666 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. in literature notes, do you write all of the stuff from a single article/book/whatever in one note, or do you split them all into individual notes of their own, one little piece on each card/note?

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

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

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

    1. Lorsque la note est absente, si les bulletins ne présentent que des commentaires, les échanges portent alors sur l’interprétation de ces commentaires. Cela oblige les enseignants à être plus explicites. En revanche, cette lecture prend du temps et l’interprétation des commentaires dépend largement de l’acculturation du lecteur au milieu scolaire.
    2. Si la lecture d’une note sur 20 est facile et fait partie de la culture de tous, elle a de sérieux inconvénients. La moyenne ne permet pas de voir les progrès sur le trimestre, elle donne parfois une fausse image scientifique, en particulier lorsque la moyenne s’affiche au centième de points, alors que chaque professeur peut jouer sur de nombreux paramètres pouvant modifier la moyenne du trimestre (coefficients, note la plus basse non comptabilisée, arrondis). Par ailleurs, elle met au même niveau des compétences qui peuvent être variées et non compensables.
    3. évaluations non chiffrées
  2. Feb 2024
    1. Let's reframe things here in part because it's highly illustrative of both the phrases as well as the specific question you raise.

      Imagine Andy Matuschak reading Sonke Ahrens' How to Make Smart Notes (CreateSpace, 2017) and making notes on what he feels is important. As he reads, he does what is prescribed, namely, he restates the idea in his own words based on what he's read. In doing this he takes the idea of "evergreen" content from journalism settings (and later SEO settings) which he was familiar with and applies that name to what Ahrens called permanent notes to expound on his understanding of Ahrens! (An evergreen article in newspaper work is an article which was written for a particular recurring holiday, event, or story and is regular. Why spend huge amounts of staff time writing that truly original Valentine's day article? The broad stories about gifts to give and restaurants to visit really don't change from year to year. Just dust it off and reprint it, as readers are unlikely to have saved or remembered it and it becomes free re-purposable content.)

      Of course, in rewriting this definition, Matuschak adds in some additional baggage for those who aren't carefully reading his work. He adds some additional emphasis on revisiting one's ideas and rewriting them over time, which is certainly fine, but I think the novice note maker puts too much emphasis on this portion thinking that each permanent or evergreen note must eventually become polished to perfection. In practice, most seasoned writers don't and won't do this. In fact, I suspect if you looked at Matuschak's note on evergreen notes, you'd find that it probably hasn't changed since the day he wrote it other than agglutinating links from other notes.

      This doesn't mean that one can't modify or change their ideas over time, this is certainly useful and good, but I suspect that the majority aren't doing it the way that might be imagined by Matuschak's original statement or the way that his idea was picked up by the (niche) digital gardening community and spread primarily in the work of Maggie Appleton. It's some of this evolution of Matuschak's definition which bled into digital gardens, which have some overlap with zettelkasten and the note taking realms, which have muddied the waters. As a result, one should take it as general advice and apply it to their own situation, needs, and practice.

      For those who use their own notes for writing, one will often mark their cards/notes to indicate that they've used those ideas in various projects so that they're not actively repeating themselves ad nauseum. Some of the additional tweaks one might make to their notes from a style or context specific perspective are also left to the editing portion rather than being done in the notes themselves. As a result of some of this, unless there is a dramatic flaw in a note, there isn't generally a lot of additional work one would come back to it to revise it. If it does require that sort of major revision, then perhaps the better method would be to make a new note and linking it to the original along with an explanation of the error. I typically wouldn't recommend polishing individual notes to some Plationic idea of perfection. Doing so is often just make-work which distracts from one's time which could be better spent doing additional reading or actual thinking. If you're going to do that sort of polishing work, do it at the end when you've got a longer piece of writing you're including your note in.

      The real question now, is how are you personally going to define permanent notes, evergreen notes, or other related phrases like atomic notes? This practice is called by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren "coming to terms" with an author's work and is part of their analysis for how one should read a book to get the most out of it. I highly recommend reading How to Read a Book (Simon & Schuster, 1972 or Touchstone, 2011) as a companion to any of the usual note taking manuals.

      If you want to continue the experiment on a better unified definition of permanent notes, evergreen notes, atomic notes, etc., you can find a pretty solid bibliography of note making, writing, and reading manuals to peruse at https://boffosocko.com/2024/01/18/note-taking-and-knowledge-management-resources-for-students/#Recommended%20reading.

      While one could certainly go down the rabbit hole of reading all these resources, I would recommend only looking at one or two and spending your time working on actual practice. It's through practice that you're more likely to make actual progress on your own problems and questions.


      reply to u/franrodalg at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1azoo9m/permanent_vs_evergreen_notes_am_i_thinking_about/

    1. Contrary to a literature note, a fleeting note is usually comprised of your own thoughts, things you'd like to remember, a passing bead of "brilliance."

      Fleeting notes are loose thoughts and aren't part of a source.

    2. The term "fleeting note" comes from Sonke Ahrens' book, How to Take Smart Notes, and describes a note which is impermanent or, to use Ahrens' language, not permanently stored in your zettelkasten.

      Fleeting notes aren't permanently stored in the zettelkasten

    1. Created over a 50-year span from 1939 to 1989, that catalog grew to about 4 million cards in 65 cabinets with 4,000 drawers.

      This is roughly 65 cabinets of 60 drawers each.

      4 million cards over 50 years is approximately 220 cards per day. This isn't directly analogous to my general statistics on number of notes per day for individual people's excerpting practice, but it does give an interesting benchmark for a larger institution and their acquisitions over 50 years. (Be sure to divide by 3 for duplication over author/title/subject overlap, which would be closer to 73 per day)

      Shifted from analog cards to digital version in 1989.

    1. On 3 June 1912 Edward Peacock wrote inshaky handwriting to James Murray from his deathbed: ‘I have been so longill – more than a year and a half, and do not expect ever to recover, that Ihave made up my mind to discontinue The Oxford English Dictionary for thefuture.’ He added in a postscript, ‘I am upwards of eighty years of age.’ Bythen Peacock had been a volunteer for the Dictionary for fifty-four years,making him one of the longest-serving contributors. He had submitted24,806 slips and had given great service to Murray not only as a Reader butas a Subeditor and Specialist too.

      One of the longest serving OED contributors, Edward Peacock wrote 24,806 slips over 54 years which comes to approximately 1.25 notes per day.

    2. The Dictionary’s coverage of the leading transcendentalist, HenryDavid Thoreau, is largely due to the monumental efforts of a single woman,Miss Alice Byington of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, who sent in 5,000 slipsfrom books that included several by Thoreau:

      over how long a period?

    3. The American who sent in the most slips was a clergyman in Ionia,Michigan, Job Pierson. A Presbyterian minister, book collector, and librarian,Pierson had the largest private library in Michigan (which included a bookpublished in the earliest days of printing, from Vienna in 1476). Over elevenyears, from 1879 to 1890, Pierson, who had studied at Williams College andattended Auburn Theological Seminary, sent in 43,055 slips from poetry,drama, and religion. His correspondence with Murray shows the breadth ofhis reading, from Chaucer (10,000 slips) to books on anatomy (5,000 slips),and lumbering (1,000 slips).

      Job Pierson 43,055 slips over 11 years<br /> 10.7 notes per day

    4. Stephen kept sending slips toMurray for twelve years, until 1891

      What was his slip total to give a notes per day calculation?

      (obviously not taking into account his other work...)

    5. Murray received a poignant letter in 1906 fromthe wife of William Sykes of South Devon who had been a one-timeassistant, and faithful Reader and Specialist for twenty-two years, sending in atotal of 16,048 slips: ‘My dear husband died last Friday, the day he receivedyour letter, he was able to read it, and wrote your name in one of the books Iam going to send you eight hours before he died. It took him an hour to writeit, but he made up his mind to do it, and did. The last words he ever wrotewere to you.’ A poignant last line from the impoverished widow reads, ‘I shallsend the books when the probate duty has been paid.’

      William Sykes 16,048 slips over 22 years<br /> (approximately 2 notes per day)

    6. the outright winner was a mysterious character called Thomas Austin Jnr whosent Dr Murray an incredible total of 165,061 over the span of a decade.Second place goes to William Douglas of Primrose Hill who sent in 151,982slips over twenty-two years; third place to Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield ofDevon, with 70,277 over twenty-eight years; with Dr William Chester Minorof Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum coming in fourth place with 62,720slips.

      Top slip contributors to OED: 1. Thomas Austin Jnr. 165,061 slips over 10 years (45.22 notes per day) 2. William Douglas 151,982 over 22 years (18.92 notes per day) 3. Thomas Nadauld Brushfield 70,277 over 28 years (1.98 notes per day) 4. William Chester Minor 62,720 slips over 23 years (to 1906) (7.5 notes per day)

  3. Jan 2024
    1. From an organizational standpoint, the beauty of sermons is that each revolves around a specific theme. Accordingly, King could devote a single folder to each topic. He accumulated 166 folders, each with a title like “Loving your Enemies” (folder 1), “Why the Christian must Oppose Segregation” (folder 87), “Mental Slavery” (folder 113), and “The Misuse of Prayer” (folder 166). These folders contain King’s outlines; source material, like clippings from books; and drafts.

      In addition to his card index, Martin Luther King, Jr. compiled a collection of 166 folders organized around various topics which he used to organize outlines, clippings, pages from books, and other source materials as well as drafts of sermons or speeches on those topics.

      To some extent these folders are just larger format repositories mirroring the topical arrangements of his card index.

    1. This is why choosing an external system that forces us todeliberate practice and confronts us as much as possible with ourlack of understanding or not-yet-learned information is such a smartmove.

      Choosing an external system for knowledge keeping and production forces the learner into a deliberate practice and confronts them with their lack of understanding. This is a large part of the underlying value not only of the zettelkasten, but of the use of a commonplace book which Benjamin Franklin was getting at when recommending that one "read with a pen in your hand". The external system also creates a modality shift from reading to writing by way of thinking which further underlines the value.

      What other building blocks are present in addition to: - modality shift - deliberate practice - confrontation of lack of understanding

      Are there other systems that do all of these as well as others simultaneously?


      link to Franklin quote: https://hypothes.is/a/HZeDKI3YEeyj9GcNWKX4iA

    1. taking random (and un-filed) notes

      "unfiled notes" as "fleeting notes" which aren't expanded upon and turned into "permanent notes"

      how are these related to his "fringe thoughts"

    2. " f r i n g e - t h o u g h t s "

      C. Wright Mills' idea of "fringe-thoughts" is similar to Ahrens framing of "fleeting notes".

    1. 複習卡片時,可以選擇下方的 4 個動作:1. 重寫卡片,去除廢話2. 刪除卡片,不再需要3. 連結卡片,增加連結4. 寫成文章,分享知識​這樣做,就能讓大腦「擁有」筆記上的知識。

      review 複習 知識虛肥

  4. Dec 2023
    1. 4. Cite Card Icon : Hat (something above you)Tag : 5th block Quotation, cooking recipe from book, web, tv, anything about someone else’s idea is classified into this class. Important here is distinguishing “your idea (Discovery Card)” and “someone else’s idea (Cite Card)”. Source of the information must be included in the Cite Card. A book, for example, author, year, page(s) are recorded for later use.

      https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/189972899/in/album-72157594200490122/

      Despite being used primarily as a productivity tool the PoIC system also included some features of personal knowledge management with "discovery cards" and "citation cards". Discovery cards were things which contained one's own ideas while the citation cards were the ideas of others and included bibliographic information. Citation cards were tagged on the 5th block as an indicator within the system.

      Question: How was the information material managed? Was it separate from the date-based system? On first blush it would appear not, nor was there a subject index which would have made it more difficult for one to find data within the system.

    1. Wish You Were Here - The “Great Lakes” Edition from Field Notes Brand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFemm4LjJbY

      The Newberry Library in Chicago, IL, maintains a collection of the Curt Teich & Co.'s Art-Colortone postcards from 1898 onward. It's stored in tab divided boxes using an alpha-numeric system generally comprising a series of three letters followed by three numbers. The company sold over a billion of these postcards.

  5. Nov 2023
    1. The ‘size’ of facts served a dream of information recombination, and was served bythe card form. Other advocates of Zettelkasten like Johann Jacob Moser (1701–1785)remarked that fairly small facts meant the mass of information was broken down to itsindividual components and thus could be constantly reshuffled in a ‘game of cards’(Krajewski, 2011: 53-5).

      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'.

    1. We know we’re supposed to write one idea per page/card. What constitutes an “idea”? How do I identify what a good idea is? What does an idea that fits on one card feel like?

      Here the writer, who doesn't lay out any of the general principles of a zettelkasten practice, automatically presumes one idea per card (presumes it from where? zeitgeist) and then jumps into the question of note size and other semantics.

    1. How do you title your literature notes?

      reply to u/tenebrasocculta at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17vejto/how_do_you_title_your_literature_notes/

      Like many, I prefer to call these reference notes. For ease of use and brevity I use the standard citekey from Zotero, which I also use to quickly generate bibliographies. Like others have mentioned this is typically the author's sir name and publication date, so something like Gessner1548, or for your particular example Weeks2015. I can then use these quickly as well on cards with quotes or notes relating to sources that get excerpted from them for linking back to them.

      Generally I'd caution that if its a topic you're really interested in that you don't do too much note taking from tertiary sources but instead delve into more primary sourcing like the book mentioned in the article by Amy Reading. You'll get a lot further a lot faster, and generally find more useful insight.

    1. posted reply:

      I appreciate that you're centering some of the Cornell notes workflow into a linked note taking system. I don't think many (any?) of the note taking platforms have made it easy for students to quickly or easily create questions from their Cornell notes and build them into a spaced repetition practice. I've seen a handful transfer their work into other platforms like Anki, Mnemosyne, etc. for this purpose, but it would be interesting to see Protolyst and others offer this as out of the box functionality for following up on Cornell notes workflows. I've not seen it mentioned in any parts of the note taking space, but Cornell notes are essentially a Bibliography note/card (where the source is typically a lecture) + fleeting notes which stem from it (in a Niklas Luhmann-artig zettelkasten framing) out of which one would build their permanent notes as well as create questions for spaced repetition and review. User interfaces like that of Protolyst could potentially leverage these common workflows to great advantage.

    2. Cornell notes = ZK bibliography notes + ZK fleeting notes + questions for spaced repetition

    3. Next Step for your Cornell Notes? by Dr Maddy<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZFrR-u9Ovk

      Like that someone in the space is thinking about taking Cornell notes and placing them into the linked note taking framing.

      She doesn't focus enough on the questions or the spaced repetitions pieces within Cornell. How might this be better built into a UI like Protolyst, Obsidian, etc.? Where is this in people's note taking workflows?

    1. SIMPLER First Zettelkasten from Scratch by Dr Maddy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRrKO6TNN6w

      Protolyst has an "atom" functionality for short quick notes.

      The UI of Protolyst looks nice, but I wonder how well it holds up when one is at 10,000 notes? Is it still as simple?

    1. I like that she's explicit about not migrating over all of one's highlights and annotations after the fact. Few people focus on this piece which is highly important and many beginners fall trap to thinking that they need to write down, save, and link everything.


      What if the initial exercise of making the fleeting note was enough to have a baseline knowledge of a thing that really isn't going to be used again? Save the time and effort for the really important ideas. Build these.

      An annotation like 2+2=4 is useful in 2nd grade and will be remembered/used for your lifetime. It's so ubiquitously commonplace that it doesn't need to be commonplaced into your zettelkasten. Similarly for basic ideas that anyone in a particular sub-field will already know. Delve deeper for building true insights.

      This is related to the idea of collector's fallacy, but is subtly different from the usual framing. It has to do with focus against the commonplace.

    1. Sönke Ahrens' Concept of "Permanent Notes" in a Zettelkasten is Completely False

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6jt7SPbhMs


      One snippet of brief insight which he could have built upon, but instead he sandwiches it in multiple shills for his book, shills for his newsletter, and several heaping servings of zettelkasten cultish religion.

      sigh

      Given the presentation here, one wonders how long Scott spent looking through the main portion of Luhmann's ZK to verify that, in fact, that section did not appear. It's nice that he found the bilbliography card related to the footnote, but I don't see enough evidence for deep search to indicate that it might not actually exist somewhere. I also know from experience that Scott doesn't have enough strength in German to potentially pull off such a search, particularly given two different translators of Luhmann's German into English. It may have been the case that Scott missed it.

      The better example would have been to use Goitein whose writing output far exceeded that of Luhmann with a fraction of the cards.

    1. Do digital note taking tools extend the ranges of affordances versus their analog counterparts with respect to the SAMR model?

      On the augmentation front, they allow one to capture things faster, but may do so at the loss of understanding due to the lack of active learning (versus passive as the tool may be robbing them of the interaction with the material).

      There may be some workflow modification, but it's modest at best. Is it measurably better?

      I'm unaware of anyone talking about technological redefinition of digital note taking affordances, though some of the surface level AI-related things may emerge here.

      In some sense, I still think that the ease of remapping and rearranging/linking/relinking/outlining ideas in digital spaces doesn't exist, so digital note taking tools aren't doing very well even at the root substitution level.

      I suspect that some people weren't exposed to the general process of good note taking and their subsequent use for linking, developing, and then creating and as a result of learning this, they're attributing their advances to the digital nature of their tools rather than the original analog process which was always there and isn't necessarily improved measurably by the digital modality.

    1. Analog zettelkasten for natural sciences .t3_17kui2u._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      Reply to u/Wooden-School-4091 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17kui2u/analog_zettelkasten_for_natural_sciences/

      Given that Carl Linnaeus "invented" the standardized 3x5 inch index card and used it heavily in his scientific work (read Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Müller-Wille's works for more on his practice), and a variety of others including me, use it for mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., Zettelkasten can certainly be used for STEM, STEAM, and any of the natural sciences.

      See also, notes and links at: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22zettelkasten+for+studying%22

      If I were using it for classes/university/general studying via lectures, I'd base my practice primarily on Cornell Notes in combination with creating questions/cards for spaced repetition and/or a variation on Leitner's System.

      Some of the best material on spaced repetition these days can be found via:

      and other material on their sites.

      Beyond this, I'd focus my direct zettelkasten practice less on the learning portion and more on the developing or generating ideas portion of the work. Some of my practice with respect to mathematics can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17bqztm/applying_zettelkasten_for_math_heavy_subjects/

      For those interested, it may bear mentioning that Bjornstad, an engineer at Remnote, has a TiddlyWiki-based zettelkasten at https://zettelkasten.sorenbjornstad.com/#PublicHomepage:PublicHomepage which he demonstrates with a walk through at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjpjE5pMZMI

  6. Oct 2023
    1. Links are made by readers as well as writers. A stunning thing that we forget, but the link here is not part of the author’s intent, but of the reader’s analysis. The majority of links in the memex are made by readers, not writers. On the world wide web of course, only an author gets to determine links. And links inside the document say that there can only be one set of associations for the document, at least going forward.

      So much to unpack here...

      What is the full list of types of links?

      There are (associative) links created by the author (of an HTML document) as well as associative (and sometimes unwritten) mental links which may be suggested by either the context of a piece and the author's memory.

      There are the links made by the reader as they think or actively analyze the piece they're reading. They may make these explicit in their own note taking or even more strongly explicit with tools like Hypothes.is which make these links visible to others.

      tacit/explicit<br /> suggested mentally / directly written or made<br /> made by writer / made by reader<br /> others?

      lay these out in a grid by type, creator, modality (paper, online, written/spoken and read/heard, other)

    1. Any recommendations on Analog way of doing it? Not the Antinet shit

      reply to u/IamOkei at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5s6aek/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      u/IamOkei, I know you've got a significant enough practice that not much of what I might suggest may be helpful beyond your own extension of what you've got and how it is or isn't working for you. Perhaps chatting with a zettelkasten therapist may be helpful? Does anyone have "Zettelkasten Whisperer" on a business card yet?! More seriously, I occasionally dump some of my problems and issues into a notebook, unpublished on my blog, or even into a section of my own zettelkasten, which I never index or reconsult, as a helpful practice. Others like Henry David Thoreau have done something like this and there's a common related practice of writing "Morning Pages" that you can explore. My own version is somewhat similar to the idea of rubber duck debugging but focuses on my own work. You might try doing something like this in one of Bob Doto's cohorts or by way of private consulting sessions. Another free version of this could be found by participating in Will's regular weekly posts/threads "Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week" at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/. It's always a welcoming and constructive space. There are also some public and private (I won't out them) Discords where some of the practiced hands chat and commiserate with each other. Even the Obsidian PKM/Zettelkasten Discord channels aren't very Obsidian/digital-focused that you couldn't participate as an analog practitioner. I've even found that participating in book clubs related to some of my interests can be quite helpful in talking out ideas before writing them down. There are certainly options for working out and extending your own practice.

      Beyond this, and without knowing more of your specific issues, I can only offer some broad thoughts which expand on some of the earlier discussion above.

      I recommend stripping away Scheper's religious fervor, some of which he seems to have thrown over lately along with the idea of a permanent note or "main card" (something I think is a grave mistake), and trying something closer to Luhmann's idea of ZKII.

      An alternate method, especially if you like a nice notebook or a particular fountain pen, might be to take all of your basic literature/fleeting notes along with the bibliographic data in a notebook and then just use your analog index cards/slips to make your permanent notes and your index.

      Ultimately it's all a lot of the same process, though it may come down to what you want to call it and your broad philosophy. If you're anti-antinet, definitely quit using the verbiage for the framing there and lean toward the words used by Ahrens, Dan Allosso, Gerald Weinberg, Mark Bernstein, Umberto Eco, Beatrice Webb, Jacques Barzun & Henry Graff, or any of the dozens of others or even make up your own. Goodness knows we need a lot more names and categories for types of notes—just like we all need another one page blog post about how the Zettelkasten method works by someone who's been at it for a week. Maybe someone will bring all these authors to terms one day?

      Generally once you know what sorts of ideas you're most interested in, you take fewer big notes on administrivia and focus more of your note taking towards your own personal goals and desires. (Taking notes to learn a subject are certainly game, but often they serve little purpose after-the-fact.) You can also focus less on note taking within your entertainment reading (usually a waste) and focusing more heavily on richer material (books and journal articles) that is "above you" in Adler's framing. You might make hundreds of highlights and annotations in a particular book, but only get two or three serious ideas and notes out of it ultimately. Focus on this and leave the rest. If you're aware of the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule, then spend the majority of your time on the grander permanent notes (10-20%), and a lot less time worrying about the all the rest (the 80-90%).

      In the example above relating to Marx, you can breeze through some low level introductory material for context, but nothing is going to beat reading Marx himself a few times. The notes you make on his text will have tremendously more value than the ones you took on the low level context. A corollary to this is that you're highly unlikely to earn a Ph.D. or discover massive insight by reading and taking note posts on Twitter, Medium, or Substack (except possibly unless your work is on the cultural anthropology of those platforms).

      A lot of the zettelkasten spaces focus heavily on the note taking part of the process and not enough on the quality of what you're reading and how you're reading it. This portion is possibly more valuable than the note taking piece, but the two should be hand-in-glove and work toward something.

      I suspect that most people who have 1000 notes know which five or ten are the most important to where they're going and how they're growing. Focus on those and your "conversations with texts" relating to those. The rest is either low level context for where you're headed or either pure noise/digital exhaust.

      If you think of ideas as incunables, which notes will be worth of putting on your tombstone? In other words: What are your "tombstone notes"? (See what I did there? I came up with another name for a type of note, a sin for which I'm certainly going to spend a lot of time in zettelkasten purgatory.)

    2. Knowledge that is excluded from synthesis... .t3_17beucn._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionOr... what do you all do with expansive lit notes that have been taken from a textbook for future reference and broad understanding of a methodology, rather than for its direct relevance to research and synthesis of new ideas?It's too unwieldly to keep in current form - six chapters of highlighted paras + notes on how I might apply certain approaches, but it resists atomisation/categorisation. Maybe just chapter summaries?Not suggesting there's 'A' way of doing this, but interested in others' approaches to directly applicable/foundational 'textbook' knowledge that is unlikely to evolve.(Someone really should do a PhD in the epistemology of Zettelkasten!)Cheers,Chris

      reply to u/Admirable_Discount75 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/knowledge_that_is_excluded_from_synthesis/

      What is your purpose/need/desire to turn all this material into individual zettels or atomic ideas? If you've read the material, taken some literature notes, and reviewed them a bit, don't you broadly now know and understand the methodology? If this is the point and you might only need your notes/outline to review occasionally, then there's nothing else you need to do. If you're comparing other similar methodologies and comparing and contrasting them, then perhaps it's worth breaking some of them out into their own zettels to connect to other things you're working on. Perhaps you're going to write your own book on the topic? Then having better notes on the subject is worthwhile. If you don't have a good reason or gut feeling for why you would want or need to do it, taking hundreds of notes from a book and splitting them all into interconnected atomic notes is solely busy work.

      It's completely acceptable to just keep your jumble of literature notes next to your bibliographic entry for potential future reference or quick review if necessary. Perhaps you've gotten everything you need from this source without creating any permanent notes? Or maybe only one or two of the hundreds are actually valuable to your potential long term goals?<br /> It's really only the material you feel that is relevant to your longer term goals, research, and synthesis needs that's worthwhile breaking out into permanent notes/zettels.

      syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5lr0mz/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      Just as Adler and Van Doren (1972) suggest that most books are only worth a quick inspectional read and fewer are worth a deeper, analytical read, most (fleeting) notes, highlights, and annotations you make are only worth their quick scribble while vanishingly few others are worthy of greater expansion and permanent note status. You might also find by extension that some of the most valuable work you'll do is syntopical reading and the creation of high value syntopical notes which you can weave into folgezettel (sequences of notes) that generate new knowledge.

      Don't fall into the trap of thinking that everything needs to be a perfect, permanent note. If you're distilling and writing one or two good permanent notes a day, you're killing it; the rest is just sour mash.

      As ever, practice to see what works best for your needs.

    1. The tri-colored ribbon, folded into a patriotic symbol, is intended to evoke the connectedness of the American people. Aaron Draplin, who designed the stamp, created the artwork first by sketching the design by hand and then rendering it digitally. Greg Breeding served as the project’s art director.
    1. ?

      Petite faute dans la retranscription par wikisource ici.

    2. elle murmura

      Ici le wikisource n'a pas bien fonctionné : voir la publication en feuilleton pour la réponse de Manon.

    3. Colombe du Moustiers

      Un moustier est un synonyme de monastère (https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/moustier) De plus, il y a une ancienne commune (avant 1793) qui se nommait le Moustier, fusionnée avec deux autres communes sous le nom de Peyzac-de-Montignac. Ce village est au sud-est de Périgueux.

    1. I've been struggling with duplicate notes within my Zettelkasten. .t3_17ajd34._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/Flubber78769 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17ajd34/ive_been_struggling_with_duplicate_notes_within/

      This is the value of actually indexing your content. You can do a quick search around the index entries which provides a natural check against duplication, but importantly it'll let you think about those ideas again and spend your time more profitably by expanding upon them instead.

      Occasionally I'll find duplication from one source to the next which provides some support about an idea's value or spread over time, especially when I'm tracking usage of a thing, so it's not always the case that duplication is automatically a bad thing.

  7. Sep 2023
    1. Jerry Michalski says that The Brain provides him with a "neighborhood perspective" of ideas when he reduces the external link number for his graph down to 1.

      This is similar to Nicholas Luhmann's zettelkasten which provided neighborhoods of related notes based on distance from any particular note.

      Also similar to oral cultures who relied on movement through their environment for encoding memories and later remembering them. [I'll use the tag "environmental memory" to track this until a better name comes along.]

    1. Is the idea that you force yourself to find the link between a new idea and the existing cards? I didn't understand it that way.Example of the 4 cards I have nowone how there's a continuum between music that's easy digestable for the listener, where the creator does a lot of effort, and music that asks a lot from the listener, because the creator makes idiosyncratic music.the concept of "false consensus" in psychologylinked with that: "naive realism"one about (marching band) parades, how in some cultures/for some people it's more about choosing to enjoy and dance then about the musicians who are responsible for that. (I see a link with the first, but that's not what interests me in this one)

      reply to u/JonasanOniem at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ss0yu/comment/k2buxsc/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      In digital contexts it is much easier and very common to create orphaned notes that aren't connected to anything. In a paper zettelkasten, you are forced to file your note somewhere and give it a number (only to be able to find it again—it's difficult, but try not to make the mistake of conflating your number with the idea of category). The physical act of placing it in your slipbox creates an implicit link to the things around it. As a result, your four notes would all initially seem to be directly related because they're nearby, but over time, they will naturally drift apart as you intersperse new notes between and among them. Though if they're truly directly interrelated, you can write down explicit links from notes at one end of your thought space to notes which seem distant.

      In your example, you may see some sort of loose link between your first and fourth notes relating to music. While it may be a distant one, given what you have, putting marching band "next to" digestible music is really the only place to put it. Over time, you'll certainly find other notes that come between them which will tend to split them apart and separate them by physical distance, but for now, if it's what you've got, then place them into the same neighborhood by giving them addresses (numbers) to suggest they live nearby. (Some note applications like Obsidian make this much harder to do, and as a result orphaned notes will eventually become a problem.)

      This physical process is part of the ultimate value of building knowledge from the bottom up. Like most people, you've probably been heavily trained to want to create a hierarchy from the top down (folder-based systems on computers of the late 20th century are a big factor here) which is exactly why you're going to have problems like this at the start. You'll want to place that music note somewhere else, or worse, orphan it. For some people who may not be able to immediately trust the process, it can be easier to create a few dozen or a hundred notes and then come back to them later to file and arrange them. This will allow you to seed some ground from which to continually build and help to bridge the gap between the desire to move top-down in a system designed to move from bottom-up.

      Depending on one's zettelkasten application (Obsidian, Zettlr, Logseq, The Archive, et al.) some do a better job of allowing the creation of "soft links" versus the more explicit hard or direct links (usually using [[WikiLinks]]). The soft links are usually best done by providing a number that places one note into proximity with another, but not all systems work this way. As a result, it's much easier to build a traditional commonplace book with Obsidian than it is to build a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten (see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/). The concept of tags/categories in many systems is another form of soft link that can hold ideas together, so use this affordance if your application offers it as well. But also keep in mind that if sociology is your life's work, you'll eventually amass such a huge number of digital notes tagged with "sociology" that this affordance will become useless as it won't scale well for discovery and creating links.

    2. Hi, I just started to use Zettlr for my thoughts, in stead of just individual txt-files. I find it easy to add tags to notes. But if you read manuals how to use ZettelKasten, most seem to advice to link your notes in a meaningful way (and describe the link). Maybe it's because I just really started, but I don't find immediate links when I have a sudden thought. Sometimes I have 2 ideas in the same line, but they're more like siblings, so tagging with the same keyword is more evident. How do most people do this?

      reply to u/JonasanOniem at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/16ss0yu/linking_new_notes/

      This sort of practice is harder when you start out in most digital apps because there is usually no sense of "closeness" of ideas in digital the way that is implied by physical proximity (or "neighborhood") found in physical cards sitting right next to or around each other. As a result, you have to create more explicit links or rely on using tags (or indexing) when you start. I've not gotten deep into the UI of Zettlr, but some applications allow the numbering (and the way numbered ideas are sorted in the user interface) to allow this affordance by creating a visual sense of proximity for you. As you accumulate more notes, it becomes easier and you can rely less on tags and more on direct links. Eventually you may come to dislike broad categories/tags and prefer direct links from one idea to another as the most explicit tag you could give a note . If you're following a more strict Luhmann-artig practice, you'll find yourself indexing a lot at the beginning, but as you link new ideas to old, you don't need to index (tag) things as heavily because the index points to a card which is directly linked to something in the neighborhood of where you're looking. Over time and through use, you'll come to recognize your neighborhoods and the individual "houses" where the ideas you're working with all live. As an example, Luhmann spent his life working in sociology, but you'll only find a few links from his keyword register/subject index to "sociology" (and this is a good thing, otherwise he'd have had 90,000+ listings there and the index entry for sociology would have been utterly useless.)

      Still, given all this, perhaps as taurusnoises suggests, concrete examples may help more, particularly if you're having any issues with the terminology/concepts or how the specific application affordances are being presented.

    1. the Whiteboard and like open a bunch of books um in my physical space leave the office come back the next day and they're all still there the drawing's still on the Whiteboard the books are still open to the pages that I was open to that feeling of permanence

      I like this concept of persistence of your desk.

    1. https://lacountylibrary.libnet.info/event/9097350

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMF37TXAV5w

      Presenter Lawrence Mak broke down types of notes into the following three categories:<br /> - general notes (projects, ideas, journals, recipes, budgeting, homework, etc.)<br /> - lists (groceries, reading, gifts, to dos, assignments) - reminders (birthdays, bills, maintenance, health)

    1. Watch the scale and scope of what you're doing. If you read a book and make a hundred highlights and small notes, DO NOT attempt to turn all of these into permanent notes. You might fell like that is the thing to do, but resist it. A large portion are small things or potentially useful facts that you'll likely never use again or would easily remember, particularly once you've read a whole book.

      Find the much smaller subset (5-10% or less of the overall total of notes and highlights as a ballpark rule of thumb) of the most interesting and potentially long term useful ones, and turn those into your permanent notes. Anything beyond this is sure to cause overwhelm. Also don't think that your permanent notes need to be spectacular, awesome, or even bordering on "perfect". They just need to be useful enough for you.

      If you own the books or keep your brief notes and highlights written down and need them in the future, you'll still have those to search/find and do something with later as a backstop just in case.

    1. Merchants and traders have a waste book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch in GermanI believe) in which they enter daily everything they purchase and sell,messily, without order. From this, it is transferred to their journal, whereeverything appears more systematic, and finally to a ledger, in double entryafter the Italian manner of bookkeeping, where one settles accounts witheach man, once as debtor and then as creditor. This deserves to be imitatedby scholars. First it should be entered in a book in which I record everythingas I see it or as it is given to me in my thoughts; then it may be enteredin another book in which the material is more separated and ordered, andthe ledger might then contain, in an ordered expression, the connectionsand explanations of the material that flow from it. [46]

      —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Notebook E, #46, 1775–1776


      In this single paragraph quote Lichtenberg, using the model of Italian bookkeepers of the 18th century, broadly outlines almost all of the note taking technique suggested by Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes. He's got writing down and keeping fleeting notes as well as literature notes. (Keeping academic references would have been commonplace by this time.) He follows up with rewriting and expanding on the original note to create additional "explanations" and even "connections" (links) to create what Ahrens describes as permanent notes or which some would call evergreen notes.

      Lichtenberg's version calls for the permanent notes to be "separated and ordered" and while he may have kept them in book format himself, it's easy to see from Konrad Gessner's suggestion at the use of slips centuries before, that one could easily put their permanent notes on index cards ("separated") and then number and index or categorize them ("ordered"). The only serious missing piece of Luhmann's version of a zettelkasten then are the ideas of placing related ideas nearby each other, though the idea of creating connections between notes is immediately adjacent to this, and his numbering system, which was broadly based on the popularity of Melvil Dewey's decimal system.

      It may bear noticing that John Locke's indexing system for commonplace books was suggested, originally in French in 1685, and later in English in 1706. Given it's popularity, it's not unlikely that Lichtenberg would have been aware of it.

      Given Lichtenberg's very popular waste books were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Reference: Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.) It would not be hard to imagine that Niklas Luhmann would have also been aware of them.


      Open questions: <br /> - did Lichtenberg number the entries in his own waste books? This would be early evidence toward the practice of numbering notes for future reference. Based on this text, it's obvious that the editor numbered the translated notes for this edition, were they Lichtenberg's numbering? - Is there evidence that Lichtenberg knew of Locke's indexing system? Did his waste books have an index?

    1. There are no privileged places in the note-card system, every card is as important as every other card, and no hierarchy is super-imposed on the system. The significance of each card depends on its relation to other cards (or the relation of other cards to it). It is a network; it is not "arboretic." Accordingly, it in some ways anticipates hypertext and the internet.

      Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten system doesn't impose a heirarchy upon it's contents and in some ways its structure anticipates the ideas of hypertext and the internet's structure.

      Also similar to the idea from Umberto Eco: https://hypothes.is/a/jqug2tNlEeyg2JfEczmepw

    1. For note makers who find themselves creating an unwieldy amount of so-called "orphan notes," the folgezettel sounds the alarm. When faced with a sea of parents without children (9A 9B 9C 9D 9E, etc) it makes these "empty nesters" all the more apparent as the note gets added to the stack.

      There's an interesting dichotomy which seems to be arising here. It's almost as if he's defining a folgezettel note in opposition to orphaned notes, most often seen in digital settings when importing lots of "stuff" but which Doto indicates can happen in analog systems as well.

      Orphaned notes in an analog space, however are still linked by proximity even though they're not as densely linked (even from a mathematical topology perspective.)

    2. Whether or not a note maker increases their knowledge "sufficiently" at the time of import or at the time of writing longer works, is a moot point. So long as it happens.

      "So long as it happens." And here lies the rub: when will you put in the work to make the note useful and actionable? Will it be now or later?

      Some notes are certainly more mission critical than others. Some work towards one's life's work while others are tidbits which may be useful at a later time. Distinguishing along this spectrum isn't always easy, particular in build a bottom up view of one's research.

    1. Does anyone use zettelkasten method for their university notes? .t3_16h0k5n._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/PumpkinPines at tk

      Your 1chapter1note idea is essentially what Ahrens called a "literature note" for your lecture. Many of the things you write down you'll either absorb or remember over time as you learn and you won't think twice about them. However there may be one or two interesting snippets you put into your lecture notes that are really intriguing to you and those you'll want to excerpt and expand on as more fleshed out "permanent notes" which will be the zettels in your zettelkasten. Over time these may grow into projects, papers, articles, a book, or other more explicit content.

      For more on this idea, try these recent discussions * https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/yf1e8j/help_a_newbie_difference_between_literature_notes/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/162os2q/how_can_i_use_zettelkasten_as_a_high_school/

      A common make-work mistake is that everyone seems to think that they need to take each scrap they write down into some sort of "perfect" permanent note. Don't do this. You'll only exhaust yourself and die by zettelkasten.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vww7JLcrJl4

      8:05 - 16:20 GTD - Capture - Clarify - What is it? - Is it actionable? What is the action? - Is it a project? - Batching - Reflect - Review over lists/calendars daily/weekly - Engage


      17:30 They use the phrase "atomic" paper based index cards, so they've been infected by the idea of "atomic notes" from somewhere, though it seems as if he's pitching that he's "invented" his card system as if from scratch.


      19:45 He mentions potentially using both sides of the card, against the usual (long term) advice.

      20:00 Analogizes his cards as ballerinas which work together, but each have their own personalities and function within the ballet

      He's using a leather cover for Moleskine pocket notebook and Manufactum A7 index cards, as well as a box

      Sections of his box: - to erase - inbox - next actions - projects (3 categories of projects) - someday - to delegate - tickler (by month and by day; 12 months and 31 days) - blank cards

      Mentions erasing cards as he finishes them rather than archiving them.

      Inspiration by How to Take Smart Notes by Ahrens

      Recommends one item per card to make things easier and more actionable; also improves focus versus having a longer list. (28:00)

      Portability

      Sustainable (he erases)

      High quality textile experience

      The ability to shift between associative modes and sequential modes seems to work well with such a system.

      They distinguish between atomic notes and "stellar" notes. Stellar being longer lists or more dense notes/outlines/etc.

      Project cards<br /> titles and project numbers (for reference) Project numbers in the top right with a P and/or M below it for<br /> - P for paper<br /> - M for email data<br /> - D for digital files which helps him find reference materials

      Weekly review with all cards out on the table

      Expansion pack includes: - action - calendar - waiting

      Search was quick and easy, but had to carry his box back and forth to work.

      Stopping doing it because he was losing the history (by erasing it). Moving to notebook and he likes fountain pens. He likes the calendar portion in his notebook.

      He tried it out for the sake of experiment.

      In the paper world things are more present and "in your face" versus digital formats where things can disappear.

  8. Aug 2023
    1. Personally I often used #type/sketchnote and #type/question. But I will spend a little time and effort to build up an improved architecture for tagging.

      reply to Edmund at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/18550/#Comment_18550

      @Edmund since I don't do such a thing myself, I'm curious what sort of affordance your #type/NoteName tagging provides you with (especially if you're using more than just those two)? Do you use them regularly for search or filtering, and if so for what reason? How does it help?

      To me it look likes extra metadata/work, but without a lot of direct long term value in exchange. Does doing this for long periods of time provide you with outsized emergent value of some sort that's not easy to see from the start?

    1. In the end, I numbered and scanned 52,569 individual note cards from the Phyllis Diller gag file.

      Hanna BredenbeckCorp numbered and scanned 52,569 index cards from Phyllis Diller's gag file. Prior to this archival effort most estimates for the numbers of cards were in the 40-50,000 range.

      Spanning the 1960s to the 1990s roughly. The index was donated in 2003, so there were certainly no

      Exact dating on the cards may give a better range, particularly if the text can be searched or if there's a database that can be sorted by date.

      Via https://hypothes.is/a/UbW8nERrEe6xjEseEEEy1w we can use the rough dates: 1955-2002 which are the bookends of her career.

      This gives us a rough estimate of:<br /> 2002-1955 = 48 years (inclusive) or 17,520 days (at 365 days per year ignoring leap years)

      52,569/17520 days gives 3.000513698630137 or almost exactly 3 cards (jokes) per day.

      Going further if she was getting 12 laughs (jokes) per minute (her record, see: https://hypothes.is/a/MTLukkRpEe635oPT5lr7qg), then if continuously told, it would have taken her 52,569 jokes/12 jokes/minute = 4,380.75 minutes = 73.0125 hours or 3.0421875 days to tell every joke in her file.

    2. While most of the joke cards are simply index cards with a joke typed on, others are more complicated. Some cards have strips of paper glued to them with longer jokes on those papers. Some cards have entire letter-size sheets of paper containing long jokes stapled to the cards. Some cards have comic strips, cut from the newspaper, glued to the cards. Other cards are not even cards but are just pieces of printer paper with jokes scribbled on them. These irregular cards were not stable enough to be sent through the feed scanner and had to be scanned one-by-one using a flatbed scanner, which slowed my progress.

      Not only a short description of the broad standard form of cards in Phyllis Diller's gag file, but also an enumeration of some of the non-standard cards, many of which are specified because of the issues which they presented in scanning/digitizing for transcription.

    1. Die Bücher waren undsind noch heute zum Teil nach seinem Prinzip der »gutenNachbarschaft« geordnet und folgten ausdrücklich seinensubjektiven Forschungsinteressen.

      Warburg's zettelkasten does not appear to be a simple bibliographic classification system according to Steiner. He indicates that the books in Warburg's library are arranged according to Warburg's idea of »guten Nachbarschaft« or "good neighborliness" whereby they followed his subjective interests an ordering that is reflected in the labels of his note boxes and various tabs which subsection notes within them.

    1. I'm not convinced that a Luhmann-style ZK is the right note-making method for school notes. Though, I'd be fine having my mind changed.

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

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

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

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

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

      Good luck!

    1. Writing on small cards forces certain habits which would be good even for larger paper, but which I didn’t consider until the small cards made them necessary. It forces ideas to be broken up into simple pieces, which helps to clarify them. Breaking up ideas forces you to link them together explicitly, rather than relying on the linear structure of a notebook to link together chains of thought.

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

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

    1. light-enables-creation

      This looks like the sort of structure note I might often make as I am a day or two into a literature review for a new area. It definitely helps to scaffold new ideas and identify specific areas which I may want to delve into more specifically. It's definitely been useful for me to begin linking things into other portions of my ZK to find areas of overlap with these new areas, so it's great to see you doing that with your Prometheus note already.

      Coming from the science area you may want to look at cells or animals with autofluorescence or areas like green fluorescent protein (GFP) if that is of interest in the area of creatures which produce their own light.

    1. — Nous ne devons pas nous plaindre de la destinée puisqu’elle nous a fourni l’occasion de faire un peu de bien. Annibal répondit aussitôt en baissant la tête : — C’est juste.

      Quelle belle fin, c'est émouvant ! La fin est clairement moralisante, la leçon est claire : faire le bien, peu importe ce qui arrive ; prendre soin des gens pour le simple fait de faire le bien.

    2. Oh ! ce ne fut pas long : dès que celui-ci eut compris que la cage était enfin ouverte, il tourna vivement de çà de là son petit œil rusé ; puis, jetant un grand cri de joie, il battit des ailes et s’envola tout droit devant lui, comme une flèche, piquant vers l’horizon qui rougeoyait. Il ne s’arrêta pas aux toits voisins : il monta, monta, planant, point noir bientôt invisible, puis disparut.

      Encore et encore ! Fuite de l'être soigné

    3. ’égayaien

      Encore une fois, le soin de l'autre permet d'égayer ces gens morts sans cela.

    4. pierrot

      Un moineau

    5. Elle s’envolera au printemps, ajouta amèrement Annibal.

      Traitement différent : en apparence, plus la force du soin ! Mais bien sûr, ils changent d'avis très rapidement.

    6. iselet demi-mort

      Retour de l'animal en besoin de soin : ici l'oiseau...

    7. eur enlevait jusqu’à la possibilité de se laisser entraîner à des projets d’avenir

      Encore une fois, le temps c'est de l'argent dans ce livre

    8. Manon morte pour eux, qui allait les quitter pour toujours, il balbutia : — Ça me rappelle Mamette.

      Encore l'analogie : morte, mais différement

    9. Marcel avait pris sa fiancée à la taille et il ne tenait qu’un verre pour deux. Quand il l’eut levé, très haut, d’un geste fou, comme s’il voulait choquer son verre, par delà les murs et l’espace, aux étoiles de cette divine nuit de printemps, il le rabaissa doucement aux lèvres souriantes de Manon avant de le porter aux siennes. Et tandis que les futurs époux se repassaient cette coupe emblématique de l’éternel mélange de leurs cœurs et de leur vie, Annibal chercha sous la table la main de Scipion, qui perdait le souffle, tout blême comme s’il allait mourir, et la lui serra dans une étreinte violente, à la fois pour le ranimer et pour exhaler lui-même son épouvantable souffrance

      Quel passage puissant, quel contraste !

    10. aïeux

      Importance de la famille, de la génération, des aïeux : la fête mentionnée plus haut doit avoir rapport ici

    11. ce qui restait du Moustiers. On vendrait

      Manon a totalement remplacé de but des frères, a pris la place de la famille (revenir sur le passage de l'incipit parlant de cet endroit comme familial, lieu générationnel, ici vendu, même si la soeur a accepté de leur laisser)...

    12. devoir accompli

      C'était le devoir des frères ? Quelle est leur rôle ?

    13. Dans le balbutiement de ces enfants il y a pour eux quelque chose de l’art et du génie qui les troublaient dans les sonates d’Haydn ou de Mozart, qu’ils admiraient sans comprendre et sans s’expliquer comment on pouvait exécuter cela. C’est une surprise : ils sont confus de n’avoir pas deviné comment s’exprimait l’amour. Peut-être aussi qu’il y a des âmes artistes dans la passion comme dans les arts. Manon leur avait toujours paru une personne supérieure. Les paroles incohérentes que lui murmurait Marcel semblaient avoir pour elle un sens particulier,

      Ce passage semble important central : l'amour incompris, mais vu comme supérieur par les frères.

    14. Marcel croit rêver

      Marcel entre en scène

    15. que le jour de sa fête, où l’on célèbre en même temps l’inoubliable fête des aïeux

      La fête des aïeux ? À trouver

    16. ménage

      Le ménage a changé : du ménage fraternel au ménage matrimonial.

    17. barreaux de sa cage

      Cela désigne bien encore la condition d'oiseau de Manon

    18. ramage de fauvette

      La richesse sémantique de ce groupe de mot est intéressant : "ramage" désigne à la fois les branches et le chant des oiseaux, puis "fauvette" désigne à la fois un oiseau qu'une fleur.

    19. gazouillement

      Toujours revenir au motif de l'oiseau (elle ne porte pas le nom, mais elle le personnifie mieux que les frères)

    20. Meudon

      Commune tout juste à côté de Paris, au sud-ouest. Ce n'est pas dans la direction du bois de Chaville : m'ai-je trompé ou est-ce Peyrebrune qui se trompe ?

    21. il s’examinait.

      Étrange passage

    22. le livre trembla dans la main du lecteur

      Encore mise en abyme

    23. ce charmant sonnet de Leconte de Lisle : Sommeil de Léïlah

      Trouver les informations

    24. passant à un autre

      Il y a quelque chose dans ce livre, avec l'arrivée de Manon, qui rappelle Bouvard et Pécuchet, l'encyclopédisme, le mouvement d'un intérêt à un autre avec un faible lien entre ceux-ci. C'est aussi la cohabitation entre deux hommes (amis dans un cas, frères dans un autre) qui est ressemblant. Si ce livre est publié en 1885, B&P l'est en 1881.

    25. Les adieux de Lucie leur crevaient le cœur ; le grand air de Marguerite dans la prison

      Trouver ces chansons ?

    26. On emprunta sur la vieille maison du Moustiers. Première hypothèque : cinq mille francs.

      Comme prévu, le temps recule, la marche vers le Moustiers recule.

    27. Manon possédait maintenant une théorie de l’amour.

      Enseignement par la littérature, la fiction

    28. unique raison de travailler et de vivre

      Le but de la campagne, de la liberté, s'est transféré dans le soin de la fille

    29. Vous ne voulez pas que je lise de romans.

      Mise en abyme, très XVIIe +, pouvoir du roman

    30. La petite fille aux cerises.
    31. maladie

      Similitude avec Mamette, sans la mort : parcours différent alors ? On relève la ressemblance plus bas

    32. Leur cœur vide s’était peuplé

      L'hébétement machinal plus haut termine avec la famille, le soin

    33. gazouillement

      Plusieurs fois avant cela, mais encore tellement d'allusions aux oiseaux.

    34. Elle avait pris les façons d’apprécier de Scipion

      Un élément explicite des affirmations par la négative de Scipion

    35. Scipion avait une façon de dire : « Ce serait un crime que d’y renoncer ! » qui amenait immédiatement l’assentiment d’Annibal ; et le projet était voté.

      Les arguments de Scipion, qui mènent directement à l'approbation "C'est juste" d'Annibal qui ne pense pas, sont presque toujours dit à la négative,,,

    36. 443

      Comme si le temps se fixait alors et même reculait.

    37. Manon ! Mamette !

      Rapport est encore clair et explicite

    38. maman

      Je relève encore, bien qu'il y en ait eu d'autre : Scipion comme mère. En bas c'est absolument clair : Maman Scipion, maman Pion, papa Nibal, "appelle-moi maman" ! Voir tout ce passage de Scipion comme mère, comme femme ("idées de femme"...)

    39. pigeon-vole
    40. ait payé très cher

      Le rôle de l'argent, permettant d'acheter la liberté et le bonheur, est centrale dans le roman, et se conjugue au problème du temps (temps = argent, véritablement, dans ce roman).

    41. crime social

      Dénonciation sociale par Peyrebrune pour l'immobilité face aux enfants abandonnés.

    42. fakirs

      Un des phénomènes du fakirisme est d'accélérer la croissance des plantes (trouver une source au besoin)

    43. ressemblait

      Sorte de ressemblance entre l'individu et son lieu d'origine ? On le rend saint aussi

    44. t sourire

      Ce désir du "care" revient et semble fondamental pour les personnages

    45. gazouillante

      Ce n'est pas la première allusion au champ lexical de l'oiseau : on pourra peut-être les relever.

    46. Manon…, Mamette

      Le transfert et le rapport entre les deux figures est confirmé

    47. u

      Coquille ici

    48. pèlerinage à Saint-Siméon

      Vérifier peut-être cette coutume ?

    49. — Ça me rappelle Mamette.

      Transfert de la fille : de la chienne à l'humaine. Comme Mamette, peur d'Annibal.

    50. les femmes

      Dédain des femmes ?

    51. Leurs habitudes monacales et bureaucratiques les avaient à la fin transformés en machines parfaitement réglées, en automates peu à peu vieillissant, s’émiettant et s’usant, ternis par la poussière des années, la tête vide, le cœur éteint.

      Robotisation des frères : important peut-être ? On peut y voir une critique du travail de ville qui aliène, comparativement au travail des champs (à confirmer)

    52. Famille du Moustiers.

      Je ne sais pas si cette inscription peut aider.

    53. Mamette vécut deux ans

      Cette mort rapide de Mamette doit avoir un apport narratif quelconque... l'humanisation qui suit est aussi frappante.

    54. C’est juste

      Cette justice comme guide éthique chez Annibal (donc chez Scipion) est pour l'instant importante : une attention, un care passe par cette notion.

    55. coups

      Comme dans Victoire, la question de la cruauté animale

    56. mariage

      La question de l'union des les deux rajoute de l'ambiguïté dans leur rapport, surtout avec la question domestique avec "le ménage des frères Colombe"

    57. caste

      Il existe un rôle important de la famille chez les Colombe

    58. je suis juste. Ce mot de justice

      La justice (avec le care comme sous-catégorie on dirait dans le roman) joue un rôle majeur, surtout avec cette phrase clé qui se répète sans arrêt dans le roman.

    59. Gracques

      Donc tous les noms sont relatifs à des conquérants, des hommes de guerre : Napoléon, Annibal, Scipion (qui battu Annibal), Cornélie (Cornelia, fille de Scipion, symbole de la mère romaine) et les Gracques (ici pas vraiment leur nom, mais ce sont les enfants de Cornelia, ces grands hommes d'état romain). À voir si le nom "Colombe" a une signification précise.

    60. écusson intact représentant une crosse croisée avec un sceptre et surmontée de deux clefs et d’une mitre.

      Chercher l'écusson ? Héraldique ?

    1. Does anyone has it’s Zettelkasten in Google Docs, Microsoft Word or Plain Tex (without a hood app like obsidian or The Archive)? .t3_15fjb97._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/Efficient_Earth_8773 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/15fjb97/does_anyone_has_its_zettelkasten_in_google_docs/

      Experimenting can be interesting. I've tried using spreadsheet software like Google Sheets or Excel which can be simple and useful methods that don't lose significant functionality. I did separate sheets for zettels, sources, and the index. Each zettel had it's own row with with a number, title, contents, and a link to a source as well as the index.

      Google Docs might be reasonably doable, but the linking portion may be one of the more difficult affordances to accomplish easily or in a very user-centric fashion. It is doable though: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/45893?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop, and one might even mix Google Docs with Google Sheets? I could see Sheets being useful for creating an index and or sources while Docs could be used for individual notes as well. It's all about affordances and ease of use. Text is a major portion of having and maintaining a zettelkasten, so by this logic anything that will allow that could potentially be used as a zettelkasten. However, it helps to think about how one will use it in practice on a day-to-day basis. How hard will it be to create links? Search it? How hard will it be when you've got thousands of "slips"? How much time will these things take as it scales up in size?

      A paper-based example: One of the reasons that many pen and paper users only write on one side of their index cards is that it saves the time of needing to take cards out and check if they do or don't have writing on the back or remembering where something is when it was written on the back of a card. It's a lot easier to tip through your collection if they're written only on the front. If you use an alternate application/software what will all these daily functions look like compounded over time? Does the software make things simpler and easier or will it make them be more difficult or take more time? And is that difficulty and time useful or not to your particular practice? Historian and author David McCullough prefers a manual typewriter over computers with keyboards specifically because it forces him to slow down and take his time. Another affordance to consider is how much or little work one may need to put into using it from a linking (or not) perspective. Using paper forces one to create a minimum of at least one link (made by the simple fact of filing it next to another) while other methods like Obsidian allow you to too easily take notes and place them into an infinitely growing pile of orphaned notes. Is it then more work to create discrete links later when you've lost the context and threads of potential arguments you might make? Will your specific method help you to regularly review through old notes? How hard will it be to mix things up for creativity's sake? How easy/difficult will it be to use your notes for writing/creating new material, if you intend to use it for that?

      Think about how and why you'd want to use it and which affordances you really want/need. Then the only way to tell is to try it out for a bit and see how one likes/doesn't like a particular method and whether or not it helps to motivate you in your work. If you don't like the look of an application and it makes you not want to use it regularly, that obviously is a deal breaker. One might also think about how difficult/easy import/export might be if they intend to hop from one application to another. Finally, switching applications every few months can be self-defeating, so beware of this potential downfall as you make what will eventually need to be your ultimate choice. Beware of shiny object syndrome or software that ceases updating in just a few years without easy export.

    1. How do you refer from and to multiple sources? .t3_15eljnf._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

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

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

  9. Jul 2023
    1. Hello! I've recently encountered the Zettelkasten system and adore the emphasis on connecting ideas. However, I don't want to use the traditional index card way, seeing as I have a ring binder with 90 empty pages thus I don't want it to go to waste. I've researched a lot of methods using a notebook, where some organize their zettels by page number, while others write as usual and connect and index the ideas for every 30 pages or so. But considering that the loose-leaf paper can be in any order I chose, I think there can be a better workaround there. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

      reply to u/SnooPandas3432 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/158tzk7/zettelkasten_on_a_ring_binder_with_looseleaf_paper/

      She didn't specify a particular dimension, but I recall that Beatrice Webb used larger sheets of paper than traditional index-card sized slips in her practice and likely filed them into something akin to hanging files in a filing cabinet.

      For students, I might suggest using the larger sheets/3-ring binder to make Cornell notes for coursework and then later distilling down one or two of the best ideas from a lecture or related readings into index card form for filing away over time. You could then have a repository of bigger formatted literature notes from books/lectures with more space and still have all the benefits of a more traditional card-based zettelkasten for creativity and writing. You could then have the benefit of questions for spaced repetition for quizzes/tests, while still keeping bigger ideas for writing papers or future research needs.

    1. About 24 percent of Italians are over 65, making it the oldest country in Europe, and over 4 million of them live alone.

      24% of Italy's population is roughly 14 million people.

      So there are 14 million people over 65 in Italy.

      If 4 million of them live alone, that is approximately 28%.

      This is as of 7/21/23

    1. When I tag a note with a new keyword like [[Productivity]], it then becomes a ghost note on the graph.

      This is the first time I've seen someone use the phrase "ghost note" to mean a future implied note which could be created by using wiki syntax [[*]] which in some systems like Obsidian or WikiMedia creates a (red) link which one could click on to create that note.

      via u/THX-Eleven38 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/14ox2tw/what_is_the_proper_way_to_create_a_moc_note_from/

    1. CPB vs Reading Notes .t3_14li1ri._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } Does anyone separate their reading notes from their common place Notebook? I’ve always used a notebook to combine my Bullet Journal, reading notes, and Common Place. It’s been a mesh of words and I’ve been ok w that, but I just got the Remarkable 2 and I’m trying to figure out how to set it up. Any ideas?

      reply to u/Nil205 at https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/14li1ri/cpb_vs_reading_notes/

      I have a similar and differently formed, but still simple system compared to most here. Rather than a traditional commonplace book, I keep all my notes on index cards. I keep all my reading notes for a particular book on a series of index cards that I staple together with a citation card for the book and then file them by author and title.

      When I'm done, I'll excerpt the most important parts each individual note (highlight/annotation) and expand on them on its own index card which I file away and index. In your case you might equivalently have a reading notebook where you might keep a section of notes as you read a book and then excerpt the most important or salient parts into your main commonplace. Some may prefer, especially if they own the book in question, to annotate (put their reading notes into) the book directly and then excerpt either as they go or at the end when they're done and can frame their ideas with a broader knowledge of the area in question. Sometimes at later dates you may realize you read something useful which you don't find in your commonplace book, but you can find the gist of it in your reading notes which you can reference, refresh your memory, and then excerpt into your commonplace.

      For more on my sort of card index or zettelkasten (German: slip box) practice you might take a look at one or more of the following which explain the broad generalities:

      If it's useful/inspiring as an example, Ross Ashby had a lifelong series of notebooks, much like a commonplace, and a separate card index where he cross-indexed all of his ideas to make them more easily searchable, findable, and cross referenceable. You can see digitized versions of the journals and index online which you can explore at http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index.html.

  10. Jun 2023
    1. I develop ideas, theories on my overview Zettel. Sometimes, like in the book I write after finishing my next one, titled “Modernity as disease”, I develop a theory in a Zettel which serves as an outline and manuscript at the same time. I always state that the method should bend around your thinking and not the other way around. I just can think and write - the Zettelkasten Method does the rest. This is the freedom of the digital version.
    1. The expressiveness of the blues comes from the melodic inflections added to particularnotes. When we listen to various vocal or guitar renditions of the blues, these inflectionsare easily recognizable; they stand out because of their emotional charge and slightly “outof tune” sound. 1 The so-called blues scale approximates the sound of these pitchinflections by altering ^3, ^5, and ^7 of the major scale. Figure 9.3 illustrates the content ofthe blues scale and its derivation from the major scale.The blues scale is a six-note collection with the “blue” notes on ≤3, ≤5, and ≤7. Althoughthe presence of ≤7th suggests a chord–scale relationship with the dominant 7th chord,the use of the blues scale is not limited to this chord only. In the context of the bluesscale, the pitches ≤3 and ≤5 constitute expressive embellishments not bound by anyparticular harmonic function or chord type. The blues scale, then, is an androgynous
    1. With his carefully kept Commentationes, Rütiner was building a conversational arsenal – a treasury of stories, jokes and privileged information that would show him to be in the know.

      There's a somewhat poetic connection between the "conversational arsenal" of Johannes Rütiner and the "stacking ammo" of Eminem who used his notes in rap battles.

  11. May 2023
    1. Figure 2.3 The fi xation of paper slips. (From Wellisch 1981, p. 12.)

      This is essentially a version of a modern pinboard with ribbons which are used to hold various pieces onto the board!

      Also similar in functionality to Post-it Notes, but with string instead of glue.

    1. Even three or four words are often worth jotting down if they will evoke a thought, an idea or a mood. In the barren periods, one should browse through the notebooks. Some ideas may suddenly start to move. Two ideas may combine, perhaps because they were meant to combine in the first place. —Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
    1. https://substack.com/notes

      Yet another status update-like product, this time from Substack as Twitter is heavily waning...

    1. As you go about town…constantly observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk, quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows. — Codex Ash.
    1. Within the pantheon of types of notes there are: - paraphrasing notes, which one can use to summarize ideas for later recall and review as well as to check one's own knowledge and understanding of what an author has said. - commentary notes, which take the text and create a commentary on them, often as part of having a conversation with the text. These can be seen historically in the Midrashim tradition of commenting on Torah.

      [23:12 - 24:47]


      separately also: - productivity notes - to do lists, reminders of work to be done, often within or as part of a larger complex project

    1. Writing permanent notes was time consuming as f***.

      The framing of "permanent notes" or "evergreen notes" has probably hurt a large portion of the personal knowledge management space. Too many people are approaching these as some sort of gold standard without understanding their goal or purpose. Why are you writing such permanent/evergreen notes? Unless you have an active goal to reuse a particular note for a specific purpose, you're probably wasting your time. The work you put into the permanent note is to solidify an idea which you firmly intend to reuse again in one or more contexts. The whole point of "evergreen" as an idea is that it can actively be reused multiple times in multiple places. If you've spent time refining it to the nth degree and writing it well, then you had better be doing so to reuse it.

      Of course many writers will end up (or should end up) properly contextualizing individual ideas and example directly into their finished writing. As a result, one's notes can certainly be rough and ready and don't need to be highly polished because the raw idea will be encapsulated somewhere else and then refined and rewritten directly into that context.

      Certainly there's some benefit for refining and shaping ideas down to individual atomic cores so that they might be used and reused in combination with other ideas, but I get the impression that some think that their notes need to be highly polished gems. Even worse, they feel that every note should be this way. This is a dreadful perspective.

      For context I may make 40 - 60 highlights and annotations on an average day of reading. Of these, I'll review most and refine or combine a few into better rougher shape. Of this group maybe 3 - 6 will be interesting enough to turn into permanent/evergreen notes of some sort that might be reused. And even at this probably only one is interesting enough to be placed permanently into my zettelkasten. This one will likely be an aggregation of many smaller ideas combined with other pre-existing ideas in my collection; my goal is to have the most interesting and unique of my own ideas in my permanent collection. The other 2 or 3 may still be useful later when I get to the creation/writing stage when I'll primarily focus on my own ideas, but I'll use those other rougher notes and the writing in them to help frame and recontextualize the bigger ideas so that the reader will be in a better place to understand my idea, where it comes from, and why it might be something they should find interesting.

      Thus some of my notes made while learning can be reused in my own ultimate work to help others learn and understand my more permanent/evergreen notes.

      If you think that every note you're making should be highly polished, refined, and heavily linked, then you're definitely doing this wrong. Hopefully a few days of attempting this will disabuse you of the notion and you'll slow down to figure out what's really worth keeping and maintaining. You can always refer back to rough notes if you need to later, but polishing turds is often thankless work. Sadly too many misread or misunderstand articles and books on the general theory of note taking and overshoot the mark thinking that the theory needs to be applied to every note. It does not.

      If you find that you're tiring of making notes and not getting anything out of the process, it's almost an assured sign that you're doing something wrong. Are you collecting thousands of ideas (bookmarking behavior) and not doing anything with them? Are you refining and linking low level ideas of easy understanding and little value? Take a step back and focus on the important and the new. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to create?

    2. The few notes I did refer back to frequently where checklists, self-written instructions to complete regular tasks, lists (reading lists, watchlists, etc.) or recipes. Funnily enough the ROI on these notes was a lot higher than all the permanent/evergreen/zettel notes I had written.

      Notes can be used for different purposes.

      • productivity
      • Knowledge
        • basic sense-making
        • knowledge construction and dispersion

      The broad distinction is between productivity goals and knowledge. (Is there a broad range I'm missing here within the traditions?) You can take notes about projects that need to be taken care of, lists of things to do, reminders of what needs to be done. These all fall within productivity and doing and checking them off a list will help one get to a different place or location and this can be an excellent thing, particularly when the project was consciously decided upon and is a worthy goal.

      Notes for knowledge sake can be far more elusive for people. The value here generally comes with far more planning and foresight towards a particular goal. Are you writing a newsletter, article, book, or making a video or performance of some sort (play, movie, music, etc.)? Collecting small pieces of these things on a pathway is then important as you build your ideas and a structure toward some finished product.

      Often times, before getting to this construction phase, one needs to take notes to be able to scaffold their understanding of a particular topic. Once basically understood some of these notes may be useless and not need to be reviewed, or if they are reviewed, it is for the purpose of ensconcing ideas into long term memory. Once this is finished, then the notes may be broadly useless. (This is why it's simple to "hide them with one's references/literature notes.) Other notes are more seminal towards scaffolding ideas towards larger projects for summarization and dissemination to other audiences. If you're researching a topic, a fair number of your notes will be used to help you understand the basics while others will help you to compare/contrast and analyze. Notes you make built on these will help you shape new structures and new, original thoughts. (note taking for paradigm shifts). These then can be used (re-used) when you write your article, book, or other creative project.

    1. How big is your ZettelKasten? .t3_13b0b5c._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/jordynfly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13b0b5c/how_big_is_your_zettelkasten/

      The idea of notes per day comes up occasionally, here's some discussion on the last go-round: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11z08fq/comment/jdbnchv/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      Many people, especially when getting started, get wrapped up in the idea of doing this for "increased productivity" or the goal of being as prolific as Niklas Luhmann. I would submit (and think others would back me up anecdotally) that there's far more to the practice than raw (or measurable) productivity as the single, driving value. Perhaps approach it as a way to sharpen and improve your thinking instead? If you're seeing life-like behavior already, that's a good sign of appreciating some of the hidden benefits which are difficult to describe and which are likely more valuable than the "productivity" goals many may have.

      I've noted before that S.D. Goitein had 1/3 less index cards than Luhmann over an equivalent research lifetime, but produced a 1/3 more written output (in terms of books and journal articles). Others like Aby Warburg and Gotthard Deutsch (70,000 notes) had significant practices, but their writing output was marginal at best, though their impact and influence were outsized, in part, I would suggest as a result of their zettelkasten work.

      Others like Roland Barthes (generally low card output of \~12,500) and Deutsch also used their fichier boîte/card index/zettelkasten as teaching tools, so while their written outputs may have varied considerably, their teaching practices were incredibly influential for the students and generations they encountered afterwards.

      This being said, I'll share my current easily countable lower bound dating roughly from 2016 as:

      • 15,200 notes
      • 32,000+ links
      • 2.1M words

      (Having a zk in digital form makes it reasonably easy to do these sorts of counts versus analog methods of note making.)

      Some additional pathways to learning and practicing, including my own, can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11ay28d/how_did_you_teach_yourself_zettelkasten/

    2. Why are folks so obsessed with notes per day? Perhaps a proxy for toxic capitalism and productivity issues? Is the number of notes the best measure or the things they allow one to do after having made them? What is the best measure? Especially when there are those who use them for other purposes like lecturing, general growth, knowledge acquisition, or even happiness?

    1. I don't show my entire "ZK Stats" all the time. But you might be interested in this little snippet. It helps me keep on top of where the level of my zettelkasting moves. The 10-day and the 100-day workflow give me a trend that I can quickly compare with the "since day zero" to objectively feel my place in the world. This may sound grand, but from the current ZK Stats, I feel my ZK involvement is low because of class. This has been my experience of the periods where my coursework overwhelms my zettelkasting. Maybe overwhelm is too strong a word. I have created 63 notes tagged ENGL501 in the last 12 weeks. I watch this and expect it to rebound in a few weeks. Last year, on this day, I was at 20 notes in 10 days, 204 in 100 days, and 2.12 per day. Today I'm at 13 notes in the last ten days, 152 notes in 100 days, and I've dropped to 2.03 per day. This all can't be blamed on class pressures. Some of it concerns my growing disinterest in the mechanics of zettelkasting and just doing it.

      example of Will's notes output

      931447 total word count<br /> 16190 total link count<br /> 3279 total zettel count

      11 new zettel in the last 10 days<br /> 156 new zettel in the last 100 days<br /> 2.03 zettel created on average since day zero.

  12. Apr 2023
    1. It is difficult to see interdependencies This is especially true in the context of learning something complex, say economics. We can’t read about economics in a silo without understanding psychology, sociology and politics, at the very least. But we treat each subject as though they are independent of each other.

      Where are the tools for graphing inter-dependencies of areas of study? When entering a new area it would be interesting to have visual mappings of ideas and thoughts.

      If ideas in an area were chunked into atomic ideas, then perhaps either a Markov monkey or a similar actor could find the shortest learning path from a basic idea to more complex ideas.

      Example: what is the shortest distance from an understanding of linear algebra to learn and master Lie algebras?

      Link to Garden of Forking Paths

      Link to tools like Research Rabbit, Open Knowledge Maps and Connected Papers, but for ideas instead of papers, authors, and subject headings.


      It has long been useful for us to simplify our thought models for topics like economics to get rid of extraneous ideas to come to basic understandings within such a space. But over time, we need to branch out into related and even distant subjects like mathematics, psychology, engineering, sociology, anthropology, politics, physics, computer science, etc. to be able to delve deeper and come up with more complex and realistic models of thought.Our early ideas like the rational actor within economics are fine and lovely, but we now know from the overlap of psychology and sociology which have given birth to behavioral economics that those mythical rational actors are quaint and never truly existed. To some extent, to move forward as a culture and a society we need to rid ourselves of these quaint ideas to move on to more complex and sophisticated ones.

    1. How I annotate books as a PhD student (simple and efficient)

      She's definitely not morally against writing in her books, but there are so many highlights and underlining that it's almost useless.

      She read the book four times because she didn't take good enough notes on it the first three times.

      Bruno Latour's Down to Earth

      Tools: - sticky tags (reusable) - purple for things that draw attention - yellow/green referencing sources, often in bibliography - pink/orange - extremely important - highlighter - Post It notes with longer thoughts she's likely to forget, but also for writing summaries in her own words

      Interesting to see another Bruno Latour reference hiding in a note taking context. See https://hypothes.is/a/EbNKbLIaEe27q0dhRVXUGQ

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5PDWfWli54

    1. reply to u/noobinPython at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12rfku6/how_has_the_zettelkasten_system_changed_the_way/

      Historically there is the popular idea of a waste book, which originally comes from double entry accounting, in which one might keep quick scribbled notes and ephemera. Upon reaching a quiet space for work and reflection one would then transcribe all the most important ideas into a more permanent place in their commonplace book or zettelkasten. I suspect this historical practice is part of where Ahrens came up with the often used terms "fleeting notes" and "permanent notes" which serve the same purpose.

      I follow this practice and either have a small pocket notebook (usually a small Field Notes) or an index card at hand for writing things down throughout the day. Then every evening or every few days at worst, I transcribe/rewrite the idea.

      As examples, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Waste Books were ultimately published and were highly influential. Isaac Newton developed his version of the Calculus in his waste book.

    1. My biggest realization recently is to do whatever the opposite of atomicity is.

      Too many go too deep into the idea of "atomic notes" without either questioning or realizing their use case. What is your purpose in having atomic notes? Most writing about them online talk about the theoretical without addressing the underlying "why".

      They're great for capturing things on the go and having the ability to re-arrange and reuse them into much larger works. Often once you've used them a few times, they're less useful, specially for the average person. (Of course it's another matter if you're an academic researcher, they're probably your bread and butter.) For the beekeepers of the world who need some quick tidbits which they use frequently, then keeping them in a larger outlined document or file is really more than enough. Of course, if you're creating some longer book-length treatise on beekeeping, then it can be incredibly helpful to have them at atomic length.

      There's a spectrum from the small atomic note to the longer length file (or even book). Ask yourself, "what's your goal in having one or the other, or something in between?" They're tools, choose the best one for your needs.

    1. any easy strategies to improve my notetaking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1. The Zettelkasten needs a couple of years to reach critical mass.

      I find that this is not the case. Even a few hundred cards is more than enough to create something interesting.

      Though what does he mean specifically by "critical mass"?

    1. In Notes, writers will be able to post short-form content and share ideas with each other and their readers. Like our Recommendations feature, Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack. But while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links.

      Substack slowly adding features and functionality to make them a full stack blogging/social platform... first long form, then short note features...

      Also pushing in on Twitter's lunch as Twitter is having issues.

    1. How do I store when coming across an actual FACT? .t3_12bvcmn._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionLet's say I am trying to absorb a 30min documentary about the importance of sleep and the term human body cells is being mentioned, I want to remember what a "Cell" is so I make a note "What is a Cell in a Human Body?", search the google, find the definition and paste it into this note, my concern is, what is this note considered, a fleeting, literature, or permanent? how do I tag it...

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1. 20

      Revisit the question from earlier about dialectical notes and "separate sheets". See: https://hypothes.is/a/QJ-tsNKvEe20jVORiPEA0g

    2. Since they are made concerning several books, not just one,they often have to be made on a separate sheet ( or sheets ) ofpaper. Here, a structure of concepts is implied-an order ofstatements and questions about a single subject matter. Wewill return to this kind of note-making in Chapter 20.

      The authors recommend making dialectic notes on "a separate sheet (or sheets"). Presumably here, this is because the notes don't relate to just one text, but to multiple. This doesn't seem to have the same underlying cause or need as that suggested by Konrad Gessner or others to keep separate sheets for individual ideas, but we should revisit this when we get to chapter 20.

  13. Mar 2023
    1. https://www.3m.co.uk/3M/en_GB/post-it-notes/ideas/articles/make-the-leap-from-to-do-to-done-with-the-scrum-methodology/

      "The Scrum method" described here, similar to the Kanban method, the Memindex method, tickler systems, or other card index as productivity systems, seems to be a productized name for selling Post-it Notes.

      Scrum method consists of a project broken down into "story" rows with "to do" items in columns which progress along to "in process", "to verify", and finally "done".

      Other productized names (particular to the note taking space): Antinet zettelkasten, Linking Your Thinking, Second Brain, etc.

    2. The Scrum method, which is powered by Post-it® Products, breaks up a project into bite-sized modules. It helps to track each task through various stages of completion, and ensures that everyone on the team is aware of progress and updates. It can help turn thoughts into actions, and actions into achievement.

      Seeing this, I can't help but think about some of the ads from the early 1900s for filing cabinets and card indexes which had similar named methodologies for productivity, but which were also advertisements for purchasing the associated physical goods.

      Examples: Shaw-Walker, Yawman & Erbe, etc.

    1. What type of note did Niklas Luhmann average 6 times a day? .t3_11z08fq._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/dotphrasealpha at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11z08fq/what_type_of_note_did_niklas_luhmann_average_6/

      The true insight you're looking for here is: Forget the numbers and just aim for quality followed very closely by consistency!

      Of course most will ignore my insight and experience and be more interested in the numbers, so let's query a the 30+ notes I've got on this topic in my own zettelkasten to answer the distal question.

      Over the 45 years from 1952 to 1997 Luhmann produced approximately 90,000 slips which averages out to:

      • 45 years * 365 days/year = 16,425 days
      • 90,000 slips / 16,425 days = 5.47 slips per day

      In a video, Ahrens indicates that Luhmann didn't make notes on weekends, and if true, this would revise the count to 7.69 slips per day.

      260 working days a year (on average, not accounting for leap years or potential governmental holidays)

      • 45 years x 260 work days/year = 11,700 days
      • 90,000 slips / 11,700 days = 7.69 slips per day

      Compare these closer numbers to Ahrens' stated and often quoted 6 notes per day in How to Take Smart Notes.

      I've counted from the start of '52 through all of '97 to get 45 years, but the true amount of time was a bit shorter than this in reality, so the number of days should be slightly smaller.

      Keep in mind that Luhmann worked at this roughly full time for decades, so don't try to measure yourself against him. (He also published in a different era and broadly without the hurdle of peer review.) Again: Aim for quality over quantity! If it helps, S.D. Goitein created a zettelkasten of 27,000 notes which he used to publish almost a third more papers and books than Luhmann. Wittgenstein left far fewer notes and only published one book during his lifetime, but published a lot posthumously and was massively influential. Similarly Roland Barthes had only about 12,500 slips and loads of influential work.

      I keep notes on various historical practitioners' notes/day output over several decades using these sorts of practices. Most are in the 1-2 notes per day range. A sampling of them can be found here: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten/#Notes%20per%20day.

      Anecdotally, I've found that most of the more serious people here and on the zettelkasten.de forum are in the 4-10 slips per week range.

      <whisper>quality...</whisper>

    1. Übersicht über die Auszüge des Zettelkastens Der Zettelkasten Niklas Luhmanns besteht aus insgesamt 27 Auszügen mit jeweils 2500 bis 3500 Zetteln. Diese verteilen sich auf zwei getrennte Zettelsammlungen: Zettelkasten I: 7 Auszüge mit Notizen aus dem Zeitraum von ca. 1952 bis 1961, insgesamt ca. 23.000 Zettel Zettelkasten II: 20 Auszüge mit Notizen aus dem Zeitraum von 1961 bis Anfang 1997, insgesamt ca. 67.000 Zettel. In den Auszügen 15-17 des ZK II, die Teil des hölzernen Zettelkastens sind, sowie den Auszügen 18-20, die außerhalb dieses Kastens in einzelnen Schubern gelagert waren, befinden sich die bibliographischen Abteilungen des ZK II. Teil des Auszugs 17 sind zudem mehrere Schlagwortregister und ein Personenregister des ZK II sowie einige weitere Spezialabteilungen, außerdem das Schlagwortregister sowie die bibliographische Abteilung und eine Themenübersicht des ZK I.

      Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten consists of a total of 27 sections/drawers each containing from 2,500 to 3,500 slips.

      • ZK1 comprises 7 sections with about 23,000 notes written from about 1952 to 1961
      • ZKII comprises 20 sections with approximately 67,000 slips written between 1961 to early 1997.

      Sections 15, 16, 17 were part of the beechwood zettelkasten and along with sections 18, 19, and 20 which were stored outside of the main boxes in individual slipcases contain the bibliographic portions of ZKII

      Part of section 17 contains some of the index as well as an index of people for ZKII in addition to some other special portions along with the index of keywords, bibliographical slips, and an overview of topics from ZKI.

      The primary wooden boxes frequently pictured as "Luhmann's zettelkasten" is comprised of six wooden four-drawer card index filing cabinets which were supplemented by three individual slipcases.


      One would suspect the individual slipcases were like the one pictured on his desk here: Luhmann zuhause am Zettelkasten (vermutlich Ende der 1970er/Anfang 1980er Jahre)<br /> Copyright Michael Wiegert-Wegener<br /> via Niklas Luhmann Online: die Erschließung seines Nachlasses - Geistes- & Sozialwissenschaften

      The Luhmann archive has a photo of the beechwood portion with 24 drawers and one of the additional slipboxes on top of it:

      (via https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/nachlass/zettelkasten)

      Most of the photos from the museum exhibition and elsewhere only focus on or include the main wooden portion of six cabinets with the 24 drawers.


      See also: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/nachlass/zettelkasten

      Over the 45 years from 1952 to 1997 this production of approximately 90,000 slips averages out to

      45 years * 365 days/year = 16,425 days 90,000 slips / 16,425 days = 5.47 slips per day.

      260 working days a year (on average, not accounting for leap years or potential governmental holidays) 45 years x 260 work days/year = 11,700 90,000 slips / 11,700 days = 7.69 slips per day

      In a video, Ahrens indicates that Luhmann didn't make notes on weekends, and if true this would revise the count to 7.69 slips per day.

      Compare these closer numbers to Ahrens' stated 6 notes per day in How to Take Smart Notes. <br /> See: https://hypothes.is/a/iwrV8hkwEe2vMSdjnwKHXw

      I've counted from the start of '52 through all of '97 to get 45 years, but the true amount of time was a bit shorter than this in reality, so the number of days should be slightly smaller.

    1. Raul Pacheco-Vega uses five different types of index cards (notes): - direct quotations - bibliographic references - one idea index card (a major idea or them in one or two sentences) - summaries - combined (or content) index card

    2. the Content Index Card is a combination type of index card that includes direct quotations, draft notes and ideas, conceptual diagrams, etc. that are all associated with the main article, book chapter or book discussed in the index card. I use larger (5″ x 8″) index cards for those cases.

      Pacheco-Vega defines a "combined" or "content index card" or one might say a content note as a one with "direct quotations, draft notes and ideas, conceptual diagrams, etc. that are associated with" the work in question. These seem similar to Ahrens' fleeting notes, though seem a bit more fleshed out.

    3. The One Idea Index Card

      Some people recommend writing JUST ONE IDEA/quotation per index card. I don’t do this. I use 1 index card per article, and per book chapter. If a book has 9 chapters I write one for each chapter (more of chapter is very dense). via embedded tweet: https://twitter.com/raulpacheco/status/1067406555455389697

    1. I found the format of these Hypothes.is notes to be much more readable than the notes on the same topic in Evernote.

      https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17617#Comment_17617

      There is definitely something here from a usability (and reusability) perspective when notes are broken down into smaller pieces the way that is encouraged by Hypothes.is or by writing on index cards.

      Compare: - ://www.evernote.com/shard/s170/sh/d69cf793-1f14-48f4-bd48-43f41bd88678/DapavVTQh954eMRGKOVeEPHm7FxEqxBKvaKLfKWaSV1yuOmjREsMkSHvmQ - https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/

      The first may be most useful for a note taker who is personally trying to make sense of material, but it becomes a massive wall of text that one is unlikely to re-read or attempt to reuse at a later date. If they do attempt to reuse it at a later date, it's not clear which parts are excerpts of the original and which are the author's own words. (This page also looks like it's the sort of notes, highlighting, and underlining recommended by Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain text using progressive summarization.)

      The second set, are more concrete, more atomic, more understandable, and also as a result much more usable.

    1. We were naturally at first rather puzzled to account for thisbox. Were its contents an accidental collection of left-overs?Was it a receptacle for random deposits of casual scraps ofwriting? Should the large works which were some of its sourcesbe published and it be left on one side?

      This section makes me question whether or not the editors of this work were aware of the zettelkasten tradition?!?

    1. Altfranzösisches etymologisches Wörterbuch : AGATE

      I recall that the Oxford English Dictionary was also compiled using a slip box method of sorts, and more interestingly it was a group effort.

      Similarly Wordnik is using Hypothes.is to recreate these sorts of patterns for collecting words in context on digital cards.

      Many encyclopedias followed this pattern as did Adler's Syntopicon.

    1. A few times in his Grand Fichier, Barthes includes notebook paper from other sources which he's cut down to fit into his box or clippings of newspapers which he's taped to cards and included. ᔥ [00:32:00]

    2. partir de 78 79 mais plutôt 79 et 81 donc dans les derniers dans les deux dernières années de sa vie l'avant veille de son accident l'a dit les prises de notes sont alors beaucoup moins espacées dans le temps et bar peut écrire jusqu'à une quinzaine de fiches par jour voire plus on voit ici sur ce diagramme l'année 1979 avec véritablement un bon mois à l'été 79 ou [00:29:35]

      In 1978/79 Roland Barthes was making up to 15 cards per day. ᔥ

    3. Histogram of Roland Barthes fiches between 1968 and 1980 from [29:28]

  14. Feb 2023
    1. Am I taking too long to finish notes? .t3_11bxjms._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/m_t_rv_s__n at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11bxjms/am_i_taking_too_long_to_finish_notes/

      Some of it depends on what you're reading for and what you're trying to get out of the reading. On a recent 26 page journal article, I spent several hours over a couple of days (months apart) reading and taking notes in a relatively thorough fashion. I spent another hour or so refining them further and filing them and another 15 minutes noting out references for follow up. It was in an area I'm generally very familiar with, so it wasn't difficult or dense, but has lots of material I specifically know I'll be using in the near future for some very specific writing. Because I know it's something of specific interest to me and several overlapping projects, I had a much deeper "conversation with the text" than I otherwise might have.

      Because it was done digitally, you can see the actual highlights and annotations and even check the timestamps if you like (you'll have to click through individual notes to get these timestamps): https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Aurn%3Ax-pdf%3A6053dd751da0fa870cad9a71a28882ba Some of it is basic data I'll use for a variety of purposes on several already well-defined projects. A few are for more slowly developing projects further out on the horizon. It's relatively easy to see the 10 or 15 permanent notes that I'll pull out of this group of about 74 notes. Since writing them, I've already referenced two of the more fleeting notes/highlights by searching for related tags on other reading which look like they may actually develop further.

      Had this been something less targeted to my specific area, say for a master's level course of general interest, I'd probably have spent far less time on it and likely not gone over about 15 or so notes. Sometimes for these, I'll just read the abstract and conclusions and scan the references. Reading lots of these in your area of interest gives you some idea of the space and types of questions you might be asking. As you hone in on a thesis, you'll begin asking more and more questions and delve more deeply into material, and if something you read in the past becomes more specific to your project then you'll likely go back to re-read it at a deeper level, but you'll still have your prior work at your fingertips as a potential guide.

      Once you know what your particular thesis is going to be your reading becomes more dense and targeted. Some things you'll read several times and go through with fine-toothed combs while others you'll skim to get the gist/context and only excerpt small specific pieces which you need and then move on.

      (If you need it, remember that you only need one or two good permanent notes per day to make some serious progress.)

    1. if you break it down it's just six notes a day 00:11:11 and that doesn't include Saturdays and Sundays

      Ahrens' 6 notes per day calculation doesn't include Saturdays or Sundays

    1. level 2A_Dull_SignificanceOp · 2 hr. agoYes! When I run across a comment on a book I haven’t read yet but seems interesting I make a little card with the comment and book title2ReplyGive AwardShareReportSaveFollowlevel 2taurusnoises · 2 hr. agoObsidianSo, you keep the titles of books you want to read organized in folgezettel (you give them an alphanumeric ID?) among your ZK notes? That's really interesting!

      I've done something like this when I think a particular reference(s) can answer a question related to a train of thought. But I keep cards of unread sources at the front of my sources section so that it's easier to pull it out frequently to prioritize and decide what I should be reading or working on next. These will then have links to the open questions I've noted, so that I can go back to those sections either as I'm reading/writing or to add those ideas into the appropriate folgezettel. These sorts of small amounts of work documented briefly can add up quickly over time. Source cards with indications of multiple open questions that might be answered is sometimes a good measure of desire to read, though other factors can also be at play.

      That to-read pile of bibliographic source notes (a mini antilibrary) is akin to walking into a party and surveying a room. I may be aware of some of the people I haven't met yet and the conversations we might have, but if there are interesting questions I know I want to ask of specific ones or conversations I already know I want to have, it can be more productive to visit those first.

      This sort of practice has been particularly helpful for times when I want to double check someone's sources or an original context, but don't have the time to do it immediately, don't want to break another extended train of thought, have to wait on materials, or may have to make a trip to consult physical materials that are singular or rare. For quick consultative reading, this can be a boon when I know I don't want or need to read an entire work, but skimming a chapter or a few pages for a close reading of a particular passage. I'll often keep a pile of these sorts of sources at hand so that I can make a short trip to a library, pick them up, find what I need and move on without having to recreate large portions of context to get the thing done because I've already laid most of the groundwork.

    1. I started capturing everything directly in Obsidian but it has two major drawbacks. The first is that I will inevitably end up taking a lot of fleeting notes that I don't want to be included in the literature note. By taking the fleeting notes and highlights in Zotero, and then exporting a copy to Obsidian, I have the piece of mind that much raw material (that I might possibly need one day) is in Zotero, but that a more polished and reduced version is in my literature notes. The clutter stays in Zotero, in other words, while Obsidian is the home of the more processed notes.

      Keeping one's fleeting notes separate from their permanent notes can be useful for managing the idea of clutter.

      Luhmann generally did this by keeping things in different boxes. Modern academics may use different digital applications (Zotero/Obsidian, Hypothes.is/Zettlr, etc.as examples) for each as long as there is some reasonable dovetail between the two for data transfer when necessary.

    2. If you want one final piece of (unsolicited) advice: if you bulk-import those Kindle highlights, please do not try to create literature Zettels out of everything. I did it and I DO NOT RECOMMEND. It was just too much work to rehash stuff that I had already (kind of) assimilated. Reserve that energy to write permanent notes (you probably know much more than you give yourself credit for) and just use the search function (or [^^]) to search for relevant quotes or notes. Only key and new papers/chapters you could (and should, I think) take literature notes on. Keep it fun!

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

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

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

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


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

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