Software and applications for creating visualizations of zettelkasten contents: - Tinderbox (Mac) - Apple's Freeform (app) - Obsidian Canvas - Excalidraw (plugin for Obsidian) - Scrintal - Heptabase - Card Buddy (Mac) - AFFiNE (https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE)

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2797/an-app-to-represent-a-zettelkasten-or-parts-of-it-visually

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  • Look to canal cities like Venice or Amsterdam for inspiration because if it cities are salvagable, parts of them will become canal cities.

https://erinflotodesigns.com/collections/metal-stencils/products/bullet-journal-monthly-circle-tracker-stencil-habit-tracker-stencil-unique-design-stencil-cleaning-tracker-stencil

Erin Floto has a metal stencil for a chronodex circular design for use in bullet journals. It's a form of circular calendar with the inner circle containing space for daily, bi-weekly, weekly, monthly and longer time horizons with succeeding rings of the circle containing space for data related to the inner categories. Some of the exterior rings also include numbered squares representing days of the month or week on which a task should be done or for which a habit on an interior part of the circle might be tracked.

The chronodex, a portmanteau of chrono (time) and index, idea is fairly simple, but can be quite complex. For actual use, one may need to be able to spin the visualization around to read and understand it.

Other stencils with habit trackers, etc: https://erinflotodesigns.com/collections/metal-stencils

Maxfield suggest drawing out a timeline as a possible visual cue for helping to remember dates. He seemingly misses any mention of ars memoria techniques here.

https://treeverse.app/

Treeverse is a tool for visualizing and navigating Twitter conversation threads.<br /> It is available as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.

https://zephoria.medium.com/what-if-failure-is-the-plan-2f219ea1cd62

https://github.com/shaunabanana/intrigue

https://www.comeetie.fr/galerie/mapstodon/

https://lucahammer.com/

https://medium.com/@ben_fry/tracing-the-origin-65011dc20877

Could be interesting to apply this sort of process to a variety of texts over time. A draft of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein comes to mind.

How to view this through the lens of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? particularly as this was the evolution of an idea by the same author over time...

https://benfry.com/traces/

What a spectacular visualization of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Richard Carter will love this if he's not seen it.

OK, but start visualizing descriptives from the beginning of the Results. This is getting tedious.

Natto https://natto.dev<br /> built by Paul Shen https://twitter.com/_paulshen

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o49C8jQIsvs

Video about the Double-Bubble Map: https://youtu.be/Hm4En13TDjs

The double-bubble map is a tool for thought for comparing and contrasting ideas. Albert Rosenberg indicates that construction of opposites is one of the most reliable ways for generating ideas. (35:50)

Bluma Zeigarnik - open tasks tend to occupy short-term memory.

I love his compounding interest graphic with the steps moving up to the right with the quote: "Even groundbreaking paradigm shifts are most often the consequence of many small moves in the right direction instead of one big idea." This could be an awesome t-shirt or motivational poster.

Watched this up to about 36 minutes on 2022-08-10 and finished on 2022-08-22.

Continuing on the bouba/kiki effect thread, I thought some might appreciate this visualization, though I'm unsure of a more concrete method for tying it into my own practice (yet).

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYCX1WpXEAcYphG?format=jpg&name=small

via

pic.twitter.com/xDfBj3mxon

— Alex Tomlinson 🪶 (@hootalex) July 19, 2022

http://cluster.cis.drexel.edu/~cchen/talks/2011/ICSTI_Chen.pdf

The Nature of Creativity: Mechanism, Measurement, and Analysis<br /> Chaomei Chen, Ph.D.<br /> Editor in Chief, Information Visualization<br /> College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University<br /> June 7‐8, 2011

Randomly ran across while attempting to source Randall Collins quote from https://hypothes.is/a/8e9hThZ4Ee2hWAcV1j5B9w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0exK-xFP3k

Lima, Manuel. The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, 2014. https://papress.com/products/the-book-of-trees-visualizing-branches-of-knowledge.

The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

<small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.

This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work

Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

--

It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.

Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.

I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

Visual cues one can make in their notes and user interfaces that help to focus or center on these can be useful reminders for what appears in particular notes, especially if visual search is a possibility.

Is this the reason that Gyuri Lajos very frequently cuts and pastes images into his Hypothes.is notes?

Which note taking applications leverage this sort of visual mnemonic device? Evernote did certainly, but other text heavy tools like Obsidian, Logseq, and Roam Research don't. Most feed readers do this well leveraging either featured photos, photos in posts, or photos in OGP.

https://thebrain.com/

Initially came across this via Jerry Michalski who has an extensive personal mind map of over 24 years (as of fall 2021).

https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/32f9fc36-6963-9ee0-9b44-a89112919e29/attachments/6492d41a-73b2-20d8-b145-3283598c612b

A fantastic example of an extensive mind map from Jerry Michalski using The Brain.

There are lots of interesting links and resources, but on the whole

How many of the nodes actually have specific notes, explicit ideas, annotations, or excerpts within them?

Without these, it's an interesting map and provides some broad context, but removes local specific context of who Jerry is and how he explicitly thinks. One can review the overarching parts to extract what his biases may be based on availability heuristics, but in areas of conflicting ideas which have relatively equal numbers of links within a particular area, one may not be able to discern arguments from each other.

Still a fascinating start and something not commonly seen in the broader literature.

I'll also note that even in a small sample of one video call with Jerry sharing his screen while we talked about a broad sub-topic it's interesting to see his prior contexts as we conversed. I've only ever had similar experiences with Bill Seitz who regularly drops links to his wiki pages in this sort of way or Kevin Marks (usually in text chat contexts and less frequently in video calls/conversations) who drops links to his extensive blogging history which also serves to add his prior thoughts and contextualizations.

The five step philosophy of the Algebra Project: - physical experience - pictorial representation - people talk (explain it in your own words) - feature talk (put it into proper English) - symbolic representation

"people talk" within the Algebra project is an example of the Feynman technique at work

Link this to Sonke Ahrens' method for improving understanding. Are there research links to this within their work?

© Alexander Kluge/ Universität Bielefeld*

Tables and Illustrations for A Brief History of Equality available here: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/supplementary/a-brief-history-of-equality/

This PDF of tables and illustrations is being made available as a supplement to the audio book format of Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality as published by Harvard University Press, 2022.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-icwOk8YFk

It's interesting to see the differences between the bookclubs in this visualization of their related notes.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/treeverse/

https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>https://indieweb.social/@elgg/</span> in Platform for Social Apps: "Map of #Reddit https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-r…" - Indieweb.Social (<time class='dt-published'>05/13/2022 13:29:09</time>)</cite></small>

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1521158984941686791.html

https://forebears.io/surnames/aldrich

Penetrative thinking is the ability to abstractly consider and internally visualize or theorize about the inside of a three dimensional object based on what can be seen on its surface.

Penetrative thinking can be useful in areas like geology and anatomy.

Improvements in penetrative thinking can be exercised, encouraged, and improved by using gestures.

Working on a new data visceralization. I’m particularly interested in the tactile quality of this one. Covid deaths from 3/2020-6/2021 pic.twitter.com/MjFZCqDP4x

— Jacqueline Wernimont (@profwernimont) March 1, 2022

https://thinkzone.wlonk.com/Numbers/NumberSets.htm

A relatively clear explanation of the types of numbers and their properties.

I particularly like this diagram:

https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/browse/

Ha!

Interesting to see this actually hosted by GitHub pages.

This is also a great exercise for readers and learners. If the book doesn't do this for you already, spend some time to annotate it or do it yourself.

Source code of this (or predecessor to this): https://gist.github.com/kerryrodden/7090426

Inventive interactive history of philosophy linking quotes/ideas from various thinkers. No Deleuze!?