reply to u/Active-Teach6311 at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ilvvnc/you_need_to_first_define_the_zettlekasten_methoda/

#1 == #2 In German contexts, zettelkasten subsumed both ideas which can easily be seen in the 2013 Marbach Exhibition: Zettelkasten: Machines of Fantasy. That exhibition featured six different Zettelkasten of which Luhmann's was but one. It wasn't until after this that sites like zettelkasten.de, this Reddit sub, or the popularity of Ahrens' book shifted the definition to a Luhmann-centric one, particularly in English language contexts which lacked a marketing term on which to latch to sell the idea. The productivity porn portion of the equation assisted in erasing the prior art and popularity of these methods.

One can easily show mathematically that there is a one-to-one and onto mapping of Luhmann's method with all the other variations. This means that they're equivalent in structure and only differ in the names you give them.

Even Ahrens suggests as much in his own book when he mentions that in digital contexts one doesn't need numbered cards in particular orders for the system to work. If Erasmus, Agricola, or Melanchthon were to magically arrive from the 15th century to the present day, they would have no difficulty recognizing their commonplacing work at play in a so-called Luhmann-artig zettelkasten.

I would suggest that Luhmann didn't write more about his method himself because it would have been generally fruitless for him as everyone around him was doing exactly the same thing. The method was both literally and figuratively commonplace! J. E. Heyde's book, from which Luhmann modeled his own system, went through 10 editions from the 1930s through the 1970s in Luhmann's own lifetime.

Reply to u/FastSascha at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ilvvnc/you_need_to_first_define_the_zettlekasten_methoda/mc01tsr/

The primary and really only "innovation" for Luhmann's system was his numbering and filing scheme (which he most likely borrowed and adapted from prior sources). His particular scheme only serves to provide specific addresses for finding his notes. Regardless of doing this explicitly, everyone's notes have a physical address and can be cross referenced or linked in any variety of ways. In John Locke's commonplacing method of 1685/1706 he provided an alternate (but equivalent method) of addressing and allowing the finding of notes. Whether you address them specifically or not doesn't change their shape, only the speed by which they may be found. This may shift an affordance of using such a system, but it is invariant from the form of the system. What I'm saying is that the form and shape of Luhmann's notes is identical to the huge swath of prior art within intellectual history. He was not doing something astoundingly new or different. By analogy he was making the same Acheulean hand axe everyone else was making; it's not as if he figured out a way to lash his axe to a stick and then subsequently threw it to invent the spear.

When I say the method was commonplace at the time, I mean that a broad variety of people used it for similar reasons, for similar outputs, and in incredibly similar methods. You can find a large number of treatises on how to do these methods over time and space, see a variety of examples I've collected in Zotero which I've mentioned several times in the past. Perhaps other German professors weren't using the method(s) as they were slowly dying out over the latter half of the 20th century with the rise and ultimate ubiquity of computers which replaced many of these methods. I'll bet that if probed more deeply they were all doing something and the something they were doing (likely less efficiently and involving less physically evident means) could be seen to be equivalent to Luhmann's.

This also doesn't mean that these methods weren't actively used in a variety of equivalent forms by people as diverse as Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus, Rodolphus Agricola, Philip Melancthon, Konrad Gessner, John Locke, Carl Linnaeus, Thomas Harrison, Vincentius Placcius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, S. D. Goitein, Gotthard Deutsch, Beatrice Webb, Sir James Murray, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mortimer J. Adler, Niklas Luhmann, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Jacques Barzun, Vladimir Nabokov, George Carlin, Twyla Tharp, Gertrud Bauer, and even Eminem to name but a few better known examples. If you need additional examples to look at, try searching my Hypothesis account for tag:"zettelkasten examples". Take a look at their examples and come back to me and tell me that beyond the idiosyncrasies of their individual use that they weren't all doing the same thing in roughly the same ways and for roughly the same purposes. While the modalities (digital or analog) and substrates (notebooks, slips, pen, pencil, electrons on silicon, other) may have differed, the thing they were doing and the forms it took are all equivalent.

Beyond this, the only thing really unique about Luhmann's notes were that he made them on subjects that he had an interest, the same way that your notes are different from mine. But broadly speaking, they all have the same sort of form, function, and general topology.

If these general methods were so uncommon, how is it that all the manuals on note taking are all so incredibly similar in their prescriptions? How is it that Marbach can do an exhibition in 2013 featuring 6 different zettelkasten, all ostensibly different, but all very much the same?

Perhaps the easier way to see it all is to call them indexed databases. Yours touches on your fiction, exercise, and nutrition; Luhmann's focuses on sociology and systems theory; mine looks at intellectual history, information theory, evolution, and mathematics; W. K. Kellogg's 640 drawer system in 1906 focused on manufacturing, distributing and selling Corn Flakes; Jonathan Edwards' focused on Christianity. They all have different contents, but at the end of the day, they're just indexed databases with the same forms and functionalities. Their time periods, modalities, substrates, and efficiencies have differed, but at their core they're all far more similar in structure than they are different.

Perhaps one day, I'll write a deeper treatise with specific definitions and clearer arguments laying out the entire thing, but in the erstwhile, anyone saying that Luhmann's instantiation is somehow more unique than all the others beyond the meaning expressed by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince is fooling themselves. Instead, I suspect that by realizing you're part of a longer, tried-and-true tradition, your own practice will be far easier and more useful.

The simplicity of the system (or these multiply-named methods) allows for the rise of a tremendous amount of complexity. This resultant complexity can in turn hide the simplicity of the root system.

“To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world..."

I can only hope people choose to tame more than Luhmann.

reply to u/Active-Teach6311 at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ilvvnc/you_need_to_first_define_the_zettlekasten_methoda/mc14p0r/

Certainly there are idiosyncracies in how each person chooses to to work with them. The primary difference I see is how much work and when each person chooses to put into a system and what outputs, if any, there are. However, at the end of the day, their similarities as systems far, far exceed their differences. Their principles may differ in slight ways, but in the end they are identical in form. If you feel differently, then I suggest you take a deeper and closer look into the variety of traditions beyond your cursory view.

As a small exercise, attempt to explain why S. D. Goitein's system allowed him to write 1/3 the notes of Luhmann and create almost 3 times the written output? Why aren't people emulating his system? Why are there still dozens of researchers actively sharing and using Goitein's notes when almost none are doing the same for Luhmann?

Another solid exercise is to look at Heyde and explain why Luhmann chose to file his cards differently than was prescribed there? Are the end results really different? Would they have been different if kept in commonplace form using John Locke's indexing method?

reply to u/JeffB1517 at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ilvvnc/you_need_to_first_define_the_zettlekasten_methoda/mc1y4oj/

I'm not new here: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

You example of a hierarchy was not a definition. In practice Luhmann eschewed hierarchies, though one could easily modify his system to create them. This has been covered ad nauseam here in conversations on top-down and bottom-up thinking.

When "dumping" from one program to another, one can almost always easily get around a variety of affordances supplied by one and not another simply by adding additional data, text, references, links, etc. As an example, my paper system can do Logseq's block level linking by simply writing a card address down and specifying word 7, sentence 3, paragraph 4, etc. One can also do this in Obsidian in a variety of other technical means and syntaxes including embedding notes. Block level linking is a nice affordance when available but can be handled in a variety of different (and structurally similar) ways. Books as a technology have been doing block level linking for centuries; in that context it's called footnotes. In more specialized and frequently referenced settings like scholarship on Plato there is Stephanus pagination or chapter and verse numberings in biblical studies. Roam and Logseq aren't really innovating here.

Similarly your OLE example is a clever and useful affordance, but could be gotten around by providing an equation that is carried out by hand and done each time it's needed---sure it may take more time, but it's doable in every system. This may actually be useful in some contexts as then one would have the time sequences captured and logged in their files for later analysis and display. These affordances are things which may make things easier and simpler in some cases, but they generally don't change the root structure of what is happening. Digital search is an example of a great affordance, except in cases when it returns thousands of hits which then need to be subsequentlly searched. Short indexing methods with pen and paper can be done more quickly in some cases to do the same search because one's notes can provide a lot of other contextual clues (colored cards, wear on cards, physical location of cards, etc.) that a pure digital search does not. I often can do manual searches through 30,000 index cards more quickly and accurately than I can through an equivalent number of digital notes.

There is a structural equivalence between folders and tags/links in many programs. This is more easily seen in digital contexts where a folder can be programatically generated by executing a search on a string or tag which then results in a "folder" of results. These searches are a quick affordance versus actively maintaining explicit folders otherwise, but the same result could be had even in pen and paper contexts with careful indexing and manual searches (which may just take longer, but it doesn't mean that they can't be done.) Edge-notched cards were heavily used in the mid-20th century to great effect for doing these sorts of searches.

When people here are asking or talking about a variety of note taking programs, the answer almost always boils down to which one you like best because, in large part, a zettlkasten can be implemented in all of them. Some may just take more work and effort or provide fewer shortcuts or affordances.

reply to u/JeffB1517 at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ilvvnc/you_need_to_first_define_the_zettlekasten_methoda/mc0f8ip/

Explain your definition of hierarchical reference system. How is one note in his system higher, better, or more important than another? Where do you see hierarchies?

Infinitely long notes can easily be excerpted down to smaller sizes and filed, so that portion of your argument doesn't track.

Luhmann had what some call "hub notes" and the ability to remove cards and rearrange them to suit his compositional needs and later refile them. This directly emulates the similar ideas of MOCs, whiteboards, and mind maps. Victor Margolin's example quickly shows how this is done in practice.

If there weren't direct mappings, it should be impossible to copy & paste Luhmann's notes into Obsidian, Logseq, OneNote, Evernote, Excel, or even Wikipedia. This is not the case. You might get slightly different personal affordances out of these tools or perhaps better speed and in other cases even less speed or worse review patterns of your notes, but in ultimate form they are identical and will ultimately allow you to accomplish all of the same end results.

We might argue about efficiencies, affordances, or speed, but at the end of the day they're all still structurally similar.