🌲When Themed Logs are More Useful than Daily Notes by [[Eleanor Konik]]
Konik seems to have realized that filing things topically can be a valuable practice as if this wasn't the mode of the day for centuries now. How did the daily note become such a thing that this was lost? Is it the focus on notebook-based bullet journals? Programmers creating daily notes?
Zettelkasten Numbering is so Damn Confusing (I Think I Can Help) by [[Zettelkasten Blah Blah Blah]]
He doesn't say it explicitly, but the Luhmann-artig zettelkasten numbers are only addresses. They don't represent hierarchies. Doing this allows a bottom up organization to emerge.
You can later create hub notes or outlines that create a "correct" or hierarchical order. This is where things become top down.
He points out that Scheper's recommendations for using the numbering for academic disciplines and putting cards in specific orders (giving them negative numbers, etc.) is a counter-productive habit with respect to Luhmann-artig practice.
But by means of the cards, these materials canbe arranged and re-arranged in almost endless variety, we mayclassify them roughly or minutely, we may arrange them by thealphabet, by numbers, trades or professions, territories, we maylimit ourselves to certain trades or territories only
Accuracy This is one of the chief claims of the card system. 63To increase accuracy in fUing, the materials arealways arranged numerically. We thereby approach as nearlyas possible to mathematical exactness. The advantages of thecard system become more and more apparejit as the files increasein bulk, and accuracy must remain a constant factor in aU workconnected with it. It will also bring its reward in the smoothworking of the files and the immediate accessibility of anythingrequired. In accuracy might be included consistency, which isindispensable for effective work (356).
In modern, digital settings, the work of approapriately indexing content is lost in exchange for other forms of organization (tagging, for example), this means one is less reliant on an index for looking up material and more reliant on concordance search of particular words within an ever-growing corpus of collected knowledge.
Over time and with scale, simple tagging may become overwhelming as a search method for finding the requisite material, even when one knows it exists.
As a result a repository may do better in the long run with a small handful of carefully applied rules from the start.
KW: Great Ideas, Selection
Dan Allosso uses the abbreviation KW (key word) after which he ascribes categories or tags to his notes.
The 17 interlinked Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their related 169 targets, which are at the heart of the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, provide a new policy framework worldwide towards ending all forms of poverty, fighting inequalities and tackling climate (https://sdgs.un.org/goals). The SDGs, set in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and intended to be achieved by the year 2030, are part of a UN Resolution called the "2030 Agenda". The EU has committed to implement the Sustainable Development Goals both in its internal and external policies.
The UN developed a system of Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) for Sustainable Development Goals, Targets, Indicators and related statistical series to support the development of a United Nations system-wide ecosystem of machine-readable data and documents based on Linked Open Data (LOD) principles. The taxonomy is available to IT developers and the public at large under http://metadata.un.org/sdg/?lang=en.
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?
The ‘top level’ category was too fixed, and it was hard to know when you needed a new category i.e. 1004 versus 1003/3.
The problem here is equating the "top level" number with category in the first place. It's just an idea and the number is a location. Start by separating the two.
Yes, you can definitely use a card index for note-taking. In fact, many people find card indexes to be a useful and convenient tool for organizing and storing notes. Here are some tips for using a card index for note-taking:Choose a system: Decide on a system for organizing your cards. You could organize them alphabetically, by topic, by date, or by any other method that works for you.Choose the size of cards: Choose the size of cards that works best for your needs. Common sizes include 3" x 5", 4" x 6", and 5" x 8".Use one card per idea: Write one idea or piece of information on each card. This will help keep your notes organized and easy to reference.Include keywords: Include keywords on each card to make it easier to find relevant information later.Use dividers: Use dividers to separate different topics or sections in your card index. This will help keep your notes organized and easy to navigate.Carry it with you: A card index is a portable tool, so you can take it with you wherever you go. This makes it easy to take notes on the go and to refer to your notes when you need them.Overall, a card index can be a useful and efficient tool for note-taking, especially if you prefer a physical, tangible way of organizing and storing information.
Q: Can I use a card index for note taking?
ChatGPT does a reasonable bit of advice on how one would use a card index for note taking.
Part 2: Search & Inspect. Denote as a Zettelkasten, 2023. https://share.tube/w/4ad929jjNYMLc6eRppVQmc.
His file naming convention and search operation in this is really fantastic:
20230226155400==51a3b--note-title__tag1_tag2.org
This allows one to search the file by date/time, signature, title or tags, by using the =, - or _ along with text.
Beyond this however, there's a fair amount of context to build to use this system including using regex search.
Beginner question .t3_112wup1._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } I see that a lot of people have the main categories as natural sciences. Social sciences etcCan I switch it toReligionActivitiesFoodOrganizationMad weird thoughtsCommunication
reply to u/Turbulent-Focus-1389 at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/112wup1/beginner_question/
I'd recommend you do your best to stay away from rigid category-like classifications and see what develops. For specifics see: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/19/on-the-interdisciplinarity-of-zettelkasten-card-numbering-topical-headings-and-indices/
If it's easier to conceptualize, think of it all like a map which may have place names, but also has numerical coordinates. Sometimes a specific name like Richard Macksey's house is useful, but other times thinking about a specific coordinate and the general neighborhoods around them will be far more useful in your community development plan. A religion-only neighborhood without religious activities, religious food, religious organization or communication will be a a sad one indeed. If you segregate your communities, they're likely not to be very happy places for co-mingling of ideas and the potential resultant creativity you'll get out of them.
Bob Doto also suggests a similar philosophy in some of his work, particularly with respect to folgezettel: https://writing.bobdoto.computer/zettelkasten/
I'll note that this is an incredibly hard thing to do at the start, but it's one which you may very well wish you had done from the beginning.
If the jargon points to a coherent phenomenon, it can be very useful.
When jargon or argot points to "coherent phenomenon" or provides a taxonomic purpose, it can be useful beyond its alternate function of gatekeeping areas of thought.
What's this trick with the knitting needle? It sounds cool. How do you do it so you don't just run into the unpunched ones and get stopped?
reply to u/stjeromeslibido at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10lqfsn/comment/j63y2k9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Every card has holes pre-punched into it in exactly the same place (see the photo in the original post at the top) so that one might put a knitting needle (or other thin instrument) through the whole deck in each of the positions. Then one should decide on what each hole's meaning will be by position.
As an example, imagine you're using your cards in a rolodex fashion and you want to distinguish the six categories: family, friends, service providers, neighbors, co-workers, and organizations/businesses. For family members you cut/remove the additional paper between the first hole (representing "family") and the edge of the paper. You do the same thing for all the other cards based on their respective categories. So, for example, your brother Joe who lives across the street from you and works with you at the office in the family business would have cuts removed for positions 1, 4, and 5. For an entity that fits all six categories, cuts would be made such that the sheet would no longer stay in u/I-love-teal (the original poster's) six ring binder notebook.
At the end of the year you want to send Christmas cards to your friends, family and neighbors, so you put the knitting needles into position 1 and pull up separating your family out, then you repeat for positions 4 and 5 until you have your full list. (Pro tip: you probably wouldn't want to pull them out of the deck completely, but might rather pull them up and set them at a 90 degree angle thus preventing you from needing to do the work of refiling them all in a particular order.)
Obviously if you have multi-row edge punches or dozens of edge notches you can discern a lot more categories or data types using basic logic. Just abstract this to your particular note card system. Herman Hollerith used this in early versions of the U.S. Census in the late 1800s and it and variations were used heavily in early computer programming applications.
A variation of this sort of trick can also be done by coloring in (or not) the edges of parts of your cards as well. See for example the general suggestions in these photos which help to layout the idea of the "Pile of Index Card" system used back in 2006 with respect to Getting Things Done (GTD) philosophy:
On my mathematics specific notes which I generally put on graph paper cards, I use colored edge "notches" like these to represent broad categories like theorems, proofs, definitions, corollaries, etc. or method of proof (induction, direct, contradiction, contraposition, construction, exhaustion, probabilistic, combinatorial, etc.) This makes finding specific cards a bit easier as I tip through various sections.
A historian might use colored edges to visually label dates by decades or centuries depending on the timespan of their studies. The uses can be endless and can be specific to your field of study or needs.
Some might also attach the idea of tags/categories to the colors of their cards, so you might use white cards for ideas which are your own, yellow cards which are quotes of others' material, blue cards which represent synopses of other's ideas, etc. One might also profitably use a multi-pen with different colored inks to represent these sorts of meta-data as well.
The variations are endless...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS-b_RUtL1A
LATCH method for search within note taking (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, and Hierarchy)
Does anyone else work in project-based systems instead? .t3_y2pzuu._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/m_t_rv_s__n https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/y2pzuu/does_anyone_else_work_in_projectbased_systems/
Historically, many had zettelkasten which were commonplace books kept on note cards, usually categorized by subject (read: "folders" or "tags"), so you're not far from that original tradition.
Similar to your work pattern, you may find the idea of a "Pile of Index Cards" (PoIC) interesting. See https://lifehacker.com/the-pile-of-index-cards-system-efficiently-organizes-ta-1599093089 and https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122 (read the descriptions of the photos for more details; there was also a related, but now defunct wiki, which you can find copies of on Archive.org with more detail). This pattern was often seen implemented in the TiddlyWiki space, but can now be implemented in many note taking apps that have to do functionality along with search and tags. Similarly you may find those under Tiago Forte's banner "Building a Second Brain" to be closer to your project-based/productivity framing if you need additional examples or like-minded community. You may find that some of Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking (LYT) is in this productivity spectrum as well. (Caveat emptor: these last two are selling products/services, but there's a lot of their material freely available online.)
Luhmann changed the internal structure of his particular zettelkasten that created a new variation on the older traditions. It is this Luhmann-based tradition that many in r/Zettelkasten follow. Since many who used the prior (commonplace-based) tradition were also highly productive, attributing output to a particular practice is wrongly placed. Each user approaches these traditions idiosyncratically to get them to work for themselves, so ignore naysayers and those with purist tendencies, particularly when they're new to these practices or aren't aware of their richer history. As the sub-reddit rules indicate: "There is no [universal or orthodox] 'right' way", but you'll find a way that is right for you.
Goutor recommended using subject headings as a marginal annotations on one's note cards to "indicate[s] the preliminary coding to be used in classifying" a note. (p21)
here are several ways I havefound useful to invite the sociological imagination:
C. Wright Mills delineates a rough definition of "sociological imagination" which could be thought of as a framework within tools for thought: 1. Combinatorial creativity<br /> 2. Diffuse thinking, flâneur<br /> 3. Changing perspective (how would x see this?) Writing dialogues is a useful method to accomplish this. (He doesn't state it, but acting as a devil's advocate is a useful technique here as well.)<br /> 4. Collecting and lay out all the multiple viewpoints and arguments on a topic. (This might presume the method of devil's advocate I mentioned above 😀)<br /> 5. Play and exploration with words and terms<br /> 6. Watching levels of generality and breaking things down into smaller constituent parts or building blocks. (This also might benefit of abstracting ideas from one space to another.)<br /> 7. Categorization or casting ideas into types 8. Cross-tabulating and creation of charts, tables, and diagrams or other visualizations 9. Comparative cases and examples - finding examples of an idea in other contexts and time settings for comparison and contrast 10. Extreme types and opposites (or polar types) - coming up with the most extreme examples of comparative cases or opposites of one's idea. (cross reference: Compass Points https://hypothes.is/a/Di4hzvftEeyY9EOsxaOg7w and thinking routines). This includes creating dimensions of study on an object - what axes define it? What indices can one find data or statistics on? 11. Create historical depth - examples may be limited in number, so what might exist in the historical record to provide depth.
For instance, particular insights related to the sun or the moon may be filed under the(foreign) keyword “Astronomie” [Astronomy] or under the (German) keyword “Sternkunde”[Science of the Stars]. This can happen even more easily when using just one language, e.g.when notes related to the sociological term “Bund” [Association] are not just filed under“Bund” but also under “Gemeinschaft” [Community] or “Gesellschaft” [Society]. Againstthis one can protect by using dictionaries of synonyms and then create enough referencesheets (e.g. Astronomy: cf. Science of the Stars)
related, but not drawn from as I've been thinking about the continuum of taxonomies and subject headings for a while...
On the Spectrum of Topic Headings in note making
Any reasonable note one may take will likely have a hierarchical chain of tags/subject headings/keywords going from the broad to the very specific. One might start out with something broad like "humanities" (as opposed to science), and proceed into "history", "anthropology", "biological anthropology", "evolution", and even more specific. At the bottom of the chain is the specific atomic idea on the card itself. Each of the subject headings helps to situate the idea and provide the context in which it sits, but how useful within a note taking system is having one or more of these tags on it? What about overlaps with other broader subjects (one will note that "evolution" might also sit under "science" / "biology" as well), but that note may have a different tone and perspective than the prior one.
This becomes an interesting problem or issue as one explores ideas in a pre-designed note taking system. As a student just beginning to explore anthropology, one may tag hundreds of notes with anthropology to the point that the meaning of the tag is so diluted that a search of the index becomes useless as there's too much to sort through underneath it. But as one continues their studies in the topic further branches and sub headings will appear to better differentiate the ideas. This process will continue as the space further differentiates. Of course one may continue their research into areas that don't have a specific subject heading until they accumulate enough ideas within that space. (Take for example Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work which is now known under the heading of Behavioral Economics, a subject which broadly didn't exist before their work.) The note taker might also leverage this idea as they tag their own work as specifically as they might so as not to pollute their system as it grows without bound (or at least to the end of their lifetime).
The design of one's note taking system should take these eventualities into account and more easily allow the user to start out broad, but slowly hone in on direct specificity.
Some of this principle of atomicity of ideas and the growth from broad to specific can be seen in Luhmann's zettelkasten (especially ZK II) which starts out fairly broad and branches into the more specific. The index reflects this as well and each index heading ideally points to the most specific sub-card which begins the discussion of that particular topic.
Perhaps it was this narrowing of specificity which encouraged Luhmann to start ZKII after years of building ZKII which had a broader variety of topics?
For the sheets that are filled with content on one side however, the most most importantaspect is its actual “address”, which at the same time gives it its title by which it can alwaysbe found among its comrades: the keyword belongs to the upper row of the sheet, as thegraphic shows.
With respect to Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten, it seems he eschewed the Heyde's advice to use subject headings as the Anschrift (address). Instead, much like a physical street address or card card catalog system, he substituted a card address instead. This freed him up from needing to copy cards multiple times to insert them in different places as well as needing to create multiple cards to properly index the ideas and their locations.
Without this subtle change Luhmann's 90,000 card collection could have easily been 4-5 times its size.
Tagsare simple yet powerful forms of categorizing used in social mediathat further organize categorical information according to user needsand preferences (Shimic, 2008). Tags help people find and situateideas, providing a mode of peripheral social collaborativeparticipation (Lave & Wenger, 2012). Tags also create flexiblesearch tools, not available with traditional annotation tools, thatsupport reading-for-writing by making the process of retrieval fasterand more straightforward.
This discussion seems to miss the broader intellectual historical background of tags in prior generations. There's not even a nod to commonplaces, topic headings, subject headings, indices, etc.
The notes from each document are entered upon aloose leaf furnished with the precisest possible in-dications of origin. The advantages of this artificeare obvious : the detachability of the slips enablesus to group them at will in a host of different com-binations ; if necessary, to change their places : it iseasy to bring texts of the same kind together, andto incorporate additions, as they are acquired, in theinterior of the groups to which they belong. As fordocuments which are interesting from several pointsof view, and which ought to appear in several groups,it is sufficient to enter them several times over ondifferent slips ; or they may be represented, as oftenas may be required, on reference-slips.
Notice that at the bottom of the quote that they indicate that in addition to including multiple copies of a card in various places, a plan which may be inefficient, they indicate that one can add reference-slips in their place.
This is closely similar to, but a small jump away from having explicit written links on the particular cards themselves, but at least mitigates the tedious copying work while actively creating links or cross references within one's note taking system.
The materials collected must be classifiedsooner or later
Hypothes.is tools<br /> https://jonudell.info/h/tools.html
facet tools<br /> copy annotations<br /> tag rename<br /> annotation powered survey<br /> pagefit
Don’t worry about organization…at least at first. I get a lot of emails from people asking me what categories I organize my notes in. Guess what? It doesn’t matter. The information I personally find is what dictates my categories. Your search will dictate your own. Focus on finding good stuff and the themes will reveal themselves.
Ryan Holiday's experience and advice indicates that he does little organization and doesn't put emphasis on categories for organization. He advises "Focus on finding good stuff and the themes will reveal themselves."
This puts him on a very particular part of the spectrum in terms of his practice.
Half the time I begin typing something, I'm not even sure what I'm writing yet. Writing it out is an essential part of thinking it out. Once I've captured it, re-read it, and probably rewritten it, I can then worry about what to label it, what it connects to, and where it should 'live' in my system.
One of my favorite things about Hypothes.is is that with a quick click, I've got a space to write and type and my thinking is off to the races.
Sometimes it's tacitly (linked) attached to another idea I've just read (as it is in this case), while other times it's not. Either way, it's coming out and has at least a temporary place to live.
Later on, my note is transported (via API) from Hypothes.is to my system where I can figure out how to modify it or attach it to something else.
This one click facility is dramatically important in reducing the friction of the work for me. I hate systems which require me to leave what I'm doing and opening up another app, tool, or interface to begin.
CIP - The Classification of Instructional Programs
Another classification scheme
https://archive.org/details/britannica_propaedia/mode/2up
The one-volume Propædia is the first of three parts of the 15th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, the other two being the 12-volume Micropædia and the 17-volume Macropædia. The Propædia is intended as a topical organization of the Britannica's contents, complementary to the alphabetical organization of the other two parts. Introduced in 1974 with the 15th edition, the Propædia and Micropædia were intended to replace the Index of the 14th edition; however, after widespread criticism, the Britannica restored the Index as a two-volume set in 1985. ==The core of the Propædia is its Outline of Knowledge, which seeks to provide a logical framework for all human knowledge==; however, the Propædia also has several appendices listing the staff members, advisors and contributors to all three parts of the Britannica.
link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/ISNt8BBPEe2oTse1NiJv4w
Because I wanted to make use of a unified version of the overall universe of knowledge as a structural framework, I ended up using the Outline of Knowledge (OoK) in the Propædia volume that was part of Encyclopedia Britannica 15th edition, first published 1974, the final version of which (2010) is archived at -- where else? -- the Internet Archive.
The Outline of Knowledge appears in the Propædia volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is similar to various olther classification systems like the Dewey Decimal system or the Universal Decimal Classification.
Thefirst is tagging eachnote with a keywordthat identifies what the idea described in the note is about.
What are the potential different affordances allowed by giving cards titles versus giving them topic keywords or other taxonomic links?
Card titles may be useful in analog settings, but they can be even more valuable in digital settings where one can transclude "cards" (read: ideas) into outlines.
Both of these two patterns have some similarities. Is Allosso differentiating between them? As his notes don't seem to have titles otherwise, one would presume that he's solely referring to topic categories.
https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V
One may notice that Niklas Luhmann's index within his zettelkasten is fantastically sparce. By this we might look at the index entry for "system" which links to only one card. For someone who spent a large portion of his life researching systems theory, this may seem fantastically bizarre.
However, it's not as as odd as one may think given the structure of his particular zettelkasten. The single reference gives an initial foothold into his slip box where shuffling through cards beyond that idea will reveal a number of cards closely related to the topic which subsequently follow it. Regular use and work with the system would have allowed Luhmann better memory with respect to its contents and the searching through threads of thought would have potentially sparked new ideas and threads. Thus he didn't need to spend the time and effort to highly index each individual card, he just needed a starting place and could follow the links from there. This tends to minimize the indexing work he needed to do regularly, but simultaneously makes it harder for the modern person who may wish to read or consult those notes.
Some of the difference here is the idea of top-down versus bottom-up construction. While thousands of his cards may have been tagged as "systems" or "systems theory", over time and with increased scale they would have become nearly useless as a construct. Instead, one may consider increasing levels of sub-topics, but these too may be generally useless with respect to (manual) search, so the better option is to only look at the smallest level of link (and/or their titles) which is only likely to link to 3-4 other locations outside of the card just before it. This greater specificity scales better over time on the part of the individual user who is broadly familiar with the system.
Alternatively, for those in shared digital spaces who may maintain public facing (potentially shared) notes (zettelkasten), such sparse indices may not be as functional for the readers of such notes. New readers entering such material generally without context, will feel lost or befuddled that they may need to read hundreds of cards to find and explore the sorts of ideas they're actively looking for. In these cases, more extensive indices, digital search, and improved user interfaces may be required to help new readers find their way into the corpus of another's notes.
Another related idea to that of digital, public, shared notes, is shared taxonomies. What sorts of word or words would one want to search for broadly to find the appropriate places? Certainly widely used systems like the Dewey Decimal System or the Universal Decimal Classification may be helpful for broadly crosslinking across systems, but this will take an additional level of work on the individual publishers.
Is or isn't it worthwhile to do this in practice? Is this make-work? Perhaps not in analog spaces, but what about the affordances in digital spaces which are generally more easily searched as a corpus.
As an experiment, attempt to explore Luhmann's Zettelkasten via an entryway into the index. Compare and contrast this with Andy Matuschak's notes which have some clever cross linking UI at the bottoms of the notes, but which are missing simple search functionality and have no tagging/indexing at all. Similarly look at W. Ross Ashby's system (both analog and digitized) and explore the different affordances of these two which are separately designed structures---the analog by Ashby himself, but the digital one by an institution after his death.
https://udcsummary.info/php/index.php?lang=en
Interesting defined vocabulary and concatenation/auxiliary signs for putting ideas into proximity.
Could be useful for note taking. Probably much harder to get people to adopt this sort of thing with shared notes/note taking however.
Somewhat similar to the Dewey Decimal classification system.
I may be insane, but somehow text search here makes me wonder that Calibre might actually make an interesting interface for keeping one's notes?
Document management, text search, tagging, reference management capabilities, open source, custom meta data, server potential, etc. What's missing to prevent such an off-label use case?
Syndication link: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1547689914078179328
Worth taking a look at the various affordances of folders vs. links vs. tags.
Some of these functionalities may be highly dependent on the particular tool in question and what affordances the tool allows for these ideas.
Has anyone done this comprehensively across a number of tools other than threads in fora like reddit, zettelkasten.de, etc.?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/vofakc/folders_vs_links_vs_tags/
Tags can overcomethis limitation by infusing your Second Brain with connections,making it easier to see cross-disciplinary themes and patterns thatdefy simple categorization.
Forte frames things primarily from a digital perspective so he talks about folders and tags, but seems to wholly forget the grand power of having an subject index. While they're broadly the same, it's as if he's forgoing two thousand years of rhetorical tradition to have something that seems new and innovative, but which are paths that are incredibly well travelled.
By takingthat small extra step of putting a note into a folder (or tagging it*) fora specific project, such as a psychology paper you’re writing or apresentation you’re preparing, you’ll encounter that idea right at themoment it’s most relevant. Not a moment before, and not a momentafter.
But what about the unimagined future projects that may be our most important. Zettelkasten methods cover for this better perhaps?
Outline of academic disciplines
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines
Broad area outline of academic disciplines - humanities - social science - natural science - formal science - applied science
Compare these with the original trivium and quadrivium or early humanities and arts and sciences designations.
Simply stated, Luhmann’s Zettelkasten structure was not dynamic or fluid in nature. Yet, it was not rigid, either. Examples of a rigid structure are classification systems like the Dewey Decimal Classification System or Paul Otlet’s massive notecard world museum known as, The Mundaneum. These types of systems are helpful for interpersonal knowledge systems; however, they’re not illustrative of what Niklas Luhmann’s system was: an intrapersonal communication system. Luhmann’s notebox system was not logically and neatly organized to allow for the convenience of the public to access. Nor was it meant to be. It seemed chaotic to those who perused its contents other than its creator, Niklas Luhmann. One researcher who studied Luhmann’s system in person says, “at first glance, Luhmann’s organization of his collection appears to lack any clear order; it even seems chaotic. However, this was a deliberate choice.” (11)11 Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was not a structure that could be characterized as one of order. Indeed, it seems closer to that of chaos than order.
This seems illustrative of the idea that some of the most interesting things in life or living systems exist at the chaotic borders.
There seem to be differences between more rigid structures like the Dewey Decimal Classification system or Paul Otlet's Mundaneum and less rigid branching systems like Luhmann's version of his zettelkasten. Is this really a difference or only a seeming difference given the standardization some of the systems. There should be a way to do both. Maybe it's by the emergence of public standards, or perhaps it's simply through the use of subject headings and the cross linking of emerging folksonomies.
What does the use of platforms like the Federated Wiki or the early blogosphere and linking and discovery methods enabled by Technorati indicate?
Luhmann's system may seem intrapersonal, perhaps as a result of the numbering system, but it becomes highly penetrable by the subject index and the links from one idea (card) to the next. Use over time makes it even easier.
But in thinking about providing a permanent home for my writing on the web, this kind of chronology isn’t very useful. Who cares that I wrote this post in 2015, and this one in 2017? Organizing posts that way is only useful if someone is reading along as the collection is being written. For a permanent writing home, with writing from a year ago as well as writing from ten years ago, chronological order isn’t that useful. Who’s going to sift through a hundred pages of old posts?
Part of the question about the ordering of posts on a website comes down first to what the actual content is. Is it posts, pages, articles about particular topics, short notes?
Most blogs typically default to a particular time ordered display, but also provide search and archives for content by topical headings (tags/categories) as well. Digital gardens and wikis are set up with no particular hierarchies and one is encouraged to wander. Most social media notes and photos are created in a time only order.
There aren't enough online zettelkasten yet to look at what that might entail, though affordances there are likely to be similar to that of digital gardens which let you pick out something via keyword and then follow links from one thing to the next.
These are interesting questions for publishers as much as they are from anticipating what one's intended or imagined audience might be looking for.
…and they are typically sorted: chronologically: newest items are displayed firstthrough data: most popular, trending, votesalgorithmically: the system determines what you see through your consumption patterns and what it wants you to seeby curation: humans determine what you seeby taxonomy: content is displayed within buckets of categories, like Wikipedia Most media entities employ a combination of the above.
For reading richer, denser texts what is the best way of ordering and sorting it?
Algorithmically sorting with a pseudo-chronological sort is the best method for social media content, but what is the most efficient method for journal articles? for books?
Amie Fairs, who studies language at Aix-Marseille University in France, is a self-proclaimed Open Knowledge Maps enthusiast. “One particularly nice thing about Open Knowledge Maps is that you can search very broad topics, like ‘language production’, and it can group papers into themes you may not have considered,” Fairs says. For example, when she searched for ‘phonological brain regions’ — the areas of the brain that process sound and meaning — Open Knowledge Maps suggested a subfield of research about age-related differences in processing. “I hadn’t considered looking in the ageing literature for information about this before, but now I will,” she says.
Another visual-mapping tool is Open Knowledge Maps, a service offered by a Vienna-based not-for-profit organization of the same name. It was founded in 2015 by Peter Kraker, a former scholarly-communication researcher at Graz University of Technology in Austria.
https://openknowledgemaps.org/
Open Knowledge maps is a visual literature search tool that is based on keywords rather than on a paper's title, author, or DOI. The service was founded in 2015 by Peter Kraker, a former scholarly communication researcher at Graz University of Technology.
A third difference between experts and novices lies in the way they categorizewhat they see: novices sort the entities they encounter according to theirsuperficial features, while experts classify them according to their deep function.
http://expositions.mundaneum.org/fr/mundaneum-petite-histoire-dune-grande-idee
Universal Bibliographical Directory (RBU)
But modern note-taking is more idiosyncratic to each note-taker and no longer follows a set of subject headings that pedagogical practicesand printed reference works helped to standardize.
Early modern reference works, handbooks, and pedagogical practices created a sort of standardized set of subject headings amongst note takers.
A similar sort of effort could have been seen in the blogosphere of the early 2000s in which Technorati and their search functionality may have helped to standardize some of these same sorts of taxonomic issues within their product which was widely used at the time.
give the text your reading the opportunity to tell you something new and something 00:49:02 you have not expected so i'm worried a little bit of having fixed [Music] categories to look through 00:49:16 text because it might turn every text into something that is um already fitting your categories instead of expanding them 00:49:26 or adding to them
Coming to a text with too rigid a set of questions or preconceived categories may cause you to be blinded by what you expect to get out of it rather than allowing the text to surprise you with new and interesting insights you may not have anticipated.
Several years would pass, and a new editor-in-chief would ascend, before the paper eliminated the automatic race tags, in 1961, under pressure from readers who were sick of them.
At that time, The Sun was still choosing to identify Black people by race in its coverage — and only Black people — placing the tag “Negro” after individual names, even though many other newspapers had long since stopped similar practices. When a Westminster minister and seminary professor asked the paper to discard “this discriminatory practice” in 1955, according to an article in The Afro-American, the editor-in-chief flat out refused, self-righteously declaring that “the Sunpapers will not be a party to such suppression” of fact and that “the matter of what it is now fashionable to call ‘pigmentation’ is important from both the white and the Negro point of view.”
“Manipulations such as variation, spacing, introducing contextualinterference, and using tests, rather than presentations, as learningevents, all share the property that they appear during the learningprocess to impede learning, but they then often enhance learning asmeasured by post-training tests of retention and transfer. Conversely,manipulations such as keeping conditions constant and predictable andmassing trials on a given task often appear to enhance the rate oflearning during instruction or training, but then typically fail to supportlong-term retention and transfer” (Bjork, 2011, 8).
This is a surprising effect for teaching and learning, and if true, how can it be best leveraged. Worth reading up on and testing this effect.
Indeed humans do seem built for categorizing and creating taxonomies and hierarchies, and perhaps allowing this talent to do some of the work may be the best way to learn not only in the short term, but over longer term evolutionary periods?
Most students sort their material by topicor even by seminars and semester. From the perspective ofsomeone who writes, that makes as much sense as sorting yourerrands by purchase date and the store they were bought from.Can’t find your trousers? Maybe they are with the bleach you boughtthe same day at your department store.
This is a brilliant analogy.
Make permanent notes.
The important part of permanent notes are generating your own ideas and connecting (linking them densely) into your note system. The linking part is important and can be the part that most using digital systems forget to do. In paper zettelkasten, one was forced to create the first link by placing the note into the system for the first time. This can specifically be seen in Niklas Luhmann's example where a note became a new area of its own or, far more likely, it was linked to prior ideas.
By linking the idea to others within the system, it becomes more likely that the idea can have additional multiple contexts where it might be used and improve the fact that context shifts will prove more insight in the future.
Additional links to subject headings, tags, categories, or other forms of taxonomy will also help to make sure the note isn't lost completely into the system. Links to the bibliographical references within the system are helpful as well, especially for later citation. Keep in mind that these categories and reference links aren't nearly as valuable as the other primary idea links.
One can surely collect ideas and facts into their system, but these aren't as important or as interesting as one's own ideas and the things that are sparked and generated by them.
Asking questions in permanent notes can be valuable as they can become the context for new research, projects, and writing. Open questions can be incredibly valuable for one's thinking and explorations.
After all, the academic disciplines, as they have come down to us, represent an implicit taxonomy that favors analytical reasoning and discursive practices.
This system of short annotations was conceived to de-contextualize information and free it from pre-structured meaning frames that would otherwise remove the possibility of further variety. Moreover, it could be expanded without limits in terms of both number and possible meaning combinations. Finally, it allowed a continuous (and recur-sive) improvement of open-ended combinatory performances, thereby shift-ing the burden of recollection from contents to indexing systems.74
In a valuable article, Lorraine Daston, ‘Perché i fatti sono brevi?’, Quaderni storici 108 (2001), 745–70, esp. 756–59, noted that a clear analogy exists between these features and the art of excerpting.
Can one trick oneself into forced context collapse with relation to the material one is reading in such a way so as to force surprise and the creation of new ideas by then re-contextualizing them into one's system of notes?
One of these tools was the so-called Indice Categorico designed by Emanu-ele Tesauro. Tesauro displayed it as a ‘secret truly secret’ (‘secreto veramente secreto’), that is, as a truly valuable invention. According to Tesauro,72 the matter was to discover topics that were hidden behind several different cat-egories and to compare them to each other (‘penetrar gli obietti altamente ap-piattati sotto diverse Categorie, e di riscontrarli tra loro’) to discover analogies and similarities that would have otherwise been overlooked if everything had been preserved under its own category (‘scovare analogie e somiglianze che sarebbero passate inosservate se ogni cosa fosse rimasta classificata sotto la propria Categoria’). The cognitive device used to achieve this purpose was the metaphor. By listing topics in a jumbled manner under a certain category ac-cording to some similarity in meaning among them, it was possible to produce unexpected results. In short, it was possible to discover something new.
72 Emanuele Tesauro, Il Cannocchiale aristotelico, 5th ed. (Venice, 1669), 83. On this inven-tion, see also Umberto Eco, Dall’albero al labirinto. Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione (Milan, 2007), 45–7.
Emanuele Tesaurio's Indice Categorico was a tool for thought which aimed to discover new information by using metaphors and analogies with respect to the categories or taxonomies so as to draw links between them.
Drexel recommended pondering the choices of the correct subject-term (caput rei), because it is hard to foresee in the ‘present’ which ‘past’ one might search for in the ‘future’.
Drexel, Aurifodina, 135
The question of the correct taxonomies isn't an easy one and certainly isn't new.
Usually it is more fruitful to look for formulations of problems that relate heterogeneous things with each other.
A great quote, but this is likely a nebulous statement to those with out the experience of practice. Definitely worth expanding on this idea to give it more detail.
Through an inner structure of recursive links and semantic pointers, a card index achieves a proper autonomy; it behaves as a ‘communication partner’ who can recommend unexpected associations among different ideas. I suggest that in this respect pre-adaptive advances took root in early modern Europe, and that this basic requisite for information pro-cessing machines was formulated largely by the keyword ‘order’.
aliases for "topical headings": headwords keywords tags categories
"Vielmehr", so Schmidt et al., "notiert Luhmann in der Regel nur maximal drei Systemstellen, an denen der jeweilige Begriff zu finden ist, da er annimmt, dass man dann über das interne Verweisungsnetz schnell die anderen relevanten Stellen findet."
machine translation:
"Rather," says Schmidt et al., "Luhmann usually only notes a maximum of three system points at which the respective term can be found, since he assumes that the other relevant points can then be found quickly via the internal network of references."
I wonder how many tags one might use in practice to maximize this? Can we determine such a thing mathematically?
A thing must exist in order to be preserved, and an element separated from its kindred elements only half exists.
Taxonomy is important.
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/no-categories/
There's lots of advice for categories, tags, and other taxonomies out there. This isn't as opinionated as some, but takes the approach to allow things to come organically so that one can grow, expand, and (possibly most importantly) change.
Episode 002 – Organizing Information for Use
This is an interesting series, but I'm starting to wish that the episodes were longer and/or interview/discussion based.
Andy only gets to scratch the surface of some of his topics.
Something about tagging has been bugging me and I think I just figured it out. Suppose you have a topic that's starting to develop, and you want to hijack its links to redirect to a page that includes more information than just a scrolling list of references. Well I have the glossary for that, I just realized. I can override what double-square brackets means for a certain term, have it link to a page which also has a list of the references. Boom and bing. Do they have these overrides at LogSeq and other tools for thought products?
Based on the use case here, it sounds like he's talking about the idea of aliasing or in the wiki sense doing a page redirect to create an alias. WikiMedia obviously does this with the ability to redirect a page and Obsidian allow one to use YAML headers to create aliases.
http://scripting.com/2021/06/24/150234.html?title=theGlossaryInLittleOutliner
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Dave Winer</span> in Scripting News: Sunday, August 1, 2021 (<time class='dt-published'>08/01/2021 19:31:13</time>)</cite></small>
There are endless ways of organizing your notes—by book, by author, by topic, by the time of reading. It doesn’t matter which system you use as long as you will be able to find the notes in the future.
Or by all of the above... Library card catalogues did all three, but most digital systems will effectuate all of them as well.
Up to 1200 the contents list of a monastic library was usually merely an inventory: it marked the presence of a book, but not its location. The later Middle Ages saw a surge of real catalogues, listing books and their location. Some of these catalogues were written out in books (as we will see in a moment), while others were pasted to the wall in the library.
I am beginning to think that the significant difference is that with songlines, learning is always done in the physical ‘memory palace’ which is constantly revisited. It can be recalled from memory, but is encoded in place. For me, that is way more effective, but I have aphantasia and very poor visualisation, so it may not be as big a factor for others. So recalling your childhood home can be a memory palace, but not a songline.
Lynne Kelly is correct here that we need better delineations of the words we're using here.
To some of us, we're taking historical methods and expanding them into larger super sets based on our personal experiences. I've read enough of Kelly's work and her personal experiences on her website (and that of many others) that I better understand the shorthand she uses when she describes pieces.
Even in the literature throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance we see this same sort of picking and choosing of methods in descriptions of various texts. Some will choose to focus on one or two keys, which seemed to work for them, but they'd leave out the others which means that subsequent generations would miss out on the lost bits and pieces.
Having a larger superset of methods to choose from as well as encouraging further explorations is certainly desired.
I remember also seeing this as an indexing system for index cards in 2007. https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/sets/72157594200490122/
It's not too dissimilar a pattern from the early 20th century edge-notched cards which were used to make sorting collections easier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge-notched_card Of course doing this for a notebook isn't going to work as easily.
By contrast, a systematic ordering, which finds its contemporary equivalent in modern outliners, soon runs into difficulties. The anthropologist Alan MacFarlane noted some time ago that "one danger inherent in paper indexes is the amount of effort they take to add to and maintain. That means that more and more of the worker's energies go into the creation of the tools for research, and the less time there is to actually do the research and the writing." He traced this problem to the hierarchical classification that he thought paper makes necessary and complained that the system broke down at 40.000 cards because the preconceived categories proved inflexible. Luhmann's alternative avoids this problem.
when he laid out the early form of his classification method in a pamphletentitled Methodus(1736), he used heads to order the text.16
Carl Linnaeus' classification method in Systema Naturae, his famous nomenclature system, was informed by the traditional topical headings of commonplace books.
[16] The content of Methodus and the nature of the heads is addressed in S. Müller-Wille, ‘Introduction’, in C.Linnaeus, Musa Cliffortiana: Clifford’s Banana Plant, translated by S. Freer (Liechtenstein: A.R.G. Gantner VerlagK.G., 2007), 33
I keep my index cards in chronological order : the newest card comes at front of the card box. All cards are clasified into four kinds and tagged according to the contents. The sequence is equivalent to my cultural genetic code. Although it may look chaotic at the beginning, it will become more regulated soon. Don't be afraid to sweep out your mind and capture them all. Make visible what is going on in your brain. Look for a pattern behind our life.
Example of a edge-based taxonomy system for index cards.
I've used something like this in a textbook before while also using different colored pens to help differentiate a larger taxonomy. I found it to be better for a smaller custom cpb that only had a narrow section of topics. In my larger, multi-volume commonplace, I have a separate volume that serves as an index and uses a method similar to John Locke's, though larger in scope and shape. Sadly in this case, the index would be much too large (with too many entries) to make the high five method practicable.
Highfive Notebook indexing method
A clever method for creating an index or tracking system in a bound notebook by creating an index and then marking the edge of the page for related pages.
Could also be used for tracking one's mood or other similar taxonomic items.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>u/mor-leidr </span> in Has anyone used this indexing system? Curious what you think : commonplacebook (<time class='dt-published'>07/30/2021 12:29:53</time>)</cite></small>
https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/07/13/alphabetic-writing-500-years-earlier-glenn-schwartz/
The objects, which he describes as cylinders, are clay tubes about the size and shape of a little finger—like elongated beads. Because of their shape, and because they were found near pottery vessels inside the tomb, he suspects they might have served as tags that could be strung on the vessels to identify something about them, whether their contents, their owner, or their origin or destination. If that is the case, he speculates that the writing could denote names, or descriptions of property.
These archaeological objects could theoretically have been one of the first written tags in human history.
This system was invented by Carl Linnaeus,[1] around 1760.
How is it not so surprising that Carl Linnaeus, the creator of a huge taxonomic system, also came up with the idea for index cards in 1760.
How does this fit into the history of the commonplace book and information management? Relationship to the idea of a zettelkasten?
Phyllis Diller’s groundbreaking career as a stand-up comic spanned almost 50 years. Throughout her career she used a gag file to organize her material. Diller’s gag file consists of a steel cabinet with 48 drawers (along with a 3 drawer expansion) containing over 52,000 3-by-5 inch index cards, each holding a typewritten joke or gag. These index cards are organized alphabetically by subject, ranging from accessories to world affairs and covering almost everything in between.
Comedian Phyllis Diller collected over 52,000 3x5" index cards in a gag file. Each card contained a typewritten joke or gag of some sort which she organized alphabetically by subject.
For the past thirty-some years, Rivers has been filing each and every joke she's written (at this point she's amassed over a million) in a library-esque card cabinet housed in her Upper East Side apartment. The jokes—most typed up on three-by-five cards—are meticulously arranged by subject, which Rivers admits is the hardest part of organizing: "Does this one go under ugly or does it go under dumb?"
Joan Rivers kept a Zettelkasten of jokes in her Upper East Side apartment. They spanned over thirty years and over a million items, most of them typed on 3"x5" index cards and carefully arranged by subject.
Over time, Carlin formalized that system: paper scraps with words or phrases would each receive a category, usually noted in a different color at the top of the paper, and then periodically those scraps would be gathered into plastic bags by category, and then those bags would go into file folders. Though he would later begin using a computer to keep track of those ideas, the basic principle of find-ability remained. “That’s how he built this collection of independent ideas that he was able to cross-reference and start to build larger routines from,” Heftel explains.
George Carlin's process of collecting and collating his material. His plastic bags by category were similar to the concept of waste books to quickly collect information (similar to the idea of fleeting notes). He later placed them into file folders (an iteration on the Zettelkasten using file folders of papers instead of index cards).
This sounds cool. I sort of wish I could easily do this with my own WikiMedia install.
Gwern.net was one of the earliest and most consistent gardeners to offer meta-reflections on their work. Each entry comes with:topic tagsstart and end datea stage tag: draft, in progress, or finisheda certainty tag: impossible, unlikely, certain, etc.1-10 importance tagThese are all explained in their website guide, which is worth reading if you're designing your own epistemological system.
I've noticed that Dan Mackinlay has some public notebooks with an interesting system for indicating knowledge process too.
A lot of this resonates with me. On links, it is often the reason I was interested in it in the first place that's the most important.
The nostalgia factor is very valuable to me, but it also means you need an easy means for not only looking back, but regular reminders to do so.
Owning your stuff: hopefully my stance on this is obvious.
I'm not sure I agree so much with the taxonomy stance. I find it helpful to have it for search and review, the tougher part is doing it consistently with terms that are important to you.
Ravi outlines some of how he syndicates from his Drupal website to Twitter.
I particularly appreciated that he's using a sort of taxonomy within Drupal to add some of his particular content to "books" which aggregate related content together. If this were done in an editable outline then it should be easier to aggregate and edit later into an actual book. This would be a cool UI to have within a website for writing and creating.
Since “Sexy Times With Wangxian” became a whole Thing, it has spawned memes, spinoff fics, and a frankly fabulous fic prompt generator that scans all of the STWW tags and chooses some at random for you to write fics around. Just now I got the tags, “Foursome – M/M/M/M,” “I’m Bad At Summaries,” “Cryptography,” “Body Dysphoria,” and “Organs.” Outstanding.
This could be an interesting feature for a personal website/blog. A generator that takes pre-existing taxonomies from one's website and suggests combinations of them as potential writing prompts when one has writer's block.
Along the right side of the page, we have short snippets of text written by five advertisers, mostly journalism schools as it happens, though they are in a silent competition with other snippets of text created by other advertisers bidding to be on this page.
Reframing:
SEO is really just various commonplace books competing to be the most important zettels in the world for particular taxonomies.
Locke’s humble two page method, in this sense, prefigures libraries filled with volumes of encyclopedias, from Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) to Luke Howard's classification of clouds.
Principle #8: Organize your notes by context, not by topic
instead of filing things away according to where they came from, you file them according to where they’re going. This is the essential difference between organizing like a librarian and organizing like a writer.
The tags for objects are much more precise and reveal real connections. They narrow down the search way more which is hugely important if your archive grows. They only give you what you want, and not the topic which also contains what you want.
There are two different types of tags: Tags for topics. You use tags to group notes under a topic. Tags for objects. You use tags to group notes around an object, real or conceptual.