reply to u/Subject_Industry1633 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zwgeas/is_the_zk_method_worth_it_and_how_it_helped_you/ (and further down)

ZK is an excellent tool for literature reviews! It is a relative neologism (with a slightly shifted meaning in English over the past decade with respect to its prior historical use in German) for a specific form of note taking or commonplacing that has generally existed in academia for centuries. Excellent descriptions of it can be found littered around, though not under a specific easily searchable key word or phrase, though perhaps phrases like "historical method" or "wissenschaftlichen arbeitens" may come closest.

Some of the more interesting examples of it being spelled out in academe include:

• Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.
• Webb, Sidney. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.
• Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.
• Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. (Particularly ch 7 if I recall correctly)

For academic use, anecdotally I've seen very strong recent use of the general methods most compellingly demonstrated in Obsidian (they've also got a Discord server with an academic-focused channel) though many have profitably used DevonThink and Tinderbox (which has a strong, well-established community of academics around it) as much more established products with dovetails into a variety of other academic tools. Obviously there are several dozens of newer tools for doing this since about 2018, though for a lifetime's work, one might worry about their longevity as products.

http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/who.html

Inspiration for Tinderbox

Cathy Marshall was an early digital gardener!

https://theinformed.life/2022/10/23/episode-99-mark-bernstein/

Listened to this yesterday (2022-11-17).

https://forum.eastgate.com/

https://forum.eastgate.com/

Looks like this eternal question is addressed in The Tinderbox Way.

https://www.markbernstein.org/Mar20/TheNewZettelkasten.html

https://vimeo.com/753881107

https://forum.eastgate.com/t/a-tinderbox-solution-to-organising-a-zettelkasten/3073

Tinderbox really is a fantastic name for a note taking / personal knowledge management system. Just the idea makes me want to paint flames on the sides of my physical card index. https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

syndication link

https://web.archive.org/web/20080412071219/http://eastgate.com/catalog/Briefcase.html

Eastgate systems used to make a "3x5 Card Briefcase" to capture short notes on the go which could later "be scanned or transcribed to Tinderbox."

Tinderbox was one of the first digital tools to be used in a way very similar to zettelkasten of old, particularly by academics, who are a large portion of their power user base.

https://www.becktench.com/blog/2018/11/12/using-zettelkasten-and-tinderbox-to-document-a-literature-review

I was reminded of this via Dan Allosso's mention of it in https://vimeo.com/729407073. Tench's mention of it in the Tinderbox space was what brought him to the idea of zettelkasten in his own work.

Just noticed that Mark Bernstein, the writer of Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas, has page about commonplace books on his site, which he wrote with his note taking cum digital gardening tool Tinderbox.