7 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. Your zettelkasten, having a perfect memory of your "past self" acts as a ratchet so that when you have a new conversation on a particular topic, your "present self" can quickly remember where you left off and not only advance the arguments but leave an associative trail for your "future self" to continue on again later.

      Many thoughts and associations occur when you're having conversations with any text, whether it's with something you're reading by another author or your own notes in your zettelkasten or commonplace book. For more conversations on this topic, perhaps thumb through: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27conversations+with+the+text%27

      If you view conversations broadly as means of finding and collecting information from external sources and naturally associating them together, perhaps you'll appreciate this quote:

      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 in Foucault's Pendulum (Secker & Warburg)

      (Reply to u/u/Plastic-Lettuce-7150 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ae2qf4/communicating_with_a_zettelkasten/)

  2. Oct 2023
    1. If you don’t have a setup, there are many times when you get theinspiration, the idea, but you have no tools, no place to put ittogether. And the idea just sits there and festers. Over time, it will goaway. You didn’t fulfill it—and that’s just a heartache.
  3. May 2023
    1. @chrisaldrich, I appreciate your feedback. Indeed there is magic in making notes which comes not only from finding connections in the ZK but also from making connections in mind. Maybe I'm confused. A mindset that makes note-making fun is one way to recruit the body's dopamine mechanism. This creates a positive feedback loop. More mote-making turns to more dopamine which turns to more note-making. Maybe even some notes on dopamine. (I have 11 already!) My sense of Luhmann's phrase "second memory" is a rehashing of an idea—a continued exploration. Using the ZK method is one way of formalizing the continued review of ideas. Without a formal process, it is too easy to fall into old bad habits and not work towards "the serendipity of combinatorial creativity. "

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

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

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

  4. Apr 2023
    1. TheSyntopicon invites the reader to make on the set whatever demands arisefrom his own problems and interests. It is constructed to enable the reader,nomatter what the stages of his reading in other ways, to find that part of theGreat Conversation in which any topic that interests him is being discussed.

      While the Syntopicon ultimately appears in book form, one must recall that it started life as a paper slip-based card index (Life v24, issue 4, 1948). This index can be queried in some of the ways one might have queried a library card catalog or more specifically the way in which Niklas Luhmann indicated that he queried his zettelkasten (Luhmann,1981). Unlike a library card catalog, The Syntopicon would not only provide a variety of entry places within the Western canon to begin their search for answers, but would provide specific page numbers and passages rather than references to entire books.

      The Syntopicon invites the reader to make on the set whatever demands arise from his own problems and interests. It is constructed to enable the reader, no matter what the stages of his reading in other ways, to find that part of the Great Conversation in which any topic that interests him is being discussed. (p. 85)

      While the search space for the Syntopicon wasn't as large as the corpus covered by larger search engines of the 21st century, the work that went into making it and the depth and focus of the sources make it a much more valuable search tool from a humanistic perspective. This work and value can also be seen in a personal zettelkasten. Some of the value appears in the form of having previously built a store of contextualized knowledge, particularly in cases where some ideas have been forgotten or not easily called to mind, which serves as a context ratchet upon which to continue exploring and building.

  5. Mar 2023
    1. ‘the ratchet effect’

      New term for me - the Ratchet effect! - equivalent to CCE - A ratchet is a device with angled teeth that allows a bar or cog to move in one direction only. Here, it is a metaphor for the accumulation of increasingly effective modifications without reverting back to prior, less effective states.

  6. Sep 2022
    1. There has been much discussion about “atomic notes”, which represents the key ideas from a person’s research on some topic or source (sources one and two). These are not the kind of thing I am interested in creating/collecting, or at least not what I have been doing. A far more typical thing for me is something I did at work today. I was trying to figure out how to convert the output of a program into another format. I did some searching, installed a tool, found a script, played with the script in the tool, figured out how to use it, then wrote down a summary of my steps and added links to what I found in my search. Since I am not doing research for a book or for writing academic papers, the idea of an atomic note does not fit into my information world. However, capturing the steps of a discovery or how I worked out a problem. is very real and concrete to me. I used to know a fellow engineer who wrote “technical notes” to capture work he was doing (like a journal entry). Maybe that is how I should consider this type of knowledge creation. 

      Andy Sylvester says his engineering type of notes don't fit with the concept of atomic note. A 'how to solve x' type of note would fit my working def of 'atomic' as being a self-contained whole, focused on a single thing (here how to solve x). If the summary can be its title I'd say it's pretty atomic. Interestingly in [[Technik des wissenschaflichen Arbeitens by Johannes Erich Heyde]] 1970, Heyde on p18 explicitly mentions ZK being useful for engineers, not just to process new scientific insights from e.g. articles, but to index specific experiences, experiments and results. And on p19 suggests using 1 ZK system for all of your material of various types. Luhmann's might have been geared to writing articles, but it can be something else. Solving problems is also output. I have these types of notes in my 'ZK' if not in the conceptual section of it.

      Vgl [[Ambachtelijke engineering 20190715143342]] artisanal engineering, Lovelock Novacene 2019, plays a role here too. Keeping a know-how notes collection in an environment where also your intuition can play a creative role is useful. I've done this for coding things, as I saw experienced coders do it, just as Andy describes, and it helped me create most of my personal IndieWeb scripts, because they were integrated in the rest of my stuff about my work and notions. Vgl [[Vastklik notes als ratchet zonder terugval 20220302102702]]

  7. Nov 2020