Hartlib Papers 30/4/47A, Ephemerides 1640, Part 2.

In extolling the Ark of Studies created by Thomas Harrison, Samuel Hartlib indicated that the combinations of information and the potential links between them created the "argumentative part" of the system. In some sense this seems to be analogous to the the processing power of an information system if not specifically creating its consciousness.

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

Interesting to see a mix of numbers and letters in the indexing system here from 1908.

Numbers for companies and dates and letters as tags for a variety of business purposes as well as for month indicators.

Richard @ Writing Slowly. “Even the Index Is Just Another Note.” Personal website. Writing Slowly (blog), January 26, 2024. https://writingslowly.com/2024/01/26/even-the-index.html.

<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/

reply to u/whiteo3 at https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/18aggj9/best_organizationindex_system/

One of the most common methods may be using John Locke's indexing system. https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685/ (And, yes, it's THAT John Locke...)

You could have a single notebook you use as your index which indexes the rest. Not sure how you number pages (or not), but you could keep a running page number from one notebook to the next to make differentiating notebooks a bit easier.

W. Ross Ashby was known to keep running page numbers across notebooks like this, however, instead of a notebook-based index, he actually used index cards to index them (the way libraries used to index books by subject, but instead of indexing books, he was obviously indexing quotes, ideas, and notes). So you could use a card with your index word on it with page numbers (and potentially brief notes). Then just file the category headings alphabetically to find them later. His collection has been digitized, so you can view it online to see what he was doing: http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index.html

If you want to do hybrid paper/digital you could look at https://www.indxd.ink/, a digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional). It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears.

I've used Obsidian in combination with Hypothes.is and documented the way I created a subject index out of it: https://boffosocko.com/2022/05/20/creating-a-commonplace-book-or-zettelkasten-index-from-hypothes-is-tags/

I've also used WordPress as a commonplace of sorts and documented what I did to make an index for that: https://boffosocko.com/2021/09/04/an-index-for-my-digital-commonplace-book/

Searching the entire sub may also unearth other options to get your creative indexing juices flowing: https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/search/?q=index&restrict_sr=1

Good luck!

Esta expresión de código permite la creación de un índice con todos los documentos de hedgeDocs que hemos creado a lo largo del semestre para cada sesión. Dentro de las etiquetas cuadradas, se encuentra la palabra HedgeDoc en singular, porque esta indicando que cree ese índice para cada uno de esos documentos o sesiones creadas

Esta expresión de código permite la creación de un índice con todos los documentos de hedgeDocs que hemos creado a lo largo del semestre para cada sesión. Dentro de las etiquetas cuadradas, se encuentra la palabra HedgeDoc en singular, porque esta indicando que cree ese índice para cada uno de esos documentos o sesiones creadas.

buscadores_datos,action https://twitter.com/TheLensOrg,action,patentes

IndexaPubMed

reply to IvanCyb at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1587onp/comment/jt8zbu4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 Asking broadly about indexing methods in zettelkasten

When you begin you'll find yourself creating lots of index entries to start, in part because you have none, but you'll find with time that you need to do less and less because index entries already exist for most of what you would add. More importantly most of the entries you might consider duplicating are likely to be very near cards that already have those index entries.

As an example if you have twenty cards on cultural anthropology, the first one will be indexed with "cultural anthropology" to give you a pointer of where to start. Then when you need to add a new card to that section, you'll look up "cultural anthropology" and skim through what you've got to find the closest related card and place it. You likely won't need to create a new index entry for it at all.

But for argument's sake, let's say you intend to do some work at the intersection of "cultural anthropology" and "writing" and this card is also about "writing". Then you might want to add an index entry for "writing" from which you'll branch off in the future. This will tend to keep your index very sparse. As an example you can look at Niklas Luhmann's digitized collection to notice that he spent his career in the area of "sociology" but there are only just a few pointers from his index into his collection under that keyword. If he had tagged every single card related to "sociology" as "sociology" in his index, the index entry for it would have been wholly unusable in just a few months. Broadly speaking his entire zettelkasten is about sociology, so you need to delve a few layers in and see which subtopics, sub-subtopics, sub-sub-subtopics, etc. exist. As you go deeper into specific topics you'll notice that you branch down and out into more specific subareas as you begin to cover all the bases within that topic. If you like, for fun, you can see this happening in my digital zettelkasten on the topic of "zettelkasten" at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22zettelkasten%22. The tool only shows the top 50 tags for that subject in the side bar, but you can slowly dig down into subtopics to see what they look like and a bit of how they begin to overlap.

Incidentally, this is one of the problems with those who tag everything with top level topic headings in digital contexts—you do a search for something important and find so much that it becomes a useless task to try to sift through it all. As a result, users need better tools to give them the ability to do more fine-grained searching, filtering, and methods of discovery.

reply to u/posh-and-repressed at https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/15218d5/overloaded_with_notes/

Overwhelm of notes always reminds me of this note taking story from 1908: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/24/death-by-zettelkasten/ If you've not sorted them, tagged/categorized them or other, then search is really your only recourse. One of the benefits of Luhmann's particular structure is that it nudged him to read and review through older cards as he worked and filed new ones. Those with commonplace books would have occasionally picked up their notebooks and paged through them from time to time. Digital methods like Obsidian don't always do a good job of allowing or even forcing this review work on the user, so you may want to look at synthetic means like one of the random note plugins. Otherwise don't worry too much. Fix your tagging/categorizing/indexing now so that things slowly improve in the future. (I'm sitting on a pile of over 50K notes without the worry of overwhelm, primarily as I've managed to figure out how to rely on my index and search.)

via Andy

Andy indicates that this review functionality isn't specific to zettelkasten, but it still sits in the framework of note taking. Given this, are there really "other" ways available?

This section is almost exactly the same as Umberto Eco's description of a slip box practice:

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them. -- Umberto Eco. Foucault's Pendulum

See: https://hypothes.is/a/jqug2tNlEeyg2JfEczmepw

Interestingly, these structures map reasonably well onto Paul Baran's work from 1964:

The subject heading based filing system looks and functions a lot like a centralized system where the center (on a per topic basis) is the subject heading or topical category and the notes related to that section are filed within it. Luhmann's zettelkasten has the feel of a mixture of the decentralized and distributed graphs, but each sub-portion has its own topology. The index is decentralized in nature, while the bibliographical section/notes are all somewhat centralized in form.

Cross reference:<br /> Baran, Paul. “On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks.” Research Memoranda. Santa Monica, California: RAND Corporation, August 1964. https://doi.org/10.7249/RM3420.

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.

u/zleonska in discussing their paper notebook commonplace practice reports that finding their material within multiple notebooks isn't difficult but that, like W. Ross Ashby, they use index cards to index their commonplaces.

This is a major drawback to this method and the affordance of sparse indexing using Luhmann's method.

This research site has a digitized copy of Jonathan Edwards' commonplace book (aka Miscellanies): http://edwards.yale.edu/research/misc-index

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.

As humans we're good at separating things based on categories. The Dewey Decimal System systematically separates mathematics and history into disparate locations, but your zettelkasten shouldn't force this by overthinking categories. Perhaps the overlap of math and history is exactly the interdisciplinary topic you're working toward? If this is the case, just put cards into the slip box closest to their nearest related intellectual neighbor—and by this I mean nearest related to you, not to Melvil Dewey or anyone else. Over time, through growth and branching, ideas will fill in the interstitial spaces and neighboring ideas will slowly percolate and intermix. Your interests will slowly emerge into various bunches of cards in your box. Things you may have thought were important can separate away and end up on sparse branches while other areas flourish.

If you make the (false) choice to separate math and history into different "sections" it will be much harder for them to grow and intertwine in an organic and truly disciplinary way. Universities have done this sort of separation for hundreds of years and as a result, their engineering faculty can be buildings or even entire campuses away from their medical faculty who now want to work together in new interdisciplinary ways. This creates a physical barrier to more efficient and productive innovation and creativity. It's your zettelkasten, so put those ideas right next to each other from the start so they can do the work of serendipity and surprise for you. Do not artificially separate your favorite ideas. Let them mix and mingle and see what comes out of them.

If you feel the need to categorize and separate them in such a surgical fashion, then let your index be the place where this happens. This is what indices are for! Put the locations into the index to create the semantic separation. Math related material gets indexed under "M" and history under "H". Now those ideas can be mixed up in your box, but they're still findable. DO NOT USE OR CONSIDER YOUR NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!! Don't make the fatal mistake of thinking this. The numbers are just that, numbers. They are there solely for you to be able to easily find the geographic location of individual cards quickly or perhaps recreate an order if you remove and mix a bunch for fun or (heaven forfend) accidentally tip your box out onto the floor. Each part has of the system has its job: the numbers allow you to find things where you expect them to be and the index does the work of tracking and separating topics if you need that.

The broader zettelkasten, tools for thought, and creativity community does a terrible job of explaining the "why" portion of what is going on here with respect to Luhmann's set up. Your zettelkasten is a crucible of ideas placed in juxtaposition with each other. Traversing through them and allowing them to collide in interesting and random ways is part of what will create a pre-programmed serendipity, surprise, and combinatorial creativity for your ideas. They help you to become more fruitful, inventive, and creative.

Broadly the same thing is happening with respect to the structure of commonplace books. There one needs to do more work of randomly reading through and revisiting portions to cause the work or serendipity and admixture, but the end results are roughly the same. With the zettelkasten, it's a bit easier for your favorite ideas to accumulate into one place (or neighborhood) for easier growth because you can move them around and juxtapose them as you add them rather than traversing from page 57 in one notebook to page 532 in another.

If you use your numbers as topical or category headings you'll artificially create dreadful neighborhoods for your ideas to live in. You want a diversity of ideas mixing together to create new ideas. To get a sense of this visually, play the game Parable of the Polygons in which one categorizes and separates (or doesn't) triangles and squares. The game created by Vi Hart and Nicky Case based on the research of Thomas Schelling provides a solid example of the sort of statistical mechanics going on with ideas in your zettelkasten when they're categorized rigidly. If you rigidly categorize ideas and separate them, you'll drastically minimize the chance of creating the sort of useful serendipity of intermixed and innovative ideas.

It's much harder to know what happens when you mix anthropology with complexity theory if they're in separate parts of your mental library, but if those are the things that get you going, then definitely put them right next to each other in your slip box. See what happens. If they're interesting and useful, they've got explicit numerical locators and are cross referenced in your index, so they're unlikely to get lost. Be experimental occasionally. Don't put that card on Henry David Thoreau in the section on writers, nature, or Concord, Massachusetts if those aren't interesting to you. Besides everyone has already done that. Instead put him next to your work on innovation and pencils because it's much easier to become a writer, philosopher, and intellectual when your family's successful pencil manufacturing business can pay for you to attend Harvard and your house is always full of writing instruments from a young age. Now you've got something interesting and creative. (And if you must, you can always link the card numerically to the other transcendentalists across the way.)

In case they didn't hear it in the back, I'll shout it again: ACTIVELY WORK AGAINST YOUR NATURAL URGE TO USE YOUR ZETTELKASTEN NUMBERS AS TOPICAL HEADINGS!!!

S.D. Goitein's index cards have been imaged and transcribed and added to the Princeton Geniza Lab as of May 2018. Digital search and an index are also available.

Search indicates the word "later" appears in this book 123 times, about half of them (57 by a quick count) are in contexts of the author saying he'll explain something later in the book. This is an annoying habit and would be better replaced with links to the exact pages where the material occurs.

Alternately/in addition to, an index could be immensely helpful here.

How does a book which speaks so heavily of indices and their value not have an index?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9QOHaAqhXc

https://www.indxd.ink/

A digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional).

It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears.

This could potentially be used by those who have analog zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>sgtstretch </span> in @Gaby @pimoore so a good friend of mine makes [INDXD](https://www.indxd.ink/) which is for indexing analog notebooks and being able to find things. I don't personally use it, but I know @patrickrhone has written about it before. (<time class='dt-published'>10/27/2022 17:59:32</time>)</cite></small>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hill_(historian)

Christopher Hill's practice of creating indices of topics of interest to him in the end papers of his books is similar to that of Mortimer J. Adler who attested this practice as well.

Hello u/sscheper,

Let me start by thanking you for introducing me to Zettelkasten. I have been writing notes for a week now and it's great that I'm able to retain more info and relate pieces of knowledge better through this method.

I recently came to notice that there is redundancy in my index entries.

I have two entries for Number Line. I have two branches in my Math category that deals with arithmetic, and so far I have "Addition" and "Subtraction". In those two branches I talk about visualizing ways of doing that, and both of those make use of and underline the term Number Line. So now the two entries in my index are "Number Line (Under Addition)" and "Number Line (Under Subtraction)". In those notes I elaborate how exactly each operation is done on a number line and the insights that can be derived from it. If this continues, I will have Number Line entries for "Multiplication" and "Division". I will also have to point to these entries if I want to link a main note for "Number Line".

Is this alright? Am I underlining appropriately? When do I not underline keyterms? I know that I do these to increase my chances of relating to those notes when I get to reach the concept of Number Lines as I go through the index but I feel like I'm overdoing it, and it's probably bloating it.

I get "Communication (under Info. Theory): '4212/1'" in the beginning because that is one aspect of Communication itself. But for something like the number line, it's very closely associated with arithmetic operations, and maybe I need to rethink how I populate my index.

Presuming, since you're here, that you're creating a more Luhmann-esque inspired zettelkasten as opposed to the commonplace book (and usually more heavily indexed) inspired version, here are some things to think about:<br /> - Aren't your various versions of number line card behind each other or at least very near each other within your system to begin with? (And if not, why not?) If they are, then you can get away with indexing only one and know that the others will automatically be nearby in the tree. <br /> - Rather than indexing each, why not cross-index the cards themselves (if they happen to be far away from each other) so that the link to Number Line (Subtraction) appears on Number Line (Addition) and vice-versa? As long as you can find one, you'll be able to find them all, if necessary.

If you look at Luhmann's online example index, you'll see that each index term only has one or two cross references, in part because future/new ideas close to the first one will naturally be installed close to the first instance. You won't find thousands of index entries in his system for things like "sociology" or "systems theory" because there would be so many that the index term would be useless. Instead, over time, he built huge blocks of cards on these topics and was thus able to focus more on the narrow/niche topics, which is usually where you're going to be doing most of your direct (and interesting) work.

Your case sounds, and I see it with many, is that your thinking process is going from the bottom up, but that you're attempting to wedge it into a top down process and create an artificial hierarchy based on it. Resist this urge. Approaching things after-the-fact, we might place information theory as a sub-category of mathematics with overlaps in physics, engineering, computer science, and even the humanities in areas like sociology, psychology, and anthropology, but where you put your work on it may depend on your approach. If you're a physicist, you'll center it within your physics work and then branch out from there. You'd then have some of the psychology related parts of information theory and communications branching off of your physics work, but who cares if it's there and not in a dramatically separate section with the top level labeled humanities? It's all interdisciplinary anyway, so don't worry and place things closest in your system to where you think they fit for you and your work. If you had five different people studying information theory who were respectively a physicist, a mathematician, a computer scientist, an engineer, and an anthropologist, they could ostensibly have all the same material on their cards, but the branching structures and locations of them all would be dramatically different and unique, if nothing else based on the time ordered way in which they came across all the distinct pieces. This is fine. You're building this for yourself, not for a mass public that will be using the Dewey Decimal System to track it all down—researchers and librarians can do that on behalf of your estate. (Of course, if you're a musician, it bears noting that you'd be totally fine building your information theory section within the area of "bands" as a subsection on "The Bandwagon". 😁)

If you overthink things and attempt to keep them too separate in their own prefigured categorical bins, you might, for example, have "chocolate" filed historically under the Olmec and might have "peanut butter" filed with Marcellus Gilmore Edson under chemistry or pharmacy. If you're a professional pastry chef this could be devastating as it will be much harder for the true "foodie" in your zettelkasten to creatively and more serendipitously link the two together to make peanut butter cups, something which may have otherwise fallen out much more quickly and easily if you'd taken a multi-disciplinary (bottom up) and certainly more natural approach to begin with. (Apologies for the length and potential overreach on your context here, but my two line response expanded because of other lines of thought I've been working on, and it was just easier for me to continue on writing while I had the "muse". Rather than edit it back down, I'll leave it as it may be of potential use to others coming with no context at all. In other words, consider most of this response a selfish one for me and my own slip box than as responsive to the OP.)

Deutsch's zettelkasten seems to have been done in index style using headwords as was common in the older commonplace tradition.

Cattell, J. McKeen. “Methods for a Card Index.” Science 10, no. 247 (1899): 419–20.

Columbia professor of psychology calls for the creation of a card index of references to reviews and abstracts for areas of research. Columbia was apparently doing this in 1899 for the psychology department.

What happened to this effort? How similar was it to the system of advertising cards for books in Germany in the early 1930s described by Heyde?

Goutor doesn't specifically cover the process, but ostensibly after one has categorized content notes, they are filed together in one's box under that heading. (p34) As a result, there is no specific indexing or cross-indexing of cards or ideas which might be filed under multiple headings. In fact, he doesn't approach the idea of filing under multiple headings at all, while authors like Heyde (1931) obsess over it. Goutor's method also presumes that the creation of some of the subject headings is to be done in the planning stages of the project, though in practice some may arise as one works. This process is more similar to that seen in Robert Greene's commonplacing method using index cards.

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?

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.

Heyde indicates how "valuable notes and chains of thought are" but also points out "how uncontrollable and irretrievable" they are.

This statement is strong evidence along with others in this chapter which may have inspired Niklas Luhmann to invent his iteration of the zettelkasten method of excerpting and making notes.

(link to: Clemens /Heyde and Luhmann timeline: https://hypothes.is/a/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA)

Presumably he may have either heard or seen others talking about or using these general methods either during his undergraduate or law school experiences. Even with some scant experience, this line may have struck him significantly as an organization barrier of earlier methods.

Why have notes strewn about in a box or notebook as Heyde says? Why spend the time indexing everything and then needing to search for it later? Why not take the time to actively place new ideas into one's box as close as possibly to ideas they directly relate to?

But how do we manage this in a findable way? Since we can't index ideas based on tabs in a notebook or even notebook page numbers, we need to have some sort of handle on where ideas are in slips within our box. The development of European card catalog systems had started in the late 1700s, and further refinements of Melvil Dewey as well as standardization had come about by the early to mid 1900s. One could have used the Dewey Decimal System to index their notes using smaller decimals to infinitely intersperse cards on a growing basis.

But Niklas Luhmann had gone to law school and spent time in civil administration. He would have been aware of aktenzeichen file numbers used in German law/court settings and public administration. He seems to have used a simplified version of this sort of filing system as the base of his numbering system. And why not? He would have likely been intimately familiar with its use and application, so why not adopt it or a simplified version of it for his use? Because it's extensible in a a branching tree fashion, one can add an infinite number of cards or files into the midst of a preexisting collection. And isn't this just the function aktenzeichen file numbers served within the German court system? Incidentally these file numbers began use around 1932, but were likely heavily influenced by the Austrian conscription numbers and house numbers of the late 1770s which also influenced library card cataloging numbers, so the whole system comes right back around. (Ref Krajewski here).

(Cross reference/ see: https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA

Other pieces he may have been attempting to get around include the excessive work of additional copying involved in this piece as well as a lot of the additional work of indexing.

One will note that Luhmann's index was much more sparse than without his methods. Often in books, a reader will find a reference or two in an index and then go right to the spot they need and read around it. Luhmann did exactly this in his sequence of cards. An index entry or two would send him to the general local and sifting through a handful of cards would place him in the correct vicinity. This results in a slight increase in time for some searches, but it pays off in massive savings of time of not needing to cross index everything onto cards as one goes, and it also dramatically increases the probability that one will serendipitously review over related cards and potentially generate new insights and links for new ideas going into one's slip box.

I like that there are a variety of potential contexts here which students might find themselves within (short term versus long term / big projects versus small). The broad advice can be useful to more people because they can pick and choose for their own needs.

This is similar to Umberto Eco's advice which is geared toward a longer thesis, though he mentions that one might continue on their system across additional topics or even an entire career.

Watch closely to see how Allosso's description of an index comes to the advice of John Locke versus the practice of Niklas Luhmann.

Alternately, is it closer to a commonplace indexing system or a shallowly linked, but still complex zettelkasten indexing system?

In shared digital systems, I still suspect that densely indexed notes will have more communal value.

Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/nrk0vgoCEe2y3CedssHnVA

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.

Realizing that my prior separate advice wasn't as actionable or specific, I thought I'd take another crack at your question.

Some seem to miss the older techniques and names for this sort of practice and get too wound up in words like categories, tags, #hashtags, [[wikilinks]], or other related taxonomies and ontologies. Some become confounded about how to implement these into digital systems. Simplify things and index your ideas/notes the way one would have indexed books in a library card catalog, generally using subject, author and title.

Since you're using an approach more grounded in the commonplace book tradition rather than a zettelkasten one, put an easy identifier on your note (this can be a unique title or number) and then cross reference it with any related subject headings or topical category words you find useful.

Here's a concrete example, hopefully in reasonable detail that one can easily follow. Let's say you have a quote you want to save:

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

In a paper system you might give this card the identification number #237. (This is analogous to the Dewey Decimal number that might be put on a book to find it on the shelves.) You want to be able to find this quote in the future using the topical words "power", "information", "connections", and "quotes" for example. (Which topical headings you choose and why can be up to you, the goal is to make it easier to dig up for potential reuse in future contexts). So create a separate paper index with alphabetical headings (A-Z) and then write cards for your topical headings. Your card with "power" at the top will have the number #237 on it to indicate that that card is related to the word power. You'll ultimately have other cards that relate and can easily find everything related to "power" within your system by using this subject index.

You might also want to file that quote under two other "topics" which will make it easy to find: primarily the author of the quote "Umberto Eco" and the title of the source Foucault's Pendulum. You can add these to your index the same way you did "power", "information", etc., but it may be easier or more logical to keep a bibliographic index separately for footnoting your material, so you might want a separate bibliographic index for authors and sources. If you do this, then create a card with Umberto Eco at the top and then put the number #237 on it. Later you'll add other numbers for other related ideas to Eco. You can then keep your card "Eco, Umberto" alphabetized with all the other authors you cite. You'll effect a similar process with the title.

With this done, you now have a system in which you don't have to categorize a single idea in a single place. Regardless of what project or thing you're working on, you can find lots of related notes. If you're juggling multiple projects you can have an index file or document outline for these as well. So your book project on the History of Information could have a rough outline of the book on which you've got the number #237 in the chapter or place where you might use the quote.

Hopefully this will be even more flexible than Holiday's system because that was broadly project based. In practice, if you're keeping notes over a lifetime, you're unlikely to be interested in dramatically different areas the way Ryan Holiday or Robert Greene were for disparate book projects, but will find more overlapping areas. Having a more flexible system that will allow you to reuse your notes for multiple settings or projects will be highly valuable.

For those who are using digital systems, ask yourself: "what functions and features allow you to do these analog patterns most easily?" If you're using something like Obsidian which has #tagging functionality that automatically creates an index of all your tags, then leverage that and remove some of the manual process. The goal is to make sure the digital system is creating the structure to allow you to easily find and use your notes when you need them. If your note taking system doesn't have custom functionalities for any of these things, then you'll need to do more portions of them manually.

I'm guessing it's just the fact that I have an advance reader copy of the book that accounts for the missing index in my copy.

If not, then dear G-d!!!

He says this, but his advice on how to use them is too scant and/or flawed. Where are they held? How are they indexed? How are they linked so that finding and using them in the future? (especially, other than rote memory or the need to have vague memory and the ability to search for them in the future?)

The area of serendipity becomes much more powerful when one has ideas both directly interlinked, ideas categorized with subject headings or tags, or when one can have affordances like auto-complete.

The method Forte suggests and outlines allows for some serendipity, but not as much as other methods with additional refinements. Serendipity in Forte's method isn't as strong as in others.

In this section he's talking about some of the true "magic of note taking" which is discussed by Luhmann and others.

link to:<br /> Luhmann's writings on serendipity and surprise when using his zettelkasten (Communication with the Slipbox...)<br /> Ahrens mentions of this effect

Coming back to the beginning of this section. He talks about tags, solely after-the-fact instead of when taking notes on the fly. While it might seem that he would have been using tags as subject headings in a traditional commonplace book, he really isn't. This is a significant departure from the historical method!! It's also ill advised not to be either tagging/categorizing as one goes along to make searching and linking things together dramatically easier.

How has he missed the power of this from the start?! This is really a massive flaw in his method from my perspective, particularly as he quotes John Locke's work on the topic.

Did I maybe miss some of this in earlier sections when he quoted John Locke? Double check, just in case, but this is certainly the section of the book to discuss using these ideas!

Holiday's system is roughly similar to the idea of a commonplace book, just kept and maintained on index cards instead of a notebook. He also seems to advocate for keeping separate boxes for each project which I find to be odd advice, though it's also roughly the same advice suggested by Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit and Tiago Forte's recent book Building a Second Brain which provides a framing that seems geared more toward broader productivity rather than either the commonplacing or zettelkasten traditions.

I suspect that if you're not linking discrete ideas, you'll get far more value out of your system by practicing profligate indexing terms on your discrete ideas. Two topical/subject headings on an individual idea seems horrifically limiting much less on an entire article and even worse on a whole book. Fewer index topics is easier to get away with in a digital system which allows search across your corpus, but can be painfully limiting in a pen/paper system.

Most paperbound commonplaces index topics against page numbers, but it's not clear to me how you're numbering (or not) your system to be able to more easily cross reference your notes with an index. Looking at Luhmann's index as an example (https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/zettel/ZK_2_SW1_001_V) might be illustrative so you can follow along, but if you're not using his numbering system or linking your cards/ideas, then you could simply use consecutive numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, ..., 92000, 92001, ... on your cards to index against to easily find the cards you're after. It almost sounds to me that with your current filing system, you'd have to duplicate your cards to be able to file them under more than one topic. This obviously isn't ideal.

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/adding-an-index/

Tonz has an index now too!

Locke's method is certainly a compact one and is specifically designed for notebooks of several hundred pages where you're slowly growing the index as you go within a limited and usually predetermined amount of space. If you're using an index card or digital system where space isn't an issue, then that specific method may not be as ideal. Whichever option you ultimately choose, it's certainly incredibly valuable and worthwhile to have an index of some sort.

For those into specifics, here's some detail about creating an index using Hypothes.is data in Obsidian: https://boffosocko.com/2022/05/20/creating-a-commonplace-book-or-zettelkasten-index-from-hypothes-is-tags/ and here's some detail for how I did it for a website built on WordPress: https://boffosocko.com/2021/09/04/an-index-for-my-digital-commonplace-book/

I'm curious to see how others do this in their tool sets, particularly in ways that remove some of the tedium.

https://indexhistory.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/boswells-commonplace-book-and-lockes-index/

https://www.hjkeen.net/halqn/index.htm

A great example of an online commonplace book prominently featuring quotes with an index featuring authors, titles, categories, and even translators. Even more interesting, it looks like it's hand built using a large table.

Indices are certainly an old construct. One of the oldest structured examples in the note taking space is that of John Locke who detailed it in Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as A New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706).

Previously commonplace books had been structured with headwords done alphabetically. This meant starting with a preconceived structure and leaving blank or empty space ahead of time without prior knowledge of what would fill it or how long that might take. By turning that system on its head, one could fill a notebook from front to back with a specific index of the headwords at the end. Then one didn't need to do the same amount of pre-planning or gymnastics over time with respect to where to put their notes.

This idea combined with that of Konrad Gessner's design for being able to re-arrange slips of paper (which later became index cards based on an idea by Carl Linnaeus), gives us an awful lot of freedom and flexibility in almost any note taking system.

Building blocks of the note taking system

• atomic ideas
• written on (re-arrangeable) slips, cards, or hypertext spaces
• cross linked with each other
• cross linked with an index
• cross linked with references

are there others? should they be broken up differently?

Godfathers of Notetaking

• Aristotle, Cicero (commonplaces)
• Seneca the Younger (collecting and reusing)
• Raymond Llull (combinatorial rearrangements)
• Konrad Gessner (storage for re-arrangeable slips)
• John Locke (indices)
• Carl Linnaeus (index cards)

https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/05/08/curating-my-blog-archive/

I like the overall look and effect done here to create a table of contents in WordPress, but it seems like some quirky gymnastics to pull it off. How might this be done in a more straightforward way? Are there any plugins for WordPress that could create a page that keeps the categories and the descriptions? And particularly a page that primarily only shows articles and not other content types?

Link this to my work on my own index at https://boffosocko.com/about/index/

It's worth look looking into the structure of Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project as the numbering system that he used on his zettels is very similar to that of both Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten as well as the street numbers of 1770 Vienna.

link to - https://hypothes.is/a/4jtT0FqsEeyXFzP-AuDIAA - https://hypothes.is/a/lvGHJlNHEeyZnV-8psRNrA

parlance they were subject indexes.126

126 Théry (1935), 443n99.

Q: How many permanent notes did it take before you felt you had a communication partner?

Sönke Ahrens has indicated that the first couple hundred notes are more of a static collection. Then from five hundred notes onward there is a shift and having an index becomes more important. It's only at about one thousand notes that one begins automatically turning to the zettelkasten to find connections. Perhaps it's at this point that the tool begins to look like a communication partner.

link this to the few other examples from others.

https://collect.readwriterespond.com/monks-a-polymath-and-an-invention-made-by-two-people-at-the-same-time-its-all-in-the-history-of-the-index/

Great find Aaron. Thanks for the ping.

I've gone back further than this for the commonplace and the florilegium which helped to influence their creation, though I've not delved into the specific invention or general use of indices in the space heavily. I suspected that they grew out of the tradition of using headwords, though I'm not sure that indices became more popular until the paper by John Locke in 1689 (in French) or 1706 (in English).

I'll put Dr. Duncan's book into the hopper and see what he's got to say on the topic.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-28/index-history-invention-made-simultaneously-800-years-ago/100690782

The idea of the index was invented twice in roughly 1230.

Once by Hugh of Saint-Cher in Paris as a concordance of the Bible. The notes towards creating it still exist in a variety of hands. The project, executed by a group of friars at the Dominican Friary of Saint-Jacques, listed 10,000 words and 129,000 locations.

The second version was invented by Robert Grosseteste in Oxford who used marginal marks to create a "grand table".

The article doesn't mention florilegium, but the head words from them must have been a likely precursor. The article does mention lectures and sermons being key in their invention.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis</span> in 📑 Monks, a polymath and an invention made by two people at the same time. It’s all in the history of the index | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>02/15/2022 21:22:10</time>)</cite></small>

Dennis Duncan includes two indices in his book Index, A History of The, one by a professional human indexer and the second generated by artificial intelligence. He indicates that the human version is far better.

An example here of a misconception. The zettle may be given a number, but it is also given a topic tied into an index. Because it isn't put into a "folder" or "hierarchy" isn't the same thing as not giving it a topic.

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_IgMVAAAAQAAJ/page/n107/mode/2up

Page 90-91 of De arte excerpendi shows the exact same index scheme for commonplace books suggested by John Locke in 1685 (French) and later .published as A new method of making common-place-books (1706, in English).

Mnemonic (mental) storehouses (thesaurus) and written archives are functionally equivalent and serve to store and retrieve information. Their primary difference is in the effort put into how one applies their attention to them. The former requires more mental effort into storing information into the location and then recalling it.

In the case of archives with subject indices, they require less mental effort and visually serve a potential store of variety and ease of creating additional links between bits of knowledge.

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?

73 Cf. Götz Müller, Jean Pauls Exzerpte (Würzburg, 1988), 321–22

I'm not quite sure I understand what the mechanism of this is specifically. Revisit it later. Sounds like it's using the set up the system not only to discover the adjacent possible but the remote improbable.

65 Johann Benedict Metzler, Artificium excerpendi genuinum dictus Die rechte Kunst zu excer-piren (Leipzig, 1709), 23–4; 30; 91–2

Is there really any mathematical difference between alphabetical order and a numerical decimal order? Can't they be shown to be one-to-one and onto?

To a layperson they may seem different...

Placcius, De arte excerpendi, 84–5;

Just Christoph Udenius, Excerpendi ratio nova (Nordhausen, 1687), 62–3; Placcius, De arte excerpendi, 84–5; Drexel, Aurifodina, 135.

What earlier suggestions might there have been for creating indices for commonplaces?

Interesting that he makes no reference to the commonplace book or zettelkasten traditions—particularly because we know he (later?) had an extensive system of index cards.

Mortimer J. Adler's method of annotating a text.

He's primarily giving the author and their ideas all the power and importance here.

There is nothing, so far, about immediate progressive summarization. There's also little about the reuse of one's notes for analysis and future synthesis, which I find surprising.

Earlier in the essay he mentions picking the book up later to refresh one's memory, but there's nothing about linking the ideas from one book to another.

https://tim.blog/2007/12/05/how-to-take-notes-like-an-alpha-geek-plus-my-2600-date-challenge/

Tim Ferriss discuses some of his take on his note taking process. Nothing new or interesting here, though he seems to focus more on to do lists and follow up material for productivity purposes rather than remembering or connecting details after-the-fact and in the long term.

He does outline and highly recommend having an index, but his version has a quirk of number pages as 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5 instead of a more straightforward whole number system. Presumably this save the time and effort of putting a number on each page, though one could just number either the even or odd pages this way if necessary and presume the missing numbers.

Nothing really mind bending here.

https://www.amazon.com/Indexing-Paper-Create-Indexes-Stuff/dp/1926892267/

This really could be quite useful to those with a paper commonplace book or zettelkasten

So the big secret then is, how did he know that this note here exists? How could he remember that this existing note was relevant to the new one he was writing? A mystery we haven't solved yet.

I'm surprised to see/hear this!

How did Niklas Luhmann cross link his notes? Apparently researchers don't quite know, but I'd suggest that in working with them diligently over time, he'd have a reasonable internal idea from memory in addition to working with his indices and his outline cards.

The cards in some sense form a physical path through which he regularly traverses, so he's making a physical memory palace (or songline) out of index cards.

http://oldschool.scripting.com/KenSmith/2021/08/24/144925.html?title=organizingInformationForUse

One might also suggest the use of John Locke's method here: See: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685

An index in the back would potentially be more historically correct, but...

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.

Reply to https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/oq12xs/has_anyone_used_this_indexing_system_curious_what/

Some thoughts about leaving space in new notebooks, especially for one's future self:

• contact information in front in case of loss
• space for a future table of contents to come
• space for page numbers and dates
• space in the back for house keeping, indices, etc.

http://www.notesaboutnotes.com/Notes/FrontMatter.html

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.

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/oq12xs/has_anyone_used_this_indexing_system_curious_what/

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>

Quels indices ont permis d’affirmer qu’il s’agit de copies?