in reply to los2pollos<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/y5un81/comment/it4jy3c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

You're not the only one to think of a card index as diary. Roland Barthes practiced this as well. His biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call it his fichierjournal.

https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/browse/

History of Philosophy: Summarized & Visualized

This could be thought of as a form of digital, single-project zettelkasten dedicated to philosophy. It's got people, sources, and ideas which are cross linked in a Luhmann-sense (without numbering) though not in a topical index-sense. Interestingly it has not only a spatial interface and shows spatial relationships between people and ideas over time using a timeline, but it also indicates—using colored links—the ideas of disagreement/contrast/refutation and agreement/similarity/expansion.

What other (digital) tools of thought provide these sorts of visualization affordances?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/y5w98j/if_you_are_just_looking_at_starting_a/

The zettelkasten can be a useful educational substrate for thinking in as few as five cards.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/Iwy7MGlMEeyztTNgvCXUOA

Kaube, Jürgen. “Zettelkästen: Alles und noch viel mehr: Die gelehrte Registratur.” FAZ.NET, June 3, 2013. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/geisteswissenschaften/zettelkaesten-alles-und-noch-viel-mehr-die-gelehrte-registratur-12103104.html

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

Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français (DEAF) is a dictionary built out of a slip box containing 1.5 million slipswith over 12 million references.

machine translation (Google):

Classic editions can hardly depict Jungius' complex way of working and can never show all possible cross-connections. In particular, passages that belong together thematically have often been filed far apart from each other, so that even the printed catalog by Christoph Meinel, which extends down to the level of the smallest bundles of the collection (“Maniples” averaging around 15 pages in size), makes finding them only slightly easier. Nor are they able to adequately reproduce the role of drawings and tables or even the information on the backs of notes. Due to these special features, the estate of Joachim Jungius is particularly attractive for digitization.

It sounds here as if Christoph Meinel has collected and printed a catalog of Joachim Jungius' zettelkasten. (Where is this? Find a copy.) This seems particularly true as related cards could and would have been easily kept far apart from each other, and this could give us a hint as to the structural nature of his specific practice and uses of his notes.

It sounds as if Stabi is making an effort to digitize Jungius' note collection.

machine translation (Google):

His estate includes i.a. Notes on all important natural-philosophical questions of his time and correspondence with his students who stayed at the various universities in Protestant Germany and the Netherlands. He wrote excerpts from literature, observation notes, lecture preparations and other things on small pieces of paper, of which almost 42,000 are still preserved in the Stabi today.

Die Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky (Stabi) houses the almost 42,000 slips of paper from Joachim Jungius' lifetime collection of notes which include excerpts from his reading, observational notes, his lecture preparations, and other miscellaneous notes.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/36761543@N02/

Kf333 falls into the tradition of PoIC which they associated directly.

They photographed and saved their cards into Flickr.

As is apparently often in describing new organizing systems (commonplace books, zettelkasten, PoIC, etc.), not everyone is going to understand it the first time, or even understand what is going on or why one would want to use it.

This post by Susan is such an example.

Susan does almost immediately grasp that this might be something one could transfer into a digital system however, particularly for the search functionality.

An example of a ticker file in the vein of getting things done (GTD) documented using index cards and a card file from 1917. Sounds very familiar to the Pile of Index Cards (PoIC) from the early 2000s.

note that they're incorrectly capitalizing these types of reading to indicate their importance.

via https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/

If you want to try commonplacing digitally, u/Citrie is developing commonplaces.io — if you try it, please send them any feedback you have!

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/usj4dvF0Eeut6W8aTWJVaQ

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.)

Example

Is he falling trap to the lure of literacy as the only means of crystallizing knowledge here? He starts with a literate Aristotle and specifically mentions 30,000 years ago instead of oral cultures which we know could do this sort of work orally almost 65,000 years ago.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>u/taurusnoises</span> in One of the ways I use my zettelkasten (though Obsidian) to write essays : Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>08/10/2022 12:28:58</time>)</cite></small>

Examples

Examples

https://social.ayjay.org/2022/09/27/the-workshop.html

Examples

Examples

Examples

Examples

Examples

Zettelkasten, if nothing else, are a close reflection of the interests of the author who collected them.

link: Ahrens mentions this

Hebrew University Jewish mysticism scholar Gershom Scholem's zettelkasten has its own reading room at the National Library of Israel.

Gershom Scholem (1897-1982)

Gotthard Deutsch (1859-1921) had a card index of 70,000 items relating to Jewish history.

https://archive.org/details/MyInnerWorkingsTheCommonplaceBookOrKnowledgeBoxNoteCardSystem

https://www.amazon.com/English-3200-Programed-Course-Grammar/dp/0155226754

In a democracy, is it not just rule by majority, but rule by the most organized that ends up dominating the society?

Perhaps C. Wright Mills' work on the elite has some answers?

The Republican party's use of organization to create gerrymandering is a clear example of using extreme organization to create minority rule. Cross reference: Slay the Dragon in which this issue is laid out with the mention of using a tiny amount of money to careful gerrymander maps to provide outsized influences and then top-down outlines to imprint broad ideas from a central location onto smaller individual constituencies (state and local).

What a lot to unpack here.

He's actively looking through all parts of his files to find potential links and connections between ideas. He brings up the idea of "unsuspected connections" which touches on Luhmann's idea of serendipity, Llull's combinatorial arts, or what one might call combinatorial creativity.

Note takers reading this may appreciate that Mills had a note taking system:

https://hypothes.is/a/Wbm09giuEe2-tH8vp1LziA<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/_7SQkPdFEeunDX9htFmQ8w

This particular note and my notice of it is an interesting case of faint recognition and combinatorial creativity at play. I vaguely recognized Mills' name but was able to quickly find it within my reading notes to discover I'd run across him and his intellectual practice before.

As many people used slip boxes in 1930s Germany, publishers sold texts, not as typical books, but as file card collections!

Link to: Suggestion that Scott Scheper publish his book on zettelkasten as a zettelkasten.

He's wholly wrong on this score because he lacks a deeper appreciation for how this works or its value to oral societies. He uses the word "trick" in a disparaging sense with respect to mnemotechniques.

Throughout Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts (Utah State University Press, 2006) Joseph Harris presents highlighted sidebar presentations he labels "Intertexts".

They simultaneously serve the functions of footnotes, references, (pseudo-)pull quotes, and conversation with his own text. It's not frequently seen this way, but these intertexts serve the function of presenting his annotations of his own text to model these sorts of annotations and intertextuality which he hopes the reader (student) to be able to perform themselves. He explicitly places them in a visually forward position within the text rather than hiding them in the pages' footnotes or end notes where the audience he is addressing can't possibly miss them. In fact, the reader will be drawn to them above other parts of the text when doing a cursory flip through the book upon picking it up, a fact that underlines their importance in his book's thesis.

This really is a fantastic example of the marriage of form and function as well as modelling behavior.

cc: @remikalir

Joseph Harris uses a mélange of materials to make his writing including books, papers, magazines, from which he is copying sections out, writing in margins, making notes on index cards and then moving those pieces of text and pieces of paper (the index cards, and possibly Post-it notes) around to create his output.

He doesn't delineate a specific process for his excerpting or note taking practice. How does he organize his notes? Is he just pulling them from piles around him? Is there a sense of organization at all?

Circa late 2011, he's positing Luhmann had 35,000 cards and not 90,000.

Jules Verne used index cards. Joachim Jungius is said to have had 150,000 cards.

https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/zukunft-im-zettelkasten-a-75d23643-0002-0001-0000-000046407320?context=issue

Google translation:

The result was 98 volumes, produced according to a Zettelkasten system (Verne left 25,000 keyword cards), mostly written in the tower at Amiens, the interior of which Verne had decorated like a ship.

Jules Verne had a zettelkasten which he used to write 98 volumes.

Given that he was French we should cross check his name with "fichier boîte".

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2005/03/writing-and-index-cards.html

Looser tradition here for using index cards for writing. Comment have some interesting potential examples from circa 2005

What's the solution: dig into your primary sources. Ask open-ended questions, and refine them as you go. Be open to new lines of inquiry. Stage your work in Conversation with so-and-so [ previously defined as the author of the text].

Stacy Fahrenthold recommends digging into primary sources and using them (and their author(s) as a "conversation partner". She doesn't mention using either one's memory or one's notes as a communication partner the way Luhmann does in "Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen" (1981), which can be an incredibly fruitful and creative method for original material.

http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3641225-mcconnell-throws-shade-on-grahams-proposed-national-abortion-ban/

I've recently run across a few examples of a pattern that should have a name because it would appear to dramatically change the outcomes. I'm going to term it "decisions based on possibilities rather than realities". It's seen frequently in economics and politics and seems to be a form of cognitive bias. People make choices (or votes) about uncertain futures, often when there is a confluence of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and these choices are dramatically different than when they're presented with the actual circumstances in practice.

A recent example was a story about a woman who was virulently pro-life who when presented with a situation required her to switch her position to pro-choice.

Another relates to choices that people want to make about where their children might go to school versus where they actually send them, and the damage this does to public education.

Let's start collecting examples of these quandaries at all levels of making choices in the real world.

What is the relationship to this with the mental exercise of "descending into the particular"?

Does this also potentially cause decision fatigue in cases of voting spaces when constituents are forced to vote for candidates on thousands of axes which they may or may not agree with?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/xaky94/so_what_do_you_do_for_topics_that_dont_fit_in_a/

Other than my own practice, this may be the first place I've seen someone mentioning that they maintain dual practices of both commonplacing and zettelkasten simultaneously.

I do want to look more closely at Niklas Luhmann's ZKI and ZKII practices. I suspect that ZKI was a hybrid practice of the two and the second was more refined.

https://deafplushomeschool.blogspot.com/2022/09/a-childs-zettelkasten.html

Example of a child's zettelkasten

https://twitter.com/shannonmattern/status/1512134425785610255

That stage when you're pretty sure you've finished reading + taking notes, and you're ready to start porting everything over into thematic sections on Scrivener. One of the many stages of writing before The Writing actually begins. T-minus 14 hours 😰

— Shannon Mattern (@shannonmattern) April 7, 2022

Merve Emre's note taking process: dog earing and highlighting followed by typing out sentences and sorting into a rough draft.

Similar to Shannon Mattern's as noted.

"I do not take notes as I read. I dog-ear—verso-top, recto-bottom—and underline sentences + paragraphs. I create a document and type out every underlined sentence and paragraph, sorted by book. Then I create a second document + sort the sentences + paragraphs by subject...."

— Shannon Mattern (@shannonmattern) April 16, 2022

"... The process of doing this usually gets me to a preliminary articulation of the argument I want to make, its beginning and its end, its arc, and its subclaims." How affirming - this is my process, too! // All of this is from a lovely @nybooks email interview with @mervatim pic.twitter.com/iAF82mo5MI

— Shannon Mattern (@shannonmattern) April 16, 2022

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=math+for+dummies&i=stripbooks&crid=89N2XQ5IZTX1&sprefix=math+for+dummies%2Cstripbooks%2C117&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=math+demystified&i=stripbooks&crid=UM15P2ZTY84C&sprefix=math+demystified%2Cstripbooks%2C137&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

A whole series of books from McGraw Hill whose titles all carry an implicit math shaming. Who wants to carry these books around and be seen reading them? Even the word DeMYSTiFieD on the cover is written in CLoWn case.

• Business Math Demystified
• Dosage Calculations and Basic Math for Nurses Demystified
• Geometry Demystified
• Business Calculus Demystified
• Math Word Problems Demystified
• Everyday Math Demystified
• Discrete Mathematics Demystified
• Math Proofs Demystified
• Pre-Algebra Demystified

https://medium.com/flourish-inc/wait-what-the-did-i-just-read-4b00ff02d1b7

She's basically describing a form of the original zettelkasten (a slip or index card-based commonplace book), but where did she get this from? If it was the blogosphere, which is highly likely these days, then she's either misread or heavily simplified the practice (Luhmann's practice) back down to it's original form.

She seems to take for granted how to link physical cards.

https://mycorrhiza.wiki/

an example within this essay of a cross reference from one note to another showing the potential linkages of individual notes within one's own slipbox.

Body and environment are commonly ignored in modeling of the brain to understand its working. Example of sub-system / system / supra-system perception levels not being taken into account simultaneously, compare [[Triz denken in systeemniveaus 20200826114731]], and the corresponding switches wrt where the complexity is [[De locus van Complexiteit 20040513173600]]. Similar to [[Disruption Theory is Real, but Wrong 20191014111801]] where the disruption can manifest on a different level than the players in the scene being disrupted and causing the disruption.

Greedy reductionism, beyond the point where it still provides new agency or insight, is a consistent risk. Consciousness, economics. Perhpas make a list of examples where this happened in different fields and the impact of it? Should be a bunch in my notes.

did that. Playing with it is highly fascinating. Saving some conversations as examples.

The essay gives various examples of usage: legal advice medical diagnosis nanny to talk to your kid a research assistant, prompting it for surprisal basically to come up with lines of inquiry an questions let the algo impersonate someone and run ideas by that impersonation let the algo impersonate opposing debate partners list possible counterarguments draw analogies between knowledge domains

I know that a few people have been using the Webmention and the Semantic Linkbacks plugins for WordPress together to show the backlinks in the "comments" section of their posts/pages. Perhaps this may work for your purposes?

A recent example I've seen someone put together on WordPress that does something similar (though not using Slippy) is https://cyberzettel.com/.

In a similar vein, though not with WordPress, Kevin Marks mocked up a UI for an incoming/outgoing links in the mode of a Memex that also leverages Webmentions for part of the functionality: https://www.kevinmarks.com/memex.html.

Thanks u/taurusnoises, your spectacular recent video "Using the Zettelkasten (and Obsidian) to Write an Essay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OUn2-h6oVc is about as close to the sort of public example of output creation I had been looking for!

I'm sure that there are other methods and workflows out there which vary by person, method, and modality (analog/digital) and it would be interesting to see what those practices look like as examples for others to use, follow, and potentially improve upon.

I particularly appreciate that your visual starting perspective of the graph view in Obsidian fairly closely mimics what an analog zettelkasten user might be doing and seeing within that modality.

I'm still collecting extant examples and doing some related research, but perhaps I'll have some time later in the year to do some interviews with particular people about how they're actively doing this as you suggested.

On a tangential note, I'm also piqued by some of the specific ideas you mention in your notes in the video as they relate to some work on orality and memory I've been exploring over the past several years. If you do finish that essay, I'd love to read the finished piece.

Thanks again for this video!

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-ancient-soldiers-enemies.html

https://universitylifecafe.k-state.edu/bookshelf/academicskills/indexcardstudysystem.html

Natalie Umberger is writing about an "index card study system" in an academic study skills context, but it's an admixture of come ideas from Cornell Notes and using index cards as flashcards.

The advice to "Review your notes and readings frequently, so the material is 'fresh.' " is a common one (through at least the 1980s to the present), though research on the mere-exposure effect indicates that it's not as valuable as other methods.

How can we stamp out the misconception that this sort of review is practical?

This is similar to the IndieWeb and web standards ideas of looking back at history to see the actual patterns of work that were beneficial.

Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/HhAj3r1bEeyw9h_Pa4QNrA

!- examples : double bind * When one thinks a little, one finds many such double bind situations in life such as: * Persons in positions of responsibility who have access to more resources than they have ability to afford, creating temptation to steal Marrying out of sense of duty instead of love * Challenges identifying with gender identity - LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or sometimes questioning), and others. The "plus" represents other sexual identities including pansexual and Two-Spirit) * Conformity bias - sensing injustice of certain social norms propagated by your own ingroup but feeling peer pressure to conform

Another of the abounding examples of people thinking that writing and literacy are the first technology of thinking.

https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pruning-for-output/comment-page-1/#comment-4960

I love that you're adding links to the responses back and forth for future reference. I remember doing this manually several years back, but its a practice I rarely see. Both Stephen and I are using the Webmention spec to do this for our selves in an automatic fashion. (Mine display on my site in the comments, though I don't think Stephen does presently.) On wordpress.com you'd likely need to have a higher paid tier to add the plugins to enable this for WordPress, though depending on how often you do this it may be worth it?

https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pruning-for-output/

In response to my call for zettelkasten output examples, Matthias Melcher comes up to the border of what I was looking for but doesn't cover the actual output portion.

He focuses instead about some of the processing and the pruning portions, but not use for actual content creation. Is this because he doesn't actively use his notes for the creation portion? Or does he use his branching tree space as recollections of notes, perhaps to create outlines for creation?

Note specifically that he doesn't mention any sort of surprise or serendipity with respect to linking ideas nor is there any mention of "inventio" portions of the process.

This is an example about preparation for going into a conference (or battle, which is suggested by this particular conference's topic). The work provides a primer for what is about to happen and can be analogized to ancients taking the ark of the covenant into battle before them. It serves as a cultural talisman representing what they're fighting for, but it also likely served as a mnemonic device for their actual battle strategies and plans from the time. They take it with them as a physical review reminder and device.

Scott, I'm not looking for outputs themselves (there are many of these floating about, though they're infrequently seen or talked about in our spaces), but more the unseen work between having a deck of cards and how one pulls them out, potentially orders them around, and physically manufactures the text itself. I'm looking for the (likely) droll videos of the enthusiastic zettelmacher(in) crawling around on the floor moving cards about to actually form the content. Or photos or video of their living room covered with several hundred cards ordering them into the form of the ultimate output which they've already written down, but just need to put into a reasonable logical linear form. What do these look like in digital and analog form?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7XbgD4VVa4

Matthias Melcher's note taking process. Quick capture as text. Linking and categorizing later, and then import into a private WordPress space.

No indication here what happens after, though ostensibly some of it is covered here: https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/pruning-for-output/

https://quiescent.us/2022/06/think-external/

Brief example of someone who says they have an antinet zettelkasten note taking approach.

Nothing exceptional here beyond this.

Example of someone in the wild using their body as a locus for attaching memories temporarily so that they can recall ideas for making note of later.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2022/roe-opinion-annotated/

An interesting example of visual user interface of highlights and marginalia on a news site to help tell and report on a story.

https://wiki.nikiv.dev/other/wiki-workflow

The trending topics on Twitter can be used as a form of juxtaposition of random ideas which could be brought together to make new and interesting things.

Here's but one example of someone practicing just this:

Y’all, imagine Spielberg’s Sailor Moon pic.twitter.com/xZ1DEsbLTy

— Matty Illustration (@MN_illustration) June 30, 2022

cc: https://twitter.com/marshallk

One of the toughest parts about these systems is that while they're relatively easy to outline (evidence: the thousands of 500-1000 word blog posts about zettelkasten in the last 3 years), they're tougher to practice and many people have slight variations on the idea (from Eminem's "Stacking Ammo" to Luhmann's (still incomplete) digital collection). Far fewer people are sticking with it beyond a few weeks or doing it for crazy reasons (I call it #ProductivityPorn, while Scott has the colorful phrase "bubble graph boys").

For those who visit here, seeing discrete cards and ideas, videos, or examples of how others have done this practice can be immensely helpful. While it can be boring to watch a video of someone reading and taking notes by hand, it can also be incredibly useful to see exactly what they're doing and how they're doing it (though God bless you for speeding them up 😅).

This is also part of why I share examples of how others have practiced these techniques too. Seeing discrete examples to imitate is far easier than trying to innovate your way into these methods, particularly when it's difficult to see the acceleration effects of serendipity that comes several months or years into the process. Plus it's fun to see how Vladimir Nabokov, Anne Lamott, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bob Hope, Michael Ende, Twyla Tharp, Roland Barthes, Kate Grenville, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Joan Rivers, Umberto Eco, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Raymond, Llull, George Carlin, John Locke, and Eminem all did variations of this for themselves. (This last sentence has so much entropy in it, I'm certain that it's never been written before in the history of humanity.)

And isn't everyone tired to death of Luhmann, Luhmann, Luhmann? You'd think that no one had ever thought to take note of anything before?!

While my own approach is a hybrid of online and offline techniques, I've gotten long emails from people following my Hypothes.is feed of notes and annotations saying what a useful extended example it is. Of course they don't see the follow up that entails revision of the notes or additional linking, tagging, and indexing that may go on, but it's at least enough of an idea that they understand the start of the practice.

(Incidentally, I wrote most of this using a few cards from my own system. 🗃️✂️🖋️)

Dan Charnas, Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2016)

mise-en-place is an example of a means of thinking externally with one's environment

link to - similar ideas in Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind

By writing down and collecting ideas slowly over time, working on them in small fits and spurts, when one finally comes to do the final work on their writing project or other work, the pieces only need minor shaping to take their final form. This process allows for a much greater level of serendipity, creativity, and potential sustained genius of connecting ideas across time to take shape in a final piece.

How does this relate to diffuse thinking? How can slow diffuse thinking be leveraged into this process?

Writing down fleeting notes while walking around can be valuable as one's ideas brew slowly in the mind (diffuse thinking) in combination with active combinatorial creativity, thus a form of Llullan combinatorial diffusion.

Many business books seem so shallow and often only have one real insight which is repeated multiple times, perhaps to drive the point home or perhaps just to have enough filler to seem being worth the purchase of a book.

Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich is an example of this, though it shows a different form of genius in expanding the idea from a variety of perspectives so that eventually everyone will absorb the broader idea which is distilled to great effect into the title.

another example of the idea of "magical" experience that comes when taking notes. This one isn't about idea creation or even serendipity though, but relates specifically to being "bulk productive".

would sign with herself each day for how many words she committed to write.

Not really enough evidence for a solid quote here. What was his source?

He cites the following shallowly: <br /> - Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories: Positive Obsession (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), 123–36.<br /> - 2 Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2020).<br /> - 3 Dan Sheehan, “Octavia Butler has finally made the New York Times Best Seller list,” LitHub.com, September 3, 2020, https://lithub.com/octavia- butler-has-finally-made-the-new-york-times-best-seller-list/.<br /> - 4 Butler’s archive has been available to researchers and scholars at the Huntington Library since 2010.

Explicit example of someone using a zettelkasten to develop ideas and create content for distribution online and within social media.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vgtyuf/mastery_requires_theory_application_of_theory_is/

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vj0blr/decidedly_inessential_share_your_physical_set_up/

An in-depth list of materials someone uses for their zettelkasten.

(Read when there were no comments; potentially useful for revisiting later if there are any.)

Worth pulling out the exact reference, but Anthony Grafton indicates that Sherlock Holmes regularly read and "excerpted systematically into a massive collection of notebooks, which he regularly consults."

Twyla Tharp tells the story of a colleague who is a magazine editor. They keep a pile of clippings of phots, illustrations, and stories in their desk and mine it, often with others, for something that will create story ideas for new work.

This method is highly similar to that of Eminem's "Stacking Ammo" method.

While she keeps more than just slips of paper (or index cards) in it, Twyla Tharp definitely falls into the pattern of creative collection related to the zettelkasten tradition.

This indicates that it's a list of public zettelkasten, but in reality more are blogs, websites, digital gardens, or articles about digital gardens.

Potentially indicative of the confusion people have about what these practices look like online.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Xennial</span> in The Rise of Digital Gardeners - Musings of a Xennial (<time class='dt-published'>06/14/2022 12:01:39</time>)</cite></small>

http://messnerenglish.weebly.com/who-uses-a-writers-notebook.html

Example of a teacher using the commonplace book tradition within her class, though she frames it as a "writer's notebook". I like the way she uses examples of cultural figures who are doing this same sort of pattern.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/note-cards?s=r

Outline of one of Dan's experiments writing a handbook about reading, thinking, and writing. He's taking a zettelkasten-like approach, but doing it as a stand-alone project with little indexing and crosslinking of ideas or creating card addresses.

This sounds more akin to the processes of Vladimir Nabokov and Ryan Holiday/Robert Greene.

Mario Bunge had a card index note taking practice.

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/401/hopeful-theorist

This is a fascinating first hand example of note taking experience spanning several decades. It includes descriptions of personal experience with a wide variety of most of the major note taking digital applications during this time period and provides a clear preference for a text-only (digital) format.

It describes a collection of over 10,000 text notes and 6,000 bibliographic entries.

https://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/the-scope-and-nature-of-darwins-commonplace-book/

Erasmus Darwin's commonplace book

It is one of the version(s?) published by John Bell based on John Locke's method and is a quarto volume bound in vellum with about 300 sheets of fine paper.

Blank pages 1 to 160 were numbered and filled by Darwin in his own hand with 136 entries. The book was started in 1776 and continued until 1787. Presumably Darwin had a previous commonplace book, but it has not been found and this version doesn't have any experiments prior to 1776, though there are indications that some material has been transferred from another source.

The book contains material on medical records, scientific matters, mechanical and industrial improvements, and inventions.

The provenance of Erasmus Darwin's seems to have it pass through is widow Elizabeth who added some family history to it. It passed through to her son and other descendants who added entries primarily of family related topics. Leonard Darwin (1850-1943), the last surviving son of Charles Darwin gave it to Down House, Kent from whence it was loaned to Erasmus Darwin House in 1999.

While this excerpt doesn't indicate the index card origin of the published book, it does indicate that it has descriptions of more than 5,000 novel-length mysteries, detective stories, etc. which includes annotations and critical judgements of each.

One can thus draw the conclusion that this shared index card collection of details was used to publish a subsequent book.

Though if we roughly estimate this collection at 1000 cards per box with roughly 76 boxes potentially present, the 76,000 cards are still shy of Luhmann's collection. It'll take some hunting thigs down, but as Adler suggests that people write their notes in their books, which he would have likely done, then this collection isn't necessarily his own. I suspect, but don't yet have definitive proof, that it was created as a group effort for the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World and its two-volume index of great ideas, the Syntopicon.

Jacques Barzun had a card index for cataloging mystery/suspense books which he maintained on 3x5" cards with his friend Wendell Hertig Taylor.

Did he keep a card index for his ideas as well?

Are there examples of people using The Brain in public as more extensive commonplace books or zettelkasten?

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/v48una/randomly_found_out_a_friend_of_mine_uses_note/

Example of a card index note taking method in the wild. Sounds a bit more like a commonplace book rather than a highly organized zettelkasten.

This feels like an underlying and underpinning principle of how the IndieWeb which focuses on working real world examples which are able to build up more complex systems instead of theoretical architecture astronomy which goes no where.

Reference: John Gall (1975) Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail p. 71

Markus Krajewski indicates here that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) kept a zettelkasten, though from the sound of it, his sheets, organized by head words have more of a ring of commonplace book.

https://www.hjkeen.net/halqn/index.htm

A great example of an online commonplace book prominently featuring quotes with an index featuring authors, titles, categories, and even translators. Even more interesting, it looks like it's hand built using a large table.

Piketty indicates that Ernest Labrousse, Adeline Daumard, and Simon Kuznets carried out their economic and historical research almost exclusively by hand using file cards.

Are their notes still extant? What did their systems look like? From whom did they learn them?

A clarion call for owning your own data.

Sascha Fast started his zettelkasten in 2008 or 2009 and went to plain text around 2010.

There are likely far more people talking about zettelkasten and writing short, simple blogposts and articles about it than those who are actually practicing it and seeing benefit from it.

Finding public examples of people practicing and showing their work in the zettelkasten space are few and far between.

This effect likely increases the availability bias of Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten which is frequently spoken of, but it also has the benefit of being online, even if it's primarily written in German.

Sounds that like me, Sascha Fast thinks many are talking about zettelkasten, but not actually practicing it properly.