reply to u/scihuy at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1c2b2d6/note_taking_in_the_past/kzcg3qa/

I posed your question to my own card index:

Generally scientists haven't spent the time to talk about their methods the way those in the social sciences and humanities are apt to do. This being said, their methods are unsurprisingly all the same.

If you want to look up examples, you can delve into the nachlass (digitized or not) of most of the famous scientists and mathematicians out there to verify this. Ramon Llull certainly wrote, but broadly memorized all of his work; Newton had his wastebooks; Leibnitz used Thomas Harrison's Ark of Studies cabinet; Carl Linnaeus "invented" index cards for his work (search for the work of Staffan Müller-Wille and Isabelle Charmantier); Erasmus Darwin and Charles Darwin both used commonplace books; physicist Mario Bunge had a significant zettelkasten practice; Richard Feynman used notebooks; engineer Ross Ashby used a combination of notebooks which he indexed using a card index.

For historical reasons, most used a commonplace book method in which they indexed against keywords rather than Luhmann's variation, but broadly the results are the same either way.

Computer scientist Gerald Weinberg is one of the few I'm aware of within the sciences who's written a note taking manual, but again, his method is broadly the same as that described by other writers for centuries:

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

I identify as both a mathematician and an engineer, and I have a paper-based zettelkasten for these areas, primarily as I prefer writing out equations versus attempting to write everything out as LaTeX. I'm sure others here could add their experiences as well. I've previously written about zettelkasten from the framing of set theory, topology, dense sets, and have even touched on it with respect to the ideas of equivalence classes and category theory, though I haven't published much in depth here as most don't have the mathematical sophistication to appreciate the structures and analogies.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8120601076/

Edward Lane's Arabic English Lexicon sounds like it was compiled by means of card index. Worth looking into the scholarly method behind compiling it.

Researcher Michael Macdonald created a card index database of safaitic inscriptions which he and French archaeologist Laïla Nehmé eventually morphed into a digital database which included a collection of photographs of the extant texts.

Fascinating that within a section or prose about indexing within MiddleMarch (set in 1829 to 1832 and published in 1871-1872), George Eliot compares a character's distinguished appearance to that of John Locke!

Mr. Brooke asks for advice about arranging notes as he has tried pigeon holes but has the common issue of multiple storage and can't remember under which letter he's filed his particular note. Mr. Casaubon indicates that he uses pigeon-holes.

Dorothea Brooke mentions that she knows how to properly index papers so that they might be searched for and found later. She is likely aware of John Locke's indexing method from 1685 (or in English in 1706) and in the same scene compares Mr. Casaubon's appearance to Locke.

In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)

Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.

30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.

Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.

(13:39) Hands flipping through a card index with overlapping dialogue about prospects

https://archive.org/details/0800_Beware_of_Mental-itis_06_00_55_00

There are likely other metadata he may be missing here: - in particular dates/times/time periods which may be useful for the historians. - others? - general forms of useful metadata from a database perspective?

Further evidence to the claim at https://hypothes.is/a/iQwqzvC4Ee6PrNfzDQurog

as a rule, the law, order, and precision of an engineer's office.

There's an interesting dichotomy presented here about the tech forwardness of the automobile industry in 1908 versus the tech reticence of the carriage builders in regard to adopting card indexes with respect to their related (though different) industries.

Me (sarcastically):<br /> "Oh, those backwards carriage builders will get with the 'program' any day now..."

Variations of card index systems were published in booklet form by filing cabinet manufacturers as a means of selling not only their cabinets, but their systems for using them was common in the early 1900s. Examples of magazine advertisements in System Magazine back this up. It is also specifically highlighted in a review of J. Kaiser's book "The Card System at the Office" from Ironmonger (1909-10-03) which appreciates a more fully fleshed out version of a card index system in book form without mention of specific manufacturing firms.

When were bookmark-like "flags" introduced in America? (Certainly prior to 1908, based on this reference.)

anecdotal evidence from Ironmonger (1908) that this is the first card index book and prior versions are only of shorter booklet-like forms.

(Naturally, I don't trust this in the fullest sense.)

Kaiser, J. Systematic Indexing. The Card System Series 2. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1911. http://archive.org/details/systematicindexi00kaisuoft.

Annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:2acc267d4cbe455af640e4a707a84692

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See alternate version at: # or https://www.google.com/books/edition/Systematic_Indexing/iwFDAAAAIAAJ?hl=en Google-Books-ID: iwFDAAAAIAAJ

(Switched for better OCR)

Kaiser, J. Systematic Indexing. The Card System Series 2. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1911. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Systematic_Indexing/iwFDAAAAIAAJ?hl=en Google-Books-ID: iwFDAAAAIAAJ

Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:5e00705cb3b4484c6753104643a1e1a6

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Switching editions for better OCR. see: Internet Archive or

I love the verb "carding" here.

Kaiser, J. Card System at the Office. The Card System Series 1. London: Vacher and Sons, 1908. http://archive.org/details/cardsystematoffi00kaisrich.

Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:01c6d04ce30f5072bccfd0b7ea69d9d2

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The description here is almost similar to interdepartmental memos or corporate emails which are sent out now instead. This information flows out, but broadly isn't kept or filed in the same sorts of ways.

Key cabinets are used to control the information found in other card indexes as well as for private business information which should be restricted within a firm.

Business Ledger

This section looks at index cards for communication to/from clients and appropriate follow up with respect to sales management in a manufacturing firm. It broadly represents some examples of how one would do larger scale project management and follow up with index cards.

Broadly this sounds like an indexed corporate diary of sorts, but his use of future reminders (or ticklers in the footnote) certainly points to the use of index cards in a Memindex-like fashion.

Keep in mind that he's writing in Britain and the Memindex from 1903 was a US-based product, though similar ideas may have been used at the time across the pond.

examples of specific workflows within Kaiser's card system

https://www.ebay.com/itm/276403515343 <br /> archived copy

In 1984, Memindex was selling monthly planning calendars (pocket notebook size with spiral binding and a case) rather than their older small index card sized formats. Their calendar format looks eerily like what Day-Timer, a division of ACCO Brands, has been selling since at least the early 1990s.

This goes down to even the "cut here" triangles in the lower right corners of pages to help bookmark the current page.

Early 20th century mail merge using a card index!

This is similar to the idea of edge notched cards, but is done visually instead of cutting the cards. It's also seen in the Pile of Index Card method which uses a variety of marks on gridded cards.

Luhmann's topical index was a form of a central register as he concatenated words on cards rather than having a separate card for each word.

This is a restatement that a particular system should be customized to its users.

There is potential that a system could be applied universally, but it requires a very large amount of data and metadata to suit the needs of a greater number of people and use cases. It also requires a reasonable amount of work in practical use to make it operate as expected.

The Mundaneum was likely close on paper and Google comes close to this, but still isn't perfect.

quote via ¶76 and 92

Devising Card Systems

Many modern-day note takers and knowledge workers might take solace in the broad advice provided by J. Kaiser in 1908. In describing some of the broad categories of uses of card index filing systems for business use he says that each entity "has its individual character and individual requirements, and its individual character" (ie, everyone is different and has different needs), therefore everyone "must devise [their] system in accordance with [their] own requirements" and should "be the best judge as to what these requirements are." He continues on in the rest of the book to outline a variety of suggestions and methods which one might use or adopt, but he doesn't dictate specific methods and leaves those decisions up to the end user.

When devising their own systems, one certainly ought to heed this advice when looking at a variety of alternative methods like Forte's P.A.R.A., Milo's LYT, or even in mimicking Luhmann's idiosyncratic Zettelkasten set up. Are these methods best for your particular use cases? Are they simple enough for what you want to do, or are they overly structured and complicated? The key is to be able to classify and file things quickly so that they can be easily accessed in the future, all the rest becomes additional details and overhead to support on an ongoing basis.

(¶76)

In describing classification schemes for card index-based business uses, Julius Kaiser indicated in 1908 that "elaborate library classifications were either inapplicable or much too complicated and therefore unmanageable." This is in part because of the standardization of the Dewey Decimal System, which may have provided efficiencies for library systems, but proved too rigid for the idiosyncrasies of a variety of businesses. Instead he describes an alpha-numeric system in which numbers provide simple means of finding while the initial alphabetic codes assign specific office-related classes (correspondence, press cuttings, catalogs, etc.) to the indexed materials.

grin

This sort of failure is still seen today with people setting up note taking systems in a variety of digital environments.

Setting up and learning a note taking or card index system has a reasonably large up-front cost, but learning it well and being able to rely on it over long periods of time will eventually reap larger and cheaper long-term outcomes and benefits.

Unless changing systems creates dramatically larger improvements, the cost of change will surely swamp the benefits making the switch useless. This advice given by Kaiser is still as true today as it was in 1908, we tend not to think about the efficiency as much now as he may have then however and fall trap to shiny object syndrome.

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.

This quote is broadly recognized in economic settings as true, but few in the knowledge management space place emphasis or focus on designing both simple systems which are easy to master and use on a regular, ongoing basis. This allows the knowledge worker the ability to more quickly (almost blindly) handle their indexing and filing operations so that things are precisely where they need them when required for use.

Poor design will not only decrease the ease of use, but also discourage the user from both efficiently using and benefiting from their systems.

Even simple and efficient filing systems require familiarity and expertise for them to effect useful gains to their users, and prove their effectiveness over time. If a user can't get to a basic level of functionality in short time, they're likely to give up on it and never see the ultimate benefits.

Julius Kaiser contemporaneously posits that mass manufacture and maximizing efficiency (greater output for minimum input) are the primary drivers of card index system use in the early 20th century. These also improve both precision and accuracy in handling information which allow for better company or factory operation, which would have been rising concerns for businesses and manufacturing operations at the rise of scientific management during the time period.

Given this date, he's potentially either giving advice to consumers about what to buy or manufacturers about how to design and improve their systems.

He notes the general equivalency of cards and papers in vertical files.

One of the primary affordances that individual atomic cards have is the ability to more easily re-arrange and reuse them for various purposes in comparison with larger sheets with greater amounts of data on them.

Index card quality can be important for cards that are repeatedly used.

This admonition was more frequently attended to with respect to library card catalogs, but potentially less followed in personal use—Niklas Luhmann's self-cut paper slips which wore ragged over time come quickly to mind here.

I've seen some mixed cabinet in the early 1900s, but apparently by 1908, it was common practice to separate vertical filing cabinets and card cabinets.

¶5

The book is ostensibly in the form of a card index with numbers laid out in running order to create a book. The index is also done keyed to these paragraph numbers rather than by page as has traditionally been done.

As a result, one could cut up the book (or two copies to get both sides) and turn it back into a card index with very little work.

companion volumes treated the topics of "analysing literature" and the application of tabulated cards to practical business "at the Factory".

see: Kaiser, J. Systematic Indexing. The Card System Series 2. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1911. http://archive.org/details/systematicindexi00kaisuoft.

The nebulous, but colloquial "card system" was a common, but now lost moniker for the use of a card index in business settings in the early 1900s.

Is this documented in the Child Ballads?

Compare with The Turkish Lady- Forget-me-Not Songster c.1845<br /> http://bluegrassmessengers.com/the-turkish-lady--forget-me-not-songster-c1845.aspx

The Turkish Lady https://mainlynorfolk.info/peter.bellamy/songs/theturkishlady.html

https://www.composers.com/composers/allan-blank/variations-turkish-lady <audio controls="controls" controlslist="nodownload"> <source src="http://acacomposers.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/andrewkohn-allanblank-variationsonturkishlady_-_excerpt.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"> </audio>

Young Beichan<br /> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Beichan

Lord Bateman<br /> https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2012/05/english-folk-songs-lord-bateman.html

https://pipdecks.com/

Also targeting business executives (via YouTube) as a storytelling deck: https://pipdecks.com/pages/storyteller-tactics-card-deck

Described as "expert knowledge in your back pocket", and sold as a "toolkit" with "practical step-by-step recipes", and "templates."

They offer 7 decks of tactics for Brand, Team, Storytelling, Innovation, Productivity, Team, Workshop, Strategy.

https://www.sherlockholmespodcast.com/2018/02/episode-58-sherlock-holmess-index.html

card index in Russian is 'картотек'

https://qnnnp.medium.com/is-a-second-brain-superior-to-no-brainer-writing-c494dc86d429

Otlet's effort was more than a "database for all subjects", wasn't it? This seems a bit simplistic.

Burke, Colin B. Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss. History and Foundations of Information Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262027021/information-and-intrigue/

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Duncan, Dennis. Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age. 1st ed. London: Allen Lane, 2021. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324002543.

annotation link: urn:x-pdf:a4bd1877f0712efcc681d33d58777e55

https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3Aa4bd1877f0712efcc681d33d58777e55

Dennis Duncan completely misreads this image of Grosseteste and the Pelican which appears in the Lambeth Palace Library's MS 522 of The Castle of love. (for image see: https://hypothes.is/a/RzHLjsz8Ee6dZLOTV5h65Q)

Duncan identifies Grosseteste's pose with his hand raised and his index finger extended as "the classic gesture of the storyteller." In fact, the bishop is pointing directly up at the pelican which sits just on top of the frame of the illuminated scene. This pelican is elevated above and just beyond the scene of the image because it represents, as was common in the time period, the suffering of Christ.

Bestiaries of the age commonly depicted the "pelican in her piety" which was noted by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies (Book 12, 7:26) from the 7th century, a text which heavily influenced many of these bestiaries. It was also thought at the time that the insatiable and rapacious pelican ate lizards and crocodiles (or lived off of them); as these were associated with snakes and by way of the story of the Garden of Eden the devil, they were also further associated with Christ and driving sin out of the world.

Thus the image is more appropriately read in its original context as Grosseteste giving a sermon about the suffering of Christ who is represented by a pelican floating above the scene being depicted.

see: https://hypothes.is/a/QAc8us24Ee6d1kPcrhQPyw

that they had themselves been writing all those years.

Baker describes the library card catalog as a massive book made up of 3 x 5 inch pages describing all the other books. Sadly he laments, they never bothered to catalog this meta-book itself.

The wear of cards can be an important part of your history with the information you handle.

Luhmann’s slips show some of this sort of wear as well, though his show it to extreme as he used thinner paper than the standard index card so some of his slips have incredibly worn/ripped/torn tops more than any grime. Many of my own books show that grime layer on the fore-edge in sections which I’ve read and re-read.

One of my favorite examples of this sort of wear through use occurs in early manuscripts (usually only religious ones) where readers literally kissed off portions of illuminations when venerating the images in their books. Later illuminators included osculation targets to help prevent these problems. (Cross reference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370119878_Touching_Parchment_How_Medieval_Users_Rubbed_Handled_and_Kissed_Their_Manuscripts_Volume_1_Officials_and_Their_Books)

(syndication link: https://boffosocko.com/2024/02/04/55821315/#comment-430267)

https://www.knapeandvogt.com/

Manufacturer of index followers

https://www.amazon.com/Knape-Vogt-Card-Size-Follower-Anochrome/dp/B0006FKQJ4

https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/hardware/storage-and-organization/files/69118-index-followers

Listed as an "Index Follower". Looks to be the same model as https://www.wwhardware.com/catalog/product/view/_ignore_category/1/id/3588/s/kv-index-follower-and-track-kv047/

https://www.levenger.com/products/vintage-library-catalog-cards-set-of-50?variant=43444256243861

These don't have the pre-drilled holes, but at least are still offered, though at the price gouging cost of $14.50 for 50 (in 2024).

Cost per card: $0.29

https://www.levenger.com/products/card-catalog-box?variant=43007544066197

A bit on the small side, but has a built in pen holder:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1amt6ir/seeking_inspiration_for_a_university_course_on/

u/enabeh and u/Busy-Feeling-1413 interested in zettelkasten pedagogy

Presumably this dictionary also used a card index for collection? (check...)

see: https://hypothes.is/a/rYYCXsbDEe6fpR-_EMl5Fw

Oxford English Dictionary (1857 - )

The Grimmwelt Museum in Kassel, Germany is the home of some of the work of Grimm Brothers work on the Deutsches Wörterbuch which features a large wall of zettel or slips hanging from long nails.

The slips hanging on nails sounds similar to Thomas Harrison's 1740's wooden cabinet of hanging slips used for excerpts and isn't far off from the organizational structure used by the subsequent Oxford English Dictionary's pigeonhole system of organization for their slip collection.

see: https://hypothes.is/a/kVW3glq0EeyihQ834uN_Ig

Volunteer 'Readers' for the Oxford English Dictionary were encouraged to write down interesting headwords along with their appearances in-situ along with the associated bibliographical information. The recommended paper size was 4 x 6-inch pieces of paper which were commonly called 'slips'.

(Double check this against the historical requests from James Murray.)

Ogilvie, Sarah. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2023. https://amzn.to/3Un0sv9.

Read from 2023-12-04 to 2024-02-01

Annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:c95483c701c7fc677e89f2c44f98a30b

https://www.demco.com/demco-reg-permalife-catalog-cards

The old school Library of Congress card catalog cards with the red ruling.

https://findingaids.lib.umich.edu/catalog/umich-bhl-0183

https://pages.oup.com/ol/cus/1646173949115570121/submit-words-and-evidence-to-the-oed

The modern day digital version of an OED contribution slip includes database fields for the following:

• Submission type (new word or sense of a word; information about origin/etymology; other)
• the word or phrase itself
• the part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, other)
• pronunciation (recording, IPA, rhyming words, etc.)
• the definition or sense number as defined in the OED
• quotation evidence with full text, and bibliographical references/links)
• additional notes

Only the first two fields are mandatory.

re: open question about Luhmann's index at https://hypothes.is/a/NSo4ArxzEe6ElC-Cg7ex8g

Per personal communication with Bob Doto, the reference here about 4 references at most comes from:

Schmidt "serendipity":

"the file’s keyword index makes no claim to providing a complete list of all cards in the collection that refer to a specific term. Rather, Luhmann typically listed only one to four places where the term could be found in the file, the idea being that all other relevant entries in the collection could be quickly identified via the internal system of references described above."

Source for the claim of "at most four references"?

I could believe this on first blush, but has his archive done this work?

According to Schmidt, Luhmann's index typically had "only one to four places where [a] term could be found in the file" indicating among a total of 3,450 indexed topics just how sparse his index was for 90,000 cards.

Niklas Luhmann's ZKI had 1,250 entries in the index and ZKII had 3,200 entries.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/276296844684

quote from Martin <br /> https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/19435#Comment_19435 on 2024-01-28

I've sketched it out elsewhere but let's memorialize the broad strokes here because we're inspired at the moment... come back later and add in quotes from Luhmann and other sources (@Heyde1931).

Luhmann was balancing the differences between topically arranged commonplaces and the topical nature of the Dewey Decimal System (a standardized version across thousands of collections) and building neighborhoods of related ideas.

One of the issues with commonplace books, is planning them out in advance. How might you split up a notebook for long term use to create easy categories when you don't know how much room to give each in advance? (If you don't believe me, stop by r/commonplacebooks where you're likely to see this question pop up several times this year.) This issue is remedied when John Locke suggests keeping commonplaces in chronological order of their appearance and cross-indexing them.

This creates a new problem of a lot of indexing and increased searching over time as the commonplace book scales. Translating to index cards complicates things because they're unattached and can potentially move about, so they don't have the anchor effectuated by their being bound up in a notebook. But being on slips allows them to be more easily shuffled, rearranged, and even put into outlines, which are all fantastic affordances when looking for creativity or scaffolding things out into an article or book for creation.

As a result, numbering slips creates a solid anchor by which the cards can be placed and always returned for later finding and use. But how should we number them? Should it be with integers and done chronologically? (1, 2, 3, ..., n) This is nice, but makes a mish-mash of things and doesn't assist much in indexing or finding.

Why not go back to Dewey, which has been so popular? But not Dewey in the broadest sense of using numbers to tie ideas to concrete categories. An individual's notes are idiosyncratic and it would be increasingly rare for people to have the same note, much less need a standardized number for it (and if they were standardized, who does that work and how is it distributed so everyone could use it?) No, instead, let's just borrow the decimal structure of Dewey's system. One of the benefits of his decimal structure is that an infinity of new books can be placed on ever-expanding bookshelves without needing to restructure the numbering system. Just keep adding decimal places onto the end when necessary. This allows for immense density when necessary. But, importantly, it also provides some fantastic level of serendipity.

Let's say you go to learn about geometry, so you look up the topic in your trusty library card catalog. Do you really need to look at the hundreds of records returned? Probably not. You only need the the Dewey Decimal Number 516. Once you're at the shelves, you can browse through that section to see what's there and interesting in the space. You might also find things on the shelves above or below 516 and find the delights of topology and number theory or abstract algebra and real analysis. Subjects you might not necessarily have had in mind will suddenly present themselves for your consideration. Even if your initial interest may have been in Zhongmin Shen's Lectures on Finsler geometry (516.375), you might also profitably walk away with James E. Humphreys' Introduction to Lie Algebras and Representation Theory (512.55).

So what happens if we use these decimal numbers for our notes? First we will have the ability to file things between and amongst each other to infinity. By filing things closest to things which seem related to each other, we'll create neighborhoods of ideas which can easily grow over time. Related ideas will stay together while seemingly related ideas on first blush may slowly grow away from each other over time as even more closely related ideas move into the neighborhood between them. With time and careful work, you'll have not only a breadth of ideas, but a massive depth of them too.

The use of decimal numbering provides us with a few additional affordances:

1 (Neighborhoods of ideas) 1.1 combinatorial creativity Neighborhoods of ideas can help to fuel combinatorial creativity and forge new connections as well as insight over time. 1.2 writing One might take advantage of these growing neighborhoods to create new things. Perhaps you've been working for a while and you see you have a large number of cards in a particular area. You can, to some extent, put your hand into your box and grab a tranche of notes. By force of filing, these notes are going to be reasonably related, which means you should be able to use them to write a blog post, an article, a magazine piece, a chapter, or even an entire book (which may require a few fistfuls, as necessary.)

2 (Sparse indexing) We don't need to index each and every single topic or concept into our index. Because we've filed things nearby, if a new card about Finsler geometry relates to another and we've already indexed the first under that topic, then we don't need to index the second, because our future selves can easily rely on the fact that if we're interested in Finsler geometry in the future, we can look that up in the index, and go to that number where we're likely to see other cards related to the topic as well as additional serendipitous ideas related to them in that same neighborhood.

You may have heard that as Luhmann progressed on his decades long project, broadly on society and within the area of sociology, he managed to amass 90,000 index cards. How many do you suppose he indexed under the topic of sociology? Certainly he had 10s of thousands relating to his favorite subject, no? Of course he did, but what would happen over time as a collection grows? Having 20,000 indexed entries about sociology doesn't scale well for your search needs. Even 10 indexed entries may be a bit overwhelming as once you find a top level card, hundreds to thousands around it are going to be related. 10 x 100 = 1,000 cards to flip through. So if you're indexing, be conservative. In the roughly 45 years of creating 90,000 slips, Luhmann only indexed two cards with the topic of "sociology". If you look through his index, you'll find that most of his topical entries only have pointers to one or two cards, which provide an entryway into those topics which are backed up with dozens to hundreds of cards on related topics. In rarer, instances you might find three or four, but it's incredibly rare to find more than that.

Over time, one will find that, for the topics one is most interested in, the number of ideas and cards will grown without bound. Here it makes sense to use more and more specific topics (tags, categories, taxonomies) all of which are each also sparsely indexed. Ultimately one finds that in the limit, the categories get so fractionalized that the closest category one idea has with another is the fact that they're juxtaposed closely by number. The of the decimal expansion might say something about the depth or breadth of the relationship between ideas.

Something else arises here. At first one may have the tendency to associate their numbers with topical categories. This is only natural as it's a function at which humans all excel. But are those numbers really categories after a few weeks? Probably not. Treat them only as address numbers or GPS coordinates to be able to find your way. Your sociology section may quickly find itself with invasive species of ideas from anthropology and archaeology as well as history. If you treat all your ideas only at the topical level, they'll be miles away from where you need them to be as the smallest level atomic ideas collide with each other to generate new ideas for you. Naturally you can place them further away if you wish and attempt to bridge the distance with links to numbers in other locations, but I suspect you'll find this becomes pretty tedious over time and antithetical when it comes time to pull out a handful and write something. It's fantastically easier to pull out a several dozen and begin than it is to go through and need to pull out linked cards in a onesy-twosies manner or double check with your index to make sure you've gotten the most interesting bits. This becomes even more important as your collection scales.

https://cultpens.com/products/exacompta-white-5-x-3-125-x-75-record-cards-pack-of-100

These are surprisingly inexpensive here at CultPens.com! They don't seem to have the larger 100x150s though.

Some of King's note cards later figured in his speeches including his "I Have a Dream" speech.

for - resource - climate change performance index - how well a city is adapted to the climate crisis

https://web.archive.org/web/20180227134526/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/12/22/writing-format-of-fieldnote/

Hawk Sugano uses a wastebook-like process to take contemporaneous notes in a pocket notebook and later transfers the ideas to index cards for follow up and filing.

Hawk Sugano was introduced to index cards circa 2001 by means of Watanabe Shoichi's book “知的生活の方法” (A Method of Intellectual Life".

https://web.archive.org/web/20170530033313/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/08/20/me-and-indexcard/

https://web.archive.org/web/20180227130424/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/12/25/start-indexcard-provider-service/

Hawk Sugano apparently offered the Pile of Index Cards as a physical product offering by combining Correct's index card dock and Kokuyo's fieldnotes in late December 2006.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170321222822/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/cluster/

Hawk Sugano's archived Pile of Index Cards website for exploration.

I could totally see this UI with a video generated version of Niklas Luhmann answering questions using the training set of notes in his online zettelkasten at https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/tutorial

syndication link: https://bavatuesdays.com/ai106-long-live-the-new-flesh/comment-page-1/#comment-388943

https://oblivion.university/

ᔥ[[Jim Groom]] in AI106: Long Live the New Flesh

https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/next-action.net

Archive pages for Aki Oda's website next-action.net

https://flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/275215540/

Fascinating commentary here

https://www.flickr.com/photos/aki_oda/albums/72157606070587225/

Another writer in Japan using the Pile of Index Cards method with visualizations in Flickr.

read [[Edward Vielmetti]] in Index Cards, Anne Lamott, from Bird By Bird

https://communicationnation.blogspot.com/2009/09/designing-narrative-with-index-cards.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftWord/comments/psrqdc/can_someone_send_me_a_free_microsoft_word/

Überblicksartikel über klimapolitische Fort- und Rückschritte 2023, besonders zu Großbritannien, Schweden, den Niederlanden und China. Ausführlich wird auf Maßnahmen der britischen und schwedischen Regierung eingegangen, die die bisherige konsequente Klimapolitik deutlich verwässern. https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000188940/war-2023-ein-jahr-der-klimapolitischen-rueckschritte

each sub-portion has its own topology. The index is decentralized in nature, while the bibliographical section/notes are all somewhat centralized in form.

I imagine this diversity of structure is what made Luhmann's slipbox so potent. In an ecosystem, neither an arboreal root system nor a mycorrhizal network are enough to stage nutrient flow; they must intertwine with each other.—oxytonic on 2024-01-08

Luhmann's system wasn't very unique (really only in his filing system) compared with the thousands of others in use at the time or for centuries prior. The more interesting space of intertwining is between the ideas in the box and those held in memory and worked on in coordination with the brain. Too many get wrapped up in his physically visible box and forget the work done by the by the "invisible" brain.

https://www.aslobcomesclean.com/about-me/

Wowzers!

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernkartei

X17-Mind-Papers - die Wiederentdeckung der Karteikarte<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxZMia35usc

Mind Papers has a variety of small leather covers (folders) with binder clips for storing one's note cards. They range from smaller than A7 up to A5 sizes.

They're broadly reminiscent of smaller versions of the Everbook, though I suspect these came first given the 2014 post date.

https://betterhumans.pub/i-built-my-own-personal-productivity-system-around-a-3-x-5-index-card-147d7a8d83de

Melange of GTD, card index, and gamification....

Update 2024-01-04: I knew I had heard/seen this system before, but not delved into it deeply. I hadn't seen anyone either using it or refer to it by name in the wild until yesterday. All the prior mentions were people sharing the URLs as a thing rather than as something they used.

https://thetodaysystem.com/

The Today System:

A simple, yet scalable personal productivity system, centered around a single 3 x 5″ index card.

used by u/runslack

FireKing File Cabinet, 1-Hour Fire Protection, 6-Drawer, Small Document Size, 31" Deep<br /> https://www.filing.com/FireKing-Card-Check-Note-Cabinet-6-Drawer-p/6-2552-c.htm

A modern index card catalog filing solution with locks and fireproofing offered by FireKing for $6,218.00 with shipment in 2-4 weeks. 6 Drawers with three sections each. Weighs 860 lbs.

at 0.0072" per average card, with filing space of 25 15/16" per section with 18 sections, this should hold 64,843 index cards.

https://shop.canvascorpbrands.com/products/gypsy-momets-card-today

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/18omqgt/a_no_coding_required_alternative_to_printing_your/

Instructions and a method for printing out Obsidian notes onto index cards.

Hawk considered PoIC a "software" and licensed it as such. :)

Avery Templates for 4 x 6" products:

• Avery 8386 postcards 2 per sheet (template compatibility 5889)
• Avery 5292 Shipping Labels 1 per Sheet White (template compatibility 5454, 5614)
• Avery 5454 Print or Write Multi-Use Labels 6" x 4" 1 per Sheet White (template compatibility 5292, 5614)
• Avery 5389 Postcards 4" x 6" 2 per Sheet White (template compatibility 15389)

White highlights the ability to easily shuffle and reshuffle cards in a variety of orders (alphabetical, by source type) and this is one of the benefits of using note cards. (p51)

Ron White recommends taking notes on 3 x 5 inch index cards. One should place the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress catalog number in the upper left of their bibliography card and in the upper right corner one should number their cards consecutively (1, 2, 3, etc.). White indicates the importance of these numbers is primarily that they are unique, presumably so one can refer to them or reorder them if they are put out of order. (p46-7)

https://web.archive.org/web/20170321132112/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/

Hawk Sugano's blog Pile of Index Cards

https://web.archive.org/web/20060422014759/http://that4.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/stationery/1021438965/l50

https://web.archive.org/web/20060422014759/http://that4.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/stationery/1021438965/l50

the 2ch site that inspired Hawk Sugano's Pile of Index Cards method

ᔥ[[hawkexpress]] in How to link between Cards

Hawk Sugano's Pile of Index Cards method is laid out visually in his Flickr account using photos of several of his cards along with descriptions of what each is for and how they work.

These include: 0. PoIC Format/Template 1. Record Card 2. Discovery Card 3. GTD Card 4. Cite Card 5. How to link between cards

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Manfred Kuehn</span> in Taking note: Luhmann's Zettelkasten (<time class='dt-published'>08/06/2021 00:16:23</time>)</cite></small>

Note the use of the edge highlighted taxonomy system used on these cards:

Similar to the so called high five indexing system I ran across recently.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/189972895/in/album-72157594200490122/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/192480328/in/album-72157594200490122/

The PoIC system allows linking of cards using date/timestamps for indexing/finding. Interestingly they were all kept in chronological order rather than in idea order as in Luhmann's zettelkasten.

What are the pros/cons of this?<br /> - more searching and hunting through cards certainly is a drawback for lack of "threaded" ideas - others...

hawkexpress apparently learned this technique on the 2-channel.

(Edited 2022-10-13, 2023-12-27)

https://web.archive.org/web/20170321132253/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/08/23/link-between-cards/

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

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

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

Introduction to the Pile of Index Cards method.

These are more similar to zettelkasten and commonplacing traditions. They comprise the majority of the system.

• 1、牛腱子1.4kg泡水三个小时，加入酱油270g放入冰箱隔夜腌渍； 2拿出腌渍了一晚的牛腱子，和酱油一起倒入锅中，加入凉水没过牛腱子，开火煮，撇血沫； 3、加入花椒、八角、桂皮、草果、香叶、陈皮、山楂、干辣椒和; 4、加入甜面酱160g，洋葱60g，生姜42g，豆腐乳25g，水开后尝味道，根据自己口味添加盐； 5、小火炖煮两个小时十五分钟，用筷子插入牛腱子，能穿过就可以了，关火然后把牛腱子直接放在锅子里等汤汁凉了之后再盛出来，放入冰箱； 6冰箱里取出切片，开吃！ Ps:炖肉汤不要倒掉，可以拿来做牛肉米线或者继续卤制其他食物！​

• 盖碗1：50 杯泡1：100，先热被人，泡开叶，倒满。​

ujjj

http://www.schach-udo.de/dab/zwei.htm

MESON is comprised in part of card index collections of chess problems and puzzles.

http://www.bstephen.me.uk/meson/meson.pl?opt=top MESON Chess Problem Database

Compiled using a variety of sources including card indexes.

found via

As for the Pirnie collection, not counted it, but I am slowly going through it for my online #ChessProblem database: https://t.co/eTDrPnX09b . Also going through several boxes of the White-Hume Collection which I have.

— Brian Stephenson (@bstephen2) August 5, 2020

https://twitter.com/bstephen2/status/1290562798616031235

It Took Decades To Create This Chess Puzzle Database (30 Thousand), 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9craX0M_2A.

A chess School named after Genrikh Kasparyan (alternately Henrik Kasparian) houses his card index of chess puzzles with over 30,000 cards.

The cards are stored in stacked wooden trays in a two door cabinet with 4 shelves.

There are at least 23 small wooden trays of cards pictured in the video, though there are possibly many more. (Possibly as many as about 35 based on the layout of the cabinet and those easily visible.)

Kasparyan's son Sergei donated the card index to the chess school.

Each index card in the collection, filed in portrait orientation, begins with the name of the puzzle composer, lists its first publication, has a chess board diagram with the pieces arranges, and beneath that the solution of the puzzle. The cards are arranged alphabetically by the name of the puzzle composer.

The individual puzzle diagrams appear to have been done with a stamp of the board done in light blue ink with darker blue (or purple?) and red inked stamped pieces arranged on top of it.

ᔥu/ManuelRodriguez331 in r/Zettelkasten - Chess players are memorizing games with index cards

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxsCVEBM510<br /> How To Use An Antinet Zettelkasten For Personal Growth by Haile Rene on 2023-12-21<br /> featured on Scott P. Scheper (channel)

Video intro for Soul Cards book...

ugh...