Reply to Will Simpson at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17939/#Comment_17939

There should be more conversation about zettelkasten as both a "ratchet" as well as a "flywheeel". Sometimes I feel like it's hard to speak of these things for either lack of appropriate words/naming and/or having a shared vocabulary for them.

Even Luhmann's "second memory" has a mushiness to it, but I certainly see your sense of it as a thing which moves forward. I have the same sort of sense with the Aboriginal cultural idea of a "songline" which acts as both a noun as well as having an internal sense of being a verb to me. The word "google" has physically and specifically undergone the transition from noun to verb in a way which "second memory" and "songline" haven't, though perhaps they should? The difference is that the word google is much more concrete and simple while second memory and songline have a lot more cultural material and meaning sitting with them if you know them and their fuller attendant practices.

Jared Henderson defines commonplace books as only containing the thoughts of others collected while reading. In the following breath, he then says he writes summaries of his own ideas and then creates links between the ideas...

link to: - https://boffosocko.com/2022/05/14/55804938/ - Aby Warburg's coinage of Verknüpfungszwang

A book can't only be about the text, it has to be about the reader's interaction with it and thoughts about it. Without these, the object has no value.

Annotations are the traces left behind of how one valued a book as they read and interacted with it.

An association copy is a copy of a book which belonged to the author or someone connected to them or a copy of a book that once belonged to someone particularly associated with its contents, often annotated.

I've got association copies of some information theory texts...

If the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" who benefits from the excess value and how is that economically broken up in a fair manner?

A serious thought; a carefully considered reflection.

Dirty or deteriorated, especially from poverty or lack of care.

In modern college parlance - a quad - a courtyard surrounded on all four sides by buildings.

The Finnish paradox stems from the fact that despite Finland having one of the latest school start ages in the world (at the age of 7), they also have one of the highest literacy achievements as well.

The paradox is only perceived by those who may feel that hammering knowledge into children's heads from a young age is the best method of education.

Luhmann attributes (an independent) life to his zettelkasten. It is effectuated by internal branching, opportunities for links or connections, and a register as well as lack of pre-planned comprehensive order, lack of hierarchy, and lack of linear structure.

Which of these is necessary for other types of "life"? Can any be removed? Compare with other systems.

Potential definition of a table of contents: A table of contents is a linear ordering or traversal of of specific material which could potentially be found within an index.

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.

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.

—Detlef Stern, 2023-03-21, https://mastodon.social/@t73fde/110062851811483123

A note not referenced by another note is not a note. (translation mine)

Based on the history and usage of horreum here in this first episode of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae podcast, a project featuring a 10+ million slip zettelkasten at its core, I can't help but think that not only is the word ever so apropos for an introduction, but it does quite make an excellent word for translating the idea of card index in English or Zettelkasten from German into Latin.

My horreum is a storehouse for my thoughts and ideas which nourishes my desire to discover and build upon my knowledge.

This seems to be just the sort of thing that Jeremy Cherfas might appreciate on multiple levels.

https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/download/nxm28u/Horreum.mp3

The split between the ideas of commonplace book and zettelkasten may stem from the time period of the Anglicization of the first. If Gessner was just forming the tenets of a zettelkasten practice in 1548 and the name following(?) [what was the first use of zettelkasten?] while the word commonplace was entering English in 1531 using a book format, then the two traditions would likely have been splitting from that point forward in their different areas.

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.

Don't be blinded by availability bias. It was historically almost always thus! Especially in Germany. (The French have traditionally called it a fichier boîte and in English it's the card index.) It's only been since the rise in popularity of the use of the German word in English (beginning in late 2013 with zettelkasten.de) where it has almost always been associated with Niklas Luhmann that has has most people now associating Luhmann's method with the word Zettelkasten.

If you look back at the 2013 exhibition "Zettelkästen. Machines of Fantasy" at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, you'll notice that there were six zettelkasten featured there including those of Arno Schmidt, Walter Kempowski, Friedrich Kittler, Aby Warburg, Paul, Blumenberg, and Luhmann. Of those, the structure of Luhmann's was the exception which wasn't primarily organized broadly by subject heading. You'll also find some historians and sociologists organizing theirs by date or geographic regions as well as other custom arrangements as their needs and work might dictate.

The preponderance of books talking about these note taking methods suggest a topic heading arrangement for filing, including the book by Johnannes Erich Heyde from which Luhmann's son has indicated he learned an old technique from which he evolved his own practice.

See also:

• The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/

• Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens: zeitgemässe Mittel und Verfahrungsweisen. Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931.

Rarely does a week go by that I don't run across another new/significant example of a zettelkasten. Thanks u/atomicnotes for keeping up the pace with James Peter Zollinger. (Though this week may be a twofer given my notes on Ludwig Wittgenstein's over the last few days.)

Nachlass<br /> : a German word, used in academia to describe the collection of manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and so on left behind when a scholar dies.

compounding of nach as "after", and the verb lassen meaning "to leave".

compare this with tummeling

What is the overlap? How do they differ?

Why "Verity"?<br /> by Richard Rhodes

Richard Rhodes uses the word verity rather than non-fiction as a means of defining his writing work in a more positive framing rather than defining it as the opposite of fiction (i.e. non-fiction).

definition of hipster PDA, a backronym for Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).

Policy entrenchment is when policies outlast the people, movements, or coalitions that created those policies.

I'm not the only one to think of zettelkasten as "living"...

what is the meaning of "the" here (which is italicized for emphasis)?!?

Stop Procrastinating With Note-Taking Apps Like Obsidian, Roam, Logseq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baKCC2uTbRc by Sam Matla

sophisticated procrastination - tweaking one's system(s) or workflow with the anticipation it will help them in the long run when it is generally almost always make-work which helps them feel smart and/or productive. Having measurable results which can be used against specific goals will help weed this problem out.

"Personal knowledge management is an aid to your work, not the work itself." —Sam Matla #

This is entirely dependent on what and how you're doing it. If you're actively reading and annotating, and placing it somewhere, then that is the work, just in small progressive steps.

He needs to be more specific about what he means by "personal knowledge management" as a definition of something.

Part 1: What Do We Need? Denote as a Zettelkasten, 2023. https://share.tube/w/mu7fMr5RWMqetcZRXutSGF.

It starts and ends with Denote, but has an excellent overview of the folgezettel debate (or should one use Luhmann-esque identifiers within their digital zettelkasten system?)

Some of the tension within the folgezettel debate comes down to those who might prefer more refined evergreen (reusable) notes in many contexts, or those who have potentially shorter notes that fit within a train of thought (folgezettel) which helps to add some of the added context.

The difference is putting in additional up-front work to more heavily decontextualize excerpts and make them reusable in more contexts, which has an uncertain future payoff versus doing a bit less contextualization as the note will speak to it's neighbors as a means of providing some of this context. With respect to reusing a note in a written work, one is likely to remove their notes and their neighbors to provide this context when needed for writing.

(apparently I didn't save this note when I watched it prior to number 2, blech....)

A statistic that quantifies the strength of association between two events, A and B. It is the ratio of the odds of A in the presence of B, the odds of A in the absence of B, the odds of B in the presence of A, or the odds of B in the absence of A.

A person that serves as the starting point for a genetic familial study.

anecdotal definition/summary of zettelkasten.

I like the "shorter notes" idea here which would have arisen before the "atomic notes" or "evergreen notes" ideas.

By "easy" here, I think he also includes the ideas of fun, interesting, pleasurable, and (Csikszentmihalyi's) flow.

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

Parents often use variations of double entendre to communicate between each other with out children understanding while present.

It's also likely that Indigenous elders may use this sort of communication with uninitiated members nearby.

Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’ by Taylor Lorenz

a subtle catch about Ahrens' terminology

google translate:

So if you raise such a wooden life partner, you will get more and more interesting answers to your questions after a few years...

I love the idea of rearing a zettelkasten as a "wooden life partner".

Within the history of personal knowledge management, one was often faced with where to store their notes so that it would be easy to find and use them again. Often this was done using slip methods by means of "multiple storage" by making multiple copies and filing them under various headings. This copying process was onerous and breaks the modern database principle "don't repeat yourself" (DRY).

Alternate means of doing this include storing it in one place and then linking that location to multiple subject headings in an index, though this may cause issues of remembering which subject heading when there are many appropriate potential synonyms.

Modern digital methods allow one to store a note in one location and refer to it in multiple ways electronically as well as with aliases.

Marcel Proust on What Writing Is<br /> by William Benton

"drawing together of distant phenomena" which William Whewell, master of trinity college, called conscilience (coinage).

(3:50)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

Incremental reading is spaced parallel reading of multiple sources with note taking and spaced repetition.

It's not far from how I read and take notes myself, though I place less emphasis on the spaced repetition piece as I tend to run across things naturally within my note collection anyway.

One of the major potential benefits of incremental reading (not mentioned in the Wikipedia article; is it in Wozniak's work?) is the increase of combinatorial creativity created by mixing a variety of topics simultaneously.

There is also likely a useful diffuse thinking effect happening between reading sessions.

careen<br /> turn (a ship) on its side for cleaning, caulking, or repair.

"Екатерина Шульман: Практический Нострадамус, или 12 умственных привычек, которые мешают нам предвидеть будущее". vedomosti/ (in Russian). Retrieved 24 June 2021.

A Note on the Cargo Cult of Zettelkasten

Modern cargo cults can be seen in many technology and productivity spaces where people are pulled in by exaggerated (or sometimes even real claims) of productivity or the general "magic" of a technology or method.

An example is Niklas Luhmann's use of his zettelkasten which has created a cargo cult of zettelkasten aspirants and users who read one or more of the short one page blog posts about his unreasonable productivity and try to mimic it without understanding the system, how it works, or how to make it work for them. They often spend several months collecting notes, and following the motions, but don't realize the promised gains and may eventually give up, sometimes in shame (or as so-called "rubbish men") while watching others still touting its use.

To prevent one's indoctrination into the zettelkasten cult, I'll make a few recommendations:

Distance yourself from the one or two page blog posts or the breathless YouTube delineations. Ask yourself very pointedly: what you hope to get out of such a process? What's your goal? Does that goal align with others' prior uses and their outcomes?

Be careful of the productivity gurus who are selling expensive courses and whose focus may not necessarily be on your particular goals. Some are selling very pointed courses, which is good, while others are selling products which may be so broad that they'll be sure to have some success stories, but their hodge-podge mixture of methods won't suit your particular purpose, or worse, you'll have to experiment with pieces of their courses to discover what may suit your modes of working and hope they'll suffice in the long run. Some are selling other productivity solutions for task management like getting things done (GTD) or bullet journals, which can be a whole other cargo cults in and of themselves. Don't conflate these![^1] The only thing worse than being in a cargo cult is being in multiple at the same time.

If you go the digital route, be extremely wary of shiny object syndrome. Everyone has a favorite tool and will advocate that it's the one you should be using. (Often their method of use will dictate how much they love it potentially over and above the affordances of the tool itself.) All of these tools can be endlessly configured, tweaked, or extended with plugins or third party services. Everyone wants to show you their workflow and set up, lots of which is based on large amounts of work and experimentation. Ignore 99.999% of this. Most tools are converging to a similar feature set, so pick a reasonable one that seems like it'll be around in 5 years (and which has export, just in case). Try out the very basic features for several months before you change anything. Don't add endless plugins and widgets. You're ultimately using a digital tool to recreate the functionality of index cards, a pencil, and a box. How complicated should this really be? Do you need to spend hundreds of hours tweaking your system to save yourself a few minutes a year? Be aware that far too many people touting the system and marketers talking about the tools are missing several thousands of years of uses of some of these basic literacy-based technologies. Don't join their island cult, but instead figure out how the visiting culture has been doing this for ages.[^2] Recall Will Hunting's admonition against cargo cults in education: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”[^3]

Most people ultimately realize that the output of their own thinking is only as good as the inputs they're consuming. Leverage this from the moment you begin and ignore the short bite-sized advice for longer form or older advice from those with experience. You're much more likely to get more long term value out of reading Umberto Eco or Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren[^4] than you are an equivalent amount of time reading blog posts, watching YouTube videos, or trolling social media like Reddit and Twitter.

Realize that reaching your goal is going to take honest-to-goodness actual work, though there is potential for fun. No matter how shiny or optimized your system, you've still got to do the daily work of reading, watching, listening and using it to create anything. Focus on this daily work and don't get sidetracked by the minutiae of trying to shave off just a few more seconds.[^5] In short, don't get caught up in the "productivity porn" of it all. Even the high priest at whose altar they worship once wrote on a slip he filed:

"A ghost in the note card index? Spectators visit [my office to see my notes] and they get to see everything and nothing all at once. Ultimately, like having watched a porn movie, their disappointment is correspondingly high." —Niklas Luhmann. <small>“Geist im Kasten?” ZKII 9/8,3. Niklas Luhmann-Archiv. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_NB_9-8-3_V. (Personal translation from German with context added.)</small>

[^1] Aldrich, Chris. “Zettelkasten Overreach.” BoffoSocko (blog), February 5, 2022. https://boffosocko.com/2022/02/05/zettelkasten-overreach/.

[^2]: Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.

[^3]: Good Will Hunting. Miramax, Lawrence Bender Productions, 1998.

[^4]: Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

[^5]: Munroe, Randall. “Is It Worth the Time?” Web comic. xkcd, April 29, 2013. https://xkcd.com/1205/.

Recommended resources

Choose only one of the following and remember you may not need to read the entire work:

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.

Allosso, Dan, and S. F. Allosso. How to Make Notes and Write. Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/.

Bernstein, Mark. Tinderbox: The Tinderbox Way. 3rd ed. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, Inc., 2017. http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/TinderboxWay/index.html.

Dow, Earle Wilbur. Principles of a Note-System for Historical Studies. New York: Century Company, 1924.

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.

Gessner, Konrad. Pandectarum Sive Partitionum Universalium. 1st Edition. Zurich: Christoph Froschauer, 1548.

Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout.

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.

Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.

Weinberg, Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005.

"...of or forming a single irreducible unit or component in a larger system." - Oxford Languages

A reframing of the idea of a signal within a probability setting.

anastrophe noun anas·​tro·​phe ə-ˈna-strə-(ˌ)fē : inversion of the usual syntactical order of words for rhetorical effect

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anastrophe

Neo-Darwinism: a modern version of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, incorporating the findings of genetics.

High-level view of the 3 different types of heterogeneity (clinical, methodological, statistical). I used these definitions as the basis for some Anki cards

parturition<br /> the action of giving birth to young

<Y> potentially one of the first written "words"

Computer Assisted Language Learning : An approach to teach and learn language through the support of computers. (IGI Global)

According to Richards and Rogers, Task-Based Language Learning strategy focuses on communication through task completion. Students get engaged with a task they are truly interested in, and they aim to carry it out only using the target language and its taught elements.

On: https://sanako.com/introduction-to-task-based-language-teaching-and-learning-method

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

In archival science, a fonds is a group of documents that share the same origin and that have occurred naturally as an outgrowth of the daily workings of an agency, individual, or organization. An example of a fonds could be the writings of a poet that were never published or the records of an institution during a specific period.

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

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

Classical scholars met in 1931 to establish a set of convention and sigla (symbols, brackets, etc.) for indicating the conditions of texts, editorial corrections, and restorations in inscriptions, papyri, manuscripts and other writing contexts.

https://dice.camp/@brennenreece/109622279965144935

example of someone "processing" a book and doing so in the context of having read Ahrens

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

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

I came here after recalling a critique by Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma" regarding the disease model and it's negative impact on adequately helping people with trauma. van der Kolk's critique was similar to Marc Lewis' critique of the disease model as it applies to addiction from "The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease". This made me wonder what the term "disease" actually means and whether or not some general consensus existed within the medical community. This article suggests there is no such consensus.

This article is by Jackie Leach Scully who holds a "PhD in cellular pathology, University of Cambridge; BA (Hons) in biochemistry, University of Oxford; MA in psychoanalytic studies, Sheffield University".

Scully does several insightful things in this paper the following are the ones that were most salient to me upon the first read: - distinguishes "disease" from "disability" - contrasts the "social model" and "medical model" perspectives on "disability" - The "medical model" referred to here is probably what Lewis & van der Kolk are critiquing as the "disease model".<br /> - Are the "medical" and "disease" model different? - the social model seems to have arisen as a response to the inadequacy of the medical model

    - "The social model's fundamental criticism of the medical model is that it wrongly locates 'the problem' of disability in biological constraints, considering it only from the point of view of the individual and neglecting the social and systemic frameworks that contribute to it. The social model distinguishes between impairment (the biological substrate, such as impaired hearing) and the disabled experience. In this view the presence of impaired hearing is one thing, while the absence of subtitling on TV is quite another, and it is the refusal of society to make the necessary accommodations that is the real site of disability. A social model does not ignore biology, but contends that societal, economic and environmental factors are at least as important in producing disability."

• brings up a subtle point that there are two jumps "from gene to phenotype, and from phenotype to experience" and that some of the arguments mentioned "suggest that the 'harm' of the impairment is not straightforwardly related to phenotype. What ought to concern us about disease and disability is the disadvantage, pain or suffering involved, and in a sense the impairment is always a kind of surrogate marker for this experience."

There's some flawed logic here in that Ward Cunningham outlined his version of a wiki and others who created versions thereafter modified and potentially expanded on that original "definition". We now have a general consensus of a wiki, but it's not necessarily the same for everyone. Scheper doesn't leave any fungible room in the semantics of his argument here and thereby forces one into a practicing the "one true way", which doesn't exist as even Luhmann's own practice varied over time.

Harnessing the dictionary into fronting for his zettelkasten religion?

What really supports this distinction? The closest historical American English translation is probably "card index" from the early 1900s while the broader academic historical translation is "slip box".

Yet another new name for a sub-type of notes, here he uses reformulation notes as a shorthand for the old advice to rewrite ideas you find in your own words. This advice is often suggested to accomplish two things: - avoid plagiarism - restatement of ideas in your own words is related to the Feynman Technique and assists one in learning and ensuring they understand the concepts

Context-specific definition of "equity"

I'd always known this was a thing, but didn't have a word for it.

https://meso.tzyl.nl/2022/12/05/the-history-of-zettelkasten/

If generated, it almost perfect reflects the public consensus, but does a miserable job of reflecting deeper realities.

A pretty solid definition of IndieWeb here.

Tropes are shorthand storytelling methods that rely on a common storytelling grammar or pattern language to quickly relay information to the viewer or listener.

As portions of ideas begin to become clear and crystalize, they still maintain some creative ambiguity while the remaining portions aren't necessarily clearly defined. Creatively ambiguous ideas are better defined than generatively ambiguous ones.

Generative ambiguity is the process of giving names, potentially tentative, to a nebulous collection of nascent and unclear ideas in an effort to help make sense of them both to themselves as well as others.

https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2015/01/22/volcanoes-and-ambiguity/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis </span> in 📑 The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>11/18/2022 19:54:00</time>)</cite></small>

• What is a "mode of production"?
• What is a "social formation"?

"In the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production (German: Produktionsweise, "the way of producing") is a specific combination of the:

• Productive forces: these include human labour power and means of production (tools, machinery, factory buildings, infrastructure, technical knowledge, raw materials, plants, animals, exploitable land).
• Social and technical relations of production: these include the property, power and control relations (legal code) governing the means of production of society, cooperative work associations, relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations among the social classes, [JC -- in this case, "social classes" exist]

ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_of_production

The use of kafala shows a shift from a meaning of social responsibility into a meaning co-opted by capitalism and social contract.

Definition of personality

Dialectical notes are made at the level of syntopical reading and entail creating a conversation not only between the reader and the author, but create a conversation of questions and answers between and among many texts and the reader.

Conceptual notes are made during the analytical reading of a book and "give answers to questions about the truth and significance of the book."

Adler and Van Doren define structural note making as the sorts of questions one might ask at the level of inspectional reading including: - what kind of book is it? - what is it about? - what is the overall structure with respect to the argument the author intends to make?

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/848/zettelizers

A thread about what to call those who have a zettelkasten or those who practice the method.

Robert Green's definition of creativity sounds like it's related to diffuse thinking processes. read: https://billyoppenheimer.com/august-14-2022/

Often note taking, and reviewing over those notes is more explicit in form for creating new ideas.

Come back to explore these.

in relation to the character in the satire Penguin Island by Anatole France who dies by zettelkasten

Naturally a tapir is the nocturnal hoofed mammal with a stout body, sturdy limbs, and a short flexible proboscis, native to the forests of tropical America and Malaysia.

So the name Fulgence Tapir is essentially "a sparkling foraging pig".

https://dictionary.apa.org/elaboration

Elizabethans called pocketbooks or small notebooks "tablets."

ephebic • \ih-FEE-bik\ • adjective. : of, relating to, or characteristic of a youth of ancient Greece or a young man.

I did not know this word, and looked it up to discover it was the name of the last Aztec Emperor. He surrendered his Empire to Cortés.

Find this quote and context!

reference for this quote? date?

Walter Benjamin's fantastic re-definition of a book presaged the invention of the internet, though his instantiation was as a paper based machine.

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.

Here Mills seems to be defining (in 1952) an "intellectual workman" as an academic, but he doesn't go as broad as a more modern "knowledge worker" (2022) which includes those who broadly do thinking in industry as well as in academia. His older phrase also has a more gendered flavor to it that knowledge worker doesn't have now.

Surely by "files" he means his written notes and ideas which he has filed away?

Thus articles and books are agglomerations of ideas within notes (or perhaps one's retained memory, as best as that might be done) which are then broken off from them and released to a wider readership.

Open question:<br /> Why is the word "below" used with numbers like "150 percent below the poverty line" when in fact this number indicates near, but above, poverty based on my reading?

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

It can apparently apply to either income inequality or wealth inequality, so it may have slightly different meanings based on this underlying context.

Delve into this question of definition.

compare with income inequality: https://hypothes.is/a/_JLGuj3HEe2dJFdOJRcvaQ

A genome-wide association study (abbreviated GWAS) is a research approach used to identify genomic variants that are statistically associated with a risk for a disease or a particular trait. The method involves surveying the genomes of many people, looking for genomic variants that occur more frequently in those with a specific disease or trait compared to those without the disease or trait. Once such genomic variants are identified, they are typically used to search for nearby variants that contribute directly to the disease or trait.

source: https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Genome-Wide-Association-Studies

this is more like a medical definition... what about plants?

What specifically does she define "writing" to be? What exactly is she writing, and how much? What does her process look like?

One might also consider the idea of active reading and writing notes. I may not "write" daily in the way she means, but my note writing, is cumulative and beneficial in the ways she describes in her list. I might further posit that the amount of work/effort it takes me to do my writing is far more fruitful and productive than her writing.

When I say writing, I mean focused note taking (either excerpting, rephrasing, or original small ideas which can be stitched together later). I don't think this is her same definition.

I'm curious how her process of writing generates new ideas and creativity specifically?

One might analogize the idea of active reading with a pen in hand as a sort of Einsteinian space-time. Many view reading and writing as to separate and distinct practices. What if they're melded together the way Einstein reconceptualized the space time continuum? The writing advice provided by those who write about commonplace books, zettelkasten, and general note taking combines an active reading practice with a focused writing practice that moves one toward not only more output, but higher quality output without the deleterious effects seen in other methods.

!- chart : basic definitions of language - begins with animal world and extends into human

The Noguhchi Filing System is a method developed by Noguchi Yukio, a Japanese economist, that organizes one's projects using envelopes and sorts them based on the frequency upon which you work on them.