- Mar 2023
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Local file Local fileZettel1
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We were naturally at first rather puzzled to account for thisbox. Were its contents an accidental collection of left-overs?Was it a receptacle for random deposits of casual scraps ofwriting? Should the large works which were some of its sourcesbe published and it be left on one side?
This section makes me question whether or not the editors of this work were aware of the zettelkasten tradition?!?
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Notes Rafting
Inspired by Shime's Word Raft, Haikal Kushahrin has created a note raft with several people as a means of keeping them all accountable for writing at least 15 notes per week.
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agate.academy agate.academy
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Altfranzösisches etymologisches Wörterbuch : AGATE
I recall that the Oxford English Dictionary was also compiled using a slip box method of sorts, and more interestingly it was a group effort.
Similarly Wordnik is using Hypothes.is to recreate these sorts of patterns for collecting words in context on digital cards.
Many encyclopedias followed this pattern as did Adler's Syntopicon.
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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Little Machines in Your Zettelkasten<br /> by Sascha Fast
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a Structure Note can make use of a TOC form, a normal table, a mind map, a flow diagram, a straight list, or even a picture.
Structure notes can take a variety of forms including lists, diagrams, mind maps, tables, and tables of contents.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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A few times in his Grand Fichier, Barthes includes notebook paper from other sources which he's cut down to fit into his box or clippings of newspapers which he's taped to cards and included. ᔥ [00:32:00]
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partir de 78 79 mais plutôt 79 et 81 donc dans les derniers dans les deux dernières années de sa vie l'avant veille de son accident l'a dit les prises de notes sont alors beaucoup moins espacées dans le temps et bar peut écrire jusqu'à une quinzaine de fiches par jour voire plus on voit ici sur ce diagramme l'année 1979 avec véritablement un bon mois à l'été 79 ou [00:29:35]
In 1978/79 Roland Barthes was making up to 15 cards per day. ᔥ
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Histogram of Roland Barthes fiches between 1968 and 1980 from [29:28]
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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https://www.amazon.com/s?k=The+Cornell+Note-Taking+System+Walter+Pauk&ref=nb_sb_noss
Provides a page of pre-formated/printed notebooks for use with the Cornell note taking system.
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- Feb 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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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.)
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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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
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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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.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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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.
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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.
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newcriterion.com newcriterion.com
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Mrs. Custer’s Tennyson April 2017<br /> by William Logan
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spectator.org spectator.org
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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.
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Local file Local file
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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
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Bruno Latour has reflected, information is more malleable when it is not too large(Daston, 2002; Latour, 1986: 19).
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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What the two fictions share is a solitary, restless, irritable hero and a feeling for the feverish, crowded streets and dives of St. Petersburg—an atmosphere of careless improvidence, neglect, self-neglect, cruelty, even sordidness.
What a beautiful way to describe the connection between Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground.
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joshduffney.gumroad.com joshduffney.gumroad.com
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https://joshduffney.gumroad.com/l/take-smart-notes-obsidian
$2.99 for "How to Take Smart Notes in Obsidian"
(not a recommendation)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX2p-1afdRA
wrt: https://hypothes.is/a/uDIE9q70Ee2xxiszhAZGOQ<br /> I'll give him a little credit that he's at least aliasing his notes as he "files" them, but I suspect that over time he's making more work for himself than not. This seems unsustainable over time.
It also seems like he's doing a lot more make-work here than he otherwise ought to?
Notice that he's making this to sell a course: https://joshduffney.gumroad.com/l/take-smart-notes-obsidian
He doesn't directly link the GitHub repo as he indicated, but it can be found here: https://github.com/Duffney/smart-notes. In looking at it, the timestamped notes will become problematic.
This was from 2021-10-17. I'm curious what his "system" looks like today? Has it changed through time and experience?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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u/jwhco has ~5,000 index cards and 18,237 files (presumably mostly note-based text files, though some mentioned are papers, articles, etc.) over the span of 22 years.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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How long do you spend in a single note-taking session? .t3_112k929._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionBasically, just curious how much time people spend writing down notes in a typical session, as well as how many notecards you usually finish. If you can give me an idea of how long a single lit/permanent note takes you to write, even better
reply to u/m_t_rv_s__n at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/112k929/how_long_do_you_spend_in_a_single_notetaking/
Quite often my sessions can be in small 5-10 minute blocks doing one or more individual tasks that compose reading, writing, or filing/linking things together. Usually I don't go over a couple of hours without at least a small break or two.
Like Luhmann “I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.” Incidentally by "easy" here, I think Luhmann also includes the ideas of fun, interesting, pleasurable, and (Csikszentmihalyi's) flow.
For my lowest level reading I'll only quickly log what I've read along with a few index terms and a short note or two, if at all. For deeper analytical reading (as defined by Adler & van Doren) those sessions are more intense and I aim to have a direct "conversation with the text". Notes made there can sometimes be 2 - 10 minutes in length. I can often average about 50 annotations in a given day of which maybe 2 or 3 will be longer, fileable zettels. Most of my notes start as digital public annotations which one can view at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich if they like. On the topic of notes per day, I have a collection for that, some of which is given as a synopsis with some caveats here: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/s-d-goiteins-card-index-or-zettelkasten/#Notes%20per%20day%20comparison.
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Local file Local file
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Object-oriented Design (OOD) is the process of converting such requirements intoan implementation specification. The designer must name the objects, define thebehaviors, and formally specify what objects can activate specific behaviors onother objects. The design stage is all about how things should be done. The outputof the design stage is an implementation specification. If we were to complete thedesign stage in one step, we would have turned the requirements into a set ofclasses and interfaces that could be implemented in (ideally) any object-orientedprogramming language.
OOD
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What object-oriented means
What does the object-oriented means? Objects are models of somethings that can do certain things and have certain things done to them. Formally, an object is a collection of data and associated behaviors.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZgMpjjgCRA
Combining sketchnotes with Cornell Notes in a fairly straightforward manner.
He mentions anecdotally that teachers who have used custom icons for their subjects see students drawing some of them on their exam papers as mental associative tags. This is the same sort of use that drolleries had in medieval manuscripts.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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a permanent note (according to Ahrens) is actually the name for both "zettels" (what Ahrens calls "the main notes in the slip box," or what many are now calling "zettels") and literature notes.
a subtle catch about Ahrens' terminology
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I started analog 08/09, went digital 09/10, went software-agnostic 11. All dates within 6month margin of error.
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Current count: 12.258
u/FastSascha reported 12,258 notes ("cards" on 2022-08-13), which presuming a start around 2013 (the beginning of zettelkasten.de) gives him 3.73 notes per day.
Update:<br /> Sascha reports starting analog notes around 08/09 then he went digital 09/10, and software-agnostic in 11.
This gives him 12,258 notes over 14 years (5,110 days) or 2.4 notes per day.
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forum.obsidian.md forum.obsidian.md
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That is, a part of my note taking process involves the physical act of writing, sketching ideas, etc., and I form a picture in my mind of particularly relevant – perhaps “evergreen” in Obsidian-speak – notes.
Example of someone who associates "evergreen notes" as "Obsidian-speak".
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- Jan 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I'd recommend a Book-to-Maincard approach for this (instead of the 2-step Bibcard Method). And I'd recommend Reformulation notes (i.e., summarization notes) instead of Excerpts.
reply to u/sscheper at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10o4jnl/comment/j6ii64d/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Is this about as close as Scott Scheper comes to recommending taking Cornell Notes?!? 😂
Let's be honest that this is roughly what this (and Bibcards) ultimately is. You take some general notes on a lecture (book or other material) as a sense making tool to help you better understand the material. You write down some bits you want to remember and use for some brief spaced repetition perhaps. You write down some pointed questions to help review for a test later. The subtle difference is that Cornell notes were designed to do the sense making, summary, and repetition portions well for students and learners, but didn't focus as much on the longer tail of knowledge creation using analysis, and synthesis. To fill in the last mile for your card index, take the best idea(s) (maybe one or two at most) and flesh it out to create a useful maincard.
If it's useful try some 8 x 12" paper for your lecture notes, and take them Bibcard or Cornell Notes style. Once you've excerpted your main card notes, you can fold your sheet in half twice and file it with your Bibcards, naturally taking care to have the paper's spine face up to prevent other slips from becoming lost in between. (This obviously works best for those using 4 x 6" index cards though if you're in the 3 x 5" camp, then use 6" x 10" sheets for folding.) For those with middle grades or high school students, this may be a more profitable method for introducing these methods to their study, learning, and creation patterns.
Summary: Cornell Notes can be an excellent method for capturing session-based fleeting notes and distilling them down into permanent notes. Cornell Notes focus on the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy rather than the broader spectrum that a zettelkasten method might.
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jonreeve.com jonreeve.com
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Cc: @ChrisAldrich
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifDi2SsQjQM
Comparing the various e-note/e-reader devices, Kit Betts-Masters ranks them overall as follows: - Boox Note Air 2 - Supernote A5X - Remarkable 2 - Bigme Inknote - Kobo Elipsa - Boyue P10
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www.connectedtext.com www.connectedtext.com
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I accumulated altogether between 5.000 and 6.000 note cards from 1974 to 1985, most of which I still keep for sentimental reasons and sometimes actually still consult.
Manfred Kuehn's index card commonplace from 1974 - 1985
At 5 - 6,000 cards in 11 years from 1974 to 1985, Kuehn would have made somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.25 - 1.49 note per day.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Interested in seeing what others’ reference/bib notes look like .t3_10m3abl._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } share + showcaseNothing more than that, just curious how other people structure/write their reference/bib notecards
reply to u/m_t_rv_s__n at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/10m3abl/interested_in_seeing_what_others_referencebib/
An example of my digital "bib notes" for: Sayers, Dorothy L. The Lost Tools of Learning. E. T. Heron, 1948.
https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Aurn%3Ax-pdf%3A13447fd092edd947b775ba269de28ee6
There are some other good anecdotal examples here too.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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supernote.com supernote.com
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By linking notes in a zettelkasten-like way, you can create a relationship between one piece of information and another, forming a more thorough and deeper insight.
https://supernote.com/pages/note-system-everything-you-need-to-stay-organized
The Ratta Supernote e-reader/e-note device indicates that you can link notes "in a zettelkasten-like" way.
Interesting that they say this rather than "wiki-like"...
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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11534762/
The Good Fight S4 E5 "The Gang Goes to War"
This episode features Diane chatting with a co-star about her note taking experience. The woman indicates that she took notes incessantly and voraciously, but that she never referred back to them. The experience just caused her extreme stress so she gave it up completely as she felt it never gave her any benefit. She resorted instead to a more zen practice of drawing circles in her notebooks. She showed Diane a pile of notebooks filled with circles in various designs and colors. Later in the episode while in court the woman asked Diane about it and Diane showed her some of her new circle "note" pages.
[Watched the episode passively sometime in the past two weeks.]
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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Sonia Sotomayor asked herself what new thing did she learn at the end of every day. If she couldn't think of something then she remedied the issue by reading something. (Meltzer2018)
While it's not known if she wrote notes about what she learned, doing so may have allowed her to accumulate a heck of a zettelkasten practice. Many people mistakenly think that they need to be creating dozens of perfect permanent notes for their zettelkasten every day, but in reality, most historical practitioners only made one or two each day. It's the accumulation and links between them that turn them into a more valuable collection over time.
Meltzer, Brad. I Am Sonia Sotomayor. Illustrated edition. New York: Dial Books, 2018.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds90JeVyKiE
Review of variety of Boox e-readers.
- Boox Note 3 - NO (older model)
- Best 7.8" is probably Note Air for $350
- 10" Note Air 2 >> Note Air
- 10" Note Air 2+ is $500 and has a bigger battery and batteries over it's smaller v2
- 13.3" Max Lumi >> Max Lumi2 especially because of price and heavy reflectivity issues with the Lumi 2
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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1 1/2 card a day average
https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10gn820/the_more_you_read_and_process_the_info_you_gather/
u/Kenwaldek reports at least a short term average of making 1 1/2 cards per day.
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richardcarter.com richardcarter.com
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I make a habit of outlining chapters in Obsidian as it allows me to structure them with indented bullet points, and to link individual bullet points to supporting notes, including notes on original sources. I also make the bullet points into checkboxes, so I can check them off as I make my way through the outline as I’m drafting the actual chapter.
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Local file Local file
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It is not a bad plan for two or more students to meet at stated intervals and compare their notes . The lecture can be discussed so that thepoints omitted or not fully understood can be placed correctly in the notebook against the final test . The chance for error is greatly decreased inthis way and, besides , the discussion greatly aids the memory so that thework of studying from the notes is lessened . In at least one instance wherethe speaker delivered his lecture very rapidly several students arrangedto take his points in relays ; that is, since there was scarcely time for oneman to get all, one man could take the first point, another the second, andso on. These men occupied seats close together so that an exchange ofsignals was possible. Afterwards they discussed each lecture and puttheir notes together.
Apparently sharing/comparing notes was reasonable advice in 1910 including the idea of in-class signals for splitting up note taking amongst multiple people.
Compare this to shared notes (Google Docs, Etherpad, etc.) in modern context with multiple people doing simultaneous notes.
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One even better plan is to get regular library index cards and, afterthe lecture is fairly well learned, transfer the points underlined to them, onecard to a lecture. These cards can be carried about and studied at oddmoments. One is enabled by their use to get the perspective view of thelecture which brings out the sense of values which one loses when onestudies the notes in their mass of detail only. With the skeleton in mindone has little difficulty in recalling the details .
Here again he comes close to some of the methods and ideas of having flashcards for spaced repetition, but isn't explicitly aware of the words or techniques. Note that he also doesn't use the word flashcard. When was the word first used?
Rewriting things as flashcards also tends to be a part of the spaced repetition itself.
By cutting the notes up he's specifically decontextualizing them so as to make one's memory be better tested in coming up with the solutions/answers as they are more likely to appear on a test, decontextualized from the original lecture.
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Thus his notes will be legible, interesting and complete,and more than this, the process of rewriting wll fix the various points muchbetter in his mind at a time when it is most susceptible to them, than anystudy from cold notes can do .
Rewriting one's notes soon after they are written will be easier because they are fresher in one's mind and any issues with them can be more easily remedied. There's also the space repetition effect to be had.
Note here that Maxfield suggests the sort of value behind the idea of spaced repetition, but writing in 1910 doesn't have the word or the effect related to it yet.
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The first injunction is then : Do not try to take the lecture verbatim.
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Letusconsiderthepracticeof note takingundertwo mainheads:notesonlectures,andnotesonreading
I've been heavily focused on note making while reading to the detriment of the different form of note making for lectures.
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fieldnotesbrand.com fieldnotesbrand.comContact1
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A lovely quote I ran into this morning, perhaps for a future 3 pack, potentially featuring Thoreau, Thoreau and writing, Thoreau and nature, the Concord writing group, etc., etc.:
"Might not my Journal be called 'Field Notes?'" —Henry David Thoreau, March 21, 1853 via The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861. Edited by Damion Searls. Original edition. New York: NYRB Classics, 2009. https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Thoreau-1837-1861-Review-Classics/dp/159017321X/
There's also another writerly tie-in here as when he returned to Concord, Thoreau worked in his family's pencil factory(!!), which he would continue to do alongside his writing and other work for most of his adult life. Replica Thoreau factory pencils anyone?!
Given the fact that he was an inveterate journaler as well as someone who who kept multiple commonplace books, perhaps a tie-in to a larger journal or commonplace book format product? (I'm reminded that the famous printer, publisher and typeface designer John Bell published blank commonplace books along with instructions from John Locke on how to keep and index them. See an example: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Bell_s_Common_Place_Book/3XCFtwAACAAJ?hl=en )
At a minimum I'm pretty sure we all want this Thoreau quote on a Field Notes brand t-shirt...
Thanks for all the years of solid design and great paper!
Warmest regards, Chris Aldrich
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Local file Local file
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Might not my Journal be called “Field Notes?”
—Henry David Thoreau, March 21, 1853
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vimeo.com vimeo.com
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https://vimeo.com/showcase/9704917
Vimeo collection of Dan Alloso's work with respect to his book How to Make Notes and Write.
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- Dec 2022
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borretti.me borretti.me
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https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought
He covers much of what I observe in the zettelkasten overreach article.
Missing is any discussion of exactly what problem he's trying to solve other than perhaps, I want to solve them all and have a personal log of everything I've ever done.
Perhaps worth reviewing again to pull out specifics, but I just don't have the bandwidth today.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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But then life went on and nothing really happened.
This essay seems to be more about shiny object syndrome. The writer doesn't seem to realize any problems they've created. Way too much digging into tools and processes. Note the switching and trying out dozens of applications. (Dear god, why??!!) Also looks like a lot of collecting digitally for no clear goal. As a result of this sort of process it appears that many of the usual affordances were completely blocked, unrealized, and thus useless.
No clear goal in mind for anything other than a nebulous being "better".
One goal was to "retain what I read", but nothing was actively used toward this stated goal. Notes can help a little, but one would need mnemonic methods and possibly spaced repetition neither of which was mentioned.
A list of specific building blocks within the methods and expected outcomes would have helped this person (and likely others), but to my knowledge this doesn't exist as a thing yet though bits and pieces are obviously floating around.<br /> TK: building blocks of note taking
Evidence here for what we'll call the "perfect system fallacy", an illness which often goes hand in hand with "shiny object syndrome".
Too many systems bound together will create so much immediate complexity that there isn't any chance for future complexity or emergence as the proximal system is doomed to failure. One should instead strive for immediate and excessive simplicity which might then build with time, use, and practice into something more rich and complex. This idea seems to be either completely missed or lost in the online literature and especially the blogosphere and social media.
people had come up with solutions Sadly, despite thousands of variations on some patterns, people don't seem to be able to settle on either "one solution" or their "own solution" and in trying to do everything all at once they become lost, set adrift, and lose focus on any particular thing they've got as their own goal.
In this particular instance, "retaining what they read" was totally ignored. Worse, they didn't seem to ever review over their notes of what they read.
I was pondering about different note types, fleeting, permanent, different organisational systems, hierarchical, non-hierarchical, you know the deal.
Why worry about all the types of notes?! This is the problem with these multi-various definitions and types. They end up confusing people without giving them clear cut use cases and methods by which to use them. They get lost in definitional overload and aren't connecting the names with actual use cases and affordances.
I often felt lost about what to takes notes on and what not to take notes on.
Why? Most sources seem to have reasonable guidance on this. Make notes on things that interest you, things which surprise you.
They seem to have gotten lost in all the other moving pieces. Perhaps advice on this should come first, again in the middle, and a third time at the end of these processes.
I'm curious how deeply they read sources and which sources they read to come to these conclusions? Did they read a lot of one page blog posts with summarizations or did they read book length works by Ahrens, Forte, Allosso, Scheper, et al? Or did they read all of these and watch lots of crazy videos as well. Doing it "all" will likely lead into the shiny object syndrome as well.
This seems to outline a list of specifically what not to do and how not to approach these systems and "popular" blog posts that are an inch deep and a mile wide rather than some which have more depth.
Worst of all, I spent so much time taking notes and figuring out a personal knowledge management system that I neglected the things I actually wanted to learn about. And even though I kind of always knew this, I kept falling into the same trap.
Definitely a symptom of shiny object syndrome!
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genizalab.princeton.edu genizalab.princeton.edu
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Goitein accumulated more than 27,000 index cards in his research work over the span of 35 years. (Approximately 2.1 cards per day.)
His collection can broadly be broken up into two broad categories: 1. Approximately 20,000 cards are notes covering individual topics generally making of the form of a commonplace book using index cards rather than books or notebooks. 2. Over 7,000 cards which contain descriptions of a single fragment from the Cairo Geniza.
A large number of cards in the commonplace book section were used in the production of his magnum opus, a six volume series about aspects of Jewish life in the Middle Ages, which were published as A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1967–1993).
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www.granarybooks.com www.granarybooks.com
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https://www.granarybooks.com/pages/books/GB_176/aram-saroyan/the-letter-book?soldItem=true
Aram Saroyan decomposed a 1968 letter to his father into 195 recto pages containing fragments of the original.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>taurusnoises</span> in (2) Oblique Strategies, a custom zettelkasten for creativity : antinet (<time class='dt-published'>12/14/2022 13:07:14</time>)</cite></small>
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Reply to:
Who is Zettelkasten note-taking system for? <br /> u/Beens__<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/who_is_zettelkasten_notetaking_system_for/
Perhaps your use case may benefit from knowing the longer term outcomes of such processes, particularly as they relate to idea generation and innovation within your areas of interest? Keeping notes which you review over periodically and between which you create potential links will help to foster more productive long term combinatorial creativity, which will help you create new and potentially useful ideas much more quickly than blank page-based brainstorming.
Her method was much more ad hoc than the more highly refined methods of Luhmann which allowed him to write, but perhaps there's something you might appreciate from the example of the character Tess McGill in the movie Working Girl. Even more base in practice is that of Eminem, which shows far less structure, but could still have interesting long term creativity effects, though again, it bears repeating that one should occasionally revisit their notes (even if they're only in "headline form") in attempts to refresh their memory and link old ideas to new to generate completely new ideas.
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hessen.social hessen.social
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Today my Zettelkasten is 8 month old. When I started note-taking in March 2022, I didn‘t expect a number of nearly 1000 notes in such a short time.
https://hessen.social/@groepl/109456367157130265
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Local file Local file
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you’ll spend the beginning phases learning by readingbooks in brand new fields and noting down brand new ideas. You’ll mostlybe writing reformulation notes in this phase.
Yet another new name for a sub-type of notes, here he uses reformulation notes as a shorthand for the old advice to rewrite ideas you find in your own words. This advice is often suggested to accomplish two things: - avoid plagiarism - restatement of ideas in your own words is related to the Feynman Technique and assists one in learning and ensuring they understand the concepts
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bib notes
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- Nov 2022
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subconscious.substack.com subconscious.substack.com
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www.eastgate.com www.eastgate.com
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How Large Is A Note?
Looks like this eternal question is addressed in The Tinderbox Way.
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www.obsidianroundup.org www.obsidianroundup.org
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For example, if I've left myself a note like #pkm/xref this reminds me of something the Carthage expert I like said, but I can't remember her name I will search my notes to figure out the name of the Carthage expert I like, cross-reference the highlight with things she said, and add links and update notes as appropriate. If I said something like This reminds me of the article about the guy a crane is in love with when I was taking notes on something without access to my notes, I will go find the article and link to my notes about it so that my backlinks and graph are updated.
I'm not sure how frequent this pattern is within fleeting notes, but it's something I do myself to create at least a temporary shorthand context of how things interrelate and which can easily be cleaned up later in the longer form permanent notes.
The tougher thing is to always capture these sorts of things which one won't remember, but which quite often create better and stronger insights down the road.
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delong.typepad.com delong.typepad.com
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That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors,even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will becomeclear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.
Dialectical notes are made at the level of syntopical reading and entail creating a conversation not only between the reader and the author, but create a conversation of questions and answers between and among many texts and the reader.
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during an analytical reading, you will need to give answers to questions about the truthand significance of the book. The notes you make at this levelof reading are, therefore, not structural but conceptual.
Conceptual notes are made during the analytical reading of a book and "give answers to questions about the truth and significance of the book."
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The point to recognize is that these notes primarily concern the structure of the book, and not its substance-at leastnot in detail. We therefore call this kind of note-making structural.
Adler and Van Doren define structural note making as the sorts of questions one might ask at the level of inspectional reading including: - what kind of book is it? - what is it about? - what is the overall structure with respect to the argument the author intends to make?
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billyoppenheimer.com billyoppenheimer.com
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I never immediately read an article then make a notecard.
By waiting some amount of time (days/weeks/a few months) between originally reading something and processing one's notes on it allows them to slowly distill into one's consciousness. It also allows one to operate on their diffuse thinking which may also help to link ideas to others in their memory.
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When I come across something that reminds me of some other story or idea or etc., I write “<=> INSERT RELATED THING” in the margin.
He's literally drawing out bi-directional links to other ideas in his collection of notes as he creates fleeting notes so that he doesn't forget them in the future.
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- Oct 2022
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Local file Local file
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McMaster's Stephen Girard(1918), he said, was a "series of anecdotes . . . without connection"and with little interpretation or analysis." In Rhodes's last twovolumes the facts rarely appeared "to have meaning or to be partsof a coherent structure." " "No simple theme, like that whichdominated his great work, is apparent here. Mr. Rhodes has notseen any constructive unity in the years he covers. Instead of mak-ing a synthesis that would of itself lead the reader to a clearerunderstanding of American history . . . , he has developed his topicsparagraph by paragraph, with often abrupt transition from themeto theme." 26 His failure in the final product followed,
Paxson would have considered it a failure in note taking to have only compiled but not to have synthesized one's accumulated knowledge.
Why take notes if one is not going to use them to some end, whether that be personally in one's life, or to extend and expand the depth and breadth of human knowledge by analyzing and synthesizing the ideas to create something new for others' benefit?
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On the whole, his efficiency probablyreduced the time required for taking and filing notes to the amountother historians spent in note-taking alone. What he wrote in hisnotes was brief, and yet specific enough so that he saved himself thejob of searching at length for what he had read. His mind was freeto reflect and appraise.
Earl Pomeroy suggests that Paxson's note taking method freed his mind to better reflect and appraise his work. This allows a greater efficiency of work, particularly when it comes to easier search and recall as well as the overall process which becomes easier through practice.
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He had a separate bibliographical file,kept in six scantily filled drawers in his coat closet, and it is obvious
that he used it little in later years. His author-title entries usually went into the main file, after the appropriate subject index cards.
This is a curious pattern and not often seen. Apparently it was Paxson's practice to place his author-title entries into his main file following the related subject index cards instead of in a completely separate bibliographical file. He did apparently have one comprised of six scantily filled drawers which he kept in his coat closet, but it was little used in his later years.
What benefits might this relay? It certainly more directly relates the sources closer in physical proximity within one's collection to the notes to which they relate. This might be of particular beneficial use in a topical system where all of one's notes relating to a particular subject are close physically rather than being linked or cross referenced as they were in Luhmann's example.
A particular color of cards may help in this regard to more easily find these sources.
Also keep in mind that Paxson's system was topical-chronological, so there may also be reasons for doing this that fit into his chronological scheme. Was he filing them in sections so that the publication dates of the sources fit into this scheme as well? This may take direct review to better known and understand his practice.
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Most men's notes are useless stuff to others, useless even to them-selves with the passage of time, and useless especially because ofchaotic arrangement.
Tags
- Frederic L. Paxson
- efficiency
- atomic notes
- bibliographical notes
- analysis
- open questions
- topical headings
- chronological headings
- scrap heaps
- organization
- note taking affordances
- chaos
- notes useless to others
- Frederic L. Paxson's zettelkasten
- chronological order
- note taking why
- synthetic notes
- card index as memory
- synthesis
Annotators
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fieldnotesbrand.com fieldnotesbrand.com
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https://fieldnotesbrand.com/from-seed
Some interesting history of notebooks in America.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI3yiPA6npA
Generally interesting and useful, but is broadly an extended advertisement for JetPens products.
Transparent sticky notes allow one to take notes on them, but the text is still visible through the paper.
One can use separate pages to write notes and then use washi tape to tape the notes to the page in a hinge-like fashion similar to selectively interleaving one's books.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Digitize your notes: Step by Step Using Neo Smart Pen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otj3x_9h2RM
Nothing brilliant. the Neo Smart Pen looks like a direct competitor to Livescribe with Anoto paper
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Handwriting + Zettelkasten
I've used Livescribe pens/paper for note taking (including with audio) before, and they've got OCR software to digital workflows. Or for the paper motivated, one could use their larger post it notes and just stick them to index cards as a substrate for your physical ZK with digitally searchable back ups? Now that I've thought about it and written this out, I may have to try it to see if it's better than my prior handwritten/digital experiments.
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I have been using Apple notes, but began to wonder if I could find an app that supports zettelkasten in digital handwritten form. The closest thing I found is CardNotes however it is underdeveloped imo, and maybe dead?
Someone looking for handwriting apps that allow one to use handwriting in digital contexts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/ydwl32/handwriting_zettelkasten/
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Very nice to differentiate between core notes (notes that we have worked a lot on) and peripheral notes.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Very nice to differentiate between core notes (notes that we have worked a lot on) and peripheral notes.
— Bianca Pereira | PKM Coach and Researcher (@bianca_oli_per) October 24, 2022Coming from the Strange New Worlds Plugin, Bianca Pereira defines core notes (those worked on and thus likely of more value) versus peripheral notes.
Core notes have a similar connotation to so-called permanent notes while peripheral notes have connection to fleeting notes, though peripheral notes would seem to have a higher connotation of value than fleeting notes.
Some of this is similar to my commonplacing practice and collection versus my more focused Luhmann-esque zettelkasten practice.
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another long forgotten manual for students, History and Historical Research (1928) by C.G. Crump of the Public Record Office: ‘Never make a note for future use in such a form ... that even you yourself will not know what it means, when you come across it some months later.’
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In his delightful autobiography, Memories Migrating, the late John Burrow records his perplexities when this injunction was conveyed to him by his graduate supervisor, George Kitson Clark: ‘I brooded on this. What was a fact? And what made it one fact? Surely most facts were compound. How would I know when I had reached bedrock, the ultimate, unsplittable atomic fact?’
Historian John Burrow brooded over the definition of the atomicity of an idea in his autobiography Memories Migrating (2009).
Individual facts link together into small networks to create context for each other.
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I have always been impressed by those academics who can sit impassively through a complex lecture by some visiting luminary without finding it necessary to make a single note, even a furtive one on the back of an envelope. They’d lose face, no doubt, if they were seen copying it all down, like a first-year undergraduate.
In academia, the act of not taking notes can act as an external signal of superiority or even indifference.
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If you give a title to your notes, "claim notes" are simply notes with a verb. They invite you to say: "Prove it!" - "The positive impact of PKM" (not a claim) - "PKM has a positive impact in improving writer's block" (claim) A small change with positive mindset consequences
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>If you give a title to your notes, "claim notes" are simply notes with a verb.<br><br>They invite you to say: "Prove it!"<br><br>- "The positive impact of PKM" (not a claim)<br>- "PKM has a positive impact in improving writer's block" (claim)<br><br>A small change with positive mindset consequences
— Bianca Pereira | PKM Coach and Researcher (@bianca_oli_per) October 6, 2022Bianca Pereira coins the ideas of "concept notes" versus "claim notes". Claim notes are framings similar to the theorem or claim portion of the mathematical framing of definition/theorem(claim)/proof. This set up provides the driving impetus of most of mathematics. One defines objects about which one then advances claims for which proofs are provided to make them theorems.
Framing one's notes as claims invites one to provide supporting proof for them to determine how strong they may or may not be. Otherwise, ideas may just state concepts which are far less interesting or active. What is one to do with them? They require more active work to advance or improve upon in more passive framings.
link to: - Maggie Delano's reading framing: https://hypothes.is/a/4xBvpE2TEe2ZmWfoCX_HyQ
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twitter.com twitter.com
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TiddlyWiki's philosophy now is that the purpose of recording and organising information is so that it can be used again. To maximise the possibilities for reuse, write or slice information into the smallest semantically meaningful units, and weave them together into narratives.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>TiddlyWiki's philosophy now is that the purpose of recording and organising information is so that it can be used again.<br><br>To maximise the possibilities for reuse, write or slice information into the smallest semantically meaningful units, and weave them together into narratives.
— TiddlyWiki (@TiddlyWiki) September 20, 2022 -
The first demo of TidlyWiki from 2004 took the ideas of wiki and applied them to fragments rather than entire pages. The hypothesis was that it would be easier to write in small interlinked chunks that could be gradually massaged into a linear narrative
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>The first demo of TidlyWiki from 2004 took the ideas of wiki and applied them to fragments rather than entire pages. The hypothesis was that it would be easier to write in small interlinked chunks that could be gradually massaged into a linear narrativehttps://t.co/v2v6dyL3Oy pic.twitter.com/MJO7tyopr2
— TiddlyWiki (@TiddlyWiki) September 20, 2022
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Blumenberg's Zettelkasten - 30,000 entries in 55 years, i.e. almost 550 per year, which is not that much - obviously served the material management for books that he had planned and the collection of documents for theses that he had in mind, without that the reading work for it was completed.
Blumenberg's Zettelkasten had 30,000 notes which he collected over 55 years averages out to 545 notes per year or roughly (presuming he worked every day) 1.5 notes per day.
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www.loom.com www.loom.com
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https://www.loom.com/share/a05f636661cb41628b9cb7061bd749ae
Synopsis: Maggie Delano looks at some of the affordances supplied by Tana (compared to Roam Research) in terms of providing better block-based user interface for note type creation, search, and filtering.
These sorts of tools and programmable note implementations remind me of Beatrice Webb's idea of scientific note taking or using her note cards like a database to sort and search for data to analyze it and create new results and insight.
It would seem that many of these note taking tools like Roam and Tana are using blocks and sub blocks as a means of defining atomic notes or database-like data in a way in which sub-blocks are linked to or "filed underneath" their parent blocks. In reality it would seem that they're still using a broadly defined index card type system as used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to implement a set up that otherwise would be a traditional database in the Microsoft Excel or MySQL sort of fashion, the major difference being that the user interface is cognitively easier to understand for most people.
These allow people to take a form of structured textual notes to which might be attached other smaller data or meta data chunks that can be easily searched, sorted, and filtered to allow for quicker or easier use.
Ostensibly from a mathematical (or set theoretic and even topological) point of view there should be a variety of one-to-one and onto relationships (some might even extend these to "links") between these sorts of notes and database representations such that one should be able to implement their note taking system in Excel or MySQL and do all of these sorts of things.
Cascading Idea Sheets or Cascading Idea Relationships
One might analogize these sorts of note taking interfaces to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While there is the perennial question about whether or not CSS is a programming language, if we presume that it is (and it is), then we can apply the same sorts of class, id, and inheritance structures to our notes and their meta data. Thus one could have an incredibly atomic word, phrase, or even number(s) which inherits a set of semantic relationships to those ideas which it sits below. These links and relationships then more clearly define and contextualize them with respect to other similar ideas that may be situated outside of or adjacent to them. Once one has done this then there is a variety of Boolean operations which might be applied to various similar sets and classes of ideas.
If one wanted to go an additional level of abstraction further, then one could apply the ideas of category theory to one's notes to generate new ideas and structures. This may allow using abstractions in one field of academic research to others much further afield.
The user interface then becomes the key differentiator when bringing these ideas to the masses. Developers and designers should be endeavoring to allow the power of complex searches, sorts, and filtering while minimizing the sorts of advanced search queries that an average person would be expected to execute for themselves while also allowing some reasonable flexibility in the sorts of ways that users might (most easily for them) add data and meta data to their ideas.
Jupyter programmable notebooks are of this sort, but do they have the same sort of hierarchical "card" type (or atomic note type) implementation?
Tags
- programmable notes
- integrated development environment
- category theory
- user interface
- cascading idea sheets
- building blocks
- types of notes
- idea links
- scientific note taking
- Tana
- watch
- super tags
- Boolean algebra
- Roam Research
- Jupyter
- CSS
- integrated thinking environments
- card index as database
- Maggie Delano
- Beatrice Webb
Annotators
URL
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www.education.gouv.fr www.education.gouv.fr
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Pour rappel, la note de zéro infligée à un élève en raison de motif exclusivement disciplinaire est proscrite
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I'd really love to see and hear more about people incorporating dreams, visions, non-ordinary experiences and the like in their zettelkasten.
taurusnoises https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/xyhpq4/2015_exhibition_of_roland_barthes_zettelkasten/
Me too. This is one of the reasons I'm not the biggest fan of the "fleeting note" framing of Ahrens, as it's more likely to marginalize these sorts of smaller daily ideas and discourage people from placing some of these types of things into their zettelkasten as potentially "unimportant". I feel like from what I see and hear anecdotally his framing encourages too many to only put in things which are significant, deep, academic, or which have a certain sense of gravitas.
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archive.org archive.org
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Much like Umberto Eco (How to Write a Thesis), in the closing paragraphs of his essay, Goutor finally indicates that note cards can potentially be reused for multiple projects because each one "contains a piece of information which does not depend on a specific context for its value." While providing an example of how this might work, he goes even further by not only saying that "note-cards should never be discarded" but that they might be "recycled" by passing them on to "another interested party" while saying that their value and usefulness is dependent upon how well they may have adhered to some of the most basic note taking methods. (p35)
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For the second time Goutor mentions using different size cards for different note types, but doesn't specifically advise for it or provide a reason. Perhaps his advice for consistency and card size applies only to cards of particular types? (p28)
link to: https://hypothes.is/a/XPphjkNZEe2s3i9VV4qt1g
Incidentally he also specifically mentions 7x9" cards here too. How frequently used were these as a standard?
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As is common in the tradition of the zettelkasten, Goutor advises "that each note-card should contain only one item of information, whether a quotation, a summary, or anything else". (p28) He ascribes this requirement to his earlier need for clarity. (cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/SfWFwENIEe2KfGMbR5n7Qg)
He indicates that while it may seem wasteful to have only one item on each card that the savings in time, efficiency in handling, classification, and retrieval will more than compensate for the small waste.
This sort of small local waste being compensated for by a larger global savings and efficiency can be seen in the design of the shipping container industry as discussed in Mark Levinson's The Box (Princeton University Press, 2008). Was this the exact sort of efficiency mentioned by Ahrens'? (Compare at https://hypothes.is/a/t4i32IXoEeyF2n9jQxu6BA)
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The design of Goutor's note taking method is such that each note should have "a life of its own, so that it can stand independently of every other one in the file." (p28) This concept is broadly similar to the ideas of both atomic notes and evergreen notes in related contexts.
Goutor says that a note's life stems from its identity by means of its bibliographic source, its unique content, and its ultimate purpose. Here he uses the singular "purpose" and doesn't explicitly use "purposes" thereby indicating that an individual note can have multiple potential lives in different places within one's lifetime of work. It seems most likely that he may not have thought of using ideas in multiple different locations, but again, his particular audience (see: https://hypothes.is/a/8jKcTkNPEe2sCntTfNWf2Q) may have also dictated this choice. One could argue that it would have been quite easy for him to have used the plural to suggest the idea simply and tangentially, but that his use of the singular here is specifically because the idea wasn't part of his note taking worldview.
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Goutor defines self-help notes as notes which one would use to refresh their memory about what remains to be done or researched, problems that remain to be solved, or information which is needed to be researched or found. (p26) These are akin in some sense to what I call "open questions". He also indicates that these notes might be triggered by one's daily activities or occasional musings which relate to one's project but occur outside of its active pursuit. In this sense, they have a similar feel to the idea of Ahrens' fleeting notes, but in Goutor's practice they aren't defined as occurring while one is doing active reading or research.
He suggests that one keeps these notes in a separate area so that they might be systematically and regularly visited for review, further research, or answering as the opportunities to do so present themselves. Once the questions have been answered and appropriate notes updated or added, these self-help notes can be discarded.
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Jacques Goutor defines content notes as those that "are drawn in one way or another from the actual contents of the sources." He considers them the most important part of note taking as "they will eventually constitute the pieces of the mosaic." (p20)
He further breaks this type down into generally self-explanatory "quote notes" and "summary notes". (p20) He does advise that one writes out careful summaries so that one needn't do additional future work of writing notes on one's own notes. While he doesn't state it directly, the presumption in his presentation is that a well written summary can be directly used in one's future written project.
Compare this type of note to others like evergreen or permanent notes.
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Noting the dates of available materials within archives or sources can be useful on bibliography notes for either planning or revisiting sources. (p16,18)
Similarly one ought to note missing dates, data, volumes, or resources at locations to prevent unfruitfully looking for data in these locations or as a note to potentially look for the missing material in other locations. (p16)
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When interviewing subjects, one should not only note the date, time, and location, but get (preferably written) permission to (record) or quote them. Notes about their memory, recall, or behavior may be useful, if nothing else as a reminder for crossing checking their information with other potential sources.
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Not mentioned in any other sources I've consulted (yet), Goutor recommends adding notes about the physical location of bibliographic sources to bibliographic notes. This should include details about not only the library and even call numbers, to minimize needing to look them up again in the future, but to have notes about arrangements and contacts which may needed to revisit harder to access resources. (p14) This can also be useful for sources like maps which may be needed for higher quality reproduction in the final text. (p15)
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Goutor recommended the use of bibliographic cards not only for their standard uses as sourcing, information, and footnotes, but for creating potential scopes of work and research for planning purposes, especially in planning out one's reading and note taking using various archives and resources to make more effective and productive use of one's time. (p13) This can be potentially very useful for visiting archives and sources for which one does not have easy or frequent access.
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Goutor acknowledges that there are a variety of note types, but focuses on bibliographic notes, content notes, and self-help notes as being the most common and most important. (p12)
These first two are broadly self-explanatory, but the third should be intriguing given the other literature in which this type is rarely, if ever, used. We'll see what comes of it...
Tags
- failures of memory
- efficiency
- The Box
- 7 x 9" index cards
- dates
- global changes
- group notes
- progressive summarization
- types of notes
- self-help notes
- evergreen notes
- quotations
- local vs. global
- interviews
- publishing
- excerpting vs. progressive summarization
- fleeting notes
- physical reminders
- diffuse thinking
- Jacques Goutor
- note reuse
- card index as productivity system
- accessibility
- moveable information
- fleeting ideas
- note taking
- clarity
- note sharing
- consistency
- atomic notes
- small local wastes in exchange for greater global efficiencies
- bibliographical notes
- recall
- research planning
- paper standards
- open questions
- note card sizes
- Mark Levinson
- note taking affordances
- ars excerpendi
- identity
- note taking advice
- summarizing
- self-help
- life of x
- Herman Hollerith
- local changes
- shipping containers
- productivity
- bibliographic data
- maps
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Posted byu/Kshkn16 hours agoRate my idea for a new product
One might suggest that the freedom, flexibility, and customization of these systems is actually an unuseful time suck for many users which only encourages shiny object syndrome. From a design perspective, try starting out building a system that works for you before beginning on design for others. Research and looking at the user interfaces offered by the competition will helpful as well. Which are the most popular? fun to use? Why? What actual affordances do those interfaces and functionalities allow? are they truly productive?
Possibly more productive, what sorts of standards can you leverage to make people's pre-existing notes more useful? Can you take pre-existing stores of .txt or .md files and provide different views or perspectives on them? This will allow people to pick and choose which applications might work with their stores of data to provide different views or perspectives on them. Why reinvent a text editor or tools like Logseq or Obsidian when you can leverage the local stores of data to provide the sorts of services you're not seeing in the broader space? For example, on the "social media" side, there are existing solutions for taking your locally stored notes, putting them into the cloud and displaying them on the web, but the various steps are highly technical and require a relatively large amount of work and admin tax to maintain. A service that allows one to point at their local store of data and automatically host it on a website and keep it synced would be a major boon for the non-technical user.
Separately, Matuschak did not invent evergreen notes. The first clear cut instantiation I've seen in the literature is from Konrad Gessner in 1548, and honestly even his idea really stems from a longstanding tradition of working with commonplace sententiae preceding his work. (see https://hypothes.is/a/uEboYlOwEeykkotYs594LA) Matuschak simply applied the definition/idea of "evergreen" (meaning easily reusable) articles or content from journalism to describe his notes which could be reused in various contexts. (Example: Why rewrite an article on how to decorate and entertain for the holidays, when you can reuse the same article you've been publishing for years, perhaps along with some updated photos?) "Atomic" notes is another variation on this same theme, but is one which underlies the ability to re-use notes in combination with one or more other notes to generate new ideas.
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So there is nothing exaggerated in thinking that Barthes would havefinally found the form for these many scattered raw materials (indexcards, desk diaries, old or ongoing private diaries, current notes,narratives to come, the planned discussion of homosexuality) ifdeath had not brought his work and his reflection to an end. Thework would certainly not have corresponded to the current definitionof the novel as narration and the unfolding of a plot, but the historyof forms tells us that the word ‘novel’ has been used to designate themost diverse objects.
Just as in Jason Lustig's paper about Gotthard Deutsch's zettelkasten, here is an example of an outside observer bemoaning the idea of things not done with a deceased's corpus of notes.
It's almost like looking at the "corpus" of notes being reminiscent of the person who has died and thinking about what could have bee if they had left. It gives the impression that, "here are their ideas" or "here is their brain and thoughts" loosely connected. Almost as if they are still with us, in a way that doesn't quite exist when looking at their corpus of books.
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Further, Deutsch triedto instill a certain chronological, geographical and thematic method of organization. Butthis arrangement is also a stumbling block to anyone who might want to use it, includingDeutsch. ACCUSATIONS AGAINST THE JEWS (489 cards), for instance, presents an array ofevents organized not by date but in a surprisingly unsystematic alphabetical order. Insteadof indicating when such accusations were more or less prevalent, which could only beindicated by reorganizing cards chronologically, the default alphabetical sorting, whichshows instances in disparate locations like London (in May, 1921) alongside Sziget,Hungary (from 1867), gives the impression that such anti-Jewish events were everywhere.And even this organization was chaotic. The card on Sziget is actually listed under‘Marmaros’, the publication with which the card’s text began, and an immediately pre-ceding card is ordered based on its opening ‘A long list of accusations . . . ’, not thereference to its source: Goethe’s Das Jahrmarketsfest zu Plundersweilern.
Lustig provides a description of some of the order of Gotthard Deutsch's zettelkasten. Most of it seemed to have been organized by chronological, geographical and thematic means, but often there was chaos. This could be indicative of many things including broad organization levels, but through active use, he may have sorted and resorted cards as needs required. Upon replacing cards he may not have defaulted to some specific order relying on the broad levels and knowing what state he had left things last. Though regular use, this wouldn't concern an individual the way it might concern outsiders who may not understand the basic orderings (as did Lustig) or be able to discern and find things as quickly as he may have been able to.
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If in 1908 itcontained 10,000 cards, by 1917 it had ballooned in size to 50,000 items, reaching60,000 in 1919 and nearly 70,000 at the time of Deutsch’s death in 1921 (Deutsch,1908b, 1917b; Brown, 1919: 69). It seems that Deutsch consistently produced 5,000cards per year (about 20 per workday) for the final 13 years of his life.
Look up these references to confirm scope of numbers.
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- Sep 2022
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paperwebsite.com paperwebsite.com
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Permanent Notes
Permanent Notes
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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https://web.archive.org/web/20080412071219/http://eastgate.com/catalog/Briefcase.html
Eastgate systems used to make a "3x5 Card Briefcase" to capture short notes on the go which could later "be scanned or transcribed to Tinderbox."
Tinderbox was one of the first digital tools to be used in a way very similar to zettelkasten of old, particularly by academics, who are a large portion of their power user base.
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www.getfrictionless.com www.getfrictionless.com
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Capture Cards (red) 4.00 Beautifully Useful 3″ x 5″ Index Cards (Pack of 100)I created my Capture Cards to help make it easier for me to capture ideas, make notes, and record tasks as they happen. Good tools have a way of removing frustration and stress from a workflow, and for me, these cards do just that.Just enough structure to help you capture, but not enough to get in the way.They’re printed full-bleed on 70lb (heavy and durable) premium smooth white cover stock, and you get 100 2-sided cards in each pack. They feel great in your hand, yet hold up well in your pocket.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140707053048/http://www.getfrictionless.com/products/capture-cards-red
Simple index cards, but sold with a purpose in mind: capturing notes!
One is reminded here of waste books and fleeting notes.
Image:<br />
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mleddy.blogspot.com mleddy.blogspot.com
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The Field Notes journal serves as RAM, the index cards as HDD, metaphorically speaking...(brain is CPU).
Den analogizes their note taking system to computing on 2010-11-11 8:43 PM.
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andysylvester.com andysylvester.com
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There has been much discussion about “atomic notes”, which represents the key ideas from a person’s research on some topic or source (sources one and two). These are not the kind of thing I am interested in creating/collecting, or at least not what I have been doing. A far more typical thing for me is something I did at work today. I was trying to figure out how to convert the output of a program into another format. I did some searching, installed a tool, found a script, played with the script in the tool, figured out how to use it, then wrote down a summary of my steps and added links to what I found in my search. Since I am not doing research for a book or for writing academic papers, the idea of an atomic note does not fit into my information world. However, capturing the steps of a discovery or how I worked out a problem. is very real and concrete to me. I used to know a fellow engineer who wrote “technical notes” to capture work he was doing (like a journal entry). Maybe that is how I should consider this type of knowledge creation.
Andy Sylvester says his engineering type of notes don't fit with the concept of atomic note. A 'how to solve x' type of note would fit my working def of 'atomic' as being a self-contained whole, focused on a single thing (here how to solve x). If the summary can be its title I'd say it's pretty atomic. Interestingly in [[Technik des wissenschaflichen Arbeitens by Johannes Erich Heyde]] 1970, Heyde on p18 explicitly mentions ZK being useful for engineers, not just to process new scientific insights from e.g. articles, but to index specific experiences, experiments and results. And on p19 suggests using 1 ZK system for all of your material of various types. Luhmann's might have been geared to writing articles, but it can be something else. Solving problems is also output. I have these types of notes in my 'ZK' if not in the conceptual section of it.
Vgl [[Ambachtelijke engineering 20190715143342]] artisanal engineering, Lovelock Novacene 2019, plays a role here too. Keeping a know-how notes collection in an environment where also your intuition can play a creative role is useful. I've done this for coding things, as I saw experienced coders do it, just as Andy describes, and it helped me create most of my personal IndieWeb scripts, because they were integrated in the rest of my stuff about my work and notions. Vgl [[Vastklik notes als ratchet zonder terugval 20220302102702]]
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More effective structured note-taking systems,such as Cornell Notes or REAP, increase students' critical readingskills, including synthesis, analysis, and evaluation (Ahmad, 2019)
More effective than what? Just highlighting? What does Ahmad show? Is there a hierarchy of strategies that have been cross tested with larger groups? What effect does a depth and breadth of neurodiverse subjects show, for example?
This is the my first encounter with REAP.
REAP is an acronym for Read, Encode, Annotate, Ponder.
Has anyone done direct research on commonplacing or zettelkasten techniques to show concrete data to compare them with other currently more popular techniques like Cornell notes or REAP?
Read for potential methods and set up for a potential meta study: Ahmad, S. Z. (2019). Impact of Cornell Notes vs. REAP on EFL secondary school students’ critical reading skills. International Education Studies, 12(10), 60-74
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notes.andymatuschak.org notes.andymatuschak.org
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www.connectedtext.com www.connectedtext.com
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In writing my dissertation and working on my first book, I used an index card system, characterized by the "one fact, one card" maxim, made popular by Beatrice Webb.
Manfred Keuhn indicates that Webb popularized the idea of "one fact, one card", (and perhaps she may have helped re-popularize the idea in the 20th century) but Konrad Gessner (Pandectarum sive Partitionum Universalium. Zurich: Christoph Froschauer, 1548) had already advised "A new line should be used for every idea." Since Gessner then says that each line was to be cut up into an individual slip, the ideas are equivalent.
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The Size of Thoughts of 1996.
details that might be of interest with respect to atomic note definitions?
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I have found that the "size of a thought" is usually not much larger than 500 words. Nicholson Baker, who has written an essay on "The Size of Thoughts" thinks that "most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product." Mine are a lot smaller. It takes between 50 and 500 words for me to express one thought or one idea (or perhaps better a fragment of a thought or an idea, because thoughts and ideas usually are compounds of such fragments). See also Steven Berlin Johnson on his experiences with an electronic outliner, called Devonthink: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html.
What is the size of a single thought?
500 words is about the size of a typical blog post. It's also about the size of a minimum recommended post for SEO purposes.
Nice to see his link to Steven Johnson here as I think this is where I've seen similar thoughts recently myself.
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By bringing the statementstogether we learn the extent of our information onthe fact; the definitive conclusion depends on therelation between the statements.
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- Aug 2022
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www.npr.org www.npr.org
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At the time he was selling, Jay-Z was also coming up with rhymes. He normally wrote down his material in a green notebook he carried around with him — but he never took the notebook with him on the streets, he says. "I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice — anything just to get a paper bag," he says. "And I'd write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook. As I got further and further away from home and my notebook, I had to memorize these rhymes — longer and longer and longer. ... By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn't need pen or paper — my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape." Since his first album, he says, he's never written down any of his lyrics. "I've lost plenty of material," he says. "It's not the best way. I wouldn't advise it to anyone. I've lost a couple albums' worth of great material. ... Think about when you can't remember a word and it drives you crazy. So imagine forgetting an entire rhyme. 'What's that? I said I was the greatest something?' "
In his youth, while selling drugs on the side, Jay-Z would write down material for lyrics into a green notebook. He never took the notebook around with him on the streets, but instead would buy anything at a corner store just for the paper bags as writing material. He would write the words onto these paper bags and stuff them into his pockets (wearable Zettelkasten anyone? or maybe Zetteltasche?) When he got home, in long standing waste book tradition, he would transfer the words to his notebook.
Jay-Z has said he hasn't written down any lyrics since his first album, but warns, "I've lost plenty of material. It's not the best way. I wouldn't advise it to anyone. I've lost a couple albums' worth of great material."
https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2010/11/20101116_fa_01.mp3
Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/T3Z38uDUEeuFcPu2U_w_zA (Jonathan Edwards' zettelmantle)
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Should I always create a Bib-note? .t3_x2f4hn._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/x2f4hn/should_i_always_create_a_bibnote/
If you want to be lazy you could just create the one card with the quote and full source and save a full bibliographical note. Your future self will likely be pleasantly surprised if you do create a full bib note (filed separately) which allows for a greater level of future findability and potential serendipity, It may happen when you've run across that possibly obscure author multiple times and it may spur you to read other material by them or cross reference other related authors. It's these small, but seemingly "useless", practices in the present that generate creativity and serendipity over longer periods of time that really bring out the compounding value of ZK.
More and more I find that the randomly referenced and obscure writer or historical figure I noted weeks/months/years ago pops up and becomes a key player in research I'm doing now, but that I otherwise would have long forgotten and thus not able to connect or inform my current pursuits. These golden moments are too frequently not written about or highlighted properly in much of the literature about these practices.
Naturally, however, everyone's practices may differ. You want to save the source at the very least, even if it's just on that slip with the quote. If you're pressed for time now, save the step and do it later when you install the card.
Often is the time that I don't think of anything useful contemporaneously but then a week or two later I'll think of something relevant and go back and write another note or two, or I'll want to recommend it to someone and then at least it's findable to recommend.
Frequently I find that the rule "If it's worth reading, then it's worth writing down the author, title, publisher and date at a minimum" saves me from reading a lot of useless material. Of course if you're researching and writing about the broader idea of "listicles" then perhaps you have other priorities?
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writing.bobdoto.computer writing.bobdoto.computer
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In discussing the various ways Luhmann referenced his notes, Schmidt discusses specific notes created by Luhmann that appeared to produce "larger structural outline[s]."8 It seems, when beginning a major line of thought, Luhmann created a note that resembled "the outline of an article or table of contents of a book."9 Today, many call these outline notes "structure notes," a term which has come to prominence through its usage on the zettelkasten.de forum.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Another prime object in making notes is tohave record in the most convenient or effectiveway of the data or “ facts ” found in sources ofinformation, or the conclusions built from suchfindings. The results reached in pursuit of thisobject may properly be called subject notes.
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Oneprimeobject inmakingnotesistohaveaseasilyavailable as possibleappropriate informationor conclusionsaboutthings thataretobe usedas sources ofinformation-especiallydocuments and works.Thenotesmadeorcollected inpursuit ofthisobjectmaybecalledbibliographicalandcritical;or simply,withsufficiently liberalinterpretation of the term,bibliographical
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Thismeans,uselooseslipsorsheets.Withthemone canmakenotesquite separately,so thateach,nomatterwhatitslength,willbeaunitbyitself.Notes thus separatelymadecan then beput here or there at will;classifiednowinoneway,nowinanother;employed,asfirstwritten,for various purposesin succession.Duplicationofeffort,renoting of thesame matter,maybereduced-especiallybythe aid of cross-references-to a minimum.
sheets / slips
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subconscious.substack.com subconscious.substack.com
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Content addressing is the big little idea behind IPFS. With content addressing (CIDs), you ask for a file using a hash of its contents. It doesn't matter where the file lives. Anyone in the network can serve that content. This is analogous to the leap Baran made from circuit switching to packet switching. Servers become fungible, going from K-selected to r-selected.
Content addressing is when a piece of content has its own permanent address, a URI. Many copies may exist of the content, hosted by many in the network, all copies have the same address. Whoever is best situated to serve you a copy, does so. It makes the servers interchangeable. My blogposts have a canonical fixed address, but it's tied to a specific domain and only found on 1 server (except when using a CDN).
IPFS starts from content addressing.
Content addressing, assuming the intention 'protocol for thought' here, does match with atomic notes type of pkm systems. All my notes have unique names that could as human readable names map to CIDs. CIDs do change when the content changes, so there's a mismatch with the concept of 'permanent notes' that are permanent in name/location yet have slowly evolving content.
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Apart from a higher probability to retrieve particular note sheets, that advantage lies in thecircumstance that notes having a similar keyword will, as the box grows, find themselves atthe same location because of the alphabetical structure. That means not only an automaticcollection of content, but also a comparative review of those related note sheets, which inturn leads to new thoughts basd on the relation between the note sheets with identicalkeywords
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o49C8jQIsvs
Video about the Double-Bubble Map: https://youtu.be/Hm4En13TDjs
The double-bubble map is a tool for thought for comparing and contrasting ideas. Albert Rosenberg indicates that construction of opposites is one of the most reliable ways for generating ideas. (35:50)
Bluma Zeigarnik - open tasks tend to occupy short-term memory.
I love his compounding interest graphic with the steps moving up to the right with the quote: "Even groundbreaking paradigm shifts are most often the consequence of many small moves in the right direction instead of one big idea." This could be an awesome t-shirt or motivational poster.
Watched this up to about 36 minutes on 2022-08-10 and finished on 2022-08-22.
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boffosocko.com boffosocko.com
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“500 and 1000 cards” is a long way before perceiving some benefit. Maybe this is necessary because “mine is more textual and less visual than his [Michalsky’s]”. For me, benefit is visible after approx. 40 new notes, dropped on the canvas of my tool, rearranged and connected.
Thanks for this additional piece of Data Matthias! I have a feeling that some of the benefit will also come down to the level of quality of the notes and how well interlinked they may be. Those doing massive dumps of raw, unelaborated, and unlinked data using services like Readwise into their collections will certainly take longer than those who have more refined ideas well linked. My number is presuming something closer to the former while something along the lines of a tenth of that (an order of magnitude) would seem to fall in line with my current working model. It would be nice to have a larger body of data to work with though.
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https://boffosocko.com/2022/07/03/55806862/
https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich<br /> Joined: January 18, 2012<br /> First annotation: 2018-11-29
Annotations: 10,099 (public and private as of 2022-07-03)
Date of publication: 2022-07-03<br /> Duration: 3 years, 6 months, 5 days or 1312 days<br /> Average of: ~10099/1,312 = 7.69 annotations per day
compare: https://hypothes.is/a/26pRxBpQEe2VXK8kiyXtKQ
I suspect that earlier years were more sparse with higher number of fleeting notes. The past year or two output and quality increased dramatically with more valuable literature notes and more actual near-permanent or actual permanent notes.
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In addition to resources annotations, tags, highlights and comments, it would be nice to store our own personal notes on Hypothesis.
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web.hypothes.is web.hypothes.is
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https://web.hypothes.is/blog/100000-annotations/
https://hypothes.is/users/heatherstaines<br /> Joined: November 11, 2016<br /> Annotations: 1,063 (public as of 2022-08-12)
Date of publication: 2020-02-07<br /> Duration: 3 yr 3 mo or 1,183 days<br /> Average of: ~100,000/1,183 = 84.53 annotations per day
These would be closer to the idea of fleeting notes per day and not a more zettelkasten-like permanent note. It does provide at least a magnitude of order level of measurement on practice however.
Note that it's possible that as a part of the company she has multiple accounts including one with an earlier born by date which would tend to dilute the average.
The publication is dated 2020-02-07 (which matches publication meta data) and somehow Heather makes an annotation on the post itself (dated 2020-02-02) saying she's already at 105,000 annotations. This could have given a smaller window on a few week's worth of annotations, except for the improbably mismatch in dates.
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scholarworks.wmich.edu scholarworks.wmich.edu
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Why won't annotators use the "Page Notes"?
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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I like @prometheanhindsight’s explanation “Permanent,” just meaning “permanently useful.” Not “unchanging/fully formed.”
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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How many cards (both analog and digital) have you created yet? .t3_wjzjaz._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } question.71 votes2129.6%0=zero, I haven't started yet but I'm interested to learn4462.0%1..1000, some cards, I take it easy57.0%1k..10k, I like to imitate Roland Barthes with 12k cards11.4%10k..100k, my idol is Niklas Luhmann with 90k cards
I'm curious who are the 6 that have been at this and honestly have over 10,000 cards? What timeframe did it take you to produce them? Roland Barthes worked for 37 years to produce his ~12,000.
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I'm working on my zettelkasten—creating literature notes and permanent notes—for 90 min a day from Monday to Friday but I struggle with my permanent note output. Namely, I manage to complete no more than 3-4 permanent notes per week. By complete I mean notes that are atomic (limited to 1 idea), autonomous (make sense on their own), connected (link to at least 3 other notes), and brief (no more than 300 words).That said, I have two questions:How many permanent notes do you complete per week on average?What are your tips to increase your output?
reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/wjigq6/how_do_you_increase_your_permanent_note_output
In addition to all the other good advice from others, it might be worth taking a look at others' production and output from a historical perspective. Luhmann working at his project full time managed to average about 6 cards a day.1 Roland Barthes who had a similar practice for 37 years averaged about 1.3 cards a day.2 Tiago Forte has self-reported that he makes two notes a day, though obviously his isn't the same sort of practice nor has he done it consistently for as long.3 As you request, it would be useful to have some better data about the output of people with long term, consistent use.
Given even these few, but reasonably solid, data points at just 90 minutes a day, one might think you're maybe too "productive"! I suspect that unless one is an academic working at something consistently nearly full time, most are more likely to be in the 1-3 notes a day average output at best. On a per hour basis Luhmann was close to 0.75 cards while you're at 0.53 cards. Knowing this, perhaps the best advice is to slow down a bit and focus on quality over quantity. This combined with continued consistency will probably serve your enterprise much better in the long run than in focusing on card per hour or card per day productivity.
Internal idea generation/creation productivity will naturally compound over time as your collection grows and you continue to work with it. This may be a better sort of productivity to focus on in the long term compared with short term raw inputs.
Another useful tidbit that some neglect is the level of quality and diversity of the reading (or other) inputs you're using. The better the journal articles and books you're reading, the more value and insight you're likely to find and generate more quickly over time.
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Luhmann’s slip-box contains about 90,000 notes, which sounds like an incrediblylarge number. But it only means that he wrote six notes a day fromthe day he started to work with his slip-box until he died.
Should check the dates of start and finish and do the direct math myself, but ostensibly Luhmann averaged six notes a day for the duration of keeping his zettelkasten.
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ljvmiranda921.github.io ljvmiranda921.github.io
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I also mentioned Zettelkasten many times in this post, but I don’t do that anymore—I just did a 1-month dry run and it felt tiring. Pen and paper just gives me the bare essentials. I can get straight to work and not worry if something is a literature note or a permanent note.
What is it that was tiring about the practice? Did they do it properly, or was the focus placed on tremendous output driving the feeling of a need for commensurate tremendous input on a daily basis? Most lifetime productive users only made a few cards a day, but I get the feeling that many who start, think they should be creating 20 cards a day and that is definitely a road to burn out. This feeling is compounded by digital tools that make it easier to quickly capture ideas by quoting or cut and pasting, but which don't really facilitate the ownership of ideas (internalization) by the note taker. The work of writing helps to facilitate this. Apparently the framing of literature note vs. permanent note also was a hurdle in the collection of ideas moving toward the filtering down and refining of one's ideas. These naming ideas seem to be a general hurdle for many people, particularly if they're working without particular goals in mind.
Only practicing zettelkasten for a month is certainly no way to build real insight or to truly begin developing anything useful. Even at two cards a day and a minimum of 500-1000 total cards to see some serendipity and creativity emerge, one would need to be practicing for just over a year to begin seeing interesting results.
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www.jasongilbertson.com www.jasongilbertson.com
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Structure notes—sometimes called index notes
- index notes or toc, there it sounds like toc, just list the relevant notes
- how about MOC?
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I like to highlight verbatim and add manual notes while I read. Later, when reviewing the literature note to create permanent notes, I rewrite and summarize them in my own words. Ahrens (2017) says to keep literature notes concise by being selective and using your own words while consuming the content.
- highlights seems to save a copy
- should I save the copy into my notebook or just save its metadata?
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permanent notes are the note I rewrite from my comprehension, this is the core of ZK
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another question is we always forget the context of the highlights...
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Fleeting notes capture quick thoughts
use Flomo to capture fleeting notes but it is temporary and should to be filtered through your brain something unimportant to be cleared
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www.ischool.berkeley.edu www.ischool.berkeley.edu
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Historical Hypermedia: An Alternative History of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 and Implications for e-Research. .mp3. Berkeley School of Information Regents’ Lecture. UC Berkeley School of Information, 2010. https://archive.org/details/podcast_uc-berkeley-school-informat_historical-hypermedia-an-alte_1000088371512. archive.org.
https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/audio/2010-10-20-vandenheuvel_0.mp3
Interface as Thing - book on Paul Otlet (not released, though he said he was working on it)
- W. Boyd Rayward 1994 expert on Otlet
- Otlet on annotation, visualization, of text
- TBL married internet and hypertext (ideas have sex)
- V. Bush As We May Think - crosslinks between microfilms, not in a computer context
- Ted Nelson 1965, hypermedia
t=540
- Michael Buckland book about machine developed by Emanuel Goldberg antecedent to memex
- Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine: Information, Invention, and Political Forces (New Directions in Information Management) by Michael Buckland (Libraries Unlimited, (March 31, 2006)
- Otlet and Goldsmith were precursors as well
four figures in his research: - Patrick Gattis - biologist, architect, diagrams of knowledge, metaphorical use of architecture; classification - Paul Otlet, Brussels born - Wilhelm Ostwalt - nobel prize in chemistry - Otto Neurath, philosophher, designer of isotype
Paul Otlet
- wrote bibliography on law
- book: Something on Bibliography #wanttoread
- universal decimal classification system
- mundaneum
- Le Corbusier - architect worked with Otlet for building for Mundaneum; See: https://socks-studio.com/2019/05/05/the-shape-of-knowledge-the-mundaneum-by-paul-otlet-and-henri-la-fontaine/
Otlet was interested in both the physical as well as the intangible aspects of the Mundaneum including as an idea, an institution, method, body of work, building, and as a network.<br /> (#t=1020)
Early iPhone diagram?!?
(roughly) armchair to do the things in the web of life (Nelson quote) (get full quote and source for use) (circa 19:30)
compares Otlet to TBL
Michael Buckland 1991 <s>internet of things</s> coinage - did I hear this correctly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things lists different coinages
Turns out it was "information as thing"<br /> See: https://hypothes.is/a/kXIjaBaOEe2MEi8Fav6QsA
sugane brierre and otlet<br /> "everything can be in a document"<br /> importance of evidence
The idea of evidence implies a passiveness. For evidence to be useful then, one has to actively do something with it, use it for comparison or analysis with other facts, knowledge, or evidence for it to become useful.
transformation of sound into writing<br /> movement of pieces at will to create a new combination of facts - combinatorial creativity idea here. (circa 27:30 and again at 29:00)<br /> not just efficiency but improvement and purification of humanity
put things on system cards and put them into new orders<br /> breaking things down into smaller pieces, whether books or index cards....
Otlet doesn't use the word interfaces, but makes these with language and annotations that existed at the time. (32:00)
Otlet created diagrams and images to expand his ideas
Otlet used octagonal index cards to create extra edges to connect them together by topic. This created more complex trees of knowledge beyond the four sides of standard index cards. (diagram referenced, but not contained in the lecture)
Otlet is interested in the "materialization of knowledge": how to transfer idea into an object. (How does this related to mnemonic devices for daily use? How does it relate to broader material culture?)
Otlet inspired by work of Herbert Spencer
space an time are forms of thought, I hold myself that they are forms of things. (get full quote and source) from spencer influence of Plato's forms here?
Otlet visualization of information (38:20)
S. R. Ranganathan may have had these ideas about visualization too
atomization of knowledge; atomist approach 19th century examples:S. R. Ranganathan, Wilson, Otlet, Richardson, (atomic notes are NOT new either...) (39:40)
Otlet creates interfaces to the world - time with cyclic representation - space - moving cube along time and space axes as well as levels of detail - comparison to Ted Nelson and zoomable screens even though Ted Nelson didn't have screens, but simulated them in paper - globes
Katie Berner - semantic web; claims that reporting a scholarly result won't be a paper, but a nugget of information that links to other portions of the network of knowledge.<br /> (so not just one's own system, but the global commons system)
Mention of Open Annotation (Consortium) Collaboration:<br /> - Jane Hunter, University of Australia Brisbane & Queensland<br /> - Tim Cole, University of Urbana Champaign<br /> - Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory annotations of various media<br /> see:<br /> - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311366469_The_Open_Annotation_Collaboration_A_Data_Model_to_Support_Sharing_and_Interoperability_of_Scholarly_Annotations - http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130205/index.html - http://www.openannotation.org/PhaseIII_Team.html
trust must be put into the system for it to work
coloration of the provenance of links goes back to Otlet (~52:00)
Creativity is the friction of the attention space at the moments when the structural blocks are grinding against one another the hardest. —Randall Collins (1998) The sociology of philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (p.76)
Tags
- Charles van den Heuvel
- octagonal index cards
- Herbert Van de Sompel
- material culture
- Mundaneum
- Otto Neurath
- Paul Otlet
- hypermedia
- Vannevar Bush
- listen
- Tim Berners-Lee
- atomic ideas
- Open Annotation Collaboration
- Wilhelm Ostwalt
- Universal Decimal Classification
- Web 2.0
- Jane Hunter
- Tim Cole
- Emanuel Goldberg
- Randall Collins
- S. R. Ranganathan
- W. Boyd Rayward
- mnemonic devices
- atomic notes
- idea links
- semantic web
- memex
- evidence
- atomist philosophy
- Hypothes.is
- references
- Le Corbusier
- Michael Buckland
- index cards
- materialization of knowledge
- Herbert Spencer
- Ted Nelson
Annotators
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.comYouTube1
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but serve as a fast way to insert a reference
参考笔记是摘录还是只有源的metadata?
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universitylifecafe.k-state.edu universitylifecafe.k-state.edu
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https://universitylifecafe.k-state.edu/bookshelf/academicskills/indexcardstudysystem.html
Natalie Umberger is writing about an "index card study system" in an academic study skills context, but it's an admixture of come ideas from Cornell Notes and using index cards as flashcards.
The advice to "Review your notes and readings frequently, so the material is 'fresh.' " is a common one (through at least the 1980s to the present), though research on the mere-exposure effect indicates that it's not as valuable as other methods.
How can we stamp out the misconception that this sort of review is practical?
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- Jul 2022
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Others have called these“Main Notes” or “Permanent Notes” or “EvergreenNotes”. I called them Point Notes to remind myself thatwhen I write them I should be making a point.
Part of Allosso's definition of point notes: they should be making a point.
(No mention of "atomic notes"?)
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With practice, your SourceNotes will become more like data and your Points moreanalytical.
This distinguishing factor is a more useful one than those in other systems.
Compare this with the idea of Beatrice Webb's "analytic notes" versus "synthetic notes" or "scientific notes" which she describes in My Apprentice (1926).
see: - https://hypothes.is/a/Fb3Y4Au1Ee2p_sdveWOJKw - https://hypothes.is/a/WGPrOAoOEe2WJV9yx2SVZg - https://hypothes.is/a/2gdRwgoMEe2mdccJDX6zTw
Web considers "analytic note taking" to be the raw data collection and arrangement (in the same vein of creating databases in the computer science space, which didn't exist when she did her work) upon which historical work is based.
She views "synthetic notes" as observations of behaviours and writings which probably more closely resembles the idea of "literature notes" (Ahrens) or "source notes" (Allosso). Some of the difference is that she's viewing her notes as a tool for her particular work (sociology) rather than as a broader enterprise which might be used in all fields.
Webb's synthetic notes are also likely bound up in her idea of Herbert Spencer's "synthetic philosophy" of thinking, which may require some more reading of these sections on my part to better distinguish her specific meaning.
Webb didn't seem to have a version of "permanent notes" in her conceptualization. Perhaps this is an indication that the evolution of the note really only occurred as it was placed into published writing. This may potentially preclude the reuse of the evolved ideas unless they are separately re-subsumed into one's note collection.
Ahrens' conceptualization of the zettelkasten has all the writing, revision, and evolution work occurring in the slip box itself so it's always available and reusable. Many modern note taking and writing systems would seem to elide this part. (Is this true in practice? Can we provide examples?)
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“Comparing notes” is a metaphor for talking throughideas for good reason
What is the origin of this metaphor?
One might suspect the 1500s or during the Scientific Revolution?
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As you writea new note, which I call a Point Note, the focus shiftsfrom the source material to your own thoughts. This iswhere you begin taking real ownership of the idea, usingthe source as support for a thought you’re pursuing apoint you want to make.
further elaboration on the idea of a point note
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Engage with the idea and comment or elaborateon it in a Point Note.
Dan Allosso's definition of a point note.
This is roughly equivalent to permanent notes or evergreen notes in Ahrens or Matuschak's frameworks respectively. Somehow I like what seems like a broader feel here, thought the name
Does this version contain within it the idea of growth or evolution over time? Evergreen note in Matuschak's version does, though the word evergreen stemming from the journalism space would indicate an idea that doesn't evolve over time but is simply reusable or republishable with little or no work. The linguistic link to evergreen articles in the journalism space creates cognitive dissonance for me in calling notes evergreen. Evergreen connotes reusability, which is useful, but ideas should have the ability to evolve and procreate with other ideas.
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Summarize and paraphrase (and only rarelyquote) this information into a Source Note;
Dan Allosso's definition of a "source note".
This seems roughly equivalent to what Ahrens calls a "literature note".
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In addition tozettel, some of the other names used for various types ofnotes are, Fleeting Note, Literature Note, Reading Note,Permanent Note, Evergreen Note, Main Note, andAtomic Note.
bibnote is another I've seen
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there isa lot of energy devoted to naming the different types ofnotes and the workflows they represent.
Do we really need another new sets of names?! ;)
One day all of these different types will eventually be canonical...
Tags
- Synthetic Philosophy
- source notes
- permanent notes
- point notes
- metaphors
- content reuse
- atomic notes
- types of notes
- main notes
- evergreen notes
- comparing notes
- open questions
- definitions
- historical linguistics
- literature notes
- note taking metaphors
- analytic notes
- note reuse
- Dan Allosso
- synthetic notes
- Herbert Spencer
- Beatrice Webb
- aphorisms
Annotators
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educacion.wke.es educacion.wke.es
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Tocqueville
AUTOR QUE HABLA DEL APS
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Local file Local file
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Once I was started on the career of a social investigator,the manuscript books became a record of other people’scharacter and conversation; of their gestures and acts; infact, of human behaviour; and, as such, these entries havean interest of their own.
and a sentence or two later
Hence, in describing the technique of a social investigator—for instance, the use of the “ interview ” and “ watching organisations at work ” [...]
Beatrice Webb's definition of synthetic notes (particularly from the perspective of a sociologist) includes recording of conversations, actions, gestures, interviews, and general behavior.
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writingcommons.org writingcommons.org
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Synthesis notes are a strategy for taking and using reading notes that bring together—synthesize—what we read with our thoughts about our topic in a way that lets us integrate our notes seamlessly into the process of writing a first draft. Six steps will take us from reading sources to a first draft.
Similar to Beatrice Webb's definition of synthetic notes in My Apprentice (1926), thought this also includes movement into actually drafting writing.
What year was this written?
The idea here seems to be less discrete in the steps of the writing process and subsumes multiple things instead of breaking them into discrete conceptual parts. Has this been some of what has caused issues in the note taking to creation process in the last century?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I bet with the advent of computers and the digitalizing of reference material there was a spike in the amount of verbatum quotes that are used instead of summarizing the thought into your own words.
It's a reasonable assumption that with the rise of digital contexts and the ease of cut and paste that people excerpting or quoting material are more likely to excerpt and quote longer passages because it is now easier to do.
Has anyone done research on showing that this is the case?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I broadly take most of my (online) notes using Hypothes.is for web pages and .pdf files. I then use the Hypothesidian set up with Templater to import all the pieces: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225
So far it's been pretty helpful and I spend a huge amount of time in Hypothes.is.
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chrome.google.com chrome.google.com
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notes.andymatuschak.org notes.andymatuschak.org
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Over the course of his intellectual life, from about 1943 until hissudden death in 1980, Barthes built a card index consisting of morethan 12,250 note cards – the full extent of this collection was notknown until access to it was granted to the manuscript researchers ofthe Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) inFrance (Krapp, 2006: 363).3
Roland Barthes accumulated a card index of more than 12,250 note cards beginning in 1943 which were held after his death in 1980 at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) in France.
Barthes' dates 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980 age 64
He started his card index at roughly age 28 and at around the same time which he began producing written work. (Did he have any significant writing work or publications prior to this?)
His card collection spanned about 37 years and at 12,250 cards means that was producing on average 0.907 cards per day. If we don't include weekends, then he produced 1.27 cards per day on average. Compare this with Ahrens' estimate of 6 cards a day for Niklas Luhmann.
With this note I'm starting the use of a subject heading (in English) of "card index" as a generic collection of notes which are often kept in one or more boxes. This is to distinguish it from the more modern idea of zettelkasten in the Luhmann framing which also connotes a dense set of links between the cards themselves, though this may not have been the case historically. Card index is also specifically separate from 'index card' which is an individual instance of an item that might be found in a card index. At present, I'm unaware of a specific word in English which defines the broader note taking context or portions thereof relating to index cards in the same way that a zettelkasten implies. This may be the result of the broad use of index cards for so many varying uses in the early 20th century. For these other varying uses I'll try to differentiate them henceforth with the generic 'index card files' which might also be used to describe the containers in which cards might be found.
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www.otherlife.co www.otherlife.co
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I tried using Roam for about two weeks once. I used Roam and only Roam, diligently. After only two weeks, my knowledge graph was utterly unintelligible and distressing.
While one can take a lot of notes in two weeks, even just six quality notes a day (Niklas Lumann's pace was six per day while Roland Barthes was closer to 1 and change per day) only provides about 84 cards or zettels. This isn't enough to make anything distressing or unintelligible. It's also incredibly far short of creating any useful links to create anything. He should have trimmed things down and continued for about 24 weeks to see any significant results. (Of course this also begs the question: what was his purpose in pursuing such a system in the first place?)
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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The presenter in the video has 70 notes across 3 months which is drastically lower than what I have.
Somewhere I think I read that Luhmann only added about 6 cards a day to his zettelkasten. (I suspect they averaged his 90K output over the span of years he said he used it....)
My fleeting note output right now is potentially too much, and I certainly should be spending more time refining and building on my (note-based) thoughts.
It's not how many thoughts one has, but their quality and even more importantly, what one does with them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/jho1em/i_found_a_gem/
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I have compiled, at latest reckoning, 35,669 posts - my version of a Zettelkasten.
Stephen, to get a general grip on note taking practices, I've been collecting rough numbers of notes per day over spans of time from people. You mention 35,669 posts here. Over what span of time (years/days) does that currently represent?
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Famously, Luswig Wittgenstein organized his thoughts this way. Also famously, he never completed his 'big book' - almost all of his books (On Certainty, Philosophical Investigations, Zettel, etc.) were compiled by his students in the years after his death.
I've not looked directly at Wittgenstein's note collection before, but it could be an interesting historical example.
Might be worth collecting examples of what has happened to note collections after author's lives. Some obviously have been influential in scholarship, but generally they're subsumed by the broader category of a person's "papers" which are often archived at libraries, museums, and other institutions.
Examples: - Vincentius Placcius' collection used by his students - Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten which is being heavily studied by Johannes F.K. Schmidt - Mortimer J. Adler - was his kept? where is it stored?
Posthumously published note card collections - Ludwig Wittgenstein - Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project - Ronald Reagan's collection at his presidential library, though it is more of an commonplace book collection of quotes which was later published - Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary - Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura - others...
Just as note collections serve an autobiographical function, perhaps they may also serve as an intellectual autobiographical function? Wittgenstein never managed to complete his 'big book', but in some sense, doesn't his collection of note cards serve this function for those willing to explore it all?
I'd previously suggested that Scott P. Scheper publish not only his book on note taking, but to actually publish his note cards as a stand-alone zettelkasten example to go with them. What if this sort of publishing practice were more commonplace? The modern day equivalent is more likely a person's blog or their wiki. Not enough people are publicly publishing their notes to see what this practice might look like for future generations.
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manage.kmail-lists.com manage.kmail-lists.com
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www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
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https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/spring-83/
I've been thinking about this sort of thing off and on myself.
I too almost immediately thought of Fraidyc.at and its nudge at shifting the importance of content based on time and recency. I'd love to have a social reader with additional affordances for both this time shifting and Ton's idea of reading based on social distance.
I'm struck by the seemingly related idea of @peterhagen's LindyLearn platform and annotations: https://annotations.lindylearn.io/new/ which focuses on taking some of the longer term interesting ideas as the basis for browsing and chewing on. Though even here, one needs some of the odd, the cutting edge, and the avant garde in their balanced internet diet. Would Spring '83 provide some of this?
I'm also struck by some similarities this has with the idea of Derek Siver's /now page movement. I see some updating regularly while others have let it slip by the wayside. Still the "board" of users exists, though one must click through a sea of mostly smiling and welcoming faces to get to it the individual pieces of content. (The smiling faces are more inviting and personal than the cacophony of yelling and chaos I see in models for Spring '83.) This reminds me of Stanley Meyers' frequent assertion that he attempted to design a certain "sense of quiet" into the early television show Dragnet to balance the seeming loudness of the everyday as well as the noise of other contemporaneous television programming.
The form reminds me a bit of the signature pages of one's high school year book. But here, instead of the goal being timeless scribbles, one has the opportunity to change the message over time. Does the potential commercialization of the form (you know it will happen in a VC world crazed with surveillance capitalism) follow the same trajectory of the old college paper facebook? Next up, Yearbook.com!
Beyond the thing as a standard, I wondered what the actual form of Spring '83 adds to a broader conversation? What does it add to the diversity of voices that we don't already see in other spaces. How might it be abused? Would people come back to it regularly? What might be its emergent properties?
It definitely seems quirky and fun in and old school web sort of way, but it also stresses me out looking at the zany busyness of some of the examples of magazine stands. The general form reminds me of the bargain bins at book stores which have the promise of finding valuable hidden gems and at an excellent price, but often the ideas and quality of what I find usually isn't worth the discounted price and the return on investment is rarely worth the effort. How might this get beyond these forms?
It also brings up the idea of what other online forms we may have had with this same sort of raw experimentation? How might the internet have looked if there had been a bigger rise of the wiki before that of the blog? What would the world be like if Webmention had existed before social media rose to prominence? Did we somehow miss some interesting digital animals because the web rose so quickly to prominence without more early experimentation before its "Cambrian explosion"?
I've been thinking about distilled note taking forms recently and what a network of atomic ideas on index cards look like and what emerges from them. What if the standard were digital index cards that linked and cross linked to each other, particularly in a world without adherence to time based orders and streams? What does a new story look like if I can pull out a card either at random or based on a single topic and only see it or perhaps some short linked chain of ideas (mine or others) which come along with it? Does the choice of a random "Markov monkey" change my thinking or perspective? What comes out of this jar of Pandora? Is it just a new form of cadavre exquis?
This standard has been out for a bit and presumably folks are experimenting with it. What do the early results look like? How are they using it? Do they like it? Does it need more scale? What do small changes make to the overall form?
For more on these related ideas, see: https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%22spring+%2783%22
Tags
- Derek Sivers
- atomic idea links
- web standards
- atomic notes
- cadavre exquis
- Pandora's box
- narrative forms
- Dragnet
- experimental fiction
- Fraidyc.at
- Now Now Now
- yearbooks
- calmness
- index cards
- media studies
- alternate universes
- Markov monkey
- Lindy library
- combinatorial creativity
- Spring '83
- experimental media
- read
- quiet
Annotators
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www.remastery.net www.remastery.net
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Beyond the cards mentioned above, you should also capture any hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry on separate cards. Regularly go through these to make sure that you are covering everything and that you don’t forget something.I consider these insurance cards because they won’t get lost in some notebook or scrap of paper, or email to oneself.
Julius Reizen in reviewing over Umberto Eco's index card system in How to Write a Thesis, defines his own "insurance card" as one which contains "hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry". These he would keep together so that they don't otherwise get lost in the variety of other locations one might keep them
These might be akin to Ahrens' "fleeting notes" but are ones which may not easily or even immediately be converted in to "permanent notes" for one's zettelkasten. However, given their mission critical importance, they may be some of the most important cards in one's repository.
link this to - idea of centralizing one's note taking practice to a single location
Is this idea in Eco's book and Reizen is the one that gives it a name since some of the other categories have names? (examples: bibliographic index cards, reading index cards (aka literature notes), cards for themes, author index cards, quote index cards, idea index cards, connection cards). Were these "officially" named and categorized by Eco?
May be worthwhile to create a grid of these naming systems and uses amongst some of the broader note taking methods. Where are they similar, where do they differ?
Multi-search tools that have full access to multiple trusted data stores (ostensibly personal ones across notebooks, hard drives, social media services, etc.) could potentially solve the problem of needing to remember where you noted something.
Currently, in the social media space especially, this is not a realized service.
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- Jun 2022
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Local file Local file
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There’s no need to capture every idea; the best ones willalways come back around eventually.
While one can certainly capture a lot of cruft that isn't actionable or easily reusable, it's a fable that the best ideas will come back around. All too often the really brilliant ideas can be quickly lost to the wind if not captured immediately.
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“I think it’s important to put your impressions down on the firstreading because those are the initial instincts about what youthought was good or what you didn’t understand or what you thoughtwas bad.”
First gut reactions can be highly valuable and should be noted because it's incredibly difficult to remember what it was like before you knew a thing. It's hard to revisit a thing with beginner's eyes and those reactions can help one to improve and refine a thing.
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On average I capture just twonotes per day
Tiago Forte self-reports that he captures two notes a day.
Link to other's notes per day including Barthes, Luhmann, et al.
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nofilmschool.com nofilmschool.com
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The big lesson here is that you must write it down. Lynch talks about the big ideas he's lost over the years. The ones he will never get back. So write them down. Catalog them, and see if you can build them into a screenplay. When you're writing a story you love the rest of the work comes from the heart too. What do you think of Lynch's ideas? Are these strategies you employ?
You must write it down.
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For anyone who reads music, the sketchbooks literally record the progress of hisinvention. He would scribble his rough, unformed ideas in his pocket notebook andthen leave them there, unused, in a state of suspension, but at least captured withpencil on paper. A few months later, in a bigger, more permanent notebook, you canfind him picking up that idea again, but he’s not just copying the musical idea intoanother book. You can see him developing it, tormenting it, improving it in the newnotebook. He might take an original three-note motif and push it to its next stage bydropping one of the notes a half tone and doubling it. Then he’d let the idea sit therefor another six months. It would reappear in a third notebook, again not copied butfurther improved, perhaps inverted this time and ready to be used in a piano sonata.
Beethoven kept a variation of a waste book in that he kept a pocket notebook for quick capture of ideas. Later, instead of copying them over into a permanent place, he'd translate and amplify on the idea in a second notebook. Later on, he might pick up the idea again in a third notebook with further improvements.
By doing this me might also use the initial ideas as building blocks for more than one individual piece. This is very clever, particularly in musical development where various snippets of music might be morphed into various different forms in ways that written ideas generally can't be so used.
This literally allowed him to re-use his "notes" at two different levels (the written ones as well as the musical ones.)
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Everyone hashis or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at OfficeDepot for transferring files.I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as thepiece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance.This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in mystudio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of artthat may have inspired me.
While she keeps more than just slips of paper (or index cards) in it, Twyla Tharp definitely falls into the pattern of creative collection related to the zettelkasten tradition.
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them birth, and it is galling to have to say, "Now, what wasthat bright idea I had about this?"
Do not omit these last- they will not come back at will, even when you return to the item that gave
When reading, it's important to sketch out your own novel ideas and thoughts as you go as they will be difficult or impossible to recover them.
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- May 2022
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Local file Local file
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The last element in his file system was an index, from which hewould refer to one or two notes that would serve as a kind of entrypoint into a line of thought or topic.
Indices are certainly an old construct. One of the oldest structured examples in the note taking space is that of John Locke who detailed it in Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (1685), later translated into English as A New Method of Organizing Common Place Books (1706).
Previously commonplace books had been structured with headwords done alphabetically. This meant starting with a preconceived structure and leaving blank or empty space ahead of time without prior knowledge of what would fill it or how long that might take. By turning that system on its head, one could fill a notebook from front to back with a specific index of the headwords at the end. Then one didn't need to do the same amount of pre-planning or gymnastics over time with respect to where to put their notes.
This idea combined with that of Konrad Gessner's design for being able to re-arrange slips of paper (which later became index cards based on an idea by Carl Linnaeus), gives us an awful lot of freedom and flexibility in almost any note taking system.
Building blocks of the note taking system
- atomic ideas
- written on (re-arrangeable) slips, cards, or hypertext spaces
- cross linked with each other
- cross linked with an index
- cross linked with references
are there others? should they be broken up differently?
Godfathers of Notetaking
- Aristotle, Cicero (commonplaces)
- Seneca the Younger (collecting and reusing)
- Raymond Llull (combinatorial rearrangements)
- Konrad Gessner (storage for re-arrangeable slips)
- John Locke (indices)
- Carl Linnaeus (index cards)
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Local file Local file
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digital, we can supercharge these timelessbenefits with the incredible capabilities of technology—searching,sharing, backups, editing, linking, syncing between devices, andmany others
List of some affordance of digital note taking over handwriting: * search * sharing * backups (copies) * editing * linking (automatic?) * syncing to multiple spaces for ease of use
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notes don’t need to be comprehensive or precise
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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What's the Best Way to Teach Science?
0:31 What's the best way to teach science in my opinion? It's to do science. And to summarize my motto it's this: Don't Kill the Wonder! (and don't hide the practices)
0:42 The wonder is a look that you see on a person's face when they're REALLY interested in a problem but they don't know the answer.
1:13 And so the WORST way to teach science is to start by explaining! You want them to have that curiosity and then follow that curiosity.
3:16 When you're teaching science it's not the content ... what is the most important thing. It's the actual practices of doing science.
3:41 ...We live in an ironic time. At a time where people are so excited about science and new discoveries but students are not excited about their classroom. And I think one of the reasons why, is that what we do, is we tend to just explain all the time. When you explain all the time what you lose is the Wonder. —
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Hour Physics: What makes a good (or bad) YouTube science video
- Influences when starting Minute Physics: xkcd, Khan Academy, RSA, RadioLab.
Some criticism * 14:00 About Khan Academy. Like a text book; not exciting. * 15:00 About RSAnimate. Show an idea, or tell an ideal. Don't do both with one idea. Sometimes audio quality is distracting. * 17:27 About Stanford's AI course. Like Khan Academy. Like a videotaped lecture. * 18:50 About Alice & Bob. Annoying voice of Alice's character. <br /> * 24:40 About PBS & Brian Greene. Shock and Awe cliche.
Teaching Physics * 28:16 "... why do we think about special relativity in this beautiful simple way and then teach it to first-year college students as a horrific set of equations" * Physics loves its history, "29:16 ... why would you teach physics the way it was discovered if you can teach it the way it's understood." Better focus on understanding and have a little bit of history; of the main historical events.
Analogies in physics * 30:23 "Why do we use them [analogies] at all? And I think that this comes down to human nature and [the] fact that humans really have to understand things in relative terms. We have to put things in terms relative to something we already know and already understand. And if people are going to do it anyway it probably makes sense for you to do it; for somebody who's knowledgeable at the subject and has an idea of a good analogy to do it. Rather than let somebody come up with a super wrong analogy." * But [that said] analogies are not science. * Metanalogy[?].
Grand Unified Theory [of science YouTube videos] * Know and respect your audience * Choose valid content. * Length appropriate for content. "Don't talk for ten minutes if you have one minute of things to say." * Use your medium to its full potential. Combine assets (video, audio, text) in a meaningful way. Make it complementary not repetitive. * Quality execution. Video should sound good, look good. Low quality is a distraction from the content of the video. * Be your own Feynman. "Be creative, be crazy, but be good [at what you do]."
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www.investopedia.com www.investopedia.comDebt1
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is something, usually money, borrowed by one party from another. Debt is used by many corporations and individuals to make large purchases that they could not afford under normal circumstances
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ifttt.com ifttt.com
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https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook
IFTTT.com sent out a marketing email today in which one of the five major headlines was "Automated Notebook": "Your Ideas and Inspiration in one place" with a big "Explore" button that goes to https://ifttt.com/explore/make-inspiration-notebook
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fieldnotesbrand.com fieldnotesbrand.com
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The minute we saw his frantic, hand-lettered presentation of the Field Notes credo — “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now” — we knew just what to do.
https://fieldnotesbrand.com/apparel/remember-it-now-tee
Field Notes, a manufacturer of notebooks, uses the credo "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now." This is an fun restatement of the idea behind the power of the Feynman technique.
Link to Ahrens' version of this idea.
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lifehacker.com lifehacker.com
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The biggest mistake—and one I’ve made myself—is linking with categories. In other words, it’s adding links like we would with tags. When we link this way we’re more focused on grouping rather than connecting. As a result, we have notes that contain many connections with little to no relevance. Additionally, we add clutter to our links which makes it difficult to find useful links when adding links. That being said, there are times when we might want to group some things. In these cases, use tags or folders.
Most people born since the advent of the filing cabinet and the computer have spent a lifetime using a hierarchical folder-based mental model for their knowledge. For greater value and efficiency one needs to get away from this model and move toward linking individual ideas together in ways that they can more easily be re-used.
To accomplish this many people use an index-based method that uses topical or subject headings which can be useful. However after even a few years of utilizing a generic tag (science for example) it may become overwhelmed and generally useless in a broad search. Even switching to narrower sub-headings (physics, biology, chemistry) may show the same effect. As a result one will increasingly need to spend time and effort to maintain and work at this sort of taxonomical system.
The better option is to directly link related ideas to each other. Each atomic idea will have a much more limited set of links to other ideas which will create a much more valuable set of interlinks for later use. Limiting your links at this level will be incredibly more useful over time.
One of the biggest benefits of the physical system used by Niklas Luhmann was that each card was required to be placed next to at least one card in a branching tree of knowledge (or a whole new branch had to be created.) Though he often noted links to other atomic ideas there was at least a minimum link of one on every idea in the system.
For those who have difficulty deciding where to place a new idea within their system, it can certainly be helpful to add a few broad keywords of the type one might put into an index. This may help you in linking your individual ideas as you can do a search of one or more of your keywords to narrow down the existing ones within your collection. This may help you link your new idea to one or more of those already in your system. This method may be even more useful and helpful for those who are starting out and have fewer than 500-1000 notes in their system and have even less to link their new atomic ideas to.
For those who have graphical systems, it may be helpful to look for one or two individual "tags" in a graph structure to visually see the number of first degree notes that link to them as a means of creating links between atomic ideas.
To have a better idea of a hierarchy of value within these ideas, it may help to have some names and delineate this hierarchy of potential links. Perhaps we might borrow some well ideas from library and information science to guide us? There's a system in library science that uses a hierarchical set up using the phrases: "broader terms", "narrower terms", "related terms", and "used for" (think alias or also known as) for cataloging books and related materials.
We might try using tags or index-like links in each of these levels to become more specific, but let's append "connected atomic ideas" to the bottom of the list.
Here's an example:
- broader terms (BT): [[physics]]
- narrower terms (NT): [[mechanics]], [[dynamics]]
- related terms (RT): [[acceleration]], [[velocity]]
- used for (UF) or aliases:
- connected atomic ideas: [[force = mass * acceleration]], [[$$v^2=v_0^2+2aΔx$$]]
Chances are that within a particular text, one's notes may connect and interrelate to each other quite easily, but it's important to also link those ideas to other ideas that are already in your pre-existing body of knowledge.
See also: Thesaurus for Graphic Materials I: Subject Terms (TGM I) https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm1/ic.html
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https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/ug2efy/how_to_create_useful_links_with_zettelkasten/
Article that focuses on how important it is to create links between atomic ideas in a zettelkasten.
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- Apr 2022
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oachim Jungius (1584–1657),professor of mathematics, medicine, logic, and natural philosophy at variousGerman universities, amassed one of the largest collections of notes of his day,estimated at 150,000 pages, of which 45,000 are extant.51
Meinel (1995), 166, 168.
Joachim Jungius had a collection of notes estimated at 150,000 pages of which 45,000 are extant.
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Among natural historians, Ulisse Al-drovandi (1522–1605) left more than 400 volumes of manuscripts that attest tohis efforts at collecting and sorting a vast abundance of information. Historiansand antiquarians, like the French nobleman Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), also amassed abundant notes.50
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t his death the great Italian humanist AngeloPoliziano (1454–94), for example, left many volumes of notes and papers. Thesewere rapidly dispersed among students and peers, who variously wished to own,read, or publish them, under Poliziano’s name but sometimes also without attrib-uting them. Today dozens of volumes of Poliziano’s manuscripts are scatteredacross many European libraries, and an important manuscript of his Miscel-lanea was rediscovered as recently as a few decades ago
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We also have good studies of reporta-tiones, or the notes taken from oral events, such as sermons or lectures.25
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the scholastic theologian Godfrey of Fontaines (be-fore 1250–after 1305) left a collection of excerpts and summaries from his readingthat could readily be considered a collection of notes
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discarding has always been a central feature of effective note-taking. Dis-carding enhances the utility of the notes that are saved by removing materialsthat have been superseded.
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Zettelkasten notes are little atomic Feynman Technique experiences.
The creation of literature notes for one's zettelkasten are atomic instances of the use of the Feynman technique to test one's understanding.
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ratfactor.com ratfactor.com
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Dave Gauer has nascent digital zettelkasten on his website though he calls them a virtual box of cards "(as opposed to 'zettelkasten' or 'wiki' or 'notes')".
Given it's limited extent, the collection presents in a more wiki like fashion with such limited functionality (on the front end) that it appears more like a loose collection of web pages.
What are the generally accepted distinctions between all these forms?
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Crossover physical note / digital note system? .t3_u1wtbk._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; }
Does this count? https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/20/55799844/
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winnielim.org winnielim.org
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https://winnielim.org/library/collections/personal-websites-with-a-notes-section/
Winnie has some excellent examples of people's websites with notes, similar to that of https://indieweb.org/note. But it feels a bit like she's approaching it from the perspective of deeper ideas and thoughts than one might post to Twitter or other social media. It would be worthwhile looking at examples of people's practices in this space that are more akin to note taking and idea building, perhaps in the vein of creating digital gardens or the use of annotation tools like Hypothes.is?
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You've got some excellent examples of people's websites with notes, similar to those at https://indieweb.org/note. But it feels a bit like you're approaching it from the perspective of deeper ideas and thoughts than one might post to Twitter or other social media. Is this your intent?
Note to myself: It would be worthwhile looking at examples of people's practices in this space that are more akin to note taking and idea building, perhaps in the vein of creating "digital gardens" or the use of digital social annotation tools like Hypothes.is.
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die Durchmischung der Sprachen
Spanglish Denglish Chinglish ?
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www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
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2. What influence does annotating with an audience have on how you annotate? My annotations and notes generally are fragile things, tentative formulations, or shortened formulations that have meaning because of what they point to (in my network of notes and thoughts), not so much because of their wording. Likewise my notes and notions read differently than my blog posts. Because my blog posts have an audience, my notes/notions are half of the internal dialogue with myself. Were I to annotate in the knowledge that it would be public, I would write very differently, it would be more a performance, less probing forwards in my thoughts. I remember that publicly shared bookmarks with notes in Delicious already had that effect for me. Do you annotate differently in public view, self censoring or self editing?
To a great extent, Hypothes.is has such a small footprint of users (in comparison to massive platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that it's never been a performative platform for me. As a design choice they have specifically kept their social media functionalities very sparse, so one also doesn't generally encounter the toxic elements that are rampant in other locations. This helps immensely. I might likely change my tune if it were ever to hit larger scales or experienced the Eternal September effect.
Beyond this, I mostly endeavor to write things for later re-use. As a result I'm trying to write as clearly as possible in full sentences and explain things as best I can so that my future self doesn't need to do heavy work or lifting to recreate the context or do heavy editing. Writing notes in public and knowing that others might read these ideas does hold my feet to the fire in this respect. Half-formed thoughts are often shaky and unclear both to me and to others and really do no one any good. In personal experience they also tend not to be revisited and revised or revised as well as I would have done the first time around (in public or otherwise).
Occasionally I'll be in a rush reading something and not have time for more detailed notes in which case I'll do my best to get the broad gist knowing that later in the day or at least within the week, I'll revisit the notes in my own spaces and heavily elaborate on them. I've been endeavoring to stay away from this bad habit though as it's just kicking the can down the road and not getting the work done that I ultimately want to have. Usually when I'm being fast/lazy, my notes will revert to highlighting and tagging sections of material that are straightforward facts that I'll only be reframing into my own words at a later date for reuse. If it's an original though or comment or link to something important, I'll go all in and put in the actual work right now. Doing it later has generally been a recipe for disaster in my experience.
There have been a few instances where a half-formed thought does get seen and called out. Or it's a thought which I have significantly more personal context for and that is only reflected in the body of my other notes, but isn't apparent in the public version. Usually these provide some additional insight which I hadn't had that makes the overall enterprise more interesting. Here's a recent example, albeit on a private document, but which I think still has enough context to be reasonably clear: https://hypothes.is/a/vmmw4KPmEeyvf7NWphRiMw
There may also be infrequent articles online which are heavily annotated and which I'm excerpting ideas to be reused later. In these cases I may highlight and rewrite them in my own words for later use in a piece, but I'll make them private or put them in a private group as they don't add any value to the original article or potential conversation though they do add significant value to my collection as "literature notes" for immediate reuse somewhere in the future. On broadly unannotated documents, I'll leave these literature notes public as a means of modeling the practice for others, though without the suggestion of how they would be (re-)used for.
All this being said, I will very rarely annotate things privately or in a private group if they're of a very sensitive cultural nature or personal in manner. My current set up with Hypothesidian still allows me to import these notes into Obsidian with my API key. In practice these tend to be incredibly rare for me and may only occur a handful of times in a year.
Generally my intention is that ultimately all of my notes get published in something in a final form somewhere, so I'm really only frontloading the work into the notes now to make the writing/editing process easier later.
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www.openculture.com www.openculture.com
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Reviewing The Original of Laura, Alexander Theroux describes the cards as a “portable strategy that allowed [Nabokov] to compose in the car while his wife drove the devoted lepidopterist on butterfly expeditions.”
While note cards have a certain portability about them for writing almost anywhere, aren't notebooks just as easily portable? In fact, with a notebook, one doesn't need to worry about spilling and unordering the entire enterprise.
There are, however, other benefits. By using small atomic pieces on note cards, one can be far more focused on the idea and words immediately at hand. It's also far easier in a creative and editorial process to move pieces around experimentally.
Similarly, when facing Hemmingway's White Bull, the size and space of an index card is fall smaller. This may have the effect that Twitter's short status updates have for writers who aren't faced with the seemingly insurmountable burden of writing a long blog post or essay in other software. They can write 280 characters and stop. Of if they feel motivated, they can continue on by adding to the prior parts of a growing thread. Sadly, Twitter doesn't allow either editing or rearrangements, so the endeavor and analogy are lost beyond here.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Surprised no one mentioned window notes as a strategy. You fold the paper into 4 squares entitled Facts, Feelings, Questions, and Ideas.
Window notes are a note taking method in which one folds a piece of paper into four squares and titles them "facts", "feelings", "questions", and "ideas" to be filled in by the note taker.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Surprised no one mentioned window notes as a strategy. You fold the paper into 4 squares entitled Facts, Feelings, Questions, and Ideas. I also like the idea of using Popplet or Evernote as a digital or collaborative note taking method as well to include drawings and videos.
— Valerie Lewis (@iamvlewis) October 7, 2018
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www.cultofpedagogy.com www.cultofpedagogy.com
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One study found that while doing online research, students who used matrix-style notes and were given time limits were much less likely to become distracted by other online material than students without those conditions (Wu, & Xie, 2018).
Distraction has been shown to be an issue with regard to digital note taking. Adding time limits to work has been shown to mitigate this form of problem.
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Some researchers have found no significant difference in performance between paper-based and digital note-takers (Artz, Johnson, Robson, & Taengnoi, 2017).
Not all research shows that handwritten note taking is better than digital.
Compare and contrast the results in Dynarski,2017 and that of Artz, Johnson, Robson, & Taengnoi, 2017. What does Holland, 2017 say on the matter?
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