https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gR4gyZxr9CAc8KoN0Cdlpjpp0305CZ8ZpNWRHfMq83w/edit#slide=id.g228c93eec09_0_0

TAG Feedback Protocol Prompts for responding to classmates - Tell some things you like - Ask thoughtful questions - Give suggestions

(Source: https://learninginhand.com/blog/feedbackchat)

Via: https://hypothes.is/a/8iTBtM8dEe29byc2oLQk-w

Liquid Margins 39 - Inclusivity and Social Annotation: Fostering Diverse Learning Environments

Attended from the halfway point onward.

What would a list of prompts for teaching creatively look like if it were created using Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies as a model?

Inspired by Sophia Rahming (~09:48)

The massive zettelkasten which powers the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae is befittingly housed on the top floors of the Residenz, the former palace of the Bavarian royal family, now a part of the Bavarian Academy (Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften) in Munich, Germany.

Thesaurus Linguae Latinae - Society for Classical Studies

basic details, particularly administrative ones about the structure of the editors, fellows, et al and funding for attending

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

How much of the 1935 Stakhanovite movement was propaganda vs. reality and how much of it used the ideas of scientific management from the late 1800s/early 1900s?

reply to Christoph Thiede at https://norden.social/@LinqLover/110011970287271976

@LinqLover@norden.social @academia@a.gup.pe @zettelkasten@a.gup.pe @zettelkasten@mobilize.berlin @academicchatter@a.gup.pe @academicsunite@a.gup.pe If I understand your question properly, you're presumably using a paper zettelkasten and not a digital one? The issue is that of "multiple storage". Niklas Luhmann solved this by numbering his cards (using a Dewey-like system) and then creating an index for the subjects to be able to find them. John Locke did roughly the same thing with his indexing method for commonplace books.

cf. https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22multiple+storage%22 and https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685

In the digital domain I rely on relational databases or heavy tagging and digital search. For an example, see again the Hypothesis link above.

"Classical" ZK prior to Luhmann simply made multiple copies and distributed them, though updating them was nearly impossible.

https://baty.net/2022/personal-knowledge-management

🤪

—Detlef Stern, 2023-03-21, https://mastodon.social/@t73fde/110062851811483123

A note not referenced by another note is not a note. (translation mine)

In re: Last lines of: https://www.nb.admin.ch/snl/en/home/about-us/sla/insights-outlooks/einsichten---aussichten-2012/aus-dem-nachlass-von-james-peter-zollinger.html

Google translate does a reasonable job on translating it as 'getting bogged down' but the original sich ‹verzettelt› would mean roughly to "get lost in the slips", perhaps in a way similar to Anatole France's novel Penguin Island (L’Île des Pingouins. Calmann-Lévy, 1908) but without the storm or the death.

A native and bi-lingual German speaker might be better at explaining it, but this is a useful explanation of the prefix (sich) ver- : https://yourdailygerman.com/german-prefix-ver-meaning/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11uibsm/zettelkasten_or_hopeless_paper_chaos/

Don't be blinded by availability bias. It was historically almost always thus! Especially in Germany. (The French have traditionally called it a fichier boîte and in English it's the card index.) It's only been since the rise in popularity of the use of the German word in English (beginning in late 2013 with zettelkasten.de) where it has almost always been associated with Niklas Luhmann that has has most people now associating Luhmann's method with the word Zettelkasten.

If you look back at the 2013 exhibition "Zettelkästen. Machines of Fantasy" at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, you'll notice that there were six zettelkasten featured there including those of Arno Schmidt, Walter Kempowski, Friedrich Kittler, Aby Warburg, Paul, Blumenberg, and Luhmann. Of those, the structure of Luhmann's was the exception which wasn't primarily organized broadly by subject heading. You'll also find some historians and sociologists organizing theirs by date or geographic regions as well as other custom arrangements as their needs and work might dictate.

The preponderance of books talking about these note taking methods suggest a topic heading arrangement for filing, including the book by Johnannes Erich Heyde from which Luhmann's son has indicated he learned an old technique from which he evolved his own practice.

See also:

• The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/

• Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens: zeitgemässe Mittel und Verfahrungsweisen. Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931.

Rarely does a week go by that I don't run across another new/significant example of a zettelkasten. Thanks u/atomicnotes for keeping up the pace with James Peter Zollinger. (Though this week may be a twofer given my notes on Ludwig Wittgenstein's over the last few days.)

Smith, Chris. “Thesaurus Linguae Latinae: How the World’s Largest Latin Lexicon Is Brought to Life.” De Gruyter Conversations, July 5, 2021. https://blog.degruyter.com/thesaurus-linguae-latinae-how-the-worlds-largest-latin-lexicon-is-brought-to-life/.

Basic overview article without much direct data/insight

We need more scholarship which leaves open thinking spaces for future scholars.

Antiquae linguae Britannicae thesaurus being a British, or Welsh-English dictionary<br /> https://www.library.wales/discover-learn/digital-exhibitions/europeana-rise-of-literacy/dictionaries-and-grammars/antiquae-linguae-britannicae#?c=&m=&s=&cv=&xywh=-1596%2C-267%2C5574%2C4321

Pinkerton, Byrd. “The Ultimate Latin Dictionary: After 122 Years, Still At Work On The Letter ‘N.’” NPR, May 14, 2016, sec. Parallels. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/05/14/476873307/the-ultimate-latin-dictionary-after-122-years-still-at-work-on-the-letter-n.

Interesting to see a reference the branching nature of the meanings of an individual word which has multiple ways of being categorized.

The TLL categorizes words alphabetically first and then by chronologically second. The rest of the structure shakes out from there as editors write articles for each of the words.

This Latin Thesaurus Has Been in Progress Since 1894<br /> by Maris Fessenden

very basic surface level article

Kathleen Coleman, “The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae” Paideia Lectures 2022, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s98hTIOW1Ug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s98hTIOW1Ug

The TLL was moved to a monastery in Bavaria during WWII because they were worried that the building that contained the zettelkasten would be bombed and it actually was.

The slips have been microfilmed and a copy of them is on store at Princeton as a back up just i case.

[01:17:00]

Roberta Stewart of Dartmouth has written a description (available on the website) of how an article for the TLL is generally written. [01:10:26]

Remember the Thesaurus is a work of the human brain and therefore it is fallible. —Kathleen M. Coleman

replace Thesaurus with zettelkasten...

Following volumes I and II (a and b) the editors of the TLL separated out the occurrence of proper names into a supplement, called the Onomasticon, which includes the words beginning with "C" and "D". Following D, they began leaving out proper names because their inclusion was slowing down the progress of the thesaurus and there are other resources like encyclopedias for discussion and inclusion of these. [24:48]

For rare words in Latin, articles may include all surviving attestations of those words. Typically only a representative selection of attestations are included in most articles which is indicated in the text by two "crossed cigars" before the lemma (or headword).

Within the TLL's work they consider the work on each headword to be an "article" which are also individually credited.

The TLL contains every instance of every know Latin word in every known medium from the beginning of the language down to the 2nd century CE and from then on, every lexicographically significant instance from that time until the 6th century CE. [22:32]

Basic statistics regarding the TLL: - ancient Latin vocabulary words: ca. 55,000 words - 10,000,000 slips - ca. 6,500 boxes - ca. 1,500 slips per box - library 32,000 volumes - contributors: 375 scholars from 20 different countries - 12 Indo-European specalists - 8 Romance specialists - 100 proof-readers - ca. 44,000 words published - published content: 70% of the entire vocabulary - print run: 1,350 - Publisher: consortium of 35 academies from 27 countries on 5 continents

Longest remaining words: - non / 37 boxes of ca 55,500 slips - qui, quae, quod / 65 boxes of ca. 96,000 slips - sum, esse, fui / 54.5 boxes of ca. 81,750 slips - ut / 35 boxes of ca 52,500 slips

Note that some of these words have individual zettelkasten for themselves approaching the size of some of the largest personal collections we know about!

[18:51]

It took approximately five years of collecting and excerpting material before the researchers of the TLL began writing articles.

The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae didn't excerpt every single word in written Latin, just what they thought was lexicographically significant. As an example, they didn't excerpt all of Augustine for had they, the collection would have been approximately 50% larger because he was such a prolific writer. [t=891]

San/sand (? what is the correct word?) box invented with a hinge which moves forward allowing one to more easily thumb through the slips in their box.

The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae used the Meusel system for creating Zettel by utilizing double folio sheets onto which they copied text in hectographic ink which can be reproduced by lithography before cutting them up into slips.

Done alphabetically and then secondarily by chronological time. (Indicated in a box on the top left of each slip.) The number of copies of each slip is written in the bottom left hand corner and circled.

https://www.abandonedamerica.us/remington-arms-munition-factory

https://jamaicanpatwah.com/term/Criss/1303#.ZCLoWKQpCDY

Forschung: Der Thesaurus linguae Latinae. Munich, Germany: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3Eqt2QBKNs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3Eqt2QBKNs

How to promote my podcast <br /> by Jeremy Cherfas

Jon Udell's Tag Rename tool for Hypothes.is.

use of theausaurus to limit subject headings...

Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens. (Sektion 1.2 Die Kartei) Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931.

annotation target: urn:x-pdf:00126394ba28043d68444144cd504562

(Unknown translation from German into English. v1 TK)

The overall title of the work (in English: Technique of Scientific Work) calls immediately to mind the tradition of note taking growing out of the scientific historical methods work of Bernheim and Langlois/Seignobos and even more specifically the description of note taking by Beatrice Webb (1926) who explicitly used the phrase "recipe for scientific note-taking".

see: https://hypothes.is/a/BFWG2Ae1Ee2W1HM7oNTlYg

first reading: 2022-08-23 second reading: 2022-09-22

I suspect that this translation may be from Clemens in German to Scheper and thus potentially from the 1951 edition?

Heyde, Johannes Erich. Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens; eine Anleitung, besonders für Studierende. 8., Umgearb. Aufl. 1931. Reprint, Berlin: R. Kiepert, 1951.

It would seem that the word treasure here is being used to modify one's attention. Historically in books about "knowledge work" or commonplacing, the word was used with respect to one's storehouse of knowledge itself and not one's attention. Some of the effect is the result of the break in historical tradition being passed down from one generation to another. It's also an indication that the shift in value has moved not from what one knows or has, but that the attention itself is more valued now, even in a book about excerpting, thinking, and keeping knowledge!

Oh how far we have fallen!

It's also an indication of the extremes of information overload we're facing that the treasure is attention and not the small tidbits of knowledge and understanding we're able to glean from the massive volumes we face on a daily basis.

We can imagine mining the information we encounter, following veins and seams underground, then smelting and refining the ore into useful metals. Occasionally we might come across gems that are nearly perfect when we discover them, perhaps needing only a bit of cutting and setting to reveal their beauty. But mostly the work involves patience and effort, as we go through the steps of finding, collecting, refining, and concentrating information from a raw material into exactly what we need for our structure

I love these two new clever metaphors (mining and refining and cooking) for note taking for building knowledge. They're a welcome addition to the older and more classical metaphor of bees (Latin: apes) collecting pollen to make honey in the commonplace tradition.

https://tllpod.podbean.com/

Based on the history and usage of horreum here in this first episode of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae podcast, a project featuring a 10+ million slip zettelkasten at its core, I can't help but think that not only is the word ever so apropos for an introduction, but it does quite make an excellent word for translating the idea of card index in English or Zettelkasten from German into Latin.

My horreum is a storehouse for my thoughts and ideas which nourishes my desire to discover and build upon my knowledge.

This seems to be just the sort of thing that Jeremy Cherfas might appreciate on multiple levels.

https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/download/nxm28u/Horreum.mp3

Project: Thesaurus linguae Latinae<br /> from Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften

Dictionary covers ancient Egypt’s everyday language<br /> by William Harms - Chicago

duplicate of https://scienceblog.com/56681/scholars-finish-dictionary-of-ancient-egyptian-language/

University of Chicago. “Scholars Finish Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian Language.” Substack newsletter. ScienceBlog.com, September 19, 2012. https://scienceblog.com/56681/scholars-finish-dictionary-of-ancient-egyptian-language/.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was completed in 2011 after 90 years of work.

The Chicago Demotic Dictionary compiled by the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago was facilitated by computers compared with the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary which relied on index cards.

Hayes, William C. Review of Historical Records of Rameses III, by William F. Edgerton and John A. Wilson. American Journal of Archaeology 40, no. 4 (1936): 558–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/498809.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/498809

...have been diligently consulted and compared with the present versions and the authors have also availed themselves of the invaluable material contained in the Zettelkasten of the Berlin Wirterbuch der...

This is the oldest appearance of the word "Zettelkasten" appearing in a journal article which I could find on JSTOR.

I'm not surprised it's in a journal in the humanities and specifically on archaeology.

Update: even better, this has introduced me to a massive new ZK: Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache!

Where is Indiana Jones' zettelkasten?!

https://aaew.bbaw.de/thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae

https://aaew.bbaw.de/erman-grapow-wb

Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache by Adolph Erman and Hermann Grapow can be viewed online using the Wb. browser at https://aaew.bbaw.de/tla/servlet/WbImgBrowser. Links from reference points within the dictionary go directly to corresponding slips of paper in the digitized slip archive.

https://aaew.bbaw.de/digitalisiertes-zettelarchiv

The Digitized Card Archive ( DZA ) of the Dictionary of the Egyptian Language (Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache) has been available on the Internet since 1999. The archive can be searched at: https://aaew.bbaw.de/tla/servlet/DzaIdx.

Since 2004, the materials and query functions have been integrated into the larger Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae project at https://aaew.bbaw.de/thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.

The Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache was an international collaborative zettelkasten project begun in 1897 and finally published as five volumes in 1926.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rterbuch_der_%C3%A4gyptischen_Sprache

Structures and Transformations of the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language: Text and Knowledge Culture in Ancient Egypt. “Altägyptisches Wörterbuch: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften 1999,” 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20180627163317/https://aaew.bbaw.de/wbhome/Broschuere/index.html.

With support from the German Research Foundation, the 1.5 million sheets of the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache began to be digitized and put online in 1997.

Google translation:

The sheer quantity exceeds the possibilities of book publication, the complex, multidimensional structure of a networked information base cannot be reproduced in print, and finally the dynamic of a constantly growing and constantly correcting material does not fit into the rigid rhythm of book production, in which each expanded and corrected new edition is associated with an incalculable amount of effort. A book publication could only offer a snapshot of such a database, reduced to a specific perspective. This too can be very useful from time to time, but it does not solve the problem of publishing the entire material.

While the writing criticism of "dumping out one's zettelkasten" into a paper, journal article, chapter, book, etc. has been reasonably frequent in the 20th century, often as a means of attempting to create a linear book-bound context in a local neighborhood of ideas, are there other more complex networks of ideas which we're not communicating because they don't neatly fit into linear narrative forms? Is it possible that there is a non-linear form(s) based on network theory in which more complex ideas ought to better be embedded for understanding?

Some of Niklas Luhmann's writing may show some of this complexity and local or even regional circularity, but perhaps it's a necessary means of communication to get these ideas across as they can't be placed into linear forms.

One can analogize this to Lie groups and algebras in which our reading and thinking experiences are limited only to local regions which appear on smaller scales to be Euclidean, when, in fact, looking at larger portions of the region become dramatically non-Euclidean. How are we to appropriately relate these more complex ideas?

What are the second and third order effects of this phenomenon?

An example of this sort of non-linear examination can be seen in attempting to translate the complexity inherent in the Wb (Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache) into a simple, linear dictionary of the Egyptian language. While the simplicity can be handy on one level, the complexity of transforming the entirety of the complexity of the network of potential meanings is tremendously difficult.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/U95jEs0eEe20EUesAtKcuA

Is this phenomenon of "complex narratives" related to misinformation spread within the larger and more complex social network/online network? At small, local scales, people know how to handle data and information which is locally contextualized for them. On larger internet-scale communication social platforms this sort of contextualization breaks down.

For a lack of a better word for this, let's temporarily refer to it as "complex narratives" to get a handle on it.

For some research the book form is just not conducive to the most productive work. Both the experiences of Beatrice Webb (My Apprenticeship, Appendix C) and Adolph Erman (on Wb) show that database forms for sorting, filtering, and comparing have been highly productive and provide a wealth of information which simply couldn't be done otherwise.

Correcting a text within a digital archive or database allows the change to propagate to all portions of the collection compared with a physical card index which has the hurdle of multiple storage and requires manual changes on all of the associated copies.

This sort of affordance can be seen in more modern note taking tools like Obsidian which does this sort of work with global search and replace of double bracketed words which change everywhere in the collection.

In the early twentieth century one might have created a card index to study a large textual corpus, but in the twenty first one is more likely to rely on a relational database instead.

Google translation:

Every Egyptology student learns in their first semester that the Egyptian word pt (pronounced pet) means "heaven". The collection of documents in the dictionary archive comprises around 6,000 document slips. In the order of this material one learns that the Egyptian heaven has gates and ways, waters and banks, sides, pillars and chapels. This makes it tangible that the Egyptians had something completely different in mind when they heard the word "heaven" than modern Westerners do, namely a mythical space in which gods and spirits of the dead dwell.

This is a fantastic example of context creation for a dead language as well as for creating proper historical context.

In looking at the uses of and similarities between Wb and TLL, I can't help but think that these two zettelkasten represented the state of the art for Large Language Models and some of the ideas behind ChatGPT

Alternate sort orders for the slips for the Wb include chronological, grammatical, semantic, and graphic, but for teasing out the meanings the original sort order was sufficient. Certainly other sort orders may reveal additional subtleties.

The preposition m "in" appears more than 60,000 times in the corpus, a fact which becomes a bit overwhelming to analyze.

The benefit of creating such a massive key word in context index for the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache meant that instead of using an ad hoc translation method (guessing based on limited non-cultural context) for a language, which was passingly familiar, but not their mother tongue, Adolph Erman and others could consult a multitude of contexts for individual words and their various forms to provide more global context for better translations.

Other dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary attempt to help do this as well as provide the semantic shift of words over time because the examples used in creating the dictionary include historical examples from various contexts.

The method used for indexing the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae is now generally known as a key word in context (KWIC) index.

questions:

• What were the exact sizes of the slips? Had they been standardized at the time?

The Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache slip box collection is almost 17 times the size of Niklas Luhmann's by number of slips (1,500,000/90,000 = 16.67) and 58.81 times the size in number of boxes (1588/27).Though keep in mind that due to the multiple storage here each card was copied ~40 times, so if only only counts individual cards then the collection would have been (1.5M/40) 375,000 slips, which is still more than 4 times the size of Luhmann's collection of slips.

See: https://hypothes.is/a/QMYAQMztEe2disvmvCAEAA for source of Wb number source.

The zettelkasten for the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache comprises approximately 1.5 million slips for words and the card archive fills 1588 boxes.

Once made, the initial note excerpts were copied 40 times using a lithography process. Then each word in the original slip was underlined in red on respective copies to be filed away alphabetically. At the top right corner of each slip was written down the phonetic sound of the rubricated word's Egyptian transcription. Within the collection certain special words were also separated for the names of people, kings, gods, and places to allow for additional study.

Talk about a problem of multiple storage!!

The structure of the filing system for the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache was designed based on the work done for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae started in 1894. Texts in the collection were roughly divided into passages of about 30 words and written in hieroglyphic form on postcard-sized slips of paper. The heading contained the designation of the text and the body included the texts' context (inscriptions, etc.) as well as a preliminary translation of the passage.

These passages were then cross-referenced with other occurrences of the hieroglyphics to provide better progressive translations which ultimately appeared in the final manuscript. As a result some of the translations on the cards were incomplete as work proceeded and cross-comparisons of individual words were puzzled out.

A slip showing a passage of text from the victory stele of Sesostris III at the Nubian fortress of Semna. The handwriting is that of project leader Adolf Erman, who had "already struggled with the text as a high school student".

Out of a total of 201 notebooks, Kurt Sethe's work on the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache comprised 27 notebooks with 3240 pages of notes on hieroglyphic copies from his travels and research.

Kurt Sethes' philosophy was encapsulated as "I only work when I like. But I always like to work." (Translation from German mine.)

The Berlin dictionary project combined the work of more than 60 scholars headed by Adolph Erman with the help of the academies at Berlin, Göttingen, Leipzig and Munich and the International Orientalist Congress.

Kaiser Wilhelm II appropriated 70,000 M in 1897 to help fund the estimated 11 year dictionary project that would be known as the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache.

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

!!

McCauley, Edward Y. “A Dictionary of the Egyptian Language.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 16, no. 1 (1883): 1–241. https://doi.org/10.2307/1005403.

Prior to the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, but nothing brilliant with respect to use of a zettelkasten to create.

Hayes, William C. Review of Historical Records of Rameses III, by William F. Edgerton and John A. Wilson. American Journal of Archaeology 40, no. 4 (1936): 558–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/498809.

Tagged this because it's the first appearance of Zettelkasten in an English language setting in the JSTOR repository.

see also: https://hypothes.is/a/RYZOssqXEe2H5wtABI0puA

Started on 2023-03-24; finished on 2023-03-27.

Did our word "ray" (as in ray of sunshine) derive from the ancient Egyptian word for their god "Ra"?

ägyptischen Sprache.

This is the first use of the word Zettelkasten in an English (non-German) context in JSTOR that I've been able to find.

Still likely not the first appearance, but reasonably early...

What a searing insult carefully couched here!

National libraries began to more commonly acquire the working papers (nachlass) of authors and researchers after the mid-19th century.

Blair, Ann M. “The Rise of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe.” Intellectual History Review 20, no. 3 (August 4, 2010): 303–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2010.492611.

Annotation target: urn:x-pdf:202007e9836543a7b69e7045c81f5965

Hypothes.is: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Aurn%3Ax-pdf%3A202007e9836543a7b69e7045c81f5965

The split between the ideas of commonplace book and zettelkasten may stem from the time period of the Anglicization of the first. If Gessner was just forming the tenets of a zettelkasten practice in 1548 and the name following(?) [what was the first use of zettelkasten?] while the word commonplace was entering English in 1531 using a book format, then the two traditions would likely have been splitting from that point forward in their different areas.

Apparently Cole Steel manufactured typewriters in the 1960s.

reply to u/zleonska at https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/1223a2e/comment/jdp8nbl/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Thanks for sharing this u/zleonska! More people might consider using a card index to index their commonplace books for future search and discovery. The first person I'd ever come across doing this was W. Ross Ashby whose commonplace and index have been digitized and are now searchable online at http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index/index.html. It seems a nice change of pace to have a centralized index over keeping one in each book and having to search in multiple books over time as described in John Locke's commonplacing method, though it obviously seems to have made a significant impact.<br /> If folks find it interesting/useful I did come across 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 commonplace/zettelkasten practices, but want the digital search and some back up of their system.

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.

• We don't have everything we need, e.g., information, resources, etc.

• We're tired, overwhelmed, frustrated, and/or burnt out.

• We're waiting until we have more motivation. Future me will be brimming with motivation and get so much done

• We lack urgency. This can wait until tomorrow.

• We lack a big enough why. Why does this project even matter?

• We've hit the project's boring/tedious/difficult bits.

• We're surrounded by tantalizing distractions

• We struggle to get started because we'll just be interrupted in a few minutes, breaking our flow.

• We feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the project.

• We struggle with perfectionism

• We get sucked into distraction spirals. A 5-minute Reddit break turns into two hours.

• We do many urgent but unimportant tasks, so there's no time/energy for the important stuff.

• We seek distractions to quiet the monkey brain. (If we could snap our fingers and silence the mental chatter, we'd be more productive.)

• We dream of creating something amazing and perfect. Once we start the work, the ability to create something perfect disappears. As long as we don't start, perfection feels possible.

• We talk about projects and daydream a lot. These feel good and feel like progress. But these good feelings diminish our motivation to actually get started.

• We dream of doing so many things. It's hard to commit to one project because it means saying No to a dozen others. Not starting on a project means we're keeping our options open.

• We seek out distractions to soothe negative emotions.

• We fear judgment and criticism.

• We fear making mistakes.

• We fear failing

• We have imposter syndrome.

• We have too many concurrent projects/responsibilities. This causes us to constantly switch contexts and/or feel overwhelmed. This kills any chance of getting into a flow state.

• We feel like other people don't have to work as hard, and it's not fair that things take so much effort for us.

• We don't have anyone to cheer us on, celebrate tiny wins and small victories, etc

• We don't have anyone holding us accountable.

• We're surrounded by people who procrastinate, so it feels normal to put things off. Who wants to be the only person not procrastinating?

• We feel lonely, so it's hard to find the motivation to do stuff.

via u/clumsyAmeba on https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/121pe2x/ive_identified_27_causes_of_procrastinationwhich/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geChDY3MQj8

Similar to TUL disk bound notebooks.

Paper is nice for fountain pens.

On the expensive side.

https://williamhannah.com/

https://plotterusa.com/

reply to u/deafpolygon at https://www.reddit.com/r/PKMS/comments/121ihrj/other_pkm_forums_places_to_discuss/

The space is fragmented broadly by both tools (some with specific workflows) and philosophies, so you may have to hunt/peck (or subscribe/filter) for the types of pieces you're searching for. Here's some resources you might appreciate. In the fora section things are ordered roughly by relation to the topic as well as frequency of posting/activity.

Fora

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/
• https://forum.zettelkasten.de/
• Tools for Thought Rocks https://lu.ma/community/com-mmvGpDTZoRDsxou
• https://www.reddit.com/r/NoteTaking/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/
• https://forum.obsidian.md/
• https://forum.eastgate.com/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity
• https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/

Sites

• https://jarango.com/ and related podcast
• https://rheingold.com/
• https://zettelkasten.de/
• https://writing.bobdoto.computer/
• https://boffosocko.com/category/note-taking/
• https://www.lesswrong.com/ (Not entirely focused but frequently has related material to the space)

Discord

For some communities like Obsidian, Logseq, etc. you're also likely to find discord servers with some reasonable sub-channels and activity as well. A good non-product specific Discord with related material is The Productivists at https://discord.gg/m2bP2hh3. There's also one for Zettelkasten https://discord.gg/bYrVm9sr.

And of course as you visit all these locales, be sure to mention r/PKMS and maybe more will learn that this location is a better catch-all for in-depth conversations and questions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/shorthand/comments/122gsma/is_there_a_qwerty_keyboard_shorthand_system/

reply to u/taurusnoises at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11ov8qp/comment/jbvdyx8/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Thanks for the tip Bob, JSTOR was a reasonably quick/easy search (compared to the larger list I've got that'll take some manual digging.) The vast majority of instances I found within JSTOR were in full German contexts, and many definitely were in a negative contextual light (generally as an epithet—one went so far as to mention a smell— describing authors' poor structure, over-reliance on ZK, argument, or writing style, potentially as not providing appropriate context.) Fascinatingly the number of appearances of zettelkasten in any language began in the early 1900s and have grown from a dozen every decade to 150 this past decade with a marked increase in the 1980s and 90s.

The oldest one I found in an English language article was from:

Hayes, William C. Review of Historical Records of Rameses III, by William F. Edgerton and John A. Wilson. American Journal of Archaeology 40, no. 4 (1936): 558–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/498809. (JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/498809)

All available earlier copies and parallel texts have been diligently consulted and compared with the present versions and the authors have also availed themselves of the invaluable material contained in the Zettelkasten of the Berlin Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache.

Potentially not the very first English appearance, but 1936 is reasonably early. I wasn't surprised that it appeared in an archaeology journal.

Of particular interest is that it provides an indication that the "Berlin Dictionary" or the Dictionary of the Egyptian Language, which was begun in 1897 just two years after the beginning of the Mundaneum by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, began life as a multi-user zettelkasten. For those who are looking for the rare versions of collaborative zettelkasten, this is a new version for folks to research.

Süss, Wilhelm. Karl Morgenstern (1770-1852), eloquentiae, I - ll. Gr. et Lat., antiquitatum, aesthetices et historiae litterarum atque artis p.p.o. simulque bibliothecae academicae praefectus : ein kulturhistorischer Versuch. Dorpat : Mattiesen. Accessed March 24, 2023. https://jstor.org/stable/community.32963350.

Karl Morgenstern (1770-1852), eloquence, I - ll. Gr. and Lat., antiquities, aesthetics and history of literature and art ppo and at the same time in charge of the academic library: ein kulturhistorischer Versuch<br /> 1928<br /> Sweet, William<br /> Karl Morgenstern (1770-1852), eloquence, I - ll. Gr. and Lat., antiquities, aesthetics and history of literature and art ppo and at the same time in charge of the academic library: ein kulturhistorischer Versuch,

... the ancient ones etc., his note boxes filled with quotations He compares the nations, speaks of the Germans who, since Gellert, “read and write and read what. has, eyes.. other nation has one, Leipziger which boasts such staid mass catalogues?” But not the word interpreters of the ancients, who the ...

Stroebe, Lilian L. “Die Stellung Des Mittelhochdeutschen Im College-Lehrplan.” Monatshefte Für Deutsche Sprache Und Pädagogik, 1924, 27–36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44327729

The place of Middle High German in the college curriculum<br /> Lilian L. Stroebe<br /> Monthly magazines for German language and pedagogy (1924), pp. 27-36

... of course to the reading material. Especially in the field of etymology it is easy to stimulate the pupils' independence. For years I have had each of my students create an etymological card dictionary with good success, and I see that at the end of the course they have this card box ...

Müller, A., and A. Socin. “Heinrich Thorbecke’s Wissenschaftlicher Nachlass Und H. L. Fleischer’s Lexikalische Sammlungen.” Zeitschrift Der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 45, no. 3 (1891): 465–92. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43366657

Title translation: Heinrich Thorbecke's scientific estate and HL Fleischer's lexical collections Journal of the German Oriental Society

... wrote a note. There are about forty smaller and larger card boxes , some of which are not classified, but this work is now being undertaken to organize the library. In all there may be about 100,000 slips of paper; Of course, each note contains only one ...

Example of a scholar's Nachlass which contains a Zettelkasten.

Based on this quote, there is a significant zettelkasten example here.

Review: [Untitled] Roman und Satire im 18. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Poetik by Jörg Schönert Review by: J. D. Workman Monatshefte, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter, 1970), pp. 420-421 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30156502

...form of the period for which there are no classical "rules." Schinert musters his evidence in an interesting and generally very lucid manner, although at times he may seem somewhat overzealous, if not indeed repetitious, in assembling all the data: at times one detects the faint odor of the Zettelkasten...

faint odor! ha! and in an English language document.

"Neither of us seems to be good for professors." The lectures by Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) Steffen Martus Journal for German Studies , New Series, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2010), pp. 79-103 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23977728

... of knowledge that can be constantly rearranged, constantly expanded, constantly rebuilt, added to and sorted out. While the topography was fixed in the old systems of knowledge, new categories could easily be set up in the Zettelkasten , for example, under which knowledge found its place that had not been foreseen ...

Paris on the Amazon?: Postcolonial Interrogations of Benjamin’s European Modernism (pp. 216-245) Willi Bolle From: A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin, Camden House (2009) Edition: NED - New edition https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt14brv7g

...and complete but constitutes an open repertoire, always in movement, expressing and stimulating the spirit of experimentation and invention. Let us remember that Benjamin, in his early work Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street, 1923/28), argued in favor of direct communication between the “ Zettelkasten ” (card box...

communication between?! though it is 2009 and after Luhmann's reference to communication with slip boxes....

In Memoriam: Josef Körner (9 May 1950) Robert L. Kahn The Modern Language Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan., 1963), pp. 38-59 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3720394

...of German letters long before Heine, impudently naive and imprudently honest, though always in- dustrious, 'griindlich' (and was it not Korner who 'discovered' the numerous un- published notebooks of Friedrich Schlegel and, in turn, left behind some twenty ' Zettelkasten ' which were recently acquired by Bonn University, a unique 'Fund-...

example of use of zettelkasten in English here in 1963 specifically as a loan word from German...

On organizational forms of historical research in Germany Hermann Heimpel Historical Journal , Vol. 189 (Dec., 1959), pp. 139-222 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27612563

... , has worked through baroque collectaneas laid out in book form, will appreciate the uniform paper format, the slip box and its prerequisite, the paper cutting machine3). Without the railway there would be no congress?, no ?General Association of German Historical and Antiquity Associations ...

Review: [Untitled] Intellectual history of ancient Christianity by Carl Schneider Review by:Peter Nober Biblica , Vol. 36, No. 4 (1955), pp. 537-539 https://www.jstor.org/stable/42619108

... very different areas, which is all the more astonishing since the author had to endure difficult fates in life at the same time (I, VII: loss of his library and all card boxes in Königsberg). The author has a lot of church history, patristic, archaeological, old classical, rabbinic and even Byzantine literature ...

Der Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in München Adolf Lumpe Journal of Philosophical Research , Vol. 7, H. 1 (1953), pp. 122-125 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20480611

... J. Rubenbauer, Dr. Ida Kap and Dr. O. Hiltbrunner and a large number of domestic and foreign employees. The thesaurus archive, which after various transit stations is now housed in Arcisstrasse (No. 8/III), currently includes around ten million slips of paper in around 7000 slip boxes . So far are complete ...

Review: [Untitled] Richard Dehmel Man and the Thinker; A Biography of His Mind in the Reflection of Time by Harry Slochower Review by:Friedrich Bruns The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Apr., 1931), pp. 319-320 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27703515

... who is passionate about this work and who has extensive knowledge, especially in the philosophical field. A restriction must be made. The hardest thing about collecting is throwing it away. Too much is offered to us from a very large slip of paper . From Laotse it goes to John Dewey and from Buddha ...

Review: [Untitled] Historical Records of Rameses III by William F. Edgerton, John A. Wilson Review by: William C. Hayes American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1936), pp. 558-559

...have been diligently consulted and compared with the present versions and the authors have also availed themselves of the invaluable material contained in the Zettelkasten of the Berlin Wirterbuch der...

This is the oldest appearance of the word "Zettelkasten" appearing in a journal article which I could find on JSTOR.

I'm not surprised it's in a journal in the humanities and specifically on archaeology.

Where is Indiana Jones' zettelkasten?!

Review: [Untitled] Frontier areas of forensic psychology, especially on the theory of legal capacity. (Archive for legal and economic philosophy, vol. 21, pp. 213-219) by Karl Haff Review by:Rümel's Archive for Civilistic Practice , vol. 128, h. 3 (1928), pp. 366-372

... " than with semi-finished products, in which the author's whole list of papers is poured out on the unfortunate reader - quite apart from the cram-books and mnemonics, which still find an all too believing audience. A quote from be in place for Don Quixote ...

Wigent, William David, Burton David William Housel, and Edward Harry Gilman. Modern Filing and How to File: A Textbook on Office System. Rochester, N.Y.: Yawman & Erbe Mfg. Co., 1916. http://archive.org/details/modernfilingate02compgoog.

Original .pdf converted with docdrop.org for OCR annotation on 2023-03-24.

annotation target: urn:x-pdf:3c1f14d64c91cf4b513efa16df4ed90d

Annotations: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Aurn%3Ax-pdf%3A3c1f14d64c91cf4b513efa16df4ed90d

Wigent, William David, Burton David William Housel, and Edward Harry Gilman. Modern Filing and How to File: A Textbook on Office System. Rochester, N.Y.: Yawman & Erbe Mfg. Co., 1916. http://archive.org/details/modernfilingate02compgoog.

Watts, Charles J. The Cost of Production. Muskegon, MI: The Shaw-Walker Company, 1902. http://archive.org/details/costproduction01wattgoog.

Short book on managing manufacturing costs. Not too much of an advertisement for Shaw-Walker manufactured goods (files, file management, filing cabinets, etc.). Only 64 pages are the primary content and the balance (about half) are advertisements.

Given the publication date of 1902, this would have preceded the publication of System Magazine which began in 1903. This may have then been a prototype version of an early business magazine, but with a single author, no real editorial, and only one article.

Presumably it may also have served the marketing interests of Shaw-Walker as a marketing piece as well.

Tangentially, I'm a bit intrigued by the "Mr. Morse" mentioned on page 109 who is being touted as an in-house consultant for Shaw-Walker.... Is this the same Frank Morse who broke off to form the Browne-Morse Co.? (very likely)

see: see also: https://hypothes.is/a/Sp8s4sprEe24jitvkjkxzA for a snippet on Frank Morse.

https://www.facebook.com/muskegonheritagemuseum/posts/browne-morse-companyin-1907-former-shaw-walker-executive-frank-morse-partnered-w/3640379512645950/

Attached image of the factory has a sign across two sides of the building that repeats the words: "Quality Cabinets Browne-Morse Company"

Frank Morse, a former Shaw-Walker executive, partnered with retired plumbing dealer Richard Browne in 1907 to form the Browne-Morse Company which would manufacture office equipment.

Shaw-Walker. Flexowriter File-Desks. Accessed March 24, 2023. http://archive.org/details/TNM_Flexowriter_File-Desks_-_Shaw-Walker_20171021_0001.

An interesting in-desk filing system for punched cards. Interesting I've not seen anything like this prior for a mini card index maintained in an office desk drawer.

Perhaps such a system wouldn't have been as easily accessible for use on a daily basis versus potentially more portable small systems that could have been transferred from desk to desk (person to person).

How to Run a War Chest Campaign. Rochester, N.Y.: Yawman & Erbe Mfg. Co., 1918. http://archive.org/details/howtorunwarchest00yawm.

Broadly a manual on how to do a big community fundraising effort. Emphasis on furniture and filing systems that could be purchased from the publisher of the piece.

Richards, Olly. Interview with Michel Thomas Publisher Sue Hart, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abjrsATBc5A.

Thomas had a secretive nature and did most communication either over phone or in person. He didn't write letters. Sue Hart felt that it was the result of his experience in World War II. (Potentially relationship with spycraft?)

He was a bit of a showman and enjoyed dropping names. He enjoyed his fame and status. Thomas seemed to enjoy people listening to him and didn't appreciate confrontation and dealt with it by shutting people off and walking away.

Nothing deep here about his method really. All just background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abjrsATBc5A

https://karaskustoms.com/

Seems like from a historical perspective hierarchical databases were more prevalent in the 1960s and relational databases didn't exist until the 1970s. (check references for this historically)

Of course one must consider that within a card index or zettelkasten the ideas of both could have co-existed in essence even if they weren't named as such. Some of the business use cases as early as 1903 (earlier?) would have shown the idea of multiple storage and relational database usage. Beatrice Webb's usage of her notes in a database-like way may have indicated this as well.

9/8b2 "Multiple storage" as a necessity of<br /> storage of complex (complex<br /> evaluating) information.

Fascinating to see the English phrase "multiple storage" pop up in Luhmann's ZKII section on Zettelkasten.

This note is undated, though being in ZKII likely occurred more than a decade after he'd started his practice. One must wonder where he pulled the source for the English phrase rather than using a German one? Does the idea appear in Heyde? It certainly would have been an emerging question within systems theory and potentially computer science ideas which Luhmann would have had access to.

• Link to https://hypothes.is/a/WtB2AqmlEe2wvCsB5ZyL5A on multiple storage affordances

The researchers at the Niklas Luhmann-Archive studying Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten consider that "the collection can be understood as an intellectual autobiography" (translation mine) even though his slips were generally undated.

According to the Niklas Luhmann-Archiv, Luhmann began his first zettelkasten in 1952 likely when he was working as a legal trainee in Lüneburg or as a government councilor in the Ministry of Education in Lower Saxony.

This timeframe would have been just after Johannes Erich Heyde had published the 8th edition of Technik des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens in 1951.

Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/Jn9elsk5Ee2hsLP5WWBEBw on dates of NL ZK - https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA aktenzeichen - https://hypothes.is/a/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA Clemens Luhmann link

Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–23. FAccT ’21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.

Would the argument here for stochastic parrots also potentially apply to or could it be abstracted to Markov monkeys?

reply to u/dotphrasealpha at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11z08fq/what_type_of_note_did_niklas_luhmann_average_6/

The true insight you're looking for here is: Forget the numbers and just aim for quality followed very closely by consistency!

Of course most will ignore my insight and experience and be more interested in the numbers, so let's query a the 30+ notes I've got on this topic in my own zettelkasten to answer the distal question.

Over the 45 years from 1952 to 1997 Luhmann produced approximately 90,000 slips which averages out to:

• 45 years * 365 days/year = 16,425 days
• 90,000 slips / 16,425 days = 5.47 slips per day

In a video, Ahrens indicates that Luhmann didn't make notes on weekends, and if true, this would revise the count to 7.69 slips per day.

260 working days a year (on average, not accounting for leap years or potential governmental holidays)

• 45 years x 260 work days/year = 11,700 days
• 90,000 slips / 11,700 days = 7.69 slips per day

Compare these closer numbers to Ahrens' stated and often quoted 6 notes per day in How to Take Smart Notes.

I've counted from the start of '52 through all of '97 to get 45 years, but the true amount of time was a bit shorter than this in reality, so the number of days should be slightly smaller.

Keep in mind that Luhmann worked at this roughly full time for decades, so don't try to measure yourself against him. (He also published in a different era and broadly without the hurdle of peer review.) Again: Aim for quality over quantity! If it helps, S.D. Goitein created a zettelkasten of 27,000 notes which he used to publish almost a third more papers and books than Luhmann. Wittgenstein left far fewer notes and only published one book during his lifetime, but published a lot posthumously and was massively influential. Similarly Roland Barthes had only about 12,500 slips and loads of influential work.

I keep notes on various historical practitioners' notes/day output over several decades using these sorts of practices. Most are in the 1-2 notes per day range. A sampling of them can be found here: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten/#Notes%20per%20day.

Anecdotally, I've found that most of the more serious people here and on the zettelkasten.de forum are in the 4-10 slips per week range.

<whisper>quality...</whisper>

Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten consists of a total of 27 sections/drawers each containing from 2,500 to 3,500 slips.

• ZK1 comprises 7 sections with about 23,000 notes written from about 1952 to 1961
• ZKII comprises 20 sections with approximately 67,000 slips written between 1961 to early 1997.

Sections 15, 16, 17 were part of the beechwood zettelkasten and along with sections 18, 19, and 20 which were stored outside of the main boxes in individual slipcases contain the bibliographic portions of ZKII

Part of section 17 contains some of the index as well as an index of people for ZKII in addition to some other special portions along with the index of keywords, bibliographical slips, and an overview of topics from ZKI.

The primary wooden boxes frequently pictured as "Luhmann's zettelkasten" is comprised of six wooden four-drawer card index filing cabinets which were supplemented by three individual slipcases.

One would suspect the individual slipcases were like the one pictured on his desk here: Luhmann zuhause am Zettelkasten (vermutlich Ende der 1970er/Anfang 1980er Jahre)<br /> Copyright Michael Wiegert-Wegener<br /> via Niklas Luhmann Online: die Erschließung seines Nachlasses - Geistes- & Sozialwissenschaften

The Luhmann archive has a photo of the beechwood portion with 24 drawers and one of the additional slipboxes on top of it:

(via https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/nachlass/zettelkasten)

Most of the photos from the museum exhibition and elsewhere only focus on or include the main wooden portion of six cabinets with the 24 drawers.

See also: https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/nachlass/zettelkasten

Over the 45 years from 1952 to 1997 this production of approximately 90,000 slips averages out to

45 years * 365 days/year = 16,425 days 90,000 slips / 16,425 days = 5.47 slips per day.

260 working days a year (on average, not accounting for leap years or potential governmental holidays) 45 years x 260 work days/year = 11,700 90,000 slips / 11,700 days = 7.69 slips per day

In a video, Ahrens indicates that Luhmann didn't make notes on weekends, and if true this would revise the count to 7.69 slips per day.

Compare these closer numbers to Ahrens' stated 6 notes per day in How to Take Smart Notes. <br /> See: https://hypothes.is/a/iwrV8hkwEe2vMSdjnwKHXw

I've counted from the start of '52 through all of '97 to get 45 years, but the true amount of time was a bit shorter than this in reality, so the number of days should be slightly smaller.