Perhaps both learning and research can often be used in the same process... Learning first to inform what is the most vital to include in the Zettelkasten for research synthesis.

Maybe what to use when, in my personal case, should not be objective but rather subjective based on what I like and prefer? This requires further thought. Complex matter.

Useful line of thought about the use of Folgezettel in Zettelkasten.

(~6:30)

I think the major point here is that Adler points out our minds, and thus our thinking, changes over time. Therefore, when a book is read at a later point in time, our notes are different.

Perhaps his argument to "think again as to make the thought more current" is antithetical to Luhmann's Zettelkasten, which principles upon continuing previous lines of thought, even decades later.

(future note, about half an hour later)... I think in the Zettelkasten the problem is dealt with adequately, since you actually can make new notes expressing why your thought changes... So in this sense it is even more expanded upon the point that Adler makes even though at first sight it seems the complete opposite.

https://scottscheper.com/vanbillemont/

archive copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20230212131135/https://scottscheper.com/vanbillemont/

I will start doing this too, but on the associated bib-card.

I might actually use a system similar to this myself to aid with the dissection of a book in its fullest; to keep track of arguments and points, I am in need of this. Combine the bib-card with the Marginalia to enhance my reading process.

This is the entire point of an Antinet or Zettelkasten, and it is far more advanced/useful for this purpose than just Marginalia. Sorry Adler, but you should have spoken to Luhmann in this regard. Both of you are heroes of mine, but in this round, Luhmann takes the crown.

I need to do this more often myself. Too often, at least when reading physical books, I am doing the thinking in my head instead of writing on my bib-card what I actually think.

I agree on these three points, which I usually do through the bib-card method or annotating on hypothes.is if I read digitally. I keep the physical book mostly clean.

However, I am looking for a way to keep track of points and arguments in works, and I hypothesize that marginalia are the way to do this the best.

Apparently, the real ownership of a book, to make it a part of oneself, you need to mark it up. To make use of marginalia, according to Adler that is.

I personally don't like Marginalia, as I want to keep my books clean, which is why I use Luhmann's bibliography card method, but perhaps Adler can convince me of the opposite. We shall see.

Adler makes a valid point here, books in its own have no worth. Owning a book, or even having "read" it don't serve any purpose. One must read properly in order to this, analytically or syntopically as Adler would call it.

What he is wrong at, in my opinion, that Marginalia are the key to doing this... Yes, they might be helpful, but other techniques, such as Luhmann's bib-card method and learning methodologies like GRINDEmapping could perhaps be even more useful for this purpose.

At least Scott Scheper is advising people to ignore the advice in his own book about numbering systems. (Too bad he didn't write that advice in his own book...)

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/193c6bu/comment/khcbe5n/

reply to u/sscheper at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/18u39ca/comment/kfi3nl4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

It's not a Luhmann Zettelkasten if ~~it's digital~~ Luhmann didn't make it. 🗃️

There, I've fixed it for ya...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/18i45tm/with_me_being_an_analog_zk_user_im_curious_where/

Lots of analog vs digital angst here. Some of it stirred up by Scheper and his religion.

Perhaps the only terse part of the book then evidently.

reply to u/IamOkei at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5s6aek/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

u/IamOkei, I know you've got a significant enough practice that not much of what I might suggest may be helpful beyond your own extension of what you've got and how it is or isn't working for you. Perhaps chatting with a zettelkasten therapist may be helpful? Does anyone have "Zettelkasten Whisperer" on a business card yet?! More seriously, I occasionally dump some of my problems and issues into a notebook, unpublished on my blog, or even into a section of my own zettelkasten, which I never index or reconsult, as a helpful practice. Others like Henry David Thoreau have done something like this and there's a common related practice of writing "Morning Pages" that you can explore. My own version is somewhat similar to the idea of rubber duck debugging but focuses on my own work. You might try doing something like this in one of Bob Doto's cohorts or by way of private consulting sessions. Another free version of this could be found by participating in Will's regular weekly posts/threads "Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week" at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/. It's always a welcoming and constructive space. There are also some public and private (I won't out them) Discords where some of the practiced hands chat and commiserate with each other. Even the Obsidian PKM/Zettelkasten Discord channels aren't very Obsidian/digital-focused that you couldn't participate as an analog practitioner. I've even found that participating in book clubs related to some of my interests can be quite helpful in talking out ideas before writing them down. There are certainly options for working out and extending your own practice.

Beyond this, and without knowing more of your specific issues, I can only offer some broad thoughts which expand on some of the earlier discussion above.

I recommend stripping away Scheper's religious fervor, some of which he seems to have thrown over lately along with the idea of a permanent note or "main card" (something I think is a grave mistake), and trying something closer to Luhmann's idea of ZKII.

An alternate method, especially if you like a nice notebook or a particular fountain pen, might be to take all of your basic literature/fleeting notes along with the bibliographic data in a notebook and then just use your analog index cards/slips to make your permanent notes and your index.

Ultimately it's all a lot of the same process, though it may come down to what you want to call it and your broad philosophy. If you're anti-antinet, definitely quit using the verbiage for the framing there and lean toward the words used by Ahrens, Dan Allosso, Gerald Weinberg, Mark Bernstein, Umberto Eco, Beatrice Webb, Jacques Barzun & Henry Graff, or any of the dozens of others or even make up your own. Goodness knows we need a lot more names and categories for types of notes—just like we all need another one page blog post about how the Zettelkasten method works by someone who's been at it for a week. Maybe someone will bring all these authors to terms one day?

Generally once you know what sorts of ideas you're most interested in, you take fewer big notes on administrivia and focus more of your note taking towards your own personal goals and desires. (Taking notes to learn a subject are certainly game, but often they serve little purpose after-the-fact.) You can also focus less on note taking within your entertainment reading (usually a waste) and focusing more heavily on richer material (books and journal articles) that is "above you" in Adler's framing. You might make hundreds of highlights and annotations in a particular book, but only get two or three serious ideas and notes out of it ultimately. Focus on this and leave the rest. If you're aware of the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule, then spend the majority of your time on the grander permanent notes (10-20%), and a lot less time worrying about the all the rest (the 80-90%).

In the example above relating to Marx, you can breeze through some low level introductory material for context, but nothing is going to beat reading Marx himself a few times. The notes you make on his text will have tremendously more value than the ones you took on the low level context. A corollary to this is that you're highly unlikely to earn a Ph.D. or discover massive insight by reading and taking note posts on Twitter, Medium, or Substack (except possibly unless your work is on the cultural anthropology of those platforms).

A lot of the zettelkasten spaces focus heavily on the note taking part of the process and not enough on the quality of what you're reading and how you're reading it. This portion is possibly more valuable than the note taking piece, but the two should be hand-in-glove and work toward something.

I suspect that most people who have 1000 notes know which five or ten are the most important to where they're going and how they're growing. Focus on those and your "conversations with texts" relating to those. The rest is either low level context for where you're headed or either pure noise/digital exhaust.

If you think of ideas as incunables, which notes will be worth of putting on your tombstone? In other words: What are your "tombstone notes"? (See what I did there? I came up with another name for a type of note, a sin for which I'm certainly going to spend a lot of time in zettelkasten purgatory.)

Scott continues in his efforts not to make any main notes, but is pushing the indexing of ideas where they live directly in books using only a topic in his index and a page number.

He calls this practice, which he himself practices, sacrilegious. 00:00:27

What happened to pushing knowledge-building?!?

This is the second video I've seen him do this. (Previously: https://hypothes.is/a/28AkYFadEe6ZH_MjTZlnLQ). So his Antinet zettelkasten is now primarily an index and bibliographic cards with fleeting notes. He's specifically leaving out any of what he has previously called main notes.

Someone complaining of Scott Scheper's teaching/pedagogy/"system".

One needs to read a bit between the lines with only the initial context, but they circled around later to say:

I am talking about that A**net guy

This method is interesting, I like the aesthetics of such commonplace books. However, in terms of functionality, it is nearly fully replaced with the Antinet Zettelkasten method. Perhaps I could use some of this to improve my journals though? In addition, this does inspire me to create progressive summarization pages of my ideas and concepts, contained in Sage Scientia, in Notion or Obsidian.

A method such as this, or Zettelkasten, can help create theoretical expertship... It might not be the MOST EFFICIENT, but it is highly effective.

A Fred-box could be very useful. This contains cards with useful snippets of thought, very small usually, that don't need a particular ordering or connection of thought but are worth it to be reminded of every now and then, a shuffle if it were.

If need be used in connective thought as well, the content could be copied over into an Antinet entry as well.

When it comes to thinking, the Zettelkasten solves an important issue which is the problem of scope, which is impossible at the current moment in mindmapping software such as Concepts.

Mainly, Zettelkasten allows you gain a birds-eye holistic view of a topic, branch, or line of thought, while allowing you to at the same time also gain a microscopic view of an "atomic" idea within that thought-stream, therefore creating virtually infinite zoom-in and zoom-out capability. This is very, very, beneficial to the process of deep thinking and intellectual work.

Think of branches not as collections, but rather as conversations

When a branch starts to build, or prove itself, then ask the question (before indexing): "What is the conversation that is building here?"

Also related to Sönke Ahrens' maxim of seeking Disconfirming Information to counter Confirmation Bias. By thinking of branches as conversations instead of collectives, you are also more inclined to put disconfirming information within the branch.

The author goes into the correlation between categorization (branching) and the use of the index and the focus on them respectively. He mentions he "learned" that branching would be more beneficial than the using of the index to make finding the cards easier.

I strongly disagree with this focus. I agree with the "relational" principle of put the card between the one that has the closest proximital conceptual relation. The Zettelkasten's power relies in serendipitous creativity (or creativity/insight by chance), this is facilitated highly by the use of connectivity between cards, where each card as you go down the "hierarchy" of "branches" will be more unrelated to the original topic. (See also Luhmann's paper Communication with Zettelkasten, Manfred Kuehn Translation and Johannes F.K. Schmidt's article on Zettelkasten within Forgetting Machines, as well as his video presentation about Zettelkasten). In short, the friction of searching for cards by following trains of thought through connectivity boosters insight by chance and therefore facilitates the power of the system.

This is also, I believe, why Bob Doto argues to let categories emerge after the creation of notes/streams of thought instead of making the names for the "branches" up front.

I believe Luhmann himself also emphasized the use of the index by calling it a system of "query into the database," the index is the main navigational map for the Zettelkasten. If you have a question for your "communication partner" the index is the way to go. For example, if I wanted to know the impact of cognitive load theory within employee management as a CEO, I would go to my index and collect the entrances for both "branches" or terms, and then start reading these thought streams... Afterward, I might synthesize and create a new branch somewhere, in one of the aforementioned categories, or an entire new one, where I put the results of this questioning.

My own system of numbering and branching in this way is the following: A number signifies a note's position within a stream of thought. I branch off if, following the relational principle, a note adds unto a thought on a specific card, but not the stream specifically. This gets signified by a letter.

So, 1a1, 1a2, 1a3, and 1a4 are all part of the same stream while 1a, 1b, and 1c would all be different "branches" stemming from the original card that would be 1 in this case. This can repeat infinitely, therefore facilitating what Luhmann calls "Infinite potential for inward growth" of the system. It's autopoietic and cybernetic. (See also: The Radical Luhmann by Hans-Georg Moeller).

Something that can benefit the finding of notes once the system grows sufficiently large is the use of "structure" or "hub" cards where you put down a few key entrances to concepts related to this stream of thought or "branch" in remote sections of the Zettelkasten.

According to Henderson, there are three steps to keeping a commonplace book:

1) Read (Consume)

"Commonplace books begin with observation."

2) Capture (Write) Always also capture the source.

3) Reflect Write own thoughts about the material. Synthesize, think.

I'd personally use a digital commonplace book (hypothes.is), like Chris Aldrich explains, as my capture method and my Antinet Zettelkasten as my reflect methodology. This way the commonplace book fosters what Luhmann would call the thought rumination process.

There's a danger to using digital tools to help with Higher Order Thinking; namely, it offloads precious cognitive load, optimized intrinsic load, which is used to build schemas and structural knowledge which is essential for mastery. Another danger is that digital tools often make falling for the collector's fallacy easier, meaning that you horde and horde information, which makes you think you have knowledge, while in fact, you simply have (maybe related) information, not mastery. The analog way prevents this, as it forces you to carefully evaluate the value of an idea and decide whether or not it's worth it to spend time on writing it and integrating it into a line of thought. Evaluation/Analysis is forced in an analog networked thinking tool, which is a form of Higher Order Learning/Thinking, as they are in the higher orders of Bloom's Taxonomy/Hierarchy.

This is also true for AI. Always carefully evaluate whether or not a tool is worth using, like a farmer. (Deep Work, Cal Newport).

Instead, use a tool like mindmapping, the GRINDE way, which is digital, for learning... Or the Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott Scheper, which is analog, for research.

The power of an Antinet Zettelkasten. Use this principle both in research and learning.

Scheper, Scott. Antinet Zettelkasten: A Knowledge System That Will Turn You Into a Prolific Reader, Researcher and Writer. Greenlamp, LLC, 2022.

annotation target: url: urn:x-pdf:614d5b6d353f410da4a46e5eddde997e

Should You Read Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P Scheper<br /> by Curtis McHale

Generally mirrors most of my opinion.

Odd that there haven't been many reviews of this...

https://pkm.social/@bobdoto/109558009858082429

quote by Bob Doto. :)

https://members.scottscheper.com/

reply to: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/zgvcqh/happy_publication_day/

I already have an advanced digital copy, but honestly can't wait for the analog (and therefore "true copy") to be available for order and on my doorstep.

When are we going to see the link to order it?!? Don't think I'm just sitting around here holding my breath waiting to order this... sometimes I turn blue and fall off my chair 😰

Seriously though. Congratulations Scott!

Hopefully I'll see everyone at the start of the book club tomorrow: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/zbibue/book_club_reading_scotts_book/

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/ur5xjv/handwritten_cards_to_a_digital_back_up_workflow/

For those who keep a physical pen and paper system who either want to be a bit on the hybrid side, or just have a digital backup "just in case", I thought I'd share a workflow that I outlined back in December that works reasonably well. (Backups or emergency plans for one's notes are important as evidenced by poet Jean Paul's admonition to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812: "In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first.") It's framed as posting to a website/digital garden, but it works just as well for many of the digital text platforms one might have or consider. For those on other platforms (like iOS) there are some useful suggestions in the comments section. Handwriting My Website (or Zettelkasten) with a Digital Amanuensis

I agree with many that the black and red are overwhelming on many and make the book a bit less approachable. Warm tones and rich wooden boxes would be more welcome. The 8.5x11" filing cabinets just won't fly. I did like some with the drawer frames/pulls, but put a more generic idea in the frame (perhaps "Ideas"?). From the batch so far, some of my favorites are #64 TopHills, #21 & #22 BigPoints, #13, 14 D'Estudio. Unless that pull quote is from Luhmann or maybe Eco or someone internationally famous, save it for the rear cover or maybe one of the inside flaps. There's an interesting and approachable stock photo I've been sitting on that might work for your cover: Brain and ZK via https://www.theispot.com/stock/webb. Should be reasonably licensable and doesn't have a heavy history of use on the web or elsewhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysD-V06Jszs

notes at: https://docdrop.org/video/ysD-V06Jszs/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7czJsftMYZ0

It's tough to do your own marketing and naming is hard. If you have an obscure short title, be sure to have a sharply defined subtitle, both for definition but to hit the keywords you'll want for discovery and search (SEO) purposes. Though be careful with keyword stuffing, if for no other reason than that Luhmann had a particularly sparse index.

Zettelkasten doesn't have much value for for native search (yet). Who besides a student that doesn't really want to buy it searches for a book on note taking?! Creativity, Productivity, and Writing are probably most of your potential market, so look at books in those areas for words to borrow (aka steal flagrantly). Other less common keywords to consider or throw into your description of the book, though not the title: research, research methods, literature review, thesis writing, Ph.D., etc.

Perhaps you've limited the question Scott. Instead ask everyone: What title would you want to see on such a book that would make you want to buy and read it? Everyone should brainstorm for 3 minutes and write down a few potential titles.

I'll start:

Antinet Method: Thought Development for Creativity and Productive Writing

Antinet Zettelkasten: A Modern Approach to Thought Development

Antinet: The Technique of Unreasonably Productive Intellectual Work (and Fun) [h/t F. Kuntze]

Mix and match away...

But isn't Scheper's Method explicitly that of Niklas Luhmann?!?

My method is similar to classic Zettelkasten with a few tweaks, mainly the use of double-sized index cards and colored index cards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H2H3hvmrNQ

Pretty good short description of how to start an (antinet) zettelkasten.

via: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vzertk/using_the_antinet_for_professional_conferences/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk55seYhN20

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vzertk/using_the_antinet_for_professional_conferences/

Thanks /ultwalt This seems to underline the aphorism, that the more you put into something, the more you'll get out of it. It's something that many miss as an underlying benefit to these processes in general.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDBiW9Y-lqc

brief example; nothing exceptional about technique here.

https://quiescent.us/2022/06/think-external/

Brief example of someone who says they have an antinet zettelkasten note taking approach.

Nothing exceptional here beyond this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vtekz2/there_is_a_zettel_maximum_capacity_and_thats_not/

I wonder if Scott P. Scheper has done any videos on his writing/composing process for getting material out of his card file for creating his book for which I've seen portions of a few chapters floating around. I've loosely followed his YouTube channel and his r/antinet community on Reddit, but I haven't seen this portion of his process in any detail.

This (export) part also seems like one of the more intense, manual, and heaving lifting pieces of the process. I've yet to see any digital tools which automate or make this portion of the work easier.

Perhaps a graph view of connected nodes with titles in which one can highlight nodes as a selection method and then export them in some process to a space where they might be potentially reordered or shuffled into a linear order for further editing and ultimately publishing, might be useful? Even saying this takes forever much less doing it easily with an inspiring user interface..

Link to: https://hyp.is/9PV1jP5OEeyPumNKyckR1A/danallosso.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-on-paper

Syndication links: - https://danallosso.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-on-paper/comment/7610486

These always read as hyperbole to me, but it's difficult to explain the surprise and serendipity of re-finding things in one's notes on a regular basis. It's akin to the sort of cognitive dissonance that religious people have when encountering the levels of complexity formed by living systems through evolution. Not having better words for describing the experience, they may resort to descriptions of magic or religion to frame their experiences.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/zettelkasten-on-paper

u/sscheper in writing your book, have you thought about the following alternative publishing idea which I'm transcribing from a random though I put on a card this morning?

I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a traditional linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index at the end so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it?

It could be done roughly like Edward Powys Mathers' Cain's Jawbone or Henry Korn's Pontoon Manifesto? Perhaps numbered consecutively to make it easier to bring back into that format, but also done with your zk numbering so that people could order it and use it that way too? This way you get the book as well as a meta artifact of what the book is about as an example of how to do such a thing for yourself. Maybe even make a contest for a better ordering for the book than the one you published it in ?

Link to: - https://hyp.is/6IBzkPfeEeyo9Suq-ZmCKg/www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/

Based on surveys, readers indicate that two important parts of textual navigation are sense of control and serendipity.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Electronic_journal_literature.html?id=YSFlAAAAMAAJ

How does the control over a book frame how we read? What does "power over" a book look like compared to "power with"?

What are the tools for thought affordances that paper books provide over digital books and vice versa?

I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it.

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/introduction-antinet-zettelkasten/

There's some magical thinking involved here. While the system has some arbitrary internal branching, the surprises come from the system's perfect memory that the human user doesn't have. This makes it appear that the system creates its own creativity, but it is really the combinatorics of the perfect memory system with use over time.

Link to: serendipity of systems based on auto-complete

The four principles Niklas Luhmann used to build his notebox system are:

1. Analog
2. Numeric-alpha
3. Tree
4. Index

The first letters of those four principles (A, N, T, I) are what comprise an Antinet. An Antinet Zettelkasten is a network of these four principles.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/v08b1i/do_you_like_the_antinet_name/

People's opinions on the name antinet (zettelkasten).

antinet 1. Analog 2. Numeric/alpha 3. Tree Index 4. Network

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf4caUoi5bo

Scott Scheper shows how he uses his paper zettelkasten for planning six week sprints. Only a very rough outline of what this looks like, though he does show using his index to cross reference the card with the actual details.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/unopml/finished_1st_draft_of_book_but_need_your_advice/

Someone considering re-creating Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain business, but with pen and paper.