- Nov 2023
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Analog zettelkasten for natural sciences .t3_17kui2u._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }
Reply to u/Wooden-School-4091 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17kui2u/analog_zettelkasten_for_natural_sciences/
Given that Carl Linnaeus "invented" the standardized 3x5 inch index card and used it heavily in his scientific work (read Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Müller-Wille's works for more on his practice), and a variety of others including me, use it for mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., Zettelkasten can certainly be used for STEM, STEAM, and any of the natural sciences.
See also, notes and links at: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22zettelkasten+for+studying%22
If I were using it for classes/university/general studying via lectures, I'd base my practice primarily on Cornell Notes in combination with creating questions/cards for spaced repetition and/or a variation on Leitner's System.
Some of the best material on spaced repetition these days can be found via:
- Soren Bjornstad: https://controlaltbackspace.org/repeat/
- Piotr Wozniak: https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm
and other material on their sites.
Beyond this, I'd focus my direct zettelkasten practice less on the learning portion and more on the developing or generating ideas portion of the work. Some of my practice with respect to mathematics can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17bqztm/applying_zettelkasten_for_math_heavy_subjects/
For those interested, it may bear mentioning that Bjornstad, an engineer at Remnote, has a TiddlyWiki-based zettelkasten at https://zettelkasten.sorenbjornstad.com/#PublicHomepage:PublicHomepage which he demonstrates with a walk through at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjpjE5pMZMI
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- May 2023
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British historian of science, StaffanMueller-Wille at the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter, recently claimedthat Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the father of modern taxonomy,had “invented” the card index to manage his information storage and retrieval.
How can Linnaeus (1707-1778) be said to have invented the card index or the index card when there are systems that predate him including Vincent Placcius and Leibnitz?
Linnaeus' version were all of a standard size at least. Would this have been a shift in the definition or did others have and recommend "cards of equal size" before this?
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- Oct 2022
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Local file Local file
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A historical perspective on the sciencesbrings into view controversies, and some beliefs and methodological con-victions that retrospectively turn out to be false—among Blumenberg’scharacteristically colorful picks are Augustine writing that “the stars werecreated for the consolation of people obliged to be active at night,” and“Linnaeus’s opinion that the song of the birds at the first light of morningwas instituted as consolation for the insomnia of the old.”84
something poetic about these examples even if they're poor science...
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- Aug 2022
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The smaller A6 format, hardlybigger than an ordinary note book sheet, makes it easy everywhere to take short notes forlater sheetification, no matter if one is in a reading room, the tramway or on a train. This is aparticularly valuable characteristic of it!
The values of A6!
Heyde is putting more thought into the size of note paper than I've seen in much of the literature. Did Linnaeus have similar thoughts?
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Much of the material in this lecture is to appear in a chapter entitled “Prob-lems of Explanation in Linguistics” in Explanations in Psychology, edited byR. Borger and F. Cioffi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967), alongwith interesting critical comments by Max Black.
Linnean-like reuse of materials
precedents
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www.popularmechanics.com www.popularmechanics.com
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https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a19379/a-short-history-of-the-index-card/
Broad history essay but doesn't dig into the weeds. Feels a lot like a few other essays I've seen of this sort. Content farmish...
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multimediaman.blog multimediaman.blog
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After thirty years of working with notebooks, Linnaeus began to experiment with a filing system of information recorded on separate sheets of paper.
Carl Linnaeus used notebooks for thirty years before beginning to experiment with information written on slips of paper.
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- May 2022
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via3.hypothes.is via3.hypothes.is
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“This technique alsoexplains why I don’t think at all linearly and have trouble finding the right sequence ofchapters when writing a book, because indeed every chapter must reappear in everyother.”22
- Luhmann, Archimedes und wir , 145.
Luhmann indicated that his note taking system made it difficult for him to be a linear thinker. Instead he felt that each chapter he wrote "must reappear in every other."
This seems quite similar to Carl Linnaeus' work which he regularly recycled into future works.
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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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- Feb 2022
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cut out paper as Luhmann hadto.
On the back of his notes, you will find not only manuscript drafts, but also old bills or drawings by his children. [footnote]
While it's possible that Luhmann may have cut some of his own paper, by the time he was creating his notes the mass manufacture of index cards of various sizes was ubiquitous enough that he should never have had to cut his own. He certainly wasn't forced to manufacture them the way Carl Linnaeus had to.
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- Nov 2021
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site.pennpress.org site.pennpress.org
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By examining works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Montaigne, and others, he dispels the notion of literary texts as static or closed, and instead demonstrates how the unsettled conventions of early print culture fostered an idea of books as interactive and malleable.
Jeffrey Todd Knight in Bound to read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature examines the works of various writers to dispel the notion of literary texts as static. He shows how the evolution of early print culture helped to foster the idea as interactive and malleable. This at a time when note takers and writers would have been using commonplacing techniques at even smaller scales for creating their own writing thus creating a similar pattern from the smaller scale to the larger scale.
This pattern of small notes building into larger items with rearrangement which is seen in Carl Linnaeus' index card-based notes as well as his longer articles/writings and publication record over time as well.
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- Aug 2021
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Local file Local file
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commonplace tabulae effectively functioned as memory aids to beused in conjunction with other texts and the direct observation of objects.
The commonplace tabulae created by Linnaeus used spatial layout which also served as memory aids.
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Although the popularity of Linnaeus’s works are sometimes attributedto genius of his system, such economic and practical advantages of his topically arrangedPhilosophiasuggest that the success of his book also may be linked to the fact that his readersfound his commonplace practices familiar and, hence, memorable.
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It seems, however, that he did add an innovative twist to the commonplace arcaconceptwhen he coupled the tradition with the spatial arrangement of plants in his botanical garden
Carl Linnaeus didn't completely invent the commonplace cabinet (arcae), but did expand it with his spatial arrangement of plants within his botanical garden.
Garberson's Libraries, Memory and the Space of Knowledge has more on prior examples apparently.
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Figure 10. ‘Pharmacopoea”, frontispiece in Carolus Linnaeus, Materia Medica(1749). Wellcome Library,London.
Note the similarity of this filing cabinet system to the similar ideas of library card catalogs.
Where does this fit into the timeline with respect to the publication date of 1749 on Pharmacopoea and Linnaeus' use of it?
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Like the spatial hierarchies presented in the Philosophia botanica, he wanted asimple form of linear order that allowed him to access his sheets quickly. Such a desire led himto reject the spatial divisions featured in many contemporary curiosity and medical cabinets, thatis, closed drawers that were stacked in multiple columns. This rejection was probably linked tothe fact that he had already seen a better way forward in the form of filing systems that werephysical instantiations of commonplace divisions used so often in books.
Linnaeus used the logic of topical headings in commonplace books as an intellectual framework for designing a better filing system for his physical plant specimens. This was in marked contrast to the sorts of contemporary curiosity and medical cabinets that others were using at the time.
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In contrast to the sheets used by other contemporary natural-ists, he refrained from binding his into a proper book and this allowed him to stack them in abespoke cabinet (arca) in a manner that allowed him to insert, remove and reorder them as he sawfit (Figure 9).64 It was for this reason that the Philosophia botanica gave explicit instructions onhow to build the cabinet and how to organize the specimen sheets within it. He recommended thatthe internal space be split into two columns with shelves that were collectively divided intotwenty-four sections, each of which was assigned a numerical head that represented a class withinhis system.65Each class section was filled with select specimen sheets divided by bands intogenera. In his words: If the folding doors are marked with the numbers and names of the genera, with the space on the shelvescorresponding exactly, and linden bands are kept between the spaces, enclosing the same genera andthemselves marked with the number of the genera, then any plant can be pulled out and produced with-out delay.66
Note here the idea of being able to file things away, reorder them, and find them quickly. Search was a likely motivator.
He's essentially created an early form of zettelkasten, but for plants.
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C. Linnaeus, Örtabok(1725/1727). This was a student notebook now housed at Växjö. It is available online at http://www.vaxjo.se/ortaboken/.
This could be a cool online resource.
I'm curious what the UI looks like and what additional digital affordances were made for it.
Update: the link 404's. May have to search elsewhere for it.
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In other words, the chapter titles of the Fundamenta botanicawere effectively titularheads which were transferable from one book to another and which served as labels for textualunits that could be moved through the space of the page in a manner that split books into chap-ters and chapters into books.
In much the way one might move around portions of ideas under heads in a commonplace book, Carl Linnaeus was moving around bigger ideas/chapters within books and moving from one book to another.
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For example, his erasable writing tablet is referenced inW. Blunt, Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 70.
What form did Carl Linnaeus' erasable writing tablet take?
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when he laid out the early form of his classification method in a pamphletentitled Methodus(1736), he used heads to order the text.16
Carl Linnaeus' classification method in Systema Naturae, his famous nomenclature system, was informed by the traditional topical headings of commonplace books.
[16] The content of Methodus and the nature of the heads is addressed in S. Müller-Wille, ‘Introduction’, in C.Linnaeus, Musa Cliffortiana: Clifford’s Banana Plant, translated by S. Freer (Liechtenstein: A.R.G. Gantner VerlagK.G., 2007), 33
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First, what were the economies of attention thatguided his commonplacing techniques? Second, what type of impact did his note-taking skillshave upon the way that he arranged information in texts?
The two questions addressed in this article.
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Eddy, Mathew Daniel, Tools for Reordering: Commonplacing and the Space of Words in Linnaeus's Philosophia Botanica, Intellectual History Review, 20 (2010), 227-252
Tags
- method of loci
- Carl Linnaeus
- tools
- card catalogs
- note taking
- commonplace cabinets
- digitized examples
- curiosity cabinets
- herbarium
- Systema Naturae
- writing
- zettelkasten
- information management
- taxonomies
- loci
- attention
- thinking tools
- books
- organization
- commonplace books
- topical headings
Annotators
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- Jul 2021
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boffosocko.com boffosocko.com
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Your post says nothing at all to suggest Luhman didn’t “invent” “Zettelkasten” (no one says he was only one writing on scraps of paper), you list two names and no links
My post was more in reaction to the overly common suggestions and statements that Luhmann did invent it and the fact that he's almost always the only quoted user. The link was meant to give some additional context, not proof.
There are a number of direct predecessors including Hans Blumenberg and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. For quick/easy reference here try:
- https://jhiblog.org/2019/04/17/ruminant-machines-a-twentieth-century-episode-in-the-material-history-of-ideas/
- https://muse.jhu.edu/article/715738
If you want some serious innovation, why not try famous biologist Carl Linnaeus for the invention of the index card? See: http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/research/centres/medicalhistory/past/writing/
(Though even in this space, I suspect that others were already doing similar things.)
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www.hps.cam.ac.uk www.hps.cam.ac.uk
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Researcher working on the idea of Carl Linnaeus and the invention of the index card.
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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according to Charmantier and Müller-Wille, playing cards were found under the floorboards of the Uppsala home Linnaeus shared with his wife Sara Lisa.
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Linnaeus experimented with a few filing systems. In 1752, while cataloging Queen Ludovica Ulrica’s collection of butterflies with his disciple Daniel Solander, he prepared small, uniform sheets of paper for the first time. “That cataloging experience was possibly where the idea for using slips came from,” Charmantier explained to me. Solander took this method with him to England, where he cataloged the Sloane Collection of the British Museum and then Joseph Banks’s collections, using similar slips, Charmantier said. This became the cataloging system of a national collection.
Description of the spread of the index card idea.
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More than 1,000 of them, measuring five by three inches, are housed at London’s Linnean Society. Each contains notes about plants and material culled from books and other publications. While flimsier than heavy stock and cut by hand, they’re virtually indistinguishable from modern index cards.
Information culled from other sources indicates they come from the commonplace book tradition. The index card-like nature becomes the interesting innovation here.
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www.sciencedirect.com www.sciencedirect.com
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The Swedish 18th-century naturalist Carolus (Carl) Linnaeus is habitually credited with laying the foundations of modern taxonomy through the invention of binominal nomenclature. However, another innovation of Linnaeus' has largely gone unnoticed. He seems to have been one of the first botanists to leave his herbarium unbound, keeping the sheets of dried plants separate and stacking them in a purpose built-cabinet. Understanding the significance of this seemingly mundane and simple invention opens a window onto the profound changes that natural history underwent in the 18th century.
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www.sciencedirect.com www.sciencedirect.com
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Dug up with respect to the idea of Carl Linnaeus inventing the idea of the index card.
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www.sciencedaily.com www.sciencedaily.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Wikipedia</span> in Index card - Wikipedia (<time class='dt-published'>07/03/2021 21:36:58</time>)</cite></small>
Bookmarked at 10:41 PM
Read 11:09 PM
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Towards the end of his career, in the mid-1760s, Linnaeus took this further, inventing a paper tool that has since become very common: index cards. While stored in some fixed, conventional order, often alphabetically, index cards could be retrieved and shuffled around at will to update and compare information at any time.
Invention of index card dated to the 1760's by Carl Linnaeus.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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This system was invented by Carl Linnaeus,[1] around 1760.
How is it not so surprising that Carl Linnaeus, the creator of a huge taxonomic system, also came up with the idea for index cards in 1760.
How does this fit into the history of the commonplace book and information management? Relationship to the idea of a zettelkasten?
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- Feb 2021
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publicdomainreview.org publicdomainreview.org
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Locke’s humble two page method, in this sense, prefigures libraries filled with volumes of encyclopedias, from Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) to Luke Howard's classification of clouds.
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