Mark Twain's verbiage on combinatorial creativity: "mental kaleidoscope".

As quoted from 1906 in the 1912 in the third volume of Mark Twain: A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens by Albert Bigelow Paine

quote and verification via Quote Investigator at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/05/08/new-idea/

see: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24749966/

actual posted reply to https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1gpx62s/is_a_zettelkasten_a_largely_unknown_form_of/

Taking too narrow a definition of zettelkasten is antithetical to the combinatorial creativity inherent in one of the zettelkasten's most important affordances.

OP was right on track, perhaps without knowing why... I appreciate that you scratch some of the historical surface, but an apple/tomato analogy is flimsy and the family tree is a lot closer. Too often we're ignoring the history of ars excerpendi, commonplacing, waste books, summas, early encyclopedias, etc. from the broad swath of intellectual history. What we now call a zettelkasten evolved very closely out of all these traditions. It's definitely not something that Luhmann suddenly invented one morning while lounging in the bath.

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

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

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

Those interested in expanding their practice might try some of the following for more details:

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

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

cc: u/JasperMcGee u/dasduvish u/Quack_quack_22

Reply to @Edmund https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/21907/#Comment_21907

Doto's book is the best and tightest yet for explaining both how to implement a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten as well as why along with the affordances certain elements provide. He does a particularly good job of providing clear and straightforward definitions which have a muddy nature in some of the online spaces, which tends to cause issues for people new to the practice. Sadly, for me, there isn't much new insight due to the amount of experience and research I bring to the enterprise.

I do like that Doto puts at least some emphasis on why one might want to use alphanumerics even in digital spaces, an idea which has broadly been sidelined in most contexts for lack of experience or concrete affordances for why one might do it.

The other area he addresses, which most elide and the balance gloss over at best, is that of the discussion of using the zettelkasten for output. Though he touches on some particular methods and scaffolding, most of it is limited to suggestions based on his own experience rather than a broader set of structures and practices. This is probably the biggest area for potential expansion and examples I'd like to see, especially as I'm reading through Eustace Miles' How to Prepare Essays, Lectures, Articles, Books, Speeches and Letters, with Hints on Writing for the Press (London: Rivingtons, 1905).

I could have had some more material in chapter 3 which has some fascinating, but still evolving work. Ideas like interstitial journaling and some of the related productivity methods are interesting, but Doto only barely scratches the surface on some of these techniques and methods which go beyond the traditional "zettelkasten space", but which certainly fall in his broader framing of "system for writing" promise.

Doto's "triangle of creativity", a discussion of proximal feedback, has close parallels of Adler and Hutchins' idea of "The Great Conversation" (1952), which many are likely to miss.

For those who missed out, Dan Allosso has posted video from the sessions at https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/ Sadly missing, unless you're in the book club, are some generally lively side chat discussions as the primary video discussion was proceeding. The sessions had a breadth of experiences from the new to the old hands as well as from students to teachers and everywhere in between.

In the video for Walk on Water (2017), a song about art, aging, self-doubt, insecurity, criticism, and creativity, Eminem and his various clones use SMC Classic 12 typewriters to type random words in a nod to Émile Borel's 1913 analogy of dactylographic monkeys with respect to statistical mechanics.

The video closes with Eminem showing typed evidence of his creative genius: "So me and you are not alike / Bitch, I wrote 'Stan'".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryr75N0nki0

Notice the overlap of the dactylographic monkey idea and the creation of combinatorial creativity in Eminem's zettelkasten practice. The fact that he's brilliant enough to have created Stan (2000) is evidence that he's not just a random monkey, but that there is some directed thought and creativity which he has tacitly created during his career. https://boffosocko.com/2021/08/10/55794555/

ideative connectivity sounds fun, but ???<br /> Sounds like a Nick Milo neologism...

potentially a stab at combinatorial creativity?

Ben Shneiderman's work is deeply influential in HCI; his work has assisted in creating strong connections between tech and creativity, especially when applied to fostering innovation.

his 2007 national science foundation funded report on creativity support tools, led by UMD, provides a seminal overview of the definitions of creativity at that time.

in this context, flow is a psychological state of being completely absorbed in a activity that feels both effortless and challenging.

the full manuscript is dense, yet thoughtful and engaging.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's work is deeply influential in psychology, education, and HCI because he discusses how one can achieve higher levels of happiness by engaging in activities they find meaningful.

Margaret Boden, research professor at University of Sussex, has provided pivotal work in the exploration of creativity using interdisciplinary research across music, game, story, physics, and artificial intelligence to explore human creativity in arts, science, and life.

The Creative Mind is available to all on archive.org.

creativity can mean different things at the same time.

to further simplify, creativity is used as a noun (a thing) but functions as an adjective (a descriptive word).

[Expensive] typing paper it makes me feel like I am obligated to the paper to do as good of a service as I can to serve it. Eliminating typographical errors, having as good of a sentence structure as possible. All of these become inhibitions to the free creative expression.

I end up serving the paper rather than [it] serving my creative needs

—Joe Van Cleave

27:00 Flow is a meta-skill (also mentioned are creativity, critical thinking, learning)

How Books Fail Us (constraints the book format imposes)

thinking about constraints for books

3 minute constraint for music due to format in the 20th century<br /> consider rock operas like Queen or longer compositions like Beatles that cross-pollenate

"History Workshop movement" here (https://hypothes.is/a/pzSbkDSWEe-GVmsfDdhvrg) is another good example of the serendipity of autocomplete functionality in Hypothes.is helping to link together disparate examples of ideas which I'd long since forgotten. In this case to a tangential idea I'd read about a year prior (https://hypothes.is/a/bxMX5MKJEe2Wkq_zinG3iw) and been interested in, but completely forgotten about.

Now I've got a link from that to the founder of the movement in 1967.

brief outline of Raphael Samuel's note taking tools and some scant description of the method.

I love the phrase "scholarly prestiditation" to describe the "magic of note taking" along with the idea of combinatorial creativity.

Presumably the quote comes from the Samuel piece quoted in the article.

Fusion power tech adapted to ease geothermal power. IMO a good example of remixing knowledge from one domain to another. And, for example, if you think fusion isn't worth pursuing, then we might not get this cross-cutting adaptation that's valuable for advancing renewable energy.

Even if you're writing comedy, a legal pad, it says, "I'm taking this seriously." —Jerry Seinfeld 2:31

for - quote - taste - who can't develop it - perfectionists - key insight - finding our own unique voice - adjacency - creativity - learning from others - synthesis

quote - taste - who can't develop it - (see below)

• the one thing I can't teach is taste,
  • and the one predictor I have of the people who will never develop it are
    • the ones who are perfectionists.
• Because they're filtering their-- perfectionists that filter their perfection through the feedback of others.

comment - We we are overly dependent on others - it becomes difficult to develop our own - taste or - style - To develop our own unique taste is a balancing act - we are influenced by others by digesting the work of others - but then we must synthesize our own unique expression out of that - A useful metaphor is tuning a string - too loose and it can't work - neither if it is too tight - it snaps

adjacency - between - creativity - learning from others - synthesis - adjacency statement - our creativity depends on a balance of - learning from others - synthesizing what we've learned into something uniquely ours

for - podcast channel, youtube channel - Andrew Huberman - neuroscience - theme - science-based tools for everyday life - interview with - music producer Rick Ruben - podcast title - How to access your creativity

summary - Although Rick Ruben's field is music production, he shares his perspective on creativity

source: Fineman, Mia (June 8, 2005). "The Most Famous Farm Couple in the World: Why American Gothic still fascinates". Slate. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/art/2005/06/the_most_famous_farm_couple_in_the_world.html

It may require having something like "youth spies" to keep up with the more interesting parts of contemporary culture, and these can be used for expanding one's combinatorial creativity horizon.

Reasons kids should use apps and what apps and parents must consider

Great Books tend to arise in the presence of great audiences. by [[Naomi Kanakia]]

Kanakia looks at what may have made 19th C. Russian literature great. This has potential pieces to say about how other cultures had higher than usual rates of creativity in art, literature, etc.

What commonalities did these sorts of societies have? Were they all similar or were there broad ranges of multiple factors which genetically created these sorts of great outputs?

Could it have been just statistical anomaly?

this example of an autocomplete of 1834 tagging is a spectacular and phenomenally useful example of combinatorial creativity with respect to poverty and historical research... of course, following it along with some useful outcome(s) would add additional power, but even the small suggestion here is spectacular.

https://hypothes.is/a/Gt38VOpFEe6oqSPHU9gL7A

Compare "trust the process" as a guiding principle with "let go and let God" which has a much more random and chaotic potential set of outcomes.

Catmull, Ed, and Amy Wallace. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2014.

Annotation link: urn:x-pdf:30663863383637656631613936313361656266663266383336636530383636623965393736396531323237383235353363353236653830623034366132373130

alternate annotation link

Catmull, Ed, and Amy Wallace. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2014.

If you're into music producers and creativity, Brian Eno and his collaborator Peter Schmidt created and sold a custom "zettelkasten" called "Oblique Strategies" which Eno frequently used in the recording studio during live sessions when he hit creative walls. There are various digital versions of his card set online for playing around with in your own creative work.

Thanks for this mini-review. I've had Rubin in my reading pile for a while, specifically to see what he says with respect to the idea of combinatorial creativity. Perhaps it's time to bump him up the list?

syndication link

11:00 Owning too much stuff as decreasing rumination/creativity

correctly and the notes could easily be spotted as counterfeit, but that only went so far.

It limit creators because some will fear the backlash and try to make something they want, and that will hurt the creators creativity

for - quote - Whitehead - quote -creativity

quote - Creativity is what reality is made of and it's not a substance, it's a process

The first part of "sociological imagination" for Mills is what I term combinatorial creativity. In his instance, at varying intervals he dumps out disconnected ideas, files and resorts them to find interesting potential solutions.

https://www.amazon.com/Antiracist-Deck-Meaningful-Conversations-Justice/dp/0593234847

Kendi, Ibram X. The Antiracist Deck: 100 Meaningful Conversations on Power, Equity, and Justice. One World, 2022.

A zettelkasten for creating conversations (randomly) around power, equity, and justice.

machine translation:

The remarkable thing about this statement is that it clearly expresses what we might call, in systems theory terms, the production of complexity by selection. The basic idea is that the Zettelkasten, when set up correctly, must be able to generate much more complexity than was introduced into the Zettelkasten. This is precisely the case if its internal structure, as Luhmann (1992a, p. 66) put it, enables “independent combinatorial performances”, so that what the Zettelkasten has to communicate with each query is always much more than that user himself had in mind.

Perhaps a usable quote to support my own theory, but certainly nothing new to me.

Perhaps some interesting overlap with Ashby's law of requisite variety here? Perhaps an inverse version for creating variety and complexity?

Machine translation:

This aspect was not lost on the educated people of the early modern period. At the end of the 18th century, Christoph Meiners (1791, p. 91) had pointed out that “even the union of as many facts and ideas as have been brought together in complete excerpts [causes] a multitude of combinations and prospects that otherwise never made or received would have".

Find the Meiners reference and look more closely at his version of combinatorial creativity with respect to excerpts.

See: Meiners, Christoph. 1791. Anweisungen für Jünglinge zum eigenen Arbeiten besonders zum Lesen, Excerpiren, und Schreiben. Hannover: In der Helwingschen Hofbuchhandlung.

Machine translation:

In the machine, however, the order of knowledge is broken down into alphabetically ordered entries. That is, there is no hierarchy and no particular structure other than that of the completely conventional alphabetical order. The crucial effect of this dissolution is that combinatorial possibilities increase dramatically and knowledge can react on itself in unpredictable ways.

Cevolini suggests that by removing knowledge from traditional rhetorical geographical commonplaces new combinations of knowledge were more likely to occur. There was no hierarchy other than conventional alphabetical order.

I would suggest that he's on the wrong track as these combinations both then and now could certainly have been done by moving the excerpts around via slips or even looking things up while flipping pages. He also seems to be unaware of Llull's mnemonic techniques which specifically seemed to be designed to increase combinatorial creativity.

suggestion of recombination of individual notes using cards to create something new

(have I remarked on this in krajewski?) ᔥ Johann Jacob Moser commented on the ability to breakdown bodies of information into smaller pieces that might be reshuffled into new configurations as one might in a 'game of cards'.

key point - the connection through creativity. Relate to arts & storytelling

46:00 Creativity is state of consciousness, not perse skill

In Re: to folgezettel or not? in an unlogged chat:

Zettelkasten (slips) or not (commonplaces, notebooks, paper, files, other), you're going to have a variety of related ideas which you'll juxtapose, especially if you're regularly writing. Those who practice folgezettel are putting in some of the work/heavy lifting from the start versus those who don't and are leaving the work until some later point closer to composition. Folgezettel also helps to encourage the emergence of ideas, but requires work to do so. This doesn't mean that this emergence or new ideas may not arrive without Folgezettel and/or Zettelkasten, but one needs to have some process or affordances which help to foster them. Victor Margolin's process put more of his work on the back end in comparison to Luhmann, but his version obviously works all the same. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI

waren. Diese Technik, so glaube ich, erklärt auch, warum ich überhaupt nicht linear denke und beim Bücherschreiben Mühe habe, die richtige Kapitelfolge zu finden, weil eigentlich ja jedes Kapitel in jedem anderen Kapitel wieder vorkommen müßte

Niklas Luhmann's process for writing from his box

Machine translation:

Q: When you start writing an essay, how do you put your note box to work?

I first make a plan for what I want to write and then take out what I can use from the note box.

Q: In contrast to a builder who only assembles prefabricated parts, a scientist must also have new ideas that are not already contained in the individual parts. Ideas like these don't come from a note box?

But. For example, I have a large set of notes on the term "functional differentiation", I also have a set of notes on "self-referential systems", and I have a large set of notes on "binarity". At the moment I am giving a lecture on ecological problems in modern societies, and my work consists of sifting through pieces of paper from the three conceptual areas outlined and combining them so that I can say something substantive on this topic. The new ideas then arise from the different possible combinations of the pieces of paper for the individual terms. Without the notes, just by thinking about it, I wouldn't come up with ideas like that. Of course my mind is required to record the ideas, but it cannot be held solely responsible for them. In this respect, I work like a computer, which can also be creative in the sense that by combining input data it produces new results that could not have been predicted. I think this technique also explains why I don't think linearly at all and why I have trouble finding the right sequence of chapters when writing books, because every chapter should actually appear in every other chapter.

Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York, NY: Tarcher Perigee, 2006.

annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:7d3165882b27dc69918cc2de97baab96

Because Frank Silva was a proverbial slip in David Lynch's living zettelkasten process, he ended up appearing in Twin Peaks by way of the serendipity of Lynch's method of combinatorial creativity.

Similar to Eminem's "stacking ammo" or Gerald Weinberg's "fieldstone method", David Lynch gathers piles of "firewood" from which he can draw to fire his creativity.

In various places in the book, Lynch uses the idea of drawing on piles of ideas and using his feedback to draw out creativity: his collaboration on music with Angelo Badalamenti in which he draws out ideas through conversation and having the prop man bring in various props with similar feedback. The music and props here are both forms of creative "firewood".

https://www.openculture.com/2018/08/how-david-lynch-got-creative-inspiration.html

Lynch has spoken about the use of 3x5" index cards for screenwriting (via Frank Daniel).

Here he mentions writing down ideas for movies on the napkins provided by Bob's Big Boy restaurant. (zettelkasten made of napkins?)

Metropolitan State University of Denver. “Writing as a Thinking Tool,” June 17, 2021. https://www.msudenver.edu/writing-center/faculty-resources/writing-as-a-thinking-tool/.

pattern recognition as discernment of patterns and connections between info (complementary to creativity)

What about discerning patterns between your interests, combining them, and so forth? (combining first and twelfth flow trigger)

https://flyingleapgames.com/products/wing-it-the-game-of-extreme-storytelling-1

Recommended by Jesse Stommel.

Creating a "signpost user interface" can help to uncover directions to take in digital contexts as out of sight is out of mind. Having things sit in your way within one's note taking workflow can remind them to either link things, or move in particular directions for discovering new avenues of thought.

Example: it would be interesting if Jerry's The Brain would have links directly to material in Flancian's Agora to remind him to search or find relevant material there. This could help with combinatorial creativity with inputs from others, though it needs to be narrow so as not to result in rabbit holes which draw away attention.

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/iQvo7l1zEe6dZ5_9d9rrVw

• for: quote, quote - Michael Levin, quote - self as control agent, self - control agent, example, example - control agent - imperfection, spontaneous thought, spontaneous action, creativity - spontaneity

• quote: Michael Levin

  • the Bodhisattva vow can be seen as a method for control that is in alignment with, and informed by, the understanding that singular and enduring control agents do not actually exist.

• comment

  • adjacency between
    • nondual awareness
    • self-construct
    • self is illusion
    • singular, solid, enduring control agent
  • adjacency statement
    • nondual awareness is the deep insight that there is no solid, singular, enduring control agent.
    • creativity is unpredictable and spontaneous and would not be possible if there were perfect control
• example - control agent - imperfection: start - the unpredictability of the realtime emergence of our next exact thought or action is a good example of this

• example - control agent - imperfection: end

• triggered insight: not only are thoughts and actions random, but dreams as well

  • I dreamt the night after this about something related to this paper (cannot remember what it is now!)
  • Obviously, I had no clue the idea in this paper would end up exactly as it did in next night's dream!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Bono

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4767325/does-the-entropy-of-a-chatgpt-sentence-match-that-of-the-output

correlation to negative self-talk of 'other' external and negative self-talk of 'I' internal

Framing of his book as a remedy to the speed reading fad in the 1970s...

What did those books at the time indicate that their purpose was? Were they aimed at helping people consume more (hopefully with greater comprehension?) while there was a continuing glut of information overload building up in society?

Which is better, more deep understanding of less or more surface understanding of more? How does combinatorial creativity effect the choice?

reply to u/DunesNSwoon at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ad43u/zettelkasten_alphanumeric_method_vs_alphabetical/

Allow me an iconoclastic view for this subreddit: Given what you've got and your creative use case, I'll recommend you do not do any numbering or ordering at all!

Instead follow the path of philosopher Raymond Llull and create what is sometimes referred to as a Llullian memory wheel. Search for one of his diagrams from the 11th century. Then sift through your cards for interesting ones and place one of your cards at each of the many letters, numbers, words, images, or "things" on the wheels, which were designed to move around a central axis much like a child's cryptographic decoder wheel based on the Caesar cipher. Then move things about combinatorically until you find interesting patterns, rhymes, rhythms, etc. to compose the poetry you're after.

Juxtaposing ideas in random (but structured) ways may help accelerate and amplify your creativity in ways you might not expect.

They meant them to be used on a slower timescale, but Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies are not too dissimilar in their effect. You might find them useful when you're creatively "stuck". As a poet you might also create a mini deck of cards with forms on them (sonnet, rhymed couplets, villanelle, limerick, etc.) to draw from at random and attempt to compose something to fit it. Odd constraints can often be helpful creative tools.

• 20:47 Only creating out of flow a problem for people; “how often, or can we even, get there” (good market research)
• 24:17 you can’t force the process of creativity (exactly, Wu Wei)

Dan Koe seems to argue against a specialistic education based on the argument that it is nigh-impossible for a teenager to decide what they want (to be) for the rest of their lives. He also gives the argument that it results in a lack of creativity and underlying knowledge (that which connects the dots, instead of compartmentalization) which would result in abnormal performance.

I can bypass the limitation of the first point by giving the counter-point that when one has an insane amount of metacognition, which can be trained, it does not matter if one changes path later; why? Because one can easily learn the new subject matter and skills.

However, the second point is interesting and I think I agree with it. That said, I think there is a continuum, instead of only two points, between super-specialists and super-generalists. I myself enjoy specializing. And I believe a team of specialists (that can also work together) can accomplish much more than one (or even multiple) generalist.

Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

• for: awe experiment
• experimental results
  • awe upregulates
    • Default Mode Network (DMN) which controls interaction to multiple brain regions, increasing:
      • creative thinking
      • daydreaming
  • awe downregulates executive control

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

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

How might one use quirky algorithms in interestingly destructive or even generative ways to combinatorially create new things?

as scalable/building on previous knowledge

Does it really?!? When the conversation omits so many perspectives and points of view for lack of diversity, it's also going to be missing quite a lot that one may not anticipate either. It's also likely to go down some blind alleys that may not be as beneficial too.

The author goes into the correlation between categorization (branching) and the use of the index and the focus on them respectively. He mentions he "learned" that branching would be more beneficial than the using of the index to make finding the cards easier.

I strongly disagree with this focus. I agree with the "relational" principle of put the card between the one that has the closest proximital conceptual relation. The Zettelkasten's power relies in serendipitous creativity (or creativity/insight by chance), this is facilitated highly by the use of connectivity between cards, where each card as you go down the "hierarchy" of "branches" will be more unrelated to the original topic. (See also Luhmann's paper Communication with Zettelkasten, Manfred Kuehn Translation and Johannes F.K. Schmidt's article on Zettelkasten within Forgetting Machines, as well as his video presentation about Zettelkasten). In short, the friction of searching for cards by following trains of thought through connectivity boosters insight by chance and therefore facilitates the power of the system.

This is also, I believe, why Bob Doto argues to let categories emerge after the creation of notes/streams of thought instead of making the names for the "branches" up front.

I believe Luhmann himself also emphasized the use of the index by calling it a system of "query into the database," the index is the main navigational map for the Zettelkasten. If you have a question for your "communication partner" the index is the way to go. For example, if I wanted to know the impact of cognitive load theory within employee management as a CEO, I would go to my index and collect the entrances for both "branches" or terms, and then start reading these thought streams... Afterward, I might synthesize and create a new branch somewhere, in one of the aforementioned categories, or an entire new one, where I put the results of this questioning.

My own system of numbering and branching in this way is the following: A number signifies a note's position within a stream of thought. I branch off if, following the relational principle, a note adds unto a thought on a specific card, but not the stream specifically. This gets signified by a letter.

So, 1a1, 1a2, 1a3, and 1a4 are all part of the same stream while 1a, 1b, and 1c would all be different "branches" stemming from the original card that would be 1 in this case. This can repeat infinitely, therefore facilitating what Luhmann calls "Infinite potential for inward growth" of the system. It's autopoietic and cybernetic. (See also: The Radical Luhmann by Hans-Georg Moeller).

Something that can benefit the finding of notes once the system grows sufficiently large is the use of "structure" or "hub" cards where you put down a few key entrances to concepts related to this stream of thought or "branch" in remote sections of the Zettelkasten.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7r9t9T9Aww

Nothing new or exciting for me here. They're rehashing the Project Zero compass points creativity idea for zettelkasten use.

Creative thinking

Can the zettelkasten method be a means of fixing/helping with this problem of facts versus creativity in a programmatic way?

This is similar to how I've been feeling lately. I cross a corner on the street and I can remember what podcast/audiobook I was listening to at that time and that too with proper context. It's weird, to say the least, and utterly fascinating.

I quite like the idea of "combinatorial synthesis"as a phrase with relation to the framing of "combinatorial creativity" as an output.

Bob Ross' "happy accidents" tied to the idea of serendipity or the outcome of combinatorial creativity within a zettelkasten.

Ross's version is related to experimentation and the idea of adjacent possible. Taking a current known and extending it to see what will happening and accepting the general outcome. This was one of the roots of his creative process.

@Will Thanks for always keeping up with your regular threads and considerations.

I've been keeping examples of people talking about the "magic of note taking" for a bit. I appreciate your perspectives on it. Personally I consider large portions of it to be bound up with the ideas of what Luhmann termed as "second memory", the use of ZK to supplement our memories, and the serendipity of combinatorial creativity. I've traced portions of it back to the practices of Raymond Llull in which he bound up old mnemonic techniques with combinatorial creativity which goes back to at least Seneca.

A web search for "combinatorial creativity" may be useful, but there's a good attempt at what it entails here: https://fs.blog/seneca-on-combinatorial-creativity/

Will Simpson feels that the magic of note taking stems from "the repetition of adding your thoughts to the notes you take and reviewing notes regularly".

I think it sems more from the serendipitous connections and resultant combinatorial creativity.

Noticing that the title of this isn't original itself (or is it?) There's a similar post entitled "Combinatorial Creativity and the Myth of Originality" by Maria Popova at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/combinatorial-creativity-and-the-myth-of-originality-114843098/

Perhaps the William Inge quote is incredibly apropos here: https://hypothes.is/a/Fvkz-i8rEe2hJYM4oINfpw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk

I wish he'd gotten into more of the detail of the research and index card making here as that's where most of the work lies. He does show some of his process of laying out and organizing the cards into some sort of sections using 1/3 cut tabbed cards. This is where his system diverges wildly from Luhmann's. He's now got to go through all the cards and do some additional re-reading and organizational work to put them into some sort of order. Luhmann did this as he went linking ideas and organizing them up front. This upfront work makes the back side of laying things out and writing/editing so much easier. It likely also makes one more creative as one is regularly revisiting ideas, juxtaposing them, and potentially generating new ones along the way rather than waiting until the organization stage to have some of this new material "fall out".

via: Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), vii–viii; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 129f.

Multi-modal output can for now still suggest there's a human at work, not a generative agent. But multi-modal output can soon if not already also be generated. This still seems to focus on the output being the thing authenticated to identify human making. output that is connected to other generated output. There's still no link to things outside the output, into the authors life e.g. Can one fake the human process towards output, which is not a one-off thing (me writing this in a certain way), but a continuous and evolving thing (me writing this in a certain way as part of a certain information process, connected to certain of my work processes etc.). Seen from processes multi-modal output isn't a different media format, it is also work results, projects created, agency in the physical world. In those processes all output is an intermediate result. Because of those evolving processes my [[Blogs als avatar 20030731084659]]. Vgl [[Kunst-artefact is (tussen)uitkomst proces 20140505070232]] There was this article about an artist I can't find back that saw all his outputs over time as intermediate and expression of one narrative. This https://www.flickr.com/photos/tonz/52849988531/in/datetaken/ comes to mind to. Provenance and entanglement as indicators of authenticity.

This is a nice thought. You can see this demonstrated if you bring a group together and run a session that demonstrates diverge and converge.

Frans Johansson's "Medici effect" which describes innovation arriving from an admixture of diversity of people and their ideas sounds like a human-based mode of combinatorial creativity similar to that seen in the commonplace book/zettelkasten traditions. Instead of the communication occurring between a person and their notes or written work, the communication occurs between people.

How is the information between these people crystalized? Some may be written, some may be in prototypes and final physical products, while some may simply be stored in the people themselves for sharing and re-sharing over time.

reply to Sara Martínez at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQPvrcksjUA&lc=UgzbdJ1cdxkjnN0DBOl4AaABAg

Sara, here are some creative/art-related examples that might help:<br /> Dancer/Choreographer Twyla Tharp used a slightly modified slip box method that included much more than notes on cards for her dance-related work. She describes the process well in chapter 6 of her book "The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life".

If you're into art and image-based work, Aby Warburg had a zettelkasten with images. Search for details on his "Mnemosyne Atlas" at The Warburg Institute at the School of Advanced Study University of London which has some material you may appreciate.

Product designer khimtan has a visual zettelkasten practice you can find examples of on Reddit in the "Antinet" sub.

A variety of comedians like Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, Bob Hope, and George Carlin had zettelkasten practices for their comedy work.

Eminem has a fantastic, but tremendously simple zettelkasten for songwriting. Taylor Swift has a somewhat similar digital version which she has talked about using, though she doesn't use the word zettelkasten to describe it.

syndication link

Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. Simon & Schuster, 2006. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Creative-Habit/Twyla-Tharp/9780743235273.

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The value of a zettelkasten is as a tool to actively force combinatorial creativity—the goal is to create accidents or collisions of ideas which might have a high chance of being discovered and selected for.

Nothing progresses without randomness.

Think about this for a bit. True/untrue? Provable? Counterexamples?

Perhaps of interest here, would not be a specific OER text, but an OER zettelkasten or card index that indexes a variety of potential public domain or open resources, articles, pieces, primary documents, or other short readings which could then be aggregated and tagged to allow for a teacher or student to create their own personalized OER text for a particular area of work.

If done well, a professor might then pick and choose from a wide variety of resources to build their own reader to highlight or supplement the material they're teaching. This could allow a wider variety of thinking and interlinking of ideas. With such a regiment, teachers are less likely to become bored with their material and might help to actively create new ideas and research lines as they teach.

Students could then be tasked with and guided to creating a level of cohesiveness to their readings as they progress rather than being served up a pre-prepared meal with a layer of preconceived notions and frameworks imposed upon the text by a single voice.

This could encourage students to develop their own voices as well as to look at materials more critically as they proceed rather than being spoon fed calcified ideas.

Primary care physician Gavin Francis reviews two books on the importance of forgetting, as part of a larger reflection on memory.

Adler, David, James Cornehlsen, and Andrew Frothingham. Harnessing Serendipity: Collaboration Artists, Conveners and Connectors. Advanced Reader Copy. 2023. Reprint, David Adler, 2023.

Collecting for collections' sake is a fools errand. Collecting to connect and create is where the magic happens.

We create product not to show how good we are, but to measure how good we are.

— Naval (@naval) February 19, 2023

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Billy Oppenheimer</span> in The Notecard System: Capture, Organize, and Use Everything You Read, Watch, and Listen To (<time class='dt-published'>11/03/2022 16:53:44</time>)</cite></small>

Nothing stupendous here. Mostly notes on cards and then laid out to outline. Most of the writing sounds like it happens at the transfer stage rather than the card and outline stage.

This process seems more akin to that of Victor Margolin than Vladimir Nabokov.

Example of someone who says most of their best flashes of thought or creativity come when they're out walking or doing something else #

What makes note taking exciting?

• serendipity
• surprise
• creativity

• the most important result of the idea of the whole is creativity

In addition to "critical thinking, resourcefulness, creativity, attention to detail, and academic pride and humility", the ability to use a note card-based research system like Umberto Eco's is the key to overcoming information overload.

The writing of a thesis is a shock to many specifically because information overload has not only gotten worse, but because the underlying historical method of doing so has either been removed from the educational equation or so heavily watered down that students don't think to use it.

When I think and write about "note taking" I'm doing it in a subtly different way and method than how it seems to be used in common parlance. Most seem to use it solely for information extraction and as a memory crutch which they may or may not revisit to memorize or use and then throw away. I do it for some of these reasons, but my practice goes far beyond this for generating new ideas, mixing up ideas creatively, and for writing. Note reuse seems to be the thing missing from the equation. It also coincidentally was the reason I quit taking notes in college.

google translate:

And yet he never found what he was actually looking for, but something new and surprising.

While you'll only find in your zettelkasten exactly what you placed there, you may be surprised to find more than you expected.