"The Stoic Practice is a Dialogue With The Self" -- Ryan Holiday (~7:58)

I think this is also true for Zettelkasten. You write for yourself. Only you need to understand your notes, nobody else.

"If you do one or two positive contributions a day, it adds up." - Ryan Holiday

Perhaps this is the essence of both Zettelkasten and Commonplace books; Marginal Gains.

Exponentional Increase over time. Upon first glance, it seems linear (1+1 = 2)... However, the formula is different because, at least in Zettelkasten, a new note means N new possible connections as this new note can virtually be connected to all other notes. In a Zettelkasten this is explicit, in a commonplace book connections are implicit.

Perhaps I need to argue more with the authors and the content, as Adler & van Doren also recommend.

This might be a limitation in (the way I do) Zettelkasten. Because I am not writing in the margins and not engage in "tearing up" the book, I am less inclined to argue against/with the work.

Maybe I need to do this more using bib-card. Further thought on implementation necessary...

Perhaps a different reason is that I like to get through most books quickly rather than slowly. Sometimes I do the arguing afterward, within my ZK.

I need to reflect on this at some point (in the near future) and optimize my processes.

Learning and Intellectualism can both be found in the act of comparison, or more broadly, analysis. One must do this perpetually when reading to dissect and gain most (long-term) (syntopical) value out of it.

Is this a criticism by Luhmann on the conventional notion of syntopical reading in Adlerian terms? Probably without knowing Adler's work.

Because science/truth work (knowledge) is constantly in revision, conventional syntopical reading on a topic of science is without necessary value?

Perhaps unless stored and expanded upon in a ZK?

Further thought is required to disseminate this paragraph.

Malashenko, Gevorg T., Mikhail E. Kosov, Svetlana V. Frumina, Olga A. Grishina, Roman A. Alandarov, Vadim V. Ponkratov, Tatyana A. Bloshenko, Lola D. Sanginova, Svetlana S. Dzusova, and Munther F. Hasan. “A Digital Model of Full-Cycle Training Based on the Zettelkasten and Interval Repetition System.” Emerging Science Journal 7, no. 0 (March 18, 2023): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.28991/ESJ-2023-SIED2-01.

Perhaps both learning and research can often be used in the same process... Learning first to inform what is the most vital to include in the Zettelkasten for research synthesis.

Maybe what to use when, in my personal case, should not be objective but rather subjective based on what I like and prefer? This requires further thought. Complex matter.

I'd listened to this whole episode sometime since 2022-04-05, but didn't put it in my notes.

Mark Robertson delineates how he actively models the use of his note taking practice (using Roam Research) while teaching/lecturing in the classroom. This sort of modeling can be useful for showing students how academics read, gather, and actively use their knowledge. It does miss the portion about using the knowledge to create papers, articles, books, etc., but the use of this mode of reading and notes within a discussion setting isn't terribly different.

Use of the system for conversation/discussion with the authors of various texts as you read, with your (past) self as you consult your own notes, or your students in classroom lectures/discussion sections is close to creating your own discussion for new audiences (by way of the work your write yourself.)

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1194506/4875515-mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue-live-roaming.mp3

Extending off of this, is the reality that the research experience is far easier if one has been taught a convenient method, not only for carrying it out, but space to practice the pieces along the way.

These methods can then later be applied to a vast array of topics, thus placing method above topic.

(1:20.00-1:40.00) What he describes is the following: Most of his notes originate from the digital using hypothes.is, where he reads material online and can annotate, highlight, and tag to help future him find the material by tag or bulk digital search. He calls his hypothes.is a commonplace book that is somewhat pre-organized.

Aldrich continues by explaining that in his commonplace hypothes.is his notes are not interlinked in a Luhmannian Zettelkasten sense, but he "sucks the data" right into Obsidian where he plays around with the content and does some of that interlinking and massage it.

Then, the best of the best material, or that which he is most interested in working with, writing about, etc., converted into a more Luhmannesque type Zettelkasten where it is much more densely interlinked. He emphasizes that his Luhmann zettelkasten is mostly consisting of his own thoughts and is very well-developed, to the point where he can "take a string of 20 cards and ostensibly it's its own essay and then publish it as a blog post or article."

(1:21:20-1:39:40) Chris Aldrich describes his hypothes.is to Zettelkasten workflow. Prevents Collector's Fallacy, still allows to collect a lot. Open Bucket vs. Closed Bucket. Aldrich mentions he uses a common place book using hypothes.is which is where all his interesting highlights and annotations go to, unfiltered, but adequately tagged. This allows him to easily find his material whenever necessary in the future. These are digital. Then the best of the best material that he's interested in and works with (in a project or writing sense?) will go into his Zettelkasten and become fully fledged. This allows to maintain a high gold to mud (signal to noise) ratio for the Zettelkasten. In addition, Aldrich mentions that his ZK is more of his own thoughts and reflections whilst the commonplace book is more of other people's thoughts.

The Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache was an international collaborative zettelkasten project begun in 1897 and finally published as five volumes in 1926.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rterbuch_der_%C3%A4gyptischen_Sprache

With support from the German Research Foundation, the 1.5 million sheets of the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache began to be digitized and put online in 1997.

The power of an Antinet Zettelkasten. Use this principle both in research and learning.

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

Digital Smart Notes Part 4: Creating Permanent Notes In Roam Research<br /> by Harley Stanger

Part 1: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-1-the-capture-toolkit/ - Part 2: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-2-exporting-highlights-to-roam-research-with-readwise/ - Part 3: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-3-creating-literature-notes-in-roam-research/ - Part 4: Digital Smart Notes Part 4: Creating Permanent Notes In Roam Research

synopsis of Ahrens

As humans we're good at separating things based on categories. The Dewey Decimal System systematically separates mathematics and history into disparate locations, but your zettelkasten shouldn't force this by overthinking categories. Perhaps the overlap of math and history is exactly the interdisciplinary topic you're working toward? If this is the case, just put cards into the slip box closest to their nearest related intellectual neighbor—and by this I mean nearest related to you, not to Melvil Dewey or anyone else. Over time, through growth and branching, ideas will fill in the interstitial spaces and neighboring ideas will slowly percolate and intermix. Your interests will slowly emerge into various bunches of cards in your box. Things you may have thought were important can separate away and end up on sparse branches while other areas flourish.

If you make the (false) choice to separate math and history into different "sections" it will be much harder for them to grow and intertwine in an organic and truly disciplinary way. Universities have done this sort of separation for hundreds of years and as a result, their engineering faculty can be buildings or even entire campuses away from their medical faculty who now want to work together in new interdisciplinary ways. This creates a physical barrier to more efficient and productive innovation and creativity. It's your zettelkasten, so put those ideas right next to each other from the start so they can do the work of serendipity and surprise for you. Do not artificially separate your favorite ideas. Let them mix and mingle and see what comes out of them.

If you feel the need to categorize and separate them in such a surgical fashion, then let your index be the place where this happens. This is what indices are for! Put the locations into the index to create the semantic separation. Math related material gets indexed under "M" and history under "H". Now those ideas can be mixed up in your box, but they're still findable. DO NOT USE OR CONSIDER YOUR NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!! Don't make the fatal mistake of thinking this. The numbers are just that, numbers. They are there solely for you to be able to easily find the geographic location of individual cards quickly or perhaps recreate an order if you remove and mix a bunch for fun or (heaven forfend) accidentally tip your box out onto the floor. Each part has of the system has its job: the numbers allow you to find things where you expect them to be and the index does the work of tracking and separating topics if you need that.

The broader zettelkasten, tools for thought, and creativity community does a terrible job of explaining the "why" portion of what is going on here with respect to Luhmann's set up. Your zettelkasten is a crucible of ideas placed in juxtaposition with each other. Traversing through them and allowing them to collide in interesting and random ways is part of what will create a pre-programmed serendipity, surprise, and combinatorial creativity for your ideas. They help you to become more fruitful, inventive, and creative.

Broadly the same thing is happening with respect to the structure of commonplace books. There one needs to do more work of randomly reading through and revisiting portions to cause the work or serendipity and admixture, but the end results are roughly the same. With the zettelkasten, it's a bit easier for your favorite ideas to accumulate into one place (or neighborhood) for easier growth because you can move them around and juxtapose them as you add them rather than traversing from page 57 in one notebook to page 532 in another.

If you use your numbers as topical or category headings you'll artificially create dreadful neighborhoods for your ideas to live in. You want a diversity of ideas mixing together to create new ideas. To get a sense of this visually, play the game Parable of the Polygons in which one categorizes and separates (or doesn't) triangles and squares. The game created by Vi Hart and Nicky Case based on the research of Thomas Schelling provides a solid example of the sort of statistical mechanics going on with ideas in your zettelkasten when they're categorized rigidly. If you rigidly categorize ideas and separate them, you'll drastically minimize the chance of creating the sort of useful serendipity of intermixed and innovative ideas.

It's much harder to know what happens when you mix anthropology with complexity theory if they're in separate parts of your mental library, but if those are the things that get you going, then definitely put them right next to each other in your slip box. See what happens. If they're interesting and useful, they've got explicit numerical locators and are cross referenced in your index, so they're unlikely to get lost. Be experimental occasionally. Don't put that card on Henry David Thoreau in the section on writers, nature, or Concord, Massachusetts if those aren't interesting to you. Besides everyone has already done that. Instead put him next to your work on innovation and pencils because it's much easier to become a writer, philosopher, and intellectual when your family's successful pencil manufacturing business can pay for you to attend Harvard and your house is always full of writing instruments from a young age. Now you've got something interesting and creative. (And if you must, you can always link the card numerically to the other transcendentalists across the way.)

In case they didn't hear it in the back, I'll shout it again: ACTIVELY WORK AGAINST YOUR NATURAL URGE TO USE YOUR ZETTELKASTEN NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!!

"process not product"

Zettelkasten-based note taking methods, and particularly that followed by Luhmann, seem to focus on process and not product.

Hello u/sscheper,

Let me start by thanking you for introducing me to Zettelkasten. I have been writing notes for a week now and it's great that I'm able to retain more info and relate pieces of knowledge better through this method.

I recently came to notice that there is redundancy in my index entries.

I have two entries for Number Line. I have two branches in my Math category that deals with arithmetic, and so far I have "Addition" and "Subtraction". In those two branches I talk about visualizing ways of doing that, and both of those make use of and underline the term Number Line. So now the two entries in my index are "Number Line (Under Addition)" and "Number Line (Under Subtraction)". In those notes I elaborate how exactly each operation is done on a number line and the insights that can be derived from it. If this continues, I will have Number Line entries for "Multiplication" and "Division". I will also have to point to these entries if I want to link a main note for "Number Line".

Is this alright? Am I underlining appropriately? When do I not underline keyterms? I know that I do these to increase my chances of relating to those notes when I get to reach the concept of Number Lines as I go through the index but I feel like I'm overdoing it, and it's probably bloating it.

I get "Communication (under Info. Theory): '4212/1'" in the beginning because that is one aspect of Communication itself. But for something like the number line, it's very closely associated with arithmetic operations, and maybe I need to rethink how I populate my index.

Presuming, since you're here, that you're creating a more Luhmann-esque inspired zettelkasten as opposed to the commonplace book (and usually more heavily indexed) inspired version, here are some things to think about:<br /> - Aren't your various versions of number line card behind each other or at least very near each other within your system to begin with? (And if not, why not?) If they are, then you can get away with indexing only one and know that the others will automatically be nearby in the tree. <br /> - Rather than indexing each, why not cross-index the cards themselves (if they happen to be far away from each other) so that the link to Number Line (Subtraction) appears on Number Line (Addition) and vice-versa? As long as you can find one, you'll be able to find them all, if necessary.

If you look at Luhmann's online example index, you'll see that each index term only has one or two cross references, in part because future/new ideas close to the first one will naturally be installed close to the first instance. You won't find thousands of index entries in his system for things like "sociology" or "systems theory" because there would be so many that the index term would be useless. Instead, over time, he built huge blocks of cards on these topics and was thus able to focus more on the narrow/niche topics, which is usually where you're going to be doing most of your direct (and interesting) work.

Your case sounds, and I see it with many, is that your thinking process is going from the bottom up, but that you're attempting to wedge it into a top down process and create an artificial hierarchy based on it. Resist this urge. Approaching things after-the-fact, we might place information theory as a sub-category of mathematics with overlaps in physics, engineering, computer science, and even the humanities in areas like sociology, psychology, and anthropology, but where you put your work on it may depend on your approach. If you're a physicist, you'll center it within your physics work and then branch out from there. You'd then have some of the psychology related parts of information theory and communications branching off of your physics work, but who cares if it's there and not in a dramatically separate section with the top level labeled humanities? It's all interdisciplinary anyway, so don't worry and place things closest in your system to where you think they fit for you and your work. If you had five different people studying information theory who were respectively a physicist, a mathematician, a computer scientist, an engineer, and an anthropologist, they could ostensibly have all the same material on their cards, but the branching structures and locations of them all would be dramatically different and unique, if nothing else based on the time ordered way in which they came across all the distinct pieces. This is fine. You're building this for yourself, not for a mass public that will be using the Dewey Decimal System to track it all down—researchers and librarians can do that on behalf of your estate. (Of course, if you're a musician, it bears noting that you'd be totally fine building your information theory section within the area of "bands" as a subsection on "The Bandwagon". 😁)

If you overthink things and attempt to keep them too separate in their own prefigured categorical bins, you might, for example, have "chocolate" filed historically under the Olmec and might have "peanut butter" filed with Marcellus Gilmore Edson under chemistry or pharmacy. If you're a professional pastry chef this could be devastating as it will be much harder for the true "foodie" in your zettelkasten to creatively and more serendipitously link the two together to make peanut butter cups, something which may have otherwise fallen out much more quickly and easily if you'd taken a multi-disciplinary (bottom up) and certainly more natural approach to begin with. (Apologies for the length and potential overreach on your context here, but my two line response expanded because of other lines of thought I've been working on, and it was just easier for me to continue on writing while I had the "muse". Rather than edit it back down, I'll leave it as it may be of potential use to others coming with no context at all. In other words, consider most of this response a selfish one for me and my own slip box than as responsive to the OP.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRssjvU2d-s

Starts out with some of the personal histories of how both got into the note making space.

This got more interesting for me around the 1:30 hour mark, but I was waiting for the material that would have shown up at the 3 hour mark (which doesn't exist...).

Scott spoke about the myths of zettelkasten. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/urawkd/the_myths_of_zettelkasten/

He also mentions maintenance rehearsal versus elaborative rehearsal. These are both part of spaced repetition. The creation of one's own cards helps play into both forms.

See also the author's (Eva Keiffenheim) article on RoamBrain: THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR BUILDING A ZETTELKASTEN WITH ROAM RESEARCH

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

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnfSs6Hu3k

https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam

A user talks about why they've stopped using Roam Research.

I suspect that a lot of people have many of the same issues and to a great extent, it's a result of them not understanding the underlying use cases of the problems they're trying to solve.

This user is focusing on it solving the problem of where one is placing their data in hopes that it will fix all their problems, but without defining the reason why they're using the tool and what problems they hope for it to solve.

Note taking is a much broader idea space than many suppose.

1. Placcius 1689, p. 72.

Vincentius Placcius in De Arte Excerpendi: Of Scholarly Book Organization (1689) offers a contemporary set of instructions on excerpting knowledge as well as a history of the subject.

In the book, he warns specifically against the loose form of indexing exhibited by Joachim Jungius. (p72)

Konrad Gessner's Bibliotheca Universalis has two audiences: librarians for it's extensive bibliography and scholars for the instruction of how to properly organize their studies by excerpting material and keeping it in a useful order.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis</span> in 📑 How to remember more of what you read | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>08/20/2021 12:31:59</time>)</cite></small>

https://bzawilski.medium.com/using-zettelkasten-and-obsidian-to-learn-more-effectively-333ac90d001a

Facile overview article that touches on the basics but looses sight of the longer flow of history.

Don't recommend.

Revisiting this essay to review it in the framing of digital gardens.

In a "gardens and streams" version of this metaphor, the stream is flow and the garden is stock.

This also fits into a knowledge capture, growth, and innovation framing. The stream are small atomic ideas flowing by which may create new atomic ideas. These then need to be collected (in a garden) where they can be nurtured and grow into new things.

Clippings of these new growth can be placed back into the stream to move on to other gardeners. Clever gardeners will also occasionally browse through the gardens of others to see bigger picture versions of how their gardens might become.

Proper commonplacing is about both stock and flow. The unwritten rule is that one needs to link together ideas and expand them in places either within the commonplace or external to it: essays, papers, articles, books, or other larger structures which then become stock for others.

While some creators appear to be about all stock in the modern era, it's just not true. They're consuming streams (flow) from other (perhaps richer) sources (like articles, books, television rather than social media) and building up their own stock in more private (or at least not public) places. Then they release that article, book, film, television show which becomes content stream for others.

While we can choose to create public streams, but spending our time in other less information dense steams is less useful. Better is to keep a reasonably curated stream to see which other gardens to go visit.

Currently is the online media space we have structures like microblogs and blogs (and most social media in general) which are reasonably good at creating streams (flow) and blogs, static sites, and wikis which are good for creating gardens (stock).

What we're missing is a structure with the appropriate and attendant UI that can help us create both a garden and a stream simultaneously. It would be nice to have a wiki with a steam-like feed out for the smaller attendant ideas, but still allow the evolutionary building of bigger structures, which could also be placed into the stream at occasional times.

I can imagine something like a MediaWiki with UI for placing small note-like ideas into other streams like Twitter, but which supports Webmention so that ideas that come back from Twitter or other consumers of one's stream can be placed into one's garden. Perhaps in a Zettelkasten like way, one could collect atomic notes into their wiki and then transclude those ideas into larger paragraphs and essays within the same wiki on other pages which might then become articles, books, videos, audio, etc.

Obsidian, Roam Research do a somewhat reasonable job on the private side and have some facility for collecting data, but have no UI for sharing out into streams.

This is generally fantastic advice! It's also the general underpinning behind the idea of Luhmann's zettelkasten method.

I'll also mention that it's not too dissimilar to Benjamin Franklin's writing advice about taking what others have written and working with that yourself, though there he doesn't take it as far as others have since.

Another great synopsis of useful tips in using Obsidian for research.

The idea of using the general form ![[Smith, 2018#One-sentence summary of idea]] can be particularly powerful for aggregating smaller ideas up into a longer work.

This is an excellent overview of how to take notes for academic research and creating writing output.

The design of this, which predates that of the wiki, also seems eerily familiar as a digital version of a zettelkasten or the design which seems to underlie Roam Research's product.