In their 1986 book, Thinking in Time, Ernest May and Richard Neustadt showed how bad analogies have led to poor foreign-policy decisions
Bad analogies can lead to poor decisions.
In their 1986 book, Thinking in Time, Ernest May and Richard Neustadt showed how bad analogies have led to poor foreign-policy decisions
Bad analogies can lead to poor decisions.
how did you teach yourself zettelkasten? .t3_11ay28d._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/laystitcher at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11ay28d/how_did_you_teach_yourself_zettelkasten/
Roughly in order: - Sixth grade social studies class assignment that used a "traditional" index card-based note taking system. - Years of annotating books - Years of blogging - Havens, Earle. Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2001. - Locke, John, 1632-1704. A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. 1685. Reprint, London, 1706. https://archive.org/details/gu_newmethodmaki00lock/mode/2up. - Erasmus, Desiderius. Literary and Educational Writings, 1 and 2. Edited by Craig R. Thompson. Vol. 23 & 24. Collected Works of Erasmus. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1978. https://utorontopress.com/9781487520731/collected-works-of-erasmus. - Kuehn, Manfred. Taking Note, A blog on the nature of note-taking. December 2007 - December 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181224085859/http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/ - Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Create Space, 2017. - Sertillanges, Antonin Gilbert, and Mary Ryan. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. First English Edition, Fifth printing. 1921. Reprint, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960. http://archive.org/details/a.d.sertillangestheintellectuallife. - Webb, Beatrice Potter. Appendix C of My Apprenticeship. First Edition. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926. - Schmidt, Johannes F. K. “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity.” Sociologica 12, no. 1 (July 26, 2018): 53–60. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/8350. - Hollier, Denis. “Notes (On the Index Card).” October 112, no. Spring (2005): 35–44. - Wilken, Rowan. “The Card Index as Creativity Machine.” Culture Machine 11 (2010): 7–30. - Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know. - Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines. - Goutor, Jacques. The Card-File System of Note-Taking. Approaching Ontario’s Past 3. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1980. http://archive.org/details/cardfilesystemof0000gout.
And many, many others as I'm a student of intellectual history.... If you want to go spelunking on some of my public notes, perhaps this is an interesting place to start: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22note+taking%22 I also keep a reasonable public bibliography on this and related areas: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought
New book 'Myth America' examines misinformation in U.S. history<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLAPfRqBHYs
Flancian thought this was interesting.
In der aktuellen Folge „research_tv“ der Universität Bielefeld erklären Professor Dr. André Kieserling, Johannes Schmidt und Martin Löning, wie sie sich der so genannten „intellektuellen Autobiographie“ Luhmanns annähern.
Translation:
In the current episode "research_tv" of Bielefeld University, Professor Dr. André Kieserling, Johannes Schmidt and Martin Löning how they approach Luhmann's so-called “intellectual autobiography”.
!!
Emacs on windows<br /> by John D. Cook
Analog Supplies
I should mention that the Stockroom Plus 4 x 6" cards I got a while back are great with even my juiciest fountain pens. They're some of the least expensive gridded cards I've been able to find and are a fraction of the cost of the Exacompta.
Analog Supplies .t3_11erqdi._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
Definitely Exacompta. The color grid cards in 3x5 and 4x6 are fountain pen friendly and delightful to use.
u/abbienormal, u/Alan_Shutko, u/CynTut all recommend Exacompta cards for fountain pen friendly use.
4x6": - Goulet Pens - White Graph $9.00 - White lined $9.00 - White blank $9.00 - Pastel graph $13.50 - Flotsam and Fork Pastel graph $9.50 - Anderson Pens $13.50 (multi-color) - JetPens Pastel graph $14.50 - Amazon White(?) grid $19.96
https://www.levenger.com/products/nantucket-bamboo-compact-bleacher?variant=42489708773525
This sort of reminds me about the way Rick Nicita kept his to do list on index cards spread out all over his desk.
Perhaps he might have benefitted from an index card bleacher?
Luhmanns intent was to create an organic growing system – not to implement Folgezettel.
I have a separate theory here...
A Zettelkasten is a system of notes that fit the criteria of being a system. Being alive vs. being a machine is a good metaphor to understand the difference. A Zettelkasten is alive, a conventional note taking system is a machine.
I'm not the only one to think of zettelkasten as "living"...
Luhmann’s Zettelkasten does not show the Zettelkasten Method
what is the meaning of "the" here (which is italicized for emphasis)?!?
My translation of Niklas Luhmann (1997): Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. S.11: “Bei meiner Aufnahme in die 1969 gegründete Fakultät für Soziologie der Universität Bielefeld fand ich mich konfrontiert mit der Aufforderung, Forschungsprojekte zu benennen, an denen ich arbeite. Mein Projekt lautete: Theorie der Gesellschaft; Laufzeit: 30 Jahre; Kosten: keine.”
As I began to work at the 1969 founded faculty of sociology of the University of Bielefeld, I was confronted with the request to name research projects I work on. My project was: a theory of society; Duration: 30 years; Costs: none.(1)
That entails that Luhmann had to close the system–environment border of the Zettelkasten in order to make it a system. The Zettelkasten had to be autopoietic, it reproduces only with its own elements. It can only connect to its own operations.
I don't think I buy any of this argument even on the surface level...
This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics.
How does this book speak with respect to Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire?
Amazon removing titles from Kindle Unlimited due to ebook piracy issues<br /> by Sovan Mandal
Read at Tue 2023-02-28 6:50 AM
What screenwriting books recommend note cards for drafting/outlining? Do any go beyond the general outlining advice?
What is the overlap of this sort of writing practice with comedians who had a practice of writing jokes on index cards? (Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Diller, etc.?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwKjuBvNi40
Ben Rowland uses index cards to outline the plot of his screenplays. This is a common practice among screenwriters. Interestingly he only uses it for plot outlining and not for actual writing the way other writers like Vladimir Nabokov may have. Both Benjamin Rowland and Duston Lance Black use cards for outlining but not at the actual writing stage.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Billy Oppenheimer</span> in The Notecard System: Capture, Organize, and Use Everything You Read, Watch, and Listen To (<time class='dt-published'>11/03/2022 16:53:44</time>)</cite></small>
Nothing stupendous here. Mostly notes on cards and then laid out to outline. Most of the writing sounds like it happens at the transfer stage rather than the card and outline stage.
This process seems more akin to that of Victor Margolin than Vladimir Nabokov.
NOW I SAY, "OKAY, THIS IS DONE." I READ IT. IT FEELS LIKE A MOVIE. AND I'M GONNA PUT IT IN THE BOX. AND I'M GONNA PUT IT IN THE BOX IN THIS ORDER, AND THIS IS THE ORDER THAT I'M GONNA WRITE IT IN IN MY FIRST DRAFT. OVER THE NEXT NUMBER OF WEEKS, I START WRITING. WHAT I'VE BEEN DOING, I'VE BEEN SEEING THE SCENES IN MY HEAD FOR SO LONG AT THIS POINT THAT IT'S ALMOST LIKE JUST REGURGITATION. LIKE, I'M JUST GETTING OUT. AND I CALL IT MY VOMIT DRAFT. #
Dustin Lance Black's "vomit draft" is similar to Mozart's peeing his music out like a cow. His method is also similar to Victor Margolin who's gone over the material several times by the time he's finally writing out his draft.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O8pBbcCWME
Harri Potter yn Cymraeg
https://duome.eu/chrisaldrich/progress
Duolingo progress with words and grammar tabs
Johnson's articles on DT were a great inspiration when I fiddled with the app. Surprise/serendipity is a moment he shares with the Zettelkasten Method -- but he focuses too much on finding new stuff in original sources (PDFs, web clippings), so you figured that out all right: his popular approach only makes you suffer from Collector's Fallacy more and more. Christian Tietze 2015-11-16 https://zettelkasten.de/posts/luedeckes-follow-up/#comment-2362116722
Christian Tietze credits Stephen Johnson for inspiration with respect to his DevonThink work and writing but accuses him of popularizing an approach which tends to draw people into the "collector's fallacy". Johnson's more traditional commonplace book approach seems to have worked incredibly well for him and allowed him to have a rather large output of books, articles, and blog posts over the years.
Tietze also suggests that the surprise/serendipity portion of the system works well for both the commonplace book and Luhmann-esque zettelkasten approaches.
Fast, Sascha. “No, Luhmann Was Not About Folgezettel.” Topical Blog. Zettelkasten Method, October 31, 2015. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/luhmann-folgezettel-truth/.
I don’t think it is the best choice to realize Luhmann’s principles. Yet it is the best application adapting his techniques I know so far.
Sascha Fast appreciated Lüdecke's ZKN3 application as one of the best for adapting Luhmann's techniques to a digital space, but felt that it could have gone further in realizing Luhmann's principles.
Some of the tension in this debate is that between the affordances of analog (paper) versus digital information storage and tagging.
Paper lacks easy corpus text search while simultaneously requiring additional manual indexing to make up for it. Paper also doesn't have the discovery value of autocomplete. On the opposite end paper forces one to more regularly review physical associative trails through one's past work while digital allows one to skip over some of this review process.
Folgezettel
Do folgezettel in combination with an index help to prevent over-indexing behaviors? Or the scaling problem of categorization in a personal knowledge management space?
Where do subject headings within a zettelkasten dovetail with the index? Where do they help relieve the idea of heavy indexing or tagging? How are the neighborhoods of ideas involved in keeping a sense of closeness while still allowing density of ideas and information?
Having digital search views into small portions of neighborhoods like gxabbo suggested can be a fantastic affordance. see: https://hypothes.is/a/W2vqGLYxEe2qredYNyNu1A
For example, consider an anthropology student who intends to spend a lifetime in the subject and its many sub-areas. If they begin smartly tagging things with anthropology as they start, eventually the value of the category, any tags, or ideas within their index will eventually grow without bound to the point that the meaning or value as a search affordance within their zettelkasten (digital or analog) will be utterly useless. Let's say they fix part of the issue by sub-categorizing pieces into cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, etc. This problem is fine while they're in undergraduate or graduate school for a bit, but eventually as they specialize, these areas too will become overwhelming in terms of search and the search results. This problem can continue ad-infinitum for areas and sub areas. So how can one solve it?
Is a living and concatenating index the solution? The index can have anthropology with sub-areas listed with pointers to the beginnings of threads of thought in these areas which will eventually create neighborhoods of these related ideas.
The solution is far easier when the ideas are done top-down after-the-fact like in the Dewey Decimal System when the broad areas are preknown and pre-delineated. But in a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten, things grow from the bottom up and thus present different difficulties from a scaling up perspective.
How do we classify first, second, and third order effects which emerge out of the complexity of a zettelkasten? - Sparse indexing can be a useful long term affordance in the second or third order space. - Combinatorial creativity and ideas of serendipity emerge out of at least the third order. - Using ZK for writing is a second order affordance - Storage is a first order affordance - Memory is a first order affordance (related to storage) - Productivity is a second+ order (because solely spending the time to save and store ideas is a drag at the first order and doesn't show value until retrieval at a later date). - Poor organization can be non-affordance or deterrent which results in a scrap heap - lack of a reason why can be a non-affordance or deterrence as well - cross reference this list and continue on with other pieces and affordances
One piece of clutter was the concept of Folgezettel.
Sascha Fast felt in 2015 that the idea of Folgezettel within a zettelkasten was unnecessary "clutter".
Did he later change his mind after further discussion?
check this for further arguments: https://hypothes.is/a/xzuclLbBEe2Ov4viA3XOkQ
Update 2020-04-15: The topic re-emerged after a couple of years. There is quite some discussions in the forum. For example: Here, here and here. See this new post from 2020 for an expansion on that topic.
For the folgezettel debate check the following through 2020-04-15: - https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/928/hierarchical-branched-note-taking-and-the-archive-app-is-topography-important - https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/978/is-there-a-benefit-to-luhmann-ids-vs-date-time-ids - https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/976/the-case-for-a-digital-folgezettel - https://zettelkasten.de/posts/understanding-hierarchy-translating-folgezettel/
I got rid of most of the features after I realized that they are redundant or a just plain harmful when they slowed me down.
Many long time practitioners of note taking methods, particularly in the present environment enamored with shiny object syndrome, will advise to keep one's system as simple as possible. Sascha Fast has specifically said, "I got rid of most of the features after I realized that they are redundant or a (sic) just plain harmful when they slowed me down."
During my journey of developing the Zettelkasten Method,
Seems like he's saying he developed the Zettelkasten Method... perhaps his version of the method based on Luhmann's? Commodifying the version "created" by Luhmann?
Credit here for native German speaker writing in English....
Principles are higher than techniques. Principles produce techniques in an instant. —Ido Portal
source?
How to Report on the Repatriation of Native American Remains at Museums and Universities Near You<br /> by Ash Ngu, ProPublica
Does Your Local Museum or University Still Have Native American Remains?<br /> by Ash Ngu, Andrea Suozzo (ProPublica)
p143 contains details for calculation of gravity
1478-1518, Notebook of Leonardo da Vinci (''The Codex Arundel''). A collection of papers written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452, d. 1519), in his characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left), including diagrams, drawings and brief texts, covering a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes. The core of the notebook is a collection of materials that Leonardo describes as ''a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place according to the subjects of which they treat'' (f. 1r), a collection he began in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli in Florence, in 1508. To this notebook has subsequently been added a number of other loose papers containing writing and diagrams produced by Leonardo throughout his career. Decoration: Numerous diagrams.
Marginalia Uncovered in Leonardo's Famous Codex Arundel Suggests the Renaissance Polymath Theorized Gravity Before Galileo by Jo Lawson-Tancred, February 20, 2023, Artnet News
cc: @remikalir
Despite the crudeness of his experimental setup 500 years ago, da Vinci, Dr. Gharib said, was able to calculate the gravitational constant to an accuracy within 10 percent of the modern value.
Nearly a hundred years before Galileo and two hundred years before Newton, in a series of diagrams and notes in the Codex Arundel, Da Viinci was able to calculate the gravitational constant to an accuracy within 10 percent of the accepted value.
The Codex Arundel, named after a British collector, the Earl of Arundel, who acquired it early in the 17th century. Da Vinci composed the collection of hundreds of papers between 1478 and 1518 — that is, between the ages of 26 and 66 — the year before his death. The papers now reside in the British Library. The collection features his famous mirror-writing as well as diagrams, drawings and texts covering a range of topics in art and science.
Da Vinci composed a collection of hundreds of papers from 1478 and 1518 which are now bound in the Codex Arundel, named for the Earl of Arundel who acquired it in the 17th century.
VINTAGE quartersawn oak wood 2 drawer library card file catalog Cabinet 13x13x5
Stop Procrastinating With Note-Taking Apps Like Obsidian, Roam, Logseq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baKCC2uTbRc by Sam Matla
sophisticated procrastination - tweaking one's system(s) or workflow with the anticipation it will help them in the long run when it is generally almost always make-work which helps them feel smart and/or productive. Having measurable results which can be used against specific goals will help weed this problem out.
Example of someone who says most of their best flashes of thought or creativity come when they're out walking or doing something else #
optimization-procrastination trap is related to shiny object syndrome - the idea of tweaking one's system constantly
perfect tool trap - guess what? there isn't one
"Personal knowledge management is an aid to your work, not the work itself." —Sam Matla #
This is entirely dependent on what and how you're doing it. If you're actively reading and annotating, and placing it somewhere, then that is the work, just in small progressive steps.
He needs to be more specific about what he means by "personal knowledge management" as a definition of something.
Sam Matla talks about the collector's fallacy in a negative light, and for many/most, he might be right. But for some, collecting examples and evidence of particular things is crucially important. The key is to have some idea of what you're collecting and why.
Historians collecting small facts over time may seem this way, but out of their collection can emerge patterns which otherwise would never have been seen.
cf: Keith Thomas article
concrete examples of this to show the opposite?
Relationship to the idea of AI coming up with black box solutions via their own method of diffuse thinking
G-L-O-R-EYE-EYE-EYE<br /> by Dale Keiger
Not sure I completely follow the logic of the debate between Sascha and taurusnoises (Bob Doto) here. I'll have to look closer.
Perhaps mapping out the 1-1 distinctions between the digital and the analog here would be helpful. What structures would be needed to make them 1-1?
fz is less about the tree (though that is important) and more about the UX.
I do like the framing of folgezettel as a benefit with respect to user experience.
There is a lot of mention of the idea of trees within the note taking and zettelkasten space, but we really ought to be looking more closely at other living systems models like rhizomes and things which have a network-like structure.
Part 2: Search & Inspect. Denote as a Zettelkasten, 2023. https://share.tube/w/4ad929jjNYMLc6eRppVQmc.
His file naming convention and search operation in this is really fantastic:
20230226155400==51a3b--note-title__tag1_tag2.org
This allows one to search the file by date/time, signature, title or tags, by using the =, - or _ along with text.
Beyond this however, there's a fair amount of context to build to use this system including using regex search.
Part 1: What Do We Need? Denote as a Zettelkasten, 2023. https://share.tube/w/mu7fMr5RWMqetcZRXutSGF.
It starts and ends with Denote, but has an excellent overview of the folgezettel debate (or should one use Luhmann-esque identifiers within their digital zettelkasten system?)
Some of the tension within the folgezettel debate comes down to those who might prefer more refined evergreen (reusable) notes in many contexts, or those who have potentially shorter notes that fit within a train of thought (folgezettel) which helps to add some of the added context.
The difference is putting in additional up-front work to more heavily decontextualize excerpts and make them reusable in more contexts, which has an uncertain future payoff versus doing a bit less contextualization as the note will speak to it's neighbors as a means of providing some of this context. With respect to reusing a note in a written work, one is likely to remove their notes and their neighbors to provide this context when needed for writing.
(apparently I didn't save this note when I watched it prior to number 2, blech....)
ᔥ u/gxabbo in r/Zettelkasten - Video Series: Denote as a Zettelkasten (accessed:: 2023-02-26 02:52:52)
through research on the topic, i accidentally learned about the Zettelkasten industry.
—u/theinvertedform
It's an "industry" now! long live the zettelkasten capitalists!
antecedent: research on Walter Benjamin's Archive
Am I taking too long to finish notes? .t3_11bxjms._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to u/m_t_rv_s__n at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/11bxjms/am_i_taking_too_long_to_finish_notes/
Some of it depends on what you're reading for and what you're trying to get out of the reading. On a recent 26 page journal article, I spent several hours over a couple of days (months apart) reading and taking notes in a relatively thorough fashion. I spent another hour or so refining them further and filing them and another 15 minutes noting out references for follow up. It was in an area I'm generally very familiar with, so it wasn't difficult or dense, but has lots of material I specifically know I'll be using in the near future for some very specific writing. Because I know it's something of specific interest to me and several overlapping projects, I had a much deeper "conversation with the text" than I otherwise might have.
Because it was done digitally, you can see the actual highlights and annotations and even check the timestamps if you like (you'll have to click through individual notes to get these timestamps): https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Aurn%3Ax-pdf%3A6053dd751da0fa870cad9a71a28882ba Some of it is basic data I'll use for a variety of purposes on several already well-defined projects. A few are for more slowly developing projects further out on the horizon. It's relatively easy to see the 10 or 15 permanent notes that I'll pull out of this group of about 74 notes. Since writing them, I've already referenced two of the more fleeting notes/highlights by searching for related tags on other reading which look like they may actually develop further.
Had this been something less targeted to my specific area, say for a master's level course of general interest, I'd probably have spent far less time on it and likely not gone over about 15 or so notes. Sometimes for these, I'll just read the abstract and conclusions and scan the references. Reading lots of these in your area of interest gives you some idea of the space and types of questions you might be asking. As you hone in on a thesis, you'll begin asking more and more questions and delve more deeply into material, and if something you read in the past becomes more specific to your project then you'll likely go back to re-read it at a deeper level, but you'll still have your prior work at your fingertips as a potential guide.
Once you know what your particular thesis is going to be your reading becomes more dense and targeted. Some things you'll read several times and go through with fine-toothed combs while others you'll skim to get the gist/context and only excerpt small specific pieces which you need and then move on.
(If you need it, remember that you only need one or two good permanent notes per day to make some serious progress.)
(10:35)
I have you two sheet boxes I gave up on that I'm using a to buy from a colleague of mine he's written a small program 00:46:58 based on lumen set accustomed but it's a one-man show I mean he's it's not an open-source project but it's the only one that really tries to emulate that system so 00:47:11 I'm using that at the moment
Ahrens had started out using his method in an analog process using shoe boxes, but in 2018 was using a small program based on Luhmann's process, but it was a one man show and wasn't an open source project.
(I'm pretty sure this is Daniel Lüdecke's ZKN3, but should double check.)
Ahrens, Sönke. “How to Take Smart Notes.” Presented at newcrafts: Professional Developer’s Conference at Paris, France, May 17, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPOI4f7yCag.
annotations at https://docdrop.org/video/nPOI4f7yCag/
if you break it down it's just six notes a day 00:11:11 and that doesn't include Saturdays and Sundays
Ahrens' 6 notes per day calculation doesn't include Saturdays or Sundays
My program of choice used to be ZKN3 by Daniel Lüdecke, which is free and developed explicitly to emulate the Zettelkasten, but it lacks the flexibility of newer apps. Alternatives of stand-alone Zettelkasten programs include Zettlr and The Archive.Nowadays, I use and value Roam Research, but would probably go with Obsidian if I had to start over today.
Sönke Ahrens used to use Daniel Lüdecke's ZKN3, but currently uses Roam Research, though he's said he might choose Obsidian if he were starting over again today.
https://www.zotero.org/support/note_templates
Used this and the templates for setting up templates in Zotero to import notes from .pdf files into Zotero to migrate into Obsidian.
Posted byu/A_Dull_Significance6 hours agoWhat’s something you do with your Zettelkasten that you’re “not supposed to do”? .t3_11awtrx._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionI think the title says it all.There are lots of ideas about things you should, or shouldn’t, do with you zettelkasten. What is something that works for you that you’re “not supposed to do”?For me, it’s the idea you shouldn’t keep quotes. I have a section (56/2) which is mainly a collection of different quotes on the topic of writing complexity and ease of comprehension. Some are for complexity, some against. Some place the burden on the writer, some on the reader, some mutual. I find it fruitful.What about you? What “rule” do you break?
Who made up this supposed rule against quotes! Are they not aware that quotes, particularly of sententiae, are some of the most excerpted and transmitted bits of knowledge in the entire Western canon? Without quotes, the entire tradition of note taking would probably not exist. Of course properly quoting is a sub-art in and of itself within rhetoric and the ars excerpendi.
A zettelkasten with no quotes— by definition— shouldn't carry the name.
level 2A_Dull_SignificanceOp · 2 hr. agoYes! When I run across a comment on a book I haven’t read yet but seems interesting I make a little card with the comment and book title2ReplyGive AwardShareReportSaveFollowlevel 2taurusnoises · 2 hr. agoObsidianSo, you keep the titles of books you want to read organized in folgezettel (you give them an alphanumeric ID?) among your ZK notes? That's really interesting!
I've done something like this when I think a particular reference(s) can answer a question related to a train of thought. But I keep cards of unread sources at the front of my sources section so that it's easier to pull it out frequently to prioritize and decide what I should be reading or working on next. These will then have links to the open questions I've noted, so that I can go back to those sections either as I'm reading/writing or to add those ideas into the appropriate folgezettel. These sorts of small amounts of work documented briefly can add up quickly over time. Source cards with indications of multiple open questions that might be answered is sometimes a good measure of desire to read, though other factors can also be at play.
That to-read pile of bibliographic source notes (a mini antilibrary) is akin to walking into a party and surveying a room. I may be aware of some of the people I haven't met yet and the conversations we might have, but if there are interesting questions I know I want to ask of specific ones or conversations I already know I want to have, it can be more productive to visit those first.
This sort of practice has been particularly helpful for times when I want to double check someone's sources or an original context, but don't have the time to do it immediately, don't want to break another extended train of thought, have to wait on materials, or may have to make a trip to consult physical materials that are singular or rare. For quick consultative reading, this can be a boon when I know I don't want or need to read an entire work, but skimming a chapter or a few pages for a close reading of a particular passage. I'll often keep a pile of these sorts of sources at hand so that I can make a short trip to a library, pick them up, find what I need and move on without having to recreate large portions of context to get the thing done because I've already laid most of the groundwork.
Should You Read Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P Scheper<br /> by Curtis McHale
Generally mirrors most of my opinion.
Odd that there haven't been many reviews of this...
What Scott is really engaged in is a religious argument.
amen
When an idea feels like too much work to write down, you just told yourself it wasn’t valuable enough.
They write a bunch of crap down that they wish they’d be able to do (secretly knowing they never will) and then their task manager gets overwhelming and they drop it because there is too much noise. This is why systems like Bullet Journal thrive in a digital world. When something is too hard to migrate to a new page or notebook, you just said it’s not worth doing and you let it go. Bullet Journal is a no-first system.
Bullet journaling works well in a noisy world because it forces people to confront what they're eventually not going to do anyway and gets them to drop it rather than leaving it on an ever-growing list.
Carrying forward to do lists manually encourages one to quit things that aren't going to get done.
There is no link to this book because you shouldn’t read it.
Scalding...
PKM Weekly Feb 19 2023 – Issue 057 – Curtis McHale<br /> by Curtis McHale
Dendron is shutting down active development. (discord)
https://discord.com/channels/717965437182410783/737323300967022732/1072563304289030164
Ctrl+Shift+Z
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/71852/how-to-remove-or-edit-zotero-shortcut-in-chrome
Keyboard shortcut to add something to Zotero using Zotero connector browser extension.
Could potentially be changed at chrome://extensions/shortcuts
Autobibliographie annotée (2018-2022) <br /> by Arthur Perret on 2023-02-20 (accessed:: 2023-02-24 11:30:20)
Perret looks back at several years of blogposts and comments on his growth over the intervening years. This sort of practice and providing indicators of best posts is an interesting means of digital gardening.
Kathryn Greenhill in PhD notetaking workflow – PDF to Zotero to Zotfile to Dropbox to GoodNotes to Zotero to Scrivener. Blogjune 2019/7 at 2019-06-07 (accessed:: 2023-02-24 10:18:56)
Regina Martínez Ponciano aka u/NomadMimi in r/ObsidianMD - PhD workflow: Obsidian, Zettelkasten, Zotero, Pandoc, and more at 2021-03-15 (accessed:: 2023-02-24 10:10:11)
Broadly similar to my own workflow though I use Hypothes.is for fleeting notes rather than Zotero.
Original copy at: https://martinezponciano.es/2021/04/05/research-workflow-as-a-phd-student-in-the-humanities/
I started capturing everything directly in Obsidian but it has two major drawbacks. The first is that I will inevitably end up taking a lot of fleeting notes that I don't want to be included in the literature note. By taking the fleeting notes and highlights in Zotero, and then exporting a copy to Obsidian, I have the piece of mind that much raw material (that I might possibly need one day) is in Zotero, but that a more polished and reduced version is in my literature notes. The clutter stays in Zotero, in other words, while Obsidian is the home of the more processed notes.
Keeping one's fleeting notes separate from their permanent notes can be useful for managing the idea of clutter.
Luhmann generally did this by keeping things in different boxes. Modern academics may use different digital applications (Zotero/Obsidian, Hypothes.is/Zettlr, etc.as examples) for each as long as there is some reasonable dovetail between the two for data transfer when necessary.
If you want one final piece of (unsolicited) advice: if you bulk-import those Kindle highlights, please do not try to create literature Zettels out of everything. I did it and I DO NOT RECOMMEND. It was just too much work to rehash stuff that I had already (kind of) assimilated. Reserve that energy to write permanent notes (you probably know much more than you give yourself credit for) and just use the search function (or [^^]) to search for relevant quotes or notes. Only key and new papers/chapters you could (and should, I think) take literature notes on. Keep it fun!
Most veteran note takers will advise against importing old notes into a new digital space for the extra amount of administrative overhead and refactoring it can create.
Often old notes may be: - well assimilated into your memory already - poorly sourced or require lots of work and refactoring to use or reuse them - become a time suck trying to make them "perfect"
Better advice is potentially pull them into your system in a different spot so they're searchable and potentially linkable/usable as you need them. If this seems like excessive work, and it very well may be, then just pull in individual notes as you need or remember them.
With any luck the old notes are easily searchable/findable in whichever old system they happen to be in, so they're still accessible.
I'll note here the conflicting definitions of multiple storage in my tags to mean: - storing a single note under multiple subject headings or index terms - storing notes in various different (uncentralized locations), so having multiple different zettelkasten at home/office, storing some notes in social media locations, in various notebooks, etc. This means you have to search across multiple different interfaces to find the thing you're looking at.
I should create a new term to distinguish these two, but for now they're reasonably different within their own contexts that it's not a big problem unless one or the other scales.
I find it very tiring haha. As I said in another comment, processing a single chapter can take me a full day or two. However, I keep reminding myself that I would rather spend a day processing a chapter well, and have literature notes to serve me a lifetime (potentially, at least), rather than reading a chapter in two hours and not remember a single thing the next day. When I REALLY need a reminder of this, I just look at my "Backlog" folder which contains old "notes" that are now pretty much useless: I didn't use a reference manager consistently during my first two years of PhD so there are a lot of citations which are unreliable; I didn't really summarise texts, I only read them and highlighted; I didn't use the cloud for a long time, so I lost a lot of notes; and I didn't have Obsidian, so a lot of my notes are just contained within the context of the place I read them, rather than being connected. Seeing three years worth of useless materials, and knowing that I read a couple hundred of articles/chapters but I have nothing to show for it, that makes me more patient when writing my literature notes now. However I also find it very exciting that I can future-proof some of my notes. I feel like I'm working for my future self.
A partial answer to note taking why.
sometimes I’m afraid I’m more fighting the tools than doing research. Sometimes it seems to me there’s too much friction, and not the productive kind.
relation to Note taking problem and proposed solution?
This seems to be a common reality and/or fear.
I’m an imposter-perfectionist
—NomadMimi
Perfectionism is a good thing to be an imposter at.
I finished processing the 22 page chapter. It took me about 10 hours total to read, take notes, polish notes, and connect them to 39 permanent notes (6 new notes and 33 existing notes). Bear in mind, this is an extremely important reference for me, so it's by far one of the most-linked literature notes in my vault.
I knew you could do [[filename# to search for headings in a specific file, but I didn't realize you could do [[^^# to search all headings until I just tried it.
my Zettelkasten is named "House of Pomegranates", after my favorite Oscar Wilde short story collection.
INFORMA(C)TION No. 135: Plain Text <br /> by Jorge Arango at 2023-02-19 (accessed:: 2023-02-24 09:05:06)
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford University Press, 2008.
This looks intriguing...
autocomplete tells me I've seen her before....
update: it's a Rowan Wilken reference! https://hypothes.is/a/xwRnzr-REeyvvDd7YBbLVA
Living with a Zettelkasten | Blay <br /> by Magnus Eriksson at 2015-06-21 <br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 06:40:39)
a zettelkasten method one pager based generally on Luhmann's example and broadly drawn from material only on zettelkasten.de up to the date of writing in 2015.
Interesting to see the result of a single source without any influence from Ahrens, Eco, or any others from what I can tell. Perhaps some influence from Kuehn, but only from the overlap of zettelkasten.de and Kuehn's blog.
Note that it's not as breathless as many one page examples and doesn't focus on Luhmann's massive output, but it's still also broadly devoid of any other history or examples.
I would have hoped for more on the "living with" portion that was promised.
A sequence of Folgezetteln notes in the filenames of the Zettelns can from this perspective be considered a hardcoded outline and should be avoided, however convenient it seems.
And here he says it out loud... see https://hypothes.is/a/Gl5ferPsEe2Yf5P83a3wUg
But it is your writing that is the map, not the Zettelkasten, it can’t do that for you, you have to put in the work.
He's arguing here for even more work to make an outline for writing as if some of that work hasn't already been done. This seems very off to me.
The author would likely fall into the "folgezettel is not an outline" camp. I take a middle ground that it could be an outline or at least help to lower the activation threshold to making one.
You are presented with traces of your past thoughts, each Zettel bringing something back to life within you, lighting up some parts of your brain that start to remember those trains of thoughts the memory had sorted away.
traces of your past thoughts feels closely related to Vannevar Bush's associative trails
The collector’s fallacy should be channeled, not squashed. Cherish your inner “archive fever”[12] — it is your engine — but channel it to productivity. Use strategic procrastination.
The second reference to "archive fever" in almost as many weeks.
Collecting does not transform us and always postpones learning and transformation to the future. Collecting creates debt that we promise to pay back in some future that never arrives.
There's some truth and falsity here...
Life in Zettelkasten is more like dance than a factory.
link to related: https://hypothes.is/a/whBvKrLnEe2OvPOgSd_4zg
A Zettelkasten becomes uninteresting when 1) It does not grow, 2) it grows only with isolated notes, 3) it never produces an output.
Factors that will cause one to lose interest in the maintenance of their card index...
In computer science, this is called “Separation of concerns” [1507211921].
Has the author accidentally included a zettelkasten identification number here?
The core of the system is a collection of shorter notes with links between them.
anecdotal definition/summary of zettelkasten.
I like the "shorter notes" idea here which would have arisen before the "atomic notes" or "evergreen notes" ideas.
implemented on index cards
Interesting to see a somewhat out of place link to Pile of Index Cards system here.
Given the 2015 date of the post this could be a part of the small distribution of the 2006 idea into the conversation a decade later.
The term Zettelkasten comes from Luhmann’s note-taking system.
At least they don't say he invented it...
Remember that life in a Zettelkasten is supposed to be fun. It is a joyful experience to work with it when it works back with you. Life in Zettelkasten is more like dance than a factory.
I've always disliked the idea of "work" involved in "making" notes and "processing" them. Framing zettelkasten and knowledge creation in terms of capitalism is a painful mistake.
the quote is from https://blay.se/2015-06-21-living-with-a-zettelkasten.html
@ZettelDistraction said Perhaps the shipping hub is a better analogy for the Zettelkasten than the shipping container (Ahrens, 40).
We should be careful to separate the ideas of analogy and metaphor. Analogies are usually more direct and well-defined in scope.
While there's an apt and direct correlation between shipping containers and zettelkasten as boxes, Ahrens was making the analogy with respect to the shift that shipping containers made to the overall system:
shipping containers : shipping industry and globalism :: zettelkasten : thinking and writing/content creation
As with many analogies, stretching it the way one might stretch metaphors isn't usually fruitful or even possible.
In hindsight, we know why they failed: The ship owners tried to integrate the container into their usual way of working without changing the infrastructure and their routines. They tried to benefit from the obvious simplicity of loading containers onto ships without letting go of what they were used to.
He's saying one needs to consider how one's note taking method fits into their work in a more integrative way. Without properly integrating it into one's workflow seamlessly the system will fail. This is also one of the most difficult problems many zettelkasten aspirants have. In addition to creating a zettelkasten, they're often also simultaneously trying to integrate new (digital) tools into their process at the same time and they get distracted by them rather than focusing on the move to increasing writing/creating and creativity overall (globalism).
To focus on Ahrens' analogy a bit, if Obsidian, for example, is your "ship", is it as custom built for your specific purpose the way a container ship would be for a cargo container? Might you be better off with something like The Archive, ZKN3, or simple index cards that help to limit you to only do the function you want rather than all the other possible functions (wiki, blog, to do list, calendar, journal, kanban, etc.)? Obsidian and many other applications can be a proverbial row boat, a yacht, a tugboat, a steamer, a cruise ship, and even a warship in addition to a container ship, so one has to be extra careful how they choose to use it.
zettelkasting
Perhaps the shipping hub is a better analogy for the Zettelkasten than the shipping container (Ahrens, 40).
Misreading of Ahrens. The shipping container wasn't a direct analogy to the zk. It was an analogy about process of building a system from the ground up to better effectuate a result.
reply https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/16622/#Comment_16622
Adler has an excellent primer on this subject that covers a lot of the basics in reasonable depth: - Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1940. (https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-courses/how-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf)
Marking books can be useful not only to the original reader, but future academics and historians studying material culture (eg: https://apps.lib.umich.edu/online-exhibits/exhibits/show/marks-in-books), and as @GeoEng51 indicates they might be shared by friends, family, romantic interests, or even perhaps all of the above (see: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2017/4/mrs-custers-tennyson).
For those interested in annotation marks and symbols (like @ctietze's "bolt" ↯) I outlined a few ideas this last month at: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10qw4l5/comment/j6vxn6a/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Mrs. Custer’s Tennyson April 2017<br /> by William Logan
Reagan’s Note Card Treasures<br /> by John H. Fund <br /> at August 10, 2011, 12:00 AM<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 12:25:06)
archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20151017020314/http://spectator.org/articles/37399/reagans-note-card-treasures
WHILE REAGAN was governor, I will never forget his taking time out of his schedule after a television taping to show me—a 15-year-old high school student—how he could instantly arrange his packs of anecdote-filled index cards into a speech tailor-made for almost any audience. I still use a variation of Reagan’s system to construct my own speeches.
John H. Fund wrote that while he was a a 15-year old high school student, Reagan taught him how he arranged his index card-based notes to tailor-make a speech for almost any audience. In 2011, Fund said he still used a variation of Reagan's system for his own speeches.
No such care in sourcing was needed for the time-tested jokes: “Those congressmen who worry about being bugged by the FBI—you’d think they’d be glad someone was listening to them.”
Reagan, however, did not source many of his one-liner jokes.
As one looks at the yellowing speech cards, one can see Reagan was always careful to include the documentation and source at the top. In his shorthand, you can see him quoting Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free in a state of civilizations, it expects what never was & what never will be.”
On many quote-based cards, Reagan was careful to cite his sources.
Indeed, Martin Anderson, Reagan’s former domestic policy adviser, says that Reagan’s system did wonders for his ability to give speeches. Reagan was able to approach a lectern with no sign anywhere of a prepared speech. Only those seated on the stage behind him could see his left hand drop into his suitcoat pocket and pull out a neat, small packet of cards and slip off the elastic band with his right hand as he set the cards down. And as for helping him in preparing the speech material, “his system was unrivaled,” Anderson remembers. “Before the speech Reagan would pore over the packs of cards, then pluck a few cards from one pack, a few from another, and combine them. In a matter of minutes, he would create an entirely new speech. The system was as flexible as a smooth gold chain.”
He compiled hundreds of them over the course of his career. Some were lost or given away as souvenirs, but 91 were recently discovered at the Reagan Library, stored in boxes that contained the contents of Reagan’s desk at his Los Angeles office on the day he died in June 2004.
Ronald Reagan compiled hundreds of index card-based notes over his career. Some were lost or given away as souvenirs, but 91 we discovered at the Reagan library (circa 2011). They were discovered among boxes which contained the contents of his Los Angeles office desk after his death in June 2004,
The cards would feature between five and 10 items and would be written on both sides in Reagan’s inimitable shorthand.
Ronald Reagan broke the typical rule to "write only on one side" of his index cards. His cards would typically have five to ten items written out by hand.
Given some of the cards I've seen, it seems that they weren't categorized generally and with multiple ideas on the same card they also broke Gessner's other common advice.
“These cards are the tools of his trade. He can take any speech and insert some of these zingers and one-liners. Let’s say he’s speaking to a Kiwanis Club. He knew what to put in. If he was talking to a group of firemen, he had a joke about putting out a fire. If you’re really looking for the hand of a president, and how his mind is working, all of these note cards together, in a way, give you the magic of Ronald Reagan.”
Consisting of quotes, economic statistics, jokes, and anecdotes, they became the core of Ronald Reagan’s traveling research files.
Ronald Reagan's index card-based commonplace book consisted of quotes, economic statistics, jokes, and anecdotes.
One of his secrets was a stack of 4 x 6 inch note cards that he compiled over the span of four decades.
Though other sources like the CBS News article look like 3 x 5" index cards, John Hunt indicates that Ronald Reagan used 4 x 6" inch cards for his notes.
Ronald Reagan's index cards of one-liners at 2014-07-20 <br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:41:42)
archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200305070906/https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/ronald-reagans-index-cards-of-one-liners/12/
ᔥ Manfred Kuehn in Ronald Reagan's Notecards at 2015-01-25<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:34:10)
"There's little danger of our government being overthrown – there's too much of it."
—Ronald Reagan
Little would he have expected January 6th...
"It's a great kindness to entrust some one with a secret. They feel so important while telling it."
—Ronald Reagan
"Prosperity is something created by businessmen for politicians to take credit for."
—Ronald Reagan
"If at first you don't succeed, do it the way she told you."
—Ronald Reagan
Now that we know better about the history and the results of the Regan administration, we really should be listening more to women —Ronald Reagan said it himself!
"Easier to forgive someone if you get even with them first."
—Ronald Reagan
"Used to talk our problems over cigarettes and coffee. Now cigarettes and coffee ARE our problems."
—Ronald Reagan
"The art of politics is making people like you, no matter what it costs them."
—Ronald Reagan
"Room bugged? Every time I sneezed the chandelier said, 'Gesundheit!'"
—Ronald Reagan
"I won't say he should be put in a mental institution, but if he was in one, don't think I'd let him out."
—Ronald Reagan
A sad show for the man who gutted mental health support in California and then more broadly in the United States.
"Never start an argument with a woman when she's tired -- or when she's rested."
—Ronald Reagan
"Don't say he's old, but every time there's a knock on the door he yells 'Everybody hide, it's Indians!'"
—Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library
One of Ronald Reagan's Index cards with four bullet-pointed one-liners has the annotation "(over)" written on the bottom which indicates that he wrote on both sides of his cards.
If he was keeping these in clear plastic sheets in a binder, this would have been easy to see the opposite sides.
Were all of his cards double-sided? This particular example seems to be a list of one liners which may have been used in the same speech (or timeframe) and thus served solely as a reminder of the jokes to be told.
"You can talk to any number of President Reagan's speechwriters over the years, and when they might hand him a speech, the speeches would come back with a quote, or an expression or a joke that they hadn't seen before," John Heubusch, executive director of the Reagan Library, told CBS News' Mo Rocca.
It turns out he had a secret arsenal: stacks of 3x5 index cards filled with one-liners, which he kept in his desk to append to speeches.
Ronald Reagan used 3 x 5" index cards.
"Nothing like a vote in the U.N. to tell you who your friends used to be."
—Ronald Reagan
Manfred Kuehn in Ronald Reagan's Notecards at 2015-01-25<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:34:10)
Kuehn felt that Ronald Regan's note taking "does not seem like a good system. In fact, it's hardly any system at all..."
What makes note taking exciting?
Manfred Kuehn in Umberto Eco on How to Write a Thesis at 2015-01-30<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:29:34)
Kuehn felt Luhmann's writing on note taking was more exciting that Umberto Eco's.
We tend to think in terms of our tools.<br /> ᔥ Christian Tietze in Eco's 'How to Write a Thesis' Available in English at 2015-03-17<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:26:16)
Eco's 'How to Write a Thesis' Available in English<br /> by Christian Tietze
meh...
Interesting that he credits Manfred Kuehn here...
Related here is the horcrux problem of note taking or even social media. The mental friction of where did I put that thing? As a result, it's best to put it all in one place.
How can you build on a single foundation if you're in multiple locations? The primary (only?) benefit of multiple locations is redundancy in case of loss.
Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene are counter examples, though Greene's books are distinct projects generally while Holiday's work has a lot of overlap.
Should You Have One Zettelkasten or Many?<br /> by Christian Tietze
The Zettelkasten Method is not a thing; it is a manual to productivity.
Just to prevent rumors: There is no beef. @taurusnoises asked to have his account deleted for digital hygiene.
Writing has taken priority. My course assignment is to write a creative non-fiction essay modeled after the works we discussed in class. My Zk has been a joyous and surprising resource for ideas. I'm using my ZK by creating search queries and using the highlighting feature to find where I've already written answers to the query in my own voice. They become snippets directly into my essay. In a sense, I've already written my essay. I just have to find all the pieces and put them together. In truth, this is only a first draft and still needs work. What I've found to be key steps to creating a rough draft. 1. Write and outline 2. Craft queries following the outline 3. Spend time looking closely are all the returned results 4. Look for quotes and epigraphs relevant to the paper 5. Look through the draft for ideas that want expansion repeating steps 2-5
—Will via https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2519/ideas-im-grappling-with-february-23-2023#latest
Of course the metaphor of the bees and their honey is the biggest which we've all failed to mention! It's my favorite because of its age, its location within the tradition of rhetoric and sententiae/ars excerpendi, its prolific use through history, and the way it frames collecting and arranging for the use of creativity and writing.
In the his classic on rhetoric, Seneca gave an account of his ideas about note-taking in the 84th letter to Luculius ("On Gathering Ideas"). It begins from ut aiunt: "men say", that we should imitate the bees in our reading practice. For as they produce honey from the flowers they visit and then "assort in their cells all that they have brought in", so we should, "sift (separate) whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading" because things keep better in isolation from one another, an idea which dovetails with ars memoria, the 4th canon of rhetoric.
"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says: 'pack close the flowering honey And swell their cells with nectar sweet.' "
Generations later in ~430 CE, Macrobius in his Saturnalia repeated the same idea (he assuredly read Seneca, though he obviously didn't acknowledge him):
"You should not count it a fault if I shall set out the borrowings from a miscellaneous reading in the authors' own words... sometimes set out plainly in my own words and sometimes faithfully recorded in the actual words of the old writers... We ought in some sort to imitate bees; and just as they, in their wandering to and fro, sip the flowers, then arrange their spoil and distribute it among the honeycombs, and transform the various juices to a single flavor by some mixing with them a property of their own being, so I too shall put into writing all that I have acquired in the varied course of my reading... For not only does arrangement help the memory, but the actual process of arrangement, accompanied by a kind of mental fermentation which serves to season the whole, blends the diverse extracts to make a single flavor; with the result that, even if the sources are evident, what we get in the end is still something clearly different from those known sources."
Often in manuscripts writers in the middle ages to the Renaissance would draw bees or write 'apes' (Latin for bees) in the margins of their books almost as bookmarks for things they wished to remember or excerpt for their own notes.
Of course, neither of these classical writers mentions the added benefit that the bees were simultaneously helping to pollenate the flowers, which also enhances the ecosystem.
If you treat a metaphor as a second order perception (first order perception = senses) you can create Pseudo-Synesthesia which may increase divergent thinking.
Mull on this...
Bruno Latour showed us how to think with the things of the world | Aeon Essays<br /> by Stephen Muecke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory
I ought to dig into some of Bruno Latour's work which keeps popping up in some of my reading....
Journal and zettelkasten.<br /> by flin
One of the benefits of journaling on an index card is that the small space is much less intimidating than a large blank sheet, particularly when one isn't in the mood but feels like they ought to write. This is similar to the idea that many people find that microblogs (Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr) are much easier to maintain than a long form blog.
I keep a wholly separate section of one of my boxes as a journal/diary as well, but it's less significant and is ordered only by date with very sparse indexing and an almost non-existent amount of linking. I have a bit of @Sascha's practice going on there, though certainly not as deep as his excellent description. I would caution newcomers to the practice of ZK to be very conscious of what, how, and why they're integrating a journaling practice into their workflow so that they don't risk what I call "zettelkasten overreach". Guarding against this sort of overreach can very easily be seen in my separate/distinct "journal on index cards" versus Sascha's more explicitly thought out "journal within a zettelkasten".
One might have considered some of this part of his (Roland Barthes') fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten) as a journal/diary or what some might today consider a private microblog of thoughts and observations.
reply lifted from my notes:
Henry David Thoreau kept both a commonplace book (essentially a traditional (non-Luhmann-esque) zettelkasten in notebook form) and a separate writing journal where he did what most would consider typical 'journaling', but where he also tried out phrasing, writing, and other experimental work that would ultimately become part of his published written output. This may be a useful model for some. His journals ran to multiple volumes, but a good edited version with a nice introduction to some of his work and methods can be found in:
Similarly Roland Barthes used his card index as more than the traditional bibliographical, excerpting, and note taking tool that many had before him. He also used it to accumulate notes on what he had seen and heard in his daily life, phrases he liked, and plans. It came to serve the function, particularly in the last two years of his life, of a diary or what biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call his fichierjournal or index-card diary. Published posthumously on October 12, 2010, Mourning Diary is a collection from Roland Barthes' 330 index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother in 1977.
The reason is that the journaling is in part an accumulative method: There is a long period of low-structured input which benefits manifest first acutely (writing in itself seems to be healing through understanding). After you amassed a time-line of thoughts you can try to find throughlines and patterns which then gives you access to deep insights if you have the right tools. Most of the time people use psychologists which I think is in a similar way problematic that people use physical therapists for too much of their problems: Many problems are best solved by the person that has immediate access to the ego-perspective (phenomenological layer, subjective access, etc.) of the problem. This is of course dependent on self-education on basic concepts of what I call true self-care. Self-care seems to be associated with stuff like doing pleasant things (hot bath, nice walks in the sun) nowadays. If you take the antifragile nature of us humans into account this is just another way of the modern hedonist to keep stuck. (This is important for my approach to incorporate journaling into the Zettelkasten Method)
—Sasha Fast https://forum.zettelkasten.de/profile/Sascha
I love the deeper definition and distinction of self-care here.
I am a journaler and a zettelnaut.
via Will
zettler is another common one used by Chritian Tietze
https://boffosocko.comБлог Криса Алдрича со множеством статей об управлении знаниями. Алдрич невероятно дотошный исследователь. Если вы заинтересованы в серьезном изучении истории вопроса, вам сюда.
translation:
Chris Aldrich's blog with many articles on knowledge management. Aldrich is an incredibly meticulous researcher. If you are interested in a serious study of the history of the issue, you are here.
One online company, Books by the Foot, offers to ‘curate a library that matches both your personality and your space’, promising to provide books ‘based on colour, binding, subject, size, height, and more to create a collection that looks great’.
Unlike books, tablets do not offer a medium for demonstrating taste and refinement. That is why interior decorators use shelves of books to create an impression of elegance and refinement in the room.
If Seneca or Martial were around today, they would probably write sarcastic epigrams about the very public exhibition of reading text messages and in-your-face displays of texting. Digital reading, like the perusing of ancient scrolls, constitutes an important statement about who we are. Like the public readers of Martial’s Rome, the avid readers of text messages and other forms of social media appear to be everywhere. Though in both cases the performers of reading are tirelessly constructing their self-image, the identity they aspire to establish is very different. Young people sitting in a bar checking their phones for texts are not making a statement about their refined literary status. They are signalling that they are connected and – most importantly – that their attention is in constant demand.
Lustig, Jason. “‘Mere Chips from His Workshop’: Gotthard Deutsch’s Monumental Card Index of Jewish History.” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 32, no. 3, July 2019, pp. 49–75. SAGE Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695119830900
Cross reference preliminary notes from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0952695119830900
Finished reading 2023-02-21 13:04:00
urn:x-pdf:6053dd751da0fa870cad9a71a28882ba
Gershom Scholem’s card catalogue of mystical texts and termswhich has been furnished with its own reading room at the National Library of Israel;
The two sections of the index, then, went different ways: when Marcus opened‘branches’ of his archive in Los Angeles, New York, and Jerusalem, he microfilmedportions of his archival collections and also the Americana part of Deutsch’s cards. Bycontrast, the remaining cards were left to languish at Hebrew Union College’s Cincinnatilibrary.
Moststriking, though, was Marcus’ appropriation of Deutsch’s cards when he extracted thoserelating to America, installing them in the reading room of the American JewishArchives where they remain to this day.
As a graduate student, hemaintained a card index of his own. When Marcus’s friends wrote of his travels abroad,they declared that ‘When we think of that card index by now we shudder. What propor-tions it must have assumed’. 18
Example of a student who saw/learned/new a zettelkasten note taking method from a teacher.
Shortly after Deutsch’s death thealumni of the Hebrew Union College purchased his index for the seminary’s library.15
It is reminiscent ofPierre Nora’s suggestion that physical objects and especially the written word constitute‘archival memory,’ a secondary or ‘prosthesis’ memory (Nora, 1989: 14).
Simultaneously, it showcases how little actually has changed with therise of digital platforms, where some scholars have sought to build software edifices toemulate card index systems or speak of ‘paper-based tangible interfaces’ for research(Do ̈ring and Beckhaus, 2007; Lu ̈decke, 2015).
Döring, T. and Beckhaus, S. (2007) ‘The Card Box at Hand: Exploring the Potentials of a Paper-Based Tangible Interface for Education and Research in Art History’. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 15-17, 2007. New York, ACM, pp. 87–90.
Did they have a working system the way Ludeke did?
Certainly, computerizationmight seem to resolve some of the limitations of systems like Deutsch’s, allowing forfull-text search or multiple tagging of individual data points, but an exchange of cardsfor bits only changes the method of recording, leaving behind the reality that one muststill determine what to catalogue, how to relate it to the whole, and the overarchingsystem.
Despite the affordances of recording, searching, tagging made by computerized note taking systems, the problem still remains what to search for or collect and how to relate the smaller parts to the whole.
customer relationship management vs. personal knowledge management (or perhaps more important knowledge relationship management, the relationship between individual facts to the overall whole) suggested by autocomplete on "knowl..."
In 1905 – just as Deutsch began his index inearnest – the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden (General or Total Archive of the Ger-man Jews) was established under the leadership of Eugen Ta ̈ubler, who developed aprogram to collect all the files of German Jewry. This dream of archival totality was lateradopted explicitly and implicitly by a number of Jewish archival efforts in Austria, theUSA, and the state of Israel, where the Jewish Historical General Archives (since 1969the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People) tried to create what its formerdirector Hadassah Assouline termed a ‘central repository of Jewish historical material inthe world’ (Lustig, 2017: 110-25). 14
As a result, hisindex is simultaneously a relic of research and a reminder of the pitfalls of all such effortsto create systematic knowledge, regardless of the underlying technology – paper, digitalor otherwise.
One might then say that Deutsch’s index devel-oped at the height of the pursuit of historical objectivity and constituted a tool ofhistorical research not particularly innovative or limited to him alone, given that the useof notecards was encouraged by so many figures, and it crystallized a positivistic meth-odology on its way out.
Can zettelkasten be used for other than positivitistic methodologies?
R. G. Collingwood’s critique of what hecalled ‘scissors and paste’ history – meaning both those who uncritically cited earlierworks, and the use of scissors and paste to cut apart sources on index cards
Just as with hisinterleaved volumes of Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden,
Card indexes were a tool to manage information overloadand enabled one to move and recombine letters, words and ideas – which led WalterBenjamin to describe the explosion of the book into its fundamental components,recorded on cards, so that they could be recombined (Benjamin, 2016[1986]: 43).
Beyond the realm of historians, advocates called card indexes ‘the only portable,elastic, simple, orderly and self-indexing way of keeping records’, and the practice wascommon enough that Gustave Flaubert parodied the unending and ultimately futilepursuit of all knowledge in his 1881 satire Bouvard et Pe ́cuchet (Dickinson, 1894).
Fred Morrow Flingwrote effusively of the ‘manifest advantages’ of the ‘card system of note taking’
from<br /> Fling, F. M. (1920) The Writing of History: An Introduction to Historical Method. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Herbert Baxton Adams’ model of ahistorical seminar room suggested it have a dedicated catalogue;
(Boyd, 2013; Burke, 2014; Krajewski, 2011: 9-20, 57; Zedel-maier, 2002)
Most of these are on my list, but doublecheck them...
20th-century enterprises like Herbert Field’s‘Concilium Bibliographicum’, a system of zoological research
And it constitutes an important but overlooked signpost in the 20th-centuryhistory of information, as ‘facts’ fell out of fashion but big data became big business.
Of course the hardest problem in big data has come to be realized as the issue of cleaning up messing and misleading data!
in 1917 he celebrated his fifty-thousandth card with an article titled ‘Siyum’, referencing the celebration upon conclud-ing study of a tractate of Talmud (Deutsch, 1917b).
Did he write about his zettelkasten in this article?! Deutsch, G. (1917b) ‘Siyum’, American Israelite, 8 March, 15 March.
Gotthard Deutsch celebrated his fifty thousandth card in 1917. ᔥ
The fact that Deutsch’s students saw their teacher’sindex as a monument to his historical genius
At once intended as a foundationfor a systematic history of the Jews, it was deeply unsystematic; meant to be a means ofproductivity, in the end Deutsch was essentially unproductive.
An example of a zettelkasten, meant for productivity in most settings, being called unproductive in Gotthard Deutsch's case.
Of course this calls to mind the definition of productivity and from who's perspective. From Deutsch's written output perspective it may have been exceptionally low in comparison to the outputs of others like Niklas Luhmann, S.D. Goitein, or Roland Barthes. But when viewed from the perspective of a teaching instrument and influence on his students, perhaps it was monumentally productive?
Deutsch’s index and his ‘facts’, then, seemedto his students to embody a moral value in addition to epistemological utility.
Beyond their epistemological utility do zettelkasten also "embody a moral value"? Jason Lustig argues that they may have in the teaching context of Gotthard Deutsch where the reliance on facts was of extreme importance for historical research.
Some of this is also seen in Scott Scheper's religious framing of zettelkasten method though here the aim has a different focus.
More fallout from Scott Sheper madness...
reply to Share the ideas dancing in your ZK with us. February 17, 2023
Congratulations @Will on the milestone! @ctietze's analogy with smithwork is fantastic. I might also liken it to the point in acquiring a new language when one begins dreaming in their new target language. So many talk about the idea of increased productivity associated with having a zk, but most spend an inordinate amount of time on shiny object syndrome or over complicating it and never get to the point of quickly writing things out, filing them, and being able to trust that their system will just work™. When you no longer notice it anymore and it has become second nature is when the real fun (and magic) begins to happen. It also seems easier and more natural to break the "rules" once you've internalized the basics. We should spend more time talking about the value of 'zettelkasten fluency'.
I'm excited this week to be doing some work in areas of the history of misinformation, cultural myths, and 'American exceptionalism' in preparation for Dan Allosso's upcoming book club on Kruse and Zelizer's new edited book. I suspect he'll announce it shortly at https://danallosso.substack.com/ if folks are interested in joining in the discussion/sensemaking.
Kruse, Kevin M., and Julian E. Zelizer. Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Basic Books, 2023.
https://www.unddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/115hvkj/_/j91xw9b/#comment-info
TIL: There's an archived version of deleted/edited Reddit fora...
Döring, Tanja, and Steffi Beckhaus. “The Card Box at Hand: Exploring the Potentials of a Paper-Based Tangible Interface for Education and Research in Art History.” In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, 87–90. TEI ’07. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1145/1226969.1226986.
This looks fascinating with respect to note taking and subsequent arranging, outlining, and use of notes in human computer interaction space for creating usable user interfaces.
Deutsch (Gotthard) Papers. 1859-1922 (bulk 1900-1920). [MS-123]
https://7079.sydneyplus.com/archive/final/Theme.aspx?r=529915&f=FindingAids%2fms0123.pdf&m=resource