reply to u/atrebatian at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/13dsj8v/celtic_druid_history/

I've only scratched the surface of the Druids, but have gotten pretty deep into Celtic history over the past few years, including becoming reasonably fluent in colloquial Welsh and working on old Welsh for some research.

As an excellent set of introductions, I'd recommend:

Paxton, Jennifer. The Celtic World. Great Courses, 2251. The Teaching Company, Chantilly, VA, 2018. Cunliffe, Barry. The Celts: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.<br /> ———. Druids: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

You'll also probably appreciate the following:

Aldhouse-Green, Miranda. Animals in Celtic Life and Myth. Routledge, 1993.<br /> ———. Caesar’s Druids: An Ancient Priesthood. Yale University Press, 2010.<br /> ———. The Celtic Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends. Thames and Hudson, 2015.<br /> ———. The Celtic World. Routledge, 2012.<br /> Avalon, Annwyn. Water Witchcraft: Magic and Lore from the Celtic Tradition. Red Wheel Weiser.<br /> Bridgman, Timothy P. Hyperboreans: Myth and History in Celtic-Hellenic Contacts.<br /> Chadwick, Nora. The Celts: Second Edition. Revised edition. London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 1998.<br /> Conway, D. J. Celtic Magic. LLewellyn’s World Magic Series, 1.0, 2011.<br /> Cunliffe, Barry. The Ancient Celts. 1st edition. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.<br /> Fagan, Edited by Brian M., ed. The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. Oxford Companions. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.<br /> Fimi, Dimitra. Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy: Idealization, Identity, Ideology. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, 1.0, 2017.<br /> Forest, Danu. Celtic Tree Magic: Ogham Lore and Druid Mysteries. Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD., 2014.<br /> Hughes, Kristoffer. The Book of Celtic Magic: Transformative Teachings from the Cauldron of Awen. Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD., 2014.<br /> King Arthur: History and Legend. Streaming Video. Vol. 2376. The Great Courses: Literature and Language. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2015. https://www.wondrium.com/king-arthur-history-and-legend.<br /> Rutherford, Ward. Celtic Mythology: The Nature and Influence of Celtic Myth from Druidism to Arthurian Legend. Red Wheel Weiser.

One of my favorites on memory which underpins early Celtic life and is likely related to Druids, (but which doesn't cover them directly, but is likely similar to their memory practice) is the anthropology text:

Kelly, Lynne. Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107444973.

I've also got lots of research on henges and wooden/stone circles and related archaeology in early British isles history, but this may be afield from your interests.

https://www.exaclair.com/

reply to u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13cqnsk/comment/jjkwc05/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Definitely history in service of the present and the future. Too many people are doing some terribly hard work attempting to reinvent wheels which have been around for centuries.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13cqnsk/do_you_suffer_from_verkn%C3%BCpfungszwang_the/

original source?

https://www.wondrium.com/king-arthur-history-and-legend?tn=632_tray_Course_1_0_2444&lec=3

reply for Fidel at https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-meetup-sunday-may-7-2023-video-connect-with-sonke-ahrens-live-the-author-of-how-to-take-smart-notes/6659

@fidel (I'm presuming you're the same one from the meetup on Sunday, if not perhaps someone might tag the appropriate person?), I was thinking a bit more on your question of using physical index cards for writing fiction. You might find the examples of both Vladimir Nabokov and Dustin Lance Black, a screenwriter, useful as they both use index card-based workflows.

Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977 leaving an unfinished manuscript in note card form for the novel The Original of Laura . Penguin later published the incomplete novel with in 2012 with the subtitle A Novel in Fragments . Unlike most manuscripts written or typewritten on larger paper, this one came in the form of 138 index cards. Penguin's published version recreated these cards in full-color reproductions including the smudges, scribbles, scrawlings, strikeouts, and annotations in English, French, and Russian. Perforated, one could tear the cards out of the book and reorganize in any way they saw fit or even potentially add their own cards to finish the novel that Nabokov couldn't. Taking a look at this might give you some ideas of how Nabokov worked and how you might adapt the style for yourself. Another interesting resource is this article with some photos/links about his method with respect to writing Lolita: https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html

You might also find some useful tidbits on his writing process (Bristol cards/Exacompta anyone?) in: Gold, Herbert. “Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40.” The Paris Review, 1967. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov.

Carl Mydans photographed Nabokov while writing in September 1958 and some of those may be interesting to you as well.

Dustin Lance Black outlines his index card process in this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrvawtrRxsw

If you dig around you'll also find Michael Ende and a variety of other German fiction writers who used index cards on the Zettelkasten page on Wikipedia, but I suspect most of the material on their processes are written in German.

Index cards for fiction writing may allow some writers some useful affordances/benefits. By using small atomic pieces on note cards, one can be far more focused on the idea and words immediately at hand. It's also far easier in a creative and editorial process to move pieces around experimentally.

Similarly, when facing Hemmingway's "White Bull", the size and space of an index card is fall smaller. This may have the effect that Twitter's short status updates have for writers who aren't faced with the seemingly insurmountable burden of writing a long blog post or essay in other software. They can write 280 characters and stop. Of if they feel motivated, they can continue on by adding to the prior parts of a growing thread.

However, if you can, try to use a card catalog drawer with a rod so that you don't spill all of your well-ordered cards the way the character in Robert M. Pirsig's novel Lila (1991) did.

via https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17819#Comment_17819

Zettelkasten tutorials for use with Tana: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaScw0zHBuE By Kent Langley - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkYPlN82LRc By Theo Koppen - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FufUz1EWJVA by Andre Foeken - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvvsTD2RzKE by Cortex Futura - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzC62nIhq1s by Ev Chapman

"[What] I like about the [zettlekasten] system is that it's a constant reminder to to make up your mind and to specify what you what you're thinking."<br /> —Sönke Ahrens, [Tinderbox Meetup - May 7, 2023 00:30:36]

Tinderbox Meetup - May 7, 2023: A Discussion with Sönke Ahrens, Author of How to Take Smart Notes. Tinderbox Meetup, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx1Ax8z_eDY.

Within the pantheon of types of notes there are: - paraphrasing notes, which one can use to summarize ideas for later recall and review as well as to check one's own knowledge and understanding of what an author has said. - commentary notes, which take the text and create a commentary on them, often as part of having a conversation with the text. These can be seen historically in the Midrashim tradition of commenting on Torah.

[23:12 - 24:47]

separately also: - productivity notes - to do lists, reminders of work to be done, often within or as part of a larger complex project

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

https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/archive/archive-collections/verkn%C3%BCpfungszwang-exhibition

https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/archive/archive-collections/verkn%C3%BCpfungszwang-exhibition

reply to u/ruthlessreuben at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/w5yz0n/comment/ihxojq0/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

u/ruthlessreuben, as a historian, you're likely to appreciate some variations which aren't as Luhmann-centric. Try some of the following:

• Victor Margolin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI
• Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary.
• S. D. Goitein used a (non-Luhmann-esque) zettelkasten to write many things including the magisterial A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1967–1993). Incidentally he took 1/3 less notes and had 1/3 more output than Luhmann: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten/.

The following note taking manuals (or which cover it in part) all bear close similarities to Luhmann's system, but were written by historians and related to the ideas of "historical method":

• Barzun, Jacques. The Modern Researcher. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992. http://archive.org/details/modernresearcher00barz_1.
• Dow, Earle Wilbur. Principles of a Note-System for Historical Studies. New York: Century Company, 1924.
• Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout.
• Langlois, Charles Victor, and Charles Seignobos. Introduction to the Study of History. Translated by George Godfrey Berry. First. New York: Henry Holt and company, 1898. http://archive.org/details/cu31924027810286.

Although she's a sociologist, you might also appreciate Beatrice Webb's coverage which also has some early database collection flavor:

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

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/zkefis/is_the_concept_of_personal_knowledge_management/

Note taking should serve a specific purpose; it should be a means to some end.

Note taking can also be done to create a database (a la Beatrice Webb's scientific note taking).

The framing of "permanent notes" or "evergreen notes" has probably hurt a large portion of the personal knowledge management space. Too many people are approaching these as some sort of gold standard without understanding their goal or purpose. Why are you writing such permanent/evergreen notes? Unless you have an active goal to reuse a particular note for a specific purpose, you're probably wasting your time. The work you put into the permanent note is to solidify an idea which you firmly intend to reuse again in one or more contexts. The whole point of "evergreen" as an idea is that it can actively be reused multiple times in multiple places. If you've spent time refining it to the nth degree and writing it well, then you had better be doing so to reuse it.

Of course many writers will end up (or should end up) properly contextualizing individual ideas and example directly into their finished writing. As a result, one's notes can certainly be rough and ready and don't need to be highly polished because the raw idea will be encapsulated somewhere else and then refined and rewritten directly into that context.

Certainly there's some benefit for refining and shaping ideas down to individual atomic cores so that they might be used and reused in combination with other ideas, but I get the impression that some think that their notes need to be highly polished gems. Even worse, they feel that every note should be this way. This is a dreadful perspective.

For context I may make 40 - 60 highlights and annotations on an average day of reading. Of these, I'll review most and refine or combine a few into better rougher shape. Of this group maybe 3 - 6 will be interesting enough to turn into permanent/evergreen notes of some sort that might be reused. And even at this probably only one is interesting enough to be placed permanently into my zettelkasten. This one will likely be an aggregation of many smaller ideas combined with other pre-existing ideas in my collection; my goal is to have the most interesting and unique of my own ideas in my permanent collection. The other 2 or 3 may still be useful later when I get to the creation/writing stage when I'll primarily focus on my own ideas, but I'll use those other rougher notes and the writing in them to help frame and recontextualize the bigger ideas so that the reader will be in a better place to understand my idea, where it comes from, and why it might be something they should find interesting.

Thus some of my notes made while learning can be reused in my own ultimate work to help others learn and understand my more permanent/evergreen notes.

If you think that every note you're making should be highly polished, refined, and heavily linked, then you're definitely doing this wrong. Hopefully a few days of attempting this will disabuse you of the notion and you'll slow down to figure out what's really worth keeping and maintaining. You can always refer back to rough notes if you need to later, but polishing turds is often thankless work. Sadly too many misread or misunderstand articles and books on the general theory of note taking and overshoot the mark thinking that the theory needs to be applied to every note. It does not.

If you find that you're tiring of making notes and not getting anything out of the process, it's almost an assured sign that you're doing something wrong. Are you collecting thousands of ideas (bookmarking behavior) and not doing anything with them? Are you refining and linking low level ideas of easy understanding and little value? Take a step back and focus on the important and the new. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to create?

Notes can be used for different purposes.

• productivity
• Knowledge
  • basic sense-making
  • knowledge construction and dispersion

The broad distinction is between productivity goals and knowledge. (Is there a broad range I'm missing here within the traditions?) You can take notes about projects that need to be taken care of, lists of things to do, reminders of what needs to be done. These all fall within productivity and doing and checking them off a list will help one get to a different place or location and this can be an excellent thing, particularly when the project was consciously decided upon and is a worthy goal.

Notes for knowledge sake can be far more elusive for people. The value here generally comes with far more planning and foresight towards a particular goal. Are you writing a newsletter, article, book, or making a video or performance of some sort (play, movie, music, etc.)? Collecting small pieces of these things on a pathway is then important as you build your ideas and a structure toward some finished product.

Often times, before getting to this construction phase, one needs to take notes to be able to scaffold their understanding of a particular topic. Once basically understood some of these notes may be useless and not need to be reviewed, or if they are reviewed, it is for the purpose of ensconcing ideas into long term memory. Once this is finished, then the notes may be broadly useless. (This is why it's simple to "hide them with one's references/literature notes.) Other notes are more seminal towards scaffolding ideas towards larger projects for summarization and dissemination to other audiences. If you're researching a topic, a fair number of your notes will be used to help you understand the basics while others will help you to compare/contrast and analyze. Notes you make built on these will help you shape new structures and new, original thoughts. (note taking for paradigm shifts). These then can be used (re-used) when you write your article, book, or other creative project.

Example of someone falling prey to shiny object syndrome, switching tools incessantly, then focusing on too many of the wrong things/minutiae and getting lost in the shuffle.

Don't get caught up into this. Understand the basics of types of notes, but don't focus on them. Let them just be. Does what you've written remind you of the end goal?

u/ittspelledsindi

https://medium.com/@fairylights_io/the-zettelkasten-method-examples-to-help-you-get-started-8f8a44fa9ae6

reply to u/jordynfly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13b0b5c/comment/jjcu3cn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm curious what your area of research is? What are you studying with respect to Zettelkasten?

Caveat notetarius. Note collections are highly idiosyncratic to the user or intended audience, thus quality will vary dramatically on the creator's needs and future desires and potential uses. Contemporaneous, very simple notes can be valuable for their initial sensemaking and quite often in actual practice stop there.

Ultimately, only the user can determine perceived quality and long term value for themselves. Future generations of historians, anthropologists, scholars, and readers, might also find value in notes and note collections, but it seems rare that the initial creators have written them with future readers and audiences in mind. Often they're less useful as the external reader is missing large swaths of context.

For my own personal notes, I consider high quality notes to be well-sourced, highly reusable, easily findable, and reasonably tagged/linked. My favorite, highest quality notes are those that are new ideas which stem from the combination of two high quality notes. With respect to subjectivity, some of my philosophy is summarized by one of my favorite meta-zettels (alt text also available) from zettelmeister Umberto Eco.

Anecdotally, 95% of my notes are done digitally and in public, but I've only got scant personal evidence that anyone is reading or interacting with them. I never write them with any perceived public consumption in mind (beyond the readers of the finished pieces that ultimately make use of them), but it is often very useful to get comments and reactions to them. I'm only aware of a small handful of people publishing their otherwise personal note collections (usually subsets) to the web (outside of social media presences which generally have a different function and intent).

Intellectual historians have looked at and documented external use cases of shared note collections, commonplace books, annotated volumes, and even diaries. There are even examples of published (usually posthumously) commonplace books, waste books, etc., but these are often for influential public and intellectual figures. Here Ludwig Wittgenstein's Zettel, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura, Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Waste Books, Ralph Waldo Emmerson, Ronald Reagan's card index commonplace, Stobaeus' Anthology, W. H. Auden's A Certain World, and Robert Southey’s Common-Place Book come quickly to mind not to mention digitized scholarly collections of Niklas Luhmann, W. Ross Ashby, S.D. Goitein, Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, and Aby Warburg's notes. Some of these latter will give you an idea of what they may have thought quality notes to have been for them, but often they mean little if nothing to the unstudied reader because they lack broader context or indication of linkages.

reply to u/jordynfly at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/13b0b5c/how_big_is_your_zettelkasten/

The idea of notes per day comes up occasionally, here's some discussion on the last go-round: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11z08fq/comment/jdbnchv/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Many people, especially when getting started, get wrapped up in the idea of doing this for "increased productivity" or the goal of being as prolific as Niklas Luhmann. I would submit (and think others would back me up anecdotally) that there's far more to the practice than raw (or measurable) productivity as the single, driving value. Perhaps approach it as a way to sharpen and improve your thinking instead? If you're seeing life-like behavior already, that's a good sign of appreciating some of the hidden benefits which are difficult to describe and which are likely more valuable than the "productivity" goals many may have.

I've noted before that S.D. Goitein had 1/3 less index cards than Luhmann over an equivalent research lifetime, but produced a 1/3 more written output (in terms of books and journal articles). Others like Aby Warburg and Gotthard Deutsch (70,000 notes) had significant practices, but their writing output was marginal at best, though their impact and influence were outsized, in part, I would suggest as a result of their zettelkasten work.

Others like Roland Barthes (generally low card output of \~12,500) and Deutsch also used their fichier boîte/card index/zettelkasten as teaching tools, so while their written outputs may have varied considerably, their teaching practices were incredibly influential for the students and generations they encountered afterwards.

This being said, I'll share my current easily countable lower bound dating roughly from 2016 as:

• 15,200 notes
• 32,000+ links
• 2.1M words

(Having a zk in digital form makes it reasonably easy to do these sorts of counts versus analog methods of note making.)

Some additional pathways to learning and practicing, including my own, can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11ay28d/how_did_you_teach_yourself_zettelkasten/

Why are folks so obsessed with notes per day? Perhaps a proxy for toxic capitalism and productivity issues? Is the number of notes the best measure or the things they allow one to do after having made them? What is the best measure? Especially when there are those who use them for other purposes like lecturing, general growth, knowledge acquisition, or even happiness?

r/Zettelkasten - How big is your ZettelKasten?

explore relationships here with body doubling, observer effect (physics), and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle...

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

Mallon, Thomas. A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries. First Edition. St. Paul, Minn: Hungry Mind Press, 1995. https://www.amazon.com/Book-Ones-Own-People-Diaries/dp/1886913021

Recommended by Mark Bernstein at Tinderbox Meetup.

example of Will's notes output

931447 total word count<br /> 16190 total link count<br /> 3279 total zettel count

11 new zettel in the last 10 days<br /> 156 new zettel in the last 100 days<br /> 2.03 zettel created on average since day zero.

Is there a word or phrase in the advertising space which covers the filtering out of websites and networks which have objectionable material one doesn't want their content running against?

Contextual intelligence seems to be one...

Apparently the platforms Verity and Grapeshot (from Oracle) protect against this.

https://jetpack.com/blaze/

Looks like Jetpack is getting into the ad space leveraging WordPress.com and Tumblr.com with a product called "Blaze".

Saw this by an ad in my own website back end as a result of the Jetpack plugin with a text ad that read:

Reach more people across millions of sites. Promote your content on the WordPress.com and Tumblr ad network using Blaze.

Tagging and linking with AI (Napkin.one) by Nicole van der Hoeven

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2E3gRXiLYY

Nicole underlines the value of a good user interface for traversing one's notes. She'd had issues with tagging things in Obsidian using their #tag functionality, but never with their [[WikiLink]] functionality. Something about the autotagging done by Napkin's artificial intelligence makes the process easier for her. Some of this may be down to how their user interface makes it easier/more intuitive as well as how it changes and presents related notes in succession.

Most interesting however is the visual presentation of notes and tags in conjunction with an outliner for taking one's notes and composing a draft using drag and drop.

Napkin as a visual layer over tooling like Obsidian, Logseq, et. al. would be a much more compelling choice for me in terms of taking my pre-existing data and doing something useful with it rather than just creating yet another digital copy of all my things (and potentially needing sync to keep them up to date).

What is Napkin doing with all of their user's data?

reply to cristinadias7 at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17804/#Comment_17804

@cristinadias7 If you're interested in the overlap of zettelkasten and art or even zettelkasten for art, I've got a small collection available digitally if you think it would be useful/helpful.

Some artworks are difficult to index on physical cards because of their physical nature, so if it helps and you don't have pictures available to file away, you can index their storage locations the way libraries would index "realia" and keep your notes on them there. Twyla Tharpe kept actual objects in larger boxes by categories which is another fascinating way of doing things.

https://www.napkin.one/

Yet another collection app that belies the work of taking, making, and connecting notes.

Looks pretty and makes a promise, but how does it actually deliver? How much work and curation is involved? What are the outputs at the other end?

Circling back around to this after a mention by Tim Bushell at Dan Allosso's Book Club this morning. Nicole van der Hoeven has been using it for a while now and has several videos.

Though called Napkin, which conjures the idea of (wastebook) notes scribbled on a napkin, is a card-based UI which has both manual and AI generated tags in a constellation-like UI. It allows creating "stacks" of notes which are savable and archivable in an outline-esque form (though the outline doesn't appear collapsible) as a means of composition.

It's got a lot of web clipper tooling for saving and some dovetails for bringing in material from Readwise, but doesn't have great data export (JSON, CSV) at the moment. (Not great here means that one probably needs to do some reasonably heavy lifting to do the back and forth with other tools and may require programming skills.)

At present, it looks like just another tool in the space but could be richer with better data dovetailing with other services.

Johnson, Dirk. “Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins.” The New York Times, February 21, 2011, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/books/21margin.html.

suggested by The Margins of Marginalia by Tom Peters, ALA TechSource on 2011-05-02

This is a fascinating bit of reading practice.

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

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

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

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

The Margins of Marginalia by Tom Peters, ALA TechSource on 2011-05-02

Peters talks about his own reading practices and his annotation habits throughout his life. There's some discussion of the oncoming annotation functionality in the digital space in 2011.

readum.com no longer resolves in 2023. It was apparently a annotation tool in 2011...

this last bit is poetry of a fascinating sort...

Marginalia is a form of literary expression.

https://amanote.com/

https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/728-how-a-library-of-america-book-is-born

Book pages should be printed in the direction of the paper's grain. This does three things: improves the durability of the binding, allows the book to lie completely flat, and keeps the binding from crackling when opened.

https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooks/comments/x45frr/i_hole_punch_standard_index_cards_to_use_in_my/

https://baronfig.com/products/strategist?variant=39787199529043

reply to https://www.reddit.com/r/Arno_Schmidt/comments/1267heb/arno_schmidt_compulsively_wrote_and_hoarded/

Schmidt's zettelkasten (the direct English translation would be slip box thought card index is more appropriate) (or most likely only portions of it) was featured in the 2013 "Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie" exhibition in Marbach: https://www.dla-marbach.de/presse/presse-details/news/pm-11-2013/. For the interested, the exhibition did publish a book which will likely have more details, but when I looked about a year ago, it was only available in German.

There is a lot of research on zettelkasten methods, which are most often variations of the commonplace book method transferred into the index card or slip form rather than books/notebooks. I've not looked intensively at Schmidt's practice (yet), but it was likely similar to that of Victor Margolin outlined here, though in Margolin's case it was non-fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI. Vladimir Nabokov and Michael Ende are other writers who used similar methods.

There's some more examples/detail about the idea of zettelkasten (aka card indexes) in general on Wikipedia.

An important question here: her identity may not have been completely authentic, but is this a reason not to heed and consider her work on its own merit?

How do any of us really know our identities?

‘I am a White person:’ UC Berkeley scholar apologizes for wrongly claiming to be Native American her ‘whole life’ by Martha Ross

Example of someone using index cards as the core of their bullet journal practice on 2020-07-23 as opposed to a notebook/journal.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bulletjournal/comments/hwdwld/notecard_bullet_journal/

also posted to https://www.reddit.com/r/indexcards/comments/it3uj9/notecard_bullet_journal/

Sunday, May 7, 2023, 12:00 noon Eastern Time (US and Canada)<br /> 9 AM Pacific Time<br /> Zoom link for the meetup: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8850659900?pwd=ZE9ROUs1czNiK2FTTStjTUJuVkIydz09 4

Agenda This one is going to be fun! Sönke Ahrens, the author of How to Take Smart Notes 12 will join our meetup on May 7th. Let’s start a thread on what we’d like to review with him. The meetup is not for a couple of weeks. If you have the time, I highly suggest you grab a copy and give it a read.

https://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-meetup-sunday-may-7-2023-connect-with-sonke-ahrens-live-the-author-of-how-to-take-smart-notes/6636/1

https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/the-key-to-removing-a-rod/

There are broadly five types of card catalog rod configurations: - no rod - threaded rod - friction fit rod - lift and pull rod - hidden release rod

https://roterfaden.de/en/

https://www.instagram.com/dailynotecard/

Someone posting photos of an index-card based commonplace book on Instagram.

@Ddanielson @brad We have lots of fountain pen reviewers online🖋️. How can we normalize more/better index card reviews? Maybe even sommelier-style reviews that pair fountain pens with index cards: "You might appreciate this Stockroom Plus gridded card paired with your Montblanc Meisterstück" or "Roland Barthes would have gushed over these green Bristol cards with the TWSBI Diamond in Prussian Blue for his fichier vert." Also who's making Tomoe River paper in card stock thickness?!?

Incidentally, index cards + bullet journal = Memindex might be your sort of rabbit hole @hjertnes?

reply to rogerscrafford at tk

Fine furniture comes at a fine price. 🗃️🤩 I suspect that it won't sell for quite a while and one could potentially make an offer at a fraction of that to take it off their hands. It might bear considering that if one had a practice large enough to fill half or more, then that price probably wouldn't seem too steep for the long term security and value of the contents.

On a price per card of storage for some of the cheaper cardboard or metal boxes you're going to pay about $0.02-0.03 per card, but you'd need about 14 of those to equal this and those aren't always easy to stack and access regularly. With this, even at the full $1,900, you're looking at storage costs of $0.10/card, but you've got a lot more ease of use which will save you a lot of time and headache as more than adequate compensation, particularly if you're regularly using the approximately 20,400 index cards it would hold. Not everyone has the same esthetic, but I suspect that most would find that this will look a lot nicer in your office than 14 cheap cardboard boxes. That many index cards even at discount rates are going to cost you about $825 just in cards much less beautiful, convenient, and highly usable storage.

Even for some of the more prolific zettelkasten users, this sort of storage is about 20 years of use and if you compare it with $96/year for Notion or $130/year for Evernote, you're probably on par for cost either way, but at least with the wooden option, you don't have to worry about your note storage provider going out of business a few years down the line. Even if you go the "free" Obsidian route, with computers/storage/backups over time, you're probably not going to come out ahead in the long run. It's not all apples to apples comparison and there are differences in some of the affordances, but on balance and put into some perspective, it's probably not the steep investment it may seem.

And as an added bonus, while you're slowly filling up drawers, as a writer you might appreciate the slowly decreasing wine/whiskey bottle storage over time? A 5 x 8 drawer ought to fit three bottles of wine or as many fifths of Scotch. It'll definitely accommodate a couple of magnums of Jack Daniels. 🥃🍸🍷My experience also tells me that an old fashioned glass can make a convenient following block in card index boxes.

https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2018/03/11/such-a-shame-julia-childs-family-home-now-owned-by-caltrans-is-vacant-deteriorating-in-pasadena/

Local Nikki High opens Pasadena bookstore Octavia's Bookshelf - Los Angeles Times by Melissa Gomez

The Book Pages: Octavia’s Bookshelf founder ‘floored’ by public’s response by Erik Pedersen

https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/2rru4x/where_can_i_buy_the_key_to_the_case_of_a_smith/

https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/135omj9/a_bit_of_nostalgia/

real?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbGUVjOF2uw

He still seems iffy about the value of using WD-40 on crinkle cut finish, primarily because of the smell.

Others use brass bristle brushes for applying the WD-40 instead of nylon brushes.

Hermes Rocket Typewriter Case Cleaning — Crazy Results, Simple Tools

A few hours with some mild soap and water and a toothbrush will clean up most of a plastic typewriter case.

A mild solvent like isopropyl alcohol can generally get the remainder of any tough spots or gummy spills.

WD-40 for Crinkle Finish Typewriters — Does it work??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz1t6QtARyI

WD-40, which has paraffin wax as an ingredient, can be brushed onto the crinkle finish of a typewriter to clean it up and give it some shine. Use a rag to wipe off excess and take care not to get any in the segment comb. The difference on a generally clean typewriter appears to be negligible and primarily results in a WD-40 smell.

Would something like Armor All work better? Car wax might also work as well. Powder coating polish could work, but it may act as a gentle abrasive as it is also meant to lift stains.

Typewriter Cleaning and Repair Basics #3 Bell Fixed

Keep in mind that some typewriters don't have hard mechanical margin stops, but rely on the user to hear the bell to know the margin is approaching and return the line manually.

Bell hammer mechanisms may simply need to be cleaned to get them into functioning order. Dirt and grime may prevent the hammer mechanism from having enough force to strike the bell. Beyond this replacing the spring may be necessary.

Typewriter Cleaning and Repair Basics #2 Type Bars, Case, and Crinkle Finish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82O_iUAI5og

Segment comb cleaning - isopropyl alcohol (gentler solvent) - odorless mineral spirits - Lacquer thinner (maybe a bit too aggressive) - naphtha (lighter fluid) take care for flammability and ventilation

Work solvent into bearing between type bar and segment comb. To dry things out one can used compressed air when done or just air dry.

If sticking keys not due to being gummed up, bend portions slightly for better alighment.

Do not lubricate the segment comb.

Only lubricate the carriage rails when necessary.

Exterior cleaning

Brass bristle or nylon bristle brushes (toothbrushes) can be used to clean the exterior of the typewriter and/or cases with mild detergents or other solvents. Depending on the finish, try the brush and solvent on a small portion to determine colorfastness and potential scratching first.

Typewriter Cleaning and Repair Basics #1 Assessment and Testing

Recommends against any lubrication on the key mechanism, just keep it clean. Lubrication in some cases may actually gum up the works and cause the keys to return slowly.

He suggests Krud Kutter as a cleaner/degreaser.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alveary

This could be a fine English translation of the German word Zettelkasten.

The relationship to bees here is fascinating with respect to the commonplace tradition as well.

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

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

tangentially mentioned in the Dan Allosso Book Club 2023-04-29

reply to u/zielkarz at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/132o4w7/alternative_numbering_and_classifications/

Assigning random decimal numbers is more than adequate and is roughly what you'll have in the long term anyway... see https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/27/thoughts-on-zettelkasten-numbering-systems/ for some of what I've written on this before.

Because of the way that the topology of dense sets work in the real (decimal) numbers, any topic you give a number can be made arbitrarily close to any other topic you choose. As a result the numbers you choose are generally inconsequential, so simply choose something that you feel makes sense to you.

Cognate with the Welsh cwtch??

https://www.wordnik.com/lists/outcasts

https://www.wordnik.com/lists/twitter-favorites

See also: http://laivakoira.typepad.com/blog/2013/10/twitters-new-favourite-words.html

Follow along:https://twitter.com/favibot

See word clouds: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugovk/sets/72157636928894765/

See the script: https://github.com/hugovk/word-tools/blob/master/new_favourite_words.py

Inspired by: http://www.wordnik.com/lists/outcasts

https://www.wordnik.com/users/scarequotes

An interesting Wordnik user.

Early library card catalogs used cards that were 2 x 5" cards, the Harvard College size, before the standardization of 3 x 5" index cards.

Why do people not generally use the name "call number" when referring to the numbers on their Niklas Luhmann-esque zettelkasten cards?

Raworth, Kate. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017.

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

Where are the tools for graphing inter-dependencies of areas of study? When entering a new area it would be interesting to have visual mappings of ideas and thoughts.

If ideas in an area were chunked into atomic ideas, then perhaps either a Markov monkey or a similar actor could find the shortest learning path from a basic idea to more complex ideas.

Example: what is the shortest distance from an understanding of linear algebra to learn and master Lie algebras?

Link to Garden of Forking Paths

Link to tools like Research Rabbit, Open Knowledge Maps and Connected Papers, but for ideas instead of papers, authors, and subject headings.

It has long been useful for us to simplify our thought models for topics like economics to get rid of extraneous ideas to come to basic understandings within such a space. But over time, we need to branch out into related and even distant subjects like mathematics, psychology, engineering, sociology, anthropology, politics, physics, computer science, etc. to be able to delve deeper and come up with more complex and realistic models of thought.Our early ideas like the rational actor within economics are fine and lovely, but we now know from the overlap of psychology and sociology which have given birth to behavioral economics that those mythical rational actors are quaint and never truly existed. To some extent, to move forward as a culture and a society we need to rid ourselves of these quaint ideas to move on to more complex and sophisticated ones.

Kate Raworth's Donut Economics thesis is a step in the direction of reframing economics towards cooperation and creating a self-sustaining world.

Emergent note taking: what ants can teach us about notes

Nothing new to me, but interesting to see part of Nicole van der Hoeven's process.

https://www.reddit.com/user/Dangerous-Ratio6448/

reply to ctietze at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2560/zettel-feedback-functor-yeah-just-that#latest

Kudos on tackling the subject area, especially on your own. I know from experience it's not as straightforward as it could/should be. I'll refrain from monkeying with the perspective/framing you're coming from with overly dense specifics. As an abstract mathematician I'd break this up into smaller pieces, but for your programming perspective, I can appreciate why you don't.

If you want to delve more deeply into the category theory space but without a graduate level understanding of multiple various areas of abstract mathematics, I'd recommend the following two books which come at the mathematics from a mathematician's viewpoint, but are reasonably easy/intuitive enough for a generalist or a non-mathematician coming at things from a programming perspective (particularly compared to most of the rest of what's on the market):

• Ash, Robert B. A Primer of Abstract Mathematics. 1st ed. Classroom Resource Materials. Washington, D.C.: The Mathematical Association of America, 1998.
  • primarily chapter 1, but the rest of the book is a great primer/bridge to higher abstract math in general)
• Spivak, David I. Category Theory for the Sciences. MIT Press, 2014.
  • Spivak had a free draft prepublication version at https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.6946; There's also an open courseware version of his MIT course with a free .pdf textbook (with a 2013 date, but ostensibly a copy of the final published version from 2014) at https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-s996-category-theory-for-scientists-spring-2013/

You'll have to dig around a bit more for them (his website, Twitter threads, etc.), but John Carlos Baez is an excellent expositor of some basic pieces of category theory.

For an interesting framing from a completely non-technical perspective/conceptualization, a friend of mine wrote this short article on category theorist Emily Riehl which may help those approaching the area for the first time: https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2021/winter/emily-riehl-category-theory/?ref=dalekeiger.net

One of the things which makes Category Theory difficult for many is that to have multiple, practical/workable (homework or in-book) examples to toy with requires having a reasonably strong grasp of 3-4 or more other areas of mathematics at the graduate level. When reading category theory books, you need to develop the ability to (for example) focus on the algebra examples you might understand while skipping over the analysis, topology, or Lie groups examples you don't (yet) have the experience to plow through. Giving yourself explicit permission to skip the examples you have no clue about will help you get much further much faster.

I haven't maintained it since, but here's a site where I aggregated some category theory resources back in 2015 for some related work I was doing at the time: https://cat.boffosocko.com/course-resources/ I was aiming for basic/beginner resources, but there are likely to be some highly technical ones interspersed as well.

https://www.pdfdrive.com/

Scott Scheper returns to r/zettelkasten...

https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2023/04/28/want-to-read.html

👀 How did I not see this?!?? 😍 Looks like a good follow up to Ann Blair's Too Much to Know (Yale, 2010) and the aperitif of Simon Winchester's Knowing What We Know (Harper) which just came out on Tuesday. 📚 Thanks for the recommendation Kimberly!

Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume II, Man to World. 1st ed. Vol. 3. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume I, Angel to Love. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

Jerry Springer, former Cincinnati mayor and talk show host, dead at 79 by Lisa Respers France, Marianne Garvey

read at 8:12 PM

This is good news!

Reader Question 2: Notes on Paper, Notes in Apps, Here, There, and Everywhere, Should I Just Give Up and Accept the Chaos?

I love the framing of Rubber Ducks LLC as a company to look at personal productivity.

My name’s Richard. I live in Sydney, on the traditional land of Bidjigal people of the Eora nation. Here I write about writing and reading (and what I do when I'm not writing or reading). I'm writing slowly but may at some point speed up. Connect with me on micro.blog or at Mastodon @aus.social@writingslowly. On Reddit, I'm @atomicnotes. via https://micro.blog/writingslowly

In Australia index cards are frequently called system cards,

via micro.blog/writingslowly at https://micro.blog/writingslowly/18676734

https://tantek.com/2023/110/t2/beyond-mastodon-indieweb-own-domain

This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • April 15th - 21st, 2023 by Marty McGuire

Paying for participation | Open Thinkering by Doug Belshaw

The Museum of Modern Art acquires the MIT Press colophon by Chris Walton

Muriel Cooper, the first design director of the MIT Press and a founding faculty member of MIT's Media Lab, designed the MIT Press colophon in 1965. The iconic colophon has been acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 2023.

The commission had originally been offered to Paul Rand (o Eye Bee M logo fame) in 1962, but when he turned down the offer, he suggested they offer it to Cooper.

Vicky Zhao indirectly frames the answer for "why have a zettelkasten?", especially for learning, as overcoming the "illusion of competence" which is closely related to the mere-exposure effect and the Dunning–Kruger effect.

How To Take Smart Notes (3 methods no one's talking about)<br /> by Vicky Zhao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O46Rqh5zHE

Zhao briefly describes Cal Newport's Questions, Evidence, Conclusions (QEC) framework which she uses as a framework for quickly annotating books and then making notes from those annotations later.

How does QEC differ from strategies in Adler/Van Doren?

reply to @AnthonyJohn@pkm.social at https://mastodon.social/@AnthonyJohn@pkm.social/110230007393359308

Perfectionism and Shiny object syndrome are frequently undiagnosed diseases. Are you sure it's not preventing you from building critical mass in one place to actually accomplish your goals? Can't wait to see the essay.

syndication link

Lace card

Harry belafonte vs Animal

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

reply to u/MisterTTS at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1301mhl/any_good_antinet_programs_and_android_apps_out/

I've searched for ages, built programs for myself, and come to the conclusion that there is no really good app or workflow that will allow you to do both paper and digital at the same time without a lot of extra unnecessary repetitive work that doesn't provide you with tangible benefit to pay for itself. The best bet currently to save yourself a lot of time and headache is to pick one or the other and just go with it.

I suspect this reminder is in response to the post just before it at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12zgyos/i_made_an_antinet_interest_group_in_my_school/ which is a crosspost from r/antinet. The sparseness of the poster's history seems to indicate that it might be a sock puppet of Scott Scheper.

In case some haven't been watching, I'll mention that Simon Winchester's new book Knowing What We Know on knowledge to transmission was published by Harper on April 25th in North America. For zettelkasten fans, you'll note that it has some familiar references and suggested readings including by our friends Markus Krajewski, Ann Blair, Iaian McGilchrist, Alex Wright, Anthony Grafton, Dennis Duncan, and Mortimer J. Adler to name but a few.

Many are certain to know his award winning 1998 book The Professor and the Madman which was also transformed into the eponymous 2019 film starring Sean Penn. Though he didn't use the German word zettelkasten in the book, he tells the story of philologist James Murray's late 1800s collaborative 6 million+ slip box collection of words and sentences which when edited into a text is better known today as the Oxford English Dictionary.

If you need some additional motivation to check out his book, I'll use the fact that Winchester, as a writer, is one of the most talented non-linear storytellers I've ever come across, something which many who focus on zettelkasten output may have a keen interest in studying.

Syndication Link: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2558/knowing-what-we-know-the-transmission-of-knowledge-from-ancient-wisdom-to-modern-magic/p1?new=1

++ on the idea of not putting date/time stamps in titles. I have seen a few people using traditional Luhmann-esque numbers in digital contexts. The primary benefit here is that it forces one to create a link to at least one other note and creates small outlines over time. Otherwise one can end up with a large "scrap heap" of orphaned notes that make a lot less sense over time.

mostly testing to see why my YouTube comments seem to be disappearing.... permalink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkB5FmgUY1I&lc=UgxP6r5pt94uWyK5t1Z4AaABAg

Somehow I've always been disappointed with the two dimensional aspects of the pseudo-diagrams on prior books and articles in the space. If you go with something conceptual, perhaps try to capture a multidimensional systems/network feel? It's difficult to capture the ideas of serendipity and combinatorial complexity at play, but I'd love to see those somehow as the "sexier" ideas over the drab ideas people have when they think of their mundane conceptualizations of "just" notes.

Another idea may be to not go in the direction of the dot/line network map or "electronics circuit board route", but go back to the older ideas of clockworks, pneumatics, and steampunk...

By way of analogy, there's something sort of fun and suggestive about a person operating a Jacquard Loom to take threads (ideas) and fashioning something beautiful (https://photos.com/featured/jacquard-loom-with-swags-of-punched-print-collector.html) or maybe think, "How would John Underkoffler imagine such a machine?"

Now that I'm thinking about it I want a bookwheel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookwheel) next to my zettelkasten wheel!