etherpad, etc.) in modern context with multiple people doing simultaneous notes.

Notice the advice for shorthand here in 1910. When was it a dead technology for students? Certainly by the 1980s when it was less frequently taught in schools.

Even with the ability to do shorthand and get things verbatim, he suggests against it for the sheer volume of material to go over.

Link to/compare with: - https://hypothes.is/a/gqSGbpVaEe2pmiuwPwm8Vw from 1892

reply to u/IamOkei https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10bjqjq/how_do_you_generate_unique_notes_i_feel_weird_to/

You may find value in re-framing your active reading and note taking/annotating as "having a conversation with the text". Adler's essay How to Mark a Book is a good short introduction. If you try this for a while and still have trouble, watch the movie Finding Forrester and try again. If you're still having trouble after this, read through Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading with a pen(cil) in hand and then try a third time.

reply to u/Subject_Industry1633 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zwgeas/is_the_zk_method_worth_it_and_how_it_helped_you/ (and further down)

ZK is an excellent tool for literature reviews! It is a relative neologism (with a slightly shifted meaning in English over the past decade with respect to its prior historical use in German) for a specific form of note taking or commonplacing that has generally existed in academia for centuries. Excellent descriptions of it can be found littered around, though not under a specific easily searchable key word or phrase, though perhaps phrases like "historical method" or "wissenschaftlichen arbeitens" may come closest.

Some of the more interesting examples of it being spelled out in academe include:

• Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.
• Webb, Sidney. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.
• Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.
• Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. (Particularly ch 7 if I recall correctly)

For academic use, anecdotally I've seen very strong recent use of the general methods most compellingly demonstrated in Obsidian (they've also got a Discord server with an academic-focused channel) though many have profitably used DevonThink and Tinderbox (which has a strong, well-established community of academics around it) as much more established products with dovetails into a variety of other academic tools. Obviously there are several dozens of newer tools for doing this since about 2018, though for a lifetime's work, one might worry about their longevity as products.

Steven Johnson indicates that it can be difficult to change workflows, tools, apps, etc.

Again note taking is the wrong tool for fact-based acquisition. Apparently this is not advice given in most sources. Spaced repetition and mnemonic methods are far better suited for memorizing and remembering basic facts.

Take notes on the surprising and unique. Take notes as writing you'll reuse later. Take notes to understand.

How was this not obvious from the jump? Was the author of the essay so distracted by shiny object syndrome they failed to see the obvious?

It's like taking notes in a language class... the goal is to read and write with fluency, so you practice these things regularly and gain fluency over time. Taking notes about the grammar and syntax of a language is highly unlikely to get you to fluency. Note taking is the wrong tool for a number of processes and the user should very quickly get a gut feeling for what's useful and what is not.

This author obviously missed the boat here.

Reply to:

Who is Zettelkasten note-taking system for? <br /> u/Beens__<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/who_is_zettelkasten_notetaking_system_for/

Perhaps your use case may benefit from knowing the longer term outcomes of such processes, particularly as they relate to idea generation and innovation within your areas of interest? Keeping notes which you review over periodically and between which you create potential links will help to foster more productive long term combinatorial creativity, which will help you create new and potentially useful ideas much more quickly than blank page-based brainstorming.

Her method was much more ad hoc than the more highly refined methods of Luhmann which allowed him to write, but perhaps there's something you might appreciate from the example of the character Tess McGill in the movie Working Girl. Even more base in practice is that of Eminem, which shows far less structure, but could still have interesting long term creativity effects, though again, it bears repeating that one should occasionally revisit their notes (even if they're only in "headline form") in attempts to refresh their memory and link old ideas to new to generate completely new ideas.

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zixzgj/should_i_use_a_zettelkasten_if_im_just_intending/

If you're considering less work upfront, you might consider a closely related form by maintaining a commonplace book, or a pared down version of what folks here are calling a zettelkasten.

https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/10/reframing-and-simplifying-the-idea-of-how-to-keep-a-zettelkasten/

Quote timestamp 01:26:36 from Obsidian Book Club checkin on 2022-12-04

Context: talking about note taking methods; note that the autogenerated transcription actually misses the word as eclectoamania which is interesting in itself as a potential word.

cliptomania<br /> definition: an excessive enthusiasm or desire to clip interesting material into one's notes. It often manifests itself in online settings where digital tools allow one to easily highlight and keep information including a URL or permalink to revisit that information in the future; a portmanteau of "clip" and "mania"

Examples of tools that allow or encourage this collection of material include Evernote and Hypothes.is.

a phenomenon which is related to the so-called "collector's fallacy"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbUEa9B0wLM

This appears like it might fit the bill for my Call for Model Examples of Zettelkasten Output Processea

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Eleanor Konik</span> in The Konik Method for Making Useful Notes (<time class='dt-published'>11/07/2022 12:03:38</time>)</cite></small>

https://www.obsidianroundup.org/the-konik-method-for-making-notes/

Eleanor Konik explores, in reasonable depth, how she makes notes and uses Obsidian to manage them. She doesn't talk much about the philosophy of her method in a prescriptive manner so much as she looks directly at her process.

This isn't so much a "rules" set, but takes some pre-existing rules (unstated) and shows how she bends them to her particular needs for outputs primarily in non-academic settings.

While there are rules and processes for taking notes, it's small personal tidbits like this that are harder fought knowledge for the beginner who generally only learns these bits through work and experience.

https://notebookofghosts.com/2018/02/25/a-brief-guide-to-keeping-a-commonplace-book/

very loose and hands-off on dictating others' practices

nothing new to me really...

Because your note taking practices will grow and evolve, don't get over-involved in too many specifics up front. Start somewhere and see where it goes.

"Nullum numen abest si sit prudentia, is unquestionably true, with regard to every thing except poetry; and I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by proper culture, care, attention, and labour, make himself whatever he pleases, except a good poet." Chesterfield, Letter lxxxi.

See also: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Works_of_the_Rev._Jonathan_Swift,_Volume_5.djvu/261 as a source

Swift, Jonathan. The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift. Edited by Thomas Sheridan and John Nichols. Vol. 5. 19 vols. London: H. Baldwin and Son, 1801.

By waiting some amount of time (days/weeks/a few months) between originally reading something and processing one's notes on it allows them to slowly distill into one's consciousness. It also allows one to operate on their diffuse thinking which may also help to link ideas to others in their memory.

Being willing to capture an idea by spending the time writing it out in full is an incredibly strong indicator that it is actually worth capturing. Often those who use cut and paste or other digital means for their note capture will over-collect because the barrier is low and simple.

More often than not, if one doesn't have some sort of barrier for capturing notes, they will become a burden and ultimately a scrap heap of generally useless ideas.

In the end, experience will eventually dictate one's practice as, over time, one will develop an internal gut feeling of what is really worth collecting and what isn't. Don't let your not having this at the beginning deter you. Collect and process and over time, you'll balance out what is useful.

Take notes for your most imperfect, forgetful future self. You're assuredly not only not going to remember either the thing you are taking notes for in the first place, but you're highly unlikely to remember why you thought it was interesting or intriguing or that clever thing you initially thought of at the same time.

Capture all of this quickly in the moment, particularly the interesting links to other things in your repository of notes. These ideas will be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for one to remember.

Paxson doesn't directly indicate to rewrite for one's own digestion and understanding process, but hints at it strongly when he says that "Your sentences must be your own." By making and owning your sentences, you ought to have completely understood the ideas and made them a part of you prior to transmitting them back along to others.

Under Paxon's framing and knowing that he also sometimes held onto is notes for a while before forming final opinions, one's notes, even when public (like my own are), are still just partial truths of thought caught in the moment. It takes further digestion and juxtaposition with additional thoughts which are later rewritten in longer form to make articles, books, etc.

Note taking is a process of sense making seeking out the truth of a situation.

1. Note headed "notes," n.d., Paxson File, unclassified.

Francesco Sacchini advised in 1615 that one should make two sets of notes: one to be cut up and filed, and the other kept in it's original form so as to keep the full context of the original author's context.

This is broadly one of the values of note taking in Hypothes.is. One can take broader excerpts of an authors' works as well as maintain links for fuller context to reconsult, but still have the shorter excerpts as well as one's own notes.

Keith Thomas wasn't taught, nor did he read (until much too late), methods on note taking, but still managed to puzzle out most of the specifics for his note taking practice in his historical work, or at least everything but taking notes on note cards instead of on sheets of paper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvxbl7Iwep4

Lots of levels here to pull apart, but this should be particularly interesting to novices.

Modes of note taking: * note taking for raw information * note taking (or writing) for understanding * note taking for relationships of and between knowledge * note taking for creating proficiency * note taking for productivity

Sung takes the viewpoint that linear note taking isn't as effective as mind mapping and drawing out relationships; in part this is why handwriting is more effective means of note taking compared to typing, particularly as most note taking apps force one into a linear pathway that doesn't mirror the affordances available within handwriting.

This video is definitely more about note taking than note making.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI3yiPA6npA

Generally interesting and useful, but is broadly an extended advertisement for JetPens products.

Transparent sticky notes allow one to take notes on them, but the text is still visible through the paper.

One can use separate pages to write notes and then use washi tape to tape the notes to the page in a hinge-like fashion similar to selectively interleaving one's books.

Film making is like note taking

Incidentally, one should note that the video is made up of snippets over time and then edited together at some later date. Specifically, these snippets are much like regularly taken notes which can then be later used (and even re-used--some could easily appear in other videos) to put together some larger project, namely this compilation video of his process. Pointing out this parallel between note taking and movie/videomaking, makes the note taking process much more easily seen, specifically for students. Note taking is usually a quite and solo endeavor done alone, which makes it much harder to show and demonstrate. And when it is demonstrated or modeled, it's usually dreadfully boring and uninteresting to watch compared to seeing it put together and edited as a finished piece. Edits in a film are visually obvious while the edits in written text, even when done poorly, are invisible.

Much like Umberto Eco (How to Write a Thesis), in the closing paragraphs of his essay, Goutor finally indicates that note cards can potentially be reused for multiple projects because each one "contains a piece of information which does not depend on a specific context for its value." While providing an example of how this might work, he goes even further by not only saying that "note-cards should never be discarded" but that they might be "recycled" by passing them on to "another interested party" while saying that their value and usefulness is dependent upon how well they may have adhered to some of the most basic note taking methods. (p35)

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/jqug2tNlEeyg2JfEczmepw

Goutor only mentions two potential organizational patterns for creating output with one's card index: either by chronological order or topical order. (p34) This might be typical for a historian who is likely to be more interested in chronologies and who would have likely noted down dates within their notes.

Goutor recommends cross-referencing or linking ideas between cards "at the bottom of the note-card, as soon as the note itself is completed." Links shouldn't be trusted to memory and should be noted as soon as possible. Further he recommends periodically sorting through cards and adding adding additional cross references as one ruminates. While he indicates that cross-referencing may seem "cumbersome at first sight, experience will show that it enhances the usefulness of the card file when the time comes to retrieve the information it contains." (p32-33)

Beyond this he doesn't indicate any additional benefits of creativity or serendipity that have been seen in similar treatises.

...the usefulness of a note-taking system has an ultimate limit beyond which it becomes self-defeating. [...] After all, the ultimate purpose of the exercise is not to produce beautiful notes displaying the researcher's technical prowess, but rather usable notes to build the mosaic.<br /> —Jacques Goutor (p33)

Goutor mentions that the innovation of photocopying, while potentially useful in some cases, isn't a replacement for actual reading and proper note taking. (p30) These same sorts of affordances and problems might be similar in the newer digital/online realm for people who rely on either whole scale copy/pasting or highlight capturing of texts, but who don't do the actual work of reading, processing, and creating good notes.

Some of the benefits like portability, ease of access, ability to work with delicate primary materials, better facsimiles of things like maps or tables, etc. are still true.

Unlike many note taking manuals, Goutor advises for consistency in method and use as a means of improving efficiency. He extends this specifically to choosing card sizes (though this only goes as far as particular note types: i.e. bibliographic notes versus content notes), card colors, layout of cards, and card classification. (p28)

It's frequent in practice, however, that many people make small incremental changes in their workflows and systems over time. In some cases, people have been known to make dramatic changes, like changes in platforms, or start over from scratch (example: that of Luhmann who started ZKII after many years of building ZKI).

Goutor recommended using subject headings as a marginal annotations on one's note cards to "indicate[s] the preliminary coding to be used in classifying" a note. (p21)

Noting the dates of available materials within archives or sources can be useful on bibliography notes for either planning or revisiting sources. (p16,18)

Similarly one ought to note missing dates, data, volumes, or resources at locations to prevent unfruitfully looking for data in these locations or as a note to potentially look for the missing material in other locations. (p16)

When interviewing subjects, one should not only note the date, time, and location, but get (preferably written) permission to (record) or quote them. Notes about their memory, recall, or behavior may be useful, if nothing else as a reminder for crossing checking their information with other potential sources.

Not mentioned in any other sources I've consulted (yet), Goutor recommends adding notes about the physical location of bibliographic sources to bibliographic notes. This should include details about not only the library and even call numbers, to minimize needing to look them up again in the future, but to have notes about arrangements and contacts which may needed to revisit harder to access resources. (p14) This can also be useful for sources like maps which may be needed for higher quality reproduction in the final text. (p15)

Goutor recommended the use of bibliographic cards not only for their standard uses as sourcing, information, and footnotes, but for creating potential scopes of work and research for planning purposes, especially in planning out one's reading and note taking using various archives and resources to make more effective and productive use of one's time. (p13) This can be potentially very useful for visiting archives and sources for which one does not have easy or frequent access.

Having an easily repeatable, mechanical process of note taking can free up the cognitive space one might otherwise spend on making sure that it works for them in the long run.

Simple and sometimes dull activities like always starting by writing down sources of material in full, can save one immeasurable amounts of time in tracking down these pieces at a later date when they will be needed, especially in relation to the miniscule time and effort doing so takes upfront. (p12)

Perhaps in large part because of his narrow local audience of amateur historians, Goutor's detailing of note taking method included several pages on early research preparation before taking any notes at all. Some of this was to ensure that extant potential materials for one's subject actually existed, in cases where a researcher might run into issues of availability. It also took into account the public audiences they might be serving and what those audiences would expect in terms of level of detail, resources, photos, maps, charts, etc. (p 9-11)

This is in marked contrast with the broader audiences of writers like Eco and Ahrens who presumed either extended research needs for either masters or Ph.D. theses, or, in Ahrens' case, life long researchers at universities or journalists, though Eco did make a nod in this direction at the end of his work. With a broader area of applicability, one's collection of notes might also help to guide their particular interests into a variety of tangential or related areas. Goutor either didn't see this longer term value, or curtailed his efforts here because of the scope of his audience.

The goals of a note taking system or method should be that the resulting notes are clear, concise, complete, searchable, and easily manipulated for creating end-products.

If these criteria aren't met, then the work involved in making them may be wasted or require additional (unnecessary) time and effort to make them manageable and useful.

(p7)

For physical note taking on index cards or visualizations provided by computer generated graphs, one can physically view a mass of notes and have a general feeling if there is a large enough corpus to begin writing an essay, chapter, or book or if one needs to do additional research on a topic, or perhaps pick a different topic on which to focus.

(parts suggested by p7, though broadly obvious)

Goutor comments, like many before him, that it is common to take notes on notebook paper in longer form, but that this is inadvisable as it is much harder to impose a useful order or classification on such work. He does mention scissors as a means of cutting up such notes, but comments that "a mass of slips of paper of varying sizes [can be] difficult to arrange and potentially useless unless care has been taken to note the source of each separate entry."

He also repeats the frequent admonitions that one should take notes only on one side and to use cards of a uniform size.

(p6)

Barbara Tuchman recommended using the smallest sized index cards possible to force one only to "extract the strictly relevant" because copying by hand can be both "a chore and a bore".

In the same address in 1963, she encourages "distill[ing] from the very beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one's own mind, so to speak." This practice is similar to modern day pedagogues who encourage this practice, but with the benefit of psychology research to back up the practice.

This advice is two-fold in terms of filtering out the useless material for an author, but the grinder metaphor indicates placing multiple types of material in to to a processor to see what new combinations of products come out the other end. This touches more subtly on the idea of combinatorial creativity encouraged by Raymond Llull, Matt Ridley, et al. or the serendipity described by Niklas Luhmann and others.

When did the writing for understanding idea begin within the tradition? Was it through experience in part and then underlined with psychology research? Visit Ahrens' references on this for particular papers to read.

Link to modality shift research.

related, but not drawn from as I've been thinking about the continuum of taxonomies and subject headings for a while...

On the Spectrum of Topic Headings in note making

Any reasonable note one may take will likely have a hierarchical chain of tags/subject headings/keywords going from the broad to the very specific. One might start out with something broad like "humanities" (as opposed to science), and proceed into "history", "anthropology", "biological anthropology", "evolution", and even more specific. At the bottom of the chain is the specific atomic idea on the card itself. Each of the subject headings helps to situate the idea and provide the context in which it sits, but how useful within a note taking system is having one or more of these tags on it? What about overlaps with other broader subjects (one will note that "evolution" might also sit under "science" / "biology" as well), but that note may have a different tone and perspective than the prior one.

This becomes an interesting problem or issue as one explores ideas in a pre-designed note taking system. As a student just beginning to explore anthropology, one may tag hundreds of notes with anthropology to the point that the meaning of the tag is so diluted that a search of the index becomes useless as there's too much to sort through underneath it. But as one continues their studies in the topic further branches and sub headings will appear to better differentiate the ideas. This process will continue as the space further differentiates. Of course one may continue their research into areas that don't have a specific subject heading until they accumulate enough ideas within that space. (Take for example Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work which is now known under the heading of Behavioral Economics, a subject which broadly didn't exist before their work.) The note taker might also leverage this idea as they tag their own work as specifically as they might so as not to pollute their system as it grows without bound (or at least to the end of their lifetime).

The design of one's note taking system should take these eventualities into account and more easily allow the user to start out broad, but slowly hone in on direct specificity.

Some of this principle of atomicity of ideas and the growth from broad to specific can be seen in Luhmann's zettelkasten (especially ZK II) which starts out fairly broad and branches into the more specific. The index reflects this as well and each index heading ideally points to the most specific sub-card which begins the discussion of that particular topic.

Perhaps it was this narrowing of specificity which encouraged Luhmann to start ZKII after years of building ZKII which had a broader variety of topics?

Heyde specifically highlights that planning for one's future search efforts by choosing the right keyword or even multiple keywords "seems to be the biggest complaint about the entire system of the slip box and its merit."

Niklas Luhmann apparently spent some time thinking about this, or perhaps even practicing it, before changing his system so that the issue was no longer a problem. As a result, Luhmann's system is much simpler to use and maintain.

Given his primary use of his slip box for academic research and writing, perhaps his solution was in part motivated by putting the notes and ideas exactly where he would both be able to easily find them, but also exactly where he would need them for creating final products in journal articles and books.

often repeated advice, especially in the modern period.

What specifically does she define "writing" to be? What exactly is she writing, and how much? What does her process look like?

One might also consider the idea of active reading and writing notes. I may not "write" daily in the way she means, but my note writing, is cumulative and beneficial in the ways she describes in her list. I might further posit that the amount of work/effort it takes me to do my writing is far more fruitful and productive than her writing.

When I say writing, I mean focused note taking (either excerpting, rephrasing, or original small ideas which can be stitched together later). I don't think this is her same definition.

I'm curious how her process of writing generates new ideas and creativity specifically?

One might analogize the idea of active reading with a pen in hand as a sort of Einsteinian space-time. Many view reading and writing as to separate and distinct practices. What if they're melded together the way Einstein reconceptualized the space time continuum? The writing advice provided by those who write about commonplace books, zettelkasten, and general note taking combines an active reading practice with a focused writing practice that moves one toward not only more output, but higher quality output without the deleterious effects seen in other methods.

Thanks for this! I like the framing and general concept of the book.

It seems like its a good follow on to Dan Allosso's OER text How to Make Notes and Write https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/ or Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes https://amzn.to/3DwJVMz which includes some useful psychology and mental health perspective.

Other similar examples are Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis (MIT, 2015) or Gerald Weinberg's The Fieldstone Method https://amzn.to/3DCf6GA These may be some of what we're all missing.

I'm reminded of Mark Robertson's (@calhistorian) discussion of modeling his note taking practice and output in his classroom using Roam Research. https://hyp.is/QuB5NDa0Ee28hUP7ExvFuw/thatsthenorm.com/mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue/ Perhaps we need more of this?

Early examples of this sort of note taking can also be seen in the religious studies space with Melanchthon's handbook on commonplaces or Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, though missing are the process from notes to writings. https://www.logos.com/grow/jonathan-edwards-organizational-genius/

Other examples of these practices in the wild include @andy_matuschak's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcs4tyey18 and TheNonPoet's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdp0jo2Fe4 Though it may be better for students to see this in areas in which they're interested.

Hypothes.is as a potential means of modeling and allowing students to directly "see" this sort of work as it progresses using public/semi-public annotations may be helpful. Then one can separately model re-arranging them and writing a paper. https://web.hypothes.is/

Reply to: https://twitter.com/BenjaminVanDyne/status/1571171086171095042

Notice that at the bottom of the quote that they indicate that in addition to including multiple copies of a card in various places, a plan which may be inefficient, they indicate that one can add reference-slips in their place.

This is closely similar to, but a small jump away from having explicit written links on the particular cards themselves, but at least mitigates the tedious copying work while actively creating links or cross references within one's note taking system.

A warning that linear note taking is "utterly wrong."

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/x2f4hn/should_i_always_create_a_bibnote/

If you want to be lazy you could just create the one card with the quote and full source and save a full bibliographical note. Your future self will likely be pleasantly surprised if you do create a full bib note (filed separately) which allows for a greater level of future findability and potential serendipity, It may happen when you've run across that possibly obscure author multiple times and it may spur you to read other material by them or cross reference other related authors. It's these small, but seemingly "useless", practices in the present that generate creativity and serendipity over longer periods of time that really bring out the compounding value of ZK.

More and more I find that the randomly referenced and obscure writer or historical figure I noted weeks/months/years ago pops up and becomes a key player in research I'm doing now, but that I otherwise would have long forgotten and thus not able to connect or inform my current pursuits. These golden moments are too frequently not written about or highlighted properly in much of the literature about these practices.

Naturally, however, everyone's practices may differ. You want to save the source at the very least, even if it's just on that slip with the quote. If you're pressed for time now, save the step and do it later when you install the card.

Often is the time that I don't think of anything useful contemporaneously but then a week or two later I'll think of something relevant and go back and write another note or two, or I'll want to recommend it to someone and then at least it's findable to recommend.

Frequently I find that the rule "If it's worth reading, then it's worth writing down the author, title, publisher and date at a minimum" saves me from reading a lot of useless material. Of course if you're researching and writing about the broader idea of "listicles" then perhaps you have other priorities?

One shouldn't use highlighting in books/texts as a means of remembering things. They are the lowest form of fleeting note and should be used as an indicator or finding device for portions of text one wants to excerpt or reframe more fully for their note collection.

Finally a concrete statement about actively cross-linking ideas on note cards together!